Notes from the Fog

by Ben Marcus

  Her father was right. It could be heavily distracting. She finished feeding him, patted his arm, and left his room for a little while. Maybe some air or some sun or an area free of people would be nice, if such a thing existed. There were hallways and hallways in this home, with room after room, and if she ever made a mistake, and looked inside one, really looked, she saw people in beds all alone, connected to bags, mouths agape, struggling to breathe. She saw men in ill-fitting gowns, sprawled on the floor. Women with no hair, sobbing in their chairs. Now in the hallway she kept her head down, watching her feet, and soon she was outside, where there was a little bit of lawn ringing the parking lot.

  The light was funny today, catching surfaces just so. Little sparkling things glimmered from the grass, from the parking lot, everywhere. Like jewels that had dropped from somewhere, which was stupid, she knew. Probably just little stones, maybe washed up over everything from a recent rain. She thought she might sit down, but there was her car, just waiting, and maybe she’d had enough for the day. Maybe it was time to go. She’d visited a little bit, and it was possible that her father would fall asleep soon, anyway.

  A nurse approached Ida just as she was reaching for her keys.

  “You here to see your father?”

  “Yes I am. How are you today?”

  Maybe if she showered this person with kindness, something would unlock in the tough, ungiving dispositions of the nurses, and maybe they’d look after her dad better when she wasn’t around.

  “If you’re here to see him, why are you outside?”

  “I just came out for some air.”

  “There’s air inside. There’s air everywhere. That’s what the world is.”

  “I know.”

  “He can’t see you if you’re out here. You can’t see him. You might as well be at home.”

  “I’m going back in.”

  “You weren’t, though. You were going to leave.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t tell me. I see your face. I can read your thoughts. You think I can’t?”

  Ida scanned up at her father’s window. He would never be looking out. He didn’t do that. He didn’t really stand up anymore, although he did love his window. But she wouldn’t want him to see this just the same. He wouldn’t understand, not that she did either.

  “Anyway, there aren’t too many thoughts to read,” the nurse said. “Just one big one. I gotta get out of here. I gotta go. Where’s the door. That’s the only thought anyone has ever had. In all of history. It’s not just you.”

  For no reason that she could think of, Ida told the nurse that her mother was also in a home.

  “Everybody’s somewhere,” said the nurse.

  “She’s at the Sullivan Gardens.”

  “That’s a place.”

  “I go back and forth.”

  “How else would you do it?”

  “My mother and my father.”

  “I don’t imagine you’d visit any other kind of person in a place like that.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  The nurse almost smiled at her. “I know you’re leaving, so you can go ahead and leave. I’m not going to stop you.”

  “I might have to,” said Ida. “I don’t feel so great.”

  “Your father will die soon.”

  “I know.”

  “You won’t be here. Chances are. People are never here. They know not to be. People aren’t stupid. They wake up that day and they know to stay away. You don’t go into a burning house. You feel the heat. You keep walking.”

  “So it’s not just me.”

  “Nothing is just you, dear. Trust me.”

  “I’d like to try to be here. When that happens.”

  “You’ll get a phone call. It might be me calling you. It might be someone else. I make the phone calls when I’m here, but I’m not always here. If I’m here, I’ll call you. We have your number. Your number is first. You’re the emergency contact. But it won’t be an emergency. The emergency will have already happened. It will have come and gone. I’ll say hello, and I’ll ask to speak to you. You’ll probably say that it’s you on the phone. Some people, fancy people, say This is she, or This is he. And that’s when I say, It’s about your father. That’s how the call will go up to that point.”

  “Okay, well, I guess it’s good to know this. I appreciate the information. May I ask your name?”

  “It’s Lorraine.”

  Ida took the nurse’s hand. “Lorraine,” she said. “I am really pleased to meet you.”

  The nurse pulled back her hand. “Don’t be pleased. If you get a phone call, and the person says that it’s Lorraine from Sweethill Village, then it’s me calling, and you should never be happy to hear from me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t be happy when I call.”

  “I won’t be,” said Ida. “I promise.”

  And then, in her throat, Ida felt the familiar crawling, the little pill surging up, filling her mouth. This time she managed to get her hand up, to block it from getting out, but she had to double over and clench her teeth together.

  Then she felt the nurse’s hand rubbing her back, so softly, so gently, that she relaxed in some way that startled her, and her mouth opened and the pill rolled out onto the asphalt.

  Ida and the nurse looked at it, shining like a perfect white tooth. It was hard to imagine that it had been in her stomach all day. It looked perfect, even cleaner and whiter than when she’d swallowed it.

  “It’s okay,” the nurse said. “You can leave it there.”

  “I’d better not.”

  “Leave it. Trust me. Just look around for a minute. Everyone else is leaving theirs. It makes the world look prettier. Why keep something like that for yourself?”

  Those shiny things in the grass, the glittering crystals in the parking lot, the glinting everywhere she looked. Like the tiny white skulls of birds. Tablets strewn everywhere, glowing at her feet.

  Blueprints for St. Louis

  It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Helen’s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they’d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of Daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt? You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer, or the prior spring, and, well, didn’t the seasons and the years just dog-pile one another when you tried to solve math like that?

  Helen wasn’t particularly concerned, because, whatever, there was a clarity to the coldness, right? And screw Roy if he’d fallen down a brightly colored porn hole, pummeling himself to images of animated youngsters slithering around nude, in grown-up crotch gear, in a cartoon fairyland. Internet histories weren’t her favorite literary genre, but she knew how to read them. Anyway, if her husband’s use-case viability on the marital graph had taken a nosedive, then so, too, had her own burden. She had her friends, she had her work on the memorial, and she had the showerhead. When she and Roy first got married, whenever ago, Helen’s mother had told her that if people don’t visit, you don’t have to host. Period, full stop. And even though Helen’s take on this advice now was off-label, it applied just fine to her touchless union. The body unloved, the body unhandled and unseen. The body as a ghost in training for whatever soiled world came next. Anyway, wasn’t left-alone the best place to wind up?

  Maybe old age and the cold blue death of the groin would solve that. Maybe Helen would inherit a sweet and useless Roy, post-pornography, sitting politely behind a drool cloth, swaddled in food-stained sweaters. She’d feed him until he cooed and maybe sometimes they woul
d run out of gruel and she would watch his hunger grow, watch his eyes turn small and sad. Would it be so terrible? The sexual urge would be merely an embarrassing spasm of the past. They’d been friends once, before they’d gotten into designing memorials for unspeakable catastrophes. Intense and respectful partners in their architectural firm. Mutually committed cattle prodders of each other’s darker, stranger brains, torturing out each other’s best ideas, before the chemical repulsion and bed-death had struck. Maybe by old age they’d return to form, be ideal dance partners again, if only they could stay alive long enough.

  The problem was today and tomorrow and the next huge bunch of days, the entirety of their middle age, really, which shouldn’t be just a rotten footbridge you had to navigate, with a creepy old troll beating off underneath it. Roy was technically handsome, but he preened, and he moped, and he fished for so many compliments that Helen was fished out, empty, unable to spray any favorable speech over his prim, needy body. Lately he’d been taking himself to the gym with more ambition and lust than he showed for their collaborative design work, and he was all cut up now, a strange, Photoshopped musculature slipped over his bones like a bronzed wet suit. She should have wanted to handle the new body he’d built, use it to snuff out her baser urges, not that Roy offered it to her, but she asked that he keep it covered. In loose-fitting layers, please. It stank of his not-so-hidden effort to attract a mammal outside the home. To sport with it and lick its fur, no doubt. Plus, she had tolerated her husband better when he wasn’t such a vain custodian of the ephemeral—one mustn’t fawn over that which will rot, someone important probably once said.

  * * *

  —

  What consumed them both right now was the situation in St. Louis, for which their firm had been ceremoniously commissioned to design the memorial. Months after the bombing, the city was still digging out. Thirty dead souls, the news had said when it happened. But everyone knew that number wasn’t real. It was low by a couple of decimal points. For days, the toll did not breach a hundred, which seemed impossible. Where did these cautious estimates come from? Maybe from actual bodies. Maybe this meant that the other, more plentiful dead were simply nowhere to be found, in the same way that wind can’t be found. What you did was you factored in the missing, and privately you did not call them “missing.” Thousands of people had not suddenly left their homes that morning and vanished to the mountains. When you watched the footage of the bombing, the dark slab of glass folding over itself like a blanket, then erupting into a pale brown flower of smoke, and you calculated the typical occupancy, not just of the office tower but of the surrounding plaza, with its underground restaurants and shops, its perimeter of cafes, along with the time of day, the number thirty was a violent piece of wishful thinking, heavy, heavy, heavy on the wish.

  “10k+,” Roy had texted Helen from wherever he was the day it happened.

  He wasn’t wrong. It emerged that explosives had been buried in the foundation of the tower when it was being built, two years before, by some slithering motherfuckers on the construction crew. Stashed down there the night before the footings were poured, apparently, and then triggered when the building was finished and stuffed to the gills with people. In burning daylight, a time of high commerce, maximum human traffic. Not a government building, so far as anyone knew. Just as dense a cluster of people as any in the Midwest, excepting one or two zones in downtown Chicago. And so, and so. They had the perpetrators on video, brutes in hard hats. Except that they were skinny and they laughed a lot and were often seen hugging one another. Four of them had walked off the job on the same day, before the building had even started to rise up out of the concrete. How that very act—quitting in a group, never to be seen again—hadn’t been some sort of security trigger was beyond Helen, but whatever, hindsight was a foul drug. And now everyone was asking, Who were these men and where had they gone? Oh, please, Helen thought, whenever this particular investigation blistered onto the screen. The St. Louis Four. The villains of Missouri. Can we please not believe that finding these men will matter at all? Please?

  * * *

  —

  “Terrorism” wasn’t really the term anymore. Helen found that it soured in her mouth, like a German word for some obscure feeling. “Tax” seemed to be a finer way to put it. A tax had been levied in St. Louis. In New Orleans last year, in Tucson three years back. Et cetera. A tax on comfort, safety. A price paid for being alive, for waking up. Occasionally the tax collector came. Not just occasionally. Quite a lot these days. You could run out of breath trying to name all the cities that had been hit in this country. The collector came, and people were subtracted from space. Buildings withered into rubble. One’s imagination needed to frequently dilate in order to accommodate the ways and means, and otherwise-smart men and women were busy with their scuffed and crummy crystal balls trying to figure out what was next, and how, and how. As if this forecasting ever…oh forget it. Soon you knew not to be surprised, and this awareness was chilling. A low hum could be heard during the day, the night, at all times. You walked in a space that might not really be there. There was no longer anything proverbial when it came to danger, nothing to invent, no more fiction of dark days to come. The dark days were here. They were now.

  In light of this, it was somehow Roy and Helen’s calling to honor the site with a memorial. Or to try to, to actually compete for this kind of work, squirming through town halls and public debates, spinning a story about their vision, which was only ever a humble story to the effect that nothing anyone did could ever be enough. Their track record so far wasn’t the worst, which was not much of a feel-good fact for either of them, even if a sort of undertaker’s renown had attached itself to their firm over the years. They made their mark by designing large public graves where people could gather and where maybe really cool food trucks would also park. There was money for this, and money for this, and money for this. Hooray. Except that now Helen found it hard to view any other kind of design commission—for a vanilla-white office building in their own downtown Chicago, for example—as anything other than a future headstone, a kind of sarcophagus that would briefly house living, glistening people before they were lowered into the earth or scattered out over the lake in a burst of powder. If you were an architect, you designed tombs, for before or for after. What was the difference?

  Helen kept a map pinned above her desk because she thought she might see something in the pattern of fallen cities: a story. Detectives did this to solve crimes. She thought it might tell her what to build. But sometimes, when she and Roy marveled at it, it seemed to them like a coloring book that hadn’t been filled in all the way yet. Sure, there were some spaces still to shade, whole cities left strangely untouched, but not that many. And there was always tomorrow.

  St. Louis should not have been high on the list of targets, maybe not on the list at all, but that seemed to be the point these days, in the year of our sorrow. The years and years of it. A new and unspoken list of vulnerable sites had emerged: sweet zones, soft parts of the American body that could be knifed open and spilled out by the most skilled urban surgeons the world had ever seen.

  * * *

  —

  Six months after the St. Louis attack, Roy and Helen had been invited to submit a proposal, and they’d gone through their usual tangled brainstorm, smoothing over the sharper ideas of their junior staff, whiteboarding a design that would appear sufficiently nonthreatening in the space, a kind of tranquilizing maze of low walls and open rooms for visitors to throw themselves around in and grieve. Roy called it the sanatorium aesthetic, and he wasn’t that far off.

  One day, as the deadline loomed, they walked along the lake, which was flat and black, even as the wind pounded them. They started, brokenly, to drill down toward what they might possibly build, what it would look and sound like, what sort of feelings they were trying to create. Usually you had to dance around the stakeholders to determine the emotional
bolus of a work, as they called it. But the stakeholders for this project? Only the entire population of the United States of America.

  Helen didn’t want to aim high, she started to say, so much as she wanted to aim into a kind of hidden space. “I don’t want you to be able to picture it when I talk about it,” she told Roy. “You shouldn’t be able to photograph it. I mean, like the lake—you wouldn’t even want to photograph it. You shouldn’t be able to draw it. That’s my problem.”

  “Gosh, that really is your problem.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, gesturing at the sky, which was not particularly pretty or interesting that afternoon. It was not the kind of sky you would ever take a picture of, and Helen found that compelling. “Is there a better memorial than that? The sky?”

  “Ha,” Roy said. “It’s good. It’s moody. Maybe it’s a bit obvious, though?”

  “Isn’t the sky just a gravestone,” Helen said, “and we’re all buried under it?”

  “Oooh. Not bad. I see what you did there. But, no offense, why are we talking about this?”

  Helen had to do this, to think too grandly or wrongly in order to maybe get closer to what was called for. “It’s almost like,” she said, “what if you had to design the afterlife exactly as you really think it is. Not something aspirational, some bullshit heaven. Not a religious fantasy. The truth.”

  “Yeah?” Roy said. “As in…oblivion? You want to build an oblivion theme park?”

  He didn’t care about any of this right now, Helen could tell, and maybe he had a point.

  “I assume you don’t believe in, well, anything?” When she thought back to their first conversations in grad school, prickly and intense and flirty, she wasn’t sure if this had ever come up. Was that possible? She had adored and then admired him for so long and now she knew him inside and out, and she felt she understood him to the core. Was it possible that he harbored private, unknowable ideas about his own death and whatever might happen after?