Notes from the Fog

by Ben Marcus

“Uh, what are you doing?” the doctor asked.

  To answer that in detail, Carl would have had to wave a pretty complicated set of emoticons. Desperation, suspicion, apology, and, hovering over all the others, exhaustion. Just a yellow ball of tired face. Not yawning, though. Not that kind of tired.

  “Tired face, tired face,” Carl said to the doctor. “Just fucking tired face.”

  “There’s nothing back there,” the doctor said. “It’s a closet. I’ll show you.”

  Carl waved him away. He apologized. He was being paranoid, he explained. It’s just that he was always so hungry, and it wasn’t pain so much as tremendous pressure flushing through him. “It’s like someone keeps pouring hot water inside me. Inside my whole body. I’m getting rinsed out by very hot water. Agony face. Face for I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

  The doctor looked at him but made no note.

  “I’m just being foolish,” Carl said. “You know me.”

  The doctor nodded. They hardly knew each other.

  Carl ducked out and resumed his session at his desk. The light from his computer today was cool, almost soothing. Maybe they’d iterated a healing blue ray. Maybe this would all start feeling better. To kill time, he fired up a lost-person website and put in his own name. The tracking on these things was pretty poor. You could register, supposedly, and get better data. Live tracking was promised. Was it real? Could he pay the money and then see, in digital scribble, the path he’d been taking these past few months? Would the bird’s-eye view reveal something new? Because he’d been through it on the ground, in person, and even he couldn’t be sure.

  The problem was that there were too many Carl Hirsches to choose from. Maybe thirty in Carl’s region alone. You could pick only one at a time, then pay your money for the reveal. But behind each clickable Carl Hirsch was the same picture, the only extant picture of a Carl Hirsch anywhere, apparently.

  The picture looked a good deal like Carl’s own father, dead a long time now, who never lived in this area. Never even visited, as far as Carl knew. Was it really him? The picture was from that era when subjects did not look at the camera, so here was someone who looked very much like his dad, from so long ago, staring into the distance, at something behind Carl that he couldn’t see. No matter how he jogged his head, he could not quite get those eyes to look at him.

  * * *

  —

  The rest of the week went okay. The sympathy dried up, but all seemed well. Carl fried at his desk, sipped distilled water. His guards didn’t seem to be minding him so carefully, and Kora hadn’t come by to stick him with Shitazine, so he grabbed a scone at one point, and it burst into powder in his mouth. He fell to the ground coughing, a cloud of crumbs spraying everywhere, but no one at Mayflower particularly minded him. They knew his life was hell.

  In the coatroom as Carl was leaving that Friday, Kipler pulled him aside. Out in the open, in front of the rush-hour crowd of employees, who pretended that their boss wasn’t standing right there, huddled up with Blizzard Face himself.

  “So what’s with the crotch shot?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you send a picture of your testicles to so many strangers? People were revolted and confused. And over email. The least secure form of communication ever devised, including whatever the apes used.”

  “You knew?”

  “A scrotum isn’t some rare species, nor does any living person have a neck that fucked up. We know what your symptoms are. We caused them. I’ve probably seen forty unique pairs of balls. Just a round number. Not all of them up close, but I know what they look like.”

  “I’m sorry,” Carl said.

  “So are we. You’re out. It breaks your nondisclosure. Honestly, even if it doesn’t, it breaks something. Something is wrong. Your data. I don’t know. I don’t specialize in precise ways to say something so obvious. You’re done.”

  “I agree,” Carl said.

  “Go have a sandwich, already. You’re off the feed. We neutralized your panels a few days ago from a kill switch in Albuquerque.”

  “I was going to say,” Carl said. “Something seemed like an improvement.”

  “The alpha unit wasn’t friendly. We know that. Sorry for, you know. Mostly it was proof of concept. And guess what. Proof achieved. Through the so-called roof. Maybe your numbers weren’t good, but they were numbers. You fed. Badly, and with little retention. But you fed. We’re moving to beta. The life hackers are going to strap in. This thing will make it to market. I’m sorry you can’t take the ride with us.”

  “So am I fired?”

  “Don’t push your luck. The NDA still stands, for, like, three lifetimes. Your children’s children, not that offspring are a likely outcome for you, can’t even whisper it to each other. I’ll be dead myself, but I’ll leave instructions that your kids get slapped across the room and out a window if that happens. Slapped right the hell off the planet. So nary a whisper. Not that you’re having kids. We find that it’s easiest for you to keep quiet about all this if you, you know, don’t even remember it. That way it’s not a secret you’re keeping. You don’t even know about it yourself. Which is very nearly true. That’s the argument from our side. Not even the argument, just the language. It never happened.”

  “Thanks,” Carl said.

  “I love you, man,” Kipler said. He closed in on Carl, wrapped him in his arms. “What a bullet you took for us,” he whispered. “A huge bullet. The biggest.”

  As the employees of Mayflower filed out of the building for the night, Carl held on to Kipler in the coatroom, squeezing him tightly, feeling the man’s heartbeat throb against his face.

  * * *

  —

  For a while, everything went quiet. Carl returned to mouth food with an animal focus, but he couldn’t keep it down, and all the time he fretted about the UV panels. Showing up, who knows, in traffic lights. On televisions. At home, pulsing from his mirror. He stayed cautious of screens, skipped past them quickly.

  The winter failed, and along came April, one of the twelve punishments. Carl had seen this month too often by now and had hardened against its pleasures.

  April was a bastard name for a month so numb. Slush on the ground, a salty slurry in the air. Slush, most likely, in his insides, which he pictured as muddied guts down a hole.

  Day after day, Carl tromped to work. He tromped home. His pants grew stiff with salt. He lost his security clearance and was migrated through Mayflower’s cubicles once, twice. Finally, they exiled him, with the older, idea-free crowd, to a featureless room overlooking the vast, immaculate cafeteria. In Carl’s new work corridor, the employees went uninstructed and drastically unpoliced. Did they really work there? They shared a single computer and a pristine in-box. To Carl, the workspace was a petting zoo, without visitors. People moved from table to window to door, moaning. He did his best not to touch anyone.

  He soon lost his taste for food. Maybe he’d outgrown it, which possibly meant that his clock had finally run down, and okay, that was okay. A creature senses an ending. A window, a door, a hole opens, and he steps through. For now, he sipped the occasional yogurt drink and kept some bread nearby, but something had died in him, and he worried that eating, even a little, would feed it, would stoke the thing and bring it back to life. He felt safer with it gone.

  Sometimes Carl woke up confused. He spent time trying to figure out how to reverse what had happened. What was the opposite of a human grow light? He tried the obvious: darkness, the deepest kind. He tried it and tried it and tried it. At home for days with the shades down, then—where the darkness was so much better, so exquisite and fine—out of town, along the sand roads, under the salt pines, in the dunes, or deep in the woods off the highway.

  One night, the police picked him up, and they were not pleased. What face could Carl show them but his own, burned and unmoving? Wha
t he told them, at length and through his charred mouth, was not true and it was not enough. They drove him home in silence, and when they dropped him off they saw him all the way to his door and inside, and after Carl locked up he listened for a long time, but never did hear them walk away.

  * * *

  —

  At the age of forty-one, Carl left Mayflower and accepted an IT job in a school system near the water. Tech support turned out to be lightbulbs, wind blinds, a chimney. Chairs, phones, walls. The yard, too. Carl would maintain all of them.

  The school kept Carl away from the children. He understood. Children’s fears should be managed. Sometimes their eyes need to be covered. So much is better left unseen. There would be more and greater to fear when they were older. Best to save room. But Carl found a way to tend the landscape in the mornings, at a squinting distance from the school doors. From afar, he was a faceless man in a jumpsuit, leaning into his shovel, Carl the Small, the frantic waver. Every day, the kids, fired like missiles from the yellow school buses, waved at Carl, and he saluted them all, righty-o. Hello there, you guys! People should always greet one another that way. If he could store a message for creatures thousands of years in the future, it would be simple. Upon meeting one another in whatever passes, in your world, for a room, a hallway, a road, a field, do not play dead while you are still alive. Just try to say hello.

  It turned out that there was a woman at the school who did not die from seeing Carl up close, again and again. They had lunch together, and lunch together, and lunch and a walk, and a weekend coffee, and lunch again, until something felt wrong when they didn’t meet up, even if it was to do nothing much but take the woods path, or walk, once night had come on, right through town.

  Her name was Maura, and she ran art and languages for the sixth graders. She asked what had happened to him, and he shook his head. He wanted to pull a long-story face. The hardened shell of him had withered by then, gone soft. It looked as if someone had died just outside his body and he was still wearing that person’s skin. He shook his head, that was all, and this was fine with her. She said she understood. Which meant, to Carl, that in one way or another maybe Maura was keeping to her own nondisclosure agreement, one that she’d struck with herself or others, sometime in the past, far from here.

  It was no romance, which relieved them both. Maura and Carl were plain about what they needed to feel pleasure. If their intimacy could feel turn-based and a little like a chore, just friends bestowing favors, like old women doing each other’s hair, it was at least a manageable sorrow that he could endure. He could keep an eye on it and be sure that it didn’t grow.

  Maura was older than Carl. She was kinder, finer-looking, more at peace, as far as he knew, with having been born. What a gift, not to be constantly scouting for an exit! And if Carl felt private or mean he knew to leave the house and pour out his cruelty in a safe place, where Maura could not be hurt. Perhaps what was most animal in him had been cooked out by Kipler and his rig, burned or boiled or just reduced so that it hardly ever appeared. He hated to think so positively, because he felt as if it did a kind of violence to his brain, but perhaps something good had come of all that heat, all that light. An off-script use case to the human grow light that no doubt they’d never suspect over at Mayflower: you could use that fierce power to eliminate the wrong and rotten parts of yourself. Not a grow light but the reverse, which felt better to Carl than he would have liked to admit.

  * * *

  —

  It was probably not the Lord who allowed Maura to conceive a child, even though she thanked Him. Carl tried thanking Him, too. His policy on the matter—as they tended her pregnancy all summer and into the fall, walking to school together on weekday mornings before silently parting for the day, then meeting again for the walk home—was that gratitude needed only to be released from one’s person, spoken out loud. From there, it could find its proper destination on its own.

  When his son was born, on a cold, cloudless October night, Carl could not help himself. Some very old words came back to him. What a tremendously ridiculous person he’d become, even though nothing that had happened to him had been ridiculous. The words he recalled were somehow suddenly available, wanting out. He whispered them, over and over, until the little creature, still unnamed, mouth bubbling on Maura’s tummy, fell asleep for the very first time in his life: Someone new is among us. Someone special.

  It hurt him to say this, because he was Carl. He knew the odds, the science, the facts. Or at least he used to. Was such a statement really as grossly untrue as it seemed? Just him being wishful, being scared? What, really, was so special about one more boy in the world?

  Maybe the verdict on this could stay out for now. Just scattered into the distance, a verdict you could never really reach, even if you wanted to. Maybe, in whatever time he had left, Carl would work as hard as he could to keep the verdict on that question, along with every other question that pressed in, as far away from his family as humanly possible.

  George and Elizabeth

  When George’s father died, he neglected to tell his therapist, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except for those killer moods of hers. She knew how to punish him with a vicious show of boredom.

  He’d been deep in a session with her, maintaining that when he was younger he had discovered that there was no difference, in bed, between men and women. Literally. At the biological level. If you could wrap a present, you could make one into the other. And therefore this issue of preference had weirdly become moot. You didn’t have to check either box.

  “Have you ever worked with clay?” he asked her. “Have you ever pushed pudding around in your bowl?”

  George gestured to show what he meant. Spoon work, a bit of charade knitting.

  Dr. Graco waved for him to get on with it.

  It was finally, he explained, just a shame that there were no other categories he could sample.

  “So you feel incapable of surprise at the sexual level?” she asked.

  “I’m sure there are things out there I haven’t tried, but in the end they belong to categories that have washed out for me. Just, you know, haircuts I’ve already had, beards, whatever. There’s too much time left on the clock. I wish that I had paced myself.”

  “Paced yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it a race?”

  “Yes. I just got my number. I should have pinned it to my shirt. Sorry about that.”

  “You don’t take this seriously, do you?”

  “Well…I pay you to take it seriously. Which gives me room to deflect and joke about it and put my insecurities on display, which you should know how to decode and use in your treatment. Another layer of evidence for your salt box.”

  “Do you often think about how I conduct your treatment, as you call it?”

  George sighed.

  “I thought about it once, and then I died,” he said. “I bled out.”

  * * *

  —

  And boom, the session was over. He was in the waiting room putting on his coat before he remembered his news, what he’d been so determined to tell her, but he had to deal with the ovoid white noise machine which turned speech into mush, and the miserable young man waiting his turn who refused to ever acknowledge George when he burst out of his appointment. It was all a bit exhausting. Were the two of them really supposed to pretend that they weren’t both paying Dr. Graco to inhale their misery and exhibit a professional silence about it? And couldn’t they finally just unite in shame and even go sadly rut somewhere? Roll out their crusts against a building, even, or on the merry-go-round in Central Park?

  Sex with sad people was something that could still deliver—in terms of sheer lethargy and awkwardness—but the demographics were stubborn. These people didn’t exactly come out to play very often. It wasn’t clear what birdcall you were supposed to use. You p
ractically had to go around knocking on doors. And then the whole thing could verge on coercion.

  The news of his father’s death had come in yesterday from a laundromat. Or perhaps it was simply a place with loud machines and yelling in the background. Someone was on the other end of the phone asking if a Mr. George was next of kin.

  At first George was confused. “To what?” he asked. The word “kin” made him picture the Hare Krishna display, human beings going hairless and sleek as they evolved. As if a bald, aquiline man couldn’t swing a club and crush someone.

  “All the tenants do a next of kin. I just need to know if that’s you. Tenant name is…I can’t really read this writing, to be honest. I didn’t know this man. We have a lot of units.”

  George very slowly said his father’s name.

  “That’s it. Check. And are you Mr. George?”

  George said he was. Whenever someone tried to pronounce his true last name, it sounded unspeakably vulgar.

  “I’m sorry to report your loss,” the voice said.

  Then don’t, thought George. Keep it to yourself.

  * * *

  —

  He guessed he knew he’d get a call like this one day, and he guessed he’d have to think about it for a while, because the initial impact felt mild, even irritating. He’d have to stick his head into the dirty, hot, self-satisfied state of California and try not to drown in smugness while he solved the problem of his father’s body, which he hadn’t particularly cared for when his father was alive. But what was most on his mind was this question of kin, and why they had not made another call first.

  There was a sister, but she’d scored out of the family. It was hard to blame her. Better food, prettier people, sleeker interiors. George read about her now and then online. She’d achieved a kind of fame in the world of industrial materials. At some point she’d promoted her ridiculous middle name, Pattern, to pole position. Like Onan, maybe. Or Pelé. Her old name, Elizabeth, George figured, was holding her back, and in a way he couldn’t blame her, given the sheepish Elizabeths he’d privately failed to grant human status in college. Sleepwalkers, enablers, preposterously loyal friends. Pattern was a family name belonging to their great-grandmother, who lived on a brutally cold little island, and who, according to their mother, had made a sport of surviving terminal illnesses. Now George’s lovely sister Pattern, so many years later, was a person, a business, a philosophy, a crime. She did something in aerospace. Or to it. Had his brilliant sister once said, in a Newsweek profile, that she wanted to “help people forget everything they thought they knew about the earth”? One such bit of hypnosis had apparently resulted in immense profits for her, the kind of money you could get very paranoid about losing. She produced shimmering synthetic materials from terribly scarce natural resources—a kind of metal drapery that served as “towels” for drones—which meant Pattern was often photographed shaking hands with old people in robes on the tarmacs of the world, no doubt after administering shuddering hand jobs to them back on the airbus.