Notes from the Fog

by Ben Marcus

  The child was dead the next morning, his body small and cold. The specialist went home. In his lab he extracted water from the cream until it thickened into a salve. He booted the cream in a charger. He ran softeners along the underside to raw out the hardness. From his cabinet he selected finer ingredients, to support knowing, thinking, remembering. He used a cooling herb for a skin, then peeled it back leaving only a membrane. The water that he would add back to the salve, to cream it, could only be water extracted from the human being. Then the product passed through a purifier and, to be sure, the specialist tested it on himself, using the cream over his torso, documenting his own fevered speech, days of it, on the machine.

  Over the years the specialist visited similar patients in the western states, in the heat-blackened towns. He worked the neighborhoods of Chicago. Children stricken with fever. Children too cold to think or move. Adults who’d gone quiet. He spread salve on the children from a metal tin and before they passed away the patients grew calm and sometimes spoke. Sometimes they wrote. Messages of demise, usually, predictions of peril. Medically induced prophecy. A prophecy cream is how it came to be understood. It was requested and dreaded. As they spoke the children postured at wellness, arranging their rooms just so, tidying their possessions. In flat, slow voices, they spelled out sorrow, pointing out the doomed persons in the room. Then they died.

  The specialist explained to the families that he needed to study these cases in order to possibly save some other boy or girl, some man or woman whose lights had burned out. The specialist pressed the speeches onto filament, parsed them for meaning, and set the deathbed claims on a pinned grid. He compiled a truth map, finding it faulty. The auguries of the children obeyed a pattern outside reality, surpassing sense. People lived beyond their predicted dates, or perished sooner. The cream-induced prophecies were not accurate. The cream yielded mainly mistaken claims.

  The specialist ceased his practice of applying cream to the ill. He desiccated the cream again, removing the human water. Then he spread the resulting salve on people who were well. He used it over and around his own body, on his clothes, in the rooms he visited. He tried and failed to atomize the salve into a mist. With volunteers at his lab, the specialist initiated a revised cream at their necks, in varying dosages, a cream debased by earth sugars. Then the specialist migrated across the body of the volunteer. He spread a weaker cream over one leg, the other, a hand, a fist. He had parents hold down their own children while he spread the cream on their backs. A cream was used inside clothing, slurried into cones through which the volunteers, in weak voices, commenced to sing.

  Each application of each revised cream produced fits of speech. A literature ushered from the mouths of the volunteers. Prophetic, cream induced, forgotten later by the speakers, sometimes denounced. In content the language extractions were plain, banal, riddled with fear, without clear meaning. The specialist transcribed them all, logged them into English text, released them back into the world under different names, different titles. Documents from the salve. Provoked by cream.

  Late in life the specialist gave up his practice. Many years after he died, the specialist’s daughter, now a young doctor herself, discovered samples of the darkened cream in his lab, maturing in a cabinet, a crust of sand along its surface, along with a notebook recording his results. She broke the cream down, ripped toxins from its core, added back salves. She kept the skeleton of the cream and built over it a new body. Her father’s patents for each medical bolus he produced were rogue, indicating a larger plan, to which the salve was only a small feature, a lubricant. Each portion of salve, released from its tin and rolled thin into ropes, was meant, according to a diagram she found, to join together, serving as a kind of circulatory system for a machine that did not exist yet, or for a machine, she later came to think, that was hiding in plain sight, a machine we could not see properly because we wore it. She could not picture what machine this salve would enable, what contraption it might grease, other than a human body, an animal body. She sensed a criminal component, a kind of weapon latent in the salve. At each site of fever, each home of a child who spoke ill and died, an unknown paste was found, sometimes inside the child’s body, predating any illness in the area. Implicating her father as the bringer of fever, only to test his prophecy cream. Her father would have seemed to be designing a weapon all along, using plant and chemical products together in a balm to bring a violence on the body. A body in fever will not keep its secret, was one of the notes she found. And other such claims. The specialist’s daughter found references to grave site applications. A cream rubbed on stone. On trees. A cream—this one an early iteration of her father’s product—spread over roads. Applied to the wheels of cars, which rolled through a territory. He called it, at times, a privacy cream. Batches of it were manufactured at Thompson, each tin numbered, the numbers etched free, indicating the properties of mind the cream would give or remove. Sometimes indicating nothing.

  The rest is history, just not the kind that comforts. By the time of the specialist’s daughter’s death, creams of understanding were no longer new. Lotions smart and otherwise. Fortifying pastes across the torso, or in skins hovering at face level. Surrogate torsos made of lotion. A cosmetic fore-face that hung in liquid suspension in front of the real face, which turned as old and muddy as a coin. Bodies of cream worn like clothing. And so decorated. Foreign-language creams at the throat, to make speech plain. A cream at the back of the neck to release secrets. A salve for the mute and a salve for the tongue. A swishing lotion for inside the mouth, to protect the speaker from cream-induced prophecy. An unwitting release of secrets, compelled forth by perfect application, unbeknownst, of a cream. Applied in the woods. In the home. At work. Underground. On people, things, and space.

  Omen

  It was April 29 and the streetlights were flickering in and out. And yet—little miracle—power was still on at Fowler’s house. Barely. He still had water. Heat. The clock on his stove was blinking, so at some point in the night he’d lost electricity. Briefly. His house might go dark again. It was out of his hands.

  The flood had come on hard yesterday, the answer to a season of mountain rain. They’d seen it coming, and all the clay-faces had been crying about it on the news. Whimper whimper out of their omen holes. Everybody run for the hills. But you couldn’t force people from their homes. Yet. You could scare them to higher ground, another town, a school gymnasium outside the flood zone. You could conjure the odds of survival, showing the footage of past disasters, a child’s sock in a ditch, the imprint of a little person in the grass. Most people would scatter.

  Most people. Excepting his truly. Fowler the Last. There would be no heirs. He’d waited out the evacuation because certain projects flourished in an empty neighborhood. Houses hollow. No people around to see. Most of what was really urgent to do necessitated a near-total absence of the living. Hell yes, he was relieved, but there was a sack of undesired emotion inside him. Instincts boiled up, even in idiots. His blood was on notice. His body could be scared and so what. Death to all feeling soon, right? RIP and whatever, because darkness forevermore. He wasn’t in charge of his feelings. It was kind of a relief. Just see where the secret engine pulled him, and don’t show your goddamn cards.

  From his doorway Fowler could see a distant light burning in the hills. Given what he knew about the terrain, a light of that sort didn’t compute. There were mud barriers up there, rock dams, and lookout blinds, sometimes with little huts attached. There was what was called a sluice. He’d been to a few of the huts. He knew the hills pretty well. You could enter a hut, go to sleep. No one bothered you. You could think of it as your own home when you wanted to.

  But there were no power lines at that elevation. Not even animals, really. The word “hideout” had obvious problems. Connotations. You pictured a shoot-out. You pictured an old dirty bed with handcuffs on the floor, a shit stain on the wall. But he used the word priva
tely as a kind of code. He knew what it meant. He could call it whatever he liked.

  He found it hard not to worry. A light pulsing in the hills as if someone had just plugged in the eye of God. Was there a work crew dug in up there, and did that mean there’d been a significant mudslide, bringing a hut down with it? With some daylight he’d have perspective. Shapes would come out and show themselves.

  He held something of value in the hills, is why he cared. That was a safe way to think about it. Holdings. A lien. A claim. Nothing on paper, of course. Never that. You had to keep yourself from even thinking of these things in any detail. In case of what? Men, women, and children, first of all. Spies of varying skill sets, which was more or less the entire human race. People who were not whole. Certain citizens, just a mush of sadness on the inside, ached and pined and agonized unless they could lick your insides for whatever you knew. They had to sniff you over like you were a dog bowl and tear off a piece of your special core and just rub it all over themselves. Your own true water. Not that there were people who could stethoscope your thoughts. He wasn’t stupid. But the operating wisdom now, in the year of all hell breaks loose, was that you didn’t know who could hear you, see you, know you. Weren’t you the ultimate fool if you thought you had a secret that was yours alone?

  * * *

  —

  At sunrise Fowler stepped outside his house, closed the door gently so as not to disturb his wife. It would be pretty hard to wake her, he laughed to himself, because she wasn’t home. Hadn’t been for a good while. How funny that he kept doing that, tiptoeing around, being so careful, so quiet, because she always said his steps were too heavy. She could hear him breathing in the next room. She told him he coughed too loudly, and once she said that when he coughed like that, with such a rumble, she felt threatened.

  Threatened like, what, he was going to hurt her?

  She wasn’t sure. She said she didn’t control her own reactions. How was she supposed to just pretend it didn’t scare her? Did he want her to do that? She could try to do that. Would that make him happy, she asked, if when he did something she found frightening, she kept quiet and calm and acted like it did not upset her?

  He didn’t want to smash her head in. Nothing like that. He would know if he regularly had thoughts like that. He wasn’t really that way. She wasn’t here, anyway. He couldn’t get to her if he tried.

  * * *

  —

  Fowler wandered the waterlogged neighborhood, mud spilling over his Bogs. What a strange vacancy all around him, like everyone just had to get off the planet.

  He wanted to be able to look up into the sky and see a stream of people, just slashes and dark marks, shooting off and away from here. A proper evacuation. A full-on abandonment of the world. That wasn’t something you often got to see. The word “evacuation” should be held in reserve for such an event.

  From Burdock Road to the Deering radial there were uprooted trees drifting by like canoes. The people who had left yesterday had left badly. Doors to some houses were still open, lights shining inside, which, if he didn’t have something else to take care of right now, he could be a good neighbor about. He bet there were cats. People often left a cat behind. During calamity, Fowler could pick a house, and go on in, and run into a cat or two. See who wore the crown then, who owned the planet. He didn’t really know who kept cats. You had to be a regular in someone’s house before you knew if they kept a cat.

  He got the occasional invite, but mostly he knew these houses from the outside. Sometimes the cats never appeared when someone strange was over. The cats had an idea of their own safety and they practiced it carefully. People less so, which, well. A different attitude toward safety. Someone comes to your house, and you happen to be in the other room, you come out. You don’t crawl under your couch. Mostly because of being polite. That would be a good chart to look at. Just all of the creatures and how they supervised their own safety. Strategies against harm, real or imagined. Accurate or inaccurate view of a threat. Good choices, bad choices. Success rates. How was the species doing overall, in relation to its enemies? So many charts he’d like to examine.

  Anyway, if this all kept up for a few days—rain in the hills, loosening slabs of earth—he’d start to know who kept cats, and had left them. He’d hear them.

  It was funny. To have waited so long for this opportunity, a time when no one was around and he could do as he pleased, go straight to the designated location, which he would not name to himself, and grab those items of interest, which he would neither name nor picture.

  But the going was hard outside in the water. And something seemed wrong. Which, well, of course.

  Waders. He had them at home. Walking through dark water, you had no real idea what you kept running up against, what was under your feet, what bumped your legs. Half of your world was blind. In reverse, that would really be something. A sheer darkness above the belly. Moving through a cold, thick mass, unable to breathe or see, your legs kicking freely below as if dangling in space. That’d be a ride he’d pay for.

  Maybe he should return home, have lunch, and think through his plan again. He pictured himself at the table, his waders folded over a chair in the mudroom. Half a person with the bones removed. If only he’d already taken care of his errand, crossed it off his list. Screw it, screw it, screw it. There was so little time.

  Slowly he aimed himself toward the girl’s house.

  * * *

  —

  It was at the block party a year ago when his plan started to grow a sort of awful hair, and leak, and sort of slobber on him no matter what he did or where he went. Regarding the girl. The girl, the girl, the girl. Who created this inadequate language that rubbed all of the detail off a thing and still ruled supreme as the primary currency people hurled at each other to make themselves known and whatnot?

  A block party last year. Of all things. There was a fire engine parked on the street, and there were food tables, and the neighborhood association had rented a dunk tank.

  Every so often, a great big splash sent water hurtling over the crowd, and a fat, shirtless man climbed out of the dunk tank, laughing.

  Fowler came around to talking with some of the men gathered in the street. First he waited in line for a sausage roll. The one they gave him was sweaty and soft in his mouth. Something like a bone seemed to run the length of it.

  “You caught yourself a beauty, there,” one of the men said to him.

  Fowler looked down at it. In these situations, you could eat, and people understood you wouldn’t be answering right away.

  Men were easy, in that as long as you showed you’d heard them, you could go a very long time without saying anything back. It was a mercy.

  He knew that it was a little bit of an accident that he was a man. It would have been an accident of a different kind had he been a woman. It was a small accident, really, that he was a person in the first place. A chart of all those little accidents, along with drawings of his bones, adding up to who he was—that’d be worth looking at.

  In his little group, the men were talking about hunting, even though only one of them seemed to do it. The others got by on saying how much they would like to do it, or intended to try it, once certain conditions were met. A season was beginning, the hunter was saying, or a season was ending, and then something else about traps. Where you put them, when you checked them, and how you baited them.

  “Really, now,” the hunter said, “I just load the fuckers up with candy.”

  The men all chuckled.

  Fowler looked at them, one by one, and very nearly saw through their faces into something more. Punishing insights. Understandings. But it clouded over. He lived in an unpromising time; that was just a fact. A time of terrible ignorance. Too little information about what mattered the most. There wasn’t, as yet, a good tool to get a clear picture of exactly what others were thinking. This ab
ility was probably on its way for people, a hundred years out, maybe. One hundred and fifty. Things would open up, in all sorts of ways. A method of getting in there and really knowing something. But Fowler would be dead before such technology came along.

  He wondered if, on his deathbed, he’d want to be told what was really in store. Deathbed. That was a joke. There’d be no bed. Fowler could picture himself, all too convincingly, running through trees, scrambling up a hillside, taking bullets to the torso. They’d itch going in, he figured. Itch and burn. He hadn’t been shot before, but it didn’t tax the imagination to picture it. It came to him sometimes almost like a memory.