Notes from the Fog

by Ben Marcus

  The hunter went on about traps. You had to clean them after each use, and the process sometimes needed a hose, or even this thing, and he tried to make a drawing of it with his hands. He said one thing he saw in a trap was something he’d not forget. An animal eating candy with a jaw-clamp of knives sunk into its haunch. Almost happy. Going through the candy pretty slowly, sort of relaxed.

  You heard a version of this story as a kid. Animals caught in traps chewed off a leg to escape. Fowler had to wonder. Obviously it hurt a little bit. That wasn’t something anybody would really want. But if you did have to do it, and you found yourself, as an animal, chewing into your own flesh, tearing it away, trying to gnaw through the bone, which was when the project got serious, was there ever a moment, even just for a second, when you felt like you’d been born to the job? A kind of pure calling? The slow destruction of oneself with one’s mouth? You’d be smart leaving room around categories like that, he thought. Not to believe that you know what there is to be known. You don’t.

  They were standing in a circle, eating. Some of the men held little glass jars of beer. Fowler kept away from that. He took in all the liquid he needed at night.

  The kids were out today, because everybody said that the block party was really for them. You did this kind of thing for the kids. And then you also took part in it for the kids. You went to work for the kids. You cooked dinner for the kids. You cleaned up for the kids. When you had kids, according to the people who blasted Fowler with their views, what you did you did for them. Even when you had more kids, you did it for the kids you already had, and when you struck one of them in the face, everyone should know whose good it was for. Whereas if you didn’t have kids, like Fowler and his wife—despite a verbal project that circled the possibility, but had long since faltered—what you did you apparently did for yourself. Or maybe for no one. To hear the parents talk, without kids you were nothing, a quarter person, a kind of costume that could be hung on a hook. You powered down in the evening and your body deflated in the corner. Someone could kick you down the street like a trash bag.

  Some young people at the block party were making a disturbance. Fowler caught sight of the girl pretty quickly. The girl—this wasn’t really how he would come to think of her. It was just that the usual words were not ideal. They didn’t fully seem to function. There was too much slippage, like an electric short that kept them from sticking. He would learn her name, and wish he hadn’t. In Fowler’s view the name didn’t suit her. It was like a small lie that needed to be owned up to. He would come to an arrangement with himself not to use it. He would go to her house, watch her sleep, but this first time, out in the wild, was different, and he’d never see her that way again.

  The girl had on what looked like men’s pants and a sort of circus sweater. The pants were high-waters and the sweater, too, but on her arms, like maybe she’d gone swimming and her clothes seized up, tried to vanish off her body. A creature who fell asleep for a very long time and woke up too large for her clothing. Her hair was piled in some kind of bundle as if her crafter had dropped it on her head from the sky. Because she was not ordinary. She had not been made in the normal way.

  She was singing or she was shouting, and maybe what was making all of her friends laugh is that they weren’t sure which one. In a group of creatures, regardless of the species, there is sometimes one who seems to control the blood of the others.

  Fowler tucked deeper into his sausage roll and saw all the men looking at her, not hiding it, their faces made of rubber and their eyes scratched from their heads, like in a picture.

  As the girls walked by, the men turned small and strange. No one breathed. They just waited for the girls to get clear and then you could feel them catching up on their breath.

  They again gave each other glances. Just a significant exchange of silence, trying not to break into pieces.

  “Well, thank god I don’t shit in my own backyard,” one of them finally said, shaking his head.

  “Hell, I don’t shit in my own toilet,” someone replied, and they all laughed.

  Fowler would see her asleep in a month. You didn’t keep records for things like that, because of course. He would stop in, take a look, gather some items, and truck them up to the hut, where a certain kind of situation was taking shape. A residence, a place, a grave. Today her face seemed filled with air. He squinted so she could be blurry.

  A bit more chatter, everybody silently agreeing that they wanted to destroy what they’d seen, that they could remove the small parts of their bodies and make a pile there in the street. For someone to find later. Someone smart, a sort of scientist, who could look at it, throw his hand into it, and have a close enough idea of just what had happened in this place.

  Then the men tensed up. “Shut up, shut up,” someone said, “here they all come.”

  It was the wives, bombing at them from the other side of the street. They closed in pretty fast and acted like they’d missed all the fun.

  “What are you all laughing about?” One of the wives turned to Fowler.

  The Shebster wife, the Coramper one. He didn’t remember. Those sounded like fake names to him, like they had all lied about who they really were. He wanted to keep eating. A tough bit of cartilage was lodged in his mouth. He was almost done chewing. He’d do anything not to look at the girl. You had to follow a ration.

  This wife was really on him.

  “Tell us what these guys said or we will torture you,” she shrieked.

  Fowler saw where this woman would be buried and he saw the weather for it, her children crying at her grave. If he really strained he could see the children themselves get old and bloat with fluid until they burst.

  She touched him and he stopped eating. “Are you ticklish?” The men all watched.

  Fowler was occupied with the larger question of how many ways the girl could look, doing different things, even long after she’d died. As bones, as powder, at night, having all of the different feelings, and if any of those ways would change what he felt should happen—that she and Fowler should combine themselves in a remote location. Even the girl’s father, whom Fowler had seen, and once spoken to, had, buried in his face, something that drew Fowler in.

  So it wasn’t the girl in particular, was it? Maybe the father would do, or the mother, or, if it were possible, ancestors going back further, if you could arise out of where you lived and drift into the past, to make selections. Because the attraction—even though that was the wrong word, really—was just the cells, and the blood. A precise arrangement of them, regardless, really, of the carrier, rendering her face and body just so. Maybe the girl herself didn’t matter, even if she seemed to hold a more concentrated level, as if a strong dose of it had funneled down into her for the time being. He couldn’t ignore that. He’d be lying to himself. What would he want from her as an old woman? It was a problem.

  The tools didn’t really exist for him to scrape what he needed into a bottle.

  * * *

  —

  “Marjorie,” the woman called over to Fowler’s wife. “Hey, Marjorie, I caught myself a big one!” She’d grabbed Fowler now and he started to sway, eating his sausage again, trying to smile in just the right way for the guys.

  The other wives looked down and laughed. The laughing had changed. It didn’t make him feel good to hear someone say his wife’s name. It never had. Early on, when they were first just getting to know each other and he hoped to show her some of the paths in the foothills, before they had embarrassed each other with nudity, he wondered if that meant they should not be married. Her name wasn’t entirely her fault.

  Marjorie was nearby, in a circle of people, and she didn’t seem to immediately notice she was being called out. When he saw her he could tell she didn’t want to look up—she had on her do not disturb face. She’d be gone in three months, leaving with no argument, the two of them nearly sha
king hands. He wanted to keep these people from bothering her. But she looked over at them anyway.

  “What do you say?” the wife asked, pointing her finger right into Fowler’s body. “Is this one ticklish? Your husband! Is he?”

  Marjorie shrugged, and it was like they all suddenly felt the same thing, with this woman’s finger pressing into Fowler, as if she knew what she was looking for, when really she had her hand in something she should not be touching. The group quickly fell quiet. Maybe each of them, in their own way, was picturing themselves being launched off the street, as Fowler was, and propelled high up into the air, then rapidly hurtling through space. Their faces spreading in the wind as it rushed by them, and all of them looking down at their whole neighborhood, where everything had turned so small. Killable, dismissible, unreal. There wasn’t really such a good word for how it all looked from up there where he was.

  * * *

  —

  Now Fowler was out in the neighborhood, just where the block party was a year ago, and everyone was gone, evacuated. He could do what he liked. The streets were empty. Yesterday some vehicles had lifted in the muck and floated off. The biggest things, in the right weather, were suddenly weightless, beautiful. Should not people, on occasion, float past one another, weightless and rolling? The problem with the laws of physics was repetition, dullness. There was a kind of deep insult buried in the way the world was designed.

  Pretty much everything was hidden by a rumbling flow of mud. Some houses were seeing damage.

  Mud, they all knew by now, because you heard it on the news every time the rain started, slid down from Moyer Creek, which nearly ringed the town from above. Nearly. From space the creek might look like a broken circle, a circle with a tear in it, where some beast had maybe broken through. But today you couldn’t really look into the hills and think the mud was coming from just one place anymore. Someone long ago had named the area a basin. Not a scientific term. In the neighborhood they called it a bucket because it did fill right up.

  Stupid to put houses in it. Stupid to put people there. True of any place if you took the long view. Pretty much any location anywhere featured its own notable extinction. Sudden death. But people did not exactly get to see a list, for example, of all the people who had died in the place they were thinking of living. Plus how they died, going back a good enough ways to give them the picture they really were entitled to have. Probably it would be unbearable to know. Who died here. And here. And here. How they died. When they died. Probably no one would care to know. But still, freedom of information. If you felt yourself to be strong enough, you should be allowed to know.

  There was probably an ocean here long ago. And before that, what, maybe hot plains, they said, too hot even to stand on. Jungle, too. Sharp beds of coal. A meadow of knives, Fowler had read somewhere.

  Fowler had to figure that, throughout history, one animal had hunted another in this very spot. What were the larger observations one could make, in terms of who escaped, who was caught, who was eaten? You could think that you walked down the street in your town, but you didn’t. You participated in something else entirely.

  A chart depicting every creature who passed this way, going back to the beginning. Did they know they were in danger? Did they intend harm to others?

  * * *

  —

  When he got to the girl’s house, it didn’t take him long. Her bedroom was off the kitchen, and not upstairs with the other bedrooms. Nobody was home, but Fowler couldn’t help calling out. He instantly regretted it. What if there was a recording instrument? They’d have captured his voice. Except, nonsense. That was nonsense and he knew it. In the entryway, dripping mud, he debated between boots or socks. Which sort of footprints were called for? A pair of clogs in the shoe rack solved the problem. Belonging to the girl’s father, no doubt, owing to their size. Perhaps for gardening, or cooking. He pushed his mud-caked feet into them, then clomped to the girl’s bedroom, the same way her father must have done many, many times.

  * * *

  —

  It had taken a little bit of hiding to be able to stick around yesterday, when the patrols came through on bullhorns. Men at the door pounding away. Everyone barking in animal voices. You shouldn’t have to take cover in your own house. But the county had learned its lesson from last time, when no one got out, no one was scared enough, no one wanted to be troubled.

  It was last year’s flood that had them all crazy. The bunch of little people they’d lost to it, just around the corner from here. The Larsen boys and their friend whose name Fowler always forgot. Everyone acted like their own children had died. You had to be prepared to discuss the matter, and be silent about it, too, when that was called for. So no one was fooling around this time. They were going to scoot off and play it safe.

  Not him, though. A couple of items could get scratched off his to-do list if he sat this one out and had the place to himself. He’d squatted under a window for most of the day, crawling here and there for supplies, and clocked a good bit of the mayhem going on outside.

  * * *

  —

  Today at the girl’s house Fowler found a backpack to stash the stuff in. If the girl cared for the backpack, which he figured she must, since it was on her bed, then that was one more thing she’d be pleased to see.

  If he got her up to the hut, if that was something that would ever really happen. After he’d solved some of the logistics. Acquisition. Transport. If the hut was even there anymore. So far, when he pictured it, he could not summon any shapes out of the darkness. The visualization was proving difficult. One’s imagination often failed.

  Fowler walked home, the backpack raised over his head. He was careful not to get anything dirty, impossible as that was. If anyone came along, it’d be a sorrow, but he could sink the backpack into the mud. Objects like that seemed to reappear in the girl’s room over time, in different colors and shapes, so he could always fetch them again, but, well.

  * * *

  —

  At home, Fowler peeled off his mud-stiffened clothing and dropped himself into the hot bath. He warmed a soup for lunch, then dialed into the news. A water-volume report was coming up later in the hour. Numbers on the flood so far. How much of it there still was to come down. To rise up. That would be a good number to know.

  The news never reported on the mountain roads. Too few people lived up there. Possibly no one. A crushed hut wouldn’t make the news.

  The girl’s diary listed her top ten favorite things. Some of them were people. Her mother and dad. But they weren’t invited. They had spent enough time with their daughter. Time’s up. Other items could be crossed off the list. If a hut came down, and its contents spilled, what would they find? A girl’s pillow. A basket of stuffed animals. In the backpack today was a poster he’d had to fold. When it went up in the hut, with a thumbtack, it would have creases. There were four little guys in the poster. They had grown-up hair. No names. They looked stunned, like they’d opened the wrong door. One of them held a raccoon.

  A set of markers and a pad. A blanket with a picture pattern of some people Fowler couldn’t place. Certainly they were famous. More stuff from that top dresser drawer. He would just reach in and see what came back out. What you did on a dig was you collected artifacts and kept your own ideas out of it. Your own ideas almost always led to trouble.

  He could just as well take a sliver of wood from the floor in her room. A divot of Sheetrock from inside her closet. All throughout the house, her yard. He could scrape enough pieces. Where did it stop, and why not her father, her mother, her friends? All of them brought, in pieces or whole, to the hut, which could never hold it all. It was getting too crowded already, but there was no way to know where it ended.

  What you’re trying to do is make yourself whole. Which it’s stupid to think another person’s bones can’t help you with.

  In the same way
it didn’t pay to say the girl’s name, it didn’t pay to think about her. It didn’t pay to go into her house. It didn’t pay to know where she went to school and what her schedule was each day of the week, when school let out and practice began. Band or sport. Musical instrument or study group. Nothing paid. You got an answer and nothing broke open.

  Two creatures, built of cells, fueled on blood. A system of bones at the core. If they died in the same area, or were buried together, and then, hundreds of years later, were found by archaeologists, the archaeologists might easily think that they had stumbled across the remains of a single creature. There would be a way to reassemble these bones, of him and the girl, for instance, if they had died or were buried together in the same area, into one beast on their wire frame. There would be redundant bones, two of each, but a bigger and a smaller, and it would be just as easy to tell a story about this creature, to create an exhibit, to show it to children, or whatever they called their young, who could stand and look at it in awe.

  The carcass of a single creature. It was just that the bones of this creature had gone into scatter, and they needed to be gathered up. Put back together.

  * * *

  —

  At around dinnertime, a trooper came to the door.

  The sun was going down. An unpleasant spectacle. It wasn’t a given that the sunset would be something universally considered beautiful. At the outset of things, when that feature was put into place, he didn’t think it was a given. It could just as easily have become something that routinely horrified the citizens of the world. Made them crazy. Made them ill.