Notes from the Fog

by Ben Marcus

  There were two troopers when Fowler opened up. One right there on his doorstep, the other leaning against a Jeep down in the street. Water to his knees.

  “Evening rounds,” said the trooper. “Safety check. Passing through. Saw that your lights were on.” The trooper squinted past him into the house.

  “Okay,” said Fowler. “All’s well here. We’re doing fine.”

  Lots of lights on all over the neighborhood. Was the trooper going to every house?

  They stood talking on the steps.

  A bad spot of weather, they agreed. Too much rain collected in a place that couldn’t hold it. So down it came. Pretty fast, actually. The trooper had once used his speed gun on a flash flood, he told Fowler. Clocked it faster than a car. And if the ground was too warm, and too goddamn loose, then forget it. Too much of the mountain peels away and you can’t stop it.

  Fowler agreed. He had often stood with another person, discussing recent phenomena, and found agreement on everything that could not be done. It was shameful to bond over powerlessness. Shameful. Here he was engaged in it again.

  “Anyone else home?” asked the trooper. “Wife?”

  “No, sir,” said Fowler. “She’s up in Rooneville.”

  “No kids?”

  “Not yet.” Fowler crossed his fingers and held them up. I wish I may I wish I might.

  Just words in his head he would not share.

  “Okay, well,” said the trooper. “I’m supposed to do my best to talk you folks out of your houses. That’s my best. I’ve done it.”

  “Oh yeah, other people stuck it out?” Fowler asked, looking up the street. He’d seen no one today. Heard nothing.

  Witnesses, was the worry. Except what had he really done? Just the one home invasion, although that was a strong way to name it, with no one being home. Wasn’t every bit of motion, anywhere, an invasion? You invade a room, you invade the street, you invade your own bed.

  “A few folks. Here and there. Holed right up like you, no doubt. But look, we could get you to dry ground, no charge. Pack a bag real quick. Better safe than sorry.”

  “Right. Or both.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Safe and sorry.”

  Well, he should not have said that.

  “Sorry about what?” asked the trooper.

  He couldn’t find an answer. This man sure could talk and now here Fowler was, answering.

  “Just a lot of suffering,” Fowler said finally. “For the people who suffer. I’m sorry about it.”

  The trooper gave Fowler a pretty long look.

  “Anyway, good thing you’re up here on this rise.”

  “Good luck for us,” agreed Fowler. “Plus the stilts.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Got the house up on stilts. Even last time with, what was it, six feet of it coming right through town, we kept it pretty dry in here.”

  “Good for you,” said the trooper. He looked around. “You’ve got a nice little situation. You all take care.”

  “We had the work done when we bought the house. Never could have gotten a mortgage without it.”

  Stupid to keep talking. When someone leaves the conversation, you let them go. Never keep talking. Just let them go. If he ever had to write a manual for how to be a person, that would be in there, right at the top. Just look for the silence and be the first to practice it.

  The trooper turned back. “So, no children in the house, huh?”

  That seemed to be a funny way to ask. Fowler looked at the trooper and tried to make the question go away with his face.

  “No,” he said. Simple was best. It also happened to be true, which made him more uneasy. That’s where they got you, when you said the truth but did so falsely, nervously.

  Fowler saw himself doing unspeakable things. That didn’t mean he’d do them. He’d come to terms with that difference a long time ago.

  “I had to ask,” explained the trooper, waving as he left.

  Had to ask. Fowler knew the feeling. He thought of all the things that he had to ask, too, and that he never would ask. The things he wouldn’t say. The things he wouldn’t think. Statements waiting inside him, if only the right listening device were deployed. Mostly you walked the world in a kind of lockdown. Mostly.

  * * *

  —

  He couldn’t sleep so well that night. Rain and mud and rain again, and then thunder shook the house. Weather like this could peel back a mountain. A hut had no foundation. It sat on rocks. When the soil softened and the rocks shifted, then the hut was merely another grave, unearthed, sliding off, with no bodies in it yet.

  No one questioned an empty grave. It was often just mistaken for a hole. No one noticed that empty graves were everywhere, inside houses and out, on mountains and right in town. Areas being readied for the dead. All areas. You more or less could not occupy an area, anywhere, that was not once, or would not soon be, a fairly ample grave.

  Fowler had to feel it didn’t matter. He was in his grave already. He and the girl. Their graves were on the move. The question was how best to fix them in place. Get the thing formalized.

  When he finally got out of bed, in pure darkness, he confirmed that his power was down. Streetlights, too. Nothing in the hills. No light. Too little sound. Water and heat and everything, finished for a while. How he had kept power this long was a mystery.

  How big the outage was, along with its long-term forecast, would remain unknown for a bit. He had a radio that took batteries, but the men who spoke on the overnight broadcast had little to say. Farmers and thinkers and worriers. Sensibilities from another time. Imaginary creatures with old sad voices whose message, perhaps, had never been clear. If they ever had information he could use, he’d found, they withheld it from him, in ways that could seem intentional. A promise of what they might be discussing, which they never did in fact discuss.

  He had a flashlight. He had a telephone landline that used to work, though he hadn’t checked it in a while. Phone calls were not his specialty, though he was capable of receiving them. Should one come along, he’d be ready.

  Probably he had candles and matches if he wanted to go and look. This was the sort of thing you did when you had a partner in the darkness, a blackout friend, Marjorie used to say. Light up some candles and make a home out of it. Marjorie had always been pretty good about keeping a kit. She’d get him to fill the tub with water, to help the toilet along when the pump was off. You’d want to move that water out of your home. Keep a little bucket by the tub. Sometimes the bustle and panic was for nothing, and sometimes he was grateful that she’d thought of it.

  For a minute he wondered if she was out of power wherever she was, too, but then figured that it wouldn’t be too likely. Not that he knew for sure. Rooneville was just a town name he’d given the trooper. There were lots of good town names, each of them as likely as the other. Each the name of some place you went to die. You could give them out and they seemed to work. She was asleep somewhere, he would bet, unless she’d gone and leapt a time zone, which wasn’t really like her. She was safe and warm. He could hear her voice anytime he wanted to. She would wake up soon and make tea.

  Probably what he would do was sit up and wait for morning. The time right now was unclear. It could be midnight or it could be 4 a.m. Something might have happened and he would not know it. Something big. He hoped it was closer to day. Waiting wasn’t his specialty. From his kitchen window he could look to where the sun would be, expecting advance notice of some kind, but right now there was nothing out there, no lights in the hills, none in the sky. The power outage would seem complete. From far away was the whole planet dark? Maybe, if things seemed stuck out there, in terms of the sun, some kind of rupture, he’d move his chair to where he wouldn’t even have to get up. He could sit there looking for it, be the first to see it, a front-row
seat for when the world turned back on.

  Some people, apparently, suffered a disturbance where they were afraid the sun wasn’t going to come up. It was a fear and it had a name. His wife had read about it. She said these people had to be consoled at night, but you couldn’t console them. There was a kind of therapy for it, but she didn’t remember what it was. Supposedly it didn’t much help. They were as certain as you could be about anything. They fought you off and yelled.

  Fowler pictured these people in a dark house, holding each other, trembling. When the sun finally came up they stood and shook themselves, relieved. They’d be embarrassed, apologizing to everyone. What a lot of fuss over nothing. They kept looking out the window to make sure the sun was still there. Weeping and hugging each other, shaking their heads, feeling foolish, foolish. Then the day, of course, advanced, took a left turn, deepened, the afternoon came on strong, and they felt a pull again, a terrible suspicion. They went outside, staring and pointing. They watched and wept, holding each other as tightly as they could, as the sun went down again, for what genuinely felt like the last time on earth.

  A fear like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Some people always know, ahead of all the others, what to be watching out for. One day, sooner or later, those people wouldn’t be wrong.

  And where would he be? he wondered. Would he be complete? Would he have done whatever it took, no matter what, to make himself whole?

  4

  Stay Down and Take It

  James is home early saying that goddamnit we really seriously need to pack. Hup hup, time to go. It’s the weather, again, and it bores me so. We live where the water loves to visit. Just a little bit of rain off the coast, that’s all, and it will try to flood into our home. It loves to soak our rug and rise up the walls, and once it loved to seep into our electronics, inside the TV cabinet, and destroy our precious entertainment center, which keeps us, or me anyway, from raiding the medicine cabinet at night for other pleasures. Otherwise, well, we have brilliant sunsets and the kind of grass that is absurdly tall, taller than you or me. I don’t know how it doesn’t just fall over. You’d think it had a long slender bone in it, in each blade. Some original, beautiful creature that needed no limbs or head, because it had no enemies. Who knows.

  James bustles around the house, grabbing what he can. He says to pack light and to pack smart. I like this military side of him. I almost feel charmed. The evacuation is mandatory this time, something nasty and mean and serious is barreling down on us, and I almost wish we had a pretty siren in our little community for occasions like this one. A siren adds a feeling of gravity—to an evacuation, to a catastrophe. Just a feeling that something important is happening, which one so often does not get to feel. James says that he’ll grab our “go” bag, which I didn’t even know we had. Does it have pears in it, and medical marijuana, and Percocets, and frozen Snickers bars? Something tells me it’s more of a batteries and rope and candles and matches kind of bag. James is huffy and swollen and red as he loads the car. This is a little bit much for him. Still, it’s nice to see him excited, in charge, alive. It’s been hard to watch a man his age slowly lose his purpose, as he’s been doing, shuffling around the kitchen trying to perfect his long-simmering sauces, which only get poured out on the back lawn when he’s done, since how much gravy-drenched flesh can the two of us reasonably consume?

  There is just one road out of here, and everyone we know is on it, moaning silently, I imagine, gently rending their summer linens at this unwelcome disruption. It gets tiring waving at them all—stressed-out wrinkled accidents of the human form, with white hair, or no hair, or nubby yellow sun visors. Grimacing, hunched over their steering wheels, as if they are being chased by men with guns. We know these people by their cars, which are long and dark and quiet, just like ours. We could all just call each other, share information and prop up each other’s nervous systems with voice-based medication, but people are saving their cell phone batteries. We’ve been through this drill before. Who knows where we’ll all be tonight. James also prefers me not to talk on the phone when he’s driving. He does his best to tolerate it, bless him, but he tenses up so terribly that I fear he will break open and spill everywhere, even while he insists, sometimes angrily, that he really doesn’t mind. Really really really, with spit fluffing out of his mouth and a look of pure murder in his eyes. I feel that he is daring me to make a call, but when I consider the risk, I sort of daren’t. After all, I am also a passenger in the vehicle that he is driving, and I must consider my own safety as well.

  “This is the hardest part,” says James. “Just getting out of here.”

  Well put, and doesn’t that just apply to any old situation: a meeting, a party, a relationship, a life? Always that sticky problem of the exit and how to squeeze through it.

  When I don’t respond, James says, “Do you agree?” It’s what he often wants and needs. Assent. I tend to pay out as much as I can, with my mouth and otherwise, but always one must monitor the personal cost, careful not to add to the deficit, which can swell up and trigger a low-grade rage. Not my prettiest style. I never knew that I would be called on so relentlessly to agree with someone. Mother never said. Ask not, I guess, and I sort of haven’t.

  I touch his leg. “Oh I do. I was just thinking, in fact, how right you are. This is the difficult part. This right here.” I would so love to point at the two of us, the fact of us, here in this car, on this road, on this day with a storm coming, in this particular life, just to say that this is the difficult part. Because, well. But the precise gesture eludes me. Hands can only signify so much. Usually they should just rest in one’s lap, sneaking beneath the garment now and then for a wee scratch at the tuft. This is possibly why one is supposed to use one’s words. I think. Plus, James is focusing all of his energy on the road ahead, which is really just an endless line of cars pointing west, away from the storm, away from home. We will be here a while. We might as well table any immediate feelings.

  “This is about the only time I hate this island,” James says. “When it keeps us prisoner.”

  “Yup,” I say. “Me too.”

  It’s not really an island that we live on, or it wasn’t until some developers got clever. Because people love an island. I guess we love an island. I’m told they used explosives. They bombed a little spit of land that connected two bigger blobs of coastal blah, then built a baby road over the obliterated spit, the road we are now stuck on. So, poof, our little town became an island, and the houses suddenly cost more. The wind was arguably sharper and cooler after that, the light more intense, more knowing and intimate. More light-like. According to the marketing, anyway. Oh it was instantly spectacular, and all it took was some dynamite stuffed into the gaping pores of an old, rotted peninsula. Blowing your way to beauty might have been a nice slogan. One’s whole attitude to life was said to deepen, thoughts and feelings growing ever more rarefied and special. Island life. Too bad we can’t all die here, too, just to sustain our purity, but the island has a rule. You can die here, sure, and many of us have, spectacularly and otherwise, usually otherwise, but you must be buried across the sound, where the regular dumb folk reside and perish, and where the ground will open up for any old dead person, no questions asked. Even a living one, maybe, although who can say? Of course cremation is, as the saying goes, a workaround. A fine one. You can come home again—in a jar—and some of us have, but the victory seems small. I look at certain old friends, rendered to dust in their tureens, placed on various island mantels, and it is hard to feel just what it is they’ve won.

  “What’s strange,” I say, as we idle in traffic, “is that the sun is out. It’s such a fine day. So weirdly beautiful.”

  James cranes his neck to look out the window, trying maybe to be fair, and he has that expression, as if he’s evaluated all of the evidence but still, he’s very sorry to say, he just cannot bring himself to agree. It would violate his delicate mo
ral compass to cede any ground here. “I’m not sure that’s so strange,” he says, as if there’s a superior adjective he’s reluctant to share. “Quiet before the you know, and all. Plus I see some…” And he points into nowhere, where there is maybe nothing, and I’m sure I don’t even need to look.

  Oh, he’s probably right. What do I know when it comes to strange? Gosh knows I’m no expert in the uncanny.

  “Yes, well, should we have music, or just listen to each other’s bodies complain?”

  “You think I’m complaining?” says James. “Because I’m not. This is a little bit stressful. I’m trying to get us out of here.”

  “I understand,” I say. And I do. It needn’t be said aloud, but I was referring to the sounds we make, each of us, which are whorishly amplified in the car, and not exactly my preferred music. Sounds of hunger, sounds of anxiety, sounds that have no explanation whatsoever—just the body at work, leaking and churning, groaning at a frequency no one was ever meant to hear. Live with someone long enough and you learn all of their gruesome lyrics, memorize all of the squishy instrumentals that gurgle out of them, note by note.

  I click on the news and for a little while it’s just the sound of the storm elsewhere, where it’s ripened into a roar. We are to believe that the storm has paused in the lee of a mountain up north, where it’s gathering strength, pawing at the dust like a bull. They have a microphone penetrated deep inside this poor storm, I guess, and I’d give anything to sound like that. So sweet and angry and brand-new, a kind of subvocal monster simply cooing at the pain and pleasure of life. It’s perfectly beautiful and soothing, on such a nice day, until people start talking over it, explaining where this storm is from and where it might go, what it could do along the way, and then saying just how this storm makes them feel. Feelings! Every one of them would seem to be stirred up by this storm, by every kind of person. When it’s over, I’m exhausted and confused. I examine myself for feelings, carefully checking in the usual hiding places, and there are simply none to be found.