by Ben Marcus
In any case, nothing short of a family emergency was going to keep me from going to work. I took the bus with a few other cozy folks, and it was no big deal. Yes, the walking was slow, and yes, you could not hear a thing, not your feet on the ground, not the cars rolling by, but it was gorgeous and I think we should feel lucky when our world is transformed so wholly before our eyes, when everything is changed just by some snow. You live for things like that, and you don’t even know it. Then they happen and you almost want to lie down in it, roll around, and pray that it doesn’t go away.
They were calling me Terry at the office, and what a big goof that was. They must have seen the name in the logger, and then why not haze the mule with a bit of nicknamery? I smirked at them. I didn’t give a shit. Their names were worse. They were lucky if they even had names. I’d seen their bodies hung with needles. I’d seen them breathing through masks, crying at their desks. These were people who were drowning, who would be dead soon. I walked past their cubicles and saluted. Here’s to you, people of the grave. Sleep well, my friends.
There was a book of photos on my desk, which I assumed had been left by Nelson. In this stage of a trial he was always showing me pictures and whatnot, and I guess I was supposed to log my reactions.
I looked through the photos, and it was sordid and strange and not at all pleasant, a book of sorrows and loss and mostly unspeakable desolation. Nelson must have been wondering what I could handle, how low he could go. Unbreakable my ass, maybe he was thinking. Would I give in and buckle? I wasn’t going to try to control my reactions. It wasn’t as if you walked around deciding how to feel. That’s not how it worked. You don’t have your feelings, they have you.
The pictures were of people with hair, people licked clean. People with faces you wanted to set fire to. People you would fight on the street if you saw them, even if you loved humanity, even if you did not believe in death. However peaceful you think you are, however sweet and nonviolent and angelic—you have a fight in you if only it can get unlocked, and that’s what these pictures were doing, testing one’s absolute limits, tearing thresholds, one by one. A kind of violation of your own moral line. Pictures, horribly vivid, of people who couldn’t smile without showing who they really were, and it wasn’t pretty. Just a way that they opened their mouths and showed too much. People with obvious secrets. People with no inner life. And then people with no outer life, either, because they were just dead. Shots of corpses galore, although just before, moments or days or weeks or maybe years before death, but it’s all the same in the longer view. Pictures of children. Babies. Landscapes. Parts of the world that could not have existed. Made-up scenery, not just too good to be true, but too horrible to be true. A good deal of that. Someone’s nightmare of the world, the sort of thing that makes everyone wish there were no such thing as the imagination. And then more people, especially ones who could not have existed, which was the worst. Realistic in their features, and all of that, but clearly unreal all the same. Someone’s sick idea of what a person looks like. Perversion everywhere, as if we’d only been born to feel the very worst things, and it all begged a pretty big question about why one had to be a person in the first place.
I’d had enough. I looked over to where Nelson usually came from, the hallway, the wall, his whole mysterious wing, but I didn’t figure I would see him today. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t watching.
One time they strapped me to some sensors and the screen lit up with bright bursts of dots not when I spoke, but when I didn’t. So I talked and talked, because I didn’t care for those points of light. I could go my whole life without seeing them again. So who cares if I had to talk to keep them gone? I’d say what I needed to. We all do things to keep the wolf away.
The rest of the day was mostly chopped up into the usual workaday carcass: lots of data to wing around, and lots of filing. I pounded away at my terminal and I filled the screen with meaning. Lunchtime came and when people asked if I was going to eat I dragged myself after them and sat through the awful, wet gnashing, holding my breath. Later we heard on the intercom that more snow was coming, and it seemed that a decision went around to let us all get the hell out of there early. People cheered, and afterward it was like they’d forgotten to close their mouths. They were showing teeth, walking around, getting their things, bundling up, all the while showing teeth as if they were about to tear something apart with their mouths, if only no one was watching. I kept my head down because after a little while you can’t look at people like that. It starts to unravel you. It starts to be too much.
* * *
—
It was early enough in the day that I thought I could catch the kids coming out of school. Surprise them maybe. I stood at the fence with the other parents, and it wasn’t clear who was in jail, us or them. We clung to the fence and we watched the door of the school. We looked at our phones. For a moment it seemed that anything could come out of that door: water, mud, animals.
When the bell rang and the children poured out, the parents pressed against the fence, hollering and waving. The children rippled into the playground, scanning the world for their makers. How did you know, looking at these children, some of them so truly lifelike, which ones were yours? The problem wasn’t that none of them were familiar, it was that they all were. I knew all of these kids. Their faces, the little way they ran. Some of them fell over and righted themselves and ran on and my heart ached. I stood there as they paired off and ran to hug their parents, and after the dust had cleared none of them had run to me. Not even one. They’d all been spoken for. I was standing here in plain sight and my own little ones were nowhere to be found. I watched the door and waited. The school had gone quiet. Everyone was shuffling away.
There was a man at the fence who widened his eyes at me, as if I was too big to see in one look, too complicated.
“Hey Terry, don’t see you here much anymore. How are the kids?”
What did you ever say when people asked you shit like that? You don’t say help me I’m dying. You don’t say hold me because I’m going to fall. You don’t say I cannot really speak to you right now, because if I do the blood will come out and I won’t be able to stop it and then we’ll all be in trouble. I guarantee it. You just don’t do that.
What I did say was that everyone was swell, in their way, and I rolled my eyes, and what a day and wasn’t it beautiful, the snow? The man looked around as I pointed, but you didn’t need to look around. It was on us, covering us up, and if we stood still any longer we’d be buried for good. I said, wasn’t it the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen?
* * *
—
There were cops at my house when I got home. Outside of the old rotted house, looking in the windows. A couple of young men in uniform. What was my protocol here? Keep walking and circle back around? But didn’t that leave my house vulnerable and should I not be protecting the inner contents? Who else would guard the place if not me?
When I walked up, they took off their hats, called me ma’am.
Did I live here, they wanted to know, and what was my name and would I be so kind as to show them some identification?
They came in and we talked and it was not at all unpleasant. This was routine, they said, they were checking in. They were seeing that people were all right. Did I live alone? Was there anyone else in the house?
I offered them tea and apologized. There was just nothing to eat. Nothing nothing nothing, never, no matter how much I shopped. Trucks rolled up and offloaded food, I explained, and the little ones upstairs sucked it down, spitting out not even a bone. There was no way to keep up.
They were okay, they didn’t care, they weren’t hungry. They just had a question for me, if I didn’t mind. Just a question and then they’d be on their way. Was I okay? Did I feel okay? What did I feel?
What did I feel? What a funny thing for a police officer to ask. I half expected a quest
ion along the lines of, where were you when, and I was worried a little bit. I thought I might not know. I thought I might not remember. Who doesn’t feel that in some tiny, forgotten part of their day they might have done something truly horrible? And then the cops come, and then, well, you find yourself confessing.
But what did I feel? What I felt was old, and I shared this with the officers. I cried a little bit right in front of them, and I’m not really bragging. I felt dead. I felt tired. I felt unattractive. I felt no longer intelligent. I felt slightly horny, but in such a nonspecific way that it might just be an allergy, an illness, an excitation of the skin. But really, I asked them, why was anyone ever expected to report accurately on their own feelings? Could either of them do it? If I were to pin them down and ask them to report the truth of themselves? Would they be able to perform? They shouldn’t trust me, I said, finally. I was not a reliable source. If they really wanted an answer, they should ask my doctor.
* * *
—
The car that we rode in had a nice comfortable seat in the back. It was more like a bed. We drove through the sweeter part of town and it was almost like we skirted the perimeter of a plunging cliff. You know that feeling—that the car and the road beneath it are themselves just delicately suspended in space, poised to fall? It’s like you understand that the road is holding the car up, and the earth is holding the road up, but it’s not clear what’s holding up the earth itself, and if you pay attention, really really pay attention, you can feel it, the falling. Certain people are terribly attuned to it, and they can’t bear it. They try to escape the world as soon as they can. Scientists try to explain this, but you can see it on their faces, the doubt, the sadness. They are more afraid than we are. I looked out the window and only saw sky, the sort that bends into finer clarity where it meets the horizon. A sharpening of the lens, just where you most need it. Where, if you look carefully, and really study it, you might see something important in the distance, something that has been kept from you your entire life.
I knew where we were going. I’d driven this same route myself, many times. It was my favorite part of town and I’d never get tired of it. I got a little bit emotional, I must admit, when I looked at the long, thin trees in Sawtooth Park. I’d seen these things planted when I was a girl. There had been a fire. Nothing serious, but part of town was blackened. The parks were scorched. It wasn’t a big deal. Anyone with a computer could look up the details. From space, maybe, it looked like nothing. But for those of us down below it was not nothing. And then they chose a species of tree that was controversial, I guess. Because these trees grew taller without getting thicker, and after a little while they curled, maybe like hair would. And so from above this park was supposed to really look like something. People oohed and aahed over it. People said it was indescribable, amazing. But who got to look at the park, or really anything, from above? What population took to the air to see the world? A mistake had been made. Our world had been designed for birds, and the people had been forgotten. What about the people? I always wanted to ask. We will never know how beautiful our own world is if we’re stuck down here.
In the car, I asked if I could go ahead and lie down all the way. I wasn’t tired. It wasn’t that. It was mostly because I did not think I could keep looking out of the window, at the people on the streets, marching off the end of the planet. I couldn’t do that without really starting to have some feelings that I was fairly sure would not soon go away. Permanent feelings? Maybe not. I don’t think there are such a thing. I think that we die, and the feelings go on, they find a new person, and so on, moving from host to host, destroying bodies and soaring away to the next fellow. But probably not forever. That’s too big a claim. I’m not comfortable going out on that sort of limb. We just don’t know enough.
* * *
—
Dr. Nelson had another clinic, I guess. The secrets people kept! They had beds there. It was all super professional, a real building in a real place with people as real as can be scurrying around looking busy. Sometimes Nelson brought his subjects in, during a trial, for closer study. That is what I figured when I saw this place. The experiments needed to be controlled. You couldn’t blame him. You have a subject who’s out at large in the city, and how can you possibly begin to collect any reliable data? If you put them in a bed, in a room, with nurses and the whole shebang, your experiment gets tighter. You narrow down your variables. It’s just good doctoring, is what it is. Dr. Nelson knew how to swim in this world. He wasn’t going to go over the falls. He knew how to keep from disappearing.
They made me comfortable, which I appreciated. It was only late afternoon, but who doesn’t like slipping on some pajamas and getting into bed early now and then? Who would really complain about a luxury like that? Especially when it’s snowing. To get into bed and be cozy while the world is turning to powder outside. I was in good hands.
This was the part of the study where they sent in people who pretended to know me. I had to hold my ground. They found an older couple, gray-haired and shriveled up. They played a certain role. They showed off a certain kindness. You’ve seen it before. Compassion and concern, faces twisted into sympathy. Straight out of central casting. I always loved that expression: central casting. Didn’t that just mean the whole world, every fucking person? Anyway, here came the two, sweet-faced old-timers. The name “Terry” was on their lips. Of course it was. They’d obviously been briefed. I didn’t mind. They approached my bed, smiling, melting with concern, and took my hand. Even fake feelings can feel good when they come down on you—you know there’s very little difference. I’ll take a hug when it comes. I’ll hug right back. I’ll feel the warmth of a body, even the bodies of those two old-timers, who got pretty worked up. I’m really not picky. Does it matter if it’s a stranger? What I would like to know is who isn’t a stranger? Name one person.
The man they called Richard was the biggest stranger of all. My soon-to-be husband. They sent him in and he said his words. He wore a familiar body but it was big on him. It didn’t fit. You could see him squirming inside it, trying to get out. Unless you can rip apart someone’s body and finally know their secrets, then they are a stranger. It’s fine. It’s how things are. Stop crying about it, is what I think. You should, you know, hug them, too. Hug whoever you can. You should live with them. You should spend your whole life with them if you want to. Answer to whatever name they call you—does it finally matter? Put down roots and hand over your money and take off your clothes when they snap their fingers. Just don’t forget. Don’t take your eyes off them for even one second.
The next thing they did was pretty clever. They had two people come at me masked up perfectly. A young man and a young woman, as if someone had taken my kids and rubbed them in life, in time, in years and years. Maybe someone dragged these people from a truck, sprayed them with oldening, and just pulled on them longwise until they grew and were disfigured and were just some typical, sad-looking adults. But with the faces of my children. The unmistakable faces. And someone made those faces cry as they hugged me. I hugged them and they hugged me and I held my ground. It was easy. Someone peeled them away and they sobbed and said goodbye and I said goodbye, too. It was easy.
It got a little bit late, and it got a little bit dark. For a while when it was snowing it was like the snow was so white and so abundant that it would hold the light, well after sunset, and into evening, radiating it back, so the night never got dark. But that didn’t last. It couldn’t. That was just a fantasy, because the world doesn’t work that way. You have to be realistic.
Most of the people cleared out of my room, but the two old-timers stayed, sitting in chairs, keeping their distance. I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want to tell anyone this, but I was getting tired and I wasn’t sure how long I could hold on. Maybe if I wasn’t in bed, and maybe if that bed wasn’t so goddamned comfortable, and maybe if out my window I couldn’t see some lights—
of the city, speckled and flowering outside—maybe then I wouldn’t feel so drowsy. But I was determined to stay vigilant. You have to stand guard. You have to hold your weapon high. I was thinking that even your enemy has to sleep. Your enemy gets tired, too. You can count on it.
They kept trying to offer me water, but what was I, a moron? Water. Did they know where I worked? Did they know what I did? Water. I remember when I drank water, just a little girl who didn’t know better, unlocking the gates myself, pouring it right in. Come and get me! Holy Christ. Here, have some, they kept saying, just a sip, you’re thirsty, you must be so thirsty, Terry, and I wanted to reply, Why not just cut me open. Let’s dispense with ceremony. I’d hand you the knife myself, if I had one. Just don’t treat me like a fool, please. Treat me with dignity. I’m a human being. Have you ever heard of that? Do you know what a human being is? Well, here’s a real one, right in front of your face. Stand back and bow down and show some fucking respect. If there’s something you want to know, get out your knives and come at me. I’m ready.
Notes from the Fog
My wife, Gin, once knocked gently on my head, as if it were a door. “Hello,” she kept saying. “Hello. Who’s in there?” She and our therapist, Dr. Sherby, laughed a little about this, so I did too. What fun. Keep knocking on my head like that, like it’s a door, or an egg. I wasn’t going to be the only one not laughing. That’s Human Survival 101. Not that survival is such a prize. But, still, you might as well control your exit. Put your own little spin on how you step away from the show once and for all. I laughed as Gin kept knocking on my head, and I said, as if I might really be answering the door, “Just a minute, I’m coming. Hold your horses. No need to break the house down.”