Notes from the Fog

by Ben Marcus

  We all just looked at each other. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be in on the joke. Gin stopped knocking and tucked her hands in her lap.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said, in the most distant voice I could manage, as if I were many rooms away—underwater, overseas—crawling toward them as best as I could.

  * * *

  —

  There was nothing wrong with us. We were sweet. We were great. Friends, if that’s what you wanted to call them, said we were the perfect couple. To me that meant we were alive. We hadn’t died. We hadn’t bled out in the streets. We didn’t drag each other by the hair from room to room. We observed holidays and put food on the table and hadn’t been pushed from a cliff yet. We couldn’t fly, we couldn’t live forever, we couldn’t fight off disease when it came. But we lifted the kids into the air and let the wind shape them. Not really, not really, but it could feel that way, and who really knew how the kids had ended up so kind, so free of murder in their hearts? It wasn’t because of us. Certainly not me anyway.

  Those friends, all of them, went the way of the drain. They floated out of their homes and turned to smoke. They rotted in place. None of them lived long, because nobody does. They wandered off into the sunless afterlife, sooner, later, eventually. You can look up their names and you won’t learn much. They packed no bags. Their stuff was probably just thrown away.

  It was late April, the eleventh year of my marriage, when I was fired from my job as a teacher at Foley Parochial. Mr. Rubins, the chief anxiety machine at the school, called me into his office. Given the hour, lunch, and his initial silence when I walked in, I knew it could not be good. When is it ever good when someone says they need to talk to you? We should all know better. We should run for the woods when our name is called.

  At Foley I was a floater. I roamed the lower grades, preaching the sort of science that doesn’t involve the human being. It’s a personal preference, a diversion from the official curriculum. The human being is a walk-on player in a spectacle that is none of its damned business. Even though we get our hands on everything. Crumple it up, try to mate with it or destroy it.

  I taught chemistry, specializing in the wrong turns of science, the shit-crazed detours. You dive for knowledge, and the dive is long. It might take a lifetime. You come up empty at the end, but along the way you’ve shaped some brains, you’ve campaigned pretty hard to seat your error deep in the minds of others. It’s something I discussed with my students—the little, scrubbed, colorless beings who hated the planet, themselves, each other, and me especially. How every great insight is something to be embarrassed about later. The shelf life of truth, if it even gets on the shelf. What to do with all of our wrong ideas about the world and ourselves.

  At Foley I never had my own homeroom group, thank god. A little fake family of sweating puppies who thought I could lick their wounds and vomit food into their mouths. Which is not to say that I do not care for some young people in this world. It is just a question of the role one plays. The costume worn. I had my own young people at home. I poured myself into them when I could.

  At Foley I never struck a child, I hurt no one, I said nothing untoward or incorrect, so far as I know. It was my policy to do my job to the letter, then return home. At home I would rest up and restore myself to power, then rinse and repeat. Forever, if need be. Or that was the plan. I had it charted far into the abyss: how I’d survive my sweet term on the planet, gathering spoils and repelling misfortune, how I’d hit my marks and keep from breaching etiquette, hugging Gin close to me all the while. Because without a religion one must have a code. Without a code it’s like piloting a body with no bones through life, which some people do, god help them. Dragging a heap of skin from room to room, hoping people see you as a human being when you are only a spill. You’ve leaked from something larger that is gone now, not even a shadow, and you are all that remains. In the end it is too exhausting to approximate a real person. You deflate. Where your body was there is barely a face. Your skin gets kicked from room to room. Some child wears it, calls it his “shirt.”

  Mr. Rubins sat me down, offered tea. He spoke of the world. He called it a place for feelings, for fun. He called it a room waiting to be filled by children. A system of linked rooms. Every so often these rooms empty out, and new children flood in, he explained. Some of us work to keep the rooms clean, well decorated, and ready for the next contenders.

  The metaphor was problematic, of course. Worrisome. A poet I otherwise do not understand once said that we are disloyal to both things when we say that one is like the other. It is a kind of treason against difference. I hid my concern. It was fine for him to cushion the air with idiocies. I would grant him that favor, just as I might long for it now and then for myself. A time might come when it might be necessary for me to talk this way, too.

  “We do our best, don’t we,” I said.

  Mr. Rubins seemed pained. I must have as well. Who does not seem pained, finally, when you examine them closely enough? He looked at me as if I could help him with his task—to destroy me. Poor man. So out of his league. Death was coming soon, anyway, and then he’d rest in peace, or possibly squirm for all eternity in great agony. We don’t really know. Our vision of oblivion is clouded. It should concern us more than it does—how little we know, how little we are trying to find out.

  Mr. Rubins spoke of people in general. What they need versus what they want. “Education, which is what we are selling here, finally,” he said, “makes a guess about this need every day.”

  An educated guess? I wanted to ask.

  “I wake up and I have to make the right choice,” he said.

  Whereas I wake up and feel no pressure whatsoever, I didn’t say. I wake up and decide who among the earth’s gorgeous creatures I will make love to. That’s how easy I have it. A buffet of fuckery awaits.

  It was wrong to feel anger toward him. Maybe it was wrong to feel anything at all. Mr. Rubins was being controlled by people in other rooms, I knew. Not in some alien way, but really, actually. These rooms were off-site, no doubt. Not at the school, maybe nowhere close. They had him on live feed, maybe. They had a mic in his ear, whispering formations, plays, strategies of attack. A wire pierced into the sweet core of his brain. Just so to speak, because I know that’s not how it really works. In all of the important ways he was not a real person, but simply a vessel for urges that originated elsewhere. A remote actor. In truth, the very same thing might have been said of me. A carrier pigeon for a set of feelings and ideas that were not mine. Tear away the body and what was left? I felt for a moment that I could stand up and prove what an apparition Mr. Rubins was, just move my hand through his body and wave it around. But perhaps he had the same thought of me, and it was a standoff. Two creatures equally ephemeral, looking to expose each other. A contest of ghosts, swishing through each other like so much wind.

  I mumbled something to Rubins about the challenge of doing the right thing, the burden we all faced. And, above all, the responsibility we had to the children.

  Mr. Rubins lit up. It was like I had touched him privately. “Exactly!” he shouted. “We have a responsibility to the children, and to their families.”

  “And to the community,” I said firmly, waving my hand at the window. Because, of course, they were out there. They were wandering in the snow. They needed to be told what to do, what to think, what to feel.

  I’m not stupid. I can read feelings. He was winding up to shitcan me and why not just get it over with? On his desk were papers he kept gathering to his body. He puzzled over what he saw on them, but we know what that means. I would use a similar tactic if I had an animal in my office who needed to be torn to pieces. I’d have a few of the same little tricks. The artificial face of confusion. The artificial face of concern. Postures of empathy and compassion.

  “It comes down to atmosphere,” Mr. Rubins said. “The environment here and who is a good fit.
It is tough for me to say this, but I also don’t think you will be surprised, Jay. I mean, it can’t surprise you to hear this.”

  Oh, surprise. I looked into my past for the most recent example of real, genuine surprise. I used a fucking telescope and scanned that deep, black hole, back to my birth and maybe even before. Where was the surprise? I looked and looked but the field was bare.

  “It’s a problem of fit, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

  He blinked at me. I pictured us far above the earth, hanging from an aircraft, me holding on to his hand as he pulled his fingers away. He would let me go and I would fall and the feeling would not be unpleasant.

  The central problem was this, he went on to say: the feelings I cause in others. What people feel when they see me and hear me. What they feel, even, when they think of me. It was a situation the school could no longer abide.

  “You’ve gotten some results with these kids, there’s no denying that,” Mr. Rubins told me.

  But I could deny it. I would. To the grave. I’d been part of a learning outcomes study. I’d seen brain scans of some kids, before and after their science exposure. All science learning did was take some gray away. Or maybe it added some. I can never remember. In any case there was a color valuation shift in the brains of my children. It’s what might have once been called making a difference. Certainly there would be a chemical shortcut for this kind of learning soon, if the learning was even a desired outcome. This premise, that we as a civilization would be better off if we knew more—the progress fetish, the growth fetish, the fetish for getting out of bed—might prove short-lived and decadent in the larger picture, the longer historical view. It will possibly be seen as a tenable mistake. Maybe we should all be hiding in our homes until the right technology comes along to absolve us from, well, from most things of this sort. It is awkward to live just before a significant invention comes about.

  You have to wonder. When death is solved one day, all of us will be viewed as mules. Brutish, dumb, not really human. Because we let ourselves get old, grow infirm, die. Because we let ourselves feel pain. We experienced pain with a certain resignation and acceptance. Maybe we thought we deserved it. There was even a value system, a kind of morality, around who could hide their pain the best. You were a superior person if you hid it better. You were praised and celebrated when you pretended you were not in agony. Fucking mules.

  Mr. Rubins shook my hand. Whatever he said about me was true, but any human being in the world could be reduced to nothing with a few sentences. That’s what sentences do. Turn a man or a woman to powder. It doesn’t mean that that powder wasn’t once packed together to form a beautiful shape.

  My classes, as of now, were covered by others, Mr. Rubins told me. I deserved a break. I could go on home. But I should gather my things first, of course. Didn’t want to forget that. Remove every trace, Mr. Rubins requested. Which is, you know, what I tried to do. But later you discover that it’s not so easy. Traces remain. Not just one’s dumb things, but the people we have spoken to, who hold traces of us inside them. Do we remove them, too? Where does it stop?

  * * *

  —

  Some cats were asleep in the road on my way home. Everyone seemed tired. People sat on the sidewalks as if they couldn’t wait to collapse in private. Not a lot of people. But here and there. Enough to notice. I steered the car carefully. I was not tired. Not even close. I sensed I would be awake for a long time.

  At home I did some math regarding my finances. I’d have my salary for two more months. I had savings for another three. My pension, such as it was, would pay for a bag of apples every few months for one small child. How much longer would we all live, me and Gin and the kids? It was hard to say. A person had trouble coming up with an airtight plan, or even a deluded plan, when basic data of this sort was so hard to uncover. You could fuss with these little life-expectancy calculators on the Internet, but they didn’t always kick out real numbers when it came to kids. Little kids especially, cute or not, healthy or not, creeps or sweethearts. Sometimes the sites shut you out if you punched in, say, a very low number in the menu bar for age—as if you wanted to know something illicit. Life expectancy of a nine-year-old. I mean, why not just say? There’s math behind everything. It’s not a death threat to wonder how long a creature will live. Who has time for shyness?

  The upshot was, of course, not enough money. Nowhere close. Maybe that was always the upshot. Maybe that’s the definition of upshot. I loaded up the job lists and clicked into the sweet heart of them. I needed to work alone, in a lonely place, where no one would walk or stand. I needed a job inside myself, a way to get paid for sitting in a dark room, money for steering clear of others. I could clean things and fix things, and I could talk to people who didn’t talk back. I had a made-up language, with words that mostly sounded like breath gone wrong, the last breaths of an old man, and I could recite that for someone if they paid me. I could use my body against the world, where things were wrong and needed to be changed. Digging and hauling and lifting and pushing. I could climb and I could descend and I could travel on the horizontal, unless someone was hunting me. I could make shapes where there were none and maybe they’d be called houses. I could speak to children, if anyone would allow it. I could not sing and I could not cook for a crowd and I could not laugh on command. I did not, so far as I knew, have a bad back. I knew something about the invisible world—the worms we call molecules—but all of that could change—facts could grow up—and then I’d just be a storyteller, lying about what goes on around us, hoping people believed that untruth reveals a kind of beauty, and not just because it’s a medicine against what is real. Maybe it was once true, and maybe it will be true again.

  Gin came home and we drank a great deal, because that was the dance style in those days. That was how we fought the night. We roasted the shit out of a chicken and cracked into it like it was a great mythological beast. There was a wine and we put our faces in it, forgetting to breathe. Gin went to the icebox, where she found a frozen old log of something she’d made, bearded in freezer burn, and with my help we sawed into it, making thick yellow discs. Gin kept saying I should trust her, and when these toasted beauties came out of the oven, after ages and ages, they were soft and hot and sweet, and if they burned my mouth they also almost made me cry with pleasure. We attacked a platter of them and left none for the kids. Screw the kids, we were yelling, smashing our glasses against the wall.

  The night wasn’t going to go on forever, because no one had figured that out yet. Everyone in the world wished for such a thing, begged for it all the time, but it was as if each of us thought that someone else would do the hard work to bring it about, an endless night now and then, an option, invoked even at extreme personal cost, for no morning. I wanted to sit with Gin forever and die in our chairs. Me dying before she did. But just by a second. Me and then her and then I would have to think a bit about the list from there, who would die and when. There was so much more involved.

  “They took my kids away,” I told Gin. I hated to ruin her night, but she needed to know.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “They took them from me. I’m fired.”

  It probably wasn’t possible for Gin to get softer, but she did. You could have seen it on film, and maybe then you’d see proof that she wasn’t even really a person. What a small, dull word for what Gin was. How obscene. She softened and she almost transformed into a kind of medicine, not just a creature but a whole atmosphere, designed to soothe and neutralize this sad angry thing that had flown into its airspace. Gin had been tapped for a role and I could see her getting into character. Ms. Sympathy. She might have had the decency to leave the room during this transformation. Of course I might have had the decency not to exist in the first place. How rude to come on the scene like I did. How thoughtless.

  “We knew this might happen, Jay,” Gin said. She held my
hands.

  “You did, maybe.”

  “Oh sweetie.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh no. I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Oh it’s not your fault. I deserve it.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Well, you’re being nice. You’re being paid to say that.”

  Gin got her wild and beautiful look. She grinned and I almost couldn’t bear to look at her.

  “Ha!” she said. “Not enough. Where’s my money, if that’s so? Why aren’t I rich by now?”

  What I did a few days later was to take a special twenty-dollar bill that I’d been given and that I’d saved forever, I don’t know why. A mother might have given it to me long ago, I can’t remember. I didn’t earn it, I know that. It was a gift. A person handed it to me and I had never at that point seen so much money in my life. I just always kept it in my shaving kit, and it had stayed crisp somehow. It was still new money and I probably thought that it had magic, which embarrasses me to admit because mostly I can’t stand that kind of talk. I put it in an envelope for Gin and left it on her dresser. Once I used to collect gin bottles, just for their labels, and I’d steam them off and then scissor out her name, Gin and Gin and Gin. I pasted one of these to the envelope so she’d know it was for her. I wanted to write a note and I thought a lot about what I might say. I wrote it all out in my mind. But there was no easy way to get it out of me. I didn’t know how to extract it. It was all in there, in me, but I couldn’t prove it.

  “From me,” I wrote, “for you. Because you are very nice.”

  * * *

  —

  After Gin died, the children went to live with their aunt in Maroyo County, north of here by not so long. This all sounds pretty vague, but trust me, it wasn’t. It really happened and it felt real and there was nothing remotely vague about any of it. Gin’s was the fast cancer, which, I hate to say it, is far cheaper, I mean dollar-wise, and possibly on the emotional side, though I am no expert in that sort of tabulation. How do we count the various ways and styles of nothing we feel?