Notes from the Fog

by Ben Marcus

  We used our money for her last days. She begged me not to. Once she even said that I was supposed to drive her out into a field and leave her there. It was one of our favorite places, not that I rank things like that: nice places, fun places, places I like. We used to go there before the kids, and then with the kids, and then alone sometimes, when the kids had their own life. Maybe the kids will go there one day without me. Maybe there will be days when no one goes there, when no one is left. One day it won’t even be a field. Lava will flow slowly over it.

  Gin wanted only a blanket and a thermos of soup and then I was to drive off. It was a favor she begged me to grant. A favor. It really didn’t sound like one. We were making pots and pots of healing soups in those days, with the sort of herbs and roots that cost much more, because we knew so little that we were willing to believe a leaf or a root or a seed would make this all go away.

  We drove out to the field and I got her set up on the blanket and poured her out a bowl of soup. The day was fair and we didn’t think she’d be too cold. How many nights would she last? It was something we didn’t want to discuss. I asked her was there anything else and she just put her head on me. It was small and cold. When I held it I didn’t feel like I was holding her. That had happened—her body didn’t feel like it was hers. She was somewhere else. I held what she had, anyway. The old, finished body she still showed the world. I touched it and tried to keep it from spilling out onto the ground.

  Gin said she didn’t want her pills or anything. One of the medicines was a cream for her head. She also had a tincture in a dropper bottle, which she needed to squeeze into her mouth in the mornings, that ate flesh—the kind that didn’t belong to her, that had invaded her body and grown in her but that was never hers. She was going to have a little bit of time without it all. It made her feel pretty crummy, she laughed, all of that healing. Something about being awake and alive again. Something about not going into a terrible fog. We talked a little of the kids. They knew she was sick but they didn’t know anything. Just like me. Gin asked for things and I agreed. She said things and I nodded. I made assurances I could not keep. She predicted that. She knew it. It was like she was talking to me from the future, telling it all to me. Except here I am in the future, and I don’t see her anywhere.

  I stood up after a while to say goodbye. You have been a good wife, I told her. I am sure I did not deserve you, and I am sure you do not deserve this. We hugged without tears and I went back to the car, but on the way I ducked off the path and threw myself into the grass. It was there that I waited and watched her. She sipped her soup and stared off at the trees on the far side of the field. She had the blanket pulled over her, and she was so small beneath it it looked like no one was there. Like I had just left an empty campground. We both knew this wasn’t really happening. We must have. Some things, just a very few things, don’t have to be real if you don’t want them to. When she suddenly stirred and looked around—for me, I thought, I hoped—when she struggled to try to stand, I ran to her and picked her up and took her home. And that was the end of that kind of talk.

  The last of our money was spent on the hole we put her in. A coffin and some flowers and some food for the few people who came by. The children went up north, and I was told to come see them, and I was told to hug them, and I was told to talk to them. I did those things and did those things and did those things. They had a good aunt, a fair aunt, and if the uncle was neither he was so far away that it might not matter. The idea was, I needed to find work, and get us some money, or nothing, and nothing, and nothing. Would someone explain that to them, I wondered. When I saw them they crowded into me—warm and wet and weepy—and we walked around as one body. We tilted and we swayed, we lurched from room to room, and sometimes we fell. We’d need to figure out how to go faster, I told them, with them hanging on to my neck. We had to be smooth and quick, in case something happened and we had to run. That was what a family was now, just this one body that had a lot of parts, and several heads, and it had children’s voices and a man’s voice, and it was a force to be reckoned with. So until we learned how to do that, until we could glide through the world as fast as a cat, them hanging from me and me carrying them along, we’d have to be apart. Just for a little while.

  * * *

  —

  You can’t give up what you never started, said someone from my past. A mother, a father, a friend. Such a long time ago. I remember only the vague outline of their body, and the horrible glow from their mouth when they spoke.

  I did little jobs, big jobs, no jobs. Coins came in and I smashed them into bread, into meat. I made a deal with County Electric, and they put me on a schedule of darkness, which killed the lights for days, in exchange for no charges, and they leaked me power when they could spare it. A trickle on a Saturday, that sort of thing. The house would suddenly hum, shuddering back on, and I’d see something wild and terrible in the mirror. Enough light to blind a small animal, I’d think. I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to think about bottling it. But what I had was more than enough. I would have been fine with less.

  I called the children when I could, and I told them, “Soon.” Sometimes, when they couldn’t come to the phone, their aunt held the receiver into whatever space they were in, or so I pictured, and I shouted it, hoping they could hear me. Soon! Despite how it sounded, it wasn’t a birdcall. It was the call of a man, their father. It was just how he sounded when he needed to reach them. Whenever their aunt said they couldn’t come to the phone, which was more and more, I pictured them trapped on the floor, someone sitting on them. Or blanket after blanket after blanket, covering and smothering them. Or they were in a hole and there was no ladder. Or they were in the water, the wrong kind of water—the black and thick kind, where if you try to swim you slip down lower, you sink, and the more you try to swim, which is what I taught them always to do, no matter the kind of water, the lower you got, until you were standing on the dark sand floor of the darkest, blackest ocean. Of course they could not come to the phone. Of course. They needed to hold hands and push off the ocean floor, first. They needed to swim to the surface, like I taught them.

  * * *

  —

  That year the summer had a glitch. A flaw in the calendar, we were told. Like a leap year, but worse. The days would flicker out early, and sometimes, after sunset, would strobe back on, due to some sort of unspent sunlight that was trapped in the higher atmosphere. People thought it meant something but it most certainly did not.

  A star came out in late August, and it took a low position in the night sky, and then it started to make a soft, terrible noise. It had some people concerned. Not just in my neighborhood, my town, where concern runs high, where people polish their worry like a stone. This came from people who know what to watch out for, what to worry about—they said it wasn’t good. In daylight, in sunshine, a planet should respect our border, I believe. It looked dirty from here. I daresay it had a shit stain across it. Of course this was only a local weather system discoloring the planet. I knew that. Weather, in the end, simply adds a shit stain to a place. Gray sometimes. Sometimes yellow. But still, just a stripe of shit over the people and place. Sometimes the shit is clear and wet. It comes in pellets. I do not know why we call it rain.

  The next day the star was gone. We know enough about stars to say that this one was never there in the first place, so it could never leave, and it may be that it’s wrong to even call them stars. Whatever one says, or thinks, about stars is no doubt incorrect, and once you follow this line of reasoning, I mean really follow it as if you’re stalking it home for the kill, well, reality pulls away a little bit. Like a skin, it just comes off.

  Soon after that I went looking for work and I fucking found it. An unbearable amount of work, everywhere I searched. Because everything was broken, torn, crushed. There were faults in the soil, the buildings, the air. The people, especially, needed work—their moods, their appeara
nces, the way they walked. But of course so did the streets and roads. So did the trees. Disarray everywhere, flaws of design. Error, human and otherwise. A shattered state of things. Would I be paid if I fixed some of these things? Made them right? Not for me to say, I knew. Nothing really was for me to say.

  I would have to learn to ignore all of this unfinished work, or it would disturb me—so much wrong, so much left undone. We shirk our duties when we open our doors, when we leave our homes. We shirk and shirk. We walk down the street and we ignore jobs, swirling around us, needing to be completed. We pretend we don’t see.

  * * *

  —

  The job I finally took required so little of me that I wasn’t sure if I was even doing it. It was like getting paid for not dying. I stood and I sat and I walked. I had memories and I had the opposite, when nothing came to me and I listened to music come from the wall—just a piano that sounded like it had been tipped over and kicked to pieces, but was somehow still in tune. The days were driven fast by an engine I could not see. When cars approached, I pressed a button for the bridge, and when they were long gone I pressed that button again. My money began to form a pile and the pile began to glow.

  It was October and the roads were already snowy when I finally went to get the kids. The aunt wasn’t even there. The kids were packed and clean and all dressed up and they stood apart from me, because we hadn’t been practicing our single-body power walk through the terrible terrible world. The team had been on hiatus and now we were back together, I told them. I knew that I looked strange and scary, and smelled like someone from the past. I hugged them anyway and whispered a few of the things I’d been saving up to say. In my pocket was the envelope I’d given Gin. We took that twenty dollars and we went out to breakfast. We got eggs and cakes and there was a sweet pudding served in a long bowl that the three of us shared, as if we were the fanciest horses at the most golden of troughs. We dove our spoons into it and we laughed at how good it was. I had a real coffee and I accidentally cried, which no one saw. That was her money I was spending. It would be gone after today. Would she have wanted us to, as I kept trying to tell myself? I am afraid the answer was no, and no, and no, because she didn’t want anything, she wasn’t anything, she had no name and no body and her heart did not beat, and I didn’t even know how to remember her right.

  * * *

  —

  I took a sort of girlfriend before too long, and I don’t use that expression lightly. I actually took her from another man who was asleep at the wheel, just so out of it—as if he were operating his own body with a broken remote control. You could peel off his face and throw it into the woods. I was forty-eight years old. For some reason I was not dead, even though the late autumn season had that smell. Of failure, of the afterlife.

  She had a name, and out of respect for Gin I won’t mention it here. The children met her and called her “sister,” and she never got too close or too far. When it came time to test our parts, I found she fit on me, but we all knew where that could go. She hollered at night, out of nowhere, and sometimes it put me in a terrible crouch. She had her own job, her own life, her own children, and even, somewhere else—a city, a town, a cave, I didn’t know—an old, abandoned husband, who didn’t know where she was. I thought of him sometimes.

  The deal was that she would always call ahead, and what that sometimes meant was that I’d hear my name, and not just my name but the names of the kids, sounding loud and pretty and strong way down the street. You may not know what it’s like to hear your name sung out loud, from far away, by someone who has beauty in her throat. Bow your head and imagine it. Sometimes in the morning we’d hear it and we’d go outside and wait in the yard. When she got up to us, out of breath and laughing, she’d always say: I called ahead, did you hear me?

  * * *

  —

  I still go down to Foley, the school where I worked. I watch the kids flow in and out. The ones I taught are long gone, now. They are grown, I imagine. Some of them have died, no doubt. Maybe they are buried near Gin. When you’re underground, buried dead like that, distances are different. You are close by to the others. This is understood. You can get to them, and they to you. It’s not like up here, in the holding room called the world, where you have to walk or drive or fly. Where you might have to swim. Where, maybe, you can’t get somewhere else at all, because of mountains, or wars.

  At Foley once, I saw Mr. Rubins, walking from his car over to the school. He had his bag and his hat, a newspaper tucked under his arm. He looked the same, not that I had ever really studied him. What impressed me the most was how he walked and waved and smiled, using all the tricks of a real human person. How he clung to the ground and used his body in relation to gravity, as if he weren’t a ghost. He could have floated off, he could have melted down, he could have simply collapsed into a heap of clothing, vacating this world forever, but he held it together, even if it was taking all of his loving energy and soon his chest would explode with the effort. I watched him until he disappeared into the school and the bell rang and everything suddenly went incredibly quiet. I admired his technique. He was a spirit to watch.

  * * *

  —

  The children are home. They keep their own secrets. I no longer curate their minds. No one has time. No one has the energy. Isn’t that the world now? Listless, cowering in our homes. Beset by paralyzing indifference. Too tired to eat, and waiting for a hammer to the head? Witness the birds. Their exhaustion. Please. Look at them closely for a change and ignore the ruse of beauty. Who can finally be bothered to still pretend we’re not moments away from some blistering cremation?

  Not that I have specific information. I don’t. I have no gift for the future.

  You’ve driven by houses like ours, and maybe you’ve wondered just how the surrender happened inside. Did the body rot from the head down, as legend would have it? Who gave up, and how? A question that is always relevant. Take a picture of a family, of any family, and that is always the caption.

  Before her diagnosis, possibly even the very morning we learned of her cancer, Gin was outside doing something to the old tree. She loved the tree, felt it needed to know that. Loved it but feared it. Fretted forever that it would topple over and crush us. Now the kids and I will sit under it. It leans and sways and it makes a tremendous sound sometimes. The sound of a house getting crushed, the sound of a train slowing down, the sound of the world hurtling through space—all of this noise booming inside this monstrous tree. We will look around, at the other, smaller trees, at the leafy bushes, at anything that might move in the wind, and all of it is just so still, as if someone is suffocating the world with a bag and not even a breath can escape. And yet the tree above us sways and sways, observing its own private wind, moving according to a logic we’ll never understand. Sometimes I hope that Gin was right, that this tree is coming for us. Sometimes when the kids get antsy and want to go inside, I hold them close and ask them to wait. Just a little longer, I say, outside in the shade. Just wait with me under the tree here a little bit longer. Something amazing is coming.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the editors who first published these stories: Cecilia Alemani, Andrew Bourne, Junot Díaz, Matthew Fishbane, Ben Metcalf, Sigrid Rausing, Paul Reyes, Will Rogan, Nicole Rudick, David Samuels, and Deborah Treisman. Andrew Eisenman read these stories early with great critical care. I am indebted to him for his intelligence and vision. Max Porter, too. Smart and generous readings that always pushed the stories where they needed it most. Heidi Julavits offered crucial readings and critical editorial ideas at every stage of revision. To me there is no sharper reader, not to mention writer, not to mention person.

  A special thanks is due to the MacDowell Colony, who provided not just time and space, of the most ideal kind, but some unnameable deeper gift, conducive to work and concentration, that is harder and harder to find.

  To Debor
ah Treisman, thank you for your faith and support and always exacting editorial insights. Many of these stories are much improved because of you.

  To Denise Shannon, my one and only agent, thank you as always for your brilliance, candor, and advocacy. I have been so fortunate to be able to work with you for all of these years.

  To Jordan Pavlin, thank you for your unerring belief. I am endlessly grateful for your intelligence and loyalty and passion.

  And to everyone at Knopf—thank you for sticking by me and offering such a very good home.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction—The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, and Leaving the Sea—and the editor of two short-story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. His fiction has appeared in Granta, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and Tablet. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in New York City, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.

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