by Mark Slouka
All That Is Left Is All That Matters
Stories
Mark Slouka
For Leslie, Maya, and Zack, who will always be home, wherever the world may find me.
And he wondered whether death might not be vulnerable to an invasion of his own territory.
—W. G. SEBALD
Contents
Dominion
The Hare’s Mask
Then
King’s Cross
Russian Mammoths
August
Justice
Conception
1963
Dog
Half-Life
Bramble Boy
The Angels Come to Panorama Heights
Bakersfield
Crossing
All That Is Left Is All That Matters
Dominion
THEY’D ALWAYS SLEPT WITH THE WINDOWS OPEN. Even now, late into the season, with the husks of the cicadas dangling like Chinese lanterns in the webs below the eaves, they’d swing the frames up to the ceiling, mating hook to eye: one toward the dirt road, another toward the upsloping woods, two toward the old pasture wall that ran straight into the lake and disappeared like a man determined to drown himself. Not that you could see any of these things—on moonless nights, opening the windows was like punching holes into a barrel—but they were there. They always had been.
He didn’t know where the coyotes had come from, or how long they’d been there. A season, maybe two. The dairy farms were falling fast, replaced by things named after whatever had been destroyed to make room for them, but there were still enough woods left to allow for a pack or two. Now, with the leaves almost down, you could hear them all the way out toward the state park. It always started the same way: a series of quick, laughing yips that pulled you out of your sleep, three, four, five voices, almost joyful, falling over one another like pups until one would suddenly catch and hold, as though impaled, mid-laugh, and then the others would follow, stricken in turn, rising, barking, screaming, a braided chorus of hilarity and pain. These were not dogs.
He didn’t know what it was. He’d awoken the first time in a well of fear, unable to breathe.
“Hear that?” he’d whispered into the dark, needing to wake her.
“What on earth . . . ?”
Her voice was sanity, bottom, ground. The world corrected itself. “What am I listening to?” she asked.
“I think they’re coyotes,” he said, slipping back inside himself, resuming his place.
“Since when do we have coyotes?” she whispered back.
HE HADN’T KNOWN what he was listening to at first, what it was he was hearing—hadn’t been able to place it at all. He’d been dreaming something . . . bad, and for a few moments it had been as though the dream, the madness of it, had followed him out into the waking world, clinging to him like a piece of tape stuck to the middle of his back.
They lay side by side, listening. At the base of the wall of voices he could now make out a simple screaming—something being killed.
“Good God,” she said.
“Sounds like they got something,” he said. The screams changed into a high, repetitive keening, like a broken mechanism.
“We have to do something,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Make a noise or something.”
“They’re a quarter of a mile away.”
Outside in the blackness something was choking wetly. It was oddly embarrassing to listen to it. He had to say something, cover this.
“I saw in the paper they found one in Central Park,” he said, and that instant saw a small, blue motel room sixty years ago, the two of them trying to talk over the cries and grunts coming from the landscape hanging over the bed as their daughter colored in a picture on a round table—“Said it had to have walked over one of the bridges during the night.”
“Into Manhattan?”
“That’s where they keep Central Park.”
“I don’t believe it. Sounds like alligators in the sewers to me.”
“Said they’re cunning little bastards. Tough as a shovel. That they’ll go anywhere.”
“Did it say where they came from?”
“Didn’t say. I think . . .”
They were going, dropping quickly into silence. The quiet spread: thick, cool paint on glass.
“I think it’s over,” she said.
“I think it is,” he said.
He could feel himself beginning to unclench. He wished he could remember now what the article had said—whether they had come out of the west, spreading east through the plains and the cornfields as the predators died before them, or whether they had always been there, right from the beginning, and only been squeezed into visibility by the loss of their space. He seemed to recall that both theories had their backers. It hardly mattered. Domestic or imported, they were here.
“I’ve never heard anything like that before in my life,” she said, turning over on her side.
They hunted like cats, he remembered now, stalking and leaping on the backs of their prey rather than running it down like wolves.
HE LAY AWAKE for an hour after that, listening, waiting for them to return, trying to understand what had happened to him. In the first few moments, as he’d plunged from sleep like a swimmer rushing from the water, he’d distinctly imagined a giant muzzle crashing through the roof of the cabin, snuffing and snatching at flesh as though they were voles in a burrow. The madness of that image, so uncharacteristic of him, troubled him now. He had never been particularly bothered by the ferocity of nature before, had always known, and accepted the fact, that the border between life and death was a porous thing, the two sides bleeding into each other everywhere and always. And yet, though he understood all this and more, having served in France at a time when the borders had been fixed and hard and the bleeding pretty much all one way, there was something else going on here.
SOMETIMES, LATELY, HE’D wake up in the middle of the night and lean over her to see if she was breathing. Twice in the last year, unable to hear anything, he’d shaken her awake, fighting off the panic tightening his chest and rising into his throat like glue. “What’s wrong? What is it?” she’d cried out both times, bolting up into the dark, and both times he’d had to invent some absurd story, once that he’d had a nightmare, the other, more shamefully, that he had no idea what she was talking about, that she was the one who had woken him. “What? What is it?” he’d begun yelling the instant she sprang awake, making a big show of being disoriented and confused. When she asked him what this was all about, and whether he had finally lost his mind, waking her up in the middle of the night, he’d allowed himself to get angry. “Why the hell would I want to wake you?” he’d demanded, and spent the next few minutes arguing so convincingly, so self-righteously, that by the time he’d rolled over on his other side he half believed that it was she who had woken him, and resented her for it.
At night he would lie looking up into the cedar planks or out through the open windows into the dark, weighing his life, adding a little dust here, a little there, shaking it in his palm, then raining it out like salt. The scales tipped and creaked.
ARTHUR PROCHASKA HAD been a journalist with the Hartford Courant for fifty-nine years. He’d think about that sometimes. He’d started there when he was sixteen, two years after armistice, less than three after his father died—a tough, ringwormy-looking kid in borrowed shoes who did whatever was asked of him. The old guys, who didn’t like anybody, had taken a shine to him right off. It had all been an accident, the way it had turned out. A noisy argument had broken out around O’Connor’s desk, where the boys had gathered, as usual, to shoot the shit an
d pass judgment on whoever seemed in need of it. God how he’d loved the place.
“Hell, any kid off the street could tell you that,” he heard someone say as he walked into the mailroom.
“Hey, you,” O’Connor had called out to him—“Yeah, you. What’s your name?” Arthur told him. O’Connor waved it away. “Jesus, all right, get over here. You can read, right?” He snapped a sheet of paper at him. “Read this.”
And seventeen-year-old Artie Pro-kaska, who hadn’t even gotten laid yet though he’d thought about it a good deal, who didn’t know shit from shinola, who had nothing but a pair of oversized shoes and a bit of moxie with which to front the world, opened his mouth and a legend flew out—a miracle of deadpan delivery and Swiss-watch timing. Everyone was there: Franks, with his leg up over the corner of the desk; Maroni, looking like the bagged-out welterweight he was; old Ralph Simmes, forever rolling a spit-black inch of stogie between his teeth—all of them, including himself, blissfully unaware that they were calcifying into newsroom clichés, becoming in some basic way unbelievable. “Well?” O’Connor had growled after some seconds had passed. “Not too bad,” the kid pronounced, still looking at the paper. “What’s his first language?”
And there it was. Just like that. Afterward, all he’d have to do was not smile or, when he did, make it look like it hurt. The old guard protected him, laughed at his mistakes, created openings: “Give it to the kid. What about the kid? Let the kid take a whack at it.” Maroni, seeing him reading something, would call: “Hey, kid, what do you think—French?” and all he would have to do was not look up but stare at the paper a moment, considering it—“Well . . .” and it was in the bag. His line, which owed everything to the gods of chance, who could turn the world on its head in an instant, became as much a part of the atmosphere as the ring-and-smack of the carriage returns. One generation passed it on to the next like a well-fingered baton.
A blessed life, in many ways. He’d enjoyed the newsroom, resisted all attempts to move him up and away from it. He’d loved everything about it: the smell—like smoke and sweat and something very much like the inside of a brass pot; the harsh, industrial lighting; the immovable metal-topped desks . . . loved getting up to go to the cooler just to see the room sit up and tighten, so to speak, the younger men hunching over their typewriters or pulling pencils from behind their ears, the older ones deliberately leaning back in their swivel chairs and leafing through some papers to show that, like him, they didn’t need to look busy to get the job done. He liked this generalized awareness of himself, this constant reflecting back. He hadn’t realized how much. Once or twice, after he’d left, he’d felt as though he’d disappeared.
Which he had, really. On the day he retired he’d received a plaque, a pen, a bottle of Champagne, and a rectangular black jewelry box in which a row of printer’s type, buried up to the pin mark in cotton, spelled out “Thank you, Arthur P.” He drank the Champagne, kept the pen, tossed the plaque and the jewelry box in the kitchen garbage. Whose bright idea had that been?
And that was that. He was gone, yanked, pulled like a hair. Off the radar. A butterfly flaps its wings, he thought, and not a goddamned thing happens in China. He recognized himself for what he was—a retirement cliché—and ridiculed himself for it, but that didn’t make it go away. He still felt thin somehow—transparent. He couldn’t help it. Less than a month later, walking through the midday crowd along Main Street, he had been overcome by the sense that he could do anything he wanted—take out his dick and piss in his hat, run out of a store with an armful of brassieres—and no one would notice. No one. Everything around him had grown strangely quiet, the sounds of voices and traffic receding as though they were all on the back of an invisible truck moving steadily away from him. He’d stood there in the hot sun until he became aware of the fact that he was breathing very high and fast, as though his lungs had shrunk to the size of a fist, and then, not knowing what else to do, had sat down on a nearby bench. It passed. The next day he had himself checked out, thinking it might have been a stroke of some kind, but nothing.
He’d decided not to say anything to Janice. It wasn’t that he was worried she’d overreact—she’d always been a practical woman, good at seeing what was there and no more—just that he didn’t much care for the picture of himself going on. That was never the way it had been between them—he’d never played the child with her—and he wasn’t about to start changing things now.
They’d been married for damn near sixty years. At night when they went to sleep he’d press up against her back and reach around and cup one of her big, soft breasts with his right hand, then move down to her stomach, whose skin was soft and foldy like the fur on those socklike dogs that had been so fashionable a few years back. She would reach behind and give him an affectionate squeeze, and though it didn’t lead to anything anymore like it used to, that was all right.
God in heaven but how he used to ride her. In this very room, in fact, though the beds had changed over the years, rocked out of joint one after the other, including one that had actually crashed to the floor in the middle of things, scaring the hell out of them both. Janice Vaculik—who would have believed it? Seemed like that first year they couldn’t get enough of each other—she was always grabbing at him, sneaking a squeeze even under her parents’ dinner table or whispering in his ear, making him hard on the bus—but even after, when the imagination had taken over and they had begun to dare each other further and further into thinking things that shamed and excited them, it had been good. Very good. He still remembered it—the stored up feeling of it, the anticipation of it.
Arthur Prochaska rolled over on his back. The antique scales on his chest, their base nestled down into the mat of hair, rose and fell. The first house, the second, the view from the bedroom window, the faces of the kids . . . They’d done all right. Better than all right. He had no complaints, nor any right to any.
BUT RIGHT HAS no claim in the court of our fears. As Arthur Prochaska was sliding sideways into sleep, the inevitability of his own death suddenly slipped up and seized him by the throat. He struggled and thrashed, knowing it would pass, brought his usual weapons to bear: Everyone had to die. Others died young, or in pain, or alone. He himself could have died a half a century ago in France. He called himself names: He was an ungrateful bastard, a coward, the worst kind of egotist, whining for a special dispensation, unable to imagine the world without him. Sit up, you fool, he said to himself, and sat up in bed in the dark and then, like a man pushing back a great dark wall on rollers, began to think of other things, moving the thing inch by inch from his mind. He got up and walked to the kitchen, his toes curling up from the cold floor, and poured himself a drink. Fuck it. He was fine. When he came back to bed Janice was still sleeping.
It was such a simple thing. You really had to laugh. He was eighty-seven years old, with spots on his temples and odd little tags of skin on his arms and legs and neck, and he didn’t want to die. But that wasn’t it, exactly. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t want to die—Who would?—as that he simply couldn’t conceive of it. It had been a problem, off and on, for as long as he could remember. How could the moment come when he would no longer be conscious of the world? He understood death. He’d written about it, seen more than his share of it. And yet, when it came right down to it, he didn’t understand it at all. How could you be alive, and then not? How could the great doors close forever, sweeping over the sky, the trees . . . ?
He had always thought it was something he’d understand once he got closer to it, like algebra. That his occasional episodes (for that was what he thought of them as) would pass with age. That like a forest, which seems solid from a distance but is actually filled with paths, death would explain itself on closer acquaintance. It hadn’t happened that way. And now here he was. Bummer, as the young people said.
IT WASN’T UNTIL he’d seen it go by with the cat that he knew it was death. Lowercase death, unemphatic and certain. It was just after lunch, a str
angely warm November afternoon. He was sitting at the too-tall desk by the window, trying to work, when it appeared, a long-legged, unhealthy-looking creature at once arrogant and supplicant, and looked at him—that is, looked at him as he sat there in dreaming disbelief as it trotted straight across the yard and along the wall, then disappeared out of sight into the undergrowth. There had been a hand-sized patch of fur missing on its right flank. A rusty cat was hanging from its jaws.
Janice had been in the other room, reading by the window. “Oh, my God, I just . . .” he started to call out, still half-disbelieving what he’d seen, and then for some reason stopped himself. He heard the chair springs in the other room. “Arthur?”
“Right here,” he said. “I swear to God I just had it right here. Not five seconds ago.” He heard her settle back in the chair. “You want some more coffee?” she said, and he heard the newspaper. Some days later, when a young couple who lived down the road came by asking whether they had seen their cat, he didn’t have the heart or the courage to tell them. It was like a secret he’d pledged to keep. And anyway it was done.
He was fine during the days, reading in the hammock, carrying small bundles of kindling into the cabin, cleaning out the shed. A late fall. When they went for their walks now, the walls that marked the old pastures were visible everywhere, and yet during the afternoons sometimes he would still hear the high trill of crickets that should have been gone long ago. A cold sound, thin and perfect. The lake was tea-black and still. On warm days he could hear the wasps under the eaves and one morning nearly bit into one that was walking carefully along the edge of his toast.
And yet it was always there now, like a shape hidden in a drawing. He could sense it in the trees and the lichened boulders of the walls, in the late light on the water, in the black rim of shore reflected in the pond. An absurd conceit. During the days it was deniable, laughable. At night it wasn’t. He was exhausted now. Every night he’d snap awake and lie there listening, clammy with sweat and self-disgust, unable to escape that ridiculous equation: they were it. It was as though, once imagined, the thing had taken on a life that could not be denied. He didn’t know what he was afraid of, exactly, and yet he was afraid. Again and again it trotted through his world, its head turned to the window behind which he sat frozen, and disappeared over the wall. There was the ugly, hand-sized patch of skin on its haunch. It looked at him over the floppy-legged body in its mouth, then leaped the stones, the cat’s head swinging back and forth like a child’s doll with its stuffing removed. And there it was again. It trotted past the window. There was the ugly patch of hairless skin, the cat’s head swinging . . . and again.