Farthest South & Other Stories

by Ethan Rutherford

  It was just weird, she said. That’s all. We watched the waves roll in and out and eventually the oppressive feeling passed. We stood, and did our best impression of a couple, tourists on holiday. We bought postcards. We wrote in our journals. But something was off, tilted. The clouds hung very low and made a flat white ceiling of the sky. Our old unhappiness stranded back to us, braided with something less solid but just as real, and the knowledge that this was happening took physical root, and became a headache that painted the back of my eyes. I had never hallucinated before, but I was feverish, and I saw M. everywhere. He had firmly lodged in my mind. There was a new unbalance to things I didn’t know how to address. And it seemed to me like something had been taken from us, but I didn’t, for the life of me, know what it was, or how to get it back.

  I don’t know what my wife was thinking. We didn’t eat dinner, and we talked no more. Every turn we took felt like a mistake. We headed back to the Captain’s House as the sun was going down. A woman met us at the door and introduced herself as M.’s wife. She told us that M. had told her what he’d said, and wished to apologize, again. He’s not well, she said. Her hair was white and cut short. Her face bore the deep lines of suffering.

  Please, my wife said. Think nothing of it.

  His mind, the woman said as she let us in. He always thinks something terrible is going to happen. He’s had, she said as she shut the door behind us, a very hard life.

  Please, my wife said again. We’re having a lovely time.

  That night, my fever climbed and then broke. I dreamed that someone had found our bags, but no one had bothered to tell me. I dreamed of my wife near the water, holding our baby. And then M. was there, picking her up, folding her in his jacket, accusing me of things I had yet to do. Look more closely, he said to me. When I woke, my wife, in all of her beauty, took my hand in hers. She asked how I was feeling, I told her: fine. I was just happy to be feeling better. We made love and I felt a gratitude so great and directionless that it shaded into guilt. This is our holiday, my wife said. It’s ours. We don’t live here. We’re just visiting.

  THE NEXT DAY we woke around lunch. M. was nowhere to be found, but we had a key as well as directions, and a small meal had been placed directly outside our door that had most likely been sitting there for hours. Tucked into our door was a map, and a note written in shaky text that indicated there were two bicycles around the corner of the house, which we could use if we so desired. We biked around the town, which was modestly shuttered for the winter, stopping now and then to gape at the butcher shop windows, or go into a bookstore. We found a pub and stepped in. We had decided separately, I think, to reset ourselves, to start again, but when I returned from the bar carrying our drinks, my wife said: I don’t want you to look at the newspaper.

  I could tell by the way she said it she was serious. The paper was on our table. It had been there when we walked in. The article was brief, an obituary for a writer whose work I had, long before I’d met my wife, idolized. I had, I thought, been writing my book for him: mirroring his sentences, his words. But I wasn’t, really. I was just lifting. He’d died on Long Island, in the company of his children. It was liver failure. His final gesture, the paper reported his daughter saying, was a gentle fluttering of his hands. I could see it, of course, as incongruous as the image struck me at the time. A bed, tightly made, this man staring out his window at the small boats tugging gently at their anchors in the harbor, the ceaseless folding of the waves. All life, he had written in one of my favorite poems, exists at the expense of other life. And here he’d gone, shuffling off. My wife said she was sorry. She’d never liked his work, but was polite about it. I said, what can you do? I tried to absorb the information as deeply as I could.

  But what can you do? Time catches everyone. There’s nothing interesting about that, but it cannot be the full story.

  We drank our beers in silence, and then biked to the shore. It was afternoon, the low light pushed us forward. We biked together, slowly, without speaking, down the middle of the street. No cars came. It felt to me like we had the entire town, and all of its grayness, all of its January damp and splendor, to ourselves. Perhaps we biked for hours. I felt both diminished and enlarged at the same time. The wind pressed against my face in a pleasing way and cut through my sweater. I pushed some spit from between my lips and let it dry coolly on my chin. I was aware that we, my wife and I, were biking in tandem, and that she might have been lost to herself as well, but our reveries did not overlap. I thought about my parents, and then I thought about their parents. I allowed myself to be borne backward.

  We reached a dead end, where pavement gave way to path, some patch of sand that led to the beach. I could smell the ocean. I could hear its echo. We walked our bikes over the shore, and after a few minutes, my wife found a point down the beach she said she’d like to see. She was looking at the wreck of an old oyster trawler. I’ll race you, she said. She dropped her bike in the sand and began running. Though I knew better, I swung my leg over the seat, placed my feet in the pedals, and began to churn after her. The wheels turned, but the bike would not go forward, not an inch, in the sand. I could hear the sound of my own grunting combine with the rhythmic squish of the ground giving way under the wheels of the bicycle and felt seized by a strange terror at the idea that we’d be so nakedly seen. My wife, now framed by the ocean and suddenly very far away, never stopped running.

  I’M TAKING TOO LONG HERE getting to the part of the story I want to tell. I suppose I’ve been delaying it. It’s a bad habit. But there is a balance to things that can’t be upset. When I was young, I stole from my friends, my understanding parents, everybody. I’d get caught, and eventually I quit, but the feeling carries, the thrill and deep shame of it. I was a fearful kid. Everything I loved, I kept for myself. If you are the sort of person who keeps secrets, it’s not a habit easily shed.

  After we had dinner that night, we came home early. We fell into bed. My wife tossed and turned, and finally turned her back to me, as was her habit when sleeping. I listened as her breathing flattened out and gained the percussive musicality of sleep I’d grown accustomed to. I loved her, I knew that. That was not in doubt. And she loved me. But sadness had been predicted for us. And sadness accrues. It was circling us, growing, getting closer.

  I must have fallen asleep, for I have no idea what time it was when I left the bed. By the quality of the darkness I knew that it was late. I stood, unable to see, near the door to our room. Because, I think, the room did not appear to me to be recognizable, I could not prevent myself from swaying. I looked at my wife. She was trying to tell me something in sleep. I stayed there for who knows how long. She faced the wall.

  I don’t know what compelled me to dress and leave the room. The hallway was lit. Sometimes that’s enough. I was quiet. I passed a wall of photographs. I walked softly down the stairs, keeping my steps close to the bannister to avoid creaking the house awake. And there I stood in the blazing foyer, unsure of what to do next, or where to go. The house, to me, suddenly felt immense. I knew it was not true, but I could not shake the suspicion that I could not find my way back to my room, and to my wife, if I had tried. I was torn between the panic of wanting to return, and the calmness of knowing that if I simply stayed here, in the foyer, I would eventually be found.

  Can I tell you how long I stayed there? I cannot. I heard a number of cars go by. I heard the rustle of the trees just outside the front door. I heard a branch draw a windblown, high-pitched circle on one of the windowpanes.

  The kitchen was hung with garlic knots and decorative plates. There was an immense wooden table. I was a kid again. I moved around that kitchen, looking for something. I opened all the cupboards. I opened and closed the door to the stove. I felt like the house was whispering against me, urging me back to my own room, but I fought against it. In one drawer, near the sink, I found some old photographs. In another, just below, was the silver. And then I found what I was looking for—when I saw it, I knew it
s radiant power—and I wrapped it in a napkin, tucked it under my sweatshirt, and made my way back upstairs.

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS were soggy, and gray, the kind of weather we’d come for. We stayed in our room, listening to the rain pit the roof. One afternoon we slipped across the street to the Anglican church, where we met a small group of elderly congregants. They treated us as if we were visiting dignitaries come to tell them about the Great American Midwest. It didn’t matter to them that we had met, initially, in New York. They wanted to hear about snow. Our bags were still delayed. We bought paperbacks and read them in the Laundromat as the clothes we did have thumped around.

  We ate breakfast in pubs, walked on the shore. And nightly I was visited by an apparition of M.—sometimes in the shape of a bird, sometimes as a shadow figure pinned to the ceiling above me—that followed me into the deepest sleep. Give it back, give it back, he was saying. We stood on the edge of a building, overlooking a town I had never seen. Give it back, he said, his wings flapping close to my ear. He followed me home. I was in my mother’s arms and she was singing to me. I was on my father’s shoulders, as he walked up a flight of stairs. I am the bringer of death. Give it back, he said. But I was no longer afraid.

  WE COULD HAVE LEFT—I could’ve suggested it, I could’ve insisted—but we had paid for the week and were almost out of money. I didn’t tell my wife about my dreams, I just slid into the bed next to her. She moved to me, curled as a ball. Each night I told myself I would explain everything to her in the morning, that I’d done what I did for her, because her story had compelled me to do it, but when the morning came, I forgot. I told myself that if we saw M. again, I would tell her I didn’t understand it myself, but we didn’t run into M. again, not in any meaningful way. I told myself that if M. ever found me out, I’d return what I’d taken, and pay for a second week we wouldn’t use. But he didn’t. We adjusted to the time change, our bodies caught up with us. Our bags arrived. We made love, a confirmation, a suture, call it what you will. The pendulum had swung in our favor. We were full of life, a surprise, an embarrassment, and had plenty of it to give.

  Our last night, after dinner, we found ourselves still unaccountably hungry. We went down the road to a restaurant. Who knows why it was open? It was 10 p.m. by the time we were seated. And what a feast! We ate pickled herring, bread, apple skewers; pork scratchings with mustard dipping sauce; oysters with apple foam topped with ham; mussels and chives served in a chowder, hand-poured at the table; crab risotto; cured pork; smoked wigeon with quince and a light mustard foam sauce; sturgeon with seaweed and greens; breaded lamb stomach with mint leaf sauce; cream cheese ice cream with pear puree; and finally a nutmeg-coated tartlet, which, when I thought no one was looking, I just licked and returned to my plate. The hanging lanterns inside the restaurant blazed with a light so warm and bright I thought to myself that whatever fires lit this most holy of spaces, they must never go out.

  In the morning, we left our keys on the bed as instructed and walked right out. M. was nowhere to be found. I pulled the car around for one final sweep, a goodbye to the house, and as we passed the front, I looked up and there he was, standing in the window, mouthing something I couldn’t make out, his hands moving like little birds, flitting around, stitching the air, unwilling to land.

  As the plane banked, New York came through the small port window like the idea of industry, a huge hulking land where everyone worked. Another bank and the buildings sprang into full view: the place where we’d met, the land of eternal happiness. The city would always be that way because we had left it behind and would never be back. Forget your dreams, you might say, you have said. But all of this happened; we were happy for a while. And M. That poor man. That hideous soul! Though I tell no one, I think of him frequently. I’m sure he’s dead now. He died so that my son, a child who greeted the world with indiscriminate love, who was incandescent at birth, now a young man in possession of his own stories and a light he no longer shares with us, could live.

  FABLE

  IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT and the four of them were sitting around the dining room table at Sasha’s house, telling stories. Do you remember, do you remember?—that was the song they were singing. Nils and Anna hadn’t seen Sasha for years—they’d missed the wedding, and didn’t know Karen, his third wife, at all. But there were no hard feelings; they drank, had some mood-loosening hash; it was like no time had passed. At dinner, Sasha had clapped and rubbed his hands together, blown through his fingers as though he were holding dice. He’d sung of the friends they’d had in common and spoke of their great adventures. He’d told the stories of their youth in such luxurious and precise detail that the episodes began to seem new, as if they’d happened to someone else.

  Dinner had been delicious, ram and ewe, heaping platters of food. Now they were into the wine, and it seemed no one wanted the night to end. At some point, Karen stood and wandered around the kitchen, where she spent half an hour opening and closing drawers as Sasha held forth. “I feel like a sultan,” Sasha said. “This is Homeric. We’re riding the lightning here. Pass the lute, for this has been the best night yet.” He reached for his cup and began talking again.

  “He never listens,” Karen said from the kitchen. She had the refrigerator open and was staring into its gray light as though it held some sort of secret scroll.

  “Have mercy,” Sasha said, and clutched at his heart.

  THE HOUSE WAS DEEP in the country, and it had taken Anna and Nils almost an hour of driving narrow, winding roads to find it. When Nils had tried to apologize for being late—trouble with the kids, a new babysitter—he’d been waved off. “Old friends,” Sasha said, wrapping him in a bear hug so tight his neck hurt. “And Anna, still so beautiful. Welcome.” He’d made them little paper hats, which he placed on their heads as they stepped through the door. “Remember these?” he’d said. “Of course,” said Anna. It was something he’d done when they were in grad school. Each hat, when unfolded, revealed some sort of blessing or fortune you would take with you into the good, cool night. It was, in fact, how Nils and Anna had met.

  “I see you’ve got your hats,” Karen said.

  “We’re playing along,” Anna said.

  Nils folded his and put it in his jacket pocket.

  “Fine, fine, you don’t have to look now,” Sasha said. “Save it for the drive home. But don’t forget. Or it’ll never come true.” He shut the door and began pouring drinks. This was how things had always gone between the three of them. They took themselves to the dining room, and the night unfurled like a dark sail around them.

  KAREN RETURNED TO THE TABLE as Sasha was winding down. With some shock, Nils and Anna had come to realize that a number of the old friends they’d been talking about—not close friends, but still—were now dead: one or two heart attacks, a ski accident, cancer. A great spin on the roulette wheel, the marble magnetized, succinct, final. Sasha pushed out his chair and walked down the hall to the bathroom. “It’s unendurable,” he said when he came back. His cheeks were flushed, and Anna thought he might’ve been crying. “They stand on the banks,” he said. “They’re in this very room.” A thick, heavy silence fell over the group. As though recounting a dream, Sasha then began to list his own reversals in fortune, which had been great—he’d built and lost companies, an accident had left him unable to have children—and what he had learned from them, which was almost nothing. “Except for this: if you find a beautiful woman, you hang on, you hang on, you hang on,” he said, looking at Karen, “and you never let go.”

  The effect that these stories had on Nils and Anna was immediate and strange. As their old friend spoke, each scene, familiar and not, had emerged as though from some shrouded, timeless woods, taken physical shape on the table in front of them, and said: study me for the clues to your life. And what did they see? Only that they, themselves, had been lucky, happy; they’d been content. They were not dead, they’d had their children. There was nothing wrong with celebrating that, but that’s not what
stories were supposed to do, and the idea that they’d arrived at some point where all had been said was, somehow, horrendous. Who would want that?

  Karen reached out and rested her hand on the crook of Sasha’s elbow. Anna and Nils reluctantly folded their napkins. Outside, the wind picked up and blew little gusts of snow against the kitchen window, and for a minute it seemed as though no one would ever speak again.

  “Karen tells stories,” Sasha finally said. He coughed into his hand. “It’s what she does for a living.”

  “Translates,” Karen said.

  “Really?” Anna said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Why would you? I’m the odd man out.”

  “We haven’t asked you a single question,” Nils said. “We’ve been rude.”

  “She’s incredibly smart,” Sasha said. “You, I mean. You are incredibly smart.”

  Anna turned to Karen. “Perhaps you could tell us a love story,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Nils, and patted her hand. “If you have one, it’s the best way to end.”

  “They aren’t really love stories,” Karen said. “They’re more like fables.”

  “Surprise us,” Sasha said. “We can switch gears. I think that’s something we’re ready for.”

  They cleared the table, and took themselves to the spacious living room, where they sat on an L-shaped couch that faced an enormous gas fireplace.

  “This is our first time out in who knows how long,” Anna said. She sat close to Nils on the couch. The night was approaching its natural end, of course, but Anna felt as though something important was on the verge of passing between her and Nils, and in that sense the evening didn’t feel finished. She took his hand. Their babysitter would be wondering where they were, but she knew to call if something was wrong.