I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  Because there was no train. Of course. We talked for a while—about what I can’t remember—and tried to find stars we could name. We didn’t know the name for anything except the Milky Way; we knew so little back then, the three of us. We returned at the appointed time. We knocked once and the orderly let us back in, flashed that million-dollar smile, confident in our dumb obedience. We crept into our room and got into our beds. Lights out. I slipped away on the edge of dawn. I have never traveled with so little. If they were awake they didn’t say anything. Apparently we had all decided, without discussion, that we didn’t believe in goodbyes.

  This was a long time ago.

  Long enough that it has ceased to feel like the defining period of my life.

  Except sometimes.

  Like when I see a train.

  The weird thing is: I love trains. I never get tired of riding them.

  After the free counselor’s last day in the art room, I take the long way to the pool. It’s still winter, the downstairs bar is still stuck in its sudden silence, though right now it’s warm enough that I do not need to zip my coat. I wonder, as I have before, what would have happened if there really had been a train. If the tall roommate would have wanted to pray. If the redhead and I could have talked her down. What’s one small thing you could do today to better your life? If the redhead would have seen her brother’s face in ours and sent us flying. If we all would have come to our senses and gotten the fuck out of there. Or if I would have abandoned them both to the tracks, those ghosts I killed to survive.

  SLUMBERLAND

  I spent that summer driving around at night and taking photographs because I could not stand the sound of my neighbor wailing through the walls. This neighbor lived in the apartment above me and when I passed her in the stairwells she looked perfectly regular, but at around ten o’clock at night she would start carrying on and her uncorked sadness had a physical effect on me: my skin itched, my teeth ached, a clear liquid leaked from one of my ears. Once I even got a nosebleed. I wondered if our other neighbors could hear her and if anyone had knocked on her door or called building management to complain. I did not knock on her door or call building management to complain because I did not want to confront whatever was happening in my neighbor’s apartment; I wanted only to get away.

  The apartment complex I was fleeing was north of Orlando, situated between the Deltona Lakes and the Seminole State Forest. My life there seemed provisional, even though I had no immediate plans to move, and so it felt natural to wander.

  As I drove around looking for things to photograph, I added up what little I knew about my neighbor. She had lived in the apartment complex for six months. I did not know her first name, but from the mailboxes I knew her last (Novak). Unless that name was left over from the people who had lived there before, which was possible. Until this wailing situation I had not paid particularly close attention to the mailboxes. My neighbor had a shoulder tattoo that spelled out something inscrutable in dainty cursive lettering. I often passed her hauling swollen bags from Dollar Tree up and down the stairwell. I had no idea what she did for a living. We had never really spoken, just waves and nods. She used to have a cat, but a few months after she moved in the cat vanished. I remembered seeing signs in the laundry room: a photo of a black-and-white cat, the offer of a meager reward.

  Things my neighbor did not know about me: I have taken photographs all my life. My first camera was a Kodak. I used to make my living as a wedding photographer, but after moving into the apartment complex I migrated over to pet portraiture. There was a surprising amount of money to be made in photographing German shepherds in bow ties. Plus no one ruins their life by getting a dog.

  When I ran out of facts about my neighbor, I cataloged the subjects I had photographed so far: a sinkhole; roadkill; the molten night air and all the near-invisible things floating through it; the sidewalks still damp from afternoon rains; the long dark arcs of highways; fluorescent-lit parking lots; malls. There was a specific and terrible sadness to the malls, those places where people went to give in to their loneliness.

  Sometimes I photographed human beings: a man sleeping under the scant shelter of a bus stop, a waitress smoking a cigarette outside an IHOP. Sometimes I parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood and walked around with my camera, my armpits dripping under my shirt. That was how I got the mother and son, haloed in the warm light of their kitchen. The mother was kneeling in front of her son, who looked to be about six or seven, and dabbing ointment on his forehead with her pinkie finger. So precise. So tender. Their house didn’t have front lights or a fence and so to get this shot I crept onto their lawn, moving in a squat like the creature of the night I was becoming, ashamed of how much I enjoyed it.

  If apprehended by the mother, I could have said—I had what you had once, or a version of it, and I long to visit that lost world.

  When my phone buzzed at odd hours, I knew it was my sister, sending me WhatsApp messages from Kyrgyzstan, where she lived with her girlfriend because they were both in the Peace Corps. How are you? she would ask and I would feel the weight of all her unspoken questions, the questions she probably discussed with her girlfriend late at night. Nearly ready for bed, I would message back while stopped at a red light.

  If my phone buzzed and it wasn’t my sister then it was WhatsApp sending me strange spam messages, people asking for prayers or money or both. That summer, I got the same message—pray that we get the duplex—so frequently that every time I drove past a duplex I started thinking of the sender, whoever they were.

  Parking and walking was also how I started photographing Slumberland, a motel at the end of a residential street, in my old neighborhood near Lake Monroe, an area I had not been back to in some time. The lodgers, mostly women checked in for extended stays, tended to look either like they had just arrived on earth or like they had been stuck in this motel for all eternity. Back when I lived in the neighborhood, every week it seemed some distraught woman was standing on the pitched roof and threatening to jump. This would set off a predictable series of events: Someone would alert the manager, who would stand out on the sidewalk, in front of the three-story Craftsman with a wild yard and a drooping porch. He would light a cigarette and gaze up at the woman with utter boredom and say, “Go right on ahead. It won’t kill you.” After that, he would go back inside and the woman would stand very still, looking a little stunned, and then scramble up the roof and through the third-floor attic window, which was how they always got up there in the first place, all of them agile as cats. I used to think that this manager had missed his true calling as a hostage negotiator.

  Whenever I ended up at Slumberland, I checked to see if there was a woman on the roof. Then I photographed the old-fashioned neon sign, the name spelled out in cursive lettering, like my neighbor’s tattoo, and the black cat that hunted lizards in the ferns by the entrance. I crept around the building to see if anyone had left the blinds open on the ground floor and if so what was happening in those rooms. Once I got a woman trimming her bangs with nail scissors.

  Sometimes I had the feeling that someone was creeping up behind me—even though it was usually me who was creeping up behind someone. Moments when I would feel the air thicken all around and the hairs on the back of my neck would rise up like antennae. Yet when I spun around to look I would find only a half-lit sidewalk, an empty car, silence.

  Across the street from Slumberland stood a sprawling white Victorian on a double lot, sunk deep in the rot of foreclosure. Every time I saw the house, and the long shadows it cast, I thought of my sister. Before she and her girlfriend joined the Peace Corps they worked for a foreclosure clean-out service; in fact, that was how they met. They had woeful stories about finding oxygen tanks and toilet chairs and sinister doll collections. The wreckage of wrecked lives. Then there was what the banks covered up—that the house had been used as a brothel, with soiled mattresses in all the rooms and in the basement and so many discarded condoms on the floors my sister and her gir
lfriend had to use rakes. Or: a meth lab. Then there was what the owners did to take their revenge: menacing graffiti on the walls and cement in the plumbing and poisoned pets. That side of real estate, my sister and her girlfriend eventually decided, was a cycle of violence with no end.

  One night, when I was prowling around Slumberland with my camera, I caught movement over there, two slim shadows slipping through the larger shadow of the foreclosed Victorian. I darted across the still street and snuck around the back, where I observed the cutting beam of a flashlight and two teenagers, a boy and a girl, pressing each other down into the grass. The light disappeared, one of them must have switched it off, but it was a clear night and in the moonlight I watched as they shed their clothes effortlessly, like dogs shaking off water. Their faces came together and then their bodies and that was when I started taking photos. Later, when I clicked through the images in my parked car—the windows rolled tight and fogged, the radio at blast, my heart hammering—the teenagers looked like quicksilver spilled in the grass.

  Was it better to die with a pillow under your head or stretched out in the grass?

  That was the kind of question that could preoccupy me all night, the kind that caused my sister and her girlfriend to worry, because he had not died with a pillow under his head, he had died stretched out in the grass.

  A dare, a climb, a fall.

  That border between magic and annihilation crossed.

  These photographs are my best work and no one will ever see them.

  On the night in question, the shadows around the foreclosed house were quiet and there were no women on the roof, but there was a commotion coming from the third floor. The window to the attic bedroom was open, the walls bleached by a harsh light. I watched from the sidewalk, partially shielded by an oak tree. Two women were having an argument. About what I couldn’t tell. And then a woman was scrambling out the window and onto the pitched roof. She stood, her bare feet spread for balance, and waved an object over her head, something small and hard and bright yellow, a drop of sunshine in her hand.

  The woman on the roof wore a pink cotton nightgown that hit her knees. Her legs looked as sturdy as logs. Her hair, twisted up in a bun, sat like a nest on top of her head.

  “Do you promise?” she kept shouting on the roof, dangling the object over the ledge. “Do you swear?”

  The one inside must have promised, must have sworn, because the woman on the roof straightened her shoulders and nodded and then began her careful trek back inside. She was passing the hard yellow thing through the window when she slipped. Her hands slapped at the edges of the sill; the object clattered down the slope and fell to the sidewalk, smashed to pieces. The woman was beached on her stomach, her pink nightgown hiked up to her ass. “I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry.”

  I hoped the manager might come out and be moved to help. Maybe all this time he’d had a mattress stashed in his office, just in case. Because while it was unlikely that the fall would kill this woman, angles, I knew all too well, could be unpredictable and cruel.

  “Don’t let her fall,” I whispered to the one inside, fingers hot and tight around my camera.

  Two long arms shot out of the window and grabbed the flailing woman by her wrists. The one inside pulled; the one outside squirmed and kicked. With my camera I got her pointed feet just before she disappeared through the window, two pale fish arcing out of the sea.

  The object she had been ransoming was a ceramic bird. It lay on the sidewalk with its head cracked open, its wings yellow splinters. The two little black feet were still intact, pointing in opposite directions.

  East, west.

  Left, right.

  Clearly the bird had meant a lot to the woman inside, for reasons I would never know. Now a chunk of her private world was out here on display, for all to see and for no one to understand.

  I strapped my camera around my neck and walked on. Not everything was meant to be photographed.

  I had parked right by a streetlight and once my car was in sight I noticed how it gleamed strangely, like it was under interrogation. I stopped in the middle of the empty street, raised my camera to my face.

  On the way back to my apartment, I hit all the green lights, though I found myself wishing for a red because I had an uneasy feeling that something was in the backseat, cloaked in the shadows behind me.

  At the complex, I parked and twisted around to check. Of course there was nothing.

  It was three in the morning by the time I got home and in the stairwell I could still hear my neighbor wailing. I went to her door and knocked so hard my knuckles stung. The door swung open and there she stood, the wailing woman, her chest heaving, her face luminous and swollen, in denim shorts and a giant black T-shirt. She looked at once relieved and appalled to see me.

  “What is wrong?” I said to her. “What is so very wrong?”

  She squinted at me like I was dense, her eyes bloodshot and leaking. “What isn’t wrong?”

  I watched the news. I couldn’t argue.

  “How much longer do you plan to keep this up? All night you go on. I can’t sleep.”

  “You should try sleeping during the day.”

  “I have a job,” I said. “Do you not have a job?”

  “Not all jobs are done during the day.”

  I couldn’t understand what kind of job my neighbor could be doing in her apartment in the middle of the night, with all that wailing.

  “I was just about to take a break.” She snapped the purple hair elastic on her wrist. “Do you want to come in?”

  I did want to go in, to my surprise; it had been a long while since I had spent time in another person’s home, so lonely that maybe I had started making up presences in the backseat.

  Her apartment was neat and spare. A small burnt-orange sofa and a coffee table in the center of the living room, a standing lamp in a corner. A glass bowl filled with red apples sat on the fake marble kitchen island. On the coffee table, I noticed a headset plugged into a cell phone, a thin black mike extending from the base. The headset was surrounded by boxes of tissues and eye drops and cherry throat lozenges.

  I sat on the edge of the couch. My neighbor brought over two clay mugs of tea. As she passed one to me I tried to read her tattoo.

  “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream,” she said when she caught me looking. “Edgar Allan Poe, artist and degenerate.”

  I bowed my head over the tea, felt steam on my face. I repeated the phrase to myself, thinking about how when he died stretched out in the grass I had thought my life was over, but that didn’t turn out to be right at all; rather the life I’d had was consumed by a life I never could have imagined living.

  “So that’s my job.” She gestured at the headset with her mug. “The crying.” She explained that ever since she was a child she had been able to cry on demand and in recent months she had parlayed this gift into an actual job. She took calls for a fetish hotline that catered to people who were sexually aroused by the sound of another person weeping.

  “Dacryphilia,” she said. “That’s the technical name.”

  The wailing I had heard from my apartment sounded like something out of a Greek tragedy; I had a hard time believing it was all a performance, in the service of a paycheck.

  “Why on earth,” I said.

  “Most people get off on trying to comfort me. Take it easy now. One day at a time. They say things like that. Every now and then I talk to someone who likes the suffering, who wants me to beg for stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  She blew on her tea. “Like my life.”

  Without my neighbor’s wailing the building seemed unusually quiet, even for the hour. I wondered if some people had moved out over the summer.

  “So what do you do when you can’t sleep?” my neighbor asked.

  “I drive around and take pictures.”

  “Can I see?”

  She pointed at my chest. I looked down and was startled to discover my
camera; I had forgotten I was still wearing it around my neck.

  I put my mug down on the coffee table and unhooked the camera strap. My neighbor sat next to me on the couch; she smelled of fruity body lotion and the faintest trace of cigarettes, even though I had not noticed a pack or an ashtray or any other paraphernalia in the apartment. I clicked through the photos, showing her the nighttime malls and highways, the sinkhole and the mother keeling before her son. I lingered on the teenagers fucking behind the foreclosed Victorian. In one photo the boy’s naked back was a silver arch cutting up through the dark.

  “Jesus,” she said. “These are creepy.”

  After I clicked past the last photo, of my car gleaming like a little spaceship under the streetlight, my neighbor pressed her fingers to my wrist.

  “Wait,” she said. “What was that?”

  “That’s just my car.” I went back to the photo.

  “No.” She tapped her fingernail against the small screen. “Right there. In the window.”

  The moment I hunched over the camera he appeared in the passenger window, trapped like a specimen in the glass. His face had a greenish tint, the borders bright and jellied, a liquid gone temporarily solid.

  “A reflection,” I could hear my neighbor saying. “Is that it?”

  I did not know how to answer her. My breath was a thunder between my ears.

  He was the same age as he was when I saw him last, that liminal meadow between boy and whatever was supposed to come next.

  I clicked back through the Slumberland photos and then returned to my car and this time he looked a little different, his face distorted from being pressed too hard against the window, as though pained by having to wait for me to come back.

  I decided the world was playing a terrible trick on me and the only solution would be to destroy my camera at once and maybe even my car too. Possibly I should never leave my apartment again and get a job that kept me indoors, like my neighbor.

  First, though, I would have to get up.