I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  We found a bar with bright red walls and a disco ball suspended over the dance floor. Clear liquor in plastic cups, the rattle of ice. My sister’s voice was rising. Pale tentacles of hair were stuck to her forehead. The anchor was being pulled up. The red walls of the bar made me want to call it the Murder Room.

  From a dark corner, we watched the tangle of bodies on the dance floor. The disco ball caught fragmented reflections in the glass. Soon my sister vanished into the rush, hands above her head. She had a gift for boldness when the social moment demanded it. She was always the first to cannonball into the pool, to dance at a wedding. She could shed self-consciousness at will, whereas I could not dance at a wedding without narrating the moment: Look! You are dancing now. Are you having fun? Is this what living is supposed to feel like?

  “I don’t think you were lost at all,” Tom said in the Murder Room. He leaned in close, hot breath on my cheek. “I think you wanted to ditch us.”

  “If only I was that good at making plans.”

  He laughed so hard his shoulders shook. I didn’t understand. My sister returned, her cheeks glowing. She gestured for my drink. A group of men in tight white T-shirts passed and I swallowed a cloud of cologne.

  “Is this Boston?” I said.

  “We’re in Iceland.” She held an ice cube between her lips, then swallowed.

  “I meant the band.” I plucked the drink from her hand. “Fuck off. I’m not that confused.”

  The disco ball fell from the ceiling like a silver bomb. It shattered on the dance floor. Bright shards went flying. The music stayed on. A woman in a short purple dress limped away from the crowd. She was barefoot and screaming—I could tell from the way her mouth moved, though I couldn’t hear her over the music—and leaving behind a dark trail of blood, a sliver of the disco ball sticking out of her calf like a plunged knife.

  We ran away from the Murder Room and toward the harbor. We passed a flock of young women in huge pink sunglasses, bare arms shimmering with glitter. We ended up at a food stand, eating hot dogs made of sweet dark meat. Warm buns, mustard, fried onions on top. I reached into Tom’s pocket and let my hand linger. I pulled out the map and told him to find us on it.

  * * *

  Things we will try to get my sister to wake: doctors injecting drugs to stimulate her brain. A music therapist pounding out scores on a portable electric piano in her room. The therapist wears cloth headbands and Crocs. She asks about my sister’s favorite sounds and colors, and I am surprised by how little I have to offer. Sensory stimulation with a sound machine that plays ocean noises. Deep pressure touch stimulation with weighted blankets. We talk to her. I tell her stories about volcanoes and ghosts. We rub her feet and hands. The longer she stays asleep, the more the list of dangers grows: pressure sores, blood infections, collapsing lungs, swelling in the brain, never waking up.

  * * *

  At the Borg, I left my sister in the elevator. I had hazy ideas about wanting to show off my freedom. I have spent so much time stuck between the hot pulse of need and performing needlessness. Where is that right middle? In Tom’s room, I closed the curtains tight. I shed my clothes and lay down, waiting. When he appeared at the foot of the bed, naked, I pulled him closer. He gasped, tipped his head back. Soon he was rolling away, into a waterfall of shadow.

  Later, I climbed into bed with my sister. She slept with her arms sprawled above her head like she was still on the dance floor. I smelled her lavender shampoo. I petted the rough skin on her elbow. I slept for a while, and when I woke, we were shaking. I hugged a pillow. The bed frame rattled against the floor. I told myself this was nothing but a dream, even though I was awake. I closed my eyes until the shaking stopped. Earthquakes were common in Iceland.

  III. FORM AND GROUND

  We brush my sister’s hair. We file down her nails. We are astonished at the way the body continues to grow without the consent of the mind. We turn on the sound machine and listen to the waves. We drink the bitter hospital coffee. I watch Pat clutch his cup and think that I have never felt so close to another person before.

  At my sister’s bedside, I remember the deacon, a misogynist even from the grave, and I start reading up on the ghost stories of Maine. I tell her about the three-legged dog rumored to haunt a beach in Acton. The bridge in Rockport that’s haunted by a Revolutionary soldier who got so drunk celebrating the American victory that he tumbled over. Tales of people who still retain a presence in the world even after they’re dead.

  I don’t tell her about the more disturbing stories I uncover, the stories that make me turn to Pat and say, “This state is fucked-up,” like the headless teenage ghost who was dismembered by her stepfather on Halloween and now haunts the Androscoggin Riverlands.

  One afternoon I’m in the middle of a story when she makes a noise that sounds like drowning. Her body seizes under the sheets. A terrible gurgling rises from her throat; saliva bubbles between her lips like she has a cauldron inside her. In the parking lot, a car alarm is sounding. I scream for a nurse. Pat finds me in a bright hallway, clutching my knees. “She’s okay,” the nurse tells us a little while later, meaning: she is the same.

  * * *

  What I know about John Evans: white male, twenty-two, no criminal record. Student at Southern Maine Community College, reported to have a photographic memory. Only child, single, rented a basement apartment from a woman in South Deering. In the preserve, he wore orange foam earplugs, purchased at a sporting goods store near Pittston. His parents—who look small and bewildered on TV—are lifelong residents of Gorham. His father admits to taking his son hunting as a child.

  John Evans has a pink, hook-shaped scar on his left cheek, acquired in a dirt bike accident two years before the shooting. In the media, brain damage is one theory, followed by undiagnosed mental illness, as some people will go to great pains to find another reason for John Evans’s actions beyond a desire to inflict chaos and harm. Then an old girlfriend comes forward with domestic violence accusations and some people start saying well there you go and others take this new discovery as evidence that John Evans was disenfranchised by feminism and the alienating ways of modern life. I listen to all of it and I realize that I don’t care about why. I just want John Evans and all his kind eradicated from this earth and at the same time I know it’s not so easy, that such an eradication would be meaningless if we can’t cut out the roots.

  I remember my college boyfriend, who came from a hunting family, and how one Thanksgiving he took me into the woods of Pennsylvania to shoot. The gun was heavier than I had expected; I needed a strength I didn’t know I had to keep the barrel aimed at the paper target taped to a tree trunk, to keep pulling the trigger as my boyfriend adjusted my stance. I remember the wild cracking of the bullets and how the sound traveled through my body like voltage and how I could, hours later, still smell the gun smoke in my hair.

  More than once, I’ve wondered why the police didn’t shoot John Evans on sight, how it is possible that he’s still alive. I ask the question, even though I know the answer.

  * * *

  Reporters in bad suits keep stomping through Baxter Woods. News trucks are parked in Gorham and in South Deering. Cellophane bouquets of flowers appear inside the condo and in my sister’s room. Her office sends a card with hundreds of scrunched signatures. Her patients collect a donation for the Brady Campaign. We come back from Augusta to find a ham on the doorstep, an unsigned card taped to the foil wrapping. SO SORRY, PRAYING, FOR YOU, the card says on the inside.

  January brings a memorial in Baxter Woods. Hundreds of LED votives are arranged on the trails so for a night the forest floor glows an eerie gold. The candles make bands of light around the trees. The reporters are out with their camera crews and microphones. There is the same unearthly fog as there was in the Almannagjá, as though Iceland has followed us home. I grip Pat’s arm. The light makes it look like a spaceship is landing.

  * * *

  At a little bar in upstate New York, between trips to
Maine, the bartender asks me to tell him my story, and I describe the places I have lived. Eight cities in ten years. Many different jobs. Few possessions or attachments. I’ve had some drinks. I go on.

  “You on the run from something?” the bartender asks.

  “Yes,” I say, without hesitating.

  * * *

  After the memorial, a blizzard. I can’t drive back to New York. I call in sick to the copy shop. The owner shouts in Russian. I hang up. Maybe I’ll never go back. Pat’s office is just down the street, so he leaves me alone for the morning. In their bedroom, I open the closet, where my sister’s clothes still hang, waiting for a body to occupy them. I slip a midnight blue blouse over my T-shirt. I stroke the silk sleeves. I rub the gold buttons. I find a pair of opal earrings on the dresser, next to a photo of my sister and Pat. They are on a beach in southern Maine, smiling wide. I put the earrings on and am surprised by their weight. The bed is unmade. I get under the sheets.

  * * *

  How confusing to be the husband of a comatose woman, I sometimes think as we drive to Augusta, past the dark lakes and the tall green trees. What to do with desire, for one thing. Where to put it.

  * * *

  As winter descends, the pure shock of what has happened begins to lift. Our register for beauty returns. Fresh snow on cobblestone streets. Twilight over the bay. During another blizzard, we stay up watching black-and-white movies. Outside, the snowfall is so heavy it looks like someone has wrapped the city in a blanket. We discuss things that do not involve pressure-sore dressings or insurance policies or gun control marches or any of the terrible acronyms we have learned: PVS and DPTS and GCS. Instead, Pat teases me about having not bothered to learn Russian for my job.

  “You really don’t know a single word?”

  “I keep trying to learn how can I help you, but it always comes out like I’m the one asking for help.”

  * * *

  One night we go to Bubba’s Sulky Lounge, where a wedding party has taken over the dance floor. Men in suits, ties undone, make a ring around a bride in her white dress. I take Pat’s hand. I do not narrate. We join the circle. We pretend like we belong. On the walk home I have a terrible thought: what if some kind of transference is occurring and the closer my sister gets to becoming a ghost, the more I turn into something solid, something real.

  * * *

  Despite the careful dressings and the nurses turning her in bed, the pressure sores on her hips become infected. Antibiotics are added to her IV to avoid cellulitis. Her GCS score shows no improvement. In his drab office, the doctor tells us that she feels no pain, that if we wish to cease nutrients and fluids, she will slip away without suffering.

  “It is up to you to decide,” he says.

  We are sitting across from the doctor in stiff black chairs. Pat shakes his head. My throat closes like a lock. On our way back to Portland, we discuss consulting the priest who visits the facility, not because we are religious, but because the decision we have been tasked with feels so far beyond what a person should get to decide. Pat pulls onto the side of the road. He hunches over the wheel, breathing fast. We are somewhere near Bath. The snow is marbled with dirt. Beyond the highway there’s a little bald hill, a cluster of spindly trees. Pat turns off the ignition and gets out. I watch him scramble over the hill. I run after him, leaving the car behind.

  “Hey,” I say when I catch up to him. “Hey.” He leans against a tree trunk. The bark looks charred. A wind shakes the branches. I find myself listening for the crack of a gun. I see my sister crouched behind a tree, darting from one position to the next, the careful crunch of the leaves. She is getting closer to the road, she is getting away, and then the walloping pressure in the back of her head, the obliterating darkness.

  When we return, we find an old orange Corvette parked behind us. Two teenage boys in camo hunting jackets are standing by our trunk. The third boy is in the driver’s seat, trying to hotwire the car.

  “Hey,” we shout, running toward them. “Hey.”

  A fury turns me electric. My throat unlocks. I move in a charge. I’m about to beat their hood, to kick their tires, but then I imagine one of the boys pulling a rifle from the backseat and aiming it at us.

  “What were you doing out there? Sucking his cock?” the third boy shouts out the window before they drive off.

  * * *

  On a frozen night in March, Pat and I go to an opening at a gallery in Portland. The artist is my sister’s college roommate. Apparently my sister never missed her local shows. At the gallery, the artist rushes over and takes my hands and squeezes. Her eyelashes are gooey with mascara. Red triangles hang from her ears.

  “So you’re the sister,” she says.

  I nod. “I’m the sister.”

  There is a video installation of a lighthouse on a cliff shot at different angles, at different times. Pat doesn’t watch for long, but I am mesmerized. Sometimes the image includes water, sometimes a white road. Sometimes the lighthouse casts a shadow, sometimes it does not. The lighthouse takes on the appearance of being haunted. I think of evil deacons and three-legged dogs and missing heads.

  “Form and ground,” the artist says when I mention this effect to her later.

  “Form and ground,” I say the next time I see my sister, searching her face for recognition.

  * * *

  On our second night in Iceland, her voice woke me. She was on her back, in a tangle of sheets. A long, naked leg. The heave of her chest. “I missed my chance,” she kept saying in her sleep.

  IV. Volcano House

  I missed the whale watch. I woke alone in her bed, my memory a smudge of light and sound. My tongue was sour. My bones ached. Bits of meat still wedged in my teeth. I caught up with the group at the restaurant listed in our itinerary for the farewell lunch. Next we were scheduled to visit Kringlan, a giant shopping mall that sold Icelandic souvenirs.

  “Oh, dear,” the guide said when I arrived. The group was seated at a long table, the guide at the head. Tom was across from her, his map of Iceland folded into a square on the table, my sister at the opposite end. “You missed, well, let’s see, just about everything.”

  I plopped down in the empty chair next to my sister. The windows were open; I heard the caw of gulls. The man with the camcorder was showing footage to the people next to him. Soon waiters served us brown bowls filled with lamb soup.

  “I hope you enjoyed yourself.” My sister slurped a spoonful of soup. “I hope you enjoyed having sex with a stranger. I hope you enjoyed sleeping in.”

  “He’s not a stranger!” I pushed my bowl away.

  “You left me.” She held up two fingers. “Two times you left me.”

  She had a point. I left her in Thingvellir. I left her in the elevator. Sisters were not supposed to leave each other behind. Even in Iceland I could not keep still. I wondered if she was calculating how much my half of the tour had cost her, if she was tempted to lean over and demand I pay up.

  “How did it feel to be lost out there?” a voice said. We looked across the table. The man with the camcorder was pointing the lens at me.

  There are people who diffuse and people who detonate, people who make a mistake and instead of fixing it they say: watch me be worse than you could have ever imagined. I put my elbows on the table. I smiled with teeth.

  “I wasn’t lost. I was looking for a Viking to fuck. I’m a huge slut. Just ask my sister.”

  She dropped her spoon on the table. A flush crept up her neck. Her jaw pulsed. For a moment, I thought she was going to hit me.

  “Okay.” She stopped. She raised a hand. I could tell she was trying to rein herself in, even as the flush spread to her ears. “You don’t want to eat soup or go on a whale watch or stay with the group. So tell me. What do you want?”

  The man kept filming us.

  “Turn off that goddamn camera.” My sister slapped the table. I wanted to cheer. Again she looked at me. Again she asked. Everyone was staring, but I didn’t care. I felt
like we were on the edge of something honest.

  “I want to see a volcano,” I said.

  * * *

  “A true rúntur is not for the faint of heart,” the guide told us after we announced our return to the hotel, pleading illness. At the Borg, we asked the man at the front desk if it was possible to see a volcano.

  “Right now?” He rubbed his slender hands together. We nodded. He made a call, and within an hour we were driving a black jeep out of a rental lot. We departed Reykjavik to the south, on a road that hugged the coast. My sister was behind the wheel. I read directions aloud from my phone. We were bound for Eyjafjallajökull.

  My sister tapped a fingernail against the window. “I remember when Eyjafjallajökull erupted. The ash clouds on the news. All those grounded flights. And no one could pronounce the volcano’s name.”

  “The Internet says it’s perfectly safe now,” I said, even though I had not consulted my phone on the current state of Eyjafjallajökull. As the land turned rural, the black nose of the jeep dipped up and down. We swayed gently in our seats. The road led us to Thorvaldseyri Farm at the base of the volcano, a cluster of white buildings with red roofs surrounded by flat green fields. After the 2010 eruption and the subsequent recovery, the owners of the farm opened a visitor center. I lost cell reception and switched over to a brochure with a map on the back page. According to the brochure, the visitor center contained a gift shop and a small museum, where you could view an informational video.