by Matt Bell
Panic sets in, she said. People lose their heads. It’s my job not to lose mine.
When she laughed he could see more of her teeth than when she didn’t. Her teeth weren’t perfect but what did it matter. Her name was Jackie but her name wasn’t what he thought when he saw her. He didn’t tell her what he called her in his head.
On the big screen the game unfolded and the crowd in the bar erupted whenever there was a goal scored or a fight started. Between highlights she told him about her week and this week was the week a teenager burbled into the telephone for three minutes after his grandmother shot him in the chest.
This was the week a mother miscarried in the checkout line, squatting over the linoleum, crying and screaming and surrounded by strangers, all bonded by the intimacy of her disaster.
This was the week a toddler drank drain cleaner and this was the week Jackie didn’t know if she’d ever know if the toddler was alive or dead.
Despite her week she smiled more than he did and he didn’t know why. She touched his arm across the table and she said if she was sure a caller was passing then she never hung up, not before the paramedics arrived. She didn’t want anyone to be alone when they died. It mattered to her even after it couldn’t matter to them. He bought her a beer and himself a beer he couldn’t afford. Even after the game went bad for the home team he thought his face might hurt from happiness in the morning. Joy’s spreading warmth, starting low and swelling fast. How long had it been since he’d lived this close to its hum.
They met for coffee, drinks, lunch, made the expected small talk. She told him more about her work, her week, about new car crashes, heart attacks, domestic violence. She asked him about his days too but he didn’t know what he wanted to tell her. The work was a series of repetitive motions. There were surprises but all of a kind. Before he met her, he had been training himself to feel less about everything and now he gave her the unadorned actions, without explanation or inflection, what sights he saw in the zone’s abandoned places: A busted flip-flop found in an alley, its imagined implications like at the scene of a crime. A bird he couldn’t save, trapped in a crumbling chimney. A house whose roof had fallen in, seedlings growing where the living room turned to moss. Because after you broke the shell of the house who knew what might come next.
He said, I never imagined how hard we worked to keep the world out, to stop its taking back the places we’d claimed.
There were streets with every business barred and nearly every house vacated and still there could be a shamble of people shuffling the sidewalks. He required an enormous vocabulary for describing degrees of distance, a vocabulary he didn’t possess. He called a lot of parts of the zone empty or abandoned or derelict but those words never meant there was no one there.
He said, I saw a child hollering in a front yard yesterday, in a block I thought was vacant. A boy, eleven or twelve. The child alone, shirtless, his skin glistened with sweat, sunshine. It was fall but the year had a few warm days left.
He told her this but what he told her wasn’t a story. It was something he’d seen, not something he’d done. He was merely a spectator, didn’t want to paint the image tainted by his action or inaction, didn’t want the responsibility of cause and effect.
There’s this creeping kind of fatigue, he said. If he thought harder about what he heard and saw from his apartment he didn’t think he could live there. The vast turnover of the people with loud voices, louder problems, the small miseries and the daily cruelties. Better to focus on external anxieties, on crises more far-flung, the news. On what he read in books or saw in documentaries. It was easier if he could pretend the tragedy was happening somewhere else.
She touched his hand until he calmed. She said, You think the world is a bad place but you want to be a good man in it.
Yes, he said. The fatigue, the exhaustion, his own mistakes: he’d seen bad things happen in the zone but so far he’d kept his distance, worked to forget what he’d seen. What he was most afraid of was the time when he would be the only one who could help, when there was a choice between letting harm continue and getting involved.
He liked her but it was simpler to talk about the hockey team, the news on television. It was easy to get her to switch topics: she liked him but she loved hockey, and this was the week her team was winning. She filled their table talk with Russian names and American rules and he nodded along and when without warning she asked if he was divorced he was able to say no and let the subject drop.
After the confrontation in the gymnasium he decided he didn’t have to work in the night, didn’t have to live in the darkness. He could live in the distance instead: the distance between inhabited houses, the distance between open schools and working hospitals and still-thriving businesses. The distance between a family sleeping softly on a Saturday morning and the wind clanking a twisted metal door against a doorframe it no longer fit. A single lot could be enough. A single lot bought plenty of looking the other way.
He worked harder in the day so he could spend his evenings with her, and at the table even sitting still his muscles ached. She was the one with the limp but by the time they went to bed he wasn’t standing straight either. One day he noticed her fingernails were a different color every time he saw her. She wore so many shades of lipstick. When he woke up the next morning he saw in the mirror where she’d marked him, the drag of a lip across his stomach, his hip bone. Little she did outlasted his shower but for a moment he remembered. With her, he was getting his color back, began to dress a rack better, again paid a whole price for a whole shirt. He’d kept himself up before but he’d never liked maintenance for its own sake. Now there was a reason.
They didn’t go many places he wouldn’t have gone on his own but he was louder in the places they went. He had kept his own company so long their conversations renewed the ringing in his ears. She called him the quiet type. He nodded and she laughed. It was so easy, this beginning. He hoped it lasted a long time. He struggled with the absurdity of middles, and endings happened so fast or violent there wasn’t anything to do but let loose and wait for the impact. He had the kind of blank face women liked least to fight with, his features passive even when he was angriest. Almost every woman he’d ever dated had one day learned to hate it.
They both failed at darts and pool but they celebrated the arcade machines left in their kinds of bars, the residue of an earlier age. With her by his side he got better at moving the frog across the street than when he was a kid but he got worse again as he drank. Then the digital splat and splatter. She couldn’t pilot a spaceship for anything but loved any game with a trackball, analog action making digital moves, the imprecision of desire. Once they played a bowling game inside a bowling alley and he grew irritated when she liked it better than the real thing but she said she preferred wearing her own shoes. She couldn’t wear high heels but he said heels weren’t everything. In another game she spun the ball as hard as she could, then lifted her hand, letting fate take over for control. It didn’t save her life but he could buy her three more for a quarter.
He obsessed over certain parts of her shape, the ways of her speech. The swoop of her clavicle, the word clavicle. He could catch a sound or an idea and good luck getting rid of it. The titles and designations, the taxonomies of compound words. The exactness of language he desired, the way the right word might be used to name an object. The girl with the limp: it wasn’t like she hadn’t told him her name. He’d learned it the first night, never forgot it, could reproduce it immediately if asked. Jackie. He thought often of the sound of her voice but he didn’t hear her voice saying her name. Her name wasn’t who she was. When he thought of her he saw first her shape, her way of movement, her facial expressions. His affection wasn’t for the name but for the shape, wasn’t for the name but for the action it contained.
The girl with the limp reminded him. She had slightly darker hair, a similar arrangement of curves. Her personality was
different but he learned to adjust. He no longer thought the wrong name when he awoke and found her beside him, turned away. He wasn’t confused anymore: this was Jackie and no one else. Sometimes she woke to find him staring. Sometimes he woke up and found her on top of him. This was another way she was different. They ate and they talked and they watched the violence upon the ice, they fucked and they stayed hungry. He watched her take pills for the nerve damage, another prescription for depression. She wasn’t supposed to drink on either but they stayed thirsty too. It would be winter soon and he wondered what would last until spring came. After the first month her resemblance to the past waned. Or else her body had come to supplant the memory of the other body, his southern woman. An intercession of the physical: he’d had this happen before, with other pairs of women. He started seeing someone new because her outline reminded him of someone else but one day he couldn’t remember how the first shape had felt.
She didn’t shave her legs as often as other women he’d dated. They were harder to reach in her condition or else she always wore pants or else she was comfortable with him, with herself. In bed she commented on his suntan, on the contrast between the darkness of his public skin and the paleness of everything else. He said his tan persisted all winter. You could work hard enough in January to not need a coat and some years he had. Her skin was a paleness everywhere, a luminosity in the dark. He could walk back into the blacked-out bedroom and know exactly where in the bed she was sleeping.
Her car was low and bright yellow and growled when she punched the gas, she had nerves but she wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t supposed to drive in case she had an attack but she said the doctors weren’t going to take anything from her. At night she would drive them twenty or thirty miles above the speed limit on the darkest stretches of freeway and on the right nights they might see no one else. She took risks because she wasn’t going to live forever, because, she said, there was a finite length of time she could be punished for her mistakes, and Kelly knew this already, understood this was how they had met, why she had invited him in their first night. She kept another cane in the backseat of her car but worse than the canes, she said, were the forearm crutches. Psychological torture, she said, and when you got prescribed a forearm crutch you knew you were never going to get better. He said he didn’t know there were prescriptions for objects but he could see how he should have.
I’ve been healthy all my life, he said. It wasn’t ever my body I’ve had trouble with.
With his southern woman he hadn’t used anything. With her he had let down this guard, then that one, some at her request, some out of the creeping apathy of the familiar. It had been a mistake, his walls built for a reason. Now he was using protection again and said the condoms caused him trouble. He got nervous about the delay ripping the packages, snapped the latex against the skin during removal. All the little indignities collected. The reservoir nippled at the end of his cock made him feel ridiculous. If he couldn’t stop thinking, then he had trouble staying hard but he pretended his lack was something he could hide with enthusiasm. The girl with the limp wasn’t on the pill but she told him she couldn’t get pregnant. Something about ovarian cysts, surgical scarring. He didn’t ask questions. He let her know he was willing to listen but more often they kept their pasts behind them.
When she said Kelly during sex or after waking it was like a mystery unfolding. He had never loved his name except in the way a woman said it, except when she said it, when she said it like the woman before had. Their sex was slow and quiet and he did most of the work so the exertion wouldn’t cause her an attack. It wasn’t what he wanted to think about but he had to keep her safe. When her orgasms came they were soft and sudden: a movement of her mouth, a quick clenching, then the shuddery squeeze and release, the subtlest of hiccups.
Afterward they laughed and talked and smoked. Survivors of the day, sharing the inexplicable unspeakable elation that everything wrong in their lives had not brought them to ruin. But then she said that if she did get pregnant she would have to have an abortion because the pregnancy could worsen her condition.
He said there wasn’t anything to worry about. He wasn’t getting anyone pregnant, ever.
I had a vasectomy years ago, he said, speaking softly. He waited, listened to her breathing until he wasn’t sure if she was awake.
I never wanted kids, he whispered. I’m glad you can’t have children.
He’d thought she might be sleeping but now he saw her mouth contorting in the dark. She turned over, pulled the sheet across her bare back. He said, There was a woman I loved. The woman had a son. We lost our house and then I lost them.
IN THE CHURCH BASEMENT they circled the chairs, found a volunteer to begin. One by one they shared what had been lost and when a speaker completed her story the others clapped, hugged her, thanked her for sharing. Never a critique, always an acceptance. All those quavering voices, their narratives of death. The living came to meeting after meeting until they knew how to structure the story. These were the basic redemption tales, stories of education through suffering: All they had to do was learn to love someone through their hurt. To love them as much as when it had been easy. Or else learn to let someone go because of how bravely they’d borne their dying, their death. Or else they hadn’t come over to forgiveness, harbored some old pettiness or even well-deserved hate, because who hurt us like the people who were supposed to love us?
Kelly liked the people who couldn’t name their grief the best. If your betrothed died you were not a widower. There was no word in the language for a man who had lost his child before he ever got the chance to say the word father. It was impossible to offer your story by your title, to transfer it easily and without explanation, in the way husband told a tale, in the way father did.
If he told a story, this might have been one story he told. It wasn’t exactly the truth but for him the absence of the southern woman and her son had become a kind of death, a going away of love never to be undone, unfelt, forgiven.
Or else he might have told an earlier story, might have spoken of his father, about how he could have chosen to sit beside his mother at the moment of his father’s death, witnessed the spittle and the gurgle and the waste. What revenge would it have been to see the bones shining beneath the skin, to see all the crawling blue scrawl between? His father would have been enfeebled, weak of speech, unable to breathe. A tonnage of tubes pumping life back into a black balloon. A sack of air and blood, some deathly monster. Not the shape of myth he remembered best, the man taller and stronger and smarter than himself, always and forever the hale creature of his youth.
There was a man who cried at the end of every story and there was a man who never cried and Kelly thought he knew where his own sympathies lay. Outside in the dark the three men smoked and the man who never cried said the suffering of the individual had been eclipsed by the suffering of the masses. Earthquakes in Haiti, tsunamis and nuclear devastation in Japan. Genocides in Africa, riots in the streets in London, Athens, Los Angeles. It had happened here in the city, the city burning three times. There was what we had made with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in places we probably didn’t know our country’s forces were fighting, and What is Syria was at least as good a question as Where. The longer the man spoke the more the qualities of pronouns got nebulous. Who was we and who was they. He said there were diseases in Asia making our vaccines look like the toys of children, unlucky Americans returning from foreign vacations with their flesh falling off their faces, crying out their disbelief for the nightly news.
The man who never cried said, It could be any one of us before the cameras, insane with the odds. While in vacationland there’s a thousand natives sick, unrecorded, unbroadcast.
Here we are, the man said. And am I the same as my complaint or am I worse for knowing better.
The other man was at it again. Still crying he tried to comfort the man who never cried but the second man nearly shoved
him from the church steps.
All I’m saying, the man who never cried said, is there are whole cities falling into the ocean, whole species going extinct beneath the hottest sun in ten thousand years. We’re here wailing about a single human life.
He said, I loved my wife but she’s gone.
He said, I loved my wife but is she the equivalent of a thousand starving children I can’t see well enough to mourn.
My wife, he said, is statistically insignificant no matter how you’re counting.
The girl with the limp had a bad day and the cane came out from the side of the bed, its handle curled beneath her clenched hand. The muscles in her bad leg knotted and Kelly rubbed their tight cords, made amateur improvements. This was a different way of touching her body, her sickness more private than their sex. She had a bottle of muscle relaxers, a physical therapist she could call. He cooked the food she needed to take the pills, refused her the drink she requested next, poured them both water instead. And when was the last time they drank water.
How bad is it, he asked, and she lied to him: I’m fine, she said, I told you I’m fine. She could barely talk through the pain and as the pills took effect her voice thickened. She gestured aimlessly with the remote, hit its buttons with a senseless violence, found her hockey game and settled onto the couch. She knew the names of all the players, complained when Kelly forgot what she’d taught him. He wasn’t good with names, he said, and she laughed because she knew, because it was one of the first things she knew about him.
When he lost track of the game he watched her watching instead. There was something local to know about octopus, a play-off legend she couldn’t explain. Tradition, she said. Its origins were in the past and she didn’t care about history, only victory. She couldn’t be an athlete anymore but she cheered anyone who was. He had been one himself but he didn’t tell her the details. Boxing, he said. Wrestling, he said. More history. After the game ended they watched the news and at the bottom of the screen the scrolling ticker announced again the results of a televised singing competition, the flavor of a new color of soda, the failure of a bill promoting equal pay for equal work. The long emergency was visible anywhere the ticker ran. The ticker had come to life on the country’s worst day and it had never gone away: How you couldn’t always guard against what scared you most. How the urgency of your watchfulness dulled with time. How knowing this only made the remaining fear worse.