Weather

by Jenny Offill

  * * *

  …

  My mother sends me a picture. She took a bus with her prayer group to a detention center in the next state. They were not allowed to talk to the people being held there, but they stood outside the barbed wire fence and sang in hopes of cheering them. The picture is of a spindly tree outside the fence. Apparently, it is the only tree visible from the prison. They hung their cross necklaces on its branches before they left.

  You are not going to have to walk thirty-four miles with your child on your back.

  But if I did.

  * * *

  …

  I’ve been hanging out too much at my old bar while everyone’s away. It’s fun to talk to people who don’t know anything about me. And I spend a lot of time eavesdropping too.

  It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

  Then one day my guy comes in. His name is Will. Turns out he’s some kind of journalist. Recently back from Syria. He has an odd side gig: taking kids out for wilderness trips. “No set line between lost and not lost,” he tells me, and I write this down on a napkin.

  And then somehow, it’s four drinks later, and I’m telling him about the coming chaos. “What are you afraid of?” he asks me, and the answer, of course, is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity; then he says, “What are your most useful skills?” “People think I’m funny, I know how to tell a story in a brisk, winning way. I try not to go on much about my discarded ambitions or how I hate hippies and the rich.” “But in terms of skills,” he says, and I tell him I know a few poems by heart, I recently learned how to make a long-burning candle out of a can of tuna (oil packed, not water), I’ve learned how to recognize a black walnut tree and that you can live on the inner bark of a birch tree if need be, I know it is important to carry chewing gum at all times for post-collapse morale and also because it suppresses the appetite and you can supposedly fish with it, but only if it is a bright color and has sugar—only then will a fish investigate and somehow get hooked to the end of the fishing pole I have fashioned with a sharpened paper clip and a string and a stick. If you need to, you can use wet tobacco as a poultice over a wound. Red ants can be eaten (they have a lemony taste); the Mormons ate lily bulbs, a famine food; Malcolm X said his mom would make soup out of dandelions when there wasn’t enough to eat. If you don’t have enough water, don’t eat, keep your mouth closed, conserve your energy. You can last three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food, three months without hope, but don’t drink your own urine—that is a myth—and don’t eat snow—you have to melt it first. If you have a toothache you can put crushed aspirin on it. All you need to make toothpaste is baking soda, peppermint oil, and water. You can chew on a stick until it splinters into a toothbrush…

  He keeps touching my arm, this guy. Sometimes your heart runs away with someone and all it takes is a bandanna on a stick.

  When I come home, Henry is playing video games. I look at the list of prepper acronyms I printed out this morning.

  GOOD = Get Out of Dodge

  DTA = Don’t Trust Anyone

  FUD = Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

  BSTS = Better Safe Than Sorry

  WROL = Without Rule of Law

  YOYO = You’re on Your Own

  INCH = I’m Never Coming Home

  * * *

  …

  The next time, I tell him about how soon they will build a seawall around the city. Already, the mayor is getting advice from the Dutch. There are seaside villages in the Netherlands where you can hear waves crashing, see seagulls circling, and smell the salt water without ever once seeing the sea.

  He’s charismatic, this one, used to being pursued. One night he showed me a picture of his ex-wife, who is a ridiculously hot photojournalist. She’s French. He’s French Canadian. They used to go to war zones together. I asked him if he’d only ever dated beautiful women. He paused kindly, thought about it. Sort of, he said. Does she have an eye patch? No eye patch, Will said.

  Later, after he leaves, Tracy says I’m a loser for not making a move on him. “You should just stay married,” she tells me. “I am married,” I point out pedantically. “Right,” she says.

  * * *

  …

  I just…I couldn’t bear the part where you fell out of love with me, I tell the guy who smiles at me on the subway. Telepathically. But he hears me. Now he’s playing some game on his phone, not looking at me at all.

  If he runs off with Tracy, I’ll be fine. Law of the land. Assortative mating. There’s no way I would throw myself in front of a train. Not a chance. But there are always those single-car tree accidents; I could be the other girl in the car. They’d walk away holding hands, but they’ll never get over me.

  * * *

  …

  One of the things I like about Will is that he doesn’t seem to mind if I blather on about zazen. I can tell he’s firmly in the school of whatever gets you through the night. I wonder sometimes what he’s doing here. “Just passing through,” he says. Right, right, ramble on, sing your song, that kind of thing probably.

  It takes me a while to piece together what he does with his time. As far as I can tell, he goes somewhere terrible, almost gets killed, then leaves and wanders around some peacetime place until he’s ready to go back to reporting again.

  He tells me about how he used to go on these long treks. Once he followed the path of an eighteenth-century adventurer. He walked where he walked, stayed where he had stayed. He used the man’s journal as a guide. Writing his own book as he went. It became a kind of overlay to the first one, he said. The trip took eight months. There were a few times his feet left the ground. Once on a rainy day, he accepted a ride in a car and was stunned at how violent this new speed felt to his body. His thoughts could not unfold calmly, they were all in a jumble. He clutched the side of the door and waited in a panic to be released.

  How is your walk? That’s what they used to ask us at youth group. With Jesus, they meant.

  * * *

  …

  My question for Will is: Does this feel like a country at peace or at war? I’m joking, sort of, but he answers seriously.

  He says it feels the way it does just before it starts. It’s a weird thing, but you learn to pick up on it. Even while everybody’s convincing themselves it’s going to be okay, it’s there in the air somehow. The whole thing is more physical than mental, he tells me.

  Like hackles? The way a dog’s hackles go up? Yes, he says.

  He tells me that at the wilderness camp they teach the kids something called “loss-proofing.” In order to survive, you have to think first of the group. If you look after the needs of others, it will give you purpose and purpose gives you the burst of strength you need in an emergency. He says you never know which kids will do well. But in general the suburban kids do the worst. They have no predators, he says.

  * * *

  …

  I don’t know how Ben did it. I have to call and get instructions about how to get all the mouse shit off the spice rack and the shelf beneath it, because it’s been an hour already with the yellow gloves and the disinfectant and the wet paper towels and so much throwing away of paper that I’ve already undone all the good I’d done in the world until now. But then I have to put everything back—does that mean I have to wash each spice, each bottle, individually too? “I did,” he says sweetly, “but no, I don’t think you have to, just getting rid of the shit is great.” He laughs when I tell him how long I’ve been working on it and says, “It’s a new day.”

  I’m starting to miss him. The warm hum of his body next to me in bed. Certain little jokes and kindnesses. A kind
of credit or goodwill, extended and extended again and again whether or not you deserve it.

  Funny how when you’re married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you’re anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed.

  * * *

  …

  The email keeps coming. And people have ideas. Don’t engineer the sun or the ocean, engineer us.

  Smaller people tend to live longer, one scientist says. They use less fabric for their clothes, less rubber for their shoes and they fit into airplanes better.

  Q: What would it mean to bioengineer humans to be more efficient?

  A: One thing they looked into were cat eyes, the technique of giving humans cat eyes or of making their eyes more catlike. The reason is that cat eyes see nearly as well as human eyes during the day, but much better at night. The researchers figured that if everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn’t need so much lighting, and so you could reduce global energy usage considerably.

  I read about all of this in the periodicals room. Other stuff too. There’s one journal that’s filled with studies about loneliness and how to combat it.

  Hunt et al. (1992) found that a woman sitting in a park received significantly more social approaches from passersby whenever she was accompanied by a rabbit or turtle, than when she sat alone with a television set or blowing bubbles.

  The adjunct seems paler than usual. He isn’t speaking in complete sentences. Would it be possible to…? Do you mind if…?

  They say when you’re lonely you start to lose words.

  * * *

  …

  Later, in the middle of the night, I start worrying about him. Thinking about things I should have said. I know the things you are supposed to look for. I grew up with the list in my head. Do you have a plan? I’d ask Henry when he called late at night, trying to give away something he no longer needed.

  I’d talk and talk, but when he wanted to get off the phone, I’d claim that I had one more thing to say, something I’d forgotten, something important. I need to talk to you in the morning, I’d say. You have to call me back so I can remember. A simple trick, but it worked. Get them to commit to the next day, the next hour, the next minute even.

  * * *

  …

  Scientists say that the theory of everything is a technical expression, not a metaphysical one.

  But a lot of people who hang out at this bar seem to have grand unifying theories. I heard a lot of them back when I used to bartend here. For a long time, what I picked up on were the grief ones. The way they’d wince if you made a small domestic complaint; the way they radiated anger at your belief the ground was solid beneath your feet.

  Lately, I’ve been noticing the sex ones, the people who’ve been all the way down the line and back again. They know every way a person can be broken or break; they know how to be the hammer and the nail. “Can I ask you something?” Will says and I say “Sure, ask me something.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’m a fucking librarian.”

  …

  People Also Ask

  What will disappear from stores first?

  Why do humans need myths?

  Do we live in the Anthropocene?

  What is the cultural trance?

  Is it wrong to eat meat?

  What is surveillance capitalism?

  How can we save the bees?

  What is the internet of things?

  When will humans go extinct?

  * * *

  …

  Sylvia decides to stop recording interviews. She tells me to go through the archive and pick which ones to air.

  I played the one by that disaster psychologist again. He explains that in times of emergency the brain can get stuck on a loop, trying to find a similar situation for comparison.

  This is why you must make a plan before disaster strikes. In a hotel, study the fire exits. On a ferry, look for the life jackets. On a plane, read the card they tell you to read.

  Without such a plan, people quickly lose their bearings. Husbands leave behind their wives. Parents flee without their children. You might even repeat to yourself, like a mantra, I have children! I have children!

  * * *

  …

  One weekend my brother and I house-sit for Sylvia. I’m edgy, restless, thinking of things I shouldn’t be. There are so many mice in the walls it is impossible to sleep. They make that noise that is somewhere between a skittering and a whirring. And some animal gnawed through the protective casing on the propane tank. Henry’s eyes look bad. This morning we got up very early to look at a rare and particular kind of moon.

  And I need to get my mother’s teeth fixed. A wisdom one’s infected, another is crumbling. She told me her plan is to drive to the clinic at the university four hours away. People come from much farther, from miles and miles away, so many that when you get there, there is a lottery system to see who gets to have their pain taken away. America is the name of this place where you can win big.

  * * *

  …

  Do you want to hang out in the daylight? Will texts me when I get back. I wait until my brother has a friend over and then I go out for a cheat walk with him. We go to a little park I’ve never been to before. Maybe it’s near where he lives. We never talk about where we live.

  There’s a little pond in the middle of it. We wonder how deep it is. I find a stick, hand it to him. “Women are equal now,” he says, but he throws it just to humor me.

  Prepper tip: If you are caught without any gear, all you need to fish is some spit and your shirt. Wade out into the water, then lift up your shirt to make a net beneath the water’s surface. Spit as much as you can into it. Minnows will be attracted to it because they think it’s food. When you have several of them investigating, jerk your shirt up out of the water. Now you have dinner.

  Will laughs when I tell him this. “There are better ways,” he says. “I grew up fishing.” He grew up out in the middle of nowhere, snow up to their windows.

  So sure, maybe I could charm him for a while, but when the shine wore off? How long until he figured out I can’t chop wood or light a fire? Ben is used to my all talk, no action ways, but it took a long time to bank all that goodwill.

  The thought of having to be with someone else long enough to deserve it again. That’s what feels impossible. Because the part where they are charmed by you, where you are every good thing, and then the part later—sooner, maybe, but always later—where they tire of you, of all your repetitions, of all your little and big shames, I don’t think I could bear that. Tracy says nonsense, I should seize the moment, have a fling while Ben’s away. And I could, right? I could! I could!

  All I would have to do is take my clothes off with a stranger who has no particular interest in my long-term well-being or mental stability. How hard is that? I could do that. It would be fun. Especially if said stranger got all my jokes, and liked how I never nagged and how I never asked if I looked fat, and would agree to make me go to the dentist and doctor even though I don’t ever want to (because of death, death, the terrible death), and would be okay with my indifferent housekeeping and my seventies-style bush, and would be okay with us having to take care of my brother financially and emotionally for the rest of his life, also my mother, who is good and kind, but doesn’t have a cent, then I’m totally into it, I’d happily fuck him whichever way he fancied until the bright morn.

  But also I’m married. Happily, I’d say. So what we do mostly is we text each other. The moment we part. Stupid things, little jokes about the news or our days. Sometimes I send them late at night, but when I do they are scrupulously chaste. This tonight from the bathroom: kompromat on me: electric toothbrush now manual.

  * * *

  …

  Sometimes
Will flinches when I stray off the paved sidewalk onto the grass. He’s got lots of good stories. None of them are about war.

  Well, that’s not true. That one time he talked about war, or not quite about war, but about the time just before it. He said your body knew things before your brain did. You started noticing different things.

  Are you sure you’re not a spy? Because you kind of seem like a spy, I told him once. I’m not a spy, he said. But I could send you a message in code.

  * * *

  …

  In class, a woman talks about what has happened to her. She has some kind of illness where the lightest of touches is painful to the skin. “I can’t bear it,” she says. Margot nods. You can barely bear it, I think reflexively.

  There are different stories about how Margot’s husband died. He was stung by a bee, I think. Somehow he never had been before in all his life and he was deathly allergic.

  In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one’s gaze.

  * * *

  …

  Henry’s box is full of scraps of paper, phrases in micro-script. We both have dreams about people finding it. In the beginning, it took a week to fill. But this time just four days. Often these thoughts get worse before they get better, Margot said. This is to be expected. But you can expect something and still get the breath knocked out of you by it.

  “Shall we start?” I ask him. Henry nods, hunches his shoulders. The park is mostly empty because it’s cold. We’re on an out of the way bench. As instructed, he reads each one aloud to me. The baby is burned, smothered, strangled, flayed. I rip them into pieces, throw them away.