Lauren Groff - Arcadia

When he comes out again, the man is looking squirrelly, but he beams when Bit presses on the side of the ball and the invisible cut in it mouths open and a little bag of weed falls out. Bit rolls one, and they smoke. It feels so good to stand with another man in compassionate silence. Amos goes heavy-lidded and says, Glory. They walk back together toward the Green house. When Glory comes out, tucking her loose hair under her bonnet, Bit and Amos are petting the horse, chuckling at nothing.

She sniffs and frowns at Bit with her bunched-berry features. She says, What have you done with my husband?

Bit only says, thoughtfully, I would like to eat the world; and his new friend Amos chuckles alongside him.

In the dusk, Grete arrives home, scratched and sunburnt, her arms speckled with bites. The house is packed. Ellis is giving Hannah a manicure; she grins up at Bit, and he blows her a kiss from the door. Grete leans toward Bit and mutters, Why are there old ladies all over the place?

He puts another biscuit in his mouth to keep from answering.

Hannah hears Grete, though, and the computer voice rises sweetly, saying: It’s an infestation.

Wasting Hannah, faster and faster. Her belly, distended. Her face shrinking to settle among its bones, her flesh mottled. Bit tries to not shudder upon seeing her. Grete can’t be in the room without closing her eyes to her grandmother.

So strange, however: with her body leaving, her soul is rising to the surface. There is fire there, he sees. An ecstasy. He hurts with recognition: where has he seen this before? The answer comes to him in the night. In his knowledge-drunk youth in the college library, the lonely section of art books, the giving spread of them, the lustful dizzied colors. The faces of the saints. Girls: Catherine of Siena, Saint Veronica, Columba of Rieti. Anorexia mirabilis, the body emptying of corporeal want and filling with the wine of God.

Bit buries his face among his father’s sweaters, yearning for Abe to emerge, to make it all better, to take over.

He comes out of the closet. Luisa moves about in the kitchen. Hannah’s room is black and he and Hannah are there alone. Through the thick air, the smooth voice says softly, Don’t be afraid, Bit. I’m not afraid.

He fills an entire roll watching the afternoon light slant across his mother’s wasted face, watching her hands curled like snails on the dough of her belly.

He will develop these later in the pitch-black silence of a color darkroom; in the light, he will hold his mother in his hands again, fractured and grainy, her ruined body perfected by the ruined film.

Astrid sits behind Hannah, smoothing her hair. They used to be sisterly; now, the gulf is vast. Astrid flesh, Hannah bone. They remove the ventilator. Hannah’s eyelids are the purple of a bruise. She doesn’t wake. Her body is clenching back to its original form. She is a wisp, she would be gone in a slight wind.

Insomniac, he comes into the living room and finds Ellis in the recliner. She wakes to him watching her. She begins to say something, but he puts his hand over her mouth and holds it there, feeling the warm movement of her lips, her big teeth, her breath. She stands, and makes him dizzy with her perfume. He leads her out, into the night, over the ground that cracks with branches. The door of Midge’s house, dug into the hillside, opens under his palm. A fury fills him, and he leads her into the farthest bedroom, the windowless one, the pure blankness of earth there. He presses her against the cold concrete wall; she gasps; he pulls her skirt roughly over her hips and finds the welcome of her. They slip to a low bed. The darkness in him comes alive, angry. When he is done, he lifts himself so he is light on her bones and her shallow breath can deepen. He feels the clammy sheets on his legs, her mouth sliding gently on his wet cheeks, the fist clenched in his chest loosening.

Despite the shame, it is good, this thing; in a world gone to shit, this between people should be preserved.

I’m sorry, he says.

Don’t, she says. I’m not.

I’m an ass, he says. Her hands on his neck, shoulders, back. His ear is against the concrete. Ellis says, kindly, It’s all right.

He says nothing, and she says at last, Listen. I love Hannah. But you know I’m not here right now because of her. Her eyelashes are damp on his cheekbone. It had to happen sometime.

He groans. I’ll make it up to you, he says. His lips on the delicate, bitter folds of her ear. Her smile tightening along his jawbone. You will, she murmurs, her voice somewhere inside his skull.

It is the quiet hour. He can hear the tinkle of a wind chime forgotten up at Arcadia House.

Astrid looks at the clock. Luisa will be here soon, she says.

Bit holds his mother’s frond of a hand.

Astrid moves to the table where the morphine sits. I’m giving her a large dose, she says. Enough to knock her out. She bends over Hannah, a willow.

She finishes and puts a palm on Bit’s cheek. I’m not going to write this down, she says. The silence swells between them. You have to say you understand, she says.

I understand, he says. The words come from far away, years ago, the sun.

Astrid leaves. Luisa comes in. She flips through the log in the light of the pallid moon. Hm. Unlike Astrid to forget morphine, she says, but she is careful not to look at Bit.

He says nothing. He watches Luisa prepare the drug, find the catheter. He watches the slow slide in.

It doesn’t take long. Asleep, Hannah folds further into herself.

There is a lightening, as if a weight has been removed from her chest.

And his mother is gone.

It is hot and windless and bright; the last flare of sunset, Hannah’s time of day.

Many said their goodbyes to Hannah at Abe’s services. This gathering is smaller. The stalwarts are here, the women. The Amish are here, mixed in. Ellis holds Bit’s hand. Grete is pale and composed in the green dress Hannah had made her promise to wear. It brings out your eyes, Hannah had said. It makes Grete look like Hannah.

Astrid stands in the Pond, and the water draws slow dark swoops up the fabric of her white dress. She bends to a leaf, where she places a lit candle and pushes it off. The candle moves toward the center of the Pond in a length of ripples, then stops. Astrid sings, her voice cracked. Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changes not, abide with me.

There is no wind. Grete wades out alone, tipping the basket. When Hannah’s remains go into the Pond, they fall straight down. When the heavy pieces of her break the surface, the water heals itself. The rest of the ashes are lighter and float; they bloom in a slow flush across the surface.

Back inside the empty house, the black dog arrives. Bit opens his arms to it, tooth and claw. Outside, there are voices, people drinking juice and eating cake in the Sugarbush.

One week, Bit tells Grete. Give me one week. Then come get me.

Grete holds her sharp elbows and nods. She watches him go into his room.

All is still here, the walls full of comforting dimness. The bed is like two cupped hands, welcoming him in.

There is a landscape inside his head. Delicate hills, threading rivers of blood.

Unpeopled, this place would be nothing. Bit’s people come at will. Abe, striding along, his toolbelt jingling. Grete, a fleet flash in the woods. Verda gathering from the shadows at the edge of the trees, the white dog her dapple. Titus, who reaches for Bit and swings him into the sky. Hannah, her hand stretching toward something, young, golden, round.

Everything he needs is here.

If he cannot be infinite — his love meeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadow — this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night.