Adam Johnson - Fortune Smiles - Stories

I use my powers of perception to scan the neighborhood for signs of this so-called writer’s studio. I try to detect the effervescence of my husband’s ever-present sparkling water, the shimmer of his condom wrappers or the snap of Megumi’s bra strap. My feelers feel only the fog rolling in, extinguishing the waking world block by block, starting with the outer avenues.

Interesting fact: The Miwok believed the advancing fog could draw one into the next world.

Interesting fact: Accidentally slipping into the afterlife was a grave concern for them. To locate one another in the fog, they darkened their skin with pigment made from the ashes of poison oak fires. They marked their chests with the scent of Brewer’s angelica. They developed signature calls by which they alone would be known.

For some reason, my family skips archery tonight. And there is no Native American story when the kids are put to bed. Even bigboobsalert has to wait. In his office, my husband calls up his document and continues stealing my story. I don’t shout at him this time. He is a slow and expressive writer. Word choices play across his face. He drinks sparkling water, urinating into the plastic bottles when they’re empty, and writes most of the night. I miss talking with him. I miss how nothing seemed like it really happened unless we told each other about it.

Interesting fact: My third, unfinished novel is about Buffalo Calf Road Woman, the Cheyenne warrior who struck the felling blow to Custer at Little Bighorn. I wrote about her life only because it amazed me.

My husband has my research spread before him: atlases of Native American tribes and field guides for botanicals and customs and mythology. I think this is good for him.

I’m there when he hits one last Command-S for the night.

I follow him upstairs. The children are sleeping in the big bed. He climbs in among their flopped limbs, and I want to join, but there is no room. My husband’s head comes to rest upon the pillow. Yet his eyes remain open, growing large, adjusting focus, like he is trying to follow something as it disappears into the dark.

Interesting fact: My husband doesn’t believe that dreams carry higher meanings.

Interesting fact: I had a dream once. In the dream, I stood naked in the darkness. A woman approached me. When she neared, I could see she was me. She said to me, or I guess I said to myself, “It’s happening.” Then she reached out and touched my left breast. I woke to find my breast warm and buzzing. I felt a lump in a position I would later learn was the superior lateral quadrant. In the morning, I stood in front of the mirror, but the lump was nowhere to be found. I told my husband about the dream. He said, “Spooky.” I told him I was going to the doctor right away. “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “It’s probably nothing.”

Eventually, my husband sleeps. An arm passes over one child and secures another. All the pillows have been stolen, then half-stolen back. The children thrum to his deep, slow breathing. I have something to tell him.

Interesting fact: My husband has a secret name, a Sioux name.

He’s embarrassed by it. He doesn’t like anyone to say it, as he feels he doesn’t deserve it. But when I utter the Lakota words, he wakes from his sleep. He sees me, I can tell, his eyes slowly dial me in. He doesn’t smile, but on his face is a kind of recognition.

Through the bay windows, troughs of fog surge down Frederick Street.

“I think it’s happening,” I say to him.

He nods, then he drifts off again. Later, this will only have been a dream.

I near the bed and regard my children. Here is my son, back grown strong from pulling the bow. Still I see his little-boy cheeks and long eyelashes. Still I see the boy who nursed all night, who loved to hug fire hydrants, who ran long-haired and shirtless along a slow-moving river in Florida. His hair is buzzed now, like his father’s, and his pupils behind closed eyes track slowly, like he is dreaming of a life that unfolds at a less jolting pace.

My daughter’s hair is the gravest shade of black. If anyone got the Native blood, it is her. Dark-skinned and fast afoot, she also has fierce, far-seeing eyes. She is the one who would enter the battle to save her brother, as Buffalo Calf Road Woman famously did. Tonight she sleeps clutching my iPhone, alarm set for dawn, and in the set of her jaw, I can feel the list of things she’ll have to accomplish to get her siblings up and fed and off to school.

And then there is the Horse-child.

Interesting fact: My youngest’s love of interesting facts was just a stage. When my illness turned her into a horse, she never said interesting facts again.

Interesting fact: Horses cannot utter human words or feel human emotions. They are resilient beasts, immune from the sadness of the human cargo they carry.

She is once again a little human, a member of a weak and vulnerable breed. Who will explain what she missed while she was a horse? Who will hold her and tell her who I was and what I went through? If only she had never been a horse, if only she could remain one a little longer. What I wouldn’t give to hear her whinny and neigh her desires again, to see how delicately she tapped her hoof to receive a carrot or sugar cube. But it is over. She’ll never again gallop on all fours or give herself a mane by drawing with markers down her back. It will just have been a stage she went through, preserved only in a story. And that, I suppose, is all I will have been, a story from when they were little.

In the morning, Prinz leaps onto the bed and stands on my chest, the handle of his leash in his mouth. For a little dog, he has large, wet eyes. I can smell his breath— wurst —and I realize I must have left a link of sausage on the cutting board. Though Prinz is capable of obedience, he succumbs to criminal tendencies. I am no longer a prison warden — I retired after the Wall fell — but I can tell a subversive personality when I see one. And it’s the charming ones you have to look out for.

Prinz cocks his head and goes pant-pant .

“I do not forget this betrayal,” I tell him, and take the leash in my hand.

At the front door, I help Prinz into his miniature jacket, which is made of leather and gives him the look of a tough little VoPo. It’s November, so I button up, too. I know, the East German Volkspolizei haven’t existed for eighteen years. It’s 2008, after all. But you can’t change what a man and his dog look like in matching leather jackets.

Outside, the air is sharp. Crisp leaves blanket the dormant lawn. Prinz sees a red squirrel and barks like mad till I drop the lead and let him race off. I peek in the mail slot, where I find the new Der Spiegel and a letter, but it’s not addressed in the handwriting of my wife, Gitte — or ex-wife, or whatever she’s calling herself.

The letter is probably from an old inmate — my former prisoners are entering the period in life when they are “recovering their voices” and want to speak to me about what their time in my facility did to them. My address is public record, and I have nothing to hide. I welcome their letters but admit I only kind of skim them. It is a little like the rhetoric of Anonyme Alkoholiker —you understand that the steps are important for someone’s sobriety, but who really wants to hear about it? I close the mail slot. Those old inmates would piss their pants if I ever wrote back and reminded them of the criminal actions they took that landed them in my facility, let alone the things they did once they found themselves inside — lying, snitching, begging, weeping and stooping to every possible indignity and deceit.