Alix Ohlin - Inside

He got a promotion at the stationery store, to evening supervisor, and his hours changed. By the time he left, the parks were quiet and there were no boys to remind him of Yozefu.

Christmas came, then went.

In January there was an ice storm, and the store lost its electricity. He called the manager, who told him to close up early and go home, so he walked home with the sting of sleet against his face. The city was stippled with light and dark, some buildings still sparkling, others black, a pattern of blankness and power.

When he got home, the lights were off, and Marcie was startled to see him. He explained what happened, and she burst into tears.

“It’s just a storm,” he said, puzzled. “The electricity will come back on.”

She was sitting on the living-room couch, and candles flickered on the coffee table in front of her. There were two glasses of wine there, sedimented with red.

“I’m sorry,” she said, now crying hard.

He had no idea what she was talking about. “It’s okay,” he said.

“No it’s not,” she said. She was curling into herself, her head down. “I know I should be more patient, but I just needed somebody. I’ve been so lonely. I’m so alone.”

Tug had trouble focusing his attention on the scene before him, this woman and her tears. With some difficulty he realized she was still talking.

“I guess you want to know who it is,” she was saying. “It’s Jake. I know, I know, it’s terrible, but he and Joanne are having trouble and he and I were just, well, comforting each other, I guess. That old story.”

“Who’s Jake?” Tug said.

Marcie raised her head, tucked her blond hair behind her ears, and drew a deep breath. When she spoke, her tone was acidic. “Jake and Joanne Herschfeld,” she said, very slowly, “are our friends. We had dinner with them last weekend.”

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”

“You’re not even here,” she said. Then the anger passed and she started sobbing again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m messing them up, I’m messing us up. I should be supporting you. I’m evil, I’m terrible, I’m the worst.”

Feeling sorry for her, he put his hand on her knee. (She told him later that it was the first time he had touched her in months.) He wanted to say something to make her feel better. He looked down at his fingers and thought of a child running through the streets carrying his own severed hand in the one he still had.

“This,” he said, looking at her. “This is nothing.”

By the time the power came back on she was living with her parents. Over the next week she emptied the apartment of her possessions, and was gone.

Should he have felt sad? Probably; but he didn’t. He was enormously relieved. And best of all, he was freed from the obligation to think about the future, in which he no longer had any interest. He was released.

Of that day on the mountain he wouldn’t say much, only that the idea of not having to sit in front of the television at three a.m. waiting for the night to end, of not having to pretend to be happy for the sake of other people, was perilously tempting. It was luxurious, almost a reward. He never said that he wanted to die.

He did say, “I wish I’d stayed in Africa.”

When Grace thanked him for telling her all this, he shrugged. “You can tell people your story,” he said, “or any terrible story, and it doesn’t make any difference. Things just keep happening, over and over again.”

Montreal, 1996

AFTER SHE LEARNED the truth about Tug, Grace thought everything would be different; it seemed as though she had broken through a barrier and found herself in Tug’s own country, closer to the heart of things. Tug himself acted differently — glad that he’d told her, glad that she’d understood why he hadn’t wanted to talk about it earlier. Reliving it was something he had already done, and now he wanted to move beyond it and live somewhere else.

“I’m not that person anymore,” he said. “I need to get used to life in the comfortable nations.”

“Comfortable nations?” Grace asked.

“I heard an aid worker say that once. He said the hardest part wasn’t being over there but coming back. Supermarkets. Cars everywhere. Too many choices. That kind of thing.”

“It’s not that bad to have supermarkets and choices, is it?”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t.”

In this comfortable nation, it was a cold spring. Grace and Tug went skiing every chance they could. She loved seeing him up ahead of her, striding hard, his shoulders broad against the gray sky; sometimes he would turn around to see where she was, and she loved that he checked.

They spent their weekends together, except for Tug’s Saturday shift at the stationery store. They went to movies or, more often, stayed at Grace’s place and cooked. While the stews simmered or the meat roasted, they read or napped or talked. He asked her tons of questions, and she asked as many in return. Now there was no limit to their conversation. He wanted to know everything about her childhood, her family, her life with Mitch; she even told him about Kevin and the child she’d chosen not to keep. She heard all about his adolescence, his first girlfriend, his family’s summer house in Muskoka, his sister in Toronto and her two spoiled children.

Tug seemed fine most of the time, but occasionally he erupted into fits of anger over things she considered trivial. He couldn’t sit through a movie he found stupid and would retreat to the lobby and pace there, while the ushers looked at him worriedly. Gradually she understood that he often didn’t sleep, because his mind was at a simmering boil, his muscles clenched with its heat. He brought the same explosiveness to bed, covering her body with his, kissing her neck, her shoulders, and everywhere else, murmuring in her ear. Afterward, as they held each other, he gave off so much warmth that his chest grew slippery with sweat.

This didn’t trouble Grace all that much, and he did seem to be getting better. What did bother her was that he didn’t want to hear about her patients. He never once asked about her sessions, and when she offered anecdotes he would change the subject as quickly and politely as he could, visibly shutting down. But she came to understand that he’d been through enough trauma and didn’t need to be reminded of how much of it surrounded him. In a way it was also good for her, because it enabled her to draw a firm line between work and home. Work ended the second she left the office, and by not speaking to him about it, she found she thought about it less. During the day she concentrated on her patients, clear-minded, sharp with perspective, then later she focused on Tug.

When she made him laugh, the pulse of satisfaction was so powerful it was almost physical. Getting to know him, to understand the depths of him, felt like her vocation, a task set to her specific parameters. He was difficult, and the terms of their relationship complicated, yet being with him was somehow perfect. She’d been waiting to feel like this for years.

One Sunday they had planned to go shopping. She needed a new coffeemaker and a few other kitchen things, and wanted to take him to a store she liked in Little Italy. They were apart the night before; Tug had explained that he didn’t feel well and wanted to go to bed early. In the morning he didn’t come over, which was unlike him; she had never once known him not to show up where and when he said he would. And he didn’t answer the phone.