Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

She tried to speak to the nurses. She knew they were overworked, exhausted, poorly paid, and that they had families of their own. She understood that. But when she asked them if there was something to be done, even if she paid extra, so that what she brought her father, even just the chocolates she knew he liked, might not vanish so quickly from his room, what they told her was that if she, Ida, were around more, if she visited more often, that sort of stuff was less likely to happen. You’re never here, they said to her. We never see you. Who knows what goes on in there?

Something seemed wrongwith the picture on the TV in her father’s room. There were numbers unlike any Ida had seen before—so much prettier than the old ones. They floated over a young man’s face and formed a beautiful pattern: a flower, a galaxy. Was that Donny? The sound was down low, or her father’s room simply drank in speech until only a foreign garble swirled around, but when the man spoke the numbers seemed to pulse, to breathe.

She’d fallen asleep again. Oh, god. Who knew how late it was and she was afraid to check her phone. Because of calls and texts she didn’t want to receive, and actual human hands that would grab her and pull her down deep into the mud. Quietly she gathered her things, kissed her father’s forehead, and crept from the room.

“You don’t say good night?” asked her father. He was wide awake and he sounded cross.

“Good night, Dad,” she whispered. “I gave you a kiss.”

“I know that. I’m right here. I was here when you did it. I’m the person you kissed.”

“Okay. Okay.” She was whispering, even though there were loud voices in the hall, in the other rooms. No one anywhere was much trying to keep it down, despite the late hour. “I will see you soon.”

“When, honey?”

“Whenever you want, Dad.”

“Well, tomorrow works for me. Tomorrow and the next day. I’m free.”

“Okay, I think I can do that.” She had meetings upon meetings upon meetings for the rest of her life. Her calendar was dark with obligation.

She returned to his bed and gave his hand a squeeze, then leaned down to drop another light kiss on his forehead.

“A second kiss?” said her father. “I’m not sure that was warranted.”

And as Ida drove home, winding through the empty city streets out across the old highway and into the hills where she lived, she couldn’t help but think that her father might be right.

Sometimes Ida would forget,and she would appear at the office on Sundays, her face strangely delicate on her head, a visitor to her body. She would stare through the glass at the vast lobby of Thompson. The doors to work were locked on the weekends, of course, and after standing there a while, the intruder alert, which certainly went by a blander name, shot a jolt of current into Ida’s legs, sweetening them with pain, and she backed away onto the sidewalk.

If there was a movie playing, Ida bathed in it, alone in the back of the theater. The movies these days were troubling. Children go searching for parents, lost in the snow, and do not find them. A boat’s faulty navigation system leads it to an island not on any maps. The island turns out to be, well, everyone knew how these things went. A terrible place. A really unimaginably terrible place.

Here it was, summer, but something was off. In the air, on the faces of people. Just wherever you looked. The city of Chicago, if you could still call it that, was quiet on the weekend, pretty gusts of powder blowing around buildings, unmanned sweeper trucks docked in their charging pads. The restaurants were mostly open, but without too many other customers Ida felt odd bothering the staff.

Today she braved a diner, and sat and ate alone. She had a dark soup and some toast, and she listened to the prettiest piano music from the restaurant’s little speaker. Music from under water, from another world. Or maybe just from the next room. But when it came time to pay she couldn’t find her server, and no one answered when she politely whispered into the kitchen. She called out Hello, hello, until it started to sound strange. She peeked into the kitchen and found no one. The diner had emptied out and it was getting dark. Maybe they’d all gone home and forgotten to charge her, forgotten to lock up. That was a lot of forgetting. It was possible, maybe, but it didn’t feel right. She never carried very much cash, so she crept out as apologetically as she could, thinking that she should write a note, or that she might come back. Before leaving she turned to face the kitchen, in case there was a surveillance camera. She shrugged and made a series of gestures that, she hoped, might tell the whole story here, if that were even possible. She wanted to pay, she really did, but there was no one left to pay, and she had no money, and everyone seemingly everywhere had vanished.

For most of the night she walked the city, until that magic hour when the streetlights are given a rest, and the early risers are not yet chewing up space on their way to the great, savage feed. A text came in from Mort—up really early, or maybe, like her, having not yet gone to sleep. He’d been texting her a lot, and now he wanted to come over. He kept referring to a rematch. “I have finished my training,” he wrote, “if it pleases Madame.”

It sort of didn’t please Madame right now. Not really. She sent back a few little emojis, indicating that she was tired and busy, and she threw some other ones in that might make him feel better, some warm and bright little animals, smiling from ear to ear with wet human mouths.

Mort wrote back that he understood, and Ida figured that that was true. That was what was so wonderful about him. Mort probably understood far better than she did.

When June camethere was a summer party at work, which meant that gray-faced cubicle worms tried to straighten their backs and stand at the punch bowl without crumbling into powder. The parents among the workforce clustered together, no doubt checking the coarseness of each other’s hair shirts. Ida suddenly found herself inside their crop circle.

They were young, still in their twenties, if barely, but their prison was real and gleaming, and even though they sang pretty songs from within, generally you knew to steer wide, clear, and away, tying yourself to a mast if need be. They were afraid to be alone. They wanted reinforcements.

People with kids tended to look at Ida with a mixture of envy and derision, which wasn’t so different from how she looked at herself. Right now one of them had singled her out. “I say this as a friend, as someone who just, like, completely loves you, I mean just as you are. You are amazing. Really. But you are nothing without kids. I’m sorry, it’s true. I’m so sorry!”

“Hear, hear,” a few of them said. “Well put.”

“I wish,” said Ida. “Nothing still seems like a long way off.”

She looked down at her hands, made little fists, held up her fingers as if she’d never seen them before. Hadn’t one of the big-time philosophers thrown himself from a window in order to prove that he existed?

“I don’t know. I look at pictures of myself from before, ” said one of the parents, “and those pictures look, like, fake. Like they’ve been Photoshopped? I mean, who was that person? I am fairly certain that in most important ways I didn’t really exist back then.”

And now? Ida wanted to ask, looking at this smiling, tired bag of sauce in front of her. You’re sure you exist now?

“Well,” said Ida, trying to detach from orbit and find a childless friend elsewhere, someone to perhaps eat big, scary drugs with, “I do look forward to it some day. A child, wow. I know it would be, it might. I know that I.” Ida pictured herself cramming bread into a grown man’s mouth, or bathing an aging, unconscious wolf, waking up to terrible shouts. Parenthood?