Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

“You might be right, Dad. Sometimes even I don’t know what I do. They don’t always tell us what things are for.”

“No one will ever tell you what something is for. For Christ’s sake. We don’t get that information. Don’t expect that.”

“I guess I shouldn’t. But I spend my life there. It’s okay if you don’t know. You don’t work there. But what about me? Shouldn’t I know?”

“What about you ? Don’t start to get sad. That’s not what this is about, being sad. Your sadness isn’t the issue here, Ida. That’s a distraction. Don’t change the subject.”

Her father was right. It could be heavily distracting. She finished feeding him, patted his arm, and left his room for a little while. Maybe some air or some sun or an area free of people would be nice, if such a thing existed. There were hallways and hallways in this home, with room after room, and if she ever made a mistake, and looked inside one, really looked, she saw people in beds all alone, connected to bags, mouths agape, struggling to breathe. She saw men in ill-fitting gowns, sprawled on the floor. Women with no hair, sobbing in their chairs. Now in the hallway she kept her head down, watching her feet, and soon she was outside, where there was a little bit of lawn ringing the parking lot.

The light was funny today, catching surfaces just so. Little sparkling things glimmered from the grass, from the parking lot, everywhere. Like jewels that had dropped from somewhere, which was stupid, she knew. Probably just little stones, maybe washed up over everything from a recent rain. She thought she might sit down, but there was her car, just waiting, and maybe she’d had enough for the day. Maybe it was time to go. She’d visited a little bit, and it was possible that her father would fall asleep soon, anyway.

A nurse approached Ida just as she was reaching for her keys.

“You here to see your father?”

“Yes I am. How are you today?”

Maybe if she showered this person with kindness, something would unlock in the tough, ungiving dispositions of the nurses, and maybe they’d look after her dad better when she wasn’t around.

“If you’re here to see him, why are you outside?”

“I just came out for some air.”

“There’s air inside. There’s air everywhere. That’s what the world is.”

“I know.”

“He can’t see you if you’re out here. You can’t see him. You might as well be at home.”

“I’m going back in.”

“You weren’t, though. You were going to leave.”

“No.”

“Don’t tell me. I see your face. I can read your thoughts. You think I can’t?”

Ida scanned up at her father’s window. He would never be looking out. He didn’t do that. He didn’t really stand up anymore, although he did love his window. But she wouldn’t want him to see this just the same. He wouldn’t understand, not that she did either.

“Anyway, there aren’t too many thoughts to read,” the nurse said. “Just one big one. I gotta get out of here. I gotta go. Where’s the door. That’s the only thought anyone has ever had. In all of history. It’s not just you.”

For no reason that she could think of, Ida told the nurse that her mother was also in a home.

“Everybody’s somewhere,” said the nurse.

“She’s at the Sullivan Gardens.”

“That’s a place.”

“I go back and forth.”

“How else would you do it?”

“My mother and my father.”

“I don’t imagine you’d visit any other kind of person in a place like that.”

“No, I guess not.”

The nurse almost smiled at her. “I know you’re leaving, so you can go ahead and leave. I’m not going to stop you.”

“I might have to,” said Ida. “I don’t feel so great.”

“Your father will die soon.”

“I know.”

“You won’t be here. Chances are. People are never here. They know not to be. People aren’t stupid. They wake up that day and they know to stay away. You don’t go into a burning house. You feel the heat. You keep walking.”

“So it’s not just me.”

“Nothing is just you, dear. Trust me.”

“I’d like to try to be here. When that happens.”

“You’ll get a phone call. It might be me calling you. It might be someone else. I make the phone calls when I’m here, but I’m not always here. If I’m here, I’ll call you. We have your number. Your number is first. You’re the emergency contact. But it won’t be an emergency. The emergency will have already happened. It will have come and gone. I’ll say hello, and I’ll ask to speak to you. You’ll probably say that it’s you on the phone. Some people, fancy people, say This is she, or This is he. And that’s when I say, It’s about your father. That’s how the call will go up to that point.”

“Okay, well, I guess it’s good to know this. I appreciate the information. May I ask your name?”

“It’s Lorraine.”

Ida took the nurse’s hand. “Lorraine,” she said. “I am really pleased to meet you.”

The nurse pulled back her hand. “Don’t be pleased. If you get a phone call, and the person says that it’s Lorraine from Sweethill Village, then it’s me calling, and you should never be happy to hear from me.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t be happy when I call.”

“I won’t be,” said Ida. “I promise.”

And then, in her throat, Ida felt the familiar crawling, the little pill surging up, filling her mouth. This time she managed to get her hand up, to block it from getting out, but she had to double over and clench her teeth together.

Then she felt the nurse’s hand rubbing her back, so softly, so gently, that she relaxed in some way that startled her, and her mouth opened and the pill rolled out onto the asphalt.

Ida and the nurse looked at it, shining like a perfect white tooth. It was hard to imagine that it had been in her stomach all day. It looked perfect, even cleaner and whiter than when she’d swallowed it.

“It’s okay,” the nurse said. “You can leave it there.”

“I’d better not.”

“Leave it. Trust me. Just look around for a minute. Everyone else is leaving theirs. It makes the world look prettier. Why keep something like that for yourself?”

Those shiny things in the grass, the glittering crystals in the parking lot, the glinting everywhere she looked. Like the tiny white skulls of birds. Tablets strewn everywhere, glowing at her feet.

It was winter,which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Helen’s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they’d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of Daddy you’ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt? You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer, or the prior spring, and, well, didn’t the seasons and the years just dog-pile one another when you tried to solve math like that?

Helen wasn’t particularly concerned, because, whatever, there was a clarity to the coldness, right? And screw Roy if he’d fallen down a brightly colored porn hole, pummeling himself to images of animated youngsters slithering around nude, in grown-up crotch gear, in a cartoon fairyland. Internet histories weren’t her favorite literary genre, but she knew how to read them. Anyway, if her husband’s use-case viability on the marital graph had taken a nosedive, then so, too, had her own burden. She had her friends, she had her work on the memorial, and she had the showerhead. When she and Roy first got married, whenever ago, Helen’s mother had told her that if people don’t visit, you don’t have to host. Period, full stop. And even though Helen’s take on this advice now was off-label, it applied just fine to her touchless union. The body unloved, the body unhandled and unseen. The body as a ghost in training for whatever soiled world came next. Anyway, wasn’t left-alone the best place to wind up?