Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

The first night, I sat with my sister’s husband. He’d always been a mystery to me, but perhaps no more so than anyone else. He used his moods as weapons, and you kept your distance. I don’t mean that he was angry or aggressive or mean. It was the opposite. He had an alarming level of good cheer, a machine-honed smile, and whenever you saw him you felt overwhelmed by it, rebuked that someone in the world could be so profoundly happy. He wanted to hug and hold you and beam at you. He wanted to shout with joy, even, which was always alarming. What did it say about the rest of us, who moped and shuffled and mumbled and were always on the verge of quiet tears, or had spent so long shielding our emotions from view that the emotions themselves had finally been snuffed out and could not be detected, even by the proprietors themselves? It was like he, Drew, was running for office, even though the government had shut down and no one was voting and very likely the entire world had gone cold and dark. He was running a solitary campaign and there was no one to notice how insanely happy he was.

He was not so happy tonight. We drank wine and talked. I learned a great deal about his relationship with my sister, Sarah. She was the sweetest. She was the best. She did everything. She never complained. But sometimes she could be very quiet, Drew explained. Days without noise, as if she’d lost her voice. Was that so bad? I asked. I mean, we don’t always need to disrupt the room tone, just because we can. Speech is so overused. The language will grow meaningless if we abuse it. Let’s leave words alone so they won’t erode. Maybe it’s already too late.

“You’re not quiet,” he said. “You never had that problem.”

Drew looked at me long and steady. This was the most we’d ever talked to each other since he started dating Sarah. We poured more wine. One of the boys came down, rubbing his eyes. He stood next to me and grabbed my arm, tugged at it, his thumb in his mouth perhaps to keep himself from shouting obscenities. I resisted, without wanting to provoke him, but I wasn’t prepared to be dragged out of my chair by this young beast, so I held my ground. Drew laughed, in his hearty, amplified way. A widower for five days and he sure had his chuckle back. “I think you have a friend,” he said.

Not that I know of, I thought.

“I think he wants you to go tuck him in.”

The boy looked up at me, wondering, perhaps, just what kind of toy I was. Could I be kicked from the window and would I still love him? I didn’t know the answer myself.

“Tuck you in? Well, that I can do,” I said, and I took careful note of the level of wine still left in the bottle. I wasn’t sure how deep Drew’s stores were, and something in me wanted to fight for my share. I’d flown all the way out here and he’d better not hog all the intoxicants while I played mommy to his kid, for Christ’s sake.

Over the next few daysI helped Drew with the basics. I got the boys up in the morning, rolled them into their clothing, fed them strange objects from bright, colorful boxes, and ran with them to the school bus stop so I wouldn’t be stuck with them all day. Drew went to work. An office, somewhere, with other people, presumably, and conveyor belts conveying crisp bricks of cash right into the mouths of his bosses. Some of this money must have come out the other end, and been gifted in a satchel back to Drew, because they—well, just he and the boys now—did okay. Nice house and two newish cars and furniture that didn’t look like it also served as a face towel for the young. It was a fine setup all around. They were sure doing better than we were.

I told my husband it would be just a few days. I mean, I left that message on his voice mail. He quickly texted back a thumb, pointing up. To the girls I texted that I missed them, I really did, and that it was so sad out here, sad and hard, but Uncle Drew needed me right now and the boys, the boys. Oh my god you couldn’t even imagine. The girls instantly fed all the right emojis back at me, covering all the possible ways that someone might feel about this.

When Drew came home we cooked dinner, at least for the first few days. The boys ate something Drew kept calling “cantebole.” An Italian dish, I thought at first, and I was impressed. This is how they do it in the mountains. Were the boys ready for their cantebole, Drew would ask them. Did they want a big portion of cantebole tonight, or a small one; warm, or piping hot? It turned out that cantebole simply meant, literally, “can to bowl.” Food that could slide, often in one sucking gelatinous cylinder, from a can right into a bowl. Drew had made up the phrase himself, and he seemed proud. I suppose that not all of us can claim an original contribution to the language. Cantebole looked like little pillows swimming in fake blood, and the blood bubbled and spattered when it came out of the microwave. I’m sure it wasn’t repulsive, and sometimes I longed for a meal that simple. The boys would take their bowls over to the living room, where they sat on pillows and ate by themselves, wearing big, jug-like headphones over their helmets, watching their iPads, trying to spoon their food through their face masks.

“If you spill it, what ?” Drew yelled at them during our first dinner together, maybe on my behalf, to show me how tough he was, how he hadn’t forgotten his obligations as a parent.

When the boys didn’t answer he yelled again. “What happens if you make a spill?”

“You’ll clean it up,” one of the boys said, and the two of them burst out laughing.

“Ha ha,” said Drew. “I’m over here dying. You just killed me. Ha ha.”

I thought that perhaps he should not joke about dying just after their mother, and then there was the issue of his soft, guilt-based parenting style. The permissiveness followed by the false threats. But I cast no stones. Too tiring, first of all. And anyway, sometimes the window is already broken, it’s been broken for a long time, so why would you cast a stone into an empty, ruined house? Save your stones for a better target. One that’s still standing.

Drew liked to drinkat night, and he liked to tell stories. One out of two, I guess. I’d survive. I found that his stories required little of me except for a crazed grin now and then. If you occasionally express disbelief and admiration to people, just through your face, you won’t be quizzed on what they are saying and they will gurgle on, engraving their message in the evening air all night long. If only it were a little simpler, though, and you could just flick a lighter and hold it up every now and then to keep the sounds coming.

I took over the kids’ bedtime. Drew felt that he sometimes couldn’t face the boys, didn’t know what to say. Sarah had done a lot of this, and when he stepped in, it made him think of her, and he got sad. He’d lose track of what he was doing and the boys would notice and then they would get sad, too. I didn’t really mind doing it. I needed a project, and it was like being a custodian for two hyper, slightly forlorn animals who’d forgotten precisely how to behave in the wild. I got the little guys on a tight schedule, and they knew not to try the helmet business with me, because I made up a story involving sleep and floods and helmets and drowning and lots and lots of dead people, and this seemed to momentarily convince them to keep their heads uncovered at night—strictly to survive. When the boys were brushed and bundled into their pajamas, their hair still wet from the bath, I tucked them in and dove between them on their big, shared bed.

“I ate a horse’s face once,” the littlest boy said one night.

“Oh? Did the horse cry, or was it already dead?”