Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

“Ah, I see. Well, I’m afraid we have to stop.”

Afraid, afraid, afraid. Don’t be afraid, George thought. Embrace it.

For once he wished she’d say, “I’m delighted our session is over, George, now get the hell out of my office, you monster.”

Bowing to a certainprotocol of the bereaved, George acquired a baby dog: hairless, pink, and frightening. His therapist had put him onto it after he kept insisting he was fine. She explained that people who lose a parent, especially one they weren’t close to, tend to grieve their lack of grief. Like they want to really feel something, and don’t, and so they grieve that. That absence. She said that one solution to this circular, masturbatory grief, is to take care of something. To be responsible for another living creature.

Except George and the animal had turned out to be a poor match. That’s how he put it to the dog catcher, or whatever the man was called when he sent the wet thing back, and then hired cleaners to sanitize his home. The animal was more like a quiet young child, waiting for a ride, determined not to exploit any hospitality whatsoever in George’s home. It rarely sprawled out, never seemed to relax. It sat upright in the corner, sometimes trotting to the window, where it glanced up and down the street, patiently confirming that it had been abandoned. Would it recognize rescue when it came? Sometimes you just had to wait this life out, it seemed to be thinking, and get a better deal next time. God knows where the creature slept. Or if.

Did the animal not get tired? Did it not require something? George would occasionally hose off the curry from the unmolested meat in his takeout container, and scrape it into the dog bowl, only to clean it up, untouched, days later. The animal viewed these meals with calm detachment. How alienating it was, to live with a creature so ungoverned by appetites. This thing could go hungry. It had a long game. What kind of level playing field was that? George felt entirely outmatched.

One night George tried to force the issue. He wanted more from it, and it wanted absolutely nothing from George, so perhaps, as the superior species, with broader perspective in the field, George needed to step up and trigger change. Be a leader. Rule by example. Maybe he had been playing things too passive? He pulled the thing onto his lap. He stroked its wet, stubbled skin, put on one of those TV shows that pets are supposed to like. No guns, just soft people swallowing each other.

The dog survived the affection. It trembled under George’s hands. Some love is strictly clinical. Maybe this was like one of those deep-tissue massages that release difficult feelings? George forced his hand along the dog’s awful back, wondering why anyone would willingly touch another living thing. What a disaster of feelings it stirred up, feelings that seemed to have no purpose other than to suffocate him. Finally the dog turned in George’s lap, as if standing on ice, and carefully licked its master’s face. Just once, and briefly. A studied, scientific lick, using the tongue to gain important information. Then it bounced down to its corner again, where it sat and waited.

Months after his father’s deaththere was still no word from Pattern. After he’d returned from California, and cleansed himself in the flat, gray atmosphere of New York, George had sent her another email, along the lines of, “Hey Pat, I’m back. I’ve got Dad’s dust. Let me know if you want to come say goodbye to it. There are still some slots free. Visiting hours are whenever and whenever and whenever. —G.”

He never heard back, and figured he wasn’t going to—on the Internet now Pattern was referred to as a fugitive wanted by Europol, for crimes against the environment—but one night, getting into bed, his phone made an odd sound. Not its typical ring. It took him a minute to track the noise to his phone, and at first he thought it must be broken, making some death noise before it finally shut down.

He picked it up and heard a long, administrative pause.

“Please hold for Pattern,” a voice said.

He waited and listened. Finally a woman said hello.

“Hello?” said George. “Pattern?”

“Who’s this?” It wasn’t Pattern. This person sounded like a bitchy tween, entitled and shrill.

“You called me,” explained George.

“Who’s on the line,” said the teenager, “or I’m hanging up.”

George was baffled. Did a conversation with his sister really require such a cloak-and-dagger ground game? He hung up the phone.

The phone rang again an hour later, and it was Pattern herself.

“Jesus, George, what the hell? You hung up on my staff?”

“First of all, hello,” he said. “Secondly, let’s take a look at the transcript and I’ll show you exactly what happened. Your team could use some human behavior training. But forget all that. What on earth is new, big sister?”

She wanted to see him, she said, and she’d found a way for that to be possible. They had things to discuss.

“No shit,” said George. He couldn’t believe he was actually talking to her.

“Wait, so where are you?” she asked. “I don’t have my thing with me.”

“What thing?”

“I mean I don’t know where you are.”

“And your thing would have told you? Have you been tracking me?”

“Oh c’mon, you asshole.”

“I’m in New York.”

She laughed.

“What?”

“No, it’s just funny. I mean it’s funny that you still call it that.”

“What would I call it?”

“No, nothing, forget it. I’m sorry. I’m just on a different, it’s, I’m thinking of something else. Forget it.”

“O-kay. You are so fucking weird and awkward. I’m not really sure I even want to see you.”

“Georgie!”

“Kidding, you freak. Can you, like, send a jet for me? Or a pod? Or what exactly is it that you guys even make now? Can you break my face into dust and make it reappear somewhere?”

“Ha ha. I’ll send a car for you. Tomorrow night. Seven o’clock.”

George met Patternin the sky bar of a strange building, which somehow you could not see from the street. Everyone had thought the developers had purchased the air rights and then very tastefully decided not to use them. Strike a blow for restraint. The elevator said otherwise. This thing was a goddamn tower. How had they done that? The optics for that sort of thing, Pattern explained to him, had been around for fifteen years or more. Brutally old-fashioned technology. Practically caveman. She thought it looked cheesy at this point.

“A stealth scraper,” said George, wanting to sound appreciative.

“Hardly. It’s literally smoke and mirrors,” Pattern said. “I am not kidding. And it’s kind of gross. But whatever. I love this bar. These cocktails are just violent. There’s a frozen pane of pork in this one. Ridiculously thin. They call it pork glass.”

“Yum,” said George, absently.

The funny thing about the bar, which was only just dawning on George, was that it was entirely free of people. And deadly silent. Out the window was a view of the city he’d never seen. Whenever he looked up he had the sensation that he was somewhere else. In Europe. In the past. On a film set. Asleep. Every now and then a young woman crept out from behind a curtain to touch Pattern on the wrist, moving her finger back and forth. Pattern would smell her wrist, make a face, and say something unintelligible.

But here she was, his very own sister. It was like looking at his mother and his father and himself, but refined, the damaged cells burned off. The best parts of them, contained in this one person.