Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

“You know the studies, right?”

Dear god Jesus. “What studies?”

“About what happens when people are given a lot of money. People like you, with the brain and appetites of an eleven-year-old.”

“Tell me.” He’d let the rest of the comment go.

“It’s not good.”

“Well I don’t exactly want it to be good. I want it to be fun.”

“I don’t think it’s very fun, either, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t be afraid, Pattern. Leave that to me. I will be very afraid, I will be afraid for two, and never have to worry about money again. Depraved, sordid, painful. I’ll go for those. Let me worry about how it will feel.”

Pattern laughed into her drink.

“Sweet, sweet Georgie,” she said.

It was getting late,and the whispering interruptions had increased, Pattern’s harried staff scurrying around them, no doubt plotting the extraction. An older gentleman in a tuxedo came out to their couch and held up a piece of paper for Pattern, at eye level, which, to George, sitting right next to her, looked perfectly blank.

Pattern studied it, squinting, and sighed. She shifted in her seat.

“Armageddon,” said George. “Time to wash my drones with my drone towel!”

Pattern didn’t smile.

“I hate to say it, little George, but I think I’m going to have to break this up.”

He didn’t like this world, standing up, having to leave. Everything had seemed fine back on the couch.

“Here,” Pattern said, giving him a card. “Send your bills to William.”

“Ha ha.”

“What?”

“Your joke. That you obviously don’t even know you just made.”

She was checking her phone, not listening.

On the street they hugged for a little while and tried to say goodbye. A blue light glowed from the back seat of Pattern’s car. George had no idea who she was, what she really did, or when he would ever see her again.

“Do you think I can be in your life?” George asked. “I’m not sure why but it feels scary to ask you that.”

He tried to laugh.

“Oh, you are, George,” said Pattern. “Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.”

“You know what I mean. How can I reach you?” He didn’t particularly want to say goodbye to her.

“I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.”

“But I don’t know that. I don’t really feel that. It doesn’t feel like you’re even out there. When you’re not here it’s like you never were here at all.”

“No, no,” she whispered. “I don’t believe that. That’s not true.”

“Is something going to happen to you? I don’t know what to believe.”

“Well,” she said. “Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?”

“Please don’t make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it. There’s nobody left but you. What if I don’t see you again? What will I do?”

“Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.”

George kept quietabout his sister in therapy. He talked about everything else. But sometimes he’d catch Dr. Graco studying him, and he’d think that perhaps she knew. She didn’t need to be told. She might not grasp the specific details, the bare facts—who and when and what and all those things that did not matter—but it seemed to George that she could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him. That someone really knew him and that, whatever else you could say about him, it was clear that he was no longer really alone.

At home George listened, and hoped, and waited, but his phone never made the strange tone again. He found nothing on his sister in the news, though he looked. Whoever had been calling for her blood had gone quiet. And George couldn’t decide if their silence meant that they’d lost interest, or that they had her, they got her, and Pattern was gone.

One night it was late and he’d let his uncertainty overpower him. It had been a year since he’d seen her. Where was she? How could she just disappear? He’d been saving up his idea for a moment just like this one, so he sat down at his desk and wrote his sister an email.

Elizabeth—

Is it just me now, or are you still out there? Don’t write back. I cannot imagine how busy you must be! There is a lot that I cannot imagine. But that’s okay, right? You’re out there looking, I know. I am waving at you, wherever you are. I am down here saying hello. Do you see me? Send a sign, if so. Send a person, send a thing, send some weather. Or better yet, send yourself. There’s no substitute. I will be looking out, I swear. I will see you coming.

Before my father went missing,he taught me to give the weaker man a chance. The advice occurred when I was a child, after a baseball affair on the gentle border of soft Ohio, right where Widow Mountain is being rebuilt by our young inmates. As usual, there were children in competition that day much smaller than myself. I was compelled by park rules to utilize the gear designated for my age group, which I had long ago outgrown, such as small hand-slips and swatters—thus, I felt, unfairly restricting me from succeeding at a festival that seemed precisely designed by the sports council to bring my family shame.

So I called it upon myself to ask Paul Mattingly, the bald servant, to loot our vehicle for my own customized gear, which I then politely applied to myself for my next opportunity in front of the judges, who were supported by pillows in the low-lying viewing arena. It was just before this crucial moment that I noticed Jane Rogerson leading my swollen father—he was pink and glistening, as if something had stung him on the inside of his body—over to the fence—the only thing standing between me and the people who were going to watch my comeback. I was getting ready and taking big swings and doing lunges to keep my legs from going cold. My father standing small in the summer dust raised up his hand to initiate a semaphore. Held it open, twisted it, pulled it down. This meant go to him now, or else get caught up in the blows and belts and slaps of his helper Rogerson, which she dispensed with the authority of a baker punching down dough. He summoned me over to him and talked me out of the whole affair. He talked the helmet off me and somehow got the bat out of my hands and the extra-large cleat off of my batting foot and talked me over to our vehicle where I was given children’s coffee and consoled by my mother, who even in close quarters could express an intense interest in the distant horizon, just beyond wherever I might be sitting. I watched from the passenger window as my batting turn was forfeited and the zero was hoisted up next to my small name on the scoreboard, snapped into position with the crispness of an egg cracking. A sharply bleating siren, accompanied by a flare that sizzled over the field, indicated that I had been disqualified, and several area televisions began to moan. Later in the evening, my father talked me into bed after Jane had given me a brief, forceful bath with her terrible sponge. When I was tucked in, he entered my room and sat on my bed and asked Jane Rogerson to leave us. Be reminded, please, that this story depicts a boy much younger than myself, who has little or no bearing on the individual that I have become. I will not entertain the pity of people I do not know.

“You are a strong boy and you are beautiful and you are my son,” my father said to me. “But you must remember that this is not true of anyone else, nor will it be, nor can it be.”

We were involved in what might be called a darkened room. There was his mustache to regard, for me, and that was all. Indeed it was often all that I saw when my father came at me in the dark. For discussions and such. The blond crop that styled his words to be so fatherly.