Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

From his doorway Fowler could see a distant light burning in the hills. Given what he knew about the terrain, a light of that sort didn’t compute. There were mud barriers up there, rock dams, and lookout blinds, sometimes with little huts attached. There was what was called a sluice. He’d been to a few of the huts. He knew the hills pretty well. You could enter a hut, go to sleep. No one bothered you. You could think of it as your own home when you wanted to.

But there were no power lines at that elevation. Not even animals, really. The word “hideout” had obvious problems. Connotations. You pictured a shoot-out. You pictured an old dirty bed with handcuffs on the floor, a shit stain on the wall. But he used the word privately as a kind of code. He knew what it meant. He could call it whatever he liked.

He found it hard not to worry. A light pulsing in the hills as if someone had just plugged in the eye of God. Was there a work crew dug in up there, and did that mean there’d been a significant mudslide, bringing a hut down with it? With some daylight he’d have perspective. Shapes would come out and show themselves.

He held something of value in the hills, is why he cared. That was a safe way to think about it. Holdings. A lien. A claim. Nothing on paper, of course. Never that. You had to keep yourself from even thinking of these things in any detail. In case of what? Men, women, and children, first of all. Spies of varying skill sets, which was more or less the entire human race. People who were not whole. Certain citizens, just a mush of sadness on the inside, ached and pined and agonized unless they could lick your insides for whatever you knew. They had to sniff you over like you were a dog bowl and tear off a piece of your special core and just rub it all over themselves. Your own true water. Not that there were people who could stethoscope your thoughts. He wasn’t stupid. But the operating wisdom now, in the year of all hell breaks loose, was that you didn’t know who could hear you, see you, know you. Weren’t you the ultimate fool if you thought you had a secret that was yours alone?

At sunrise Fowlerstepped outside his house, closed the door gently so as not to disturb his wife. It would be pretty hard to wake her, he laughed to himself, because she wasn’t home. Hadn’t been for a good while. How funny that he kept doing that, tiptoeing around, being so careful, so quiet, because she always said his steps were too heavy. She could hear him breathing in the next room. She told him he coughed too loudly, and once she said that when he coughed like that, with such a rumble, she felt threatened.

Threatened like, what, he was going to hurt her?

She wasn’t sure. She said she didn’t control her own reactions. How was she supposed to just pretend it didn’t scare her? Did he want her to do that? She could try to do that. Would that make him happy, she asked, if when he did something she found frightening, she kept quiet and calm and acted like it did not upset her?

He didn’t want to smash her head in. Nothing like that. He would know if he regularly had thoughts like that. He wasn’t really that way. She wasn’t here, anyway. He couldn’t get to her if he tried.

Fowler wanderedthe waterlogged neighborhood, mud spilling over his Bogs. What a strange vacancy all around him, like everyone just had to get off the planet.

He wanted to be able to look up into the sky and see a stream of people, just slashes and dark marks, shooting off and away from here. A proper evacuation. A full-on abandonment of the world. That wasn’t something you often got to see. The word “evacuation” should be held in reserve for such an event.

From Burdock Road to the Deering radial there were uprooted trees drifting by like canoes. The people who had left yesterday had left badly. Doors to some houses were still open, lights shining inside, which, if he didn’t have something else to take care of right now, he could be a good neighbor about. He bet there were cats. People often left a cat behind. During calamity, Fowler could pick a house, and go on in, and run into a cat or two. See who wore the crown then, who owned the planet. He didn’t really know who kept cats. You had to be a regular in someone’s house before you knew if they kept a cat.

He got the occasional invite, but mostly he knew these houses from the outside. Sometimes the cats never appeared when someone strange was over. The cats had an idea of their own safety and they practiced it carefully. People less so, which, well. A different attitude toward safety. Someone comes to your house, and you happen to be in the other room, you come out. You don’t crawl under your couch. Mostly because of being polite. That would be a good chart to look at. Just all of the creatures and how they supervised their own safety. Strategies against harm, real or imagined. Accurate or inaccurate view of a threat. Good choices, bad choices. Success rates. How was the species doing overall, in relation to its enemies? So many charts he’d like to examine.

Anyway, if this all kept up for a few days—rain in the hills, loosening slabs of earth—he’d start to know who kept cats, and had left them. He’d hear them.

It was funny. To have waited so long for this opportunity, a time when no one was around and he could do as he pleased, go straight to the designated location, which he would not name to himself, and grab those items of interest, which he would neither name nor picture.

But the going was hard outside in the water. And something seemed wrong. Which, well, of course.

Waders. He had them at home. Walking through dark water, you had no real idea what you kept running up against, what was under your feet, what bumped your legs. Half of your world was blind. In reverse, that would really be something. A sheer darkness above the belly. Moving through a cold, thick mass, unable to breathe or see, your legs kicking freely below as if dangling in space. That’d be a ride he’d pay for.

Maybe he should return home, have lunch, and think through his plan again. He pictured himself at the table, his waders folded over a chair in the mudroom. Half a person with the bones removed. If only he’d already taken care of his errand, crossed it off his list. Screw it, screw it, screw it. There was so little time.

Slowly he aimed himself toward the girl’s house.

It was at the block partya year ago when his plan started to grow a sort of awful hair, and leak, and sort of slobber on him no matter what he did or where he went. Regarding the girl. The girl, the girl, the girl. Who created this inadequate language that rubbed all of the detail off a thing and still ruled supreme as the primary currency people hurled at each other to make themselves known and whatnot?

A block party last year. Of all things. There was a fire engine parked on the street, and there were food tables, and the neighborhood association had rented a dunk tank.

Every so often, a great big splash sent water hurtling over the crowd, and a fat, shirtless man climbed out of the dunk tank, laughing.

Fowler came around to talking with some of the men gathered in the street. First he waited in line for a sausage roll. The one they gave him was sweaty and soft in his mouth. Something like a bone seemed to run the length of it.

“You caught yourself a beauty, there,” one of the men said to him.

Fowler looked down at it. In these situations, you could eat, and people understood you wouldn’t be answering right away.

Men were easy, in that as long as you showed you’d heard them, you could go a very long time without saying anything back. It was a mercy.

He knew that it was a little bit of an accident that he was a man. It would have been an accident of a different kind had he been a woman. It was a small accident, really, that he was a person in the first place. A chart of all those little accidents, along with drawings of his bones, adding up to who he was—that’d be worth looking at.