Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

At home, Fowler peeledoff his mud-stiffened clothing and dropped himself into the hot bath. He warmed a soup for lunch, then dialed into the news. A water-volume report was coming up later in the hour. Numbers on the flood so far. How much of it there still was to come down. To rise up. That would be a good number to know.

The news never reported on the mountain roads. Too few people lived up there. Possibly no one. A crushed hut wouldn’t make the news.

The girl’s diary listed her top ten favorite things. Some of them were people. Her mother and dad. But they weren’t invited. They had spent enough time with their daughter. Time’s up. Other items could be crossed off the list. If a hut came down, and its contents spilled, what would they find? A girl’s pillow. A basket of stuffed animals. In the backpack today was a poster he’d had to fold. When it went up in the hut, with a thumbtack, it would have creases. There were four little guys in the poster. They had grown-up hair. No names. They looked stunned, like they’d opened the wrong door. One of them held a raccoon.

A set of markers and a pad. A blanket with a picture pattern of some people Fowler couldn’t place. Certainly they were famous. More stuff from that top dresser drawer. He would just reach in and see what came back out. What you did on a dig was you collected artifacts and kept your own ideas out of it. Your own ideas almost always led to trouble.

He could just as well take a sliver of wood from the floor in her room. A divot of Sheetrock from inside her closet. All throughout the house, her yard. He could scrape enough pieces. Where did it stop, and why not her father, her mother, her friends? All of them brought, in pieces or whole, to the hut, which could never hold it all. It was getting too crowded already, but there was no way to know where it ended.

What you’re trying to do is make yourself whole. Which it’s stupid to think another person’s bones can’t help you with.

In the same way it didn’t pay to say the girl’s name, it didn’t pay to think about her. It didn’t pay to go into her house. It didn’t pay to know where she went to school and what her schedule was each day of the week, when school let out and practice began. Band or sport. Musical instrument or study group. Nothing paid. You got an answer and nothing broke open.

Two creatures, built of cells, fueled on blood. A system of bones at the core. If they died in the same area, or were buried together, and then, hundreds of years later, were found by archaeologists, the archaeologists might easily think that they had stumbled across the remains of a single creature. There would be a way to reassemble these bones, of him and the girl, for instance, if they had died or were buried together in the same area, into one beast on their wire frame. There would be redundant bones, two of each, but a bigger and a smaller, and it would be just as easy to tell a story about this creature, to create an exhibit, to show it to children, or whatever they called their young, who could stand and look at it in awe.

The carcass of a single creature. It was just that the bones of this creature had gone into scatter, and they needed to be gathered up. Put back together.

At around dinnertime,a trooper came to the door.

The sun was going down. An unpleasant spectacle. It wasn’t a given that the sunset would be something universally considered beautiful. At the outset of things, when that feature was put into place, he didn’t think it was a given. It could just as easily have become something that routinely horrified the citizens of the world. Made them crazy. Made them ill.

There were two troopers when Fowler opened up. One right there on his doorstep, the other leaning against a Jeep down in the street. Water to his knees.

“Evening rounds,” said the trooper. “Safety check. Passing through. Saw that your lights were on.” The trooper squinted past him into the house.

“Okay,” said Fowler. “All’s well here. We’re doing fine.”

Lots of lights on all over the neighborhood. Was the trooper going to every house?

They stood talking on the steps.

A bad spot of weather, they agreed. Too much rain collected in a place that couldn’t hold it. So down it came. Pretty fast, actually. The trooper had once used his speed gun on a flash flood, he told Fowler. Clocked it faster than a car. And if the ground was too warm, and too goddamn loose, then forget it. Too much of the mountain peels away and you can’t stop it.

Fowler agreed. He had often stood with another person, discussing recent phenomena, and found agreement on everything that could not be done. It was shameful to bond over powerlessness. Shameful. Here he was engaged in it again.

“Anyone else home?” asked the trooper. “Wife?”

“No, sir,” said Fowler. “She’s up in Rooneville.”

“No kids?”

“Not yet.” Fowler crossed his fingers and held them up. I wish I may I wish I might.

Just words in his head he would not share.

“Okay, well,” said the trooper. “I’m supposed to do my best to talk you folks out of your houses. That’s my best. I’ve done it.”

“Oh yeah, other people stuck it out?” Fowler asked, looking up the street. He’d seen no one today. Heard nothing.

Witnesses, was the worry. Except what had he really done? Just the one home invasion, although that was a strong way to name it, with no one being home. Wasn’t every bit of motion, anywhere, an invasion? You invade a room, you invade the street, you invade your own bed.

“A few folks. Here and there. Holed right up like you, no doubt. But look, we could get you to dry ground, no charge. Pack a bag real quick. Better safe than sorry.”

“Right. Or both.”

“What’s that?”

“Safe and sorry.”

Well, he should not have said that.

“Sorry about what?” asked the trooper.

He couldn’t find an answer. This man sure could talk and now here Fowler was, answering.

“Just a lot of suffering,” Fowler said finally. “For the people who suffer. I’m sorry about it.”

The trooper gave Fowler a pretty long look.

“Anyway, good thing you’re up here on this rise.”

“Good luck for us,” agreed Fowler. “Plus the stilts.”

“What’s that?”

“Got the house up on stilts. Even last time with, what was it, six feet of it coming right through town, we kept it pretty dry in here.”

“Good for you,” said the trooper. He looked around. “You’ve got a nice little situation. You all take care.”

“We had the work done when we bought the house. Never could have gotten a mortgage without it.”

Stupid to keep talking. When someone leaves the conversation, you let them go. Never keep talking. Just let them go. If he ever had to write a manual for how to be a person, that would be in there, right at the top. Just look for the silence and be the first to practice it.

The trooper turned back. “So, no children in the house, huh?”

That seemed to be a funny way to ask. Fowler looked at the trooper and tried to make the question go away with his face.

“No,” he said. Simple was best. It also happened to be true, which made him more uneasy. That’s where they got you, when you said the truth but did so falsely, nervously.

Fowler saw himself doing unspeakable things. That didn’t mean he’d do them. He’d come to terms with that difference a long time ago.

“I had to ask,” explained the trooper, waving as he left.

Had to ask. Fowler knew the feeling. He thought of all the things that he had to ask, too, and that he never would ask. The things he wouldn’t say. The things he wouldn’t think. Statements waiting inside him, if only the right listening device were deployed. Mostly you walked the world in a kind of lockdown. Mostly.