Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

He couldn’t sleepso well that night. Rain and mud and rain again, and then thunder shook the house. Weather like this could peel back a mountain. A hut had no foundation. It sat on rocks. When the soil softened and the rocks shifted, then the hut was merely another grave, unearthed, sliding off, with no bodies in it yet.

No one questioned an empty grave. It was often just mistaken for a hole. No one noticed that empty graves were everywhere, inside houses and out, on mountains and right in town. Areas being readied for the dead. All areas. You more or less could not occupy an area, anywhere, that was not once, or would not soon be, a fairly ample grave.

Fowler had to feel it didn’t matter. He was in his grave already. He and the girl. Their graves were on the move. The question was how best to fix them in place. Get the thing formalized.

When he finally got out of bed, in pure darkness, he confirmed that his power was down. Streetlights, too. Nothing in the hills. No light. Too little sound. Water and heat and everything, finished for a while. How he had kept power this long was a mystery.

How big the outage was, along with its long-term forecast, would remain unknown for a bit. He had a radio that took batteries, but the men who spoke on the overnight broadcast had little to say. Farmers and thinkers and worriers. Sensibilities from another time. Imaginary creatures with old sad voices whose message, perhaps, had never been clear. If they ever had information he could use, he’d found, they withheld it from him, in ways that could seem intentional. A promise of what they might be discussing, which they never did in fact discuss.

He had a flashlight. He had a telephone landline that used to work, though he hadn’t checked it in a while. Phone calls were not his specialty, though he was capable of receiving them. Should one come along, he’d be ready.

Probably he had candles and matches if he wanted to go and look. This was the sort of thing you did when you had a partner in the darkness, a blackout friend, Marjorie used to say. Light up some candles and make a home out of it. Marjorie had always been pretty good about keeping a kit. She’d get him to fill the tub with water, to help the toilet along when the pump was off. You’d want to move that water out of your home. Keep a little bucket by the tub. Sometimes the bustle and panic was for nothing, and sometimes he was grateful that she’d thought of it.

For a minute he wondered if she was out of power wherever she was, too, but then figured that it wouldn’t be too likely. Not that he knew for sure. Rooneville was just a town name he’d given the trooper. There were lots of good town names, each of them as likely as the other. Each the name of some place you went to die. You could give them out and they seemed to work. She was asleep somewhere, he would bet, unless she’d gone and leapt a time zone, which wasn’t really like her. She was safe and warm. He could hear her voice anytime he wanted to. She would wake up soon and make tea.

Probably what he would do was sit up and wait for morning. The time right now was unclear. It could be midnight or it could be 4 a.m. Something might have happened and he would not know it. Something big. He hoped it was closer to day. Waiting wasn’t his specialty. From his kitchen window he could look to where the sun would be, expecting advance notice of some kind, but right now there was nothing out there, no lights in the hills, none in the sky. The power outage would seem complete. From far away was the whole planet dark? Maybe, if things seemed stuck out there, in terms of the sun, some kind of rupture, he’d move his chair to where he wouldn’t even have to get up. He could sit there looking for it, be the first to see it, a front-row seat for when the world turned back on.

Some people, apparently, suffered a disturbance where they were afraid the sun wasn’t going to come up. It was a fear and it had a name. His wife had read about it. She said these people had to be consoled at night, but you couldn’t console them. There was a kind of therapy for it, but she didn’t remember what it was. Supposedly it didn’t much help. They were as certain as you could be about anything. They fought you off and yelled.

Fowler pictured these people in a dark house, holding each other, trembling. When the sun finally came up they stood and shook themselves, relieved. They’d be embarrassed, apologizing to everyone. What a lot of fuss over nothing. They kept looking out the window to make sure the sun was still there. Weeping and hugging each other, shaking their heads, feeling foolish, foolish. Then the day, of course, advanced, took a left turn, deepened, the afternoon came on strong, and they felt a pull again, a terrible suspicion. They went outside, staring and pointing. They watched and wept, holding each other as tightly as they could, as the sun went down again, for what genuinely felt like the last time on earth.

A fear like that doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Some people always know, ahead of all the others, what to be watching out for. One day, sooner or later, those people wouldn’t be wrong.

And where would he be? he wondered. Would he be complete? Would he have done whatever it took, no matter what, to make himself whole?

James is home earlysaying that goddamnit we really seriously need to pack. Hup hup, time to go. It’s the weather, again, and it bores me so. We live where the water loves to visit. Just a little bit of rain off the coast, that’s all, and it will try to flood into our home. It loves to soak our rug and rise up the walls, and once it loved to seep into our electronics, inside the TV cabinet, and destroy our precious entertainment center, which keeps us, or me anyway, from raiding the medicine cabinet at night for other pleasures. Otherwise, well, we have brilliant sunsets and the kind of grass that is absurdly tall, taller than you or me. I don’t know how it doesn’t just fall over. You’d think it had a long slender bone in it, in each blade. Some original, beautiful creature that needed no limbs or head, because it had no enemies. Who knows.

James bustles around the house, grabbing what he can. He says to pack light and to pack smart. I like this military side of him. I almost feel charmed. The evacuation is mandatory this time, something nasty and mean and serious is barreling down on us, and I almost wish we had a pretty siren in our little community for occasions like this one. A siren adds a feeling of gravity—to an evacuation, to a catastrophe. Just a feeling that something important is happening, which one so often does not get to feel. James says that he’ll grab our “go” bag, which I didn’t even know we had. Does it have pears in it, and medical marijuana, and Percocets, and frozen Snickers bars? Something tells me it’s more of a batteries and rope and candles and matches kind of bag. James is huffy and swollen and red as he loads the car. This is a little bit much for him. Still, it’s nice to see him excited, in charge, alive. It’s been hard to watch a man his age slowly lose his purpose, as he’s been doing, shuffling around the kitchen trying to perfect his long-simmering sauces, which only get poured out on the back lawn when he’s done, since how much gravy-drenched flesh can the two of us reasonably consume?

There is just one road out of here, and everyone we know is on it, moaning silently, I imagine, gently rending their summer linens at this unwelcome disruption. It gets tiring waving at them all—stressed-out wrinkled accidents of the human form, with white hair, or no hair, or nubby yellow sun visors. Grimacing, hunched over their steering wheels, as if they are being chased by men with guns. We know these people by their cars, which are long and dark and quiet, just like ours. We could all just call each other, share information and prop up each other’s nervous systems with voice-based medication, but people are saving their cell phone batteries. We’ve been through this drill before. Who knows where we’ll all be tonight. James also prefers me not to talk on the phone when he’s driving. He does his best to tolerate it, bless him, but he tenses up so terribly that I fear he will break open and spill everywhere, even while he insists, sometimes angrily, that he really doesn’t mind. Really really really, with spit fluffing out of his mouth and a look of pure murder in his eyes. I feel that he is daring me to make a call, but when I consider the risk, I sort of daren’t. After all, I am also a passenger in the vehicle that he is driving, and I must consider my own safety as well.