Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

“This is the hardest part,” says James. “Just getting out of here.”

Well put, and doesn’t that just apply to any old situation: a meeting, a party, a relationship, a life? Always that sticky problem of the exit and how to squeeze through it.

When I don’t respond, James says, “Do you agree?” It’s what he often wants and needs. Assent. I tend to pay out as much as I can, with my mouth and otherwise, but always one must monitor the personal cost, careful not to add to the deficit, which can swell up and trigger a low-grade rage. Not my prettiest style. I never knew that I would be called on so relentlessly to agree with someone. Mother never said. Ask not, I guess, and I sort of haven’t.

I touch his leg. “Oh I do. I was just thinking, in fact, how right you are. This is the difficult part. This right here.” I would so love to point at the two of us, the fact of us, here in this car, on this road, on this day with a storm coming, in this particular life, just to say that this is the difficult part. Because, well. But the precise gesture eludes me. Hands can only signify so much. Usually they should just rest in one’s lap, sneaking beneath the garment now and then for a wee scratch at the tuft. This is possibly why one is supposed to use one’s words. I think. Plus, James is focusing all of his energy on the road ahead, which is really just an endless line of cars pointing west, away from the storm, away from home. We will be here a while. We might as well table any immediate feelings.

“This is about the only time I hate this island,” James says. “When it keeps us prisoner.”

“Yup,” I say. “Me too.”

It’s not really an island that we live on, or it wasn’t until some developers got clever. Because people love an island. I guess we love an island. I’m told they used explosives. They bombed a little spit of land that connected two bigger blobs of coastal blah, then built a baby road over the obliterated spit, the road we are now stuck on. So, poof, our little town became an island, and the houses suddenly cost more. The wind was arguably sharper and cooler after that, the light more intense, more knowing and intimate. More light-like. According to the marketing, anyway. Oh it was instantly spectacular, and all it took was some dynamite stuffed into the gaping pores of an old, rotted peninsula. Blowing your way to beauty might have been a nice slogan. One’s whole attitude to life was said to deepen, thoughts and feelings growing ever more rarefied and special. Island life. Too bad we can’t all die here, too, just to sustain our purity, but the island has a rule. You can die here, sure, and many of us have, spectacularly and otherwise, usually otherwise, but you must be buried across the sound, where the regular dumb folk reside and perish, and where the ground will open up for any old dead person, no questions asked. Even a living one, maybe, although who can say? Of course cremation is, as the saying goes, a workaround. A fine one. You can come home again—in a jar—and some of us have, but the victory seems small. I look at certain old friends, rendered to dust in their tureens, placed on various island mantels, and it is hard to feel just what it is they’ve won.

“What’s strange,” I say, as we idle in traffic, “is that the sun is out. It’s such a fine day. So weirdly beautiful.”

James cranes his neck to look out the window, trying maybe to be fair, and he has that expression, as if he’s evaluated all of the evidence but still, he’s very sorry to say, he just cannot bring himself to agree. It would violate his delicate moral compass to cede any ground here. “I’m not sure that’s so strange, ” he says, as if there’s a superior adjective he’s reluctant to share. “Quiet before the you know, and all. Plus I see some…” And he points into nowhere, where there is maybe nothing, and I’m sure I don’t even need to look.

Oh, he’s probably right. What do I know when it comes to strange ? Gosh knows I’m no expert in the uncanny.

“Yes, well, should we have music, or just listen to each other’s bodies complain?”

“You think I’m complaining?” says James. “Because I’m not. This is a little bit stressful. I’m trying to get us out of here.”

“I understand,” I say. And I do. It needn’t be said aloud, but I was referring to the sounds we make, each of us, which are whorishly amplified in the car, and not exactly my preferred music. Sounds of hunger, sounds of anxiety, sounds that have no explanation whatsoever—just the body at work, leaking and churning, groaning at a frequency no one was ever meant to hear. Live with someone long enough and you learn all of their gruesome lyrics, memorize all of the squishy instrumentals that gurgle out of them, note by note.

I click on the news and for a little while it’s just the sound of the storm elsewhere, where it’s ripened into a roar. We are to believe that the storm has paused in the lee of a mountain up north, where it’s gathering strength, pawing at the dust like a bull. They have a microphone penetrated deep inside this poor storm, I guess, and I’d give anything to sound like that. So sweet and angry and brand-new, a kind of subvocal monster simply cooing at the pain and pleasure of life. It’s perfectly beautiful and soothing, on such a nice day, until people start talking over it, explaining where this storm is from and where it might go, what it could do along the way, and then saying just how this storm makes them feel. Feelings! Every one of them would seem to be stirred up by this storm, by every kind of person. When it’s over, I’m exhausted and confused. I examine myself for feelings, carefully checking in the usual hiding places, and there are simply none to be found.

We aren’t kids anymore.We are old. Old er. Nearly dead, really. My husband, James, is nearly dead, at least. He shows it. When he went to the doctor recently he hid the results from me, and I didn’t really ask, because we have to ration our concern. We can’t waste it on false alarms, and even if it’s a genuine alarm we must, I have come to believe, enact a protocol w/r/t what we feel. James shows his feelings so liberally that they come at a discount, and their value diminishes. When he says he loves me, usually in a threatening way, it always seems to beg for reciprocation. I guess he cries wolf. More or less sobs it. One could argue that whatever James says is merely the word “wolf” in one language or another. If he loves me, it is because that might open the portal for more cuddles and touches. That’s all. He needs to be swaddled and I just happen to often be in the same room. If I ever dare to walk past him without touching his hand, or his head, or stopping to outright kiss him, he pouts all day and looks up at me with mournful eyes. A husband, these days, is a bag of need with a dank wet hole in its bottom. The sheer opposite of a go bag. I comply with James’s wishes when I can, but the day is long and I have other projects.

I guess I want James to die. Not actively. Not with malice. But in a dim and distant way I gently root for James’s absence so I can see to the other side of the years I have left, get to what happens next. For a good while, James was what happened next for me. As a person he was a sort of page-turner. I moved through parts of him and made discoveries, large and small, and he led me to places and ideas I’d not seen or heard before. This looked and felt like life. And then, and then—even though I don’t think it happened suddenly—the story died in my old, tired husband. It ended. I knew everything there was to know: what the nights would be like, how the morning would feel. What he would say. What he wouldn’t. How I would think and feel around him. How I wouldn’t. Knowledge is a lot of things, but it definitely is not power. Dread is the better term, I think, though I do understand how that ultimately fails as a slogan.