Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

“What?”

“I mean, is it related to anything? I know you went to the doctor.”

“I did go to the doctor.”

“And?”

“It was really interesting. Really surprising. I found out that he thinks that I am still alive.”

“He sounds like a smart man. I would like to meet him. Maybe shake his hand.”

James is quiet and I’m not sure I really like it. I listen to his breath and it sounds fine. But then he coughs, and it’s such a feeble cough, as if he barely has the energy for it. I don’t like it.

“But now?” I ask. “Are you still not feeling so…”

James laughs quietly. “Oh, now. I’d like to say that I’m fine now.”

“Well, don’t hold back, mister. Say that. Make it so.” I take his hand.

“I’m fine,” he whispers. “I feel wonderful. Better than I have felt in a long time.”

His voice is too quiet for me. The fight has gone out of him. Maybe he’s just tired.

“Well, don’t go and die on me tonight,” I say, and I kind of want to punch him.

“Okay.”

“You know that’s what everyone’s thinking, right. Everyone who’s watching this at home? That the couple who has been bickering all day will start to get along, but it will be too late, and then the man will die. That’s such a classic plot.”

“Oh is that what they’re thinking?”

“That’s what all the betting sites say. That’s where the odds are.”

“Does the woman ever die?”

“In situations like this?”

“Are there any other kinds of situations?”

We settle in,and I guess we are maybe trying to fall asleep, but I feel too vigilant. James’s hand is warm in mine. It doesn’t feel like the hand of a man about to die. It is big and soft and I pull it over to me, get it in close against my chest.

“I can’t see you, James. What is the look on your face? What are you thinking?”

“No one is watching this but you, Alice. You’re the only one here. No one knows about us. People can’t really know.”

“Sweetheart, are you okay? Should I be calling someone?”

“I guess I’m a little more tired than I thought I was.”

“You must be. You’ve done all the driving. You got us out of there. You saved us.”

He must think I’m joking with him. I wish I knew how to say it better. How come so many things can sound mean and nice at the same time?

“Could we lie together?” he asks.

I crawl over the seat, wrapping up against him. “Yes of course. I mean, in the end it will be more of a his-’n’-hers sleeping arrangement, just because of these weird beds, but let me settle in here with you for a bit. Why not?”

It feels good to snuggle him. Warm and just right. James is thinner than I remember. I can feel his bones.

“Why don’t we do this more often?” I say, nuzzling against him.

“Because we haven’t wanted to?” James says. He’s drifting off. I can hear his voice grow thin. I’m not ready to sleep. Not ready to be alone.

“Hey,” I say to him.

“Yeah?”

“Stay awake with me for a little bit.”

“Okay.”

“Breast cancer.”

“What?”

“Breast cancer is picking up speed. Landfall is expected at twenty-one hundred hours.”

“Oh. Ha. Yeah. I almost forgot about that. Boris. So weird. Boris.”

When James is silent for a while I nudge him. “Your turn,” I say.

“Okay. It’s so hard to think.” His voice trails off and I nudge him again. Then he says, “Maybe we’ve thought of the best ones already.”

“No, we haven’t, we haven’t. I swear. There are so many more.”

“Okay,” he says. “But this one isn’t so great. Are you ready?”

I say that I am. I lean in close.

“Balls.”

I squeeze his hand. “There you go.”

“Balls is blowing at forty-eight mph.”

“They sure is,” I say. “Hurricane Balls rolled in this morning and people are afraid to leave their homes.”

James doesn’t laugh. I need to leave him alone. He needs his space.

“Beloved,” James whispers, and it’s the last thing I hear him say to me before he falls asleep. “Beloved is coming,” I say to no one, listening to his breathing slow down. “Close your windows. Go down into the basement and don’t come out until she’s gone.”

Dr. Nelson wanted me to feel something.In the palm of his hand was a pale yellow mound of powder. He proposed to puff this powder, with his medical straw, into my face. A precisely regulated expulsion of air, he called it. To exhale just so until I was caked in it.

“Just take it passively, if you would, Lucy,” Dr. Nelson said. “Relax your face. If possible, relax your head.”

“ You take it passively.” I was so not in the mood. I pictured him shamed by animals, dogs with pants at their knees lining up to defile him.

“Too late for me, I’m sure,” Dr. Nelson said, touching his face as if he’d just discovered it. “I’ve had my hand in the cookie jar so much on this one that I can’t feel the effects anymore. I can’t feel anything, really. I need more subjects.”

So do we all, I thought, but tough luck and boo-hoo.

Dr. Nelson was speaking in a high, shitbird whisper, but no one in the office bothered to look. Because ho-hum. Because who really cared? If a so-called scientist hadn’t approached you directly at your cubicle for a turn on his chemical merry-go-round, you kept your head down. Otherwise we were just too used to these eureka freaks sprinting through our wing, spritzing us with boutique medicines. Dr. Nelson was just another white coat haunting the office, with scarcely a body beneath. I called him Half Nelson, because he lacked a badge, had no ID, and worked so far off-book that he hardly seemed to exist. Just a little boy in a sweater, with a huge, grotesque brain pulsing behind his dear, dear face.

“Are you ready, Lucy? Sweetheart?” He brought the straw to his lips, poised to administer a puffback.

I wasn’t ready, not really.

“There’s not a pill or just, maybe, a lotion?” I asked. I so preferred the cold lotion they’d been deploying recently in the drug trials. Cold lotion was better than human touch by a pretty far cry. A kind of finer boyfriend. With one of these newer lotions, applied just so, I could see myself living alone, feeling loved, feeling complete, in the mountains somewhere, very far from here.

“Nope, there is not,” he said, speaking around the straw. “And now I’m going to count to three.”

I closed my eyes and relaxed as the sandstorm hit, jagged crumbs pelting my face. Holy holy holy it hurt. Some of it went up my nose. It smelled of flowers, but the sweetness turned rancid and started to burn inside my face. It was like I was smelling myself get cooked.

“Jesus, was there glass in that? Did you just fucking spray glass on me?” I groped for my water.

“Hardly,” Dr. Nelson mumbled. He always seemed surprised to find that his subjects weren’t corpses. That they could speak or shout. He wiped his mouth. “That’s just the coarseness of the grit, so that it doesn’t spike too soon on you and blow out your levels. We ground it at forty-one on the, uh.” And here he whispered something in German. I think. His speech sounded laced with ancient obscenities. He made a gesture to indicate a large machine, pointing to a room down the hall I had no clearance for. I knew the door that led there. It had no handle. It had no code box. No retina thing, either. It was just a slightly cleaner slab of Sheetrock. But what wasn’t, when you thought about it.

Dr. Nelson had a big smile on his face. A shit-eating scientist smile. Whatever he blew into me didn’t seem to have much of an opening act. I wasn’t seizing, and I wasn’t writhing on the ground in some kind of unbearable euphoria. My levels, whatever that meant, were pretty much unblown. I felt the same as always. The same, the same, the same. Fuck it all.