Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

We fed this data, big and hairy as it was, to a crew over in a building we called the dorm, where beaver-faced children worked the curation. I mean worked the shit out of it. Maybe these wet beasts were of age, but just. And maybe they were human, but, well, also just. And that’s being generous. I don’t think they slept, and if they ate it must have been liquid food through a very thin straw, or the tiniest nibbles of mush, because their mouths were disturbingly small. Like, how did these kids really breathe out of such pinholes, at least without causing a balloon squeak? How did they stick a toothbrush in there to clean their teeth, let alone administer oral deliciousness to some hulking uncle who needed his emerson drained? Maybe the kids at the dorm were just, uh, small people, horrendously gifted with numbers, but there was something off in their appearance. Everyone kept reasonably quiet about the whole thing, though. Given the speech protocols at Thompson, not to mention elsewhere, you just didn’t really say what you were thinking. And if you could help it, you didn’t really think what you were thinking, either. I got good at that. My thoughts were going to die with me, whenever that day came. Or maybe my thoughts already had, preceding me to the grave. I wasn’t going to get caught out. I wasn’t going to get listened in on. I had a few tricks to protect myself.

The house was darkwhen I got home. Another cold St. Louis afternoon. There was going to be snow, supposedly, and there was going to be a lot of it. Maybe we’d all be buried alive. Everything would freeze and in hundreds of years they’d find us, chilled in position as we tended our homes or pursued our craven desires out on the street, and the story they would concoct—of who we were and what we were doing—would be so splendid. It would be majestic. Everything so small and remote in our lives—our handbags, our kitchen tongs—would be rescued from their current uses and gifted with tremendous, almost unbearable power, united to a meaning we could never even imagine. We’d be gods and we’d be animals, we’d be uncanny accidents in the larger trajectory of the universe, anomalies of light. It would almost be worth it, to die that way, and then to be understood through such a profound, new lens. To be upgraded and romanticized and lifted up. Weren’t we all just caught in a rehearsal for our fossilization? Stories would be written. Songs would be sung.

I called out into the house. Richard was usually back from work by now. He’d be up to something desperate in the kitchen. A cooking project from one of his books. Save your relationship with this brilliant stew. That sort of thing. The result was usually a cozy bowl of something to eat, and we’d sit together looking out the window at our favorite tree, trying not to argue. The children would be home as well, for sure. They’d be upstairs in their rooms, polishing their privacy until it glowed. You could sometimes see the light under the door. It stood for everything you’d never know about them. Everything you’d never understand.

But there was no one home. No one anywhere. Quiet in the streets and quiet abroad. Quiet inside the home. A pretty quiet world tonight overall maybe. I had the sense that if I turned on the TV it would not be able to penetrate such profound silence. It’d be no match for this hushed world. I’d just see the strange faces on the screen as if they were trapped under water, shouting silently behind the glass. For a moment I thought that if I cut myself open, there’d be no noise in there, either. Just the silent rush of blood, all perfectly muzzled, even as my body hurried about its business, working so tremendously hard, which you rarely got to see, just to keep me alive.

I slept forever. I slept and slept and slept. And I woke to a different world. The snow was piled high up on the windows. Plows rolled down the street pushing so much snow that the parked cars on each side were covered in it, perfect white mounds with nothing visible underneath. I went to wake the kids, but they’d come and gone already. Richard, too. They must not have wanted to disturb me. I was still in my clothes from yesterday. I needed to shower and eat and get the hell back to work.

The phone rang as I was making breakfast.

“How are you holding up?” the caller asked.

“Who’s calling?” I said.

“Is this Terry?”

“No.”

“Terry, I just wanted to be sure you’re okay. With the storm. If you need anything.”

I told them it was a wrong number, and they didn’t apologize, or say anything. They just held the line and listened. I said that I was hanging up, and they yelled that name again, Terry, just as I disconnected.

At work we wereon lockdown, of sorts. Not everyone could make it in. I wasn’t going to let some weather stop me, plus Dr. Nelson would probably worry if I didn’t show up. He’d think I’d died. He’d send a team. They’d need to collect me, clean up, hide the traces. Whatever. None of that was relevant. The buses were running, and all I did was bundle up like crazy, with so many layers that you could have thrown me from a building and it wouldn’t have hurt when I landed. “Unbreakable” was the word I kept saying to myself. Unless a car got to me. Unless someone used fire. I pictured myself flung from a window and falling gently into the snow. I’d be fine. I’d stand up and walk it off. Maybe I’d even ask to do it again, just one more time, because you don’t get to feel that way very often. You rarely get to feel that you could fall forever, without harm, as the world rushes by you.

In any case, nothing short of a family emergency was going to keep me from going to work. I took the bus with a few other cozy folks, and it was no big deal. Yes, the walking was slow, and yes, you could not hear a thing, not your feet on the ground, not the cars rolling by, but it was gorgeous and I think we should feel lucky when our world is transformed so wholly before our eyes, when everything is changed just by some snow. You live for things like that, and you don’t even know it. Then they happen and you almost want to lie down in it, roll around, and pray that it doesn’t go away.

They were calling me Terry at the office, and what a big goof that was. They must have seen the name in the logger, and then why not haze the mule with a bit of nicknamery? I smirked at them. I didn’t give a shit. Their names were worse. They were lucky if they even had names. I’d seen their bodies hung with needles. I’d seen them breathing through masks, crying at their desks. These were people who were drowning, who would be dead soon. I walked past their cubicles and saluted. Here’s to you, people of the grave. Sleep well, my friends.

There was a book of photos on my desk, which I assumed had been left by Nelson. In this stage of a trial he was always showing me pictures and whatnot, and I guess I was supposed to log my reactions.

I looked through the photos, and it was sordid and strange and not at all pleasant, a book of sorrows and loss and mostly unspeakable desolation. Nelson must have been wondering what I could handle, how low he could go. Unbreakable my ass, maybe he was thinking. Would I give in and buckle? I wasn’t going to try to control my reactions. It wasn’t as if you walked around deciding how to feel. That’s not how it worked. You don’t have your feelings, they have you.

The pictures were of people with hair, people licked clean. People with faces you wanted to set fire to. People you would fight on the street if you saw them, even if you loved humanity, even if you did not believe in death. However peaceful you think you are, however sweet and nonviolent and angelic—you have a fight in you if only it can get unlocked, and that’s what these pictures were doing, testing one’s absolute limits, tearing thresholds, one by one. A kind of violation of your own moral line. Pictures, horribly vivid, of people who couldn’t smile without showing who they really were, and it wasn’t pretty. Just a way that they opened their mouths and showed too much. People with obvious secrets. People with no inner life. And then people with no outer life, either, because they were just dead. Shots of corpses galore, although just before, moments or days or weeks or maybe years before death, but it’s all the same in the longer view. Pictures of children. Babies. Landscapes. Parts of the world that could not have existed. Made-up scenery, not just too good to be true, but too horrible to be true. A good deal of that. Someone’s nightmare of the world, the sort of thing that makes everyone wish there were no such thing as the imagination. And then more people, especially ones who could not have existed, which was the worst. Realistic in their features, and all of that, but clearly unreal all the same. Someone’s sick idea of what a person looks like. Perversion everywhere, as if we’d only been born to feel the very worst things, and it all begged a pretty big question about why one had to be a person in the first place.