Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

The central problem was this, he went on to say: the feelings I cause in others. What people feel when they see me and hear me. What they feel, even, when they think of me. It was a situation the school could no longer abide.

“You’ve gotten some results with these kids, there’s no denying that,” Mr. Rubins told me.

But I could deny it. I would. To the grave. I’d been part of a learning outcomes study. I’d seen brain scans of some kids, before and after their science exposure. All science learning did was take some gray away. Or maybe it added some. I can never remember. In any case there was a color valuation shift in the brains of my children. It’s what might have once been called making a difference. Certainly there would be a chemical shortcut for this kind of learning soon, if the learning was even a desired outcome. This premise, that we as a civilization would be better off if we knew more—the progress fetish, the growth fetish, the fetish for getting out of bed—might prove short-lived and decadent in the larger picture, the longer historical view. It will possibly be seen as a tenable mistake. Maybe we should all be hiding in our homes until the right technology comes along to absolve us from, well, from most things of this sort. It is awkward to live just before a significant invention comes about.

You have to wonder. When death is solved one day, all of us will be viewed as mules. Brutish, dumb, not really human. Because we let ourselves get old, grow infirm, die. Because we let ourselves feel pain. We experienced pain with a certain resignation and acceptance. Maybe we thought we deserved it. There was even a value system, a kind of morality, around who could hide their pain the best. You were a superior person if you hid it better. You were praised and celebrated when you pretended you were not in agony. Fucking mules.

Mr. Rubins shook my hand. Whatever he said about me was true, but any human being in the world could be reduced to nothing with a few sentences. That’s what sentences do. Turn a man or a woman to powder. It doesn’t mean that that powder wasn’t once packed together to form a beautiful shape.

My classes, as of now, were covered by others, Mr. Rubins told me. I deserved a break. I could go on home. But I should gather my things first, of course. Didn’t want to forget that. Remove every trace, Mr. Rubins requested. Which is, you know, what I tried to do. But later you discover that it’s not so easy. Traces remain. Not just one’s dumb things, but the people we have spoken to, who hold traces of us inside them. Do we remove them, too? Where does it stop?

Some cats were asleepin the road on my way home. Everyone seemed tired. People sat on the sidewalks as if they couldn’t wait to collapse in private. Not a lot of people. But here and there. Enough to notice. I steered the car carefully. I was not tired. Not even close. I sensed I would be awake for a long time.

At home I did some math regarding my finances. I’d have my salary for two more months. I had savings for another three. My pension, such as it was, would pay for a bag of apples every few months for one small child. How much longer would we all live, me and Gin and the kids? It was hard to say. A person had trouble coming up with an airtight plan, or even a deluded plan, when basic data of this sort was so hard to uncover. You could fuss with these little life-expectancy calculators on the Internet, but they didn’t always kick out real numbers when it came to kids. Little kids especially, cute or not, healthy or not, creeps or sweethearts. Sometimes the sites shut you out if you punched in, say, a very low number in the menu bar for age—as if you wanted to know something illicit. Life expectancy of a nine-year-old. I mean, why not just say? There’s math behind everything. It’s not a death threat to wonder how long a creature will live. Who has time for shyness?

The upshot was, of course, not enough money. Nowhere close. Maybe that was always the upshot. Maybe that’s the definition of upshot. I loaded up the job lists and clicked into the sweet heart of them. I needed to work alone, in a lonely place, where no one would walk or stand. I needed a job inside myself, a way to get paid for sitting in a dark room, money for steering clear of others. I could clean things and fix things, and I could talk to people who didn’t talk back. I had a made-up language, with words that mostly sounded like breath gone wrong, the last breaths of an old man, and I could recite that for someone if they paid me. I could use my body against the world, where things were wrong and needed to be changed. Digging and hauling and lifting and pushing. I could climb and I could descend and I could travel on the horizontal, unless someone was hunting me. I could make shapes where there were none and maybe they’d be called houses. I could speak to children, if anyone would allow it. I could not sing and I could not cook for a crowd and I could not laugh on command. I did not, so far as I knew, have a bad back. I knew something about the invisible world—the worms we call molecules—but all of that could change—facts could grow up—and then I’d just be a storyteller, lying about what goes on around us, hoping people believed that untruth reveals a kind of beauty, and not just because it’s a medicine against what is real. Maybe it was once true, and maybe it will be true again.

Gin came home and we drank a great deal, because that was the dance style in those days. That was how we fought the night. We roasted the shit out of a chicken and cracked into it like it was a great mythological beast. There was a wine and we put our faces in it, forgetting to breathe. Gin went to the icebox, where she found a frozen old log of something she’d made, bearded in freezer burn, and with my help we sawed into it, making thick yellow discs. Gin kept saying I should trust her, and when these toasted beauties came out of the oven, after ages and ages, they were soft and hot and sweet, and if they burned my mouth they also almost made me cry with pleasure. We attacked a platter of them and left none for the kids. Screw the kids, we were yelling, smashing our glasses against the wall.

The night wasn’t going to go on forever, because no one had figured that out yet. Everyone in the world wished for such a thing, begged for it all the time, but it was as if each of us thought that someone else would do the hard work to bring it about, an endless night now and then, an option, invoked even at extreme personal cost, for no morning. I wanted to sit with Gin forever and die in our chairs. Me dying before she did. But just by a second. Me and then her and then I would have to think a bit about the list from there, who would die and when. There was so much more involved.

“They took my kids away,” I told Gin. I hated to ruin her night, but she needed to know.

“What? What do you mean?”

“They took them from me. I’m fired.”

It probably wasn’t possible for Gin to get softer, but she did. You could have seen it on film, and maybe then you’d see proof that she wasn’t even really a person. What a small, dull word for what Gin was. How obscene. She softened and she almost transformed into a kind of medicine, not just a creature but a whole atmosphere, designed to soothe and neutralize this sad angry thing that had flown into its airspace. Gin had been tapped for a role and I could see her getting into character. Ms. Sympathy. She might have had the decency to leave the room during this transformation. Of course I might have had the decency not to exist in the first place. How rude to come on the scene like I did. How thoughtless.

“We knew this might happen, Jay,” Gin said. She held my hands.

“You did, maybe.”