Бен Маркус - Notes from the Fog - Stories

“Oh sweetie.”

“I know.”

“Oh no. I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Oh it’s not your fault. I deserve it.”

“You don’t.”

“Well, you’re being nice. You’re being paid to say that.”

Gin got her wild and beautiful look. She grinned and I almost couldn’t bear to look at her.

“Ha!” she said. “Not enough. Where’s my money, if that’s so? Why aren’t I rich by now?”

What I did a few days later was to take a special twenty-dollar bill that I’d been given and that I’d saved forever, I don’t know why. A mother might have given it to me long ago, I can’t remember. I didn’t earn it, I know that. It was a gift. A person handed it to me and I had never at that point seen so much money in my life. I just always kept it in my shaving kit, and it had stayed crisp somehow. It was still new money and I probably thought that it had magic, which embarrasses me to admit because mostly I can’t stand that kind of talk. I put it in an envelope for Gin and left it on her dresser. Once I used to collect gin bottles, just for their labels, and I’d steam them off and then scissor out her name, Gin and Gin and Gin. I pasted one of these to the envelope so she’d know it was for her. I wanted to write a note and I thought a lot about what I might say. I wrote it all out in my mind. But there was no easy way to get it out of me. I didn’t know how to extract it. It was all in there, in me, but I couldn’t prove it.

“From me,” I wrote, “for you. Because you are very nice.”

After Gin died,the children went to live with their aunt in Maroyo County, north of here by not so long. This all sounds pretty vague, but trust me, it wasn’t. It really happened and it felt real and there was nothing remotely vague about any of it. Gin’s was the fast cancer, which, I hate to say it, is far cheaper, I mean dollar-wise, and possibly on the emotional side, though I am no expert in that sort of tabulation. How do we count the various ways and styles of nothing we feel?

We used our money for her last days. She begged me not to. Once she even said that I was supposed to drive her out into a field and leave her there. It was one of our favorite places, not that I rank things like that: nice places, fun places, places I like. We used to go there before the kids, and then with the kids, and then alone sometimes, when the kids had their own life. Maybe the kids will go there one day without me. Maybe there will be days when no one goes there, when no one is left. One day it won’t even be a field. Lava will flow slowly over it.

Gin wanted only a blanket and a thermos of soup and then I was to drive off. It was a favor she begged me to grant. A favor. It really didn’t sound like one. We were making pots and pots of healing soups in those days, with the sort of herbs and roots that cost much more, because we knew so little that we were willing to believe a leaf or a root or a seed would make this all go away.

We drove out to the field and I got her set up on the blanket and poured her out a bowl of soup. The day was fair and we didn’t think she’d be too cold. How many nights would she last? It was something we didn’t want to discuss. I asked her was there anything else and she just put her head on me. It was small and cold. When I held it I didn’t feel like I was holding her. That had happened—her body didn’t feel like it was hers. She was somewhere else. I held what she had, anyway. The old, finished body she still showed the world. I touched it and tried to keep it from spilling out onto the ground.

Gin said she didn’t want her pills or anything. One of the medicines was a cream for her head. She also had a tincture in a dropper bottle, which she needed to squeeze into her mouth in the mornings, that ate flesh—the kind that didn’t belong to her, that had invaded her body and grown in her but that was never hers. She was going to have a little bit of time without it all. It made her feel pretty crummy, she laughed, all of that healing. Something about being awake and alive again. Something about not going into a terrible fog. We talked a little of the kids. They knew she was sick but they didn’t know anything. Just like me. Gin asked for things and I agreed. She said things and I nodded. I made assurances I could not keep. She predicted that. She knew it. It was like she was talking to me from the future, telling it all to me. Except here I am in the future, and I don’t see her anywhere.

I stood up after a while to say goodbye. You have been a good wife, I told her. I am sure I did not deserve you, and I am sure you do not deserve this. We hugged without tears and I went back to the car, but on the way I ducked off the path and threw myself into the grass. It was there that I waited and watched her. She sipped her soup and stared off at the trees on the far side of the field. She had the blanket pulled over her, and she was so small beneath it it looked like no one was there. Like I had just left an empty campground. We both knew this wasn’t really happening. We must have. Some things, just a very few things, don’t have to be real if you don’t want them to. When she suddenly stirred and looked around—for me, I thought, I hoped—when she struggled to try to stand, I ran to her and picked her up and took her home. And that was the end of that kind of talk.

The last of our money was spent on the hole we put her in. A coffin and some flowers and some food for the few people who came by. The children went up north, and I was told to come see them, and I was told to hug them, and I was told to talk to them. I did those things and did those things and did those things. They had a good aunt, a fair aunt, and if the uncle was neither he was so far away that it might not matter. The idea was, I needed to find work, and get us some money, or nothing, and nothing, and nothing. Would someone explain that to them, I wondered. When I saw them they crowded into me—warm and wet and weepy—and we walked around as one body. We tilted and we swayed, we lurched from room to room, and sometimes we fell. We’d need to figure out how to go faster, I told them, with them hanging on to my neck. We had to be smooth and quick, in case something happened and we had to run. That was what a family was now, just this one body that had a lot of parts, and several heads, and it had children’s voices and a man’s voice, and it was a force to be reckoned with. So until we learned how to do that, until we could glide through the world as fast as a cat, them hanging from me and me carrying them along, we’d have to be apart. Just for a little while.

You can’t give upwhat you never started, said someone from my past. A mother, a father, a friend. Such a long time ago. I remember only the vague outline of their body, and the horrible glow from their mouth when they spoke.

I did little jobs, big jobs, no jobs. Coins came in and I smashed them into bread, into meat. I made a deal with County Electric, and they put me on a schedule of darkness, which killed the lights for days, in exchange for no charges, and they leaked me power when they could spare it. A trickle on a Saturday, that sort of thing. The house would suddenly hum, shuddering back on, and I’d see something wild and terrible in the mirror. Enough light to blind a small animal, I’d think. I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to think about bottling it. But what I had was more than enough. I would have been fine with less.

I called the children when I could, and I told them, “Soon.” Sometimes, when they couldn’t come to the phone, their aunt held the receiver into whatever space they were in, or so I pictured, and I shouted it, hoping they could hear me. Soon! Despite how it sounded, it wasn’t a birdcall. It was the call of a man, their father. It was just how he sounded when he needed to reach them. Whenever their aunt said they couldn’t come to the phone, which was more and more, I pictured them trapped on the floor, someone sitting on them. Or blanket after blanket after blanket, covering and smothering them. Or they were in a hole and there was no ladder. Or they were in the water, the wrong kind of water—the black and thick kind, where if you try to swim you slip down lower, you sink, and the more you try to swim, which is what I taught them always to do, no matter the kind of water, the lower you got, until you were standing on the dark sand floor of the darkest, blackest ocean. Of course they could not come to the phone. Of course. They needed to hold hands and push off the ocean floor, first. They needed to swim to the surface, like I taught them.