by Lauren Groff
No cell phones, Bit says. No computers, no MP3s, no GPS, no social networking, no e-mail, no whatever else it is that you do and frankly I don’t understand. If you have other coursework, try to do it all tonight or put it off until Sunday night, if you can. Let’s see how long you can resist the siren song of the outside world. Have a response paper to your digital fast for me on Monday. One page. Written by hand, of course.
Some make faces; others, the hipsters, smile. They love being throwbacks. They wear the jeans and teeshirts and sneakers and sunglasses he wore when he came to the city so many years ago from Arcadia. He reminds himself that the hippies seemed just as childish in their own time.
Sylvie calls out as she stands and gathers her things, No problem. Smiling, her bone bracelets dully clinking on her wrists, Sylvie sings out, Easy, easy, easy.
When he woke that first morning without Helle in bed beside him, he was almost calm. He made excuses in his head: she had gone out on a long walk in the afternoon and visited an old friend, stayed too late to come home. Once in a while, she’d do this. Regina and Ollie owned a cupcake emporium in the city and a frilly apartment by the river where Helle had her own key. Maybe she was housesitting their cats and forgot to tell Bit. Or maybe she went up to Jincy’s in the suburbs, Jin just having given birth to her twins; and Helle forgot to tell Bit. He didn’t want to push beyond this thought for what followed; the drugs again, scourge of Helle’s twenties, the desperation, the needle marks between the toes.
To avoid the apartment, Bit took Grete to the children’s museum all day. The two of them ate an early dinner out. It was passive-aggressive, Bit could admit. He’d wanted Helle to come home to a cold apartment and worry about where they were, the same way he had barely contained his panic, a tightness in his chest, all day. It was dark outside when he and Grete came home; but the apartment, also, was dark.
By night, he grew worried. Grete finally fell asleep after calling out Mommy! for an hour. Bit sat at the heavy old rotary phone he would never replace for a cell and dialed their friends. Nobody had seen her. He called family. Erik, an engineer in California, was grumpy, still at work. Handy was having dinner with his fourth wife, Sunny, who told Bit that Handy was saving his voice for a concert, could she take a message, and hung up when Bit shouted, It’s Handy’s daughter, dammit, put him on the line. Astrid was at the Tennessee Midwifery School. Nobody had heard from Helle for a week.
Ike’s number was still in the ancient pleather phone book: poor Ike, dead these twenty years, who, like his sister, had grown into beauty in his midteens. Who loved his new adult body, used it indiscriminately, with gorgeous Norwegian women who knitted him sweaters, men in the park at night. By the time he finally admitted he was sick, he had lesions. It didn’t take much for him to die. A breath of cold air, pneumonia, one weekend in a hospital, and Bit arriving too late with flowers, finding a bed still warm under the imprint of Ike’s body. Those were the years when Helle’s family rarely knew where she was or how to get in touch with her. She didn’t know to come to Ike’s memorial. This broke her heart, even twenty years later, made her cry and cry when the shame of her life swallowed her down.
He called Leif, who answered coldly. Couldn’t talk. In editing. Hadn’t heard from his sister. Wait until morning then file a police report. Get back to him after Bit calls the cops. Earlier’s better than later. Dial tone.
It was midnight when he called Hannah, who had just begun living apart from Abe. He’d watched, alarmed, as Hannah suddenly became a fury of a woman, a new Hannah, a shouting one. When his mother answered her phone, Bit heard the desert behind her, the coyote howl and insect hum; could almost feel the wall of heat rise up against him, almost see the grasping saguaros. She was teaching history at a university there, and was still so full of anger at Abe that she couldn’t say his name. Your father, she called him. I haven’t heard anything from Helle, she’d said that night. Call your father.
Although Bit was on Hannah’s side (always on Hannah’s side; poor Abe), the richness of his mother’s fury took him aback. Her rage seemed immoderate in light of Abe’s sins. Bit could understand how she’d be upset: Abe had used their life savings to build a house in the Arcadia Sugarbush, throwing away all those years of scrimping, telling her they were poor again only when their new house was mostly built. Worse, Abe was officially squatting: Leif’s corporation, Erewhon Illuminations, now rented the old Homeplace from Handy. Leif had been a puppeteer, then went into movies and, when he’d tired of shoving his hand up felted asses, had gone on to computer-generated films. His last one was a retelling of the old Scottish ballad “The Well of the World’s End.” It was nightmarish, shockingly beautiful. The landscape was pure Arcadia. The company’s ranch in California had proved too small and Handy still held the title to Arcadia and always needed money, so Leif took over. What had been the Free People’s was now a corporation’s; sacrilege! The diaspora of Arcadia had rebelled. Squatters had descended, ponytailed men with tents so old the sides shivered apart in a small wind, women with rears gone soft as brioches. Most wandered home soon, but four stayed to build houses. Midge dug into the hill on the side of the Sugarbush, a geothermally controlled cabin, her own Hobbit hole. Titus and Saucy Sally and their kids built a treehouse. Scott and Lisa, hiding their anarchic hearts under Brooks Brothers sweaters, built a Mission-style cabin overlooking the Pond. And Abe, old engineer, had poured his whole being into his house. He had become obsessed with what would happen in the end of the era of oil and went offgrid, solar everything, backup windmill; rainwater catchment system, backup well; ambient solar heating, backup woodstove; materials eighty percent salvaged. Even the insulation was shredded dollar bills from Fort Knox.
When Bit called his father the night after Helle disappeared, he imagined the dark lonely Sugarbush, the forest pressing in on the old man. Abe picked up, panicked. What’s wrong? he said. When Bit explained, his father went silent. At last he said, Helle was so troubled, honey.
I know how troubled Helle is, snapped Bit. She’s been fine for four years.
Abe said nothing. Bit hung up, hard.
Bit wanted to weep with frustration. He heard a mouselike noise and looked up to find Grete, pale in the door, her stuffed frog in her arms. I can’t sleep, she said. Mommy needs to come.
Bit said, Can I try?
Grete said, No. It’s Mommy.
Mommy’s on a walk, said Bit. Why don’t I tell you a story? And she was too tired to resist, and he sat with her then the way he has sat with her every night since that first one, waiting until her breath evened out into sleep, into the morning, wondering how in the world he was going to protect her now.
He reads Sylvie’s paper about her digital fast three times before he puts it down. She has a tight, tiny script and uses the whole page. She describes how lonely she first felt when she put away her digital things, how cut off from the life she knew. She panicked a little, thinking about what would happen if her father had a heart attack or if a professor sent out an important e-mail, and to escape the anxiety, she went for a long walk. It was strange to walk outside without music in her ears. The city seemed so loud, and now that she could hear its regular noises, she could sense other things, too, the smell of the pretzels from the cart, the deep blue color in the folds of the steam from a grate. She sat for a long time in a park and watched the iridescent throats of pigeons. It seemed miraculous, this glorious color in such filthy birds. The people sped by, and she noticed how naked their faces were, as if they had become so used to nobody looking at them that they allowed themselves to be seen again. She was cold because she had watched for so long. To warm up she went to the Film Forum; they were playing movies from the forties. It was strange to be going into a theater on a bright cold day, and she kept itching to check her e-mail or text messages, feeling awkward because she was alone. But she bought a huge tub of popcorn and sat there, and after the first movie, began enjoying herself enormously. It was like taking a vacation from her life. Then a ma
n sat down next to her. He was good-looking, salt-and-pepper. There was something about the almost-empty old theater with its velvet and gilding, the hot butter on her hands, the emotional sweep of the movies above, the man’s handsome profile, his smell of soap and shaving cream, that seemed glamorous and filled her with tension. She stopped seeing the movie, waiting for the man beside her to touch her, not knowing if she was going to scream and run or if she was going to sink into the feeling, let herself lose her head. She doesn’t say what happened. Only that when she was walking home, her knees still a little rubbery, in the thrilling cold darkness without even a phone for protection, she understood how alive people must have felt before you could reach anyone at any time. How it must have taken so much effort to connect with people. Back then, the past was more subjective, she imagines, because things weren’t immediately logged online for everyone to see; the future was more distant because it had to be scrupulously planned. That meant that the present would have been a more intense experience. The last time life felt like that to her was when she was a child, and the nostalgia for that time almost swallowed her up.
Sylvie watches him when he distributes the papers, keeps her eyes on his face when he gives hers back. When she leaves, she says, Professor Stone? About my grade? The other students pour away, and he can hear their feet in the hall, their voices released, going louder on the stairwell up to the street level. He packs his things and opens the door for Sylvie, locking it behind himself when they’re both in the hall.
You got an A-minus, Sylvie, he says.
I know, she says. I was hoping for an A.
He smiles, and she smiles back, friendly. She has a bright face that is always hungry; a puppy’s, ready to be petted. He says, as kindly as he can, Sylvie, an A means perfect. I’ve never had a perfect student. Nobody is perfect.
He says this, yet there is a strange thrill in him, a sharpness, and he understands how very much he longs to find someone who will prove him wrong.
Well, says Sylvie, pushing the door into the bracing chill. In the sunlight, the dark moles on her face are even darker, her skin translucent. There’s a blue branching at her temples. She stands, all awkward angles, one foot rubbing on the other. Her glance darts away, darts back to his chin. Try me, she says, quickly, under her breath.
Layer-speak. He waves and goes off. Three blocks later he is attacked by staircase wit. He should have said, he understands now, It’s not for me to try.
Every few semesters, there is something like this: a shy girl who flushes when he stands near, a confident girl whose eyes go dewy with suggestion. Helle used to say it was because Bit was small and gentle and emanated care. They look at you and see a husband, she said and laughed.
I always thought it was because I’m overwhelmingly sexy, Bit said.
Oh, you’re sexy, she said. But closer to the ground, which makes you more humble. You’re unthreatening.
Bit had felt the sting of this. Is that what you see? he said, at last.
Helle came close, then, and put her forehead against his, her eyes smiling. I see my best friend, she said. At the time, it was enough.
He is cleaning the darkroom at the school, wondering where his dreams went. They were not so very large; they were not too heavy to carry. One legacy of Arcadia is that his push for happiness was out of sync with the world’s; his ambition was for safety, security, a life of enough food and shelter and money, books and love, the luxury of pursuing the truth by art. The luxury of looking deeply, of finding a direct path to empathy. It didn’t seem unattainable. In the city, where there were a million talented artists, his quiet, slow pursuit was seen as a form of ambitionlessness. And even that push, after Helle, had vanished.
In a kind of anger, he grabs a developed photograph—a test run to figure out the kind of cropping needed—and writes on the back. He lists the solo shows he knows he should want, the fellowships, the competitions won, lists the galleries he should be courting, the prices he should be charging. He envisions a new set of portraits, blown up so large the whole is swamped by the particulars: this follicle, this pose. He writes a step-by-step plan over the next year to get it all and locks the darkroom behind him, feeling powerful.
But the paper embarrasses him, the vulgar scrawl of it. Just as he’s leaving the building, he folds it over and over and shoves it into his wallet. There it sits all day, a strange, bad weight. It falls out of his pocket that night as if telling him something he already knows, and he is relieved to shove it at last into the trash.
His women call him. Hannah from the desert every day; every few weeks, Pooh, Marilyn, Midge, Eden, Regina, Sweetie. Once a week, Astrid, breathless for news. He says, as always, that he has heard nothing from the police, nothing from the private detective. The detective is ferrety and lush of moustache, like an overgrown Hercule Poirot, a cliché of grooming that, absurdly, had put Bit at ease when he met the man. But Bit is starting to suspect the detective is doing nothing more than pocketing the thousand dollars a week that Bit can’t afford. Astrid’s voice always breaks a little on the phone.
Today, she says, Oh, my poor girl. She’s dead, I can feel it.
A flare of anger in Bit, and he says, Astrid. She’s out there. I believe that she’s still alive.
A breath on the other end. Assent on the intake. Yes, she says slowly. Do believe. One of us must.
Immediately afterward, Jincy calls, her twins screaming behind her. For six months last year, Jincy wouldn’t speak to Bit, after she’d taken Bit and Helle out to dinner and stuffed them like foie gras geese and had played nervously with her hair so that it spun up from her head in a wild frizz, until Helle had put down her fork and said, Okay, Jin, tell us what this is all about. Then Jincy looked at Bit and said in a great blurt that she was forty-two already and always thought she didn’t want kids but now she wanted them, badly, and would like for Helle and Bit to agree to donate sperm, and, oh, my God, she actually said it. And she didn’t mean to offend them. So consider it? And they said they would and soberly went home. Bit watched Helle get undressed that night in the dark, the slow peel of the black dress from her shoulders. Bare, they began to shake. He reached out to comfort her, only to find she was laughing. When she calmed, she said, You should do it. It’s the right thing. Plus, everyone knows you should have married Jincy anyway. You’d be happier. She smiled wanly and pulled up the sheets and fell asleep. And so Bit told Jincy no, though it broke his heart; he said it was because the world was too terrifying these days with one child of his in it. But he knows he declined because of Helle’s steadfast refusal to be jealous. When Jincy was pregnant with the twins, she rang the doorbell and came in with an armful of peonies and a chocolate cake, saying, Bygones, and that was the end of that.
He hangs up at the end of the call and is about to go back to the mural on Grete’s wall—he is painting in Titus, a giant, at the Gatehouse—when the phone rings and it is Hannah.
Nothing? she says.
No, he says. He imagines his mother. She has lost a great deal of weight: she looks like one of those lean, browned outdoorsy women who hike all day, with their beautiful legs and sunshot hair. But her voice has grown progressively darker. He says, Are you okay, Hannah?
I guess, she says. I think I’m lonely. Drinking too much.
Now he hears the bourbon in the smoky rasp. How disappointing, when people succumb to what is expected of them. Then again, his wine bottle is already empty tonight. He says, Me too.
They sit together in companionable silence. When a garbage truck churns on the street below, Bit says, Hannah, is it worth being lonely just because you’re proud? I mean. You have a choice.
Just because, Hannah says, chewing on her words. Just because I’m proud.
Well, Bit says. That’s why you’re not talking to Abe.
Please. I have better reasons than pride, she says.
There’s more to the story? Bit says. He had assumed it was so simple: money, the universal wedge between people. He hadn’t
the energy to imagine more.
Isn’t there always? Hannah says, and Bit understands that, whatever it is, her loyalty to Abe is still too strong to tell.
I miss her, he says, at last.
Oh, honey, says Hannah. And I miss your father, that old bastard on wheels.
Sharon opens the door raw-eyed, her brown hair puffed on her head like a mushroom cap. Grete and Frankie squeeze one another around the neck. Bit says, Bad night? and Sharon shrugs and says, Worse than average. I was served with d-i-v-o-r-c-e papers yesterday.
I’m sorry, Bit says, but he has to settle a twinge of envy; there is an endpoint to Sharon’s grief, at least.
Yesterday, the girl Helle had been was everywhere. In photographs on the walls in the apartment, in the frail wrists of the barista who served him tea at the university café, in the magazine on the coffee table at his dentist’s. These young starlets in Hollywood all seem to want to be who she had been: skinny within layers of clothing, with her clear white face, her vagueness. It is as if the idea of Helle he’d carried around with him for twenty-five years had bloomed external into the world.
He had barely survived his transition from Arcadia to the gritty Outside when he was fourteen. He was lonely. There were ugly urban trees, pigeons, piss caked on walls. He knew nobody and filled his time by walking for hours. The streets of Queens pinched crookedly into other streets; the parks, a mockery of countryside. He felt tender, unshelled. The warp of stories that had always blanketed him, his personal mythology, was invisible, so nobody knew him; no one knew he was the miracle baby, Little Bit of a Hippie, Abe and Hannah’s boy; no one knew about Abe’s fall and Hannah’s legendary strength and the fable of his meeting Verda on a snowy night; they didn’t know the traumas of baby Felipe and the Dartful Codger and Cockaigne Day; they didn’t know anything at all. They took one look at his slight body and tried to put him with the seventh graders; when he showed them his calculus, history, biology, they reluctantly shelved him with the juniors, two years older than he. There he rested, perilously. The other kids were incomprehensible. They fistfought, snapped gum, played sports as bloody as miniature wars. They were cruel. They called Bit Dippie because he was a hippie-dippie; they called him Stinkass because at first he didn’t dare to take more than two baths a week, even though water was free and soap abundant. When he came home from school, it was as if he were dragging a sack of lead.
