by Lauren Groff
Even the things he first found good soon made him feel hollow: Cheez Doodles, peanut butter, sodapop, Red Hots, which he ate until he was sick. The flickering sorts of lights they used in supermarkets and schools made even blinking feel like work. The streets were full of dogs, which he had always imagined to be good, peaceful creatures, but these dogs choked on leashes, left shit to rot on the concrete. Summer cooled into autumn, but beyond the softer light, a hint of cold, the season couldn’t come into its own. There were no golds, no blazes, no woodsmoke. The sidewalks only grew sadder until a dirty ice emerged. Worst were the people. There was no care in what they did. The pipes burst one day on the corner, the men in orange came, slapped a patch on the concrete, and within a week, the pipes burst again. People argued with themselves in public and wore their faces savage. Everyone was pale, puffy, unhealthy. At first, he marveled at the grossness, the fatness of everyone, and then one day it struck him that it was not normal to be as brown and scrawny as Arcadians were: it was not normal to see your friends’ ribs through their shirts, for men and women both to work bare-chested all day, equally topless, everything shining back at the sun. At night, the voices that came through the walls were canned, the many inflections of television, or the neighbors’ raised in anger. There were no soft songs, no lullabies. In the hall, he saw a mother hit her baby with a fist.
Even inside the apartment things were bleak: gray linoleum, Goodwill furniture. His parents moved about, faces in grief thick as paint. A silence grew between them and formed into a solid the consistency of wet sponge. Hannah stood at the window, her long hands cupped around her tea until it went cold. Her eyes sagged with winter. When she returned home from work, an administrative job at a social services clinic, silently, they had dinner. They were on the sixth floor, and there was no elevator and Abe could not descend to the street without Hannah and Bit to carry him, so all day he circled the apartment in his new wheelchair bought by welfare. Around and around he went, a thousand times. His wheels chewed tracks into the carpet.
What Bit hated most in all the Outside world, hated with an irrational, puking hatred, was the goldfish in the pet store a street away, its endless dull slide around the glass. When he passed the store on his way to school, he crossed the street. He was afraid of himself, of how badly he wanted to smash his fist through the window, to cradle the fish in his bloody hands and carry it down to the river. There he would dip it to the surface and free it into the terrible cold water. It might have been swallowed in a second, a sudden jagged mouth out of the black. But at least that second it would feel on its body a living sweetness, a water that it hadn’t dirtied with its own dying body.
His friends from Arcadia had scattered and he couldn’t track them down. He didn’t try for Outside friends. He did perfect work in school, so adults would leave him alone. Hannah and Abe wagged their lips at him, and he nodded and turned his back. He slept, later and longer, and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was locked in the bathroom. He had liberated a red lightbulb from a photography store and stolen cash from Hannah for the chemicals, and only in the half-light of his improvised darkroom, watching the world emerge on a piece of white paper, did he feel his old self stirring. He could control this world. He could create tiny windows he could fit between his hands and study until he began to understand them.
The spring of his first year out of Arcadia tumbled into summer. Without school, he didn’t get up at all. He refused to eat. He lost twenty pounds. When he stopped speaking, his parents, who had seen this before from him, took him for help.
The dreary corridors, the female doctor who held Bit’s hand, the gelatin and canned fruit, the rings of sad people talking their demons out of themselves and into the air, a kind of spiritual siphoning. A fog of time, Hannah crying at the window, clenched with guilt, once confessing to the doctor how she had given this sadness to Bit, it was all her fault. He watched, as if from far away. She visited every day, and clipped his fingernails, and combed his hair and told him stories, holding him on her lap as if he were a baby. Every morning he swallowed a pill, and slowly the chemicals settled into his system, built up there, a superconductor, pulling back the magnetic splinters of himself one by one. Eventually, they erected a barricade between his sadness and the world. He has swallowed the same pill every day since. He is afraid of what would happen if he didn’t, the chemistry ebbing in the dark of his brain. Even on the drugs, he has had some long bad slides. In graduate school, anxiety swallowed him whole and he didn’t come out of his apartment for a month; after the terrorist attacks on the city; a quiet slipping in the first few months after Helle left. He hasn’t yet dug himself out of this last one.
After his very first episode of sadness, Bit returned to school and kept going until he graduated and went smoothly into college. His sophomore year at Cornell, when he was visiting Jincy at Smith, he heard that Helle had returned from Norway. Jincy was somehow the knot at the center of the net, the one who searched people out and stayed in touch with them. And over the years after the first sighting, it was Jincy who told him that Helle was modeling, mostly local stuff, JCPenney catalogs and ads. Then she’d gone out to Los Angeles. Then she’d gone to San Francisco. Then she was in rehab. Cole had become Bit’s best friend again; they’d found each other at age twenty-four in a grocery store two blocks from where they both lived. Cole took over the narrative: Helle was married. The marriage was annulled. She was in Miami. Then, for a long time, nobody knew where she was.
Suddenly, Bit was thirty-five. Time, he often thinks, goes like that. He had grown tired of poverty, of scrambling for galleries’ attention, the few solo shows not fulfilling enough, anymore. He had gone back to school for his MFA, had gotten an assistant professor position in the university.
Then one drizzly day in spring, Cole called Bit up, saying that Helle was coming to town. She was going to stay with Sweetie, who had married wealth and had a cavernous apartment on the park. Sweetie had invited her sons for dinner, but Cole and Dyllie hated one another because Dyllie, after years of editorials, had been hired as a commentator on a far-right cable news show.
A young, handsome, bowtied black man with an irrational hatred for all things liberal and hippie, said Cole on the phone. He’s the neocon wet dream.
Dear God, said Bit, though all he was thinking was Helle, Helle, Helle, the girl with the vulnerable white face, the stud flashing in her nose.
Cole was laughing. He said, Sweetie always says, Lord knows, kiddos, that I named you the right way, Cole black and Dyllie white, but fate somehow dipped you in the wrong tie-dye. Of course, that makes Dylan scream Racist!, which he does only when convenient. So what I’m saying is that you have to come to the dinner, if just to keep the peace between us. You’re so inoffensive.
Bit would have given his right arm to see Helle again, but he had a show opening that night. The Chemical Quatrain, the gallery called it. There was a woman who took huge closeups of the sexual organs of wildflowers; a man who trucked in double negatives and found the ghost of himself in the shadows of buildings; a woman who staged savage little scenes with naked children. Bit and his large-scale portraits.
No problem, said Cole. We’ll come to the show first, then all go to Sweetie’s after.
But Bit never made it to Sweetie’s that night. The brothers were bickering about parking, and Helle had given up; she’d opened the car door in traffic and run inside to get away from them. She shook the rain off her cropped hair, her earrings jangling. Even from afar Bit saw that life had ridden her hard. The sight of her drooping skin, her painted-on eyebrows, broke him. She was stringy and sad, but somehow turned heads as she walked, as she’d always done. He held his breath watching her. Then she saw him in the corner with the wine, and her false smile fell, and she walked very fast right to him. She collapsed onto his shoulder, her skin’s deep smell still the same under all the orange and clove of her perfume, her body in his arms the same, his own body’s movement toward hers the same. There in the chic gloss of t
he gallery, the years peeled off of him and all the old stories hummed, taut, between them, electric lines.
Take me home, she said into his neck. So he took her, darting out into the night, before the Fox brothers even parked, before they entered the gallery and saw their own handsome adult Outside faces juxtaposed with their achingly tender and open Arcadia faces, shelled and unshelled, among the dozens of portraits of Arcadia that Bit had hung that night. What they found most moving, they told him later, were the blanks between the frames, the leaps that happened invisibly between the then and the now.
A brutal November morning, and Bit is walking through protesters in Union Square. Cold enough to make your balls vanish, he thinks, and remembers his hungry year in France after college, panting for the crumbs of insight strewn by the great photographer he’d traveled half the world to be near. Bit was willing to do anything: sweep the atelier, make excuses to the photographer’s wife when the photographer was with his mistress, print the contact sheets, do the enlargements alone. He was freezing and starving, wretchedly poor. He saw himself in the shop windows and was surprised at the small skinny urchin he looked like, something out of Hugo, a Gavroche nightly nibbled by the rats in the belly of the steel elephant. He was in the market searching for bruised fruit to bargain down to centimes when one old woman, peasant-fat, with buckteeth, beckoned him over. Mon pauvre, she said, eyes full of love. She was someone’s mother. She made a basket out of Bit’s hands and filled them with gorgeous purple figs, a delicate vegetable frost on them. Couilles du pape, she said with a wink, and he grins now, remembering. Pope’s balls: tiny, cold, purple.
He is still smiling at the thought, he knows, because the protesters smile back when they see him. Their faces are painted in white, and they are wearing white robes. He takes a picture, then ten. He looks over one of their leaflets, printed on paper the color of a rosy cheek. They are protesting Guantánamo, that limbo of terrorists. They protest the torture, the lack of due process. Well and good; he is on their side.
But his eye falls on a phrase that sends a white bolt through him. Ghost detainee: a person taken into detention anonymously so their families don’t know what has happened.
For a moment, the winged thing in him is relief. This is where Helle went, he thinks wildly; a mix-up, Helle saying something foolish in public as she always does at parties; Jesus, if I had a terminal disease, I’d strap a bomb to me and get rid of the Dick and the Bush in one blow. Or, looking at a television where women weep and ululate by a destroyed market: Fuck, what are we doing to that poor fucking country, no wonder they want to murder us all. Someone told on Helle, he thinks, a file was opened. He sees her go out of the apartment for a walk, sees a van pull up, a burlap sack on the head, a swallowing; she in an orange jumpsuit at a stainless-steel table, the Feds not knowing how harmless she is, how damaged, how deeply Grete needs her.
Bit lets the flyer drop into a rubbish bin. He is staggered; he has to sit. For a moment he felt relief at the idea of Helle being an enemy of the state, that she hadn’t been abducted, sold into slavery, raped, murdered; that she hadn’t fallen off the wagon and passed out in some ugly motel room, the needle in her vein under the rubber thong. Worse than those awful possibilities is the thought that she walked away in health and sanity. And what hurts him most is the gleam of peace he’d had: he would rather imagine his wife tortured in a secret cell than imagine that she chose to not love them anymore.
At morning drop-off, Bit stands watching Grete until long after all the other parents are gone. The aide has a face as lucid as a dormer window under the brown eaves of her hair, and she takes his elbow and deposits him gently into the hall. He blinks. There are the distant voices of children, the smell of their warm bodies, the sun in its pour over the honey-colored hallway, but something cold grips the back of his neck and refuses to let him move.
Look, he commands himself. Look hard. There is a piece of paper in the middle of the floor. He looks until it becomes terrifyingly strange. The branched folds across the surface, the incisor dents on one corner, the way the paper holds pores like skin, the feathery scrawl of pencil drawn across it, the way the corner shifts ever so gently in some tiny invisible wind, rocking and rocking into its own small shadow beneath, how the light from the windows condenses in the white until the paper holds a power beyond that of any other object, merely because it has been seen.
He remembers the lists of beautiful things that he used to make when he was little, and how he would say the litany quietly to his mother to try to pry her from her sad bed. He gathers a list again: this slice of late afternoon light across the subway tiles on the wall, the tree outside full of plastic bags white-bellied in the wind, Grete’s tiny spoon in her hand this morning, the gerbil smell of Grete’s breath, Grete running away from him at the playground, becoming a peapod, a spot, a dot. Again and again, all good things circle back to his breathtaking Grete. She breaks the spell. He can move again.
Hannah flies up for the week of Thanksgiving. Abe is coming also, Titus having agreed to drive him down on the morning of the feast. Abe is a secret. Bit hasn’t told his mother yet. He doesn’t think he’ll have the courage to do so until the doorbell rings.
In the airport, as she comes into baggage claim, Hannah’s face seems old and worn. Her hair has gone a heathered gray, the one long braid of it snaking around her upper arm. Her duffel is heavy. She studies the ground. Her lips are moving almost angrily, and Bit can’t believe his mother is the kind of woman who, in her loneliness, would begin talking to herself. He imagines a slippery slope; a roil of cats, a trashcan full of bottles, Hannah as bag lady. He scans behind her for Abe without thinking. He hasn’t seen his parents apart since he was little.
Then Grete bounces and shouts, and Hannah looks up, and when she sees Grete, her face is young again, and she is the great golden Hannah, dropping to her knee to hug her granddaughter. The part in her hair has the same warm sourdough smell when he kisses it. His head swims; he feels awakened.
They have a luxury of time together, almost too much. Grete clings to her Grannah, squeezes her, leads her from toy to toy and store to store, plants long slow kisses on her mouth. They are so absorbed in one another that Bit feels a flush of jealousy and laughs at himself: which one is he jealous of? Whose attention does he miss most?
At the old-fashioned ice cream parlor, as Hannah and Grete whisper and feed spoonfuls of frosty sugar to one another, he has an idea. Hannah, he says, and she looks up, her face rosy. Would you mind watching Grete all day tomorrow? I’m thinking I want to take the train to Philadelphia.
She fumbles in her purse and hands Grete two worn dollar bills. Monkey, she says, your Grannah desperately needs a chocolate chip cookie. Grete skips off: ordering at counters is her favorite thing to do.
Hannah looks at Bit. You’re going to see Ilya? she says.
What? he says. You think it’s a bad idea.
It’s just. What are you hoping to find?
Maybe she went to him, he says. Maybe she chose him. It’d be bad, but not as bad as not knowing.
You didn’t call him when she first vanished? You don’t think the detective would have dug her up, if she were there? She reaches her hands toward his, and he is shocked at the feel of them; bird-boned, tissue-skinned.
I did call him. I don’t know about the detective. But I didn’t go look, myself.
Hannah blows a graying wisp from her eyes and says, What, you think Ilya lied?
Bit says, softly, as Grete begins to speed back with a cookie raised high, I would have, if I were him.
Hannah plays with a red-and-white straw, thinking. Grete climbs up into her lap, and Hannah says, All right. Maybe not finding her there will give you something. Closure. You can live again.
Maybe, Bit says. I think I have to try.
Hannah pulls Grete to her, wrapping her long arms around Bit’s daughter, nestled and calm. Two versions of the same girl, peeping at him.
My potbellied Orpheus, Hannah says
, theatrically, toward the light fixture that just came on overhead with a warm sizzle. My Orpheus descending into the underworld, whistling his gentle tune.
Grete, who couldn’t possibly understand, hears the laugh in her Grannah’s voice and guffaws, showing her tiny crooked teeth.
Bit takes the predawn train and walks through the awakening city. He likes Philadelphia, the no-nonsense hardness of the place. The day is already crisp and bright. It takes much longer than he thought it would to get to Ilya’s; he has to walk a bike path by the Schuylkill for miles to get there. The water ruffles under the wind bounding off it, blasts him with cold, whistles merrily into his ears. Sculls dart elegantly by, eights like crawling monsters muscle their way up the river. At last, he sees again the church where the schoolchildren mass in their uniforms, waiting for school. He’d come here once before, with Helle, when she took her things away from Ilya’s house and home to Bit’s. He stands in front of the brick house for a few minutes, unwilling, then knocks. The door opens.
For a moment, Bit feels like he is staring in a mirror that reflects his own future. It isn’t good. A small man, dark-haired, jaw like an andiron; but his once-handsome face is clotted, like milk left out for days. Ilya, Helle’s previous husband, reaches out a white hand and guides Bit in.
