Arcadia

by Lauren Groff

  I’m sorry? he says.

  Amos, the man says, pointing at his chest. He makes the sign again, then a motion that could only mean waterfall. And it returns to Bit like a slap, the day at the end of Arcadia, Ike and Cole and he in the waterfall, the two Amish boys stepping out of the twilit woods, the crouching around the campfire, the joint. This must be one of those boys.

  Bit gapes in astonishment. The man looks around and winks. Then he makes the toke sign again. One minute, Bit says. He walks through the back door and rummages in Abe’s office until he finds the tennis ball he knows would be there.

  When he comes out again, the man is looking squirrelly, but he beams when Bit presses on the side of the ball and the invisible cut in it mouths open and a little bag of weed falls out. Bit rolls one, and they smoke. It feels so good to stand with another man in compassionate silence. Amos goes heavy-lidded and says, Glory. They walk back together toward the Green house. When Glory comes out, tucking her loose hair under her bonnet, Bit and Amos are petting the horse, chuckling at nothing.

  She sniffs and frowns at Bit with her bunched-berry features. She says, What have you done with my husband?

  Bit only says, thoughtfully, I would like to eat the world; and his new friend Amos chuckles alongside him.

  In the dusk, Grete arrives home, scratched and sunburnt, her arms speckled with bites. The house is packed. Ellis is giving Hannah a manicure; she grins up at Bit, and he blows her a kiss from the door. Grete leans toward Bit and mutters, Why are there old ladies all over the place?

  He puts another biscuit in his mouth to keep from answering.

  Hannah hears Grete, though, and the computer voice rises sweetly, saying: It’s an infestation.

  Wasting Hannah, faster and faster. Her belly, distended. Her face shrinking to settle among its bones, her flesh mottled. Bit tries to not shudder upon seeing her. Grete can’t be in the room without closing her eyes to her grandmother.

  So strange, however: with her body leaving, her soul is rising to the surface. There is fire there, he sees. An ecstasy. He hurts with recognition: where has he seen this before? The answer comes to him in the night. In his knowledge-drunk youth in the college library, the lonely section of art books, the giving spread of them, the lustful dizzied colors. The faces of the saints. Girls: Catherine of Siena, Saint Veronica, Columba of Rieti. Anorexia mirabilis, the body emptying of corporeal want and filling with the wine of God.

  Bit buries his face among his father’s sweaters, yearning for Abe to emerge, to make it all better, to take over.

  He comes out of the closet. Luisa moves about in the kitchen. Hannah’s room is black and he and Hannah are there alone. Through the thick air, the smooth voice says softly, Don’t be afraid, Bit. I’m not afraid.

  He fills an entire roll watching the afternoon light slant across his mother’s wasted face, watching her hands curled like snails on the dough of her belly.

  He will develop these later in the pitch-black silence of a color darkroom; in the light, he will hold his mother in his hands again, fractured and grainy, her ruined body perfected by the ruined film.

  Astrid sits behind Hannah, smoothing her hair. They used to be sisterly; now, the gulf is vast. Astrid flesh, Hannah bone. They remove the ventilator. Hannah’s eyelids are the purple of a bruise. She doesn’t wake. Her body is clenching back to its original form. She is a wisp, she would be gone in a slight wind.

  Insomniac, he comes into the living room and finds Ellis in the recliner. She wakes to him watching her. She begins to say something, but he puts his hand over her mouth and holds it there, feeling the warm movement of her lips, her big teeth, her breath. She stands, and makes him dizzy with her perfume. He leads her out, into the night, over the ground that cracks with branches. The door of Midge’s house, dug into the hillside, opens under his palm. A fury fills him, and he leads her into the farthest bedroom, the windowless one, the pure blankness of earth there. He presses her against the cold concrete wall; she gasps; he pulls her skirt roughly over her hips and finds the welcome of her. They slip to a low bed. The darkness in him comes alive, angry. When he is done, he lifts himself so he is light on her bones and her shallow breath can deepen. He feels the clammy sheets on his legs, her mouth sliding gently on his wet cheeks, the fist clenched in his chest loosening.

  Despite the shame, it is good, this thing; in a world gone to shit, this between people should be preserved.

  I’m sorry, he says.

  Don’t, she says. I’m not.

  I’m an ass, he says. Her hands on his neck, shoulders, back. His ear is against the concrete. Ellis says, kindly, It’s all right.

  He says nothing, and she says at last, Listen. I love Hannah. But you know I’m not here right now because of her. Her eyelashes are damp on his cheekbone. It had to happen sometime.

  He groans. I’ll make it up to you, he says. His lips on the delicate, bitter folds of her ear. Her smile tightening along his jawbone. You will, she murmurs, her voice somewhere inside his skull.

  It is the quiet hour. He can hear the tinkle of a wind chime forgotten up at Arcadia House.

  Astrid looks at the clock. Luisa will be here soon, she says.

  Bit holds his mother’s frond of a hand.

  Astrid moves to the table where the morphine sits. I’m giving her a large dose, she says. Enough to knock her out. She bends over Hannah, a willow.

  She finishes and puts a palm on Bit’s cheek. I’m not going to write this down, she says. The silence swells between them. You have to say you understand, she says.

  I understand, he says. The words come from far away, years ago, the sun.

  Astrid leaves. Luisa comes in. She flips through the log in the light of the pallid moon. Hm. Unlike Astrid to forget morphine, she says, but she is careful not to look at Bit.

  He says nothing. He watches Luisa prepare the drug, find the catheter. He watches the slow slide in.

  It doesn’t take long. Asleep, Hannah folds further into herself.

  There is a lightening, as if a weight has been removed from her chest.

  And his mother is gone.

  It is hot and windless and bright; the last flare of sunset, Hannah’s time of day.

  Many said their goodbyes to Hannah at Abe’s services. This gathering is smaller. The stalwarts are here, the women. The Amish are here, mixed in. Ellis holds Bit’s hand. Grete is pale and composed in the green dress Hannah had made her promise to wear. It brings out your eyes, Hannah had said. It makes Grete look like Hannah.

  Astrid stands in the Pond, and the water draws slow dark swoops up the fabric of her white dress. She bends to a leaf, where she places a lit candle and pushes it off. The candle moves toward the center of the Pond in a length of ripples, then stops. Astrid sings, her voice cracked. Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; change and decay in all around I see; O thou who changes not, abide with me.

  There is no wind. Grete wades out alone, tipping the basket. When Hannah’s remains go into the Pond, they fall straight down. When the heavy pieces of her break the surface, the water heals itself. The rest of the ashes are lighter and float; they bloom in a slow flush across the surface.

  Back inside the empty house, the black dog arrives. Bit opens his arms to it, tooth and claw. Outside, there are voices, people drinking juice and eating cake in the Sugarbush.

  One week, Bit tells Grete. Give me one week. Then come get me.

  Grete holds her sharp elbows and nods. She watches him go into his room.

  All is still here, the walls full of comforting dimness. The bed is like two cupped hands, welcoming him in.

  There is a landscape inside his head. Delicate hills, threading rivers of blood.

  Unpeopled, this place would be nothing. Bit’s people come at will. Abe, striding along, his toolbelt jingling. Grete, a fleet flash in the woods. Verda gathering from the shadows at the edge of the trees, the white dog her dapple. Titus, who reaches for B
it and swings him into the sky. Hannah, her hand stretching toward something, young, golden, round.

  Everything he needs is here.

  If he cannot be infinite—his love meeting its eventual exhaustion, his light its shadow—this is the nature of landscapes. The forest meets mountain, the sea the shore. Brain meets bone, meets skin, meets hair; meets air. Day would not be, without night.

  Every limit, a wise woman once wrote, is a beginning as well as an ending.

  Grete climbs behind him, holding him with her thin length. But she is made of flight and burrow, Helle and Hannah both, and leaves him to run when twilight falls.

  Luisa comes in and, weeping, kisses him goodbye.

  Jincy comes in, bringing the twins. They sleep against him, and Jincy sleeps in the chair, her face lined in the moonlight, mouth open, black as a cave.

  Dylan comes in; Cole comes in; Bit’s department chair comes in.

  Ellis comes in, the hardcover book splayed in her hands like a bird poised for flight. She stays and stays. She whispers in his ear.

  The night comes in, Grete comes in, Astrid comes in.

  Glory comes in with muffins, saying something over him in her guttural language, a prayer, perhaps.

  In the window, the moon comes in.

  On her e-reader, Grete holds Yoko, who was at last allowed to go home to Japan; the girl plays her violin but so poorly Grete snorts and turns her off.

  Astrid comes in with avocados and mushroom soup.

  Ellis comes in, puts his head on her lap, brushes his temples with her cool hands, murmurs.

  Grete comes in; Grete comes in; Grete comes in. With a new song and a sunwarmed tomato, with applesauce and ice water, with a scrimshaw, brittle and yellow, Hannah’s face endlessly carved in the bone. Grete, like water, like the world, will always let herself in.

  The first thing is the tea. The stun of rosehip lets the ghosts enter, the cookies flavored with anise, the sighing cushion of the white dog, the close smoky cottage of his own story.

  Next, the stars brief in a window between the maple branches. From under a rocking chair, a mouse. It prays into its pink hands, watching Bit, it smoothes its fat haunches like a housewife in a new dress. Bit laughs and the noise scares them both, and the mouse skitters off. Bit is lonely when it is gone.

  Soon the page of a book can stay cohesive in the eyes; one sentence can lead to the next. He can crack a paragraph and eat it. Now a story. Now a novel, one full life enclosed in covers.

  They are in the room when he wakes again.

  It’s been a week, Dad, Grete says, her voice tight with urgency.

  Time to get up, says Ellis from the chair. She is rumpled; Otto sleeps under her feet.

  Astrid, in the doorway, her own column of light.

  Dad, says Grete. Please.

  It is an effort like digging himself out from a mound of dirt. But he sits.

  It is a cool morning. The spring has ended, Bit sees. Grete leaves her e-reader out for him to use, and he finds that the disease has tiptoed backward. Quarantine is over: three quarters of a million dead, only thirty thousand in the United States. Most deaths have been contained in a few areas, the city mostly. The president praises technology, the ability to track the disease and make decisions; he comes onto the e-reader, blue thumbprints under his eyes, and says, Without technology, the pandemic would have been a disaster of proportions never before seen on this planet. We must be grateful. Bit is.

  Grete is rosy with health and tan from the sun. Home, she says, a flash of yearning in her face. He sees how the brownstone they bought ten years ago is to Grete what Arcadia is to him. Soon, they will leave the furniture where it sits in the Green house, the clothes neat in their closets. They will seal the windows against drafts and close the curtains. They will secure doors that have locks as afterthoughts: Titus’s, Midge’s, Scott and Lisa’s, the Green house, quieted of its solar clicks. They will load the car. Ellis is coming for a week to help them resettle. There is little of Helle’s in the brownstone: a chair, the same kitchen table, the same bed. He imagines thin brown Ellis filling those places, and is surprised to feel no pain.

  He will miss this quiet full of noise: the nighthawks, the way the woods breathe, the things moving unsuspected through the dark. But he will take with him the canisters full of blasted images and have the pleasure of living them again. They are not nothing, the memories.

  The night before they go, he stays awake, watching the subtle seep and draw of the moon. In the dark, he scans Abe and Hannah’s bookshelves until he finds what he’s been looking for. The book is smaller than he remembered, the edges flaking like pastry dough under his fingers. But the color plates surprise him: they are so startling, so excessively beautiful. He hadn’t remembered such beauty.

  For hours in the sleeping house, he reads the old stories until they blend together. Then he puts down the book. When he turns out the light, the moon seizes its brightness again in the window. The stories themselves aren’t what moves him now. They are sturdy wooden boxes, their worth less in what they are than in what they can be made to hold. What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire, the milk churned, the chickens sleeping, the babies lulled by rocking, the listeners’ own bones allowed to rest, at last, in their chairs. The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set off fear: a nail dropped in the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods, the newest baby in the tired womb. His heart, in the night-struck house of his parents, responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.

  Bit moves through the house, turning out the lights that Grete thoughtlessly left burning. And like that he lets the darkness in to take its place, where it belongs.

  The early June woods simmer. When Bit and Grete lace up their boots, Ellis starts to put hers on, too, but something in Bit’s face makes her sit back down on the porch steps with a book instead. Take Otto, she says. He’ll dream of this walk when he’s a city dog. Bit stays to look at the way the sun off the page shines on her face. I’ll be here when you get back, she laughs into her book. Don’t worry. In gratitude, he doubles back to kiss her on the soft part in her hair. By midmorning the birds grow heavy and watch the world with their beaks cracked, panting from the coolest clefts of the branches. Under such cheery light it is impossible to see the forest as he had so long ago when he was a lost child, grasping and bitter and ready to gobble him, the twigs turned fingernails, the roots sinuously rising from the ground to pull him in.

  Grete tells him long, fantastical tales of the kids at the school. She had finished the year with a kind of shuddery relief: now she turns others grotesque to strip them of their terror. The girls are blades in female form; the boys lurch through the halls as rustic as bears. The teachers are gobbling amoebas, greedy for what they can’t understand. Otto races back, his underbelly caked with mud, and squeezes his body between their legs, and races off again.

  They come to the place Bit has avoided all these years and climb a storm-felled oak to find the path. Here is the island of trees between two snakes that once were knee-deep streams. Here is the house. The old walls are still standing. The roof has fallen in: a tree grows from the heart of Verda’s cottage as if it were a vast stone planter. One window is breathtakingly intact. The cherries by the doorstep have spawned an orchard, and last year’s pits gravel the ground. When Bit pushes open the door, it swings easily, true in its frame. Inside, the house is forest. The floor is dirt and skittering leaves; the beams have returned to mossy logs. They sit and unpack their lunch, the dog panting at their feet, and he tells his daughter of Verda.

  Hm, is all she says.

  He watches her, amazed. I’m not lying, he says.

 
I didn’t say you were, she says. Just, how fantastic it seems. I mean, she was precisely the opposite of everything you were. A witch, magical. Old, self-sufficient, with a pet. You were tiny, overwhelmed with community, longing for a woman to take you in. It’s interesting. She shrugs.

  You think Verda was an imaginary friend, Bit says, laughing with dismay.

  This place looks like it’s been abandoned for centuries, Dad. But whatever. It doesn’t matter. You found what you needed when you needed it, she says, and squeezes his knee.

  She has more of a shell than he ever will. Already, she watches life from a good distance. This is a gift he has given her.

  Peace, he knows, can be shattered in a million variations: great visions of the end, a rain of ash, a disease on the wind, a blast in the distance, the sun dying like a kerosene lamp clicked off. And in smaller ways: an overheard remark, his daughter’s sour mood, his own body faltering. There’s no use in anticipating the mode. He will wait for the hushed spaces in life, for Ellis’s snore in the dark, for Grete’s stealth kiss, for the warm light inside the gallery, his images on the wall broken beyond beauty into blisters and fragments, returning in the eye to beauty again. The voices of women at night on the street, laughing; he has always loved the voices of women. Pay attention, he thinks. Not to the grand gesture, but to the passing breath.

  He sits. He lets the afternoon sink in. The sweetness of the soil rises to him. A squirrel scolds from high in a tree. The city is still far away, full of good people going home. In this moment that blooms and fades as it passes, he is enough, and all is well in the world.