by Jeremy Tiang
He can hardly pretend to be busy—when they appear, he is slumped on the porch swing, rubbing the dog’s belly—and in any case is ravenous for company. He recognises these two as fellow city dwellers poleaxed by nature. The little girl twitches at each rustle in the trees, and flinches when a field mouse scampers a few yards from her foot. He offers them iced lemonade and cookies.
They fill him in on the news he has missed—a nuclear accident somewhere, a politician’s gaffe, a plague of moths in lower Manhattan. They’re still talking when his wife arrives back, or at least he and the man are; the girl has curled up for a nap on the swing. His wife seems annoyed, her greeting somewhat clenched. Still, she doesn’t object when he invites them to stay for dinner, nor when their guest reciprocates by offering up the six-pack of PBR he happens to have in his knapsack.
Soon they are splayed across the cushions and rugs, not drunk but loose enough for the fresh air to go to their heads. The dog, out of its mind at the presence of fresh companions, yelps in sharp asthmatic bursts as it lurches from human to human, demanding to have its ears scratched. This is the sort of night for a crackling log fire, but it is far too hot for that. Besides, he would have to chop some wood first, which he’d probably be inept at.
The man turns out to be a sound engineer—which is, what, something to do with music?—and works mostly from home, which is convenient as he home-schools his daughter. He notes the flash of alarm that touches their faces and says, Don’t worry, it’s not like that, I’m not one of those religious nuts. He isn’t indoctrinating his daughter about God planting fossils to test our faith. It’s just—he pauses here to prise open another can—her allergies. Almost as soon as she was born, they started. We thought she’d have to live in one of those giant plastic bubbles.
They turn to look at the girl, who seems perfectly healthy, snoring in sweet curls of sound. The dog has settled at her feet, its breathing almost in sync. It was ambitious bringing her into the woods, he continues, but I didn’t want her to miss out. I stuffed her full of antihistamines, I guess we’ll wait and see. She’s been itching all day. I didn’t think there’d be much pollen—
Perhaps the insects—says his wife tentatively, and he is about to mention the ticks before realising it might be tactless to compare dog and daughter. Also, ticks are arachnids, not bugs. Their guest is shaking his head, anyway. She’s slathered in insect repellent—fragrance-free, of course—and I made sure she was in long sleeves.
The conversation drifts towards movies none of them have seen, and the coming week’s weather. The dog licks a foreleg determinedly, as if trying to dislodge a particularly bothersome tick. The girl shifts and scratches in her sleep. His wife gets up to put the kettle on the stove. All the beer is gone.
After the second pot of green tea, the man declares he is sober enough to head back to his tent—if the bears haven’t eaten it. For some reason they all find this hilarious. Then his wife starts to explain earnestly there are no bears in these woods, and that sets them off again. They wake the girl, who seems startled and unhappy not to find herself in her own bed. The man has to carry the pack across his front so he can piggy-back her.
As they get ready for bed, he says to his wife, I wonder if I have allergies. If it’s something in the air, the food, that’s making it so hard for me to concentrate. She laughs unkindly. If they had a drug to fix that, she says, I’d have given it to you years ago. He is silent and she goes on, a bit more conciliatory, Why don’t you go back to yoga? It’ll help. He doesn’t tell her he only ever joined her class because he’d heard the faculty boys talk about a hot new instructor, flexible enough to get both legs behind her head.
She is normally insistent on the dog sleeping in its designated basket, for discipline, but tonight she allows it on the bed. Too feeble to jump, it yelps until he lifts it, then snorfles happily amongst the blankets, turning in circles to make a little nest. They fall into shallow, clinging sleep until half past five when the dog, in a froth of anxiety, demands to be let down.
A handful of days go by, and he slips past the halfway point of his stay. Now he fancies he can actually sense things leaching away from him. Not just time, a steady trickle of seconds and days, but also money, credibility, talent, even love. He sits grimly before the laptop, stabbing letters on the keyboard, trying not to ask himself who might want to read what he produces. He has an excruciating memory of their last dinner party when, fuelled by two-thirds of a bottle of wine, he held forth about his need to document the crises engulfing their country. A chronicle of our times, he slurred. Someone has to write it. Someone clear-eyed.
He stays at his post all day, with only one bad stretch when a couple of hours slip into the black maw of Minesweeper. At least he has a respectable slab of text at the end of the day, although reading back he is surprised how unformed it is. But is this incoherence or raw creative power? His finger flirts with the delete button, but the day has been a rare triumph and he cannot relinquish its fruits so lightly. Pushing back from his desk, he feels a satisfactory pain across his shoulders, the aching accomplishment of a day’s labour.
His wife is subdued at dinner, and he wonders if he has said something wrong or if she is simply growing tired of him, but then she says, Sorry, I’ve had a bitch of an afternoon. He feels a hot wash of guilt at not having asked, and listens hard as she tells him about her demanding students. When she asks about his day, he shows her the block of text but says he’s worried about structure. For a moment as they do the dishes together they seem like a normal couple.
Before bed, she gives the dog a massage. I suppose it’s had a hard day too, he jokes. She ignores him, running her hands in slow, steady strokes over the thinning grey fur, the white blaze at its crown. The dog groans happily, either at the pleasure of human contact or because she really is relaxing its muscles. Whenever her probing fingers encounter a tick, she briskly removes it between her nails and deposits it on a Kleenex. When the sheet gets too crowded he flushes it, trying not to look at the brown-black mass of bodies swirling in the water.
The next couple of days are unproductive. He takes the dog on long walks, hoping to be inspired by nature, but all he sees are leaves changing colour. Soon, fall semester will start and he will be back at work. When colleagues ask about his retreat in the forest he’ll have to grimace and say It’s not as easy as it looks—or else Wow, yeah, such a productive time, shrivelling from the lie.
Each walk entails a lengthy cleaning process. There are muddy boots to deal with, but first the dog needs to be thoroughly brushed down before it can track dirt and dead leaves through the cabin. And it has acquired new ticks, of course. It seems a long time ago when they lived in the city, and the dog was a normal dog that didn’t teem with its own vicious ecosystem.
His wife is late back from work, and he wonders what he would do if she simply failed to turn up. She has the car, and takes her cell to work with her. He plays the game of counting the tins in the cupboard, working out how long before he runs out of food. Would he starve to death, or learn to snare wild game? Perhaps the easiest thing would be to eat the dog.
When she finally shows up, grumbling about traffic, he senses she is resentful he hasn’t started cooking. But I might have been writing, he thinks, and anyway he feels tired and out of sorts. By the next morning, this has developed into a full-blown cold. His wife stares in horrified disgust as he lies streaming and hacking. She cannot be ill; if she showed up at the studio with so much as a runny nose, her regulars would lose faith in the curative powers of yoga. She puts food and drink within reach of him and hurries out the door.
He spends the day drifting through a succession of unpleasant naps. They have not bathed the dog for more than a fortnight now, and it is too smelly to be allowed on the bed. Instead, it prowls around yapping, and the noise seeps into his head. He tries to feel victorious—a legitimate reason for inactivity—but his mind will not let him rest. What if today was the day he might have done something good? He beg
ins forming the story he will tell others, of how illness derailed his writing streak.
He dreams that insects of all kinds are pressed against the windows of the cabin, the mass of bodies crushing the luckless ones in front so their carapaces burst against the glass. He dreams of swollen grey ticks all down his arm, like berries, gorging themselves on his blood, swelling to the size of grapes. When he wakes, there are raised red dots exactly where he dreamt they were. He flaps the sheets frantically, but there are no lurking ticks. Psychosomatic, his wife says, when he shows her the blistered arm. She spends the night on the couch, and when he still looks haggard the next day, urges him to see a doctor. Just get me something from CVS, I’ll be okay, he says groggily, turning his head away so she won’t nag. He certainly won’t be able to do any writing in this state, but he has the confused notion that leaving the woods now would destroy the purity of his stay here.
It rains heavily that afternoon. He is woken by the thrumming on the roof, an initial machine gun burst and then steady pounding, like a thousand typewriters going at once. He pulls a pillow over his head but it barely makes a difference. Giving up, he wanders into the living room, where the dog is cowering under an armchair. It is terrified of loud noises, and continues to tremble even after he picks it up and cradles it to his chest. Its eczema is getting worse.
Out of habit he begins combing the dog for ticks, but his heart isn’t in it. He finds half a dozen and goes out onto the porch to flick them away. The rain is warm as it plops onto his arm, and impulsively he walks out into it, barefoot as he is, in his underpants. It is not the fat, tropical warmth of a monsoon, and all the more refreshing for it. The world becomes a room-temperature wall of water, an inverted bed of nails lightly massaging his scalp. He opens his arms to it. A baptism. This is the wettest he’s ever been, wetter than a bath or deep-sea dive. He thinks of all the things that need washing away—the ticks, his illness, years of unproductivity and sloth and stultifying inertia. Some of the rainwater trickles into his mouth, but it is sour and gritty, not refreshing as he expected.
He leaves a trail of dirty footprints through the house. In the bathroom he dries himself carefully, hoping his wife won’t ask about the sodden boxers in the sink. He is limp, the sudden gift of energy gone. Back in bed, he feels his skin fizz, and tries not to think about acid rain, or poisonous saps washing off the trees. The dog places its front paws on the footboard and whines. Too tired to argue, he lifts it, and it huddles against his body. He is getting used to its flaky, yeasty skin, the infections that ageing shih-tzus are prone to.
His wife is an hour late, then two. He finishes everything on the bedside table: saltine crackers, an apple, a juice carton. The dog eats the crumbs off the sheets then yaps and yaps until he gets up to feed it. Padding naked through the cabin, he notices the quiet—the rain has stopped. He tips dry food into a bowl and the dog attacks it. Most of its teeth are gone, and it has to grind each biscuit with its gums.
His wife does not come home that night. In the small hours he is still pressed against the window, hoping to see distant headlights. Many times in recent years he has wondered whether his uselessness and utter lack of accomplishment would begin to repel her. If she left him it would be like this, without warning. Her suitcase is here, of course, but she may have abandoned that too.
How many tins are in the cupboard? He makes a mental note to count again in the morning. Without the car, he is trapped—though starvation is not really an issue, the landlord will be along to reclaim his property in a couple of weeks. There are other lurid possibilities, which become more plausible as he tumbles through the night. The outbreak of war. Fast-spreading flu wiping out most of the Eastern seaboard. Or, more prosaic but just as terrifying, his wife dead in a five-car pile-up, no way for anyone to know he is stuck here.
Eventually, the dark fantasies blur into dreams, although he is later unsure at what point he falls asleep. Either the rain starts up again, or he has a nightmare that it does. A glowing rectangle beside his bed turns out to be his laptop screen. He opens the document containing his novel, but every word of it sickens him. There are only seven pages. He deletes the document and empties the trash can. It makes a sound like distant thunder. Then real lightning hits the roof and it springs a leak above his bed, only it is hundreds of ticks that trickle down right onto his chest. He swats them away, waking himself with the exertion. He must have scratched in his sleep, his torso is a mass of red welts. It is not yet dawn. He tries to get back to sleep as best he can, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets.
When he wakes properly, there is someone else in the house. A bear or burglar? His wife sticks her head round the door: Oh good, the beast has risen. She leaves a mug of coffee by the bed and begins tidying the room, explaining volubly about the storm throwing a tree trunk across the road, being stuck, spending the night on her brother’s sofa.
I think I’ve been bitten, he starts to say, but before he can go on she has ripped the covers off and is looking dispassionately at his naked body. He knows her yoga instructor’s eye is mechanically noting: middle-aged, sedentary, incipient beer-gut. There are now little red marks on his arms and legs. His face begins to itch and he wonders if they are there too.
You have chicken pox, she says, as if it is obvious. I googled your symptoms. The kid the other day must have been infectious. Reaching for her handbag, she pulls out calamine lotion in a bright pink tube, a gaping baby sprawled down one side. The drugstore guy seemed to think it was for a child, I didn’t correct him. Don’t scratch, it might turn to shingles. He hopes she will spread lotion on him, but she places the tube in his hand and strides away. Where is his laptop? He needs to check if he really has deleted his novel or if that was part of the dream—but what does it matter? A few scraps of imagination, paragraphs of drawn-out anguish. Even if it still exists, he will never look at it again.
He follows his wife into the kitchen, where she grudgingly butters some toast for him. I suppose the dog hasn’t had its breakfast? Without waiting for an answer, she pours biscuits into the bowl. Every action seems to use a little more energy than is strictly necessary. She keeps up a monologue about how difficult it was to get time off work, the absurdity of a man pushing forty getting chicken pox, and then the kicker, You’re not even a real writer, like Dan Brown. No one’s heard of you.
There is nothing he can say to that, and anyway his whole body is heavy with a dull pain, his head stuffed solid. He rests it on the table until he can get enough strength together to drag himself back to bed. Then he hears his wife say, with more tenderness than he has heard from her in a decade, You’re not doing great, are you? Poor baby, it hasn’t been easy for you. Such caresses in her voice. Despite himself, a flicker of hope rises in his chest, a needle-thin crack of light. He looks up, ready to say something, then realises she was speaking to the dog.
Schwellenangst
SHE CAN MAKE out the words in the fading sunlight: “The only good system is a sound system.” The long, concrete façade is at least a kilometre long, and the expanse has clearly defeated its vandals, who have marred it only in patches. She has walked past several stretches still pristine grey, damaged only by the salt air and bird droppings. Some of the windows are broken—often with chairs or bottles protruding through the glass—some covered in wooden boards, and a rare few still intact.
Joy pulls out her phone and takes a photo of the English sentence. It will make a good cover for her Facebook page. Most of the graffiti is in German, but language here is no badge of authenticity. Everyone she has met seems eager to parade their English before her, once they work out she speaks it more or less at native level. Even the older residents, the ones whose second language at school was Russian, pepper their dialogue with trendy words. “Auf meinem To-do List stehen drei Urgent Emails.”
Her own German is fairly rusty, but good enough to cope with ordinary conversation. She isn’t too bothered about getting things like gender right. It makes no sense, anyway, that “sea” is
feminine but “ocean” neutral. She tries both out, looking at the glittering water just visible through a screen of pine trees. “Das Meer. Die Ostsee.” It is the Baltic, on the Northern German coast. From a high enough place, on a clear day, they say you can see Sweden.
She has been walking for forty-five minutes now, and there is no sign the building will surprise her. Its uniformity is its strength, what gives it the sheer brute force of a monolithic bulwark against—what? The locals, when they refer to it at all, call it the Hitler Building. On the way over, when they stopped for lunch, the fat woman who ran the café tried to talk them out of staying there. “Go to Binz instead,” she insisted. “Nicer there. Not so much history.”
Joy tried to explain that history was exactly what they were after, why the school was sending twenty-three of its brightest A-Level candidates at hugely subsidised prices on a journey away from anything normal teenagers might find exciting. No shopping or nightclubs. The Head of Department having decided that the way to truly understand a language is to know the past of its speakers, they have gone in search of artefacts.
And now, Prora. They arrived that afternoon and have seen the museum, but the real exploration will take place tomorrow. Her solo walk around is ostensibly so she can identify potential problems in their route, but really so she can experience the building without the distraction of two dozen well-meaning but unbiddable young people. The daytrippers have long gone, and she has the narrow footpath to herself.
Even with the wind, she can hear vague throbbing that resolves into a bass line as she nears the row of windows with light behind them. Not the steady glow of normal lamps, but flickers and flashes. Torches? Then she gets closer and it is obvious. As she watches, a tallish red-haired man steps from a window, finding his footing on the ledge, lighting a cigarette. They eye each other. She shouts up, “Entschuldigung, ist hier einen Rave?” Hoping the German word is the same as in English. They so often are.
