Fidelity

by Michael Redhill

  He let his shoulders drop and he exhaled, his heart still squeezing madly inside his chest. He would not do this; he knew it now. This last moment in his life when his body might have had some role in the future had passed. He got down on the floor and started to look for the batteries, then had to sit up on his haunches to collect his air again. The sound from the television was encompassing; he was sure they could hear it three doors down. Instead of a hyperventilating woman, it was now an American newscaster’s voice filling the room.

  Someone had blown up a bus in Haifa. Above Roth’s head, yellow tape flapped in close-up at the perimeter of the scene. The newscaster’s voice numbered the casualties and reported that the work of the police had just begun. The camera closed in on the cramped space of the disaster, the shattered form of the bus at its center, bits of red steel pointing up nakedly. The police stood outside the tape while men in green and white uniforms wandered the site, their hands protected by surgical gloves. The voice swarmed the air around Roth with its urgency, identifying the men as orthodox Jews appointed as representatives of the community, there to gather anything that looked like human remains for the sake of religious burial. They were allowed access to such disasters to do holy duty, combing with their bodies bent double the dark little spaces where someone’s hand might have come to rest, where a strip of flesh might be clinging to a shard of glass like a flag. All of this went into their bags, to be blessed and returned to the earth where, at some longed-for moment in the future, the Angel of Mercy would open the graves and gather the assembly of the chosen, re-creating their shattered bodies from remains.

  Roth watched the scene numbly, his hands limp at his sides, his ears pulsing with the sounds of the ruined street. And as the men continued their terrible work, moving slowly back and forth over the smoking street, he realized they were calling his name, they were saying, Roth, Roth, over and over. They believed he was there. He was the only survivor and they were calling for him. Roth! they were calling. Hearing his name spoken like that made a strange kind of sense to him, and it filled his head with brightness, it made him feel like he was carrying a charge.

  “I’m here,” he said quietly, standing and stepping back so they could see him. He raised his arms; the men were frantically searching for him now, shouting Roth, can you hear us? His face lit up with hope, it glistened, he could hear them, they must be close now. He called out to them: “Here I am! I’m here!”

  But despite answering them, they continued to look. What if they did not find him? What if he perished here, despite their efforts, what if he died under this great weight and he never again saw the children who still loved him? He would never fix then what was wrong in his life; his love would never grow to gather in his other children, the ones he’d lost, or grow to tie Sybil to him more perfectly. He would never have the chance to accept that he would grow older now, his strength would wane; here he would die at an age people would say was too young, and he didn’t want that—he was too young, he still had much of his old vitality, he could have been a father again at this age if he’d wanted! All of this would fade from him, and he from it if the men gave up, and he cried out in desperation now, “HERE I AM!” until finally the door behind him was forced open and a security guard stood in the verge with the woman from reception and they called out to him over the din. But Roth could not hear them; his attention was fastened to the flesh collectors. He was waiting until one of them turned and finally saw him there and reached out a gloved hand to deliver him to safety.

  Human Elements

  AS SOMETIMES HAPPENS, I HAD A DEPRESSION. IT OUGHT TO BE reassuring to know that half of humankind has had one, and there they all are, up and walking around again. It ought to be.

  The best way to describe depression is that it can take seven hours to do a load of laundry. If you drink while you’re doing the laundry, it will take eight, but it will seem to go faster, and you won’t mind so much the red stains on your whites, or at least it will not seem to you to be confirmation of the hopelessness of everything.

  Before I was depressed I had mostly been lonesome. I was lonesome with people and without them. This condition led to my moving out of a house I’d been sharing with a woman named J—. I took a bachelor apartment in a university neighborhood, and my loneliness metastasized. As winter came on, I realized that I was planning on dying there. I started to smoke, a disgusting habit, and I drank more. On the weekends, I went to loud parties thrown by the fraternities on my street. It was easy enough to walk into one and claim I was from another frat or another school, and someone would point out the keg and that was that. I brought home what my mother would once have called coeds, and did the kinds of things that one was supposed to do with coeds. It was a pleasant routine, but I’d already become immune to beauty, and once that happens, you’re almost there. I’d been cured of the mating sickness that had always animated my life and I imagined my death would be like a plant drying out on a radiator, seemingly gradual, but ending with an ashy spasm. In all, it was an excellent plan, but then the spring came and the park beside the building filled up with children in strollers and the sun rose earlier and set later, and worse, spring training started and on every channel ballplayers were talking in the idiom of stupid but irrefutable hope. The black flame flared down and I came back to the desiccated kernel of my self. And, like a sign of life, simple loneliness came back. I decided to get out of the city.

  IN THOSE days, I was still a poet. When I was with J— I wrote a great deal of poetry, but I never published it. I poured it into one black hard-covered notebook after another. J— thought I was keeping a diary and it freaked her out. She’d never met a man who kept a diary. I told her it was poetry, and no, she couldn’t see it. So she came to believe I was writing things about her anyway, and in a sense I was. So I stopped, and poetry left me like a chronic condition suddenly clearing up. Although in the case of poetry, I would have been happy to go on suffering.

  I left my little apartment in the university district and rented a cabin on a lake outside of tourist country, three hours north of the city. My thought was that I could start writing poetry again, and if that didn’t work, at least I could smoke and read. There was no phone. Trying to live without a phone can make you realize how weird it is to be “modern.” In a place where a phone never rings it starts to feel like someone’s dropped you into a hole, although all it means is that you’re in nature.

  I found, for a few days, that talking to myself was reassuring. A human voice is a human voice. I didn’t indulge in real dialogue; I wasn’t crazy anymore, so there was no Well, Russell, how are we this morning? Or Ha ha, good one, Russell. I just narrated my day to myself. It’s a beautiful morning, I’d say. Time for coffee. I’d talk to my books. Mr. Sorel, I said to Stendhal’s misanthropist, make up your fucking mind. And at night, down at the lakeshore, in the web of animal calls and the unseen water lapping against the rocks, I’d look up and name the alarming sky. Orion, Cassiopeia, Gemini. Constellations of the north. Even most of the sky was hidden from my sight.

  I tried to write poems, but mainly I sat on the porch looking down the unkempt lawn to the ridge. Below the ridge, the land fell away in scrub and blackberry canes to the water. Pine trees and oaks were scattered all over the property, and a variety of birds visited the branches and performed their various tasks. I’d spent my summer childhood in places like this, under curving skies and jumping into lakes with the shadows of black branches laid on their surfaces. Outside of the city, my natural existential skittishness faded somewhat, even though the country can make you feel awesomely tiny, with its skies and wilderness. It was true I felt alone, I did crave another human voice. But at least I was supposed to feel alone there. After another couple of weeks passed, I stopped speaking to myself and slipped into a peaceable silence.

  ONE MORNING around this time, I went outside to the porch with a cup of coffee, a plate of fried eggs, and the poems of Francis Ponge. When I looked up after an hour or so, I saw tha
t there was something sticking up beyond the ridge. It looked as if someone had leaned a large piece of wet cardboard against it. I put down my book and walked to the edge of the porch, and in the changing perspective I saw I was looking at the top of a tent.

  I stood there for a while, reassured to be in a space that was clearly defined as my own, but then I told myself I had nothing to fear and I went inside to grab a couple of friendly gesture beers and walked down to the ridge. A pot of coffee sat on a portable gas stove to one side of the tent, and a duffel bag poked out of the front flap. On the other side was a large plastic tub with a lid on it; the faint sound of water moving around came from inside it. I continued down onto the thin line of gray sand that passed for the beach there, and off to the left, standing on the shore and peering down into the weeds, were a man and a woman. They each wore a headset with a microphone that arced over their mouths. They looked like a pair of badly lost telemarketers. I held up the beers and they exchanged glances, then the man looked at his watch and shrugged and they both came over.

  “Thanks,” said the woman. She was dressed in a well-rounded yellow bikini, and he was wearing a Speedo and a worn-out T-shirt that said Be Kind to Your Mother and had a big picture of the planet on it. He was over six feet, and terminated in a patch of thorny black hair. He was also comprehensively pierced. Neither of them made any move to explain what they were doing on my rented property. Finally, I said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I’m Kate,” said the woman, “and this is Sylvain. We’re on a ministry capture.” I stared at her blankly, so she added, “Frogs. We’re catching and counting frogs for the Ministry of the Environment.”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, nice to meet you. I’m Russell.”

  “Thanks for the beers, Russell. Are you a cottager?”

  Given that she was in a bikini catching frogs for the government, I felt free to say, “I’m writing poetry in a rented cabin to get over a breakup.”

  Sylvain lifted his head a little. “Is it working?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Too bad,” he said.

  “But you’re not in that place, are you?” Kate gestured with the beer bottle to the roof of the cabin. It was all we could see.

  “I am. Why.”

  “See?” she said angrily to Sylvain. She really was quite lovely. Her long brown hair swayed up and covered her face for a moment when she swung her head over to him. She was a good foot shorter than he was. “So you’re wondering what we’re doing here?”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not really my place.”

  “We were told there wasn’t anyone here. Otherwise, we would have introduced ourselves.”

  “As a courtesy,” said Sylvain.

  “I won’t report you,” I said. That seemed to make us equals again, and Sylvain raised his bottle to me before draining it. Kate put her bottle down in the cool muck at the shore.

  “I’ll bring them both up later, okay?” she said. Sylvain was already walking back along the bushes, his head down, his eyes sweeping back and forth like a metal detector. Kate whispered, “We just took a break.”

  “Well then, back to the mines.”

  She waved to me with her fingers, then went to join Sylvain. One of them had smelled like coconut and I was pretty sure it was her.

  IN MY time in the north, I’d been trying to force diligence on myself in a vain effort to get some creative results. I’d been starting my days with whiskey-splashed coffee and reversing the ratio as the day went on, and this might have been playing a role in my output. It certainly had a deleterious effect on my ability to read. I’d come armed with enough books to last me my stay, but, especially after lunchtime, I had trouble understanding what exactly was happening on the page. I would see the words, and I’d hear them in my head, and for the first time in my life, that seemed like a very odd thing. If I saw the word H-U-M-A-N-I-T-Y, I would hear hyoo-MAN-itty, and I realized those two things were not the same. There was some filter that caused what was out in the world to make a sound in my head. And so I became frightened of reading and had no other agenda after that except to write, and that was not going well, either. It was a relief, then, that some hint of human activity was taking place down by the water. It relaxed me.

  The morning after the frog catchers’ appearance, I once again took my coffee and my notebook out to the porch. They had already left for their work, creeping through the reeds at the lake perimeter, armed with a couple of clipboards. I put out a cigarette and opened the notebook. I’d written two lines of what I presumed was poetry since I’d got there, about three weeks earlier. There were also some drawings of tree limbs and my own hand. The two lines of poetry were:

  quadrabalance of the elements

  human limbs, months, and hours

  I wasn’t sure what they were leading to, what they meant, or even if they were mathematically accurate. At least they didn’t sound like conversation, so I wasn’t going to give up quite yet. I’d always felt that if I didn’t know exactly what I was doing, there was still a chance I’d do something.

  Below, I heard someone splashing along the water’s edge and then, I presumed, come up on the beach. A moment later, Kate appeared, walking up the wood-stump steps. “Do you have a minute?”

  “I have one or two,” I said. “Beer?” It was probably 10 A.M.

  “Maybe later.” She was still in that yellow bikini, but there was a towel around her waist. I turned a chair to her and she sat down. Her shins were covered in thin patches of mud from the lake bottom.

  “Looks like you’ve been giving chase.”

  She looked down and slapped lightly at her legs. Little brown flakes fell off. “I look like this all summer. You writing?”

  “Yep!” I waved the notebook in the air manically. “Writing writing!” I stole a glance at her shoulders—brown and spotted—then her hands. They were just girl hands, thin fingers and nails like almond slivers. Hard to imagine them full of frog. “So what is it you two do all day?”

  “We catch frogs, sex them, and mark them. Then we let them go.”

  “Do they like it?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “But it’s for their own good.” She squinted her eyes at me because I was trying to be funny, but the sentiment was true. Nature hadn’t made animals like frogs with the ability to distinguish between when they were about to be eaten and when they were just going to be sexed and marked. “What are the secret-agent headsets for?”

  “Have you ever seen a frog?”

  “I’m pretty sure I have.”

  “They have huge tympana—those are the eardrums, the big circles on the sides of their heads. Their ears are even larger than elephants’, relatively speaking.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Anyway, they’re attuned to certain frequencies, like the beating of a dragonfly’s wings or the buzzing of a fly. We try not to make much noise in the field, since some of the frequencies of the human voice are like those of insects or predators. We just whisper to each other over a radio channel.”

  “Coming in under the radar.”

  “Kinda,” she said. “Look, uh, we wanted to ask you something, me and Sylvain. We’re going to be here for like another eight days, and all we’ve got down there is a gas stove and two pots. But we have lots of food. So we were wondering if we could interest you in a swap.” She tucked some hair over her ear.

  “You want to use my kitchen.”

  “We cook, you eat our food, and we all have a bit of company.”

  I’d been eating cereal for supper and the idea of a hot meal was appealing. “Sylvain’s French, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” she said, catching my drift. “But he doesn’t cook. I cook.”

  “Are you two . . .”

  “We used to be.” She picked some invisible lint off her towel. When she looked up, she pointed her eyes away. “To be honest with you,” she said, “having another person around would be kind of good for us.
You know, make things seem normal.”

  “They’re not normal?”

  “They are for me,” she said.

  THAT FIRST night, they came in around seven o’clock, lugging their huge cooler into the cabin. That they would unpack their groceries into my fridge had not been discussed, but I was pleased by what I saw. Vacuum-packed bags of frozen meat and fish, frozen packs of corn, spinach, and strawberries, fresh mushrooms, milk and cream, bacon, eggs, and butter. A rucksack on Sylvain’s back disgorged whole wheat bread, pasta, coffee, and corn chips. It was half their provisions; the other half would be delivered after the fifth day. We weren’t that remote, but the ministry apparently wanted them to focus on their work. Someone else could do the shopping.

  Kate was putting things in the fridge and freezer. “What have you been eating?”

  “Just light things,” I said. “I eat light.”

  “I think you’ve been living on Rice Krispies.”

  “I have potatoes, too. And apples.”

  “You need meat,” she said.

  “Potatoes have protein,” said Sylvain, and we both looked at him. He was setting the table. “They do.”

  “Whatever,” said Kate.

  I was relegated to a chair as the two of them commandeered the kitchen. I hadn’t seen either of them wash their hands, but I wasn’t going to make an issue out of it. When I had been alive enough to cook, I wasn’t bad. There had even been a time in my life when I made pizza dough from scratch. But when I’d been with J— she’d been the cook. I had the traditional male role: chopping, tasting, complimenting. Complimenting was very important. Sylvain was a little more useful than I was. He was cutting the mushrooms and holding one of the frozen meat packs under his arm to thaw it. It was still in its bag.