Dept. Of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

  There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

  Personality Questionnaire

  1. I enjoy the sensation of speeding in a car.

  2. Others know me by the long hours I keep.

  3. I am drawn to games of chance.

  4. Parties make me nervous.

  5. I eat more quickly than other people.

  6. Friends have called me thin-skinned.

  7. I prefer indoor activities.

  8. Often, I fear I am not up to life’s challenges.

  9. I would like to learn to fly an airplane.

  10. Sometimes I am restless for no apparent reason.

  There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

  What the Yoga People say: None of this is banal, if only you would attend to it.

  All right then, this thing clogging the sink. I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease.

  My husband clears the table. Bits of meat cling to the plates, a soggy napkin floats in gravy. In India, they say, there are men who eat only air.

  Someone has given my daughter a doctor’s kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. “Would you like to be a doctor when you grow up?” I ask her. She looks at me oddly. “I’m already a doctor,” she says.

  I would give it up for her, everything, the hours alone, the radiant book, the postage stamp in my likeness, but only if she would consent to lie quietly with me until she is eighteen. If she would lie quietly with me, if I could bury my face in her hair, yes, then yes, uncle.

  Student Evaluations

  She is a good teacher but VERY anecdotal.

  No one would call her organized.

  She seems to care about her students.

  She acts as if writing has no rules.

  “Where is the funny?” my husband says, clicking the remote. “Bring me the funny.”

  What Keats said: No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.

  Our beautiful Italian babysitter tells me she broke up with her boyfriend. I know him, a serious young musician who adored her. “What did he do?” I say. She makes herself a cup of tea. “He cried like a clown.”

  When my daughter comes home, her fingers are indelibly red and black. “Look at your hands! What happened to them?” my husband says. She looks at her hands. “I guess it is my responsibility,” she tells him.

  “Were the parties always so dull?” I ask my husband as we stand at the bank machine, getting money for the babysitter. He puts the bills into his wallet. “That was a $200 party,” he tells me.

  The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.

  “Everything that has eyes will cease to see,” says the man on the television. He looks credentialed. His hair has a dark gleam to it. His voice is like the voices of those people who hand out flyers on the subway, but he’s not talking about God or the government.

  “When is everyone coming?” my daughter says. “Isn’t everyone coming?” She drags her dollhouse out of her room and begins arranging and rearranging the chairs inside it. It is hard to make them as they should be, it seems. One is always askew. She is so solemn, my little girl. So solemn and precise. Carefully, she places the tiny turkey in the center of the tiny table. It is golden brown. Someone has carved a perfect flap in it. Why? I wonder. Why must everything have already begun? “Hurry,” she murmurs as she works. “Hurry, hurry!”

  The credentialed man is talking about the heavens now, about their most ruinous movements. The time lapse shows a field of plants perishing, a mother and child blown away by a wave of red light. Something distant and imperfectly understood is to blame for this. But the odds against it are encouraging. Astronomical even.

  Still, I won’t be happy until I know the name of this thing.

  12

  Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart … it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.

  It’s true that I am feebleminded at the grocery store. I write lists that I forget, buy things we don’t need or already have. Later, my husband will say, did you get toilet paper, did you get ketchup, did you get garlic, and I will say, no, no, I forgot, sorry, here is some butterscotch pudding and some toothpicks and some whiskey sour mix. But for now my daughter and I stand shivering in front of the meat case. “I’m cold,” she says. “Why can’t we go? Why do we have to stand here?” There is some kind of meat I am supposed to buy. A kind of meat to go in a meat recipe. “We can go soon,” I say. “Just wait. Let me think for a minute. You’re not letting me think.”

  So lately I’ve been having this recurring dream: In it, my husband breaks up with me at a party, saying, I’ll tell you later. Don’t pester me. But when I tell him this, he grows peevish. “We’re married, remember? Nobody’s breaking up with anybody.”

  “I love autumn,” she says. “Look at the beautiful autumn leaves. It feels like autumn today. Is autumn your favorite time of year?” She stops walking and tugs on my sleeve. “Mommy! You are not noticing. I am using a new word. I say autumn now instead of fall.”

  I run into an acquaintance on the street, someone I haven’t seen in years. When I knew him, we were both young. He edited a literary magazine and I sometimes wrote for him. He had a motorcycle but married early, both of which impressed me. He is still very handsome. As we talk, I discover he has a child now too.

  “I think I must have missed your second book,” he says.

  “No,” I say. “There isn’t one.”

  He looks uncomfortable; both of us are calculating the years or maybe only I am.

  “Did something happen?” he says kindly after a moment.

  “Yes,” I explain.

  That night, I bring up my old art monster plan. “Road not taken,” my husband says.

  13

  I had this idea in the middle of the night that maybe I could stop working for the almost astronaut and get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I’ve jotted down a few of them.

  Objects create happiness.

  The animals are pleased to be of use.

  Your cities will shine forever.

  Death will not touch you.

  I send my fortunes to the philosopher. He writes back immediately. I am interested in bankrolling you. But I only have $27 in checking.

  The next morning a man comes to look at the apartment. He brings his dog with him. “Seek!” he tells the dog. “Seek! Seek!” but the dog just sits there, looking at me.

  A week later, I call the man back. I give him tea and cookies. “Here’s what you do,” he says. “Put poison on the mattress, then on the windowsills, then in the electrical sockets. Then just go to sleep in your bed.”

  But the kid upstairs knows all about it already. “Can I give you a little piece of advice?” he says. “Throw out everything you own.”

  I read an article written by a woman living alone who got them. She talks about how depressing it is to have no one to help her with all the spraying and washing and cooking and bagging. She’s spent all her money, hasn’t had a date in years. I show it to my husband. “It’s true. We’re lucky,” he says.

  A few weeks later, they send a note home from her school about lice. Moth
ers drive across town to the Orthodox neighborhood to see the nitpicker. $100 a head is what she charges them. She is very thorough, the mothers claim. Worth every penny.

  But my husband is thorough too. He goes through our hair, then holds the comb up carefully to the light.

  “Do you know why I love you?” my daughter asks me. She is floating in the bathwater, her head lathered white. “Why?” I say. “Because I am your mother,” she tells me.

  There is a video I have seen, which I cannot unsee, that shows them avoiding the poison by climbing the far wall, crossing the ceiling, and then dropping onto the bed. And another one, even worse, in which a woman films herself waiting up all night beside her daughter’s bed with a lint roller.

  What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.

  The almost astronaut calls me at all hours now to talk about his project. “I think it’s going to be a best seller,” he tells me. “Like that guy. What’s his name? Sagan?”

  “Carl?”

  “No,” he says. “That’s not it. Something else. It’ll come to me.”

  A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.

  14

  My husband listens on his headphones to a series of lectures called “The Long Now.” For a long time, I hear this name without inquiring further. It seems to me a useful but imprecise phrase along the lines of “The Human Condition” or “The Life of the Mind.” I am startled to learn it is in fact an organization which seeks to right the wrongs of the world. A brief survey of their website turns up lectures on topics such as Climate Change and Peak Oil. Somehow I had assumed it meant the feeling of daily life.

  I find a cheap piano and surprise my husband with it. Sometimes he composes songs for us after dinner. Beautiful little things. If it is after eight, the neighbors complain. Anyway, the bugs get in it.

  An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country.

  A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul.

  My daughter has a habit now of rifling through our drawers to see if anything inside might be of use to her. One day she unearthed the bride and groom that stood atop our wedding cake. The groom was discarded but the bride has been placed on a shelf in her room among the plastic pink horses with girlishly long manes. This is a high compliment, I discern, though my daughter does not say so explicitly.

  The little jokes of the long-married. “My wife … She no longer believes in me,” my friend says with a small wave of his hand. Everyone laughs. We are all having dinner. His wife passes me something intricate and Moroccan he has made. It is unbelievably delicious.

  Are you afraid of going to the dentist?

  Never Sometimes Always

  I answer “sometimes” but they seem to bump me up to “always.” The dentist speaks carefully to me, probing my mouth with his soft fingers. The hygienist tries to make casual conversation by asking me how many children I have. “One,” I say, and she looks startled. “But you’ll have another?” she asks as she rinses the blood from the sink. “No, I don’t think so,” I say. She shakes her head. “It just seems cruel to have an only child. I was one and it was cruel.”

  A Lebanese proverb: The bedbug has a hundred children and thinks them too few.

  “Don’t tell a soul,” the kid warns me. “Not if you ever want anyone to visit again.” He gives me some special plastic bags that zip closed tightly. At night, we can hear the bags shifting as we lie awake in bed. The deal is that if one opens up, everything in it is contaminated. Before we leave the house, we have to cook our clothes in a special cooker. Anything we are not wearing must be immediately bagged and sealed. “We’re living like astronauts,” my husband says, inching over to his side of the bed.

  The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed in the spacecraft cabin. This is what the first man in space said.

  A woman at the playground explains her dilemma. They have finally found a house, a brownstone with four floors and a garden, perfectly maintained, on the loveliest of blocks in the least anxiety producing of school districts, but now she finds that she spends much of her day on one floor looking for something that has actually been left on another floor.

  I am spending hours and hours at the Laundromat now, shrinking our sweaters and un-furring her animals. One day I forget and put her blanket in. When I hand it back to her, she cries. “That was my best thing,” she says. “Why would you ruin my best thing?”

  15

  Survival in space is a challenging endeavor. As the history of modern warfare suggests, people have generally proven themselves unable to live and work together peacefully over long periods of time. Especially in isolated or stressful situations, those living in close quarters often erupt into hostility.

  Don’t cook, don’t fuck, what do you do? Don’t cook, don’t fuck, what do you do?

  Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn’t look at it.

  Russian ground control had a traditional signoff for the cosmonauts: May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather.

  “What I’m looking for,” the almost astronaut tells me, “is interesting facts.”

  Vladimir Komarov was the pilot on Soyuz 1, a spaceship that was plagued with technical problems from the start. In the weeks leading up to the launch, the cosmonaut became convinced that this would be a death mission, but the Russian politicians waved off the engineering reports. On the appointed day, a grim-faced Komarov was strapped into the spacecraft and launched into orbit. But almost immediately things began to go wrong. An antenna failed to rise. Then a solar panel malfunctioned, making the craft lopsided and difficult to navigate. Sensing a potential catastrophe, ground control aborted the mission and tried to guide Komarov home. But as he reentered the atmosphere, the spacecraft began spinning wildly. Komarov fought to control it, but it couldn’t be righted.

  During the long terrible descent, a politician called Komarov to tell him he was a hero. Then his wife came on the line and the couple spoke of their affairs and said good-bye. The last thing anyone heard was the cosmonaut’s yells of rage and fear as his ship hurtled towards the ground. The capsule flattened instantly on impact, then burst into flames. There was no body to recover. Komarov’s widow was given his charred heel bone.

  But long-term survival for astronauts in space environments poses other dangers as well. Some of the most daunting challenges may, in fact, be psychological. People studying such odds look to other kinds of isolation studies for clues. The logs of polar explorers may give us the best glimpse of what it might be like to stay in space for extended periods.

  Aboard the Belgica, off Antarctica, May 20, 1898: Explorer Frederick Cook, trapped with his men on an icebound ship, wrote the following in his log:

  We are as tired of each other’s company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience … I know that this depression will increase.

  “We’ll get through this,” I say to my husband. “We always do.” Slowly, he nods his head. I lie on the couch in the crook of his arm. Our clothes smell cooked.

  We take turns taking her on trips. The other one stays home, sprays the house with poison again. Lice, she thinks they are. Neither my husband nor I can stand to keep secrets, but we keep this one, yes, we keep it. We learn not to wince when people worry aloud about getting them. We hardly ever go out and if we do we cook every bit of our clothing for hours so as not to chance giving them to anyone. Winter makes it harder. Before we leave the house, we must do the scarves and mittens, the boots and coats. When the timer goes off, we take all the clothes out of the cooker and then without sitting on the chair or t
he bed, get dressed and leave as fast as we can.

  That year we get Christmas cards from his relatives, some with those family letters tucked inside. S got a promotion and is now a vice vice president of marketing. T has a new baby and has started an organizing business called “Sorted!” L & V have given up rice and sugar and bread.

  My husband won’t let me write one. We send a smiling picture instead.

  Dear Family and Friends,

  It is the year of the bugs. It is the year of the pig. It is the year of losing money. It is the year of getting sick. It is the year of no book. It is the year of no music. It is the year of turning 5 and 39 and 37. It is the year of Wrong Living. That is how we will remember it if it ever passes.

  With love and holiday wishes.

  When we visit his parents, my daughter tries to learn to swim at the indoor pool. I watch her serious scrunched-up face, eyes closed, counting one stroke, two strokes. A few days later, she is up to fifty. Then my husband arrives from Brooklyn and she insists we rush him straight from the airport to the pool. But when we get there, she won’t do it. I am tight-lipped, resentful of all the fuss she has required to be made, the great anticlimax of it. My husband falls asleep in a deck chair as we are deliberating. He has been up all night, spraying poison. His mother, bright-eyed, gentles her through the water. “Once a swimmer, always a swimmer,” she says.