Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  That night, the boy flashed me a message in code, turning his lights on and off again. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I knew I should do the same. His lights began to blink on and off faster and faster; one short, two longs, short, long, short, long, then his house went dark. Suddenly I knew he had died. I went into the hall and called 911. I explained that a boy with a bandaged hand had collapsed in front of his window. I said I had seen this while I was driving by. A few minutes later, the sirens started up and headed toward me. They came closer and closer. All the neighborhood dogs started to bark. The ambulance sped through the light and pulled up on the boy’s lawn. My parents were on the porch in their bathrobes. “The boy must have died,” my father said. “They wouldn’t have called an ambulance unless he actually died.” My mother started to cry. “It could have been Grace,” she told him. “I bet that boy was playing in the street.” My father looked at his watch. “It’s midnight, my dear,” he said.

  DEC. 22: FIRST AMPHIBIANS

  Some three hundred and seventy-five million years ago, the first amphibians left the ocean and crawled ashore. They resembled large fish except for the four stilt-like legs that supported them. No doubt they ventured onto land tentatively at first, but soon with increasing confidence in their newly evolved legs and lungs. These ancient amphibians are the ancestors of us all. If they had never left the sea, we might now find scales as beautiful as skin.

  My mother said that I was an amphibian, that I got legs from my father and fins from her. And it was true that she couldn’t stand to be away from water for long. Every morning she went to the lake to walk, no matter how cold it was. But my father didn’t care about the lake at all. He had an idea that we should move to the city. There was no place here for him to work, he said. My mother refused to even discuss it. Instead, she clipped coupons and let the hem down on my pants when they got too short. In her purse, she carried a stack of bills bound together with a rubber band. Urgent! Last Notice, they said on the front.

  One night, she served cornflakes for dinner. “Top of the mornin’ to you,” my father said when he passed the box around. My mother didn’t laugh. She didn’t even look at him. The week before, she’d started working full-time at the raptor center. There were scratches on her arms from the birds’ claws. She was supposed to wear gloves at work, but sometimes she forgot, and when she came home, her hands were torn to pieces.

  I tapped my spoon against the metal bowl. Ding, ding, ding, it said. Outside, it was getting dark. My mother got up to turn on a light. I spun the bowl and struck it again. “Stop that,” the spoon said. “Can’t you give me some peace?” Surprised, I looked at my mother, but she wasn’t looking at me. I hit the bowl, harder this time. The spoon was silent. “Stop that,” my mother said.

  The only thing that made my mother laugh anymore was seeing my uncle on TV. For months now, he’d been getting fatter. Every afternoon, we counted his chins. The first one to spot a new one got a prize. As soon as the show came on, my mother asked: How fat am I? and the answer was: Fat enough to be buried in a piano case!

  We hadn’t seen my uncle since summer. He was too busy with the show, he said. My mother wrote out recipes on index cards and sent them to him in the mail. Lard tacos with sour cream. Cheese-and-fatback pie. Corn dogs in butter sauce. To your health! she wrote on the back of the cards.

  At first, we’d hoped the question girl might balloon up too, but she stayed just the same. For the end-of-the-year show, she wore a silver space suit and traveled through time. My uncle looked tired as he stepped into the lights. His chins wobbled a little as he spoke.

  IS IT POSSIBLE TO TRAVEL INTO THE FUTURE?

  Such travel would require a starship that could move at something near the speed of light. Light travels through space at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, but the strange thing is that, as you approach this speed, time slows down. Physicists like to speculate about what would happen to two twins—one an astronaut on a speeding starship, the other left behind on Earth. Suppose that they are just thirty years old when the journey begins. If the astronaut travels to a star ten light-years away, the round trip will take nearly twenty-two years as judged by Earth time. In the meantime, the twin who stays on Earth will grow older. His skin will wrinkle and his hair will gray. But time slows for the twin in space. As he nears the speed of light, the ship’s clocks slow down. Soon they are completely out of sync with the clocks back home. Yet time for the astronaut feels no different. A minute seems like a minute and an hour an hour. Only when the ship returns to Earth can the true effects be seen. The astronaut no longer recognizes his brother. The twin who went into space is forty years old, but the one who stayed behind is fifty-two.

  The week before Christmas, Aunt Fe called and said that my uncle had run away in the middle of the night. He’d left everything behind and flown to Florida with a writer from the show. When my father heard the news, he went on a diet and dyed his hair brown. “What causes hiccups?” he asked me. “How big is the moon?” Once I spotted him in the driveway taking a bow beside a pile of dirty snow.

  My father wanted to audition for Mr. Science, but my mother refused to even let him try. The show filmed in New York, five hours away. If he got the job, we’d have to live in the city for a year, maybe two. “I’d rather live in hell,” my mother said.

  The next morning, she woke me up early for school. It was supposed to be Christmas Eve, but we weren’t having Christmas this year, she said. Beneath her eyes were dark circles from fighting with my father all night long. We tiptoed through the living room, where he was asleep on the couch, but as soon as we got to the classroom my mother moved all the furniture around. Then she ran her fingernails across the board until she broke all of them. By the time my father stumbled in, she was at her desk, reading to me about Tyrannosaurus Rex. He looked around the room, but there was nothing to see. Dec. 24: First dinosaurs, my mother had written on the board. My father held a hand up to his head. “What was that infernal racket?” he asked her, grimacing.

  My mother took out a file and did her nails. “You must have been dreaming, Jonathan,” she said.

  DEC. 26: FIRST MAMMALS

  The first true mammals were nothing much to see. Scientists think they were timid shrew-like creatures who fed on insects and fruit and lived high in the trees. They arrived one hundred million years after the first reptiles, in the days when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. But then, quite suddenly, the dinosaurs went extinct. They may have been done in by a giant asteroid or they may have disappeared more slowly; no one knows for sure. What is certain is that a world without dinosaurs allowed the meek mammals to evolve. It took a rat-sized creature cowering in the dark to survive whatever killed the dinosaurs and inherit the Earth.

  My mother said that the story of the first mammals proved that the meek really would inherit the Earth. That means your father, she told me. Just like the Bible says.

  After dinner, he brought up the Mr. Science tryouts again. “I look just like him,” he repeated like a charm. Already my mother had thrown two glasses of wine and a plate of spaghetti at him. “What’s the harm in trying?” he asked her, but she walked away.

  The next morning, he got up early and left before the sun was up. When my mother realized he was gone, she went upstairs and packed his things. Then she left the suitcases outside in the snow. “Mr. FUCKING Science,” she wrote on the tags. All day long, she stormed around the house in an old bathrobe, muttering. I hid in my room and read about a monster in Brazil that had the body of an earthworm and the snout of a pig. “Don’t start with me,” my mother said at dinner, though I hadn’t said a word.

  That night, my mother told me about the hyena men of Africa who have two faces, one in back and one in front. If a hyena man meets a young girl on the road, he shows her his first face, which is handsome and human. In back, he hides his terrible face, which has powerful teeth for crushing bones. Sometimes a girl falls in love with a hyena man, never realizing what he is. She leaves her family and
marries him. Then one night the man comes home hungry and shows his true face in the dark. He takes his wife in his arms and tears her to pieces with his sharp teeth. In the morning, he tells her family that hyenas dragged her away in the night. Just down the road, they find her picked-clean bones, but no one suspects him because he has on his beautiful face again.

  My mother leaned over and turned off the light. “Wait,” I said. “Where does he hide his terrible face?”

  My mother touched the nape of her neck. “He hides it here,” she said.

  The next morning, when my father called, my mother handed me the phone. “Tell him I’ve got nothing to say,” she told me.

  I reported this to him.

  My father laughed. “Never mind that,” he said. “I got the part. I’m Mr. Science now. They want me to start right away.”

  I looked out the window. Outside, the trees were filling with snow. Is he coming home? my mother mouthed from the doorway. I shook my head.

  “Goddammit,” she screamed and slammed the door.

  “What was that?” my father asked.

  “Nothing.” I could hear my mother throwing things around in the bedroom. I put my hand over the phone. “When are you coming back?” I asked.

  “Soon, soon,” my father said. “Until then, talk to your mother for me, will you?”

  The phone felt hot against my ear. “It won’t work,” I told him.

  My father sighed. “I have to stay in New York for a little while, but I’ll be home before you know it, Grace. Do you think you can hold down the fort for me?”

  “Okay,” I said. I hung up and went outside. I tried to imagine living in a city, but I couldn’t think how it would be. My mother had told me that in New York everywhere you looked there were skyscrapers instead of sky.

  That afternoon, a package came from my father with a hundred-dollar bill inside. Take care of your mother, he’d written on the card. Beneath this, there was a telephone number. Call me day or night, every call is free. Love from your Dad (Mr. Science), the note said.

  I wrote down the number in my green notebook. 1-800 SCIENCE. This was the same number they put on the screen at the end of every show. I imagined my father sitting in a room with a bright red phone like the President. And whenever the phone rang, it would be me.

  But as soon as my father left, a funny thing happened. It seemed as if he’d never been there at all. My mother moved a cot into my room and we stayed up all night, watching movies on TV.

  “It’s just the two of us now,” she said. “We’re all alone, my love.”

  In the morning, she took the rest of my father’s things and put them outside on the curb in garbage bags. Afterwards, I wandered through the house looking for traces of him, but there was nothing left to find. Only some shaving cream in the bathroom and a pair of glasses in the den. “December 27: First birds,” my mother said.

  She put on a record and danced around the room with me. Halfway through the song, she stopped and went to the window. She stood looking out for a long time. “Come here, Grace,” she said. “Do you hear someone outside?” Cars sped back and forth through the intersection. The yellow light blinked like a sleepy eye. I stood on a chair and listened. Inside, the traffic’s buzz was a faint wailing sound; it faltered, then cut off. “I think I hear it,” I said. My mother nodded excitedly. “It catches in the trees, don’t you think? Then makes its way over here.” She wiped her hands on the hem of her dress. I pressed my ear to the glass. There was a slight hum in the air. “It sounds like a song,” I said. I waited for something to fly out of the trees. My mother pulled me off the chair and shut the blinds. “A song?” she said. “Why are you always pretending with me?”

  “There are some animals that have no eyes,” my father said. “They live deep at the bottom of the ocean where it is always dark. Even if they had eyes, there would be nothing to see.” He walked across the stage and got into a tiny car. The question girl stepped from behind a curtain and got in with him. When they drove, their feet were the wheels. This made everyone laugh. They pulled their car up to a backdrop painted like the bottom of the sea. There were coral reefs and fish with whiskers and yellow fins. In the far corner was the hammer head of a shark. “Careful,” my father said. He moved a little away from it. The music sputtered on. The question girl stepped into the small circle of light in front of her.

  ARE THERE ANY ANIMALS THAT GLOW IN THE DARK?

  At the bottom of the sea, there are many luminous fish. They glow with a blue chemical light that helps them find each other in the dark. If you tried to dive down to see them, you would die because they live too deep.

  WHAT ELSE?

  There are glowworms and fireflies, but their light is much fainter. You can catch them in a jar and look at them if you wish.

  “He looks like a salesman,” my mother said when she saw him on TV. I liked to turn the dials and hear his voice coming in louder and louder, but my mother liked the volume very low. The best show was the one where he put on a silver space suit and pretended to walk on the moon. He took big slow steps across the moonscape, then turned to wave at the Earth below. His face was hidden behind a mask. A recording explained that, during all moon landings, one astronaut remained in space orbiting the moon. When this astronaut was on the far side of the moon, he was thirty-five hundred miles from the nearest human being. “No one had ever been that far away from other people before,” the voice said, “and no one has ever been since the moon landings ended.” The tape recorder clicked off. My father walked to the edge of the moon in his heavy boots. Behind him, a field of stars sped by. “This is a good one,” my mother said.

  That night, she told me a story about astronauts too. Once, thousands and thousands of years ago, God came to earth disguised as one, she said. His skin was silver and his boots were made of light. He came because all over the world man was starving. The age of ice had come and all the plants and animals were covered with frost. Everything was dying; even the giant cats and reptiles that once ruled the earth had frozen in their tracks. Man too was almost extinct. The few tribes that were left hid in caves, weak with hunger. They lived off melted ice and tiny snow worms. There were fewer than a thousand people left when the astronaut came. These people had survived because they were the strongest and the ones with the most hope. He taught them how to use their hands to make fire and how to plant and cultivate crops. Everywhere he went, he left seeds behind, and in his wake, plants and flowers grew. In this way, agriculture was invented and mankind ceased to be a race of wanderers. This was because men set up camps beside their crops and these camps became villages and these villages cities. And that is how we came to build bridges and towers and roads, my mother said. And that is why we feel homesick when we look at the stars.

  That Sunday, my mother took me to church. We drove across town to the one with the neon cross in front. I liked this church because everyone sang songs and talked back to the minister. Sometimes during the service my mother closed her eyes and waved her hands in the air too. This was a secret I was keeping from my father.

  At the beginning of the service, the minister asked everyone, Who made the world? and they said in one voice: God made the world.

  My father believed that the world was made of dust and ice, I knew. Once he had taken me to a zoo and shown me monkeys who had hands and feet just like mine and carried their babies on their backs. This is where we come from, he said, and once we slept high in the trees and leapt from branch to branch without falling. He told me that the Bible was only one version of a myth people all over the world had told for thousands of years, the story of the first man who walked the Earth and how darkness came to be separated from light.

  There was a puppet show at this church and in it was a doomed dog who did not believe in God and was always angry. A cow, a rabbit, and a pig tried in turn to speak to him of Christ’s love, but he wouldn’t listen. “I don’t believe you,” the angry dog cried. “There is nothing to believe in but the sun and the s
ky.” The dog stood alone on the stage and shook his paw at the small children below him. I sat quietly among them, my hands in my lap. Then the cow, the rabbit, and the pig rose up behind the dog, and suddenly he disappeared and there was only the minister’s naked hand fluttering among the animals.

  “One will be taken and one will be left,” my mother whispered. “Two will be sleeping in a bed and one will disappear.”

  A man came and took the puppet show away. The minister stood at the front of the church with his hands upraised. “I beseech you, Beloved, to love and serve Him all of your days.” His face was flushed. Behind him, the music began. He touched his dog hand to his heart. “Beloved,” he said once more.

  There was a sound from the back of the church and a man came down the aisle carrying a wooden cross on his back. He was a bent-over black man with green eyes that looked like glass. When he reached the altar, he stood in front of the cross with his arms outstretched. The minister spoke in a low voice. He told how Christ had carried the rough cross up the hill, how he had been fitted with a crown of thorns, how he had been nailed to the wood, one nail pounded into each wrist, another in his feet. Each time he talked about the nails, there was the sound from somewhere of a hammer hitting wood. The man on the cross flinched each time he heard this. Dark spots appeared on his wrists and feet. He let out a long cry which seemed to catch in his throat. Then it was over and everyone began to sing about a train.

  On the way home, my mother made me promise not to tell my father about the man who had been hammered. The minister had said that Jesus’ father was a carpenter and this worried me because my father liked to build things too. I asked if Jesus’ father had had to make his cross. “Oh no,” my mother said. “By then, he wasn’t a carpenter anymore.”