To be Kurt’s emotional … support?
To care. You are required to care for Kurt.
I do care.
You haven’t even so much as sent him a text in three days, Mary. How is that caring?
I thought you told me—
So it’s my fault? Is that it? It’s my fault that you don’t care?
That’s not—
Listen, we need you to get here as quickly as possible. Can you do that for me?
I can fly back tomorrow.
Tomorrow. Well. I suppose that will do—and he hung up.
Clara was gone when I came back in. The same nurse at the front desk looked up as if she’d never seen me before, as if we had to start all over.
Can I help you?
Mrs. Parsons—she was just here a minute ago.
I think you ought to come back some other day. She’s not in such a good way for company.
In the car again I knew where I needed to go and I knew the rigid woman couldn’t guide me there, that I would have to drive from memory.
Three
The rifle clicked before I could see him, but I knew he wouldn’t shoot. He walked onto the shadow-dappled porch, holding the barrel in line with my heart. It was all for show—that one never had bullets in it, had been broken for years. It was just part of his tactic for hikers that had drifted off course, clicking the rifle, thickening his accent to tell them this was private property, though I knew he didn’t even believe in property, just privacy.
I stood silent beside the car. The wind didn’t move and I didn’t move and I couldn’t hear any birds, not even the faint cluck from the chicken coop behind the house.
When he recognized me, his face became my father’s face again and I noticed how his skin hung looser, hair grayer, beard wild. He lowered the rifle slowly, as if we both had one. Here was my father at the end of all the years we’d lost.
Well, he said.
He set the gun on the porch and sat on one of the stairs. I started to say something but my jaw clicked when I opened it and my throat resisted, became achy—every greeting was too casual, asking for Mom too childish, observations all futile, his name too heavy. Why hadn’t I considered this, considered how I’d have to say something?
It happened, he said. His beard had grown patchy, worn down in some places and wild in others. I didn’t think that’s how it would …
His voice was strangely soft and airy.
What happened?
He went to the other side of the porch, touched Mom’s rocking chair.
Right here. She started praying out loud and you know she never prayed out loud, didn’t like the spectacle of it. She said the Lord’s Prayer, then she said it backward. He smiled in that fearful way people smile when they should not smile. Her mind worked like that sometimes, worked backward for those last couple weeks. I went out to the sycamore and dug a hole like we said we would, picked her up and carried her there. And that was it.
No, I thought, and I may have said it. He wasn’t speaking like a man who had buried his wife and I didn’t feel like a daughter who had lost her mother. This wasn’t right. Something wasn’t here.
This was never the plan, he said, I think, because as he spoke, I fell over, fainting with open eyes. I lay there awhile. Merle stood over me.
You’re fine, he said.
My right arm was skinned up and I had dirt and little bits of bark in my mouth. I washed up in the kitchen with the same deer-tallow soap I remembered from forever ago. We said nothing for a while, then he said something about a tumor, some kind of herb she used on it, all the prayers they said and now she’d been dead almost a year. My lungs sank lower in my body, the air in them immovable.
Merle and I sat at that wooden table and I knew then that all he ever wanted was a life that made sense, a life with reasons. He wanted a reason for why he had to watch her cut that tumor from her own breast since he’d been unable to do so, had trembled too much with the scalpel, and there had to be a reason that he had cried as she just grimaced when she poured the tincture into the gaping hole in her body, then burned the wound shut.
At the end she asked for you, he said, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t feel anything but the absence of what I thought I should feel. I wondered how the Research Division would have measured this moment, what it might have proved about me.
I had the urge to report this death to someone, to fill out a government form or stand in a line. I would have taken any kind of ritual, even just a document that explained what had happened. Something to say, I’m here. She’s dead. It’s over. I realize this.
You didn’t tell anyone, I said.
Who’s there to tell?
Clara.
She’s as good as dead herself, he said unsoftly, looking up at the rafters. I hated his ambivalent God, his belief in a plan so infallible that it could tamp out mourning, explained all pains away as part of God’s will and therefore not painful, but divine.
Clara is still alive, I said, unable to keep my anger from filling the words. She was her sister, and you owe it to her—
You don’t know Clara as well as you think you do. She was always against me, against our marriage. And after Tom was gone she just—she was unbearable, always trying to argue with your mother … She had ideas about me that wouldn’t change no matter what I did and once you stopped coming down here, she wouldn’t even talk to us anymore. She never gave me a chance. She never did.
She was still family.
You were family, too.
I had nothing to say, nothing to tell him.
I didn’t ask for this, he said. I never asked to be alone like this. There was supposed to be a family, more children. No one was supposed to be alone—we didn’t plan for that. But you were all God gave us. And you left and Florence— But he didn’t finish this sentence, covered his face, and crumpled.
Excuse me, he said a moment later, numb, I don’t know what’s gotten into me.
I knew his raging rhetoric, his silence, his contentment, even his flashes of gratefulness—but I had never seen his sorrow. I wondered if he knew about how, in the real world, sometimes two sad people cry together and the person who is crying a little less grips the person who is crying more, holds them still until their crying lessens and their body releases, lets go of something, then they bend away from each other but keep their arms around each other and they let their eyes meet and one of them will make this tiny hurt smile. Maybe, I thought, we could try to do that.
Everyone is tricking themselves. He shook his head, his eyes drying. We try to make time easier here, in this creation, and it took my whole life for me to realize it … but I don’t understand God. All I have is faith.
I waited for a while, then asked, What am I supposed to do? I mean about you, out here.
I’m fine. I’ll go to God someday. I’ll go lie under that sycamore and wait for it.
I couldn’t say anything to this, couldn’t tell him he wouldn’t, because I knew he would.
You could call me sometime, at least.
To say what?
I looked past him, above him, anywhere but his eyes, those eyes the same size and color as mine, whether I wanted it or not, just like mine.
I don’t know why she went like that, why we had a daughter who lost her faith or maybe never had it. But all I have left is faith. This was the life God chose for me. I pray. I write. I wait for the end. That’s all there is for me.
I left soon after that.
In my motel room I drank glasses of tap water until I was sick and sat on the bathroom floor, waiting as this slow grief reached me. Eventually I turned on the television to bring a voice into the room, to leave this room without leaving it, but the screen just showed Kurt and me with the black bag over my head. I turned the television off.
I found the motel Bible and put it on the bed, watched it as if it might do something, might move or speak, and eventually I did open it, found some verses I used to love, and as I read them, I h
eard the words in her voice, calm and soft, natural as birdsong. Had she believed it all? Did she ever hear these verses in my voice? Did she even remember, toward the end, what I sounded like?
I closed the Bible and as I went to put it away, I held it in front of me until my arms ached, waiting for something, it seemed, but all I felt was the weight of an object in my hands.
Four
Unlocking my apartment, I found it was already unlocked.
Kurt was sitting on the blue couch, his arm still in the sling and cast. He was drinking a green juice from his good hand.
You’re back.
Yes.
A small video recorder on a tripod was aimed at me, red light above the lens.
Nice place. Very stark.
How did—
You gave me a key months ago.
We were quiet for a moment and he asked me how my flight was, sounding somehow angry, and I said something and we were quiet again. In this silence it eventually occurred to me I hadn’t shut the door or taken off my backpack—with nowhere to put them I dropped my keys and bag on the floor, shut the door behind me. Finding company when I’d expected to be alone was disproportionately aggravating.
And how was your trip?
I nodded, hardly felt I’d even had one. It was—um. I don’t know if I can … really say.
Interesting, he said, disinterested.
What’s with the camera?
He stood and drained his juice through a straw.
Archival purposes. He walked back to the kitchen. I’ll explain.
I heard him toss the empty bottle in the sink. He reappeared in the living room, told me to have a seat. I did, on the couch. He angled the camera to face me again and stood behind it.
Do you know the first thing I thought of when I woke up on the morning after the Gala?
I nodded no.
You.
I didn’t know how to feel or react to this—the handbook protocols had gone hazy. I thought of how still and silent the forest had been as Merle explained how Florence had died. I thought about having to pull over on the drive back to my airport motel to throw up pure bile onto the passenger seat.
But I didn’t hear from you at all.
I’m sorry, I said, a reflex, though the apology seemed to be for someone else. For Clara or Florence. For Chandra. It was possible I didn’t care for Kurt at all unless I’d been assigned to do so and I don’t know if that makes me a good employee or a bad person or both. I wanted to tell him what had happened in Tennessee, to explain myself, to not have to be the person who had done everything wrong, but I also didn’t want him to ever know. These stories were mine, as personal as my spleen.
I know Matheson was probably very short with you on the phone yesterday. He’s very protective of me. He understands when I am really hurting.
You look all right now.
And you actually don’t look so good.
My mother died.
So did mine. He stared at me through the back of the camera. You told Matheson it was your aunt. Now it’s your mother?
It’s both. My aunt has dementia, I guess, and my mother is just … she’s dead.
He shook his head. We know all about you, Mary. That you’re an orphan, that the woman who adopted you is named Clara Parsons, that she’s been in a retirement home for a while now and you’ve never visited. It’s not that hard to find this stuff. We knew everything the whole time. We just didn’t know you were such a liar.
I sat there, silent, unsure of what I could or should be feeling. I stared into my reflection in the camera lens.
It calls all our data into question. All of it. You’ve ruined so much.
I didn’t care if he thought I was a liar. I didn’t want him to know the truth. It was mine. I was keeping it.
One thing is clear, though—we loved each other. From a scientific perspective, at least—and maybe that’s all that counts. No matter how much you’ve lied, you can’t lie about what the research proves, and you’re the one who has to face the fact that you hurt someone you loved.
To hurt someone you love—what a human activity.
What I had felt for him, I knew, hadn’t been an unfettered love but instead an obligation, a sense of being owned—how sad to think that these feelings might seem like love in the brain, that from the outside the difference couldn’t be seen.
Maybe I should have known better, that studying people this way was too imprecise … He looked down at the back of the video recorder, at the two-dimensional me. You know, I was always very fond of you, even though you were never very good to me.
He stared at me, waiting for a reaction. I gave him none.
What I’m really here to tell you is the project is being reorganized, and we just don’t need you anymore.
The impulse came to disagree, to say he couldn’t send me away. A quick panic—what would I do? What would I even do now? But I said nothing. My mouth opened but nothing came out. I wondered what the Research Division would have measured in me in that moment.
I’ll miss you, he said, to the screen, and I said, I’ll miss you, too, the incantation I’d been taught and trained in. I love you, he said, and I repeated this as well.
He scrutinized the camera, the little me in the camera, maybe looking for evidence of a lie. But it was too late for that. I did not love him or not-love him. There were no conclusions to make. For a long while we were silent, then he repeated both those lines—the I’ll miss you and the I love you—and I repeated my repeats and he did it a third and fourth take until, on the fifth, I broke into tears that belonged somewhere else. Exhausted crying, a back stock of crying. He waited until I stopped, uncovered my face, and looked up at him. He stared at me, stared through me. I glanced at the lens. He adjusted something on the camera, then turned it off, began collapsing the tripod with his one good arm as if he had done this every day of his life.
You will still receive your full salary and benefits for a year as long as you give no interviews, anonymous or otherwise. After a year you will receive half salary and no benefits, assuming you are still able to stay away from the media and uphold the stipulations of your NDA. I should also remind you that all the contracts you’ve signed are still legally binding and in effect. And if you violate them in any way, I assure you we will know about it.
He moved toward the door, stopping short of it, barely turning to speak over his shoulder. And should anything arise that you find surprising, have a look at your contracts before attempting to contact us.
Then he was gone. I walked to the window in the kitchen and watched him from above as he left the building and got into a waiting car. And as he did, I saw Ashley dart across the street, screaming, beating on his window, trying to open the door, running after the car as it peeled away.
I wondered what could have happened between them that would make her need him this badly, but I suppose you can never tell what is happening between people. It’s as private as eye contact, no room for more than two.
Five
Ed called that afternoon, wanted to know how I was doing.
Okay, I said.
He said my aura had transmitted a message to him and I didn’t care if he was lying or delusional or honest or enlightened, and I didn’t care if PAKing was full of shit or not—I wanted the comfort of someone in my life being calm and sure. Certain about something I couldn’t see. Or maybe I just wanted the comfort of someone being in my life at all.
I asked if I could come back and he said he had room the next morning, and this is how my life went full circle, as it seems life will do, and there I was with Ed again, being stretched and pushed and pinched. I told him everything this time, and I wondered what had stopped me before, why I believed that silence could protect me from anything.
Something settled, something changed in you, he said. You know something.
I don’t know anything.
He nodded and we were quiet for a long time.
That’s something, he said
eventually, but I’m not so sure.
After our session I asked if he’d heard from Chandra.
Yesterday, in fact.
I waited for him to tell me where she was, how she was, anything, everything. I felt every pound of bone within me.
She’s okay. She can’t talk to you, but she’s okay.
Where is she?
With his head bowed he said, It would be better for you not to know yet.
We were quiet for a while. I didn’t know where to look. I felt the same scattered feeling I’d had when Chandra played that moan-y little flute.
Chandra is the sort of person who sits very close to the light. This culture doesn’t have an understanding of people like her. They’re taken advantage of or diagnosed, explained away, but with her it’s not so simple. She is awake to realms other people are too afraid to see, but she also … well, she sometimes goes into the light so deeply she can’t find her way out. We must believe there are better ways of being, ways of getting better. This is the faith we have to have in healing. But no matter how much we want it, nothing is ever fixed or final.
We sat in silence a while after that until he put his hand on my shoulder and looked at me in such a way that I knew he was telling me that our work was done for good this time, that perhaps we would never see each other again, that he, too, was leaving me here, leaving me with my not-knowing. He moved his hand to my head, thumb between the eyes, and what had been our time together became a thing we had done instead of something we were doing.
I left. I knew it was time. We didn’t say goodbye. I just got up and left.
* * *
I took a long, roaming route home, my direction feeling inevitable, the city somehow silent around me. Who were all these people and why did they wake up each morning? Did any of them feel what they needed to feel? Did any of them have anyone in their life that meant everything and if so, how did they know? And how did they bear it?
I realized on some narrow street somewhere that I had been shaking, that my legs could no longer carry me, so I leaned back into a wall and fell to the sidewalk, crumpled there, achy and sweating. My ending with Ed became my ending with everyone, with Paul, Chandra, Kurt, Florence and Clara and Merle. I had nothing but myself and I knew that was true for everyone, that we all had to live like this. In our bodies, in the world, a boundary always between them. I felt the shaking lessen, then end. I felt myself breathe. I felt still. I felt.
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