by Ben Marcus
* * *
—
It was getting late, and Ida probably knew better, but she had to try.
“I saw Mom yesterday,” she said.
“I’ve seen her before.”
“Well, I saw her yesterday. You know, when people matter to us we see them more than once. We make a regular habit of it.”
“I kicked the habit.”
“She’s doing well.”
“She always does well. That’s her specialty.”
“Well, but she hasn’t always. She’s been sick, she’s had some struggles.”
“You mean something didn’t go your mother’s way? Boy, I’d have loved to see that. What a spectacle. What a rarity. Woman fails to get her own way. World collapses.”
“I think illness is in a sort of different category.”
Her father didn’t respond for a long time.
“Illness is the only category,” he finally said.
It had gotten dark out. Her father didn’t like the overhead lights, so Ida had given him a little lamp, but she didn’t see it now. Whatever she brought in, a lamp, a radio, a vase of flowers, it was always gone when she returned. She used to leave some money in his drawer for outings, in case he wanted something, a piece of candy, a soda, but he would give it away or forget about it and then it too was gone. Only his clothes remained. His sweater, his robe, his pajamas. She had tried to replace the pajamas once but he had grown surly when he put on the new ones. He tore at himself and yelled, accusing her of trying to strangle him. He insisted that she get rid of them.
She tried to speak to the nurses. She knew they were overworked, exhausted, poorly paid, and that they had families of their own. She understood that. But when she asked them if there was something to be done, even if she paid extra, so that what she brought her father, even just the chocolates she knew he liked, might not vanish so quickly from his room, what they told her was that if she, Ida, were around more, if she visited more often, that sort of stuff was less likely to happen. You’re never here, they said to her. We never see you. Who knows what goes on in there?
* * *
—
Something seemed wrong with the picture on the TV in her father’s room. There were numbers unlike any Ida had seen before—so much prettier than the old ones. They floated over a young man’s face and formed a beautiful pattern: a flower, a galaxy. Was that Donny? The sound was down low, or her father’s room simply drank in speech until only a foreign garble swirled around, but when the man spoke the numbers seemed to pulse, to breathe.
She’d fallen asleep again. Oh, god. Who knew how late it was and she was afraid to check her phone. Because of calls and texts she didn’t want to receive, and actual human hands that would grab her and pull her down deep into the mud. Quietly she gathered her things, kissed her father’s forehead, and crept from the room.
“You don’t say good night?” asked her father. He was wide awake and he sounded cross.
“Good night, Dad,” she whispered. “I gave you a kiss.”
“I know that. I’m right here. I was here when you did it. I’m the person you kissed.”
“Okay. Okay.” She was whispering, even though there were loud voices in the hall, in the other rooms. No one anywhere was much trying to keep it down, despite the late hour. “I will see you soon.”
“When, honey?”
“Whenever you want, Dad.”
“Well, tomorrow works for me. Tomorrow and the next day. I’m free.”
“Okay, I think I can do that.” She had meetings upon meetings upon meetings for the rest of her life. Her calendar was dark with obligation.
She returned to his bed and gave his hand a squeeze, then leaned down to drop another light kiss on his forehead.
“A second kiss?” said her father. “I’m not sure that was warranted.”
And as Ida drove home, winding through the empty city streets out across the old highway and into the hills where she lived, she couldn’t help but think that her father might be right.
* * *
—
Sometimes Ida would forget, and she would appear at the office on Sundays, her face strangely delicate on her head, a visitor to her body. She would stare through the glass at the vast lobby of Thompson. The doors to work were locked on the weekends, of course, and after standing there a while, the intruder alert, which certainly went by a blander name, shot a jolt of current into Ida’s legs, sweetening them with pain, and she backed away onto the sidewalk.
If there was a movie playing, Ida bathed in it, alone in the back of the theater. The movies these days were troubling. Children go searching for parents, lost in the snow, and do not find them. A boat’s faulty navigation system leads it to an island not on any maps. The island turns out to be, well, everyone knew how these things went. A terrible place. A really unimaginably terrible place.
Here it was, summer, but something was off. In the air, on the faces of people. Just wherever you looked. The city of Chicago, if you could still call it that, was quiet on the weekend, pretty gusts of powder blowing around buildings, unmanned sweeper trucks docked in their charging pads. The restaurants were mostly open, but without too many other customers Ida felt odd bothering the staff.
Today she braved a diner, and sat and ate alone. She had a dark soup and some toast, and she listened to the prettiest piano music from the restaurant’s little speaker. Music from under water, from another world. Or maybe just from the next room. But when it came time to pay she couldn’t find her server, and no one answered when she politely whispered into the kitchen. She called out Hello, hello, until it started to sound strange. She peeked into the kitchen and found no one. The diner had emptied out and it was getting dark. Maybe they’d all gone home and forgotten to charge her, forgotten to lock up. That was a lot of forgetting. It was possible, maybe, but it didn’t feel right. She never carried very much cash, so she crept out as apologetically as she could, thinking that she should write a note, or that she might come back. Before leaving she turned to face the kitchen, in case there was a surveillance camera. She shrugged and made a series of gestures that, she hoped, might tell the whole story here, if that were even possible. She wanted to pay, she really did, but there was no one left to pay, and she had no money, and everyone seemingly everywhere had vanished.
For most of the night she walked the city, until that magic hour when the streetlights are given a rest, and the early risers are not yet chewing up space on their way to the great, savage feed. A text came in from Mort—up really early, or maybe, like her, having not yet gone to sleep. He’d been texting her a lot, and now he wanted to come over. He kept referring to a rematch. “I have finished my training,” he wrote, “if it pleases Madame.”
It sort of didn’t please Madame right now. Not really. She sent back a few little emojis, indicating that she was tired and busy, and she threw some other ones in that might make him feel better, some warm and bright little animals, smiling from ear to ear with wet human mouths.
Mort wrote back that he understood, and Ida figured that that was true. That was what was so wonderful about him. Mort probably understood far better than she did.
* * *
—
When June came there was a summer party at work, which meant that gray-faced cubicle worms tried to straighten their backs and stand at the punch bowl without crumbling into powder. The parents among the workforce clustered together, no doubt checking the coarseness of each other’s hair shirts. Ida suddenly found herself inside their crop circle.
They were young, still in their twenties, if barely, but their prison was real and gleaming, and even though they sang pretty songs from within, generally you knew to steer wide, clear, and away, tying yourself to a mast if need be. They were afraid to be alone. They wanted reinforcements.
People with kids tended to look at Ida wit
h a mixture of envy and derision, which wasn’t so different from how she looked at herself. Right now one of them had singled her out. “I say this as a friend, as someone who just, like, completely loves you, I mean just as you are. You are amazing. Really. But you are nothing without kids. I’m sorry, it’s true. I’m so sorry!”
“Hear, hear,” a few of them said. “Well put.”
“I wish,” said Ida. “Nothing still seems like a long way off.”
She looked down at her hands, made little fists, held up her fingers as if she’d never seen them before. Hadn’t one of the big-time philosophers thrown himself from a window in order to prove that he existed?
“I don’t know. I look at pictures of myself from before,” said one of the parents, “and those pictures look, like, fake. Like they’ve been Photoshopped? I mean, who was that person? I am fairly certain that in most important ways I didn’t really exist back then.”
And now? Ida wanted to ask, looking at this smiling, tired bag of sauce in front of her. You’re sure you exist now?
“Well,” said Ida, trying to detach from orbit and find a childless friend elsewhere, someone to perhaps eat big, scary drugs with, “I do look forward to it some day. A child, wow. I know it would be, it might. I know that I.” Ida pictured herself cramming bread into a grown man’s mouth, or bathing an aging, unconscious wolf, waking up to terrible shouts. Parenthood?
They were smiling and nodding at her, showing teeth and possibly looking to pounce. “You will,” they said. “It does. We know. They just absolutely do. It is not at all, and it just isn’t and it isn’t and it isn’t. We fucking swear to you.”
Later in the party her phone buzzed, and she got a text from Donny.
The text read, “Do unto others, as much as you can. Just keep doing and doing and doing, until they can’t breathe. Until they stop moving.”
“Okay,” she wrote back. It didn’t sound so bad. “Where are you? Please help.”
He texted back: “The call is coming from inside the house.”
She stood on her toes, scanned the room, surveying and dismissing one disappointing face after another, but no Donny. It surprised her how much she wanted to see him. She checked room after room, but nothing, and as she started to leave, not so happy with this game, Maury barreled up, pawing some undertouched parts of her, drunk as fuck.
“Jesus, Maury, please. You’re totally groping me.”
“I know, Ida. I know I am!” He smiled in a way that wasn’t so endearing. It kind of creeped her out.
“Okay, well, stop it. Stop it. Stop it. It doesn’t feel good.”
Her voice surprised her.
“I did something terrible, Ida. I must confess.”
Must you, though? she thought. She really didn’t need to know whatever crummy deviance he’d allowed himself. Wasn’t there a service that absorbed your dirty secrets for a fee? She’d pay, for god’s sake. Did you have to test a friendship with such material?
For some reason he held up his phone. “I pretended to be someone else. I couldn’t help it. That was me, just now.”
She wanted to say, who else would it have been, when she figured out what he was trying to tell her. And then, as she was pulling herself away from him, she felt something tickle in her throat and suddenly it was too late. The pill slipped from her mouth and landed on the carpet between them, like a lost piece of bone.
“Oh my god,” she said.
Maury just blinked at her.
She grabbed the thing and made her excuses and got out of there. Fuck him, anyway. If he hadn’t been harassing her she wouldn’t have coughed the stupid thing up.
* * *
—
Ida was tired in some new kind of way. Cooked and done and smeared all over the road. She almost slept in her clothes. She couldn’t bear getting undressed. Her teeth and face would have to wait. She would clean them in the morning. So much washing would just happen another time, and everything would be fine. Jesus. Like a four-month bath. A retreat to an underwater cave. A vow of silence, a blood transfusion, followed by a four-year sleep. She opened a window, hoping to hear something, a bird, a siren, voices. Too much room tone in her own house, room tone that could just kill a girl. But nothing was out there. It was a perfectly quiet night.
Her phone buzzed as she crawled into bed. Another text from “Donny.”
“Mine comes out sometimes too,” the text read. “Smiley face. (Sorry, I don’t know how to make emoji symbols!)”
“Oh. Thank you. Is this Maury?”
“Hi. I’m sorry I lied. And I felt so bad when your pill came up. I hate that! Sometimes after I oil my pill I dip it in sand. I know that sounds weird. But it works! What kind of oil do you use?”
Ida snuggled into bed. It was a lot more pleasant dealing with Maury this way, or at least it wasn’t repulsive. The bar had gotten lower. “Sometimes when I cough one up,” wrote Ida, “I wonder if it’s that day’s pill, or one from before.”
“Oh my god, I have wondered that too.”
“Have you ever thought of marking the pills before you swallow them?”
“No I have not!”
“Then you could know.”
“That’s true,” wrote Maury. “You would definitely know. Tag those little guys. Name them. That way you would never lose track. I would hate to lose one. I think I would feel sad.”
* * *
—
Summer burned out early and a little bit of icy wind curled over the city. Ida was breathing into her hands before too long, dragging herself from work to home, work to home. She saw her parents when she could, and if they didn’t always see her, at least they felt her next to them. Or they felt someone, a body, a person, who spoke and touched them and smiled when she could.
It wasn’t a romance that started with Donny, so much as a cluster of unrelated encounters after work, usually close to silent, in which it became easier and easier to meld her body with his. Donny was lithe and graceful and so endlessly mysterious, which maybe only meant that she no longer knew what to think of anyone. He hardly spoke and they didn’t laugh together and she felt no need to reveal herself to him. But his silence made her feel good and safe, and she looked for him, more often than not, to mute some larger ruckus that seemed to be stalking her no matter where she went. She worried that when she undressed him she’d find, instead of the usual gray meat that made up a man, a small golden animal in place of his groin, or a fairy, or just some moss. In all the best ways he didn’t seem human.
“I’m not someone you want to be investing any feeling in,” he told her one day, with the brightest possible smile. “Try to look right through me. There’s someone behind me and he’s coming for you, I’m sure. I’m just in the way.”
“Okay, Donny,” she said. “I appreciate the advice.” It’s as if you’re already not here, she didn’t say. It’s as if I imagined you.
“Ida,” he said.
“Yes?” She looked at his clean, young face.
“For now, there’s nothing better than this.”
He crawled on top of her and she could feel him breathing. He was so light, so thin, so small, no more than the weight of an extra blanket or two, really.
For now, for today, for this very minute, it was certainly okay, she thought. It would do.
* * *
—
It was October, her father’s birthday, and she showed up on a Saturday afternoon with chocolates, the ones littered with the kind of salt that looked like shards of glass. She brought flowers for his night table, and new clothing, too, but she didn’t show it to him. It could wait in his closet, and if it vanished maybe that wasn’t so bad, as long as it ended up somewhere, covering someone, keeping them warm or dry or cozy.
“I always thought that if I worked in a think tank, I would drown,” her father said, sucking on a cho
colate.
“Yes, well. That is a danger, Dad.”
“You think I don’t know what you do.”
“I don’t think that.”
“Yes you do. You think I don’t know and you think you can’t talk about it and you think I won’t understand. Don’t insult me. I’m not an idiot.”
“No, Dad, I know that.”
“You think I’ve already died. You visit me here like you’re visiting my grave. You come to sit at my grave. You even bring flowers. But here I am. Look. I’m right here.”
Her father was a beautiful man, really. Tall and fine-featured and still elegant in his nursing home bed.
“I see you. I’m very happy you’re alive.”
“This isn’t a grave, it’s a bed. There’s a window. No one has a window in their coffin. No one can look out their window at a parking lot or a hill. No one has sheets and a pillow in their coffin. You don’t get to sit up and eat a sandwich.”
“I know that.”
“Do you see a tombstone in here?”
“No.”
“Feel free to look. I’m not hiding anything. Take a look around.”
“I don’t need to, Dad. I believe you.”
“Think tank.”
“I know.”
“You don’t work at a think tank.”
“You might be right, Dad. Sometimes even I don’t know what I do. They don’t always tell us what things are for.”
“No one will ever tell you what something is for. For Christ’s sake. We don’t get that information. Don’t expect that.”
“I guess I shouldn’t. But I spend my life there. It’s okay if you don’t know. You don’t work there. But what about me? Shouldn’t I know?”
“What about you? Don’t start to get sad. That’s not what this is about, being sad. Your sadness isn’t the issue here, Ida. That’s a distraction. Don’t change the subject.”
