by Ben Marcus
“Uh, okay. I’ll have to call you back. I’ll call you back.”
She laughed out loud, but it came out a little bit off, like a shout.
“Good night, Roy,” she said. “Sleep well.” And she hung up.
The apartment was cold and she couldn’t wait to crawl under the covers. “Oh, and by the way,” Helen said to no one, as she readied herself for bed. “You can bleed smoke into a clear skin, no problem.” She laughed softly. It was not as strange as it might have been to be talking out loud to herself. “You’d want to use a large-field polymer, of course. Totally transparent and ridiculously thin. I guess it’s a kind of windowpane balloon, in a way, but its contours can be fixed nonspherically, which gives it any shape you want, including tufts and wisps and whatnot, like a cloud. A sort of scientific version of a balloon animal. Low-tech, really. And what you get is a shape made of smoke with the barest hint of skin—a person, a column, a cloud, anything. You could even make a maze, and fill the walls of the maze with dark black smoke.
“So, yeah,” she whispered, turning out the light in her empty apartment. “That’s how you’d do it, if you were to do it. The physics aren’t an issue. But honestly I’m not sure anymore that that’s the way to go.”
It was late and she was very tired. She could hardly even hear herself, as she started to fall asleep.
“I just can’t honestly say that it’s the right idea for this particular project.”
* * *
—
When Roy returned from St. Louis he didn’t come home. Helen wouldn’t have minded seeing him, to shake hands maybe, to perform some soft footwork that might approximate closure, but Roy had apparently made his decision, and soon some sweethearts from the office came for his things, operating with a list, leaving behind only an old pair of shoes. The transaction was either respectfully nonverbal, Helen thought, or calmly hostile. Was there much of a difference? It was interesting when a set of feelings went so unspoken for so long that they drifted into the unknown. Did they expire or fester? Maybe one day she’d find out.
Construction was under way on the memorial, and the opening wasn’t that far off, but rather than hover in St. Louis and fret, micromanaging the construction of their sorrowful mall, as she’d started to think of it, Helen stayed in Chicago and took walks along the lake. More often than not she ended up in one of the older graveyards of the city. For research, she told herself. Because wasn’t that really all they did anymore, build new graveyards? She had no family dead in these places, no one to mourn. Everyone she grieved these days was unknown to her, which made her grief seem more like self-pity. Was that true of all grief? Who the hell knew. She toured the marked paths and cut across the grass when she could, because that was where you could start to feel something, however fleeting. Sometimes there were woods to traverse and then she’d burst out into a patch of graves on the other side. More dead to consider. Folks who died long before she was born. Cemetery design had not changed in some time. The aesthetic was pretty resilient. Maybe it wasn’t an aesthetic. Just an instinct for shelter. She marveled at the sight lines, at the effortlessly endless rows of dead, each name, each life, hollowed out in space.
Of course it was too late. You couldn’t simply plant grass in St. Louis and design the simplest of headstones. There were too many dead. A technical problem. But a headstone could shrivel into a narrow granite pin, with a name inscribed vertically. Didn’t that solve the issue? Of course it didn’t, because no one even knew what the issue was. And whatever slick and welcoming thing she and Roy built for the plaza, there would still be a graveyard beneath it, the way there is a graveyard beneath everything. It would just take generations of people to find it, clawing down into the earth year after year until they touched stone.
* * *
—
A fog of birds passed over the Eberlee Plaza in St. Louis on the morning the memorial opened.
Helen sat at some distance from the ceremony. Roy had said that she was, of course, expected to be there, and here she was, alone on a bench with a perfect view of what she had wrought.
The birds didn’t go away. They swished and darted and soon struck a steady, gliding orbit over the plaza, a kind of dark and clotted halo, like barbed wire in the air. Had they come for the sweet sedatives that were no doubt pumping into the area from underground cylinders? Would the dosage be too strong for a bird, and was there any concern about this? Was anyone in charge of the most basic shit?
Helen sat, by chance, just across from the long, snaking plywood wall of the missing. The weather over the last two years had done a job on the wall. It was mostly stripped of posters by now. The remaining posters were scarred and wind-bleached and almost impossible to decipher. On a few, the photos had eroded but the text had endured, so there were blank sheets that simply said “Missing,” with a white space below, as if it were the white space itself that had vanished and could no longer be found.
When the ceremony began, she saw Roy. He looked good. Half the size of the large, sweaty men who surrounded him, as if he were a child being herded by giants. He was shaking hands, talking, laughing, and several times, as Helen watched from the bench, she saw Roy applauding vigorously, even though no one, as far as she could see, was speaking or performing. It was just her husband, alone in the square, clapping his hands as hard as he could.
Mostly Helen watched the birds, which seemed bizarrely determined, certain of something that she would never know. There was a theory of bird vision that came to mind: that birds saw the world through a grid, bisected down to the finest detail. Not a mosaic so much as a shattered image, with white tracers boiling in the spaces in between, or so Helen imagined, so that all the bird really saw was a kind of luminescent netting. Aglow or afire or whatever. No need to poeticize it, but still. Sort of hard not to. You didn’t see the mouse, if you were a bird, but a mouse-shaped mesh of light that contained it. She was butchering the science, she knew, but this was the general gist. A kind of shining wire bag we’re all trapped in, which might explain some things, right? Or, Helen thought, deepen the mystery. It was a structural view of space, and it treated objects as an afterthought. Objects described the light, not the other way around. Yes, it was speculative, since, whatever, it posited the sensory experience of a goddamned bird, but it seemed to have been endorsed by some of the more distinguished eggheads from expensive, self-regarding universities. One particular scientist claimed that this bird vision revealed the true, unmediated world, something that we humans couldn’t handle. We humans! Helen thought. Us! Is there anything we can handle? Our desire for sense and order, our sentimental belief that we are not hurtling through space in tiny pieces, has served as a kind of biological propaganda for our visual apparatus, leading to the sentimentalized, so-called whole-world on view in front of us.
In other words, fear, and more fear, and, yeah. Wouldn’t there one day, just by chance, Helen thought, be a little person who came along and didn’t feel afraid? Someone who saw this world of speeding pieces just as it was? Wasn’t that bound to happen, and what on earth, she thought, as she watched everyone walking past her into the mirage, was taking so long?
2
The Boys
It happens. A close relative dies. One who lives elsewhere. And then some time has to be set aside, even if no such thing is possible. Because of work, because of a lack of funds when it comes to traveling. And also because of one’s own dear family at home, a husband and two daughters, who need to be fed and petted and listened to and tolerated. Even just ignoring them or quietly loathing them takes its toll.
In this case the family member was my sister. She was in for a routine surgery, or so I was told. And you have to wonder what surgery is ever routine. As you live your life, you will, on occasion, be cut open and explored. It is what life is, part of the routine. Perhaps we should not be surprised. A knife will slice you open and some wunderkind wearing glove
s will reach into the wound, with corrective fingers, one expects, and grope around. This is what killed my sister. The wunderkind reached too deep, reached the wrong way, the body crashed, and everyone wore black.
My husband brought me flowers. The kids cried, although they hardly knew her. My own reaction was delayed, to this day, really. It may never come, at least not in my lifetime—which doesn’t mean I didn’t love the hell out of her. Of course I did. Of course of course of course. I was her sister and she was mine, always—or so we had said long ago. We’d sort of stopped saying it. We had our own lives to chisel up. In some small way I was stirred to action. I had just been so bored, and now someone had died and I was needed and maybe we’d all be knocked out of our habits into a better, realer world.
I flew out to the so-called mountains where my sister and her husband lived with their children. Two little boys who spent their lives in toy helmets, so far as I could tell. They were not allowed to wear them to bed, but this turned out to be a struggle, a bit of a battleground, and some nights, with a mother newly dead, they won this war with their father and went to bed all suited up, ready to survive a nighttime clobbering. They had a game they played, and it involved sticks—store-bought sticks with lights and triggers on them. The helmets kept their heads safe. Without them they’d have killed each other already. When I was near them I almost felt like I should be wearing one myself. I’d met my nephews before, of course, but they seemed to regard me as an animal they could not ride. What was an aunt even for? What did I mean to them? I supplied presents that suffered too much from an educational vibe, and no goodies, and my fun factor was decidedly low. Where had my fun factor gone? Had I ever had one? Their world must have been filled with people like me: curious beasts lacking in magic, unable to entertain them. Could we be eaten? Could we be killed for pleasure? It seemed they had yet to decide.
I didn’t have boys myself, and I’d like to think that my profound indifference to them had influenced the moment of conception of each of my two girls. It is not that boys were filthy, or brutish, or dumb and unsingular. One might have said that of anyone, of any age, of any gender. It is, as they say, a routine assessment of the human being. It’s just that little boys always seemed terribly expendable, a product of nature that was meant to exist in excess, so it could be endlessly culled by other forces. Boys themselves seem to know this. The so-called death wish is apparent in their behavior, which is often entertaining, but only from a distance. Some creatures have a low survival rate, and so the world produces far too many of them, and as they fight among each other to live they grow more savage, more base, more dull, and the winners, the survivors, are distinctly unappealing little beings. Which isn’t to say that some of them don’t turn out lovely, with smooth, unknowable bodies, and voices of debilitating power, and a kind of broad indifference to remote suffering that allows great historical changes to take place.
The first night, I sat with my sister’s husband. He’d always been a mystery to me, but perhaps no more so than anyone else. He used his moods as weapons, and you kept your distance. I don’t mean that he was angry or aggressive or mean. It was the opposite. He had an alarming level of good cheer, a machine-honed smile, and whenever you saw him you felt overwhelmed by it, rebuked that someone in the world could be so profoundly happy. He wanted to hug and hold you and beam at you. He wanted to shout with joy, even, which was always alarming. What did it say about the rest of us, who moped and shuffled and mumbled and were always on the verge of quiet tears, or had spent so long shielding our emotions from view that the emotions themselves had finally been snuffed out and could not be detected, even by the proprietors themselves? It was like he, Drew, was running for office, even though the government had shut down and no one was voting and very likely the entire world had gone cold and dark. He was running a solitary campaign and there was no one to notice how insanely happy he was.
He was not so happy tonight. We drank wine and talked. I learned a great deal about his relationship with my sister, Sarah. She was the sweetest. She was the best. She did everything. She never complained. But sometimes she could be very quiet, Drew explained. Days without noise, as if she’d lost her voice. Was that so bad? I asked. I mean, we don’t always need to disrupt the room tone, just because we can. Speech is so overused. The language will grow meaningless if we abuse it. Let’s leave words alone so they won’t erode. Maybe it’s already too late.
“You’re not quiet,” he said. “You never had that problem.”
Drew looked at me long and steady. This was the most we’d ever talked to each other since he started dating Sarah. We poured more wine. One of the boys came down, rubbing his eyes. He stood next to me and grabbed my arm, tugged at it, his thumb in his mouth perhaps to keep himself from shouting obscenities. I resisted, without wanting to provoke him, but I wasn’t prepared to be dragged out of my chair by this young beast, so I held my ground. Drew laughed, in his hearty, amplified way. A widower for five days and he sure had his chuckle back. “I think you have a friend,” he said.
Not that I know of, I thought.
“I think he wants you to go tuck him in.”
The boy looked up at me, wondering, perhaps, just what kind of toy I was. Could I be kicked from the window and would I still love him? I didn’t know the answer myself.
“Tuck you in? Well, that I can do,” I said, and I took careful note of the level of wine still left in the bottle. I wasn’t sure how deep Drew’s stores were, and something in me wanted to fight for my share. I’d flown all the way out here and he’d better not hog all the intoxicants while I played mommy to his kid, for Christ’s sake.
* * *
—
Over the next few days I helped Drew with the basics. I got the boys up in the morning, rolled them into their clothing, fed them strange objects from bright, colorful boxes, and ran with them to the school bus stop so I wouldn’t be stuck with them all day. Drew went to work. An office, somewhere, with other people, presumably, and conveyor belts conveying crisp bricks of cash right into the mouths of his bosses. Some of this money must have come out the other end, and been gifted in a satchel back to Drew, because they—well, just he and the boys now—did okay. Nice house and two newish cars and furniture that didn’t look like it also served as a face towel for the young. It was a fine setup all around. They were sure doing better than we were.
I told my husband it would be just a few days. I mean, I left that message on his voice mail. He quickly texted back a thumb, pointing up. To the girls I texted that I missed them, I really did, and that it was so sad out here, sad and hard, but Uncle Drew needed me right now and the boys, the boys. Oh my god you couldn’t even imagine. The girls instantly fed all the right emojis back at me, covering all the possible ways that someone might feel about this.
When Drew came home we cooked dinner, at least for the first few days. The boys ate something Drew kept calling “cantebole.” An Italian dish, I thought at first, and I was impressed. This is how they do it in the mountains. Were the boys ready for their cantebole, Drew would ask them. Did they want a big portion of cantebole tonight, or a small one; warm, or piping hot? It turned out that cantebole simply meant, literally, “can to bowl.” Food that could slide, often in one sucking gelatinous cylinder, from a can right into a bowl. Drew had made up the phrase himself, and he seemed proud. I suppose that not all of us can claim an original contribution to the language. Cantebole looked like little pillows swimming in fake blood, and the blood bubbled and spattered when it came out of the microwave. I’m sure it wasn’t repulsive, and sometimes I longed for a meal that simple. The boys would take their bowls over to the living room, where they sat on pillows and ate by themselves, wearing big, jug-like headphones over their helmets, watching their iPads, trying to spoon their food through their face masks.
“If you spill it, what?” Drew yelled at them during our first dinner together, maybe on my behalf, to
show me how tough he was, how he hadn’t forgotten his obligations as a parent.
When the boys didn’t answer he yelled again. “What happens if you make a spill?”
“You’ll clean it up,” one of the boys said, and the two of them burst out laughing.
“Ha ha,” said Drew. “I’m over here dying. You just killed me. Ha ha.”
I thought that perhaps he should not joke about dying just after their mother, and then there was the issue of his soft, guilt-based parenting style. The permissiveness followed by the false threats. But I cast no stones. Too tiring, first of all. And anyway, sometimes the window is already broken, it’s been broken for a long time, so why would you cast a stone into an empty, ruined house? Save your stones for a better target. One that’s still standing.
* * *
—
Drew liked to drink at night, and he liked to tell stories. One out of two, I guess. I’d survive. I found that his stories required little of me except for a crazed grin now and then. If you occasionally express disbelief and admiration to people, just through your face, you won’t be quizzed on what they are saying and they will gurgle on, engraving their message in the evening air all night long. If only it were a little simpler, though, and you could just flick a lighter and hold it up every now and then to keep the sounds coming.
I took over the kids’ bedtime. Drew felt that he sometimes couldn’t face the boys, didn’t know what to say. Sarah had done a lot of this, and when he stepped in, it made him think of her, and he got sad. He’d lose track of what he was doing and the boys would notice and then they would get sad, too. I didn’t really mind doing it. I needed a project, and it was like being a custodian for two hyper, slightly forlorn animals who’d forgotten precisely how to behave in the wild. I got the little guys on a tight schedule, and they knew not to try the helmet business with me, because I made up a story involving sleep and floods and helmets and drowning and lots and lots of dead people, and this seemed to momentarily convince them to keep their heads uncovered at night—strictly to survive. When the boys were brushed and bundled into their pajamas, their hair still wet from the bath, I tucked them in and dove between them on their big, shared bed.
