The Age of Perpetual Light

by Josh Weil

  Then I am there, our daughter screaming somewhere behind me, Bess holding her, and in front of me only the bear. The gleam of its lips, the wetness of its nose, the flecks of snow like spittle stuck in its muzzle hairs. I can see its breath, sense the nostrils flaring behind the steam, feel in its eyes—too dark, too small, too buried in the blackness of too huge a head for me to make them out—its fear. Its confusion. Or maybe that is my own. Because the world is coming back around the bear, the snow and the woods and the nearly nighttime sky, and I realize its shape is receding, though it takes me another second to understand that means it’s backing away. Another few steps and it turns—how huge its shoulders, how beautiful the rippling fur like water over a boulder in a creek—and leaps the stone wall, crashes into the pines, disappears.

  It’s only then that I can look behind me. Already Bess is halfway up the hill. Orly in her arms. My wife’s back, her thin shirt: she hadn’t even put on a jacket. Above her shoulder there is the pale spot of our daughter’s face. Below, something I think at first must be a flash of snow kicked up by Bess’s boots. But it is her flesh, her feet. She’s barefoot. Something about that makes me want to cry.

  What is it about a sick animal? What is it in us that can sense it? That knows when something has come uncoupled from its nature, gone somehow wrong? When I turn back to the woods, night is waiting beneath the trees, too dark to see what might be watching back. But I can feel it. I can feel its stare.

  These are things that I have done: forgotten to buckle her into her car seat, left her alone in the bath, let her get between the hooves of our nanny goat and suckle from the unwashed teat. Last summer solstice I jumped the Kupala fire with our daughter in my arms. Bess used to jump the flames with me, our hands locked to bless the strength of our bond. Where was she then, when, crouching in that crackling light, I urged Orly to attempt the leap herself? Or when, a month ago, I stood at the edge of Howland Pond, watching our girl, her mouth-wet blond hair brittle from cold, her four-year-old face furrowed with focus, go farther and farther onto the ice? It was a cold day, our first true feel of winter, and the pond was singing. That has always been one of Bess’s favorite things—the low booms and long echoing cries ice makes when it is freezing—and I stood there listening, wishing she was with me, while Orly wandered out beyond the shoreside ice, towards the crying coming from the ever thinner center.

  I can only imagine what it sounded like to her. There is no way for me to know. Our Orly hears things differently. We knew this from the start. I think it was what made Bess want her: four thousand miles from our home, in a Far North orphanage filled with the strange sounds of a language neither of us understood, Bess cooed a note and the six-month-old in her arms gurgled the same note back. Bess sang another; the baby replied, perfectly on pitch. Now they spend whole afternoons, Bess with her flute, Orly singing along. A free-form warbling, a swooping through the house, her small feet thumping time around and around the living room rug, her body a loose-flopping ungainly thing, but her singing beautiful. Magical. No matter what my wife plays, Orly matches it, mates it with a wholly intuited harmony, makes something so spectacular that, even after all this time, I can’t help but stop, leave whatever task aside, shut my eyes.

  And there are times I have walked in on our four-year-old and found her alone humming a single note. One long note, broken only for breath. It was Bess who figured it out: our daughter imitating the refrigerator, or the fan, or the washing machine downstairs, turning their tones into a chord. The way the whistles of a kettle, or a spatula scraping a pan, must, in her ears, become something else. She pounds her little fists against her head, pulls at her hair, runs from me, screeching, leaving me standing with the shopping cart on its offending wheels, or in the blinking lights of some construction vehicle backing up, struggling against my own urge to shout. If I do, it doesn’t matter, anyway. She doesn’t understand angry. She doesn’t recognize relief, or pain, or joy, or me, or Bess, or anyone. How can she without empathy? Oh, she feels things. She knows us. But she won’t ever understand us, who we are, beyond the woman she calls Mom, the man she comprehends as Dad. Which I am not. That is something I can’t feel, hard as I’ve tried.

  When we first brought her home I would try to make her smile. I’d make the faces I always did with other kids—the children of couples who always said you’d be so great and got such a way—and she wouldn’t even watch. I’d try pointing out things that made me smile; she seemed unaware of what my finger, my eyes, my eager face might mean. Honey, Bess says, you just have to find your way of connecting to her, her ways of connecting to you. But how can I when she won’t so much as wave good-bye? Or say hello? Or, on some days, even answer to her name?

  Even now there are days when Orly hardly says a word. There are days when it seems all she does is scream. And hit. I have seen her beat at another child so hard she dislocated her own wrist. I have seen her bite her mother, witnessed Bess’s bleeding neck, ear, lip, scratches on her eyelid that made my fingers shake too badly to unpeel the Band-Aid. Last year, when Bess’s mother died, our daughter sat there singing, singing to her heart’s content, as if my wife’s heart wasn’t broken, as if the child’s own mother wasn’t weeping while she held her.

  But God she’s beautiful. Even more than her long blond hair, fine as if spun from sunlight, more than her small face pale and heart shaped as a barn owl’s, more than the Bering Sea blue of her eyes, it is her expression, the seeming serenity of her very detachment, the sense of something that can’t quite be grasped. True too: she doesn’t like to be touched, won’t let me hug her. Though Bess has found a way, can stand perfectly still, arms by her sides, and through some connection that they’ve made communicate to Orly that she’s available for hugging, and it is, yes, a beautiful thing to see the girl approach, tentatively extend her arms, wrap them around my barely breathing wife, squeeze ever so softly. Each day, Bess says, I understand her a little more. She says Orly understands her, too, in ways she never knew she could be understood. She says one day our daughter could become a brilliant composer, a prodigy on any instrument, one of the many with her condition who find in it a singular unmatchable grace. That may be true. But what I do not tell Bess is that I am not worried about what our daughter might grow to be. She never will grow up, won’t ever live away from home, won’t, for all her life or all the rest of ours, get through a single day without some help from us. No, I would like to tell my wife, I am not worried about what will happen to her.

  The day after the bear, I find its prints. The sun is splintering through the trees, painting the forest floor in streaks, and they are there, in the snow, sunk deep. Earlier, I’d come in from the goats and found Bess stirring oatmeal on the stove. Usually, I fix Orly’s breakfast, but Bess took the fresh milk from me, said she’d pasteurize it herself. And after, when I started to take our daughter to feed the hog—one of the few pleasures Orly and I share—Bess held her back with a strange seriousness, her face stricken as if she’d suddenly seen the sow as some new threat.

  But she was staring at me. Sometimes, stepping into the truck, or triggering the security light outside our home, I catch my reflection in the rearview mirror, the glass pane of the storm door, and see that same stare back. Last time I trimmed my beard, I could not quit thinking how strange: that hair grew from my cheeks, around my mouth, as if my face wanted itself to disappear. And how is that different from any man’s? How, enlarged by Bess’s makeup mirror, could it look so inhuman: hairs creeping from my pores, skin swallowed by its own pelt. I pressed it with the scissors’ tip. Soft buckling, a bead of red. I touched my fingers to the cut, then to my tongue. That metallic tang: same as anybody else’s blood. Except mine is in me. I have tried to find it—this thing that must have lurked since long before Orly, since I was small as her—but had I ever harmed a single kid who came through my grandmother’s home? Of all the hundreds in all the afternoons of helping with her day care? Had I ever even raised my voice? Let alone a fist against anoth
er? Never. Not a fight. Not even one. Not even when, grown far too big for whipping, I’d still be sent out to the yard, forced to fetch a bamboo switch to replace the one my grandfather’s beatings had begun to fray. Which I know is no defense for this. Nor is the fact that I had few friends, that before Bess I’d never had anything that felt worth keeping. Now, most days, I keep to myself, spend from dark to dark in silence, working alone on land my wife and I once worked side by side. Most nights I offer her a break from Orly, or do the dishes beneath the sounds of them upstairs, wait for the half hour we might have together if Bess doesn’t fall asleep putting Orly to bed. Maybe in the morning I’ll wake beside her before our daughter starts calling for her mother; maybe my wife will kiss me when I come in from letting the animals out; maybe for a few moments then we’ll talk of something other than Orly before I start the hours of my own sounds amid the silence that has become my life.

  Though it is the sense of something else out there that brings me back. The unwatched woods, the emptiness between the trees: I look up from the paw print searching for the bear. Holding the heavy chain saw, I scan the shadows. As if I might sense it, hear a sound other than my own breathing. As if it, watching back, might recall my sound, recognize my scent, know me.

  But once in the woodlot there is so much to do—this year’s cords all sold, next fall’s still needing cutting, splitting, setting aside to season—that it drives away everything but work. These are the weeks of darkness spreading sudden and fast. The day is there, then done. It’s almost night by the time I shut the saw off, make my way out of the woods. The goats bang at the shed door as I pass, the chickens quiet in the coop. Home, I can hear Bess putting Orly in the bath. In the skillet: what’s left of a supper they’ve already eaten, the iron handle still hot.

  Normally this is when we’re closest, this season of long nights and late mornings, a few more moments managed together beneath warm covers, small celebrations we make together with each last turn of the Wheel of the Year. When we were young, still giddy with our newness, our shared escape from PhDs and years of folklore studies into this place where we could find our own fable, what had grown between us had seemed so wondrous it was almost overwhelming. We’d turned to the ways others had long tried to fathom the mysteries of their lives. Each Wren Day, we would stuff our jackets full of straw, dangle a chicken from a pole, drive door to door handing out plucked feathers to perplexed neighbors, as if to share with them a little of our luck. Home, we’d strip, light candles around the bathtub rim, slip in. Bess would lift a ladle over my head, shut her eyes so I could do the same.

  But the splashing scares our daughter. She tries to touch the candle flames. And, anyway, these days our solstice rites are meant to shine a light on Orly. We dress up in Koliada costumes in lieu of straw-boy suits, drive neighbor to neighbor singing her birth country’s songs, the hen exchanged for a plate of cookies cut in reindeer shapes. Orly holds them out the way we once did feathers. The neighbors seem to like this better. Maybe us better, too. Though this year Bess goes without me. Back from the woodlot, a few days before the solstice, I find a note—safer while it’s still light—a broken-antlered cookie. And though Bess spends the whole next day making Orly’s Rozhanitsa dress, half the night embroidering it with the image of the branch-horned goddess, when I offer to take our daughter to the equipment shed, hunt through the box of buck racks, make an antler crown, I get only a shake of my wife’s head.

  Still, I remind myself, all of it was always about more than only us. The first time that we heard the singing of the ice, Bess whispered, This. We were sitting on the abandoned beaver dam, my not-yet wife leaned back into my chest, the pond spread out before us. I know, I told her. And, together, we listened: a sound as if the earth, conversing with the heavens, had decided to let us hear. I think it was that moment that we decided there must be something. Such safety: to know there is a hand to steer us, to help us shape our lives more caringly than fate. Such sweetness: to have found our faith in that together.

  Ever since then we have gone to the pond when life seems worst, listened, tried to open our hearts to guidance. The year that Bess, at forty-one, was stricken by unbearable desire for a child. The night that I gave in. The day, after a year of trying, then of searching, that we brought our daughter home. The November, almost exactly one year later, that Orly was diagnosed. The autumn, so long ago, back when we had barely brushed our thirties, when I had tried to tell the woman I loved why I couldn’t stand to share her with a baby, couldn’t face the thought of losing the world we’d made between us to another life. Weeks of talking had solidified into an ice-hard choice: whether she would hold tight to what we had or leave it—leave me—for the chance to have a child with someone else. Scared, I’d been unable to stop talking, to let us listen to the sounds of the ice, until she pressed her fingers to my lips, said, Shh. And half an hour later: Don’t you know? I’d risen, then, as if the ice had finished her words for her, because I did.

  Now there is this: a week ago I carried the chain saw out to the woodlot and found a tree half-cut, a wedge sawed from its trunk, the felling hinge already made. A dangerous mistake, to leave a tree like that. But, standing there that morning, I couldn’t remember having done it. And worse, the end of that day I had the urge to do it again. The chain saw idled. Alone in the empty woods, too close to dark to start another tree, I told myself to shut it off. Then stepped through the snow to a marked trunk, tugged the trigger, revved the blade. I cannot explain the way it felt to rip through to the point of the hinge, cut free the notch, and then shut off the chain saw, turn in the silence, and head home.

  The next morning I couldn’t take the tree down. I left it that way, prepared for felling, and worked all day felling others and, when it came time to quit, did it again. Except this time I cut a little deeper. Went an inch beyond where the hinge should be. Removed a little larger wedge. Left that tree standing too. Seeing that notch I knew was too wide, amateurish, edging on dangerous, I felt a surge of relief. Enough—that tang of oil smoke, shiver of sweat freezing on my neck, the sense that I could breathe—to make me need it again the next day. And the next. Over that week, I must have left two dozen trees throughout that section of our woods, each notched a little deeper, weakened a little more, a forest of half-felled deadfall traps waiting for the next wet snow, the first wild wind, to bring them down.

  On solstice eve I make a cut so deep I keep expecting to hear the crack, to see the sudden tearing rush of canopy above, but when I stop almost two-thirds through, there is nothing but the stillness of all the trees and a sense of dread. I look up from the blade, scan the woods: just my breath gusting white through the visor’s mesh, my veins squeezing my blood.

  At home, tonight, we will prepare our marriage lights. It is the one remaining ritual we still keep for just the two of us, draping the greenhouse each winter solstice with the same strands, setting the same celestial cocoon aglow. And each year, the night before our anniversary, we sit together on our bedroom floor replacing all the bulbs that have burned out. For every one that we remove we tell each other something too hard to have brought up before, whatever we need to exorcise before the unborn year. And for each new bulb that we set in the old one’s place we give each other an assuaging gift, maybe a memory, a touch, anything that commits us to each other for another year, and the year after that, and the one after that, and the one after.

  Always, we start small—last solstice eve, Bess told me how sad she was I’d shaved my beard even though I’d known she loved to feel it when we kissed; I talked of times, reading Orly to sleep, that Bess had drifted off without so much as wishing me good night—and, reaching over, she smoothed my eyebrows; I massaged the soft spot on her palms; we helped each other towards the harder ones. For Bess, that year, it had been what I’d done to our new tradition: her, dressed as a goddess, emerging from the cellar to tell the fortunes of good girls, while, at her side, to keep bad ones in line, there stood the demon Krampus—me in branchin
g-antler headdress, sheepskin mask with carved-out eyes. Bess’s hands shook as she recounted how far I’d taken it, how, through her shouts and Orly’s screams, over our daughter’s cringing shape, I’d kept on roaring, roaring, unable to stop.

  By now, the branches above me have turned black, the sky nearly dark enough to swallow them. I stand, listening to their silence. The way I sat, silent, listening to Bess until she’d finished. Until her shaking hand threw the bad bulb out. And, in its place, she fit a new one. I don’t remember what sweet thing she said. But I know she must have. We always do. It’s why it works. In the darkness there is the small clatter of a twig knocked loose. Tonight, I think, Bess will sing our girl to sleep. There comes the stick’s long falling to the ground. I’ll do the dishes. Its faint landing in the accepting snow. We’ll meet in our bedroom and begin. This one thing that even Orly has not altered. Yet.

  In the space after the thought I can hear my own fear. I know I should go home, that supper must already be on the table, Orly buckled into her high chair, Bess blowing on her soup, but I do not know what I might do if this last thing goes, too. I set the chain saw down. There are the first pricks of stars.

  Long after dark, I come in through the kitchen door to find a tray of fresh-baked oat bars—still warm, smelling of molasses—waiting on the stove and, nestled beneath one corner, a note: Shhhh. Put her to bed early. And when, cupping a bit of oat bar in my palm, I pad up the stairs to our bedroom, Bess is there, cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a forest of electric wires, the glow of a thousand bulbs. In the clearing where she sits: just enough space for me.

  “You made it,” she whispers.

  Our room abuts Orly’s, the house was built two centuries ago, its walls are thin.

  “I was in the woodlot,” I whisper back.