The Age of Perpetual Light

by Josh Weil

  “After dark?”

  Taking a bite of oat bar, I mumble “afterwards” and, through my chewing, “out to the pond.”

  She always seems to know when I am lying. So when she says, “I was out there,” it stops my jaw. But she goes on: “A week ago. Couldn’t hear anything, of course. This time of year. All frozen over. Though I tried to break it”—her face winces the way it does when she’s embarrassed—“by throwing rocks.”

  My eyebrows rise, my jaw unsticks, but before I can say anything she tells me how she’d stood there hurling the biggest she could find, the way they’d clattered and skittered and in the end stayed silent on the surface of the still-solid ice.

  “Oh,” I say, taking another bite, “that’s what those were.” And, stepping across the lights, I settle on the floor. “I thought they were some kind of sign.”

  This time the slight wince is for me.

  “God,” I say, “I feel so stupid. I mean, I prayed …”

  “To the rocks?”

  I look down at the lights around us. Our knees are almost touching.

  “For what?” she says.

  “That we …” Glancing back up, I find her eyes. “That you might hear my need.” I make my face go slack with wonder. “Might bake us a pan of these.” My wife has always been unable to keep down a smile. “And that Orly might leave me one to eat.”

  Her laugh is little more than a wider smile, but I press my finger to my lips, give Orly’s door a sideways glance. When I look back, even the smile’s gone. She reaches for my hand, whispers, “Take a dead one.” And we start.

  It’s never easy, but tonight I watch her with a different kind of worry, can’t shake the feeling that each small admission of hurt or trouble is simply her preparing me for worse. Still, in between, we replace the bad bulbs with the good: the way that she surprises me at night with herbal teas she’s dried herself; the fact that the day after she held my hands like this last year I started growing back my beard.

  “Actually,” I tell her, “I started right then, that very night. I could feel it prickling my face.”

  “Me too,” she says. And in the softened line of her mouth, the ease that settles over our hands, I can tell she’s remembering those early hours of last winter’s shortest day, how, after finishing the lights, we’d made love on the floor in the midst of all those bulbs, how it had felt like sneaking something slightly forbidden, how, later that same day, the thought of it had covered our lovemaking inside the greenhouse with a second sweetness, our bodies finding their new moment within the memory of the one before.

  “It’s not scratchy anymore,” I whisper.

  “Let me see,” she says. And, leaning over, kisses me.

  My beard is a cloud compressed between us, and, for a second, I wonder if it’s going to be okay, no worse than last year, no harder than the year before that, but, by the time I’ve thought it, her mouth has left mine, the pressure gone from my lips, my beard back to my beard, my face, my face. On hers there is what I’ve been worrying would be there.

  “Ev,” she says, “how could you not have seen that bear?”

  My face, my beard, but it is as if the air has changed. I say, “What happened to taking a bulb?”

  Her hands twitch. I tighten my fingers around them.

  She says, “You wouldn’t have let it—”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But you took so long.”

  “It was just a black bear. We see them all the time. Remember that first spring? Those cubs?”

  “This wasn’t a cub.”

  “Remember how we watched them? Just the two of us wrapped together in that blanket? We were standing right over there.”

  When she turns to look, the skin below her jaw goes taut and I can see it—our home in that first year, Orly’s bedroom still a meditation studio, the lights now on the floor still glowing on the greenhouse, and it is becoming spring, the fields beginning to show their soil, and behind us the sheets are stained, and who cares with no one but us to see them, and soon we will return to the bed to stain them more—and part of me doesn’t want her to turn back.

  But she does. Her eyes seem wet. “I remember afterwards,” she says. “The way you were so straight with me that night.” Easing one hand free from mine, she slips a new bulb from the case. “How you told me you were so worried that you had pushed your own resolve on me, how you would understand if I still wanted to be a mother, give birth. How much that made me love you, your honesty, that I could trust you, that you would face something like that and talk it through and at the end we’d bring what we had come to with us to bed and how amazing it always was, then, like that, like that night.”

  For a second, the spot where we had stood seems so close, the window we gazed out of so near, that I almost think she’s right: we still can, could, one night of talking, of taking it to bed … And then—a rustle of sheets, the sound of a sigh, my eyes adjusting to the dimness beyond the lights—I see the lump in the comforter, the depression at a pillow’s edge, the hint of golden hair.

  “Honesty?” On my face I can feel the new bulb’s heat. “Straight with you?” Out of the corner of my eye I can see it, suddenly too bright. “Bess,” I say, “I was out in the woodlot. I just didn’t want you to know what I was doing. Because”—I look at the bed, make sure Orly’s still sleeping—“it’s been a long time since we’ve been like that. That way that you remember. Since we were together like that. Part of each other’s lives, of each other, the other part, the only other part. The way we were before—”

  Her voice is a whisper: “Before what?”

  My voice is not: “Her.”

  The word sounds worse after I’ve said it. I wish it would disappear from the room. But even after it has lost its sound it seems to stay.

  “Evan,” Bess says, “can I still trust you?”

  When I glance at the bed again Orly’s eyes are open. I start to tell Bess.

  But she says, “Can she?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  “I want her to hear you say it.”

  “Of course you can, Orly,” I tell the staring face. “I’m your father.” It feels strange saying it like that, such a statement, and afterwards I’m relieved I didn’t add practically.

  But Bess only shuts her eyes, shakes her head. “Then what,” she says, “is wrong with you? What the fuck”—with the child in the room the word is ten times worse—“are you doing? Who are you?”

  “Your husband,” I tell her. “Who loves you.”

  Her eyes snap open. And beneath her stare, I shut mine. In the silence between us I can feel Orly waiting. Or maybe she has rolled over, gone back to sleep, left us to do what people like us do.

  “Evan.” When I open my eyes something in Bess’s face has softened. “Can’t you see what that’s like for me? For me to know that the man I love, the only one I ever have, loves me so much he’d do anything to have me back?”

  “Not anything,” I say, but my throat closes on the words. It is the worst thing I have ever known: the knowledge that she is right.

  Reaching to her sides, she draws the masses of bulbs into a denser bunch around her. A tinkling hailstorm.

  In the quiet after it stops, I say, “Us. To have us back.”

  She mounds the lights over her legs until her lap is buried in them. “Don’t you think,” she says, “that I miss that just as much? That there are times I want it all gone too?” She leans closer. “Do you think it matters?” All those bulbs: they flood her face with a light from underneath, make her features almost unknown to me. “It is,” she says. “This is what it is, Ev. What I am, now. Can you understand that? We were each other’s only other part. But now there’s her. Now this is me. Is us. Us three. And we will never be the same as how we were, never, not even if somehow we could go back to the Eden of your memory.”

  “The one that I remember,” I say.

  “I know,” she tells me.

  “There’s a difference.”<
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  “I remember it too. That’s why I can still say I was always straight with you. Back then it was true, you were everything. I needed nothing else. And then I did.”

  “But we couldn’t know—”

  “That she wouldn’t turn out perfect?” Between us, Bess’s fingers search the tangle of bulbs, as if still looking for the burnt-out ones. “Evan,” she says, “that day, last week, I went out to the pond, it was the day after the bear. After you …” I cannot seem to look at anything but her fingers. “I needed to hear those sounds. I know it should have been impossible, I thought it was, but, in the quiet after I’d thrown the rocks I did. Just not coming from the pond.” Beneath her stare my fingers search the wires too. “They were coming from the woods.” And I want only to find the bad bulb first, hold it up, make her stop. “Where Orly stood.” But Bess’s lap is too bright, and Orly’s breathing too loud, and when I look away my eyes are too mottled from the light to make out our daughter’s face.

  Bess reaches out and turns my face to her. The flaring fades. And she is simply there, the sight of her as right as the feel of her hand on my cheek. “I had to let her sleep in here,” she says. “She was too scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “This night last year, last solstice eve …”

  “Of Krampus?”

  She takes the bulb out of my fingers. “Of you.”

  Our woods have always been most beautiful in new snow. The granite ledges distilled to wet black shapes beneath unbroken white, the boulders pared back to their bare forms rising from a forest floor become a sheet of smoothness, even the trees refined into elemental lines of darkness and light. There is a sense, while watching the snow sift through the canopy, drift down its slowly floating fall, that everything else has stopped. Such silence. Except the sound of my own breath.

  We never did finish replenishing our marriage lights. Orly stirred; Bess went to her. After she had put our daughter to sleep again, she led me out to whisper what she wanted us to do. The Festival of Wild Women, the ancient maenads chasing their bull: this solstice day I’d be the beast, Orly would chase me, Bess beside her so she wouldn’t be too scared. She’ll strip away the mask, Bess said, see nothing terrible there. And listening to her hope that it would help me, too, her it will be all right and pretty good again, I had said nothing of what I knew had always been the ending of the hunt.

  This morning we were supposed to wrap up the rest of the lights, replace the last bad bulbs, string them over the greenhouse before the promised chase. But now on this late hour of this fastest-passing day I am here, instead, standing below a half-felled tree, watching as flake by flake its branches gather weight. This is the thing: if it was Eden, it was one we made ourselves. We already knew the world, chose to leave it for our own. Then chose—her sudden need, my acquiescence, no one but ourselves to undermine us—to leave that too. Watching my breath rise into the ceaselessly descending snow, I try to remember that. That it was us, not Orly. That she is simply the result of a decision that we made. That there are no decisions left, nothing to do but live with it.

  Above, the branches seem a little thicker, the twigs at the end to bend a little more. What snow has fallen through has stuck in a long trail down the trunk. Somewhere below my shins I know the notch is a dark crossing cut through it. This is what it is. Hiding the hinge. This is what I am now. I listen for a creak.

  But when it comes it’s from another tree. I see it: a stirring in the canopy, snow dusting down. Stepping into the fall path, I check how deep I sawed the trunk, tilt my neck, let my head fall back, watch the wind pick up. This morning the forecast said it would get worse, the storm dangerous by dark. I’d meant to make it to the pond before it hit, but passing through the grove of groaning trees I’d seen the tracks, fresh paw prints sunk in the fresh snow, wending from trunk to wounded trunk, as if the bear had sniffed each wedge of inner wood and instead of sap, smelled blood. Walking its path, I’d stopped beneath each weakened tree, waiting, waiting, unable to leave. And how long have I been here now? Long enough for Bess to have dressed Orly in her maenad clothes? Begun to wonder if I will show, while with each minute it grows too cold, too close to dark, too late?

  In the growing wind, all the wounded trees sound like a timber frame settling, then, straining with ever greater gusts, like the cracking open all at once of an old house’s beams. Listening, I know what it is telling me, and feeling the fibers in each trunk struggling against the swaying weight, I move into the places where I know that each will fall, wait for the hinge to snap.

  It is, Bess says, this is what it is, and she is right.

  Around me the storm grows strong enough to shake the heavy limbs, send smaller branches clattering through the boughs, fling them into their own dark shapes cut through the snow, but not to bring a single widow maker down. By the time I finally start back, the gusts have given up swirling flakes for slicing streaks of sleet, and when I break into the open field I pull my hood low, lean forwards, stare at the snow spray before my boots, but I can feel our half-buried tractor, the goats milling in their shed, the dark mass of the greenhouse still unlit beneath its thickening shroud.

  Ahead, the kitchen windows glow. Upstairs there is another window lit, but on the first floor they seem twice as bright. I know before I’m close enough to see inside: our marriage lights, all three thousand glimmering, amassed across the floor. Bess must have finished them herself, dragged them down the stairs, is somewhere in there preparing the strands for us to bring them out, wondering where I am. But when I’m nearly there, I stop. Through the long clear pane of the back door there is just Orly, hunched on the boards, her back almost against the glass, her shape silhouetted by all the lights before her. Still, I can see her wrapped white sheet, her belted waist, the wreath around her head, her hair so golden it seems about to burst into flame. She reaches to her lap, brings out a bulb. Carefully, purposefully, she puts it in an empty socket. Selects another. Does the same. Again, and again, and I know that this is how it will be, that they will glow out on the greenhouse night after night, as if things were no different than before, just another year a little further from the truth, that it would be like this until Orly turned eighteen if she was a child for whom eighteen would matter, if we were a couple who could hope to then reclaim our second lives, but when she is nineteen we will put up the greenhouse lights again, and when she is twenty, and twenty-one, and the next year, and the one after that, and the one after that, and the one after.

  From somewhere on the second floor there comes a long, low sound: Bess, blowing a single note on her recorder. When she’s done Orly sings the same one back. Standing in the dark behind our house, listening to them pass their music between each other, it seems an entire language I’ll never know.

  And, once inside the equipment shed, I can’t hear anything but the thudding of my blood, the rustling as I hunt for last year’s Krampus mask. When I lift it from a bag of rotted canvas, its reek is thick as the sifting dust. Something has eaten at the eyeholes, but the curling fleece still hangs from the woolen hat, the horns are still attached, and, outside again—the sleet smaller, the air colder, the light nearly snuffed by the low churning clouds—my face is warm beneath the mask. My breath makes it wet. With each step, the loosened antlers shake, their sawed-off ends a shiver on my skull.

  Back at the house the sounds my wife and daughter make seem nothing like the singing of the ice, and the freezing pond is nothing like the trees, and the trees are nothing like a voice, and for a second, standing just outside the windowed door, watching Orly turn and see me, I know we do not matter to the world—which does not care, which will not know—but only to each other, husband, wife, mother, daughter, and I am suddenly terrified that somewhere outside my fleece-blurred circles of sight my wife is watching, that on the other side of the glass door my daughter will be scared by what she sees, and before Orly can scream, I flip the sheepskin up—a slap of cold against my sweating face—and show her it’s okay, it�
�s me, I’m your father.

  From upstairs: a long low note again.

  But Orly doesn’t answer. She is alone, frozen still, her face caught between fright and … What? Who can tell? Who can ever know what she is feeling? If she is scared or excited? If she remembers the game we’ve promised her or thinks that this is something just to do with me? I let the mask fall into place, start to back away, motion for her to follow. Still, I’m almost beyond the window’s light before she stands.

  Running, I turn back once to see: the bright kitchen, the pale shape bursting out the door, the flapping sheet, her hair blown wild beneath a shaking halo of evergreen, her breath steam that catches for a second in the window’s light before she is beyond it, into the night, after me.

  Ahead there is the sledding hill, its sudden drop, the darker swath of snow down there, the stone wall darker still, the even deeper dark behind it. Beneath the trees it will be nearly black. The night will crowd my eyes. I’ll see branches lunge into sight, hear the roaring wind, the clatter of crashing limbs. The crack of a hinge. And they will fall like buildings detonated in the dark, like avalanches crumbling out of the air, like all the logs I’ve ever loaded into the splitter ripping all at once, and through them I will listen for her footsteps.

  BEAUTIFUL

  GROUND

  For the first time yesterday we saw shadows.

  —Mike Horn and Borge Ousland, North Pole

  Expedition, March 23, 2006

  Now they were setting out together, the two greatest adventurers alive trying to reach the North Pole in the dead of winter, in the Arctic’s twenty-four-hour dark, on foot, day after day no different from night after night, no motors, no dogs, no nothing but the cold and the ice and them hauling sledges through the ceaseless black.

  Why, the interviewer asked, would you do a thing like that?

  On the radio: laughter.

  It seemed to Claire to fill the studio apartment, take up what little space there was for her and Todd. Standing in the steam above the stove, she shivered. Behind her, her husband stopped chopping. She knew—the way she knew this dinner they’d made together some hundred times over the years—that in the breath between last laughter and next question he would say something. Still stirring, she reached back with her other hand, touched her fingers to his lips.