The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  His wife confirmed her terrified intuition by smelling his pants. She demanded divorce immediately. Her father, a Dutch magistrate, began its execution with dispatch and feeling for both sides. He was a man, too, after all, as he told Ásmundur in an e-mail; and he himself had let his weakness play games. Only his own wife’s loyalty to the Church and her fear of hell had saved them.

  But Ásmundur’s wife’s resolve to be free, she said, and then—she knew exactly the words that could dismember him forever—to “love somebody who really understands me,” at last tore out the screw. It didn’t matter that he would have done anything to drill it back in at a different place. She did not take his calls.

  At his father-in-law’s billiard club, Ásmundur scratched the cue ball with force; and the old man, fit as a pony, contracted his great red brow and said, “You should strike it more gently. Maybe that stick is bowed.”

  “Alexis, please,” Ásmundur snapped, but immediately he repented his tone. He looked up. In the rafters, a fat spider awaited a fly. He said, “Alexis, I have to, I have to do something rash or I’ll never get out of this.”

  “I thought your fling was rash,” the old man enunciated. “I thought you rather needed to do something careful for a change—I’m sorry. I withdraw that. You have an idea?” He ran the table except for the eight ball, an easy shot he seemed to botch from pity.

  Ásmundur declared, but with a hint of inquiry, the hope of approval, “I’m thinking I will go home.”

  “Hogwash,” spat the old man. “Who do you think you are, Thomas Jefferson? He went broke on his farm.”

  “I’m broke now,” Ásmundur retorted.

  As a young man, Ásmundur had studied economics in the hope of little more than a one-bedroom flat in Germany or the Low Countries, where he might keep the vow he’d sworn that he would not die incarcerated on the smallholding in Iceland where his mother and grandparents had raised him.

  And yet at fifty, a year after the divorce was final; long after he had told Hulda, the student, to leave him alone, that he had never cared for her; his reputation among his colleagues intact but his capital destroyed—he found himself in a London airport listening to his native language spoken by a ticketing agent of Icelandair while his own ears swelled with the new promise, maybe the last promise, that, notwithstanding the experience of revenant fools everywhere, he might find a warmer future in his cold past. He knew how to get by on a farm.

  • • •

  In the terminal, he threw his tabloid in the trash and moved down the nave of the radiant concourse. His physical possessions included a boarding ticket, the clothes he was wearing, a credit card, a passport, and nothing else, but they seemed too much. He had stopped in Barcelona, Frankfurt, and London, closing his affairs. He owned nothing of value but his teenage savings and a little of his mother’s old bonds, in the Landsbanki in Reykjavík, denominated in a currency he had not spent in twenty years. Whenever his family had wanted to see him, he always insisted they come to Holland, and he paid their fares.

  A voice from everywhere like the call to prayer invited the crowd in Icelandic and English to begin boarding zone three. He took the air in, feeling the chill as far down as his stomach. As he inhaled, the place entered him; as he exhaled, he left some of himself behind.

  He fed his ticket to a laser scanner and embarked through the long umbilical of the Jetway. He drank a vodka on board. He sat still, feet flat, attending to the air that entered and departed his lungs in a stream of present moments, each of them the very center of time.

  The manufacturer had disguised the fuselage as a narrow living room fitted out for a civil wedding.

  He had rarely referred to his wife by name. To her father, he called her “she” or “your girl”; to others, “my wife” or, satirizing himself, “the woman who lives with me in the house.” He liked the name and saved it like a child with Easter chocolate for private moments when the lights burned brightly in his mind.

  “Am I your only one?” she used to ask him.

  “Yes,” he replied—but all that was past.

  Now he was only a thing that breathed.

  The home in the southlands had not changed from the last time he had visited, during his university days. It half-rose from the basalt rubble at the cliff’s sloping base, like a seal poking its head from under a wave. His grandfather had ordered the corrugated-iron house from a Norwegian catalog before the Great War, and the pieces came delivered in a crate with unintelligible instructions. Of the house’s eight sides, only the southern face was not partly buried in earth. The red roof shone in the endless summer days and for a month or two in winter lay buried in snow. Íris, six years his junior, used it as a vacation house, riding the bus to a stop three kilometers up the road. She met him at the farm today, running to the car he had rented at the airport in Reykjavík, and welcomed her brother’s crinkled face, his crooked head, the inborn grimace that she understood was his way of grinning. She kissed him through the window on top of his flimsy hair.

  The sea began two kilometers away, visible across the lava-pebble beach where no vegetation grew. In the rear of the home field, a hot spring suitable for six persons steamed year-round with a sulfurous odor as homeful to him as haddock-head soup. Their mother and grandparents were long dead. Their cousins had taken jobs in Denmark, Canada, Shanghai, and Houston. Íris was delighted to let him stay there now. She clerked at an electronics store in the capital and had always clung to Ásmundur, her only sibling, when she visited in Amsterdam; even holding his hand in bars as a lover does. In recent years she had come with the little daughter, whose other parent she had never met again after a night of hash and dancing four years ago.

  Before Ásmundur could open the door, his niece figured out the latch, climbed his leg, ensconced herself in his lap, seized the wheel, and demanded to drive the car.

  He bought as many sheep as his feeble mother had had left when she died—fourteen ewes and three rams. He would never stop hating sheep. He fed them chewing tobacco to stave off worms. Given luck, he might pull a peasant profit from the fleece and mutton in two years.

  A project gripped him right away that he knew would keep his hands moving: the repair of the derelict glasshouse, between the dwelling and the spring, that his grandfather had surrounded with blueberries. Steam pipes from the volcanic drama under the earth heated the glasshouse, and Ásmundur bought a new steam generator for electricity that represented his only vain purchase. He wanted to subsist on his own power. The steam was free. The steam rose like rage everywhere whether you liked it or not. When he switched on the machine, the turbid glass became an enormous crystal that burned all night with the sodium lamps he’d bought for a song from a neighbor who was getting out of the tulip business.

  His wife’s father wrote a letter, dictated to his secretary and FedExed to the door of the farmhouse.

  My only hopes for you, dear Ásmundi, are that you will compose a scheme of daily work, socialize a little, drink only a little, pay close attention to the fats in your blood, forget your sins, keep your feet dry, keep the holidays with your sister and Frigg, always iron your shirts, keep oil in the crankcase of your car, and do not skimp on a mechanic when your ingenuity fails you. I remain

  Your father-out-of-law,

  Alexis

  He slept in his grandfather’s room, where a hot tap emptied into a basin and a shaving brush still sat in a cup before a little mirror. The furnishings were handmade though they didn’t look so. The old man had built the bed from birch scraps and the few iron stays left over once he’d figured out, more or less, how to piece the house together. Barley straw filled the mattress, which reeked of mildew, but after a week’s airing on the line outside, the mattress suited Ásmundur well enough. He oiled the barrel of the ancient shotgun that hung over the mirror and bought fresh shells and tested them by firing at gulls on the beach. Most comforting: the new sheets and pillowcases of Egyptian cotton that his sister brought from the city as a housewarming pres
ent. The stucco walls of the interior bore the trowel strokes of the dead man—who had taught young Ásmundur to shear a ewe, to sever its child’s throat, to wash the child’s intestines and stuff them with its ground-up shoulder, and to smoke its head over charcoal.

  Yet all that winter, he woke in the bed from dreams in which he spoke and walked with none of the house’s former inhabitants, but instead with the woman who had attended the second half of his life. The two of them vacationed on Saturn. In a café that boasted an excellent view of the planet’s rings, she looked away from the window and said, “You never understood me; I never understood you.”

  He needed so little that he let the bonds languish in the bank at their geriatric interest rates. He did buy a rusted car, used parts, gasoline, silage, oatmeal, some whiskey. He might have used a little more money, but when was that ever not the case? Money was water filling a balloon at a faucet; the balloon was only ever almost full as it swelled, and swelled, until it burst. Up to now, he had expended his adulthood changing money from guilders to pounds to rubles, later to euros. Money existed only in order that you should exchange it. Even male friends could be exchanged. His gym and investment partners did not accumulate but rotated.

  The woman on Saturn, however—the woman who used to share his drink, in their shiny kitchen in Amsterdam, so they wouldn’t have to wash a second glass—she was not, as they say, fungible. She cost exactly nothing. You found her yourself, or you didn’t. She was the only one of her.

  He moved the mattress to his granny’s room and slept somewhat sounder, a little warmer there. It had a separate radiator that burbled with a noise like a lamb coughing up its blood.

  The spring after Ásmundur had settled into the farm, he resolved to sow one of the pastures with barley for feed. The gunked carburetor in his mother’s Ford tractor needed replacing, and he drove to the gas station that doubled as a junk parts store. Into this place he was followed by a yearling spitz dog. And when he walked out, the dog came along, at a distance of ten meters, respectful but determined.

  A week later, once the dog’s adoption of Ásmundur and the farm had become an established fact, he needed something to call her. He named her Hulda, the joke being that the bitch would never leave him alone. He had tried to make a clean break from Hulda—the red-headed Dane—but months afterward she would surprise him by leaping into the restaurant in Amsterdam where he and Alexis were divvying up the scraps of Ásmundur’s assets among his creditors, or by telephoning at his rented flat on Christmas morning. Once, when Frigg was visiting in Holland, she answered the phone in Icelandic and called out, “Uncle, it’s the bad elf again!” as her mother basted the goose. Ásmundur was malt and the girl Hulda was juice, and together they had made the kind of drink that only tastes good on a holiday.

  If his impulse with that name was to cure himself by ridiculing himself, he failed. However, once he admitted the futility of letting his remorse have his ear whenever it asked, the dog began to get mixed up in the very feelings he had come home to Iceland with the goal of never feeling again.

  “Come here, Hulda, my sweet,” he cooed, as the dog presented its woolly neck to his fingernails.

  In Ásmundur’s youth, no one would have called this animal a breed; it was simply the sort of dog that came from Iceland. She was curious, frolicsome, industrious, unafraid. She groomed meticulously her blonde coat, rummaging it with her snub muzzle. Her tail curled over her back like a scorpion’s. She spoke only one word, Hello! Her ears never lay down. Her lips were black.

  Her tongue was all of Hulda’s animal perfection condensed into a single organ. Still and imperceptible like a private mind when she slept, wagging like a tail when she played at chasing her master through the barley, showing only the tongue’s tip when she looked cock-headed into a mink’s den in a marsh, arched like a spoon when she drank from a puddle; instrument of kisses, tidier of her privates, dislodger of fleas. To think, Ásmundur had one of these himself, a tongue, of which he rarely took notice except when it smarted on a cocoa mug.

  Ásmundur Gudmundsson was a modern man, yes; but despite their common language of looks and yips, Hulda was a creature of deep antiquity. She knew the memory of her kind far better than she knew her own life. It costs a dog months of grief to learn a skill as simple as playing dead, while its clairvoyant gift for tracking livestock lost in a crag excels any similar talent human beings have ever acquired. We are born crippled and stupid, with a vast cavern of mind to fill with memories, conclusions, judgments: a warehouse where we build the store of implements with which we nightly torture ourselves in our dreams. But a dog is born already knowing nearly everything it will ever know.

  Thus when a collarless dog lopes down a mountain of mossy lava into an Icelandic town and follows a man into a junk store, then runs untiringly the twenty paved highway kilometers after his car until later in the dark afternoon she sits at his stockade gate sweeping her tail with such force as to wobble her paws in the mud—then the man will feel something quite different from the thrill of a woman choosing him. A woman’s choice, however fraught with feelings, is still a judgment of his prospects, his personality, his fitness, and all the things in which a man’s ego rejoices. A dog does not choose. A dog recognizes. In this way, Hulda saw in Ásmundur Gudmundsson the soul of the human being to which the prehistoric process that had fashioned her own soul had arranged that she would attach.

  It was one thing to make love with a woman; to sign a contract at church; to grow rich; to fear death; to be forgiven for sin; to eat fresh chops by the fire; even at night in bed to be scratched by a wife on the flank of the thigh at the place where the hip bone protrudes, and to have one’s own withers petted by her through the wool of one’s jacket while walking over a canal after breakfast. All these things, according to Ásmundur Gudmundsson, were very fine. But surely it was another thing to be followed home by a dog who takes you at one whiff to be a part of herself.

  Hulda ate salmon, the guts of the ptarmigans he shot in the mountains, barley mash, even cucumbers, and always licked her bowl clean. So when she lost her appetite, suddenly, the fall after her investiture at the farm, Ásmundur noticed right away. She made a squealing noise addressed to no one. She seemed always underfoot and woke him one morning in his granny’s bed by licking his toes. Her stomach hardened like the cooked yolk of an egg. Her flushed teats protruded. Within the month, her abdomen waggled under her while she walked. Ásmundur could no longer deny it. She was pregnant.

  And so young!

  His jealousy flared like an ulcer and impeded his breath. Who was this cad to whom she had submitted, and where did she find the time? She never strayed farther than a shout, and she believed that every word he spoke meant come.

  One day, in a flash of wishful insight, Ásmundur thought he discovered her violator on the way to Selfoss. A black Labrador mixed with something weaselish and longer-haired was harassing one of his ewes by the road. The ewe took cover among his silage bales, and the dog gave up and loped along the shoulder and stopped to lift a leg on a guidepost. Ásmundur eased toward the far lane to avoid the creature; then, in a florescence of wrath, swerved back to crush it under the tires of his Opel car, so small it might have overturned if he had acted in time. His adversary only bounded away in the grass of the plain.

  At length, at home, Hulda began to tremble and vomit. She had never been a neurotic dog before, but now paced around the stockade where his horse ate its hay. Ásmundur packed a wine crate with lyme-grass straw, fluffing it and smoothing it out like a nervous boy with his hair before a dance. Hulda hobbled into it. She scratched her nipples on the unplaned edge of the box and yelped, and bedded down.

  She panted in spasms.

  And when he brushed with his fingers the fur at her ribs, the contents of her mind opened themselves to him, as when a human toddler simply hugs his mother’s knee and the mother’s whole being vibrates with comprehension.

  Hulda needed air, and it was everywhere around her, and yet s
he lacked the force to draw it fully into her lungs. She stood up in the straw, turned herself in circles, scratched at the floor of the box, unsure for what she was digging, where any hole she might dig here would have led, what she would bury in it. He watched as spasms rippled her midriff. She squatted as though in hope of relieving a strain in her bowels, and yet not in her bowels. But everything was wrong. She was surely starving, yet at the offer of her master’s lamb-bone supper she recoiled. She lay down on her side, rheum streaming from her nose. Her face asked, What on earth is happening to me?

  Ásmundur wondered if anything could be more piteous than a proud animal showing you the whites of its eyes.

  The bitch’s privy parts went convex, as though trying to grow a second neck and head from behind. She stretched her legs rigidly. Her hot breath stank. Her tail broomed the straw. A bubble appeared on her vulva, yellowish and dripping pale fluid. The bubble grew. Its surface was hard and slick. With a heave, she emitted it, an ovoid mass with no discernible parts.

  She snapped herself double, lapping feverishly between her legs. She nipped with her teeth and licked passionately at an end of the thing, which revealed itself to be a face with ears, and a tongue poking out. She licked the thing’s ventral side, all in a mania as though of appetite, and gnawed at the cord with her molars until it frayed and broke. The thing made a mew and bumbled in the straw, found its mother’s hind leg, crawled up it—all the while impeded by Hulda’s mad lapping—and miraculously found a teat, affixed itself, and nursed.

  Ásmundur looked on with wonderment and disgust at the spectacle of new life.

  The bitch expelled three more sleek globs before she had finished, each in turn transforming, under the force of her tongue, into pups: all of them yellower even than she, with fawn-colored splotches across the snouts. Thus Ásmundur reconsidered his black adversary, though he had no regret left to spend on the dog he had nearly run down on the road.