I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

“Could I lie down for a minute?” I asked my neighbor.

  “Sure.” She checked her watch. She stood and collected our mugs. “My break is up in five minutes, just so you know.”

  I stretched out on the soft beige carpet and held my camera against my stomach.

  “This never happened,” I said to her. “I never came here and showed you these photos.”

  “But you did.” She stood over me, holding the mugs.

  My neighbor disappeared into the kitchen. I heard the slap-slap of her bare feet. I heard the faucet turn on. When she returned, shaking water from her hands, she collected her headset and cell phone. She kneeled beside me and placed the phone just above my heart.

  “Give it a try,” she said. “People like it best when they know the pain is real.”

  She pressed the plastic band onto my skull and secured the headphones over my ears, positioned the mike so that I could feel the smooth edge brushing against my lip. She picked up my camera and strapped it around her own neck. She told me to get ready.

  “What the fuck,” I said to my neighbor, “is happening,” but it was too late: there was already a voice on the line, breathing hard into the phone, saying What are you waiting for, do it, come on. The voice sounded muffled and strange, like it was being altered by a machine.

  “Hello,” I said to the voice. “I’m here.”

  Oh, if only this stranger could have heard me right after he died with grass under his head. I had gone on and on like my neighbor; my tears would have been the stuff of this caller’s wildest, wettest dreams.

  I tried to remember the feel of his hand in mine, always a bit sticky and warm in the way of little boys.

  You weren’t supposed to stay stuck with me, I thought. You were supposed to be nothing or you were supposed to be free.

  Still, no tears. I remained a foot soldier in the long dry march of the after.

  I asked the caller, “What do you think happens to us after we die?”

  My neighbor sprawled out on her side, raised my camera to her face. “For posterity,” she said, and then the shutter clicked.

  One night, months in the future, I wouldn’t hear a peep coming from my neighbor’s apartment and the next morning I would knock on her door and discover that another person, a graduate student, had moved in. That was how things went in these big apartment complexes; they were a kind of purgatory where we docked until our souls were called elsewhere. I stopped taking photos around Slumberland after the body of a teenage girl was found inside the foreclosed Victorian, a nasty surprise for the rich couple who had bought the place. Because I never saw or shot her face I could not know if it was the same girl I’d photographed fucking in the grass, but I turned my camera over to the police anyway, desperate to be of use. “These are not illegal per se,” an officer told me after reviewing the photos. “But they are troubling all the same.”

  In my neighbor’s apartment, the phone was a hot weight on my chest and the caller was still panting.

  “He was supposed to be nothing or he was supposed to be free,” I said to the caller.

  “Okay,” said my neighbor. “That’s enough of that.” Her index finger hovered over the phone, preparing to put an end to her little experiment, my camera swinging from her neck.

  “Why?” the caller roared just before the line went dead. Their voice came at me like a knife, sharp with rage and want. “Why do you not hurt?”

  HILL OF HELL

  I had traveled up the Hudson at my friend’s invitation, to deliver a lecture to his literature students at the college where he taught. There had been three people in attendance and one had fallen asleep halfway through. My friend had treated me to lunch before the lecture and to a drink afterward, so that by the time we hit the train back into the city we had sailed through the small talk and were ready for the blood and guts.

  After we opened the second bottle of wine, which my friend had been carrying in his briefcase, I told him about the worst thing that had happened to me in the last three years, as this was the period of time that had elapsed since we last saw each other. We sat at a table in the café car, the panoramic windows looking out on the vast sweep of the Hudson. At first, I was surprised that we could drink our own alcohol openly on the train, but my friend assured me that we could eat and drink whatever we wanted because there was no food service on this route and besides he had been taking this train three days a week for a decade and knew every conductor on here and could get away with anything.

  “It was around this time last year when everything came apart,” I said, turning my plastic cup on the table.

  For the lecture, I had traveled to New York from Boston, with the intent of spending several days visiting friends and museums, and the time alone had encouraged this memory to mushroom in my imagination, crowding everything else out.

  Last September, I told my friend, I was pregnant. My husband had been the one wracked with longing for a child and I had allowed myself to be carried along by the tide of his enthusiasm, but once it was underway I felt like I had been conned into a heist for which, as the plans came into focus, I was woefully unprepared. You’re talking about robbing the Louvre and I’m just a common criminal! In those early weeks, I willed my body to show up with the getaway car and then six months later, after I had forgotten all about getaway cars, I was standing in an Ikea in Stoughton, of all the undignified places, waving a spatula and lecturing my husband about how our dairy products were teeming with opiates, when my shorts filled with blood and I fainted. While I was unconscious, I had a dream that men in white coats were elbow deep in me and then I awoke in a hospital bed to find a doctor elbow deep in me, working on my body with the patient, grave air of an executioner. The baby had ten fingers and ten toes, the only thing that many a stranger had told me I should care about. Eyelids as thin as organza.

  “She was stillborn,” I said.

  Now my husband wanted to try again, even after seeing his wife faint in a pool of blood and a dead child pulled from her body.

  “Our marriage is on borrowed time,” I told my friend.

  The air-conditioning was out in our car. My friend mopped his forehead with a paper napkin. His hair sat like a white bush on his head and, despite the bifocals, his expression had tapered into a kind of eternal squint. He told me that in the last year his father, mother, and sister had all died. In six months’ time, he had lost his entire family. He went on to say that his sister, the only person his mother had ever loved, died first and then his mother, the only person his father had ever loved, died second and then it was just my friend and his father and they had never liked each other very much at all.

  “The big alone,” he said. “That’s all any of us has in the end. Nothing can protect us from it, not careers or children or spouses or money or lovers.”

  When I asked my friend if he was telling me that nothing matters, if at this stage he had embraced outright nihilism, he replied, “What I’m saying is: you can’t change the essential outcome.” Then he went quiet and I could tell he was watching something over my shoulder. He flung his arms across the table and leaned in close. “The conductor is coming. I’m warning you.” We had our tickets, so I couldn’t see a reason to be frightened of the conductor, and I wondered if my friend had already gotten a bit too drunk.

  As if on cue, the conductor appeared at the head of our little table. He was a young man, with pink cheeks and a buzz cut, and his face did not yet betray the deadening repetition of having traveled the same stretch of river a million times over. Even the Hudson could lose its beauty if you were forced to look upon it for too long.

  “Here’s the latest.” The conductor brandished his phone. “He’s gained five pounds.”

  I peered down at the screen, only to behold the ugliest baby I had ever seen, hairless and shriveled as a raisin, his tiny mouth contorted as though in response to the myriad horrors of this world.

  “Wow,” I said, thinking that my friend had been right to warn me. “That’s r
eally something.”

  The conductor beamed and then continued down the aisle, pausing to scan tickets. Whenever the small talk with a passenger went on for a bit, he would take out his phone and beam some more.

  “The poor bastard,” my friend said. “He has no idea.”

  The outside world disappeared, replicated by a shadow network of track and tunnel. Passengers began to fold newspapers, gather bags, rise from seats. My friend slipped on the sports coat he’d worn to class, despite the heat.

  “The big alone,” he said, shaking a finger like the old professor he was becoming. “Don’t ever forget about it.”

  I had expected for us to have a proper goodbye in the station, given how long it had been since we’d seen each other and the intensity of our respective losses, which we had shared so freely. I had expected us to embrace, for him to thank me for coming and me to thank him for having me, no matter how small the stipend or the audience. The real remuneration had been the time spent together, the chance to get caught up. You reach a certain point in life and you go too long without seeing someone you care for and the next thing you know they’re dead. But I had forgotten that we were arriving at rush hour and as we pressed our way out of the train we were separated. I could glimpse the silvered peak of my friend’s head, his jacket collar upturned like a fin. Wait, I thought. Surely there is something else. On the platform, I saw him look back once, right as he stepped onto the escalator. He gave me a little wave and for a moment I thought he was going to fight his way back down, but then the woman behind my friend flapped her arms, implored him to get moving, and so he chose to push on.

  * * *

  Six months after my friend and I rode the train together, I left my husband. Some years later, I remarried. My friend was invited to the wedding, held in an arboretum in Jamaica Plain, but he was too ill to attend. He sent me a note of congratulations and that was the last time I heard from him before he died. In my second marriage, I was the one who lobbied for a child and when I gave birth to a daughter, I thought the universe had granted me a chance to remake my life. The notion of being at the mercy of the universe turned me superstitious in a way I had never been before—for example, for the duration of my pregnancy and my daughter’s childhood I never once set foot inside an Ikea and was better for it.

  It pains me to say that our daughter was, from the moment of her birth, a difficult human being. A sleepless and squalling baby, possessed by violent tantrums as an older child, episodes where she hit and kicked and bit. Twice I needed stitches. In high school, she was diagnosed with a mood disorder. She wanted to write but could never get organized enough to make anything. She dropped out of college and got mixed up with drugs and when we finally staggered out of that terrible wilderness, marked by disappearances and theft and countless lies, the sober version of my daughter turned out to be just as prone to petty cruelty and deception. I wondered if something was genetically wrong with me, given that my body had killed one daughter in the womb and produced another so maladapted. I confess that when my daughter first complained of fatigue and back pain keeping her from work I thought she might be up to her old tricks, that she was waking too hungover to get to her job answering phones at a veterinary clinic, but then an MRI revealed a malignant tumor burrowed deep in her spine like a fat white tick and we were lost to the equally terrible wilderness of chemotherapy and radiation and drug trials, of oceanic despair and hope as fragile as eggshell. Just after my daughter’s thirty-third birthday her oncologist sat us all down in his office with the latest test results and said there was nothing left to do except prepare.

  At the height of our daughter’s troubles, after a hair-raising visit to her third rehab facility, my husband, once we were back in the car, had pounded the steering wheel and wept and cried out, I never wanted this. Why can’t she just leave us be? After that meeting with the oncologist, I wondered in secret if my husband felt the soul-warping shame that I had years ago, when my body became the getaway car I had begged it to be after all. I have learned that one must be very careful about the desperate wishes cast out into the ether because perhaps someone is listening, someone all too willing to grant us exactly what we have asked for and maybe even what we deserve.

  When my daughter began palliative care, I thought nonstop about what my friend had told me on the train, about the big alone, but the strange thing was that I had never seen her so awash in company. She had embraced the “positive death” movement, introduced to her when she took a six-week course called the Art of Dying. She was a regular at death cafés and at the meeting my daughter asked me to attend, so I could better understand her philosophy of dying, I was able to discern that some of the participants were sick and not getting better and some were from medical or religious communities and some were morbidly curious or worse. One man asked questions that made me strongly suspect he had necrophilic leanings; a woman who volunteered to sit with the dying in hospice announced, with her eyes closed and her hands in a steeple, that the end of life experience was “more transcendent than an orgasm.” I could not get away from these people fast enough. My daughter decided on a green burial, which meant that her body, unembalmed, would be interned in a biodegradable casket and we would plant a linden tree in place of a headstone. She hired an end-of-life doula, who claimed that birth and death were more or less the same: seminal life experiences that most approached with witless terror. Our daughter rented out a bar and threw her own celebration of life party. Among the guests we recognized few people from her world as it had existed before dying the best death possible became her full-time job. Instead the place was flooded with these death enthusiasts, who kept coming up to us, her bewildered parents, and saying deeply surprising things about our daughter: the beautiful song she had written for someone’s funeral; the prayer circles she led; the homemade soups and juices she brought to people who were dying or grieving or just plain sick and tired of being here.

  Where had this individual been when she was well? I thought as I watched these people embrace our daughter, who looked serene and beautiful in a floor-length white peasant dress. She was barefoot. She wore a crown of daises on her head, like a forest nymph. Was this the person she had been all along, and we had somehow failed to coax this kinder self out into the world?

  Of course, I knew my thoughts about my daughter’s new community were ungenerous, but this was how I had come to understand the big alone—the way we are walled in by our secrets and the implacability of our judgments. The big alone had little to do with physical company; rather it was a matter of understanding, and where understanding broke down.

  “We should abide whatever brings her comfort,” my husband always insisted. He was so shattered by the whole situation that he had lost the ability to think critically. Meanwhile, I could not help but feel betrayed by the universe; as it turned out, I had been doomed to relive the same old story, with the same ending, even if that ending arrived at a different moment in time. I’d never told my husband about my stillborn daughter, so I had no one with whom I could discuss this brutal symmetry. I no longer knew how to contact my first husband, who last I heard had moved to Europe for work, and my friend was, by then, long dead.

  In our daughter’s last week on earth, we slept in cots in her hospital room. The day of the week, the hour of the day—time in the conventional sense had become meaningless; the only clock I could track was how many breaths she had taken and how many more she had left. There were long stretches of silence, all of us engaged in our private acts of bargaining. I had spent my life studying medieval literature and I thought often of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, how before the construction began, just after Saint Francis’s canonization in 1228, the site had been used for public executions and was known as the Hill of Hell. Because the laborers believed the hilltop to be contagious with doom, they refused to work on the basilica and so the pope offered anyone who would forty days off their stay in purgatory and that was how the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi came
to be built. I thought about how few things were more ancient than the bartering of souls.

  One night, out of nowhere, I remembered the train conductor on the Hudson. In my imagination, he was still a young man and his baby was still a baby and ugly as can be. But of course the conductor would be much older now and his child would be an adult and perhaps it was like in a fairy tale and his son had grown into the most handsome man in all of New York.

  I left my daughter’s room and decided I would go over to maternity and see if I could look at some babies, but after wandering a series of hallways and getting turned around by signs I realized that the babies were kept in a separate building, one that I couldn’t reach at this hour. The next time I saw the death doula I was going to pull her aside and demand to know why, if birth and death were so very similar, they were not permitted to occur in the same space.

  In my daughter’s room, I found her twitching under the thin hospital blanket. Her eyelids were fluttering. Her open mouth had the look of a small, dark cave. My husband was still asleep on his cot, curled and facing a blank wall. I wondered if it might be time for more morphine soon and if so, how long it would take a nurse to get around to administering it. I placed a finger under her left eye and felt her lashes brush my skin. When I was certain she could not hear me, I kneeled beside her bed and said, “You were not my first child. You had a sister, a long time ago, but she did not make it very far in this life.” I don’t know why I so badly needed to tell my daughter the truth, right there at the end. Maybe I thought she deserved to know that her mother was not always what she appeared to be—and that maybe I, as her mother, deserved someone to tell.

  When I turned from her bedside, I saw that my husband was not asleep at all. He was sitting on the edge of his cot, facing me, his shoulders square, his hands clamped on his knees. He was starting to look a little like my friend had on the train, all those years ago: the squint, the shock of white. I sat down next to him, expecting to have to answer for what he had just overhead, which would frankly have been a relief, a chance to talk about these twin losses and how our most cloistered wishes and our ultimate fates might or might not be related. Is any thought truly private or is everything overheard by a presence we cannot detect? If nature loves symmetry then why is symmetry so cruel? But my husband never said a word about it—not then and not later. I think it must have been too much for him to take in. Instead we slept the rest of the night in the same cot, our arms wrapped tight and hot around each other, and even today I could not guess at his thoughts.