I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  “Shit!” he cries out, louder than he means to. “I told you to be careful.” At this rate, they’ll be drinking wine from coffee mugs by the weekend.

  “Didn’t you see that lizard?” She crouches down and picks up a long glass shard, her heart still quaking. “It ran right across the wall.”

  “No. I did not.” He fetches the broom and sweeps up the glass. He tells her to step aside; if she tries to touch the glass she’ll only cut herself. Does he have to do everything around here? “But do you know what? I see lizards every day. And do you know why? Because lizards are everywhere around here. They are everywhere and they are perfectly harmless.”

  She knows the lizards are harmless—they aren’t poisonous, they don’t have teeth—but she is from up north and she can’t get used to these creatures crawling around inside her apartment. They look like tiny dinosaurs and tiny dinosaurs do not belong in people’s homes. Their apartment is on the sixth floor—how do they even get up here?

  “I need to go for a walk,” she says.

  Her husband will not approve—no one they know in Florida treats walking as a leisure activity—but she is desperate for air. They live in one of those labyrinthine apartment complexes ringed by interstates, but she can at least wander the grounds and the parking lots and sit out by the retention pond. Sometimes, in the stairwells, she even finds interesting things to observe. Once she glimpsed a spectacular moth—orange and gold, a black dot on each wing—batting against a light. Also, if she’s out past a certain hour, she hears the same neighbor weeping in her apartment. It sounds like the neighbor is having a nervous breakdown in there, night after night. Sometimes she lingers by the door and listens for a minute, just to keep her own life in perspective. It has never occurred to her to knock.

  “Wait.” He hates this walking habit she insists on clinging to. Once, not long after they moved and he learned that she’d gone on foot to the grocery, he had to take her aside and let her know that around here only poor people walked—a crass thing to say, perhaps, but it was the truth.

  “I won’t be long.” She picks up the remote and turns off the TV.

  “Have you been hydrating?” He opens the fridge and reaches for a can of sparkling water, lime-flavored. He holds it out to his wife. She stares at the can for a moment and when she finally accepts it she doesn’t open the water right away—she just holds the can to her forehead and shuts her eyes. It’s only when she turns and enters the living room that he hears the reassuring hiss of the tab popping.

  He heard about this sparkling water from another husband in the complex, who maintains a stockpile in the trunk of his car. One Saturday afternoon, they were drinking beers by the retention pond and started complaining about their wives. It is a universal truth, the neighbor said, that some women never know when to shut the fuck up. He laughed along, even though his neighbor’s brashness made him uncomfortable. He likes to think of himself as more evolved. He’s a registered Democrat. He wore a DEAL ME IN T-shirt to the polls on Election Day. Come on, the neighbor said next. I want to show you something. In the parking lot, the neighbor popped open his trunk, cut into a flat of cans, and passed him one. It was lukewarm and looked like off-brand LaCroix. Have her drink it, he said, and then call me in the morning. The neighbor assured him that his wife drank a can almost every night and she was as healthy as a horse—healthier, even, than she’d been before. Besides, this water would be everywhere before too long, according to the neighbor; they needed new defenses for these times. So he took a can to be neighborly and planned to dispose of the water but then his wife came in from work, looking pale and disheveled, her blouse crooked, and started in about how she had been thinking and maybe Florida wasn’t working out for them and she really did hate her job and all this driving was frying her nerves and maybe they needed to move back north because she just couldn’t imagine starting a family here and—

  “Is that LaCroix?” she said after he opened the fridge and handed her a cold can.

  “Even better,” he said back.

  He went into the bathroom to shower and when he returned his wife was unconscious in bed, sunk into a deep and peaceful slumber, the half-empty can sitting on the bedside table. In the morning, she woke refreshed and cheerful. That evening, she did not complain about the traffic or her job.

  On his lunch break, he called his neighbor and demanded to know where this magical sparkling water had come from. His neighbor said that he had heard about it from another husband in a different apartment complex who heard about it from a second cousin who heard about it from an Internet forum. For a small fee, his neighbor said, I can be your supplier.

  That was two months ago.

  Now each time his wife simply becomes too much he offers her a can of sparkling water. He tells her it’s artisanal, made in small batches by a family friend who likes to gift it around. It helps that they live in Florida, where everyone is overheated all the time. He clips out articles on the importance of hydration for skin elasticity and weight loss and a general sense of well-being from women’s magazines and drops them into her purse.

  “I might not go for a walk after all,” his wife calls out from the living room. “I just got so sleepy.”

  She stands slumped in front of the silent TV and spends five minutes debating whether or not to brush her teeth before eventually deciding she is so desperate for sleep she must go straight to bed, hygiene be damned.

  Of course, she has noticed a correlation between drinking the sparkling water, with the mysterious label she can never find anywhere else, and being seized by a narcoleptic longing for sleep. She believes the story about the family friend, even if making small-batch artisanal water does seem like a curious way to spend one’s time. But she likes the word artisanal, thinks it sounds aspirational, and also the water is just so refreshing. Lately, though, she’s started to get an icy feeling in her stomach whenever her husband hands her a can and at the same time, for reasons she cannot articulate to herself, she feels compelled to accept his offering, as though they have entered into an agreement she doesn’t quite understand. Also, there is the problem of how her sleep has changed. After drinking the water, she used to wake feeling as though she had slept for a hundred years, like a character in a fairy tale, but recently she has been coming to in the middle of the night, upright in the shower or in the kitchen, her head stuck in the arctic glow of the freezer—even though she has no history of sleepwalking (her husband, always a sound sleeper, has yet to notice). Still, she wants this life. She really does, even if she has to admit that ever since the judge entered into the news cycle something inside her has been disturbed. The women who have come forward—they are so relatable. One of them looks just like her aunt Karen. So she wants to stand up. She wants to do something. If only she weren’t so tired. She should go to a march! Instead she has started shouting at the drivers who cut her off in traffic and snapping at coworkers and picking fights with her poor husband, who is trying his best, she supposes, to navigate these new currents.

  The truth is that she is angriest at her own anger, which she suspects has arrived far too late to be of any real use.

  She has been kept too safe, been too protected, for too long.

  Besides, if she squints at the label the can just looks like a LaCroix.

  This is what I need, she thinks as she sinks into bed. This is what the world needs. Sleep is holy. Maybe our problems would be solved if everyone just got more sleep. Isn’t that what the woman from the Huffington Post has been trying to tell us? She drifts away listening to her husband bang around in the kitchen, his movements a dim echo through the wall.

  The last time he bought a flat of cans from his neighbor, in a remote corner of one of the complex’s many parking lots, the neighbor asked if he was taking “full advantage” of his new marital situation. He frowned and said he didn’t know what that was supposed to mean and then the neighbor told him that when his wife drinks a full can you can’t wake her up for the end of the world.
Call me twisted, his neighbor whispered, but it makes me feel like a ghost. Like I’m walking through walls while everyone else is still using doors.

  The neighbor’s confession was twisted, he assures himself in the kitchen. Why would anyone want to be a ghost? In the parking lot, he yanked the flat from his neighbor’s arms and hurried away, but now that the notion is in his head he can’t scrub it out, especially when she kicks away the covers and he spots a smooth thigh all twisted up in the sheets.

  Sometimes he wonders what would happen if everyone were to one day stop pretending and he feels afraid.

  He searches for a way to roust out the lizard. He knows how to catch it in a water glass and release it back into the outdoors, if an apartment complex entombed by interstates could still be considered the outdoors. He’s from this odd southern state and lizard catching was a favored pastime as a boy. He slams the cabinet doors open and shut, to see if he can startle the creature out from hiding. He pushes his fingers into the blade-narrow space between the cabinet and the wall. He looks forward to telling his wife that he stayed up very late and worked very hard to expel this lizard from their apartment, all in the service of her comfort.

  She can’t be sure of the time when she rises from bed and begins to move (quietly, quietly), out the front door and down the open stairwell and into a vast parking lot, the asphalt lunar under the fluorescents. She walks and she walks. She has the sensation of floating, which morphs into the sensation of having been halved, like a cell dividing. One version of herself is floating right here while another hovers in the distance, her pale blue nightgown fluttering at her ankles. Except she doesn’t own a pale blue nightgown, she sleeps in sweats and T-shirts, and that’s when she feels the burn of the asphalt on her bare feet and understands the woman in the distance is not a splinter of her self but rather a distinct person, out on her own night sojourn. She drifts closer to the woman; she imagines the two of them orbiting the parking lot together, twin satellites in outer space. She wants to call to the woman, to ask what she’s doing out here, and then she feels the sound of her own voice ring through her like a bell. She stops walking. The distant woman pauses, turns toward her. She is so close to being awake.

  He thinks he hears a door open and close; for a moment, he imagines a human-size lizard creeping into the apartment, but of course there are only two human-size creatures in here and he is in the kitchen and his wife is in bed, asleep.

  He takes a break and searches for “agonizing heel pain” on his phone. The results include plantar fasciitis, cysts, tendon tears, nerve entrapment, gout. His phone buzzes in his hand, a notification from the app, to wait at the new Cronut place first thing tomorrow. He has a job interview lined up for next week, at a real estate company, and he hopes he gets hired. In his heart he knows waiting in line is an absurd and humiliating job for an adult to have and he tries to not think about what it means that he’s so good at it.

  When he finally catches the lizard, he doesn’t slide his palm under the glass right away. He keeps the glass pressed to the wall and leers at his specimen. He knows he must look like a giant, from the lizard’s perspective, that he must be terrifying. The creature is so still and it is strange how they watch you, with those unblinking eyes. Isn’t it true that they don’t have eyelids? Just as well, he thinks. They are little things, no longer than a finger, and so they have to be vigilant. The lizard cracks open its tiny mouth, heart twitching under its thin reptilian hide. His breath starts to fog the glass. It really does look like something from another epoch. Prehistoric, as his wife would say. Why are there tiny dinosaurs in our home? “How did you get all the way up here?” he asks the lizard, and the whole history of the world answers back.

  THE PITCH

  In the childhood photo my husband showed me, I noticed something strange. He had found the photo in a wood crate filled with his father’s things. We had driven several such crates home with us after the funeral in Lake City, two weeks earlier. In the picture, my husband was standing in the woods, shirtless and barefoot and holding a fishing rod. Thirteen years old, slender and pale, a streak of mud on his cheek, one of his father’s too-big belts knotted around his waist. Americana all the way.

  My husband’s mother, I had been told, died in childbirth. When we first met, he had a nasty habit of leaving his dirty socks on the bathroom floor and when I’d asked him, “Were you raised in the woods or what?” he had replied, “As a matter of fact I was.”

  The woods in the photo were called the Pitch, because the tree cover was so dense not even the fabled Florida sunshine could blunt the shadows. The first time my husband mentioned these woods—reachable on foot from his childhood home in North Florida—I’d asked him if the name had something to do with baseball and he’d said, “No, like pitch dark,” and then I’d said, “As in Renata Adler?” and he’d looked at me like I was hopeless.

  We went to the Pitch once and walked around in there, back when my husband’s father was dying but not yet dead, and I’d wondered who was in charge of naming things, how such decisions were made.

  I was fond of my father-in-law and had felt very sorry when he announced to us that he was dying, and remained sorry even after he began to flood my voicemail with messages, left in the middle of the night, in the last month of his life.

  During this time, I had tried to engage my husband on the subject of his impending orphanhood, but he refused. Instead he spent his free hours cultivating his rose garden, examining the teas for signs of distress and pruning his floribundas; he ordered expensive mulches online and frequented a nearby slaughterhouse for fresh manure. From the window of my backyard studio I had observed him bending over the wide faces of the floribundas and whispering to them. Clearly he regarded the roses as superior confidants.

  Yet I can’t say that I was thinking about any of this when my husband showed me the photo. I was too busy looking at the boy in the background, small and white as milk and shimmying up a tree.

  “Who’s that?” I asked my husband, pressing my thumb over the boy’s head. We were standing in my studio, just under a small skylight; all day I had been at work on an illustration project commissioned by a wealthy eccentric.

  He snatched the photo from me. “What do you mean who? That’s me. The man you married.”

  “Not you,” I said, already exasperated. One unfortunate side effect of marriage was knowing the mistakes a person was going to make before they actually made them. I stood beside him and pointed at the boy in the tree.

  He held the photo close to his face. He blinked like he had something in his eye. Had he really not noticed the boy until this very moment? It was summer, which meant everyone walked around looking like they’d just been sprayed with a hose, and yet when I touched my husband’s arm his skin was cool and dry.

  “I see what you’re seeing.” He began to nod. “I didn’t before, but now I do.”

  He explained that the boy was not a boy at all, but rather a large vine wrapped around the tree trunk, bleached and distorted by exposure. He pushed the photo under my nose.

  “Whatever you say.” I returned to my desk, pressed a pencil to my sketchpad. I could feel my husband hovering over me, could hear him saying my name, but I did not look up—not if he was going to insist that I had mistaken a vine for a boy. That may have been the story he was intent on telling himself, but I wasn’t about to let it infect me. I didn’t yet understand that refusing one kind of narrative could activate another.

  You draw one line and then you draw another, I told myself until I heard the studio door open and close, felt the air settle.

  The next thing I knew it was dusk and I was standing by the window, at a momentary loss for how to proceed with the next phase of my illustration project, and my husband was in the backyard with a grill light and a shovel. I watched him set the photograph on fire and then bury the ashes in the ground, a safe distance from the roses.

  * * *

  After the incident with the photo, my husband’s ever
y movement adopted an aura of menace. I would look up from my desk and see his face pressed to the window of my studio or turn from the kitchen sink and find him right behind me in socked feet, perched on tiptoe like a gargoyle. He put his father’s things on a shelf in the garage, too high for me to reach, especially now that our ladder seemed to have gone missing. My husband worked as a receptionist for a psychiatrist, Dr. X, and began coming home late. From bed, I would hear the car rumble into the driveway and once he was beside me I would, somewhat against my will, fall into a sleep so deep it was like being absorbed into a black hole, though I couldn’t say that I ever felt “at rest.” My husband continued to spend all his free time fussing over his roses. He started wearing his green gardening gloves indoors, leaving dirt trails on counters and side tables, charting his path through the house.

  When he was around, he pestered me with strange questions. “Have you been checked for cataracts?” he asked one morning, peeling an orange with his gloved hands. “Have you ever suffered from psychodynamic visual hallucinations?” he asked another.

  “Is that something you heard from Dr. X?” I said back. “Do you even know what those words mean?” My husband had always called his employer Dr. X and I had joined him in this practice because in a marriage few things were more powerful than shared habits. And then some years ago, at the office holiday party, I learned that everyone called him Dr. X—shorthand for a name, the doctor told me, he had grown tired of people mispronouncing.

  “I don’t understand what the big commotion is all about,” I said to my husband in our kitchen. “I saw what I saw and I saw a boy in that tree.”