I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  STOCKINGS

  Beth Butler preferred Kotex tampons, the same brand she’d used since she was sixteen. Her lipstick colors were all classics: Lady Dangerous, Bruised Plum, Cherries in the Snow. Impersonating her will require a prosthetic nose, tinted contacts, highlights, and three teeth-whitening treatments, as Beth Butler had unbelievably white teeth. She was five foot eight, making it necessary for me to wear a kitten heel. From the video footage, I learn that, irrespective of occasion or season, Beth Butler always wore the same tacky black glitter stockings, the kind a teenage girl might slide into on prom night, in the name of festiveness.

  WORLDS OF MYSTERY

  When she was alive, Beth Butler loved visiting the planetarium. I meet her husband at the entrance, holding two tickets. “You’re late,” I say, because Beth Butler arrived early for everything and was thus always chiding people for running behind. I take his hand and together we sail through the planetarium’s dark rooms. We sit in a theater and watch a video called Moons: Worlds of Mystery. The moons that orbit across the screen look like giant marbles. When one of the moons explodes, a child somewhere behind us cries out. I learn that exomoons are natural satellites, orbiting giant, alien planets, which I will admit I did not know before today. I can’t claim that the gig economy doesn’t ever teach me anything.

  In the parking lot, I’m supposed to say, “I’m going to swing by the market and pick up clams for dinner”—Beth Butler’s signature dish was linguine with clams—and then head to the T, where the train cars would be crowded at this time of day, but the husband breaks the script by asking if I need a ride home. The clouds move swiftly above our heads. My glitter stockings itch. I say the line about the clams and then spin around. My heels are clicking fast across the asphalt when a shadow looms behind me and a lunging hand presses a white cloth to my mouth.

  The Great Beyond

  I wake up in the dark trunk of a car, my wrists and ankles bound with rope, a square of duct tape over my mouth. I feel like my eardrums have been replaced by tiny bells. I can tell we are speeding across a highway, moving toward a destination unknown to me. I am starting to suspect that poor Beth Butler did not die in a hiking accident after all.

  This is the problem with the gig economy, I think as I squirm around in the trunk. Everyone is so vulnerable and the rules for what constitutes civilized behavior—well, they’re coming apart so quickly I’ve decided those rules were illusions all along. We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy. The men I deliver food to, the same ones who refuse to add a courier tip, offer me twenty bucks to come up to their apartments. The dogs I walk pull on their leashes and growl at birds and the owners send me angry texts, demanding to know why their dogs, despite all these walks, remain so wild. Once, in a recital hall, a husband pinched my nipple, as casual as can be, during a Shostakovich performance; his dead wife had counted String Quartet no. 3 among her favorites. The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.

  The car slides off the highway and creeps down a road. I imagine metal streetlights and vacant parking lots and shuttered box stores. The car turns again, bumps down another road, lurches to a stop. I hear the engine cut. I hear the driver’s door open and close. I make myself small in the trunk. I think of childhood, of little boys smashing snails with their fists. I wait for the trunk to pop open, but instead I hear his footfalls move farther and farther away.

  In the early days of Your Second Wife, my sister sent me an online tutorial called Uh-Oh, You’ve Been Kidnapped! In a Marco Polo video, I called her paranoid, but in private I memorized the steps for escape. I grope the trunk’s carpeted interior until I find the release. Beth Butler’s husband is clearly an amateur as the release has not been tampered with. He’s also failed to realize that once I shake off my kitten heels, the glitter stockings, made from a slippery material, will help me shed the rope from my ankles, as though Beth Butler herself has thrown me a lifeline from the Great Beyond.

  I roll out of the trunk, feet first, my wrists still bound, my mouth taped. The car is parked on the glimmering edge of a lake. Beth Butler’s husband has left the headlights on and ahead I can see him kneeling on the ground and unfurling a roll of plastic sheeting, probably part of some twisted ritual he lacks the skill to perfect. Woods rise up behind me like gravestones. Even in the dark, I know I have been here before.

  WALDEN POND

  Once I’m on the other side of the woods, I jog uphill on a quiet, two-lane road. On the shoulder, I pass a sign for Walden Pond and understand why the landscape looked so familiar. The last time I went to Walden Pond my best friend’s wife was still alive. The day was hot and infested with flies. We ate tomato and cheddar sandwiches on the shore and then my friend and his wife took a nap under a giant tree. I walked the perimeter of the lake and when I returned I noticed, from the faint twitching of their mouths and the involuntary tapping of their index fingers, that they were having the same dream, like two dogs linked in sleep.

  The sight of my best friend and his wife dreaming together left me feeling like I had never made a right choice in my life.

  Because I’ve always been a little in love with my best friend. He moved to another city last year and we have now lost touch, as people do. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if, during his time of grief, I had shown up at his door looking not like his dead wife but like my very own self. If I mistook kindness for cowardice. If I am just a person afraid to face the world unmasked.

  Eventually I come upon a twenty-four-hour diner called Helen’s Kitchen. The door chimes as I enter. The diner is empty except for two waitresses, standing behind the counter like strange twins, one on the left-hand side, the other on the right. They are both wearing forest-green aprons and holding white coffee carafes. They are wearing the same glasses, with pink cat-eye frames; their hair is pulled back into matching French braids. For a moment, I think Beth Butler’s husband has murdered me after all and Helen’s Kitchen is the afterlife. The woman on the left puts down her carafe. She walks over and rips the tape from my mouth.

  “How can we help you?” she says.

  I ask if Helen’s Kitchen serves alcohol and the woman on the right disappears into the back and returns with a bottle of Fleischmann’s and three little glasses. We sit in a booth, the two women across from me, and I realize both their name tags read HELEN. I ask them if they’re the Helen and they tell me the Helen has been dead for fifty years, but every woman who works here is made to wear a name tag that says Helen. The first Helen, the one who stripped the tape from my mouth, points to an oil portrait of the Helen, on the wall above the entrance to the bathroom, and there it all is: the forest-green apron, the pink cat-eye glasses, the French braid. Everyone is impersonating somebody.

  “Where did you come from?” the second Helen asks me. “And why are your teeth so white?”

  “Walden Pond,” I reply.

  “I hope you didn’t go swimming.” The first Helen explains that a steady increase in swimmers peeing in the pond has given rise to a virulent algae that now makes those same swimmers violently ill.

  “Life is just a circle of destruction,” she adds, shaking her head.

  The Helens pour us another round. I extend my arms across the table like a supplicant and they begin to work on the rope around my wrists.

  “How did you escape?” the second Helen asks, and I wonder if she’s asking because I came in with my wrists tied and my mouth taped or if because tonight is not the first time Beth Butler’s husband has tried to murder a woman at Walden Pond.

  “I’ve had a lot of different jobs,” I explain. “I know how to do a lot of different things.” I pause and add that I also have to credit my sister, the only person who has ever looked out for me.

  PYTHAGOREAN IDENTITIES IN RADICAL FORM

  These days I hav
e apps that track everything—how many steps I take, how much water I drink, every cent I spend—but what about the things that can’t be quantified, like the difference between kindness and cowardice, or the meaning of life? When I tell my sister about the incident with Beth Butler’s husband, I know she will plead with me to get a real job, but doesn’t she know real jobs barely exist anymore and not all of us are made to run off to Australia? The longer you stay in the gig economy, with its strange mix of volatility and freedom, the harder it is to get out.

  When I leave the Helens, it’s four in the morning and the sky looks like the interior of a vast cave. I walk to the commuter rail, to catch a train back into the city. At the station, I pace circles on the platform and think about how I will explain Your Second Wife to the police, when I report Beth Butler’s husband. Maybe they’ll think I’m really a prostitute and was about to get what I deserved at Walden Pond. Either way Beth Butler’s husband seems like an altogether incompetent killer and I imagine he’ll be apprehended soon enough.

  I peel off my prosthetic nose and leave it on a bench. I watch the glowing green numbers change on the platform sign.

  4:21. 4:24. 4:32.

  I can barely remember the math I studied in college, back when I still wanted to build skyscrapers, but sometimes the lingo returns to me, like a language I can recall only in fragments. Fractals. Pythagorean Identities in Radical Form. The Unit Circle as a pie chart for how I have spent my life and where that time has gone. There is symmetry in math and there is grace. There are rules and there are ways to circumvent the rules. There is no chaos or rather chaos exists as a set of theories, designed to help us navigate the most complex systems on earth. I remember a line from one of my textbooks: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. Translation: it’s all about the initial conditions.

  I consider my own initial conditions, all the way back to when my sister and I played hide-and-go-seek in the woods behind our childhood home. With my inborn gift for ventriloquism, I could make my voice leap from tree to clearing to creek, I could make my voice be where my body was not. I could adopt different characters, from the bits I picked up from TV or school. I was an attentive child; the world seemed like a bewildering place and I wanted all the knowledge I could come by. I believed that knowing the right thing at the right time could save a life. My sister always wanted to play this game even though it left her furious, but she is an optimist and she thought she could figure out my tricks. I agreed to play each and every time because I knew that she would never beat me, not so long as she remained uneducated in the art of being both everywhere and nowhere at all.

  I HOLD A WOLF BY THE EARS

  Margot’s destination is a walled medieval village several thousand feet above Trapani, overlooking Punta del Saraceno and the Mediterranean Sea. The village can be accessed only by a single road and as the taxi winds its way up through the arid copper hills, her phone chimes in her purse. It’s her sister, Louise, calling from the airport in Rome.

  “I’m not coming,” she says, her voice dwarfed by the echo of gate announcements.

  Louise is scheduled to attend a conference at the village’s Galileo Foundation for Scientific Culture. Margot works for an environmental nonprofit in Minneapolis and hasn’t been out of the country in years, but a month ago her sister’s husband announced he was leaving and there came her invitation to Italy, all expenses paid.

  “What are you talking about?” Margot hunches over, presses the phone tight to her ear. The taxi passes a sluggish van on a blind turn; she’s thrown into the passenger door. There is no guardrail and for a moment it looks as though the driver is speeding them straight over a cliff.

  Louise is a theoretical physicist. She studies quantum entanglements, particles that remained connected despite being separated by billions of light-years; she has spent her adult life, quite literally, on a different plane of existence, far from the world’s savage rot.

  “I’m going,” Louise begins.

  “We’re going,” Margot interrupts.

  “I’m going to—”

  The call drops, or Louise hangs up, before she finishes. Margot looks out the window and is startled to see that the taxi has completed its ascent and is now puttering through the village, the cobblestone streets curiously empty. She glimpses a piazza, a scattering of unoccupied café tables with navy umbrellas, a lotto, a stone church. The sky looks alarmingly low and then she realizes she’s not seeing sky at all but a descending fog.

  At the hotel, the lobby is empty. A man named Filippo checks her in. He’s wearing a red polo shirt and jeans and a silver watch, a little too tight on his wrist; he has an impatient manner about him, a darting gaze. Margot gives Louise’s name, since her sister is the one who made the arrangements, and makes brief mention of her traveling companion having been delayed. Filippo requests possession of Margot’s passport. He needs to make a photocopy for their records, but at the moment the machine is broken.

  “It will be fixed soon.” He drops her passport into a large leather envelope that looks like a purse, without even checking her information, just as well since the photo was taken in front of a bright white backdrop in some remote corner of a drugstore, in the terrible afterlife of a hangover. She watches him stow the envelope under the desk and thinks about how happy she would be to leave the woman in that picture behind.

  The automatic doors gust open and a giant white dog gallops out of the fog. The dog lopes into the tiled breakfast area, toward a table with carafes of coffee and a platter of tan cookies. Filippo grabs a newspaper and chases the dog back outside, but not before the animal rears up in front of the table and snatches a cookie from the platter.

  “No one around here eats better than the strays.” Filippo shakes the newspaper.

  On the front desk, Margot notices a sign, a sheet of paper crooked in a frame, stating that tomorrow the road will be closed to accommodate the annual Time Trial of Modern and Historic Cars. The only way to leave the village will be by funicular.

  “A race?” She remembers the steep climb to the village, the absence of a guardrail. “On these roads?”

  “The Annual Enemy of the Restaurateurs is more like it,” Filippo replies. Apparently the road closure prevents tour buses from journeying up to the village and depositing their lunch-and-souvenir-hungry passengers into the streets.

  “Is that why everything looks so quiet?”

  He nods, adding that they’re also nearing the end of the tourist season. In October, a month from now, the hotel will shutter for the winter and the staff will have to find new jobs.

  “And what will you do then?” Margot asks him.

  “This and that,” Filippo says with a shrug.

  He hands her a walking map. He tells her to deal with him alone because he is the only one at the hotel who speaks English. She climbs three flights of stairs to her room, where the twin beds are low and hard and the shower floods and there is the most spectacular view she has ever seen. The fog has thinned and a small balcony looks out onto Punta del Saraceno, a blue hulk in the dusk, and the sea beyond. Wheat-colored hillsides, the valleys flecked with gold. Headlights porpoise along the roads.

  She tries Louise again, but her phone is switched off. She leaves a message and works hard to not let her anger break through. “I’m looking at the sea,” she says to the voicemail. “It’s beautiful here. Like heart-stopping, fairy-tale beautiful. Come.”

  Margot showers, ankle-deep in standing water, and then puts on a loose linen dress and a sweater. At the front desk, Filippo is having a hushed phone conversation; when he sees Margot coming down the stairs, he turns away, the cord winding around his waist, and speaks faster in Italian. Margot steps out into the evening, and she cannot remember the last time she walked streets so quiet. She notices plastic compartments embedded in the time-blasted stone walls, each housing an offering to a different saint. She looks up and finds the Virgin Mary entombed in an a
rchway, her plastic case framed by electric blue lights. The great white dog, the cookie thief from the hotel, appears from around a corner and trots beside her for a little while. She reaches for one of his silky ears and he darts away, down stone steps sloping in the direction of the sea.

  In a piazza, she sits outside even though the air is chilly enough to make the hair on her arms go stiff, because she is in Italy and she has never been to Italy before and she wants to take in the sights, even if the sights presently include only a bakery and a freestanding bankomat. She is the restaurant’s sole patron. She orders a glass of wine and a plate of sardines. She eats too quickly, anxious about Louise’s whereabouts and what exactly her responsibilities are in such a situation. She hopes her sister just needs a night to get drunk on her own in Rome.

  After she settles her bill, she tries to withdraw cash from the bankomat. Halfway through her transaction, the machine makes a terrible crunching sound and the screen goes dark and her debit card doesn’t come out. She jabs all the buttons, but nothing happens. Her wallet contains thirty euros and two overextended credit cards. A pressure builds around her mouth, under her eyes.