Weather

by Jenny Offill

  No more campaigning, no more fund-raising, no more obligatory notes of hope. Already things she worked on for years have been swept away with the stroke of a pen. All she wants now is to go somewhere quiet and dark, she says.

  Withdrawal to the desert is called anachoresis in Greek.

  * * *

  …

  The meditation class is no longer crowded. I find out a lot of people left recently because of something Margot said. Someone asked her what she thought about the waves of recent allegations in the press. She said that it caused her great sadness to think of these men’s dishonorable actions. But she dismissed the language of victims and perpetrators. When she was asked about punishment, she spoke instead of reincarnation. Everyone here has done everything to everyone else, she said.

  Which explains why today it’s just me and three straight guys listening to her. She is talking about how dukkha, which is usually translated as “suffering,” can have other meanings. In Tibetan Buddhism, the word is sometimes slanted differently, she says. Instead of saying that life is suffering, they might say that life is tolerable. As in just barely.

  * * *

  …

  Nowhere feels like home anymore. That’s what my brother says as we walk around the park, his sleeping baby strapped to his chest.

  “You have to see a real shrink,” I tell him. “I don’t think I’m a real one.”

  He’s been on our couch for ten days now. He sees Iris when I arrange it. This because he got high and cheated on Catherine with an old girlfriend. Then he went home and confessed. There were a couple of weeks of back and forth, but then she kicked him out for good.

  Two weeks and three couches later, Henry is back at our place. I remember now. My brother is a terrible roommate.

  He paces endlessly around our apartment. It reminds me of those miserable weeks when he quit cold turkey. Something went wrong with his legs. He couldn’t stop moving them. All night long, he would toss and turn. There was no position that was comfortable. My brain feels scraped, he said.

  * * *

  …

  Ben is being patient, but it’s hard with my brother always here. It would be different if either one of them had an office. Henry’s still doing the greeting cards, but I’m worried Catherine will have had enough of that too. I stay up late and try to help him brainstorm. We come up with a few ideas, but I don’t say the first ones that pop into my head.

  To a Brother Who Is a Burden…

  To a Sister Who Never Made It Big…

  * * *

  …

  Henry is drinking all the milk. Henry is losing the remote. Henry is mad at Eli for coming into the living room so early. Henry comes back late at night, forgets his key and has to be buzzed in. Henry says he never should have had a kid, it was his worst idea ever. Later, Eli says, “You wanted to have me, right?”

  It’s summer and there’s nowhere for anyone to go.

  “Why did you wash your hands for so long?”

  “They were very dirty.”

  * * *

  …

  Catherine has already served Henry with divorce papers. She is moving quickly in her usual way. Henry seems sad but mostly relieved. I told him he has to do something to get better, otherwise he might lose custody completely. Margot agreed to see him. Me too, though it’s unorthodox.

  It takes some doing, but I finally talk Henry into meeting her. Afterward, we go back to my place. Eli is sitting alone by the window. “When I look at a tree or a bird, I can see the air around it,” he announces. “He reminds me of me,” Henry says. “Don’t say that,” I tell him, more sharply than I intend.

  * * *

  …

  I meant to call Sylvia back; I meant to, I did. But then Eli got the flu and I spent the night by his bed with a bucket. Evacuate. Evacuate, said our new talking alarm at four a.m. Ben and I fought about whose idea it was to get it.

  What I mean to say is that it took me a week to get back to Sylvia. When I did all I got was a recording.

  The number you have reached has been disconnected.

  * * *

  …

  In those disaster movies, if a person sees something from the time before, a phone charger, say, or the Statue of Liberty, she starts to weep.

  * * *

  …

  “You have to help me, Lizzie,” my brother says. “I am,” I tell him. “I am helping you.” I sit him on the couch, put on My Strange Addiction.

  Always a soothing hour of television. At least I don’t eat talcum powder, one can comfort oneself. At least I’m not in love with the Verrazzano Bridge.

  * * *

  …

  Margot tells Henry that the worst thoughts must be spoken out loud. If they are held back, they will only grow more powerful. It reminds me of something my mother used to say—Gods suppressed become devils.

  At the end of the second session, Margot gives us a workbook to take home with us. In the back of it are terrible exercises, none of which Henry will do.

  But I did something stupid tonight, just before the end of my shift. I read an article about a person who received a face transplant, and now I know exactly what happens if you shoot yourself in the head when you are eighteen and somehow live.

  The magazine warned me at the beginning that there would be disturbing pictures, but not how long they would disturb me or how I’d remember that Henry told me once a gun is best because you have to do the math just right with pills. And there was no warning at all about the words in the article, even though the caption to the picture was

  The face serenely waits on the table for the surgeons.

  * * *

  …

  My brother never seems to sleep anymore. “You should join the military,” I tell him. They’ve been studying the brain of the white-crowned sparrow to find out how it can fly for seven days without sleeping. The idea is to make it possible for soldiers to stay awake that long too. The Continuous Assisted Performance program, they call it.

  Go to sleep, I used to tell him. I’ll wake you up when we’re somewhere.

  * * *

  …

  All afternoon, it’s crazy hot. People are out on their stoops, talking and playing cards. An old man salutes me as we pass. Eli sidesteps some chicken bones and beer bottles on the way to the gumball machine. He gets a tiny rubber monster. This is the happiest day, he tells me.

  But Henry is playing video games all night. He seems a little high, but I can’t prove it. And he keeps trying to call Catherine, but he only ever gets her voice mail. The custody hearing is in two months. I just have to keep him alive until then, I joke to Ben. He doesn’t laugh. I distract myself by staying up late, googling prepper things.

  Start a Fire with Gum Wrapper and a Battery

  Use the foil-backed wrapper to short-circuit an AA battery and create a flame. First, tear the wrapper into an hourglass shape and touch the foil to the positive and negative battery terminals. The electrical current will briefly cause the paper wrapper to ignite. Use the flame to light a candle or tinder.

  What to Do If You Run Out of Candles

  A can of tuna can provide hours of light. Stab a small hole in the top of an oil-packed tuna can, then roll a two-by-five-inch piece of newspaper into a wick. Shove the wick into the hole, leaving a half inch exposed. Wait a moment for the oil to soak to the top of the wick, then light with matches. Your new oil lamp will burn for almost two hours and the tuna will still be good to eat afterward.

  Later, Ben comes into the living room, sees what I’m doing, and walks away. I follow him into our room. “You’re weary of me, aren’t you?” I say, and he says in the weariest voice imaginable, “No, I’m not. I just need to go to bed.”

  In the morning, he calls his sister. They talk for a long time. When he gets off, he tells me they are l
eaving on a three-week road trip to the California coast and we are invited. Glamping, she calls it. Do we want to go?

  “I can’t,” I tell him. “I have to stay here.”

  Ben has that resigned look he gets these days when we talk about my brother. “Think about it,” he says. “You have obligations to this family too, Lizzie.”

  But how can I leave him alone? Already, I’m hiding my sleeping pills in a sock under my bed.

  * * *

  …

  Of course, Ben’s worried I won’t keep my head above water. Last time Henry was drowning, I dove in right after him. I left school and never went back again. Henry had stopped working. He wasn’t seeing anyone. He just stayed in that apartment in Staten Island, high, until he ran out of drugs and had to go down the street to get some more.

  I remember this one day I came and he was like a half-Henry, flickering in and out. You have to stop, I said, let me help you. It won’t work, he said. It never works. You could go to meetings this time, I said. I might as well have signed him up for a trip to Mars. But then a few nights later he called me up giddy: he had an idea. He’d seen something on YouTube about the monks of Mount Athos. He made me watch it and call him right back. I could go there, he said. It’s beautiful, there’s nothing there.

  They interviewed this one monk, middle-aged, American, a professor once. He had fled Boston, come there and never left. He showed the reporter where the ossuary was. All the skulls of the dead monks who had ever lived there, stacked up neatly like wood in a shed. He had no fear of death: I know where I’ll end up, he said, and then an offhand wave toward them. He hadn’t left the island since he was twenty-six and he wouldn’t now, though his mother was dying. The reporter asked again: Even though your mother is dying? Even so, he said. His smile was so beautiful a chill went through me. No, I told Henry. I’d never see you again.

  Tonight he’s pacing back and forth, back and forth, across our tiny living room. “If anything happens to me, I’m leaving you Iris,” he says. “Nothing is going to happen to you,” I tell him. “Also, you can’t.”

  * * *

  …

  Saturday and my plan is to do a bunch of errands. I’m at the supermarket before the doors are even open yet. It’s just me and one other woman in a caftan. She looks focused. An extreme couponer possibly.

  I’ve been watching this show about them. It’s exactly like those shows about drug addicts minus the family ambush at the end. My favorite part is when the person comes up to the cashier with ten shopping carts. The total is always staggering, and there is a moment when it seems like the shopper might make a run for it. But then comes the music. The person opens an enormous binder and starts handing the cashier coupon after coupon. With each one, the total ticks down.

  How low can you go? How low can you go? (The eternal question.)

  Someone says hello to me and I see it’s the hot guy from the bus. He is wearing running clothes, which lowers my opinion of him. “What are you up to?” he asks me. The manager looks out at us through the glass. The doors swing open. “Not much,” I tell him. He pulls a nub of a cigarette out of his pocket, smokes it, then takes off running.

  So okay, maybe not American.

  Later, I take Eli to the new dollar store to get a plastic colander. He runs up and down the aisles ecstatically. “Who made all these things?” he asks me. “The Invisible Hand,” I tell him.

  * * *

  …

  “I’m worried about you,” Ben says. This because I said something I thought I only thought. Eli was hounding me about his cereal. Where was it? Why didn’t I get it? Why couldn’t I go back to the store? I hate everyone, I said.

  Mildly, I’d argue, but not mildly enough apparently, because Eli burst into tears.

  So now Ben announces that they are going to go on the trip with his sister. They are going whether I come or not. Three weeks. They’ve never been away that long. I repeat that I can’t go and he packs them up in a weird, ominous silence.

  But as soon as Ben gets to his sister’s house, he calls me. “How is it going?” I ask. “We miss you,” he says.

  * * *

  …

  I have the dog at least. And maybe a little crush too. The guy from the bus came into the library today. He’s been wandering in and out of the stacks all morning. Now he’s talking to one of the regulars, that woman whose nails look bitten to the quick. “Don’t eat plants with milky sap. The exception is dandelions,” he tells her. He goes outside to smoke.

  By the time I go to lunch, he’s nowhere to be seen. I give the woman on the bench her dollar. It’s muggy out. I can feel the sweat pooling under my arms. No one’s looking at you, as my mother used to say.

  When I get home, Henry is lying on the couch staring at the ceiling. I find a show that has nothing to do with either of us. We watch, eating huge bowls of chocolate pudding. A contestant faces the camera and talks about her hopes and dreams. Why are people on reality shows always setting their intentions? Is that like prayer for pharmaceutical reps?

  * * *

  …

  It feels weird in the building now with Ben gone. Like people are looking differently at me. For example, I can’t tell if the drug dealer wants to sleep with me or just with everyone. He gives off sort of an ambient vibe.

  He likes me better ever since he saw me come home the other night at two a.m., stumble drunk. He passed me in the lobby as I tried and retried to use my mailbox key. You good? he asked. I’m good, I said. He went upstairs, but after that he always holds the elevator door for me even when I am halfway across the lobby.

  * * *

  …

  It is important to remember that emotional pain comes in waves. Remind yourself that there will be a pause between the waves. That’s what Margot told Henry. We’ve been trying and failing to do the homework.

  “It’s unbearable,” Henry says. “It’s barely bearable,” she corrects him. He is supposed to record the worst of his visions. “Write it down in first person. Use clear details,” she tells him.

  Later, I hold Iris while Henry tries to do it. Oh, his eyes—it hurts to look at them. He stumbles, starts over, reads from the beginning.

  I leave the baby in the car while I go into the store. It is so much bigger than I expected. I keep wandering up and down the aisles, putting more and more things into my cart. It is so full I even fill up the seat part where the kid is supposed to sit. Suddenly, I remember Iris and run outside. It is a sweltering day and all the windows are closed. There are people standing around the car, trying to break in. A man is hitting the window with a hammer, but it won’t break. A woman is screaming. The police come and they smash it open. They give her CPR, but she is already dead. I am standing in the crowd. Then they realize I am her father.

  I kiss the baby’s head where the soft spot is. “Good,” I tell him.

  * * *

  …

  That robot Samantha is in the news again. She was on display at a tech conference in Europe. But too many men tried to test her at once, and by the end of the day she was heavily soiled and had two broken fingers. Her inventor was shaken; he had to ship her back to Spain to be fixed. Luckily, her voice box still worked. I am fine, she said. These people are barbarians, he told a reporter.

  Buddhist practice includes the notion that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been each other’s mothers and fathers and children and siblings. Therefore, we should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.

  * * *

  …

  I’ve been thinking more about my doomstead. Choosing people for it is tricky. First, you must assess their character. Will they lead, will they follow? Will they dominate others the moment this becomes possible? Are they alpha? Beta?

  My dog, I was told, is neither. She is a climber, which means she will show defere
nce to any alpha dog, but if she has a chance she will creep up farther and farther on the bed until she is found out and pushed down again. The beta would just automatically stay at the foot of the bed.

  Second, you must balance the skills of the people you choose. Is one handy? Is one musical? Is one medical?

  Third, you must figure out how to tell them you have drafted them for your doomstead.

  * * *

  …

  Sometimes I slip up and allow myself for a moment to think of what is wrong with Henry. If he were to get really high and those thoughts came. Then there is the press of strangers against me and I’m up the stairs and into the sunlight again.

  * * *

  …

  We watch the season finale of Extreme Couponing together. This time the shopper gets her total down to $2.58. Everyone in the store cheers as the train of silver carts is wheeled out to her car.

  Earlier in the show, they had given her backstory. This woman wore a dress and lipstick every day to work, but she wasn’t afraid to climb into dumpsters to retrieve discarded circulars. The host of the show noted that she’d recently converted her house to storage for bulk buys and now lived with her family in their half-finished basement.