Weather

by Jenny Offill

  Later, I ride the elevator up with the drug dealer from 5C. How about this motherfucking darkness? is what our eyes say.

  * * *

  …

  I decide to ask Will if he’s ever been to a shrink. “Nothing happened to me,” he says. He waves his hand in a general way that seems to mean, Look, one piece, not blown to bits. “Right,” I say. “Gotcha.” Lots going on in that harrowed head of his, I bet. There is a weird pause and then he shifts into another topic in that gear-stripping way of his.

  “How was your walk with Henry?” he says. “Nothing happened to me either,” I tell him.

  * * *

  …

  Okay, okay, turn off the light. Go to sleep. I have Ambien, but I want the other drugs, the gladdening drugs. I take it but somehow still wake up at three a.m.

  Where is my husband? Where is my son?

  We’ve never talked about Eli. Just once he asked me if he knew how to hunt or fish. I laughed because of where we live. But that night, in bed, I thought, Oh, Canada!

  Because I can’t seem to escape that question. What will be the safest place? There was that climatologist on television the other night. She was talking about her own children.

  I find it really hard to decide on one particular region, saying this one is going to be safe and we are just going to lock this one in. I don’t think there will be any safe places. I am…the impacts are going to be big. So my approach is to be as mobile, as flexible as possible, to be able to adapt to whatever is going to happen. My children are bilingual and we’re working on a third language. Both children have three passports, and they actually have the freedom to be able to study and work even in the European Union, or in Canada, or in Australia.

  * * *

  …

  My mother calls to tell me she is buying socks in bulk and handing them out to all the homeless people she sees. And she tries to keep a stack of dollar bills in the glove compartment so she can give at least one with each pair of socks. My mother who lives on a tiny fixed income. She’s putting too much wear and tear on the car, I worry. It has so many miles on it already.

  A brother questioned a Desert Father about his life. And he said:

  Eat straw, wear straw, sleep on straw: that is to say, despise everything and acquire for yourself a heart of iron.

  There have been a few signs that Catherine’s tilting into the abyss too. Lately, she’s been forwarding me these weird emails.

  Please share!

  Parents and children were really one in the beginning and grew as a kind of plant. But then they separated and became two, and begat children. And they loved the children so much that they ate them up. God thought, “Well, this can’t go on.” So he reduced parental love by something like ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent, so parents wouldn’t eat up their children.

  I’ve printed it out to show Henry. But he doesn’t laugh. “She’s a good person,” he says. “So are you,” I say.

  Then just as I’m remembering that we are all one people, that we all have hopes and dreams, I see Mrs. Kovinski coming down the street toward me. We avoid each other now. Ever since I told her I would not listen to her hate.

  * * *

  …

  I’ve been telling Will about the cards I help Henry write. “I want a card!” he says. So I write him one on a napkin.

  Roses are red,

  Violets are blue,

  I feel slightly less dread,

  When I am with you.

  He’s going back home soon. He wants to live near the woods again. Somewhere in Quebec.

  The other night he gave me a book: Code of Maritime Signals, 1931 edition. Beside some of them were tiny pencil dots.

  “I wish to communicate with you.”

  “Stop carrying out your intentions and watch for my signals.”

  “I am on fire.”

  “Nothing can be done until the weather moderates.”

  * * *

  …

  On his last day, we go to the aquarium. My favorite are the manta rays. We watch them wing past. They have the largest brain of any fish, I remember. If you put them in front of a mirror, they do not behave as if they see another ray. Instead they glide and watch, dip and wave.

  “What’s keeping you here?” he says. Please, I think, but no, I can’t even look at him. All these people. I have so many people, you wouldn’t believe it.

  FIVE

  A man is having terrible dreams. In them, he is being chased by a demon. He seeks counsel from a therapist, who tells him he must turn around and confront the demon or he will never escape it. He vows to do this, but each night in his dreams, he runs again. Finally, he manages to turn around and look straight at the demon. “Why are you chasing me?” he asks it. The demon says, “I don’t know. It’s your dream.”

  * * *

  …

  After he left, I realized he had inscribed the book for me. I wondered how he’d sign it. There are all those ways to be careful: yrs or warmly or best. He’s clever though. MYBAS. Even if Ben saw it, he wouldn’t guess. A prepper joke.

  May You Be Among the Survivors.

  It’s cold turkey, this thing sometimes. I’m sweating it out. Music helps a bit.

  Can I kick it?

  Yes, you can.

  * * *

  …

  I try to explain to Tracy about Will. How it was like a wartime romance. Minus the war. Minus the sex. She looks at me. “So nothing happened?” she says.

  And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.

  Q: How do you maintain your optimism?

  A: If you are not getting enough iron, put a few iron nails into a bowl of lemon juice and leave it overnight. In the morning, make lemonade out of it.

  Mom? Mom? Mom?

  * * *

  …

  Little flickers sometimes, things I want to tell him. At the bodega, I buy a cucumber from Mohan.

  You can obtain plants more easily and more quietly than meat. This is extremely important when the enemy is near.

  Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.

  * * *

  …

  “There are ancient ways of prepping too,” Ben says. The mystery cultists believed that the first thing a newly dead soul would see in the underworld was the spring of Lethe. It would be found flowing beneath a white cypress tree. The soul would arrive very thirsty but must resist the temptation to drink, because the waters of this spring were the waters of oblivion. Part of the training of the mystery cultists was to learn to endure extreme thirst.

  Consider the earth’s diminished radiance…

  I remember on our first date, I waited for Ben to tell me about his awful childhood or his newly acquired drug habit, etc., etc., but instead, he told me about the community garden he was involved in. He was having trouble with the eggplant, he said. He had hopes for it though. Maybe if there was a little more rain or a little more sun. I can’t remember now which one he needed.

  * * *

  …

  There was once a Desert Father who was able to banish demons, and he asked them afterward, What makes you go away? Is it fasting?

  We do not eat or drink, they replied.

  Is it vigils?

  We do not sleep, they replied.

  Is it separation from the world?

  We live in the deserts.

  What power sends you away then?

  Nothing can overcome us except humility, they told him.

  * * *

  …

  They are playing a board game when I come home. “I
f you give me wood, I’ll give you some wheat and a brick,” Eli says to Ben.

  I asked her once what I could do, how I could get him ready. It would be good if he had some skills, she said. And of course, no children.

  SIX

  I go to get my permanent crown. I have been putting off my dental work, but now I go. The hygienist talks to me about the weather. The dentist comes in with his gloved hands and mask. He says I have an unusually small mouth. I open it wider for him.

  * * *

  …

  There was once a race of mythic arctic dwellers called the Hyperboreans. Their weather was mild, their trees bore fruit all year, and no one was ever sick. But after a thousand years, they grew bored of this life. They decked themselves in garlands and leaped off the cliffs into the sea.

  “What is the core delusion?” Margot asks the class, but nobody knows the right answer, and she doesn’t bother to tell us.

  * * *

  …

  As soon as he got back, Ben made me make an appointment to get this mole on my arm checked. I stood there in my dingy bra and Target underwear while the doctor examined me. He was well groomed with a plume of silver-gray hair and an unplaceable European accent. He held a magnifying glass up to my skin. Described every mark on my body one by one: Exceedingly unlikely to be cancerous! Exceedingly unlikely to be cancerous!

  He had a melodious voice. I wanted every day to be like this, to begin in shame and fear and end in glorious reassurance.

  * * *

  …

  Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.

  * * *

  …

  Ben and I made a list of requirements for our doomstead: arable land, a water source, access to a train line, high on a hill. Are we on a hill for floods or defense? Both. I’ll build a moat, he said, then went on the internet to learn how to do it.

  You must own small, unnoticeable items. For example, a generator is good, but 1,000 BIC lighters are better. A generator will attract attention if there’s any trouble, but 1,000 lighters are compact, cheap, and can always be traded.

  “Wait, when did you take up smoking?” Ben says when he finds them in a drawer.

  Something happened while he was away. He did the math, all the math, and now there’s a quote from Epictetus pinned above his desk.

  You are not some disinterested bystander/Exert yourself.

  * * *

  …

  In those disaster movies, the hero always says, “Trust me,” and the one who is about to die says, “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.”

  That’s what the hero says.

  * * *

  …

  I take Eli to the playground. Someone walks past with his head down, swiping right, swiping left. The buildings look whitewashed in light. The air smells sweet. Diminishing radiance, but still some, I’d say.

  I’ve changed my mind. You can have a child. It will be small and cat-eyed. It will never know the taste of meat.

  Q: What is the difference between a disaster and an emergency?

  A: A disaster is a sudden event that causes great damage or loss. An emergency is a situation in which normal operations cannot continue and immediate action is required so as to prevent a disaster.

  What if we went for a walk, if we walked out into the streets?

  It’s impossible.

  It’s barely possible.

  * * *

  …

  Sri Ramakrishna said, Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.

  * * *

  …

  It still comes back to me sometimes, the way the light came through those windows. The dust had a presence. At least if you stared at it long enough, it did.

  The Unitarians never kneel. But I want to kneel. Later, I do at home by my bed. The oldest and best of prayers: Mercy.

  * * *

  …

  I go to church with my mother. I pray fumblingly for strength, for grace. Sunlight pours through the windows. There’s that dust I remember. Soon it will be time to shake hands with those around me and speak to them. But I don’t know what is in their hearts. One of you will betray me, I think. But my mother is so happy I have come. She sits as close to me as she can. The minister speaks of the invisible and visible worlds, but not of how to tell the difference. An old white man in the next pew is the first to turn and reach for my hand.

  Peace be with you.

  And also with you.

  * * *

  …

  Sylvia calls me. All that sky makes her more patient now when I talk about the mystics.

  There’s that idea in the different traditions. Of the veil. What if we were to tear through it? (Welcome, say the ferns. We’ve been expecting you.)

  “Of course, the world continues to end,” Sylvia says, then gets off the phone to water her garden.

  * * *

  …

  If you think you are lost: beware bending the map. Don’t say maybe it was a pond, not a lake; maybe the stream flowed east, not west. Leave a trail as you go. Try to mark trees.

  Paper ballots, paper ballots, everyone said, but I put the final card in a machine. There’s a bunch of us now milling around outside the building. Put your hackles up, I think.

  Hello? Hello?

  What is—

  What is your emergency?

  They say people who are lost will walk trancelike past their own search parties. Maybe I saw you. Maybe I passed you on my street. How will I know you? Trust me, you’ll say.

  * * *

  …

  On the way home, the wind blows some newspapers down the street. There’s a man sleeping in a doorway and one comes and curls itself around his feet.

  A visitor asked the old monks at Mount Athos what they did all day and was told: We have died and we are in love with everything.

  * * *

  …

  We don’t know if it’s a new mouse or the old mouse. This is the fatal flaw of the have-a-heart trap, Ben’s sister says. Some use paint to mark each one. Fool me once, etc., etc. But they have not gotten to that point yet. When we house-sit for them, it falls to Ben to do the work. First with the neck breaking and then with the releasing. Three nights in a row now. We hear the mouse in the trap rattling. Ben gets out of bed, puts on his shoes, permits himself a sigh. I pull the covers up while he puts the trap on the passenger seat and then drives a mile down the dirt road to the big field. But the drive is awkward. Captor, captive. The moonlight through the windshield. No one talks, he says.

  At night, the floorboards creak. Henry is pacing back and forth upstairs. He is trying to wear himself out or maybe he is trying to wear Iris out. Either is fine because nobody’s crying. He’s got his six-month sobriety chip now. He’s had these chips before, but he keeps this one in his wallet at least. In the past, he’s just let Eli play bodega with them.

  The dentist gave me something so I won’t grind my teeth in my sleep. I consider putting it in, decide against it. My husband is under the covers reading a long book about an ancient war. He turns out the light, arranges the blankets so we’ll stay warm. The dog twitches her paws softly against the bed. Dreams of running, of other animals. I wake to the sound of gunshots. Walnuts on the roof, Ben says. The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.

  www.obligatorynoteofhope.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank the John Simon Memorial Foundation for their generous support of my work.

  I could not have finished this book without the gift of time and space granted to me by the Macdowell Colony and by Art Omi.

  Thank you to the Abramovich Foundation, the Beckman House, the Blaine Colony, the Kearney Farm, and the Koehlert Cottage for offering
me impromptu residencies when I most needed them.

  Thank you to my parents, David and Jane Offill, for moral and logistical support when I was wild-eyed with deadline anxiety.

  Thank you to my editor, Jordan Pavlin, and to my agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, who gave me brilliant advice and patient encouragement along the way.

  Thank you to Laura Barber and all the excellent folks at Granta for their help.

  Thank you to Tasha Blaine and Joshua Beckman for showing me the way through the earliest drafts.

  Thank you Alex Abramovich, Dawn Breeze, Taylor Curtin, Jonathan Dee, Eugenia Dubini, Lamorna Elmer, Rachel Fershleiser, Rebecca Godfrey, Hallie Goodman, Jackie Goss, Maggie Goudsmit, Gioia Guerzoni, Irene Haslund, J. Haynes, Amy Hufnagel, Samantha Hunt, Brennan Kearney, Fred Leebron, Ben Lerner, Kyo Maclear, Rita Madrigal, Lydia Millet, Emily Reardon, Elissa Schappell, Rob Spillman, Dana Spiotta, Kieran Suckling, Nicholas Thomson, Eirik Solheim, and Jennifer Wai-lam Strodl.

  And most of all, for everything, thanks to Dave and Theodora and Jetta the dog.

  NOTES

  “Breathing in, I know that I am of the nature to”: This is a from a traditional Buddhist chant called “The Five Remembrances.” The meditation teacher has very loosely adapted it and is only doing four of the five. The original can be found in Plum Village Chanting and Recitation Book as compiled by Thich Nhat Hanh and the Monks and Nuns of Plum Village.