Helle’s voice, so distant, when she said: You’re not remembering right. Your memory’s doing some kind of crazy gymnastic routine to get happy out of our childhood.
What? Bit said, feeling a creeping sickness in him.
Oh, Bit. I can’t believe you don’t remember. It was cold, Helle said. We were never warm. We never had enough to eat. We never had enough clothes. I had to wake up every single night to someone fucking someone in the Pink Piper. Everywhere I was smelled like spunk. Handy let me drink the acid Slap-Apple when I was like five. What kind of hallucinations does a five-year-old have? For two months, I saw flames coming out of my mother’s mouth every time she talked. We were like guests at the Mad Hatter’s table, but didn’t even know the world was flipped around.
Helle turned to him, her belly swollen. Her eyes were red at the rims. She said, I’m dying of boredom, Bit. I want Thai food. I want life. This was good for a little while, this isolation, the little house in the middle of nowhere. But two people isn’t enough, Bit. It’s not enough. Let’s go back to the city. Please, please.
He didn’t say, Not enough for what? He didn’t say, Do you think you’re ready for that? He said, All right, and called the landlord and began to pack.
Amenable Bit, good-hearted Bit, gentle and generous Bit. He hates that man. Wishes he’d had any kind of backbone, the guts to say No. If he had, she would still be here. If he were more commanding, he would not be a person people would leave.
The black-and-white darkroom is in the basement of the arts building, which has long shadowy hallways and furnaces that clank and murmur. When he is alone here at night, the wood floors release the pressure built up over the day in sharp cracks that sound like footsteps. The only time he can use the darkroom for his own work is during the holidays, like this Thanksgiving week, when his students are all home, getting drunk, seeing their high school sweethearts in bars.
Hannah and Grete are at a play for children tonight, dressed like glamour queens, with sparkle on their cheekbones. Bit will use his time as well as he can. He had felt the old flame in himself. The tingle in the fingertips. He is eager to begin. He comes in whistling; someone has left the safelight burning, he sees with dismay, and takes off his coat and rolls his sleeves. When he looks up, he sees that the dark heap by the bank of enlargers is a person, watching him.
Hello, Professor Stone, says Sylvie.
A claustrophobic feeling thickens in the room. Bit frowns and says, Sylvie. What are you doing here?
I’m passionate about my art, she says, and she laughs.
Bit wavers. What is it about this girl that bothers him so much? He is half ready to get to work, start developing his film, damn the impropriety, when she speaks.
Actually, she says, I’m getting away from my family. Everyone is drunk and fighting. My dad is off somewhere doing work, per usual. We’re such a mess. Her voice throbs a little.
Sorry to hear that, he says. Families are tough.
You getting away from your family too? she says.
No. Holidays are when I get my own work done here. I can only work alone.
She smiles, her cheeks dimpling in the dim red light. But with me here, she says, you’re not alone.
Exactly, he says. He puts his coat on again. Happy Thanksgiving, he says and goes out the door, and even though Sylvie calls out, Wait, I’m sorry, he doesn’t stop.
He is irritated, irrationally angry. To calm down, he stops on the way home at an all-night diner where he has a linoleum table and a pot of coffee to himself. When people come in, he tries to guess who they are. Tonight it is too cold to tell. The insomniacs could be whores, could be drunken revelers, could be wealthy divorcees hungering for a hand on their skin. They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or a bomb.
It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won’t, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won’t let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It’s a miracle that it exists at all.
He imagines snapping his fingers, making all the people in the diner stand, at once, and become their better selves. The woman with the cragged oak-bark face throws off her hood and shakes her hair and her age drops off of her like bandages. The man with a monk’s tonsure, muttering to himself, leaps onto a table and strikes music from the air. Out of the bowels of the kitchen the weary cooks, small brown people, cartwheel and break-dance, spinning like upended beetles on the ground and their faces crack into glee and they are suddenly lovely to look at, and the dozen customers start up all at once into loud song, voices broken and beautiful. The song rises and infiltrates the city and wakes the inhabitants, one by one, from their own dark dreams, and all across the island, people sit up in bed and listen to it lap around them, an ocean of kindness, filling them, making them forget all the evil leaching out of the world for a very long moment, making them forget everything but the song.
He laughs to himself and the vision dissolves. There is lassitude, the door opening to the cold air and single bundled bodies coming in. The silent waitress ministers to those who sit down. The night draws into morning. Here they are forever, sitting at their tables, separate, alone.
It is Thanksgiving Day.
Grete is napping. The Tofurky roasts among the root vegetables, and Hannah has just sat down beside Bit at the kitchen table, taken a long breath, dived in. She is saying, The trouble is, Bit, that you can’t start to live your life again until you make yourself let go — But the doorbell interrupts her.
Grocery delivery, Bit says, though he knows it isn’t. He feels a little ill. You can give me the business after I tip the man.
All right, she says, disgustedly. She was early at the booze, is on her third tumbler of bourbon already.
Bit buzzes without answering and holds open the door. The elevator pings and the doors part to Abe’s beaming face. He is the same, always. His face has as few wrinkles as Bit’s, and his shoulders and arms are vast from wheelchair racing. He gives Bit a kiss on the cheek, and here is the old scour of beard against Bit’s skin. Abe gestures at the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon on his lap, Hannah’s favorite, and winks.
Just what we need, Bit says loudly. You can put the groceries down on the kitchen table.
Hannah is rehearsing her interrupted argument with Bit when Abe wheels in. She goes very still. He pushes himself to her. They are the same height, sitting, and he takes her hand. She lets him.
Oh, Abe, she says, after a while. She can’t keep the happiness from her face.
I know, he says. I’m an asshole.
Yes, she says.
But you love me.
Unfortunately, she says.
Haven’t I been punished enough?
Hannah wipes her eyes, still smiling. The problem is, she says, I’m really only punishing myself.
So you think, says Abe. I can’t live without you, my Hannah.