The man they called Richard was the biggest stranger of all. My soon-to-be husband. They sent him in and he said his words. He wore a familiar body but it was big on him. It didn’t fit. You could see him squirming inside it, trying to get out. Unless you can rip apart someone’s body and finally know their secrets, then they are a stranger. It’s fine. It’s how things are. Stop crying about it, is what I think. You should, you know, hug them, too. Hug whoever you can. You should live with them. You should spend your whole life with them if you want to. Answer to whatever name they call you—does it finally matter? Put down roots and hand over your money and take off your clothes when they snap their fingers. Just don’t forget. Don’t take your eyes off them for even one second.
The next thing they did was pretty clever. They had two people come at me masked up perfectly. A young man and a young woman, as if someone had taken my kids and rubbed them in life, in time, in years and years. Maybe someone dragged these people from a truck, sprayed them with oldening, and just pulled on them longwise until they grew and were disfigured and were just some typical, sad-looking adults. But with the faces of my children. The unmistakable faces. And someone made those faces cry as they hugged me. I hugged them and they hugged me and I held my ground. It was easy. Someone peeled them away and they sobbed and said goodbye and I said goodbye, too. It was easy.
It got a little bit late, and it got a little bit dark. For a while when it was snowing it was like the snow was so white and so abundant that it would hold the light, well after sunset, and into evening, radiating it back, so the night never got dark. But that didn’t last. It couldn’t. That was just a fantasy, because the world doesn’t work that way. You have to be realistic.
Most of the people cleared out of my room, but the two old-timers stayed, sitting in chairs, keeping their distance. I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want to tell anyone this, but I was getting tired and I wasn’t sure how long I could hold on. Maybe if I wasn’t in bed, and maybe if that bed wasn’t so goddamned comfortable, and maybe if out my window I couldn’t see some lights—of the city, speckled and flowering outside—maybe then I wouldn’t feel so drowsy. But I was determined to stay vigilant. You have to stand guard. You have to hold your weapon high. I was thinking that even your enemy has to sleep. Your enemy gets tired, too. You can count on it.
They kept trying to offer me water, but what was I, a moron? Water. Did they know where I worked? Did they know what I did? Water. I remember when I drank water, just a little girl who didn’t know better, unlocking the gates myself, pouring it right in. Come and get me! Holy Christ. Here, have some, they kept saying, just a sip, you’re thirsty, you must be so thirsty, Terry, and I wanted to reply, Why not just cut me open. Let’s dispense with ceremony. I’d hand you the knife myself, if I had one. Just don’t treat me like a fool, please. Treat me with dignity. I’m a human being. Have you ever heard of that? Do you know what a human being is? Well, here’s a real one, right in front of your face. Stand back and bow down and show some fucking respect. If there’s something you want to know, get out your knives and come at me. I’m ready.
Notes from the Fog
My wife, Gin, once knocked gently on my head, as if it were a door. “Hello,” she kept saying. “Hello. Who’s in there?” She and our therapist, Dr. Sherby, laughed a little about this, so I did too. What fun. Keep knocking on my head like that, like it’s a door, or an egg. I wasn’t going to be the only one not laughing. That’s Human Survival 101. Not that survival is such a prize. But, still, you might as well control your exit. Put your own little spin on how you step away from the show once and for all. I laughed as Gin kept knocking on my head, and I said, as if I might really be answering the door, “Just a minute, I’m coming. Hold your horses. No need to break the house down.”
We all just looked at each other. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be in on the joke. Gin stopped knocking and tucked her hands in her lap.
“I’ll be right there,” I said, in the most distant voice I could manage, as if I were many rooms away—underwater, overseas—crawling toward them as best as I could.
There was nothing wrong with us. We were sweet. We were great. Friends, if that’s what you wanted to call them, said we were the perfect couple. To me that meant we were alive. We hadn’t died. We hadn’t bled out in the streets. We didn’t drag each other by the hair from room to room. We observed holidays and put food on the table and hadn’t been pushed from a cliff yet. We couldn’t fly, we couldn’t live forever, we couldn’t fight off disease when it came. But we lifted the kids into the air and let the wind shape them. Not really, not really, but it could feel that way, and who really knew how the kids had ended up so kind, so free of murder in their hearts? It wasn’t because of us. Certainly not me anyway.
Those friends, all of them, went the way of the drain. They floated out of their homes and turned to smoke. They rotted in place. None of them lived long, because nobody does. They wandered off into the sunless afterlife, sooner, later, eventually. You can look up their names and you won’t learn much. They packed no bags. Their stuff was probably just thrown away.
It was late April, the eleventh year of my marriage, when I was fired from my job as a teacher at Foley Parochial. Mr. Rubins, the chief anxiety machine at the school, called me into his office. Given the hour, lunch, and his initial silence when I walked in, I knew it could not be good. When is it ever good when someone says they need to talk to you? We should all know better. We should run for the woods when our name is called.
At Foley I was a floater. I roamed the lower grades, preaching the sort of science that doesn’t involve the human being. It’s a personal preference, a diversion from the official curriculum. The human being is a walk-on player in a spectacle that is none of its damned business. Even though we get our hands on everything. Crumple it up, try to mate with it or destroy it.
I taught chemistry, specializing in the wrong turns of science, the shit-crazed detours. You dive for knowledge, and the dive is long. It might take a lifetime. You come up empty at the end, but along the way you’ve shaped some brains, you’ve campaigned pretty hard to seat your error deep in the minds of others. It’s something I discussed with my students—the little, scrubbed, colorless beings who hated the planet, themselves, each other, and me especially. How every great insight is something to be embarrassed about later. The shelf life of truth, if it even gets on the shelf. What to do with all of our wrong ideas about the world and ourselves.
At Foley I never had my own homeroom group, thank god. A little fake family of sweating puppies who thought I could lick their wounds and vomit food into their mouths. Which is not to say that I do not care for some young people in this world. It is just a question of the role one plays. The costume worn. I had my own young people at home. I poured myself into them when I could.