What Kafka said: I write to close my eyes.
39
Once ether was everywhere. The crook of an arm, say. (Also the heavens.) It slowed the movement of the stars, told the left hand where the right hand went. Then it was gone, like hysteria, like the hollow earth. The news came over the radio. There is only air now. Abandon your experiments.
The wife wants to go to the hospital. But she does not want to have gone to the hospital. If she goes, she might not come back. If she goes, he might use it against her. But when she is alone, the objects around her bristle with intent. This is fascinating to her but it must remain a secret. She packs her daughter’s lunches and reads her to sleep. On the playground, she impersonates a reasonable mother watching her child play in a reasonable way. She goes to work, hovers above herself as she speaks about all manner of things. She is as canny as an addict. She covers up when she misspeaks. She goes to the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings once a week and talks reasonably about the future, but secretly she is squirreling away money in books and journals. She stays up half the night, her brain whirring and whirring. She looks up school calendars in other cities. She investigates the cost of cars, of heat, of health insurance. She makes a plan a, a plan b, a plan c and d and e. Of these, only one involves the husband.
Her sister listens to the story about the coffin. “Okay, remind me again why you never went out with him?” she asks.
“I thought you wanted to be an art monster,” the husband says.
The philosopher’s sister-in-law ordered a piece of antique mourning jewelry to wear. A gold locket with a place inside to put a picture of the one who died. On the outside there is a small etched rose. But Prepare to follow is engraved on the inside of it. The nineteenth century. Jesus. Those people did not mess around.
How was the bake sale?
She sends her best friend a text. “11pm. Husband still playing video games.” There is a little ping. The husband looks at her. “You sent that to me.”
Her sister is the one who comes up with the winning plan. They should move to her ramshackle house in Pennsylvania and live there for next to nothing. The wife checks the schools. She checks the car insurance. She checks the cost of firewood. She orders beekeeping and chicken-tending books for him and starts filling out forms so they can adopt a puppy when they get there. She fact-checks an eight-hundred-page book about space aviation, then finishes all her grading for school in one fourteen-hour session.
Any flight of ideas?
Any pressured speech?
Any grandiose plans?
Nope.
People who have already moved to the country give warnings: Beware fracking. Check for ticks. Don’t get goats.
Prepare to follow, the wife thinks. The husband is hardly talking, but he packs the car to the roof and gets in.
They have told the daughter it will take four hours to get there. Every five minutes, she leans forward and asks them again. “Is it an hour? Is it an hour? Is it an hour?” And then they are there.
40
The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped handwriting on a grocery list. She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea.
But only possibly.
Fall comes early here. And it is unnerving to see so many stars. At night, the wife lies awake worrying about bears and chimney fires. About the army of spiders that live within. The husband wants goats. The daughter cries for Brooklyn.
The wife keeps finding $20 bills she has stashed away in books. Also tiny pieces of paper she has written on. Here is something she scrawled on the back of a credit card receipt. She squints to read her own handwriting. I teach immaculately, but lately … lately, I’ve got some dirty windows, it says.
She can’t help thinking about how she has another thing squirreled away in a book. A Monopoly card sent to her by a divorced friend. GET OUT OF JAIL FREE, it says.
But she is tired all the time now. She can feel how slowly she is walking, as if the air itself is something to be reckoned with. The shrink says it’s because she has been running on adrenaline until now and that this is starting to recede. “Be careful,” she says. “Don’t let your mind go to a dark place.”
Right, the wife thinks. Gotcha. She does not mention how she goes out to look at the sky in the middle of the night. How she stands there in a T-shirt and bare feet, shivering. Witness this wind, this flimsily constructed tree. Theatrical, this terror, she feels.
And everyone drives too slowly here. Sorry, the wife thinks as she weaves in and out of lanes. Sorry, sorry.
They never talk about it when the daughter is awake. They keep it from her like the bugs, but still it is there under everything, a low hum like furious weather.
One morning she takes her to a playground. The sun beats down on them. “Where is everyone?” the daughter says. She swings listlessly on the monkey bars and then they go home again.
The wife has to remind herself to notice that it is beautiful here. She goes for a walk in the woods after a week of rain, wearing the husband’s heavy boots.
The rain has brought the mosquitoes back. The wife unpacks the bug zapper that the almost astronaut gave her. There are still a lot of boxes in the attic. I should be more efficient, she thinks. The husband sets up their old telescope. There is almost no light pollution here. The wife looks up at the sky. There are more stars than anyone could ever need.
One day while the daughter is at school, the husband and wife drive to a neighboring town to see a movie. On the way there, they pass a Holiday Inn Express. The wife stiffens. “What?” he says. She points to it. “I spent the worst night of my life in one of those.” The husband looks at her blankly. “In a Holiday Inn Express?” They drive a little farther. He reaches over and takes her hand. It seems they have taken a wrong turn somewhere because there are farms on either side now, not businesses. The wife looks out the window. A dog runs through the field, his dark fur ruffled with light.
41
The wife is trying not to look at the husband with a cold eye, but suddenly it is hard not to notice how Midwestern he is. How charmed he is if they do anything wholesome together as a family, like play a board game, how educational he wants all of their outings with the daughter to be. One weekend, they go to some underground caverns and she listens to him go on to the daughter about the composition of limestone. Class dismissed, she thinks.