“The rules? From Bauman? How do we even know who that old man was? He was no one. A fucking weirdo. He’s gone. We’ve never seen him again. We haven’t seen anyone! There’s no one to see.”
“But there doesn’t need to be,” I said. “What would that even do? It’s a distraction.”
“Speak for yourself, you bastard.”
Claire cried hard into her hands. Hoarding, monstrously, this unknowable thing all to herself.
I said, “I won’t discuss this with you, Claire. I can’t. This is a conversation you have to have with yourself. We keep our own counsel.”
“Talking to myself is not a conversation! I have no counsel to keep. I’m alone. You are, too. How can you stand it?”
“You’re upset. Let’s get you inside and maybe try a different dose. I think I know what I did wrong.”
“Oh, you have no idea what you’ve done wrong. No idea. You’ve done enough. Just keep that fucking medicine away from me.”
I stood, tried to walk it off, but it didn’t come off. I couldn’t shake it.
“So this is your fault?” I said. “You really believe that?” I asked her. “Fine, let’s fucking talk about it.”
Claire nodded up at me. “It’s the first thing that’s made sense out there for me in years. It’s the first thing I heard that felt true and real.”
The first thing? In years?
“It wasn’t true and real. It was a sermon. You’re not meant to believe it like that.”
“Oh? Then how the fuck am I supposed to believe it? If I don’t believe it, then why are we going out there? Is it a joke?”
I didn’t know what I was saying now, but I kept talking.
“The lessons are abstract, something to think about.”
She scoffed. “Maybe to you they are. If you want to escape all responsibility, that’s your business, Sam. Do that. If that’s what you call keeping your own counsel.”
“Well, if it’s your fault, if you actually believe that, then fix it,” I said.
Claire seemed confused.
“Make it better,” I shouted down at her. “Make this go away, Claire. Undo it. I’m going to fucking wait here until you do.
“You see?” I said. “It’s meaningless. Your claim is fucking meaningless. It’s the most selfish thing of all for you to take the blame, as if you had anything to do with this.”
She looked at me in high disbelief.
“Selfish?” she asked.
“I’m serious,” I yelled, and she flinched.
“If it’s your fault, do something about it, Claire. Otherwise shut up and never say that again. Never open your mouth about this again.”
This stopped the crying. I watched my wife draw in her forces, sealing herself off from not just what I said, but from me as well, from the evening, from the days that had passed. A project of wall building, face hardening, secret fortifying of everything that mattered to her. All done without moving, an inner construction project Claire seemed to command until she was, in all the ways that matter, gone. Sitting on the steps Claire receded, drifting farther and farther away from me until she looked up at me with the stare reserved for a stranger, all intimacy erased.
“It’s not your decision,” I said to her, softer. “You can’t break faith because it also breaks mine. I can’t go out there without you. You know that. It doesn’t work. I already tried it. We have to go together, to believe in it together.”
She laughed. “But we don’t have to, Sam. We actually don’t. Find someone else to believe in nothing with. I’m done.”
“It’s not your choice,” I whispered.
“Oh, I think it is. And, anyway, it’s for the best. I have it on good faith that if I stop going, Esther will be safe. Someone’s made a promise to me, and, unlike you, I think he can keep it.”
“Someone?”
“Yes, Sam. Someone. You don’t know him.”
“Claire, please,” I said. “This person.”
“Forget it.”
“He came to the house?”
“I said forget it.”
“One question.”
“No. No questions. No questions and no answers.”
“Claire. Did this man call himself Murphy? Does he have red hair?”
My wife did not respond, but she gave me such a queer, searching look, and then it was a long time before she looked at me again.
Together we sat staring out at the street, the final exhausts of Claire’s sobs gasping out. She slid to the far end of the steps, kept to herself for the rest of the night. She was perhaps too weak to bring herself inside.
Salt blasts had streaked into the neighborhood. You couldn’t see them at night, or even so well in the day. Mostly it was the pellucid salt already washed clear by the wind. But you felt it crunching under your feet, some living thing recently crushed into grain.
I looked east toward the man-shaped silhouette between two houses where the sun would appear in a few hours, but there was nothing there to suggest a sun could ever heave itself into the sky again. I would never get used to that.
I could not ignore how that space looked forever immune from any illumination. Places give no warning that they might soon be erased by light. There is never a single thing to suggest that some grotesque change is coming that will reveal all, and soon.
A language solely of place-names. What would we possibly say to each other?
Sitting with my wife, whose disgust pulsed over me, I laughed to myself over these assessments, thoughts of a final or irresolvable darkness. There was textbook wisdom surfacing a little too easily. Sentimentality was no doubt a side effect of the speech fever, compounded by the side effects of all our failed medicine. The side effects of fighting, the side effects of knowing nothing, the side effects of being done with it and somehow, for no reason I could detect, still alive. One uses one’s deathbed energy to project meaning where none can be found. How does the species possibly benefit from such an action?
Your feelings will matter to you and to you alone, would say LeBov. You will surge with emotion over situations that have no bearing on the crisis. It’s a tactic. A trick. Believe in it at your peril. Better to bury yourself alive than give these ideas any due.
LeBov’s wisdom, like anyone’s, most fitting for those who wished to live, who had tasks in mind they still hoped to complete. For the others, like us two on the steps that night, wisdom is a high-handed scold, a reminder of what you’re not capable of thinking, some bit of behavior you can’t even reach for. Whether or not LeBov would prove to be right would remain to be seen. That night I wanted to expire on those steps, breathing in the perfect, cold air.
In many ways, that would have been a preferred outcome.
It still seems important, given all that’s happened, to report that across the street from my house, there was a hidden piece of the deadest air. No glow whatsoever, even from the streetlamps. I felt I could shine a lamp into it and the light would be extinguished. Just a swollen patch of darkness that seemed to throb the more I stared.
15
By early December we huddled at home, speechless. If we spoke it was through faces gripped in early rigor mortis. Our neighborhood had gone blank, killed down by winter. It was too cold even for the remaining children to do much hunting.
I don’t know how else to refer to their work, but sometimes they swarmed the block, flooding houses with speech until the adults were repulsed to the woods.