Prepper tip: If you are caught without any gear, all you need to fish is some spit and your shirt. Wade out into the water, then lift up your shirt to make a net beneath the water’s surface. Spit as much as you can into it. Minnows will be attracted to it because they think it’s food. When you have several of them investigating, jerk your shirt up out of the water. Now you have dinner.
Will laughs when I tell him this. “There are better ways,” he says. “I grew up fishing.” He grew up out in the middle of nowhere, snow up to their windows.
So sure, maybe I could charm him for a while, but when the shine wore off? How long until he figured out I can’t chop wood or light a fire? Ben is used to my all talk, no action ways, but it took a long time to bank all that goodwill.
The thought of having to be with someone else long enough to deserve it again. That’s what feels impossible. Because the part where they are charmed by you, where you are every good thing, and then the part later—sooner, maybe, but always later—where they tire of you, of all your repetitions, of all your little and big shames, I don’t think I could bear that. Tracy says nonsense, I should seize the moment, have a fling while Ben’s away. And I could, right? I could! I could!
All I would have to do is take my clothes off with a stranger who has no particular interest in my long-term well-being or mental stability. How hard is that? I could do that. It would be fun. Especially if said stranger got all my jokes, and liked how I never nagged and how I never asked if I looked fat, and would agree to make me go to the dentist and doctor even though I don’t ever want to (because of death, death, the terrible death), and would be okay with my indifferent housekeeping and my seventies-style bush, and would be okay with us having to take care of my brother financially and emotionally for the rest of his life, also my mother, who is good and kind, but doesn’t have a cent, then I’m totally into it, I’d happily fuck him whichever way he fancied until the bright morn.
But also I’m married. Happily, I’d say. So what we do mostly is we text each other. The moment we part. Stupid things, little jokes about the news or our days. Sometimes I send them late at night, but when I do they are scrupulously chaste. This tonight from the bathroom: kompromat on me: electric toothbrush now manual.
* * *
…
Sometimes Will flinches when I stray off the paved sidewalk onto the grass. He’s got lots of good stories. None of them are about war.
Well, that’s not true. That one time he talked about war, or not quite about war, but about the time just before it. He said your body knew things before your brain did. You started noticing different things.
Are you sure you’re not a spy? Because you kind of seem like a spy, I told him once. I’m not a spy, he said. But I could send you a message in code.
* * *
…
In class, a woman talks about what has happened to her. She has some kind of illness where the lightest of touches is painful to the skin. “I can’t bear it,” she says. Margot nods. You can barely bear it, I think reflexively.
There are different stories about how Margot’s husband died. He was stung by a bee, I think. Somehow he never had been before in all his life and he was deathly allergic.
In some Zen monasteries, gossip is defined as talking about anything not directly in one’s gaze.
* * *
…
Henry’s box is full of scraps of paper, phrases in micro-script. We both have dreams about people finding it. In the beginning, it took a week to fill. But this time just four days. Often these thoughts get worse before they get better, Margot said. This is to be expected. But you can expect something and still get the breath knocked out of you by it.
“Shall we start?” I ask him. Henry nods, hunches his shoulders. The park is mostly empty because it’s cold. We’re on an out of the way bench. As instructed, he reads each one aloud to me. The baby is burned, smothered, strangled, flayed. I rip them into pieces, throw them away.
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.