Fog

Outside was, like, soupy.

No. That’s not it. Not really.

Outside was like if you were in a cloud, but moving with it, right? ’Cause clouds usually blow with the wind. No, they scoot and scuttle. Clouds deserve cute words, don’t they? Hey, don’t clouds always seem to go one way? I mean I’m just thinking about that now. You watch those nature shows, ever? Maybe it isn’t even on those shows. Is it? But where you see those time-lapse—time lapsed?—images of the, like, the whole globe, and a the clouds all twist and swirl and mash together. Not like in a tornadoee way.

Oh my God, what am I even talking about?

It was foggy outside. That’s what it was. Had been for maybe a week already.

Wait, I know. Did you see those pictures from that warehouse in Maryland or whatever that had acres of spider webs? It was all over the Internet right before that—the Internet—all ended. At least it ended for most of us.

The fog was like those spiderwebs.

Or like the thickest fog you’ve ever seen.

Beautiful really. But really eerie.

We had a fire going, which meant we had to have a window or something open somewhere. That was Paula who thought of that. She was always really smart and careful about stuff like making sure we could always breathe. She opened one of the big, you know, garage doors that would have been for deliveries. If you went near it you could see the fog get sucked in and swirl around before it disappeared. It was weird to see it moving, because outside it was so immobile. Still, I hated that it was coming in and one night I dreamed that our warehouse had been overwhelmed by the fog, even though, well— I don’t know why fog doesn’t come inside. It must come inside sometimes in some places.

I was sitting on my wooden chair, which I could tell—I knew—that Aaron was, like, very eager to throw in the fire, but it was my favourite because it totally reminded me of one that my dad used to use, but I really didn’t feel like that was, you know, cool to say to these guys as far as giving a reason why I did not want it used as fuel.

Eric came back with some apples from our orchard. From the orchard. “Can’t see a fucking thing out there.”

“Wish I knew when it was going to stop— When the sun was coming back out,” Paula said. She had a collection of plants she’d stolen or she’d dug up and potted in stolen terracotta. Every day she fussed around them, watering them when they needed it, touching them, dusting them. She was standing beside them. “This could be very very— Could be trouble.”

The apples Eric had with him, the apples he’d brought back, were pretty good. Not eat them raw good, but still. I cut the bad bits out. The worms and stuff. Are they worms? We call them worms. They must be larva. Sometimes you wish you still had the Internet. Or knew someone you could ask.

Paula brought me a pot to put the good bits of apple in. She pulled out her knife too and we sliced the apples together, our thumbs the only cutting board we needed for our dulled pocket blades.

A few months ago, Aaron sharpened Paula’s while she slept and when she started slicing apples, the knife sliced through her easily. “We’re just lucky that didn’t— That could have been a lot worse, Aaron,” Paula said once the bleeding was under control.

Aaron was mad since they’d stopped sleeping together.

“You could at least be grateful. Like a thank you, maybe.”

“I don’t need it so sharp.”

“Not for apples, no, but what if some creep tries something?”

Paula shook her head. “I don’t need— I can take care of myself.”

That was a few months ago.

Back at the time I’m trying to tell you about, I was telling you about, back at that time a few months after the knife thing, Eric was sitting by the fire. The way he stared at it was like maybe he was trying to burn the fog from out of his mind. He shook his head before he came up to Paula and me chopping. “Is Aaron off fucking around with Joyce?” There was a small stone, or maybe a piece of floor loosened from one of its many cracks, lying at Eric’s feet. He kicked it and it bounced with a muted clacking off towards our beds—

The Nest is what Aaron called it, still called it even though he left it the first night he brought Joyce back here.

At first the whole Aaron leaving the Nest thing was hard on Paula, who, like, really actually suffered a lot because of Aaron, which was, simply, because she loved him, but that didn’t really fully explain the suffering bit. For that you’d need to really get inside her head and maybe even his head, but I think it was like, that maybe Aaron was a little abusive the way he talked to her and withheld hugs and stuff. Or the way he loudly talked about how it was her, actually, who had stopped fucking him. We didn’t have the Internet, like I said already, and the library had been pillaged, most of its materials probably burned, so we didn’t even bother to go there to look for stuff anymore and so even if they still had resources about abuse in relationships, even if they hadn’t been stolen to be read or burned, I hadn’t gone to look for them because why bother anymore? We never went there.

But I was talking about Aaron and Joyce, whose name was Joyce even though she was from the local Reserve and even though Aaron kept pressing her for her real name, like how could that be her real name, shouldn’t her real name be, like, more nature based?

I was talking about Aaron and Joyce leaving the Nest and how it bugged Paula at first, but now it seemed to bother Eric the most because Eric seemed to be having feelings for Joyce, who seemed to be feeling things back. Good things. Because Joyce seemed also to be feeling things about Aaron, too, but they weren’t good. Like how she flinched around him. Like how she tensed right up when she was trying to talk to us and Aaron would inevitably interrupt.

Like how she had a fresh bruise, or one we could see anyway.

We went back to the fire and we hung the pot up over it for the apples to cook. Nobody talked but nobody left to look at the fog or to wait for Aaron and Joyce to drive back up in the car. In Aaron’s car.

“I don’t know what Aaron’s— I think Aaron expects too much of Joyce,” Paula said.

“Like she knows every fucking thing that Indians knew, or know, or whatever,” Eric said.

I know that not every reserve is even on or near where the people forced onto that reserve are even from originally. Still, I don’t know about whether that was true for Joyce’s Nation and I can’t look it up. I didn’t want to ask her where she’s from because, I mean, think how that would sound, think how that would have sounded before things started to break down, never mind after all the vigilante problems we had around here.

I also didn’t ask her because speaking isn’t my thing.

“She hasn’t given us one useful thing,” Aaron said to us the other night while Joyce peed outside. We had stopped using the toilet in the warehouse because even though the water ran the pressure was so bad it just wasn’t worth it, so Joyce was, like, far away.

“Isn’t she now— She’s our friend,” Paula said.

“You can’t eat friendship,” Aaron said.

“We ate my fucking dog,” Eric said.

Cannibalism had been practiced in the Americas, I think. I mean, that’s true isn’t it? And I don’t mean by Native people. I had an uncle who was in a band called The Donner Party. The changes because of the fog, to the light, I think, they had us all acting really nervous. Maybe something in our lizard brain? Isn’t that what it’s called?

“Doesn’t Joyce— Did you ask Joyce about the fish in the river?”

“We don’t even trust the water from that river,” Aaron said.

We collected rain in a rusting barrel that had held something industrial back before this was our home. Eric thinks maybe some sort of oil. Petroleum product was how he put it. I like the word petroleum. But any water that we had to get from the river, Aaron made us boil then we would put a piece of burnt wood in it. Burned wood. Aaron’s parents had been sorta rich and he remembered them buying charcoal twigs imported from Japan to purify their drinking water.

“Those fish are all falling apart, like the scales can’t wait until the fucking fish are dead to rot right off them,” Eric said.

“Aren’t they— I think they’re spawning,” Paula said.

“Kay, but does Joyce know about them?” Eric asked.

“Do I know about what?” Joyce asked as she walked back towards the fire.

“The fish in the river,” Eric said.

Aaron shot him a look.

“Those big old ones. They are so nasty,” Joyce said. “They’re like, I don’t know. My mom left a cucumber in the fridge too long once and I went to pick it up and it fell apart. The plastic around it held it together, but there was this milky juice all over the fridge shelf and the cucumber was moldy.”

“Don’t rotten— Cucumbers smell so . . . so unfortunate when they go off,” Paula said.

“They’re fucking nasty,” Eric said.

“You ready to go to bed?” Aaron asked Joyce.

“I guess so,” Joyce said. She smiled at us. “I just love talking to you guys.” Joyce smiled at me, then smiled at Paula and Eric in turn. “It reminds me of my friends on the Res. There’s still a few of them left, too. You should come visit us sometime.”

“Let’s go,” Aaron said.

“Are you going back to the Reserve? I mean eventually?” Eric asked.

Aaron said, “Come on,” so fast that we could hear Joyce say, “Sure. Eventually,” even though they both started at the same time and Aaron made himself much louder.

That was from a night a few days before. Joyce and Aaron went to bed after that.

Aaron’s engine interrupted the sounds of the fire and the bubbling of our applesauce. The murk outside burned eerily from Aaron’s headlights, which he insisted on using even though Eric and Paula both told him that they didn’t think you were supposed to have them on in fog.

He came in alone. “Fuck your applesauce,” he said. “I don’t want applesauce for the rest of my fucking life.” He smiled like he was hurting somewhere. “Come here.”

Nobody asked where Joyce was until we were out by the car. Then it was Eric who said something.

“She’s not coming back,” Aaron said. He opened the trunk and it was filled with meat all wrapped in plastic. Dried meat. We hadn’t seen meat, hadn’t seen much food other than apples, in a long time. We’d talked about how if we were still alive that maybe some other large mammals were still out there, too. Like deer or moose. Maybe bears and wolves and coyotes. Some people still had dogs.

“Where’s this from?” Eric asked.

Paula and I looked at each other and I knew that Paula was thinking the same thing as me, that maybe this was Joyce in the trunk. The edible parts.

“Joyce’s aunty gave it to me.”

“Why would she do that?” Eric asked.

“If you had food, you wouldn’t— I can’t— Would we really share food if we had it?” Paula asked.

“Some people believe in generosity,” Aaron said. “Like it’s some higher principle.”

I was staring at the meat and feeling a little sick, actually.

Paula had one of those burps that you hold in because you think there might be something solid along with it, but then you let out when you are sure that it’s just air.

“Here,” Aaron said, putting a piece of dried meat, neatly shrink-wrapped, into Eric’s arms.

We ate so well that night. Despite our fear and revulsion. Only Aaron didn’t have his meat with applesauce too. Still, we ended up leaving most of the mush we’d made earlier.

Eric was totally energized after. Like the meat gave him super powers. He started talking really quickly about Repo Man, some old L.A. punk rock movie. “Remember,” he said, even though none of us had seen it, “Remember the alien in the trunk and how when they see it that one fucking guy is like, ‘Let’s go do some crimes.’”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Aaron said. “As a sentence I mean.”

“That’s what’s so funny,” Eric said.

“I guess it isn’t a realist— I mean, why’s there an alien in the trunk?” Paula asked.

“’Cause it’s a movie,” Eric said.

“I’m still stuck on that stupid sentence,” Aaron said.

The boys ended up play fighting. Or maybe it was real fighting.

Paula and I cleaned up. At one point, Paula, who was normally super hard working and efficient, she stopped in the middle of throwing some garbage into the fire. She was holding a sticker that had been placed on the meat. I came up beside her. The boys were over in the Nest. Eric had thrown a blanket over Aaron and was straddling it to keep Aaron pinned and Aaron was thrashing to get free. Paula pointed to an address on the package. “I think that’s on the Reserve,” she said.

I nodded.

“Don’t you think— I mean, maybe we could go,” Paula said.

I knew Aaron wouldn’t like it. And I knew we’d need Aaron’s car. Plus the map Aaron kept under his pillow when he slept. “We have to bring Eric,” I said.

“I wouldn’t— We will,” Paula said.

My heart was beating quickly. I wanted to ask when we were going to go, I wanted to ask which one of us would drive, I wanted to ask Paula if she knew that, ‘If we go we won’t be able to come back here,’ at least I didn’t think so. I asked, “Do you think we’ll see Joyce?”

“I— We’ll see.”

Toronto, March 2016

Emoji sequence: visual artist, Katie Bond Pretti

Story: Lee Sheppard

You Know

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

—T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

You knew it was a big deal to be invited up to our family reunion. You knew because on the drive up, I told you that one Christmas, when your girlfriend, my half-sister, was too young to remember, my father and step-mother were hosting an annual party for close family friends and my girlfriend had come back from university a day early and was emphatically not invited to the party. You probably guessed, could probably feel my resentment in my tone. I know because my wife hit me in the leg then and you turned to watch Muskoka speed past. You did not know that later, after the bonfire, behind the thin door of our room, in the cabin you and my half-sister and my wife and I were sharing, that what we were whispering about was that story, and why did I have to be so mean to you and was I trying to ruin this weekend?

You did not know the way to the old land and you did not know how to drive stick, though I swear I didn’t know the latter when I asked you that morning if you wanted to drive, though of course it was suggested, later, that I’d been trying to emasculate you. I honestly didn’t know that you’d mentioned it in the car. Maybe you said it when I was waiting in line at Weber’s to buy us all burgers, maybe I never listen to anyone else, as I was told when I got it for that one. The point is, I drove, which you probably remember because I apparently nearly hit that cyclist just outside of Port Carling. I don’t know.

When I saw what the place was like, I needed you to know that the four buildings that were here when Dad’s family owned it were cottages, real cottages, buildings more like sheds or shacks. I mean, just one of them had a flush toilet. They were not: a boathouse with three slips and more square footage of living space than your apartment and mine combined; an eight-bedroom guest cottage with a basement rec. room boasting pool, ping pong and shuffleboard tables; and a brand-new main cottage that had recently been featured in a magazine that my wife happened to see, a “cottage” that had its own boathouse with three slips for maybe three more boats, an upstairs for who knows what, and deck furniture that cost more than the car we drove here in. When Dad’s cousin, Grace, overheard me she reminded me how kind these people were for letting us use this important place for our family reunion, and she was right, they were being kind and it was going to cost them, financially, because of course they would get their house-keeper or cleaning lady or servants—whatever they had or whatever they called who they had—to give this place a thorough going over to get rid of our smell, our average manners, our Costco cheese on the marble counters, our obesity and our desperate and ostentatious fitness, our need to work, the dirt of our children, our piss around the base of the toilet.

When you bumped into me in front of the framed image of Ian Miller and Big Ben, you didn’t know that I was upstairs snooping in the bedrooms for a place to take and proposition my wife. You told me you were upstairs looking for someone’s soother, that one of the babies had napped up here and their pacifier was still in their collapsible crib. I didn’t know which bedroom that was. “Found it,” you said when you passed. By then I’d moved on to the framed picture of a blonde woman hunched down over some horse’s neck as he carried her over a red and white obstacle. The photo was too well done to be called a snapshot, but I knew, maybe even just from the quality of gloss on the photograph’s surface, that this was a print of a picture of one of the members of the family who’d oh so generously allowed us back onto this land so important to my family. 

Earlier, I had seen the baseball gloves in a wrinkled reusable shopping bag by the door, but I didn’t know who’d brought them. It was the snap of the leather that drew me to the gravel road where you and my dad were playing catch. It had been years since I’d had the pleasure and it’s true that since I was sixteen and your girlfriend was just a baby and Dad had blown a disc, I had been told No so many times that I stopped asking, so, you know, I guess it’s partly my fault. And how could you know that I cry every time I watch Field of Dreams and Kevin Costner starts playing catch with the young man who is his father come back, who is the “he” of the whispered, “If you build it he will come.” You didn’t know my dad well enough to know that when you offered me your glove so I could play catch, offered it to me because I was standing there, silent but obviously radiating some deep need, that Dad would insist that I take his glove, insist that, “No, I’m happy to watch.” He was happy to watch, for a few minutes, and playing catch with you was nice actually, but when Dad excused himself saying that he really should be visiting, I had that same thought and actually knew that when I went back my wife would be like, “Where did you go?” because she was stuck down on the dock talking to my relatives, all of whom I was happy to ignore.

And that’s what it was like. My wife was lying on a chaise in a bikini and Dad’s cousin Teresa was casting a shadow over my wife’s face and toroso like she didn’t notice that my wife was trying to catch some colour. Teresa was telling her about which stars were aligned with which planets or some such thing and there was this old Indian man who used to come to around the lake in a canoe selling moccasins who said Teresa had something special about her, that she was in tune and wasn’t the sun beautiful today, I mean it just felt so warm, like a beautiful, heavy quilt someone’s grandmother made, you know? I got Teresa talking about my grandfather, her Uncle Stephen, and while she told me, “You really look like him, I mean, its almost weird, oh my God,” my wife stood up and ran a finger around both sides of the crotch hem of her bikini bottoms before she pulled the chaise out of the shade Teresa was casting.

Maybe you do know what a relief it was when you showed up and Teresa asked you your sign and offered to do a reading and I asked my wife, “Can I talk to you, please,” and she vacated her chaise and that was it, it was gone for good. Up the stairs from the dock, my wife kept asking what it was I wanted to talk to her about, and I kept saying, “Not here, not here.” At the bottom of the stairs to the bedrooms we paused and my wife again asked, whispering, what I wanted to talk to her about and I whispered, “We’re almost there,” and your girlfriend’s mother, my step-mother, looked up from cutting eggplants for cousin Becky’s Thai boyfriend’s Thai eggplant dish. She looked up from cutting the eggplant and right into my eyes as if she could see there what I intended to do. 

Of course my wife was just annoyed with me because as you might guess she wouldn’t do it with me under a picture of a man riding a horse, in the bedroom of a guest house that wasn’t even ours or our friends’ and that was the site of a reunion for all of my father’s siblings and paternal cousins and all of their children and grand children. She wasn’t interested in how good she looked in that bikini. She wasn’t interested in breaking the rules. Neither was I, really, not after that look from my step-mother, but I didn’t want to let that look, that image deter me because I figured that once things got going I could put it out of my mind or if I failed at that, then I could call it up and use it to prolong things. Moot point, though.

I went to the kitchen and asked the Thai boyfriend, whose name was Alex, if he needed any more help with the meal. He said, No, but my step-mother said, “Oh,” and said my name before adding, “you know, you could help me put out the veggies and dip.” I didn’t even know you were there but you offered to help too and it took us five minutes to take handfuls of the already cut vegetables and arrange them on the plate in an attractive way while my step-mom smoothed the top of the dip. When I took the tray down, maybe you didn’t notice, or didn’t understand the full significance, but Teresa was lying on the chaise and my wife was on a towel on the dock. My wife asked me to make her a dark and stormy and Teresa asked what that was and asked if I’d make her one, too. You said you’d like one, but of course neither Teresa nor you could have known, or maybe you could have, that we had just a limited supply of ginger beer and rum, but there’s no way you could have known how worried my wife was that we weren’t going to have enough and you wouldn’t have understood what it meant it even if you had seen her curl her toes and make quick fists of each hand.

The eggplant dish was great and even my giant cousin Benjamin, who chose not to go you U of T because of all the ‘slanty-eyes’—his fucking words—all the Asians, all the people of Asian descent there, even the giant racist Ben loved the eggplant dish, loved it so much that he was back for seconds before everyone had had firsts and I got nostalgic for when we were kids and I learned to eat fast at family gatherings because Ben was like that and no matter how much my parents complained about it in the car on the way home from our family gatherings it never ever got better and his parents never seemed to care, even seemed a little proud of Ben like as if his greed, his hunger was some evolutionary advantage. I guess you can tell that I never liked Ben.

We had custard for dessert. My dad’s Cousin Maeve made it. I didn’t know to expect some speech about it, so I had already violated the thing with my fork when you tapped my upper-arm and jerked your chin in this very specific way that said, Look up, and I did and there was my family staring at me like I was some ignorant ass hole, that the fact I thought we were just eating dessert had fully confirmed what they already knew alright, oh boy oh boy. Maeve had written a speech about her mother and her mother’s mother, who was my great grandmother, and how this was her custard recipe and how she—Maeve, I think—would never make it as good as she—my great-grandmother, maybe—had made it. And Maeve was crying and everyone was waiting to eat the custard and Maeve’s husband—this great warm guy who believed, unfortunately, that he’d been saved and had a Bible on top of the F-150 owner’s manual in his glove box—he gave her a hug and said, “Your custard is wonderful,” and everyone started eating and I just sat there watching everyone for a while, and then I set my custard down and went for a walk because all of this shit was making me angry.

You found me in the woods and you said, “We’re ready to go if you want.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea.”

We gathered our partners and we grabbed our cooler, which still had enough beer and cider and, most importantly, rum and ginger beer and we drove back to the cabins where we were staying. Dad and my step-mother were close behind us and we got drunk in their cabin and laughed about our weird family—42 members strong that day, and that was just the people who could make it—and you and my wife kindly assured us that ours wasn’t the only weird family around, nor the only family that made fun of their weird family. Dad told stories about his childhood up at that land and talked about how different things had been in Muskoka then and at their land then. You know, it was the most I’ve heard him talk about his childhood and there were loads of things I learned. You know the way soil and rock are stratified, like the ground keeps a record of things that have happened right there? I guess people’s brains are like that. Or maybe place has past human events stratified like that, folded up somewhere under or behind the fabric of now.

Anyway, that evening was this big old happy ending which I had not expected.

And when we went to bed and my wife asked, “Are you okay, now?” I didn’t even get mad like you might think I would, but I did mistake it for an opportunity to try and have sex. Oh well. It was still a nice night, you know?

Toronto, September 2015

Emoji sequence: Sarah Sheppard

Story: Lee Sheppard