Holocene

Bridget Apfeld

 

Last winter, I was seeing a man called Ruby. He was living in an old white farmhouse down where the frontage road hit the county line, beyond the woods and the ploughed farmland. Fallow fields surrounded the house, stubbled with old growth of corn and weeds that had taken opportunity where they saw fit, and coming on the house in the twilight, which was when I best liked to go there, it sometimes seemed like a lighthouse in a silent, frozen sea. Yet it was not silent at all, rather full of the sound of small things: husks from years-old corn rasping across iced ponds when the wind blew; drips of water from bare tree branches. On days when there was no wind, you could hear the ice melt and freeze, creak and settle. This too added to the sensation of oceanness. Though I have never been to the ocean—never seen beyond the borders of my county, in the far north of Wisconsin where I live.

It was a cold winter, without much snow. You’d break your arm if you tripped on the sticks and roots, frozen into stone and hidden in the grass. I had to be careful when I walked across the fields, following deer paths where I could. But I would hurry anyway. To the farmhouse it was three miles there, three miles back. It might seem obvious to say it was the same but there was often a great difference in distance between walking that way in the daytime and at night, when the moon sliced a black sky and I slipped from Ruby’s bed to walk home in the dark. I learned to follow the shape of the wind to guide me, the way it found the straightest path.

I worked the quarry in the summer, did roads in the winter: plowing, salting. My father had done the same, my older brothers, too. It was hard work, the summer quarry, but I liked the way it made my body sweat and burn, sledging stone from the ground and feeling our shoulders turn red from the sun. At night, heat lightning rimmed the edges of the limestone hollow in soundless flashes the same way as when we lit our cigarettes, quick faces showing in the evening dark. There was a friendly feeling in not seeing one another clearly as we listened for the thunder while the wetness dried off our bodies before we drove home. I slept well in the summer.

In the winter though there was less to do, and that season I drove roads black without snow, shook bags over paths already coated with sand and salt. This was middle January, when my mother was still dying. I had just turned twenty-seven. I drove the frontage roads at dawn and slept in daylight patches in my childhood bedroom. At night I was with Ruby. All winter we waited for snow that never came while the earth froze hard and harder, and all the while I walked across the fields with my hands out in the darkness, feeling the shapes the wind made and trying to find a place for my body in those currents, hoping I did not mistake the ground beneath me and, in the cold alone, fall.

▱

Ruby liked to talk, which was fine because I did not. He talked nervous, always some part of his body letting you know there was a wire inside him sparking like flint on stone. He picked things up, put them down, tapped a lighter on the table.

Ruby moving in the bedroom. Ruby up and down the stairs. The house around us groaned in the wind and the cold snicked beneath the doors. We kept the fire burning in the grate the whole night long.

“Sam,” he might say. “Sam. Have you heard of the things they find in the ocean?” He’d been reading all day on the internet, he said. Watching videos and clicking on links.

“No,” I said. “Tell me.”

His hair was long and gold. His nails were bitten ragged. When he spoke I wanted to become the words on his tongue, to become his tongue moving against his teeth.

“Beautiful things,” he said. “They’ve found fish that have lights in their bones. Squid with a million eyes. Sometimes there are noises,” he said, his hands everywhere in the air as he spoke, “noises that we’ve only heard coming from deep space.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“I’d like to hear that,” he said. “I would like to hear something that came from the stars.” He shifted in the bed. Something that came from the stars.

At home my mother slept all day, working at untethering herself from her body, bit by bit, from the legs up: her feet were numb already, she said, parts of her legs too. She smiled when she said it—what an interesting feeling. I watched talk shows and cable news on mute while she slept, sitting next to her on the living room couch where she now lived, layers of afghans keeping her warm. I kept the same channel on all day. Without sound it was easy to make up stories about what was happening, though mostly the stories became the same in the end.

When my father and two brothers came home, we moved through the house like constellations easy over the sky. Never too near to one another but never too far neither. This was the way it had always been, and though perhaps in the past I’d wished I could be a different sort of son to my father, we were quiet people. And respect is as good a substitute for love as anything else.

▱

I met Ruby first in town where he was buying a pack at the EZ Go. It was November then, and we’d had enough sleet that I was busy all night long, salting while the roads were empty and icing over fast. My breath fogged the windows in the cab. Drops froze on my windshield; I pulled over to scrape the glass free.

He was there, by the gas station door. It opened: Ruby moving in fluorescent light. He came out of a spray of ice powder and I thought, seeing his face, there I am. I thought, seeing his face, here I am.

He almost walked on by but I said, “hey,” and he turned.

“Hey,” he said. His face open, upheld in the sleet. Ruby slick and shining.

There I am.

▱

Upstairs, all the hallways in the white farmhouse were angled with moonlight. I stood at the bedroom window; in the blaze of sleet and fine snow my snowplow, parked in the gravel, looked like a mastodon huddled into an immobile, quiet bulk. I leaned my forehead against the glass, chill spreading through my skin from the single point of contact. I felt the vertigo of time and space when you stare into the outside darkness: I was 27 in a stranger-man’s bedroom; I was 6-years-old and sleeping in the snow while my father shoveled the driveway; I was floating through the window into the black sky, rising up against the tide of ice and rain. There was a rushing in my ears. It was my blood, the umbilical beat.

I turned away from the window. Behind me, Ruby had undressed. I was surprised at how large he suddenly seemed, how he expanded without clothes. He was tall and pale. His cock plump and purply, a scruff of dark above it—so dark, his long hair so gold. He lit a joint and, after a pull, offered it to me.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

I shrugged.

He nodded. “I run hot,” he said. “My skin is always burning.” He put a hand on his chest and said, like this. As though I could feel it too: my hand there.

There I am.

In the morning, when the sleetstorm was over and the sky was blue and emptied, we found the snowplow totally encased in ice. I had to take a hammer to the door to pry the handle open. It cracked so loudly I thought I’d broken it but the hinge swung fine; I hoisted up into the cab.

Ruby stood at the open door. With his clothes on again he looked like he had at the gas station: like someone who got picked up in the night on long-haul crossroads.

“Would you like to visit me again?” he asked.

(What business did I have being coy? Oh—I wanted to cradle his face in my hands. I wanted to throw my body at his and fold into his skin.)

I said, only, “Yes.”

▱

Three miles there, three miles back. My mother sleeping on the couch. The television tuned to a nature channel: images of blue whales diving into deeper blue, the strange sounds they made like train tracks heating up, bending and muttering, miles before the freight ever passed over the ties. I rubbed her feet and felt the way her bones collided underneath her skin. “I can’t feel it,” she said. “Press harder.” I worried I would hurt her and neither of us would know it.

“Where are you going at night?” my father asked me over dinner one evening.

“Out,” I said.

“Across the field?” he asked. He kept his attention trained away from me.

“Sometimes,” I said.

My father studied a point in middle distance. “That old farmhouse,” he said. “Thought it was empty.”

“It’s not,” I said.

In the family room, my mother coughed. She was very quiet but we’d grown used to finding her frequency under the television and the daytime noises of the house. We looked quickly at the kitchen door, waited for another sound, then both turned again to the table, the way we’d learned to do that season.

“No snow yet,” my father said. He pulled his sight back from whatever place he’d gone to and looked at me. “Cold out, though.”

It struck me that my father was much younger than I’d kept him in my mind to be; his face, which I did not often look at, was much smoother than you might expect from a man who worked all year in the wind and sun. In photos, my father and I looked like twins, but outside pictures no one ever mentioned to me that we looked alike, the way they did for my brothers.

“Stay warm outside,” he said, and left the kitchen.

▱

I brought Ruby venison from our cellar, ribs and flanks of red muscle. We cooked it in butter until blood sizzled in the pan, and then we ate it from the same plate, Ruby soaking up the last blood and grease with a piece of bread.

“Do you know what the time between ice ages is called?” he asked. “Holocene. It means whole.” His hands were moving, moving while he spoke, skittering over his knees and twisting through his hair.

“The land is still rising,” he said. “From when the glaciers pressed it down. Maybe we’re actually on top of a mountain right now.”

I leaned over and thumbed off a spot of blood from his cheek.

“I’ve never seen a mountain,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “You’d like them.” He smiled. “I’ve never seen one either but they’re”—he paused, fingers picking at the table. “They’re expansive.” He nodded, pleased at having found the right word.

There I am.

Whenever we fucked, I held Ruby as close as I could, pinning his arms to his sides or wrapping mine around his back, but I always felt as though he were about to dart away, minnow-quick, every piece of his body so heavy and solid but fluid: ice turning to water in your palm. I was terrified he would vanish under my hands and I would be alone in the white farmhouse. And yet I hoped I might vanish beneath him, borne into the bed and his body too, perhaps subsumed wholly as, moving inside me, he spoke into my ear all the things he’d learned that day. His mind filled mine, and I was aware of the way his imagination roamed far into the world with all the mad focus and bravery of a voyageur, those old wildmen crossing lake waters so wide they could have been a dark black sea.

Three miles between us. I would run the last quarter in bare feet to better feel the ground and move faster than in boots.

One evening near the end of February, we lay in bed.

“My mother is dying,” I said.

He rolled over to look at me. “What is she like?” he asked.

I considered. “She’s my mother,” I said. “You know.”

He shook his head. “Tell me something about her that only you know.”

I thought about my mother and what I could say about her but I was aware that though I knew her long feet and calloused heels and the sound her lungs made when she woke in the afternoons, hauling herself from sleep and still dripping with unconsciousness, this was in fact all I knew about her, all I could say to anybody who asked. And I knew too, though not the full pain of it yet, that this was the greatest failure of my life.

“Well, come meet her,” I said. He lay against me and I could feel his heart beating through his back. His pulse on my skin: feet running, running in the cold-dark.

He was silent.

“Don’t you ever leave here?” I asked.

“There’s nothing worth it out there,” he said.

I did not want to say it but then I did. “I am,” I said. “I’m out there.”

He rose from the bed and walked to the window, his long body outlined from the snowglare outside, like something from the deep ocean, the way light seems to filter up from the water.

“I was reading today about cave paintings,” he said. “Did you know,” he said, “they’ve found a cave in Tennessee, miles deep, with paintings that are twenty-thousand years old?”

He turned away from the window and took a step toward the bed. I could tell he wanted some understanding from me.

“Twenty-thousand years,” he said. “Imagine that much time.”

I tried to imagine, but I could not.

▱

In my house the curtains were drawn, the rooms existing in an orange watery smog.

My mother leaned up on her elbows. “John,” my mother called me.

“No,” I said. “That’s my father. I’m your son.”

“Sit with me,” she said. I was not sure that she understood I was not my father but I sat at the edge of the couch.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “I once saw a white elk. Oh, yes,” she said when I raised my eyebrows, “a white elk standing by the side of the road. I was driving with my mother to town for groceries, and when we turned the curve by the willow stand, there it was: a white elk.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I don’t remember.” She said this very simply with a little puzzlement. “I can’t remember.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, thinking that maybe she would be distressed that she could not recall. “Just relax.”

My mother’s face snapped into a sudden blaze.

“You think I can’t tell what’s happening to me,” she said. Her eyes were clear. “Well, I do—I do.” She slumped back into the couch, fumbling with the afghan covers a little. I wondered if she could feel her fingertips.

“Should I call Dad?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Your sister,” she said. “Call her.”

“I don’t have a sister,” I said. “Let me call Dad.” I could feel a tide inside me moving. It was a strange thing to find myself maternal to my mother.

“Its eyes were blue,” she said. “The elk.”

Later that evening, beyond that moment: beyond the brick ranch I’d never left, my childhood bedroom, my brothers’ boots at the door; beyond the hours I spent in the plow driving aimless up snowless streets, thinking on the line of Ruby’s neck and wanting a way to say to him come home to me; beyond wanting a way to say to him you are me. Beyond the three miles that edged my life. Beyond and back again, the whole world pouring through the windows into my living room: there was my mother on the couch, my father curled around my mother. I stepped inside and saw them sleeping there together—their faces angelic, empty and slackened into ordinary beauty—I felt tender and dispassionate to these strangers on the couch, and then went into my bedroom to cry.

▱

I saw a woman too, sometimes. Her name was Laurie and she was quiet like me, never saying much of anything, and I liked this, the way she let us be together without talking, just sitting next to one another touching legs, or eating dinner, or watching the tree outside her window when we lay together. When we fucked and I moved in her, she shut her eyes and smiled and sometimes hummed a note, but never spoke. Never made more noise than that. I went to see her in the daytime and was always amazed at the way her body fit to mine, not a mirror of me but a cousin, curves notching into my straight lines, the outlines of our bodies one against the other, creating a single generic human form.

Ruby knew what I was doing. In fact, one day in the white farmhouse I had said, “I’m fucking a woman named Laurie.”

He shrugged. “I don’t mind,” he said. “What is she like?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I was suddenly intent that I would draw something out of him, make him thrash.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he said. “Just so you know.”

“You don’t want to hear about it?”

He looked at me mildly. “You seem like you want to talk about it.”

“Let’s fuck,” I said. “Let me fuck you.”

“Sam,” he said. I looked up, registering something strange in my vision—he was not moving. Ruby paused and still.

“Sam,” he said again. “I’m not this kind of person.”

“I know,” I said.

“Does that make you sorry?” he asked.

I thought of how he spent his days in the farmhouse: flipping through books he’d accumulated over years from the library, unreturned, his card long ago rescinded but his pilfering ways never curbed. Or, most often, hunched over his computer while the world flew by under his fingertips, each link and photo and screen pulling him deeper and deeper into pockets of digital data, a ticker tape of invisible zeros and ones that said Marianas Trench, that said echolocation, that said eighteenth-century erotica, that said ten words for humiliation and, once said, once typed, those things would appear, as if real: ah, magic! Nothing so small as the world, nothing so large as the farmhouse. He’d never need to move an inch. Never need to be anyone but himself. Life came to Ruby—he received it, hands open. And then let it pass through his fingers, wondering at the trail of ghostly light it left behind.

“I can’t make you be different,” I said.

He nodded. “But you want to.”

I did not need to answer. We both understood my silences enough by then.

“Well. Be careful walking back,” he said.

▱

I didn’t see Laurie for a while after that, and when I finally went to her home, she did not want to open the door.

“You can’t do this to me,” she said. “Coming and going. I won’t let you.”

I was sorry to lose her but I let her shut me out. It was her right to decide the type of pain she felt. She was like me and I understood she was the type of woman who liked to keep her anger private.

After this, I went immediately to the white farmhouse and when Ruby opened the door, I pushed him down onto the floor. He was startled; I was not gentle.

“You think you belong in here,” I said. “You think you’re safe.” I pushed my thumb into his mouth. His teeth were sharp and wet. I wanted to wrench his tongue out. I thought that I could eat it if I did.

“What did you learn today?” I asked. “What are you going to tell me today?”

I stretched the side of his cheek, released my thumb with a slick pop.

“You can disappear in me, Sam,” he said. Go ahead—here I am for you.”

I rolled away. What I had felt was gone, replaced by the shame of my outburst. Ruby sat up, his knees hugged to his chest.

“Stay here tonight,” he said.

No, I said, though I badly wanted to say yes. I wanted to tell Ruby that I would live with him forever in the white farmhouse, and bring him gifts of books and magazines and encyclopedias to line the walls. I would make the white farmhouse the world for us.

“My mother needs me,” I said.

I need you, he said.

I laughed, angry then. “She’s dying,” I said. “Are you?”

“You need me, too,” he said. “You use me, too.”

I stood up, thinking that I would not subject myself to his accusations. I was very young and did not understand my own arrogance.

“You know where to find me,” I said, and left.

It was night and the temperatures had dipped far below zero into the kind of coldness that starts on the inside: you do not realize you’re freezing until your skin goes numb and only then do you feel that your guts have turned to ice long ago. I hurried across the field, my secret path shallow on the surface of the hardpacked ground, almost invisible, though I knew it well enough. I was the only one who walked the field. Even the deer had abandoned their trails earlier in the season to go south or, more likely, curl into bramble thickets and die. It was what we in that place called a coyote’s winter.

When I reached home I stood outside for a while, longer than I knew was safe, but for a moment I could not approach the door, wearied of the ritual entry into the staging ground of my mother’s death. Inside, my father would be cooking dinner, my two brothers setting the table. My mother on the couch, numb, noting the progress of her body’s departure from itself. She had always been a curious woman, eager to understand the world, though she too, like everyone around us, had never left her home county. Yet I had never before thought of her as wistful, or seeking escape. And again I felt the onset of a great, distant pain, that this was perhaps another misunderstanding of my mother, and I would have wept had I not known the tears would coat my nose and freeze and, in doing so, suffocate me.

My bones had begun to ache. I could only stay a moment longer. I turned away from my home to look across the fallow field. There was nothing there save the low hollow sound of the wind carving away at the things it found—the same sound we’d hear in the quarry, a ghostly sorrowful voice. I saw nothing moving though, no form approaching, so I wrenched my body back into motion, with the agony of near-frostbite already beginning to heat through my blood and, ignoring the empty space between he and I, I went inside.

▱

That last night, he came to find me. Three miles there and three miles back. He’d frozen at the second mile, having fallen and twisted his ankle, where the sumac windfall broke the field in two. I found him a week later when, in desperation at my pride and love for him, I went to cross the field again. I’d thought he had no family, but when I called for help they took his body away downstate to parents and a sister who lived in a suburb and had not spoken to him in years. I sent them a letter asking to be informed about the funeral but did not hear back. In that way I thought I understood a little more about Ruby in the farmhouse, about his pain.

My mother died several weeks later, though we could not bury her until the ground, ten feet frozen, thawed out enough for the bulldozer, so for two more months she lay on ice, a Shackleton maidenhead painted in grays and blues. My father bought lilies to put around her body that, each morning when he went to replenish them, would have gathered dew from the ice slabs and in that way remained strangely alive.

▱

I am much older now. And this was not last winter, it was a winter many years ago. So long ago, in fact, that the white farmhouse is gone, first a home in modest disrepair to the jackdaws and hawks and then, cracked open by the wind, an impression of a house: a framework: nothing. I have never married, disinclined to travel the distance necessary to find someone of similar temperament. I am too quiet for a spouse anyway, too lonely. I have never lost the impulses that once led me to invite a stranger-man into my car, to look for the frayed edges haloing around other lonely nightwalkers to see if they might wend to my own seams of strangeness.

There I am: Ruby’s body in the field. I lay with him all day, hoping to pass into whatever place he’d gone.

In the winters since, we’ve had seasons of great snow, drifts that stretch from the lake basins to the quarry, dulling each field into identical whiteness. I am busy in these times, salting the roads and waking with the onset of each snowstorm, always in the early dark hours when I pull my boots on with my eyes still shut and stumble into the blank dawn to clear the roads as they fill. It is then, most often, that I think of Ruby—or more truthful to say it is then that I think more of him, since there is no breath alive for me anymore without his name in my mouth.

Beyond those moments, though: into the night and streaking across the north country where in our lakes sharp-toothed fish slug in the deep; beyond hunting stands soaked in venison blood; beyond the edges of a map, gray fogged: I push my imagination forward as he did, swimming into the world unknown. Beyond my body. Beyond and into desire.

There, see it: the white farmhouse. I can imagine him walking in the night to my door, talking, talking, talking the whole time he crossed the fallow fields that were so wide and open I could not hope to keep them free of ice. I wish I had been able to salt the fields under his feet so he would never slip.

I see him, me. I hear our feet moving on the cold, hard earth.

 

A native of Wisconsin, Bridget Apfeld currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she works as an editor, writing consultant, and production assistant. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a BA from the University of Notre Dame. Her work can be found in Dislocate, So to Speak, Verse Wisconsin, Prick of the Spindle, Able Muse, and elsewhere.