I think weve been here b.., p.22
I Think We've Been Here Before: A Novel, page 22
To be fair, the internet had lasted longer than she’d thought it would. So many things had. She hadn’t given a lot of thought to the end of the world before the world actually started ending, but on the rare occasions she had, she’d pictured everything coming to an abrupt end, like a car crash. She’d underestimated humanity, the desire so many had to keep ticking along, pretending. Collective trauma was the strangest thing she’d ever witnessed.
Petra smirks at her, as though she doesn’t believe the phone is out of order. Maybe Petra comes from the part of Nora’s brain that’s in denial. She shrugs. “I am just saying. Sometimes we wonder about things because we wonder about things. Sometimes we wonder because we already know.”
Nora frowns. Someone has said this to her before. “Yeah, well,” she says. “I’m just trying to stay grounded in reality.”
“That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” says Petra, making her point by still being on the ceiling. “What about reality is grounding? What is there to be grounded in or to? We are on a rock in the cosmos! Seven billion of us! Traveling at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, orbiting a ball of gas, which is burning at ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit!”
Nora goes into her bedroom, lies down, and puts her pillow over her head.
But the bed sags as Petra, now apparently upright, sits at Nora’s side, and the pillow stuffing doesn’t completely drown her out.
“People, like you, who talk about reality like it is easy to understand and describe are just the best at ignoring what reality actually is, at seeing the surface of an endless ocean and pretending there is not much beneath that. Looking at a starry night sky and pretending it is one dimensional and saying it is pretty instead of realizing you have no idea what it actually is or what’s in it or behind it and letting it take your breath away.” Petra taps Nora on the shoulder. “Grounded in reality,” she says. “It is like saying you are rooted in water.”
“Stop it, Petra,” Nora mumbles.
“Reality is space and time in all directions forever and ever, including inward, all of the observable things and all of the things too small or too large to be witnessed, all of the things that happen subconsciously and all of the things that cannot be seen but can be felt and sensed and just barely glimpsed: hearts beating, blood flowing, coincidence and happenstance and depthless pain and boundless joy, déjà vu and presque vu and jamais vu. None of it makes a person feel especially ‘grounded,’ no matter what you believe about where it started or how it is going to end. Reality is watery.”
Petra is watery. She disintegrates into the walls and pours into the room when Nora is most vulnerable.
But . . . there are plants that grow in water.
Sick of Pretend Petra, Nora leaves the apartment. She walks aimlessly, past familiar buildings and unfamiliar ones that she recognizes anyway. She ends up in Leise Park, where Jacob had taken her just the other day, the place she’d recognized so vividly on her first trip there.
This place was once a cemetery.
When she’d been here with him, it had felt like a park more than a cemetery—full of bright-orange leaves and park benches and people wandering the paths, the atmosphere romantic. Now it seems like only a cemetery, and she feels morbid being here. Maybe Jacob feels comfortable being alive around dead people, but Nora didn’t grow up in Berlin. Where she grew up, they buried their loved ones in the countryside, in cemeteries with old white fences around them, and your parents yelled at you to not step on your friends’ grandparents on your way to lay your own to rest, and the kids told each other ghost stories about the creepy things people saw out there when they drove past in the middle of the night, and no one—no one—acted like death was okay.
She feels light-headed. A pinprick of pain in her shoulder, in the center of her chest, in her forehead, little bursts of lightning. She can’t breathe.
She sinks onto a bench and stares at the scattered grave markers. There’s only one other person in the park, on a different bench. A man, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. He seems to sense her eyes on him, and he sits up straight, catching her gaze. Jacob.
How many people live in Berlin? Three or four million? The probability of this moment is so low as to be impossible, as though Berlin were a tiny little village, like the one Nora grew up in, a place where you’re constantly running into the one person you don’t want to run into.
Jacob is coming toward her now, and she thinks of that day in Begonia. She’d felt that day exactly as she does now, that he was a person with whom she had history. Real history, not imagined, not a marriage of convenience. Both times it had been only an illusion, like Petra on the ceiling. She needs to remember this.
She still can’t breathe.
“Nora? I was just on my way to your place,” he says. He doesn’t notice that she’s suffocating, or having a stroke, or something . . .
“Thought I’d stop here and collect my thoughts, and—there you were. Maybe we’ve become entangled.” He says it lightly, like it’s a joke, but it’s the weightiest thing he’s said to her so far.
She puts her head between her legs.
She feels him sit beside her, his hand on her back. “Nora? Nora? You okay?”
“Mama,” she gasps, “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
The best person to have in your corner when you’re in the ring with a panic attack is someone who has recently beaten the same opponent. They sit together until her breathing returns to normal. He’s holding her hand again, and she tries not to read into it; a medical emergency calls for hand-holding.
“Thank you,” she says after a while.
“Anytime,” he says. “What are husbands for?”
She ignores this. “How’d things go with your parents?”
“Ah . . .” He shifts on the bench. “We had some good conversations. It’s hard on them, having Anna so far away right now, and then I wasn’t home very much—I get it. But they also needed to understand that I want . . .” Now he looks uncertain and doesn’t finish the thought. “About what you said the other day, about how everything had gone too far—”
“I don’t actually think that,” she says. “I mean, unless you think—”
“I don’t,” he says quickly. “If anything—” He doesn’t finish that thought, either, but there aren’t a lot of ways that sentence could end.
“So we’re good?” Why do they keep saying things that mean so much less than what they want to say?
“Yes.”
The graveyard goes back to feeling like a park, like some set designer has turned up the bird sounds, warmed up the lighting, turned off some barely discernible funeral music. Nora and Jacob go back to feeling like Mr. and Mrs. Schmidt.
54
They take Irene’s car. Bud sits between Hank and Irene in the front, breathing hotly into Irene’s ear.
Irene calls Hilda on the way to let her know that Ole’s been found, but Hilda’s already received a call from Iver.
“He said he wants me there too,” says Hilda, puzzled. “Is that okay? Seems weird. I imagine you guys have stuff to work through. As a family.”
“Honestly, it is a little weird,” says Irene. “But if Dad picks up the phone to call someone, it’s not for no reason.” The last time he’d called them, their mother had been headed to the hospital for the last time. “You should come. Just give us a five-minute head start? Maybe ten? Because I’m going to be a complete mess for at least that long.”
When they pull up to Iver’s house, Ole is sitting on the front step beside a badly decorated Christmas tree with the lights unplugged. All at once he ceases to be the crying baby on the back of Irene’s eyelids and becomes himself again, a sullen preteen with his father’s hair and his mother’s lips. He and Hank look equally anxious, and Irene studies her family with despair. We need to get happy! she wants to scream at them. We have so little time; we need to fix everything!
Not that she believes the world is ending. But even if she and Hank both live to be one hundred, that is too little time. This is urgent. She throws her car door open and runs to her son and pulls him into a hug and a moment later she feels Hank’s arms around both of them and she thinks, briefly, of the cougars and the letter and how nothing bad ever really happens. It only ever seems like it’s going to.
When Hilda arrives, the family is standing in a circle on and around Iver’s porch, overshadowed by a very sad Christmas tree, teeth chattering, everyone wondering vaguely why they haven’t been invited inside. Ole has explained as much as he’s going to for now, and Hank is relieved to feel anger replaced with hope. The thing about time being short, he supposes: they have enough time to patch things up but not enough to let it all go wrong again. They can ride this reconciliation high right to the end. In normal times? Escapism, unhealthy, a setup for cyclical failure. Now? No room for cycles! Escapism, still, but without negative consequences, only the good parts. Maybe the only perk of a gamma ray burst.
“Why’s your tree on your porch, Dad?” asks Hilda, trying to steer the conversation somewhere light.
“No room for it in the living room,” says Iver.
There are some shared glances between the adults that aren’t as discreet as they think.
“It wouldn’t fit in the usual spot?” asks Irene. In her anger, she’d forgotten about her father’s apparent mental decline—but the sight of his sparse Christmas tree, with the clumped decorations and darkened light bulbs, out on the porch like this, brings her concern roaring back into focus.
“Ole and I have something for you,” Iver announces, ignoring her unease. “Follow me.”
So they follow their father into their childhood home, trailed by Ole and Hank. The familiar smells have mostly been replaced with new ones—dust, maybe mold—but there’s still a hint of them underneath, even if it’s only in their imaginations (and it probably is). Their mother’s perfume, the cinnamon candles she always brought home from her favorite store in the city, her malodorous face cream.
Iver doesn’t open the windows in the summer the way their mother had, and he isn’t great at housekeeping. It’s dark; all the blinds are drawn shut. Hilda reaches to flip a light switch, but Iver blocks her. “Nope, nope. Not yet.”
There’s a warm gleam coming from the living room, and Hilda feels a strange twinge of recognition, some kind of deep-seated nostalgia. Not completely out of place, considering this is the house she grew up in, until she turns the corner and realizes that the nostalgia isn’t related to this house at all. It’s something from farther back in her memory, from a room in her brain with a tightly shut door. And now, without her permission, the door is cracking open.
The room is lit by black-light bulbs screwed into the ceiling and lamps. Someone has draped Christmas lights around the perimeter of the room, which is lined with arcade machines, their displays glowing.
“DAD . . .” Irene bursts into incredulous laughter. “What is this?”
“It’s an arcade,” says Hilda quietly, respectfully, as though the living room is a sacred place. Arcades would not generally fall in the category of places people consider sacred, and Hilda might not have used this word to describe them before today, but now she sees that her father has created, not a place of frivolous entertainment, but a monument. A memorial to someone they all love and miss.
“Ole helped me with the lighting,” says Iver, looking absolutely everywhere except at Hilda, who is starting to cry. He would never admit, not even to himself, that this was the reaction he’d hoped for, but deep down he’s happy about it. And excruciatingly uncomfortable. He tries to move the conversation to safety. “He found the black-light bulbs at the hardware store before it closed. They just gave ’em to him. For free.”
Ole is oblivious to the emotion in the room. In his mind, this arcade is all for and about him. “The games were all reset when we got them, so I have the high score on every single one,” he says over his shoulder, already involved in a game of Space Invaders.
“Look,” Irene says to Hilda. “It’s Arnie.” It’s taken her a second longer than her older sister to fully grasp the intent behind the grand gesture, but now she does. Iver has come as close as possible to packing them all up and traveling back in time, to before everyone was so divided, before all this nonsense about exploding stars and the end of the world, before they lost their brother. A living portrait. She shakes her head in amazement. “I never noticed before how much Ole looks like Arnie.”
Iver isn’t sure whether he was meant to hear this or not. He breaks into one of his rare but genuine smiles. “He’s like Arnie in a lot of ways. I’m sorry these past few weeks have been so hard on you and Hank but . . . it’s been a dream come true for your old man.”
He feels something welling up inside of him. No, he thinks, I’m not going to be like Kelvin. I’m not going to cry in front of everyone. He clears his throat, blinks his eyes. Then, when all else fails, he blurts out, “So Kelvin’s friend was telling me that the government has been hiding alien vehicles.”
Everyone stares at him. Irene looks concerned.
But he just shrugs. Crisis averted. “Poke at the phenomenon,” he says. “I’ve been told it pokes back.”
55
Hilda is painting her last mural—in Nora’s bedroom, the only room in the house left with solid white walls. She hadn’t left this one for last on purpose; she hadn’t really gone into any of it with a sense of order or logic—it’s been a bit like falling down the stairs. You don’t choose which order you do it in; you let gravity decide.
For Nora, she has chosen birds. All kinds of birds, toucans and falcons and blue jays and flamingos and penguins. Some of the birds are adorable, some are terrifying, and some look too silly to exist in real life. Nora has always loved birds.
Marlen’s recliner is in the living room, too heavy to haul up the stairs; he lies on Nora’s bed instead, staring up at his wife painting electric-green hummingbirds all over the ceiling.
“I finished reading your book,” she says. “I finished last night.”
He raises his eyebrows, surprised. “Did you?”
“Yes.”
There’s an awkwardness to this that he hadn’t anticipated. What were you supposed to say to someone who has just finished reading your book, your wife no less? Did you like it? What did you think? Ridiculous questions, because if the answers were at all negative, the other person would have to lie. Especially dangerous when the other person is Hilda, whom he can read so extremely well.
Like a book, incidentally.
“I loved it,” she says, and thankfully he can tell she’s not lying. He lets out a breath he’s been holding since she first laid eyes on the cover.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
“Don’t apologize for that.”
“I’m not apologizing—I’m saying I’m sorry—as in, I feel sad for myself that it took me so long. It was surprisingly comforting.”
“Oh?” He hadn’t really expected her to use that word.
“I liked the ending.”
“Like, when they all die?”
“But they don’t, do they?”
He laughs. “No, I guess they never do.”
“And you are a prophet, so . . .”
“You think I got it right then?”
“I hope so.”
DECEMBER
56
Hank arrives home from what will prove to be his last ever trip to the grocery store to find Irene sitting at the kitchen table, cutting felt garlands. She has been cutting felt garlands for—days? Weeks? Years, it feels like, though this is verifiably false.
He doesn’t know how to feel about the garlands, or the baking, or the snowflakes on the windows. It’s only December 1, and already he feels as though he’s been swallowed whole by Santa Claus himself. Any other year it would be nice, maybe, if a bit much. This year it feels like—well, it feels like exactly what it is: denial.
“Hi, Irene,” he says cautiously.
She glances up at him, then back down at the felt in her hands. They’re beautiful garlands, actually; it’s mesmerizing to watch her make them. She has it down to an art, and her hands move so quickly it’s as though the leaves form themselves. “Hi.”
“How many of these are you going to make?”
“Lots. As many as I can. Maybe next year I can set up an Etsy shop and sell them.”
He nods slowly. “Maybe.”
Since Ole’s homecoming, the family’s mood has shifted, for better and worse in equal measures. They are all trying so hard. They can see each other trying. But trying, in a space where you once could just exist with no effort, is exhausting.
“Where’s Ole?”
“Dropped him off at your dad’s. He’s hanging out there for the afternoon. I’ll go get him after supper.”
“Good.” Irene knows she still has every right to be angry at her father, but—all’s well that ends well? And he’s been under a lot of stress lately, what with his whole family feeding him this story about the starburst and everything. She’d probably have cracked long ago if she believed it. She ties off the end of her garland with a neat bow.
“The delivery trucks have stopped,” says Hank, as conversationally as he can.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I went to the grocery store to get milk, and they have limits on what you can buy and how much of it, because there aren’t going to be any more trucks, they said.” He holds up two cloth bags. “This is all I was allowed.”
This should not be so surprising. Until now, the trucks have continued coming from the cities. The shelves have been stocked—maybe with a few gaps here and there, but nothing alarming. You might not be able to get Heinz ketchup, but you could get President’s Choice, and that was okay—it didn’t feel apocalyptic to have President’s Choice ketchup on your macaroni, unless you were someone for whom ketchup on macaroni had always felt apocalyptic.
