Saukfield in late August gives up the ghost of summer with abrupt abandon.
End of day temperatures drop with sudden coolness like an American Spirit extinguished in a leaf-clogged swimming pool. Not much of a swimming pool. An inflatable vinyl ring that holds the twins and their beach toys, but not without severe overcrowding. The fact that it takes forever to fill the pool from a garden hose suggests to my children watery depths that never materialize. “When’s Mom?” says Lucy, sitting in pool water up to the belly button dent in her swimsuit.
Lucy is shivering.
“When’s Mom?” says Jon.
Ruth’s return from Mudstone is delayed.
“It’s tricky,” I say.
“Trick or treat,” says Jon. He aims a Day-Glo revolver at my face. I can read his mind. Pre-season Halloween superstores are already peppering the exurbs. Or maybe he just wants to shoot me in the face.
At least I think that’s what Ruth said. Tricky, she said, or risky. “Joy Frisk is in a coma,” she said. Cellphone signals from Mudstone are intermittent at best. Hiccups of silence. Dropped syllables in the Northwoods of Wisconsin.
The twins are nine.
“Everybody out of the pool,” I say. I slap my knee and spring from the resin-wicker lawn chair like a jack-in-the-box clown.
I’m a fun dad.
“No cigarette butts in the water, please,” says Lucy.
Into the house we swerve, trailing tattered bath towels. To the kitchen table and an expectation that I will rapidly prepare an indulgent dinner. I do not have their attention. My children own Galaxy phones.
“Texting Mom,” says Jon.
“Texting Mom,” says Lucy.
Thumbs are deployed.
From my personal Galaxy, I order us a pizza.
On the rare occasion that gossip even bothers to take notice, Mudstone is likely to be derided as a New Age sanitarium or a woke safe-space. Decent health coverage will usually reimburse the cost of your visit.
Attached with sunflower magnets to our refrigerator door is a well-worn laminated printout of “The Mudstone Rules of Absence.” An empty sheet of paper except for the title at the top of the page. Absence as a prompt. The twins giggle knowingly at this paradox. They get it. The irony of object permanence. The fraud of object permanence.
Lucy and Jon start fourth grade next week at Saukfield Elementary.
Ruth wouldn’t miss it.
Mudstone intensives typically last three days and can make it difficult to ease back into things. It’s a shift in consciousness, actually. The science is clear on this. More to the point, Ruth is probably experiencing a decompression lag on the five-hour drive home. Best to pull over under these circumstances. Sleep with earplugs for an afternoon at a roadside motel before driving farther.
The anxiety of waiting for a pizza delivery can be significantly reduced with a large bag of kettle chips. The last of three bags purchased a week ago Saturday at the farmers’ market in the bank parking lot. A pop-up family business from Baraboo. Potato slicing machine clacking like a woodchipper. Ponytailed father dude in safety goggles. Rosie-the-Riveter mom in Hulk-size welding gloves, pulling wire baskets from a deep fryer. Toddlers in Packers jerseys hoisting beer can saltshakers.
My own children were convinced at that moment, and are convinced now, that we should finance a kettle chip startup at home in our kitchen.
“What you observed at the farmers’ market is called synchronized robotism,” I say. “It exposes you to the risk of repetitive motion syndrome.”
Jon’s eyebrows arch. He looks to Lucy and she shrugs.
“When’s pizza?” says Lucy.
“When’s pizza?” says Jon.
Individuation does not occur naturally in children. Environmental control is key. Separate bedrooms. Personalized soaps and eating utensils. Journals with empty pages that we encourage be kept empty. Our secret selves are our absent selves. Lucy cradles the bowl of kettle chips. Jon hugs the bag. They descend carpeted stairs to the basement family room. Bicker skillfully over television remotes and a gazillion streaming options. Smart TV. Smart kids. We learn patience and the stillness of anticipation as we scroll and select.
Ruth is one of the top high school guidance counselors in Wisconsin. I mean, she’s won awards to that effect. Friends and colleagues sometimes joke (not without, on occasion, a pinprick of microaggression) that Ruth and I have stacked the district. Lucy and Jon attending Saukfield Elementary. Me teaching biology in the middle school. And Ruth, the guidance counselor at Saukfield High. It’s something I really don’t think about. Our ubiquity. I lock eyes with “The Mudstone Rules of Absence” on the refrigerator door and I don’t think at all.
I hear the distant crunch of kettle chips like a soothing waterfall of cancelled noise.
First to fray is your identity. Not as alarming as it sounds. You’re aware of your there-ness and, then, you’re not. The self is a kind of adjustable mesh. The tighter you calibrate the weave, the more forcefully your personality exerts its contours. The secret to absence is loosening the weave. Knot by knot. When Ruth and I were together at Mudstone, Joy Frisk spoke about Lucretius and On the Nature of Things. Lucretius the Epicurean. The world is knowable. Reality is composed of two states: atoms and void. Joy’s husband, Soren, shortly before he died, wood-burned a plaque for the door to Joy’s tree house therapy-den that reads: “Atoms & Void LLP.”
Existence is not complicated.
Nor is its absence.
“Consider the void,” said Joy Frisk. “The void’s isn’t-ness. Your isn’t-ness. This is not an abstract exercise.”
Some reassembly is required.
When I come to, I’m seated at the kitchen table. Lucy and Jon digging into my wallet. A ritual not unfamiliar to me. A random disc of Tupperware slides from the top of my head. Little jokesters. At Christmastime they gleefully coil me in twinkle lights. Hang tinsel from my ears.
Pizza has arrived.
“I’m a good father,” I hear myself saying.
“Sure, Mr. Carsten.”
It’s Emily Frye, a known deliverer of pizza. Babysitter in a pinch. Eggplant colored windbreaker. Blood red logo-less baseball cap. She’s reaching into a cupboard and bringing out drinking glasses for the twins.
“No big deal,” she says. “You didn’t hear the door. Lucy and Jon were on it, for sure.”
“Mom says we’re returnable twins,” says Jon.
“Awesome.”
“It means they can give us back,” says Lucy.
“I think she said the two of you are fraternal twins,” I say, warming to the topic. “Dizygotic, right? That means two separately fertilized eggs.”
The kitchen goes quiet. The silence of a clueless classroom.
“Rather than monozygotic,” I say. “That is, a single fertilized egg split in two, which results in identical twins.”
Jon raises his hand. “So you’re giving us back?”
“No, Jon,” I assure my son.
Emily Frye is one of my former middle school biology students. Amiable. Listless. Borderline truant by the time she reached Saukfield High. Ruth successfully advocated for Emily’s return to classes. She was expelled for dealing painkillers cribbed from her grandparents. There are others of her generation still hanging around town. Living at home with obliging parents or relatives. Working at one of the two gas station convenience stores. Or Piggly Wiggly. Saukfield Hardware. The Dollar Store.
“Keep the change,” says Lucy.
“Whoa,” says Emily, accepting a mass of crumpled cash from my daughter. “Thank you, guys.”
My children are ready for pizza. We’re finished with small talk.
“Trick or treat,” says Jon. He bulldozes Emily Frye out the door and into the cicada-screaming twilight.
The motel clerk—Nicole on her nametag—is younger than Ruth by a generous decade.
Nicole leans across the pockmarked reception desk and studies the bruise on Ruth’s forehead.
“There’s Bactine in the vending machine,” she says, unflappable as a school nurse. “I’m Nicole. Usually here. Sometimes not.”
She hands Ruth a credit card receipt.
“Thank you, Nicole.”
The motel is a way station. A neutral space from which to restore agency. To reawaken what Joy Frisk calls “our atomic stitchery.”
Orange. The motel furniture is orange. Before lying down on the bed, which dearly calls to her, Ruth tends to her forehead. A wicked sight in the harsh fluorescence of the bathroom mirror.
Ruth saw Joy Frisk in the woods at Mudstone.
Not comatose in a Hayward hospice care facility.
“Love is despotic,” said Joy, briskly walking past Ruth’s open cabin window. It wasn’t an otherworldly Joy Frisk in diaphanous spirit-gown. It was Joy in faded dungarees and REI hiking boots. Pistachio shells spilling from her pockets.
She disappeared behind the boathouse.
Ruth, giving chase, ran into a tree.
To be fair, the morning mist hadn’t lifted. There is a story by Chekhov, “The Black Monk,” that Joy years ago read aloud in the dining hall after autumn equinox lentil loaf. A tale wherein a mystical visitation is revealed pretty much right off the bat to represent a psychotic break of some kind.
“We like to believe our minds are trustworthy,” said Joy. “In fact, our minds are tricksters. Good storytellers. Lousy soothsayers.”
“Doesn’t that make us prisoners of our misapprehensions?” asked Jack Carsten, raising his hand in slow motion. A gesture, in retrospect, Ruth recognizes in their son, Jon, during moments of fatalistic doubt.
“Absence,” said Joy, “will never lie to you.”
Ruth Fuller and Jack Carsten were fasting when they met at Mudstone. Magical autumn. When dead leaves breathe. An empty stomach prolongs the half-life of absence. The way an echoing church bell reverberates and shakes your teeth loose. Ruth and Jack—according to Joy Frisk—failed to distinguish this rarefied sensation from falling in love. Joy pulled the two of them aside during their gardening shift. They were laughing like lunatics. Chucking dirt clods and rotten gourds at one another. Joy is a stern maternal ex-hippie. A cancer survivor. Bald with stitches like miniature train tracks laid across the side of her head. Fingernails chipped from a pistachio fixation. She scolded them: “There are cave paintings from 40,000 years ago that reveal our prehistoric ancestors knew how to redirect their sexual energy.”
Joy Frisk spoke abstractly of love. As a kind of moral positioning. A place of borderless absence arrived at through silent reflection. Not to be confused with falling in love, she said. The mating dance. Goo-goo eyes. Falling in love is out of context here, she said. (Soren, by this time, was in a wheelchair after a head-first fall from the deck of the tree house therapy-den.) We flood our brains with endorphins like drunken sailors. Ruth remembers laughing out loud at that one. And she remembers kissing Jack Carsten for the first time. A humid afternoon in the woods. Absence thrumming like a steel guitar.
Ruth looks up at Nicole and blinks three times.
“Why are you in my room?” asks Ruth.
“Sleep isn’t advised with a concussion, ma’am,” says Nicole. “Look here, please. I’m placing a Diet Mountain Dew and a Rice Krispies Cereal Milk Bar on your bedside table.”
“Thank you, Nicole.”
Nicole is gone.
Usually here.
Sometimes not.
Ruth Fuller Carsten’s father is a military man. When Ruth was in college at Whitewater, her father called from a motel room in North Carolina on a weekend bender. Said he was going to blow his brains out with his service revolver.
“He wouldn’t have phoned you if he intended to go through with it,” said Joy, during Ruth’s tree house therapy-den session.
The comforting anonymity of motel furniture brought him around.
Pebbled ceiling painted the flattest white.
Light indistinguishable from shadow.
Joy Frisk once asked Ruth and Jack and the others around an October bonfire: “Why do you suppose we imagine we are being addressed or spoken to even in our solitude?”
Joy has a way of teaching that isn’t teaching at all.
It’s an untangling.
Lucy and Jon expect a text. A string of manic emoji. Ruth worries that she and Jack instilled a kind of too-early anxiety in their children. Jumping the gun. Object permanence testing at four months. Is the plushie annihilated, or—get this—hidden behind Mommy’s or Daddy’s back? Evaluating performance variables. Discrepancies in looking-time response. Befuddlement and tears. An infant cannot help but wonder, inchoately, language-less, “Why are you fucking with my world?”
Time doesn’t heal wounds. It collates them like an office copy machine.
The motel furniture is burnt umber when the curtains are closed and the room darkens.
Our teachers’ lounge at Saukfield Middle School boasts three donated Keurigs.
Assorted off-brand K-cup pods from a discount bin at the Dollar Store. New Orleans Salted Praline Mocha. Spicy Wings Masala Chai. Our teachers’ lounge is a fortress. It’s a key club. Windowless. Solid oak door. We sneak in and out of the room sideways like suspects.
Tanya Renaldo, our English teacher, takes a seat across from me at the lunch table.
I imagine her crooked mouth as a smile.
“Is it true, Jack?” says Tanya, eyes widening.
“Don’t remind me,” I say.
“Ruth missed orientation week at the high school?”
We’re silent. The kind of silence that can be uncomfortable for some people. Not so much for me.
“You know the expression ‘knock yourself out’?”
“Sure,” I say. “Sort of like, ‘thanks, but no thanks.’”
“Right,” says Tanya.
“I might say ‘knock yourself out’ to a Marvel Cinematic Universe enthusiast,” I say. “Neither of the twins, thank goodness.”
Tanya observes me through squint eyes. She and her husband—Kyle?—have a two-year-old, whose name escapes me.
“But I mean in your case,” she says.
“In my case?”
“I’ve seen you so quiet. Like unconscious.”
“Nonsense.”
“Are you praying?”
I approximate a throaty chuckle.
“Do you think I need to?” I say.
Tanya Renaldo laughs.
“Don’t mistake absence for indolence,” I say reflexively.
“Is that a Mudstone thing?” says Tanya.
Not the first time I’ve heard the accusation. Best to ignore it, I know. “Absent the scene,” as Joy teaches.
Each middle school teacher in our building has a distinct pedagogic footprint. Successful students recognize and capitalize on this fact. Knowing that Tanya Renaldo is vegan, for example. It colors her approach to literature and life. Fresh-faced students who come to Tanya’s morning classroom stinking of bacon and sausage patties are setting themselves up for an existential crisis. Expect passages read aloud with incantatory rigor from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle describing Chicago’s once notorious stockyard abattoirs.
Life begins in my classroom. Division of cells diagramed on cork board and painstaking PowerPoint. I’m fond of nature documentaries that enlarge images of backyard insects and household microbial life. My students gasp and laugh at the magnified strangeness of it all. We’re haunted by the knitted world. The webbing that entombs us.
Saukfield is flushing fire hydrants.
We’re notified via a doorknob flyer printed on crime-scene yellow paper. Several days of discolored water, it says. Safe to drink, we’re told.
“Fat chance,” I say.
We drive an hour north on I-90 to the Dells and book ourselves into a waterpark hotel, the Mermaid Arms, for the weekend. Wisconsin Dells is the Las Vegas of moisture. Jon believes the Dells are the source of all the water in the world. Lucy disputes this theory. The Mermaid Arms surrounds a sprawling indoor pool with fountains and spiral tube slides. Colorful concrete dolphins. Fall sunshine pours in from cathedral windows. There’s a food court. Ruth and I, in full view of the splashing twins, drink surprisingly good coffee from plastic cups wrapped in cardboard sleeves.
Ruth is kicking herself. The start of the school year is overwhelming. “A hard transition,” she might say to a student in turmoil. She can’t debrief. Her Mudstone intensive was scheduled too close to orientation week at the high school. You bring everything with you to Mudstone. Everything that will fit inside your head, that is. Joy helps us to divest ourselves of the clutter.
“A hard transition,” says Ruth.
“You just said that,” I say.
“I think you think I just said that.”
The nearby laughter of our children echoes in the chlorinated air.
I offer Ruth a pair of spongy earplugs. Our shared rule: Only one plugged parent per family outing. She declines. I roll them, one at a time, tight between thumb and forefinger. Insert them into my ear canals. Waterpark dB drops to a dull roar.
Ruth says something, perhaps.
“What?” I say.
“It’s all gone to hell,” says Ruth.
“What?”
Last winter, during my intensive, I sat at Joy Frisk’s office desk tallying kitchen receipts. There were brain scans. I flipped through them like animation cels. I saw a flaming red dot pulse and enlarge.
An overnight storm sweeps boatloads of leaves from the trees, up and down the block, converging onto our lawn.
We, a family of four, own one near-toothless bamboo rake and a non-functioning leaf blower.
“Kill me now,” says Ruth, failing to keep a straight face.
Jon disappears into a mound.
“Kettle chips,” says Lucy, pretending to chomp a handful.
“Here’s the distinction,” I say. “Dead leaves clog our gutters, and kettle chips clog our arteries.”
“Dad joke,” says Ruth.
We’re behind on household repairs.
Obscure water stains metastasizing on the ceilings of our children’s bedrooms. Last spring I purchased two stories of steel scaffolding to reach rain-rotten clapboards that whistle beneath the eaves on windy nights. The scaffolding still stands. A dinosauric exoskeleton attached to the rear of our house. Not that I haven’t hauled myself up there. The neighborhood splayed below me like a bug collection. Epicurus gives little thought to the gods, but only because he believes the gods give no thought at all to us. I punch my fist straight through to the inside wall of the attic.
Halloween costumes for Lucy and Jon are blessedly uncomplicated this year.
Oven mitts and swimming masks. They’re going as the kettle chip makers from the farmers’ market.
Ruth and I rotate shifts. One of us passes out Smarties and SweeTARTS, while the other passes out upstairs. Ruth is loathe to greet parents at our door. She’s facing opposition at the high school. Accused of “questionable practices” for the first time in her award-winning career. Diagnosing one student after another with sound sensitivity and prescribing earplugs.
“I’m a pariah,” says Ruth.
“A flesh-eating fish?” I say.
“An outcast.”
“You’re none of those things.”
The twins are trick-or-treating with the Hutchinsons. Ray and Cindi Hutchinson own Saukfield Hardware. Two, maybe three children. They’re ex-Mudstoners. No hard feelings, they insist, toward Joy Frisk, or toward me and Ruth. We make halfhearted post-Halloween plans to join Ray and Cindi for prime rib at the Saukfield Country Club.
The Hutchinsons are at the top of our list of former Mudstone clientele whom we believe most capable of betrayal.
I discover my son’s sketchbook wedged beneath the Rubbermaid bin of vintage water pistols—lime green Lugers, blaze orange Colts, ruby red derringers—under his bed.
The sketchbook is titled Hellhounds of Dleifkuas in waxy crayon flames. Pages filled with angry doglike creatures perched on rooftops and wearing Scotch-taped clothes clipped from The Saukfield Shopper.
At bedtime I address Hellhounds of Dleifkuas.
“You’ll find,” I begin, “that as you grow older, the stories in your head will become bothersome to you.”
“How do you mean?” says Jon, yawn-talking.
“The challenge is to make the stories stop,” I say.
“How do you mean?”
Jon is conking out. A drop of water falls from the mottled ceiling and glances the nightstand. I nudge my son’s bed free of harm’s way.
Saturday night prime rib at the Saukfield Country Club is served buffet style.
Steam table wells loaded with baked and mashed potatoes. Hash browns. Fries. String beans with almond slivers. Corn medley with pimento. Ruth and I are standing in line with the Hutchinsons. There’s a logjam. The carving chef is disoriented and under the weather.
“The New Testament is a rebuke of Epicurus,” says Ray Hutchinson. “Most of it is in code.”
“Ray, please,” says Cindi Hutchinson.
Ruth is wearing earplugs. She taps her dinner plate and pirouettes like Stevie Nicks with a tambourine.
“Code?” I say.
“‘Weak and worthless elementary principles of the world,’” says Ray. “That’s Paul to the Galatians. He’s talking about Epicurus and his fucking atoms. Elements. Get it?”
No one notices, or at least no one comments on, the dull gray sheen of the prime rib once the meat is plated and no longer ruddy from the carving station heat lamp.
According to Ray, Joy Frisk’s coma is the deadly consequence of “too much absence.”
“When your head is empty,” says Ray, “your body shuts down.”
The centerpiece of our table is a wicker basket brimming with saltines in two-count cellophane packets.
“We’re praying for you,” says Cindi.
“I walk the woods,” says Ruth.
“The story,” says Cindi, “is you slammed into a tree.”
“What?” says Ruth.
“Do you think we don’t know you’re wearing earplugs?” says Ray.
“What?”
The bruise on Ruth’s forehead is no longer visible. My winter intensive is rapidly approaching. I mark the days like a restless sleeper counting sheep. Joy teaches that absence brings us “nose to nose with nullity.”
Joy Frisk founded Mudstone as a spiritual retreat, along with her husband, Soren, whose unexpected inheritance of a failed fishing resort outside of Hayward, Wisconsin became the inspiration.
In her memoir, I Should Be Dead, Joy describes herself, in those early years, as a suburban Chicago watercolorist trying to incorporate Maximus the Confessor’s concept of “pure prayer” into her life and art. Seeking to empty her mind of distracting voices and images. How to depict a blank slate except as a literal blank slate? It wasn’t long before Joy abandoned painting altogether.
Soren’s philosophy studies at Northwestern similarly stalled. He reached an impasse with Heidegger. When the German philosopher wrote that clear thinking is like woodworking, Soren stopped reading and turned his focus to cabinetry. Precision. Harmony. Uncluttered design. Soren’s bed frames and headboards, five-drawer bureaus, simple desks and chairs, became cabin furnishings at Mudstone. And then Soren’s masterpiece: Joy’s tree house therapy-den high in the embrace of a bur oak behind the lodge.
There are drawbacks to winter intensives.
Sometimes, like tonight, the road to Mudstone is obscured in falling snow. Headlight beams offer little more than illuminated tunnel vision. The darkness always catches me by surprise. Cabins are heated with small wood-burning stoves whose warmth will not last through the night unless replenished. If you are a sound sleeper and neglect the fire, you will wake up chilled in the morning. Joy, to her credit, is ever mindful that split wood is plentiful and stacked just outside your cabin door. This courtesy, I learn on my arrival, is no longer available without an additional fee.
“Firewood is regulated,” says Arlene Frisk, Soren’s stepmother.
She greets me in the foyer of the darkened lodge. It’s near midnight. Arlene is dressed in a duster housecoat and snowball bedroom slippers.
“Emerald ash borer?” I say.
“Downstate bugs with fancy names,” says Arlene.
She tells me Joy was twice busted and fined for transporting infested firewood. I ask for the name of the late-stage hospice care facility in Hayward where Joy is living.
“If you call that living,” she says.
I awake in the night.
The wood-stove fire is dying. I revive the flames with pine twigs and a pre-paid hickory log.
Just before dawn, my eyes open to observe a notecard, slipped beneath the cabin door, skimming toward me across the floor planks: A 10%-off coupon for a sunrise chili dog.
In the dining hall I recognize someone whom we long ago nicknamed the Sad Ad-man, for self-evident reasons.
Media consultant. Depressive personality. I no longer recall his actual name. The Sad Ad-man’s jingle for a Madison mattress store appropriates a haunting Erik Satie melody.
“Salesmanship demands sleight of hand,” he once confessed to a full moon drumming circle.
“Absence asks nothing of you,” replied Joy, sweeping her arm to include each of us around the roaring campfire.
“How did this happen?” I ask the Sad Ad-man.
Televisions dangle on chains from overhead beams. Slot machines line the timber walls. Hot dogs rotate in display warmers. Nowhere to be found is the traditional Mudstone breakfast of muesli, unsweetened oat milk, and assorted berries (and the placard printed with a Thoreau quotation: “It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them”).
“Joy Frisk is dead, Jack,” says the Sad Ad-man.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
He shows me a series of cellphone photos depicting his recent bypass surgery. And a much older photo of Joy smiling down from the porch of the tree house therapy-den.
“Do you remember when Joy told us that the Greeks and the Romans studied bird flight patterns as a form of divination?”
“Sure,” I say. “Joy said it was silly.”
“A bird shit on my head this morning.”
“I don’t understand, Sad Ad-man.”
“A large woodpecker or a grebe.”
Lost to ear-plugged sleep the night before, it is only now that I hear the dogs. Later, I learn about the boarding kennel. Joy’s in-laws are dismantling Mudstone. The Sad Ad-man signals a nameless bartender.
Where’s your brother?” Ruth asks Lucy.
“He’s up,” says Lucy.
“Good to know.”
Outside the kitchen window, flurries of pistachio shells.
“When’s Dad?”
Intermundia. The emptiness where worlds have not formed.
Jack’s return from Mudstone is delayed.
Lucy is hunting house secrets. Closet corners. Basement cubbies. Lucy wants to talk about her mother’s hidden library.
“Two books in a shoebox are not a hidden library,” says Ruth.
Both borrowed, with Joy’s insistence, from the ever-shrinking Mudstone reading room: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, and, Albert Camus’ The Plague.
“This one,” says Lucy, indicating The Plague.
“Best practices for human behavior,” says Ruth. “Individuals capable of trust and clear-headedness during a crisis.”
“What did you mark here?” asks Lucy.
“Let me see.”
A checkmark, or is it an arrow. The passage in The Plague that inspired Joy to deliver what came to be called her “Sermon on the Mud Flat.” The summer of the drought.
“There’s a character named Tarrou,” says Ruth. “A writer—an obsessive diarist.”
“Jon has a sketchbook.”
“Not entirely dissimilar.”
“And the man in the story? Terry?”
“Tarrou.”
“Yes.”
“Tarrou is thinking about his mother. He calls her self-effacing.”
Lucy’s brow furrows.
“Efface rhymes with erase,” says Ruth. “Tarrou says when his mother died—”
“His mother died?”
“Yes. His mother died.”
“That’s sad.”
“He says that his mother was so self-effacing—self-erasing, remember the rhyme?—that when she died she was just a little more self-effacing than usual.”
Joy, in the “Sermon on the Mud Flat,” conjured a maxim from Epicurus: “Live unnoticed.” Lathe biōsas.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweetie?”
“What’s a death cult?”
Collateral bullshit from yesterday’s play date at the Hutchinson household.
“Did Cindi— did Mrs. Hutchinson say that?”
“Bethany,” says Lucy. “But she heard it from her mom.”
“Exactly,” says Ruth.
Drought dropped the water level on Mudstone Lake. A proscenium of baked lakebed extended far beyond the beach. The night of the sermon there was an ill-advised fire pit (a burn ban was in effect) and makeshift tofu kabobs. Soren, in his wheelchair, performed wheelies in the dirt.
“When I was a child,” Joy began, “I spoke about my absence out loud to others. I assumed my interiority—my absence—was universal and easily appreciated by those around me. Always a rude awakening. How do we explain our kinship with the void? Our longing for the blessed blank?”
A phone call to Cindi Hutchinson is unavoidable. An expression of disapproval, if not condemnation, of Bethany’s, or rather Cindi’s, slanderous insult.
“Let’s talk about consciousness,” said Joy Frisk. “If you’re thinking too much, ruminating, fearful, anxious, this translates into overload: waste product. A pile of shit. You become sick. Epicurus says the goal is ataraxia. The quieting of our anguish. Serenity. Absence’s gateway can feel psychedelic. Resist the temptation to hallucinate. We seek emptiness. Depletion. Not an EPCOT of neurological fireworks. And yet, so much easier—deceptively so—to enter into absence than to find our way back.”
“Ruth, I’m glad you called,” says Cindi, answering on the first ring, and breathlessly apologizing for something Ray said at a village board meeting last night.
“Ray’s feelings got hurt, okay?” says Cindi. “Because Jack didn’t purchase his scaffolding locally from us.”
“Scaffolding?”
“Your lawn looks like a construction site.”
“Jack’s working on the back of the house,” says Ruth. “Nothing you can see, really, from the street.”
“And without a permit of any kind.”
“What’s going on here, Cindi?”
“I’ve seen your kids up there,” says Cindi. “Not safe, Ruth.”
“My kids?”
“Not safe, Ruth.”
Lucy on the couch, scrolling through her Galaxy.
“Lucy, where’s Jon?”
“He’s up!” says Lucy.
Ruth catches a descending shadow in the snowfall, out of the corner of her eye, framed by the kitchen window. In the same instant, pajama-clad Jon, with hilarious aplomb, clatters down the living room staircase on a sleigh of pillows and bedsheets.
