Landscapes of Hell
by Janet Thielke
You are running – and, yes, let’s say “you,” because you know, even now, that this isn’t your story, you’re just in it, and you’re not even doing a great job at that.
So, you’re running.
Jogging, you should say.
You’ve never really liked running (or jogging) but at the suggestion of your therapist, you and your girlfriend Steph have both taken up hobbies. Hers is cross-stitch. She drags a needle up and down until, if you squint, a picture starts to appear, the tiny X’s blurring into flowers or teddy bears, like ye olde computer pixilation.
I haven’t done this since college, she said contentedly last night in bed, and it broke your heart, to imagine her cross-stitching in her dorm room, alone, while just outside her door wafted easily attainable sex, booze, and bad decisions. Far be it from you to criticize one’s choice of therapy hobby, but you wish she wouldn’t do it bed. It’s like trimming your toenails – sure, it has to be done, but here? Now? In plain sight?
Anyway, Steph picked cross-stitching and you picked self-flagellation by means of jogging.
It’s useful. When your alarm went off this morning, you were repulsed by the crusty, overused quality of your face; by your body, just lying there in a silhouette of cooling sweat. The stormy list of your failings and shortcomings had already started grumbling in your head and you wanted to roll over and let your disappointments collapse into sleep, but instead you pulled on a sports bra (the same one you left slumped on the rim of the hamper on Monday), you stomped into your shoes (the ones you had left lined up, heel to toe, when you stomped out of them), and then you were gone, out the door, running away.
This is your favorite part of running: the starting to run. The explosive decision to not-walk. Steps one through ten, maybe one through fifty – these are great. It’s just you and the breeze-trembled trees, the sound of your panting tossed back from a net of yellowing leaves.
When you hear a car, you skim to the side of the road, raising an arm in a floating hello, avoiding eye contact. The human body in motion is a treacherous thing. Do you feel graceful? Powerful? Strong? Too bad. You look red-faced and wobbly. Your butt is bisected by the line of your underwear and your breasts are loafed together with a hilariously long crease of cleavage. Your hair, when you finally see it, will make you wonder if it’s starting to thin or just really, really needs to be washed.
Then you’re at the almost-halfway and you hate the halfway because it always feels like it should already be over. This is your least favorite part of running: the still running. Which you are. Still. You’re past the wealthy neighborhoods by the golf course, followed by the less wealthy neighborhoods like the slightly-less-cool kids wedged in at the lunch table. You’re plodding past the church and its historical cemetery and then you are “downtown,” the optimistic name for the collection of quaint cafes and shops that unironically sell licorice whips and faux-colonial ceramics.
You never mean to take a breather-break downtown, but here you are, breaking for breathing.
You pause in front of the library, where the sidewalk ends and the road expands again into a highway. You stretch your quads to justify standing still. You check your shoelaces, untie them, tie them tighter. Some fallen leaves catch the wind and skitter across the concrete behind you, sounding eerily alive. The leaves here are more orange/yellow than the yellow/green closer to home. It makes you feel fond of the house, as if it is determined to protect your summer a little bit longer.
You start back – less explosively now, more aware of how long a mile is – but you haven’t made it a hundred yards when one of the brick buildings unlatches and a door swings open, blocking your path. A woman appears on the sidewalk. She looks away from you, then at you, then away again, the edges of her uncertain in the cloth of her nightgown. Then she is running towards you! as you! already running! are now running towards her? For a moment, you feel an upwelling of joy, struck by the strange and impossible idea that the two of you are about to collide in embrace –
The woman is pulling you through the door, into a café, the café where you and Steph have eaten lunch plenty of times but now unfamiliar in its early-hour emptiness, the unlit lights, the skeletal upheaval of inverted chairs on tables, the sound of the woman’s high-pitched keening (keening? yes, keening), and then you are being pulled up a staircase at the back that you never knew was there, your brain a beat behind: here is an apartment, your brain informs you as you are in it; here a hallway, there a kitchen, here the bedroom; here is a quilt on the floor, here is the open stretch of unmade bed where the quilt belongs, and here is a man.
A man?
A man – bald, broad bellied, naked but for a pair of sagging briefs twisted higher on one rump, eyes closed, mouth open. A smell hits you, goes straight to the back of your throat, makes your stomach lift and your eyes water, a bitter smell that corresponds to the speech bubble of dried vomit crusting the man’s pillowcase. You know something else then, a word – a reality in a word – a word that seems unkind to use against this old, almost-naked, not-sleeping man, but there it is, that word, the word: dead. Dead. You keep staring at him, at this man (dead), and silently repeating it as if trying to memorize a new language (dead, this is dead, he is dead). When you finally manage to tear your eyes away from him (dead) to look again into the empty panic of his wife’s face, the negative of the man’s pale image floats, briefly, as a blob over his wife’s body.
The woman stumbles over to a dresser, turning back to you with a sudden flare of light in her hands, an incandescent pearl, momentarily miraculous. She tosses the miracle at you and automatically you reach out, hands cupped! – and the miracle lands as plastic, as powder, as a small eyeshadow compact mirror. Real life again, real life as a mirror skimmed with eyeshadow dust. You don’t know if the woman asks you or if you just intuit what she wants you to do, but you take the mirror and step close, closer, as close as you can bring yourself to angle the little mirror under the dead man’s nose, the light from it twinkling across his submerged face, full of frozen-pond stillness, and a silence breaks over you, a sudden collapse from sound, as everyone who can hold their breath, does.
So, you’re running.
Jogging, you should say.
You’ve never really liked running (or jogging) but at the suggestion of your therapist, you and your girlfriend Steph have both taken up hobbies. Hers is cross-stitch. She drags a needle up and down until, if you squint, a picture starts to appear, the tiny X’s blurring into flowers or teddy bears, like ye olde computer pixilation.
I haven’t done this since college, she said contentedly last night in bed, and it broke your heart, to imagine her cross-stitching in her dorm room, alone, while just outside her door wafted easily attainable sex, booze, and bad decisions. Far be it from you to criticize one’s choice of therapy hobby, but you wish she wouldn’t do it bed. It’s like trimming your toenails – sure, it has to be done, but here? Now? In plain sight?
Anyway, Steph picked cross-stitching and you picked self-flagellation by means of jogging.
It’s useful. When your alarm went off this morning, you were repulsed by the crusty, overused quality of your face; by your body, just lying there in a silhouette of cooling sweat. The stormy list of your failings and shortcomings had already started grumbling in your head and you wanted to roll over and let your disappointments collapse into sleep, but instead you pulled on a sports bra (the same one you left slumped on the rim of the hamper on Monday), you stomped into your shoes (the ones you had left lined up, heel to toe, when you stomped out of them), and then you were gone, out the door, running away.
This is your favorite part of running: the starting to run. The explosive decision to not-walk. Steps one through ten, maybe one through fifty – these are great. It’s just you and the breeze-trembled trees, the sound of your panting tossed back from a net of yellowing leaves.
When you hear a car, you skim to the side of the road, raising an arm in a floating hello, avoiding eye contact. The human body in motion is a treacherous thing. Do you feel graceful? Powerful? Strong? Too bad. You look red-faced and wobbly. Your butt is bisected by the line of your underwear and your breasts are loafed together with a hilariously long crease of cleavage. Your hair, when you finally see it, will make you wonder if it’s starting to thin or just really, really needs to be washed.
Then you’re at the almost-halfway and you hate the halfway because it always feels like it should already be over. This is your least favorite part of running: the still running. Which you are. Still. You’re past the wealthy neighborhoods by the golf course, followed by the less wealthy neighborhoods like the slightly-less-cool kids wedged in at the lunch table. You’re plodding past the church and its historical cemetery and then you are “downtown,” the optimistic name for the collection of quaint cafes and shops that unironically sell licorice whips and faux-colonial ceramics.
You never mean to take a breather-break downtown, but here you are, breaking for breathing.
You pause in front of the library, where the sidewalk ends and the road expands again into a highway. You stretch your quads to justify standing still. You check your shoelaces, untie them, tie them tighter. Some fallen leaves catch the wind and skitter across the concrete behind you, sounding eerily alive. The leaves here are more orange/yellow than the yellow/green closer to home. It makes you feel fond of the house, as if it is determined to protect your summer a little bit longer.
You start back – less explosively now, more aware of how long a mile is – but you haven’t made it a hundred yards when one of the brick buildings unlatches and a door swings open, blocking your path. A woman appears on the sidewalk. She looks away from you, then at you, then away again, the edges of her uncertain in the cloth of her nightgown. Then she is running towards you! as you! already running! are now running towards her? For a moment, you feel an upwelling of joy, struck by the strange and impossible idea that the two of you are about to collide in embrace –
The woman is pulling you through the door, into a café, the café where you and Steph have eaten lunch plenty of times but now unfamiliar in its early-hour emptiness, the unlit lights, the skeletal upheaval of inverted chairs on tables, the sound of the woman’s high-pitched keening (keening? yes, keening), and then you are being pulled up a staircase at the back that you never knew was there, your brain a beat behind: here is an apartment, your brain informs you as you are in it; here a hallway, there a kitchen, here the bedroom; here is a quilt on the floor, here is the open stretch of unmade bed where the quilt belongs, and here is a man.
A man?
A man – bald, broad bellied, naked but for a pair of sagging briefs twisted higher on one rump, eyes closed, mouth open. A smell hits you, goes straight to the back of your throat, makes your stomach lift and your eyes water, a bitter smell that corresponds to the speech bubble of dried vomit crusting the man’s pillowcase. You know something else then, a word – a reality in a word – a word that seems unkind to use against this old, almost-naked, not-sleeping man, but there it is, that word, the word: dead. Dead. You keep staring at him, at this man (dead), and silently repeating it as if trying to memorize a new language (dead, this is dead, he is dead). When you finally manage to tear your eyes away from him (dead) to look again into the empty panic of his wife’s face, the negative of the man’s pale image floats, briefly, as a blob over his wife’s body.
The woman stumbles over to a dresser, turning back to you with a sudden flare of light in her hands, an incandescent pearl, momentarily miraculous. She tosses the miracle at you and automatically you reach out, hands cupped! – and the miracle lands as plastic, as powder, as a small eyeshadow compact mirror. Real life again, real life as a mirror skimmed with eyeshadow dust. You don’t know if the woman asks you or if you just intuit what she wants you to do, but you take the mirror and step close, closer, as close as you can bring yourself to angle the little mirror under the dead man’s nose, the light from it twinkling across his submerged face, full of frozen-pond stillness, and a silence breaks over you, a sudden collapse from sound, as everyone who can hold their breath, does.
*
Your dissertation, should you ever finish it, will be about Isaac Newton. You fell into this topic mostly accidentally, after a fascination with religious iconography, medieval art, plague art, and, somehow, Newton. Newton is seen as the emblem of logic, but you find the man himself nothing if not romantic: his father was already three months dead when Isaac was born on Christmas day (or in January depending on the calendar used, much like the other famous birth on that day, haa). His mother would be married to someone else before his third birthday, leaving him alone in his father’s house under the care of his grandmother. Imagine lil Isaac, renaissance ghost boy, standing at some thick paned rain-drenched window, miserable mopey frown over his undoubtedly stiff collar. Everything the light touched might have been his, but who did he call to in the dark when he had a bad dream? When he was around twelve, his mother’s second husband died, and his mother and her new children came back to Newton’s father’s house, but him? He was shipped off to be an assistant to an apothecary, and then school, and then it was too late for any sort of childhood anyway. His mother wanted him to be a farmer, but too damn bad, he went to Cambridge to shake up the understanding of literally everything instead.
You planned to cover his early academic interest in sundials and windmills, then his flashier discoveries of calculus and gravity, even his kinda sexy alchemical doodlings, but you planned to focus on his discovery of the color spectrum. This was during the English leg of the bubonic plague tour, which Newton spent – and this always gave you a shiver – in the empty, evacuated city of Cambridge, poking needles into his own eye to understand its lens. Needles! In his eye! You plan to tie the color spectrum discovery into the art of the time. You need to tie this discovery to art because you need to justify your admittedly sloppy swing through academia, starting with an ungraduated degree in Fine Arts that you will swear when sober you don’t regret.
You have some great titles for this dissertation, too – mostly playing with the idea of spectrum vs. specter, as in ghosts, as in all the dead people from the plague – and how strange to think that when you started it, you hadn’t yet lived through a plague. How maybe you thought you, too, could be revealed by such a life-altering event.
You planned to cover his early academic interest in sundials and windmills, then his flashier discoveries of calculus and gravity, even his kinda sexy alchemical doodlings, but you planned to focus on his discovery of the color spectrum. This was during the English leg of the bubonic plague tour, which Newton spent – and this always gave you a shiver – in the empty, evacuated city of Cambridge, poking needles into his own eye to understand its lens. Needles! In his eye! You plan to tie the color spectrum discovery into the art of the time. You need to tie this discovery to art because you need to justify your admittedly sloppy swing through academia, starting with an ungraduated degree in Fine Arts that you will swear when sober you don’t regret.
You have some great titles for this dissertation, too – mostly playing with the idea of spectrum vs. specter, as in ghosts, as in all the dead people from the plague – and how strange to think that when you started it, you hadn’t yet lived through a plague. How maybe you thought you, too, could be revealed by such a life-altering event.
*
So that was your first dead body, you think.
You hold the woman’s hand as the man, sheet-covered and strapped-down, gets rolled out on a gurney, bumping raucously as it is levered into the back of an ambulance. She’s escorted in after, dainty, fingertip assisted.
You feel deflowered – that physical discomfort, that sense of momentousness, that inexplicable giddiness. Also, you feel naked in your sweaty running clothes with your inconveniently erect nipples. Your arms stay crossed as you speak to the police officer who has been called to the scene, a cop who looks as if he were playing himself on a TV show, attractively grizzled with graying temples.
After you tell him what happened, he nods and says, So you’re going for a run and you step in family tragedy?
He grins once, briefly, as if in accident, and then grins again as if something in your face has given him permission.
Enough to put you off exercise for good, he says softly, and you can see a silver filling in one of his lower teeth, a strangely intimate sight, bristling with light.
You hold the woman’s hand as the man, sheet-covered and strapped-down, gets rolled out on a gurney, bumping raucously as it is levered into the back of an ambulance. She’s escorted in after, dainty, fingertip assisted.
You feel deflowered – that physical discomfort, that sense of momentousness, that inexplicable giddiness. Also, you feel naked in your sweaty running clothes with your inconveniently erect nipples. Your arms stay crossed as you speak to the police officer who has been called to the scene, a cop who looks as if he were playing himself on a TV show, attractively grizzled with graying temples.
After you tell him what happened, he nods and says, So you’re going for a run and you step in family tragedy?
He grins once, briefly, as if in accident, and then grins again as if something in your face has given him permission.
Enough to put you off exercise for good, he says softly, and you can see a silver filling in one of his lower teeth, a strangely intimate sight, bristling with light.
*
Steph is amazing. She comes to pick you up and drives you home. She lets you take a marathon shower and neither hovers nor hides as you binge TV on the internet. She doesn’t comment on the way you keep pausing the show, the fictional urgency made irrelevant by how easily you can boop a button into stillness, and how you prowl the house, nerves jangly, still pulled forward by some phantom urgency, tugging you nowhere.
At dinner, Steph doesn’t mind when you hug her from behind at the stove, stirring a soup recipe from a now-cancelled vegan influencer. She lets you rest your head against the space where her neck and shoulder meet, even though you have to stoop to lean low enough, and the two of you laugh at the shitty influencer, her shitty anti-vax posts, but damn the bitch knows soup.
You met Steph five years ago, in the city, at some bar, some birthday party. She looked like a lifeguard, all sun-streaked hair and freckles on her chest and sunglasses pushed up to rest on her head even though it was long since dark. Someone called to her when she walked in – “hey, whore!” (it was a time when you could call people whore ironically) – but you heard “hoard!” and the command seemed imperative, to hoard this person all to yourself.
You were young-ish and not entirely straight but working comfortably with the assumption. You were even with someone then, a man, a boyfriend, an elementary school teacher who, three months previous, had gotten fired the week before school started because: cutbacks. It was such a politically righteous way to go, cutbacks!, that he still had not recovered, and you couldn’t bring yourself to be the sort of person who kicked a guy so heroically down.
You and Steph ended up in the bathroom together, at the sink. Just talking. Just standing there, at the sink, talking. For fifteen, twenty minutes the two of you stood, hands long since washed, makeup long since reapplied, no reason to linger but so long as she was there, you would be there, too. It was the most erotic experience of your life, talking in that bathroom. When you did finally have sex, weeks later, it was shy and tender and slightly wracked because you still hadn’t broken up with your boyfriend, but it had none of the urgency you associated with the running sink and other women shooting you dirty looks for blocking the hand drier.
A few days after your boyfriend was hired by a private tutoring company, you let him break up with you. Less than a week after that, you were half-moved in with Steph to her boxy ground-floor studio – and yes, [insert lesbian u-haul joke here], but it was only supposed to be temporary except –
Lockdown. Covid, then called Corona. That weird life where life seemed unclean and uncleanable, reduced to concerns about dish soaping potato chip bags and double masking, every person a threat, every one. You taught zoom courses where you couldn’t hide from the Brady-bunch-esque images of your bored students, and she, all corporate, calling into endless marketing meetings. But it was romantic, in a sort of trial by fire way, and for a while, this was your pull. She was. When her mother decided to move to Floria and offered to sell Steph her Western Mass house for a steal, you – meaning you and her – your collective thought was, why not? Why shouldn’t you be the ones to escape?
Later, bellies soup-full and sloshing, there is no cross-stitching in bed that night, and even though there is no sex, either, (when you try to initiate, she says, You’re probably exhausted, and this is how you know you’re not allowed to initiate sex in the same timeframe as you discovered a dead man’s body), you turn off the lights and hold each other.
How long were they married for? Steph asks on the other side of the dark.
You don’t know, you tell her. You don’t even know their names.
She’s quiet. You would think she’s asleep if you didn’t know what she sounds like asleep. When her voice resurfaces next to you, it’s incredulous: It’s Mr. Jenko.
His name, she says. It’s Mr. Jenko.
We eat there all the time, she says, how can you not know his name is Mr. Jenko? You didn’t even wonder what his name was?
And you have to admit, of all the things you wondered about that pale dead man, you never once thought of a name.
At dinner, Steph doesn’t mind when you hug her from behind at the stove, stirring a soup recipe from a now-cancelled vegan influencer. She lets you rest your head against the space where her neck and shoulder meet, even though you have to stoop to lean low enough, and the two of you laugh at the shitty influencer, her shitty anti-vax posts, but damn the bitch knows soup.
You met Steph five years ago, in the city, at some bar, some birthday party. She looked like a lifeguard, all sun-streaked hair and freckles on her chest and sunglasses pushed up to rest on her head even though it was long since dark. Someone called to her when she walked in – “hey, whore!” (it was a time when you could call people whore ironically) – but you heard “hoard!” and the command seemed imperative, to hoard this person all to yourself.
You were young-ish and not entirely straight but working comfortably with the assumption. You were even with someone then, a man, a boyfriend, an elementary school teacher who, three months previous, had gotten fired the week before school started because: cutbacks. It was such a politically righteous way to go, cutbacks!, that he still had not recovered, and you couldn’t bring yourself to be the sort of person who kicked a guy so heroically down.
You and Steph ended up in the bathroom together, at the sink. Just talking. Just standing there, at the sink, talking. For fifteen, twenty minutes the two of you stood, hands long since washed, makeup long since reapplied, no reason to linger but so long as she was there, you would be there, too. It was the most erotic experience of your life, talking in that bathroom. When you did finally have sex, weeks later, it was shy and tender and slightly wracked because you still hadn’t broken up with your boyfriend, but it had none of the urgency you associated with the running sink and other women shooting you dirty looks for blocking the hand drier.
A few days after your boyfriend was hired by a private tutoring company, you let him break up with you. Less than a week after that, you were half-moved in with Steph to her boxy ground-floor studio – and yes, [insert lesbian u-haul joke here], but it was only supposed to be temporary except –
Lockdown. Covid, then called Corona. That weird life where life seemed unclean and uncleanable, reduced to concerns about dish soaping potato chip bags and double masking, every person a threat, every one. You taught zoom courses where you couldn’t hide from the Brady-bunch-esque images of your bored students, and she, all corporate, calling into endless marketing meetings. But it was romantic, in a sort of trial by fire way, and for a while, this was your pull. She was. When her mother decided to move to Floria and offered to sell Steph her Western Mass house for a steal, you – meaning you and her – your collective thought was, why not? Why shouldn’t you be the ones to escape?
Later, bellies soup-full and sloshing, there is no cross-stitching in bed that night, and even though there is no sex, either, (when you try to initiate, she says, You’re probably exhausted, and this is how you know you’re not allowed to initiate sex in the same timeframe as you discovered a dead man’s body), you turn off the lights and hold each other.
How long were they married for? Steph asks on the other side of the dark.
You don’t know, you tell her. You don’t even know their names.
She’s quiet. You would think she’s asleep if you didn’t know what she sounds like asleep. When her voice resurfaces next to you, it’s incredulous: It’s Mr. Jenko.
His name, she says. It’s Mr. Jenko.
We eat there all the time, she says, how can you not know his name is Mr. Jenko? You didn’t even wonder what his name was?
And you have to admit, of all the things you wondered about that pale dead man, you never once thought of a name.
*
You don’t go for a run the next day, small wonder. You sleep in. When you finally drag yourself to your desk, long past when Steph has left for work, you decide to write a section on Newton’s pettiness.
Because Isaac Newton, Sir, was a petty-ass-motherfucker.
In his early career at Cambridge, he didn’t publish his findings, didn’t share them at all except for the occasional letter to a friend. He limited who was allowed to read his work not because he was insecure or doubtful, but so that later, if someone drew on his findings in their research, he could – and did – hound them for plagiarism.
One would think a man so incontestably genius, fingertips fiddling the invisible treads of the universe, would also be slightly, like, spiritually enlightened as well? You wouldn’t picture a sniveling academic, begrudging even the puny achievements of others, but key word there: academic. You’ve known a few – none discovered gravity, but they, too, will bleed to stake their claim on the slightest of hills. Newton wanted to be a towering genius in a decimated landscape of Flat Stanleys.
One scholar tried to appeal to Newton’s ego, saying even a small man standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant alone.
Newton’s response was, basically: Get the fuck off my shoulders.
You find this remarkably comforting.
Even though it has nothing to do with the color spectrum, you both try and fail to write a paragraph about his pettiness. A paragraph is a reasonable goal, you tell yourself. You’ve written thousands of paragraphs in your life. Hundreds of thousands, probably. Especially if you count all the paragraphs you don’t keep. The ghost paragraphs of thoughts that never found form. The dumb ones, too. This paragraph will doubtlessly be cut because it’s not on topic, but won’t that be nice, to have something to cut? Just a paragraph, you promise. Three sentences can be called a paragraph. Two, if you’re desperate. Short sentences. Jesus wept. Come on.
You’re not really hungry, but peanut butter isn’t really food, and it calls to you. You go to the kitchen and get a spoonful and eat it standing at the counter. You appreciate the downward view of your legs in thermal leggings. Your legs haven’t changed since you started running, you don’t think, but you can pretend they have; no one is here to admire them except you, so why not, admire it up. You could do worse than snacking and appreciating your legs.
For example? For example: a few months ago, you told Steph you were going into the city to do some research at the library, and you did do some research at the library, but afterwards you went to a bar where you met and eventually had sex with a man.
Sex!
With a man!
Everything about this shocks you still. You marveled at it, at yourself, at him, his penis, the return of penises to your life when you thought you were done with penises, but here was a penis, pushing its way back in. You swore off random sex after that, and good for you, you’ve followed that to the letter. But, oh, the internet, does it not exist to make former sexual partners easily accessible? You’re currently dm-ing with a man you haven’t seen since undergrad – nothing obvious, nothing you’d be ashamed if Steph read – but you know if you go into the city again, you’ll end up at his apartment getting fucked from behind braced against his girlish headboard made to look like an ivy-covered trellis. He still has that headboard. You asked and he sent you a picture of it that you masturbated to. So.
Because Isaac Newton, Sir, was a petty-ass-motherfucker.
In his early career at Cambridge, he didn’t publish his findings, didn’t share them at all except for the occasional letter to a friend. He limited who was allowed to read his work not because he was insecure or doubtful, but so that later, if someone drew on his findings in their research, he could – and did – hound them for plagiarism.
One would think a man so incontestably genius, fingertips fiddling the invisible treads of the universe, would also be slightly, like, spiritually enlightened as well? You wouldn’t picture a sniveling academic, begrudging even the puny achievements of others, but key word there: academic. You’ve known a few – none discovered gravity, but they, too, will bleed to stake their claim on the slightest of hills. Newton wanted to be a towering genius in a decimated landscape of Flat Stanleys.
One scholar tried to appeal to Newton’s ego, saying even a small man standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant alone.
Newton’s response was, basically: Get the fuck off my shoulders.
You find this remarkably comforting.
Even though it has nothing to do with the color spectrum, you both try and fail to write a paragraph about his pettiness. A paragraph is a reasonable goal, you tell yourself. You’ve written thousands of paragraphs in your life. Hundreds of thousands, probably. Especially if you count all the paragraphs you don’t keep. The ghost paragraphs of thoughts that never found form. The dumb ones, too. This paragraph will doubtlessly be cut because it’s not on topic, but won’t that be nice, to have something to cut? Just a paragraph, you promise. Three sentences can be called a paragraph. Two, if you’re desperate. Short sentences. Jesus wept. Come on.
You’re not really hungry, but peanut butter isn’t really food, and it calls to you. You go to the kitchen and get a spoonful and eat it standing at the counter. You appreciate the downward view of your legs in thermal leggings. Your legs haven’t changed since you started running, you don’t think, but you can pretend they have; no one is here to admire them except you, so why not, admire it up. You could do worse than snacking and appreciating your legs.
For example? For example: a few months ago, you told Steph you were going into the city to do some research at the library, and you did do some research at the library, but afterwards you went to a bar where you met and eventually had sex with a man.
Sex!
With a man!
Everything about this shocks you still. You marveled at it, at yourself, at him, his penis, the return of penises to your life when you thought you were done with penises, but here was a penis, pushing its way back in. You swore off random sex after that, and good for you, you’ve followed that to the letter. But, oh, the internet, does it not exist to make former sexual partners easily accessible? You’re currently dm-ing with a man you haven’t seen since undergrad – nothing obvious, nothing you’d be ashamed if Steph read – but you know if you go into the city again, you’ll end up at his apartment getting fucked from behind braced against his girlish headboard made to look like an ivy-covered trellis. He still has that headboard. You asked and he sent you a picture of it that you masturbated to. So.
*
Objectively speaking, it was a bad time for Mr. Jenko to die. Prime tourist season in the Berkshires: leaf-peepers.
In they troop every year, the peeper pilgrims, all shuffling orthopedic sneakers and cashmere sweaters and sun visors, and the Germans, so many Germans. Here they all come, to look at dying leaves.
You get it. When you first moved out during the pandemic, even a drive to the grocery store made your thoughts go full purple prose: How ecstatic the death throes of the oak and maple, self-immolating into reds and oranges and yellows. How gasp-worthy, the sudden, secretive transition, seemingly overnight, of the gingko from green to gold to gone. There’s even a leaf that turns a ballerina-shade of pale peach that never fails to induce awe; you always mean to ask the name of the tree but never remember to. Still: pretty!
On your next run, you pause to stretch your quads a little early. The Jenkos’ café is open – can’t close during peak peeper season – and on impulse you enter.
You expected, if you’re honest, some morbidity to linger. You had hoped the teenage bus boy would drag through as if too burdened by existential crisis to bother. You imagined a hush amongst the customers, part of an unseen wake. You thought perhaps Mrs. Jenko herself would be seated at some far table, enthroned in widowhood, hallowed by slumping children like a Greuze painting without the chocolate box smiles.
But tourists are not of the world, just in it. The peepers are there for their pre-hike coffee run. They do not know a dead man was wheeled across the scuffed parquet where they now stand, arms crossed, waiting to order. Their gaze is appropriately upwards, their necks craned, but not in supplication to the divine, only the menu.
You wait in line until you get to the front. A slim woman mans the cash register, her sweater soft and nubbly. It is a strange order, when she asks what you can get her, to say you are just checking on Mrs. Jenko.
I’m Mrs. Jenko, she says, her hand to her chest.
Oh, you say. You clarify you meant the older Mrs. Jenko, Mrs. Jenko the elder.
Oh, mirrors Mrs. Jenko Jr.
You feel some need to explain yourself, but you hate the way your voice hushes as if in scandal, the way you lean closer so the counter is digging into your hip, to make sure this secret is between the two of you. You were there when Mr. Jenko – presumably also Sr. of his name – was found gone. You use that phrase, “found gone,” and hate that, too, but can’t think of a more polite way to put it.
OK, she says. She tells you her mother-in-law is resting, which feels right (you nod), but gives you the time and place they are scattering the ashes of Mr. Jenko. “A number of folks from the community are joining,” she says. You know this is not exactly inviting you personally, but you thank her anyway.
One of the many abandoned (?) subsets of your thesis was on pre-Newton Continental plague art, specifically all the gruesome landscapes of hell. Bruegel the Elder, throwing bodies around willy nilly, skeletons chomping on their necks. Giacomo Borlone de Burchis with his villagers fleeing the dainty, ribbon-tied pumps of his beak-nosed plague doctor. Earlier generations wouldn’t even say Hades’ name, so fearful of calling his attention on them, and here were their ancestors a couple of centuries later, painting portraits of the devil’s vivid, greedy, terrible, tongue-sticking mug, of his blasted deserts and pits, red-swept and smoking, and all his tortured souls. It must have been freeing, to think like that: demons, loose on the streets; your torment, arbitrary.
Now, having survived your own plague, you wonder if all that hellfire art was more nostalgic than fearful. Having survived, they might expect to feel like the chosen ones, but instead? Kinda bored. Kinda boring. Maybe they missed the drama, painting those skeletons and sighing like teenagers. Maybe that Plague Doctor portrait was practically fan art. Maybe it was their way of acknowledging they weren’t interesting enough for the devil, so the devil took his tongue elsewhere.
In they troop every year, the peeper pilgrims, all shuffling orthopedic sneakers and cashmere sweaters and sun visors, and the Germans, so many Germans. Here they all come, to look at dying leaves.
You get it. When you first moved out during the pandemic, even a drive to the grocery store made your thoughts go full purple prose: How ecstatic the death throes of the oak and maple, self-immolating into reds and oranges and yellows. How gasp-worthy, the sudden, secretive transition, seemingly overnight, of the gingko from green to gold to gone. There’s even a leaf that turns a ballerina-shade of pale peach that never fails to induce awe; you always mean to ask the name of the tree but never remember to. Still: pretty!
On your next run, you pause to stretch your quads a little early. The Jenkos’ café is open – can’t close during peak peeper season – and on impulse you enter.
You expected, if you’re honest, some morbidity to linger. You had hoped the teenage bus boy would drag through as if too burdened by existential crisis to bother. You imagined a hush amongst the customers, part of an unseen wake. You thought perhaps Mrs. Jenko herself would be seated at some far table, enthroned in widowhood, hallowed by slumping children like a Greuze painting without the chocolate box smiles.
But tourists are not of the world, just in it. The peepers are there for their pre-hike coffee run. They do not know a dead man was wheeled across the scuffed parquet where they now stand, arms crossed, waiting to order. Their gaze is appropriately upwards, their necks craned, but not in supplication to the divine, only the menu.
You wait in line until you get to the front. A slim woman mans the cash register, her sweater soft and nubbly. It is a strange order, when she asks what you can get her, to say you are just checking on Mrs. Jenko.
I’m Mrs. Jenko, she says, her hand to her chest.
Oh, you say. You clarify you meant the older Mrs. Jenko, Mrs. Jenko the elder.
Oh, mirrors Mrs. Jenko Jr.
You feel some need to explain yourself, but you hate the way your voice hushes as if in scandal, the way you lean closer so the counter is digging into your hip, to make sure this secret is between the two of you. You were there when Mr. Jenko – presumably also Sr. of his name – was found gone. You use that phrase, “found gone,” and hate that, too, but can’t think of a more polite way to put it.
OK, she says. She tells you her mother-in-law is resting, which feels right (you nod), but gives you the time and place they are scattering the ashes of Mr. Jenko. “A number of folks from the community are joining,” she says. You know this is not exactly inviting you personally, but you thank her anyway.
One of the many abandoned (?) subsets of your thesis was on pre-Newton Continental plague art, specifically all the gruesome landscapes of hell. Bruegel the Elder, throwing bodies around willy nilly, skeletons chomping on their necks. Giacomo Borlone de Burchis with his villagers fleeing the dainty, ribbon-tied pumps of his beak-nosed plague doctor. Earlier generations wouldn’t even say Hades’ name, so fearful of calling his attention on them, and here were their ancestors a couple of centuries later, painting portraits of the devil’s vivid, greedy, terrible, tongue-sticking mug, of his blasted deserts and pits, red-swept and smoking, and all his tortured souls. It must have been freeing, to think like that: demons, loose on the streets; your torment, arbitrary.
Now, having survived your own plague, you wonder if all that hellfire art was more nostalgic than fearful. Having survived, they might expect to feel like the chosen ones, but instead? Kinda bored. Kinda boring. Maybe they missed the drama, painting those skeletons and sighing like teenagers. Maybe that Plague Doctor portrait was practically fan art. Maybe it was their way of acknowledging they weren’t interesting enough for the devil, so the devil took his tongue elsewhere.
*
When you all sign onto zoom, the lens of your therapist’s glasses reflects her computer screen. You can almost make out the baby-sized reflection of your faces in the dim; you catch yourself leaning closer to the screen, trying to find your own eyes, then realize you are blocking Steph and so sit back.
Your therapist asks about how the hobbies are going.
Steph looks at you, like, Go ahead.
Pretty good, you say, and talk about running two, sometimes three times a week in the mornings.
Your therapist celebrates your progress, then asks about your goals, if you plan on training for a 10K or something?
Maybe, you say, but you feel your heart sink. You didn’t ask for a goal. How dare she just drop one on you like that. You are about to tell your therapist about Mr. Jenko – surely the juiciest thing that has happened to you or any of her clients this week – but before you can, she is asking Steph about her hobby.
Steph holds up the crumped result, her cross-stitch. You stare at it until you can understand, under the jumbled threads spiking free, it is supposed to be a basket with a bunch of flowers piled in it: purple and yellow pansies, little dripping lily-of-the-valley, a diffuse red blob that looks like a kiss-print but might ultimately resolve into a rose.
I don’t have a lot of time to work on it, Steph says. She doesn’t look at you when she tells your therapist how you don’t want her to work on it in bed.
Your therapist asks if that’s true.
You tell them, honestly, that you forgot you had said that? It was a joke?
So you don’t mind if she works on it in bed? the therapist asks.
You hesitate. How to explain that joking about something isn’t the same as it not being true?
But Steph is hiccupping with suppressed sobs. You can see her getting angry at herself for being unable to fully suppress them, and your eyes fill for her – you cry because you are so desperately sad to see her trying not to cry over you, who aren’t remotely worth it.
The first time you knew you wanted to break up with Steph, she was playing a video game on her phone, full volume, while the two of you were watching a movie. Sure, it wasn’t even that good of a movie, and of course, you asked her to mute it, and yes, she did. But she was still looking at her phone the rest of the time and it grated on you, this lack of shared experience, even for something as simple as a movie. And once you had noticed that, even as a couple, you were living moments together separately, you couldn’t stop seeing them everywhere. How she could change tracks from a song you were enjoying in the car. How she got upset in advance of the way the delivery pizza would look – would it be too soggy, too cold, would the cheese have slid off? – when you were just hungry, edging towards hangry. How last year, the pandemic long since over, you wondered out loud about ever going back to the city – and she scoffed at that idea.
You owned this house, she said, meaning the two of you but really her.
And you, she added, meaning just you personally – you couldn’t afford a place in the city on an adjunct’s salary.
How you had known those things but also, how you had needed the fantasy of a second life you had left behind but still there, some other direction you could have veered towards had not the world gotten so colossally fucked. How it was easier to sign up for the end of the world, the rest of your life, when it was right there, leaf by leaf, within sight, instead of just – still going.
Your therapist asks about how the hobbies are going.
Steph looks at you, like, Go ahead.
Pretty good, you say, and talk about running two, sometimes three times a week in the mornings.
Your therapist celebrates your progress, then asks about your goals, if you plan on training for a 10K or something?
Maybe, you say, but you feel your heart sink. You didn’t ask for a goal. How dare she just drop one on you like that. You are about to tell your therapist about Mr. Jenko – surely the juiciest thing that has happened to you or any of her clients this week – but before you can, she is asking Steph about her hobby.
Steph holds up the crumped result, her cross-stitch. You stare at it until you can understand, under the jumbled threads spiking free, it is supposed to be a basket with a bunch of flowers piled in it: purple and yellow pansies, little dripping lily-of-the-valley, a diffuse red blob that looks like a kiss-print but might ultimately resolve into a rose.
I don’t have a lot of time to work on it, Steph says. She doesn’t look at you when she tells your therapist how you don’t want her to work on it in bed.
Your therapist asks if that’s true.
You tell them, honestly, that you forgot you had said that? It was a joke?
So you don’t mind if she works on it in bed? the therapist asks.
You hesitate. How to explain that joking about something isn’t the same as it not being true?
But Steph is hiccupping with suppressed sobs. You can see her getting angry at herself for being unable to fully suppress them, and your eyes fill for her – you cry because you are so desperately sad to see her trying not to cry over you, who aren’t remotely worth it.
The first time you knew you wanted to break up with Steph, she was playing a video game on her phone, full volume, while the two of you were watching a movie. Sure, it wasn’t even that good of a movie, and of course, you asked her to mute it, and yes, she did. But she was still looking at her phone the rest of the time and it grated on you, this lack of shared experience, even for something as simple as a movie. And once you had noticed that, even as a couple, you were living moments together separately, you couldn’t stop seeing them everywhere. How she could change tracks from a song you were enjoying in the car. How she got upset in advance of the way the delivery pizza would look – would it be too soggy, too cold, would the cheese have slid off? – when you were just hungry, edging towards hangry. How last year, the pandemic long since over, you wondered out loud about ever going back to the city – and she scoffed at that idea.
You owned this house, she said, meaning the two of you but really her.
And you, she added, meaning just you personally – you couldn’t afford a place in the city on an adjunct’s salary.
How you had known those things but also, how you had needed the fantasy of a second life you had left behind but still there, some other direction you could have veered towards had not the world gotten so colossally fucked. How it was easier to sign up for the end of the world, the rest of your life, when it was right there, leaf by leaf, within sight, instead of just – still going.
*
You’re running again but earlier, having woken up earlier, started earlier. It isn’t, you promise yourself, an attempt to avoid seeing the Jenkos or the tourists on main street, though that is an added bonus. It definitely isn’t to avoid Steph, who is probably right this minute pouring coffee into an overpriced Instagram ad of thermos. It isn’t anything but you, running, earlier. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so said Freud puffing away on his surrogate penis.
The sun is just beginning to rise over the golf course, pale and sharp with frost. When you get to the cemetery, there’s a car parked outside it, propped precariously on the shoulder like an actor hesitating before entering the stage, though there is nothing hesitant about the cop, stepping away from the car, two coffee cups held in his hands. His teeth, when they appear, are all brightness and deep shadow in the early light, making them seem more prominent, more fang-like than they are. His aviator sunglasses show you growing larger as you plod up, looking less graceful than you feel.
I see you haven’t given up your dangerous exercise habit, he says.
He holds out one of the coffee cups. Your stomach cramps prudishly, as if it were a Victorian lady, drawing skirts away from a puddle. You know you don’t want it, just as you know you will take it if pressed, so you try to buy yourself time, tell him he didn’t have to buy you coffee.
I didn’t, he says. My partner will be disappointed and drowsy.
He holds the cup still closer to you and so you take it. You are wearing a shirt that is open up the back, a tent-flap of a shirt that is supposed to help wick sweat away, but right now makes you feel exposed to a long line of breeze running up your spine. You fight back a shiver because if you shiver in front of this man, he will surely think it is for him.
The cop asks how you are and you tell him fine, but when you ask how he is, he shrugs and says, You don’t want to hear about my work. Then adds, Those are the sort of stories best told over a real drink.
His sunglasses offer you a view of yourself realizing what he is offering – the invitation unspooling in your expression. You take a sip of the coffee, feel your stomach lurching under its bitterness. When you look up again there is that doubled view of yourself in his sunglasses, both of you making a decision.
The sun is just beginning to rise over the golf course, pale and sharp with frost. When you get to the cemetery, there’s a car parked outside it, propped precariously on the shoulder like an actor hesitating before entering the stage, though there is nothing hesitant about the cop, stepping away from the car, two coffee cups held in his hands. His teeth, when they appear, are all brightness and deep shadow in the early light, making them seem more prominent, more fang-like than they are. His aviator sunglasses show you growing larger as you plod up, looking less graceful than you feel.
I see you haven’t given up your dangerous exercise habit, he says.
He holds out one of the coffee cups. Your stomach cramps prudishly, as if it were a Victorian lady, drawing skirts away from a puddle. You know you don’t want it, just as you know you will take it if pressed, so you try to buy yourself time, tell him he didn’t have to buy you coffee.
I didn’t, he says. My partner will be disappointed and drowsy.
He holds the cup still closer to you and so you take it. You are wearing a shirt that is open up the back, a tent-flap of a shirt that is supposed to help wick sweat away, but right now makes you feel exposed to a long line of breeze running up your spine. You fight back a shiver because if you shiver in front of this man, he will surely think it is for him.
The cop asks how you are and you tell him fine, but when you ask how he is, he shrugs and says, You don’t want to hear about my work. Then adds, Those are the sort of stories best told over a real drink.
His sunglasses offer you a view of yourself realizing what he is offering – the invitation unspooling in your expression. You take a sip of the coffee, feel your stomach lurching under its bitterness. When you look up again there is that doubled view of yourself in his sunglasses, both of you making a decision.
*
Don’t you all just look like a collection of medieval pilgrims – Mrs. Jenko, her son and daughter-in-law, their family and friends, you and Steph – trekking through the late autumn yellows and browns, moving up the wet back of a mountain.
The trail is not a difficult one. The peepers do it. Mrs. Jenko far ahead is doing it. Steph is having absolutely no problem at all. But you feel each step as a grinding collision in your joints and thighs and back. Your chest doesn’t feel big enough to gather the air you need, and how is that possible, when you are definitely one of the younger, fitter members of the party – why do you, not them, feel like you’re dying?
You’ve been running too much, Steph says. It tightens and shortens your muscles. This requires different ones, that’s all.
Thanks, doctor, you say dickheadishly, because you cannot always control who you are in the world.
Steph climbs ahead, an articulate answer, letting you fall back with a huffing old man, a weeping someone else. Every time you look up you see the bright gash of her blue jacket against the literal earth tones around you. You realize you don’t know the name of this mountain, or if it’s technically a mountain at all. What qualifications are required for a steep hill to be called a mountain? You hate it with an intensity it probably doesn’t deserve.
There is no official service when you get to the top, though some people you don’t know speak about Mr. Jenko while you make a face that suggests you are listening. When the man who must be her son holds out the urn to Mrs. Jenko, she looks at him with too much emptiness to be called hostile; he waits until he can’t, then pries the lid off himself, the seal squelching in a way unsuited for the sobriety of the moment. He raises it high in front of him, tips it over.
You see the fluid-like fall of the gray-brown ash tumble from the canister, and then, as the wind catches it, spirals upon spirals, a wispy rush. The collection expands and expands, drifting like a liquid cloud before losing all form entirely.
And then it is over. People stand around, not sure how to leave a party without a door. Some hug. Steph stands beside you, shifting her feet, moving her hands from her pockets to hips and back. You look out over the rims of the multicolored trees and wait. You are not praying, exactly, but you are waiting for something profound – feeling or thought, you’re not picky. How many before you have looked out at this landscape and seen the world ending, the color of the leaves their own fire, and seen meaning in that? Where is your hellscape? You try to draw up the image of Mr. Jenko, his corpse, as if to goose profundity into making an appearance. But your memory has made him into a soft beige blur.
Newton, though not an artist, had a scientist’s interest in color making and kept lists of how to create paints. In one of his Grantham notebooks, there was the list: “A colour for dead corpses: change white lead with water of yellow berries and wash the picture all over and change it with blue Indie and shadow it in single hatches, and in the leanest places then take soot, yellow berries and white lead, and with it shadow the darkest places.”
It had seemed so promising, reading this. You thought you had a real hot take: science and art! But eight years of research later, and you have only recently admitted to yourself that, no, there were no discernible changes from Newton’s discovery of the color spectrum in the field of art itself. The truth was, artists were a little busy with the plague to read Newton, even if they had been included on his elite newsletter system. If anything, Newton should have been more preoccupied with the plague instead of in his dorm room, poking needles in his eyeball, and maybe that was really the only thing you have ever been interested in, the only important thing you think you have to offer – to be the finger pointing at the memory a brilliant man, in the center of a dying world, putting needles into his own eye.
The trail is not a difficult one. The peepers do it. Mrs. Jenko far ahead is doing it. Steph is having absolutely no problem at all. But you feel each step as a grinding collision in your joints and thighs and back. Your chest doesn’t feel big enough to gather the air you need, and how is that possible, when you are definitely one of the younger, fitter members of the party – why do you, not them, feel like you’re dying?
You’ve been running too much, Steph says. It tightens and shortens your muscles. This requires different ones, that’s all.
Thanks, doctor, you say dickheadishly, because you cannot always control who you are in the world.
Steph climbs ahead, an articulate answer, letting you fall back with a huffing old man, a weeping someone else. Every time you look up you see the bright gash of her blue jacket against the literal earth tones around you. You realize you don’t know the name of this mountain, or if it’s technically a mountain at all. What qualifications are required for a steep hill to be called a mountain? You hate it with an intensity it probably doesn’t deserve.
There is no official service when you get to the top, though some people you don’t know speak about Mr. Jenko while you make a face that suggests you are listening. When the man who must be her son holds out the urn to Mrs. Jenko, she looks at him with too much emptiness to be called hostile; he waits until he can’t, then pries the lid off himself, the seal squelching in a way unsuited for the sobriety of the moment. He raises it high in front of him, tips it over.
You see the fluid-like fall of the gray-brown ash tumble from the canister, and then, as the wind catches it, spirals upon spirals, a wispy rush. The collection expands and expands, drifting like a liquid cloud before losing all form entirely.
And then it is over. People stand around, not sure how to leave a party without a door. Some hug. Steph stands beside you, shifting her feet, moving her hands from her pockets to hips and back. You look out over the rims of the multicolored trees and wait. You are not praying, exactly, but you are waiting for something profound – feeling or thought, you’re not picky. How many before you have looked out at this landscape and seen the world ending, the color of the leaves their own fire, and seen meaning in that? Where is your hellscape? You try to draw up the image of Mr. Jenko, his corpse, as if to goose profundity into making an appearance. But your memory has made him into a soft beige blur.
Newton, though not an artist, had a scientist’s interest in color making and kept lists of how to create paints. In one of his Grantham notebooks, there was the list: “A colour for dead corpses: change white lead with water of yellow berries and wash the picture all over and change it with blue Indie and shadow it in single hatches, and in the leanest places then take soot, yellow berries and white lead, and with it shadow the darkest places.”
It had seemed so promising, reading this. You thought you had a real hot take: science and art! But eight years of research later, and you have only recently admitted to yourself that, no, there were no discernible changes from Newton’s discovery of the color spectrum in the field of art itself. The truth was, artists were a little busy with the plague to read Newton, even if they had been included on his elite newsletter system. If anything, Newton should have been more preoccupied with the plague instead of in his dorm room, poking needles in his eyeball, and maybe that was really the only thing you have ever been interested in, the only important thing you think you have to offer – to be the finger pointing at the memory a brilliant man, in the center of a dying world, putting needles into his own eye.
*
A silence thumps over you and Steph as you pull your car doors closed. Steph’s hand finds yours.
They were lucky to have you, Steph says. They were lucky to have you there.
A tour bus pulls up next to you the parking lot, brakes squealing. Slowly, the tourists descend from the bus’s bowels. They cluster at the damp trail head, spongy with stomped leaves, happily chatting, until, having gathered the right pairings of spouses, of children, of connections insisted upon by love, they set out up the trail, hopeful of seeing something spectacular but, barring that, at least bearing witness to an end, and you – you, yes, you – when have you ever been asked to be anything but?
They were lucky to have you, Steph says. They were lucky to have you there.
A tour bus pulls up next to you the parking lot, brakes squealing. Slowly, the tourists descend from the bus’s bowels. They cluster at the damp trail head, spongy with stomped leaves, happily chatting, until, having gathered the right pairings of spouses, of children, of connections insisted upon by love, they set out up the trail, hopeful of seeing something spectacular but, barring that, at least bearing witness to an end, and you – you, yes, you – when have you ever been asked to be anything but?