The Way They Used to Be by Andrew Bertaina

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At first, the man thought nothing of the brick on the Egyptian Cotton sheets on top of the bed he shared with his wife. It was small and almost innocuous a brick is an odd thing to put in one’s bed, he thought, why not a vibrator or another man? But he was quite busy, too busy to ask questions about such a small thing. 

Amy, he’d say. Why the brick? 

Why anything, she’d answer, in that strange way of hers. 

She didn’t mention the brick either. In the evening, they were both too busy reading novels for a book group they found annoying. The group often gathered and drank too much wine and gossiped in lieu of discussing the book, for which they’d so carefully blocked out time to read. 

I can’t believe she stayed with him that long. 

I know. I know. I’m sad, but I’m happy for her. 

He looked on, wondering what to do with all his highlighted passages. How else was one to read these days? Social pressure was needed. Sometimes friends suggested they listen to audiobooks on public transit, but they scoffed. Public transit was for podcasts, news and self-improvement. Everyone he knew was trying to improve. His friends were learning Spanish or becoming certified Pilate’s instructors. It was a difficult time to remain yourself when with a few swift hand movements, you could change everything on your phone, profile picture, political affiliation.  

His wife had delicate fingers, long and well-kept. He admired them as she turned the pages in her book. He knew her antipathies, her love of sea otters in nature videos narrated by David Attenborough, the way she always left her slippers at odd places in the house. Still, the fact of the brick was here, hard, solid. But what to say? In marriage, people acquire all sorts of strange things, assorted lovers, a desire for children, a sudden interest in buying a real oil painting from an artsy friend. At least she hadn’t asked after a dog. 

I need company. 

You have me. 

When he slept, the man had a wild dream, most of which he forgot as soon as he woke up. Only a few sketchy details remained. He dreamed that he and his wife were hiking in a distant alpine forest full of purple trees. On the trail, they’d gotten lost somehow, and he’d been separated from her. He’d searched and searched for her until he’d suddenly been stalked by a bear. What did it mean? His wife kept a dream journal, but he didn’t remember enough to write anything down.

At breakfast, while his wife brewed single origin coffee, he buttered the toast and then spread raspberry jam thinly across the top. He recounted the dream remnants to her. She half-listened, while wisps of steam drifted past her aquiline nose. 

So, you were eaten by air? 

A bear. Not eaten. 

Clouds made shapes in the sky. The man felt himself slipping back into the dream of life. Marriage was also this, a grasping towards something that wasn’t easy to define. A vase of flowers was sitting in cloudy water. They needed attention. Sunlight pounded at the window.  The brick, solid on the bed, providing its own clear-cut definition.

On the metro ride into the city, the man tried to remember the rest of his dream. Instead, he remembered a girlfriend he’d once had from Idaho, and the long silences she routinely brought into their conversations, her comfort with it. Sometimes he missed her and his image of Idaho, vertiginous mountains, icy lakes, long silences. Sometimes he daydreamed of living his whole life with her, unhappy in the country, an icy wind snapping the branches of trees. 

Work was routine as work often is. He shifted between various spreadsheets and then sat through a long company meeting that ended with a long round of kudos for  and from people who also wished the meeting was ending. 

And kudos to Jim for working on the project. And kudos to Stephanie for her hard work last week on finalizing the report for HR. 

He felt he had entered purgatory or perhaps an upper level of hell, but this was how some people he knew felt about modern working life at least some of the time. 

When he arrived home, he set his coat on the rack they’d purchased for just such things. Before, he’d been in the habit of tossing it over the couch, which she loathed. His wife was feeding a cat with red and white stripes who sat on the windowsill.

You’re a very good kitty. You’re a very good kitty, aren’t you? You were missing your mama. 

He was allergic to cats. They’d settled on not getting one. And yet, she couldn’t resist feeding the strays, cooing to them from the window, making up elaborate stories about their lives. 

I’ve had a day, he said, interrupting her chat with the cat. She kept chatting to the cat. The man had a penchant for ignoring signs of loneliness. This suited both of them well. 

In bed, she was reading the new novel by an Irishwoman the internet was abuzz about. He noticed a small line of nine bricks now in the bed, a thin little wall. Perhaps, he thought, she’d taken up quarrying? Who knew what hobbies had anymore these days? His newly single friends told him that all the woman his age were climbing now, conquering rock faces on weekends and kicking ass in the board room of non-profits for the rest of the week. These women knew what they wanted. They had ropey muscles and enjoyed fucking. Woman hit their sexual peak much later. It was a really fantastic time to be single. 

They said this all with manic excitement he didn’t believe because he knew they sometimes drove thirty minutes across town to watch their sons play soccer and avoided their ex-wives’ new good-looking and easy-going boyfriends. 

Over the next few weeks, the row of bricks between them became higher. He wanted to say something, but it was awkward now. If he’d said something after the first brick or two, he’d have had a chance, but now that the project was under way, he felt weird bothering her with his concerns. They’d had enough trouble agreeing on a show to watch these days. 

What about Frasier? 

Frasier? 

The one with the little dog and the therapist. 

I remember liking the dog but not the therapist. 

What if we watched something funny?

Frasier is funny. 

To who? 

To whom. 

His boss had asked him to finish the two byzantine spreadsheets by the end of the week. The spreadsheet tasks felt like a poorly rendered Borges story, a labyrinth with no meaning, no ending, no interpretation. On his lunchtime walk, a plane cut a solid ribbon through the sky. Pigeons wandered about, dazed by the dazzling sunlight. 

At home, he sat on the fire escape, shooing away the cats. 

Out, out damned cats, he said. They didn’t get the reference. He thought about smoking a cigarette as he’d done when he was much younger and in love with a girl from Idaho. He’d mostly smoked to be able to stand outside with her, to smell the shampoo in her hair, listen to her takedowns of the writers he’d first loved. 

Hemingway was an asshole of the first rate. Don’t get me started on Kerouac. I don’t have the whole night. 

A fire truck was driving quickly through the night, blaring its horn. Someone was having a heart attack somewhere or had fallen getting into the bathtub. Life was like that, you know, hiding so much misery under cover of apartment doors. He called one of his old friends and started talking about work, his petty disappointments, the bricks. 

That’s quite odd. 

I know, the man said. But we’ve been at odds for a while now. You can’t fight over everything. 

His friend had four children, and they were constantly interrupting his side of the conversation. 

Jeremy, put that damn gun down now. Sorry, sorry, I know hon. Darn gun. I’m sorry, man. What were you saying?

He stepped inside, shivering with the cold. 

His wife had taken to watching the news, odd shows where aggressively coiffed men and women with heavy makeup shouted at one another. It wasn’t like her. Then again, nothing is like anyone. Everyone is just making it up as they go along. 

Come look at the stars, he said.  

She briefly looked up from the new show where someone was talking about conspiracies. There aren’t any stars in the city.

Let’s go outside and imagine them. 

I’m tired, she answered, then turned back to the screen.

His boss had just texted him about the reports. Apparently, he’d really fucked up while entering data into one of the columns. The query his manager had run turned into a real shit show. It was hard to think about anything else. 

But he had to consider the possibility that his wife was haunted. What do you do with a haunted wife?

The moon was corpulent and deathly white. He wanted a life exactly like his and for someone else to be living it. 

Once, eons ago, they’d taken a trip to Umbria on a whim. They’d toured wineries and small hilltop towns with cypress trees dotting the valleys below. He had a picture of his wife from that trip, brushing back a lock of her hair, a glass of wine holding light in the foreground. It was a picture of the way they used to be. 

The man wondered if they’d ever get back to Umbria. He thought about talking to his friends via the group text about the problem with his wife, but the truth was, sometimes people just became haunted. There wasn’t much you could do about it beyond complain in the group text, which had a limited shelf life despite the few good ripostes. 

His father had ended his life haunted too. He and his mother had retired to a lake house surrounded by beech and oaks. His father had started fiddling with fishing, but he wasn’t particularly good at it. He claimed that fish just jumped off the line to piss him off. 

Next, his father tried birding. He’d purchased Audubon’s birds of America and stood in the darkness trying to identify things. They saw numerous robins, a crow, and a great blue heron swooping down into the bay. 

This is it? His father said. Just watching them and writing it down in my journal. Just toss me in the ground already. 

His father had worked his whole life at the same corporation where the man worked, but his father had been more successful, more driven. His retirement happened because of a heart attack and the recommendations that followed. The cabin turned out to have been a mistake, more like a prison than anything else. He’d always had lots of friends who he invited over for drinks, an active social life, a reasonable sense of humor. But now, those things were lost to him, his father also watched the news. 

And then his father was gone into the news, pulled in by the undertow in a matter of months. When the man visited the cabin with his wife, long before she’d even put a single brick in bed, he woke up at 4 and looked at birds, hopping through trees, pecking the ground or swooping down in parabolic arcs to try and snag fish from the calm pools of grey water. As he watched, he almost slipped out of his body, of his petty concerns at work, his worries about whether his wife loved him at all anymore. He just watched the small shapes of birds, the clouds passing overhead. All this radiance. 

When he returned, he saw his father and his wife rocking on the porch, passing time together over a cup of coffee, listening to the radio. He didn’t think anything of it at the time. 

His friends texted saying there was nothing you could do really, once the haunting began. It was almost impossible to get ghosts out of people. A human body was as large as the wardrobe in Narnia. Once possessed, the ghosts found places to hide, places to swing wildly along the stretches of large intestines, skipping rope between the vast neural nets. His friend didn’t really know what else to try. He was sorry. 

The man looked into finding an exorcist, but that required a lot of money. His father had died suddenly and giifted almost all of his money to the voices on the radio that haunted him too, leaving the man only the house, which they never went to anymore. Work had gotten so busy, and his wife didn’t like to leave home as often. She felt it was often unsafe.  

The man stays out to drink. 

My wife is possessed, he says to the bartender. 

Ain’t they all. 

No, like really, possessed. She’s building a wall in our bedroom to keep them out. 

Who’s she keeping out? 

The ghosts, I think. 

But you’re saying they’re already inside her. 

Yup. 

Ain’t that the shit, the bar tender said and put down a shot of Jameson. On the house. 

The man stumbled home through streets. The wind was bitingly cold. It whipped through the trees, slammed down the corridors of streets, but he felt alive, ready to talk to his wife. He regretted waiting so long, regretted so many things. He tripped on an icy patch of sidewalk, and he fell, smashing his nose into the ground, so that blood fell fast and freely. His hands shot up to his nose as he tried to shut off the bleeding, his fingers soon sticky with blood.

The taxis whirred past him, a blur of lights. 

You’re bleeding all over the fucking place, a homeless man said. 

I know. I know. He answered, while the man shook his head in disgust and moved away. 

The moon was laid out in the arms of a street tree. His neighbor was walking the dog, doing that peculiar thing where a human sits idly and watches another animal shit, expectant. At home, he stripped off his shirt and threw it in the washer, hoping his wife would notice. She barely looked up at him. 

Did you notice the blood? 

The what? She said, half-listening. 

The blood. 

Where? Blood? 

It was all over my shirt. 

You’ve gotten some on the washing machine, she said, stalking across the room and using a paper towel and spray to wipe it down. 

Don’t worry. I’m fine. 

Her arm worked furiously in concentric circles. Can’t even be safe in my house, she mumbled, never looking back at him. 

Maybe if they’d had children this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe the children would be haunted too. Who knew? His whole life was spinning out of control, and he was watching it, almost bemused by the sight. 

At work the next day, he called his friend again. 

So, she’s completely haunted now. 

From pinkie toe to root tip. 

At least you don’t have any kids mixed up in it. 

I thought we’d love each other forever. 

Forever is a long time, friend. 

He hung up and sat in his cube, fluorescent light beaming down from overhead. There had been a mistake somewhere. He could feel it in the marrow of his bones, but he didn’t have anyone to tell. No management or project leader. It was a simple fact, like a cell on the data sheet. 

The day was unusually warm, a breeze shook the leaves of distant trees. Sunlight poured through them, and a few city birds, crows and European starlings made shapes in the air. He thought of the Caspar David Friedrich painting they’d had in their first apartment, the man staring out into the distance, dark shapes adorning the yellowed skyline. As though the apocalyptic version of the world the voices on the radio kept talking about had already come to pass. 

Maybe they were right, all the haunted people. Maybe the world was coming to an abrupt sort of end, and only their ghosts would be walking around in the burned-out shell of the world. His nose had inexplicably started bleeding again and was leaving a trail on the streets amongst the impressions of leaves long gone. 

While he’d been at work, she’d added a watchtower to the wall, keeping them safe. The window was shut, and the tabby was mewling insistently, but she no longer seemed to care. There was someone on the television talking about the need for guns, for self-protection. 

Why are you always bleeding lately? She asked accusatorily, and he held up his hands in supplication. 

She was wearing an old Army hat he’d seen her purchasing online that reminded him of All Quiet on the Western Front. He’d watched it ages ago, seventh grade maybe. The moment haunted him, platoon member after platoon member killed off one after another. And while everyone was putting up their chairs for the day, he’d kept watching, along with his social studies teacher, a grizzled veteran of the Korean War. Just the two of them when the last bullet hits home, and the screen goes black. 

He wanted to tell her about that experience, about the moment he’d decided he’d rather move to the moon than go to war, rather do anything but shoot a gun or build a wall or get into a fistfight. He’d always been this way. It probably wasn’t even a virtue. It just was. He wondered if he could reach out to her across the space between them. He wondered if they’d ever get back to the picture from Umbria, her hair swept away from her piercing blue eyes. He thought about the dream he’d had, about searching and searching for his wife until he’d been eaten by the air. 

It’s just me, Amy, he said, closing the space between them. Feeling, as he walked that he’d close the space between them, exorcise the ghost and drive with her around the ring road in Iceland. 

She eyed him suspiciously, looking for all the world, not like the woman he’d married, but like someone possessed, and he knew that he could walk forever to try and close the distance between them, but she’d already left for a farther shore, where she’d built a fortress, one that looked out over everything and into whatever lay beyond.

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Andrew Bertaina is the author of the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award, and the forthcoming essay collection, The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus).  More of his work is available at andrewbertaina.com.

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30 June 2023