The Gilded Fog

The revolver sat on the dusty shelf of the attic like an accusation.

I had not come to Long Island to think about the war. I had come because Eleanor told me to, and Eleanor always knew the right thing to say, even when she was not saying the right thing. She wrote to me from her cousin Watson's house on the North Shore, and her letters were like the house itself--beautiful, expensive, and hollow. I could hear the hollowness in her ink.

The revolver was my grandfather's. I found it under a pile of old coats, wrapped in oilcloth that had gone brittle with time. The barrel was pitted, but the mechanism was sound. I loaded it with six bullets that I found in a tin box beneath the shelf--one for each deployment, I thought later, though of course that was coincidence. I had been to Europe five times, not six. Five times I had watched men die in fields that had no name on any map I carried.

On the last page of my grandfather's diary, he had written something that I read three times before I understood it was about me. The handwriting was shaky, the ink faded, but the words were clear: I have seen the truth of our degeneration. We are not moving upward. We are moving downward. We are becoming creatures who forget how to see the sun.

I left the revolver on the shelf and went downstairs. The house was empty--my parents in Chicago for the summer, as they always were, as they had always been. I was twenty-eight and living in a room that my uncle had let me use because it was cheaper than paying a tenant. The room faced a alley and had a window that did not close properly. In the summer, the city sounds came in through the crack--car horns, music from a neighbour's radio, the distant wail of an ambulance that would never arrive in time for anything.

I poured two fingers of whiskey into a glass and stood at the window. The alley was dark. Somewhere below, a cat scratched at a trash can. I thought of Claire.

Claire Watson was my cousin by marriage, though we did not look like cousins. Cousins look alike. Cousins share the same nose, the same stubborn chin, the same way of tilting their head when they are listening to something they do not want to hear. Claire had none of those things. She had dark eyes that seemed to see you from a distance, as though she were viewing you through the wrong end of a telescope. She was twenty-five and married to a man named Richard who made his fortune in shipping and spent it in bars along Park Avenue.

She had smiled at me once, at a dinner party, and that smile had stayed with me for three years. It was not a large smile. It did not even reach her eyes. But it was real, and in New York, that is the rarest thing.

I drank the whiskey. It tasted like everything else lately--like the hotel coffee, like the train food, like the whiskey I drank in Paris and the whiskey I drank in London and the whiskey I drank in the trenches when the rain would not stop for seventeen days.

I drove to the North Shore at midnight. I did not plan to. My hands simply turned the wheel and the car simply began to move, and by the time I noticed I was on the parkway, I was already past the toll booth and the city was dissolving behind me like sugar in water.

The Long Island Road was empty at that hour. The headlights cut a tunnel through the fog, and the fog was gold--not white, not grey, but gold. It caught the light from the streetlamps and threw it back at me, multiplied, so that the road ahead was a corridor of amber and shadow.

I thought of Claire standing in Richard's house, alone, with a husband who came home drunk and went to bed with his back turned. I thought of how I could hear her voice in my head when I was driving, as though she were sitting in the passenger seat, saying nothing, and that was enough.

I reached the coast and killed the engine. The fog was thicker here, coming off the water in great waves, and the lighthouse at the end of the pier was turned off for the season. I got out of the car and walked toward the water.

The oyster bed was there, where I had been as a boy with my father, before the war, before everything. The shells were scattered along the shore like discarded teeth, and in the fog they glowed with a faint pearlescent light. I could smell the water and the salt and the rot of things that had died in it. I knelt down and picked up an oyster. It was heavy, sealed tight. I crushed it against a rock and ate the meat raw. It was cold and sweet and tasted of everything the sea had ever tasted.

I ate seven oysters. Then I took out a sheet of paper from my pocket and began to write a letter to Claire. I wrote: I found my grandfather's revolver today. And I wrote: He said we are moving downward. And I wrote: I do not know what that means, but I think I feel it. And I wrote: You smiled at me once. And then I tore the paper into pieces and let the wind carry it into the fog, where it disappeared like all the other things I had written and all the things I had not written.

The fog was golden still, and the sea was dark, and I sat on the shore of a world that had no name and felt, for the first time in three years, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. It lasted for about five minutes. Then I thought of Richard, and the feeling dissipated like smoke.

I drove back to New York at dawn. The fog was burning off, revealing the sky in patches of pale blue, and the city was beginning to wake. Skyscrapers rose out of the morning like buildings in a dream, and on the avenues, the first cars and trolleys were already moving, and the newspaper boys were shouting headlines that no one would read properly because no one ever reads anything properly.

I parked the car in front of my building and sat for a moment, watching the city through the fog. I thought of the revolver in the attic, and of the six bullets, and of what I might need them for.

Then I started the engine and drove toward the city, and in my rearview mirror, the Long Island lights dissolved into a golden mist, and the mist shaped itself, just for a moment, into the form of something that looked like a spider, spinning a web across the face of the rising sun.

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Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: