The Simple Act of Remembering

It wasn’t raining. Aside from a few scattered wisps, like strands pulled from a tuft of cotton, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Just the softly pulsating stars and the sliver of a crescent moon so sharp it could draw blood. The only wind was a light breeze that tickled the desiccated leaves, coaxing some from the branches of the centuries-old trees that stood against the night sky like giants in silhouette.

But instead of evening silence, their kitchen was filled with an urgent sound—a low whine rising to a scream, which then fell back to a whine before returning, again, to a scream. Tornado warning horns blared from somewhere off in the distance.

Nadia took her hand off the kettle, as if touching its wooden handle had set off the alarm. “What do you suppose that’s about?”

Alain looked up, startled. Perhaps by her voice, or perhaps by the incessant howl of the tornado warning. He might have been asleep. Or, perhaps he was merely thinking deeply. It was difficult to tell where the thinking ended and the dreaming began these days. In the other room, the television was still on, and he heard the host say Drumroll, please! He stood up from the kitchen table, cleared his throat, walked to the small window over the empty sink. He peered into the night. “I’ve no idea.”

“Could they be testing it?”

“They only test on Tuesdays. It’s Thursday.”

“It’s Wednesday,” she said.

“Is it?” he answered with genuine surprise. “I could have sworn it was Thursday.”

He’d been slipping lately. Lately was generous. He’d been slipping for some time now. Seemed to start some time after he’d turned sixty. Now here he was, sixty-three. Sixty-four, come to think of it. In any case, it was certainly getting more severe lately, though he hated to use such a word. Time seemed to push and pull rather than go along at a steady pace. He’d swear it was a Wednesday when it was still only a Monday. And then, just like that, it was suddenly Sunday, when he could have sworn the weekend was only just starting. It’s what happens, Nadia told him, when you stop working, when you lose your routine. But that didn’t explain why he seemed to be getting his wires crossed so much—replacing the last name of an old friend he knew in elementary school with that of a colleague in his first job out of college, for example. This lack of an office routine didn’t explain why he found himself so frequently and strenuously reaching for a particular word that simply wouldn’t come to mind, as if it were right there, inches away but unreachable, like a fish swimming just beneath the frozen surface of a lake—a gray-green blur under the translucent lens of his mental ice.

“It does feel like a Thursday,” Nadia agreed, as the tornado warning wailed.

Alain wondered if she truly believed that or if she was only saying so to make him feel better, the way a parent might agree with their five-year-old about how hard it is to ride a bicycle or draw a cat. She was kind to him. Always kind to him. She never criticized him at all. Never even disagreed with him. Only occasionally offered a point of view that happened to vary from his own. It’s so cold out today, he might say. And she’d respond with, This wool is so warm, I can barely feel it. He might suggest chicken for dinner. Fish could also be good, she’d add. She wasn’t at all like his first wife, Patrice, who wouldn’t hesitate to inform him of just how sick of chicken she was, or wonder how on Earth he could be cold when it was in the low 60s in the middle of autumn. Patrice couldn’t stand the way he climbed the steps. You clomp, you stomp, you wake the whole house. My God, you’d think you were a giant! Alain washed his own car every week, but he never washed hers. If you’re going to wash one, why not just wash the other? Your car looks brand new, and mine is a wreck. My god, it looks like it should be on the side of the road!

Nadia never seemed to notice how loud his footfalls were. She washed her own car without complaint.

Such a complete lack of criticism, of disagreement, made him wonder what she wasn’t saying. What were his habits that irritated her? What were the things that he said that exasperated her? What opinions did he harbor that she objected to, that offended her? Patrice could cut you to the quick, but at least you knew what you were up against.

The tornado warning wound itself up, wound itself down, wound itself up, wound itself down.

Sometimes it felt to him that Nadia was a stranger. A kind stranger. But a stranger nonetheless. In reality, she was Patrice’s best friend. But Patrice was gone. She left for work one winter morning, but the car hit black ice and slipped swiftly off the road, broadside into a stately oak. It wasn’t the impact that killed her. Not directly. It was a gash on her leg, which severed her femoral artery. By the time someone had driven by and seen the wreck and called the medics, she’d bled out.

He’d always gotten along with Nadia. She was his favorite of Patrice’s many friends. Not just his favorite, but the only friend of hers that he liked at all. Toward the end, it seemed he liked Nadia more than Patrice did, who seemed increasingly irritated by Nadia’s unwillingness to date after her own husband had left her many years earlier. Nadia said she was much happier by herself. Same house, same town, same thing every day, same life. That’s Nadia. I get bored just hearing her name, let alone her voice, Patrice would complain. But after Patrice had died, it was Nadia who picked up his groceries, who drove Alain’s son, Bernard, to hockey practice, who stayed up late with him for no other reason than to keep him company. One of those nights, Alain confided in Nadia something he hadn’t told anyone: that, days before she died, Patrice had told him she wanted a divorce. She just wasn’t happy, he’d told Nadia. And when she said she wasn’t happy, I realized, you know what? I’m not so happy myself, either. So I told her to think on it, and I would, too, and if we both still felt the same way after a while, we’d talk to Bernard about it, and we’d do one of those no-contest divorce deals.

Nadia’s face showed no reaction when he’d told her this, and when he’d asked her why she didn’t seem surprised, she reminded him that she was Patrice’s best friend. She’d known Patrice had planned on leaving. I was the one who convinced her to talk to you directly. I knew how bad it felt to wake up to nothing more than a note, to have your marriage taken away one document at a time by registered mail through attorneys.

Jesus, Nadia, thanks, Alain had told her. And then he added, as if she’d done the dishes without being asked to, You didn’t have to do that, you know.

It was easy for Alain to be with Nadia and for Nadia to be with Alain. They were alone, but they were alone together. There was nothing torrid about it. That was the thing no one seemed to understand. No one. No one at all.

“Have you checked the weather today”?” Alain asked Nadia.

“I heard a report on the radio. Nothing out of the ordinary. A chance of flurries this weekend. But you know how fast these things can change.”

“What things?”

“The weather,” she said.

“That’s the nature of weather, though, isn’t it? Always changing.”

“That’s true. It is.”

Alain stroked his chin and watched a thin wisp of a cloud pass over the moon, which prompted a memory. He remembered his high-school chemistry teacher pacing at the front of the classroom, shaking a nub of white chalk in his cupped hand, as if he were playing some sort of musical instrument—a silent maraca, a quiet castanet. He was explaining how science could feel both mundane and magical. If he expected the students to be invested in science, he reasoned, they should understand why science was so interesting.

You don’t question that when you jump, you’ll return to Earth. That’s science, he’d said. But imagine an anvil and a single seed of grass. Both are dropped from the highest building in the world at precisely the same time. What hits the ground first? Trick question. The anvil and the seed fall at exactly the same speed, even though we all take it for granted that the anvil would fall much faster. Science. Science tells you to trust your instincts, but to question them as well. Some philosophers say “I think, therefore I am.” Some say, “perception is truth.” But imagine an early evening in the autumn. You see a massive moon on the horizon. Hours later, it’s high in the sky, back to its normal size. Your perception tells you that the moon has shrunk. But you know that it has not. So your best guess is that the moon has moved, and this has altered the appearance of its size—that it’s perhaps moved further away, and so it only looks smaller. But this is still wrong! The next time you see a giant moon hovering over the ground, hold your thumb up to it. Then go out later and hold your thumb up to it when it is high in the sky. You’ll see, it is the exact same size. Neither the moon has shrunk, nor its appearance. And yet your perception has not created a truth, but a lie. That’s science.

Alain held his thumb up to the moon next to the sharpened points of its crescent like pincers, poised to pierce. He chuckled softly as he thought of that old high-school chemistry teacher, with his bad hairpiece, his matted toupee.

But wait.

Wasn’t it his biology teacher with the toupee? And that was in junior high school, not high school. His chemistry teacher was the guy with the bald head and the temper—the guy who also coached junior varsity baseball. What was his name, Bowen? Bower? Bauer? He looked back to the moon and saw that either it had drifted or his thumb had, and between them there was now the black gulf of a starless stretch of sky. Frustrated, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his cardigan.

“Have you checked the weather today?” he said brusquely, and immediately realized he’d only just asked her this very question.

“I heard a report on the radio this morning. Nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe some flurries this weekend,” she answered, as earnestly as she had mere moments earlier.

Why don’t you tell me I’m repeating myself? Why don’t you ask me what’s wrong with me that I’m sitting here repeating myself like a skipping record? Don’t pretend I’m perfect! He considered confronting her, challenging her, but then doubt arrived like an unexpected knock at the door. What if I didn’t just ask her about the weather? What if I only think I just did? Christ, I can’t trust myself at all!

“But you know how fast these things can change,” she said and then added, “weather reports, I mean.”

He nodded. “These meteorologists, they have their models, but when it gets down to it they’re just, uh, you know,” he’d had the word, but then he’d lost it. “They’re just estimating.” Estimating. That wasn’t it. It was something like that. But that wasn’t it.

“Exactly,” she agreed, as if to say, Yes, honey, estimating is the perfect word for it.

“Approximating.” There it was, approximating.

“It’s all just best guesses, isn’t it?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.

“Well not guesses, of course. It’s a science after all,” Nadia revised. “But I only meant it’s not an exact science.”

Science. That whole memory of science class and the moon and perception—had he said all of that aloud? Surely not, surely not. Surely he’d only thought it. He looked at Nadia, as if searching for some clue on her face.

In the other room, the television was still showing some kind of late-night talk show to an empty room. The host called out Drumroll, please! Alain shivered. Déjà vu. Must be. Can science explain that?

“Oh, my tea,” she said. “I boiled the water, but I never poured it. I’m so forgetful.”

“You forgetful?” he said, trying to sound good-natured in his self-deprecation.

She only smiled. “Want some?” she offered.

“I was going to, but I think I’ll have a nip of whiskey instead.” And then he quickly added, “Just a small pour.” Force of habit. It was Patrice, and never Nadia, who took every opportunity to remark on how many drinks he’d had, or how heavy his pours had been getting.

Nadia poured water from the kettle into her mug and onto the teabag, which instantaneously reacted as if it were in excruciating pain, puffing up in its death throes and coloring the water with its insides. “Want me to get a drink for you?” she asked, entirely oblivious of the brutal scene playing out in her mug.

Alain felt queasy. The tornado warning horn seemed to be getting louder. “No, no, I’ll do it.” He crossed the worn hardwood floor of the small kitchen and pulled open the cabinet above the refrigerator, selecting a bottle of rye instead of the scotch. He poured two fingers’ worth into a tumbler. He took a seat back at the kitchen table. He took a sip. He rubbed his temples. He savored the burn of the booze on his tongue, down his throat, in his chest.

“I think we’d better call the non-emergency line,” Alain suggested thoughtfully. “Though my bet would be that at least half the town is doing the same.”

“Oh, Alain, I think that’s a great idea,” Nadia said, with such relief that Alain wondered if maybe she’d been thinking the same thing all along but hadn’t said anything in hopes he’d come to the same conclusion. Or maybe she had said it, but it had already slipped his mind. Or maybe she hadn’t said it all; maybe he had. Maybe this was his third or fourth time floating the idea. Good Christ, what a hopeless, helpless feeling this was—the simple act of remembering.

Nadia plucked the receiver from its cradle next to the black-and-white Kit-Cat Clock with its synchronized swinging tail and shifting eyes—always scanning, never seeing. She pulled the gleaming metal antenna from the top of the phone and handed it to him.

Eight of the buttons were preprogrammed to dial specific phone numbers. Speed Dial, it was called. Reasoning that dialing 9-1-1 was nearly as easy as dialing a single digit, he and Nadia had not bothered to preprogram the emergency services. Instead, they set it up so that the “1” would connect to the non-emergency line of the local police. The “2” would connect to the non-emergency line of the local firehouse. The “3” would connect Nadia with her ancient mother, with whom she spoke daily. The “4” was for Bernard, who hadn’t spoken to him in years. How many, he could no longer say. The cause of their estrangement had become increasingly nebulous to him. It had something to do with his son not approving of his marriage to Nadia, chiefly because she’d been his mother’s best friend. But then there had been other aspersions cast, other accusations levied between the both of them. The specifics of all of these were entirely lost to him, much like the details of a vivid dream that evaporate in the searing sunlight of reality.

The “5” was for his best friend, Marc, who had died earlier in the year. Pancreatic cancer. There was almost no warning whatsoever. One day, Marc had told him he was sick. They want me to come in and do some tests, he’d grumbled. A month later, maybe less, he was dead. Alain still couldn’t bring himself to remove the number. In part, this was because it still hadn’t stuck with him that Marc was gone—he’d only just gone in for tests, for God’s sake. One minute, he was here grousing about football and taxes and traffic and doctors, and then the next minute he was gone. It wasn’t like he died—it was like he slipped through some kind of wormhole, through a crack in the universe. Like a sock that goes missing from a load of laundry when it goes through the washer and dryer. Dead? How could he be dead? It didn’t make any sense.

Alain’s thumb hovered over the rectangular rubber “4.” He seriously considered pressing it. He could imagine himself telling his son, The tornado warnings are going off, and I think I’m suffering from some sort of mental debilitation. Dementia. Alzheimer’s. You remember Marc? He’s dead. Pancreatic cancer. Just like that. No warning. Dead. Damn, maybe I’ve got a brain tumor. I don’t know. But considering I can’t remember why we don’t speak anymore, I think it’s about time we make it up to each other . . .

Focus.

He pushed the “1” and held the receiver to his ear and squinted as he tried to listen for the soft simulated ring of his call beneath the whining and wailing of the tornado warnings.

“Non-Emergency,” a woman answered, sounding put-out by the mere act of picking up the phone.

Speaking with police officers had always intimidated Alain for reasons he never understood. You’ve got a guilty conscience, Patrice had told him decades earlier after he’d sputtered awkward apologies, excuses, and alibis to a police officer who’d pulled him over for speeding. I never speed. Never. It’s just that, I’m in a terrible rush. A terrible hurry. And new tires. They talked me into them at the shop. They’re higher profile. Larger, I mean. I understand that might cause the speedometer to undercount, which might have been why I didn’t realize I was exceeding the—

“Non-Emergency, hello?”

“Sorry, yes, hello, I’m out on, uh, Road uh—”

“Sir, is this about the tornado warning?” Her voice sounded strikingly similar to Patrice’s. So much so, he held the phone away from his ear for a moment and looked at it as if maybe someone was playing some kind of practical joke on him. “Hello? Sir? Are you there?” his dead wife’s voice asked him.

“Yes, uh, the warn—”

He was interrupted by an aggravated sigh. “I can only tell you what we’ve been telling everyone: we have no information.”

Alain tried to process what she was saying. No information? What did that mean? Was this his own mind failing to comprehend a fairly simple statement or was his perception truthful in that what she said was entirely ambiguous? “I’m sorry, you don’t have information? As in, you don’t know why the—”

“I don’t run the tornado warnings,” she snapped at him, defensively.

Some lone underpowered transmitter in Alain’s brain was trying to broadcast a message to the rest of Alain’s consciousness that this was not Patrice, no matter how much she sounded like Patrice. Patrice was dead. Patrice had been dead for years. But the signal was lost, drowned out by the countless others that were telling him that this was Patrice. Impatient Patrice. Defensive Patrice. Irritated Patrice. He flushed with anger. “I’m sorry, I thought this was the Patrice—the Police,” he quickly corrected himself, hoping Nadia hadn’t noticed his slip of the tongue, though of course she had, he knew damned well. “If you don’t run it, then who the hell does?” The volume of his voice had risen to a level that drowned out the tornado warning, that made Nadia wince, that caused the teacups and brandy glasses and delicate silver spoons on the open shelves to vibrate, registering the soundwaves as if they were meteorological instruments.

“The AMS team of the DNR branch office, which is supported by the NWS,” she responded instantaneously, authoritatively, as if she’d been expecting this exact question.

“How do you expect me to know those abbreviations? You might as well be telling me the alphabet! I’ll tell you what, you’re impossible. Do you know that? Do you know that? Impossible!”

Nadia put a hand on his shoulder.

“Thank you for calling, sir. Have a good evening,” the woman said, and Alain could swear—could positively swear—that she was smiling.

My God, she’s laughing at me. He took a deep breath, calmed himself, tried to regain a little control. “Look. All I want to know—all I’m hoping to find out—is if it’s a false alarm,” he said, as if he were trying to talk a used-car salesman into a three-month powertrain warranty.

But she’d moved on to other calls, to other business. She’d hung up. She wasn’t there anymore. She was gone. So she had that in common with Patrice, too.

Maybe it was Patrice after all.

Nadia’s hand moved from his shoulder to his back, below his neck. She was rubbing him gently. “I’m sure it’s just a false alarm.”

“Of course it is,” he said, and knocked back half the remaining rye. “Did you check the weather today?”

Her hand, on his back, stopped. “I heard a report on the radio this morning. Nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe some flurries over the weekend.” Her voice—it had become colder, like a front had moved into their kitchen.

Did I already ask you that? he was about to say, but he was interrupted by a new sound. Punctuating the mechanical wail and whine of the tornado warning, it was the pit-pit-pit percussion of fat raindrops on the panes. A slow tempo, but increasing in its volume and intensity.

“But you know how fast these things can change,” she added in that same icy tone. Her hand remained still. Or perhaps, Alain thought, she was no longer touching him at all.

“What things?”

Drumroll, please!

The raindrops pounded the panes with such force, Alain feared they might shatter.

“All things,” Nadia said.

Alain knocked back the rest of his rye. “That’s the nature of things, isn’t it?” he said. It was a rhetorical question. He already knew the answer. He knew it all too well.

Outside, the rain had turned to hail.

DAVID OBUCHOWSKI

David Obuchowski is a prolific and award-nominated author of short fiction and long-form essays. He’s also the creator/writer/narrator of the documentary podcast series Tempest. His first children’s book, How Birds Sleep, is a collaboration with artist Sarah Pedry and was published by Astra Publishing in 2023.