In Fond Remembrance of Me by Howard Norman

adrift between an absence of romance and meeting my future wife, Jane, in 1981, though in Churchill there was no way to foresee that I would have such good fortune. Yet I knew I wanted a family of my own someday. Most immediately, of course, I was adrift in the desire—it felt like an enormous sea-of-desire—to comprehend as much about Helen Tanizaki as posible. To get my human bearing in relation to Helen. Because she was dying; this fact required that I more memorize her than slowly “get to know” her—there was to be no slowly allowed.

    â€œMaybe I am lost,” I said to Mark, “but at least I’m working with you right here and now at this table, right? I’m asking for help all the time, right?”
    â€œI’m happy to be paid, working with you.”
    â€œI know that.”
    â€œThat’s good. That’s good.”
    â€œFor instance, Mark, there’s parts of the woolly mammoth story I need to listen to with you again, on the tape recorder, all right? Maybe five or ten times over again. I need help with it.”
    â€œHelen can help.”
    â€œYes, she can, but I need to work with you on it more. What the museum is paying you for, remember?” I immediately regretted saying that.
    I played the story and we worked on it for two hours; the notebook pages filled, we went through two more pots of coffee. Mary left the house twice, returning each time with something from the grocery store. Mark and I went outside for a piss a few times. It felt like a very productive day of work.
    Then, toward suppertime, things went bitterly awry. Perhaps it was partly due to the exasperating work itself, no matter how much real progress was made; perhaps our ration of civility had been used up; there could have been any number of reasons. I had one more item to discuss with Mark, so I ventured forth. “Mark, when you say”—and I attempted to pronounce a passage in Inuit concerning the actual moment when the woolly mammoths are insulted by Noah and make the decision to flee underground (see “Why Woolly Mammoths Decided to Flee Underground,” p. 62)—“does that
mean that one woolly elephant went under the ice because it was insulted, or does it mean …?”
    I was startled by the suddenness with which Mark scraped his chair back, rose with a fierce look of indignation on his face, and walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, his head hung like he had just received terrible news. Looking through the open doorway (there was in fact no door), I saw Mary sit next to Mark, all the while looking at me, offering two quick shrugs, What happened? Mary, I noticed, was wearing a brown button-down sweater over a pale yellow button-down sweater; the brown one looked to be directly buttoned to the yellow one, which was also buttoned its entire length. Mary turned off the radio, then spoke in low tones to Mark in their language. She must have convinced him of my best intentions, because Mark soon returned to the kitchen table. He sat down, sipped cold coffee without meeting my eyes. I grew quite anxious within this silence—it felt like a standoff, but over what, I had no idea. I too stared away.
    But in a moment I began more or less studying Mark’s face in its repose. Because now he didn’t appear angry at all; he looked at ease, if anything, lost in thought, as though some sort of erasure of conflict had occurred. Still, he did not look at me. But then he caught me studying his face. I must have been holding a blank stare, because he said, “Are you—a— hypnotist fellow?”
    â€œI apologize for staring, Mark. I think you mean that I looked hypnotized.”
    Mary sat down at the table. “We had a hypnotism fellow up here to visit at schools one time,” she said. “I mean to
Churchill, then up to Eskimo Point, a few other places, too. A magician—he was funny. He tried to hypnotize my sister. It