The Glister by John Burnside Page A

midlife crisis, but that's far too simple an explanation. The girl he remembers now never existed; for most of the years she spent being alive, he hardly noticed her, or perhaps it would be truer to say that she hardly noticed him—but once, on a warm summer's night at the town dance, or on some hazy winter's afternoon at the end of term, she had smiled at him, and they had gone for a walk together, or stood talking awhile in the school foyer, and he'd realized how miraculous she was. Two days later, she was dead: a tumor, a rare infection, a hole in the heart. It wasn't uncommon, in the Innertown, that such a girl might die young, but this girl had stayed alive long enough to make her mark, to take up residence in his imagination. To haunt him. Now, through her, he mourns and celebrates everything that life has denied him, all the beauty, all the magic. This is how it happens: the dead go away into their solitude, but the young dead stay with us, they color our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them.
    Yet more than any of those kind citizens, Morrison is an expert in mourning—though what he mourns has never been altogether clear to him. The boys, yes; but he doesn't mourn them enough to seek justice on their behalf. He mourns his marriage, especially now that he and Alice have turned from each other and, almost noiselessly, carried on with their separate, quietly desperate lives. He doesn't understand that. It might seem a cliché, now, but when they'd first met, he had known that Alice was the only woman he would ever love. She'd had that quality some people have, if not for everyone then at least for one magical other, of making existence itself feel like a promise. And she had seemed so close to begin with, as much a friend as a wife, even if they had never talked that much. Back then, they hadn't felt the need. She was there, he was there. Later, though, when he needed to be touched, coming to her in a fog of inarticulate longing—a wordless longing to be touched and, in that healing touch, forgiven for a sin he wasn't able to confess—she had just collapsed inward, like one of those sensitive plants they used to grow in school, so there was nothing there, no point of contact. She didn't even like it if he looked at her for too long, as if even that was an impossible demand he was making on her. At such times, she became clinical, almost brutally analytical. “I can't help you,” she would say, “if you won't tell me what's wrong.” As if what he wanted was help.
    Whenever she did that, whenever she crumbled in on herself like that, it made him think of that plant. Mimosa pudica, that was it. Pale green, slightly downy plants, with their sensitive, fingerlike leaves and perfectly engineered stems that simply folded at any contact till they were all but absent. A fingertip, the nib of a pen, even a single water drop. That was all it took to make the whole plant collapse. A single touch, and everything fell away, till all you were left with was an indifferent, infinitely patient absence. Sometimes, Morrison feels that this is what he mourns more than anything: that this is the true source of his grief. He had expected to be touched, he had thought that was what married folk did for each other: they touched. They healed each other with this simple instrument. He has never understood why Alice doesn't feel the same way. Now, he hasn't touched anyone, and nobody had touched him, for years. When Alice started having her episodes, he'd hoped this would make a difference, he'd hoped that they were finally equal, in their need if nothing else, and could start again. It was almost laughable, now, to think that he had ever been so foolish.

ALICE
    I N THE POLICE HOUSE, ALICE KEEPS HAVING THE SAME DREAM: PINK, nerveless fish with lacy, desirous mouths are all around her face, butting and probing at her lips and eyes, eating