by Jackson Arn
When Harold Haber was released from prison, he found out why nobody had visited him in two years. His brother, sister, mother, father, grandmother, uncle, and cousins had died. He and his grandfather were the last two Habers left in the country, maybe the world. His grandfather was 89 years old and slept all day. The house was cracked paint, emptied windows, dust, and gashes in walls. In Harold’s head, a sense of duty thickened. The family had to be rebuilt. The family name had to be spoken everywhere. He married Sarah and had five children. One survived long enough to have his own. As Harold choked he thought, I did my part.
*
Two of David Haber’s children outlived their childhoods. David Haber did not outlive his twenties. As he found his way home on a Tuesday night, belly sloshing, something tore in him. We found him the next morning with a mark, maroon and claw-shaped, on his abdomen’s right.
*
Esther had her first child at fifteen, but he could not be acknowledged. Two years later, as her husband raised her dress for the first time, she thought of her grandmother and resolved to name her next child Sarah. Her husband, taken aback by her silence in the crucial second, decided not to trust her and named the child after his grandmother, who’d died defending our glorious land. Esther secretly thought of their child as Sarah until she gave birth to her third, who she named Harold.
*
Harry Haber felt the full weight of his name twice in his life, the first time aged seven. His father was instructing him with a belt. Between the strokes he heard a hiss: “If your grandfather were alive to see you …” Then there was a pause and then a sniff. He did not dare turn to look. After a few minutes he realized his father had left the room, leaving him bent over, half-naked. The second time, Harry was dying in his trench. He thought of his three children and his father and his father’s father. Time oozed like a wound. He thought of the glory he and the rest of us had fought for, and the second glory to which his name belonged. He resolved, delirious, to pass on the name to his next child, and then he died.
*
Until the age of thirteen, Greta wondered what she had done to make her mother hate her. That summer, her mother drank until she couldn’t keep the truth inside her. She’d had a third child, older than Greta or Harold. That was all she knew. The year Greta, long since a Ratner, became a grandmother, she returned to our town and went to the tavern. She stared into the eyes of the man who gave her the beer and knew they were her lost brother’s. But she couldn’t think of how to tell him the story of his birth, and three years later she was dead.
*
When Harold Ratner was eight years old, he got lost in the woods. He thought of screaming for help but found his throat no longer worked. His despair led him to a hole under a tree. Inside he found a cave painted in red and purple wolves. Between the shadows he saw a large brass chest and two white fingers squeezed through the keyhole. He only told one other person what he’d seen, and when he tried to go back he realized he’d forgotten the way. He was always with a woman but never asked for her hand.
*
Since his first afternoon in the brothel Ben knew he was not made to be a father, but he felt duty bending him, pressing his body into acts he couldn’t have done on his own. When he told his wife the truth she was silent for a day and never spoke about it again. She told herself she’d hate him forever, but she tired herself out soon and discovered she was relieved, since nothing could be worse than what he’d already confessed. She and her husband worked hard at what others do for fun, and the handful of Ratners left among us is a monument to their glorious sacrifice.
*
The orphan Eli was kept ignorant of his early years until he was almost ready to leave and make his own home. His adopted father ran the tavern where Eli had been tossed. In twenty minutes he’d decided to be the baby’s parent and given it his uncle’s name, glad to have stumbled on this glorious duty. Sixteen years later, he told Eli the truth, hoping to keep his child close by. The truth worked so well that Eli never left, and forty years later, now the tavern’s owner, he met his sister. He thought she was a girl he’d loved as a boy and looked away, aroused and embarrassed.
*
Ilsa Ratner was born killing her mother, a small pickled woman who’d laughed when the doctor gave her the glorious news. We all had, even her husband. He had thought she wasn’t more than a few years short of dying—and now here she was, about to lade the family with life. The rest of Ilsa’s life was a footnote to her birth, but a long footnote. Her father strained himself into loving his wife’s killer. Later he died of the exertion. Shortly before, he told Ilsa about the birth. So the story survived him, and Ilsa, and even Ilsa’s children.
*
The first time Harry Ratner saw the wall he was five years old. It was very late and we were too drunk to stop him. He arrived at dawn, and the sunlight saved him—at night they shot whatever made a sound, but the sight of a child made them hesitate long enough to spare a life. They carried him home, and we watched, still drunk. His father beat him for an hour, and by the hour’s end Harold, who had not been trying to escape, had decided he would escape one day. On the night before he turned eighteen he was not in his bed or at the tavern where we were celebrating him. He was not anywhere in town, and after a few weeks we found it more convenient not to say his name at all.
*
Since childhood, Sarah had known the smile her mother gave her and the rictus of her mother’s sleeping lips. For Sarah, life was the temperate zone between strained love and honest disappointment. She met Samuel, who loved her without straining. Sarah Archer loved her new name for the same reason she loved Samuel, which was the same reason we hated him. He was pale and alien, like his name. The syllables slipped from our mouths like rotten food we couldn’t hold on our tongues any longer. Both of the children were pale and had their father’s name, and we wondered if everything that was good in Sarah had died with her.
*
Jenny Archer nearly died crawling to freedom. She was twelve when the walls got their barbed wire headdresses. That was when we could no longer fool ourselves into believing the wall was there for our protection. The night she got out, the wall gave her a mark on the right side of her abdomen she wore until she died. That night, the mark slowed her down, and for a while it kept her from finding a husband. But in the end she was grateful for it. In the shower or at the beach she’d see it as if for the first time and remember the first quarter of her life and how different the later three had turned out and couldn’t help but be proud of all she had done to get far away from us, so proud she wished the family history could come to a glorious end with her.
*
Luke Archer had been brought up to think he was his sister’s keeper. After she left he strained to imagine what else he should be. When soldiers passed through, he had bragged to Jenny about how he would fight them, or maybe enlist. Both seemed pointless now. The problem, he decided, was that he craved an audience he’d never get back. So he went to live in the woods, knowing that some people who went there ended up holy. He ate mostly mushrooms. Some of the mushrooms made him sick and some gave him visions. During one vision he fell into a cave painted in red and purple wolves, and when he woke up he told himself he’d imagined everything. In winter and on holy days he would come back to town. The barmen would get him drunk for free, and he’d flirt with girls named Ratner and Haber and be unable to remember why they looked so familiar. We would look at him enviously, this ordinary person who had reinvented himself as an idiot and found a way to ignore the tightening sound around us.
*
Dave Haber was too old to remember where his children were, or if he’d had any. His home was a corner of a house full of people, some who were related to him and some who were paid to work. A few times a day the TV screen, which was also a lamp, would cover itself in a static frost. He didn’t mind as long as light remained. More than anything else in his old age, he enjoyed the machine’s glow discovering shapes in the tobacco clouds. He felt he had lived an enjoyable life.
*
Lidia Archer-Bowles stood in a line that shook but did not move. The fluorescent lights that made the groceries glow forced her awake and made her study the mob behind her and the mob ahead. The same lights that were agreeable to fruits and boxes brought out the secret flaws in skin and hair. She knew this was time she should be using to learn to love her neighbors, but no love flowed from her to them, no matter how tightly she clenched her jaw. Years ago, she’d read that the average person spends six years waiting in line. This fact still excited her. Six glorious years with no company, no expectations but hers—in so much coiled emptiness she felt she was a pioneer setting out for another coast, and standing was its own adventure.
*
Harold O. Ratner could not remember who had told him the advice he lived his life by. Possibly nobody had told him and he had made it up. But it helped him accumulate three chairmanships, twenty-three grandchildren, fifteen honorary degrees, four wives, eight children, three children who spoke to him, one patent, fifty-eight million dollars not stashed in offshore accounts, four gold watches, and of course the little brass award that had started it all. The advice he’d heard, or thought he’d heard, was, “Whatever you do, do it like the whole world is watching.”
*
When Jordan Ratner-ArcherBowles was twenty-six he inherited his father’s dollars and accounts, watches and chairmanships, patent and little brass award. In the wide, blue millisecond before he fell asleep, the money would speak to him, but he could never remember what it had said.
*
Every three to five years, Lucy Ratner Archer Bowles vacationed from the famous syllables of her name. When she came back, she would reshuffle them until she had something different enough to take pride in but similar enough to remember drunk. She died the only Ratner Archer Bowles there was or had ever been and divided her name evenly between her three heirs.
*
Jordan Ratnerarchibald met his grandfather exactly twice, both times in hospitals—the hospital where he was born and the hospital where his grandfather died. The time he remembered, the building was packed with octogenarians science was too sluggish to save. Even his glorious grandfather could not buy a cure. Money can’t buy more life occurred to Jordan as a potential moral. But over the next few years the inability to buy life inspired him to try buying as much happiness as possible. By fifty-three his heart and kidneys were spent, and so was the toddler-dynasty of Ratnerarchibalds.
*
When she was old enough to understand her mother’s names, Jordan Bowles ran away. Twenty-seven years elapsed in fits of fear and nothing. When she came home, she found her mother in bed, inhaling through a machine. There was a worshipful look on her mother’s gray face, since this vacation beggared any of her mother’s. The central emotion of the rest of Jordan Bowles’s life was happiness of a spasmodic kind, like kicking in one’s sleep. She could not help but enjoy what she had denied herself for so long, and although there were guilt and self-hatred, neither could escape being smothered in happiness.
*
Sara Archer died birthing her child. She was a young, pink-skinned woman who’d wept as the doctor gave her the glorious news. Her husband had also wept. Their tragedy was connected, finger to hand, to a larger tragedy, which everyone in the country could see and few had the courage to talk about. It was wrong for a young person to die for having a child. It was enormous in its wrongness, almost beyond the horizon of thought. The greatness of the tragedy, set against its smallness in history, made it even smaller and even greater. Around Sara were other tragedies strewn like seeds on concrete, tragedies of stupidity more often than malice, although there was malice, too. Half the people wondered aloud what had become of such a glorious country, and the other half sneered, because they were afraid, at the word glorious and said no such place had ever existed or could exist and kept saying it like a chant.
*
Noah Ratner, the youngest child of Lucy Ratner Archer Bowles, studied the name of which he’d inherited a third. He wrote it and chanted it under his breath until it had lost most of its power. He plotted the name on a paper, so that he could see how it rolled down through the centuries, accumulating syllables. He made phone calls and visited library rooms the janitors never cleaned. He found he couldn’t stop. For most of his life he’d worried he was only interested in himself, and in this research project he’d assigned himself he could step outside himself and see how small he was. His research took him back home, here, over the wall that still divides our glorious country from the others. He walked through the woods where his ancestors had been happiest and most terrified. He drank at the tavern where they’d made the terrible mistakes that let him live, and we studied him, wondering how much he could smell after all this time. After a few drinks his face began to relax, and he stared out into the dark room, too tired to care that he was being watched, and the longer he sat the more he looked like the rest of us.