Foe

by Iain Reid

Fortunate conscription?

You show up here, at my home, I say, out of the blue, and you announce that I might have to go? Regardless of what I want to do? You think that after all this time living here with Hen, I might actually have to leave? I never asked for this. This isn’t normal.

In the end, we decided to build our own planet, as it were, our own space station.”

“Do you feel upset? Scared? Blindsided?” No, no, no, I say. I’m fine.

I can hear the crickets and critters in the canola.

When the car pulled up, before Terrance got out, you said, “He must want something.” How did you know it was a man in the car? “Is that what I said?” Yeah, it is.

But slowly, she began to return to the real Hen, the Hen I know, her normal self. That’s what time does. It ushers a return to equilibrium.

Existence is achievable? I say.

You’re in the fishbowl, yes. But so am I! We’re in it together.”

I don’t want Hen to feel neglected, but I do like the extra seclusion out here, how I experience time on my own.

“Intention really does matter,” he says.

Anybody can remember details if you ask them to, I say, but it doesn’t mean it actually happened that way.

This is a joke, I say. I don’t want a robot look-alike coming to live with my wife.

I’m surprised to hear her say this again. She told me this once before, but I thought it would go away and never resurface. It’s hard to hear it didn’t just fade. I don’t get it. Hen loves the rural life.

I know you think you’re being nice when you say that you don’t know what you’d be without me, but I feel like I’m not here only to help you feel secure in your life, or to offer you support so you can then do whatever it is you want to do.

Sometimes I feel drained. Sometimes I feel trapped.”

Everyone needs to sleep, I say. “Is that what you think? Interesting.”

“Sleeping is interesting,” he says. “It’s not efficient. There’s always room to make people more efficient. Eating, communicating, sleeping—what if we didn’t need to do any of it?”

“There’s no way we could function if we didn’t forget the vast majority of new information we acquire throughout the day. In other words, Junior, we sleep so we can forget.” I consider what he’s just said. I don’t want to forget, I say.

Have you ever thought about traveling, Junior?” Traveling? You mean the nice kind of traveling, that I get to choose on my own, instead of being forced to leave our atmosphere because of an imposed lottery?

There are so many instances when I’ve expected you to understand how I’m feeling, and it just doesn’t happen. It’s so discouraging, draining.

Honestly, I rarely feel happy.

I want my own identity separate from being your wife. It’s just how it should be.”

So this is something I’ve been doing? I ask. It’s something I’m doing that’s making you feel this way? “It’s more something you haven’t been doing.”

“I’m feeling bad about what’s happening here. I haven’t said everything that I could have. I’m not supposed to. He might be listening to us right now, but it’s not fair to you.”

For almost everything, any object you can think of, there are too many. There’s only one you, and it’s miraculous.

I won’t tell her. For her own good. What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.

“You’re asking about what I went through?” She sounds so surprised. “I guess so, yeah,” I say.

“I won’t leave you again. Imagine if you’d heard about this as a little girl—that one day you would have a part in helping your man do something incredible, be part of something historic. It would have been hard to believe back then, right, Hen?”