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On the day they discovered Souhan, Minnesota, Lucy was counting back from 12,310 by seventeens. She’d started first thing that morning, even before opening her eyes, in the tense moments between the blare of the NPR Morning Edition trumpets and the change in Joe’s breathing, the slither of his waking legs. Lucy had made arbitrary counting a habit on days like today, inspired by a trick in some worthless women’s interest magazine to stave off early Alzheimer’s. By the time Joe turned the water on, she was at 12,208. When she caught a whiff of his cloying aftershave seeping through the bathroom door, she’d made it to 12,072. She reached 11,919 while making faces in her makeup mirror, wondering what it meant to have “hooded eyelids.” She didn’t consider asking Joe.

11,800 came as she stepped into the kitchen. She stood at the sleet-streaked window while her morning oatmeal cooled in the microwave, watching cars and dog-walkers scurry along the city street below. The roads would be treacherous, she thought. They were heading Up North to meet a group of Joe’s colleagues and their spouses, avid cross-country skiers who sometimes left their urban paradise to play at cabin life.

Joe asked her a question—something about “snow,” maybe—but Lucy knew he wouldn’t expect a response. She had hardly realized he was there, sipping Italian coffee at his accustomed place at the kitchen table. His stylish Mirò mug left brown rings on the zebra-striped pages of the New York Times that bloomed out beneath his elbows. Joe made a comment about some irrelevant piece of news—a new CEO, a senatorial sex scandal, a small African nation’s civil unrest. Lucy found it easy to pretend he wasn’t there.

11,562.

Four hours behind the wheel passed uneventfully, save for the secret tension between Joe’s radio stock reports and Lucy’s private intervals of seventeen. Lucy basked in silent triumph when the frequency gave way to white noise and static-laced country music somewhere around 2,382.

The dusk grew in shades of purple and orange, like the landscape of Mars on the cover of a science fiction book. Lucy tried to picture wild things roaming in the trees that lined the highway, but knew that the thin veil of jackpines was too insubstantial to keep any real secrets. Then again, she thought, corpses sometimes lie for months in grassy ditches by the road before anyone finds them. She kept her eyes peeled.

Joe coughed. 2,229.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said. It was her first lie of the day.

Outside, the dark things stirred and hummed. Joe clenched the steering wheel. “What?”

“Pull over. I have to go to the bathroom.”

When she squinted, Lucy could see a nascent bead of sweat pushing through the pores on Joe’s forehead. “We just passed a rest stop. There won’t be another for twenty miles.”

Just beyond the glare of the headlights, an unidentifiable rodent hulked across the road. “I have to go now,” she said, emboldened. “Pull over somewhere.”

“There’s nothing around. You want to pee in the woods?”

Anxiety crept into his voice. “You always do this.”

2,127. A smile tugged at the corners of Lucy’s lips, but she twisted it away. “I have to go.”

Joe signaled and pulled off onto a dirt road intersecting the highway.

“Farther in.” It was almost cruel. “I don’t want anyone to see me.”

1,974. She left Joe in the climate-controlled interior of the Audi, reveling in the kiss of sporadic snowflakes on her cheek. Tick-ridden grass tickled her ankles and knees as she picked her way down the slope. She stopped at the edge of the jackpines, scanning the tall grass for dead bodies.

A car horn blasted behind her, startling a bird.

Lucy glared over her shoulder. “Don’t look!”

She stepped behind the nearest pine and gripped her belt with no real intention of taking it off. There was something in the woods, something stark and architectural and absolutely human. A house. Her face flushed with excitement.

“1,923.” She knew it was next without considering the math. Dry leaves crackled with each step she took into the murk.

“Lucy? What are you doing?”

She was hitting her stride now. The numbers came as easily as one foot in front of the other. Not just a barn—a series of buildings emerged from the darkness. 1,804. Was that Joe traipsing after her? She’d get there first. The forest thinned again. She pushed her way into a tangled clearing. 1,736.

SOUHAN

It was painted in rusty brown block letters on a billboard standing beside the pebbly evidence of a long-disused road.

SOUHAN, MINNESOTA:

POP. 384

SIT A SPELL IN SOUHAN!

Past the splintering road sign lay the remains of the town, decayed and torn open like picked-over roadkill. Crumbling stucco, picket fences wrenched apart, fallen wood and tile. A service station like something out of “Gasoline Alley” with all its windows boarded up. Half a church with a caved-in roof full of sparrows. The cement foundations of a few houses, one still standing beside its burnt-out garage.

1,481.

“Lucy!”

Lucy didn’t believe you had to respond to someone just because he addressed you by name, but she didn’t move away when Joe came up beside her. He was breathing heavily, puffily into the cold. “What the hell are you doing?”

Another time she might have enjoyed the suspense, but now she didn’t care about anything but broken stairs and chipping yellow paint. By the still-standing house, the blackened outline of the charred garage shivered in the wind, a gnawed-at-thing. 1,192.

Joe was repeating her name, two bleating syllables that distracted Lucy from her arithmetic. Throw him a bone, she thought. It’s only fair. “This place…”

Language calmed him, restored him to authority. “It probably died out when they built the highways,” he said. “Happened to a lot of towns up here in the fifties and sixties, if they weren’t close to the roads. I bet you no one’s been here for half a century.”

It was this kind of worthless commentary that made subtraction difficult. She drew away from him instinctively. 1,090.

“Lucy—stop, stop already. What do you think you’re doing?”

Quiet, relentless snow slowly settled on the odd surfaces of mangled wood. One of the front windows of the house was broken, and a brown-stained curtain fluttered weakly behind it. “I’m counting,” she said. Had she meant to whisper? 988.

“What did you say?”

It must be unbearable. She said, “Let’s go inside.”

Joe tried to grab her hand, but she was already out of reach. The front steps of the house bent beneath her weight, already slippery with the new snow. The doorknob burned winter-metal cold against her bare skin.

Lucy expected the air inside the house to be sour and foul, but it was just gritty and slightly sweet, like a stale Nilla Wafer. She made her breathing soft and shallow, trying not to disturb the perfect coat of ancient dust that covered everything in sight. 818.

The front door opened into a small living room, empty except for the lumpy mass of a low sofa with a faded rose print slipcover, a coffee table propped up on yellowed phonebooks, a broken glass, and a cobwebby pair of industrial-grade rain boots lined up neatly in a corner. To the left, the room gave way to a small kitchen dominated by a gigantic tan Frigidaire with the kind of massive door that used to suffocate small children playing hide-and-seek. Plastic turquoise plates balanced in the rusting sink, covered in fossilized tomato sauce and dry lengths of spaghetti twined together like limbs under the covers.

Joe breathed heavily as he pushed in behind her, but Lucy wasn’t surprised. She knew he wouldn’t worry about unsettling the grit of untold years. 444. He spoke so loudly Lucy found it hard not to hear him. “I just want to look around,” she heard herself say, moving toward the staircase.

Lucy dodged a question as she climbed the stairs, trailing her pointer finger up the dark wooden railing. Her math was improving. 342, 325. She pressed her palm against a greasy handprint glistening on the graying walls a few steps up, measuring herself against the ghostly deposit of bodily oils. Lucy wondered if it were the imprint of historic pleasure, smacked into the wall in a moment of organic release, or the sweaty dent of forgotten rage threatening the foundations of the home. Both possibilities excited her; she turned to Joe.

“Be careful, that might be lead paint,” he said from the bottom of the stairs. “Come back here and wash your hands.”

Lucy didn’t want to wash her hands. She wanted to inhale the asbestos fumes, bathe in the grime of rusty pans and rotting wallpaper, feel the carpet of dust like silty snow beneath her feet. It was getting harder to remember the multiples of seventeen. 223—or had she counted that before? A water-stained painting of a lamb with a daisy chain necklace hung on the wall halfway up the stairs. There must have been children here, once. A family. At the top of the stairs was a closed bedroom door.

Joe caught her hand. “What is this about?” he said. “Is this about us?”

Lucy turned around, looking at him with eyes made raw and bleary by the haze of allergenic particles. Even her mild interest cowed him like a vicious reproach. 121. “We’re great together now, that’s what matters, right?” The squirming, writhing thing within him was speaking. “We don’t need to… It wouldn’t change anything. It’s only symbolic nowadays.”

All around her the empty house fussed, with the plaintive creaks and muffled groans of warping wood. Maybe Joe couldn’t hear it over the sound of his own voice, maybe he was trying not to listen. Was he still holding her arm? 70.

Maybe if she screamed, he would let her go. The landing of the second floor was three steps away. The bedroom doorknob was made of brass worn away by years of clutching.

36. She tried to pull away, but he held her fast. “You don’t really want me to ask you. Did you expect me to?” 19.

2.

Lucy’s stomach churned grotesquely. The remainder lingered like an awful aftertaste. “No,” she said, “I didn’t.”

Numberless, there was nothing left to fill her mind but the million airborne specks of dust swarming around them, between them. She cleared the choking dust from her throat, rubbed her stinging eyes with two dirty fingers. Joe waited at the bottom of the stairs as she wiped her hands on her jeans, adjusted her belt, zipped up her ski jacket, brushed the bits of dirt and melting snow out of her hair.

“Come on,” he said.

Placid as a child, Lucy let him lead her down the dingy steps, past the straining handprint, over the graying carpet, out the groaning door, and into the empty night. The snow had accumulated a couple inches since they’d stopped the car. The night things were on full prowl. They crept away by moonlight, hand in hand, leaving footsteps that would disappear by morning.