Listen to Me (10 page)

Lately, though—and this was a phenomenon she was still puzzling out—she'd been turned off by the idea of sex in bed. It felt too intimate, too serious. Instead, she found herself increasingly turned on when, for instance, driving to get groceries. Or finishing up her day's notes at the clinic. Walking the dog, perhaps. Taking an elevator or brushing her teeth. She hadn't told Mark about her recent change in appetite. Not that she could guess his reaction. Maybe he'd be equally turned on by her admission; maybe he wouldn't. But she was worried by the possibility that he'd somehow find a way to take the change personally, which was the last thing she wanted. And so she'd kept her desires to herself, which meant recently there hadn't been as much sex as either of them would have liked. She had considered more than once bringing it up with her former therapist, but she could never settle on an appropriate opening.

Mark slid out of the booth with the tab in his hand and walked away. A moment later he was back.

“Do you have any cash?” he said.

“I have a couple hundreds in the car,” she said.

“Nothing smaller?”

“No,” she said. “Sorry. Just use the card.”

He shook his head. “No can do.”

“Why?”

He was avoiding eye contact. Never a good sign with Mark.

“Why?” she said again. She kept her voice steady, her gaze easy.

“The system is down,” he said.

“The system?”

“They've been running on a generator for the last fifteen minutes.”

Maggie looked out the window. She couldn't see Gerome, which meant either he'd been taken—which of course he hadn't, she wasn't a complete nitwit—or he was conked out. She looked back up at Mark, who was still standing there, looking down at the bill.

“What does that mean?” she said. “There's power. We have power here.”

“No,” he said. “They're offline. Everything is offline. The entire town is dark.”

“But—” Maggie looked again out the window. She looked this time past the car, past the parking lot. She looked into the deep expanse of darkness where golden bulbs at various heights and of incalculable degrees of intensity should have been twinkling and blinking and bright. What she realized was that the entirety of 35 was black. Not a single streetlamp was illuminated.

          They'd been back on the road for maybe ten minutes. Twenty max. They'd passed two hotels, both with their
NO VACANCY
signs lit up. Maggie thought there was power, but Mark explained it only meant more generators. Anyway, these were piece-of-shit places. Tiny holes-in-the-wall right on the highway like the Piney Inn Motel, or whatever it was. And neither Mark nor Maggie had even suggested they stop and make sure there wasn't a room. Maggie had offered to keep driving when they left the restaurant. She'd made a little show of it in fact: “Just give me the keys. I've had fewer than you.” But Mark insisted he take over. She wouldn't admit it, not to him, but the beer had gotten her tipsy. Her tolerance was essentially nonexistent. She said she was acting funny only because she was tired, but Mark knew better.

He glanced over at her, thinking she'd be passed out. But her eyes were open and she was looking down at her lap.

“What are you doing?”

“Reading,” she said. She waved her phone at him.

“What about?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Gerome was snoring. When they got back in the car, he didn't even wake up. It could have been anybody up there in the front seats and Gerome wouldn't have known the difference.

“It's hard to concentrate with you over there reading,” he said.

“Does the light bother you?”

The light didn't bother him. There was hardly any light at all coming from her little device. She'd turned the screen glow down. She was considerate like that.

“Fine,” he said. “Sure. Hit me. Read me something.”

Maggie turned the radio off. They'd been listening to modern country by default.

“Okay,” she said. “A group of teenagers—high school students—kidnap a college kid and torture him to death.”

“No,” he said. “Not that. Try again.”

“Okay,” said Maggie. She was quiet for a minute. “This is the story of a young woman who discovers her father has been videotaping her every time he rapes her, and it turns out she's essentially famous in the world of Internet pedophilia. Like, the most famous molested girl in the world.”

“Jesus,” he said. “No.” Where was she getting this stuff? He read the same papers she did. But he never came across articles like those. Or, if he did, he had enough sense to skip over them. “I don't want to hear about children getting hurt. Anything other than children getting hurt.”

“Okey-doke.” Maggie poked at her screen. “How about this? Google has issued a statement.”

They were always issuing statements—the big companies—and always about the smallest things. They were afraid they'd be forgotten if they didn't constantly update or reload.

“What kind of statement?”

“Their maps department is going to stop removing dead bodies from satellite images.”

Mark had no idea what she was talking about.

“I can read you the article,” she said.

“Maybe just a summary?” he said. “Maybe just the bare bones?”

Maggie was quiet a moment. He could see from the corner of his eye that she was looking at her lap again. Her index finger flicked vertically at her phone.

“Okay,” she said. “It's an apology-slash-statement.”

Of course it was.

“They set a precedent several years ago by removing that boy's body in Texas, and they're saying now that it was the wrong precedent to have set. They're saying now that it's impossible to remove all the bodies because there are too many.”

“What boy's body in Texas?”

“They're saying that the last hurricane makes it a precedent they can no longer live up to and—this is verbatim—
nor do we wish to continue to erase the realities of our planet's surface.
Can you believe that?”

No. He couldn't believe it.

He couldn't believe that such a thing existed. Why were there photos at all? Why was there a maps department at Google that had any authority to issue statements in the first place? Hadn't the world gotten along perfectly fine before satellite imaging? Did your everyday housewife really require access to professional-grade topological views of the earth? To the Internet at all? Jesus, just look at Maggie since the mugging, since the college girl. Look how quickly she'd gone from simple browser to consummate addict.

“Burglaries are up on the North Side,” Maggie said. “Want to hear about that?”

“Go for it.”

“And sexual assaults.”

It was exhausting—not Maggie, but the news itself. Lately—and this was something that didn't make him happy, didn't secretly fill him with joy—the two felt fused together. Maggie was the news and the news was Maggie. He missed his wife.

“A decade ago,” she was saying, “the theory was that men who raped were motivated differently from men who mugged. So you could get mugged and not worry about getting raped.”

“Are you reading this?” said Mark. “Or is this you talking?” He didn't like to take his eyes off the road, especially with it being so late and the weather being so unpredictable, but he was fairly certain she was going off book with all this.

A commercial truck came into view on the near side of the westbound lanes. Mark flashed his brights. The truck responded by turning on its high beams.

“Christ,” said Mark, squinting.

Maggie didn't say anything.

“I thought his brights were on,” he said.

Maggie still didn't say anything.

The truck passed. Mark rubbed his eyes, and again it was just them and their own headlights and the occasional streetlamp.

“Anyway,” said Maggie. “Now muggers are rapists, and rapists are muggers. There's no distinction. Terrorists are mass murderers, and school shooters are terrorists. Et cetera. Et cetera.” She was definitely off book. This was her brain. This was unfiltered Maggie trying to sew together bits and pieces of millions of different articles. This was Maggie hoping to make sense of a world in which she could be mugged by one man and then, nine months later, a neighbor could be raped and murdered by another. Two women. Two men. Two entirely different outcomes but somehow—improbably, unfairly—they both, Maggie and the college girl, wound up with nearly identical bruises on the backs of their necks. Only Maggie was still alive and her bruise had healed. Whereas now the college girl was dead and her bruise . . . had done whatever bruises did when people died. “If you can steal a wallet,” Maggie was saying, “why not also steal a fuck?”

Mark shook his head. For starters, he didn't like when she profaned. It wasn't natural. Sure, he had a bit of a sailor's mouth himself, that was true—and his students adored him for it—but on her, it sounded dirty. It sounded adolescent and unearned. But that wasn't even the point. The point was she was wrong about murderers being muggers and muggers being rapists. He knew she was wrong, but it wasn't worth it. It wasn't worth starting an argument that might last until morning. There was no way they were going to make it to the Blue Ridge tonight. They needed a hotel—sooner than later, actually, since his eyes were getting heavy—and the thought of being in a little shithole with his wife while they were both still stewing over some half-baked argument . . . Well, the thought made him want to weep.

“I'm good,” he said. “Thanks. No more articles for me, okay?”

He patted her thigh like he might pat Gerome's head. “Can you find me a new channel? Anything other than country.”

“Do you just want silence?”

“No,” he said. “I want to hear something.” He didn't like the idea of sitting there listening to her read to herself.

Maggie put her phone down and attended to the radio. She flipped through a few stations.

“Wait,” he said. “Go back.”

She went back.

“Stop,” he said. “There.”

“This?”

A man was talking. He had the telltale conviction of an evangelist.

“Yes,” he said. “Perfect.”

Maggie was looking at him. He could feel her face like a full moon in his periphery.

“You're actually interested in listening to this man?” she said. On the radio, the voice was explaining away dinosaurs and fossilization with Noah's flood.

“You don't think it's fascinating?”

Mark really did get a kick out of these people. To him, it was mesmerizing the way they rewrote history, working themselves into little frenzies over the most trivial things as they went along. Just then, for instance, the voice was telling the story of early settlers, who had apparently interviewed Indians—their words—who had apparently spoken of dinosaurs as a recent memory! The idea of Christians using the word of Indians as their proof—it was delightful. Utterly delightful! If only Maggie could find the humor in it, as she once, not too long ago, certainly would have.

“Fine,” Maggie said. “You win.”

She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.

“Win nothing,” he said. “It's not a competition.”

But lately—and this was the unhappy, undesired state of their current condition—it
was
a competition.

What was the joke his father was always telling about what happens when you play a country song backward?
You get your dog back, your wife back, your life back . . . ?
Well, that's exactly what Mark wanted back now: his Maggie, his marriage.
Goddamn it!
His life—as he'd once so transcendently been living it—he wanted it back!

          The first thing Maggie was aware of was her open mouth. She licked her lips, then ran her tongue along her gum lines until they were moist again.

The second thing she was aware of was a soreness at the base of her neck. She sat up, rolled her shoulders forward and back, back and forward. She opened and closed her mouth, re-licked her lips.

It was quiet in the car and dark, and it took her a minute to realize she wasn't in the driveway of Mark's parents' farm. In the early days, such things were possible. In the twelfth hour of the drive, Maggie could switch to the passenger seat, rest her head against the window for what she believed was merely a moment, then fall into a sleep so heavy, so deep that Mark would be unable to rouse her when they pulled into his parents' gravel drive. He'd been forced more than once to leave her there, in the passenger seat, until she woke on her own, usually close to morning, the neighbors' roosters her alarm. But this was before. This was long ago. This was back when sleep came fast and easy no matter where she was. They could pop in a video in the early days of their marriage, and she'd be out cold in ten minutes. Mark hadn't been miffed by it. He'd been, in fact, overjoyed. He used to say how good it made him feel—that his wife found such comfort in their life together that she could sleep through anything. She'd always liked this assessment of her patterns. She'd been as captivated by the idea as he. But in this last year, sleep had turned obstinate; the silence of the bedroom and the dark of midnight had become something to dread. In reexamining her relationship with the dark, she'd stumbled accidently onto a question she hadn't intended ever to consider: Did not the difficulty of sleep necessarily suggest a departure of the intense confidence she'd once had in her home life?

She cleared her throat.

This wasn't the time to pursue such dreary considerations because she was not now in Mark's parents' gravel driveway, where she should have been. Instead, she was—she realized as her eyes adjusted—in a parking lot, in the passenger seat of their car, alone. Almost alone. Gerome was in the back, sleeping. She could hear him breathing.