Listen to Me (13 page)

“Jesus,” said Mark. “Did it say that? Is that what the sign said?”

The exit was only a few hundred yards in front of them now.

“I didn't see any sign that said that. Are you sure you did?”

Of course he hadn't seen the sign. The highway was black. There were no streetlights and the sign wasn't illuminated. It had been a fluke—a ridiculous combination of quality headlights and serendipitous timing—that Maggie had seen it at all.

“Yes,” she said. “I'm sure.”

“Should I pull over?”

“I don't know,” said Maggie. She felt like a teenager. She felt she shouldn't be the one answering a question like that; felt he shouldn't have been asking in the first place. Why couldn't Mark show some confidence for once, some real wherewithal? It was draining sometimes, being always expected to be an equal in everything. She longed to be taken care of.

“I'll pull over,” he said. “That makes the most sense.” But he didn't sound convinced.

Mark steered the car to the right shoulder, the rear tires skidding, and came to a rough stop. To the left was the empty dark highway. To the right was a veritable rain forest filled with unknowns and unsavories. The sound of the hail was nearly deafening now.

Maggie turned again to look out the rear window. “Is this safe?” she said. “This can't be safe.”

It was true they hadn't seen another car since the hail had started, but all it would take was one truck, one semi with a driver asleep at the wheel, and they'd be a crumpled box of sardines.

“Let me see your phone,” said Mark.

She handed it to him.

“Where are we?”

She pointed.

“Here?”

“There.”

Mark held the phone closer to his face.

“I can't see anything,” he said. “Can't you zoom in?”

“I'll lose the original image,” she said. “Or I might and then what?”

Gerome, who had been sitting, now stood and took a step forward toward the front seat. Maggie scratched beneath his chin. “It's okay, boy,” she said. “You're a good monkey.”

Drool hit the center console.

Mark said, “Can you do something about him? Please? I'm trying to make sense of all this.”

“He's scared,” Maggie said. “The rain is so loud. He doesn't know why we're stopped.”

“Jesus—” Mark put an elbow into Gerome's chest and manhandled him into the backseat. “Just—Just get back. Sit down. Yes, sit. Sit. You know the word. That's right. Good boy. Good monkey. Shh. Yes. Now just—Yes. Good boy. Stay there. Good.”

Once the dog was repositioned and calmed, Mark turned to Maggie. He let out a deep breath and then switched on the overhead light. “What did the sign say exactly? Close your eyes. Tell me exactly.”

Maggie switched the light off. Mark turned it on again. Maggie switched it off and—against her better judgment—let slip, “But they'll see.”

Mark cocked his head. Even in the darkness, she saw him do it—the same slow deliberate cock as whenever he caught her at something less than ideal: canceling an appointment, overcooking a steak, walking the dog in her robe.

“What do you mean:
They'll see?
What do you mean by that?”

Maggie shook her head. “I didn't say that.”

“You did.”

“I didn't mean anything by it.”

“But you did, Maggie. You meant something.”

Maggie shook her head more aggressively. She was desperate to get going again. She was desperate for Mark to put the car in gear and take the exit—reentry or no—and get them to a hotel. A safe, dry, quiet hotel with doors that locked and windows that closed and (
oh god
) what she wouldn't give just to have time speed up! She would trade anything for the sun suddenly to rise, for the darkness to immediately give way, for the rain simply to stop. As easy as changing a channel. Just let it be tomorrow already.
I'll give anything,
she thought.
A baby. A firstborn baby. Anything. I'll make a deal with the devil. You name it; I'll give it.

From the backseat, Gerome let out a moan, half whistle, half sigh. He too was anxious for tomorrow.

“I just meant . . .” Maggie sought to explain, but she couldn't. To clarify—to correctly elucidate what she'd meant—she would have to go too far back. She would need to begin with childhood and imagination and the way, on occasion, she had indulged in letting her mind wander: the thought of a minor break-in turned a hideously bloody event; the notion of a car crash that saved a squirrel but left her family lifeless and limbless only blocks from their home; the idea of a kidnapping in which she, Maggie, was tortured, abused for years. She would have to explain how the fantasies had made her feel. But in order to do that, she'd have to find a way of expressing the disturbing chemistry of fear and attraction. She'd have to admit that the fantasies which led to the fear—or the fear which led to the fantasies; she didn't know; she was stymied even now!—she'd have to concede they felt
good.
She had liked, as a child, the way her heartbeat would quicken and her body's temperature would rise and fall abruptly, a dizziness akin to fainting. She had liked the night sweats and the way her skin felt sticky between her T-shirt and stomach. She'd enjoyed all of it, every bit of it, and she couldn't as a child shut a fantasy down until she'd let it reach its natural, most punishing resolution—a sort of orgasm, though she'd never have been able to describe it as such back then. But she couldn't shut it down until she'd pushed it so far that she was sure—quite sure, quite deliciously and deliriously positive—that no one in the world had ever imagined her particular fantasy before.

She thought she'd gotten past all this; she thought she'd grown out of it, away from it. She'd gone to college, to vet school, gotten married, opened her own clinic. She'd become an adult, given up her fantasies. She felt a true participant of the world. She enjoyed her interactions with other people. But there'd been that night in the alley—
Lady. Lady.
—and her sense of security had fluttered, a receipt resting unguarded on a windowsill. She'd done as she was told: she went to a therapist, took a Valium here and there, meditated most mornings, and then, just as she'd sensed herself recuperating, returning to the woman she'd miraculously grown into, those detectives had shown up with photos of the coed, and any sense of renewed security had finally flitted off, the receipt picked up gingerly on a breeze and carried effortlessly away, at first within reach, but then out, then gone. The lurid fantasies had returned overnight—the fantasies and the night sweats.

Saying this to Mark—saying it to anyone, really, including her therapist—was madness, sheer madness. She couldn't stomach the thought of being regarded as some nineteenth-century parlor maid who claimed ghosts in the pantry. The thought of being dismissed, of being dismissible at all, made Maggie quiver with anger.

Of course, she might have tried to laugh away her morbid adolescent fantasies—
Ha! Ha! Ha!
—to laugh away her habit as a childhood peculiarity, but Mark would have seen through the effort—
heard
through the effort—and so she knew not to try.

Oh, snap out of it!

She reached up and switched on the overhead. Mark's expression was soft, tender. Not an ounce of the displeasure she'd been so quick to assume.

“I was being hysterical.” She was matter-of-fact. “I don't know what else to say.”

She gestured toward the overhead lights and shrugged. “No one can see us because no one is around,” she said. “I'm not crazy. I'm just wound up.”

Mark put a hand to her cheek.
Good husband. Best husband.
He stroked her skin with his thumb. “You scare me sometimes,” he said.

The sky was a garbage truck of sound, the hotel still another twenty miles from the exit—once they finally took it,
if
they finally took it—and sunrise still so many hours away. Yet Mark was scared of Maggie? It was enough to make her laugh. Though of course she knew better.
Of course I know better.

“Is this our exit?” he said at last. “Is that what you think?”

Maggie nodded. He took his hand away from her cheek. She trembled in her seat.

“Then it doesn't matter that there's no reentry.” He flipped off the overhead. “All it means is that tomorrow we have to take different back roads out of here. Instead of spitting us out where we are now—Wait. Here. I'll show you.” Mark turned on Maggie's phone. A tiny spray of light hit his chin so that his nose cast a funny shadow across his lips, almost as if he had no mouth at all.

“See this baby road up here?” Mark said.

Maggie wasn't looking at the screen. It didn't matter anymore.

“Right here,” he said. “This is where we'll reenter the freeway, and it looks like we'll make some progress when we do it. It looks like we'll ultimately come out ahead.”

          The road was narrow. Mark was still driving. Once they had taken the exit and the turn off the exit and then the turn off the turn off the exit, they'd started a slow ascent into the mountains. The road they were on now was more slender than the last. There was so much tree cover that the rain seemed almost to have lightened. Or maybe it actually had lightened. Maybe the second storm was finally passing. Or was it the third? The branches—thick with wet lush leaves—were low, lower than they should have been because of the water weighing them down.

There were limbs in the road. Limbs, leaves, debris, beer cans. Mark knew Maggie would be concentrating on the beer cans. There were no houses, no signs of life, but there were beer cans. He knew what she was capable of doing with that sort of evidence—hunters up to no good, terrorists hiding in the hills, kidnappers building their next torture bunker. Maybe she'd always been this way. Maybe he'd overlooked it, which would make it his fault in a sense. Perhaps she hadn't changed at all. Perhaps he'd finally started paying attention. It made him sad for them both.

When he was a boy, Mark would sometimes find himself filled up with indignation, with what he'd call now an animal sort of fury. It came from nothing, out of nowhere. He'd be walking in the woods, kicking sticks or jumping on twigs, and he'd suddenly feel a hot rush come over his entire body, like a blanket soaked in boiling water then wrapped abruptly and tightly around him. He'd throw himself to the ground when he felt it, fists and feet pummeling the dirt, tearing apart the leaves, terrifying the branches. Anything he could touch he destroyed.

Later, a teenager, when he finally discovered Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau—those men who understood isolation and what it was not just to be alive, but to be human, to be a man and in nature—he diagnosed those early fits of fury as the Grown Man Inside, the Man Already a Man, trapped in the small boy's body. When, as a teenager, the temper returned—as it often did, though he'd many years earlier learned to stop throwing himself to the ground—he began to visualize this man who was inside, the man responsible for the wrath. He found that the image calmed him. He further discovered that he could control the image—not necessarily the man—but if he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough, he could take the picture of this man (this future iteration of himself, fully realized) and make him move. He could, for instance, will the man to jump up and down, punch the air, punch the earth, fling himself to the ground in Mark's stead.

He considered the man his grown-up twin, dressed always in whatever flannel or sweatshirt Mark happened to be wearing on a particular day. Back then, he'd taken the man very seriously. On the one hand, he fully understood him to be a figment of his own imagination. On the other, he believed the man to be a very real indication of what he—Mark—was destined one day to become. He believed that he had walked through one of those hidden doorways in the brain that only the very special ever entered. Not only had he found the door, but he'd opened it and gone inside and met himself. It was a part of the brain that only geniuses and outliers accessed. This was something Mark believed absolutely as a teenager.

Now, as an adult, he wasn't sure what he believed. He knew to laugh at the idea of an imaginary adult version of himself dressed identically to his teenage self (the flannel shirt, the baggy khakis). At the same time, the man—now more a shadowy outline—still came in useful with his adult fits of anger. From time to time, when necessary, he was still able to close his eyes, conjure the figure, and have it lasso all the ire swirling about in the blackness of his mind. Just now, for instance, weepy willowy Maggie at his side, Mark was imagining the shadowy outline: arms above his head, legs planted squarely in the terra firma of Mark's brain matter, mouth wide open and screaming for his life.

It struck him that Maggie was saying his name, perhaps had been saying his name for quite some time.

“Are you paying attention?” she asked. “Mark? Are you paying attention?”

Without realizing, Mark had brought the car to a halt at the world's smallest, darkest intersection. The road they were on had come to an abrupt end. In front of them was dense dark forest and in front of that a tiny green sign—illuminated now by their headlights—with one arrow to the right and one arrow to left. There were no route numbers, no road names. Just two arrows—right or left—in case you couldn't see that straight ahead was nothing but trees and brush and early summer overgrowth.

“Are you paying attention?” she said again. “Do you want me to drive?”

As if Maggie would trade places with him.

As if she'd get out of the car and shuffle her way around to the driver's side at this time of night.

As if.

“I'm waiting for you to direct me,” he said.

Maggie didn't say anything. She was looking at her lap now, looking at her tiny glowing screen. He cracked his knuckles. All these people all the time shining a light at their faces, voluntarily giving into the machine, voluntarily zapping their own brain cells. He could practically see his wife getting dumber. Right now. At this exact second, he could picture the brain cells being zapped by the ambient blue light. Jesus, and she hadn't even been raised on the Internet. She'd been raised on books, on paper and pens just as he had. But she'd succumbed. Somewhere along the line—before the mugging, after the mugging, did it matter?—she'd succumbed to the media, to the devices, to the wires and webs and whole wide world of Internet make-believe.