Listen to Me (20 page)

Maggie removed the needle.

All at once, she gasped, then threw the needle aside. She put her hands suddenly to her face and slumped into a little heap at Gerome's side.

Mark sat there, helpless.

          It was fully light out now. Still morning, but light out. The hotel was an ugly double-decker affair made of cinder blocks and brick. It was situated on a small hill, in what appeared to be some sort of office park, a vestige from a time when the town believed it was capable of more. But it was just a foolish little mountain town; there was nothing any more or less special about its views and streams or rocks and pebbles than any other piddly municipality in West Virginia in the middle of nowhere. No, there was nothing special or frightening or interesting at all about Black Crows Hill, except this was where their dog had died. How stupid.

Maggie took a sheet from their hotel room, which, in the light of day, was nondescript and mockingly harmless. She went out the back way but not because she cared about the petite clerk girl or her oafish boyfriend and what they might say. They could charge her double, triple.

She was careful not to let the sheet drag along the parking lot. She wanted it clean for Gerome. He would have liked that it had her smell on it—her smell and Mark's—even from a few hours' worth of sleep.

Just as she wasn't worried about what Tina or Pete might say if she'd been caught taking the sheet, neither was she worried about the fabric of the car. As she made a bed in the backseat with the sheet, she wasn't thinking about the leather, she was thinking about Gerome. It wasn't a matter of comfort at this point—he was dead, there was no changing that—but there was the matter of respect: respect for his body, respect for what he had been to them. A constant. An old pal. A faithful trouper. A total Loyalist.

Using the front and back headrests, she created a sort of hammock out of the sheet, which she imagined—if Gerome were still alive—would have felt to him like some wonderful hug all along his body. She was aware, as she tested to make sure the sheet would stay in place, of Mark watching. She wasn't angry with him. She'd meant it when she said it wasn't his fault. Things would be difficult for a while. She knew that. He'd blame himself even if she didn't. But something good would come of all this. Even if she had to root around in filth and muck, she would find the goodness. She owed it to Gerome. She would be better, calmer. She would pick up more hours at the clinic—they'd name one of the rooms after Gerome, in his memory. She'd get back to the gym. She'd take up cooking again. Hadn't she once loved to cook dinner for Mark? Starting in Virginia, starting with these couple months at the farm with Mark's parents, she'd give up the Internet. Yes. This was the place to start. She'd give up the Internet, and she'd find polite ways to get out of watching the morning news with Robert. She'd do some gardening with Gwen. Plus there were the horses and golf. She'd do all this, and Mark would be buoyed by her pluck.

She couldn't yet think about the return drive home, but once back in Chicago she would get rid of every hidden stash of pills, every hoard of would-be weaponry. She blushed just thinking about all the hiding places—the can of mace at the bottom of the toilet paper basket, the little contraband switchblade in the silverware drawer that she'd ordered off eBay and had shipped to the clinic. It was almost funny how quickly things were coming into view—how she could suddenly see so clearly just how fearfully she'd been living. The fact of the matter: Maggie wasn't the coed and the coed wasn't Maggie. Two different men, two different crimes, two different women, two different outcomes. It was all a matter of luck, life was. You could beg all you wanted for protection, you could pray or not pray to a god or to a devil, but what it all came down to was a simple game of chance.

When Maggie was satisfied that the hammock would hold, and after she'd tucked and retucked the sheet in all the right places, she turned to Mark.

“Do you think you can pick him up?”

He nodded.

“I'll help situate him from the other side,” she said.

Mark bent down in front of Gerome. For a moment, he just knelt there, his fingers resting on the dog's muzzle. Then he pushed his hands under the dog's back and scooted him into the crook of his arms with a gentle bounce. He stood up slowly. He was being so careful. Maggie felt grateful for him just then, grateful that there was someone else who cared as much as she.

“Are you ready?” she said.

Mark was at the car, Gerome still balanced perfectly in his arms. One day—it was too soon to think about now—but one day there would be another dog. There had to be.

Mark nodded again, and together—as softly as they could—they installed Gerome in the backseat.

To anyone looking down, looking in, the sheet might have seemed a simple dog bed, and Gerome just a sleeping dog, waiting to get where his owners were going.

          Maggie took the driver's seat. Mark didn't argue. From somewhere in the hotel she'd procured a small map of the Virginias. She folded it open to the appropriate section and drove them expertly down and out of the mountain and back to 64.

A plump sun was firmly in the sky by the time they reentered the highway. The big rigs were already on the road. The day was fully underway. Mark would never tell her about the truck or the sedan, what he'd seen, how it had happened. He would never mention that sickly swollen breast, the man who feared Mark a predator, the family—families?—too poor to pay for a hotel.
You some sort of perv?
The question had hit him like a fist to the gut. Unintentionally—oh, how this would have disappointed Maggie!—he had stepped into the role of villain. It didn't matter that he'd been equally frightened by them. They couldn't sense his fear. “People don't seem to mind their business like they used to.” Maggie had said so just the day before! And now he'd gone and invaded another family's space; treated the parking lot as an extension of his own property; challenged another's right to exist. His motivations might have been pure, but his actions—at least as perceived by that man, that woman, whoever else was camping out there with them—were entirely intrusive. In trying to be useful, Mark had overstepped; in overstepping, he'd ended their dog's life. He shuddered to think where those people might be now: huddled and hungry and scared, no doubt, in the cramped compartments of their too-hot automobiles.

Maggie turned on the radio and rolled down the windows. Gerome didn't yet smell, but soon he would. Before they reached the farm, there would be an odor, but the would-be odor was the least of their woes.

The talk on the radio was all about the storm, about its aftermath. Dozens of cities were without power, thousands of people were dangerously low on potable water, hundreds of homes had been destroyed. It was unclear how many had died. The deejay sounded jazzed, not saddened by the possibility that the number might be severe. Politicians were continuing to weigh in. They were already thinking about the next election.

Except for the people they'd impacted, Katrina had been forgotten, Sandy had been forgotten, and this storm too would eventually be forgotten. Next month a new horror story would unfold and the month after that a newer one. Next winter there'd be a typhoon and the summer following there would be an earthquake. After that, a tsunami would hit.

Just recently a pal at Penn had conducted a study about violence in movies and the tenuous nature of the MPAA's rating system. In only fifteen minutes, during which time hundreds of bloody clips out of context were shown, parents had gone from being outraged by the cruelty to being irked to being indifferent. Fifteen minutes.

Humans—every single one of them—would become more and more immune to the news. Soon they would be able to watch a beheading without flinching. Mark could see the future clear as day. The world, and Maggie, and one day even he would lose the ability to be horrified.

Evil—sometimes anonymous, sometimes known—not only existed, it thrived. It was in their neighborhood in Chicago, and it was at the gas station outside Indianapolis, and according to that family in the parking lot, it was there inside him too, which meant it was everywhere. The Internet would continue and technology would advance. It was just a matter of time. They were all headed in the same downward direction. There was no generosity of spirit. It had been bred out. Just look at Mark. The slap he'd supposedly heard, those words—“stop,” “no”—they had existed without context. It was Mark who'd filled in the dirty explanation as it suited him. Where was his generosity? Gone. He'd used his biased imagination to color in the missing pieces: they were poor; they were inbred, so necessarily there was abuse, neglect.

Do you think,
Maggie had asked not twenty-four hours earlier,
that you willfully see the worst in people?

His honest answer: Not willfully. But accidentally—perhaps intuitively—yes, he did. He understood that now.

Take away technology, and evil would still be there because goodness had evaporated. Mark and Maggie could recite poetry all they wanted, but the shepherd boy was dead. Elizabeth's egoism—her privilege, her cockiness—it wasn't valiant. It was churlish. And he'd been naïve to be attracted to it in the first place. This was the true condition of man—
nasty, brutish, and short
.

At least he had Maggie. That's one thing he felt sure of. Another? That she'd been right all along: People were shit, including him. They were all on the decline, a steep and fast decline. But they—he and Maggie—were on it together, battling the storm in the same defenseless boat. They had no chance of defeating it, of course. But they could try. From Maggie, he could learn to be better. Realizing his complacency was the first step.

Except . . .

If nothing was permanent . . .

If everything ended . . .

Then mightn't this current trend end as well? Wasn't there the possibility that they could wait it out? Noah waited out the flood, didn't he? Or so the story went, which was all that mattered—the stories people told, because it was from the stories that they learned; it was in the past that they saw the future. Wasn't there the very likely prospect that people would one day—perhaps even soon—tire of the constant noise, the tell-all blogs, the endless media rotations?

They passed a sign for Beckley. Soon, their car would cross the state line. They were less than two hundred miles from Charlottesville. They would be able to bury Gerome before rigor mortis set in. In an hour or so, when they stopped for gas, Mark would get out his phone and call his mother. He'd do it while Maggie was in the bathroom so that she wouldn't have to hear the banal specifics of the conversation. He'd tell her the gist of what had happened. He'd keep it brief, straightforward. He'd have Gwen instruct Robert to get to work on a grave; they'd probably need to get the backhoe out in order for the hole to be deep enough. He'd tell her to have him dig it in the shade garden, under the rope swing, where Gerome preferred to spend his afternoons. They'd bury him with a few of his favorite toys—his grasshopper, his rabbit. But he'd caution Gwen and Robert from being overly maudlin. Maggie wouldn't like it. They'd give her space, as much space as she needed.

He leaned his head back against the leather. Only a few hours earlier, they'd made love. He and his wife. He and his Maggie. They hadn't used a condom. Normally they were so careful. Had she forgotten intentionally? Had he? He sat up a little.
Good god,
he thought.
What if?
He couldn't remember the last time he'd entertained a new idea so cleanly. Like a pebble in his mouth, he moved the idea around, getting to know its unfamiliar edges and lines, its bends and curves.

He tried to imagine the next few weeks. He tried to imagine not the imminent burial but the days afterward: meals he'd cook with his mother; the inevitable talks with his father about the state of the university; drives through the country he'd take with Maggie. He'd fill a cooler with a six-pack of Mexican beer and a sliced-up lime, and they'd drink and drive on the private roads the way Maggie always liked.

And maybe—who knows?—he'd go ahead and broach the subject, the possibility. He'd say, “Even if it doesn't happen now, accidentally, maybe we should think about doing it deliberately. What do you think?”

He imagined all the ways—so many, so easily—he could become (
and would!
) a better husband, a better son, and, perhaps, a better person. There would be fewer things to regret in the future, because there would be fewer mistakes.

He looked at Maggie, at her fine tight skin, her patrician jaw. They weren't too old. They really weren't. Not yet. He glanced down at her shirt, just below her breasts. Maybe (
Ludicrous! But maybe!
) there was a little human in there—well, a microscopic egg, not yet a human—but maybe there was an egg, and maybe that egg had been fertilized by a sperm and morphed into a zygote. Maybe even now her body was transforming.
Goddamn!
Everything really could serve a purpose. It
could:
the world could right itself; the decline could plateau then twist and rise; and Mark could believe: inside, somewhere hidden in Maggie's womb, waiting, not yet known, not yet knowable, there was a baby and a change and a chance for a different future. It was possible.

Anything is possible.

The offered definition of
auto
is an amalgamation of entries culled from the
Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster
, and Apple's Dashboard Dictionary application.

The translation of Homer in the epigraph is my own. (Thanks, St. John's College!)

The following is a list of endlessly useful articles and books on which I relied to learn about everything from cloud factories to tornadoes: