The Uses of Enchantment (22 page)

You’re going to lie to further your career, I said.

Telling assumption, she said. Do you remember writing English papers in high school?

I’m still in high school, I reminded her.

Sorry, she said. You seem so mature for your age.

Thank you, I said.

Did you happen to notice where I hid my ashtray? she asked.

I think you hid it in the top left drawer, under the file folders.

What I meant was, when I was in high school so very very very very very long ago, I realized that I could take any book and pair it with a thesis—let’s say I wanted to show that Hawthorne in
The Scarlet Letter
advocated genital mutilation—and I could write a paper proving that thesis. Then I could write an equally convincing paper proving that
The Scarlet Letter
was a scree against genital mutilation. Truth is created through logic, and logic can be used to prove that anything is true. In which case, truth seems a waste of time. Right?

Truth has always been a slippery fish, I said.

Which is why we might as well just give up on this whole “truth” thing, which is what every person learns the first time they get stoned. Why look for something that doesn’t exist? It’s like spending your life in search of Big Foot. Fun, maybe, you get to travel and collect a lot of cool tracking equipment. But at the end of the day you’ll have wasted your life on something that was never there to begin with.

If we’re not looking for truth, I said, what are we looking for?

I’m looking for a way to further my career.

And me?

You’re looking for the same thing.

I’m looking to further my career, I said.

We can help each other out, she said. I think that’s why you’re here.

I thought I was here because I needed help. Not you.

Mary laughed. People only help people when it helps them to do so.

That’s a very cynical worldview you’ve got, I observed.

That’s why you pay me the big bucks, she said.

Let’s say I agree with you, I said. Let’s say that I also think that truth is a waste of time if you want to get your point across. Let’s say I prefer, as already stated, acts of deceit.

Deceit is different than giving up on truth, she said. But go on.

Or not deceit, I said. But a situation that, logically, appears true. Let’s say that I tried to tell the truth and nobody heard me. Let’s say, then, that I’ve decided telling the truth got me nowhere. If I want anyone to listen to me, I have to construct a scenario that appears true, but isn’t.

That sounds like a lot of work, she said.

Maybe it’s worth it, I said. Maybe I want to be believed, even if I’m believed under false pretenses. Maybe being believed is that important to me.

I think you should try to care less about what other people think of you, she said. Who cares what they believe?

I’m in high school, I reminded her. I care about what other people think. Besides, I’ve been hurt. I’ve been hurt and I want my revenge. But it’s not for the reason you think.

Don’t tell me what I think. Mary said. I’m the doctor. I don’t need you telling me what to think.

It would be
understandable
if you thought that the hurt I was referring to was the incident with Kurt. The actual incident of sexual abuse.

Sexual abuse
. How dramatic.

Isn’t that what you’d call it? You doctors are always categorizing every little kiss as sexual abuse.

That’s because we’re bored, Mary said. But Kurt is a sad man. I suspect he was impotent in his marriage.

So Kurt
is
a sad man, I said. You understand this.

Mary didn’t respond.

Doctor?

I’m nodding, she said.

So you agree. You understand how Kurt couldn’t really inflict hurt upon me. After all, I’m a grown girl. If a man makes a pass at me, I might take it for flattery. As proof that I was desirable and attractive.

You are
incredibly
desirable and attractive, Mary said.

So the question is,
why am I hurt
, I said.

I’m asking the questions here, Mary said.

But don’t you agree that’s the question?

Mary didn’t answer.

Don’t you agree?

I’m shrugging, she said. I have a dubious look on my face.

Why dubious?

I feel trapped, she said. I feel like you’ve trapped me.

Ah, I said. I am an expert at trapping people. I thought you’d figured that out by now. Which is why, when I was hurt that my family didn’t believe me about the Kurt incident, I decided to trap them. I decided to trap them by playing on their worst fear.

What is their worst fear?

Their worst fear is losing me, I said. But they hide this fear behind more shallow concerns. They pretend to care about my purity. My unsoiledness. The overall whiteness of the world is threatened.

This must be resolved by whatever means possible, Mary said.

Exactly, I said.

I have an idea, Mary said.

You do, I said.

You have to close your eyes, she said.

They’re closed, I said.

Wait until I tell you to open them.

I heard the groan of the office chair, the near-soundless padding of her feet.

OK, she said. Open them.

Mary stood next to the couch wearing my suit coat, which she held open like a flasher. She had removed all other items of her own clothing except her socks, bra, and underwear.

Are you cured? she asked.

Put your clothes on, Mary.

That’s “Doctor” to you, she said.

I’m leaving the room now. Please put your clothes back on.

Score one point for the patient, Mary said.

Are we keeping score, I said.

Mary laughed.

It’s a game, she said. Of course we’re keeping score.

What Might Have Happened

W
hen the girl woke up, she was alone. The sun, a bleach stain upon the overcast sky, had nearly cleared the tops of the pine trees that closed in on her from all directions save the direction of the very narrow road.

Still half asleep, she turned her groggy attention to the mess at her feet—potato chips ground into the Mercedes’s carpet, a skull-shaped stain of spilled root beer. She could see her breath, which meant the man had abandoned her some time ago. He hadn’t left the car running, nor the heat. How inconsiderate, the girl thought to herself. Her man wasn’t shaping up as she’d hoped.

She opened the door and stepped into four inches of snow covering a partially frozen puddle. Immediately her field hockey cleats filled with icy water. Her calves and ankles tingled.

Hello, the girl called out.

Overhead, the trees sounded like brushes slipping through somebody’s coarse, heavenly hair.

Her anger turned to worry. To just up and leave her to freeze to death in her field hockey uniform did not seem like him. To leave her to be gnawed to death by wolves, discovered by a depraved snowmobile rider who would take liberties with her stiff if still inviting cadaver.

She circled the car, spotted footprints leading through the woods. To the left of the footprints, every four or five steps, was a minuscule drop of blood.

So he was hurt, she concluded, but not badly. His finger, most likely; he’d reopened his wound. He had gone into the woods, simply to pee. Again she called out, to save him any potential embarrassment. Again all she heard was the sound of brushing hair.

She followed the footprints through a parting in the trees, tracing the vague suggestion of what might, in snowless times, be a path. As the cold intensified, so did her earlier dismissed anger. How could he leave her like this? Alone, in the woods, without the car key, without access to heat? She cycled back to the possibility that he was seriously injured. Now she
hoped
that he was seriously injured. She hoped he was gradually bleeding to death beneath a boulder that had landed on his leg. She hoped his foot had sprung a bear trap, that he’d been mistaken for a deer by a bow hunter. Nothing else would excuse his abandoning her.

Soon the path became a clearing, the clearing became a meadow. The footprints continued across the snow-blown expanse and entered the woods on the opposite side.
Where was he?
Her wet feet, now starting to freeze, throbbed in a prickly way and she started to cry, the tears freezing and shrinking and pulling at her skin like glue. She was thirsty, hungry—when had she last eaten? The diner, and then, after the gas station stop, she’d eaten a bag of vinegar chips that left her stomach raw and the insides of her cheeks fuzzy with canker sores. The people she and the man had been at the diner were hard to connect to the people they were now. Mere hours after exchanging their first actual words they had entered a black hole in which time no longer had any bearing on their behavior. In theory they were still newish strangers; in theory a certain politeness should still regulate, in a safe and predictable way, their interactions. Callousness, indifference, had not yet set in. But somewhere—maybe on the highway, maybe earlier—a meniscus had been pierced, and now anything could happen. He could come back and rescue her. He could leave her in the woods to die.

As the girl crossed a stream and another narrower meadow, it occurred to her that she’d made a mistake. These prints didn’t belong to the man. Maybe these prints belonged to a hunter who had discovered the Mercedes, who had seen a girl sleeping inside and left her there undisturbed because he was the type who trusted the general arrangement of things, even when peculiar.

The girl stopped. She closed her eyes and listened to the brushing of the heavenly hair. She felt sleepy now, almost peaceful. The first signs of hypothermia. You fall asleep. No pain. No suffering. Like lobsters in a pot of slowly boiled water. Death, the experts assure you, is no more traumatic than submitting to a nap.

The girl lowered herself into a snowbank. She curled into a ball, listening to the hair-brushing sounds. But she was kept awake by the sharp rumblings, like liquid convulsions, roiling about the interior of her rib cage as the blood surrounded her organs, abandoning the lesser parts of her body—hands, feet—to whatever was fated to befall them. Her body had made a decision, and it was enacting its plan without any consultation with her brain.

Fine, she thought. Her brain was clearly unreliable, hardly worth consulting in matters of her own survival. She reflected on the person she was at the diner. Who was that person? Difficult, hours later, to recall. What a fool. What an idiot, thinking she could toy with her own life. She would get what she’d secretly wished for—she was going to die. She’d imagined her family gathered around the phone as her father was informed of her mysterious demise, her sisters huddled beneath his raised elbow, her mother watching over his shoulder. Woods. Body. Mercedes. No suspects. No explanation. That would be the worst for her family—that she, the dead girl, presumably knew what happened to her, but they would not. More than her death, she imagined this curiosity would be the lasting trauma.

But in the current scenario,
she
didn’t have the answer either. She would die curious, and this would haunt her in the afterlife, a state about which she’d given little actual thought. She’d have visiting privileges with this world, this much she’d assumed; she’d be able to screen from above and gloat and possibly even, once she was feeling more generous, leave her family helpful clues hinting to her demise. But if
she
didn’t know what had happened to her, the afterlife scenario grew less appealing. She’d waste her energy haunting the man and interpreting his every action.
Did you do this to me?
she’d ask him by swirling the winds around his ears, by dropping sticks at his feet.
Did you?

The girl extracted her hand from her sleeve and examined her fingernails. They were purple-blue, the exact shade of purple-blue they turned after she’d swum too long in the ocean. She raised herself to her knees, stuttered onto her feet. The prickling had receded, now her feet felt numbly compressed and cushioned, as though they were bound in rags. She forced herself to lift her legs and run for ten steps. Her lungs blazed, her bones unsteady and sick, nauseous in the marrow.
My bones are nauseous
, she thought to herself,
I am sick in the bones
. She alternated resting and running until she’d crossed the first large meadow and reentered the original woods. Darker clouds blotted out the peaked sun completely; though it was probably only 11 a.m., the woodsy shadows and the clouds made it feel like dusk, the dark approaching, the animals convening, the cold, the fear, the end.

This sequence—
the cold the fear the end
—she repeated to herself over and over, her marching orders.
The cold the fear the end the cold the fear the end
. She ran until the trees thinned and she could see the road, the tire tracks, she could hear the engine of a car.

The engine of a car.

She exited the woods to see the Mercedes’s tailpipe expelling weak puffs of exhaust smoke. Her first response, illogical, absurd, was this:
The hunter is stealing the car
. The hunter, who had become as real to her as the man had become unreal, the hunter who accepted the peculiar arrangement of things, had returned with poor intentions. Hauling his crossbow through the woods he’d cut a deal with fortune: If the girl is in the car when I return, I will have my way with her. Not a decision, simply a response to circumstance or even a decree. But finding the car empty, the hunter decided to steal the car. The girl couldn’t explain where he’d found the keys—he was a man with a crossbow, he was a tamer of the woods, an ingenious, superior human for whom keys, for whom logic, for whom actual existence was not an obstacle.
The hunter is driving away
, she thought. He’d have his way with her or he would not—but in either case her ride was leaving. She yelled in a voice not recognizably her own. She put a hand on the door handle, as though she could restrain the car’s forward motion employing the steel intensity of her terror.