by Laird Barron
But I ain’t lying. What I’m about to do for Maggie, I am positive she’d do for me. It just ain’t what I told her.
~
I bet I don’t have to tell you, a couple miles down the road, Maggie asks me to turn off the classical music. Like that’d surprise anyone. Type of girl she is and all.
I turn it down, but not off, and I says, “You sure you’re okay? You got a heck of a bruise on your forehead.” Course I know it ain’t a bruise from the accident. Damn well I know that.
She says, “Oh. No, that’s um… That’s from a bigger accident.”
She says it like it’s a joke, talking about a man, but it ain’t funny when you know about the backpacker. That thing I said about a stone bitch sociopath.
“Well gosh,” I says. “Bit of an accident-prone little thing, ain’t ya?”
She shakes her head. “I just got caught up with the wrong guy,” she says. “It’s over now. Guess maybe I put the pedal down a little too hard on my way out.”
Guess so.
I can’t keep this dialogue up without losing my sense of calm, so I says something else. The kind of thing, these days, you’re supposed to apologize for saying as you say it. I says, “Can I say something? I just always felt like the world would be a better place if instead of keeping their thoughts locked up people just let what was on their minds be spoke, so I just gotta come right out and say it. Here it goes. You are unbelievably pretty.”
She blushes, even through the blood, she puts some hair up behind her ear. “Oh, come on,” she says.
I says, “I mean it. Unbiased source here too,” and I hold up my left hand so she can see the ring.
She says, “Well… thank you.” And I tell her it never hurts to have a stranger remind you and she says, “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
I tell her, “I’m all about things that are beautiful. Might say it’s what I think life’s all about. I read a lot, mostly poetry, travel the world, take a lot of pictures. Always looking for beauty—sights, sounds, people. You should see my wife.”
Honest, baby. That’s what I says to her.
She says, “Lucky you,” but she don’t sound interested. Maybe the same way I said “Lucky you” when she said she was the only one hurt by the crash.
And maybe in a withdrawn tone like hers before, I says, “Yeah. Lucky me…”
I don’t know how to talk to her anymore without a storm coming, so I just stare at the road like I do. Sun’s starting to come up. And we’re just about to where the cliff overlooks the clearing, you know? Where I kissed you that first time? So I start thinking I’ll show her what I mean about beauty. Least I can do for her before she learns where she’s going.
~
When I get us to that vantage point and make her get out of the car, when we’re standing there and the sun’s just coming up over the horizon and its light’s making the shadows of all the lilacs dance and it’s purple and green down there as you’ve ever seen, I says to Maggie, “This is the world we live in. Every day. When we’re hustling or drinking alone, when we’re shoveling shit, this is always where we’re living, and you miss it. It’s like everybody’s just missing it all the time. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who ain’t.”
And it’s somber, grudging, even defeatist maybe, the way she sort of mumbles to herself, “It really is beautiful. I must drive by it every day.”
“But that’s my point,” I says. “Hundred people drive by every day, you think any of them’s looking? They’re too caught up on what someone said about something someone else said they were supposed to feel some way about. They can’t stop driving, can’t ever stop. Like a shark. Gonna die if it stops, or at least it feels that way. But you gotta stop. Your eyes gotta adjust to the light. Can’t see nothing if you never wait a sec.”
She nods and says, “You’re probably right,” with a sort of tone like she wants to walk away and forget what I just taught her.
I says, “You oughta stop once in a while. Just look at things. Look till you see the awe. Like the poets say, make every second count, stop and smell… whatever. Or do you prefer the poets who say ‘Drink till you’re dizzy and drive like a crazy fucking bitch out of hell?’”
The look on her face, aw Christ, if you could see it, baby. Like all the muscles around her skull go as weak as the one inside. Then after a second she sort of whispers, “I wasn’t drinking,” like she’s convincing anyone.
I says, “Hey, don’t sweat it. Look at the view. We can look as long as you want. It’s a gift. One last taste of beauty before your trip. Drink it in, Maggie.”
And the look this time makes the last one look brave. You want to see fear in someone’s eyes, tell ‘em something about themselves you shouldn’t know and then call ‘em by name before they’ve introduced themselves. Mark my words, baby, they will feel things in their hearts ain’t never been felt before.
“Who are you?” she asks. “How do you know my name?”
I says, “I know all about you, Maggie. You remind me of a joke. There’s this girl, right, with a short temper and bad taste in men, and she gets in a fight at a party where this shitty excuse for shit ends up socking her one. And she gets in her car, even though she’s had a few, and floors it down the road a few miles before—BAM!—she plows down some poor prick who’s only out looking for a view…”
By now she’s backing away and I gotta walk toward her to make sure she don’t get far.
And still I’m telling my joke, saying, “I’d say stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but ain’t nobody heard this one before.”
She don’t even know she’s backing toward the cliff, that’s how scared she is of me.
I says, “So she dumps this fella’s body down a mountain and hitchhikes. But the guy who picks her up, he murders her in cold blood, and then—Woah!”
One of her feet slips over the side and I reach out and grab her before she tips. She fights me and we both nearly go over for a second before she falls in the dirt and forces herself up, half-running half-crawling from me with a scream.
And I’m just standing there baffled and I says, “Hey, Maggie! Don’t you want to hear the punchline?”
~
Course Maggie don’t know just how bad a wreck she’s got into, not until I do the space-shifting thing, and I don’t do that until later on, in Mr. Savior’s car.
When she breaks from me, Maggie runs in the road and waves her arms like when she stopped me, and this time she stops this fella in a black sedan who gets out, real serious, real authoritarian. Seeing the way she’s running from me, he shouts, “What’s going on here?”
I says, “Private conversation between me and the lady, bud.”
She says, “He said he was gonna murder me in cold blood!”
I says, “Well, not immediately.”
And this Good Samaritan prick, like he can’t appreciate a good joke, shouts, “Sir, get in your goddamn car and go, right now! I’m not going to warn you again.”
He advances on me, pointing a finger like it’s a gun, so obviously I do the only thing you can do in that situation and grab him around the neck. He throws an elbow into my chest and pivots us so my knees curl around the front bumper of his car and my back hits the hood, and to his credit, this time it’s a gun he puts in my chest instead of a finger.
He says, “You just made a big fucking mistake, buddy. I’m a cop. Put these on,” and he tosses me a pair of handcuffs and looks at me like he thinks he’s the toughest S.O.B. ever pissed standing up.
And I says, “Oh my God, what am I gonna do? I guess that’s so much for the evening I had planned.” And I make him put the cuffs on me himself, and he shoves me in the back seat before we go.
Whole time he drives her, you can tell he just wants in her pants. Probably that’s the reason he became a cop in the first place. Fucked up chicks like Maggie, they’ll do stuff for a cop. Definitely. Same as they’ll do for a gangster, same basic principle. The damaged fall for them who’ll do dam
age on their behalf.
I says, “Hey, officer, wanna know a joke? This girl’s out driving drunk and runs over a backpacker. This guy swings by and roughs her up, but a hero cop stops in to save the day…”
Mr. Fancy-Badge Beretta-Cock, he says, “Sir, you have the right to remain silent. I’d appreciate it if you exercised it until we get to the station.”
And I’m sitting in the back seat rolling my eyes the way Maggie’s smiling at him. Like I half expect them to pull over and get to screwing any second with me right here in the back seat.
She says, “I’m so lucky you came when you did, I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t stopped.”
Hard to tell from where I’m sitting but I’m pretty sure her hand is on his leg while she’s talking. Down his pants, even.
He says, “Hey, I’m a cop. I’ve always tried to be there for people when I can. I’ve found that most people deserve it…”
That’s when I do the space-shifting thing. That’s when, all of a sudden, it’s me driving the car and Mr. Protect and Serve is the one tied up in the back seat. Blink and you’d miss it. Maggie blinked. Maggie missed it.
And continuing Mr. Law and Order’s train of thought, I says, “…but you’re not most people, are you, Mags?”
She says, “What the fuck?” and I says, “Abracadabra.”
Mr. Truth and Justice says, “Hey, let me go!” and I says, “Sir, you have the right to remain silent. I’d appreciate it if you exercised it.”
He says, “Pull this fucking car over!” like he ain’t even handcuffed, so I reach over my shoulder with his gun and fire a few shots into the back seat without looking. Whether I hit him or not, it seems to shut him up.
I says, “Woo! I love guns!” and you know I do, baby. You know I do.
Maggie says, “Who are you and what do you want?” and I says, “I’ll give you a hint,” and I fire a shot toward her too, bursting the window by her head so the wind picks up that blonde hair and she looks beautiful screaming.
I says, “Man, I gotta get me one of these.”
Maggie’s huddling against herself, muttering, “I’m dreaming, right? I have to be dreaming.
It can’t be real. Oh God, please tell me I’m dreaming.”
I says, “What’s the difference?”
I pull over a few minutes’ walk from the Disappearing Place and I ask her, “How good are you at walking?” I hold a hand out to her and I says, “Let’s go on a journey.”
~
Right up until the end, Mr. White Knight thinks he’s gonna save her, thinks she even deserves it, maybe. Hero types, they never look at the big picture. Always running in blind, never letting their eyes adjust.
I lead Maggie to the hole. That big, deep nothing a hundred miles straight down. Like an infinite tunnel going blacker and blacker. It’s beautiful if you look hard enough, but no matter for how long you look, it’s one thing your eyes never can quite take in.
Mr. White Knight, back there in the car, he’s climbed into the front seat with his hands still cuffed behind him at the waist, trying to bend in a way he can get his keys out of the ignition. He’s frantic, thinking if he can just move fast enough, maybe he can still get lucky with pretty little Mags.
Mags is holding onto me, imagine that. She’s so scared of the Disappearing Place she’d latch onto me just to stay above the hole.
Mr. White Knight’s got his cuffs off. He’s opening the car door and running for us, through the trees, in the direction he saw us go. He’s screaming, “I’m coming!” like he wants to scream later in bed.
Maggie’s holding onto my shirt and forcing her eyes away from the Disappearing Hole.
She’s whispering, “What is it? What is it? Oh my God, what is it?”
I says, “It’s home, Maggie. This is your cross to bear. Not mine.”
And I push her in, baby, like you know I would. Don’t take but a second before the buttons pop off my shirt and her hands slip on the fabric and she free falls. She’s gone so fast into blackness you can’t even hear the transition from the scream to the echo to the memory in your mind. Down the Disappearing Hole like so many before her.
Mr. White Knight finds me a second later, but by then the Disappearing Hole’s done its thing, gone and disappeared. It’s just me standing there in the clearing, grass up to our ankles and a circle of dirt at our feet.
He grabs me, frantic. He’s screaming in my face, “Where is she? What the hell did you do with her?”
“She’s gone, man,” I says. “She’s gone.”
~
Let me tell you the one about Maggie.
Let me tell you the one about that wreck of human, dead in a field of daffodils off Old Highway 21 who all the newspapers cried for. That drunk and frantic thing on the run from the flophouse, lost control of her vehicle and hit that backpacker all those years ago.
Let me tell you, baby, what you already know.
Mr. Would-Be Hero Police Officer pulls over just seconds after the crash and runs to her, lying there. But our tragic little miss has been through the windshield and hit that soil harder than a body can take. She’s bleeding bad, like bleeding out bad, and her neck ain’t bent quite right. He applies pressure and checks her pulse and goes through all the motions, but Miss Maggie’s gone. Like I said. She’s gone, man. She’s gone.
Those moments when the pulse slows, between wake and sleep, where the past and the future ain’t showing yet, sometimes those are the only moments Maggie feels peace.
Our boy the hero cop, he hangs his head and mumbles, “She’s gone,” into his radio. Then he gets up and runs to the man that woman ran down.
The rest is history. I wake up in that field coughing blood with the hero cop leaning over me, telling me he’s gonna get me the help I need. They tell me in the hospital I got a miracle. A million times over, if we repeated that crash, I’d be a thousand miles down the Disappearing Hole.
They says, “You gotta be the luckiest guy on Earth today.”
And I says, in that condescending voice, I says, “Yeah. Lucky me…”
Every one of ‘em, they says, “I don’t know how you did it.”
And I tell ‘em about you, baby. You know I do. I says, “I got a beautiful wife. Ain’t gonna let myself slip away without a goodbye. Made that woman a promise. Hers forever. Ain’t no nothing gonna tear me away, least of all another woman.”
And the doctors, the nurses, the paramedics, they says, “It’s always the ones with someone to hang onto. That’s who the miracles happen to.”
Like they know the story. Like they heard it before.
But they ain’t heard this one before, have they, baby?
Ain’t nobody heard the one about you and me.
BREAKWATER
by John Langan
Only the main road to Breakwater had not been washed out, so Maureen had no choice but to take the most visible route into the town, around the Jersey state trooper parked in the middle of the road, his cruiser’s lights flashing blue and red, miniature lighthouses in the storm’s tumult. The cop stared open-mouthed at anyone heading toward the place; though he made no move to stop her. Her car, a gray Escort, was sufficiently nondescript to give the trooper little to remember. Even if it wasn’t, the wipers pushing the driving rain back and forth across its windshield reduced her to an androgynous blur of lowered blue baseball cap and baggy white sweatshirt. To further diminish the cop’s impression of her, she gave him the typical, compulsive glances of a citizen worried about an offense they weren’t sure they were committing. As he didn’t swing out to follow her, she assumed her act succeeded.
Either that, or Louise had paid him off to allow her entry. Which, come to think of it, was probably why he remained where he was.
Crossing the low bridge over the ocean inlet, she saw the height of the gray water, swollen with the week’s unrelenting rain and storm-boosted tide well up over the docks lining each shore, halfway to the roofs of the intermittent boathouses
. Leashed to their submerged posts, a scattering of orphaned sailboats, yachts, and speedboats struggled against the waves rising to their gunwales. On the other side of the bridge, she eased to a stop in front of the first of the town’s two traffic lights. Although the gusting wind swung it almost horizontal, the light was functioning, its red lens flashing. Directly beyond the light, the road ahead was blocked by a half-dozen orange and white striped barrels, each with a round blinking yellow light on top of it. For a couple hundred feet, the street descended a gradual incline to the beach, where it dead-ended in a parking area. Since last Saturday, though, the Atlantic had worked its steady way up the slope, enveloping beach houses and businesses as it climbed, until now its foaming rollers were almost to the bases of the barrels.
Maureen flipped her turn signal and steered right, along Ocean View, the town’s principal north-south street, which ran parallel to the ocean. Most of what she remembered about the ocean side of Breakwater, its crowded rows of over-sized, pastel houses, its restaurants and shops, was gone, battered and swept away by the storm. Here and there, the upper floor of a house rose from the waves, the roof of a motel lifted a satellite dish to a signal it was no longer receiving. In places, the pavement dipped slightly, allowing the ocean to wash closer, and the sight of the frothing water reaching for the road tightened her fingers on the wheel. Three hours, she thought. Two at the inside, four at the outside. Plenty of time.
This was assuming, of course, the meteorologists were correct in their estimate of the number of hours remaining until the Atlantic rolled over this part of the town. From the speed with which it had coalesced, to its stalling over Breakwater, to the length of time it had raged with no appreciable diminishment, enough about this storm had been unprecedented, and to such a degree, as to render all predictions concerning it suspect. Give me one hour, Maureen thought. Thirty minutes.
A mile along Ocean View, Poseidon’s Palace Motel stood on the left, two stories of sea-foam and pink cinderblock, a hold-over from days when Breakwater had attracted vacationers of a more modest means. A foot of water rippled over the empty parking lot, washed the bottoms of the doors to the ground floor rooms, splashed the base of the sign whose neon letters, now dead, advertised neither vacancy nor full.