An engine rumbled behind her, and she saw headlights approaching from the opposite direction. She anticipated the timing. The cars were going to pass each other, and the road was one-and-a-half cars wide. She pressed against the twenty-foot guardrail that prevented cars from plunging into the swampy channel below. Gerald walked on, unruffled. She yanked the back of his shirt, pulled him beside her.
If they converged on the overpass, the drivers would have to swerve wide, even though the shoulders of the road had shrunk to nothing. She would fling herself over the fence and drag Gerald with her. She pictured themselves doggy paddling in the dank water. She’d once read that Katharine Hepburn had fallen into a canal while filming a scene in Venice. In the interview, decades after her ill-fated submersion, she revealed that she still had ear infections she attributed to that brief exposure.
Marian tensed and leaned her hip against the metal rail, but the cars overtook each other before the bottleneck, before the fatal error might have occurred. Still, her heart. And Gerald, unruffled and oblivious but endearingly in one piece.
“There aren’t any streetlights,” she said.
“We’ll take a cab back,” he said without turning, letting the wind throw his words back to her.
“It’s too dark already,” she said. The sky had turned indigo. Soon, everything would deepen, she would blend into the night, and she wouldn’t be able to discern the uneven footing in her slick-soled dress flats.
“It’s not that far. Stop worrying.” Even in the dusk, she could see his clenched jaw. She had lost his ear. He was growing obstinate.
The canopy of trees was shielding the stars and moon. The night was full of shadow play, deep gray foliage shimmering against blackness. The sound of nature here was novel to her. She had never heard that particular whirring rhythm spawned by insect legs rubbing or innards vibrating, membranes pressed against deeper membranes. She could wonder about the competing instruments that evolved in those chitinous bodies, but she couldn’t help but worry about the mosquitoes and the pathogens they carried. The island was not immune, and the pungent repellent she sprayed on her legs and arms had an eighty-percent rate of deterrence. More than that, she worried about the narrow road. She imagined what it would be like to be hit and be thrown or simply to trip and fall into a deep ditch and then realize this was it. Did her father know, when it happened, that it was the end? They told her he wouldn’t have felt much pain, not for long anyway, but did he know he was fading forever?
“I’m going to call a cab.”
“Oh my god,” he said, throwing his head back. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
This was always a tipping point, when he turned to this script. Nine times out of ten, she knew he was gracious, more patient and tolerant than she could expect in others thanks to her tendency to stew in pessimistic projections and given her resulting need to control, to account for all possibilities. But words like ridiculous, hysterical, emotional — those catchall terms for women when the man was done arguing — those all felt deeply unfair, a lazy insult that had wormed its way into her lover’s brain from a half-remembered blockbuster film or prime-time sitcom. An ill-fitting costume for a bit of self-destructive role-playing. She could call him a misogynist, but that wouldn’t be true or fair either. Sometimes she did, and instantly felt the wave of guilt for so crudely using a label that didn’t do him justice. When there was any sign Gerald would disappoint her — when a fight or a half-baked comment gave her a taste of what the end of their relationship might look like — she would feel a wave of perverse power swelling in her. She could end it all in a moment if she said the right wrong words. It was like when you hike near a cliff and you feel tempted to lean over the edge, to look down as the scree tumbles too far to make a sound. Or the desire to cross the yellow line in the street when the headlights are racing toward you. The call of the void. The death drive. That feeling would surge in her when Gerald acted displeased with her. It begged her to say the thing that they could never come back from and to walk away forever. Because if she walked away, she would never have to worry about what it would feel like to lose him — to have finally lost everyone she’d ever loved. She’d already know.
But she wasn’t there yet. She would not say the unforgivable thing.
She pulled out her cell phone, searched for cab companies, and dialed the first result. Gerald shook his head at her, then paced, running his fingers through his hair as he exhaled noisily, an affected huff of displeasure.
On the phone, a singsongy voice with an unnatural rhythm asked for their location. Marian gave the name of the road and described the bridge, to which the voice interrupted, asking for the nearest intersection. She guessed the mileage since the resort. “Pickup will be in approximately five minutes,” the voice chirped, then hung up.
“Now we’re stuck waiting,” Gerald said.
“I wish I’d planned everything.” She smacked a gnat on her forehead and examined her palm for guts.
“So you have to swat a few bugs, get a bit sweaty on a tropical island before dinner. It’s not the end of the world. Stop being so pessimistic.”
She fumed at the smug curl of his lips. Then something icy settled over her. “I’m realistic,” she said. “You can’t just expect things to fall into place. You can’t just ask for a big wedding and then twiddle your thumbs and expect it all to work out. You need a plan, or life will just drift past you.”
“You’re manifesting negativity.”
He’d been reading self-help books. He’d even bought her one for her birthday, which she took as a slight. Clearly, he viewed himself as an advanced guide on some spiritual ladder and she hadn’t even found the first rung.
“Not this again,” she said. “Not now.”
A car crept over the bridge and pulled to the shoulder. The headlights flicked to the brights and back, blinding them.
“Looks like your wife just manifested a car.”
Marian tried to peer into the window, but the tint of the glass was opaque in the darkness. She scanned and matched the license plate on her phone, which seemed to trigger the back door opening.
A voice emanated from within. “Marian Grace, welcome.”
She climbed into the black interior. Her sweaty thighs stuck to the leather seat as she slid her way across.
Gerald scooted in after her, helped her find the seat belt. She knew this was his way of apologizing, but she said nothing. She just stared out the window, leaving him to stare at her silhouette. She could feel his gaze. Many times, he had told her how he loved the strong curve of her nose. He took her hand and squeezed it, but she kept looking at the passing trees, spidery black spears against the navy sky. They had not been dating long when her father died. Sometimes she wondered if they’d be together at all if she hadn’t needed Gerald so desperately in the early stages of their courtship.
She turned to look at him, and he squeezed her hand again.
He pulled her toward him and kissed the top of her head, raised her chin to kiss her mouth. They held one another, locked in their kiss, cocooned by the hum of the engine. Marian was aware of the flakes of dry skin, the way his lips suckled hers, pulling strategically on various parts of her mouth. A part of her wanted this — to finally be held and submerged in their bodies — but she wanted that moment to be later, when they had eaten, returned to their room, and found a way to disable Rhonda. Here, she couldn’t help but wonder, what if the car reached its destination in the midst of climax, the doors automated to open for a restaurant host, leaving a stranger scandalized on the sidewalk? Or what if there was an automatic fine or even a police report for this type of transgression in a self-driving vehicle? She had only skimmed the Terms of Agreement. Maybe she’d even lose her job, seeing as how she technically worked with children, although she never actually saw the students anymore.
She pulled away from him. “Later,” she said, running her hand along his jawline, trying to project the desire that she knew they both needed.
&nbs
p; The car hummed on, then whirred as it slowed for a turn onto an improbably narrow dirt path. The wheels struggled in ruts and dips, overwhelming the car’s shocks and jostling Marian and Gerald.
She tapped the map app on her phone, but after a minute of loading the page, the screen fritzed to an error message. She tried again, then tried using a different map. She even rebooted her cellular data, only to discover that they were no longer in range. They could have been driving through a black velvet tunnel. Her eyes strained to see trees or patches of night sky, but there was total darkness. She only saw her own face looking back at her, glowing dimly from the blue light of her phone.
“This isn’t right,” she said.
“It’s probably just a shortcut.”
“Why would we be going into the swamp if the restaurant was just down the street? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“You need to dial back the worry, just a bit.” He patted her hand, but she pulled away.
“Someone could have hacked the car. We could be on our way to an ambush, about to get mugged or worse.”
“It’s probably a simple mistake. Maybe there’s more than one place with the same name on the island. Like a local chain.”
“You think there are two Curry Curry Coconuts on this tiny island?”
“Or maybe there’s just another curry place and the app got confused.”
She leaned forward in her seat and yelled, “Stop the car.” Undeterred, the car kept moving. She demanded that they pull over, turn around, cut the engine, hit the brakes. Not one of her commands worked.
Gerald was sitting a bit more upright and alert, but he still appeared mostly unperturbed.
“You’re going to let this play out,” she said. “You’re going to assume that everything is fine, until it isn’t.”
“What do you suggest we do?” he said. “Call the cops?”
She held up her phone. “I already would have if we had service. At least the hotel will know to look for us.”
Gerald’s gaze flicked away too fast. It was a tell and she knew it.
“What did you do?” she asked.
That was when he told her he never actually placed the call to the front desk. He had merely spoken into the ringtone. Now, it made sense, the way he had steered her briskly through the lobby, avoiding any dialogue with the concierge.
“No normal person does that, you know,” he added. “No one assumes they are going to get murdered on their way to dinner down the street. It’s embarrassing, to tell this guy that you’re so scared of where he lives that you need him to keep tabs on you.”
“Oh, I see,” she said coldly. “So you were protecting me from embarrassing myself?”
“I mean, yeah?”
She could see his point. She hadn’t thought about how that would seem to the pusher, but she also suspected this was a good cover story. In actuality, Gerald didn’t want to be judged for avoiding the world-class resort restaurants with menus designed by celebrity chefs so they could eat somewhere cheap and unknown to anyone beyond the island. He didn’t want to tell the pusher no. For all his manifestations, he couldn’t get past this need to please the wrong people. Sometimes she wondered if she was one of them.
“I still wish you’d made the call. No one knows where we are.”
They were in the deep belly of the swamp now. The car continued on its dirt path, the wheels spinning for a second here and there as the uneven, muddy earth caught them.
“We’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s an island. How far can we go?”
Marian leaned forward. “Driver, lower the partition.”
The matte black divider lowered, revealing the front cabin of the car and the steering wheel vibrating as it corrected for each pothole. A touchscreen glowed in front of a digital gear shift panel.
“Maybe there’s an override button, or an emergency services button,” she said.
“Let’s wait a few more minutes and see where it takes us.”
Marian glared at him and his relaxed shoulders, his determined peacefulness. She resented it, she realized. How could he be the one who was supposed to know her best? He operated in such a fundamentally different way than she did. He never took the weight of things gone wrong.
She unbuckled her seat belt and climbed over the lowered partition. Its thin edge dug painfully into her midsection as she balanced there, reaching for the screen. She could feel Gerald wrap his arm around her thighs, supporting her. “Get back here,” he said, pulling slightly.
But she squirmed forward, gripping headrests and seat edges to pull herself forward, even as she felt her shins scraping across the divider. She slumped into the driver’s seat and tested the wheel. It remained impervious to her. She touched the screen and a grid of options emerged: emergency, map, destination, and help. She clicked the latter, but the screen revealed the image of pulsing concentric circles, like the ripples from a pebble, and then displayed an error message before returning to the home screen. The same was true for any option.
The car continued in darkness. The sound of the rough un-paved road mimicked white noise, lulling her to near sleep, but then a stone or pit in the road would jolt her to panic, heightening her disorientation. Her stomach ached with hunger, her throat had grown parched, and her head throbbed as though she’d been fasting for days. Had hours passed? It seemed so. But the island was too small to explain that much lost time. Perhaps they were driving in circles, deep in the preserve.
The headlights only cast a body’s length ahead, revealing dark, glistening earth and nothing more. She remembered a cave her father had taken her to not long after her mother had left. A vacation to distract them from the new configuration of their family. On the longest tour, they squeezed past crevices and walked over fathomless pits covered with flimsy-seeming grates. “You would fall forever,” she’d said. But her father explained that there was no such thing as a bottomless pit. There’s always an impact, always an end to the fall, he’d said. Deep in the bowels of a subterranean cavern, the guide turned off the lights and revealed total darkness. Marian had squeezed her dad’s hand, and he had squeezed back.
But the car was still drifting. Gerald had grown groggy, nodding off for several indeterminate lengths of time.
She turned on the cabin lights to wake him and explained her theory about their circling path.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
He reached forward and gripped her shoulder. “There’s nothing to do,” he said. “The car will stop eventually.”
But she wasn’t okay with that. She couldn’t quite explain it, but she sensed that her father was wrong. That she had manifested something endless, aimless, and lost forever, so she told Gerald to check his seat belt.
“Is it on?” she insisted as she buckled her own.
He nodded. Even in their predicament, he chuckled.
And she pulled the emergency brake.
The car spun. She felt weightless for a moment, felt her arms drift upward and her hair flying away from her, and then there was impact. They had spun off the road, maybe. Surely there were trees and they had slammed into one. The headlights still cast ahead, cross-eyed, revealing thick leaves and the edge of a trunk tucked into the compressed metal of the hood.
Already, she could feel the weak gelatin sensation in her neck. She turned with her whole body to check on Gerald.
Blood trickled down his forehead and pooled in the hollows beneath his eyes. At first, she thought he had ignored the seat belt, but she could see the metal buckle gleaming in the dome light, the pieces interlocked. Then she saw the dark blot on the interior of the window. Centrifugal force, she realized. His head had spun sideways and met the glass.
“Gerald,” she said. She said his name again and again until she finally heard a faint murmur from the back of his throat.
She had manifested this. He believed they were still going to arrive at their destination. He hadn’t felt the endlessness of the dark road, like it was swallowing them in
to a different dimension. She had believed in the danger and pulled the brake and now he was bleeding. In the dim light, it looked as though a web of ink was spreading across his face, pinning him to the black leather seat.
She had to climb back over the partition to get to him. His pulse was strong, and he was breathing. But clearly he’d suffered a concussion, and she couldn’t know the extent of the damage.
She sent him an audio text, for later, in case he woke up alone and was frightened. She made her voice steady, tried to believe the words as she said them.
I’m going for help and will be back soon. Stay put. It’s going to be okay.
She found a bottle of water in the side door pocket and left it in his lap. With its branding and cheap plastic, it looked like an insult to his predicament, but she had nothing else to offer, no way to help if she remained with him.
Outside, the air was sweet and boggy, like wet, dying leaves. Somewhere, she could hear a bird cawing, mysterious and rare. Maybe it was a replica, mimicking calls from a previous existence. Even in this moment, as Gerald lay alone, unconscious, Marian wondered, did they give the birds instincts when they remade them? Did they feel a purpose in crying out, or did they simply follow a program to imitate life?
The night was full of echoes, and all directions looked the same. Before she shut the door, she glanced at Gerald, at the vulnerability of his slack jaw and still lashes, and she felt what it might be to lose him.
If she could will him awake, she’d stay. She would. But staying was the same as doing nothing.
So she picked a direction and began walking.
WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’RE AWAKE RIGHT NOW?
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 20