Shadow Traffic

by Richard Burgin

  “Yes it’s real, you can touch it if you want. It’s a real gun and it’s all yours to use as you wish as long as we play the game.”

  “Please don’t …”

  “Please don’t what? Play the game? Why don’t you hear what the game is before you reject it? The rules are simple enough. One of these guns has bullets in it, the other has blanks. If you have the gun with bullets you can leave now simply by shooting me. You look surprised, but don’t be. And don’t assume I know which gun is which. They’re twin guns, have you noticed? They’re linked forever, just like you and me.”

  “I know that woman hurt you. I know you’re feeling a lot of pain.”

  “Do you know what I’m feeling? Haven’t you already generalized me away into some psychological category—the better not to really know me.”

  “There’s some truth in what you say. I know there are psychologists who are too analytical and not always empathetic enough. I’ve had them myself.”

  “Then you’ve had problems, too? Problems you apparently couldn’t manage.”

  “I’ve had issues I needed to have some help … dealing with. It’s very frustrating when you feel a doctor doesn’t understand the uniqueness of your pain, no question. Now could you please put …”

  “And what side of the fence are you on as a therapist: analytical or emotional?”

  “Can you put the gun away first?”

  “No. Answer me.”

  She could feel herself trembling slightly while she spoke. “I like to think I’m both, but if I had to be on one side I’d say I’m more on the feeling side.”

  “Do we really get to choose which side we’re on?” he said, taking one step closer. She looked at his gun, couldn’t help it, then at hers a couple feet away from her on its side against the sofa pillow.

  “I could talk about this a lot better if you’d put the guns away.”

  “We’ve talked about that already. That’s not an option for you.”

  “OK, would you like to talk some more with me about this?” she said, feeling it was crucial to keep a dialogue going.

  “I’m all ears,” he said tonelessly. “No, literally, I’m sometimes entirely made up of ears. I paid a doctor to sculpt some of my ears so they’d fool you by looking like other body parts. But that’s just an illusion. Look at my mouth more closely. If you do, you’ll see that it’s really an ear.”

  “Did your ex used to talk too much? Did you feel you weren’t listened to?”

  He laughed ironically.

  “Your mother, too, perhaps?”

  “When you’re composed entirely of ears it’s kind of hard to compete as a talker, wouldn’t you say?”

  She tried to force a smile to show she appreciated his humor. She had to still try to believe that empathy could have some impact on him, although he appeared to have none for her whatsoever.

  “What’s the matter? You’re not saying anything. I thought therapists had mouths as well as ears.”

  “I know that being disappointed by someone you love is the worst pain in the world,” she finally said.

  “You’re a fool if you only become disappointed after they leave you.”

  “What do you mean?” She couldn’t tell if he’d said something insightful or not. She kept looking at the gun that was still pointed at her, although its angle was less direct now.

  “Disappointment begins way before a person leaves you. Even ear people know that. The question is: is there enough there to counteract the disappointment? That’s what love really is, it’s just tolerated disappointment. You’re lying if you define it any other way.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, thinking of the man who’d recently broken up with her (a professor of architecture at her university). “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Seems like I’m right about people more than you are. Of course, I don’t have a license, so what good does it do me?”

  “Insight is always valuable, what else do we have?”

  “I have insight into what’s wrong with a lot of things, but what good does it do if you can’t ever fix any of them?”

  “You can use your insight on yourself, can’t you?” She was leaning forward, as she often did with her clients when she was excited about making a point.

  “Sit back,” he said sternly. “Don’t get too close to my gun. I already gave you your own, didn’t I?”

  It got darker outside. It was a cold night in early spring and there were lots of clouds out. She could see through the Venetian blinds that were still open until he finally noticed and closed them. What was she thinking by going back to his place in the suburbs? They could have gone to an after-hours bar in University City. She could have stayed in the city with him until she knew him better. Why hadn’t she? Her rule of thumb was to go to a man’s place only if she was prepared to sleep with him. She didn’t think she was thinking that with Phil (although lately she’d been feeling so lonely), so why had she broken her own rule? It was because his behavior was so impeccable on the first two dates—considerate, generous, animated but not aggressive. Also, he seemed to be doing well at his business, which she couldn’t quite remember but had something to do with computers. So there were no warnings, at least none that she caught until they were already at his place.

  It had gotten hot in his condominium but she was hesitant to mention it. Maybe she’d just take off the pink cardigan sweater she was wearing—the one she had picked because it looked so good with her black skirt.

  “What are you doing?” he said. He was a little further away, but his gun was still pointed at her.

  “I’m just feeling a little warm. Is that OK?”

  He didn’t say anything. She felt it was all right to take it off (she was wearing a white blouse underneath) because so far, thank God, he’d shown no sexual interest in her. Meanwhile, he lit two candles on the glass table in front of them. (It was ironic, she thought, about the candles. On her Match.com profile, which was how they met, she’d listed candlelight as one of her turn-ons.) She placed the sweater carefully beside the gun.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” he said again.

  “What? I just put my sweater down.”

  “I thought you might be reaching for your gun, which is OK, of course, I completely encourage that.”

  “I don’t believe in guns. I wish you’d throw them away.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because they’re dangerous—they can kill people and I don’t want to be part of that.”

  “But you are part of that now, aren’t you? From an objective point of view, I’d say you should keep your gun. You can never tell when you might need it, when it might be all you can reach for in this world.”

  “What do you want from me? I don’t understand,” she said, starting to cry again.

  “I’ll answer that question when I feel like it, Herr Doktor, or maybe you’ll just figure it out in time … speaking of which, time passes slowly in here, doesn’t it. It’s not at all like a therapist’s hour.”

  She stopped crying and tried to laugh at his joke.

  “It’s funny how things happen,” he said, stroking his chin for a moment with his free hand. “For many years I was very unlike other people and then after my ex, I began to do online dating, which is how I met you, and I became more like other people then, but now, I’m not acting like other people at all, am I? I’ve come back full circle to my original oddness.”

  She snuck a look at her watch and was shocked to see it wasn’t even 1 a.m. He’d said he was keeping her here all night—did he mean that literally? Although he often spoke in riddles or metaphors, he was also at times literal to a childish degree. In that case, her night might have just begun, and who knew what it would eventually include? So far, he hadn’t been violent since he pushed her down on the sofa, but she could still remember the pressure of his hands on her neck. He hadn’t made any sexual demands yet either, but who knew when that might happen or what the meaning of his long looks at her wa
s? One time she knew she’d caught him staring at her legs.

  It was stupefying, how slowly time passed. Sometimes he talked in manic little fits and starts about his ex, whose name was Melanie, a name he never said again, as if saying her name would make her even more intolerably alive. Other times, there was unadorned silence, which made her listen for the little noises that every home makes, yet his didn’t, as if it were as silent as a vault in a museum.

  Always she tried to keep eye contact with him and always he kept his gun pointed at her, until she thought she might lose her mind.

  Then she needed to urinate but was afraid to ask him—afraid he would go with her to the bathroom and who knew what would happen then? Maybe she should take her gun with her, but that might provoke him somehow. Probably it was better to somehow hold it in and if worse came to worse, do it in her underpants. But what if some of it trickled onto his sofa? Who knew how he’d react to that? In his cosmology his sofa might be sacred and that might be all it would take to make him shoot her.

  “You seem restless,” he said, without a trace of irony.

  “I’m OK.”

  “Are you worrying about what’s going to happen to you?”

  “Yes … to a degree.”

  “Are you afraid I’m going to attack you in some way?”

  “No, I don’t think you’d do that.”

  “How do you know what I’m going to do? Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t think you really want to hurt me.”

  “What am I going to do then? Tell me what I’m going to do.”

  “I think you want me to stay so you won’t be alone … with your feelings. I think maybe you’d like me to help you. Maybe that’s why you answered my ad and wanted to ask me out in the first place?”

  “Because you’re a therapist?”

  She smiled and shrugged.

  “What else do I want from you? … assuming that you’re right about any of this.”

  “Maybe you want to see if you can trust me or any person, after what happened to you.”

  “Trust you to do what?”

  “Stay here with you tonight. Listen to you, if you feel like talking.”

  He turned his face away, staring into space.

  “Do you think I should trust you?” he finally said.

  “Yes.”

  “Because you’re a therapist?”

  “That’s only part of it. I haven’t given you any reason not to trust me, have I?”

  “Women are trained to lie. To act and flatter and deceive and lie. It’s what we call their personality.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, although there was some truth in what he said, she thought. But that was only because women had always been oppressed, didn’t he know that? Didn’t he understand about social conditioning and sexism?

  “You’re the exception to the rule, I suppose,” he said.

  “I don’t believe there is a rule.”

  “But as a ‘good’ woman, and certainly as a psychotherapist, you would never break a trust, would you? You would always keep your promise and never manipulate me, right?”

  “Yes. You can definitely trust me. I’ll stay here with you tonight.”

  “Along with your gun.”

  “I told you I don’t want it.”

  He smiled and nodded ironically.

  “I prayed for something else about you tonight,” he said.

  “What was that?”

  “I prayed I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “That prayer has been answered.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, trying not to let her voice shake. Have you done it before, she wanted to ask, rape or worse? He’d seemed so affable and solicitous (albeit slightly nervous) on both dates—he hadn’t even tried to kiss her good night. But she saw now that he was just waiting for the chance to terrorize her, that that alone made him feel alive.

  “A man is always alone,” he said calmly but definitively, as if commenting on the weather. “In the end, he’s deserted by everyone, his parents, his women, and of course by God, the original deserter, and he’s left only with regret, his infinite regret and his anguish.”

  “I haven’t left you. I’ll listen to anything you want to tell me. Maybe if you tell me the story about your ex you’ll feel better.”

  “There are no stories—at least that’s the way it is for ear people like me. For us, stories go in one ear and out the other. Anyway, I’m going to make a leap of faith and trust you, simply because I have to use the bathroom. But I’m leaving the door open a little so I can hear you very easily and I’ll only be fifteen or twenty feet away with my gun in hand and all my ears wide open, and then I’ll be back in less than a half minute.”

  She nodded to reassure him as she watched him cross the room, go into the bathroom, and close the door but not completely shut it. The moment she heard him urinate she took her shoes off, grabbed her pocketbook and gun and bolted for the door, leaving it open so perhaps he wouldn’t hear her from the bathroom. She ran down his steps, worrying that she’d fall, then past two or three houses until she went into a neighbor’s backyard. That way if he chased her she could scream and someone might hear her.

  It was extremely dark out—a cloudy sky covered a hint of a moon. She nearly bumped into an enormous tree, then put her hand on the tree trunk to steady herself. She was not one who ran regularly, or even exercised, and was out of breath—panting heavily—which made a strange kind of music in the night as she put her shoes on.

  She had a horrible thought then, but it disappeared as soon as she reached in her pocketbook and found her cell phone. Why hadn’t she taken her car on this date? Why? Finally she felt herself get her breath back, then realized how cold she was and that she’d left her sweater—her favorite one—back at his place. She opened her phone to get a little light and call 911, when she realized she didn’t know what street she was on and wasn’t even sure of the town—was it Ballwin, Wildwood? Perhaps at 911 they could tell where she was, she wasn’t sure. But what could she tell the police? There’d been no rape—no sex at all—and as far as violence was concerned, just the time he threw her down on the sofa and pressed his hands on her neck. But there’d be no sign of that either. Nor would there be any sign of the threat he constantly posed to her with his gun—which he would have hidden by now or perhaps even had a license for and wouldn’t need to hide. She opened her pocketbook and felt the gun he gave her, cold and heavy like a snake. What would she say about it? She didn’t know. (She wished she’d taken her sweater instead.) She only knew that she’d throw the gun away as soon as she got home.

  He’d been clever, diabolically clever, she saw that now, in his self-restraint—turning her night of torture into a long mock therapy session of a kind, more than anything else.

  “Bastard,” she muttered, and started running again to get further away from him. But after a couple of blocks she began thinking differently. He was, after all, ill. She couldn’t lose or compromise her humanity because of him. She thought instead she’d eventually try to show some mercy toward him, only testifying against him if he would be sent to some mental health facility where he could get help, instead of jail. That would be a good thing for her, might even help her self-esteem, since she’d been feeling so blue lately. She would look at him as a person grappling with some of the painful riddles of the world and try to respect that, but meanwhile keep running till she found some light and could read a street address to call a taxi from because every town had a yellow cab, didn’t it?

  It took fifteen seconds, twenty at most before he realized he was alone. How could he not hear her leave? It must have been the fan that went on when he turned on the light. Then, when he realized what happened he was stunned, as if he’d turned into a giant frozen ear, which gave her five or more seconds to get away before he raced to the door, gun in hand, and looked out but couldn’t see her. Then he bowed his head and turned back. Fifteen or twenty seconds—tha
t’s all it took to become a ghost, at least in this room, he thought. He stared at the empty sofa, just as he did a month ago when Melanie had been sitting there, and noticed Courtney had taken the gun with her. It was like a little cavity was now on the sofa. He walked to the hall closet, unloaded the blanks from his gun, replaced them with the same bullets he’d put in her gun, turned around and walked back to his original spot. This time he noticed her sweater, even saw that it was pink before he started seeing it as flesh colored and then finally saw Courtney herself in it as if she grew out of the sweater.

  “How could you?” he said. “What’s your point? Aren’t you supposed to help people, not run away from them?”

  He kept staring at the sweater, asking it questions intermittently, until some time later he saw that it was really Melanie leaning against the sofa, and not the therapist at all. He said “Melanie” or whispered it as he moved toward the sofa to embrace her. Yet when he reached it, she’d disappeared. He blinked rapidly several times, then gasped. It was a hollow, futile sound, like a muffled wind in a shed. He felt his face, then realized he could see it as if he were looking in a mirror. He gasped again, louder this time. His face was completely covered by ears squirming and multiplying like little fish. Immediately he put the gun to it and shot into the school of earfish before falling forward onto the sweater, the red of his blood merging with the sweater’s pink, as if the two colors were always destined to coalesce.

  Mission Beach

  It begins in the ocean with wave following wave, breaking over his head and sometimes over yours. You’re on vacation again with your twelve-year-old son, Andy, on crowded Mission Beach in San Diego and he’s jumping up and down in the water, laughing and squealing. You love the waves too, especially bodysurfing with them. It’s a passion the two of you share (although his version of bodysurfing isn’t really bodysurfing at all, something you never point out to him, of course). Andy’s in the black wetsuit that you bought for him in the sporting goods store in Philadelphia, and seems oblivious to the chilly seventy-degree air. When he temporarily disappears under a wave and then emerges from it he looks like a slender little seal. In contrast, you are wearing the thickest, and one of the ugliest, T-shirts you own. The sky is a tug-of-war between sun and clouds. It gives relief one moment and removes it the next. You’re shivering and want to leave but you stay because Andy wants to. Although he’s improved his swimming a lot in the last year, he only weighs seventy-seven pounds, and with the strong undertow and waves you have to be extra vigilant and keep your eye on him virtually every second. Yet he also badly wants you to bodysurf (as do you), so you develop a technique of turning around the moment your ride ends and zeroing in on him. Meanwhile, the faraway lifeguard sits in an elevated tower of sorts like a cliff atop a distant island.