The Dark Dark

by Samantha Hunt

  * * *

  Her neighbor Chuck is sitting half in, half out of his metal utility storage shed. It’s lightweight, aluminum and fiberglass; the whole thing held together with wing nuts. Chuck has set a metal folding chair and a TV tray just outside the door. His sister, Patricia, has a three-bedroom home on the same property, but Chuck lives in his storage shed with no windows, no floor, and no plumbing. “I’m a green anarchist,” he told Ada when they first met. The ideology has to do with caveman times, dumpster diving, and friends in prison for blowing up car dealerships. Chuck doesn’t go shopping or burn fossil fuels. He rides a ten-speed bike in T-shirts magic-markered to read, RECLAIM! REWILD! RESIST! or STATE MELTDOWN or simply BURN, BURN, BURN.

  His radio is tuned to the same station Ada’s listening to in the car so that the broadcast comes through in stereo with a slight delay. “I repeat, SEVERE HURRICANE WARNING issued for southern Florida. We’ve got Chief John DeLamian here. Chief, what can you tell us?”

  “Well, at this point, Mike, I can tell you we’ve got a SEVERE HURRICANE WARNING issued for southern Florida.”

  “Chief, maybe you could clarify for our listeners the difference between a WATCH and a WARNING.”

  “Sure thing, Mike. A WATCH means we’re just watching, just gonna wait and see, while a WARNING—” Ada turns the car off.

  “Hey, Chuck.” She passes through the low row of palms dividing her land from Patricia’s. Ada holds a two-fingers wave, an Indian chief coming in peace. “I couldn’t get any plywood,” she tells him.

  “They sell out?”

  “My car’s too small.”

  “Ah ha,” he says. “Well then, you’re in for it. Total destruction.”

  “I guess so.” She chews her lip again.

  Chuck looks at her lopsided. She slept with him once, right after she’d moved here. In the intervening months she’s not made that mistake again. “There’s not much you can do to stop it, Ada. A hurricane will just take your plywooded house and deposit it upside down across the street.”

  “Those scenes on the news up north always looked faked. Like a Christmas village, trailers in trees.”

  “You must be some sort of monster.” Chuck shakes his head. “Beer, monster?”

  Nowhere does a storm appear yet. “Sure. Thank you.”

  He fishes her a can of malt liquor from out of an ice cooler. “Malt liquor gets the job done,” he told her when they first met, and in the time she’s known him she’s found that to be true.

  Dull sunlight shines into his shed. At the foot of his cot there’s a small steamer trunk with one blanket neatly folded across it. “You go ahead and sit down there,” he says, pointing to the folding chair, the only seat there is. Chuck finds a spot on the ground, crossing his legs.

  Ada stares at the chair.

  “Don’t be such a Yankee.”

  She takes a seat.

  If Ada met Chuck up north she would have mistaken him for someone whose favorite book is Helter Skelter, someone who listens to hair metal bands. She would have thought he was someone who wouldn’t care if a bit of scrambled egg fell between the stove and the cabinet. He’d leave it there for years. But here, she likes him. “How come people aren’t catatonic with wonder?” he asked her once when a scarlet ibis walked through the yard on long yellow backward-bent legs.

  Anyway, Chuck would never eat scrambled eggs.

  He explained his theory to her when they first met. “Food is fifteen percent nutrients, eighty-five percent poison. Everyone knows it’s true but most people just keep on eating. I can’t do it. It fogs up my brain when I have a sandwich.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. People in government keep a different food source. They give us this stuff to make us slow in the body, slow in the head. I won’t eat it. You shouldn’t either.”

  “Don’t you get hungry?”

  Chuck set his mouth in a way that let her know her question was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. Ada stopped poking his precarious foundation.

  Ada and Chuck are the same height and the same age, closing in on forty-five. Both are skinny with crab-long limbs and slightly stooped shoulders. Chuck’s hair is shoulder-length and thin, hanging feathered from his face like a beach bum’s. His head is tanned, skin coarse. Every day he wears Bermuda shorts, bright tube socks, and basketball sneakers. The sneakers remind Ada of things boys said in high school: sweater puppies, butterface, pearl necklace. The sneakers are creepy on a grown man, but Chuck gets his wardrobe from a Catholic Worker center where they hand out food and clothes to unfortunates on Saturdays.

  Chuck is not technically unfortunate. He could live with Patricia if he wanted to. Instead he lives in his shed, seeing his sister only on Sundays when they sit together in her air-conditioning to watch reality TV, the green anarchist and the real estate lawyer. He probably does his laundry at her house, using one of her scented dryer sheets. He probably has a snack, something really poisonous like a Pop-Tart or a Slim Jim or an Oreo cookie dipped in Fluff, Jif, Reddi-wip.

  “Does Patricia have a boyfriend?” Ada jerks her chin toward the main house, a dark thing with a large wraparound porch. Ada has only met Patricia once, though she’d spied her before, having a drink alone underneath yellow bug lights on the porch.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think she likes men. If you know what I mean.”

  Ada says nothing.

  “I don’t think she likes women either. She likes her job. And God.” He finishes his beer. “You want another?”

  For the first time that day the sky suggests the trouble coming from out at sea. The wind begins to pick up, blowing a bit of sand and dirt around. The world gets darker. “Sure.”

  In between songs, the radio is relating a top-forty list of the world’s most destructive natural disasters. Andrew. Pompeii. Galveston. Katrina. Then, “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” There’s no rain yet. They sip their beers.

  “I heard that maybe one of the reasons we’re having so many storms now is because we cleaned up the environment too much. Pollution used to keep the bigger storms in check.”

  “Well, you heard bullshit.” End of that conversation. “Any luck on the job hunt?” he asks.

  “Nope.” Ada hasn’t done much since moving south. Each morning she wakes and has a cup of coffee in her living room. The cup empties and Ada moves out to the lanai to watch the ibises and the lizards. She’ll apply a self-tanner to her legs or follow a square of sunlight as it travels across the wall.

  “Most people move because of a job,” he says, as if Ada were from outer space instead of Rhode Island and he’s charged with explaining how humans live, what their customs are.

  “Not me.”

  “No.” Chuck lifts his eyes, revealing a field of white below his pupils. He draws his knees into his chest and looks around himself slowly, to the left and right. “So why’d you come here?”

  A body trapped in a burlap sack, the answer squirms. “I already told you.”

  One night they sat together drinking until it was dark and Ada told him her reasons for moving. “I had a fiancé who died,” she said.

  “I know. Your fiancé. But didn’t that happen years ago?” Ada has only been in Florida for a few months.

  She hesitates. “It took me a while to get packed.”

  “All right.” Chuck picks at the vegetation underneath his legs. “Shoot,” he says, and then, “All right.”

  “Thanks for the beers.” Ada stands. “I’ll see you after the storm?”

  “You know they’ve called a county-wide evacuation?”

  Ada nods.

  “You can just follow the blue signs out on the highway. Head west.”

  “You’re not going to evacuate?”

  Chuck looks over at Patricia’s house. It’s built like an Austrian chalet, a fortress.

  “I’ll think about it.” Ada waves, passing back through the palm trees to her own house, the one with all those windows and nothing but a crawl space for
a lost python underneath it.

  * * *

  The red light on Ada’s answering machine is blinking. Rhode Island. Foreign grunts from a lost civilization. No one in Florida even knows the number yet. She ignores the message. She has a seat on her new couch, watching the wall of windows as if the feature presentation is about to start there. She eats crackers and peanut butter while she waits. The room darkens some and time passes. The answering machine continues to blink. Outside, branches move in two directions at once, then three directions, shuddering. More time passes. Ada smooths the fabric of the upholstery and the hurricane beats the ocean with 120 mph winds. The lights flicker and brown for a moment, holding the world in pause until the full force of the storm and the sea arrives on cue.

  Rain pours down the glass onto the lanai. More time passes. More rain falls. The wind across the roof and gutters snarls while any light left in the sky drains away. Some of the first debris to come flying by the windows is the gray, lower branches of ungroomed palm trees. They are brittle and snap off easily. Their palms act as sails. It’s The Wizard of Oz out there. A number of store circulars and plastic shopping bags fly past. Ada watches for something heavy and terrible, the neighbors’ aboveground pool, a backyard grill, one of the ATVs. She waits for an eighteen-wheeler to drop into her front yard, but the wind is not quite strong enough yet to lift anything heavier than paper, plastic, and dead foliage.

  She presses the flashing red button of her answering machine.

  “Hi, A. It’s me.” A friend from Rhode Island. “I didn’t want you to hear it from anyone else, but Henry’s wife is pregnant. About seven months now. Give me a call.” Then a dial tone. In the dark, she smells the rot of those words. Henry’s wife is pregnant. The storm grows. Ada shuts her eyes.

  * * *

  “Hello, sweetheart.” Flashes of black-and-white light behind her closed lids. A squiggle on a static-filled monitor. “Hello, sweetheart.”

  * * *

  And when she opens her eyes the power is gone. The clock on the stove is dark and the lamp switch spins around with no results. When she stands, she sees a small stream now running through her backyard, cutting veins in the sandy soil. It flows directly underneath Ada’s house, in one side and out the other. How did that much water get there so quickly? She’s never seen rain like this before. Ada bends her ear to the floorboards, listening for the rush of water below, but instead she hears a knock. “Come in,” she tells the flood.

  “Are you all right over here?”

  “Chuck?” It’s only been two hours, maybe three, since she last saw him, but the world’s changed.

  “Yeah.”

  He’s soaked through. He removes his sneakers and socks in the front hall. “Why don’t you get your things together and come over to Pat’s? You’re about to get washed out to sea.”

  “Man,” Ada says. “Look at you. You want a towel?” She passes through her bedroom and into the master bath with Chuck following, dripping throughout the house, accustomed to living where the floors are made of sand.

  In the bathroom he twists the fabric of his shorts, wringing dampness out onto the tiles. There are two facing mirrors. Chuck moves his arm and a million arms move with him, replicated into infinity. His tanned skin, his surfer hair, his kooky conspiracies that at first don’t make any sense, until quite suddenly they do.

  There are four or five drops of water making their way down Chuck’s face, beading up into larger drops, waiting to fall but then not falling. “This is some storm,” he says, twisting his shorts again. “We never had this many big storms in one season when I was a kid.”

  She passes him a towel. Chuck holds it but doesn’t use it. “That’s what they say.”

  “And Patricia doesn’t even believe in global warming.”

  One drop swings like a charm from the end of his nose. Still he doesn’t use the towel.

  Chuck raises the timbre of his voice to imitate his sister. “‘God won’t let us die.’ That’s what she says.”

  It’s impossible. The drop can’t continue to hold on.

  “I tell her that God lets us die every day. I don’t even know what she’s talking about.”

  It’s unbearable, hanging off the very tip. Ada takes the towel and presses it up against him, both her hands open on his face. She holds it there, blotting him out. Ada can feel the cartilage of his nose through the towel, the warmth of his exhalation. She feels his cheekbones and the moisture off his skin. She removes the towel and there, he is dried.

  He smiles, stops. “Why’d your fiancé die so young?”

  She drops the towel. As with a lie told in childhood, even Ada has forgotten it’s a lie. “Terrorists,” she says, and begins to smile until she sees how that word tears through Chuck’s face, corroded blood or black ink.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asks.

  But Ada does not have a good answer. So she pulls him to her. She tilts her neck, smelling Chuck’s metallic breath. She lifts her chin and Chuck follows, bending to the opposite side, closing in on her. When they’d been together before, it was a mistake, malt liquor, and she had told Chuck the following day, “Not with the neighbors.” But here in the hurricane Ada opens her mouth. She silences him. He grabs her quickly with plodding hands, baseball mitts moving across her back.

  She’s glad the sneakers are already removed when they make their way through the near-dark room and onto her bed.

  Her nose presses against his skin. Yeast and old newspapers. A wrong smell. Chuck is a wrong shape also, like a tall, thin chest of drawers. Their bodies do not fit together. Still, she tries. She wraps her arms around him. She moves more out of memory than tenderness. She hitches her leg across him, tearing into him. “Shh. Shh. Shh.”

  Chuck is clean shaven, which means a bowl of cold water and a razor, grooming himself in a shed without proper plumbing. A gentle action. Two people who live their lives alone in rooms doing strange, gentle things can sometimes be together in the middle of a dangerous storm in a house made of glass. “Shh. Shh. Shh.”

  “Mercy,” he says, arcing his thinness above her. “Mercy.”

  Ada hasn’t any idea why he should ask for mercy.

  * * *

  When it’s over they lie on their backs breathing, staring up into the storm though they can’t see it. Just a white ceiling with one small crack in the left corner by the doorjamb. She brushes Chuck with her thigh. Maybe the wind will rip the roof from its joists. Or she could just destroy the order of the world. She does it all the time.

  Chuck stands and two perfume bottles on her bureau click together. He’s naked in front of her. “I’d be curious to hear what you think about it.”

  By “it” she really hopes he doesn’t mean his lovemaking prowess. There are mysterious splotches on his torso like some rare infectious disease.

  “I mean when it first happened, were you surprised? I wasn’t. We’ve been asking for it for years.”

  He’s talking about the planes, the buildings. “Oh.” Ada pulls the sheet over her head.

  “It’s a war,” Chuck says. “But I don’t mean terrorism. I mean capitalism. If you’re going to set up hierarchies where one person has very little and another person has a lot more, that’s war. Then you’re asking for it.”

  Ada is perfectly flat under her sheet in the gray light. Her eyes dart back and forth, as if some way out, a secret tunnel, might appear beneath the covers. The wind is so loud she can pretend she doesn’t hear Chuck.

  “Of course nature and the environment are always the lowest man on the totem pole. No one looks out for nature under capitalism because trying to persuade an American to not want more, to stop buying things when they feel badly, is like trying to persuade a person to stop breathing.”

  She sees her chest rise and fall below the sheet. She hears Chuck pacing at the end of the bed, delivering his fiery sermon.

  “When it happened I thought now America will wonder why we’d been attacked and then we’d see how capit
alism failed us, how it kills people every day. Cancer, hunger, obesity, heart disease, alcoholism, car crashes.” Chuck drives a fist into his other palm. He tallies more casualties. “Genetically fucked-up corn, tobacco, kids on antidepressants, diabetes, asthma, drugs, pollution. This is what American capitalism manufactures. This is our GNP.”

  The window screen in the bedroom sucks in and out as if it will tear. Something heavy strikes the bathroom skylight. Chuck stops. Ada sits up at the noise. She lets the sheet fall. Her spine curls to a curve. Her boobs touch her stomach. Chuck’s nude body makes the trace of a ghost in the room. Here in the storm it’s easy for her to see how rigid his spine is. Ada slouches even farther.

  “Why was he there?” Chuck asks. “I thought you said you guys lived outside Providence.”

  Ada focuses on the individual fibers of tan carpeting. And just then, thoughts she’d left back in Rhode Island arrive as if they’d been delayed by careless movers who came south via Alaska. “We’re here. Sorry we’re late.” Ada’s lungs slam shut. She sees Chuck’s splotchy skin and imagines she’s burning those red spots into his flesh with just her eyes, as if the power of her thoughts could hurt someone.

  * * *

  “Hello, sweetheart,” she’d said to the ultrasound machine. The Rhode Island obstetrician rubbed jelly across Ada’s belly, then turned on the device so that an image appeared on the monitor. A tiny creature swimming inside Ada, its heart beating as fast as a hummingbird. The baby swam. Ada reached her hand out to touch the screen, stroking the black-and-white image there, petting it. A tiny spine, a tiny stomach, the bones of the baby’s small feet. Ada could feel the warmth of the monitor underneath her hand as if it were her baby’s blood. “Hello, sweetheart. Hello.”