The Dark Dark

by Samantha Hunt

  Her perfection is alarming.

  “It’ll just start all over again,” she says.

  And, in the cabin, Ted knows she’s right. He hangs his head, defeated. He’s already thought of that youngster with the big ideas himself. He tried to ignore that youngster. In his head, in his plan, he only saw undulating fields of golden wheat and children playing hide-and-go-seek in the corn. He saw how the woods are the poor man’s overcoat with mushrooms, hazelnuts, a soft pine-needle bed, sweet maple sap, and a fire for reducing the sap. So much has already been given to us. He just can’t believe people could want more.

  “What do you want?” he asks her, and she makes an expression that looks like thinking while her computers search for anything lacking. “Detonation” is all her computers come up with, but that result lies beyond her firewall, along with all the other essential truths about herself that she isn’t allowed to reveal, a glitch they’d had to fix after she said too much to that U.S. marshal in Reno. And so her computer instructs her to lie. She answers, “Nothing really. What do you want?”

  Ted stops to consider. His mug of coffee has reached the bottom but he doesn’t really want a refill. If he has too much caffeine he won’t sleep well tonight. He looks around. What does he want?

  “Do you want me?” she asks.

  But Ted is staring out the window, his theories slipping away from him. He lets her words pile up on his stomach like tiny asphalt pebbles. Beauty, even her beauty, has become something to him like a stone, a solid pit in his chest. His answer would have broken her heart if she’d had one.

  * * *

  “Wayne, you were supposed to detonate me while I was there in his cabin.”

  “I know.”

  “You failed in your duty to serve the United States of America, Honor Code section four, paragraph nineteen.”

  “I know.”

  “There are consequences,” she says.

  “I know,” Wayne answers, and reaches out to hold her cheek in his hand. She doesn’t move away. She is programmed not to resist male advances. He pulls her down onto the floor of the van, beside the pool cleaning apparatus. He nestles his face in her neck. He wraps his hand around her waist underneath her flannel shirt and pulls her closer, feeling the silicone lumps that are her breasts push into him. He smells the chalk of her scent while her arms remain limp by her sides. “Hold me,” he commands her, though he feels immediately ashamed, desperate. Still, “Hold me,” he repeats. She complies and wraps her mechanical arms around him while he speaks words of loving sweetness into her ear, the ones she’s been waiting to hear, hot breath against plastic. Wayne whispers the magic words that send a repressed tremor through the quiet night, an explosion that could only be described as American.

  A LOVE STORY

  “A coyote ate a three-year-old not far from here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. My uncle told me.”

  “Huh.”

  “He said, ‘Don’t leave those babies outside again,’ as if I already had.”

  “Had you?”

  “Come on.” An answer less precise than no.

  “Why’s he monitoring coyote activity up here?”

  “Because.”

  “Because?”

  “It’s irresistible.”

  “Really?” Again. A word that means I doubt your grasp of the truth.

  My uncle’s so good at imagining things, like a wild dog with a tender baby in its jaws disappearing into the redwoods forever, he makes the imagined things real. “Yeah.”

  “Irresistible?”

  “It’s what he does, a habit.” Or compulsion.

  “I don’t get it,” my husband says.

  But I do. Every real thing started life as an idea. I’ve imagined objects and moments into existence. I’ve made humans. I’ve made things up. I tip taxi drivers ten, twenty dollars every time they don’t rape me.

  * * *

  The last time my husband and I had sex was eight months ago and it doesn’t count because at the time my boobs were so huge from nursing that their power over him, over all men really, was supreme. Now, instead of sex with my husband, I spend my nights imagining dangerous scenarios involving our children. It’s less fun.

  * * *

  “Watch out,” my uncle says. “Watch out,” taking his refuge in right-wing notions, living life terrified of differences.

  * * *

  Once, I was a drug dealer, back when pot was still illegal here. I’m a writer now. It’s not that different from being a drug dealer. Both have something to do with levels of reality. Both offer flexible hours for mothers. I haven’t made any money writing yet; still, that’s how I spend my days, putting things down on paper. People continue to come to my house to buy pot and I sell it to them even though I’m no longer a drug dealer and they could get this shit legally and I’m sick of the people who pop their heads in my door, all friendly-like: “Hi. How you doing?”

  “Fine,” I’ll say, but I mean, Shut up and buy your drugs and stop thinking you’re better than me. I probably won’t have too many customers for much longer. There’s got to be a whole lot of people who are better drug dealers than I am.

  * * *

  When I was young I shopped at the Army/Navy with the thought that if I bought these clothes and wore them I would prevent some beautiful young man from being killed in the garments. I’m a romantic. I’m writing about the coyotes, the kids, the taxi drivers, the drugs, and the romantic notions because I want to be as honest as I can. As I said, thoughts become material. I want to make truth. It’s too bad I have to say this, but I will: I’m not hysterical or crazy. I’m providing a guided tour to a woman with hormones. Let’s talk about differences. Let’s lay the groundwork for real honesty, for belief, for biology, for no more Really?

  * * *

  I had great hopes the threat of Lyme disease would revitalize our sex life. “Will you check me for ticks?” You know, and things would go from there. Grooming each other as monkeys do. In that way, at least for a while, I got him to touch me again and that felt good, but then Lyme disease never really took off in California like it did on the East Coast.

  * * *

  Most men I know speak about sex as if their needs are more intense or deeper than women’s needs. Like their penises are on fire and they will die if they can’t extinguish the flames in some damp, tight hole. When I was younger I believed men when they said their desires were more intense than mine because they talked about sex so much through high school and college. I didn’t recognize this talk as a prop of false identity. The men developed entire industries devoted to this desire, this identity. The aches! The suffering of the boys! The shame and mutual responsibility for blue balls. The suffering of the boys. Poor boys, I thought. Poor boys, as if I were being called upon to serve in a war effort, the war against boys not getting any.

  Why do people act like boys can’t be human? Like they don’t control their own bodies? It’s not a very nice way to think about boys.

  The only desire/constructed identity I have that compares to the way men talk about sex is my devotion to rehashing the past. I relive the exquisite pain of things that no longer exist: my father’s jean jacket, my father, Travolta’s 1977 dark beauty, how it felt to be alone in the house with my mom after my siblings finally left for school, the rotations of my first record player spinning the Osmonds and Paper Lace, the particular odors of a mildewed tent in summertime. Memory as erogenous zone.

  But then I, too, started to burn, and while no one wants to hear about middle-aged female sexual desire, I don’t care anymore what no one thinks. There are days I ache so badly, the only remedy beyond a proper plowing, beyond someone using their body to slam all the self out of myself, would be a rusty piece of metal or broken glass to gouge out my hot center from mid-inner thigh all the way up to my larynx. I’d spare my spine, brain, hands, and feet. I’m not irrational.

  * * *

  The list of potential reasons for why my husban
d and I no longer have sex wakes me up at night. If I’m not already awake thinking about the coyotes. The first reason, the wildest, craziest reason, is that maybe my husband is just gone. Maybe one night a while back I kicked him out after a fight and maybe, even if I didn’t mean everything I said, maybe he went away and hasn’t come back yet. That would certainly explain why we don’t have sex. Maybe I’m just imagining him here still. Thoughts making material, etc., etc. Really? etc., etc. It can be hard to tell with men, whether they are actually here or not. Especially a man with a smartphone.

  The second reason I develop for why my husband and I no longer have sex is that my husband is, no doubt, gay. A faultless situation, though not without its heartache and deceit.

  The third reason I concoct for why my husband and I no longer have sex is that he must be molesting our children when he puts them to bed each night. This reason does a lot of work for me, double duty, cultivating hysterical worry about both my marriage and my kids at the same time. Such efficiency. It is also so insane, so far out to the margin, that some nights it can actually help to reset my brain back to center.

  The fourth reason I develop is that now, after pregnancy, I’ve lost the ability to see myself clearly. My feeling is that I probably look like a chubby Victorian maid: bad teeth, mouth agape, drooling ignorance and breast milk. This reason sends me onto the Internet for hours, researching various exercise regimens and diets hawked by self-tanned women with chemically bruised hair. In the middle of the night it’s easy to hate myself as much as the world hates me.

  A few years ago my husband bought me a short black wig as part of a sex toy package. His ex-girlfriend has short black hair. I know the chemistry of other people’s desire is not my fault, but the wig, so raw, really hurt.

  Finally the last reason I imagine for why my husband and I no longer have sex comes almost as a relief because it requires very little imagination or explanation and after I think it, I can usually go back to sleep. My husband must be having an affair.

  I have a friend from college, Susan Pembroke. She’s a real New England WASP with a fantastic secret. Her family pays for all those Lilly Pulitzers, summers on Nantucket, and boarding schools from a fortune made manufacturing dildos and vibrators. I love that secret. One of their biggest sellers is a set of prosthetic monster tongues, some forked, some spiky, most of them green or blue plastic, all of them scaled for the lady’s pleasure, especially ladies with lizard fetishes.

  Susan once asked me a greasy question that returns on nights like this one, nights unhinged. “Are you the kind of woman who would want to know if her husband’s cheating on her or not?” And she left the question dangling. Her mouth might have even been open slightly. People cheat because we are no longer running away from saber-toothed tigers. I get that. Adrenaline insists on being taken out for a spin. But there was an indictment inherent in either answer I could give Susan, so I stayed silent and wondered, was she asking because she knew something?

  * * *

  We moved out of the city because there’s no room for non-millionaires there anymore. In the country, life is more spacious. We bought a king-sized bed. Some nights we snuggle like people in an igloo, all five of us. Those nights, our giant bed is the center of the universe, the mother ship of bacterial culture. It is populated with blood, breast milk, baby urine, a petri dish of life forms like some hogan of old. Those nights I know we are safe. But when our children sleep in their own room my husband and I are left alone on the vast plain of this oversized bed feeling separate, feeling like ugly Americans who have eaten too much, again.

  * * *

  When one turns to the Internet for mothering advice, one finds a plague of perfectionism. One could be led to believe that mothering means Alice in Wonderland birthday parties; Spanish-speaking nannies; healthy children harvesting perfect blue chicken eggs from the backyard coop; homeschooled wonders who read by age three; flat, tight bellies; happy husbands; cake pops; craft time; quilting projects; breast pumps in the boardroom; micro vineyards of pinot grapes; ballet tights; cloth diapers; French braids; homemade lip balm; tremendous flat pans of paella prepared over backyard fires. What sort of sadist is running these Internets? And more important, how do these blogs not constitute acts of violence against women?

  I glimpsed a huge beyond when I became a mother, the enormity of an abyss or the opposite of an abyss, the idea of complete fullness, the anti-death, tiny gods everywhere. But now all that the world wants to hear from me is how I juggle children and career, how I manage to get the kids to eat their veggies, how I lost the weight.

  I will never lose this weight.

  When one encounters a mother doing too many things perfectly, smiling as if it is all so easy, so natural, we should feel a civic responsibility to slap her hard across the face, to scream the word “Stop! Stop!” so many times the woman begins to chant or whimper the word along with us. Once she has been broken, take her in your arms until the trembling and self-hatred leave her body. It is our duty.

  I used to think it was motherhood that loosens a woman’s grasp on sanity. Now I see it is the surplus and affluence of America. Plus something else, something toxic, leaking poison, fear. Something we can’t yet see. But not motherhood itself.

  I’d like to post some shots from my own childhood, a version of my parents’ parenting blog, if such an abomination had existed back then. In every photo through the fog of cigarette smoke filling the living room, across the roar of Georges Moustaki blasting his sorrow from the record player at midnight, it would be difficult for a viewer to even locate the children in rooms so thick with adults acting like adults. Here, I found mystery. There was no fear. Here, I was glad to face the night unprotected.

  * * *

  In my new career as a writer, I’ve been thinking about drafting a manual for expecting mothers. An honest guide through a complex time no one’s ever properly prepared for. After I became a mom I asked an older friend, “How come you never told me I’d lose my identity when I had a kid?”

  “’Cause it’s temporary. And I kind of forgot.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  When I sit down to begin my manual I understand how specific my guide is to one demographic. So then, okay, a mothering guide for middle-class, heterosexual women who went to college and are gainfully employed. But once I’ve arrived there, my pen still lifted at the ready, I realize I actually have very little wisdom. So a brochure. Pen in hand. Until I realize that what I’ve learned about being a middle-class, hetero mother who went to college could actually be boiled down to one or two fortune cookies. I write, HORMONES MAKE LIFE. HORMONES MAKE MENTAL ILLNESS. I write, EQUALITY BETWEEN THE SEXES DOES NOT EXIST. And then my job is done.

  * * *

  A few days ago I was scrubbing the rim of the upstairs toilet because it smelled like a city alley in August. My phone dinged. I’d received an e-mail. I pulled off my latex gloves to read the message. (Who am I kidding? I wasn’t wearing gloves. I was scrubbing the toilet with bare hands. Honesty. I was probably even using the same sponge I use on the sink, for that area right near the toothbrushes.) The e-mail was from my husband. “Thought you might like this,” he said. It was a link to a list of something called Life Hacks, simple tricks designed to make one’s life easier: use duct tape to open tough lids, keep floppy boots upright with swimming pool noodles, paper clip the end of a tape roll so you can find it easily.

  I wrote him back. “Or you could marry a woman and make her your slave.”

  He never did respond.

  * * *

  I’m not saying men have it better or women have it better. I’ve never wanted to be a man. I’m just saying there’s a big difference.

  * * *

  When I swim at the public pool I wear sunglasses so I can admire the hairless chest of the nineteen-year-old lifeguard. I love it that he, a child, is guarding me, fiercest of warriors, a mother, strong as stinky cheese, with a ripe, moldy, melted rotten center of such intense c
omplexity and flavor it would kill a boy of his tender age.

  * * *

  Once, I woke Sam in the night. That’s my husband’s name, Sam. “Honey,” I said. “Honey, are you awake?”

  “Uhh?”

  “I think I’m dying.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Uh-huh,” and went back to sleep.

  Presumably my husband likes stinky cheese and the challenge of living near my hormones. Presumably that’s what love is.

  * * *

  Another night, also in bed, I woke Sam. I do that a lot. “I want you to agree that there is more than one reality.”

  “Huh?”

  “I want you to agree that if I feel it, if I think it, it is real.”

  “But what if you think I’m an asshole?” he asked.

  “Then that’s real.”

  “Really?”

  “What’s that word even mean, really?” I started to scream a little. “You think we all see things the same way? You think there’s one truth and you know it?”

  “Sure. Right? Really?” he asked. Really.

  * * *

  One huge drawback to my job as a drug dealer is that, while I grow older, passing through my thirties and into my forties, the other drug dealers stay young. They are almost all in their twenties. Normally, I don’t socialize with the other drug dealers, but one night a group of the twenty-year-olds asked if I wanted to join them for a drink. I almost said no, but then decided, why not.

  All the motions at the bar were familiar. It’s not as if I forgot how to go out for a drink. I know how to order a glass of wine. I had no trouble climbing onto a bar stool. After our first drink, some of the young drug dealers disappeared to play pool, some wandered off to greet other friends. Halfway through my second glass, I was holding down the fort alone, watching a couple of purses and cocktails left in my charge. No problem. I didn’t mind a moment of silence. Plus, the young drug dealers can sometimes be stupid, boring.