The Dark Dark

by Samantha Hunt

  Let that mess brew for a few years.

  The woman bought a summerhouse by the beach because it was the most expensive place and she wants her husband to pay a lot. She takes the kids there from June to the end of August. That way she’s not responsible for any wife duties: cooking, laundry, pleasantness, napkin folding, buying of gifts, wrapping up gifts, tipping garbagemen, scrubbing under the rim (not that she would ever do this), making the bed, dressing the children, doing the homework, fucking and sucking, making the lunches, making the coffee. Each summer now she finds herself at the beach, right at the beach, face-to-face with the ocean that, despite having no mercy, is full of judgment. “You married him for shiny things and new cars,” it says.

  “So.”

  “At least he was once in love. You’re the worst. Shriveled, frigid.” The ocean doesn’t really speak like an angry Irishman, but she hears it anyway, the way it just keeps rolling and rolling, judging her.

  Imagine if even the ocean didn’t want you. That would feel very bad. Imagine the ocean refused you entry.

  A few hours ago a Volvo or a Land Cruiser driven by a teenager came and stole her children away. “Going out, Mom.”

  “Where?”

  “Out.”

  She considers the places her children might hide: a drunk house party with no parents, a private dune. She doesn’t think ice cream parlor or skinny-dipping. She knows her children are too awful to enjoy something so innocent.

  She’s alone in the house. The kitchen is in order. Tomorrow the Colombian girl will do the laundry. There is no purpose to her life. No one needs her. Nothing to be done. She hears the waves. She hears her son’s electronic devices processing distant communications. She drinks more wine, worrying it will make her fat and fatness will cause her entire world to come tumbling down. Then she hears someone laughing.

  Next door to her summer home, a civic-minded body of locals, old hippies, collected funds to install four benches looking out to sea. The benches were built by people who live by this beach year-round, an unimaginable position. They got permission in the off-season, as locals will, to place their public benches within clear-sounding distance of her private property.

  Alone and empty, she hears voices, drunk, awful locals chatting, laughing, enjoying the benches. She already raised a stink to the town council and had a sign erected that states the benches are only to be used during daylight hours. But the sign is a splendid failure. It is so dark at her end of the street, once the sun sets, no one can read the sign. Nearly nightly now it falls to her to sweep these dregs back to town or whichever lesser view they came from.

  Alone in this house, on this far beach with no one to ask, Do you want to take a walk, do you want to watch a movie, should we head up to bed now, the laughing continues. Her blood rages. She unseals her window. The night air disturbs her controlled climate. Another trespass these bench sitters claim. She opens her mouth. Violence and pure rage let loose. Fine, thick, rich curse words pour from her mouth, indignities to scratch untouchable itches like Where is her husband? Where are her children? How for fuck’s sake did she, a beautiful person, end up in this house, on this beach, with no one?

  Her initial tirade is met with silence. “Get out of here!” she screams.

  The bench sitters do nothing, they stare openmouthed, a woman with two girls.

  “What is your fucking problem? This is my property!”

  They don’t move.

  “You stupid shits! Can’t you hear me?!”

  They stare. The young age of the girls makes each of the woman’s curse words count triple. She feels her naughty language like a painful lash, producing more awful language, the worst words she can imagine. “Cunts! Cunts! Poor people!” She says it, screams it.

  Finally one of the girls holds up her hands, gesturing to the mother and the other child. She speaks in sign language, a secret conversation the woman can’t understand, and when the girl’s done both the mother and the children begin to laugh again so loudly, almost as if they are deaf, almost as if their ears can’t judge the level of the laughter they make.

  “I hate you! I hate all of you!” the woman screams, and does not stop screaming even after she’s back inside, the sliding door slammed shut, her awful reflection the only image in the glass.

  OXTR

  oxytocin receptor

  inducer of uterine contractions during parturition and of milk ejection, modulator of a variety of behaviors, including stress and anxiety, social memory and recognition, sexual and aggressive behaviors, bonding and maternal behavior

  Here’s a young nun, a novice at a convent that hasn’t been able to entice young women to stay in over twenty years. None except for her. She lives now on a mountain where many of her older sisters are preparing for death, so that one day, when she’s done ministering to all their needs, all their last rights, she’ll be left alone, the last nun standing. In some small way, she’s looking forward to that.

  TP53

  tumor protein p53

  regulates cell division and prevents tumor formation, “guardian of the genome”

  A couple rents an upstate cottage beside a river, total luxury. Their dog can run for miles undisturbed. The bottom floor houses a full-size indoor pool where they can swim parallel to the river with the current, against the current, with the current. Escaping all of the river’s inconveniences: ice, rain, barges, toxic PCBs.

  The house is decorated in Pottery Barn. It is complete. It is blank. The nondescript furniture allows renters to insert their own lives, like the decor of a just-fine business hotel. Everything has been calculated to cause the least upset.

  When they arrive, the woman who owns the property greets them. She gives them a quick tour. She shows them linens, garbage disposal, and light switches. Everything is perfect, they tell her.

  “Yes. I made sure of it.” She smiles. “Here’s a phone number should anything crop up.”

  At first, it is hard for them, city people, to not be busy. They make informal schedules: breakfast, hike, lunch in town, massages, naps, dinner prep, dinner, Netflix, bed, so that it isn’t until their second afternoon that one of them shakes off the comfort of the deep couch and says, “You know, I’m going to give that swimming pool a try.”

  He tops off his prosecco and heads downstairs. He slips into his swimsuit and pulls goggles down over his eyes. Then he removes his swimsuit. Who needs a swimsuit in a private pool? He drains his glass and dips one foot. The water is frigid. What had she said about controlling the temperature? He wishes he’d been listening better, but he was distracted by the pool, the views of the river, the mountains beyond. He dips his foot again. It is too cold for swimming. He’ll have to call. No big deal. They paid a lot of money for the rental and so far they’ve been nothing but perfect, quiet guests. He dials and after three rings gets an answer.

  “Hello?” A man.

  “Sorry to bother you. This is…” and he says his name. “I’m in the rental house this week. Quick question. I’m trying to take a swim and the pool’s frigid. Is there some way to make the water warmer?”

  Then the question hangs as if the person is slow or old or doesn’t understand.

  “Hello?”

  “The unthinkable has happened.” Finally the man speaks.

  “Sorry? What’s that?”

  “Cynthia went to the city, rode an elevator up as high as she could and found a way out. She jumped. She’s dead,” the man reports.

  Later that night the renter finds a thermostat for the pool in the downstairs utility closet. Everything has been calculated to cause the least upset. The feet leaving the ledge. In the morning a friend arrives for a visit. She brings her children. Eventually, the water in the pool warms up. None of them dare to jump in.

  PGR

  progesterone receptor

  associated with the establishment and maintenance of pregnancy

  Her partner had been dead for years when, in her late seventies, she grew interested in Skype.
Real space-age stuff to someone born during World War I. Seeing the person on the phone. The woman had learned of Skype from the story of an academic who’d suffered round after round of Skype interviews with college search committees. During the last interview, after she used the words “hegemony” and “transmedia” and “intersectionality” and the search committee still measured disappointment, the academic lifted a pistol from the couch cushions and fired it directly into the tiny flashing camera of her monitor, the secret tunnel to that conference room of scholars with health insurance. She pulled the trigger. She blew those fuckers away.

  “What is this Skype?” the older woman asked, and was told. Since then, she’s become an expert. Facebook, e-mail, Google, Twitter, Instagram, and now Skype. She spent her life as a photojournalist, traveling the world. Now that she’s older she travels less but fills this void by exploring the Internet. She sometimes even photographs her monitor or television set. She snaps Polaroids of celebrity divorces, lurid courtrooms, gossip TV.

  Late one night she stumbles across Chatroulette, an online service much like Skype, linking people via video stream. Only, Chatroulette moves randomly from one user to another, linking strangers. More than fostering international dialogues, most Chatroulette conversations start with this: “Show me your tits.”

  She has nothing to fear from the cock-strokers. They are far away and she is an older, confident woman. When she tires of watching one penis she simply clicks on to the next.

  Within moments she’s comfortable with the spectacle. The only thing that manages to surprise her is when she comes across someone who really does just want to chat.

  She photographs her screen, some graphic images, some more interested in the quality of the light, the line of the object. Night after night she trolls Chatroulette for the better part of an hour looking for life, hearing the same entreaty, “Show me your tits. Show me your tits.”

  That’s a tricky request. She lost her bosom in a double mastectomy years earlier. She never bothered with a reconstruction. It seemed not worth the effort and money, but she recognizes the one-sided nature of her presence on Chatroulette. Getting photographs for free. Giving nothing in return.

  One night she lifts her blouse overhead. Her face is hidden while her chest is on display. The double scars of her surgery look like a pair of huge eyes sealed shut forever. The seam of scar tissue. She doesn’t like that idea; still she allows people to look all they want. From beneath her shirt she even recognizes the sound of orgasm once or twice. Eventually the image of the sealed eyelids becomes more than she can bear. “Let me look,” she says from beneath her shirt, imagining her scars opening, letting in the light. “Let me look,” lowering her blouse, her eyes adjusting to the blinding monitor that’s rewired sight all together. “Let me look.” One hand on her camera, her eye. “Let me look. Let me look. Let me look.”

  * * *

  What is taking Sam so long to come back to bed?

  So much time has passed since he left. I shake off the sheets and covers. I call from the top of the stairs. “Sam?” I rest my hand against the window in the hall and hear that awful sound again. A man outside coughing in the night. “Sam?” Each step down the stairs takes years. I’m frozen by terror. How long has Sam been gone? The photos lining the stairwell don’t anchor me. Pictures of my girls at birthdays, the beach, soccer games. “Sam?” I call to him from the bottom stair. The front doorknob spins against the lock and I cannot move. I forgot the baseball bat, too. Someone is trying to get inside. There is nothing I can do to stop him, the man who has come to chop us into tiny bits. The lock holds, but I am petrified. The man tries the handle again.

  “Sam? Where are you?”

  “I’m out here.” He spins the locked handle.

  “You?” Sam is the man. “How’d you get locked out?” I grab one corner of the kitchen table.

  “Are you kidding?” It is Sam at the door. I see him through the glass, coughing, mortal. Sam’s the man who’s come to chop us to bits. No wonder I kicked him out. No wonder I changed the locks. If he cannot stop death, what good is he?

  “Open the door. Please. I’m so tired,” he says.

  I look at the night that absorbed my life. How am I supposed to know what’s love, what’s fear? “If you’re Sam who am I?”

  “I know who you are.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who?” Don’t say wife, I think. Don’t say mother. I put my face to the glass, but it’s dark. I don’t reflect. Sam and I watch each other through the window of the kitchen door. He coughs some more.

  “I want to come home,” he says. “I want us to be okay. That’s it. Simple. I want to come home and be a family.”

  “But I am not simple.” My body’s coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs and I have no idea how. There’s nothing simple about eyeballs. My body made food to feed those eyeballs. How? And how can I not know or understand the things that happen inside my body? That seems very dangerous. There’s nothing simple here. I’m ruled by elixirs and compounds. I am a chemistry project conducted by a wild child. I am potentially explosive. Maybe I love Sam because hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don’t want caveman love. I want love that lives outside the body. I want love that lives.

  “In what ways are you not simple?”

  I think of the women I collected upstairs. They’re inside me. And they are only a small fraction of the catalog. I think of molds, of the sea, the biodiversity of plankton. I think of my dad when he was a boy, when he was a tree bud. “It’s complicated,” I say, and then the things I don’t say yet. Words aren’t going to be the best way here. How to explain something that’s coming into existence?

  “I get that now.” His shoulders tremble some. They jerk. He coughs. I have infected him.

  “Sam.” We see each other through the glass. We witness each other. That’s something, to be seen by another human, to be seen over all the years. That’s something, too. Love plus time. Love that’s movable, invisible as a liquid or gas, love that finds a way in. Love that leaks.

  “Unlock the door,” he says.

  “I don’t want to love you because I’m scared.”

  “So you imagine bad things about me. You imagine me doing things I’ve never done to get rid of me. Kick me out so you won’t have to worry about me leaving?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Right.” And I’m glad he gets that.

  Sam cocks his head the same way a coyote might, a coyote who’s been temporarily confused by a question of biology versus morality.

  What’s the difference between living and imagining? What’s the difference between love and security? Coyotes are not moral.

  “Unlock the door?” he asks.

  This family is an experiment, the biggest I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in?

  “Unlock the door,” he says again. “Please.”

  I release the lock. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love.

  Sam comes inside. He turns to shut the door, then stops himself. He stares out into the darkness where he came from. What does he think is out there? What does he know? Or is he scared I’ll kick him out again? That is scary. “What if we just left the door open?” he asks.

  “Open.” And more, more things I don’t say about the bodies of women.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about skunks?” I mean burglars, gangs, evil.

  We both peer out into the dark, looking for these scary things. We watch a long while. The night does nothing.

  “We could let them in if they want in,” he says, but seems uncertain still.

  “Really?”

  He draws the door open wider and we leave it that way, looking out at what we can’t see. Unguarded, unafraid, love and loved. We keep the door open as if there are no doors, no walls, no skin, no houses, no difference between us and all the things we think o
f as the night.

  WAMPUM

  “That’s a pretty wheelbarrow.” But it isn’t a wheelbarrow at all. It’s a plain wire cart for hauling groceries, laundry. She’s trying to keep to the road’s shoulder, but a vehicle would still have to cross the yellow lines to get by. He doesn’t pass. He rides just behind.

  Her walk, slowed by the heat, changes his breath. She tightens her ponytail and he readjusts his hands on the steering wheel. She scratches a bug bite on the back of her leg and he offers her a ride. Either he’ll chop her up into body parts or he’ll drop her off at her house. “Thank you,” she says. “I’d love a ride. It’s hot out here.”

  Trey throws her cart into the backseat. His dashboard is burgundy plastic. It smells like it’s melting. He wears a piece of string around his wrist and says little. The radio is playing “Oh, won’t you, show me the way?” That old song. She doesn’t even know how old, but long before she was born. The closer they get to her house the more she thinks he might drive past it and she’ll be as good as gone.

  But he’s got more structured plans. He pulls into her driveway. “If there’s anything you ever need.”

  “There might be,” she tells him. “What’s your name? Just in case.”

  “Trey.”

  She was only asking to be coy. She’s known his name since she was nine years old.

  * * *

  There’s nothing to do in the summertime. Sit on the porch. Hang laundry on the line. Sometimes she goes to a 4-H meeting, though she has no luck keeping chickens. They don’t like her. They don’t lay eggs. She gets her period, feels sick for a day and stays home watching TV. There’s a party in town on the Fourth of July, but not if it rains. There’s a parish fair in August and a pageant that celebrates the Europeans who bought this town from the Indians for a couple of beads, some shiny coins, and a rifle. That’s how the summer passes. That and an occasional night of babysitting at four dollars an hour, country wages, no-driver’s-license wages.