by Ben Marcus
“Because it makes you sound like a sad baby?”
“You’re the one who said it. You said it. How does it make me sound like anything?”
“Yes, let the record show that I controlled your words and rendered you helpless and unaccountable. I am all-powerful.”
James is quiet for a while. The rain is thundering down on us. The wipers are going so fast across the windshield it seems they might fly off the car. When exit 49 suddenly appears, James veers cautiously down the ramp and pulls the car over in the grass of an intersection.
“The record won’t show anything, Alice, because there is no record. It’s just us. I’m worried about getting stuck out here. That’s all this day has been about. I’m trying to get us somewhere so we can get a room and then we can worry about everything else after that. Could we maybe fight later, when we get home?”
“Oh, I’d like that.”
“I mean, I don’t really feel well, and the fighting is not helping.”
I look at him. So much of our relationship depends on him being alive. Almost all of it.
“Darling,” I say. “Let’s just go sit and eat and relax for a minute. We can still drive after that. We just have to get out of this rain for a minute. And after dinner, I’m driving. No arguments.”
* * *
—
We find the restaurant and get a table near the fireplace, which turns out to be just a storage nook for old copper pots. The waiter is a boy. Not an infant, and not exactly a man. “Are you all weathering the storm okay?” he asks, grinning.
Can one say no? I wonder. No thank you, we are not. We have failed to weather it and now we are here, in your restaurant.
The food that comes out is not disgusting. Sweet and hot and plentiful, moist in all the right places. It goes down pretty heavily, though, and I feel the day starting to expire, begging to end. James was right. The druggery of road food. We eat in silence, listening to the rain. Both of us look forlornly at the bar, thinking probably that we shouldn’t, we mustn’t. On the other hand, we could simply pass out drunk here and maybe they’d take us to jail. There are beds in jail. Soap. New people to meet.
A television above the bar shows a woman in a raincoat being blown off her feet. The clip must be on a loop, or else she keeps getting up, saying something desperate into her microphone, and then falling back down again. I’d like to tell her to stay down, just stay down and take it while the wind and rain lash at her flapping back, but she gets up again and the wind seems to lift her. For a moment, as she blows sideways off the screen and surrenders herself to flight, her posture is beautiful, so absolutely graceful. If you were falling from a cliff, no matter what awaited you, you might want to think about earning some style points along the way, just turn your final descent into something stunning to watch. On the TV there is nothing to learn about the storm, nothing to know. The numbers that scroll across the bottom of the screen are long, without cease, maybe the longest single number I’ve ever seen. Does this number describe the storm? What are we to make of it?
In the car we think it over. We are too far from a hotel, and plus, the hotels aren’t answering their phones. The driving is dangerous, if not impossible. It’s not really even driving anymore, it’s like taking your car through one of those car washes. We are exhausted beyond belief. I suggest, as tentatively as I can, that it is not unreasonable to think that we could sleep in the car. Each of our seats reclines, like an easy chair, and if we found somewhere safe and quiet to park, we could ride this out until the morning, maybe even sleep well. Then we could drive all day and maybe get somewhere where they have rooms. We’d be rested. The sun might be up. The world might have ended. But at least it would be tomorrow. Tomorrow seems like the only thing that will solve anything, ever. Along comes tomorrow, with its knives, as someone or other said. That’s not the exact quote, I’m sure, but the gist of it sounds true.
James seems like he may have given up. “Is that what you want to do? Sleep on the side of the road? In the car?”
“What I want to do is to be alone in a hole, covered in dirt. But sleeping in the car is the next best thing right now.”
“Yes, that often is the second choice after live burial.”
It starts to sound nice to me, really appealing. Like going to the drive-in, but without the movie. Like going parking, which we must have done once, in another life, before our bodies took on water and started to sink, before the spoil grew like a mold in the back of our mouths. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sleeping in the car,” I say. “It’s going to be more comfortable than a motel, that’s for sure, not that there even is an available motel, and plus we won’t have to worry about the cascade of ejaculate that’s been literally sprayed from human appendages around every single motel room in the country. Purportedly.”
James seems to think about it. “When I stay in a hotel,” he says, “I do my best to ejaculate on the walls. It’s a civic obligation. You have to pull your weight.”
“That’s a lot of pressure for a man.”
“Sometimes I’m not in the mood. I’m cranky and I’m tired.”
“That’s when you bring out the jar from home?” I ask.
He laughs. “It’s good to have it with me. Who’s going to know, you know, if the product is older.”
“More mature, in some ways.”
“Must. Broadcast. Seed,” he says, like a robot, and then he mimes the flinging of the jar, splashing its imaginary contents out into space.
* * *
—
It’s not really a rest area that we find. It’s a scenic turnout, and the view—of the black, bottomless abyss—is pristine. You can see all of it, every dark acre, and if we don’t see our own ghostly faces by the end of the night it’s because we’re not looking hard enough. We park a bit out of the way, under the branches of a mammoth tree, and when we quickly realize that we’ve just increased our risk of death—because trees seem to seek people out in these kinds of situations—we move over to an open parking space, with nothing threatening above us.
“Fuck that tree,” I say. “Way to try to hide your intentions.”
We put our seats all the way back and James pulls out a bar of chocolate from the go bag. I want to rub it all over my neck.
“Oh my god, oh my god. You are a genius,” I say. “Certifiable.”
“I like to think that I have an elusive, almost unknowable sort of intelligence.”
“What else is in there?” Now I’m excited.
James peers into the bag, rummaging around with his hand. “That’s the end of it,” he says. “The rest is just sadness. Sadness and real life.”
This is my sweet man. So weird sometimes. So uncommon. And he steered us here, to safety, where we can eat our sweets and surrender to the night and everything will be so goddamn swell in the morning. Even as the rain literally seems to be crushing the car, one hard bead at a time. Not the rain. Boris. Boris is doing this to us, the motherfucker.
The seats are a little bit divine when you tilt them all the way back. A little bit like first class on an airplane, which we only did once, and by accident, because of a mistake by the sweethearts at the gate. It remains a sort of benchmark for comfort outside the home.
“I’m sorry you don’t feel well,” I say. “Is it related to…”
“What?”
“I mean, is it related to anything? I know you went to the doctor.”
“I did go to the doctor.”
“And?”
“It was really interesting. Really surprising. I found out that he thinks that I am still alive.”
“He sounds like a smart man. I would like to meet him. Maybe shake his hand.”
James is quiet and I’m not sure I really like it. I listen to his breath and it sounds fine. But then he coughs, and it’s such a feeble cough, as if he bar
ely has the energy for it. I don’t like it.
“But now?” I ask. “Are you still not feeling so…”
James laughs quietly. “Oh, now. I’d like to say that I’m fine now.”
“Well, don’t hold back, mister. Say that. Make it so.” I take his hand.
“I’m fine,” he whispers. “I feel wonderful. Better than I have felt in a long time.”
His voice is too quiet for me. The fight has gone out of him. Maybe he’s just tired.
“Well, don’t go and die on me tonight,” I say, and I kind of want to punch him.
“Okay.”
“You know that’s what everyone’s thinking, right. Everyone who’s watching this at home? That the couple who has been bickering all day will start to get along, but it will be too late, and then the man will die. That’s such a classic plot.”
“Oh is that what they’re thinking?”
“That’s what all the betting sites say. That’s where the odds are.”
“Does the woman ever die?”
“In situations like this?”
“Are there any other kinds of situations?”
* * *
—
We settle in, and I guess we are maybe trying to fall asleep, but I feel too vigilant. James’s hand is warm in mine. It doesn’t feel like the hand of a man about to die. It is big and soft and I pull it over to me, get it in close against my chest.
“I can’t see you, James. What is the look on your face? What are you thinking?”
“No one is watching this but you, Alice. You’re the only one here. No one knows about us. People can’t really know.”
“Sweetheart, are you okay? Should I be calling someone?”
“I guess I’m a little more tired than I thought I was.”
“You must be. You’ve done all the driving. You got us out of there. You saved us.”
He must think I’m joking with him. I wish I knew how to say it better. How come so many things can sound mean and nice at the same time?
“Could we lie together?” he asks.
I crawl over the seat, wrapping up against him. “Yes of course. I mean, in the end it will be more of a his-’n’-hers sleeping arrangement, just because of these weird beds, but let me settle in here with you for a bit. Why not?”
It feels good to snuggle him. Warm and just right. James is thinner than I remember. I can feel his bones.
“Why don’t we do this more often?” I say, nuzzling against him.
“Because we haven’t wanted to?” James says. He’s drifting off. I can hear his voice grow thin. I’m not ready to sleep. Not ready to be alone.
“Hey,” I say to him.
“Yeah?”
“Stay awake with me for a little bit.”
“Okay.”
“Breast cancer.”
“What?”
“Breast cancer is picking up speed. Landfall is expected at twenty-one hundred hours.”
“Oh. Ha. Yeah. I almost forgot about that. Boris. So weird. Boris.”
When James is silent for a while I nudge him. “Your turn,” I say.
“Okay. It’s so hard to think.” His voice trails off and I nudge him again. Then he says, “Maybe we’ve thought of the best ones already.”
“No, we haven’t, we haven’t. I swear. There are so many more.”
“Okay,” he says. “But this one isn’t so great. Are you ready?”
I say that I am. I lean in close.
“Balls.”
I squeeze his hand. “There you go.”
“Balls is blowing at forty-eight mph.”
“They sure is,” I say. “Hurricane Balls rolled in this morning and people are afraid to leave their homes.”
James doesn’t laugh. I need to leave him alone. He needs his space.
“Beloved,” James whispers, and it’s the last thing I hear him say to me before he falls asleep. “Beloved is coming,” I say to no one, listening to his breathing slow down. “Close your windows. Go down into the basement and don’t come out until she’s gone.”
The Trees of Sawtooth Park
Dr. Nelson wanted me to feel something. In the palm of his hand was a pale yellow mound of powder. He proposed to puff this powder, with his medical straw, into my face. A precisely regulated expulsion of air, he called it. To exhale just so until I was caked in it.
“Just take it passively, if you would, Lucy,” Dr. Nelson said. “Relax your face. If possible, relax your head.”
“You take it passively.” I was so not in the mood. I pictured him shamed by animals, dogs with pants at their knees lining up to defile him.
“Too late for me, I’m sure,” Dr. Nelson said, touching his face as if he’d just discovered it. “I’ve had my hand in the cookie jar so much on this one that I can’t feel the effects anymore. I can’t feel anything, really. I need more subjects.”
So do we all, I thought, but tough luck and boo-hoo.
Dr. Nelson was speaking in a high, shitbird whisper, but no one in the office bothered to look. Because ho-hum. Because who really cared? If a so-called scientist hadn’t approached you directly at your cubicle for a turn on his chemical merry-go-round, you kept your head down. Otherwise we were just too used to these eureka freaks sprinting through our wing, spritzing us with boutique medicines. Dr. Nelson was just another white coat haunting the office, with scarcely a body beneath. I called him Half Nelson, because he lacked a badge, had no ID, and worked so far off-book that he hardly seemed to exist. Just a little boy in a sweater, with a huge, grotesque brain pulsing behind his dear, dear face.
“Are you ready, Lucy? Sweetheart?” He brought the straw to his lips, poised to administer a puffback.
I wasn’t ready, not really.
“There’s not a pill or just, maybe, a lotion?” I asked. I so preferred the cold lotion they’d been deploying recently in the drug trials. Cold lotion was better than human touch by a pretty far cry. A kind of finer boyfriend. With one of these newer lotions, applied just so, I could see myself living alone, feeling loved, feeling complete, in the mountains somewhere, very far from here.
“Nope, there is not,” he said, speaking around the straw. “And now I’m going to count to three.”
I closed my eyes and relaxed as the sandstorm hit, jagged crumbs pelting my face. Holy holy holy it hurt. Some of it went up my nose. It smelled of flowers, but the sweetness turned rancid and started to burn inside my face. It was like I was smelling myself get cooked.
“Jesus, was there glass in that? Did you just fucking spray glass on me?” I groped for my water.
“Hardly,” Dr. Nelson mumbled. He always seemed surprised to find that his subjects weren’t corpses. That they could speak or shout. He wiped his mouth. “That’s just the coarseness of the grit, so that it doesn’t spike too soon on you and blow out your levels. We ground it at forty-one on the, uh.” And here he whispered something in German. I think. His speech sounded laced with ancient obscenities. He made a gesture to indicate a large machine, pointing to a room down the hall I had no clearance for. I knew the door that led there. It had no handle. It had no code box. No retina thing, either. It was just a slightly cleaner slab of Sheetrock. But what wasn’t, when you thought about it.
Dr. Nelson had a big smile on his face. A shit-eating scientist smile. Whatever he blew into me didn’t seem to have much of an opening act. I wasn’t seizing, and I wasn’t writhing on the ground in some kind of unbearable euphoria. My levels, whatever that meant, were pretty much unblown. I felt the same as always. The same, the same, the same. Fuck it all.
I picked some crumbs out of my hair. They were moist, like bread chewed by a baby. “You’re such an asshole, Nelson. That was like the least professional medical trial I’ve ever been a part of. You don’t just. That’s not how. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
“It’s not a trial, Lucy, and this isn’t really happening,” he said. “You were just sitting at your desk when you felt a breeze. Maybe there was dust in it. It could have been anything. It was anything.”
Good grief, the caution we endured. It was hard not to read it as extreme self-importance. Did anyone anywhere, in the entire world, have a hard-on for corporate espionage when it came to our doomed and mildly illegal experiments?
“Right, of course, right. I just mean that you have no idea what dosage you gave me.”
Nelson had his little phone out, which looked like a soft, baby bird, and was already lost in numbers. “I don’t want to argue,” he said without looking up, stroking the swollen body of his phone with a finger. “Mostly because you’re wrong and it would be boring and exhausting to explain why. But I know the dosage down to the milligram. The puffback is actually a precise delivery system, and that’s the go-to-market play, anyway.”
Dr. Nelson turned theatrically covert. He shaded his mouth with a hand as if he had a secret that people might lip-read from the surveillance cameras. “Ah-choo,” he whispered.
“Uh, bless you?” For, like, the fakest sneeze ever?
“No,” he said. “Jesus. I mean the sneeze. That’s the delivery system. This drug will be delivered via sneeze. Or maybe a yawn. Something that one person does to another. Because, well. Beyond that I can’t say. You can probably figure out the rest.”
Right. I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I absolutely couldn’t figure out the rest. The rest was an unwritten world I was not invited to. I was too far down the chain in this puzzle, another mule without the code. Whatever. It hardly mattered. I was talking to a ghost.
“So what will I be feeling?” I asked, and I must have sounded too eager. Mommy just wants new feelings. Please, please, make Mommy feel something.
“Probably we don’t want to give you any help with that. Don’t want to game the books or whatever they say.”