Jeremiah Quick

by SM Johnson

  He didn't get in, but leaned against the passenger door, his face in clear view by a nearby streetlamp. She watched his jaw tighten so hard the muscle in his face jumped. He watched her too, his odd eyes illuminated by the light. He closed them, as if he didn't want to see her, and she could see them moving beneath the lids, like REM sleep. Or like he was thinking.

  She could have run, then. To another car, or toward the building where surely someone was looking at a map or buying something out of the vending machine, or taking a leak. She could have, but it wasn't a real live thought.

  After a minute or so, he opened his eyes, and he looked surprised to see her still standing there.

  "I could take you home, right now."

  She wasn't sure what he meant. He wasn't asking, yet it felt like a question. "Do you want to?" she asked.

  He shrugged. "No. But it would be the right thing to do."

  Yeah, probably. He already wasn't good for her marriage. But then she pictured herself at home alone, a few minutes from now, her phone lost down the hill, her car abandoned at the shopping center. Jeremiah driving away for another twenty years.

  Even inside her head it felt awful and restless and lonely.

  "I… well. It's up to you. You're the teacher. It's always been up to you."

  Just saying the words started a hollow ache in the center of her chest. She cried when she was told he was dead. Just… go home now? How could she?

  An expression flashed across his face she didn't know how to read. It looked like a warning, or like he was laughing at some internal joke he wasn't going to share. It was... disconcerting. She'd never been afraid of him, but for a fraction of a second she wondered if she should be.

  He stepped aside and she got into the car. When she pulled the heavy door closed, it latched into place with a dull and solid thunk.

  Jeremiah Quick got into the driver's seat and drove away.

  He didn't take her back home.

  He just took her.

  Pause, old life.

  Goodbye, old Pretty.

  "Music?" she asked, staring out the window, at the quiet of the night, at nothing. There had always been music. She didn't think she could live without it. Her life had a soundtrack, like so many lives, from the earliest years of her dad's favored twanging country to the most recent band that rocked her world.

  He jabbed a finger at the car stereo. The classic station, maybe, because the song playing was the original Behind Blue Eyes by The Who, which made her think about her brother as a teen, all Kiss and AC/DC, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and this song, which was still beloved to her, made her heart ache, her guts, for some kind of nameless relief. Make it stop, she'd wanted to scream, a thousand times in her life, make the pain stop. Even when she wasn't in any discernible pain, not really, except for the pain of never quite fitting in anywhere.

  She never belonged anywhere, in any group. She was too bright-shiny-sun for the Jeremiahs, too bright altogether for the addicts, and too fucking dark for the normal people.

  She was too cynical for the Christians, too skeptical for the Satanists, and not quite interested or bright enough for the Atheists.

  There was no place, no safety, except for that which she built herself.

  Oh, she had her little group of friends, yeah, but she didn't really belong there either. She just did a lot of pretending to fit, and they did a lot of ignoring her pretense.

  She'd often thought Jeremiah left just when she was on the verge of understanding… something more.

  "Where are we going?" she finally asked, when the silence stretched too long despite the music.

  "You'll see."

  She rolled her eyes. "Okay, fine. Honestly, Jeremiah. I loved you, and never managed to decide if you liked me or hated me. I'm still not sure."

  "Sometimes it was both," he said, keeping his eyes focused on the road.

  "But why? What's wrong with me?" Her voice rose, almost into a cry, and she shook her head, embarrassed, and turned a little, crooking her knee up on the seat as if it could create more distance between them.

  He glanced over at her, a flick of eyes, and then back to the road. "Seriously? I find you at Walmart, of all fucking places, and you have to ask me that?"

  There was a twinge low in her belly, a bad, ugly feeling. Like she'd been fucking up all along and all along had known she was fucking up. She wanted to defend herself – she was tired, it was so easy to get all her stuff at one place. But she also knew it was lazy, and she hated the place, hated capitalism in general, and wished she knew how to make a difference.

  Jeremiah had always talked about making a difference. Free will, free thought, anarchy.

  "You've turned into one of Them," he said, and she could almost taste his bitterness. "Just another sheep in the herd. How does it feel, Sunshine?"

  She felt sick. Unsafe. She said, "Maybe you should take me home."

  He didn't look at her, just stared at the road, his voice as unmoving as his posture. "It's too late for that."

  Dread went through her like a seizure, then settled like a clenched fist in her stomach. "So, now what? What are you going to do with me?"

  "You know."

  She looked to his profile for clues.

  His eyes did that quick flick again. "Change you. Fix you. Teach you all over again."

  Ah, yes.

  Yes.

  She understood the ugly feeling in her belly then, as much guilt as fear. She deserved his punishment, whatever it might be. She'd spent the last too many years taking the easy road. Falling into things she knew she didn't believe in, morally, but were so convenient they were difficult to resist. Walmart. Sheep. American society. Truth was, Jeremiah had no idea how far she'd fallen. She hadn't watched the news or read a newspaper in years. All the bad shit in the world hurt too much to look at, made her feel too helpless. How could she possibly make any difference at all? The problems were too big, starting with the fact that the source of all news was biased toward government and big business and the beauty of capitalism.

  But was she broken? She'd survived life the only way she knew how, by closing her eyes, burying her head in the sand, and trying to exist without worrying too much.

  And now, well, the sense that she and Jeremiah were not finished was tremendous. She wanted to be here, in this car beside him. But if she wasn't broken, would he break her somehow, to have something to fix? And how does one go about that?

  "How?" she asked.

  He glanced at her, face tipped a little bit to the side, the way he seemed to do when he wasn't quite answering the question.

  "The how is unimportant," he said, and his voice was soft but steel, velvet-wrapped words reminding her how he licked the tears from her eyes, so very thirsty for them. And again came the little niggle that perhaps having more fear than fascination was appropriate. "I'll take everything you have left," he said, and the calmness, almost deadness, of his tone washed over her in a cold wave. "The use of your hands, your voice. Whatever I want to take, I will."

  She shivered, and he seemed to take note of it, teeth gleaming in the light of the dashboard, an expression that might have been a smile.

  His right hand left the steering wheel, jabbed the radio into silence, then drifted into his pocket, and came into view with an iPod. "Plug this in?" he asked.

  Pretty took it from him, found an auxiliary cable hanging beneath the dash, and connected the two. She requested songs and scrolled up to shuffle. The first song that played was Storm, by Lifehouse. It was one of her very favorite songs. No one had it. No one she knew had ever heard of it.

  She tapped the skip button, and heard the beginning notes of another oddball song she adored.

  She tapped over to the title list and scrolled down, recognizing every single one.

  It was her own iPod. Well, technically it belonged to her daughter since Pretty had graduated to an iPhone.

  "Where did you get this?" she asked, a squeeze of panic in her chest.

  His tone
was nonchalant. "Kitchen window sill."

  "You stole my daughter's iPod?"

  "I was hoping it was yours." The words sounded as sour as the look on his face in the glow of the dash.

  It was suddenly too warm in the car, and far too small. She cracked the window of this steel beast, unrolling it an inch via hand crank. "Do you have a cigarette?"

  He dug in his pocket and handed over a pack of Camels and a lighter. She lit up with a deep inhale, and exhaled with a murmured sigh. She hadn't had a cigarette in eight or nine years. Her daughter had childhood asthma so smoking was one more thing given up in the name of parenthood. She fought a cough, loving the heavy feel of the smoke in her lungs. She blew a stream of it toward the top of the window. God, she'd missed nicotine.

  She settled deeper into her seat and confessed, about the iPod. "It used to me mine. It'll be a mixture of love and hate."

  "Perfect. You'll have to tell me what you love the most."

  "So you can use it against me?"

  He shrugged. "Sure."

  He was… so comfortable, but not a warm kind of comfortable, more of a cold, in-charge sort of feeling. She remembered laughing with him, at him, even, she remembered him looser than this, easier, even if he was never all that easy. She wanted to shake him up a little, make him drop his cold control. Maybe even get him to smile.

  "If I tell you which songs I love, you can tell me what you hate about them. It'll be like old times."

  "What, me hating your music? Come on, even you have to admit Motley Crüe never had any redeeming value."

  "Sure they did, the old stuff. And so did Bryan Adams, and Bon Jovi."

  "Ugh, the syrup. I'm gagging."

  "You were always a music snob. Shit, Bon Jovi's still producing hits. Where's your music, that's what I want to know. Even the Sex Pistols are out of vogue – what have you been listening to lately?"

  "No one you've ever heard of, I'm sure."

  "Bullshit. ICP. Pantera," she suggested.

  "No, and no. Bauhaus. Manson. In This Moment. Sisters of Mercy. Nine Inch Nails." Even his voice was a sneer. But then, almost like a confession of his own: "And yeah, the Sex Pistols. Still."

  She couldn't resist, and sang a line of the one song she knew by In This Moment, so quiet she wasn't sure he'd even hear. A song of aching heartbreak, of death. "Can anybody tell me why… we're lying here on the floor?"

  The car swerved, and the tires hit the rumble strip on the shoulder of the freeway with a jarring buzz.

  So there.

  "Sing more of it," he demanded.

  Pretty shook her head. "It'll make me cry."

  Some horribleness only a teenage girl could like erupted from the speakers, startling them both. Pretty cringed and plastered her hands over her ears for a second, laughing, then grabbed the iPod and encouraged it to shuffle faster.

  She wanted to find something he knew. She had almost a thousand songs. There had to be more than just one they both liked.

  She made suggestions. He shook his head.

  "Oh, come on. There's got to be something." Fuck shuffle. She scooched closer to the dash, scrolling the song list.

  Yeah, right.

  She gave up and chose a Stone Sour song, and he didn't say anything snarky.

  They were on the freeway for what felt like a long time, and she fought her anxiety by picking songs and waiting for him to react.

  He made a face now and then, but didn't say much of anything.

  He would change her some more, more than he had already, and this time with willful intent. There was a… held breath quality to that idea, a sense of inevitability about it.

  After a while he said, "Come here," and she slid to the center of the bench seat. His arm came around her, pulling her even closer, until her thigh was seamless against his, and her arm tight against his flank.

  A thrill went through her, anticipatory, sexual. She'd never caught him exactly that way, but he smelled like her Jeremiah had always smelled, and she still wanted him in whatever way he would allow.

  He turned his head and pressed his lips into her hair. "Your music sucks," he said, a rolling low growl, and all she could do was shrug. She liked what she liked. And he was the one who taught her to give weight to her own opinion.

  Now that she wasn’t busy with her hands or her mind, she started getting anxious, started thinking too much. What the hell was she doing here? She should be at home.

  Jeremiah took an exit off the freeway and followed a flat, wooded secondary highway. There were turns every so often. Pretty was lost. She suspected she'd be lost even if she made a point to pay attention.

  "What was the first song you couldn't hear enough?" he asked. "Do you remember? Or the first album you ever bought?"

  She remembered, but didn't want to tell him. And yet, there he was looking at her with his cool glass gaze, and an almost smile, when he should have been watching the road.

  "You'll laugh."

  "I won't, I promise."

  She shook her head. "Don't promise, because I know you will. You won't be able to help yourself. I was ten or eleven years old. I had a portable record player, probably a Christmas gift. It had a red plastic lid that snapped over the turntable for travel, and a built-in mini-keyboard. I don't even know where I heard the song - the radio, I suppose - but it was just occurring to me I could buy music."

  His eyes gleamed. "One of the best things in life, right? Records and a player. Second only to cassette tapes, a walkman, and headphones. Or an Mp3 player. So? What was the song?"

  She cringed and could feel herself blushing. It was so embarrassing. But she told him. "Air Supply. Making Love Out Of Nothing At all."

  She watched him try not to laugh, and he was doing a decent job of choking it back.

  "Oh, go ahead," she said, laughing a little herself. "My mother didn't approve. I think I bought it at Montgomery Wards, and it cost like a dollar or something. It was the 45, small circle, big hole. Needed the weird little plastic disk you had to put in the center of a 45 to play them on the record player. I can't remember what was on the B side. Maybe that song was the B side." She could hear the piano intro tinkling in her head, and even some of the words. She decided to go all the way and defended her choice. "You know, lyrically, it's an amazing song."

  He was grinning at her, a genuine goofy, lopsided grin, and turned the radio volume all the way down. "Sing it."

  Her singing was only passable, and she wanted to decline, but she couldn't resist the grin. She let the piano notes start in her head, and ran a few lines of lyrics silently, then sang. "I know just how to whisper…"

  It took her, oh, two tries to get the first verse right.

  In the end, she thought he even agreed with her, because he said, "Well, it's poetic."

  "First full album?" he asked.

  She didn't have to think about that, either. "Air Supply, again, Greatest Hits or something. I planned it for weeks, knowing I'd get ten dollars from my grandmother for Christmas. That album fixed the terrible insomnia I'd started having."

  "That boring, hmm?" he teased.

  "Not boring, relaxing," she said back, enjoying the banter. It was almost like it used to be, the way they would argue. Except he always won, because his arguments were his own, and hers usually parroted what she heard others say. It had taken her a long time to learn how to think for herself, to like what she liked without needing someone else to validate her opinion."Just thinking the first words of the first song still makes me sleepy. Years of conditioning."

  "You like awful things," he said, and he looked young and fresh and beautiful. "Tell me another favorite, from way back."

  "Umm." Now she did have to think. "Paperback Writer. The Monkees. Or maybe it was the Beatles?" She tried to run the lines in her head, tried to remember the tune. Didn't want to make any attempt to sing it, because the song was terrible. But she'd grown up to be a writer.

  And so the discussion went.

  It had to have been almost a
n hour before he slowed, murmured, "We're here," and she watched out the windshield as he turned onto an unpaved track. 'Here' was a long driveway, almost a country road by itself, reflectors on poles helping him navigate the dark. He gave her a squeeze or a hug. Something. She thought he intended it to be reassuring, but it wasn't.

  Okay.

  Deep in the woods.

  "Are you going to hurt me?" Stupid. Of course he was. That was the point, right? He wanted her to experience hardship, pain. She didn't know what made her think that – it wasn't anything he'd said, it was just… a feeling, the idea that he would... what, beat her? It didn't even make sense. And still, she knew. It was something in his eyes, the set of his posture. Something that vibrated in the air between them on her kitchen floor.

  "Do you want me to?" he asked, and there was an intensity to the question that almost made her say yes or please.

  "I don't know," she answered.

  "Oh, come on, Dark child. Tell the truth."

  She could feel herself blushing in the dark. She wrote about kinky sex and BDSM, but she hadn't lived any of it. And this – this was so wrong, but she did want him to. She wanted him to push her to her limit, make her scream, then comfort her, calm her, bring her back. Make her feel, and then make everything okay again. She wanted him to be the one to do that. Perhaps because no one else in her life would.

  The driveway ended in a clearing and the headlights lit up the front of a small wood-framed house. The trim was dark, the rest of the house an ashy smudge against an acre of trees.

  Pretty was curious, somewhat excited, and about to start asking questions when she noticed Quick's demeanor had changed. Tension seemed to run the length of him, and he stared straight through the windshield, void of facial expression. His arm around her tensed, gripping more than holding.

  "What?" she asked, asking not only what happens next, but what was causing his tension.

  "It starts now. Give me your voice."

  He turned his head toward her, and his eyes were vacant.

  "My voice?" She was too startled to understand right away.

  The grip around her waist tightened, fingers slipping beneath her jacket, beneath the hem of her shirt, warm against her flesh, but then his fingernails pinched just the tiniest bit of skin, and she squeaked, visualizing red crescents marking the soft flesh there.