Listen to Me

by Hannah Pittard

  “What does that mean?” she said. “There’s power. We have power here.”

  “No,” he said. “They’re offline. Everything is offline. The entire town is dark.”

  “But—” Maggie looked again out the window. She looked this time past the car, past the parking lot. She looked into the deep expanse of darkness where golden bulbs at various heights and of incalculable degrees of intensity should have been twinkling and blinking and bright. What she realized was that the entirety of 35 was black. Not a single streetlamp was illuminated.

  12

  They’d been back on the road for maybe ten minutes. Twenty max. They’d passed two hotels, both with their NO VACANCY signs lit up. Maggie thought there was power, but Mark explained it only meant more generators. Anyway, these were piece-of-shit places. Tiny holes-in-the-wall right on the highway like the Piney Inn Motel, or whatever it was. And neither Mark nor Maggie had even suggested they stop and make sure there wasn’t a room. Maggie had offered to keep driving when they left the restaurant. She’d made a little show of it in fact: “Just give me the keys. I’ve had fewer than you.” But Mark insisted he take over. She wouldn’t admit it, not to him, but the beer had gotten her tipsy. Her tolerance was essentially nonexistent. She said she was acting funny only because she was tired, but Mark knew better.

  He glanced over at her, thinking she’d be passed out. But her eyes were open and she was looking down at her lap.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Reading,” she said. She waved her phone at him.

  “What about?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  Gerome was snoring. When they got back in the car, he didn’t even wake up. It could have been anybody up there in the front seats and Gerome wouldn’t have known the difference.

  “It’s hard to concentrate with you over there reading,” he said.

  “Does the light bother you?”

  The light didn’t bother him. There was hardly any light at all coming from her little device. She’d turned the screen glow down. She was considerate like that.

  “Fine,” he said. “Sure. Hit me. Read me something.”

  Maggie turned the radio off. They’d been listening to modern country by default.

  “Okay,” she said. “A group of teenagers—high school students—kidnap a college kid and torture him to death.”

  “No,” he said. “Not that. Try again.”

  “Okay,” said Maggie. She was quiet for a minute. “This is the story of a young woman who discovers her father has been videotaping her every time he rapes her, and it turns out she’s essentially famous in the world of Internet pedophilia. Like, the most famous molested girl in the world.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “No.” Where was she getting this stuff? He read the same papers she did. But he never came across articles like those. Or, if he did, he had enough sense to skip over them. “I don’t want to hear about children getting hurt. Anything other than children getting hurt.”

  “Okey-doke.” Maggie poked at her screen. “How about this? Google has issued a statement.”

  They were always issuing statements—the big companies—and always about the smallest things. They were afraid they’d be forgotten if they didn’t constantly update or reload.

  “What kind of statement?”

  “Their maps department is going to stop removing dead bodies from satellite images.”

  Mark had no idea what she was talking about.

  “I can read you the article,” she said.

  “Maybe just a summary?” he said. “Maybe just the bare bones?”

  Maggie was quiet a moment. He could see from the corner of his eye that she was looking at her lap again. Her index finger flicked vertically at her phone.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s an apology-slash-statement.”

  Of course it was.

  “They set a precedent several years ago by removing that boy’s body in Texas, and they’re saying now that it was the wrong precedent to have set. They’re saying now that it’s impossible to remove all the bodies because there are too many.”

  “What boy’s body in Texas?”

  “They’re saying that the last hurricane makes it a precedent they can no longer live up to and—this is verbatim—nor do we wish to continue to erase the realities of our planet’s surface. Can you believe that?”

  No. He couldn’t believe it.

  He couldn’t believe that such a thing existed. Why were there photos at all? Why was there a maps department at Google that had any authority to issue statements in the first place? Hadn’t the world gotten along perfectly fine before satellite imaging? Did your everyday housewife really require access to professional-grade topological views of the earth? To the Internet at all? Jesus, just look at Maggie since the mugging, since the college girl. Look how quickly she’d gone from simple browser to consummate addict.

  “Burglaries are up on the North Side,” Maggie said. “Want to hear about that?”

  “Go for it.”

  “And sexual assaults.”

  It was exhausting—not Maggie, but the news itself. Lately—and this was something that didn’t make him happy, didn’t secretly fill him with joy—the two felt fused together. Maggie was the news and the news was Maggie. He missed his wife.

  “A decade ago,” she was saying, “the theory was that men who raped were motivated differently from men who mugged. So you could get mugged and not worry about getting raped.”

  “Are you reading this?” said Mark. “Or is this you talking?” He didn’t like to take his eyes off the road, especially with it being so late and the weather being so unpredictable, but he was fairly certain she was going off book with all this.

  A commercial truck came into view on the near side of the westbound lanes. Mark flashed his brights. The truck responded by turning on its high beams.

  “Christ,” said Mark, squinting.

  Maggie didn’t say anything.

  “I thought his brights were on,” he said.

  Maggie still didn’t say anything.

  The truck passed. Mark rubbed his eyes, and again it was just them and their own headlights and the occasional streetlamp.

  “Anyway,” said Maggie. “Now muggers are rapists, and rapists are muggers. There’s no distinction. Terrorists are mass murderers, and school shooters are terrorists. Et cetera. Et cetera.” She was definitely off book. This was her brain. This was unfiltered Maggie trying to sew together bits and pieces of millions of different articles. This was Maggie hoping to make sense of a world in which she could be mugged by one man and then, nine months later, a neighbor could be raped and murdered by another. Two women. Two men. Two entirely different outcomes but somehow—improbably, unfairly—they both, Maggie and the college girl, wound up with nearly identical bruises on the backs of their necks. Only Maggie was still alive and her bruise had healed. Whereas now the college girl was dead and her bruise . . . had done whatever bruises did when people died. “If you can steal a wallet,” Maggie was saying, “why not also steal a fuck?”

  Mark shook his head. For starters, he didn’t like when she profaned. It wasn’t natural. Sure, he had a bit of a sailor’s mouth himself, that was true—and his students adored him for it—but on her, it sounded dirty. It sounded adolescent and unearned. But that wasn’t even the point. The point was she was wrong about murderers being muggers and muggers being rapists. He knew she was wrong, but it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth starting an argument that might last until morning. There was no way they were going to make it to the Blue Ridge tonight. They needed a hotel—sooner than later, actually, since his eyes were getting heavy—and the thought of being in a little shithole with his wife while they were both still stewing over some half-baked argument . . . Well, the thought made him want to weep.

  “I’m good,” he said. “Thanks. No more articles for me, okay?”

  He patted her thigh like he might pat Gerome’s head. “Can you find me a new
channel? Anything other than country.”

  “Do you just want silence?”

  “No,” he said. “I want to hear something.” He didn’t like the idea of sitting there listening to her read to herself.

  Maggie put her phone down and attended to the radio. She flipped through a few stations.

  “Wait,” he said. “Go back.”

  She went back.

  “Stop,” he said. “There.”

  “This?”

  A man was talking. He had the telltale conviction of an evangelist.

  “Yes,” he said. “Perfect.”

  Maggie was looking at him. He could feel her face like a full moon in his periphery.

  “You’re actually interested in listening to this man?” she said. On the radio, the voice was explaining away dinosaurs and fossilization with Noah’s flood.

  “You don’t think it’s fascinating?”

  Mark really did get a kick out of these people. To him, it was mesmerizing the way they rewrote history, working themselves into little frenzies over the most trivial things as they went along. Just then, for instance, the voice was telling the story of early settlers, who had apparently interviewed Indians—their words—who had apparently spoken of dinosaurs as a recent memory! The idea of Christians using the word of Indians as their proof—it was delightful. Utterly delightful! If only Maggie could find the humor in it, as she once, not too long ago, certainly would have.

  “Fine,” Maggie said. “You win.”

  She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.

  “Win nothing,” he said. “It’s not a competition.”

  But lately—and this was the unhappy, undesired state of their current condition—it was a competition.

  What was the joke his father was always telling about what happens when you play a country song backward? You get your dog back, your wife back, your life back . . . ? Well, that’s exactly what Mark wanted back now: his Maggie, his marriage. Goddamn it! His life—as he’d once so transcendently been living it—he wanted it back!

  13

  The first thing Maggie was aware of was her open mouth. She licked her lips, then ran her tongue along her gum lines until they were moist again.

  The second thing she was aware of was a soreness at the base of her neck. She sat up, rolled her shoulders forward and back, back and forward. She opened and closed her mouth, re-licked her lips.

  It was quiet in the car and dark, and it took her a minute to realize she wasn’t in the driveway of Mark’s parents’ farm. In the early days, such things were possible. In the twelfth hour of the drive, Maggie could switch to the passenger seat, rest her head against the window for what she believed was merely a moment, then fall into a sleep so heavy, so deep that Mark would be unable to rouse her when they pulled into his parents’ gravel drive. He’d been forced more than once to leave her there, in the passenger seat, until she woke on her own, usually close to morning, the neighbors’ roosters her alarm. But this was before. This was long ago. This was back when sleep came fast and easy no matter where she was. They could pop in a video in the early days of their marriage, and she’d be out cold in ten minutes. Mark hadn’t been miffed by it. He’d been, in fact, overjoyed. He used to say how good it made him feel—that his wife found such comfort in their life together that she could sleep through anything. She’d always liked this assessment of her patterns. She’d been as captivated by the idea as he. But in this last year, sleep had turned obstinate; the silence of the bedroom and the dark of midnight had become something to dread. In reexamining her relationship with the dark, she’d stumbled accidently onto a question she hadn’t intended ever to consider: Did not the difficulty of sleep necessarily suggest a departure of the intense confidence she’d once had in her home life?

  She cleared her throat.

  This wasn’t the time to pursue such dreary considerations because she was not now in Mark’s parents’ gravel driveway, where she should have been. Instead, she was—she realized as her eyes adjusted—in a parking lot, in the passenger seat of their car, alone. Almost alone. Gerome was in the back, sleeping. She could hear him breathing.

  The parking lot was unlit. She looked up and out the sunroof. Above the car—she could just barely make it out—was a streetlamp, but the streetlamp was dead.

  She checked the door. Hers was unlocked. She sat up a little straighter and then checked the driver’s side and the backseat. Also unlocked. She didn’t want to panic, but she did want to scream. Anger, fear, fatigue: Who could say for sure what she was feeling. All of them? None of them? She was simultaneously filled up with and emptied out of emotions. She thought about hitting the glove compartment, but that would be a punishment only to her hand. And the thing she wanted to punish—the person who had abandoned her in an unlocked car in the middle of nowhere—was currently and conveniently MIA.

  She did the next best thing to hitting and screaming. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, and visualized her own skull exploding. She imagined little pieces of cranium sticking to the upholstery of the roof, sliding down the inside of the windshield. Protoplasmic fibers splattered against the rearview mirror. Chunks of cerebellum landed on the dashboard. Her medulla dangled limply from the passenger headrest. She stayed like this until she heard a tiny buzzing at the base of her brain, and then she released herself. Except, she wasn’t released. Because now her heartbeat was racing, which necessarily engaged her anxiety, and she found herself suddenly clawing at the lock button in a sloppy and erratic sort of way that reminded her out of nowhere of climbing up a pool ladder when, as a child, she’d once managed to convince herself—though she knew it to be a pure impossibility—that piranhas had materialized in the deep end.

  She pushed the button. The sound of the doors sealing themselves against the night filled the car with a hollow thwunk. Gerome stirred, but nothing more.

  In the glove compartment there was a tin candy box the size of a matchbook. In this tin candy box there was a mixture of square-shaped breath mints and circular yellow pills. She took a deep breath and exhaled the air slowly. She did not reach for the box. Her former therapist had trained her well enough so that she didn’t need to take one every time her nerves clicked on. Sometimes—like now—it was enough just to know they were there. Lemon-colored ellipsoids interspersed neatly with small white squares. It was enough just to imagine them and all the good they could do to her central nervous system if she so chose.

  Also in the compartment was an emergency first-aid kit. Its contents were geared more toward animals than humans—large bandages, strong sedatives, at least one legal barbiturate—and not at all toward practical survival, which meant there wasn’t a flashlight, which was the only thing Maggie truly wanted at that moment.

  She cracked her neck. She was starting to notice other things about her current situation. The car key, for starters, was not in the ignition—she felt for it, just to be sure—nor was it in the center console, and the car itself was warm. In fact, the car was very warm, and she was warm, and Gerome—now she heard it more distinctly—wasn’t just snoring; he was panting. Mark had left the two of them in an unlocked car, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a heat wave. It was possible he’d finally lost his mind.

  She reached behind her seat and pulled out a half-filled water bottle. She took a sip and then poured a little into her cupped palm. She wiped it onto the fur under Gerome’s ear and then around his neck. Gerome moaned and flipped himself gently so that his belly was exposed. She poured a little bit more onto her hand—she dared Mark to say something about the leather; she just dared him—and then rubbed it along his abdomen. Gerome stretched, but still he made no move to stand. She put the back of her hand under his chin. His heartbeat was fast, but he was fine. This was simply a dog’s body’s way of cooling itself.

  At least Gerome wasn’t dying back there. At least he wasn’t dead because—

  And then for a half s
econd—no, less than a half second, a nanosecond, a piece of time so fleeting there’s no way truly to prove it ever existed except through the memory of the thought—Maggie imagined the satisfaction she might feel if Gerome had a heat stroke and died. She imagined the permanent regret with which Mark would be forever saddled. She imagined the upper hand she would have for the rest of their lives. But then immediately—almost immediately, because the nanosecond exists and existed—she felt intense guilt for having used the fantasy of Gerome’s death as a way to inflict a make-believe punishment on her husband. Dear god, she was turning perverse. Maybe there was something irreversibly wrong with her.

  She wanted to roll down a window or crack the door, but she couldn’t risk exposing herself. She leaned forward, cupped a hand to the windshield, and looked out. The parking lot was full of empty cars and trucks—or what she assumed were empty cars and trucks. Who knows? Maybe the lot was filled with women in similar situations—women lousy with despair, lousy with anxiety; women stifled by the heat and by their fear and by their own lousy husbands. Ha! If only there were other women in the night . . .

  Imagine the things they could say to one another . . .

  Imagine the stories they could tell . . .

  Imagine the comfort they might feel to be so safely ensconced in such a large number of the same sex . . .

  But there were no other women.

  There were only cars and trucks. And they were all parked, just as theirs was, in what appeared to be a large paved ravine surrounded on all sides by tall dirt banks. Maggie gazed higher and, doing so, noticed that, in the distance, up and beyond the dirt walls, there was light. A muted glowing light. Pale and lemony, just like her pills.

  14

  “All I mean,” said Mark, “is that it makes no sense.”