Listen to Me

by Hannah Pittard

  Gerome was skittish on the steps. His pads kept slipping. If he were a smaller dog, Maggie would have picked him up.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, Pete stopped, and so did the small crowd behind him. He raised the floodlight in front of a door.

  “This is the rear exit,” he said.

  Mark nodded. “Got it.”

  “Normally you can’t go out it, but the emergency alarm isn’t on.”

  Mark nodded again. “Okay.”

  “So if you need to walk the dog, this is the easiest way out.”

  “Check,” said Mark.

  “Wait,” said Maggie. “If the alarm isn’t on, does that mean the door isn’t locked?”

  “We could bolt it,” Tina said. “But that’d be against fire code.”

  Maggie didn’t say anything. If Mark was waiting for a reaction, she wasn’t going to give it to him.

  Pete switched the aim of the floodlight. “Here’s the door to the first-floor rooms.” He held it open and the others filed past him. “Tina,” he said, his voice suddenly soft. “Let’s put them in 101.” To Maggie, he said, “First door on the left there. You’ll be nearby the exit. Good for the dog.”

  “Problem,” said Tina, also now in a whisper.

  Pete brushed by Maggie and Gerome; they were alone at the end of the hallway. Mark had his back to Maggie.

  “What’s up?” said Pete.

  “101 wasn’t closed,” Tina said.

  Pete used the floodlight to push the door open a little wider; from the hallway, he shined the light into the room. “It’s empty,” he said.

  “Let’s put them in another one anyway,” said Tina. “I don’t like that the door was open.”

  Maggie nudged Mark from behind. “Give me one of those glow sticks,” she said. “I can’t see what’s going on.”

  “Better wait,” said Tina. “They only last so long.”

  “Right,” said Mark. “Good thinking.” He put the glow sticks back in his pocket.

  Pete led them down the hall to the next room. Maggie followed, still behind the pack. “This one’s good,” he said.

  “Check it out for them,” said Tina.

  Pete opened the door and walked inside alone. After a few seconds he returned. “Clean,” he said. “Empty.”

  “Go on in,” said Tina. “Get your bearings before we take the light away.”

  Maggie and Gerome followed Mark in.

  Pete shined the flashlight around the room. “Here’s your bed,” he said. “Here’s your second bed. Extra pillows here. Bathroom here.” He opened the bathroom door. “Your towels. The sink.” At each item, he shined the light briefly, then moved on.

  Maggie watched the various corners of the room light up and then darken. The images were fast and still, more like photographs than real life.

  She thought of that terrible movie about forests and witchcraft and children standing in corners. She thought of the coed.

  She’d made a mistake insisting on staying.

  This wasn’t a good idea at all.

  “Pete,” said Tina from the hallway, still whispering. “Show them about the glow sticks.”

  “Right,” said Pete. He motioned for Maggie to join him in the bathroom. “If you tie one here”—with the flashlight, he lit up a small side mirror protruding from the wall—“then you get pretty good light and you don’t need to waste more than one.”

  “Thanks,” said Maggie. She was whispering too. “So there are other people on this floor?”

  “There’s a family across the way and some of my buddies down at the end. But you won’t hear them.”

  “Where do you two sleep?”

  “We’re up in the office,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Right.”

  She wished she could sleep in the office with them. In numbers, there was safety.

  She followed him from the bathroom back into the bedroom. Mark had snapped two of the glow sticks and was inspecting the windows.

  Pete and Tina walked into the hallway.

  “Be sure to lock the door behind us,” said Tina.

  Maggie nodded.

  “You have to use the lever, though,” Pete said. “It won’t lock if you just close it.”

  “It won’t?”

  Tina took the floodlight and came back inside the room.

  “See?” she said. She showed Maggie how the lever worked. “The regular locks are automated. Without power, they’re a no-go.”

  “Oh,” Maggie said. What else had she failed to consider? It was one thing to sleep without a/c; it was something else entirely to sleep without a fully locked door.

  “Get some rest,” Tina said. She walked into the hallway, and then she and Pete were gone.

  Maggie stood in the darkness of the entryway. She closed the door and listened. There was the sound of Gerome’s panting, the sound of Tina’s and Pete’s ascending footsteps in the stairwell, the sound of her own breathing. But that was it.

  Mark came up behind her. He reached around her to lock, unlock, and relock the door. “Old school,” he said. “I like it.”

  Without turning toward him, she reached for the doorknob and pulled. The door opened three inches before the lock caught. “You like this?” she said. She wedged her hand through the narrow opening. Her knuckles scuffed against the edge of the door’s molding. “It still opens.”

  “I’ll take my chances with the person who can slip through that crack,” he said.

  He brought her hand in from the other side and shut the door.

  “Maggie,” he said. He took her by the shoulders and rotated her so that she was facing him, though eye contact was impossible in the darkness. Gerome was still on his leash, still at their sides. He was whining.

  “Maggie,” Mark said again. “It’s going to be all right.” He kissed her on her forehead. They both smelled of sweat. “Hold out your hand.”

  She held out her hand. He took a glow stick from his pocket, snapped it, then tied it to her wrist. “See?” he said. “Now you’re bona fide.”

  She looked down.

  “Bona fide what?” she said.

  “Bona fide country.”

  “And then some,” she said.

  All she needed to do was relax. Relax and let him be the man.

  From the Sumerians, a 5,000-year-old society, we receive the word love as a compound verb. At the time and taken literally, this word—this love—meant the measuring of the earth or the demarcation of the land. Love, in other words, was a business, and its business meant marriage, and marriage meant the maintenance, the preservation, the endurance of society.

  Mark bent down and unhooked Gerome, who stretched out and down on his forearms, then shook his whole body dramatically—a simple but instinctive display of freedom.

  “That’s it,” said Mark. “Shake the human off.” He reached down and took Maggie’s hand, and the two of them stood like that—hand in hand, glow stick next to glow stick—listening as their dog moved from corner to corner of the room, sniffing, exploring, familiarizing himself with their temporary retreat.

  21

  It was twenty minutes before Gerome calmed down. He whined, panted, whined some more. Maggie kept letting him up on the bed, which Mark wouldn’t have minded if there hadn’t been another perfectly good bed for the dog to sleep on all by himself and if it hadn’t been ninety degrees inside, which it was.

  While Maggie was babying Gerome, Mark worked on the windows. They were on the first floor and Maggie kept saying he shouldn’t open them, that it wouldn’t be safe; but he was suffocating from the heat. His skin—his palms, his fingers, his lower back, every inch of him—was clammy.

  Finally he was able to jimmy open the window closest to the bed, and even Maggie, after biting her lip and wringing her hands, admitted that the breeze felt nice.

  Gerome, of his own volition, jumped off their bed, drank some water, then jumped up on the other bed. Maggie stripped their mattress of everything but the sheets, and
now—finally, blissfully, thankfully—they were both lying down.

  The only light came from the glow sticks on Maggie’s side of the bed. But even that meager glimmer was weakening. Soon it would be pure shadow in their room. Soon they would be asleep.

  For a while Mark lay on his back listening to the noises, his eyes closed. From down the hallway, he thought he heard the sound of a faucet running. Soon after, he thought he heard water in the pipes.

  Then it was quiet. Gerome had begun to snore, but Maggie’s breathing was too regular and he knew she wasn’t yet sleeping.

  Outside, the sound of a diesel approached, slowed, and stopped. For many minutes, he listened to the gentle puh-puh-puh of its engine as it idled outside the hotel. He imagined other travelers, weary just as they had been, standing at the front desk, meeting Tina and Pete, being given the rehearsed terms of their potential night’s rest: clean sheets, clean towels, cold running water, nothing more.

  Several minutes after it arrived, the diesel moved away from them. No dice, Mark thought. The world turned up only so many suckers in one night.

  Outside their first-floor window, beyond the hotel’s parking lot, past its concrete margin, Mark imagined what was there: loblolly pines by the dozen, shortleaf and spruce like he couldn’t believe; hemlock and basswood wedged for position next to hickory and beech; black cherry and white oak, silk grass and sugar maple; gorges and slopes lousy with flora, slippery and slimy with rainwater and soil. Probably, too—in the kingdom of Plantae, in the division of Magnoliophyta, in the family of Fabaceae—there was kudzu, palming the mountainside like a great green hand. Robert told Mark as a boy of its self-propagating runners that cartwheel from one root to the next—onward, outward, onward, outward—of its instinctive need for reproduction; its twirling vines, its twisting and twining tentacles. In a single day, kudzu can grow an entire foot. Imagine: half an inch in an hour; two-tenths of a millimeter in a minute; three-thousandths of the same in a second. Which meant that even now, even as Mark lay there in the dark, kudzu might be growing. In the shimmering slick darkness beyond their window, it might be expanding. This very moment, its grasp on the mountain could be tightening.

  Mark rolled onto his side. He couldn’t see Maggie’s face, but he could see the white of her underpants. She was lying on her back, her breasts exposed to the air, her arms straight at her sides.

  “You awake?” he said. He found that he was whispering. He found also that he was heroically and unexpectedly turned on.

  There was no response.

  “You aren’t talking to me?”

  “Mm.”

  “Are you giving me the silent treatment, or are you actually asleep?”

  He scooted closer.

  “Neither?” She said it like a question.

  “You were right to make us stay,” he said.

  “I’m not so sure,” she said. “Stubborn is as stubborn does.”

  In the dark like this, neither of them able to make eye contact even if they wanted, things felt good between them, things felt right. At least on Mark’s end. He felt, at this moment, very much as if they were a team, as if that little hotel room and everything in it—him and Maggie, yes, but also the dog, the beds, the pillows, the sheets—they were all on a team, a team against the world. They were stranded together. Beached, marooned, abandoned, but also self-reliant. The natural accumulation of years together—years of contempt and contentment, disappointment and settlement, all of it—seemed to drift away on a tide of blackness.

  He tried—only to see, only as a test—to summon his earlier vexation, his previous frustration, but he couldn’t conjure it. He was aroused even more, aroused at his own lack of agitation.

  “It’s not like you to sleep without a top on,” said Mark.

  “Is that a remark?” She was also whispering. The bed rocked as she softly shifted onto her side to face him. The glow beyond her shoulder was nearly gone.

  “Remark?”

  He could smell her breath, feel it on his face, faint and warm.

  “About my paranoia?”

  He reached up, found her cheek, ran his thumb across her eyelid. “No,” he said. “It’s really not.”

  She inched toward him. He could feel it.

  “Do you think you can sleep?” she said.

  “Even if I can’t, just lying down is good. Just lying in the dark feels good on my eyes.”

  “I can’t even tell if my eyes are open or closed,” she said.

  He ran his thumb across her eyelid again. “Closed,” he said.

  They were quiet. He stroked her hair, but nothing more. Not yet.

  After a while she spoke. “I know how to make you sleep.”

  “What do you know?” he said.

  It was a routine.

  It was a signal.

  It was code, their code.

  “I know what you like,” she said.

  “How do you know what I like?”

  He moved his body closer.

  “I know,” she said.

  “How?”

  She inched closer still.

  “I know you,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “Better than you think.”

  “Is that right?” he said.

  He let his hand drift from her ear to her neck to her shoulder.

  “And you know me,” she said.

  “Do I?”

  His hand left her shoulder, traveled the length of her side, came to her thigh.

  She emitted a tiny noise—half moan, half sigh.

  “You do,” she said.

  They didn’t talk anymore.

  After, Maggie tiptoed slowly to the bathroom and Mark lay once again on his back, now with his arms behind his head, listening as Maggie felt her way across the unfamiliar room. He felt a knightly rush of life.

  He listened to his dog snore. He listened to his wife pee, then flush. He listened to the water gurgle through the pipes in the walls around him. Alive, he thought. Alive. Alive.

  Maggie crept back to the bed, climbed under the cheap top sheet.

  She put a hand on his stomach. “Too hot for this?” she said.

  “Not at all,” he said.

  She was asleep within seconds, her soft snore the wings of a moth against a glass pane.

  In the middle of nowhere, he thought. In the middle of nowhere, as it always should be.

  Thoreau would strip naked and walk into his pond, walk all the way out until only his nose and eyes were above the water. He’d stay this way for hours, watching the bugs that dart down and up, down and up atop the quiet surface. He remained so still and for so long that he became a part of nature. Still a man, but more than a man. A man connected to the visceral, the real, to the vegetation and wildlife of the world.

  Mark hadn’t written Elizabeth back the other day. He hadn’t told her that, yes, in fact, Maggie was the love of his life. But he would. It would be his last letter to the West Coast, and he’d write it the first chance he got. Over and out, Elizabeth.

  What it was—this feeling—what it was, was freedom. The feeling of freedom. Freedom from cities and from the grid. Freedom to walk without being seen, without being monitored, without monitoring. He felt he’d finally stripped naked, finally walked out into his own pond, finally connected with the realness of the world. It had to do with getting away from technology and getting back to nature. It had to do with a generosity of spirit. It had to do with keeping very, very quiet in the middle of nowhere.

  22

  Maggie was surprised to find herself thinking about sex. For so many months her fantasies had involved supermarkets and shopping malls—public, inappropriate spaces devoid of possible intimacy. Earlier on this very night, anticipating Mark’s probable desires, she’d recoiled at the prospect of being asked to engage. But something about Tina and Pete—about their musky tenderness toward one another—had flipped a switch, and, as Mark fiddled with the window cranks, Maggie gradually became aware of that sublimely simp
le craving. She wanted to be touched. She longed to be caressed, squeezed, jostled into various and necessary positions.

  The only problem was that she didn’t want to ask or explain. She wanted Mark to read her, understand her the way beast understands beast. Forget words, forget language altogether. She wanted them to be wolves and let their bodies do the speaking.

  She pulled off her shorts, took off her T-shirt, and unhooked her bra. Then she lay down on the bed and waited. The breeze prickled her skin.

  It took Mark maybe five minutes to notice she was topless. After that, it took very little time or energy before they were having sex.

  In the bathroom, after, Maggie ran her hands tentatively along the sink’s counter, looking for the unopened pack of glow sticks. She didn’t find them but knocked over what felt like a short stack of washcloths. They made a soft thump against the tile floor. Perhaps they’d already opened the last pack. She couldn’t now recall.

  One hand after the other, she fumbled her way to the toilet. The pattern of the tile felt foreign against the tips of her fingers. The toilet was a full foot left of where she remembered it being when Pete had quickly shone the flashlight around the bathroom’s corners. She thought of Audrey Hepburn alone and blind, groping, unaware of the burglar so close at hand. She thought of Jodie Foster in that basement, the murderer mere inches from her outstretched hand. She thought again of the coed. Eventually she made contact with the toilet’s tank.