“I know that’s your diagnosis,” Maura says.
So one of his thoughts slipped out.
He keeps nodding. Does nodding make you seem crazy? Lots of people nod yes, nod off, knot off, Knott’s Berry Farm. Cruise control: that’s what his medication is meant to be.
“You too long without meds right now?”
He continues to nod.
“I like you on or off ’em. It’s like being hooked up with two different guys. I can cheat on you with him.”
He laughs at that and the car changes lanes. Horns sound but nothing bad happens. He remembers the story that Karly told him about Mr. James Candler racing his car and wrecking, or maybe it was another car that wrecked. Karly is not great at telling and his receiving is mediocre at best, and it only matters that Mr. James Candler was racing—Mick takes his foot off the accelerator—and how everybody, it seems, has to live in this tumbledown world, not just him. He isn’t alone, and following that thought comes another, sweeping in to join it. He understands that it is his former life that never existed, that is unreal, deluded, that is only a child’s imagining. Believing in those days of seamless reality is the real madness. There is no going back, though maybe, if he’s lucky, there’s slowing down.
“You want to tonight?” Maura says. The question, he can see, makes her nervous. She reaches over and pulls on the steering wheel. “You’re wandering,” she says and laughs again.
“I’m not ever” going to be who I was before I got “schizophrenia. And if you” want some guy who isn’t—he takes his foot from the accelerator and slows again to the speed limit. “Then . . .”
She doesn’t respond, not with words. She knows she’s not sexy like Lolly and not beautiful like Karly, and she can only hope to have this boy as long as he remains ill, which means that she is not ethical like Barnstone, because Maura does not want him to get well. She wants him to belong to her. Without him, she is never going to be complete.
If this were a movie, she thinks, she would have a makeover and be suddenly gorgeous. He would get well and love her anyway. They would ride off in this terrible car into the sunset. But they have seen the sun set over the ocean, haven’t they? And her time at the Center—hasn’t that been something like a makeover? Not that she is gorgeous. That would take more than a makeover—a do-over. And nobody gets that. She unbuckles, leaning farther than necessary to let the wind have her hair. Then she slides over between the Firebird’s bucket seats, putting herself in that unsafe, uncomfortable gap to be next to him.
The author wishes to thank
Antonya Nelson & Katie Dublinski
and
Noah Boswell, Rus Bradburd, Seth Cagin, Tony Hoagland, James Kastely, Kathleen Lee, Todd Lieber, Jeff Lymburner, David MacLean, Fiona McCrae, Bill Nelson, Julie Nelson, Susan Nelson, Alexander Parsons, Lillie Robertson, Steven Schwartz, David Schweidel, Peter Turchi, University of Houston Creative Writing Program, Connie Voisine, Jade Webber, Stephen Webber, Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Wilkinson Library,
&
Kim Witherspoon.
The Pessoa fragment is translated by Chris Daniels.
ROBERT BOSWELL has published seven novels, three story collections, and two books of nonfiction. He has had one play produced. His work has earned him two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, a Lila Wallace/Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Award in Fiction. What Men Call Treasure was a finalist for the Western Writers of America Nonfiction Spur Award. Both the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly named Mystery Ride as one of the best books of the year. The Independent (London) picked The Geography of Desire as one of the best books of the year. Virtual Death was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and was named by the Science Fiction Chronicle as one of the best novels of the year. Boswell has published more than seventy stories and essays. They have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Colorado Review, Epoch, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and anthologies. He shares the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing with his wife, Antonya Nelson. They live in Houston, Texas, and Telluride, Colorado.
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