Listen to Me (14 page)

It wasn't just his students. It was his wife, too. It was everything and everyone. The world was ruled by technology; disturbed by nature.

What happened to real maps? That's what Mark wanted to know. What happened to good old-fashioned red and orange and blue and yellow maps that you could hold in your hands, rub between your thumb and index finger—maps that could be folded and jostled and looked at whenever you goddamned pleased and not just when the gods of cell service deemed it appropriate or convenient?

He closed his eyes. The little man punched the air as hard as he could—once, twice, three times—then retreated into the shaded obscurity of his brain.

“Right or left?” Mark said.

“I think,” Maggie said, then stopped short. “I mean, I think right. Take a right. It's what the map says. Unless there's another road a little farther.”

“Farther where, Maggie? There's a forest in front of us.”

“It's just . . .” she said. He was making her nervous, which meant it would take her twice as long before she would make sense. “It's just the map doesn't indicate a turn—one way or the other.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this dead end doesn't exist.”

“Of course it exists. I'm looking at it.”

“But on the map,” she said. “It doesn't exist.” She gestured to her phone.

Okay. Okay, so here. This. This right here. This—
this
was what Mark was talking about. Right here. Right now. Mark and Maggie were in a car on a road that had clearly come to an end. He was looking at it. He could see with his own two eyes that the dead end existed. But Maggie was looking at a phone. She was telling him that what he could see—what they could
both
technically see because neither of them was blind—didn't exist because it wasn't on her phone. What it was, at the end of the day—what it really, possibly was—was that Maggie was killing him.

He took a deep breath.

“From where we are now, is the hotel north, south, east, what?”

“Take a right,” she said.

“How do you know? If this turn doesn't exist, then how do you know?”

“Because the hotel is to the right of here.”

He held his hand out. “Show me,” he said.

She clutched the phone to her chest.

“Show me.”

“No.”

“Just show me where we are.”

“No.”

“Are you fucking with me, Maggie? Are you goading me? Because it's working. It really is. Just show me where we are.”

She unclenched the phone but didn't hand it to him. Instead, she cradled it like a miniature baby in her palm. “We don't show up on the phone anymore,” she said at last. “So I'm having to wing it.”

“Wing it?”

These were the facts, as Mark saw them: It was past two in the morning. They were on some microscopic back road in West Virginia. Mark could barely see shit. The wipers weren't working worth a fuck. Mangled leaves were glommed up and down the sides of both blades. The windshield would be scratched to hell by morning. And Maggie, dry and safe and cozy, was over there in the passenger seat with her personal bullshit device
winging
it?

“This is it,” she said. “This is the turn. Take a right. I'm sure.”

Fine,
he thought.
Fuck it.

Mark put the car in gear and, the headlights their only guide, took the turn.

What, after all, was the worst that could happen?

          The rain stopped—Maggie was thankful for that at least—but the front windshield was starting to fog up, and so now Mark rolled down the driver's-side window. They were going maybe twenty miles an hour.

“What are you doing?” said Maggie.

Gerome lifted his head, sniffed, then went back to sleep. He was too tired to bother with anything anymore. If only Maggie could feel fatigue like that, all her problems would be solved.

“I'm getting some fresh air. It's too close in here.”

When Mark proposed, some eight years earlier, they'd been lying together on the couch in their first apartment in Georgetown. Mark had just finished his dissertation; Maggie would earn her DVM in the spring. It was winter and dark out. At midnight, when the snow started, they opened all the windows and climbed under a blanket in the living room. It was so cold they could see their breath, but they wanted to watch the snow fall and they wanted to inhale that crisp snowy air and the smells of the wood fires from the row houses down the way. Mark's manner was twitchy and, after only a few minutes, he said it was too close where they were huddled together under the blanket. He'd gotten off the couch abruptly and disappeared into the bedroom. For a moment Maggie feared he'd lost interest in her. When he reappeared several minutes later, a small velvet box in his hands, she understood. Her fears disappeared completely. She wondered now if he ever thought about that night or if it was a memory she alone kept alive.

“Why does it matter that I've got a window down?” said Mark.

Maggie stared out the front windshield.

“Gerome isn't bothered. So what's your problem?”

“Never mind,” said Maggie. “I don't even care.” She knew—really, truly she did—that it was silly to be scared of an open window. If they were vulnerable, they were vulnerable. And if they were safe, they were safe. One window up or down wouldn't change anything.

“I know what it is,” said Mark. He was cranky, a sign of exhaustion. “Yep. I know what it is.” He knocked on the steering wheel with an open hand as though he'd come to some unforeseen and therefore grand realization. Maggie sighed.

“It's nothing,” she said. “I'm tired. That's all. It's humid with the window down. But I don't care. Really.”

“You know what your problem is?” Mark said.

To be asleep, to be blissfully lifted away from this moment, this night, that's all Maggie wanted.

“Your problem is that you think the boogeyman is lurking,” he said.

She rubbed at her neck, at the place where that hideous bruise had been. She closed her eyes, and there was the coed, prostrate, her chin angled to that ill-fated degree, her wet hair pressed against the base of the toilet. Was it wet from the struggle? Or had she been showering when the man found her? At so many times of the day, we expose ourselves to chance.

“And do you know what your problem is?” she asked at last.

“My problem?” Mark snorted. “I'd love to know. Yes. Fire away. Let's hear it.”

“You pretend it doesn't exist.”

“That what doesn't exist?”

“Evil.”

Mark snorted again, and Maggie felt suddenly sorry for him. This man, this husband of hers, was completely unaware of the complexities of the human brain. She felt sorry for all men, really—for all those penises just getting in the way of real insight. They lacked imagination; they believed only what they already knew.

Mark picked up his speed, though the road was no less narrow or unfamiliar than before. Maggie grabbed the inside handle of the passenger-side door. She did it for effect, but—if Mark even noticed—the gesture had an opposite outcome than the one she desired. He sped up.

“You're going too fast,” she said. She gripped the door more tightly.

As they rounded the next turn, an inside corner that hugged the mountain's increasing height, Mark drifted across the yellow line.

“You're not paying attention,” she said.

“I'm fine.”

“Just slow down.”

“There's no one else around.” He picked up his speed even more, and a branch overhead, thick with wet green leaves, fell onto the hood of the car, then whipped against the windshield. Their vision was momentarily obscured.

Maggie put a hand on the dashboard as if to steady the entire car.

Mark hit the brakes and the branch flew away.

He pressed the gas again, now clutching at the steering wheel and leaning more forward in his seat.

As they rounded an outside corner, Maggie looked out and down, one hand still on the dashboard, the other holding on to the door. To her right, the edge of the mountain seemed to plunge itself into a steep cosmic darkness. She closed her eyes.

At Foster Beach last winter, a woman—alone, late at night—had driven her sedan off the seawall, plunging ten feet before cracking the ice and sinking into the subzero water. In the car, when the divers, many hours later, were able to salvage what was left, they found the woman's body of course. But in the trunk they also discovered two Mason jars, each filled with the fetus of a baby and a single plastic rose. Maggie had tried to imagine the life of the person, the woman, who might have placed her own babies in those Mason jars before driving off the seawall. What desperation that woman must have felt. What unmatched and severe loneliness and isolation.

“Please,” Maggie said. She touched Mark's arm. “It's not safe. Just slow down.”

“True fact,” he said. There was something diabolic to the way his right cheek was positioned on his face. “Did you know that when the weatherman says there's a twenty percent chance of rain, he doesn't mean there's an eighty percent chance it won't? He means twenty percent of a specified region will absolutely feel rainfall. Did you know that? There's no chance to it at all except which area it will be.”

Maggie wanted to slap him. If he hadn't been driving, it's possible she might very well have done it. He opened his mouth to say more, but just as he did—just as he licked his lips, took a breath in, and opened his mouth—a bright light appeared suddenly behind them.

“Fuck,” Mark said. He flipped the rearview mirror so the light was out of his eyes. “Where the fuck did that come from?”

Maggie turned in her seat. Behind them—barreling toward them at great speed—was a large truck. There was a row of lights above the windshield, another on each of the side-view mirrors, and two more closer together just above the bumper. It looked like the face of a large black spider rapidly encroaching. Back on the highway, Maggie would have paid money for the camaraderie of another car. But here, where they were, for all intents and purposes essentially lost, the last thing she wanted was company.

“Who does that?” Maggie said. “Why are they so close to us?”

Mark looked into the rearview, then raised his hand to shield his eyes or maybe to get a better view. “Are those hunting lights?”

“Stunning deer,” she said. “It makes me sick.”

“Do they want to go around?” he said. “I can't tell. I can't just pull over.” He was still shielding his eyes from the light.

The truck swerved into the other lane, as if to pass, but then swerved back behind them.

“Are they drunk?” Mark asked.

“This doesn't feel right,” she said. “Did you just speed up?” She turned forward in her seat and again clutched at the door.

They drove on, the truck no fewer than twenty feet behind them.

“I don't like this,” she said.

“He's not giving me a choice,” he said. “He's right on my ass.”

There was no place to turn, no strip of grass to pull onto. There was simply the mountain wall to the left, the mountain edge to the right and, between, the meager two-lane blacktop.

The truck flashed its lights.

“If I slow down,” Mark said, “he'll ram right into us.”

Maggie bit at her lips. What kind of people would be out on a night like this, at an hour like this, after a storm like the one they'd driven through? What kind of people—other than Mark and Maggie, who were stranded, displaced, without other options—would voluntarily be out on the road rather than home tucked in bed? There was only one answer to that question: people who were up to no good. Perhaps it was one of their bumper stickers—idiotic, liberal bumper stickers:
PRO-CHOICE, NEUTER/SPAY, YES WE CAN.
In a place like this, their car practically shouted,
I am other. I am other. I am other.
She could have kicked herself for applying those stickers to begin with. Why did a person need to advertise her views every single place she went?

“Oh god. Oh god,” she said.

From behind, another brighter beam now appeared, not from an additional car but from atop the row of lights above the truck's windshield—a sort of high-intensity spotlight.

“Mark!” said Maggie. She covered her eyes. The light was blinding. “Can you see?”

“How much farther?” said Mark. “Do you think we're close?”

Maggie hunched over in her seat in order to block as much of the glare as possible. There were black circles in her vision, as when a child she once ventured a forbidden glance at the sun during an eclipse. She cupped a hand over her phone and looked down. The screen was darker now. It wasn't just her vision. The battery was dying.

“If we're where I think we are, then it should be—” The screen darkened more; she could barely see the map. She sat up slightly and looked out the window. Like a gift, like a tiny little present forgotten during a Christmas celebration but remembered as the tree is being dismantled and the ornaments put away, there was a sign on Maggie's side of the road. She had looked up and out at just the right moment, and the headlights of their car—or, who knows? Maybe it was the truck's searchlight behind them—had shone brightly and squarely upon it.

“There!” Maggie said. She pointed and her finger hit the window. “I saw it,” she said. “I saw the sign. Holidays Inn. It's just ahead.” She was dizzy with relief, giddy with excitement. She'd seen the sign. She'd seen it!

The truck behind them revved its engine. Maggie, her heartbeat racing, her eyes strained small and tight, turned in her seat to look, but the headlights veered suddenly to the right. She watched as the lights moved eastward and down, down, down into the woodland until its beams were too small to register or the trees too dense to reveal.