Listen to Me (18 page)

She moved her hands from her thighs to her breasts, and now she held them—her right breast in her left hand and her left in her right. Their weight felt pleasant, if a little sweaty. Four-plus decades and they were still pretty good. The nipples, never having breastfed, were still capable of expanding and contracting. Just now they were hard, responding to her own touch. But later, asleep for a few hours next to her husband, they would expand, flatten, turn round and light in color.

She stood up, a flutter of lightness in her chest.

Something else Augustine had said? That a woman's caress served only to bring down a man's mind. It wasn't verbatim, of course. But the point was, screw Augustine! Screw bleakness, irrational or otherwise!

Maggie didn't need to be sad if she didn't want to be. This weight she'd been carrying around hadn't paid any real homage to the coed; it had only served to suck the life out of her marriage. That man out there—
my man!
—was her husband, and Maggie's love, physical or otherwise, didn't lower him; it elevated him. Just as his did her.

The point?

The point?

The point?

To hell with the poets. To hell with the coed. This was
her
life, not theirs.

          Mark slept. It was a shallow sleep. He was aware of his breathing. He was aware of outside sounds. At some point he had a dream in which Maggie, at too great a distance from him to be saved, was drowning. She was wailing.
Mlip, mlip, mlip.
She sobbed as the water went in and out of her mouth, as her arms flailed and snot collected in her nose.
Mlip, mlip, mlip.

When the sound finally woke him, and eventually it had to, Mark discovered that it wasn't from within but from without. It was Gerome, whining again. He was standing at their bed, at Mark's side of their bed, his chin smashed against the mattress, and he was whining.

“Get in your bed,” Mark whispered. “Get in your bed.” It was a command Gerome knew by heart.

But the dog didn't get in his bed. Instead, he continued to whine. He pawed at the mattress. This wasn't like him.

“Fuck,” he said.

Gerome pawed more frantically now at the sheets. There was no way to avoid getting out of bed, putting on his pants and shoes, groping his way out of the building, and waiting while the dog did his business.

Mark threw off the top sheet.

It would be sunup soon. For now, though, the room was still dark, and Mark searched his way over to the armchair where he'd tossed his clothes only an hour or two earlier. He pulled on his shirt, which was stiff from the dried rain, then stepped into his pants. The legs were still wet.

Gerome came to him, leaned into his shins. He was whimpering now, a way of apologizing for the inconvenience. Gerome hated this as much as Mark did. He was embarrassed—embarrassed by his animal nature; embarrassed he couldn't express himself clearly through words; embarrassed that what was happening in his body was beyond his control. Poor dog. It wasn't right that he would be ashamed of himself. He was just being himself, a dog being a dog.

In an undergraduate honors seminar, Mark had a student, just this last semester, who'd insisted, in front of the entire class, that
to equivocate
was the same as
to equate.
Mark had had to stop the discussion in order to correct the mistake. It wasn't that he wanted to humiliate the undergrad; rather, he wanted to avoid other students' adoption of the misunderstanding. What had surprised Mark, more than anything else, was the kid's unwillingness to surrender his belief. Even after Mark had explained—at length, using the whiteboard—the immense difference between the two words, the student had insisted on his own accuracy. There was, Mark had begun to understand that day, a fundamental difference between this upcoming generation and all the ones that had come before. It was the absence of humility, the inability to admit defeat, the unwillingness to be wrong.
Be wrong,
he had thought standing in front of his class.
Just be wrong.
What he thought now was that Gerome, though he couldn't know it, was blessed with something essential, something that no amount of training or housebreaking could ever fully eliminate: animal instinct. Whereas, it seemed, on the contrary, that man was capable—more and more—of losing humanity. Every year, the students in Mark's classroom were less and less human. Every year, there was something
essential
missing.

In Mark's front pocket was the last packet of glow sticks. He tore it open, pulled out all three sticks, snapped each one, and tied them to his wrist. The room immediately around him came into pastel view. Gerome wagged his tail and circled.

“Where's your leash?” Mark whispered. “Where'd it go?”

Gerome ran to the door and nosed at the place where they'd discarded the leash.

“Good boy,” Mark said.

Once the dog's collar was hooked, Mark
eek
ed open the high-levered lock. It was only after he was in the hallway shutting the door carefully and quietly that he realized he'd be leaving Maggie in an unlocked room. He paused. The hallway was so black; he didn't like the idea of leaving Maggie exposed.

Gerome let out a full-mouthed moan at his side. Mark saw no other option. He pulled the door closed. It didn't latch. But, provided no one came through checking, it would appear, were there light, as though the door was flush with the frame. It was the best he could do.

Gerome tugged him down the hall, past the fire door, through the lower stairwell, and out the basement exit. Outside, the air was dank and fluid. His moist pants felt cool against his legs.

There was a minivan parked near the rear exit of the hotel. Gerome steered deftly around it, leading them rapidly across the bottom parking lot in the direction of the forest at the perimeter of the clearing.

Two more cars were parked in the distance, near the far edge of the mountaintop—a low sedan and a high-riding truck. Neither of them had their headlights on, but one of them—one of the far ones—was idling. Or Mark thought it was idling. He thought he could hear the engine gently ticking in the distance. Maybe he was imagining things. Maybe what he was actually hearing was the beginning of the return of electricity, its whirs and hums.

Gerome hunched into a squat the minute he hit grass and relieved himself. The smell was foul. He crab-walked along the edge of the trees, through the sodden grass, in the direction of the far cars. Mark breathed shallowly through his mouth and followed, the leash taut and his arm outstretched in order to provide as much distance between them as possible.

The earliest smidgen of light was visible to the east. Mark rubbed at his eyes. At long last, Gerome stopped, shook himself frantically, then returned daintily to Mark's side, his tail high, as though nothing had ever been troubling him.

There was just enough residual moon and just enough burgeoning morning sun that Mark could see now that the truck, definitely idling, had a door open. In fact, from its massive outline, it looked not unlike the truck they'd been followed by a few hours earlier.

Mark stepped closer.

Above the purr of the engine—impossible, of course—but above the purr, he thought he heard a whimper. Then the noise, the one that sounded like a whimper, morphed—further impossible—into a sob, and the sob into a word, and the word—the one Mark heard—was
no,
and the
no
seemed very much as if it were being uttered by a woman.

A moment later there was a slap—what sounded like a slap—and this was then followed by a full-on cry.

But the cry didn't belong to a woman. It belonged to a child.

Instinctively, Mark craned his head, his better ear angled more directly toward the vehicles.

The woman's voice, higher, clearer, now said, “Stop.” There was another slap.

It was impossible—these sounds, this series of sounds—because things like this didn't happen in real life. Not to Mark. Things like this happened on TV, on scripted police procedurals, in Maggie's articles. They didn't happen to him.

There was another sharp cry—the child again—and then what could only be described as a gasping, as though something were drowning or possibly being smothered.

Gerome lifted his head as if to say,
It's not just you, bub. It's you and me both, and you know a dog has ears designed to detect distress. You know it, bub. There's no denying it. Try all you want.

Mark felt his pulse pick up. The question, of course, was whether to approach or retreat. The options were to go back to the hotel room and pretend he'd heard nothing, or advance toward the car and risk giving the impression of a classic busybody.

He thought of Maggie, of what she'd do, what she'd say. “If you see something, say something,” she might quip. “Do you want to be polite, or do you want to be proactive?” He thought of the college girl.

Gerome tugged in the direction of the two vehicles. The little bell on his collar jingled. Mark yanked him back. He yelped. “Quiet,” he said. “Quiet.”

The sun was up a degree higher, though it was still closer to night than to day. He could see the color of Gerome's fur. In another few minutes, he'd be able to see the make of the two vehicles in front of them. In a few minutes after that, he'd see their license plates. In a few minutes more, he'd see into the windshields. But he didn't want to see into the windshields. He didn't want to see the numbers on the plates, and he surely didn't want to engage with anybody who might have been following them so belligerently just a few hours earlier on that slim mountain road.

He turned toward the hotel—he'd made his decision—but it was too late: Mark and Gerome had been spotted.

“Hey,” said a voice from inside the opened door of the truck. This was a man's voice, not a woman's, not a child's. Perhaps Mark had been mistaken. Perhaps both he and Gerome had been mistaken. “Wait a minute,” the voice said.

Mark's cheeks went hot. He'd been caught meddling. His bowels churned loudly.

A figure now emerged from the truck, the outline of a man, of a very large man. Mark thought he heard the sound of a zipper. He felt sick.

The figure stepped forward; Gerome growled, and Mark heard the unmistakably muffled mewl of a child coming from within the truck. Mark backed up.

“You need something?” the man said. His voice was familiar—not associated with a singular person, but with a specific
type
of person, with a specific
breed.
In his voice was the twang of mountains, the thud of poverty, the absence of education, the clash of inbreeding.

The man stopped walking when Gerome growled again.

“Pete?” said Mark. “Is that you?”

“Who's Pete? I'm not Pete. You want something?”

“Who do you have in there?”

“You work here? You asking me to leave?”

Mark heard rustling from the interior of the truck. Something was wrong. A struggle was underway. He was sure of it.

“Do you have permission to be here?” Mark asked. “Who do you have in there?”

“Are you the person who gives permission?” the man said. “Is that for you to give?”

The rustling continued.

“Does someone need help?” It was the only thing Mark could think to ask, though having asked it, he realized how weak the question sounded, how ineffectual and insincere even.

And now, inside the truck, an overhead light flicked on. A young woman uncrumpled herself from the passenger's seat. Her hair was disheveled; she appeared half asleep. Her face, what Mark could see through the windshield, was pale blue and hollow.

He heard the mewling again. And then, against his will, though will had nothing to do with it since he'd not been prepared or forewarned, he watched as the woman pulled aside her shirt and exposed a breast.

Mark looked away and toward the man, who was looking now at what Mark had just seen. The man stepped sideways, a defensive move, meant to block Mark's view. The maneuver worked, but not before Mark looked once again—this time, yes, against his will; it was instinct; it was animal; he shouldn't have but he did—toward the breast and saw, just before the vision was interrupted by the shadow of the man, a baby being lifted up from the deep of the cab, up and toward the breast.

“Who needs help?” asked the man. “You need help? You got extra food lying around? Water? You want to give me something? Maybe you want to give my wife something?” The man spit. The
thwack
against the pavement was indisputable. “We're not that sort of people.”

The man stepped forward. Mark stepped back.

“You want to fuck with my family?”

Gerome growled, but the man now didn't retreat.

Mark was shaking his head while backing away. It was a second or two before he realized a verbal response was in order. He thought he might puke.

“No,” he said. “No. Just walking the dog. I'm sorry.”

He held up the leash, stupidly. He couldn't yet make out the face of the man across from him. He didn't want to. He was thankful for shadows.

The light inside the truck clicked off. The passenger door opened. The woman stepped down. It appeared that the baby was still attached, still suckling. “You some sort of perv?” The woman was talking to Mark. The question was outrageous.

Now the woman joined her husband, a unified front. “He some sort of perv?” she said to the man. She let the word linger too long in her mouth—
prrrrrrv
—giving it more space, more time, more cadence than it deserved; giving it time to latch on as a possibly accurate descriptor.

“You want me to wake the others?” She was talking to her husband, whispering in fact, but Mark heard her plain and clear.
Others.

“Sure,” she said, no response one way or another from the man she stood beside, the man who seemed nearly statuesque in his determination and surveillance of Mark.