Robert Wilson - The Divide

It had been, of course, a stupid and dangerous thing to do. John turned and merged into the crowd of the crippled and the ill as the Reverend Belweather’s henchmen advanced. They were large but slow and they hadn’t had a good look at him; he was out a Tear door and into the cold rain before they realized he was gone.

He arrived back at the motel wet, cold, and rank with amphetamine sweat, but the girl behind the desk smiled at him as he passed; and the smile provoked an old response. He stopped and turned to face her. Eighteen or maybe nineteen years old, broad bones, an aggressive blur of lipstick. And that smile. She returned his look. “318, right?”

His room number. He nodded. “You were here when I checked in.”

“Right, that’s right. I’m on till midnight. Shift’s just about up.”

He watched her eyes and her lips. The smile was tentative but provocative, an offer half made. He surmised that she had allowed guests to come on to her in the past and that she had mixed feelings about it, guilt colored with arousal; that she liked him because he looked a little dangerous coming in hollow-eyed from the rain; that she was scared of him, too, a little.

The possibility was tantalizing. She was a sheep, a goat, an ape, a human animal—but I’m human too, he thought, from the neck down. She shouldn’t have provoked him with that smile. Nobody ever smiled at him. The rain and the tension had disguised some obvious clue to his nature: she doesn’t recognize the devil. Horns and tail don’t show in this light. Reverend Belweather, I am a stronger persuader than you are.

It was as easy as asking. Easy as buying a used Corvette. Look deep into my eyes and see precisely what you want, a tall westbound stranger with no attachments and big hands, see our dovetailed needs. He took her to his room and undressed her in the dark, pronouncing the words she wanted so desperately to hear, disguising himself so that she would not recoil and leave. Dangerous, this eager merging of skin and skin, sudden loss of surface tension; this knocking loose of props inside him until, delirious with orgasm and fatigue, he was no longer sure who or where he was. After a time she stood and dressed in the faint light—the light that comes through motel windows in prairie towns on cold nights after midnight—a glimmer of wet on her thigh, and John was startled by the immediacy of the vision (or was it a symptom of his decline?), the absolute solidity of white shoulder and cascade of hair. A sudden longing radiated through him like a pulse. She turned toward him momentarily and he waited for the revulsion in her eyes, her dawning sense of his alienness, but there was none: only a flicker of curiosity. She smiled. “Who’s Susan?”

John sat up on the bed, wordless.

“You said her name. I guess you didn’t even know it. Girlfriend? Wife? Well, it doesn’t matter.”

He managed, “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m flattered. You must love her a lot.”

She left him staring at the door.

Sleeping, he dreamed of his first sexual encounter.

He was sixteen and he had abandoned Benjamin and he was about to abandon the Woodwards; as an experiment, he seduced a female classmate. He selected his target and approached her methodically. She was a fragile bundle of neuroses and exposed nerves, therefore easy to manipulate. Which he did: he flattered and provoked and humiliated her into a motel bedroom, and he fucked her there—there was no other word for it. He obtained her passive submission and he fucked her.

Was it satisfying?

On the most elementary level, yes, it was. As an experiment, it was wholly successful. Fucking this schoolgirl in the dark was a confirmation of everything he had learned about himself, about his superiority. She was a lesser creature, which rendered any ethical objections moot. The sin, if there was a sin here, was not rape but bestiality, surely excusable under the circumstances.

Two things bothered him, however, and made him reluctant to repeat the experiment.

The first was that, while he was with her, while he was hovering at the brink of orgasm, some subterranean and scary impulse caused him to mouth the words “I love you” against her ear. She hadn’t noticed, thank God. But it troubled John immensely. The words weren’t his words! And words were his environment: words were where he lived. If this brick could collapse, how secure was the structure he had made of his life?

The second disturbing thing was the way she looked at him when they were finished. He switched on the bedside lamp and began to dress. He turned and caught her eyes fixed on him, and the expression on her face was one of silent shock: What am I doing here? Christ, what have I done?

He recognized the look.

He hated it.

It was far too familiar.

When he awoke it was five-fifteen of the next evening and the last daylight was bleeding away in a steely grey sky.

He checked out at the desk. There was another woman at the counter, middle-aged, lumpily overweight. She smiled and totaled his bill. “Late to be leaving,” she observed. “Are you one of those night drivers?”

He nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, “we get a few of those. Some people prefer it. Me, I think it’s lonely going down the highway all by yourself in the dark. Oh well … I guess people are different that way.”

He looked at the bill. “What’s this charge?”

“Why, that’s your phone call. Long distance to Toronto about 11 a.m. this morning. You came in the office and asked me how to get a line out, and I—hey, mister, is something wrong? What’s the matter—you don’t remember?”

In the Corvette he swallowed two pills and washed them down with coffee from a thermos, then gunned the engine and sailed west.

He passed the arena on his way out of Atelier. According to the billboard, the Reverend Belweather had canceled for tonight.

There was fresh-fallen snow in the Rockies but the roads were clear. The Corvette labored up and through a world of pine and snow and rock and cold blue sky; he was closing in on his objective now. John especially did not want to sleep—the sleep might revive his twin, if only momentarily, as it had in Atelier—and so he began to rely on the amphetamines when he felt fatigue settling in. This effectively killed his appetite, which in turn eliminated restaurant stops and saved a little time, though he did periodically force himself to stop for food. He was running the physical machine hard and he was conscious of the dangers that imposed.

He was careful; but even so, coming down the slope of the Rockies into coastal British Columbia, he began to hallucinate.

Rockfaces and switchbacks took on a sinister, knife-sharp significance. One looming wall of granite, where the mountain had been blasted to accommodate the road, compressed itself into a sudden likeness of Maxim Kyriakides—the rugged features, fierce brows, flat gray eyes. Max as he had appeared to John as a child. This immense, this unshakable. Well, he thought, as Amelie might say, Fuck you, Max. Get thee behind me.

It was the pills, he thought. They were responsible for this, the eruption of metaphor into his visual field. He shook his head and worked hard at concentrating on the road.

Of course, he thought, it might be the dissolution that Susan Christopher had warned him about. The cortical locus of his ego, the John Shaw part of his brain, misfiring in the dark of the skull … as it had when he almost allowed the Corvette to cartwheel on the highway out of Toronto. But that was not an allowable thought.

Not yet.

He blinked away the mutant landscape and reached for his baggie of pills.