David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Both the mom and the grandmother had been given to catatonic/cataleptic states, which as far as I can tell is a symptom of a certain kind of schizophrenia. The girl, ever since young, had amused herself by trying to imitate this state, which involved sitting or lying extremely still, slowing your pulse, breathing in such a way that your chest doesn’t even rise, and holding your eyes open for long periods, such that you’re blinking only every couple minutes. It’s the last that’s hardest — the eyes start to burn as they dry out. Very, very hard to push through this discomfort… but if you do, if you can resist the almost involuntary urge to blink that comes when the burning and drying is the very worst, then the eyes will start lubricating themselves without blinking. They will manufacture a kind of false or ersatz tears, just to save themselves. Almost no one knows this, because the incredible discomfort of having your eyes open without blinking stops most people before they hit that critical point. And there’s usually damage, anyway. The girl had called it ‘playing dead,’ since that’s the way her mother had tried to describe and discount the states to the girl when she was very tiny, saying that she was only playing and that the game was called ‘play dead.’

The abandoned man had caught up with them somewhere in eastern Missouri. They’d been on a little blacktop highway, and the first sign that he was behind was a pair of headlights that showed just when they were on a downslope that extended a mile or more — they’d see the headlights appear when the trailing vehicle hit the crest, then they’d lose them when they started to climb the slow grade again.

As Toni Ware remembers it and recounted it just one time to X on a night that turned out to be the anniversary of the occurrence, the vehicle that the man had commandeered or hired came up fast behind them — it turned out to be going quite a bit faster than the truck, which had a camper shell — and the man was not driving the vehicle. He was standing on the front hood of what emerged to be the trailerless cab of an enormous semi truck, swollen by rage and malice to at least twice his normal size, holding his arms up and out in a terrible gesture of almost Old Testament retribution, and hollering (in the rural sense of ‘holler,’ which is almost a special kind of art form; it used to be the way that people who lived way out in hill country out of sight of each other would communicate — it was the way of letting other people know that they were around, because otherwise it could seem, in the rural hills, like you were the only person anywhere within thousands of miles) with an ecstatic black evil rage and glee that caused Toni’s mother — who, let’s recall, was not a paragon of stability — to become hysterical and floor the accelerator and try to outrun the vehicle while at the same time trying to extract from her purse a bottle of prescription pills and to open the childproof cap, which the mother was terrible at and usually needed Toni to open for her — causing the vehicle, which was top-heavy because of the LEER camper shell, to swerve off the road and go over on its side in some kind of field or area of weeds, injuring the mom terribly such that she was half-stunned and moaning and blood covering her face and Toni was lying against the passenger-side window, and in fact still has the window’s crank imprinted into her side if you can get her to raise her top and show you the eerie reproduction. The vehicle came to rest on its right side, and the mom wasn’t wearing a seat belt, which people like that never do, and she was lying partly on top of Toni Ware, pinning her against the window so that she couldn’t move or even tell whether she was injured. There was nothing but that terrible silence and hissing and ticking of a vehicle that’s just had an accident, plus the sound of spurs or maybe just a great deal of pocket change jingling as the man negotiated the downslope down to them. Her own window was driven into the ground and the driver’s-side window was now pointing up at the sky, but the windshield, though buckled and hanging halfway off, had turned into a four-foot vertical slot through which Toni Ware got a full-length view of the man standing there, cracking his knuckles and looking at the occupants of the car. Toni lay there with her eyes opened and slowed her breathing and played dead. The mom’s eyes were closed, but she was alive because you could hear her breathing and occasionally giving little unconscious exclamations in her coma or whatever it was. The man looked at Toni, locked eyes with her, for a long time — later, she understood that he was trying to ascertain if she was alive. It is unimaginably hard to be staring straight ahead and have someone lock eyes with you and yet to appear like you’re not looking back at them. (This is what had started the story; David Wallace or someone else had remarked that Toni Ware was creepy because, even though she wasn’t shy or evasive and would maintain eye contact, she seemed to be staring at your eyes rather than into them; it was a bit the way a fish in a tank swimming past as you watched through the glass and looked into its eyes looked back at you — you knew that it was aware of you in some way, but it was unsettling because it wasn’t anything like the way a human being seems aware of you when he meets your gaze.)

Toni’s eyes were open. It was too late to shut them. If she suddenly did, the man would know she was alive. Her only chance was to appear so dead that the man didn’t check her pulse or hold a piece of glass to her mouth to check. What would keep him from checking was if her eyes were open and stayed open — no living human being could hold its eyes open for long periods of time. There was no one around; the man had plenty of time to look through the windshield and see if they were alive. Her mother’s face was right up against her face, but luckily the blood was dripping into some hollow of Toni’s throat; if it had been dripping into her eyes it would have made her blink involuntarily. She stayed rigid like that with her eyes open. The man climbed up and tried the driver’s-side door but it was locked from the inside. The man went back and got some kind of tool or crowbar and pried the windshield off, shaking the truck violently. He got on his side and edged through the slot of the windshield, looking first at the unconscious mom and then at the girl. The mom moaned and stirred slightly, and the man killed her by reaching in and pinching her nostrils shut with one hand and covering her mouth with a greasy rag with the other and pressing hard, so hard that the mom’s head strained against the side of Toni’s as she unconsciously resisted being suffocated. Toni stayed there, shell-breathing, with her eyes still open and only inches from the man’s eyes as he suffocated her mother, which took over four minutes of pressure for the man to be totally sure. Toni staring sightlessly and not blinking even though the dryness and discomfort must have been terrific. And somehow succeeded in convincing the man she was dead, because he did not pinch her nostrils shut and use the greasy rag on her, even though it would only have taken an extra four or five minutes… but no regular living human can sit there with their eyes open that long without blinking, so he knew. And so he got one or two valuables out of the glove compartment and she heard him jingling his way back up the upslope and the tremendously powerful sound of the truck’s motor starting up and the truck leaving, and then the girl lay there trapped between the door and her dead mom for what must have been several hours before someone happened by and saw the wreck and called the police, and then probably an additional long time for them to extract her from the truck, uninjured in any real physical sense, and put her in some kind of charity ambulance…