Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“That girl of yours.”

“Christ,” Martin says.

“Ain’t she a wild thing.”

“Christ,” Martin says again.

“Looks just like her mother,” Jim says.

“And nothing like me,” Martin says.

Jim says, “It’s in the eyes.” There is a long pause as they both consider this. Then Jim says, “Cold blue eyes, full of murder and vitriol.” He laughs at his own joke. Martin slaps the table, laughs. Both men fall silent. Turtle rolls onto her back, lies listening, looking at the ceiling.

“Her mother said that it was a mountain lion did it to her.”

“What?”

Another long silence. Turtle hears the chapped noise as Martin opens and closes his lips, prefatory to speech, fails each time to speak. Then, with a laugh like a murmur, he says, “She used to say that she was asleep in the bedroom and I was out cutting boards to repanel the bedroom upstairs. In the master bedroom, there’s a mudroom and a porch beyond that. She says I’d left that door open.”

“No shit?”

Silence. Martin is perhaps nodding. Soft noises of his lips, a kind of click he makes with his tongue when he’s thinking or lost in memories.

“So she said that when she woke up, the mountain lion was in the bed with her, eight feet long, head to haunch.”

“Never seen a cat that big,” Jim says, “not that I live out here, like you guys.”

“That’s a big cat.”

“She liked to rile you.”

More silence, and then, “She said that the goddamn cat climbed on top of her and took her neck in his jaws and took her right there in the bed, from behind her, said it had like a hook, like a spine on its cock.”

Jim laughs, slapping the table. “Oh fuck. She had some sass. Didn’t she?”

“Hilarious,” Martin says dryly.

There is another long silence. Then Jim says, “She’s your daughter, all right, to her fucking bones. That girl is what, a hundred and ten pounds, all of it piss and vinegar and fucking murder. She’s your daughter, all right.”

Another long silence, and Martin says, “Christ.”

“You know,” Jim says, “most often, I worry about girls growing up in this world, right? Right? It’s not the same as with boys, what can happen. But with your daughter . . .” He collects the deck of cards with a papery rasping, knocks it against the edge of the table. “The thing about Julia. The thing about that girl. Some asshole, right? You just . . . you pity that fuck and what he’s about to find out.” Jim coughs out a laugh.

“I don’t think that’s funny at all,” Martin says.

“I know, I know,” Jim says quickly.

“It’s fucks like you,” Martin says very quietly. “Fat fucks who’ve never seen a bad thing happen that think that just being good is enough. But the truth is, Jim, it can go any way, and sometimes it just doesn’t matter how good you are.”

“I know that, of course that’s true,” Jim says.

“So it’s not funny. I’ve done all I can for her, but she’s just a fourteen-year-old girl, Jim.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Jim says.

“You never know how a thing’s going to go,” Martin says. “The outcome is just never certain.”

“Of course, I’m sorry, Marty.”

“And, Christ, the worry keeps you up late at night. You just worry about what kind of world she’s growing up into, and what will become of her. Christ, it’s an awful thing. And I wish it were like you say. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter how tough you are.”

She lies on the floor, listening to her daddy, his voice full of pain, looking up at the ceiling boards. They fit one to the other and go on, board after board, across the ceiling almost shrouded in darkness, and they are all of them miraculous in their strangeness and their particularity, and Turtle thinks, life is a strange thing, if you look around, if you look, you can almost lose yourself in it, and she thinks, stop, you are thinking like Martin. There is another long silence from below.

“That was a fucking awful thing,” Jim says after a moment.

“Christ,” Martin says.

“Hell, Marty, don’t get on about her.”

“Christ,” Martin says again. “I could almost forget sometimes.”

“Don’t get on about her. It’s done.”

A noise as Martin shifts his chair. The table creaks as he puts his forearms against it, perhaps leaning in. He says, “And you just have to think, what do you tell a girl, what do you tell her about the world, what do you tell her about life. What do you say?”

“Oh fuck, Marty. I don’t know.”

“The temperature may rise six degrees in the coming decades, and that’s not just ‘rising temperatures,’ that’s a cataclysm. You think we can stop that? People don’t believe in obesity, and that they can see in the fucking mirror. They can’t take care of their own goddamn bodies. How many people die because their hearts are grimy with plaque, do you think? A lot. What is it—seventy percent of all Americans are overweight? Half of those are obese? And do you think—can this person, this average American, take care of anything? No. Fuck no. So the natural world, which they cannot see for all their roads and gas stations and schools and jails, the fucking natural world, which is more important and more beautiful than anything this average American has ever seen or understood in his whole fucking life, the natural world is going to die, and we’re going to let it die, and there’s no way we can save it. Fuck.”

“Optimism?”

“Optimism, hell,” Martin says. “You ask sometime, you ask somebody what they would do if the end came. You go ahead and ask them and there will be among those you ask a population who’ll tell you that they would just die, and among those who didn’t say it, more would mean it. People are content to live if the living should come easy. If it should stop being easy—well.” A silence. They sit for some time, and then Martin grating, his voice harsh and low, raking his fingernails across the wood grain: “Well, I tell you, what that question is asking is—what will you do when things get hard? And life will get hard. Life will get hard, and to say that you will not fight for it—well. What intercourse can you have with such people? There can be none. Their life is a sham of circumstance only, their pretended agency is perfidy, a social lie, and to regard them as people is fetishism. So what optimism can there be? They will not fight for themselves—you think they will fight for a world outside themselves? A world troublesome to imagine, troublesome to understand? They have no language to understand it, even. They see no beauty in it. And you know what the proof is? The end is coming. And here we all are—waiting, with our dicks out in our hands.”

“Well, fuck, Marty.”

“You know what I think? She couldn’t be fucking bothered. It got too fucking hard and the headaches were too bad and she gave up.”

“Don’t get on about her,” Jim says.

“Why not?”

“You said yourself, anything can happen. It could’ve been some random thing. It wasn’t a thing she meant to happen. You know that.”

“Hell, I don’t know shit.”

“Don’t let’s talk about her.”

“It’s not a thing anyone can know, I guess,” Martin says, “but you’ve got to fucking wonder.”

“It was an accident, and if it wasn’t, I don’t see that it matters.”

“It matters.”

“No, Marty, I don’t think so.”

“You’re a good guy, for a cocksucker. You know that, Jim?”

“I’m not a cocksucker.”

“Being a self-hating Republican faggot doesn’t make you any less of a faggot, Jim. It just makes you a faggot and also a blind and self-deceiving motherfucker.”