Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Tell me what happened,” he says.

Cayenne shakes her head again.

“Where’d she hit you?”

Cayenne shudders. A wracking quiver runs down her body. Turtle grips the edge of the sink, white-knuckled.

“Your finger?” Martin guesses. “She shot your finger?”

Then, as if suddenly finding that she can speak, the girl heaves up and thrusts her face at him, jaw out, eyes bulging, and screams, “I want my mom!”

“Sweetheart,” he says, reaching for her.

“I want my mom!” she yells, ribs trembling and heaving, but she allows him to take her hand. There are red dabs on her shirt. Martin enfolds her injured hand in his two, and Turtle can see that the first joint of the pointer finger has been shot off, leaving a meaty stub.

“I want my mom!” Cayenne screams at him, searching his face for any reply. She seems to be gripped both by agony and complete perplexity that Martin and Turtle are remaining silent. But Turtle has nothing to say. Cayenne’s screams embarrass her.

Martin says, “Kibble, look around, see if you can find her finger.”

At this, Cayenne howls, and then yells again, “I want my mom!” She gasps and trembles. Her brows draw together angrily.

Turtle looks around the kitchen. She gets down on her stomach and looks slantwise across the floorboards, under the overhung edges of the cabinets. The finger has perhaps simply ceased to exist.

Martin says, “You’re going to be fine, sweetheart.”

The girl wraps a fist around her finger. Blood leaks out between the knuckles and drips down her wrist. She is silent, her mouth spasming, her eyes sealed shut, shaking her head. A single line wanders down her forearm, and Turtle, looking at it, is astonished at how slender the forearm is. She could encircle it with thumb and forefinger.

Martin says, “That’s right, just hold the pressure on it, just hold pressure on it and we’ll let it bleed for a little while, you’re going to be fine, that’s nothing, you don’t need that little bit of finger, you’re going to be fine. Kibble? Those steaks are probably about burned. Would you take them off for me?”

Turtle walks to the counter. Cayenne is keening. Turtle takes two plates down. She draws her knife, skewers each steak, and drops them in turn onto the plates.

Cayenne screams again, “I want my mom!” and Turtle pauses, mid-action, listening, and then continues as if Cayenne hadn’t spoken. She turns off the burner. She looks at Cayenne, sitting upright, rocking back and forth. The girl’s eyes are swollen, tears wetting her neckline. Martin says, “You were so brave , you were so good , you’re going to be fine .”

Turtle walks out onto the porch, carrying both plates. The hillside is there, and the ocean. She stands in the gathering dark. In the kitchen, the girl’s high-pitched whine rises to a scream. Martin is trying to bandage the wound. Turtle sets the plates down on the arms of the Adirondack chairs and sits down herself. She notices a speck on Martin’s steak, dots it on the tip of her finger, and looks at it. It is like a frangible, cloudy bit of a plastic bottle. She flicks it off her finger.

When Martin comes out, he sets the fifty-cent piece on the arm of her chair. It is bent, with a single black pockmark just off center, rimmed with grease from the skillet. Turtle picks it up, looks at him. He shrugs, to indicate that he doesn’t know exactly how that worked. He picks up his plate, holds it, looking out at the ocean. Then he says, “Maybe, maybe, it hit the coin and glanced up into her finger.”

Turtle nods.

He says, “Just unlucky.”

Turtle looks at him.

He says, “No way to’ve seen that coming.”

“What?”

He shakes his head. “Couldn’t have seen that coming.”

“Really?”

He looks at her. “You hit the coin dead-on.”

“No way to have seen that coming?” Turtle repeats.

Martin seems to marvel at her anger. He says, “It should’ve been plucked right out of her fingers. She isn’t a vise . She can’t hold a coin so hard it ricochets . It should’ve been plucked right out of her grasp.”

“No way,” Turtle says, “to have seen this coming?”

“Why are you mad at me?” he says, as if it’s inscrutable. “You hit the coin. Dead-on. It should’ve been plucked right out of her fingers. There is no way, no way that she held that coin tight enough for it to ricochet up into her finger.”

Turtle opens her mouth to say something. She closes her mouth, returns her attention to the ocean. She says, “You didn’t seem bothered in there.”

“Why?” he says.

She says, “That girl is in pain.”

Martin says, “You know, some people think pain is the solution to solipsism.”

“What?”

“The problem is that we have no evidence that other people are conscious and alive, like us. We know that we are conscious because we have direct experience of our own thoughts, our emotions, the unquantifiable way that it feels to be alive, but we have no experience of others’ consciousness, and so—and so, we do not know for sure that they are alive, really alive , experiencing their life as we experience ours. Perhaps we are the only real person, surrounded by hollow shells who act like people, but who have no interior life as we do.

“The idea, so say the philosophers, is that you sit yourself down across from someone, and begin breaking his fingers with a hammer. You see how he reacts. He screams. He clutches his hand to his chest. You infer that he acts this way because he is in pain .

“But what really happens, when you are face-to-face with someone in pain, what really happens is that the gulf between you and them is made apparent. Their pain is utterly inaccessible to you. It might as well be a pantomime.

“When they are not in pain—when you two are just talking about Hume or Kant—you can believe that there exists, between you, an intercourse of ideas and emotions. But to see someone in pain like that, once you get past the surprise, is to make apparent the unbridgeable gulf that separates your own human mind from all other, alien personalities. It illuminates the true and actual—not the social and the imagined— state of human intercourse. Communication is a thin veneer, kibble.”

Turtle looks down at her steak. She cuts into it, puts a piece into her mouth, and begins to chew. Martin eats with silent thoughtfulness, looking grimly out at the slivered sunset and the darkening ocean, the sweep of the hillside, the shore pines turning to black-green in the twilight.

“People condemn this observation, kibble. They believe that to insist on the profound isolation of the human mind is madness. But in practice, everybody accepts the fact. We wouldn’t permit social stratification unless, on a basic level, we understood that we are insulated from the hardships of other people. And we are: it affects us not at all. These assholes discourse as if they care, but that’s a social lie, and if you’re paying attention you’ll see—you’re on your fucking own. Society will never help you. That principal, that teacher of yours, they’ll look out for you insofar as it’s their job, but they don’t really give a fuck, kibble. You’re invisible to them. As an individual person, with thoughts and hardships and a mind of your own, invisible.”

Turtle’s steak is bloody red in its interior. Amazing, how it parts before the knife. Blood and grease pool across the plate. The meat has a powerful, gamy taste. For Turtle, Cayenne’s pain had eclipsed everything else in its importance and mind-bending immediacy.

“What’s the matter?” Martin says.

“Nothing,” she says.