Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

He shakes his head slowly, grinning.

“It’s a deer,” she tells him.

“Isn’t this great?” He walks up to the wall of glass, puts his hand against it, leans against it, the field beyond crooked mismatched shadows and the glare off the grass stalks. “We stand,” he says, “at the limit of an uncertainty and we inquire not only into the particularities of this moment, but to all such moments; what lurks beyond the visible. What is in the grass, kibble? What is out there?”

“Nothing, Daddy,” she says.

“‘Nothing, Daddy,’” he repeats in annoyance, and then laughs at her, still braced against the glass door and looking past his own reflection into the field, and from where she stands, he seems to be confronting this washed-out image of himself, canted forward and exhausted against the glass. “This is the problem with you, you little cunt: You think you know what’s out there. But you don’t know. There is a terrible poverty in you, a poverty of mind, of imagination, of heart . The truth is that, because we do not know—for us, there both is, and there is not, anything in the field. It is Schrödinger’s intruder. The world is rich with potential, kibble, and both states exist for us at this moment; there is nothing in the field; and at the same time, there is out there something unknown. Most likely, some bastard who is about to die. Perhaps that boy of yours, and perhaps he’s out there right now, there in the grass, shitting himself with fear. He figured he’d come by and say hi, give you succor in your time of need. Well. We just don’t fucking know until we find out. For the moment, nothing is true, it is all up for grabs, and what you believe says nothing about the world and everything about you. Here you chart your course through life.”

Turtle walks to the window. Father and daughter, side by side, present against their twinned and partial reflections. Beyond, the spotlights light up the grass, a wickerwork of shadows and golden stalks shuffling together. There does seem to be a fertile potential just beyond the window. She can feel the pregnancy test against her thigh, still in its packaging.

The lights shut off. He ruffles her hair. Without a word, he walks away. She can see nothing except her breath fogging the glass in front of her. She opens the door and walks out onto the cold, wet porch and crosses to the balustrade and breathes in the scent of the field, listens to the grass moving, the soft and distant sighs of the ocean. The night feels bereft to her. She hopes almost, with a kind of bitterness, for something to come. She begs for it, wills it.

Fuck it, she thinks. Fuck it. There’s nothing out there. She walks down the porch steps and the lights come back on with a click. She walks across the gravel drive and out to the edge of the field. She thinks that Martin must be watching from the window and she thinks of how she must appear, lit up by floodlights, a girl holding a shotgun by the receiver, waist-deep in grass, wearing a white T-shirt and a mesh-back cap, looking over an unbroken hillside, turning in patient surveillance.

She wades out, the sharp smells of the crushed vegetation coming up to her, the wild mustard and radishes. She goes down to the highway and she stands at the margin of the blacktop. Beside her, Slaughterhouse Creek runs in a steep-sided gully so thicketed with fuchsias that the creek is invisible, the sides orange sandstone. She climbs down, steps into the knee-deep water. She has to sweep the fuchsias aside with her hands, following the stream, her feet numbing with cold. She comes to a culvert that goes beneath the road, big enough to walk through, the water echoing through the tunnel.

On the other side of that tunnel, the ocean folds into the shingle. The tide is out; there is a black expanse of cobbles, and each cobble holds an eye of moonlight, and each looks soft and wet like flesh, stretched out before her in a multitude. The beach draws breath like a living thing, and she can smell the muddy stink of the estuary. These waters begin at the wellspring of Slaughterhouse Creek, in the great stone drum, and they end here.

At the tunnel’s mouth, she strips out of her clothes. Then, naked, holding the shotgun, she climbs into the algae-slick culvert, touching one corrugated steel side, the bottom sandy. The tunnel smells of iron and hard water, the creek throws strange and crisscrossing ribbons of moonlight across the ceiling. She parts the curtains of blooming orange nasturtiums, and jumps down into the catch pool. The mud at the bottom is cold clay and it molds to her feet. The water is chest-deep, breathing around her, the eelgrass pluming in and out around her legs. Turtle yokes the shotgun over her shoulders. Her feet make warm places in the mud. She pushes aside floating driftwood and climbs out onto a shelf of gritty stone constellated with the dark bowling balls. The white apron of surf advances and retreats in the dark. When the waves lie out, they push the foam to her feet. She is covered in the estuary mud. Bits of eelgrass stick to her legs. The ocean is as rich, as pungent, as an open mouth around her.

She thinks, Turtle Alveston, he raped you and you went back for more. You are either pregnant or you will be soon. If you leave, he will go into the living room and kill Cayenne. Then he will drive to 266 Sea Urchin Drive and he will kill Jacob. You have to recognize where you are. You’ve got to really goddamn look at it without lying to yourself.

She ejects a shell from the chamber into her hand and weighs it, rolls it forward and back. It is a trim green cylinder of corrugated plastic with a low brass rim, heavy for its size. She drops the shell back into the breach and slides the pump all the way forward, feeling the bolt lock closed, the shotshell firmly seated in the chamber. She sits cross-legged on the cold wet stone and she places the barrel in her mouth, tastes the powder residue, threads her thumb through the trigger guard and angles the gun barrel up into her palate. She imagines pressing the trigger down. The gun will fire. A hot load of double-aught buckshot and granulated plastic buffer will travel up the barrel, contained in its plastic shot cup. The shot cup will hit her palate and split apart into a fan of plastic fingers, the buckshot pellets disgorged. She imagines herself sitting rigid and erect as her mind unfurls from the cloven, yawning bud of her skull, blooming vast, red, wet, expanding for one deep momentary breath.

Turtle thinks, pull the trigger. She can imagine no other way forward. She thinks, pull the trigger. But if you do not pull the trigger, walk back up that creek and in through the door and take possession of your mind, because your inaction is killing you. She sits looking out at the beach, and she thinks, I want to survive this. She is surprised by the depth and clarity of her desire. Her throat tightens and she takes the gun out of her mouth and strings of saliva come with it and she brushes them away. She rises and stands looking out at the waves, overcome with the beauty. Her whole mind feels raw and receptive. She experiences a searing, wide-open thankfulness, an unmediated wonder at the world.

She wades back through the eelgrass and boosts herself up and into the culvert, the shotgun tilted back against a shoulder. She goes through the pockets of her folded jeans, tears open the pink packaging one-handedly and draws out the pregnancy test. Leaning back against the culvert wall, and triggering the shotgun’s weapon light up at the top of the culvert, she reads the directions, reads them again. Her face is numb. Her lips are numb. She puts her closed fist to her forehead, shaking all over, and she thinks, if it is, if it’s in there, then you can handle that, too. She flicks the light off and squats naked in the culvert with the crisscrossing silver light thrown back at her from the creek and pisses on the flimsy plastic stick, barefoot and ankle-deep in the cold water. Then she sits in the dark with her back braced against the corrugated wall, touching the shotgun barrel self-comfortingly to her face, to her forehead, letting the time run, waiting for the two pink lines of the positive response to fade slowly into being, putting one fist in her mouth. She feels a dead weight of certainty.