Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

Mark shook his head. For starters, he didn’t like when she profaned. It wasn’t natural. Sure, he had a bit of a sailor’s mouth himself, that was true — and his students adored him for it — but on her, it sounded dirty. It sounded adolescent and unearned. But that wasn’t even the point. The point was she was wrong about murderers being muggers and muggers being rapists. He knew she was wrong, but it wasn’t worth it. It wasn’t worth starting an argument that might last until morning. There was no way they were going to make it to the Blue Ridge tonight. They needed a hotel — sooner than later, actually, since his eyes were getting heavy — and the thought of being in a little shithole with his wife while they were both still stewing over some half-baked argument… Well, the thought made him want to weep.

“I’m good,” he said. “Thanks. No more articles for me, okay?”

He patted her thigh like he might pat Gerome’s head. “Can you find me a new channel? Anything other than country.”

“Do you just want silence?”

“No,” he said. “I want to hear something.” He didn’t like the idea of sitting there listening to her read to herself.

Maggie put her phone down and attended to the radio. She flipped through a few stations.

“Wait,” he said. “Go back.”

She went back.

“Stop,” he said. “There.”

“This?”

A man was talking. He had the telltale conviction of an evangelist.

“Yes,” he said. “Perfect.”

Maggie was looking at him. He could feel her face like a full moon in his periphery.

“You’re actually interested in listening to this man?” she said. On the radio, the voice was explaining away dinosaurs and fossilization with Noah’s flood.

“You don’t think it’s fascinating?”

Mark really did get a kick out of these people. To him, it was mesmerizing the way they rewrote history, working themselves into little frenzies over the most trivial things as they went along. Just then, for instance, the voice was telling the story of early settlers, who had apparently interviewed Indians — their words — who had apparently spoken of dinosaurs as a recent memory! The idea of Christians using the word of Indians as their proof — it was delightful. Utterly delightful! If only Maggie could find the humor in it, as she once, not too long ago, certainly would have.

“Fine,” Maggie said. “You win.”

She leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes.

“Win nothing,” he said. “It’s not a competition.”

But lately — and this was the unhappy, undesired state of their current condition — it was a competition.

What was the joke his father was always telling about what happens when you play a country song backward? You get your dog back, your wife back, your life back…? Well, that’s exactly what Mark wanted back now: his Maggie, his marriage. Goddamn it! His life — as he’d once so transcendently been living it — he wanted it back!

The first thing Maggie was aware of was her open mouth. She licked her lips, then ran her tongue along her gum lines until they were moist again.

The second thing she was aware of was a soreness at the base of her neck. She sat up, rolled her shoulders forward and back, back and forward. She opened and closed her mouth, re-licked her lips.

It was quiet in the car and dark, and it took her a minute to realize she wasn’t in the driveway of Mark’s parents’ farm. In the early days, such things were possible. In the twelfth hour of the drive, Maggie could switch to the passenger seat, rest her head against the window for what she believed was merely a moment, then fall into a sleep so heavy, so deep that Mark would be unable to rouse her when they pulled into his parents’ gravel drive. He’d been forced more than once to leave her there, in the passenger seat, until she woke on her own, usually close to morning, the neighbors’ roosters her alarm. But this was before. This was long ago. This was back when sleep came fast and easy no matter where she was. They could pop in a video in the early days of their marriage, and she’d be out cold in ten minutes. Mark hadn’t been miffed by it. He’d been, in fact, overjoyed. He used to say how good it made him feel — that his wife found such comfort in their life together that she could sleep through anything. She’d always liked this assessment of her patterns. She’d been as captivated by the idea as he. But in this last year, sleep had turned obstinate; the silence of the bedroom and the dark of midnight had become something to dread. In reexamining her relationship with the dark, she’d stumbled accidently onto a question she hadn’t intended ever to consider: Did not the difficulty of sleep necessarily suggest a departure of the intense confidence she’d once had in her home life?

She cleared her throat.

This wasn’t the time to pursue such dreary considerations because she was not now in Mark’s parents’ gravel driveway, where she should have been. Instead, she was — she realized as her eyes adjusted — in a parking lot, in the passenger seat of their car, alone. Almost alone. Gerome was in the back, sleeping. She could hear him breathing.

The parking lot was unlit. She looked up and out the sunroof. Above the car — she could just barely make it out — was a streetlamp, but the streetlamp was dead.

She checked the door. Hers was unlocked. She sat up a little straighter and then checked the driver’s side and the backseat. Also unlocked. She didn’t want to panic, but she did want to scream. Anger, fear, fatigue: Who could say for sure what she was feeling. All of them? None of them? She was simultaneously filled up with and emptied out of emotions. She thought about hitting the glove compartment, but that would be a punishment only to her hand. And the thing she wanted to punish — the person who had abandoned her in an unlocked car in the middle of nowhere — was currently and conveniently MIA.

She did the next best thing to hitting and screaming. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, and visualized her own skull exploding. She imagined little pieces of cranium sticking to the upholstery of the roof, sliding down the inside of the windshield. Protoplasmic fibers splattered against the rearview mirror. Chunks of cerebellum landed on the dashboard. Her medulla dangled limply from the passenger headrest. She stayed like this until she heard a tiny buzzing at the base of her brain, and then she released herself. Except, she wasn’t released. Because now her heartbeat was racing, which necessarily engaged her anxiety, and she found herself suddenly clawing at the lock button in a sloppy and erratic sort of way that reminded her out of nowhere of climbing up a pool ladder when, as a child, she’d once managed to convince herself — though she knew it to be a pure impossibility — that piranhas had materialized in the deep end.

She pushed the button. The sound of the doors sealing themselves against the night filled the car with a hollow thwunk. Gerome stirred, but nothing more.

In the glove compartment there was a tin candy box the size of a matchbook. In this tin candy box there was a mixture of square-shaped breath mints and circular yellow pills. She took a deep breath and exhaled the air slowly. She did not reach for the box. Her former therapist had trained her well enough so that she didn’t need to take one every time her nerves clicked on. Sometimes — like now — it was enough just to know they were there. Lemon-colored ellipsoids interspersed neatly with small white squares. It was enough just to imagine them and all the good they could do to her central nervous system if she so chose.