Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

She thought she’d gotten past all this; she thought she’d grown out of it, away from it. She’d gone to college, to vet school, gotten married, opened her own clinic. She’d become an adult, given up her fantasies. She felt a true participant of the world. She enjoyed her interactions with other people. But there’d been that night in the alley— Lady. Lady. — and her sense of security had fluttered, a receipt resting unguarded on a windowsill. She’d done as she was told: she went to a therapist, took a Valium here and there, meditated most mornings, and then, just as she’d sensed herself recuperating, returning to the woman she’d miraculously grown into, those detectives had shown up with photos of the coed, and any sense of renewed security had finally flitted off, the receipt picked up gingerly on a breeze and carried effortlessly away, at first within reach, but then out, then gone. The lurid fantasies had returned overnight — the fantasies and the night sweats.

Saying this to Mark — saying it to anyone, really, including her therapist — was madness, sheer madness. She couldn’t stomach the thought of being regarded as some nineteenth-century parlor maid who claimed ghosts in the pantry. The thought of being dismissed, of being dismissible at all, made Maggie quiver with anger.

Of course, she might have tried to laugh away her morbid adolescent fantasies— Ha! Ha! Ha! — to laugh away her habit as a childhood peculiarity, but Mark would have seen through the effort— heard through the effort — and so she knew not to try.

Oh, snap out of it!

She reached up and switched on the overhead. Mark’s expression was soft, tender. Not an ounce of the displeasure she’d been so quick to assume.

“I was being hysterical.” She was matter-of-fact. “I don’t know what else to say.”

She gestured toward the overhead lights and shrugged. “No one can see us because no one is around,” she said. “I’m not crazy. I’m just wound up.”

Mark put a hand to her cheek. Good husband. Best husband. He stroked her skin with his thumb. “You scare me sometimes,” he said.

The sky was a garbage truck of sound, the hotel still another twenty miles from the exit — once they finally took it, if they finally took it — and sunrise still so many hours away. Yet Mark was scared of Maggie? It was enough to make her laugh. Though of course she knew better. Of course I know better.

“Is this our exit?” he said at last. “Is that what you think?”

Maggie nodded. He took his hand away from her cheek. She trembled in her seat.

“Then it doesn’t matter that there’s no reentry.” He flipped off the overhead. “All it means is that tomorrow we have to take different back roads out of here. Instead of spitting us out where we are now — Wait. Here. I’ll show you.” Mark turned on Maggie’s phone. A tiny spray of light hit his chin so that his nose cast a funny shadow across his lips, almost as if he had no mouth at all.

“See this baby road up here?” Mark said.

Maggie wasn’t looking at the screen. It didn’t matter anymore.

“Right here,” he said. “This is where we’ll reenter the freeway, and it looks like we’ll make some progress when we do it. It looks like we’ll ultimately come out ahead.”

The road was narrow. Mark was still driving. Once they had taken the exit and the turn off the exit and then the turn off the turn off the exit, they’d started a slow ascent into the mountains. The road they were on now was more slender than the last. There was so much tree cover that the rain seemed almost to have lightened. Or maybe it actually had lightened. Maybe the second storm was finally passing. Or was it the third? The branches — thick with wet lush leaves — were low, lower than they should have been because of the water weighing them down.

There were limbs in the road. Limbs, leaves, debris, beer cans. Mark knew Maggie would be concentrating on the beer cans. There were no houses, no signs of life, but there were beer cans. He knew what she was capable of doing with that sort of evidence — hunters up to no good, terrorists hiding in the hills, kidnappers building their next torture bunker. Maybe she’d always been this way. Maybe he’d overlooked it, which would make it his fault in a sense. Perhaps she hadn’t changed at all. Perhaps he’d finally started paying attention. It made him sad for them both.

When he was a boy, Mark would sometimes find himself filled up with indignation, with what he’d call now an animal sort of fury. It came from nothing, out of nowhere. He’d be walking in the woods, kicking sticks or jumping on twigs, and he’d suddenly feel a hot rush come over his entire body, like a blanket soaked in boiling water then wrapped abruptly and tightly around him. He’d throw himself to the ground when he felt it, fists and feet pummeling the dirt, tearing apart the leaves, terrifying the branches. Anything he could touch he destroyed.

Later, a teenager, when he finally discovered Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau — those men who understood isolation and what it was not just to be alive, but to be human, to be a man and in nature — he diagnosed those early fits of fury as the Grown Man Inside, the Man Already a Man, trapped in the small boy’s body. When, as a teenager, the temper returned — as it often did, though he’d many years earlier learned to stop throwing himself to the ground — he began to visualize this man who was inside, the man responsible for the wrath. He found that the image calmed him. He further discovered that he could control the image — not necessarily the man — but if he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough, he could take the picture of this man (this future iteration of himself, fully realized) and make him move. He could, for instance, will the man to jump up and down, punch the air, punch the earth, fling himself to the ground in Mark’s stead.

He considered the man his grown-up twin, dressed always in whatever flannel or sweatshirt Mark happened to be wearing on a particular day. Back then, he’d taken the man very seriously. On the one hand, he fully understood him to be a figment of his own imagination. On the other, he believed the man to be a very real indication of what he — Mark — was destined one day to become. He believed that he had walked through one of those hidden doorways in the brain that only the very special ever entered. Not only had he found the door, but he’d opened it and gone inside and met himself. It was a part of the brain that only geniuses and outliers accessed. This was something Mark believed absolutely as a teenager.

Now, as an adult, he wasn’t sure what he believed. He knew to laugh at the idea of an imaginary adult version of himself dressed identically to his teenage self (the flannel shirt, the baggy khakis). At the same time, the man — now more a shadowy outline — still came in useful with his adult fits of anger. From time to time, when necessary, he was still able to close his eyes, conjure the figure, and have it lasso all the ire swirling about in the blackness of his mind. Just now, for instance, weepy willowy Maggie at his side, Mark was imagining the shadowy outline: arms above his head, legs planted squarely in the terra firma of Mark’s brain matter, mouth wide open and screaming for his life.

It struck him that Maggie was saying his name, perhaps had been saying his name for quite some time.

“Are you paying attention?” she asked. “Mark? Are you paying attention?”

Without realizing, Mark had brought the car to a halt at the world’s smallest, darkest intersection. The road they were on had come to an abrupt end. In front of them was dense dark forest and in front of that a tiny green sign — illuminated now by their headlights — with one arrow to the right and one arrow to left. There were no route numbers, no road names. Just two arrows — right or left — in case you couldn’t see that straight ahead was nothing but trees and brush and early summer overgrowth.