Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

She pulled off her shorts, took off her T-shirt, and unhooked her bra. Then she lay down on the bed and waited. The breeze prickled her skin.

It took Mark maybe five minutes to notice she was topless. After that, it took very little time or energy before they were having sex.

In the bathroom, after, Maggie ran her hands tentatively along the sink’s counter, looking for the unopened pack of glow sticks. She didn’t find them but knocked over what felt like a short stack of washcloths. They made a soft thump against the tile floor. Perhaps they’d already opened the last pack. She couldn’t now recall.

One hand after the other, she fumbled her way to the toilet. The pattern of the tile felt foreign against the tips of her fingers. The toilet was a full foot left of where she remembered it being when Pete had quickly shone the flashlight around the bathroom’s corners. She thought of Audrey Hepburn alone and blind, groping, unaware of the burglar so close at hand. She thought of Jodie Foster in that basement, the murderer mere inches from her outstretched hand. She thought again of the coed. Eventually she made contact with the toilet’s tank.

She lifted the lid and then sat. The porcelain was cold. She wiped away the sex and peed.

She was aware of the knock of her heartbeat; aware of the splash of her urine hitting the water in the bowl beneath her. She wondered if anyone else in the hotel could hear. She was sure Mark could. She’d left the door open when she walked in, not wanting to be alone. But now she felt vulnerable.

She wiped again, felt until she found the handle, then flushed. The water gurgled beneath her. She stood, pulled up her underwear, but then sat immediately back down. She was overtaken by loneliness.

She knew better than to associate it with Mark specifically or even with her current and unpredictable state of mind more generally. There is a sadness after sex, always: the philosophers say so; the poets say so. And this, right now, was Maggie’s own bleak little minute of irrational sadness, which was how Augustine had put it some sixteen hundred years ago. Some things never changed.

Maybe— god —maybe it wasn’t loneliness or sadness at all. Maybe it was simply the quiet. She missed the buzz, the low steady prrr of electricity. This momentary excursion into the forlorn could be that simple. It could.

She put her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands.

The long and short of it, the plain and simple fact: Mark was afraid of technology and Maggie was afraid of people.

Her question: Could they move forward — together or alone —in a world filled with technology and people?

Were they already doomed? Or was tragedy behind them now for good? Maggie felt unsure of everything at that moment. Nice tits or nice day? She didn’t know earlier and she didn’t know now.

She leaned back against the toilet’s tank. It felt cool and clean against her skin. She closed her eyes, opened them, closed them again. There was no difference. Black, black, black. It was a metaphor for something — for life maybe: it was the same whether you looked or didn’t, the same whether you acknowledged the evil lurking in the corner or ignored it. If the plane’s going down, the plane’s going down. It doesn’t matter how aggressively you grit your teeth, how hard you grip the armrests. The end is the end is the end, plain and simple. Maybe Mark was right about everything. Maybe he always had been.

She moved her hands from her thighs to her breasts, and now she held them — her right breast in her left hand and her left in her right. Their weight felt pleasant, if a little sweaty. Four-plus decades and they were still pretty good. The nipples, never having breastfed, were still capable of expanding and contracting. Just now they were hard, responding to her own touch. But later, asleep for a few hours next to her husband, they would expand, flatten, turn round and light in color.

She stood up, a flutter of lightness in her chest.

Something else Augustine had said? That a woman’s caress served only to bring down a man’s mind. It wasn’t verbatim, of course. But the point was, screw Augustine! Screw bleakness, irrational or otherwise!

Maggie didn’t need to be sad if she didn’t want to be. This weight she’d been carrying around hadn’t paid any real homage to the coed; it had only served to suck the life out of her marriage. That man out there— my man! — was her husband, and Maggie’s love, physical or otherwise, didn’t lower him; it elevated him. Just as his did her.

The point?

The point?

The point?

To hell with the poets. To hell with the coed. This was her life, not theirs.

Mark slept. It was a shallow sleep. He was aware of his breathing. He was aware of outside sounds. At some point he had a dream in which Maggie, at too great a distance from him to be saved, was drowning. She was wailing. Mlip, mlip, mlip. She sobbed as the water went in and out of her mouth, as her arms flailed and snot collected in her nose. Mlip, mlip, mlip.

When the sound finally woke him, and eventually it had to, Mark discovered that it wasn’t from within but from without. It was Gerome, whining again. He was standing at their bed, at Mark’s side of their bed, his chin smashed against the mattress, and he was whining.

“Get in your bed,” Mark whispered. “Get in your bed.” It was a command Gerome knew by heart.

But the dog didn’t get in his bed. Instead, he continued to whine. He pawed at the mattress. This wasn’t like him.

“Fuck,” he said.

Gerome pawed more frantically now at the sheets. There was no way to avoid getting out of bed, putting on his pants and shoes, groping his way out of the building, and waiting while the dog did his business.

Mark threw off the top sheet.

It would be sunup soon. For now, though, the room was still dark, and Mark searched his way over to the armchair where he’d tossed his clothes only an hour or two earlier. He pulled on his shirt, which was stiff from the dried rain, then stepped into his pants. The legs were still wet.

Gerome came to him, leaned into his shins. He was whimpering now, a way of apologizing for the inconvenience. Gerome hated this as much as Mark did. He was embarrassed — embarrassed by his animal nature; embarrassed he couldn’t express himself clearly through words; embarrassed that what was happening in his body was beyond his control. Poor dog. It wasn’t right that he would be ashamed of himself. He was just being himself, a dog being a dog.

In an undergraduate honors seminar, Mark had a student, just this last semester, who’d insisted, in front of the entire class, that to equivocate was the same as to equate. Mark had had to stop the discussion in order to correct the mistake. It wasn’t that he wanted to humiliate the undergrad; rather, he wanted to avoid other students’ adoption of the misunderstanding. What had surprised Mark, more than anything else, was the kid’s unwillingness to surrender his belief. Even after Mark had explained — at length, using the whiteboard — the immense difference between the two words, the student had insisted on his own accuracy. There was, Mark had begun to understand that day, a fundamental difference between this upcoming generation and all the ones that had come before. It was the absence of humility, the inability to admit defeat, the unwillingness to be wrong. Be wrong, he had thought standing in front of his class. Just be wrong. What he thought now was that Gerome, though he couldn’t know it, was blessed with something essential, something that no amount of training or housebreaking could ever fully eliminate: animal instinct. Whereas, it seemed, on the contrary, that man was capable — more and more — of losing humanity. Every year, the students in Mark’s classroom were less and less human. Every year, there was something essential missing.