Hannah Pittard - Listen to Me

She leaned back into the seat.

“Wait,” said Mark.

“What?”

“The phone.”

It was on the floorboard.

“I completely forgot,” she said. “I must have dropped it.”

A small tinny voice was calling their names through the speaker. Maggie picked it up.

“Hi,” she said. “Hi. We’re here. Gwen?”

“I thought you’d had an accident,” she said.

“No, no. We’re here.”

“You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

(In fact, the amygdala, not the heart, is the seat of emotion. It is an almond-shaped region in the brain that speaks, on occasion, to that hollow muscular organ.)

Maggie said, “I don’t know if you heard me—”

“Robert says to turn on the weather station. He says there are storms in Ohio and West Virginia. They’re having outages. Statewide. He wants you to be safe. This is big. They’re saying tornadoes. Tor-na -does. ”

Ninety-three million miles overhead, the sun was gloriously and uproariously on full display. The sky out the sunroof was bright blue. There wasn’t a single cloud. Maggie gazed ahead. What was the distance of the horizon supposed to be? Two miles? Three? That couldn’t be right. Indiana was so flat, so ruthlessly flat. Surely she was seeing something closer to ten miles, maybe even twenty miles into the distance, and as far as she could see, the skies were clear.

“We’ll probably get a hotel,” said Maggie. “It’s what Mark wants.”

“Men and their hotel rooms,” said Gwen. “Just let us know. Love to Mark.”

The line went dead.

She handed Mark his phone. “Madness,” she said. “Sheer madness.”

“Did she hang up on you?”

“As always.”

He reached over and touched her cheek. “It’s technology,” he said. “It’s made assholes out of all of us.”

They were passing the final few rows of turbines. Maggie looked out the window again. No matter how often they made this drive, no matter how many times she scanned the tops of the towers, she’d never — not once — seen a person up there. She could make out the little doorways; identify the safety fences wrapped like toothpicks around the gearboxes. But she’d never seen a person, and it never failed to disappoint her.

To her right was the exit for Purdue University, where Mark had interviewed just after finishing his dissertation. He’d been offered the job and the school had flown them both out from DC for a weekend visit, an unsuccessful attempt to woo Mark away from the Chicago offer he already planned to accept. Maggie remembered little of Lafayette itself. Of the hotel, on the other hand… They’d stopped after the faculty dinner to buy beer at a nearby gas station, and Maggie, when Mark wasn’t looking, sneaked a travel-pack of condoms into her purse. When Mark went to pay for the six-pack, the man behind the counter asked if he was also planning to pay for the condoms his girlfriend had stolen. Poor Mark had been caught completely off guard. Maggie, near the exit, shook her head and blushed.

The cashier held out his hand. “Either way, ma’am,” he said. “Leave ’em or pay for ’em. But you can’t just have ’em.”

Maggie approached the cash register — she couldn’t look at Mark — then removed the travel-pack and slid it across the counter.

“Looks like you were fixing to get lucky,” the cashier said to Mark.

Maggie wanted to vomit she was so embarrassed.

Mark picked up the condoms, studied them, then put them squarely on top of the beer. “Looks like maybe I still am.”

The cashier shrugged. “At least she knows to wrap it every time.” He winked at Mark. “Good for you and for her.”

Mark picked up the beer and shoved the condoms into his pocket. “She’s my wife,” he said.

“Sure she is.” The man nodded, looked at Maggie, then grinned. “My wife’s always buying condoms. Always.”

Back at the hotel, they’d howled with laughter.

“He thought you were a prostitute,” Mark said.

“Impossible,” she said. “Look at me.”

They’d rolled around on the bed a little. But out of nowhere, Mark had paused, his hand behind Maggie’s ear, and said, so seriously she could’ve died, “Do you steal things often? Is this something we need to talk about?”

She’d nuzzled her mouth against his neck. She was mortified and yet, at the same time, found she was also overcome with lust, with love, with an exact and perfect balance of the two. “Never,” she said. “Never.” They’d fallen asleep on the covers that night, both condoms in the travel-pack successfully and happily put to use.

Maggie turned in her seat and watched the last of the turbines disappear from view.

“All gone,” said Mark. “Only five hundred seventy-seven miles to go.”

Somehow it was already three o’clock.

After the Indianapolis beltway, they stopped at the first gas station with green space. Mark had done as instructed and tuned in to the AM weather station. His father was right: there were alerts and advisories and warnings for everything east of Cincinnati. Blackouts had started. Towns off 64 were already being declared disaster zones. The storms had originated in the east and now were headed west. They were headed directly toward Mark and Maggie — that’s how she’d put it anyway, Mark wouldn’t be so histrionic — which meant US-35 would probably be black, too, by the time they crossed into Ohio.

Maggie proposed checking her computer, just to see the full extent of what they were getting themselves into. But Mark balked. They’d had a good stretch, the two of them. Where they were, the sun was still shining. Gerome had been quiet, Maggie had been sweet, and Mark had lucked into a miraculously uninterrupted set of the Stones and Petty. But then, pulling into the station, gassing up, Maggie had to go and suggest getting out the computer and researching the storm, as if what her phone could access wasn’t already enough. “There are probably pictures,” she’d said. “We could see what the devastation looks like.” It was her use of that word— devastation —that had immediately soured his mood. She sounded like one of those news anchors, delirious with the possibility of tragedy.

The thing was, the suggestion itself to get out the computer wasn’t half bad. They could have used it to look for hotels. If the situation was as dire as the broadcasts were saying, then it might have been nice to have a sure thing waiting for them when the storm came. But the quiver in Maggie’s voice had riled him with its intimation that their lives— their lives: Maggie’s and his — were somehow suddenly at risk. She’d gone and gotten desperate, illogical—“This could be bad. This could be Katrina bad. Sandy bad”—which had killed his driving buzz completely.

Nope. He wasn’t about to give in to the computer. He’d so far resisted bringing it into his classroom (to the ire of his colleagues), and he would resist, for as long as possible, bringing it into every aspect of their lives.

A few years back, Mark’s father turned him on to some intriguing articles about server farms and data barns, articles suggesting that the move from paper to e-readers wasn’t nearly as green or eco-friendly as his and most other universities were insisting. Plus, the Internet’s energy consumption was something like ten billion watts of electricity in the United States alone, with another twenty billion in the rest of the world, which was equivalent to the output of something like thirty nuclear power plants, which — come on! — was a wholly mind-boggling statistic. Once a month or so, whenever Robert forwarded a new series of articles, Mark printed one or two of them out, made a couple dozen copies off campus (no way was he going to use his copy card and risk a lecture from the chair), and then posted them in the department hallways.