Does Not Love

by James Tadd Adcox

  “I feel like you’re threatening me.”

  “Would you like something to drink? We have whiskey and vodka and gin and spiced rum and baijiu. For mixers we have orange juice and cranberry juice and several kinds of soda.”

  “I don’t want a drink.”

  “I was only trying to be polite. You keep holding your head.”

  “My head hurts. Could you turn off that damn light?”

  “There are people in the world who believe in such things as conspiracies, Robert.” The man leans forward, arms crossed and resting his elbows on the table. “I don’t. I don’t imagine that you do, either. You are a practical man. But let us consider, for a moment, why someone less practical might believe in conspiracies. We tend to think of such people as paranoid, of living in fear of something that doesn’t exist. And this might well be true, as far as it goes. But have you considered how comforting a conspiracy is? Instead of fearing the entire world and its capriciousness, such a man has a focus — which, moreover, serves to explain all of the otherwise inexplicable things happening around him. Are you religious at all, Robert? Never mind. I only bring it up because… Imagine, please, a roomful of believers. They are silent, waiting for the Holy Spirit to come and fill one of them, to cause that person to rise and begin speaking. Now let’s say you’re in that room, and I rise, and I begin to speak. You might ask yourself, how do I know that this person has actually been filled with the Holy Spirit, and isn’t, instead, just some attention-seeker? You might say to yourself, I’ve been sitting here, quiet, not speaking, because I have been honestly and steadfastly waiting to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and here’s this guy, standing up and talking about the same shit he’d be talking about anyway, Holy Spirit or no. You might, in other words, question my motives, question the purity of my intent.

  “This would be the wrong question, Robert.” The man places a new stack of photographs on the table in front of Robert. “It is entirely possible that I have base motives. But my motives are my concern, not yours. You are sitting in relation to something much larger than yourself.”

  Robert hold a photo up to the light. “This is my wife.”

  “Of course it’s your wife.”

  “Why do you have pictures of my wife?”

  “I have other pictures of your wife,” the man says. “I have video of your wife. I have audio recordings of your wife, what her breath sounds like when she’s coming, not with you, with another man. Would you like to hear that? Would you like to hear what your wife sounds like, when she’s coming with another man?”

  “Why do you have pictures of my wife?”

  “Do you imagine that she sounds different, when she’s with another man? So much of who we are depends on who we are with.” The room fills suddenly with the sound of Viola breathing.

  “Why are you doing this?” Robert begs. The breathing that surrounds him grows louder.

  “We are doing this out of love,” the man says, and places a baggie of pills on the table.

  Robert stares at the pills, with a sort of horror. “I don’t believe you,” he says, finally.

  “There were moments when she loved me,” the man says. “Even if she did not love me all the time, there were moments when she did. I have photographic evidence of this. Video stills of her eyes, magnified to hundreds of times their original dimensions, in which one can see — scientifically, objectively — that she loved me, at least during that moment.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “What? What don’t you believe? That your wife’s had an affair? You believed it enough to question her. Here: photographs! Of her eyes! Of her legs! Of her inner and outer thighs! Of the freckles underneath her navel! Of the soft skin on the underside of her arm! Of her left eyebrow, arched! Every part of her, photographically segmented and recombined right here on the table in front of you.”

  “I don’t believe any of it. You’re an FBI agent? You spend your time having affairs with people involved in your cases? You kidnap their husbands to ask about love?”

  “Here’s my badge — there!” the man says, pulling it from his neck and throwing it at Robert. “You want more photographs of your wife? You want video? You want transcripts of the call she placed to a women’s health clinic? You want to hear the audio?”

  “It’s fake!” Robert yells, shaking the badge in the air. “All of it could be fake!”

  The FBI agent throws photographs at Robert by the handful. Robert throws himself across the table and punches the FBI agent in the face. The FBI agent falls to the ground.

  “Those photographs could be fake,” Robert says, shaking. “You said so yourself, just a minute ago.”

  The FBI agent’s nose appears to be broken. He pushes it one way and then the other on his face, trying to find the position it originally corresponded to. “Ow, fuck,” he says. “Could you grab me that roll of paper towels over there? Ow.”

  “There is something in me,” says the FBI agent, holding a wad of paper towel to his nose, “that rejoices even in this, suffering for your wife.”

  “She hasn’t left me,” Robert says, possibly to himself.

  “Like this one time? We went grocery shopping? And every item she took from the shelves had its own, tragic charm. I’ve kept everything, everything. Except the milk and the apples. Those went bad.”

  “What is it about me that has stopped her from leaving?”

  “She says that the two of you fell into marriage as if part of the set-up to a joke. The morning of your wedding day, she said, her dress somehow managed to rip from neck to ass. She had to borrow one of the bridesmaid’s dresses for the ceremony. When she met you at the alter, she said, ‘Well, Robert, which of us did you want?’”

  “I’ve felt, since she lost the last child, like my life was closing in around me,” Robert says. “I haven’t been able to breathe, sometimes. I mean really. I try to take in a breath, and it stops halfway. I’ve lain awake at night, worried that I have emphysema. I don’t know any of the warning signs for emphysema. I mean, does it just happen? Just like that? One day you have it, and from that point on, life is a steady narrowing of the amount of air you can breathe in?”

  The FBI agent sits on the floor, holding his head back to try to stop the bleeding. He takes out a pack of cigarettes and matches from his front pocket, manages one-handed to shimmy a cigarette out of his pack and into his mouth, and fumbles, trying to get a match lighted. “Do you mind?” he says. Robert kneels and lights the FBI agent’s cigarette. “Fuck,” the agent says. “I think I’m going to have to see a doctor about this.”

  ~ ~ ~

  That night, Robert lolls in his hospital bed, cuffed to the bed’s siderails. Suddenly, from all sides, comes a terrible rumbling. He has felt one earthquake in his life, and it wasn’t nearly as jarring as this. He fights against the cuffs, trying to sit up straight. It feels for a moment as though the floor might give way. A stranger stands in his hospital room, a man in a fake fur coat and black goggles. Wordlessly, he uncuffs Robert’s arms and motions for him to follow. Robert follows. Everything around him seems to be happening at a great distance. Scenes of horrifying violence, explosions, gunshots — the floor under Robert’s feet shakes, it feels at moments as if the building itself might collapse. A nurse screams. An orderly stumbles blindly, collapses at Robert’s feet. There are bodies everywhere. Yet it somehow never occurs to Robert to feel afraid, or even to wonder what is happening. Instead he simply follows — the fake fur coat makes its way through the violence, and Robert stays close behind.

  The keypad that unlocks the elevator doors has been pulled free of the wall, and hangs by its jumble of wires — Robert stands beside the man in the fake fur coat and they ride the elevator down, past the first floor, the explosions he felt earlier rocking the entire elevator car, but neither Robert nor the man beside him showing any signs of distress; into the basement, where dust and flecks of paint rain down from the ceiling in time with the concussions that shake the floors above.
Robert steps around bodies and follows the man into a tunnel, burrowed into the far wall, next to a row of vending machines.

  They go down, down, down, into the darkness. It is impossible to say how far they travel. Finally their tunnel connects up with a series of others. This, Robert understands, is the guinea-pig underground: the ancient Indianapolis sewers that have expanded over the years, that have come to match the city itself in its sprawl… in the darkness there is the sound of movement, shuffling feet, indistinct orders barked out by men Robert can only just now make out, his eyes adjusting to the darkness: “Operation was a success, sir,” in front of Robert is no longer the man he followed, but a guinea-pigger militiaman, dressed in camo with a black scarf obscuring the bottom half of his face. “We’ve taken the hospital. The Savvy Cavy requested that this one—” evidently Robert, “be spared.”

  The commanding officer sizes Robert up. “What’s your name, comrade? Robert, huh? You look fancy, Robert, you used to be somebody? We’re used to your kind… Fact of the matter is, plenty of our recruits have had some sort of substance abuse problem, even former lawyers. Were you a lawyer in your previous life, Robert? Were you on the other side? We’ve seen plenty of guys like you, has-beens who take up guinea-pigging to support a habit. Probably fucks the phase I tests up a teensy bit, having guys like you in the population… For the best, I say! Let them be fucked up! But once you’re on our side, we need you clean. A requirement of the guinea-pigger militia, three months clean, minimum, we offer our own counseling programs if you need them, based on the RR rather than the AA model, given how hard it is to maintain a belief in any sort of benevolent higher power when you’ve got so much experience with earthly powers feeding you shit that makes your hands swell up to twice their size, your fingernails and teeth come loose, etcetera, etcetera… But sobriety is an absolute requirement! We’re trying to fight a war, after all! And anyhow most of us come out of our latest phase I plenty out of our minds enough already, thanks!”

  “Do you work with Jeremy?” Robert manages.

  “Jeremy, that fuck,” the commander says, already walking away. “Doesn’t know his own ass from a prolapsed hole in the ground, pussyfooting between the courts and the mafia, trying to play one off against the other, and meanwhile Indianapolis growing darker for us each day… ”

  “Here, take this,” a hand placing a pill in his.

  “What is it?”

  “It’ll help with the fever.”

  Robert is laid out on a cot, shaking, muscles jerking, face contorted. A militiaman is assigned to his bedside. They’ve seen this before: discontinuation — he was on something other than just the tranquilizers they shot him up with at the hospital, and whatever it was, his body has grown dependent. Impossible to tell, without knowing the drug, whether the situation is life-threatening, but the symptoms look familiar to anyone who’s come off certain long-term psychotropics: sweating, nausea, tremor, confusion, nightmares, “brain zaps.” The only thing to be done, with the war going on aboveground, is to let him ride it out.

  Beside his bed, a woman that could be Viola, or could be the woman he saw at the storage facility, the almost-Viola. She comes closer, until he can’t quite make out her expression for the shadows across her face. She takes his hand, urges him wordlessly to his feet. They make their way out through the cell and further into the tunnels, past the ranks of training militiamen, who begin to grow larger and stranger the further into the tunnels they go, men clinging onto the walls and ceilings at impossible angles, men with the fur and general facial structures of rodents. Goggles turn into strange eyes, black and unreflective, set deep into the skull. Heads turn to peer at them as they pass, necks rotating a full 180 degrees, the intentions of the dull black eyes impossible to discern. Finally they are alone again in the blackness, and she is leading him to a light, set so far off in the distance that Robert is sure they will never reach it. “That flame has been burning here since these caverns were first explored, by the great-great ancestors of the guinea-piggers. It rises from the depths of the earth itself.” Robert has no idea how long that is, but from the way she says it, he imagines that it’s long indeed. He thinks of who or what was here before the guinea-piggers. He hears an unearthly sound from deeper in the tunnel, somewhere far beyond the fire. It is the sound of voices keening, the combined pitches alternating almost painfully between harmony and disharmony. And then somehow they are upon it, the fire, a snake tongue flicking through the mouth of the earth.

  “This is a picture of our child,” Viola or pseudo-Viola says. “And these are pictures of what might have been. Throw them in the fire.”

  The flame rises up to meet them. Viola grows more shadowy with each picture they throw in.

  “And these are pictures of us,” she says. “Do not look at them. Throw them in the fire.”

  “Oh God,” Robert says. He is shaking now. “Everything?”

  “We have hurt each other too badly, Robert. We have been judged by the secret courts. We have to go into the fire as well.”

  Robert throws one picture after another into the fire. It is hard. He is not throwing away what might have been but what was. Viola helps him. She holds him when he cries, with her hand she brushes the sides of his face, his hair. She insists, though, on feeding them into the fire. When Robert has trouble placing the next photograph into the flame, she guides his hand, gentle, unyielding.

  By the end he has done it, he has fed every moment of their past into the fire. He falls back onto the cavern’s uneven floor, her next to him. He is not even sure now of their names.

  III

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert watches the riots on television from his parents’ house in Geist, Indiana. Pictures of downtown Indianapolis look like a different place: windows smashed in, cars overturned, flames licking out from the faces of storefronts and businesses. Most of the city has been shut down, for three days. Now, though, on the news, they are announcing that the last of the rioters are being hunted down and arrested. Fire crews and police work around the clock to retain stability. Somehow, in the suburbs, things are quiet. Robert’s mind is a complete and absolute blank. He imagines, that were he to peel his skin back, he would find nothing underneath.

  ~ ~ ~

  He visits his grandmother in the nursing home, and she starts screaming as soon as she sees him. A pit, a pit, he thinks.

  ~ ~ ~

  Viola calls Robert to tell him that she is safe, that she is staying with some friends in the suburbs. “I’m glad to hear that,” Robert says.

  “Robert, where are you?” she asks.

  “I’m safe,” Robert says.

  “I would think you would want to be together at a time like this,” Robert’s mother says.

  “We’re… separated,” Robert says, searching for the word.

  Viola calls Robert and when he won’t say anything, she listens to his breath over the line. Robert goes to sleep each night in his childhood bed, feeling four times too large for his room.

  ~ ~ ~

  Then one night, sometime after the last of the riots, there’s a tapping at his window. It’s Viola, standing on one of the lawn chairs from the backyard. She makes a motion for him to pull the window up. Robert stares at her. She slumps, her forehead against the glass, looking more tired than Robert can ever remember her looking. He pulls up the window.

  “You have lines around your eyes,” Robert says. “I don’t really remember seeing them before.”

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “No, I like them,” he says.

  “Are you going to come home?”

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  “Oh God, Robert,” Viola says. “If I had had any idea where you were — It must have been horrible—”

  “I don’t care what you were doing. I could live with that. But just — why didn’t you answer?”

  Viola thinks. She wants to answer this correctly. Not as in give the right answer, the one that Robert wants to hear, but
to answer him as honestly as she is able. She says, “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. It was — I didn’t answer your first call, and I should have. Only it didn’t seem like such a big deal, not to answer. And then it didn’t seem to matter if I put it off, calling you back, at least for a little while. When I got the next call from you, I thought, I shouldn’t answer this, I should call him back first. That is, I thought it would be better if I called you. But I was embarrassed about calling you, because you had just called me twice. Only slightly, but enough to cause me to put off calling you again. Then… I don’t know. It added up. It became harder and harder to call. Putting it off made so little difference — that is, each decision to put it off seemed to make comparatively little difference in the overall situation. And the idea of finally calling you began to feel momentous. I couldn’t even listen to your messages. I was afraid of what you would say.

  “I finally listened to them a couple of nights ago. All of them, in a single sitting. Oh God, Robert. I’m so sorry. Robert, I’m so sorry.” She attempts to hug Robert. Robert thinks, do I let her? Do I hug her back?

  “Okay,” he says, but does not hug her back. Viola pulls away from him.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m a terrible person,” she says.

  “I don’t think you are a terrible person,” Robert says.

  Robert looks past her, at the window. After a moment he realizes, with no particular affect, that he is looking at his own reflection.

  On Friday, Viola calls to tell Robert that her aunt has died.

  ~ ~ ~

  Robert and Viola drive through the husk of downtown Indianapolis. It looks, if anything, worse than it did on the news. They feel as though they are driving through an alien landscape. What could possibly live here, they think.