This Is Not Chick Lit

by Elizabeth Merrick

  “Go away!” The knocking continues. Ted lies on his back smelling the pine from the floorboards. It is a plague of knocks, a Chinese water torture of a sort. He turns his cheek down to the rough boards. The corner of his lip touches the wood. He curls his body and counts the seconds between each pounding, waiting for the following thud to arrive so that the sliver of silence, the moments between each knock, grow swollen, become rooms where long, long years of thought are stored, hallways filled with stalled breaths.

  He tries to remember the last time he encountered a human being. “Late last month? I believe so. I went to town for batteries and Fruit Roll-Ups, and the woman behind the cash register said, ‘Will that be all?’ and I nodded my head meaning yes.”

  Knock.

  Ted doesn’t really like people. He prefers the woods, the cabin, and the long dirt road one has to take to get here. The road is overgrown in part with berry bramble that scratches at any vehicle. In some places dead branches fall across the road and he just leaves them there rotting, blocking passage. Such a road is necessary to feel the way he does, that society, if it has to exist, is best kept far, far away, remaining to him like some sort of rare granite outcropping or species of palm tree, hermit crab, or saltwater estuary—something that is, but just isn’t here, not in the Montana woods.

  Ted opens his eyes. The last rays of the sun shine in through the window. The knock comes again. Who is it? He can’t imagine. It isn’t a postman because he doesn’t receive any mail. He makes sure of that by not having a mailbox at all. Why should the United States government be allowed to come to his house, every day except Sunday, to deliver strychnine printed in four colors? They shouldn’t be.

  Knock.

  No one even knows he is here except for his brother, and his brother would not knock.

  America moves so quickly it blurs itself into a coma. Ted moves slowly and nothing gets past him. He lifts his spine from the wooden floor like a cobra lifting its head, one vertebra at a time, alert.

  Knock.

  The curiosity’s the killing part. Ted can’t take it anymore. Slowly he hoists himself up off the floor of the cabin. He does a quick duck and roll over to the door and peering through a crack he sees something that surprises him. He slides back the bolt. He answers his door, something he’s never done before.

  “Finally,” she says and grabs at her chest as though her breasts are pillows she is trying to fluff. “I thought you had died.”

  “What?” he asks, and nothing else.

  “Well,” she says, beginning to explain. “You’re not going to believe this,” she says as he starts to close the door on her, regretting having opened it. “Wait, please.” The door continues to close. “WAIT!” The door stops.

  “What?” he asks again.

  “They’re chasing me. Please.”

  “Who?”

  She looks over her shoulders. “The bad guys.”

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Because I’ve been a very naughty girl,” she says flatly, sincerely, no innuendo.

  Ted is puzzled. He is curious. “What’d you do?”

  “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

  “Huh?”

  “He was a U.S. marshal,” she says and her words work. Something turns in Ted. He doesn’t care for U.S. marshals either. Indeed he doesn’t care for the entire U.S. government.

  “Do I know you?” he asks her, still standing with his arm across the doorjamb, blocking her entrance.

  “Don’t you want to know me?’ She cocks her elbow out to the side and places her hand on her hip, accentuating its curve. She winks and then stomps her foot, like she’s a racehorse waiting to run from the starting gate. Her feet are shod in a small pair of steel-toed work boots that cut a strange angle to her skin-tight jeans. The boots look bulky, like a klutzy, possibly retarded cousin to her gorgeous hips. He stares. He’s never seen a woman like this. Her message becomes vibrantly clear. Everybody needs somebody.

  “So can I come in?” she asks.

  He steps back. He lets her inside.

  “Well,” she says, dusting her hands off on her thighs, stepping through the door, and taking a look around the small room. “That’s much better.”

  There’s something weird about the way she speaks. It is both startling and attractive. “Are you from Florida?” Ted asks because something about her seems brand new.

  “Florida?” she asks. “Nope!” The tips of her perfect lips curve into a smile.

  Her lips are perfect, as is her skin or at least the skin Ted can see underneath her flannel top and jeans. The skin has a glow to it, like a waxwork he once saw of Joseph Smith and the early pioneers in a Utah rest area. Her skin is so smooth it looks as though it has once been melted, liquid, and then, when it found the place that was just right, it hardened up that way like a pond in winter that freezes before the first snow. Or maybe it has just been a while since Ted has seen a beautiful woman.

  “Listen, I don’t need any trouble. I’ve got enough,” he says.

  “I won’t give you any. I just need a place to hide out for a few days.”

  Ted considers his cabin. No one would find her here, and he does like the way she speaks plainly. He thinks he can trust her maybe. Or maybe it has just been a while since he has seen a beautiful woman.

  “And in the meantime,” she says, “Vroom. Vrooom. Maybe I can get your engine started.”

  This comment makes Ted blush until, in a moment of confusion, he starts to wonder whether she means the broken-down generator he keeps just outside the door.

  She makes herself comfortable, puts some water on the cookstove for coffee. He notices that she knows how to use a cookstove, and he likes that about her. He likes the way she sets right to work, fussing in the kitchen. Once she’s got the kettle on, she looks at him again. “Vroom. Vrooom,” she repeats, and walks toward him, slowly twisting each hip. She wraps her fingers around his forearm.

  “Oh. Oh,” he says. “My,” Ted says, surprised at being touched. Normally the most suspicious man in Montana, he thinks that she is cute with her steel-toed boots. Still he ducks away from her because just at that moment he notices his box of fuses and wires plus an empty container of ammonium nitrate has been left out in the open on his work table. The kettle whistle blows. She turns her back for a moment to brew the coffee and Ted takes that brief window of opportunity to lift a grungy serape that had been draped across the back of an old bench. He throws the serape over the table where he often sits to think and sometimes sits to build mail bombs that he later addresses to the filthy technologists.

  “Coffee?” she asks. She didn’t notice a thing.

  “Yes. I’d love a cup. Thank you.” Ted hardly knows the words to say, it has been so long since he has had a conversation.

  She winks at him again. “Why don’t you and I get to know one another in the old-fashioned way,” she proposes. “Over a cup of coffee.”

  “Good idea,” he says.

  “Let’s just talk. You first,” she says, sitting down on the old bench and patting the spot beside her.

  “Me?” he asks, taking the cup of coffee from her outstretched hand. She nods. “Okay. Me.” He has to sit and think before he starts. “Well, there’s not much to tell. I grew up in a house that wasn’t too big or too small. It was just right. Son of a sausage maker. Perfectly plain.”

  “Go on,” she says, and bats her eyes, which he notes have lashes nearly as long as the kicker on a stick of dynamite. “I’m enchanted,” she says. “Enthralled.”

  “Well, in junior high I nearly won a Scrabble tournament, but my opponent at the last minute laid out ozone on a triple-word score. The Z alone was worth thirty points, and I was stuck holding the J, minus eight, you know.”

  “Fascinating,” she says as she leans back, stretching her arm out along the top of the bench, creeping a hair closer to him.

  “It’s hard to remember much else,” he says, and looks up to the window, surprised and a b
it winded by really how few details it can take to make a life and how difficult it is for him, at this minute, to recall how he’d spent his years so far. They sped past.

  “I do remember one thing that was sort of special. I was a kid. I was sitting on the curb outside our house and the macadam road was hot. I remember the heat rising off that blacktop felt like”—Ted stops and smiles at her, doing his best Kris Kristofferson—“felt like a religious experience. I sat there staring straight ahead, perfectly pleased with life on earth, wanting and needing nothing. I lay back.” Ted sips his coffee and continues.

  “Then two kids from across the street came out and started to lob tiny stones, tiny kernels of asphalt, at my stomach. But I didn’t move a muscle. They giggled. I think they called me names but after a few minutes they walked on. I still didn’t move. I stared straight up at the sun and I felt like if I concentrated hard enough, I could sink down into the street, become something solid and hard, like the blacktop road. I lay there like that all day, and when I finally sat up, I saw how I’d gotten burned, a sunburn that left a perfect white silhouette of my hand and fingers right there on the skin of my thigh just below the fringe of my cut-off shorts. I’d been burned by the sun.”

  “You’re a wonderful storyteller,” she says, and blinks her eyes languidly, once, like an engine slowing down.

  Ted considers her comment. He’s never seen it that way before, primarily because he’s never really had someone to tell stories to, but now that she mentions it he thinks about how the work he does—building bombs, rigging wires in a pattern, constructing a path that resembles the trail left behind by a moth eating its way across a woolen blanket—these wires and bombs make a narrative. The red wires lead to the blue wires lead to the trigger which leads to the black powder. His bombs are written like masterpieces. Sadly, no one ever gets to actually read these stories, except, perhaps, for the scientist who might catch one last glimpse before the story blows a hole right through his brain. Moth-eaten.

  Back out in the van Wayne taps his fingernail against the plastic casing of his surveillance headphones. He could listen to her talk all day. Her awkward, unknowing way with language. Or how she accents the wrong syllable. It’s adorable.

  The Bureau had thought of everything. She has a nearly complete digestive and excretory system. She has beautiful baked white enamel teeth that can bite and chew. She even has a saliva simulator. Her anatomy is complete and flawless. Her ears curl like a baby’s. She is beyond perfection, she is more than a woman. She’s ageless. Her thighs will always stay tight, her cheeks will stay soft and moderately blushed even if her batteries still sometimes require catnaps to recharge.

  Through the headphones Wayne listens to her conversation with Ted. He listens to her charm that scumbag. He looks through the camera that is in her eyes, as he remotely commands her to romance this criminal, to demurely cast her gaze down. Wayne looks through her eyes and there, beyond her bosom, he sees her hand laced within this public menace’s thick, dark digits.

  Once, down in the silo, Wayne and Dwight had been discussing their onerous, slightly nerdy names. Dwight was in honor of Eisenhower, and Wayne, Wayne Newton. They were giggling over how together they made Dwayne, but as their giggles subsided Dwight asked, “Wayne, have you ever been in love?” It was the sort of question they liked to lob at each other down in the hole.

  “Not yet,” Wayne answered. “How about you?”

  Dwight had his boots up on the console. “Yes. Yes, I have,” he replied.

  “What does it feel like?” Wayne asked him and for once Dwight had no answer. Instead his gaze dashed around the silo. First his eyes rested on the steel-reinforced concrete wall that was poured sixteen inches thick, then on the bank of walkie-talkies, the haz-mat suits hanging empty, the cache of survival rations stacked neatly on an aluminum shelf and arranged by ingredient. Chicken à la King, Dried Tuna Noodle, Chipped Beef. Wayne waited for Dwight to answer. Dwight stared at the console and its blinking lights, its potential to start a nuclear war, and finally Dwight did answer. “It feels a lot like this, Wayne.”

  In the cabin Ted is still talking to her. “When I close my eyes,” he says, “I see a revolution as mesmerizing as any rainbow. People will stop and stare as factories and research universities come tumbling down. People will die, that is for certain.” He turns to her and blushes, as he doesn’t usually speak in metaphors, and wonders what sunshine has come over him. “There is a poison in the blood and leeches aren’t going to do the trick.”

  “Hey, what are you so angry about, big boy?”

  “You could say I don’t like technology.”

  “What, not even video games, TV?”

  He doesn’t answer her question. “Imagine that I am a machine.”

  There’s silence in the cabin while she tries to obey his command. She blinks twice.

  “Machines,” he continues, “have one of only two choices. Either they are run by humans or else they run themselves. And the way I see it, either choice is no good for me. If machines are run by humans, the elite class takes over, kills the rest of us off because they don’t need worker bees anymore—they have the machines. And if the machines are run by themselves, they take over and kill us all. I mean, of course they do. Who doesn’t know that? Machines always beat the people who resist them. Take cars as your example. Say you resist the automobile. Say you walk everywhere. You still have to obey traffic signals. You can’t cross the road wherever you’d like to because the machines have won. Try to walk into New York City. Try crossing Route 80. You can’t. See, machines will become responsible for doing every job we humans were put on earth here to do, and what does that leave me with?”

  “I don’t know, sailor boy, what?”

  “Not much. A handful of antidepressant pills to pop, pills that were made by the machines in the first place to keep us from revolting.”

  “I don’t know, sailor boy, what?”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t know, sailor boy, what?”

  “What the heck are you talking about?” Ted asks, and grabs her shoulder. They’d been getting along so well.

  “Fascinating,” she says, and then, rather suddenly, rather robotically, “I’ve become extremely tired. I must take a nap.” And with that she closes her eyes, brings her chin to her chest, and begins to snore, her powerful exhales stirring the fringe of the serape that’s covering Ted’s bomb-building materials.

  Poor thing, Ted thinks. She’s been on the run. She’s exhausted. I’m tired too, he thinks, because he has also killed people and injured many more. He tries not to think about it too much, but a person has urges. He’ll tell her this when she wakes, natural urges to defend ourselves when under attack. He’s being attacked by machines. He’s being attacked by the government. He’s only defending himself. And anyway, who is he to go against nature? Who is she? A person has urges. Yes, a person does, and as if to demonstrate this Ted cups her breast in the palm of his hand and squeezes once while she sleeps. He removes his hand. There is no tenderness left in him, and the experience is not as soft as Ted remembered it once was when he was young. He lets her be. He stares out the window for a while until quite suddenly, after five minutes or so, she flinches before sitting up quickly, stiffly.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said.” She cocks her head toward him, fully awake. “And I have a question for you.”

  “What is it?” Ted asks.

  “Where do you put beauty?”

  “Beauty?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Beauty. Imagine a small green pond somewhere in the mountains of Montana. There, in the middle of this cool, clear water, floats a man, legs together, arms stretched out to the sides like a white bird lit from within. The man glows from the green of the water.”

  Ted pinches his lips in consideration.

  “See, machines have made it possible for humans to concentrate on beauty,” she continues.

  “The man glows?” Ted asks.

 
“Yes, metaphorically.”

  “Is that man supposed to be me?” he asks.

  She shrugs. “Well, I don’t see how it could be if you’re going to be so busy tending your crops or tilling your fields or walking for three days into Missoula.”

  “I hadn’t thought of beauty,” Ted says, and sinks his head down below the plane of his shoulders. He tucks his chin. He feels like a simpleton for forgetting beauty. “But there’s no beauty in machines, and anyway all those people whose lives have been simplified by machines, they don’t spend their days concentrating on beauty. They watch TV. Right? What do you think?”

  She shrugs again because in truth she doesn’t think. She can’t think. She’s not built to think. She’s just a highly evolved robot, packed with explosives, ready to serve the USA on her final mission.

  Wayne is listening in the van. He has a timetable, a plan for this criminal scumbag. He’ll let Ted go all the way. Wayne wants Ted to know just how good a machine can feel inside. She feels good. Wayne can attest to just how good she feels. He’d volunteered to run Authenticity and Quality Control on her. R&D. Plus there’d been other times. Special moments. Yes, she feels good.

  The sun has set and under the darkening sky Wayne dares to pull the van up closer to the cabin to get a better look. He watches through the windshield while inside they turn on a light. A golden glow creeps out through the one high window. Yellow light can make the coldest of homes look like a palace to someone waiting outside in a cold van, his Thermos of coffee having long ago expired. The sky slips from royal to navy blue. The black branches look like a secret army lying in wait, like bayonets raised up to the sky. Very quietly Wayne opens the door to the van and steps out into the dark.

  Wayne remembers a Robert Frost poem he’d had to memorize in grade school, two roads diverge in a yellow wood. Yellow wood? Maybe yellow’s not the right word. Yellow seems odd for a wood. He can’t be sure now, but he’d liked the poem. He’d selected the poem to be his high school senior quote in the yearbook. And so he is surprised to find that here in Montana, years and years later, two roads are diverging. Not actual roads, but something more like poetic roads: one that says, “Turn the key, Wayne,” and the other that asks, “Have you ever been in love?” Wayne squeezes at the swatch of skin he keeps in his pocket to answer yes.