* * *
She moves quickly, finding her clothes at the base of the bed. A long-sleeved T-shirt, a jean skirt, slip-on leather sandals. She dresses. “Excuse me,” she says without waiting for Chuck’s answer. Ada closes the door behind her and, using a chair from her dining set, catches the bedroom door handle underneath it, wedging the chair, locking the door shut, just like they do in the movies.
“Chuck?” She speaks to him through the door, fingering the wood of it. “Try the door.”
“Huh?”
“I locked you in there.”
He tries the door handle and the chair holds. “Why?”
She listens.
He’s quiet for a long time except for his breathing. “Oh,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that about capitalism killing more people than terrorism. To you. I’m sorry.”
“Chuck. You don’t know anything,” she whispers.
“I know there’s no such thing as Us versus Them. I know we want to blame someone so we look around, find a person who is not Us and point the finger. We ask, where’d all that violence come from? Not us, we say. It was them. But they are us, Ada. A better question is where does violence really come from? Don’t tell me Cain and Abel. Don’t tell me evil, Ada. That’s bullshit. There’s no such thing as evil.” He pauses a moment. “I’d like to ask you, what’s the difference between a hurricane and a terrorist attack?”
She leans up against the door. “Is this a joke?”
“No joke. What’s the difference?”
Ada doesn’t say anything so Chuck answers for her. “Not much for the people who don’t survive.”
Her head is pressed on the jamb. “Can you try the door once more? Really try it.”
“What in the shit are you doing?”
“Just try. Please.”
He shoves, backs up and shoves again, like he’s getting mad, ramming his shoulder against the wood. The door holds. The chair legs are caught solidly in a crevice between tiles. “I’ve never done that before.”
“Trapped a man in your damn bedroom?”
“Used a chair to lock a door.”
“Well, fuck. Congratulations,” he says. “I’m not sure what to tell you. Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
“Chuck.” She whispers it, leaning into the door. “Can you hear me?”
He waits a moment. “Yeah.”
She bites into her lip without cutting it, just enough to make the pain shoot down her legs and into her toes. She lowers her voice even further. “I want to tell you something.”
“All right. Yeah. Tell me.” He lets out his breath.
“Terrorists didn’t kill Henry. He was nowhere near 9/11. That’s just what I tell people.”
Chuck is quiet. Ada pictures him still naked on the other side of the door.
“They didn’t?”
“No.”
“Then who did?”
Chuck could always just climb out the window. He’s not really locked in. He just doesn’t know he’s free. “I did,” she tells him and backs away from the door, noticing how, after that, Chuck has very little to say.
* * *
The new stream has swollen. It’s crested above the lanai. Muddy, debris-filled water is rushing up against the windows. Bending low, Ada looks through the glass. Minuscule grains of sand and dirt glisten. The whole storm in miniature swirls there, tiny golden grains floating in the brown water. The world moves forward in small sudden moments: a phone call from the human resources department, an icy road in winter, a shotgun, a diagnosis. Our existence in the miniature. Each bite of food. Each teenage heartache. The brown flecks in the water. The little baby who never even had a name. Lizards, kingbirds, bugs. But mostly the little baby whose death didn’t mean anything to anyone because it happened on such a large and horrible day.
Ada hadn’t killed anybody, not even Henry. She’d only wanted to, longing for a bit of violence that would set the world right. Henry’s alive and well back in Rhode Island. Still married to his wife, about to become a father.
* * *
“Pregnant?” Henry’d said to Ada. “That was not part of the deal.”
But Ada never realized there was a deal.
“Pregnant?” he’d said. “That’s just about the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” as if it had occurred immaculately. Henry left and didn’t come back and didn’t call or even seem to wonder what happened to the baby she was growing inside her. It wasn’t immediate, but soon Ada started having evil thoughts about Henry. Hunting accidents, car wrecks, and, though he was too young for a heart attack, Ada wished he wasn’t. Garden shears through the lungs, tractor mishaps, poison, each imagined death torturous and deserved.
She hadn’t meant to fall in love with a married man. Ada hadn’t even known Henry was married until they’d been together for months, and then it was too late because up north falling in love is like animal husbandry. It’s necessary. It’s so cold in the winter.
She’s going to explain this all to Chuck later. She’ll tell him about Henry, who was never her fiancé. She’ll tell Chuck that she had a miscarriage on 9/11 and it meant nothing to anyone but her. She’ll tell Chuck how small each life is when she’s ready to tell the truth. Soon she’ll let Chuck out of the bedroom and tell him how once it snowed for eight days straight in Rhode Island. She’ll tell him how she and Henry would go grocery shopping together and if Henry ran into someone who knew his wife, he’d always pretend that he was just helping Ada out, as if there were something wrong with her mind, retarded or something, he had to take care of her. The floors of the grocery store would be slick from people tracking slush in on their boots. The cashiers kept their parkas on inside. But Henry’d grip the yellow plastic handle of the cart. His strong hands, his wedding ring, and it seemed he was holding on to the whole world, making things steady and even as breath. Ada would see his hands and consider crying or screaming or throwing canned tomatoes, bricks of coffee at his head. She’d turn toward the shelf. Lightbulbs. She’d read the packages, looking for just the right wattage. She’d look down at the linoleum, swallowing the heat behind her eyes, and all the while Henry would wait patiently, smiling, so full with all he had, a wife and a girlfriend. Sometimes she could build up a resolve of hatred for him. I’ll leave, she’d think, but it would never work. She’d take one look at his camouflage hunting coat and get lost in that familiar pattern and all she’d want to do would be to rent a video, go home with Henry for the rest of her life, and watch dumb movies on TV.
But that didn’t happen. Henry didn’t want to be a father to her child and he didn’t want to get divorced. He left and Ada lost the baby at six and a half months, though two doctors said there was no good reason why she, a healthy woman, should miscarry.
* * *
The end table would be just the right weight. She could lift it above her head, let the heft of wood have its way with the glass wall. At first there would be just a small crack, a spiderweb that would creep all the way down to the ground, though soon the force of the flood would break through. The window would crash into her living room, allowing the water to enter. Bits of glass in the brown flood. Water would flow into the house, down the hallways, into the kitchen, a shallow river in her dining room. It would flow up against the new sofa and into the low cupboards that are still mostly empty except for some old cassette tapes that Ada can’t even listen to anymore because all she has is a CD player. She’d watch the water make its way through the house and up to the bedroom door. Chuck’ll forgive her. He’s made for forgiveness.
* * *
“Sorry,” the emergency room doctor in Rhode Island had said.
It was just after nine o’clock in the morning. Ada could hear a number of starlings outside the hospital window, whistling, dive-bombing an old pizza crust.
“Sorry?” Ada asked the doctor. That was what people said when someone was dead, and here was Ada, lying on the gurney, perfectly alive.
Did she want to see the baby’s body before th
e morgue took it away?
Should they call someone, a husband or a boyfriend perhaps?
The doctor rolled his lips, and as he did, a frantic candy striper with perfect timing came running down the hall of the hospital, yelling, “We’re under attack! Dear lord!” The voice drew the doctor out of the room.
Ada waited alone. The asbestos ceiling stared back at her.
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god!” another voice passing by in the hallway said. Ada climbed off the gurney. She held tightly on to her now empty belly and the gauze padding the doctor had put inside her. In the hall people were crying, men and women, cardiologists. People were in pain. She watched them pass. Their breathing was labored, their eyes in shock. It came as a surprise to Ada that all these people should understand how the body of one childless mother is too small a place to hold so much grief. Ada’s misery was general and spreading through the hospital, down the corridor, out the emergency doors, and across Rhode Island, across the nation. “My baby,” Ada said. Hugs were being offered to techs, patients, administrators on the verge of collapse, everyone weeping for her miscarriage. People huddled around the televisions as if the anchors were going to instruct them in grief management. “Coming up. How to make death stop hurting us. Stay tuned.” One nurse held his head in his hands, rocking. Ada walked out into the hall, clasping her gown shut. She stopped to stroke the back of the nurse’s head. “I was her mother,” she told him, and then repeated her claim on all this grief. “I was her mother.”
* * *
Ada doesn’t lift the end table. She opens the slider onto the lanai and steps outside. In the storm it’s hard to look up for long without losing her balance. The rain drenches her clothes, smelling of salt and people. Maybe Chuck’s shed will come flying through the sky and land on top of her, leaving just her feet sticking out from under like some crushed witch who won’t ever have to tell herself the truth.
The water has dampened Ada’s clothes, camouflaging her with the oncoming night, darkening the difference between Ada and every other small thing lost in the hurricane.
The water covers her feet, creeps up her shins. The hurricane above her, big as night. The ground shifting below. Ada stands in the storm. One by one, millions of miniature universes pass her by in the flood, remnants of time and shell and silica. They disappear underneath the house in Florida, no us, no them, but all, each one, going down together.
LOVE MACHINE
Once upon a time two men lived at the bottom of a nuclear missile silo. They were barely men, just out of their teens, yet their job required them to push the button when it came time for nuclear apocalypse. Really there are no buttons. They used the word “button” so civilians, friends, could visualize what they were doing in the missile silo. In actuality, each man would have to insert his own key and turn it. Together they would decide whether or not to destroy the world.
Wayne and Dwight paid attention in alternating shifts, ready to wake the other if the signal to act ever came. They were not allowed to leave the missile silo, and so each night and each day—the sixteen-inch poured-concrete walls made it hard to tell which—they slept locked underground, not too far from the huge hole that cradled a massive warhead loaded and aimed.
When Wayne and Dwight were both awake they either played Nerf basketball on a small court they’d rigged in the control room or shot the bull. They’d discussed the moment they were waiting for. They had decided they would do their duty. They would turn their keys and end the world. But then they would forsake the canned provisions stocked to survive the months after the apocalypse safe in the silo. They thought instead they would turn their keys, open the hatch, climb up to the surface of the earth as she died.
Having settled on that plan allowed Dwight to ask Wayne the big questions, like “Why do you think we’re here?” or “Do you believe in God?” or “What are you most afraid of?” Wayne always tried his best to answer Dwight’s questions but sometimes he didn’t know what to say and the two men would listen to the quiet clicks and whirls that the control console made inside their silo.
The call never came. The keys remained on chains around their necks, never sinking into the dark keyholes that Wayne had spent hours, days, and weeks studying. And then their time in the military was up and then Dwight and Wayne drifted apart as people will. But Wayne remembered.
On their last night in the silo they’d opened up a bottle of sparkling cider to celebrate the end of their orders. Soon they would be seeing the sun again on a regular basis. They would see other people as well, and, while it was a little frightening to leave their secured zone after two years together, they both tried to smile and concentrate on the good that would come from returning to the surface. Dwight and Wayne were close that night in a way Wayne’s not been able to recall since, as if there were a small man in Wayne’s brain who remembers exactly what happened that last night down in the silo, but whenever Wayne tries to remember for himself the little man says, “Well, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
What Wayne remembers is that there’s no way for two men in America who love each other, but who are not lovers, to touch or even talk about love outside of a gambling win or a sporting event.
This was after ROTC, before the FBI, and now, from time to time, Wayne misses Dwight. He misses having a friend to share the long hours with, to share the waiting. Wayne thinks about Dwight and the Cold War while stuck in a van on an FBI stakeout in the forests of Montana.
He’s done all right for himself the past five years at the Bureau, racking up top secret clearances like poker chips. Indeed, Wayne’s current assignment, Operation Bombshell, is his own brainchild. Though he’d had help from the Development and Fabrication team who’d built her—even weaving human hair collected from wives and sisters into a wig they’d bleached and, later on, deep-conditioned with a fragrant hot-oil treatment. And there were the guys in Robotics, of course. They’d had a hand in developing her language and mobility functions. And Marc from Explosives. He’d been a big help. Still, everyone at the Bureau generally agrees that she, Operation Bombshell, belongs to Wayne.
And here they are in the Montana woods, she and Wayne, down the road a small stretch from a cabin that belongs to one of the most wanted criminals in all of America. Wayne’s been on his trail for so many years now that few at the Bureau believe the guy will ever be caught. That’ll be fun when Wayne brings this sucker’s charred remains into the lab for dental and DNA analysis. He’ll show those hot-dogging agents who joke behind closed doors. He’s heard them. He’s a surveillance expert, for criminy’s sake. “There goes Wayne, down the drain,” or “Operation Bumshell,” or worst, he’s heard his name, “Wayne,” followed by an explosion of giggles, his career the punch line.
A branch ticks and scrapes against the roof of the van. Wayne studies the dark speedometer. The van has been made to resemble a pool cleaner’s work van, but outside of the surveillance equipment stashed in the back, there is little in the way of high-tech luxury. Wayne rests his feet up on the hard plastic console between the driver’s and passenger’s sides. He sticks his heel down into the cubbyhole made to hold hot beverages. Leaning back in the van’s captain’s seat, he rubs at a small swatch that he keeps in his pocket. It is a bit of her skin, a square silicone sample. He raises the skin to his nose, tickling a number of wiry nostril hairs. He inhales her faint plastic scent, recalling moments of bliss, some that transpired mere hours earlier in this van as he smiled and selected an outfit for her to wear, helped her test the charge in her battery pack, stuffed her body cavity full of explosives, and then saluted her as she signed off on her first and last mission with a quick nod and the word “Sir.” He’d taught her to be a proper soldier. With remote viewing switched on, he watched her knock on the door of the cabin.
* * *
“We don’t want any!” Ted screams through the bolted door. But Ted isn’t a “we.” He’s just an “I.”
In the cabin there’s one small windo
w from which he often peers out across the valley, startled by how steadfast the mountains can be. Ted waits for the mountains to move or exhale or erupt. He’s got all the time in the world. He could wait all day and nothing would ever happen besides the mountains changing colors with the sun at night. Ted tries to achieve such stillness himself and would be able to if not for an itch he always gets right where his hair parts and the grease of his scalp dredges up a dull ache so that he must scratch the itch or be driven insane.
Ted’s been alone for a very long time.
Some nights, as the sky turns pink at sunset, he lies on his back staring out the window. The trees’ limbs become a darker shade of black, outlines that resemble huge dendrites of nerve endings against the sky. Some nights he will lie there until there is no light left at all, until one shade of black swallows the subtleties and he is alone lying on his back staring at the square window as though it were a dead TV set.
Other nights he’ll spend his time building small bombs, some that are thin enough to slip into the open arms of an envelope.
The knocking hasn’t stopped. “We don’t want any!” Ted screams again to no effect. He cannot believe someone is knocking on his door. He is a million miles away from any civilization. But there it is, steady and rhythmic; the knocks fall like the footsteps of an approaching giant. There is a joke in this somewhere, Ted’s sure. What dedication. The knocking continues at a regular pace for thirty, thirty-five minutes. No kidding. He almost can’t believe a passion so unparalleled. This knocker is no quitter, or else, he thinks, this knocker is a robot. Ha! He laughs, finding the joke. A robot in the wilderness of Montana. It’s not a very funny joke, not really a joke at all, but he laughs anyway.
“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 knocks. 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, swells into a room where long, long years of thought are stored, warehouses filled with stalled breaths.
The Dark Dark Page 10
