by Brian Hodge
They weren't so tough, men weren't. She had met several women who had problems with men on the basis of gender alone, as if that XY chromosome pattern was in itself deserving of hatred. But Sarah had often caught wind of a strange underlying resentment in such attitudes, resentment of men's heavier bodies, their denser bones, thicker muscles. She had always found it a shortsighted view: as if brute strength really equated with inner power, and precluded sensitivity entirely. It wasn't necessarily so.
She had been intimate with a man only once in her life. Her sole heterosexual fling, it was memorable not only for its singularity, but for just how truly wrenching the experience had been … though not for the expected reasons.
It had come late in high school, before she had been certain who she really was. In this cliquish world, classmates were already talking about her behind her back, although she was finding that she cared less and less. She accepted a rare date, and when he later wanted to park she didn't try to talk him out of it. This was something she should experience, just to know, even if she felt no genuine desire beyond curiosity, certainly not the more incendiary desires that sometimes arose when she talked with other girls or glimpsed their bodies in the showers after gym class. This was something about which she should be informed.
The night had been autumn cool, the backseat of her date's car roomy. She would always remember the way his hands trembled as he touched her while pushing into her. She would always remember the endearing hesitancy of his kisses, and the pounding of his heart that she could feel against her own chest. He had wanted so much for everything to be perfect — this was obvious in retrospect — yet even before they were done, she lay there knowing it wasn't for her. No repulsion, and while it would have been hard to deny that at least a few of the sensations were pleasurable, neither was there any real gratification. It was simply wrong; this was not her, not who she was, nor the person she was growing into. It was like trying to align two puzzle pieces with a hammer instead of relying on a natural fit.
Maybe she shouldn't have been so honest afterward. She could have lied to spare his feelings. But likely he would have known anyway, sensed her remoteness. He was young and he was eager, but he was also shy enough to be terrified and considerate enough to ask how she felt rather than presume to tell her.
So Sarah hit him with the truth, and just as clearly as she would remember his hands and heart, so too would she remember the crushed expression he wore. And the way he cried, silently, turning away from her to face the nearest window as the glass fogged from his breath. She would always remember the immensity of the power she felt: a simple rejection could devastate, could shake people to their foundations and make them wonder if everything they had always believed about themselves hadn't been wrong all along.
Never again, she had thought. I know now, and I never want to have to do this to anyone else ever again.
It's not your fault, this is just the way I am, she tried to convince him, her hand on his bare shoulder until he pulled away. While eventually it seemed to sink in, how sad he looked all the same, when finally he could face her. Trying to smile, half-sick, through wet eyes, and only then did she realize it wasn't just sex — the wound cut deeper. Maybe he loved her, or thought he had, or had attached hopes to her that she'd never anticipated. He was not an especially popular young man; few noticed him; he blended well into backgrounds. Maybe he had been thrilled just to be with her.
She could see it all in his eyes, those hopes. Only he seemed clearly unable to speak of them.
"I won't tell anybody if you don't want me to," he said at last. "About you, I mean."
How naïve this was. Surely he had heard rumors of her by now, but if not, then he had to know that rumors were sure to spread whether or not he contributed. Bless his aching heart. If he could not share with her any of his misbegotten hopes, at least he could grant her what he saw as one final gift: a vow of silence.
It was something men excelled at … even when it ate them alive.
So men weren't so tough, no. But they could try to be noble. Noble was better by far.
As she turned toward the backseat, to watch over Clay's sleeping form, disturbed only by the small twitches, she knew that the noblest endeavor of all was to attempt to conquer everything that was worst in yourself.
"I think you're doing the right thing," she finally said to Adrienne.
"Then why do I feel guilty of something?"
"Because the situation, and the people who led you into it, forced you to make decisions you never had to make before. If you'd been a team player all the way, their way, you wouldn't be feeling any better. Different, but no better. You'd be feeling dirty, Adrienne. So how would you rather feel: like a fugitive, or dirty?"
Hands clenching on the wheel, she watched plains of filthy white wash past the car. "I'd rather not feel either way."
"You couldn't abandon him in two more days just because they cut your money. You couldn't let him make this trip alone." Sarah doodled in the film misted on her side window. "Maybe when we get back to Denver, he'll feel like it's time to close out what you've been doing — did you ever think of that? Look at it like cultures where the people don't segregate their spiritual values from everyday life. Pilgrimages often mark the end of one phase of a person's life and the beginning of the next. Maybe it'll be that way with Clay. Maybe this is his way of putting the last few months behind him, so he can get on with the rest of his life."
"Oh, my optimist." Adrienne smiled at her, her lean face too thin, cheekbones sharper than before. She wore the recent strains as well, and made them her own. But she was so plaintively hopeful in that smile that all was softened. "I hope you're right."
They both turned to look once more at the slumbering Clay when he voiced some low and inarticulate cry from the heart of a nightmare at midmorning. One fist brushed spastically at the side of his face, fell still, curled open. Sarah reached over to drape him with a small blanket they had taken along, and it seemed to calm him. For the moment, at least.
"To dream," she said, "perchance to sleep."
*
The day ground onward and they lost it to driving, lost an hour in western Kansas when crossing time zones. Kansas would best be driven by night, they decided, when the darkness would conceal the fact that nothing was out there but barrenness, and let you imagine there was something more. Darkness was kind that way.
Six hundred miles brought them to Kansas City, where they stopped to pass the night. Tomorrow, five hundred more and another time zone would put them in Indianapolis, where Clay would have the next day to take care of business that belonged to him alone.
Adrienne used a credit card to get them motel rooms on the outskirts of Kansas City, in that urban perimeter all interstate cities seemed to possess, having evolved for the sole purpose of catering to wayfarers. The same chain motels and the same fast food emporiums, cars fueling up at the same gas stations staffed by the same bored attendants. The great national homogenization, as Sarah saw it — there was something blandly hideous about the trend. After checking in they motored off in search of someplace nearby to eat, but the pickings were merely functional. It would fill a belly and that was all. They should have been too tired and too hungry to care, yet still it seemed an affront.
"Remember I told you I didn't touch an interstate when I went from Denver to Tempe?" Clay asked Adrienne, and she said she did. "This is why."
Sarah looked in dismay at the neon, the plastic, the refuse that choked gutters and asphalt and could have blown from any trashcan within two thousand miles. "We're cutting down every bit of diversity like weeds in a field."
Clay nodded. "This whole country's becoming one big putrid mall. Graham used to say that." She watched him smile at the memory. Missing Graham, for all his spite, or maybe because of it. "I want African food," he then said. "I want millet and beans and fried plantains. I want to eat it with my fingers. And what is there to choose from? Burger King and Taco Bell. I think I'd have a bette
r meal if I could burn them to the fucking ground instead."
"Clay," said Adrienne. "Let's be reasonable."
"Okay," he said. "Give me some matches."
He was harmless at the moment, Sarah decided, but he had a point. He nearly always had a point. If somewhere deep within Clay really was touched with madness, it was a madness prone to blunt truth. And as they cruised along some boulevard whose name she did not know, colored by splashes of ugly lights, she wondered if Clay might not feel this descent into urban sameness even more acutely than she. To her it was sad, like the erosion of pure and isolated cultures when the world at last penetrates like a rapist to wreak its change … through disease, through missionaries, through the nouveau conceit of This is mine, I will no longer share it, I will hurt you if you touch it again.
But to Clay, seeing city after city, suburb after suburb, each wearing much the same face … wouldn't that grind at him on a more fundamental level? For when it came to that most unique facet of anyone — the face — Clay would know that his was not his alone. It belonged first to a dozen others. And now hundreds.
How would it feel? That they had been born as standardized entities to fill interchangeable cities? In the light of that horrible meltdown, their visceral rage could be understandable, necessary even — a final straining by their human spirits to break free and reject the shackles of conformity.
Then again, maybe they were merely flukes and anomalies, with no futures.
This time of year, with this weather, interstate travel was safer, swifter, but how much more heartening it might have been to travel the lesser highways, as Clay had done months before, if only to prove to themselves that all was not surrendered out here. She wanted to walk roads peopled by those whose worlds ended two horizons over; to eat in shacks whose menus were painted on sheets of whitewashed plywood. She wanted the time to hang around gas stations owned by bony old men who knew engines better than their wives, to sniff the fumes and prowl the rest rooms when no one was looking, and stare at cigarette butts in the urinals as if they were runes of divination, thrown just so and full of meaning.
She would remain out in the hinterlands until she could read those omens, and know if the future they spoke of was hopeful, or barely worth the bother. Weave those threads into her thesis when she got back, maybe, explore the linkage between anthropology and prophesy.
It was a dream, anyway.
And then they gave up looking, and went for burgers.
Twenty-Nine
Outside of Minnesota's twin cities, Clay had never been east of the Mississippi. It had been a great river of adventurous unknown in another era. Passing over it the day before, as it churned frigid and gray with slabs of ice, he wondered how Mark Twain had seen it in his time. How its primal pull had felt surging up through the deck of a steamboat; if its ancient muddy allure was anything like the one now compelling him to the East Coast.
The river was behind him now, a state and a half back, but its chilly currents lingered in imagination. It was how he may have traveled a century or more ago, poling himself along atop a raft, anticipating change around every bend. He would have known nothing of chromosomes then; genetics would have provided no scapegoat. Ignorance might really have been bliss.
No more, though. A little knowledge was a dangerous thing, it had been said, and Clay supposed that was true. It could leave you with an addict's craving for more.
Here he was, living proof: Indianapolis, midday on New Year's Eve, alone with the car for the first time since they had left Denver. He thought it was an encouraging vote in his favor that Adrienne had let him take her car.
Timothy Van der Leun lived in a tiny house on the southwest side, where I-70 slashed through a flatland of warehouses and grim smokestacks. Clay had phoned from last night's motel, after consulting his illicit files for the number. He got a confused sort of hello, then hung up after a moment of listening to Van der Leun listening to him breathe. He knew of nothing to say. Better to just go.
He found the street on a local map, then in the car. The block was filled with houses just like one another, small and cramped, creeping toward decrepitude, as if they held dour secrets and were exhausted from the strain. No trees at all to speak of, just scrawny head-high twigs of things. Poisoned by the air, maybe, or by the snow whose last dregs stuck to the lawn like gray scum.
The narrow porch sagged beneath his weight, and Clay knocked. He did not trust the bell to function.
He had to knock again before the door opened, as slowly as if the person behind it were crippled, arthritic. An ever-widening slice of the house greeted him, dim as a cave, all the blinds and curtains drawn.
And then the master of the house.
The face was familiar.
He clung to the door with more weight than should have been borne by his gaunt frame; lost inside his clothes, long, loose sleeves flapping at his knobby wrists. He peered out with eyes that seemed to need moments to shift focus from wherever they had been before, and when they did, his gaze locked on with the fierce melancholy of someone staring at a shattered mirror while waiting for the pieces to meld again.
Yet still Clay could say nothing. What possible words would not be trivialized by their shared countenance? Mutation, huh? and then a lost grin. What a bitch.
"Are you a real one?" Timothy Van der Leun asked. Clay did not know what he meant. "Real. With scars. Let me see your scars if you're real."
Freezing wind behind him, the smelly heat of the house before him, Clay stood on the porch and took off his gloves. Turned his hands down to show the red slashes across their backs; skinned his hair away from his forehead to reveal the most recent one above his eye. His badges, all; his scarlet letters of admission.
"I have more," he said, "but I'm not taking off my clothes for you."
But Timothy Van der Leun was already nodding, "Okay, you're real," turning away, shuffling back inside the house and leaving the door open for him to follow.
Clay shut it behind him; waited for his eyes to adjust to the dim halls, dim rooms. It reeked of heat throughout, a thermostat allowed to go mad, but the air was worse, thick with the scent of things burned, then allowed to spoil. If he were offered food here, he would never accept.
"Which are you?" Timothy's voice, from the shadows, and this time Clay knew the meaning.
"Denver."
Timothy tilted his gaze, quizzical, a thin head on a bony stalk above the flapping sails of his shirt. "A new one."
Clay realized what they were standing in must have been the living room, surrounded by overflowing junk-pile boxes and brittle old wrappings from convenience foods. They littered the floor like tiny shrouds, and when Timothy moved over to a chair they crackled underfoot. Down he sank, his arms wrapped protectively around his middle.
"When did they finger you?"
"This past fall." Clay found another chair but beneath him it seemed to fit wrong, as if for skewed bones, or perhaps his own had begun to warp into other shapes, other forms. Anything might happen beneath this roof, far from the face of the sun. "It was an accident."
"We were all by accident," Timothy said. One hand dropped to the floor beside his chair, crabbed around, came up with a bottle. He put it to his mouth and took a ferociously long pull from it, then offered to share.
Clay looked at the bottleneck, the squared glass … dripping, dripping, amber blood that flies might die from if they lapped it up. He shook his head. "I can't."
Timothy nodded. "I heard that was a problem with some of us," then the whiskey spilled down the front of his palpitating throat as he poured it again. "It never was with me."
Clay watched him drink, silently, as the house hung as still around them as a rotting carcass, save for the televised murmur from another room, probably the bedroom. He found himself drawn again and again to that other face, so like his own, yet not. He had thought for days that this meeting might be like walking in upon a brother he had lost from birth, that the both of them would know enough
not to speak, that what they shared beneath the skin would fill the silences.
But it was not like that at all — more the tearing of a membrane between himself and what might have been, or worse, might yet be. Not brothers at all, they went deeper: fibers unraveled from the same umbilical cord that might have strangled lesser babies. They could look at each other, and the small differences — black hair or blond, clean or encrusted — were made insignificant. Anything that varied in their lives they need neither ask nor tell about, for they had lived in all the same skins.
"Where," said Clay, "did you learn about the others? Who told you?"
Timothy opened his mouth, then shut it while he prodded the question for veiled implication. "Where are you going now, where are you going?" He curled in on himself. "If you're from Denver — you're not going to Boston, are you?"
"I don't have anyplace else left to go."
"It's where we all go last, I think," and Timothy trembled, as if another thought might be torn free, then surged from the chair. Stray papers fluttered to join a hundred others on the floor. "I can't sit here, come back here with me, okay, come back here," leading down a narrow hall where tilted old pictures leered from the walls. "Seeing you here, it's just … it's just…" Repeating it over and over, a mantra.
Clay followed into what had been a kitchen, maybe not even all that long ago, but it had since been taken over by piles of newspapers and magazines spilling from cartons whose corners had ruptured. Unseen mice scurried under the cartons; their droppings speckled the counter. Timothy sat at the table, silhouetted against a window covered by a cataract of brittle, brownish paper.
And the smell was worse back here, in Timothy's wake, that sweet black stink of burnt dinners left to spoil in a room of nicotine light.
