The last time she saw Dean he had wandered into Dead Animals and Single Malts at around eleven o’clock. He was already obviously drunk. He stood by the bar and watched her, in his black expensive suit, his dumb overly fashionable shoes and vapid smile. She couldn’t bear men who wore fashionable shoes, unless, of course, they were gay men. He gave her heavy looks that irritated her completely — she almost felt bad for him. Almost. He had a drink and then grabbed her arm as she walked by. He pulled her over. That was it. She yanked her arm away.
“Look, Dean, I’ve had it. I don’t want you touching me, or hanging out in my restaurants. I am not enjoying this and I want you to leave, now.”
He smiled at her. “Lorene, Lorene, why are you such a little bitch?” When he spoke she realized he was more drunk than she had first guessed — there was an underslur to his speech, just the way thechofsuchin a slushy, ugly, sloppy sound ran through the barely detectableaand became thelioflittle. Sushalille.This gave her some alarm. She hated drunk people, they became so narrow-focused and insatiable.Relentless. But to her surprise he let go of her arm and asked the bartender for his check. He put a bill of large denomination on the table and waved at the bartender to keep the rest. Lorene supposed Dean thought this gesture indicated class of some kind. She watched him leave. Dean had good, snaky hips, a nice long, graceful body. But as soon as he spoke or even gestured, all that dumb-boy vanity poured out. She felt something hard and cold inside her that she hadn’t felt before. Dean was the last lover she’d had. It was such a shame. But she wasn’t built for it, the combustible, vaguely menacing qualities. She felt nauseous thinking about it.
Mina straddled Scott’s lap with all her clothes on. She felt his wanting her. She wanted him to slowly pull her skirt up, for them to kiss and feel each other up like schoolkids, not taking off their clothes until the last minute. But he just kissed her the way he always did, sort of perfunctorily and already wanting to be on to the next part, moving to the bed and taking off all his clothes.
“If you just want to wait until you’re ready, that’s fine. Just remember that until you speak, the healing cannot begin.” Beryl applied pressure to her back, a steady touch that seemed to melt the aching in her shoulders. Lorene found herself talking aloud.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. Beryl pressed her neck.
“I feel fear in your body, Lorene. Some deep fear. Tell me about that. Tell me what you fear. Be specific, and just go on, don’t think too much.”
Scott wanted to have dinner. He wanted to keep it going. She realized as she dressed that things had kept accruing for him. She had stayed in the same place all these months while he kept going deeper and deeper in. She felt a wind of panic. He said they had some things to discuss. She insisted no on dinner, she had to leave, was already late. She finally agreed to meet him the next afternoon. She agreed just to escape. She walked home, thinking tomorrow had to be the last time with Scott. She would have to tell him it was over.
“When I was walking from my car to this building, I passed a group of four guys huddled by their car. I think they were about eighteen years old. I readied myself for their staring. I readied the glassy gaze I have used my entire life. I saw peripherally a glance in my direction, and then I looked at one of them, but he wasn’t looking at me. His gaze traveled right past me. He was completely indifferent to me. No look back. He gave me no look back. And I can’t believe it. I am only thirty-two, and I am invisible to this guy. And then suddenly I saw the rest of my life stretched out before me. In a flash. The slow, excruciating dismantling of me as an object of desire. I would no longer command desire. And I felt so upset by this future, I wanted to run home and hide under my covers and cry. I really don’t think I can bear it, you know, getting older.” Lorene started to sob a bit, and Beryl held her shoulders.
“But that’s not it. That’s not what I’m afraid of.”
“What then?”
“I am so scared that I am the sort of person who can be undone by such a thing. I’m so scared my whole life is built onsomething so inevitably doomed and so, well, so silly. I have spent the first third of my life fending off mostly unwanted attention from strangers, and I would spend the last two thirds pining desperately for that attention when it is gone. Now, that really scares the shit out of me.”
Third Road Stop: New Mexico
Miraculously, Lorene wants to eat breakfast. Lorene wants to sit down and eat breakfast. I watch her eating pancakes with maple syrup. I watch her poke a fork into a sausage link. We discuss our plans to reach my mother’s by the end of the week. I’ve already lost interest in open spaces. I urge her to the car. Lorene’s eating a fucking sausage. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. Lorene’s lips are glassy with sausage grease.
“I’m tired of driving,” she says. “Can’t we have another cup of coffee.”
“No. I’ll drive.”
Lorene looks at me oddly.
“What. I said I’ll drive,” I say. She’s wiping syrup off her unmade-up face. She looks so young. “You’re kind of a mess this morning.”
She smiles at me, licking her lips — it’s breathtaking really.
“One more cup of coffee, doll, and then you can drive your heart out.” She winks. I nod. I look for the waitress. She’s talking to a young man furiously scribbling in a notebook. Helooks up at her, hunted and unhappy, his hand shielding the page.
“There are people in the world who furiously scribble in notebooks, and then there are—”
“And then there are the rest of us. Unconcerned and undire,” Lorene says, mouth full.
“Yeah, I guess. After Michael went to the hospital, he would send me things, documents, I guess.” This is the first time I have mentioned Michael on our trip.
“After you wouldn’t see him? What do you mean, documents?”
“Well, printouts from his computer, really. Not letters at all. Just fragments. Obsessive, odd, third-person diatribes. Which was really strange — obsessed but detached at the same time.”
“I never got anything like that.”
“Well, he spared you that. Only his family got the full force of his rants. And I did see him at the hospital. I did once.”
“I know you did, Mina. At least he wanted to see you.”
“I’m his sister, for God’s sake.”
I keep the cryptic notes in a drawer by my bed. With the postcards. Sometimes, I admit, I didn’t even read them. They never had a salutation. They seemed to be dispatches from the front.
Fuck ’em, that’s what they deserve. Damn sick of all these goddamn mediocrities. They don’t understand, they don’t want to understand. He frightened them, reminded them of what sellouts they are, rubbed their noses in the vapidity of their lives. They cannot deal with truths or truthsayers. He would be burned for this. He was certain they would kill him for these thoughts. They had designed it all very nicely, the benign smiles, the concernedlooks. The restricted visits from family. His sister. Perhaps they even got her. And then bringing the goddamn machine in here. They wanted him to write again. Type his brain into electronic bleeps that transmit through the computer into the universe. What happens, he wondered, as he typed, to the deleted words. The cursor blinking highlighted blips that seemingly flash into erased nonexistence at the press of the delete button. Why was this button twice as large as any of the letter buttons. What deleted bytes of memory stay in electronic limbo. We can discover the technology to recover data you deleted years ago. A search engine with a thousand spiders crawling everywhere. It’s all there, somehow. Like a brain, imprinted, retained, waiting for the recall. The right technology. He thought of abandoned hard drives. He thought of landfills full of abandoned outdated computers. He thought of motherboards and microchips. Of punk hackers in the future, constructing twisted, scavenged PC’s from the outdated abandoned stuff. Hybrid invasive technology.