Oh, he’s probably right. What do I know when it comes to strange? Gosh knows I’m no expert in the uncanny.
“Yes, well, should we have music, or just listen to each other’s bodies complain?”
“You think I’m complaining?” says James. “Because I’m not. This is a little bit stressful. I’m trying to get us out of here.”
“I understand,” I say. And I do. It needn’t be said aloud, but I was referring to the sounds we make, each of us, which are whorishly amplified in the car, and not exactly my preferred music. Sounds of hunger, sounds of anxiety, sounds that have no explanation whatsoever—just the body at work, leaking and churning, groaning at a frequency no one was ever meant to hear. Live with someone long enough and you learn all of their gruesome lyrics, memorize all of the squishy instrumentals that gurgle out of them, note by note.
I click on the news and for a little while it’s just the sound of the storm elsewhere, where it’s ripened into a roar. We are to believe that the storm has paused in the lee of a mountain up north, where it’s gathering strength, pawing at the dust like a bull. They have a microphone penetrated deep inside this poor storm, I guess, and I’d give anything to sound like that. So sweet and angry and brand-new, a kind of subvocal monster simply cooing at the pain and pleasure of life. It’s perfectly beautiful and soothing, on such a nice day, until people start talking over it, explaining where this storm is from and where it might go, what it could do along the way, and then saying just how this storm makes them feel. Feelings! Every one of them would seem to be stirred up by this storm, by every kind of person. When it’s over, I’m exhausted and confused. I examine myself for feelings, carefully checking in the usual hiding places, and there are simply none to be found.
We aren’t kids anymore. We are old. Older. Nearly dead, really. My husband, James, is nearly dead, at least. He shows it. When he went to the doctor recently he hid the results from me, and I didn’t really ask, because we have to ration our concern. We can’t waste it on false alarms, and even if it’s a genuine alarm we must, I have come to believe, enact a protocol w/r/t what we feel. James shows his feelings so liberally that they come at a discount, and their value diminishes. When he says he loves me, usually in a threatening way, it always seems to beg for reciprocation. I guess he cries wolf. More or less sobs it. One could argue that whatever James says is merely the word “wolf” in one language or another. If he loves me, it is because that might open the portal for more cuddles and touches. That’s all. He needs to be swaddled and I just happen to often be in the same room. If I ever dare to walk past him without touching his hand, or his head, or stopping to outright kiss him, he pouts all day and looks up at me with mournful eyes. A husband, these days, is a bag of need with a dank wet hole in its bottom. The sheer opposite of a go bag. I comply with James’s wishes when I can, but the day is long and I have other projects.
I guess I want James to die. Not actively. Not with malice. But in a dim and distant way I gently root for James’s absence so I can see to the other side of the years I have left, get to what happens next. For a good while, James was what happened next for me. As a person he was a sort of page-turner. I moved through parts of him and made discoveries, large and small, and he led me to places and ideas I’d not seen or heard before. This looked and felt like life. And then, and then—even though I don’t think it happened suddenly—the story died in my old, tired husband. It ended. I knew everything there was to know: what the nights would be like, how the morning would feel. What he would say. What he wouldn’t. How I would think and feel around him. How I wouldn’t. Knowledge is a lot of things, but it definitely is not power. Dread is the better term, I think, though I do understand how that ultimately fails as a slogan.
The hotels inland are full so we follow the endless line of cars to the shelter. We are shown to two cots in the center of a high school gymnasium. There must be five hundred beds here, scattered out in a grid. At midnight the sleep sounds must be symphonic, particularly with the soft lowing arising from the pornless apertures of the elderly. The scoreboard is on in the gym, but it seems that no one has scored yet. Zero to zero. I’d like to feel that there is meaning in this, but I am tired and hungry. “Voilà,” says the volunteer, who has a walkie-talkie on his belt that squawks out little birdcalls. He is a handsome young man and he seems unreasonably proud to be playing this role today. I picture him unplugged, powered down like a mannequin, maybe sitting in a small chair in a room with sports banners on the wall. James and I stare at the cots as gratefully as we can, and for a moment I wonder if we are meant to tip the volunteer, because he stands there expectantly as wild children rocket past our feet.
“Just let us know if there’s anything we can do for you,” he says.
Anything? What a kind offer. A softer mattress, I think, and bone-chilling privacy, and a beef stew made with red wine. Some sexual attention would also be fine, if not from you specifically, because I fear you are too polite. Maybe you have a friend? After drives like that I often crave a release. But only a particular style of lovemaking will do. I have evolved a fairly specific set of requirements. If you don’t mind reading over these detailed instructions, briefing your friend, and then sending him to meet me in the janitor’s closet, that would be fine.
We tell him thank you, no, and we wait for him to run off before we start whispering our panic all over each other.
“Yeah, no,” says James, looking around, fake smiling, as if people were trying to read his lips. “No fucking way.”
“Maybe for a night?” I offer. I would like to be flexible. I would like to bend myself around this situation, which is certainly not ideal and is almost laughably experimental. One imagines doctors behind dark glass somewhere, rubbing themselves into a scientific frenzy over the predicament they’ve designed for us—two aging soft-bodies forced into an open-air sleeping environment. Maybe we are tired enough, and armed with enough pharmaceutical support, to render ourselves comatose on these trim little cots until it’s safe to go home. But wouldn’t people fuss with our inert bodies? Wouldn’t they see that we were so heavily tranquilized as to be unresponsive and then proceed to conduct whatever procedures they liked upon us? I only surrender myself to all my sweet medicines when I can lock a door, because I hate the thought of being fiddled with when I’ve brought on elective paralysis and can’t exactly fiddle back.
“The storm hasn’t even touched down on the island yet. We are talking days, maybe,” says James, rubbing his face. He rubs it with real purpose, pulling the skin into impossible shapes, before letting it not exactly snap back onto his head, taking its time to retract like the gnarled skin of a scrotum, and I fear for him a little bit, as if his hand will drag too far and pull his face free. I can’t really watch. If he must dismantle himself, piece by piece, I wish he would do it in private. Together we look around, as we might if we’d just entered a party. There’s no one here we know. It’s just a crowd of ragged travelers, forced from their homes, with far too many children running free. The children seem to believe that they have been released into a kind of cage match. Kill or be killed, and that sort of thing. The cots, mostly empty, are simply launching pads for child divers, exploring their airborne possibilities. They leap from bed to bed, rolling into piles on the floor, whooping. A style of topless nudity prevails, regardless, it seems, of age. Certainly there is beauty on display, but it’s ruined by all of this noise. One might reasonably think that there should be a separate evacuation receptacle for children. A room of their bloody own. Answering their special needs. Relieving the rest of us from the, well, the special energy that children so often desire to display. Lord bless their fresh, pink hearts.