I moved closer to her “Did dad say something to you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it. If you want to stay here and make yourself the new hero child, that’s fine, Michael. You can count me out, though. You can fucking count me out,” she said. I could tell she was starting to cry.
I expected that she’d start talking the moment we pulled out of the driveway, but she didn’t. The only sound was the hum of the car. I reached for the radio, but I saw her roll her eyes, so I put my hand back down. She stayed quiet as we turned out of the neighborhood. She said nothing as we turned onto the highway. The blinker sounded odd and loud at every turn. I realized I’d never really heard a blinker before; there’d always been some other sound that covered it.
A church van passed us with a load of kids inside. One of them stuck her face against the rear window and waved to us. Sarah made a sound in her throat.
“What?” I asked.
“Kids,” she said, then went quiet again.
I wanted her to keep talking, I realized. I didn’t want to feel alone in the car. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you have to leave?”
“Didn’t you ask me this already?” she returned.
“You didn’t answer, before.”
“You’re right; I didn’t,” she said, and put her elbow up on the window. She rested her head in her hand, and looked out the window. I settled back into driving. She reached into her purse and took out a cigarette. She rummaged through her purse, her face growing more and more stern. I pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dash. She stopped searching, and without looking up said “Diane’s been cheating on me.”
I didn’t know what to say, “Oh.”
The cigarette lighter popped out. She touched it to the end of the cigarette, then put the lighter back with a rough shove. She inhaled once, then exhaled as she rolled the window down. The inside of the car filled with smoke.
“So—so what are you going—umm—,” I started.
“I’m going back to move my things out. Melissa said I can live at her place with her lover and her son.”
“Is—is Melissa—,”
“Queer? Yes, Michael.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good that you have some place to—you know—.”
She inhaled, looked away out the window, exhaled.
“Only in post-modern times could someone fall in love with a murderer,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“It was something Diane said. It’s true, too. She said that only in times like these could someone honestly think they were in love with a murderer.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, “who’s a murderer?”
“No one, Michael. No one. What it means is that—how to say this?—all bets are off, ostensibly. What it means is that you’re doing—all of us are doing, really—what you’re doing maybe isn’t right, but it is very right now.”
“What do you mean ‘what I’m doing’?” I asked.
“What all of us are doing: waiting to see what happens next instead of making things happen. It’s the postmodern condition,” she said and laughed. I couldn’t explain it, but the tone was so dark and poisonous that I shivered.
“Is that what that ‘postmodern’ stuff means?”
“No, not really,” she said, her voice like someone talking to a child. “That means something completely different. I’m just thinking about Diane because she’s a whore. No, what postmodern means is that no one acts like they are ‘supposed to’, and everyone applauds.”
“So what are you saying?” I asked her. The light caught her face and held it. I noticed how she looked, how she really looked. I thought of my sister as more like the me I saw in the mirror every morning than I ever felt. A tingle went down my spine, like cold water.
“Hollywood won’t let us kill off our heroes, Michael,” she told me, sighing. The light caught in her breath: it was cold. “They keep resurrecting them in movie after movie and they won’t let them die, like decent human beings should.” She turned to me, the half her face in soft silver, “What you’re trying to do?—I mean, do you really want to be a hero, Michael?”
I hadn’t thought about it. “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said. She nodded as if this somehow confirmed what she’d long suspected. “You?” I asked.
“What?” she asked, “like Sigourney Weaver or something?” She took a moment and thought, looking away. She turned back, “I think that there has to be something in us,” she sighed again, “I don’t know, something that needs a hero. Does that make sense?” she asked. I didn’t know what else to do, so I nodded. “I don’t know that there’s anything that,” she tilted her head up, as if the answer was scrolled on the moon, “archetypical in me. I don’t know that there’s anything in me someone else would want to make themselves like. Did you ever see those movies?”
“Which ones?” I asked.
“With Sigourney Weaver; the science fiction ones.”
“I think I did, a long time ago,” I answered, looking at the ground. I felt like it was some failing of mine that I didn’t know what she meant.
“It’s like that. That character she plays in them has something, something, you understand?” she said. I nodded, even though I didn’t. Her eyes searched my face, then she nodded, too. “They won’t let us kill them off, though. They won’t let us become the heroes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked her. I think I understand what she was talking, now, but back then I didn’t.
“Think about it. When you see someone in a movie do some really great stunt,” she said, exhaling smoke upward, her eyes rolled to look at me, “that’s exciting, and it sells tickets, right? But in the long run, what is it they’re saying to you?”
I shrugged.
“They’re telling you that you can never be that. You don’t know thirteen different martial arts,” she said, “you don’t know how to fly a plane after the pilot’s been killed. If some strange creature from another world was about to eat you, you wouldn’t get away.” Silence fell thick around us.
“Oh,” was all I could think to say. She nodded to herself again, and took a drag off her cigarette.
“I think maybe if they made movies about the real people who are heroes every day, no one would go see them. What does that say about what people want to be shown?”
“I don’t know,” I said. At the time, I remember wishing she’d just make whatever point she kept pushing for, and then be quiet or talk about something else. I stared at my shoes.
“Me either, but I’ve got some guesses. Like—take the devil for instance. Why is it the devil is always the hero, or at least the most interesting person in any movie or play where he or she shows up? And that goes all the way back to Milton, maybe even before. Everyone is okay with this because we all know that it is easier for us to be charismatic and evil than to attain some higher—I don’t know—good, or whatever,” she said. She stubbed out her cigarette.
We pulled off the highway and into the vast airport parking lot. I was amazed at how many cars there were. I didn’t know that this many people lived in town. I pulled the car up to the curb.
“Don’t get out. Pop the trunk. I’ll get my own bags,” she said, and reached for the door handle. Her arm seemed like some separate thing; a bridge put up a long time ago by people who had gone extinct, maybe. I stared at it for a second, thinking that it was resting against her body, not attached to it. I thought that some writer guy might think these kinds of things about that arm, about Sarah.