Our ordinary monsters. What are we supposed to see when we look at them, their monstrosity or their ordinariness?
He didn’t kick me in the head, which was lucky; otherwise, I probably would have needed new eyes, a new face. When he was finished, he bent down and grabbed me under my arms, dragging me to the truck, not seeming to notice the twin ruts my heels left in the gravel. He fastened the seatbelt around me, which would seem odd in hindsight; maybe, at first, he intended to take me to the hospital, as he had done after the garage episode. I could only imagine, later, what kind of story he might have come up with this time in order to explain what had happened, but as it turned out, he managed to tell a tale that was completely convincing without even saying a word.
I must have been making some kind of noise, moaning maybe, but he sat down in the driver’s seat and shut the door without looking over. The engine started, and he drove us out of the parking lot, pulling onto the curving road.
After a few minutes of calm, he began to gather speed, taking the turns hard, whipping us first right, then left. At first, I thought we might be rushing to the doctor, but as the tires began to skid with each curve, spraying gravel over the edges of the steep drops that lined the road, I realized that that wasn’t it.
I said his name, and he glanced at me.
“There’s blood on your mouth,” he said. “You’re drooling on yourself. Wipe it off.”
Slowly, I did as I was told, lifting my hand to my face and then sliding it along the inside of the door, grasping the armrest, slumping forward in the seat, breathing through my mouth. He kept his eyes fixed on the road, his jaw set. The needle on the speedometer edged upward; the rocks and trees flew by. He wasn’t blinking, and, looking at him through the strange film that was clouding my vision, I suddenly knew what was coming. He said nothing, just stared through the windshield, a harshly determined look coming into his eyes, bouncing in his seat whenever we hit something in the road. I didn’t say anything, either, because I didn’t know the words; because it hurt to breathe; because if I couldn’t escape, I was content to die. Then, as the car went faster and faster and the engine screamed louder and louder, I thought I might say something, take the risk, even if he would be angry, even if he would strike me, and had just turned toward him when he spun the wheel and, with a flick of the wrist, steered us straight into a telephone pole at the edge of some stranger’s yard.
There was a burst of dust, a sound so loud I thought a grenade had been dropped in my lap. Then it was over.
He hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt, even though he’d put mine on. He went over the steering wheel, into the glass.
And that was that.
Later, I would hate him for having done it, for having done all of it on purpose, but by then it was too late. Whatever words I had for him were just empty sounds. What can you say to a dead man, especially one who’s already been buried by the time you can sit up, by the time you can once again say your own name?
I went to the chapel once, the one in the hospital, while I was still in the wheelchair. It was nearly Easter. Most of the stitches were out by then, although the bones would take much longer to heal. It was a Protestant service, and the minister was giving a sermon on Matthew, the part that describes the Last Supper. “And Jesus said,” he intoned, like someone who was trying to make himself sound important, “‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.’” I began to titter, then laughed so loudly they had to wheel me out of the place. The pouring out of blood, as I could have told him, had nothing at all to do with forgiveness. Blood was blood, and suffering was suffering. It didn’t redeem anyone. It couldn’t. The world went on exactly as it had before, regardless of whose blood had been poured out for what reason. Jesus, I thought, had known what was in store for him and had only been trying to give it a meaning, to make it something other than the useless and routine act of cruelty it was.
The hospital psychologist told me I was very articulate.
I drove on in the Jeep, the miles passing. Very early in the morning, I reached New York, passing through a tunnel and emerging into a confusing thicket of streets, narrow and dark save for the few bars that still seemed to be open. Somewhere near a park, I pulled over, locked the doors, and climbed into the back of the car, pulling a blanket over me so I would be hidden from view, like a rabbit in a nest. When I woke up, my head aching, the sun had just begun to rise and I found that I had a parking ticket. I brushed my teeth with a bottle of water from the trunk, spitting into the gutter, and slipped the angry-looking sheet of paper into my pocket. At least the car hadn’t gotten towed with me in it.
People began to appear in the street, most of them looking as if they had been out all night, the men rumpled, the women in sparkling disarray. One of them pointed me toward a convenience store, where I bought a city map, but I was already so impossibly lost that the grid of streets might as well have been a foreign alphabet. As I drove, the streets became canyons, surrounded by buildings that seemed soulless, the dull stone and glass interrupted only by a thumbprint-sized park here and there.
Finally I saw a bridge, a strangely ornate-looking one, and crossed it, half hoping it would take me out of the city but also thinking it might show me why I’d come here in the first place, why I’d thought that getting lost here, disappearing, might be the first step to a new life, might erase the previous twenty-four hours. For the moment, life seemed the same, except that I was now trailing a taxi—the first one I’d ever seen—and had no idea where I was.
On the other side of the bridge, the buildings seemed shorter, more open. I looked up and saw birds turning in wide circles: seagulls. In Centerville, we only saw them rarely, when they were driven inland by storms. But I was certain that was what they were.
Of course, I thought.
The sea.
I stopped to buy a doughnut and began to feel, if not better, then at least slightly more myself. I looked at the map again and followed what seemed to be the main road, even though it was taking me the opposite of the way I’d originally planned to go. I liked it better out here than in the place where the highways and tunnels had first deposited me. The buildings were still crowded together, but in a kind of matter-of-fact, shrugging way that somehow reminded me of home, even though there was no real resemblance.
At last, the road ended, and there I was, staring out at the sand, the boardwalk. Beyond that, I was sure, must be the ocean.
I stopped and climbed stiffly out, rubbing my face. The air had a smell, a feel, that was new to me. I stood still for a moment, then started to walk.
The shoreline, when I reached it, was narrow and dirty, the brown sand strewn with rocks and glass and bottle caps. No one was there; it was still almost too cold to be walking in such a place, let alone swimming. But there it was, the water, dark and rippling and stretching to my right and left as far as I could see. The wind blew my hair into my face as I knelt and touched a wave that had approached me. It seemed softer than the lake water somehow, warmer, darker, gentler. When it receded, it left behind a white foam, which was soon overtaken by the next wave.
Squatting there, I turned my face up to the sun. I imagined the stranger sitting beside me.
There was a dry throb in my chest, and I gripped my hands together, holding them against me, clenching my eyes shut.