Hours later, when she stopped her car outside the Marathon electronics store, Eve told herself she would only look into a new set of headphones for Oliver to wear at night. And yet, inside the hangar hugeness, Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely” burbling through the speakers, she found the good, pillow-ringed headphones were locked behind glass cases, each price tag another little obscenity. It seemed one too many cruelties. Was there anyone who needed such headphones more, anyone who could afford them less?
And soon Eve found herself drifting to the back of the place, following the circuit her boys used to make when she’d bring them there for an hour of consumerist envy. As if an antidote to the antediluvian way they lived at Zion’s Pastures, Charlie and Oliver had always wanted to bathe themselves in the cool blue light of high-end electronics, run their hands over magical technologies that couldn’t be theirs. “Just imagine how much more quickly I could write,” Oliver once said, “If I had a computer like this.” Oliver had pointed to things that didn’t even look like computers to Eve, more like spacecraft for a race of diminutive aliens. She had always hoped to save enough money to present him one of these as a birthday present.
Today, when Eve put her hands on one of those portable computers, its cool curvilinear metal restored to her fingers that old feeling. It began as the most pitiful sort of indignity, that the object that could have made her son a little happier had been there in his hands but wholly inaccessible to him. She was equal parts indignant and grateful that all the laptops were securely tethered to their display table by those electronic ropes that Eve at least had the good sense never to mess with. She left the computer section behind and walked back to the front of the store. The brightness out the sliding doors was only a few yards away.
But there, on the glass-top customer service counter, a computer shone, in its cool silver promise, the exact model that she had just been fingering in the back of the store. It was noon, and the red-shirted employees were gathered behind an open door, eating their brown-bagged sandwiches. No one was looking at her at all.
And so Eve had to wonder: How could it not have been a test? The exact laptop she had been admiring, left for some reason unboxed and without security tags at customer service, whose employees were preoccupied by lunch. A part of her, of course, knew that it was no test, only a coincidence. But as she fixed her gaze on the brushed metal casing, it seemed to have come down to this, as it always did. Did she believe in her son’s future or not? Did she still believe in that better future, the one she had never quite been able to give her boys, in which they could have whatever it was they needed? Would she take the plunge, follow her conviction, or obey the opinions of the world and let Oliver rot? And could it have been a coincidence that the present symbol of this dilemma, the object in question, was a computer on which Oliver might someday begin the career he had imagined? And would—
One of the red shirts in the break room stood, began to wad his paper sack. Eve didn’t have time to consider. She watched her hands clutch the laptop by its perfect sculpted corner and slip it into the wide maroon leather purse that, three years prior, she had selected from a rack at Sears to assist in her thieving. She was already back in the dense, hot air outside before she regained control of her body and commanded it to take a breath.
“You’re okay,” she said.
*
Eve was driving, trembling, on the far side of the speed limit down the sun-hammered highway. Her purse was on the passenger’s seat, some light embedded in the metallic casing glowing in the rhythm of deep sleep. Eve knew enough about computers to know this meant the machine was still on, in sleep mode, and she panicked as if it were a living thing, a kidnapped child snatched from his crib who would cry out when he woke in this strange car. She reached for the purse straps and tossed the bag into the backseat. Down the highway, a dust devil manically wrote its signature over the cracked concrete.
Eve’s body registered the outward manifestations of shame for what she’d just done—the fiery forehead, the excoriating blush—but inwardly this shame went unacknowledged. How was it, even still, that Jed was not present to keep her from becoming the kind of toxic person who could swipe someone’s computer? Oh, on a day like today, she needed chaos, upheaval, a breach, and she wasn’t done yet. Forty minutes later, Eve found herself turning Goliath through the streets of the town she most despised in the five thousand square miles of the Big Bend.
And Eve soon discovered that the ironic smugness that was Marfa, Texas, had only deepened in the years since she last visited. The old derelict warehouses and big-rig filling stations were now done up like urban lofts, all windows and poured concrete, a few meaningless studies of geometric forms visible in their wide, otherwise empty innards. At lunchtime, some sort of hipster commissary, next to the old train station, served the bearded, tattooed, hardware-studded populace out of a battered taco truck. In front of the Victorian courthouse—a limestone, cupola-festooned building out of a storybook of Old Time Texas—stood a temporary sculpture park, the centerpiece of which was a twenty-foot cast-iron statue, in the rough-hewn style of Auguste Rodin, of a human vagina. A man wearing a knit cap and a modish woman’s librarian glasses presently emerged from the labial folds of this monstrosity, waving to a girl with a camera. The guy was shouting something as if there were an emergency. “It’s a boy!”
So this was where her husband chose to live. In their few “dinners,” Eve always brought Jed back with her to Desert Splendor, and she dreaded now to see how her husband might be living, a feral creature wallowing in the muck of his own wrecked life.