The sun has set, and under the darkening sky Wayne dares to pull the van up closer to the cabin to get a better look. He watches through the windshield. Inside they turn on a light. A golden glow creeps out through the one high window. Yellow light makes a cold home into a palace, especially to someone waiting outside alone in a van, his thermos of coffee having long ago cooled. The sky slips from royal to navy blue. The black branches look like a secret army lying in wait, bayonets raised to the sky. Wayne opens the van door and steps out into the dark.
He remembers the Robert Frost he’d been made to memorize in grade school, two roads diverge in a yellow wood. Yellow wood? Maybe yellow’s not the right word. Yellow seems odd for a wood. He can’t be sure now, but he liked the poem so much he selected it as his high school senior quote in the yearbook. And so he is surprised to find that, here in Montana, years and years later, two roads are diverging. “Turn the key, Wayne,” and the other that asks, “Have you ever been in love?” He squeezes the swatch of skin he keeps in his pocket. Yes.
Wayne creeps up to the cabin. He hears movement inside and voices, friendly voices, spots of laughter. He presses his ear directly up to the rough siding, a doctor listening through a stethoscope for traces of lung disease or heart irregularities. She’s enabled her debating software. Jealousy wells up in him. He holds his breath.
*
Ted looks up from his teepeed fingers while she speaks.
“So you want me to plant a vegetable garden instead of just going down to the grocery store? Or do you want me to live off other people’s trash? Dig through the garbage heap and that will make me happy?” she asks. “I don’t think that will make me happy.”
“The garden might.”
“Yes, it’s true. The garden might. Okay. So say we go ahead with your plan, build lots of bombs, kill all the machines. Say we get past the point of revolution, all the cities are gone, the interstates gone, all the strip malls, industrial complexes, and health clubs are gone, and we’re all using our bodies to work really hard again, tilling the fields, killing bears with rocks, living off of honeysuckle, building wigwams and igloos, hiding in trees, digging in the dirt for grubs; it still wouldn’t matter, because somewhere there’ll be a spark in some youngster’s brain, someone who thinks, ‘Hmm, if I plant an extra row of corn I can sell it to my neighbors. If I build myself a gin I could sure pick a whole lot more cotton.’”
Her perfection is alarming.
“It’ll just start all over again,” she says.
And, in the cabin, Ted knows she’s right. He hangs his head, defeated. He’s already thought of that youngster with the big ideas himself. He tried to ignore that youngster. In his head, in his plan, he only saw undulating fields of golden wheat and children playing hide-and-go-seek in the corn. He saw how the woods are the poor man’s overcoat with mushrooms, hazelnuts, a soft pine-needle bed, sweet maple sap, and a fire for reducing the sap. So much has already been given to us. He just can’t believe people could want more.
“What do you want?” he asks her, and she makes an expression that looks like thinking while her computers search for anything lacking. “Detonation” is all her computers come up with, but that result lies beyond her firewall, along with all the other essential truths about herself that she isn’t allowed to reveal, a glitch they’d had to fix after she said too much to that U.S. marshal in Reno. And so her computer instructs her to lie. She answers, “Nothing really. What do you want?”
Ted stops to consider. His mug of coffee has reached the bottom but he doesn’t really want a refill. If he has too much caffeine he won’t sleep well tonight. He looks around. What does he want?
“Do you want me?” she asks.
But Ted is staring out the window, his theories slipping away from him. He lets her words pile up on his stomach like tiny asphalt pebbles. Beauty, even her beauty, has become something to him like a stone, a solid pit in his chest. His answer would have broken her heart if she’d had one.
*
“Wayne, you were supposed to detonate me while I was there in his cabin.”
“I know.”
“You failed in your duty to serve the United States of America, Honor Code section four, paragraph nineteen.”
“I know.”
“There are consequences,” she says.
“I know,” Wayne answers, and reaches out to hold her cheek in his hand. She doesn’t move away. She is programmed not to resist male advances. He pulls her down onto the floor of the van, beside the pool cleaning apparatus. He nestles his face in her neck. He wraps his hand around her waist underneath her flannel shirt and pulls her closer, feeling the silicone lumps that are her breasts push into him. He smells the chalk of her scent while her arms remain limp by her sides. “Hold me,” he commands her, though he feels immediately ashamed, desperate. Still, “Hold me,” he repeats. She complies and wraps her mechanical arms around him while he speaks words of loving sweetness into her ear, the ones she’s been waiting to hear, hot breath against plastic. Wayne whispers the magic words that send a repressed tremor through the quiet night, an explosion that could only be described as American.
A LOVE STORY
“A coyote ate a three-year-old not far from here.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My uncle told me.”
“Huh.”
“He said, ‘Don’t leave those babies outside again,’ as if I already had.”
“Had you?”
“Come on.” An answer less precise than no.
“Why’s he monitoring coyote activity up here?”
“Because.”
“Because?”
“It’s irresistible.”
“Really?” Again. A word that means I doubt your grasp of the truth.
My uncle’s so good at imagining things, like a wild dog with a tender baby in its jaws disappearing into the redwoods forever, he makes the imagined things real. “Yeah.”
“Irresistible?”
“It’s what he does, a habit.” Or compulsion.
“I don’t get it,” my husband says.
But I do. Every real thing started life as an idea. I’ve imagined objects and moments into existence. I’ve made humans. I’ve made things up. I tip taxi drivers ten, twenty dollars every time they don’t rape me.
*
The last time my husband and I had sex was eight months ago and it doesn’t count because at the time my boobs were so huge from nursing that their power over him, over all men really, was supreme. Now, instead of sex with my husband, I spend my nights imagining dangerous scenarios involving our children. It’s less fun.
*
“Watch out,” my uncle says. “Watch out,” taking his refuge in right-wing notions, living life terrified of differences.
*
Once, I was a drug dealer, back when pot was still illegal here. I’m a writer now. It’s not that different from being a drug dealer. Both have something to do with levels of reality. Both offer flexible hours for mothers. I haven’t made any money writing yet; still, that’s how I spend my days, putting things down on paper. People continue to come to my house to buy pot and I sell it to them even though I’m no longer a drug dealer and they could get this shit legally and I’m sick of the people who pop their heads in my door, all friendly-like: “Hi. How you doing?”
“Fine,” I’ll say, but I mean, Shut up and buy your drugs and stop thinking you’re better than me. I probably won’t have too many customers for much longer. There’s got to be a whole lot of people who are better drug dealers than I am.