“His pill bottle bulged against his hip when he moved, and its quiet rattle routed his thoughts. He crossed the beach and sat near Annie, looking at her maybe too long. She looked back, arching a single eyebrow and saying nothing. She was wearing a knee-length denim skirt, a snug-fitting T-shirt with the NASA logo on the front, and smelled faintly of perfume. She was still holding her right leg, and now he saw why: a deep gash was ripped from her ankle halfway up the side of her shin, and already its ragged, flower-petal contours had gone muddy with sand. The blanket was speckled with blood, and so too was a nearby hunk of limestone.”
The sky was breathing its last pink and silver-blue gasps when he finally stumbled out to the patio, and everything on the ground had gone black in shadow, daylight slipping into oblivion and dragging all else along with it.
He caught the glint of Annie’s wheelchair along the beach, but she wasn’t in it. Without her, the chair attained a kind of permanence. Nearby she was half-lying on a bath towel and holding her leg. She was just a shadow puppet, colors gone, details indistinct—a figure in passage.
He almost waved but thought better of it—she didn’t have her binoculars with her, nor her books or maps, and was just sitting there staring at the green-cobalt water, at nothing. And though he couldn’t really tell from here, it seemed maybe she’d been crying—she had that look about her, the extra downward-sloping creases beneath her eyes, the sad up-curve of the brow.
His stomach cramped and for a second he thought he might throw up again. The urge passed, though, and he staggered toward Annie without thinking, his ankles aching from the uneven sand. He winced at the taste in his mouth.
His pill bottle bulged against his hip when he moved, and its quiet rattle routed his thoughts. He crossed the beach and sat near Annie, looking at her maybe too long. She looked back, arching a single eyebrow and saying nothing. She was wearing a knee-length denim skirt, a snug-fitting T-shirt with the NASA logo on the front, and smelled faintly of perfume. She was still holding her right leg, and now he saw why: a deep gash was ripped from her ankle halfway up the side of her shin, and already its ragged, flower-petal contours had gone muddy with sand. The blanket was speckled with blood, and so too was a nearby hunk of limestone.
He stared at the water whose darkness drank away the sky, and a few stars, over-eager, glimmered hopefully, mirroring the lights of boats floating lazy as driftwood near the horizon. A cool wind breathed out from the swelling night, and he pulled his arms close to his bare chest for warmth. His lips twitched for a cigarette that wasn’t there. There was a pack in his other pocket, empty enough to hold his lighter. It was crushed now, and the three or four remaining cigarettes had spilled some of their tobacco. He lit one of the wilted things, letting it dangle sad and forgotten from his parted lips. He hardly breathed.
“I’ll have one of those,” Annie mumbled, not looking at him, not looking at the water, not looking at anything.
He gave her one and passed the lighter. She lit it with an amateur’s precision, concentrating too hard and overcalculating everything.
“You don’t smoke,” he said.
“Yeah, well…” She shrugged and fingered her wound with her free hand. “I think I fucked up. Had a little … spill?”
“You might wanna wrap that,” he said, pointing at her leg.
“Right. Because I brought surgical gauze with me.”
He was about to ask whether or not it hurt but stopped himself. Instead:
“Sister not back?”
“No.”
She coughed and dabbed her leg with the blanket. Steadying herself with one hand, she used the other to drag her knees up to her face. Her cigarette hung limp from her mouth in precarious balance. For the next several moments she struggled to arrange her legs, striving for an impossible pose and wincing at the effort. Finally she settled into a half-reclining position, though she couldn’t have been as comfortable as she tried to look; after all, she still needed one hand on the ground to keep from toppling.
“I haven’t even heard from her,” she eventually said. “Every time this happens, I’m always like, ‘well, this is it, it’s finally over,’ and then she just shows back up again. But sooner or later I’m gonna be right.” She sighed. “Hopefully not this time.”
She regarded her blood-smeared leg.
“Motherfucker…”
“That might need stitches,” he said, just to say something. Fever pains were freezing through his body, and he just sat there and shut his eyes, too tired even to go back inside.
“It’s not really bleeding anymore,” she mumbled.
“I’d have it looked at.”
She only grunted, offered her cigarette to the mendicant wind. He groaned and stretched himself out on the beach grass, shutting out the sky and the beach and letting the surf exhaust itself at the sand. Between each thrust of the evening tide he nursed a great silence, sharing it with Annie in meager almsgiving. After a while he wondered if he were sleeping.
“I’m sorry about your wife,” she said.
He opened his eyes and lapsed into a coughing fit that seemed to blur the stars.
“I mean, I didn’t mean to sound so rude about it last night.”
“You’re fine,” he croaked, finally feeling the sand caked in layers to his skin, the pestilent scratch of the grass.
“Well, I don’t know.” A shrug was audible in her voice. “Was it an accident?”
“No.”
He heard her draw in a breath and hold it, maybe sustaining her body’s tension or confirming some suspicion she’d made days ago.
“Sorry,” she said, exhausting the word with caged breath. “I just—well—it seems like it’s always a car accident.”
“It wasn’t an accident.”
Annie sniffed and nodded. She seemed to understand.
“So what are you gonna do about those photos now?” Her voice was nearly snuffed out by a resounding wave.
“What photos?”
“The—whole reason you came here?”
“Oh.” He relaxed more fully and lay spreadeagled on the beach, as if he were trying to keep afloat on quicksand. “They wouldn’t have let me anywhere near the ship anyway. It was just an excuse to go somewhere.”
“You could’ve gone somewhere else.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
He felt himself drifting off. Annie seemed distant, the water frighteningly near yet also compassionately so—redolent of dreams and peaceful skies, childish distances measured from sleep to a quiet, floating ecstasy. But Annie was still talking—his lone annoyance now. He tried not to listen, but her tone was insistent.
“…can you hear me?”
He groaned like child woken too early for school and tried to wave her away. But she kept on, and when he opened his eyes again she was dragging herself toward him, digging her fists deep into the sand, eyes nightmare-narrow, indecipherable.
“I thought you were dead for a second,” she said.
“I wasn’t.”
For a moment she didn’t respond. She seemed more nervous now—brushing her bangs out of the way, rubbing a knee with her free hand. Night had moved up from the water in all its implacable ink; stars reproduced like hatching fireflies; myriad light spilled and sloshed along the tide like a long splash of milk.
“So it’s another day and you’re still here, eh?” she was saying.
“Looks like it.”
“It’s the girl, isn’t it.”
He sighed, massaged his forehead, grit his teeth.
“Annie—”
“Isn’t it?”
He said nothing and stared at the black water and black sky looking for a horizon, some division by which he might separate himself from the risible world.
“I don’t know why else anyone would stay here,” she mumbled to herself, wounded by his quiet. “I don’t know how any of it works. Like, how you did it.”
“What?”
“Like—you don’t even know this girl, you don’t see her any more often than you see me, probably, and—I don’t know—some hormonal exchange or mating signals or something? None of it makes any sense to me. Was it just—one second, you’re sitting there watching her clean your room, then suddenly you’re in bed with her, or what?”
He sat up, brushed the dust from his hair, and stared at her. She was sitting bolt upright, her bloody legs pointed outward at angles that should have been uncomfortable. When the wind freed her ruffled hair from her eyes, he saw how swollen they were, how red—had she been crying? She hid it well. And her NASA shirt—the white ellipse and billowing red chevron looked pathetic over the knoll of her breasts, the looming shadow of her sad posture. He wasn’t sure what to say.
“I could go for a piña colada right about now,” she was mumbling by some winding way of apology. She gathered up her leg and squinted; in the dark the wound was a black ravine, dewy in summer moisture. “Maybe you could help me wrap this up.”
“Wash it out.” He scratched his back and his skin was leprous with sand. “Let me know when you’re ready. I just—” He pointed to the motel. “—I need a shower first.”
“I might need a hand getting back into my chair.”
“Sure.” He climbed dizzy to his feet and for a second the world went darker, though he was able to shake it off. He brought her chair over and she had him crouch beside, where she used his shoulder for leverage and hoisted herself up and in. She panted with the effort and his shoulder was sore and hot where she’d squeezed it.
“That’s always embarrassing.”
“You’re all right.”
“When you’re ready you can just come over.”
He nodded and misted back into the womb-like dark of his room, tripping over debris as he went, half-expecting that stupid cleaning girl to be waiting on his bed, relieved that she wasn’t. But he couldn’t get her trembling warmth out of his head, or the ghost of her hands off his body. He showered and masturbated and for a while stared at his naked, gray-skinned reflection in the mirror, his body shivering and pallid and wet like some dying aquatic thing brought to shore by a passing lakestorm.
Later he found himself waiting on Annie’s patio, only barely remembering why. He tottered on the concrete trying not to fall, torturing his thoughts to silence. He sat on the edge of the slab, struggled to stay awake, counted the stars and the wistful patience they let sway across the water. He felt like Annie were watching him from inside the room—her eyes another compact constellation—and when she finally spoke her voice was nearer than it should’ve been, as if she’d been lurking there the whole time.
“You can come in if you want.”
He staggered to his feet and limped inside. There was a heaviness to the air that upset his stomach, a smell of fermentation and sweat that hung there and rotted, mingling strangely with the dust and clutter, the two unmade beds, the papers and empty bottles littering the floor. In a corner a small pile of suitcases spilled their contents like the guts of slaughtered infantry. The only light came from the television and the reading lamp directly opposite, hourglassing the floor in blue and gold.
“Sorry about the mess.” Her voice moved to a staccato clip, as if she were frightened. “But Natalie kinda sucks at her job, doesn’t she?” She laughed, but it was a flimsy little sound.
“You know her name?”
“She’s got a nametag, you know.”
He grunted and sat at the edge the nearest bed, and she wheeled around to face him, hands tight on the grips. She looked like she were trying to smile.
“I still don’t get it.”
“Annie, really—”
“No, not you, just—you know, people.” She sighed, looked away. “I don’t even have any friends, really, and somehow everyone else is just able to—I don’t know—it’s like there’s a wall around me all the time.”
He squeezed the mattress edge and stared at the carpet, covered in maps real and improvised. Near his left foot was a Michigan map scribbled over and vivisected, political borders erased and replaced by boundaries more inscrutable. He counted a dozen or so sketches of Amelith from various angles and perspectives, each a revision of the one before, some treated more reverently than others, some rum-stained and rumpled where she’d wheeled over them. Each was oriented around the quarry.
“But you probably wanna get this over with,” she mumbled, snatching a towel off the floor. “I don’t really know the best way to do this, but I figure we can maybe use this.” She held up the towel between two fingers like she were holding a soiled garment. “It’s kinda clean.
“Sure.”
He cut the towel in strips and knelt down before her chair, close enough to breathe in her scent—perfume, sweat, water, deodorant, a whisk of smoke—close enough to feel the warmth of her undernourished body. He lifted her leg up by the ankle and examined the wound, a wine-colored valley snaking up her atrophied calf. It was deeper than he expected, more violent. Her leg was rubbery and unresponsive in his hand.
“How did you say this happened?”
“I fell and caught it on a rock.”
“How? This isn’t just a little scrape.” He placed her leg back on the footrest, wincing at the limp cant of her ankle. “The bone could be broken.”
She let out an annoyed sigh.
“Does it feel broken?” she said. “Feel it.”
He grazed his fingertips slow along the back of her calf, up and down and back again, not really knowing what he was looking for. Her leg was just dead, meaningless flesh—he didn’t know what to make of it—shiny and beveled from a recent shave, sick summer heat like pavement in the sun, like his stomach-rot fever.
“I don’t know,” he said, still tracing his fingers along her skin. “I don’t feel anything.”
“It can’t be broken. I’d know somehow. It doesn’t look broken.”
He let his hands rest there, his mind on Maggie. Sweat gathered in tides along his forehead, and he wondered what she would say about all of this, if he could only exist in her judgment, if it were her scorn that gave him life. He lost himself in her memory, and there was something about the way Annie’s leg felt in his hands—he nearly mistook it for Maggie’s, almost held it to his lips and kissed her bloody calf. But he checked himself.
“It’s probably fine,” Annie was saying, her voice quavering. “It’s just a cut, anyway.”
“Still want me to wrap it up?”
“Might as well.”
He took her ankle in his hand and balanced her unmoving foot on his knee. He mummified her lower leg with towel strips, tying them in place with a knot that probably wouldn’t hold. He set her leg back on the footrest.
“Thanks.”
He nodded and returned to the bedside, unsure what to do next. Somehow Annie felt like more of a stranger in her own room, into which she’d unpacked her entire life in paper and ink, a nest of maps at once standing in for the real world and insulating her from it. He thought it absurd that she’d ever been anywhere else.
“You’re not leaving until they throw you out,” she said, her words more startling than they should have been. “I can tell. I think I know how you feel.”
“Yeah?”
He looked at her. She was smoothing out the folds in her NASA shirt and staring at one map in particular, which, though crosscut and ragdolled by her cryptic markings, appeared to be Quebec.
“This doesn’t even feel real anymore. Like I’ll just wake up in my bedroom with a hangover and a movie going or something.” She sighed and fingered her leg dressings. “This is another planet. Or maybe—” She paused and hiked up her skirt, hoisted and turned her right leg to see the bandaged calf. “—the middle of a supermassive black hole. Like we’re in the exact geographic center of the galaxy and we don’t even know it, except we can’t ever leave.”
“My car’s right outside. I can leave right now if I want.”
“Why don’t you?”
She wasn’t looking at him anymore. Instead she scrutinized her legs, repositioned them, adjusted her skirt, tugging it higher.
“You’re not going to. But whatever.” She looked up and met his eyes. “Anyway, I think my sister’s dead. I’m pretty sure. She hasn’t answered her phone since she left.”
“She’s fine.” It was just something to say.
“Marooned in the center of the galaxy,” she said, smirking sarcastically and grazing her fingertips up and down her thighs in a masturbatory gesture Danny didn’t understand. He couldn’t gauge her mood anymore. “Make the most of it, I guess?”
“She’s probably fine,” he said in an effort to worm his way out of the conversation. “Someone would have contacted you if something happened. People know you’re here, right?”
“Don’t worry about it. This happened so many times that—” She bit her lip and stared out the window. For a long moment he wasn’t sure she’d continue. “—when it actually does happen I probably won’t even care.”
He essayed a yawn but a coughing fit choked him off.
“I don’t feel real anymore,” she said. “Stuck in Amelith is like being dead. Or nonattachment or something.”
“There’s someone you could call for a ride.”
“Yeah.” She leaned back and deflated herself with a sigh. “But I kinda like not being real. And I’m not really looking for advice here.”
He wasn’t even sure if she were complaining or what.
“I know you’re staying because of the girl. All I ever hear anymore is you guys going at it. It’s to the point where it’s weird when I don’t hear you.”
“We don’t need to talk about this.”
“It’s just—” She paused a moment, leaned lapward, and picked at the hem of her skirt. “—it’s all so weird to me.”
He didn’t have the energy to respond, to tell her she’d been saying the same thing over and over since he’d met her. His head dropped to his hands, and his palms bristled against the sand in his three-day beard. His sunburned cheeks felt taut and crinkly, and he thought only of home, though the word had shed all associations.
“I don’t know,” she was saying, still. “I’ve never had sex. I don’t get it. It seems so violent.”
“You’re not missing much.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
Outside the front door the ice machine grumbled like a stomach complaint; they both started at the noise.
“I bet you’re really uncomfortable right now,” she said. “But the fact that I can always hear you guys—it’s like an invitation to talk about it, isn’t it? Otherwise you’d try to be quieter.”
He yawned, ran a hand through his hair, and let his eyelids close to crescents.
“You’re all right,” he grunted.
“Sorry. Sometimes I just assume.”
“You’re fine.”
She moved backward and turned, crunching over an Ontario map. She was still fiddling with her skirt and she hiked it up a little further.
“I could really go for some more rum,” she mumbled. “You don’t have any, do you?”
“No. Just whiskey.”
She made a noise of disgust.
“I can’t drink that stuff. My sister tried getting me into it, but—I don’t know. I can’t do it. I like rum. Whiskey doesn’t—what’s the word—evoke anything for me. It’s just blah, you know? With rum—” She let out a pleasant sigh. “—it’s the whole new world, old ships, desert islands, all that. Barbados and Port Royal, places like that?”
“I just drink it.”
“Well, right, but do you at least see where I’m coming from here?”
“Maybe.”
“Fine, just—I don’t know.” She curled half her mouth and narrowed her eyes, adjusted her glasses. “I feel like if I don’t keep talking about stupid trivial things I’ll start crying again.”
“You’re all right.”
“You keep saying that. I don’t think it really means anything.”
“Maybe not.”
Her cheeks were rosy from a light sunburn, and the red created on her face the mirage of a smile.
“It makes me uncomfortable when people just say things like that—you know, talk without saying anything. You never know when they’re listening.”
“I should probably just go,” he said, yawning once more. “I’m about to fall asleep in this bed here.”
“You can if you want to,” she murmured, each word teetering from her mouth and at the edge of regret.
“I could use the company.”
“I’m going back.”
He wobbled to his feet and approached the door, catching his hand on the edge and leaning there like something incomplete, his face close enough to fog the glass, one foot off the ground and the other balanced between glass and carpet. Annie’s reflection was smeared on the pane, and he watched her sit there and drum her fingers on the armrests, watching him, her mouth quivering. She’d taken her glasses off, and her face was a rose garden of humiliation blooming with hothouse rigor. He wasn’t sure if he should turn around.
“Thanks for the help,” she managed, though her voice was just a strangled squeak.
He checked the reflection again and thought he saw the bandagework already coming undone.
“Any time.”
He didn’t turn back, and when he returned to his own room he collapsed into bed without even sliding the door shut.
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