Midsummer in Kansas City. The atmosphere is thick with everything it absorbs: cut grass and roasting coffee beans and sweat and sudden thunderstorms, yard beers and grilled burgers. Breathing in heat-warped asphalt air above the sticky blacktop makes my lungs lurch and strain, an environment for gills.
I scan the parking lot for Audra’s car but don’t find it. She’s the catalyst in this re-initiation ritual. I’m rejoining the world after a long hiatus following a breakup in the spring that’s left me reckless and numb. The place she’s chosen is all glass and angles, a transformed automobile showroom. I spot Audra’s new girlfriend arriving with a tattooed guy as my phone pings:
running late. mags + dave joining us.
Audra’s new girlfriend is called Maggie; she walks like she’s on her way to a fight. Dave is bald, partially by choice, and has lots of tattoos. I don’t know either of them very well.
Maggie recognizes me, and they approach like we’re old friends. We make light conversation in the parking lot: local bands, recent concerts. We decide to go in to get out of the heat. As we cross the pavement, sun in my eyes, Maggie says: “You roll?” as soberly as if she were asking, Do you have any siblings?
My pursuit of uprightness—always ending in destruction—has not prepared me for this conversation. I’ve just turned twenty-eight and harbor a growing and malignant disaffection for virtue. Today I feel invincible. I lower my sunglasses and stare right into her. “I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity.”
Inside, the air-conditioning has turned my fingernails violet. We’ve killed the first round, and Audra still hasn’t shown up. Maggie grins at me while she signals the waitress, dimples so severe they look painful. “I think it’s fate we met.”
A few weeks later, after she’d broken it off with Audra, I lie supine beneath a window while industrial music pipes through Maggie’s downtown loft. In the dim first light and birdsong, we experience a primal bond, the effects of the XTC and the scent of flowering magnolia trees rippling through the burst of summer outside.
—
Six months later, Maggie is on edge as she completes medical school and interviews for residency placement. On an evening hinting at spring, we join a handful of friends playing pool near my midtown apartment and close it down. Maggie isn’t steady on her feet when we leave.
In the months since our first meeting, I’ve found Maggie prone to overindulge. I’m in love and make excuses. She’s stressed; there’s a lot going on.
I knew exactly what I was choosing in Maggie. She had been transparent about her violent and chaotic past. Her brilliant mind is what made me fall, but the invincible attitude was ceaselessly intoxicating. She possessed me; our paths aligned. In spite of very different origins and goals, we became inseparable, immune to misfortune in spite of how we tempted fate.
Walking back to my place, she keeps stopping to rant. I keep asking myself why I didn’t drive. She would rage into the night alone if I left her. I have just gotten her moving again when a lowrider approaches slowly, shouting and laughing people hanging out of the windows. It sounds festive at first, loud and boisterous and musical.
As the car passes, my blood goes cold. Slurs flung like so many stones: “Dykes! Si se esconden iremos por ustedes!” If you hide we will come for you!
Our invincibility has run out. The threat pierces the air; we are the target, the bull’s-eye. The car screeches away, but I see it down the street making a U-turn, and now it’s speeding toward us again.
I try to pull Maggie through the dark parking lot of a vintage clothing store, locked tight, when the car skids in front of us and I feel pebbles spray against my shins. A thick-limbed woman with a braid like a bullwhip jumps out of the car before it has stopped. She is wielding a baseball bat and swings it hard at Maggie. The urgency and immediacy of the attack paralyze me.
In my memory, the rest happens in slow motion. People are shouting, but it sounds like we are underwater, like sea creatures screaming at each other, the echo of command and desperation bobbing and pinging against my eardrums. I look into the car through the open passenger door. From the driver’s seat, a large, bearded man is staring at me. He has beautiful curls, glossy and black. I stare back, and as my gaze deepens, I see the shiny metal of a gun he points at me. I close my eyes and turn my head, breathless and terrified. I wait like a coward for my execution—immobilized, suspended. When nothing happens, I open my eyes and see the bat swing again. Maggie falls to the pavement.
In the next moment, flashing lights, red and white, illuminate everything. I discover someone has been holding my arms behind my back when they set me free, and I stumble forward. I see silhouettes jumping into the car, spooked, and the attackers speed off.
I am dazed, stuck in slow motion as if waking from a dream. If it weren’t for Maggie crumpled on the ground ten paces away, I might think I had just imagined it.
The driver of the tow truck with the lights stands nearby, a sentry, chivalrous and scared. I cradle Maggie, a swelling mass like a large fist on her forehead, and there is blood coming out of her ear. My skirt becomes crimson where her head is resting. I’m unsure how I came to be sitting on the pavement from the place I was just standing, and I am missing a shoe.
Maggie’s eyes are fluttering, her eyeballs rolling in strange, elliptical directions as if they have come unattached. She speaks but makes no sense. My body begins to shake.
At the emergency room, two officers arrive minutes after us. I’ve just begun speaking with the admitting nurse, and the officers demand to know why I didn’t call them to the scene of the crime. They can’t take a statement from Maggie, and they won’t take a statement from me because the crime didn’t happen to you.
Maggie is taken for a head scan, and the police leave with our contact information. They will go to the scene to look for evidence. It doesn’t feel right, the way this is going, but I can’t seem to access the part of me that would know what to do. I sit across from a humming vending machine and wait.
I don’t know if minutes pass or hours. A doctor comes to explain to me what they have found: torn eardrum, concussion. No bleeding in the brain, but they give me a list of warning signs and a strong dose of caution. I have to make her rest for a week.
She is discharged; it is quiet and nonceremonial. As I begin to usher her to the taxi, a frazzled-looking woman in a crumpled jacket bursts through the reception door and fixes her gaze on us. She approaches directly but not in a threatening way.
She’s a detective following leads related to a gang-initiation ritual that has been taking place in recent months in the downtown and midtown area. Several people have been killed. She wants to talk to me tomorrow and Maggie too, if she’s able. She hands me her card, and her look makes me realize how bad it could have been.
Maggie doesn’t tell her family what happened right away. Friends don’t stop over as often as I thought they might. Journalists harass me at home and at work, and there is a candlelight vigil in my neighborhood.
In the first days after, away from everyone, she is vulnerable as a kitten. The dragon she shows the rest of the world has transformed before me. But only those few days. By the time she’s back on her feet and going to work, she rushes to the whiskey and weed as soon as she walks in the door and doesn’t stop until she’s passed out.
I drag her to a psychologist so that we can talk about the attack. I want to discuss why it happened and how it has impacted us. Maggie pouts next to me on the sofa. “I’m fine,” she says. The psychologist looks at me helplessly as we stand up to leave.
When she decides to finally come out to her mom a few months later, her mother tells her that the attack was God’s way of punishing her, and she should expect more of the same.
—
Two months later, I move to Boston with Maggie. There is a heat wave, and the two-bedroom walk-up on Union Park we have rented is sweltering; an ancient and dripping air conditioner hums but does little else. It’s difficult to sleep, and the apartment feels hollow. The first night we sleep on a futon, like squatters. The light from a streetlamp casts accusing shadows.
The wife of a fellow psychiatry resident, who also lives on the street, takes me shopping: shelving and kitchen supplies, a rug, some pillows. I try to talk to her about what happened to us but can’t find the words. She invites Maggie and me to dinner.
It begins to feel like sort of a home. Or a dollhouse we’re putting together. Maggie stocks the liquor cabinet and scores a few joints. I miss my friends and the familiarity of the life I left behind. When I say this to Maggie, she tells me that she can’t do this without me.
A few weeks after the heat wave, I marry Maggie in a minuscule justice of the peace ceremony in an overgrown garden in Provincetown. It smells like rain and anise. Such elegant dresses, such beautiful flowers, people honking and waving and congratulating us until the wee hours of the morning when I, once again and for the first time, help my wife to where the two of us will be safe for the night.
I tried to believe this milestone might jump-start things and move us in the right direction. It seemed like a grown-up thing to do, and I wanted us to behave like grown-ups now. For all that wanting, ours had become a bond of desperation, of frantic searching, hungry to make contact with security in each other based on nothing more than a constant race, daring each other over and over to leave with the risks we took.
At the end of the summer, she begins her rotations. The schedule is brutal and requires a high level of physical, mental, and emotional stamina. She’s not around much, and I have trouble reading her facial expressions when she is. Maggie assures me she can handle the pace. I know what I’m doing.
A year after we arrive in Boston, I discover pills in her pants pocket. When I confront her with what I’ve found (I already looked them up: Onsolis. Fentanyl), she rolls her eyes at me.
“No, Maggie.” My voice trembling, I hold out the pills, tiny and unassuming in my palm. She glares at me as a traitor.
Our life in Boston has been an endless stream of parties, nights out at clubs, dinners and drinks that turn into parties, and nights out at clubs. I’ve found my way into a good-enough job, started a garden. I try to hold our pieces together, but they pull apart, paths diverging.
She begins to go out alone after the pills. One of the first times, she loses her way to the train station she was to have walked to with a friend. She phones me while crouched under a bush half a mile from where she should have been. I hear the heckler’s call from down the street as I help her into the car. Later, she urinates in the recycling bin in the pantry.
It’s easier to go with her. One night, after the recycling bin, we join some friends for dinner near our apartment. Before the first plates arrive, she has ordered a second cocktail. By the time the meal is over, she is incoherent. I am, again, the recipient of pitying glances as she stumbles from the restroom, a long sheet of tissue flowing behind her, sticking out of the back of her pants like a tail.
I begin to see clearly the ways in which a life can weaken when not tended well. Nobody is invincible.
As our second winter in Boston begins, Maggie completes a rotation in a locked ward. Her last shift ends at midnight, and she is determined to go to a house party. I try to talk her out of it. Come home, have a nice bath, I’ll rub your back. My invitation is ineffective. I agree to drive.
I go to pick her up and see her waiting. She is reading, her bent head still and illuminated by a fluorescent streetlamp. The bench she sits on is encased in a glass shelter, a frozen wave of gray slush smashed against the street-facing pane. She looks up and waves. As she gets in the car, she leans in close. “Hey, baby,” and a light kiss. Her eyes tell me she’s already using. She smells like antiseptic and mint.
At the party, people are draped across furniture, engaged in private conversations. It is dark and strangely quiet. Somewhere, something is buzzing quietly. Delicate trance music is playing, and a wispy couple dances alone in the center of the living room. Maggie goes to join them.
I find some friends playing poker in the basement; they wave me over. I buy in, and someone hands me a drink. Nobody asks about Maggie.
Several hours pass, and I’m tired. I stand up to go in search of her. Each room, the same people-heap but no wife. She’s often the last one standing, lost in a fiery monologue, eyes rolling about, daring the ghosts around her to disagree.
But this time she’s in the bathroom, and it’s locked. The hostess, rumpled and wasted, appears at my shoulder. She was asking for you. She puts a key in my hand and shuffles off. I see no light under the door. No sound comes from within. I knock lightly, shave and a haircut. Stumbling, cursing, then a crash against the door that makes me jump back a step.
The door remains shut, and now it’s quiet. In a few hours, my mobile will start issuing work demands. I put the key in the lock and hear the deadbolt drag its purposeful way back into the door. Her left cheek is pressed to the floor. “When did you get here?” she slurs, staring at me, blankly. Bitter resentment rises in my throat.
—
The sun is coming up when I parallel park on the street in front of our building. I get her to the sofa, put a clean shirt on her, and cover her with a quilt. I shower, get dressed, and make coffee. I stare down at her, so quiet and still, and the knowledge of what is contained in that flesh reduces my feelings to ash.
Someone once told me you can’t change an addict; you have to put up and shut up or walk away. I stand at the window drinking coffee and look into the future. I decide I am done with this now. A battle back I will face but not more of the same.
I return from work, and she is sitting up on the sofa, watching television. I turn it off and speak the words, the final ultimatum: Just tell me you know it’s a problem, just say it and we’ll get you help. She responds with an acid fury that pounds my every nerve. My limbs are concrete and won’t fight back. It goes on and on, and each word, each blow obliterates the last of the ragged tatters I’d once sewn to hold us together.
I sleep in a friend’s guest room that night. He opens the door, and his consoling expression changes to horror when he sees my bruised face. He spends several hours begging me to report Maggie. I weakly but steadfastly refuse. “She’ll lose her license.”
“She’s going to anyway,” he predicts.
One hundred roses, a pathetic display of excess that makes me feel alone and misunderstood, arrive at my office the next day. They smell like plastic, I used to say, wrinkling my nose when she would triumphantly hold up a bouquet at the flower market downtown. Maggie calls me at lunchtime, and I tell her I’m moving out.
I rent the third story of a neglected Queen Anne from a photographer/waitress who, along with her sketchy boyfriend, is eager for the extra cash. On cold mornings, willing myself to get out of bed, I remember: You were once certainbeyondadoubt that following your heart would ensure success in love.
How to fix this thing she-plus-me made? All my emotions were rubbed to tiny nubs, things that didn’t even have nerve endings anymore to feel. Some things break when put under extreme stress; others are transformed into something new. I hoped for myself the latter. Maggie lived steadfastly in her science, an unwavering belief in the body as machine. In her reality, she was the kind of thing that never changed, no matter what pressure she endured—superelastic. She still believed herself invincible and capable of snapping back from anything.
I hear stories from friends and former neighbors of cop cars and violence and drunken debauchery. Who was saving her from herself? We meet for lunch a few times on weekend afternoons, and she spends the time editing her story. My requirements for continued contact: get a shrink and get into a program. We both really only try halfway.
On a bleak evening in early March, we sit in my car in the South Station parking lot, watching the gray sky turn black. I’m dropping her off after a late afternoon walk around Castle Island. A streetlight flickers on and off as she tells me about the things that her psychologist thinks of me. It’s then I know I’m done. I’m done with her anger, and I’m done with her weaponized intelligence, and I’m done with the addiction dictating the way things go. Now, before resentment crests into revenge, I say the word divorce, and this time, the last time, I am unwavering.
The dark envelops our dance, disappearing into the crush of living. I’m not scared. When you’re liberated, no fear can stop you. “You’ll regret this,” she hisses as she slams the door.
The car is warm and quiet, and I think: No. I won’t.
In the early summer, I move back to the Midwest. I drive around country roads alone, satisfied in the silence with nothing to do and nowhere to go. When people ask how I’m doing, I have the urge to rip my chest open, tear their eyes from their sockets, and push them into me so they can see the devastation, how complicated it’s going to be to put back together. Divorce is nothing strange or special, yet this fact mocks the desperate, biting regret that remains.
For months I drive and drive and drive. Mostly to see friends now dispersed all over the country. Many of them never met Maggie, never lived in Kansas City or Boston. They take my side and soothe my heart. I sit around campfires and sing old songs, go to dive bars and sing new ones.
In November, nearly a year after that last violent night, a snowstorm hits fast as I make my way home. Somewhere west of Davenport, a buck of otherworldly size materializes out of the hypnotic white in front of me. My muscles tense and I touch the brakes, preparing to steer into the skid. I blink, just me and silence, and he’s gone, powerful enough to break the spell and save us both.
I settle down because something tells me I must. The settle becomes sedentary, and I wrap in the wool of winter and feel very little.
The holidays pass, followed by the gray cage of winter’s end in Iowa. I start to hear birds in the mornings, and then the lilacs bloom. Solitude and rest begin to knit me back together. Maggie still plagues me in my dreams from time to time; I lock her in a wooden box and try to shove it into a body of water. I wake in a sweaty, guilty panic, sure that my feet are muddy with evidence.
#
“Superelastic” first appeared in El Portal Literary Journal.