met knew my brother. He remembered my mom’s request that he find out why her son was driving this direction.
“Was he coming here to see you?”
She had asked herself this question. My mother had asked it too.
“He hasn’t done anything like that for years. I haven’t heard from him since last summer.”
“Any reason he might have decided to see you?”
“Really, I don’t think so.” Josh carefully maintained his distance for reasons she did not fully understand or want to share with a stranger.
“Did he know lots of people around here?”
“Yes. Josh was here off and on over the years.” Her limbs felt heavy. “Jude Bailey down at the co-op,” she answered. “He worked closely with Josh just last year.” She thought of Peña, his rage on the minister’s deck. She thought of Josh, the waters lapping over her again, and kept silent.
“So what drew people to him? What sort of preacher was he?”
“Preacher?” She reminded herself that this man probably needed more than bodywork to resolve his issues. “I wouldn’t know about that. You’d have to judge for yourself.”
“Myself? That’s not going to be easy. Joshua King is dead.”
Her breath tightened.
“True. But there are videos.”
It was work for her to talk, to concentrate on connecting.
“I’ve heard that you can watch Josh on the computer.” She’d been tempted to go online. She added, “but I don’t have a computer.”
“Not into technology?”
“Not into video technology. Not into computers.”
“Is it a religious thing, like the Amish?” Mikesh wondered if Josh required the material life of his followers to stop at the exit doorstep of the nineteenth century.
“No.”
“Just something you aren’t into?”
This man was pushing her. Her depression see-sawed into anger.
“It bothers me how people stare at another person on a screen in a way they would never do in the flesh. How a grown woman or man gazes longer and closer every day into the face of a news reader than into the eyes of their own life partner.”
She could see the man’s skepticism. She saw, with relief, that he was drawing back. She pushed.
“Doesn’t it bother you how boys spend their nights and weekends in front of a computer, killing . . . ”
She was sounding shrill. Her recent temptation to find a computer was making her talk, partly, to herself.
“How boys use them for games where they get points for deaths?”
“I can’t disagree with you,” Mikesh said, “but it’s not bad to catch up on the news. A boy doesn’t necessarily have to pretend that his keyboard is a gun.”
Mikesh’s earlier uneasy sense that there might be something unhinged or threatening about this woman was returning. She handed him a business card and a bill. He paid and left, and the door clicked shut behind him.
chapter 7
As the door clicked shut behind Mikesh, Mary closed her eyes. Once again she experienced the end of time. Not that the clocks stopped on their mantles. Not that the glittering second hands on dials strapped to a billion wrists around the world paused their relentless circuit. It was just that the door closed.
And she was back in her lightless bedroom, thirteen years old, and wakened by that sound, and for the long drawn-out moment of first consciousness a silence filled the room that was not quite silence. Something occupied it. Something, somebody breathing slowly and unsteadily. Somebody who had been drinking. Somebody who soon enough was struggling with his boots. She could hear the drop of his clothes. And then his slow steps as he crossed the room. Him bumping into the bed, and his hand coming down on the headboard to steady himself. His hand hitting the pillow as he felt his way toward her. His hand covering her mouth as she tried to scream. His other hand planting itself on her belly as his face came close to her ear.
“Ma lil filly. Time yer rode.”
He told her in slurred speech that if she behaved it would not hurt, that nobody would get hurt.
But he lied. Even then the way he gripped her jaw pained her. What followed was worse.
Most disgusting was that the pain eased only when her body betrayed her. When it began to loosen and cooperate with the thing he did, though her mind remained a wall, hard and frozen. And her eyes gazed blank, streaming tears into the darkness of the room he occupied, asleep and snoring when he had finished, filling her bed as he had filled her, and she frozen, unable to move, unable to speak about the thing that had happened, to which her body had become a wicked, filthy party.
And though morning would come, though she would return to school and walk between classes in a stream of other children who chattered about who had a crush on whom, who was angry at her mom for her refusal to let her wear that skirt, who could argue about whether last night’s episode of their favorite show was funny or pathetic, she was not really there with them. When she washed her hands after using the toilet, they would not get clean. When the bell rang to say it was fifth hour now, instead of fourth, it lied. It was still the middle of the night, and the door clicked. For time was refusing to move forward.
When other times it happened again, she found herself returned to that first terror, returned to her entrance into the partnership about which she could not speak, the moment when time stopped.
The world was rank as a billy goat in his shit-filled pen. The world was evil. Mary, standing with a check at the top of the stair, wondered if she had strength to withstand another stopped-time day in the prison of that world. She thought of Josh sitting, drained, in that aluminum chair, where his eyes fixed on something that no one around him saw. Why was Josh dead, while she was walking around? Why was Josh, her kind friend, lying cold when a hundred men in Iowa would beat their wife or their girlfriend to make this particular Monday afternoon interesting, and then sit down and calmly eat this evening’s dinner? Why would Josh no longer ask her one of his queer questions, when half a million men in the state of Iowa would, in the course of the coming evening, tune in to gunfire and car chases, to ten sweaty men elbowing their way around a basketball court, to a sportsman’s show where it was high-powered rifle and hunting scope against nothing more than an acute sense of smell or sight—tune in to all that brutality just to tune out the people around them? The strain of facing that question made her snap with the man whose head was as disordered by Josh’s death as her own, made her rage at him for following up on something she said about computers, even though she began their encounter hoping she would not scare him away.
Bad choice. Bad choice once again. Bad, bad, bad, bad girl. Mary focused on her breathing, like a mother working her way through labor. She must open a door that would let time move forward. Make it move forward. Tomorrow she would get back to her clients, feel her way toward being unfrozen through muscle, bone, and pulse in people who needed her help, as Arnie Mikesh had needed
