S.C. Ferguson

After Cairo

We had ceased, in a sense, to understand our own emotions. Not even death, that clarifying thunderbolt which lights up all our doubts, could draw from us a certainty of feeling. Andrew’s Aunt Clarissa had just died, and even as his wife I couldn’t tell if it had hit him. He didn’t cry, for one thing. He would just read in our bed or maybe crawl off to his writing nook, becoming glum and scholarly, as if the reason for his moping weren’t his Aunt Clarissa’s death but the problems he encountered in the strobing of his cursor. It was all, in the end, I could really understand—our perverse, our utter lack of understanding.

We were driving (I was driving) from New Orleans to Champaign. Andrew sat in shotgun, his bony knees spread, his face half-engulfed in a book. I would laugh and nudge his elbow when we passed a funny sight, like a Celica with truck nuts or a Jesus-freakish billboard, and he would nod and maybe grunt but not look up. We were driving to a funeral, it was true. In penitence, I taught myself to match his monkish silence.    

It was June by now and Andrew, who teaches English at a prep school, had begun his summer break, that time of free, unfettered reading—though he was wasting it, I thought, on something glib and dense and French, an “interrogation,” doubtless, of some bedrock of our lives. I couldn’t in my ignorance pronounce the author’s name.    

The book, of course, reminded me of college, of the theory he’d gorged and I’d grazed on half-heartedly: Althusser, Adorno, the Big M Himself. Zizek and Foucault. Foreign names like fetishes, incanted in the classrooms of our pricy liberal arts school. It reminded me as well—with its suggestions, like a Rorschach, of a slow, expanding network of associated meanings—of the music he had played when we were students, the bands he had performed with, the shows and gigs and parties where I’d first begun to form the smoky outline of my love. I saw him, while I drove, as I had seen him on those nights, on the stages and the bandstands of those dark New Orleans clubs: tall, a little gaunt, with that swatch of blank bangs that he’d peer through, at me, in those moments when the music seemed to issue from itself—its own volition, its own making—and Andrew, unencumbered, would glance up from his hands and seek my face in recognition. There wasn’t any question of our understanding then. There wasn’t any question of my loving him.    

The day was a dust bowl, complete with parched pastures and huddled-up cows. Later on, corn fields—the visual rhythm of row upon row, passed at a languorous, state-crossing clip.    

Somewhere after Sikeston, Andrew slept. No one in the forfeiture of sleep should look exciting, but what (the inner blasphemies exploded to the fore) was this dowdy imitation of that boy I’d fiercely loved? He had the makings of a belly now, a fuller face whose lines conveyed that life is but a siege, and even in his sleep (and in the teeth of his diminishment), he managed to exude an air of total self-absorption, as if he’d added to the normal involutions of his dreams another curlicue of selfishness, reflected in the smirking upward turn of both his lips.    

It is possible, of course, that I’m projecting. But what would it have cost him just to turn to me and speak, to touch my arm, to share his thoughts? The numbness of my waiting seemed to spread and overtake me—my hands against the wheel, the marble column of my torso. A decade had passed since our college graduation. Two years and six months since our Christmastime wedding. Was a child the only answer? Was it time, as he himself might say, to pop one from the oven?    

I was sticking, as I drove, toward the right, using the left lane to pass the big semis with smiley faces drawn into the dust along their hulls. Being lawful, that is. Traffic was light. I’d gotten to an empty stretch, alone on those two lanes, when I noticed, in the rearview, the speeding approach of a fat boxy pickup. I could tell that this truck was expensive and new, and it was clinging to the right, within my lane. Soon it got so close that I could see the driver’s face: pale skin, dark beard, black cap, curved brim. A look of implacable seriousness, blind, as if he weren’t here on the interstate, protected by an airbag and enveloped in A/C, but piloting a wagon through the cruel indifferent wilderness. He looked kind of stupid, I mean, but then he pulled closer, three feet from my bumper, and I felt the real threat of his size and his speed, his blank and unflappable gaze.    

I was about to move aside so he could pass, but in an instant he had swerved and pulled around and barreled right, his own rear bumper mere inches from my front. He sped off even faster than he’d come.    

As he did so I was privileged with a view of his back window, which sported, like a mission statement, a bright, plumb row of bumper stickers. The first was the Punisher logo, a long and toothy death’s head, inadvertently rat-like. The second, in the middle, was the Roman numeral III, encircled by a pack of horny stars. On the right was an assault rifle, its muzzle pointing out toward the corn.    

A total asshole, to be sure. And not just that, but one of those assholes, some cosplaying, wannabe militia man who creams his “tactical” cargo jeans at the thought of a mayo-white ethnostate.

Of course I can joke all I want, in cozy retrospect, though the truth is that he scared me, and that all my brain needed to begin an anxious tailspin, full of grim imaginings of civil wars and holocausts, was to see this row of decals, to inspect them like an augur and to recognize our doom.    

My husband hadn’t woken to observe this pleasant episode. His mouth was hanging open, and he was doing that thing where your head begins to droop, slowly, inch by inch, until at last it gets so low you jerk it back, not quite awake. It made him look childlike, defenseless in his dreams. I felt a need to keep him safe, to deliver him quick to the site of his grief, but we were running out of gas, and of course I had to pee.    

There was an Exxon in five miles. After that, we wouldn’t stop.

**    

The exit was a mile or two past Cairo. I didn’t catch the place’s name. You peeled right off the interstate and halted at a stop sign. Another sign beside it pointed east, toward the station, which sat atop a hill about thirty yards back. There were no other businesses, no drivethroughs or Subways or anything else. Just the tired red sign and the pumps beneath their awning, which canted slightly leftward like a hat brim gone awry.

I started up the hill, and Andrew woke.

“How long was I out?”

The look was in his voice, a boyish coo.

“Thirty minutes. Maybe more.”

We were up onto the lot by then: not too many cars, a sense of methy desolation. The first pump was unoccupied. I parked and told Andrew to handle the gas, then walked across the lot toward the station and the bathroom. I was halfway to the entrance when I turned my head and noticed that the bumper sticker truck had also stopped, that its snarling canine bulk was sitting two pumps from our own. The driver wasn’t in it, and he wasn’t pumping gas, and for a second I convinced myself I didn’t have to go, that I could turn around and leave and try another, safer gas station. But doing so, I knew, would mark a terrible surrender.    

I marched across the asphalt, losing nothing of my stride.

I entered, glanced around amid the tinkling of a bell. No sign of any driver—no one in the store except a shrunken, wizened woman in her fifties at the register. Aisles of wrappered goodies over specked and stained linoleum. The back wall with the fridges and their ranks of lit-up drinks.

     The wall was split in half, opened to a hallway with the restrooms, and I turned and hurried over to the women’s room, a yellowing chamber of tile like bad teeth, with a lock above the doorknob and a single squat commode. I turned the bolt.    

It was only upon reaching for the toilet paper holder that I saw that some diligent woman, moved to share the wisdom of her politics, had etched with key or knife into that tempting black plastic a trio of primitive, angular Ks. I washed my hands and scurried out, intending not to stop until I’d gotten to the car.

I’d made it to the center aisle, stocked with all the staples of American nutrition, when I spotted straight ahead the hulking form of my aggressor. He was facing the cashier, but his size was unmistakable, and I recognized his ball cap and his jacket—a rich, encrusted yellow, like a yardman’s sweaty glove. His motions were slow—racked, I imagined, by a chronic, doleful pain—and his clothes were so modest, so clearly worked-in and disheveled that I understood his truck as an inversion of himself: all speed and gleaming power, all utopian escape.    

As he paid he seemed to lumber in a cloud of his own lethargy, an atmosphere of malice and regret. I watched him, fascinated, from the far end of the aisle. It was prudent, I decided, not to move.    

I was watching him still when the door was flung open. It was Andrew, in his Birkenstocks and thrifted khaki short-shorts. He was gazing at his phone, and he didn’t really enter, only hovered at the threshold. He looked, in that moment, like a man who thinks the universe awaits his every move, will suffer no compunction in assisting all he does. He was almost debonair, in his fragile, comic fashion. He was punchable and distant and delicious all at once.    

I didn’t want the guy to see him, though of course I knew he would. I didn’t trust them, either man, to conduct themselves with sense.    

The driver, seconds later, had concluded his transaction, and he gathered up his bag and made his way toward the door. He moved with a slow sort of wallowing hop, one leg rolling hitched like a dented-in wheel. Andrew dallied at the threshold, then stepped, half-aware, to the side, his gaze at his phone still unbroken. The man grunted thanks and then shouldered the glass. The little bell tinkled. The man disappeared.    

But the buff hues of his jacket and his pants still seemed to linger, the dunner tones of lethargy which swirled about his person and now wafted, thickly spirited, throughout the burdened aisles. It was not an easy medium for Andrew to adjust to. He pocketed his phone, then stepped farther in, not yet having noticed me. He looked to me now—far from the man he’d resembled on entering—like a child in some storybook, questing but wary. He turned and passed the register, peering at the wall of glassy fridges at my back. It was then that he noticed me, squinted, a smile.    

I fear I risk reprisal by admitting that I saw, upon his seeing me, one of those flushed and extravagant daydreams—nightmarish, really—in which profligate fear and unaccountable desire are tossed together boiling in the foundry of the subconscious, producing in a rain of showy sparks some senseless image. The image was of this: Andrew somehow battered by the driver of the truck, me somehow seized and shunted up into the cab, to be transported at a gruesome speed toward some gruesome fate. A horrifying image, that’s for sure. But what of my ambivalence, so infinitely quick, before the bleeding hypothetical of Andrew in a heap?    

“Howdy,” he said. “Help me rustle up some single-use plastics?”    

He passed me on his way toward a fridge. I turned and watched him pry its door and pluck himself two bottles, which he nestled like a badly swaddled infant to his chest.    

“Spare me your Fijis and Evians,” he said. “Ozarka is the water of the gods.”    

He passed me on his way toward the register. I didn’t say a word. I hadn’t really moved, only pivoted in place, as if staked there by my thoughts of dissolution. There was a freakish kind of placelessness about my standing there. An infinity of interstates and nameless, fruitless fields sprawled ever outward from that station, which was, in fact, a nullity, purely reproducible and empty in its dinginess. This jester, my husband, seemed suddenly a stranger. Why him? Why me? Why now? Of all things. There were countless cars and trucks upon the roads of Illinois. I could have, with a tiny fateful skewing of the globe, found myself at home in any one of them—a different soul, a different heart. It was distressing and fantastical and not a little dizzy-making. I wanted to sit down. To sit and hug my knees and disappear. To sit in that pose which we’d labeled in our childhoods, with all the innocence of victory, Indian style.

“Hello?” he said. He had turned from the cashier, and he was waving at me, hazily. “You want anything?”

“I’m good,” I said, and somehow didn’t sit.     

**    

He’d decided to drive. This allowed me to inhabit an insipid catatonia, my head now secured, in a lolling and quite jellylike surrender, within the happy slot between the headrest and the door. The fields, the road, the fields, the fields. Tufted mounds of roadkill passed like sad discarded wigs. The wheat stood pale and blazing. The day had almost primped, was almost going beautiful, just as evening tapped its foot, waiting without patience for its hunkering descent.

“Nostalgia,” he was saying. “Pure fucking nostalgia.”    

I made a lowing sound, in accordance with the pastoral tradition. It passed, I hoped, for a simple assent, though the truth was that I didn’t feel nostalgic. For what? This sun? These tufts? This great expanse I knew not of?    

“My parents used to make this drive.” His voice was bright but hollow, as if performing its own wistfulness for radio, some podcast. “We had this portable TV that they nudged between their seats so me and Tyler could watch movies in the back. VHS days, you know. The Neverending Story, Lion King, Pocahontas.”    

“Deliverance,” I said.

“The Silence of the Lambs.”    

“Pure nostalgia.”

“Don’t I know it.”

I couldn’t see his face. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling.    

“My mom,” he went on, “always worried we would crash and the TV would go flying, bash our skulls in. The joys of motherhood, I guess.”    

I lowed again, a quiet moo. It pained me to consider all these wholesome travel memories. I was made to feel dead by his childhood recollections, as if I hadn’t been elsewhere, alive and raptly breathing, watching Pocahontas on a different screen entirely.    

We drove in silence for a time and I began to reminisce, as if by doing so I’d plant myself again in some reality. The basement on Pine where I first saw him play, all cadaverous and tall in his unreal Edwardian get-up—the low guitar, the lofty cheekbones. Each band had played its set, but the basement with its string lights and its dampened concrete floor was far from empty. He’d run his iPod through the speakers and selected, after a bill of such strange and shrieking music, the perfect thing: Lionel Richie, a slow-burning dance ballad. The room had converged—hipsters, punks, a scattering of frat boys—in a mass of easy movement, our conversations ebbing as the music swelled, absorbed us. We had found ourselves afloat within a scene of quiet eros, our boisterousness condensed and paired, channeled into swaying uneclipsed by any irony. I had thought then that I loved him. I had known it for a certainty.    

The sensations are all childlike, when you nap and someone drives. I was tired now. My eyes fell shut. I submitted with a filial faith I didn’t wholly trust to Andrew’s driving, to the road. The stereo was on, but you could still feel just beneath it all the fervor of the engine, the warp and tug of gravity, drawn out and sustained amid the changing of the light.    

I was alone in a convenience store. It had the feeling of a complex, of a school or a hotel, and I was made to understand that bombs were falling in the distance. I had to drive a car into that distance, toward the sea. There were no great expanses, only cramped and junky ramparts black with soot and layered ash. The bashed-in skulls of televisions, their screens all white with snow, were strewn on these embankments, projecting scenes of discord from the rubble to the road. Is it quaint of me to share the second coming of the truck—the fleet of hulking lookalikes that swelled but never reached me, charging with a grisly, coughing nearness at my back? The waters far ahead now lurched and rose with blithe indifference. A swarm behind, a flood before—the pincers of that tidy doom from which we always wake. The last thing I remember, like a slogan, or a song: Ozarka is the water of the gods. O sweet Ozarka!

**    

I awoke on the slow, shouldered curve of an exit. It was dark now, early evening, and the exit led us out onto a warmly blinking suburb. We crawled the homely thoroughfare—Panera, Moe’s, a Jimmy John’s—each storefront like a face I’d known and loved, now chose to scorn.

“I want,” Andrew said, “to make a detour. If that’s cool.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay.”

We angled off the thoroughfare, entering Urbana or what might have been Champaign. The streets changed in an instant. The houses were of stone, the streetlamps now sporadic. In the darkness, as it thickened, the houses, block by block, arranged themselves like battlements against the beaten plain. There was something truly haunted in their crenellated brickwork, the gridded, vacant porches and the blackness of the lawns. I’d have given almost anything to go back to the thoroughfare—anonymous and safe among its drabness and its light.    

“I haven’t been back here in years,” Andrew said.

He was smiling, leaning forward, craning his neck lest he miss some agile memory, fleeing from the corners of the scene. His eyes were wide and sightless. He could hardly see me hug myself.

“There,” he said. “Right there. We used to play football here. Tyler and my dad and me.”    

A park had opened out along our right. He slowed now to admire the green-black column of its grass.    

“We’re a couple blocks away,” he said. “Aunt Clarissa used to live here. Before my Uncle Lawrence passed. Then he died and she got sick and then they put it on the market. I have to see it one last time.”    

“Where’s the hotel?”    

“We’ll get there. Just a minute.”    

We crossed another block, its streetlamps casting color on the heavy brick facades—a door’s streak of red, some blue-painted shutters—and imbuing them, like the melancholy visages of strangers in a crowd, with the capacity (impossible!) to smile, to surprise us with a feeling wholly absent from our sense of them, our first unintentional impressions of their souls.    

Even so, I couldn’t trust them.    

“This is nuts,” Andrew said.

“What?”

“I haven’t been here in, what, sixteen years?”    

A streetlamp on the next block had burned out, and the half-light of the nearest lamps revealed his Aunt Clarissa’s house, hunched and bouldered up against a drear and pressing sky. A lawn in need of cutting. A defeated For Sale sign.    

Andrew parked the car along the curb. We clambered out.

“Man,” he was saying.

A truck was also parked just down the block. It boasted zero stickers, told of nothing but itself. It was just some old boy’s truck, one of millions in the state.

“The basement here was filled with old guitars,” my husband said. “Uncle Lawrence’s collection. Fifty-four Strats and Les Pauls and vintage Rickenbackers. He used to let me play them. He’s the one—” He paused. “He’s the one who gave me my first Fender.”

He turned and hugged me, lightly sobbing. A guitar, of all things, had brought him to this juncture. I felt small in his embrace, dwarfed but supportive, like the mother of a nose tackle. It was all that I had wanted, but it frightened me now—far more than these tears, than his acknowledgment of mourning—to discover that my numbness hadn’t left me, to find myself so curiously insensate and alone. The boom of my existence seemed to lift and pan away so that I felt I could observe us from afar. We formed a scrawny fleck upon a universe of plains, not so much baleful as meaningless, omnivorous. The homes of other families spread unseeing all around us, an encampment no less fleeting for its being made of stone.    

He must have recognized, implicitly, our place here in the world. He snorted through his tears and pressed the wetness through my shirt. It seemed, just then, a mighty piece of luck to have no children of our own.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and patted at his neck.    

He straightened and stepped back, then leaned against the shotgun door and sniffled and said nothing.    

“It’ll be all right,” I said.    

A streetlamp on the nearest block went flickering, then held.    

I had, in truth, no idea what would happen to us.    

S.C. Ferguson lives with his wife in New Orleans, where he works as a high school English teacher. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Westchester Review, Peauxdunque Review, The Woven Tale Press, The Champagne Room, and other journals. He is also a musician who has performed, with various groups, on stages across New Orleans and the South. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. Befriend him on Instagram @samcferg, and on Twitter @FergMode.