The road was narrow. Mark was still driving. Once they had taken the exit and the turn off the exit and then the turn off the turn off the exit, they’d started a slow ascent into the mountains. The road they were on now was more slender than the last. There was so much tree cover that the rain seemed almost to have lightened. Or maybe it actually had lightened. Maybe the second storm was finally passing. Or was it the third? The branches—thick with wet lush leaves—were low, lower than they should have been because of the water weighing them down.
There were limbs in the road. Limbs, leaves, debris, beer cans. Mark knew Maggie would be concentrating on the beer cans. There were no houses, no signs of life, but there were beer cans. He knew what she was capable of doing with that sort of evidence—hunters up to no good, terrorists hiding in the hills, kidnappers building their next torture bunker. Maybe she’d always been this way. Maybe he’d overlooked it, which would make it his fault in a sense. Perhaps she hadn’t changed at all. Perhaps he’d finally started paying attention. It made him sad for them both.
When he was a boy, Mark would sometimes find himself filled up with indignation, with what he’d call now an animal sort of fury. It came from nothing, out of nowhere. He’d be walking in the woods, kicking sticks or jumping on twigs, and he’d suddenly feel a hot rush come over his entire body, like a blanket soaked in boiling water then wrapped abruptly and tightly around him. He’d throw himself to the ground when he felt it, fists and feet pummeling the dirt, tearing apart the leaves, terrifying the branches. Anything he could touch he destroyed.
Later, a teenager, when he finally discovered Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau—those men who understood isolation and what it was not just to be alive, but to be human, to be a man and in nature—he diagnosed those early fits of fury as the Grown Man Inside, the Man Already a Man, trapped in the small boy’s body. When, as a teenager, the temper returned—as it often did, though he’d many years earlier learned to stop throwing himself to the ground—he began to visualize this man who was inside, the man responsible for the wrath. He found that the image calmed him. He further discovered that he could control the image—not necessarily the man—but if he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough, he could take the picture of this man (this future iteration of himself, fully realized) and make him move. He could, for instance, will the man to jump up and down, punch the air, punch the earth, fling himself to the ground in Mark’s stead.
He considered the man his grown-up twin, dressed always in whatever flannel or sweatshirt Mark happened to be wearing on a particular day. Back then, he’d taken the man very seriously. On the one hand, he fully understood him to be a figment of his own imagination. On the other, he believed the man to be a very real indication of what he—Mark—was destined one day to become. He believed that he had walked through one of those hidden doorways in the brain that only the very special ever entered. Not only had he found the door, but he’d opened it and gone inside and met himself. It was a part of the brain that only geniuses and outliers accessed. This was something Mark believed absolutely as a teenager.
Now, as an adult, he wasn’t sure what he believed. He knew to laugh at the idea of an imaginary adult version of himself dressed identically to his teenage self (the flannel shirt, the baggy khakis). At the same time, the man—now more a shadowy outline—still came in useful with his adult fits of anger. From time to time, when necessary, he was still able to close his eyes, conjure the figure, and have it lasso all the ire swirling about in the blackness of his mind. Just now, for instance, weepy willowy Maggie at his side, Mark was imagining the shadowy outline: arms above his head, legs planted squarely in the terra firma of Mark’s brain matter, mouth wide open and screaming for his life.
It struck him that Maggie was saying his name, perhaps had been saying his name for quite some time.
“Are you paying attention?” she asked. “Mark? Are you paying attention?”
Without realizing, Mark had brought the car to a halt at the world’s smallest, darkest intersection. The road they were on had come to an abrupt end. In front of them was dense dark forest and in front of that a tiny green sign—illuminated now by their headlights—with one arrow to the right and one arrow to left. There were no route numbers, no road names. Just two arrows—right or left—in case you couldn’t see that straight ahead was nothing but trees and brush and early summer overgrowth.
“Are you paying attention?” she said again. “Do you want me to drive?”
As if Maggie would trade places with him.
As if she’d get out of the car and shuffle her way around to the driver’s side at this time of night.
As if.
“I’m waiting for you to direct me,” he said.
Maggie didn’t say anything. She was looking at her lap now, looking at her tiny glowing screen. He cracked his knuckles. All these people all the time shining a light at their faces, voluntarily giving into the machine, voluntarily zapping their own brain cells. He could practically see his wife getting dumber. Right now. At this exact second, he could picture the brain cells being zapped by the ambient blue light. Jesus, and she hadn’t even been raised on the Internet. She’d been raised on books, on paper and pens just as he had. But she’d succumbed. Somewhere along the line—before the mugging, after the mugging, did it matter?—she’d succumbed to the media, to the devices, to the wires and webs and whole wide world of Internet make-believe.
It wasn’t just his students. It was his wife, too. It was everything and everyone. The world was ruled by technology; disturbed by nature.
What happened to real maps? That’s what Mark wanted to know. What happened to good old-fashioned red and orange and blue and yellow maps that you could hold in your hands, rub between your thumb and index finger—maps that could be folded and jostled and looked at whenever you goddamned pleased and not just when the gods of cell service deemed it appropriate or convenient?
He closed his eyes. The little man punched the air as hard as he could—once, twice, three times—then retreated into the shaded obscurity of his brain.
“Right or left?” Mark said.
“I think,” Maggie said, then stopped short. “I mean, I think right. Take a right. It’s what the map says. Unless there’s another road a little farther.”
“Farther where, Maggie? There’s a forest in front of us.”
“It’s just . . .” she said. He was making her nervous, which meant it would take her twice as long before she would make sense. “It’s just the map doesn’t indicate a turn—one way or the other.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this dead end doesn’t exist.”
“Of course it exists. I’m looking at it.”
“But on the map,” she said. “It doesn’t exist.” She gestured to her phone.
Okay. Okay, so here. This. This right here. This—this was what Mark was talking about. Right here. Right now. Mark and Maggie were in a car on a road that had clearly come to an end. He was looking at it. He could see with his own two eyes that the dead end existed. But Maggie was looking at a phone. She was telling him that what he could see—what they could both technically see because neither of them was blind—didn’t exist because it wasn’t on her phone. What it was, at the end of the day—what it really, possibly was—was that Maggie was killing him.
He took a deep breath.
“From where we are now, is the hotel north, south, east, what?”
“Take a right,” she said.
“How do you know? If this turn doesn’t exist, then how do you know?”
“Because the hotel is to the right of here.”
He held his hand out. “Show me,” he said.
She clutched the phone to her chest.
“Show me.”
“No.”
“Just show me where we are.”
“No.”
“Are you fucking with me, Maggie? Are you goading me? Because it’s working. It really is. Just show me where we are.”
She unclenched the phone but didn’t hand it to him. Instead, she cradled it like a miniature baby in her palm. “We don’t show up on the phone anymore,” she said at last. “So I’m having to wing it.”
“Wing it?”
These were the facts, as Mark saw them: It was past two in the morning. They were on some microscopic back road in West Virginia. Mark could barely see shit. The wipers weren’t working worth a fuck. Mangled leaves were glommed up and down the sides of both blades. The windshield would be scratched to hell by morning. And Maggie, dry and safe and cozy, was over there in the passenger seat with her personal bullshit device winging it?
“This is it,” she said. “This is the turn. Take a right. I’m sure.”
Fine, he thought. Fuck it.
Mark put the car in gear and, the headlights their only guide, took the turn.
What, after all, was the worst that could happen?