It was twenty minutes before Gerome calmed down. He whined, panted, whined some more. Maggie kept letting him up on the bed, which Mark wouldn’t have minded if there hadn’t been another perfectly good bed for the dog to sleep on all by himself and if it hadn’t been ninety degrees inside, which it was.
While Maggie was babying Gerome, Mark worked on the windows. They were on the first floor and Maggie kept saying he shouldn’t open them, that it wouldn’t be safe; but he was suffocating from the heat. His skin—his palms, his fingers, his lower back, every inch of him—was clammy.
Finally he was able to jimmy open the window closest to the bed, and even Maggie, after biting her lip and wringing her hands, admitted that the breeze felt nice.
Gerome, of his own volition, jumped off their bed, drank some water, then jumped up on the other bed. Maggie stripped their mattress of everything but the sheets, and now—finally, blissfully, thankfully—they were both lying down.
The only light came from the glow sticks on Maggie’s side of the bed. But even that meager glimmer was weakening. Soon it would be pure shadow in their room. Soon they would be asleep.
For a while Mark lay on his back listening to the noises, his eyes closed. From down the hallway, he thought he heard the sound of a faucet running. Soon after, he thought he heard water in the pipes.
Then it was quiet. Gerome had begun to snore, but Maggie’s breathing was too regular and he knew she wasn’t yet sleeping.
Outside, the sound of a diesel approached, slowed, and stopped. For many minutes, he listened to the gentle puh-puh-puh of its engine as it idled outside the hotel. He imagined other travelers, weary just as they had been, standing at the front desk, meeting Tina and Pete, being given the rehearsed terms of their potential night’s rest: clean sheets, clean towels, cold running water, nothing more.
Several minutes after it arrived, the diesel moved away from them. No dice, Mark thought. The world turned up only so many suckers in one night.
Outside their first-floor window, beyond the hotel’s parking lot, past its concrete margin, Mark imagined what was there: loblolly pines by the dozen, shortleaf and spruce like he couldn’t believe; hemlock and basswood wedged for position next to hickory and beech; black cherry and white oak, silk grass and sugar maple; gorges and slopes lousy with flora, slippery and slimy with rainwater and soil. Probably, too—in the kingdom of Plantae, in the division of Magnoliophyta, in the family of Fabaceae—there was kudzu, palming the mountainside like a great green hand. Robert told Mark as a boy of its self-propagating runners that cartwheel from one root to the next—onward, outward, onward, outward—of its instinctive need for reproduction; its twirling vines, its twisting and twining tentacles. In a single day, kudzu can grow an entire foot. Imagine: half an inch in an hour; two-tenths of a millimeter in a minute; three-thousandths of the same in a second. Which meant that even now, even as Mark lay there in the dark, kudzu might be growing. In the shimmering slick darkness beyond their window, it might be expanding. This very moment, its grasp on the mountain could be tightening.
Mark rolled onto his side. He couldn’t see Maggie’s face, but he could see the white of her underpants. She was lying on her back, her breasts exposed to the air, her arms straight at her sides.
“You awake?” he said. He found that he was whispering. He found also that he was heroically and unexpectedly turned on.
There was no response.
“You aren’t talking to me?”
“Mm.”
“Are you giving me the silent treatment, or are you actually asleep?”
He scooted closer.
“Neither?” She said it like a question.
“You were right to make us stay,” he said.
“I’m not so sure,” she said. “Stubborn is as stubborn does.”
In the dark like this, neither of them able to make eye contact even if they wanted, things felt good between them, things felt right. At least on Mark’s end. He felt, at this moment, very much as if they were a team, as if that little hotel room and everything in it—him and Maggie, yes, but also the dog, the beds, the pillows, the sheets—they were all on a team, a team against the world. They were stranded together. Beached, marooned, abandoned, but also self-reliant. The natural accumulation of years together—years of contempt and contentment, disappointment and settlement, all of it—seemed to drift away on a tide of blackness.
He tried—only to see, only as a test—to summon his earlier vexation, his previous frustration, but he couldn’t conjure it. He was aroused even more, aroused at his own lack of agitation.
“It’s not like you to sleep without a top on,” said Mark.
“Is that a remark?” She was also whispering. The bed rocked as she softly shifted onto her side to face him. The glow beyond her shoulder was nearly gone.
“Remark?”
He could smell her breath, feel it on his face, faint and warm.
“About my paranoia?”
He reached up, found her cheek, ran his thumb across her eyelid. “No,” he said. “It’s really not.”
She inched toward him. He could feel it.
“Do you think you can sleep?” she said.
“Even if I can’t, just lying down is good. Just lying in the dark feels good on my eyes.”
“I can’t even tell if my eyes are open or closed,” she said.
He ran his thumb across her eyelid again. “Closed,” he said.
They were quiet. He stroked her hair, but nothing more. Not yet.
After a while she spoke. “I know how to make you sleep.”
“What do you know?” he said.
It was a routine.
It was a signal.
It was code, their code.
“I know what you like,” she said.
“How do you know what I like?”
He moved his body closer.
“I know,” she said.
“How?”
She inched closer still.
“I know you,” she said.
“Do you?”
“Better than you think.”
“Is that right?” he said.
He let his hand drift from her ear to her neck to her shoulder.
“And you know me,” she said.
“Do I?”
His hand left her shoulder, traveled the length of her side, came to her thigh.
She emitted a tiny noise—half moan, half sigh.
“You do,” she said.
They didn’t talk anymore.
After, Maggie tiptoed slowly to the bathroom and Mark lay once again on his back, now with his arms behind his head, listening as Maggie felt her way across the unfamiliar room. He felt a knightly rush of life.
He listened to his dog snore. He listened to his wife pee, then flush. He listened to the water gurgle through the pipes in the walls around him. Alive, he thought. Alive. Alive.
Maggie crept back to the bed, climbed under the cheap top sheet.
She put a hand on his stomach. “Too hot for this?” she said.
“Not at all,” he said.
She was asleep within seconds, her soft snore the wings of a moth against a glass pane.
In the middle of nowhere, he thought. In the middle of nowhere, as it always should be.
Thoreau would strip naked and walk into his pond, walk all the way out until only his nose and eyes were above the water. He’d stay this way for hours, watching the bugs that dart down and up, down and up atop the quiet surface. He remained so still and for so long that he became a part of nature. Still a man, but more than a man. A man connected to the visceral, the real, to the vegetation and wildlife of the world.
Mark hadn’t written Elizabeth back the other day. He hadn’t told her that, yes, in fact, Maggie was the love of his life. But he would. It would be his last letter to the West Coast, and he’d write it the first chance he got. Over and out, Elizabeth.
What it was—this feeling—what it was, was freedom. The feeling of freedom. Freedom from cities and from the grid. Freedom to walk without being seen, without being monitored, without monitoring. He felt he’d finally stripped naked, finally walked out into his own pond, finally connected with the realness of the world. It had to do with getting away from technology and getting back to nature. It had to do with a generosity of spirit. It had to do with keeping very, very quiet in the middle of nowhere.