When it was over, Tess and I sat on the floor of the motel room with our backs against the dresser. We were both looking at the small cast resting on my knee.
“Listen to me, Joe,” she said. “Listen, I don’t need you to defend my fucking honor. I’ll do it myself. Do you understand me?”
She was shaking.
I couldn’t look at her.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Joseph,” she said. “What’s happened to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have to tell me.”
“But I don’t know.”
“You have to tell me anyway. You have to tell me anyway. Otherwise I’m going to leave. Do you understand? That I’m going to leave. It’s enough, Joe.”
“Enough?”
I could feel the slow creep.
“It can’t go on like this. It can’t continue.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that, by continue, but when I turned to look at her and I saw her eyes, I didn’t argue. It wasn’t what I had done that frightened me. It was the word.
I said, “What do you mean continue?”
“Joe, you’ve been like this for weeks.”
“Like this,” I said. “Like what? Punching people? What are you talking about?”
I could feel the sweat on my forehead.
“Dark,” she said. “Cold and remote. Like you were tonight. What do you think? Tonight was the first time?”
She was so angry. I watched her mouth. I thought of the last weeks, but I could not remember myself within them.
“Days and days go by, Joe. You’re unreachable. You don’t speak.”
I looked at her and tried to remember, but I could not find a single image. There were only the generic symbols of our life—the beach, the house, the motel, the bars. I saw no instances of unhappiness, of tension, of my apparent darkness. Seeing her anger and frustration, it shook me. She was so insistent, so certain, and yet I could not see the person she was describing. As if I’d been thrashing and screaming in my sleep and now, in the morning, she was telling me how I’d kicked her, the phrases I’d called into the night.
“When?” I asked.
She must have seen it—my fear, my bewilderment. Her look turned from anger to worry, or worse, to pity.
“When I found you sitting alone out on the beach the other night? You don’t remember?”
“I do.”
“You were gone for hours. We were supposed to have dinner.”
“I lost track of time.”
“When I finally found you, Joe. You wouldn’t look at me. You barely responded. It was like you were drugged. You don’t remember that?”
“I remember us sitting together.”
And that was all I could recall.
“I had to shake you, Joe. Just to have you look at me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I wanted her to stop talking.
“Okay?”
“I’ll stop.”
“Look, I can’t tell you what to do. I don’t want to. You have to decide. But something, Joe. You’ve got to do something.”
“Sure,” I said. “I understand.”
But I didn’t understand. Punching that guy, yes. But the other, the continuing. Not at all. I didn’t know what couldn’t go on any longer. I knew that I’d hit the guy hard. That now there was a piercing pain cutting from my elbow to my knuckles, a pain beating in rhythm with my heart.
“It can’t go on, Joe, and either you tell me what’s happening with you, or that’s it. You see? Because I don’t want that kind of thing.”
She stood and walked out of the room leaving the door open. I listened to her moving through the hallway.
It was circling.
I felt it alight.
The pointed pressure. The constricting of my heart. The spreading weight.
Did it also take my memory? Did it black out time?
Had she gone for good?
Has she gone for good?
I wanted her never to come back. Part of me did. The coward. If she were gone, the investigation would end and I would wait with it in peace.
It was a kind of peace.
It is. You want nothing. Not food. Not language. Not sex. Not even to move. And if it blinds you to yourself, if it makes time vanish, then I’m sure you understand there’s a frail peace in that too.
I sat slumped against the dresser until Tess returned with a bucket of ice. She poured us drinks and faced me. Legs crossed, elbows on her knees.
“Joey,” she said, bringing her forehead against mine and forcing me to meet her eyes, “speak.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes I imagine a bird. I imagine it circling. And there are times when it lands. When it lands right in the center of my body and I can feel its talons digging in. They’re very sharp and very strong.”
I was humiliated. She was listening to me.
“And then it changes. It’s no longer a bird. It’s something else. Tar. Tar that moves through me and pins me down and holds me there.”
She never broke. Never looked frightened. Never looked much of anything. Just those lips parted, those eyes on me.
“I imagine tar. It could be anything, but I imagine tar. It’s moving. It’s in my veins, covering my heart, filling my lungs. Sometimes it feels like it’s pulling my eyes, as if it’s in my brain and wants to pull my eyes back through my head.”
I looked up at her. I’d heard what I’d said. I could still hear it.
“I’m not crazy.”
“No,” she said.
“I’m just telling you what I imagine. How it feels. I know it’s not tar. I know it’s not a bird.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not crazy, Tess. I don’t know why it comes. And I don’t know why I can’t remember.”
She didn’t answer. I’d told her what I could and for a while that seemed to be enough. We climbed into bed. I lay next to her, curled up with my head on her breast. She stroked my hair.
“It’s recent,” I said. “It’s new.”
“Like me,” she said.
My broken hand was on her belly. I could hear her heart. Feel her breathing. Soon we were asleep.