Trust
Whenever she leaves for even a few minutes, he wonders if she’s committing a crime. Shoplifting a gas station or robbing a small savings and loan, having left someone bleeding and mystified in an alley, in whatever town they are near now. He does not want to ask her what she’s done beyond what she says she’s done. He doesn’t want to seem like it matters so much. He’d appear paranoid or whatever, sure. And why give her a reason to lie?
Sometimes a relationship holds its trust in what you leave out.
And to be fair, they’ve just met. Think of all she doesn’t know about you, he realizes. Like this aberration that lodged in his brain a couple of days ago. A neon cluster of nerves in his vision, churning, eventually dissolving.
He’s not sure where the aberration goes when it vanishes. He just hopes that’s it. It’s over. But then, later, it appears again. Twirling like a dancing Wu Li Master.
Gordon Lightfoot’s voice idles inside a car in the lot out beyond the motel window. The song about sundown taking care and being found sneaking around. Like it could have been made about this motel and all the precarity. Of the woman he’s met and is now travelling with.
On the motel television in front of him, kids on the screen, blindfolded and jubilant, swat deliriously at a rainbow unicorn piñata. The motel is a collision of nothing and everything. Of coalesced memory and an imagined future with this woman he only recently met, at once, roaming distracted and anxious around him. He left the room for the motel’s first level—this was last night—out in the back, where the lot went into a junk wilderness with wiry trees and scrub and larger driftless rock formations lit with vapor from the parking lights. Until late afternoon, you could hear metal punching and this whirring, swatting sound from a shop down the way. But now it was quiet. Sophie had fallen asleep on the motel bed. He was concerned about what he hadn’t told her about his eye. About what was maybe happening in his brain. This little mark that resembles a dragon churning, and then, that morning, the newer streaking and blue glow, like a heat lamp melting celluloid. Eyes open or closed. It comes into the far corner of his right eye, and then it is gone for a while. And last night, he was justifying why he hadn’t told her, Sophie. Not yet, because who knew, maybe this was temporary? Would it go away? And about her, he still knows so little, too. They’ve just met, really. He likes her. And he needs the ride.
Walking downstairs in the evening. Along the ground-level sidewalk with his eyes closed. Like holding his breath, the desire to open his eyes, a bit like gasping for air. Walking along the mostly empty back row of motel rooms. And he kept his trembling eyelids shut and moved through the dark. A big jazz band was quietly stomping in one room. But everywhere around him was otherwise peaceful. A kind of cacophony of small sounds. The cicadas or whatever. Flushing water. His footsteps. His pounding pulse.
Who would he have if this dragon grew any larger in his eye? Would Sophie stick around? Would she want that? The big band walked away from him. The pressure under his foot softened and gravity pulled a little. The air misty and supplicating around his face. He stopped and opened his eyes. He’d strayed toward a drop-off in the dark. Barbed wire weeds and bent punk trees. A kind of quarry of dark and stony shapes deeper below. It didn’t seem his eyes had been closed for that long. When he returned to the room, she was still sleeping.
So yeah, they only met a couple of days ago. He and Sophie. At a bar. She said she was just driving across the country, retracing places from when she was a kid. They were drinking a few. They went back to his place and later he asked if he could get a ride with her. That he had been looking to get out of his life. New York, where she was going. That would be great.
She asked if he was crazy.
But she let it happen. And the drives, they’ve been fine. He likes her.
She’s told him about her parents. How she grew up. Funny stories about being the child of con artists. How many people like that do you meet? Like this church they founded. A grift, too. But she was just a child. She said she’s lost touch with her parents. But his imagination sort of runs around it all. The crime thing, when she’s out, like now. Out grabbing food while he waits here in the room.
An ice machine in the hall gurgles cubes into a bucket.
Their bodies fit well together, and already they seem okay about being quiet around each other. A good start.
It was kind of non-denominational, she said. The Church of the Golden Eye of Providence. For short, they called it The Golden Eye. She’d described it all this morning before she left to get breakfast. Or, whatever, to rob someone.
The joke is, Sophie said, the Eye of Providence is that eye on a dollar bill. She took out a crushed bill from her front pocket and opened it flat. There. The eye shining above the pyramid.
In Albuquerque, they had a meth lab, she said. Albuquerque has some nice restaurants, she said this morning.
So that’s where they are going. Albuquerque. She was going to end up in New York, though. Then the dragon started in his eye.
The blindfolded kids on the television have finished smashing the piñata. A woman’s voice outside the room approaches in Spanish and passes the window with a cart’s little, stubborn wheels chirping. On the muted screen, monster trucks rock over a row of crushed, muddy cars. A girl in a tube top and a Tina Turner wig is screaming. Mannie clickers the channel.
He closes his eyes. The dragon curls and shimmers. Then it dissolves into bobbing little gyrations, then specks.
He opens his eyes. He’s sitting up on the bed. He dials an outside line with the phone on the nightstand. The noon news on the television. Weather now, the man in front of a map with animated arrows over the Midwest. But engines whine from another TV in another room, the one behind him. That drag-racing show, muscle cars, pickup trucks with clownish tires.
Mom?
His mom always picks up. The weatherman pushes graphic weather in an upward sweep. The sweep seems connected to the sound of the engines in the other room.
Osito?
Yeah, Mom. Hey.
She’s glad he called. How is he? And he says, Good. I’m Good.
He hears her television too, behind her phone. She asks where he is, and his motel room seems quiet because the television in the room behind him is off now. He hears the cart squealing past again on the landing outside his room.
I’ve been working a lot, he says. I’m still in Wendover. I’ve been working hard.
Is it cold? We had a deep frost. How cold are you, she says.
Yeah, pretty cold, he says.
Surprising! she says.
We’ve got something cooking for Speed Week, he says. Working in-house. Custom job.
Speed Week. Okay.
Yeah, the garage, I mean, he said. The work.
He wants to tell her about Sophie. She is talking now. But it is hard to hear. Or to really understand anymore, to concentrate. There is always a dancing sadness to her words, the little dramas in the condominium complex—she’s talking about a missing cat. Her neighbors’, this elderly couple’s, grief. He remembers that cat, doesn’t he? He wants to listen. But it is sometimes hard to listen because he keeps hearing all these vibrations of loneliness. This woman who has settled for very little. Settled for a small piece of something of which he has been a part. Settled, not because she is small and vulnerable, or deserves to settle, but because she had trusted someone unreliable and weak—but who hadn’t shown her this until it was too late.
Anyway, your car work, she says. The racing. So exciting. I love it!
I’m thinking about going east, he says.
The side of the room turns into water and in the blur the dragon again appears. It isn’t a dragon. He wants to tell his mom. To admit how he worries that he is going blind. That whatever he fears could happen seems to be happening right now.
Oh, she says. East.
The wash of drained color around this churning dragon, or whatever it is. A buzzing rises into his head, like he’s been hyperventilating or the circulation has been cut off in his neck.
Tell me about it, she says.
Huh? he says. He’s forgotten what he was saying.
You say, East? she says. And he remembers.
Okay, so I met someone, he says. A girl. Her name is Sophie.
He hesitates: A couple of weeks ago.
The blue wash starts to weave into the dragon. A blurring dervish. Gold threads spear through like jet contrails, then rope around and dance, too.
She’s nice, he says. You’d like her.
You met a girl, who is this girl? she asks. He hears joy, but it could also be concern or caution in her voice.
She’s nice. She’s someone I met in Wendover, he says. I met her at the garage. A customer. She needed her car worked on. She’s great. I want you to meet her someday.
But you’re not coming here, his mom says. You’re going East?
Oh maybe, he says. Yeah, for now. She lives there. She’s from New York.
So you met her at the garage. Maybe I can meet her someday.
I should go now, Mom, he says. He knows what’s happening. Some cycle of emotion draws into the moment. He sees the dragon’s tail emerge and curl.
I love you, he says. Color has returned to the side of the room. The room is fucking palpitating. What even is this?
I love you, his mother says. And a laugh track comes into her phone from the television. Stay good little bear, she says. And they hang up.
It is what she always says. About staying good.
Someday, he’ll tell his own kid about his parents and his childhood. He’ll make them heroic. And he’ll be heroic, even if his stories are lies. He’ll leave out things like this motel. He’ll leave the dragon out of his stories, too. By then, it won’t be important because this dragon is just some temporary problem, some passing aberration.
His mom has never told him much about her childhood. About her parents. Her dad had blown a lot of money. That’s mostly what Mannie knows. He thinks it’s why she married someone like his dad. Of whom he knows very little.
He recalls a piñata. That it had been shaped like a matador. The matador, comical and plump; he’d hold more candy. It was a weird idea. A matador piñata. It made more sense than the burro he’d seen once before. At another kid’s birthday. Which seemed fucking terrible, even then. What parent wants their kid to beat a mule? It was Mannie’s birthday, the matador piñata birthday. He wasn’t sure which year. His mom’s hair was still long and black. His dad, yeah, he was there. So, it was a long time ago. And Mannie stood at the front of a line as his dad wrapped a black cloth around his eyes and tied it at the back. His dad’s firm grip on his shoulders. He turned and turned him. Mannie was trying to remember where his dad had left him. As if at that point Mannie might have some bearing on the facing body of the matador. Or of his dad. And he swung and swung, and eventually he felt hands on his shoulder again, guiding him a little closer. His stick hit something like a bush, but harder. It was the matador. And he swung and swung until he felt something give. No, his dad wasn’t there. His memory was mistaken. His mom’s brother. His uncle David was there. No, it was his dad. Maybe.
Mannie’s heart is pulsing as if he were still attacking that piñata.
He rises from the bed. He stands in front of the television and closes his eyes. He lets the dark come into the existing dark. Red and blue spots and streaks cross the dark interior, the dark disorientation. He takes a step and feels the bed press sidewards against his leg. Bed, he says. He adjusts, moves in the direction of where he remembers the closet facing the bathroom door. His foot steps on a shoe and in the storming floaters and streaking neurons or whatever, he recalls its position. Where he’d taken off his shoes.
Shoe, he says. He has a bare understanding as his shin bumps into it just where he’d have assumed his shin would bump. Right. This anticipation becomes a kind of sight. And it’s a little thrilling. The pain, darker. He extends his hand and feels the jutted corner of a wall. A hardened sleeve in space.
Wall, he says. Now the jamb of the bathroom door, then the cold crease of its opening. The matted carpeting under his feet shifts to tile, and the temperature drops a little. It’s so hard to keep his eyes closed. But he does. His hand touches the rounded edge of the sink.
Sink, he says. The roundness seems to approximate something soft now. Cold and soft. Is it cold there? his mother asked. He can feel the concave bowl of the sink basin. He rubs the water introduced to his hand on his pants and turns his body. He walks.
Drag racing drag racing, he thinks, remembering the show on the television.
He crosses the room. His eyes are still closed. He opens the door and steps out. He is standing outside the front door now. He feels the sunlight on his closed eyelids. He is on the second floor and with his eyes closed he can sense his distance to the ground by the sound of a car passing on the highway farther off. He feels along the rail that protects his fall. He notes a pulsing sensation approaching the anterior of his dark brain. This seems new, this pulsing. He realizes he is experiencing terror in some pure state. He was perceiving something the way a child first encounters something new. A tree for the first time could be anything until it’s a tree. He feels out for the rail and says, Rail, when its warm metal touches his fingers. How would a fall come to him with his eyes closed. With a darkness like this. He knows this ledge drops into stairs. The dark has opened simple space into the center of a labyrinth. An infinity. He steps forward along the concrete elevation, his right hand’s purchase on the wrought iron bar of the ledge seems to be guiding it in some known direction beyond his mind. The stairs, the steep flight down, he recalls is somewhere ahead. He pauses. He takes a tentative step. Solid concrete presses flat into his arch and toes and startles him. The anticipation of this, with the dark, with the cool morning air, the bright light now outside of the flashing red and blue streaks of this darkness. The concrete beneath his bare freezing feet. He takes another step forward. He is closer to where the stairs should drop. It could be a couple of steps, or the next one, or many. He steps again forward. He takes his hand off the rail. Another step. The vertigo deepens a dark infinitude he hasn’t felt before. The matador curled and shimmered, twisting broken in the lost air. He steps forward. The way the stick knew the torn body. Even with his child’s eyes bandaged like that. This knowledge kept the stick alive. He sees his mother now, sitting alone in front of the flickering television. He hears a car approaching in this darkness. The car, nearer. More proximate than the highway’s distant hisses and groans. Just outside of his orbit now, its tires crumbling slow over gravel on the lot below.
Someday, he’ll tell their kids dazzling things about his life. That Viper V10 he dropped into a ‘72 Z600 for Bonneville. The car below rolls and stops. He hears its engine kill. Sophie told him this car used to be her dad’s.
Don’t mention the dragon. Not yet. Why give her a reason to worry? You can tell her once it belongs safely to an earlier time in their life.
The nerves in his will give. He opens his eyes. His mother stands in the bright daylight before him. The white sun adjusts and she dissolves. He is standing safely on the balcony’s long concrete walk. He reaches to the wrought iron rail beside him, loose in his hand. The stairs fall to the lot below, still a few feet ahead. Blue spots pull at his vision. It’s too bright, much too bright out. A sort of pixie dust burns in the sliding right bottom corner of everything.
Mi osito, his mom says.
It’s probably a vitamin deficiency. He looks down over the rail to the lot. The door of Sophie’s car opens. She stands out in the vivid, still world beside chrome and glass glaring and creased. She’s looking up at him. She’s wearing flip-flops, her toes are painted black.
A candy wrapper skuttles across the asphalt, skips dancing past her feet and flies off.
Hey, she shouts.
He thinks, We don’t know each other that well, but we will soon.
She is looking up. Her hand visoring her gaze. Like a salute. How long had she been watching him? The moment feels somehow ruthless.
She holds up a paper bag and waves.
They stand apart. This perfect opening of light and time. Everything is about to happen.
And he waves back.
David Ryan is the author of the story collections Alligator (C4G Books), and Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press). His work has appeared in the O. Henry Prize anthology, the Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Soft Union, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Fence, and elsewhere. He teaches in the writing program of Sarah Lawrence College and New England College's low-residency program. There's more about him at www.davidwryan.com.