us, which are whorishly amplified in
the car, and not exactly my preferred
music. Sounds of hunger, sounds of
anxiety, sounds that have no explana-
tion whatsoever—just the body at work,
leaking and churning, groaning at a
frequency that no one was ever meant
to hear. Live with someone long enough,
and you learn all his gruesome lyrics,
all the squishy instrumentals that gur-
gle out of him, note by note.
I click on the news, and
for a little while it’s just the
sound of the storm else-
where, where it’s ripened
into a roar. We are told that
the storm has paused in the
lee of a fledgling mountain
up north, where it’s gath-
ering strength, pawing at
the dust like a bull. They
have a microphone embed-
ded deep inside this poor storm, I guess,
and I’d give anything to sound like that.
So sweet and angry and brand-new, a
kind of subvocal monster simply coo-
ing at the pain and the pleasure of life.
It’s perfectly beautiful and soothing, on
such a nice day, until people start talking
over it, explaining where this storm is
from and where it might go, what it
could do along the way, and then how
it makes them feel. Feelings! Every one
of them seems to be stirred up by this
storm. By the time the newscast is over,
I’m exhausted and confused. I exam-
ine myself for feelings, carefully check-
ing in the usual hiding places, and there
are simply none to be found. We aren’t
kids anymore. We are old. Older. Nearly
dead, really. James is nearly dead, at least.
He shows it. When he went to the doc-
tor recently, he hid the results from me,
and I didn’t really ask, because I have
to ration my concern. I can’t waste it on
false alarms, and, even if it’s a genuine
alarm, I must, I have come to believe,
enact a protocol with respect to what I
feel. James shows his feelings so liber-
ally that they come at a discount, and
their value diminishes. When he says
he loves me, usually in a threatening
way, the statement always seems to beg
for reciprocation. I guess he cries wolf.
More or less sobs it. One could argue
that everything James says is merely the
word “wolf ” in one language or another.
If he loves me, it is because that may
open the portal for more cuddles and
touches. That’s all. He needs to be swad-
dled, and I just happen to be nearby. If
I ever dare to walk past him without
touching his hand or stopping to out-
right kiss him, he pouts all day and looks
up at me with mournful eyes. A hus-
band is a bag of need with a dank wet
hole at its bottom. The polar opposite
of a go bag. I comply with James’s wishes
when I can, but the day is long and I
have other projects.
I guess I want James to
die. I don’t want this ac-
tively. Or with malice. But
in a dim and distant way I
gently root for James’s ab-
sence so that I can proceed
to the other side of the years
I have left, get to what hap-
pens next. For a long time,
James was what happened
next for me. As a person,
he was sort of a page-turner. I moved
through parts of him and made dis-
coveries, large and small, and he led
me to places and ideas that I’d not seen
or heard before. This looked and felt
like life. And then, and then—even
though I don’t think it happened sud-
denly—the story died in my old, tired
husband. I knew everything there was
to know: what the nights would be like,
how the morning would feel. What he
would say. What he wouldn’t. How I
would think and feel around him. How
I wouldn’t. Knowledge is many things,
but it definitely is not power. “Dread”
is a better word for it, I think, though
I do understand how that ultimately
fails as a slogan.T
he hotels inland are full, so we fol-
low the endless line of cars to the
shelter. We are shown to two cots at
the center of a high-school gymna-
sium. There must be five hundred beds
here, maybe more, laid out in a grid.
At midnight, the sleep sounds in here
will be symphonic. The scoreboard in
the gym is on, but it seems that no one
has scored yet. Zero to zero. I’d like to
feel that there is meaning in this, but
such a desire is rarely satisfied, and,
anyway, I am tired and hungry. “Voilà,”
says the volunteer, who has a walkie-
talkie on his belt that squawks out lit-
tle birdcalls. He is a handsome young
man and he seems unreasonably proud
to be playing this role today. I picturehim unplugged, powered down like a
mannequin, maybe sitting in a small
chair in a room with sports banners on
the wall. James and I stare at the cots
as gratefully as we can, and for a mo-
ment I wonder if we are meant to tip
the volunteer, because he stands there
expectantly, as wild children rocket past
our feet.
“Just let us know if there’s anything
we can do for you,” he says.
Anything? What a kind ofer. A
softer mattress, I think, and bone-chill-
ing privacy, and a beef stew made with
red wine. Some sexual attention would
also be fine, if not from you specifically,
because I fear you are too polite. Maybe
you have a friend? After drives like this
one, I often crave a release. But only a
particular style of lovemaking will do.
I have evolved a fairly specific set of
requirements. If you don’t mind read-
ing over these detailed instructions,
briefing your friend, and then sending
him to meet me in the janitor’s closet,
that would be fine.
We tell him thank you, no, and we
wait for him to run of before we start
whispering our panic all over each other.
“Yeah, no,” James says, looking
around, fake smiling, as if everyone
were trying to read his lips. “No fuck-
ing way.”
“Maybe for a night?” I ofer. I would
like to be flexible. I would like to bend
myself around this situation, which is
certainly not ideal and is almost laugh-
ably experimental. One imagines doc-
tors behind one-way glass somewhere,
rubbing themselves into a scientific
frenzy over the predicament they’ve
designed for us—two aging soft bod-
ies forced into an open-air sleeping en-
vironment. Maybe we are tired enough,
and armed with enough pharmaceuti-
cal support, to render ourselves coma-
tose on these trim little cots until it’s
safe to go home? But will people fuss
with our inert bodies? Will they see
that we are so heavily tranquillized as
to be unresponsive and then proceed
to conduct whatever procedures they
like on us? I surrender myself to my
sweet medicines only when I can lock
a door, because I hate the thought of
being fiddled with when I’ve brought
on elective paralysis and can’t exactly
fiddle back.
“The storm hasn’t even touched