Water Under the Bridge: The Listener

I can sign the papers.

I keep trying to tell them this, but they’re busy arguing about where to put my body.

The judge wants six months. My signature is part of what they need. A divorce is a manageable problem, and I keep trying to return us to it.

The woman has a gun against my stomach. Her husband is driving. There is something wrong with my tongue, something that began when she put the needle in my neck back at the office.

I need to keep speaking while I still can.

“People lie when they’re afraid,” I tell them.

The man looks at me in the mirror.

I try to tell him about foundations. Trust. The difficulty of building anything lasting when two people are working against each other. These are things I have said so often that they should come easily, but I have to reach for each word.

The woman says their marriage is built on murder. She says they’re good at keeping each other’s secrets.

I begin to cry.

I don’t intend to. It happens without any decision on my part, which is embarrassing, although I’m not sure who I’m trying to impress anymore. I can’t wipe my face properly with my hands joined like this.

“How are you going to kill him?” the man asks.

He lowers his voice. As though I’m sleeping. As though he doesn’t want to disturb me.

“I’m not,” she tells him. “I’m just going to put him in the ground.”

For a moment, I don’t understand the distinction.

Then I do.

I pull against the cuffs, and she makes a small, impatient sound.

I tell her to wait.

The needle comes back.

✦

There are pieces after that.

A turn that tips me against the door.

The sound of tires on something rough.

The woman saying something I can’t understand, and the man answering in the same tone he might use if she’d asked him to carry the groceries.

For a while I believe I’m back in my office, in my chair, and someone is talking from very far away.

I think I tell them to go on.

Then my heel strikes something hard, and the chair is gone.

There is sunlight through my eyelids. My body is being moved without me, and I have a brief, absurd concern about my trousers. They’re catching on something. I paid to have them altered, and now someone is dragging them through the dirt.

I want to tell them to be careful.

Instead, I hear a car door close.

✦

My cheek is against the ground. There is grit between my lips, and when I try to spit, I discover how little control I have over my mouth.

I’m lying on my side. My hands are still together. I can see the back of one of them and the small brown spot near my thumb that I keep meaning to have looked at.

Beyond it there is a wall of dirt.

I look at the wall for a long time before I understand why it’s there.

I manage to lift my head a little. Enough to see daylight. Enough to see a man’s shoe near the edge.

He’s still here.

I have never been so relieved to see another person in my life.

“Help,” I say.

The word comes out like breath.

I try again.

“Help me.”

The shoe turns.

✦

There are things I could tell him.

That his wife will always test him. That she has decided being understood means never being opposed. That he has mistaken his ability to manage a crisis for the ability to love another person.

I know how to say these things. I can make them sound kind. I can make a man cry with relief because someone has finally put his unhappiness into words he can bear to hear.

I look at the shoe and try to remember which of these things he most needs to hear.

“She’ll do it to you,” I manage.

He crouches. For a moment his face blocks the light. There is sweat along his hairline. This has been hard work for him.

“What?”

“Someday.”

I try to lift my joined hands. They rise a fraction, then fall.

“She’ll put you here.”

He looks toward the car.

“You don’t understand her,” he says.

Then he stands.

✦

I lose him for a moment. When the world comes back, dirt is landing on my legs.

I hear it strike my trousers, a soft, heavy sound, and for a second I’m back in my office listening to rain. Rain meant people lingered after an appointment. They stood in the doorway and told you the thing they hadn’t managed to say in the previous fifty minutes.

People will tell you almost anything if you make them feel there’s still time.

More dirt lands.

I try to shout, and some of it gets into my mouth. I cough. The movement hurts, but it’s movement, and for a moment I’m grateful.

I try to bend my knees.

Nothing happens.

“I can sign,” I tell him. “The papers.”

Whatever they want. There are always ways to make paperwork say what a person needs it to say.

He doesn’t respond.

I listen for the woman. I can’t hear her anymore.

I would give anything to hear her.

✦

I never thought of myself as a cruel man.

There were clients I liked. There were people who left my office better than when they arrived. That has to count for something. It can’t all be reduced to the other part, the money, the things people were willing to pay to keep their lives intact.

They were so relieved when I gave them a number.

Before the number, they imagined everything. A wife finding out. An employer learning what they’d done. Afterward, there was an amount. A problem they could solve.

I try to believe this now, but the dirt has reached my hip, and the explanation doesn’t seem to be helping.

I remember a man sitting across from me with both hands wrapped around a cup of water. He kept asking if there was another way. He asked so often that eventually I stopped answering.

I can’t remember his name.

I remember how long he kept me there.

✦

The shoveling stops.

I hear the man move, and then nothing, and the silence is so frightening that I try to speak again. I don’t care what I say. I just need him to know I’m still here.

“Please.”

I push against the ground with my hands. A little soil breaks loose beneath my wrist. I try again, and it moves again, and hope comes so quickly that for a second it hurts worse than everything else.

The hole isn’t deep.

I can see the sky.

I wait for his footsteps to take him away. I listen for the car door, for the engine, for the ordinary sounds of two people leaving a place.

A shadow falls over me instead.

“I won’t tell,” I whisper.

It’s the simplest thing I’ve offered him. The most important. Everything else has been too complicated.

His eyes move to my hands. To the small space I’ve made in the dirt. Then he looks at the car again.

“I know,” he says.

I almost thank him.

Then he levels the gun at my head.

I have so much left to tell him. Things about his wife, about himself, about the kind of marriage they could still have if they would just let me finish.

He fires before I can choose one.