In a moment, he’s going to open the car door and tell me to run, give me a head start, and then shoot me in the back before I can make it out from under the overpass.įirst, though, he’s shining his flashlight inside the car-clipboard, dashboard, center console, Molly’s face. His gun is on his hip, his hand by the holster. “Why do you have bricks from a vacant lot?” he asks, because he probably assumes that I’m planning on breaking windows-political intimidation before the election. He wants to know what’s in the Walmart bag in the back seat. I can’t get past square one, which is where he wants me. None of us had realized that by the time we were eighteen we’d already reached the pinnacle of our careers. He was also a standout high-school athlete, as was his manager before him. It was my manager who suggested that the photos would be good for sales. There I am holding the municipal trophy after the championship win. They took a seat across from my desk, surrounded by framed photos of me from my glory days, in high school, while I asked them personal questions about their bodies. “You’ve come to the right place,” I told them, turning on the charm, a sales rep in athleisure. All day long, prospective clients stopped by my office, inquiring about signing up for a membership, first month complimentary. That last one thanks to the mayor-or blood money for the populace, depending on where you stand. It’s a decent job, all things considered: weekends off, holidays off, also dental. I’ve been up since six o’clock this morning, eating my bowl of cereal before work at the high-end fitness center that’s in the strip mall between Walmart and a vacant lot. In my semiconscious limbo, I can feel the ghostly imprint of Molly’s thighs against my elbow, reminding me of when times were good. I put my seat back a notch, and then I put it back several more notches, and when I close my eyes I could be lying on a beach chair by the shore of the man-made lake, floating somewhere between awake and asleep. The warm air from the vent is blowing around my head, trapped in the car, steaming up the windshield, obscuring the gloom outside. “The only question that remains,” she says, “is whether the populace has the strength to take matters into its own hands.” Later, I’ll look things up and still not understand. She uses words like “populace.” She talks as if she were composing a term paper with footnotes. She says, “The mayor is ipso jure unlawful.” She uses Latin. In the beginning, when times were good, this would have been something of an aphrodisiac, her passion and intelligence radiating beneath the covers. Sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of the night and see her next to me, looking at her laptop, pie charts glowing up in her face. She’s the one with the poli-sci degree in this relationship, socially engaged and crunching numbers, and I’m the former high-school jock, lettering in three sports at the expense of my G.P.A. “Look at the data,” she tells me, but I never know what data she’s talking about. Meanwhile, the future of the city hangs in the balance, things going from bad to worse-public transportation, mail delivery, garbage removal-thanks to the mayor, six terms and still nothing to show for it. “The personal is political,” Molly always says, implying that if we break up it won’t be her fault. Plus, it was compounded by the latest poll numbers, which put our candidate three points behind, with three days to go until the election. Today’s particular conflict had been set in motion by the banal-who’d left a cereal bowl in the sink-but obviously indicated a wider problem. The bickering had started after we both got home from work first we were arguing, and then we were shouting, and then she disappeared into the bedroom and slammed the door hard, emerging fifteen minutes later, composed, dressed, and ready to go. “You’re welcome,” she said, but she only closed it halfway. It’s getting dark and it’s getting cold, and neither one of us has said more than a few passive-aggressive sentences to the other, like when I thanked her for putting her window up, as if she’d done me a big favor. On Molly’s lap, propped against the steering wheel, is the clipboard with the street addresses, about fifty of them, listed alongside the pertinent info-name, age, etc.-culled from the Internet and written in her perfect handwriting, evidence that she had gone to a good school in the suburbs. We’re sitting underneath the overpass, Molly and I, lights off, motor on, staring through the windshield at the row of houses up the hill.
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