Julie leans back into the couch, but not onto me. She is wide awake now. I guess I’ll wake up too.
Behind us, New York City is dwindling. Manhattan has vanished from view except for its two tallest buildings: Freedom Tower and 432 Park Ave, clawing up from the horizon like pompous actors refusing to exit the stage. Here on the outskirts of Brooklyn, the buildings are humbler. Flat-roofed boxes, unlit and silent, glowing in the moonlight like a city of the ancient world. Egypt, Rome, mud huts and stone palaces sleeping under a sky full of mysteries.
Julie presses her face to the window as we pass an old military base. The moon’s dreamy light reveals its layers of history: colonial cannons, World War II fortifications, Terror War surveillance towers, and nonlethal riot-control turrets hastily converted into lethal ones.
“I used to play there when I was a kid,” Julie says with a wistful smile. “Waiting for Dad and Rosy to finish their meetings. Mom would lift me onto a cannon and I’d pretend it was a horse.”
A memory flutters through my head and I feel the old instinct to catch it, to seal it in a jar and hide it in my basement until it suffocates. But I don’t.
“I used to do that too,” I say with a nervous smile. “At the base in Missoula.”
Julie’s expression shifts to cautious amazement. The man with no past is reminiscing.
“Except I was a boy, so…I pretended the cannon was my penis.”
She stares at me for a few seconds, then bursts into laughter. It’s a sound of delight and surprise, and it delights and surprises me. Have I ever made Julie laugh before? Unintentionally, sure, with gaffes and pratfalls, but never like this.
“So…” she says with exaggerated earnestness, trying not to giggle at the sheer normalcy of it, “you grew up in Missoula?”
We proceed to have a conversation.
Months after falling in love, building a house, and traveling the country together, we do first-date chit-chat. Where we grew up. What our families were like. How we got to where we are—with substantial omissions on my side, of course. There will be a time and a place for the dark chapters, but not tonight, soggy and exhausted in this rattling motorhome. Tonight we keep it light, and I’m surprised by how much light I find. There is more to my past than shame and tragedy. There are childhood friends, tree forts and rope swings, river floats and hill hikes. Even my life in New York has days worth recalling, brief flickers in which I’m not the tortured scion of a corporate warlord, just a young man exploring the city, marveling at its grandeur and prying at its history, getting drunk for the first time a block from where Julie lived.
I give her the human parts of me. The parts that everyone has, in some shape and color. And when the time is right, I’ll give her the rest, and I’ll hope what we’ve built can withstand it.
We soar over the Narrows bridge and onto Staten Island, the ocean to the east and the shallow seas of New Jersey to the west. We curve down into Pennsylvania, a few hundred more miles of peopled land before the barren expanse of the Midwaste. Finally, sometime after midnight, Tomsen pulls off the highway onto a farm road. She drives about a mile until we’re well out of sight of the highway, then parks.
“Okay, goodnight,” M says, lowering himself gingerly to the floor.
“Hold up, big man,” Nora says, stepping over him to open a cabinet. “Very tough and impressive, forgetting you just got shot…” She pulls out a gallon of vodka and thumps it down on the counter. “…but we’ve got to get that mess cleaned.”
“Your opinion as a nurse?” M grunts. “Or just a girl who wants my shirt off?”
“Oh yeah,” Nora purrs as she unpacks Tomsen’s first-aid kit. “Nothing gets me hot like a septic gut wound.”
M sighs and stands up. Very carefully, he pulls off his shirt. As I’ve always suspected, his bulk is more muscle than fat. Not the sharp edges of a modern bodybuilder but the round, mountainous power of an old-fashioned strongman. Still busy preparing her instruments, Nora shoots him a sideways glance that sticks just a little longer than it should, a subtle raise of the eyebrows. Then her eyes settle on his wounds, and she’s all business again.
“Fold out that couch and lie on your back,” she tells him, and he obeys, grimacing with each movement. “Tomsen, do you have anything to put under him? It’s gonna get messy.”
M raises his head sharply.
“I don’t like messy,” Tomsen says, opening a cabinet that’s crammed so full it explodes onto her, burying her in obscure equipment that she holds in place with her shoulder and forehead. “Can’t get careless out here, have to stay neat, organized, ready for anything. Cluttered house, cluttered mind.” She plung-es an arm deep into the cabinet and emerges promptly with a folded blue tarp, then body-slams everything else back inside. “Can you sit up please?” she asks M, keeping an uneasy distance from his naked torso. When he obliges, she unfurls the tarp over the couch with a single crisp motion, then retreats to the front of the RV.
M lowers himself onto the crinkling plastic and frowns at the ceiling. “I feel like I’m in a fucking auto shop. You gonna change my oil?”
“Something like that,” Nora says, and jabs a pair of pliers into his shoulder.
One by one, she removes the staples that held him together during our mad dash out of Manhattan. He barely flinches, so I flinch for him, and I feel anger bubbling low in my belly. He took these bullets for Abram’s daughter. Did that man offer so much as a nod of thanks? Did he erase this gift along with a dozen others when he convinced himself he didn’t need anyone?
“I think I’ll give you two some privacy,” Julie says, looking queasy as she watches the surgery.
“Hell no you won’t,” Nora says, waving the bloody pliers at her. “You’re not leaving me alone in this horror show. Here.” She holds out the huge plastic vodka bottle. “Have a shot.”
Julie hesitates. “Well, when you put it that way.”
She takes a pull from the bottle, then offers it to me. I shake my head. Tonight is not the night to test my tolerance.
“Tomsen?” she says.
“I don’t drink alcohol,” Tomsen says, watching the proceedings from the elevated perch of the driver’s chair, spinning it left and right with her leg while her fingers wander through her short mat of copper curls. “Makes me jittery.”
“Hey,” M says, lifting his head to frown at everyone, “if anyone needs a drink right now, it’s me.”
Nora takes the bottle from Julie and pours it into M’s wound. He shrieks.
“Oh, wrong hole? Sorry about that.” Her sadism softens as she holds the bottle to M’s lips, pouring a gentle stream into his mouth. “I bet you miss being a slab of frozen beef, when you could get shot all you wanted.”
M swallows the liquor and lets out a sigh. “Those”—he winces as she plunges the stitching needle—“were the days.”
“Remember when we first met? When I shot you three times and you were too busy eating my friends to notice?”
The mirth drains from M’s face, but Nora gives him a playful slap on the cheek. “I’m just fucking with you, Marcus. Past is past.”
She takes a long pull off the bottle and continues stitching.
By the time the surgery is finished, Nora is far too drunk to be performing surgery. M looks a little tipsy too, but he’s spending all his euphoria on pain management. He eases himself back to the floor and groans, “Goodnight.”
“Are we done partying already?” Nora asks the room, crestfallen.
“It’s been a long day,” Julie says. She’s not entirely sober either, but her buzz looks more internal, the kind that leads to thoughts and feelings more than energy and action. The only kind I know.