Test of Metal

I sat in the car. It was running and it was grey outside. Rain fell and streamed its way down the windshield. I stared through it. Not seeing it. Waiting.

I couldn't feel my skin. My bones. Nothing. A great void had opened up and I was a vacuum, eternally insatiable, internally devoid.

The passenger door opened. I heard it and Marie got in.

"All set," she said.

"Okay."

She buckled herself in and I ran the wipers over the diagonal ocean. For an instant, I almost missed it, but then it was gone and the world was the sound of the car. The rhythm of wipers, and a great deafening silence.

"Are you okay?" Marie asked.

"Yeah."

"I do still love you, you know."

"I know."

"Okay."

I put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking space and drove out onto the road. Recently I had developed an acute awareness of the depth of my consciousness. An abyss, littered throughout with fragments of things said. Things seen. Reverberating inaudibly through the space and walls of my skull. Vibrating me sleepless, hunger-less. I stopped at a red light. I could feel Marie glance over at me. I didn't know what to say anymore. I stayed quiet. The light turned green and I drove on.

"They said it should only take a few weeks."

"Okay."

She was trying to keep me awake, in a sense. I could feel it. "...Don't fall asleep James. Stay awake. Stay with me. Stay with me."

I could only visualize it as a car accident. One she survived flawlessly. One which crushed my lungs and took one of my limbs and burned my face. One in which I was pinned under sheets and tons of crumpled wreckage and she was kneeling over me. Pleading. Her hand over mine. Her tears.

Her wide open future after me.

"...Stay with me."

The vision faded and the wipers took away more rain and I pulled up to another red light. Marie put her hand on my leg. The weight in my chest swelled and I held everything back. Just as I had been doing for months. Just as I had to keep doing. A man could be empty. But not weak. Wasn't that what all of this meant? A test of metal? A great and ultimate reminder that I could never be that man? That brute and bearded man of men?

The light turned green and I was following a car now that had a sticker on the back that read "COEXIST" in various bastardizations of religious symbols. I passed the asshole gently and the wipers took away more rain.

"Idiots," Marie said. She rubbed my thigh. "At least three of those religions preach absolute segregation. How are they supposed to coexist? Change their religions? That isn't coexisting. That's being forced into it. They can't be who they are if they have to change."

"Yeah."

She sighed. "Yeah."

After a few minutes of the swishing of the wiper blades we pulled into the driveway.

"Are you coming in?" I asked.

"Do you want me to?"

"I don't care. Do whatever you want to do, I guess. Doesn't matter." I looked at her for the first time in a while.

"If you don't want me to, I won't. I just figured since you drove, you were, I don't know, sort of setting the stage for me to come in."

"Do whatever you want. If you come in, okay. If not, it was nice seeing you." I unbuckled and opened my door.

"Yeah."

I got out and walked up to the front door. I unlocked it and went inside to the kitchen. My head felt like it was full of clouds. It was swelling now and everything was coming to the surface and I poured a whiskey. The scream was roaring to my mouth. The plates and glasses and bottles wanted to be thrown and shattered and bled over. The house wanted fire. The world wanted fire and floods and terror and death and I wanted nothing. Nothing.

The front door opened.

"James?"

I drank the whiskey. "Yeah?"

"I think it's time we talked."

She came into the kitchen and I looked at her and she looked at me. Her face was flushed. Her make up had run. Her eyes puffed. I looked away.

"About?"