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Amanda’s never seen the world so flat.
It’s almost eerie. She grew up in the Metro; she’s never known anything other than the concrete-and-chrome vertical labyrinth of skyscrapers, the sprawling morass of asphalt, the sky tinged yellow from industrial smog. But out here, the fields of corn stretch out endlessly, no matter which way Amanda turns her head to look. For the first time, Amanda really feels the definition of the word horizon. She could run forever, but it wouldn’t make a difference; there’d be nowhere to hide, not really. It frightens her.
“Not a very interesting landscape, I know.”
She turns her gaze back from the dust-streaked passenger window, to instead look across the car’s console at the driver. Lawrence’s face is inscrutable— more so than usual, as he’s wearing expensive-looking sunglasses, totally obscuring his eyes. Amanda isn’t sure if he’s wearing them to shield himself from the sun, or just from the possibility of recognition. In his short-sleeved button-down aloha shirt, his purposely-faded black jeans, he looks curiously out of place. Almost silly.
“Do people even live out here?” Amanda scoffs.
“Some do,” Lawrence answers. “In the cities. But I don’t think this is the occasion for sightseeing. Do you?”
Amanda can never tell if he means to be so condescending, or if it just comes naturally to him. She rolls her eyes and draws up one leg into the car seat, resting her elbow on her knee so she can set her chin in her hand.
“No,” Amanda sullenly replies. She tries to return her attention to the world outside, but as her eyes track back and forth over the blurring cornfields, it all just ceases to look like anything. The only sounds are the noise of the road beneath the wheels and the heavy synths of a Depeche Mode CD playing at low volume— one of few things she and Lawrence both enjoy enough to listen to together.
“You know, Amanda…”
Amanda raises her head and looks over to Lawrence. He keeps his eyes on the road; he’s a safe, responsible driver, she’ll give him that.
“I’m from around here, originally,” Lawrence says. His voice has a different sort of pitch to it; softer now, less self-important.
“Huh,” Amanda replies. It’s a bit of a surprise, imagining Lawrence growing up in this great golden nowhere. “Got any family left around here?”
Silence. Amanda sees Lawrence’s shoulders tense; he grips the steering wheel a bit harder, before his grip relaxes.
“None that I’d like to visit,” he finally says. Amanda grunts and looks back to the window, as she brushes a stray strand of hair out of her eyes.
“And here I was hoping I could be your other woman,” she jokes, her voice dry. Lawrence doesn’t laugh. The two of them drive on.
After a few more miles, Amanda finally sees something to break up the monotony of the flat horizon. It looks like a metal spiderweb, stretching out over the tops of the fields. It rolls slowly along, and it stretches for further than Amanda can see from her current vantage point.
It looks like something John would have made, she thinks, before she can stop herself. Like something she could have made.
“John, please just be honest with me.”
Lawrence’s heavy voice sounded unusually exasperated. Amanda paused where she was, holding her body as still as possible.
“You know that I’m the best-equipped to handle the procedure you need. Why take the risk bothering with anyone else?”
John inhaled to answer, but then all that Amanda heard was his thick, phlegmy cough. Amanda took advantage of the noise to sneak closer to the corner, tiptoeing as best as she could in her boots.
“This isn’t for my sake,” John eventually replied. “And it’s not for yours, either. All of this is for Amanda.”
“You keep saying that,” Lawrence answered, ”but how? I fail to see how it benefits her to—”
A full-body tremble wracked Amanda’s frame. Though it hurt to do it, she forced herself not to listen, to turn around, to come back the way she came. She wanted, more than anything, to know what Lawrence was talking about. What was going to happen to her next. But she couldn’t. It would be against the rules.
Evening comes, and they cross the border into Illinois. The wide-open sky above them has turned orange, and the fluffy clouds dotting it have turned a pale rosy pink color. Lawrence isn’t the only one wearing shades now; they’re driving directly into the sunset, so Amanda’s donned the tacky aviators that Lawrence bought her back at a rest stop in Pennsylvania. Still, it’s hard to look out of the windshield. The sun is such a bright, dramatic orange-white, and it’s turning the horizon into an oil painting. Amanda’s never seen anything like it.
“How are you feeling, Amanda?” Lawrence asks. “Should we start looking for hotels?”
Amanda considers for a moment. She’s had some time to nap throughout the day. If the two of them switched off, she could probably drive for another three or four hours before needing to stop. Where that would get the two of them, Amanda doesn’t know; though he wouldn’t dare admit it, Amanda suspects that Lawrence doesn’t have a final destination in mind for their little road trip, either.
“Yeah,” she says. “If I see one more evangelical billboard In the middle of a cornfield, I’m gonna go fucking postal.”
Lawrence doesn’t typically find much amusement in Amanda’s style of humor. So she’s surprised when he scoffs out a single laugh.
“They are tacky, aren’t they?” he agrees. “I always thought they were pointless, even when I was a kid.”
Amanda snorts and nods.
“Who would ever find Jesus on the interstate?” she asks. “You’d have to be a real pathetic fuck to fall for something like that.”
Lawrence sighs. When he next speaks, that oh-so-typical sad weight is back in his voice.
“I don’t know,” he says. “People have fallen for worse.”
Amanda crosses her arms over her chest.
“Yeah, well. Like I said,” she replies. “Real pathetic fucks.”
Lawrence doesn’t argue.
“Amanda?”
Amanda startled and dropped the cotton ball on her desk. The old, reopened cut on her arm stung as the peroxide soaked in, but at least it had stopped bleeding. When Amanda turned to look over her shoulder, she saw Lawrence lingering at the doorway. He had his fist raised towards the doorframe, knuckles still curled in as if he’d been prepared to knock on it.
“What do you want?” she asked, as she turned to fully face him. Amanda felt her mental shields going up, as she warily regarded him; Lawrence was more pleasant to deal with than Hoffman, but it still wasn’t like him to socialize. Him seeking out Amanda now didn’t seem like a good thing.
“I-I just… I thought we could…” Lawrence cleared his throat and tried again. “I came to talk to you.”
Amanda crossed her arms and fixed him with a frown. What was going on? It wasn’t like Lawrence to be nervous, or to show any outward sign of vulnerability.
“Okay, well, you’re talking to me,” Amanda said. “So? What?”
Lawrence glanced to either side of him, examining the hallway, before he stepped into Amanda’s room. When he gently pushed the door shut behind him, Amanda’s pulse jumped, and she reflexively reached for the nearest sharp implement— in this case, her razor. She gripped it tight and kept a watchful eye on Lawrence, but he stayed where he was, across the room.
“I’ve been talking to John,” Lawrence began. “About the plans for our next tests.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen you two,” Amanda said. It came out sharper than she meant it to; Amanda knew that each of them had their own parts to play, but that didn’t stop the pangs of jealousy and fear she felt every time she was reminded that there were things she didn’t know, things that John told other people and not her.
“Yes,” Lawrence agreed. “Well, I…”
Again, Lawrence shot a look back to Amanda’s closed door. Amanda began to relax her grip on the razor, and she raised an eyebrow at him. What could have Lawrence feeling so nervous?
She got her answer when Lawrence reached into the inner pockets of his coat. He produced a single sheet of heavy paper and slowly crossed the room, to hold it out for her to see. Even before she took the note in hand, Amanda recognized John’s handwriting. It was still neat and graceful, the way it used to be before his decline.
“I know how you feel about obeying John’s will,” Lawrence said. “But when I saw this, I just… I couldn’t keep it from you anymore. You deserve the truth, Amanda. From at least one person.”
There was something there in Lawrence’s face, some light flickering in his eyes, that Amanda had never seen before. Her frown deepened as she began reading.
My dear Amanda—
The enclosed is for you… To ease the waves in the sea you must navigate. Talk with Anthony McDonald at the Branch. He will take care of all.
Amanda read on, her hands trembling.
They book a hotel, halfway to midnight and halfway to St. Louis. Amanda can tell right away that Lawrence finds the place revolting, but it’s sort of charming to her eyes; it’s nestled into a patch of woodland off the side of a historic parkway, and it has a neon sign displaying a crescent moon in an old-school pajama hat, peacefully sleeping. When Lawrence idles the car outside the lobby door, Amanda hears crickets outside. She never knew they really sound like that.
It’s Amanda’s turn to check them in, so she tucks her hair up into a baseball cap, zips into an oversized hoodie, and speaks to the concierge in her old voice, the one that she hasn’t had to use in nearly a decade. Amanda can tell by the look the concierge gives her that he thinks she’s some barely-legal teenage boy, which makes it that much funnier when he asks if Amanda and her “companion” would like one room or two. Amanda pays for the pair of rooms with some of Lawrence’s cash reserves, buys a sparkling water and a Coke from the vending machine in the lobby, and then walks back out to meet Lawrence, still waiting in the car. He rolls down the passenger window so Amanda can talk to him.
“We’re good,” she says, grateful to be using her own voice again. Then, with a grin, she adds, “But I think the concierge thinks I’m your rent-boy.”
Lawrence huffs and rolls his eyes.
“Well, he’s wrong in a few different ways, then,” he says. Eyeing the sparkling water in Amanda’s hand, he finally takes off his sunglasses and nods towards it. “Is that for me?”
“Yup.” Amanda climbs into the car and gives Lawrence their room numbers, as well as his drink. He parks the car, pops the trunk, and each of them pulls out their bags— a huge, canvas carrier bag for Amanda, which she slings easily over her shoulder, and a hardshell rolling suitcase for Lawrence. God forbid he abandon all of his pomp and extravagance. Amanda gives Lawrence the key to his room before she heads towards the row of doors. Lawrence follows slowly behind, trying to negotiate both his cane and his suitcase.
The naked lightbulb outside Amanda’s door is attracting an entire litany of insects, so the second she has the key turned in the somewhat-sticky lock, she darts inside and closes the door behind her. She turns on the light switch for her room, and when she sees no stains on the ceiling and no peripheral movement of cockroaches seeking darkness, she tosses her bag onto the beige bedspread. For a hotel room; it’s typical; for Amanda, it’s a substantial upgrade from the places she’s used to staying. But there is one curiosity, something that she hasn’t seen in any of the other hotel rooms they’ve used so far. On the same wall as the television, the wall shared with the neighboring hotel room, there’s a door. Amanda scowls at it, and she considers scooting over one of the chairs to barricade it— but then she hears a soft, light knock from its other side.
“Amanda?” the voice calls. “It’s Lawrence. Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” she answers. She just stares at the door, imagining Lawrence on the other side. Maybe in the same pose she found him in when this all started, the night he showed her John’s note.
“I can’t believe this place still has connector doors.” Lawrence laughs, and Amanda can picture the pompous shake of his head. “We really are slumming it.”
“If this is slumming it, Lawrence, you”d hate to see the places I used to sleep,” Amanda answers. Silence from Lawrence’s side; Amanda grins, happy to have won another point on him.
“Fair enough,” Lawrence finally says. There’s a pause, and Amanda thinks maybe he’s moved on. But then he asks, “Are you planning on going to bed right away?”
Amanda shrugs, and then hurriedly says, “I dunno yet. Why?”
“I’m… not tired yet,” comes Lawrence’s voice. “I thought perhaps we could… hang out…?”
The casual term sounds strange, foreign in Lawrence’s mouth. Amanda isn’t sure what there is to be gained by the two of them hanging out, especially after they’ve spent the past ten hours trapped in a car together.
Pity, Amanda tells herself. That’s why she unlocks her side of the door and swings it open. Lawrence is standing there, and Amanda can see from a quick look that his room is set up in an exact mirror image to her own.
“C’mon over,” Amanda says, already turning her back on Lawrence. “We got cable.”
“Why would he do this?!” Amanda cried. The letter in her hands creased as she grasped it, arms shaking, trying to keep herself from tearing it to pieces.
“I… I don’t know,” Lawrence murmured. “I only knew that I had to tell you about it.”
Amanda growled and, in one swift movement, surged up to a standing position, dropping the letter on her desk to slam her palms down against the cold metal tabletop.
“I ruined myself for him!” she cried. “I let him fix me, and teach me, a-and use me, and he’s just going to let me go?!”
“I-I think… There’s one last test he has planned for you,” Lawrence said. “And, if you succeed, then… yes. He’s going to let you go.”
“Another test? Why?!”
Amanda whirled on her heel to level her glare on Lawrence. She wanted, so badly, to accuse him of lying, to reach out and destroy him for trying to undermine her faith in John… But there was no joy, no vindication in his eyes. Only sadness.
“It isn’t fair!” Amanda spat. “I’ve been tested more than anybody. More than H-Hoffman, more than you— so why?! WHY, Lawrence?!”
“I don’t know,” he repeated. “It isn’t fair, Amanda.”
Amanda hadn’t expected him to agree with her, hadn’t expected any sympathy at all. It was enough to make her pause. As she tried to collect herself, to decide on her next move, Lawrence took a small step closer to her.
“Amanda,” he murmured. “What if we didn’t have to do this?”
Amanda hated herself for it, but in that moment, the loyalty she felt for John was overcome by a flash of heretical intrigue.
“What do you mean?” she asked Lawrence.
Lawrence sits at the small table in the corner of Amanda’s room, reading a book of poetry and stealing occasional glances up at the low-budget sitcom Amanda’s got on TV. She sprawls on top of the bed covers, leaning against the headboard, but she’s only half-watching it, too. Mostly, Amanda’s trying to reconcile how utterly strange this all feels with how mundane it is. She doesn’t feel safe around men, as a rule; she hasn’t since she was a kid, and even then, she isn’t sure that she ever remembers feeling truly secure around them. John was the only exception— and even then, only at first. Amanda doesn’t like to admit it to herself, but a part of her was relieved when John began to weaken, when it became clear that she was much stronger than he was.
She doesn’t feel totally safe around Lawrence, either. Always, there’s that lurking look of calculation in his eye, always the little reminders of his power and privilege in the way he talks and dresses. There’s no forgetting that somewhere inside that big, vain lion of a man is a creature capable of sawing off its own foot. But… Something about him has softened on this escape attempt. Enough, at least, that Amanda doesn’t feel the need to constantly keep her eyes on him as the two of them share the space.
“Is this what television has come to?” Lawrence asks, the sneer plain in his voice. Amanda just shrugs.
“I can change it, if you want,” she says. “Maybe this place gets Showtime. You could watch Queer As Folk.”
“Very funny,” Lawrence grouses. “And so original.”
“I could have made a Will and Grace joke,” Amanda says. She grins over at him, and to her slight surprise, Lawrence is smiling, too.
“Sure,” he agrees. “I guess you could have.”
The two of them watch on in silence; Amanda sips her Coke, and she hears the crackling fizz of Lawrence cracking open his sparkling water.
“How are your meds?” Lawrence asks after a moment. “Running low?”
Amanda rolls upwards to rummage through her bag, until she finds the small colony of yellow pill bottles. Her spiro and estradiol are looking good, but she’s running low on Zoloft. It’s a strange feeling, being so open about her medication and her transition; but then again, Lawrence is a doctor, and he’s taken the knowledge of Amanda’s gender status in remarkable stride. Amanda guesses maybe it makes him feel better to be doing something that he’s familiar with. Or maybe less alone.
“I’ve only got a few more days of antidepressants left,” Amanda answers. Lawrence hums and nods his head.
“Okay,” he says. “I can fudge a prescription for you. We’ll be sure to get it filled before you run out.”
And that’s it. He doesn’t press with any invasive questions, or try to ask how Amanda’s been feeling. He just goes back to reading his book.
That’s strange, too. But not in a bad way. In fact, Amanda thinks that maybe it feels nice.
They stole quietly out of the meat plant, Amanda’s bags packed. She couldn’t stop crying, but she did her best to bite her lip and stay quiet, even when the taste of her own blood threatened to bring back the sense-memory of the bear trap on her head.
“I promise, Amanda, I did everything that I could for John,” Lawrence breathed to her. “He’s in as much comfort as he can possibly be for a man who’s d… a man in his condition.”
“O-okay,” was all Amanda could manage to whisper.
The night was freezing, when they emerged into it; it worsened Amanda’s trembling, or maybe that was just the terrifying weight of what she was doing. After all that John had done for her, to make her strong and whole, how could she just abandon him?
There was a car waiting in the lot— not Lawrence’s usual one, either. Amanda wanted to ask where it had come from, but it seemed like the least important, most inane detail In all that was going on, so she held her tongue.
“We need to hurry, Amanda,” Lawrence panted at her side. He held his cane in one hand to jog alongside her; a gangly, awkward jog, and a painful one, judging by the brief wince that crossed his face. As Lawrence paused to catch his breath, he looked over his shoulder, and Amanda followed his gaze. The meat plant loomed large in the night, blacker than black, its abandoned rotting stokes and spokes and chimneys making it look like a monstrous corpse.
“If Hoffman realizes what we’re doing, it won’t be pretty.”
A new chill swept down Amanda’s spine. She sniffled and wiped her eyes as she stared at the plant a moment longer. Was John awake in there? Did he know what Lawrence had done? …Did he know that she was betraying him? The thought was too painful to contemplate. Amanda sobbed and tore her eyes from the meat plant, and she saw Lawrence there watching her, gravity plain on his face.
“Amanda, this only works if we’re both committed,” he murmured. It should have sounded patronizing, but to Amanda’s ear, it didn’t.
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
Amanda screwed her eyes shut to think. Behind her eyelids, before she could think of anything else, her mind filled with images of blood, the smell of metal and gore, the taste of it smothering over her tongue. She gasped and reopened her eyes. Lawrence stood before her, the car ready and waiting.
“I’m sure,” Amanda breathed. She pushed past Lawrence, tossed her bag into the backseat, and climbed into the shotgun seat. She buckled the seatbelt as fast as she could, like it would be enough to hold her back if she suddenly changed her mind.
Amanda is getting tired. Her eyelids droop as she watches the lowest dregs of what late-night hotel cable in the Midwest has to offer; right now, it’s reruns of Wheel of Fortune. She never used to get sleepy so early in the night— but then, there’s nobody she has to look after anymore, no reason that she needs to wake herself up every two hours. It’s like her body has decided that she’s safe and that it’s time to rest, even if Amanda herself isn’t sure she agrees with that assessment. But whether or not she’s completely safe, she’s safe enough for tonight, safe enough to try to get some sleep. Or she will be, once she takes care of one last thing.
“Lawrence,” Amanda calls. He raises his head and startles at the sound of his name; Amanda expects to find him still reading, but when she looks back over to the table in her room, Lawrence is just… sitting there, staring off into space. He blinks as he refocuses his attention on Amanda.
“Sorry,” he says. “Yes, Amanda?”
“It’s late,” she says. “Time to get out.”
“Ah.” Lawrence nods, slowly, and gives Amanda a small smile. “Yes, I suppose it is getting late.”
He collects his book and his now-empty bottle of sparkling water, no doubt planning to throw it away in his own room. Lawrence is strange about personal space and garbage like that, Amanda’s learned over the past week. As Lawrence stands up, Amanda can’t help noticing that he still seems distracted. His gaze is curiously flat as he looks to his surroundings, like he’s seeing something else beyond the hotel room. Lawrence takes two steps towards the connector door before Amanda sighs.
“You’re being weird,” she says. “What is it?”
Lawrence pauses. He looks down at Amanda, and for a long moment, his mouth is unmoving, pressed into a thin line. Then the levee breaks; Lawrence sighs, his eyes softening as he looks at Amanda.
“I was just… Thinking about Adam,” Lawrence mumbles. “I wonder what he’d think about all this. If…”
Lawrence cuts himself off with another deep sigh.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
Amanda isn’t surprised. Adam’s become like a token or a holy icon to them both, only in different ways. To Amanda, he’s still a symbol of her failure, of the choices she was forced to make and the realization that there were no right choices after all. The nightmares of him have lessened the further she gets from the Metro, but they still haven’t stopped. But to Lawrence, Adam has become something almost like a patron saint. The patron saint of what, Amanda isn’t sure, but it’s plain that Lawrence is following in the phantom footsteps of a ghost that only he can see. Amanda doesn’t question him about it. They both have their demons, their ghosts, their secrets.
“I get it,” Amanda says softly, even though she doesn’t. She gives Lawrence a nod that she hopes is encouraging— at least, encouraging enough to get Lawrence to leave. Amanda doesn’t want to talk about Adam, not tonight. They hold each other’s eyes for a moment; Amanda sees tears shine on the surface of Lawrence’s, just for a moment, and then they disappear.
“Right,” Lawrence says. He breathes out a low laugh and resumes his walk to the door. “Well… Tomorrow is another day. Let’s try to get some rest, alright?”
“Yep,” Amanda agrees. Lawrence crosses the threshold to his own room, and Amanda stands up, ready to go over and lock her side behind him. She’s almost reached the door as well when Lawrence turns to look back at her.
“Amanda… If you need anything in the night, please feel free to knock on my door, okay?” Lawrence asks. “If there’s anything I can do to help, then—“
“Yeah,” Amanda quickly says, mostly just to cut Lawrence off. She knows that he really means that, and it stirs a frisson of panic in her chest. People aren’t supposed to help Amanda. The last person that Amanda believed helped her was John, and that hadn’t turned out well for anyone. Amanda doesn’t want to want Lawrence’s help. She can’t.
“Thanks, Lawrence,” Amanda says. “Good night.”
Lawrence’s brows draw together, but he nods back at her.
“Good night,” Lawrence echoes. Then he steps back from the door, and Amanda shuts and locks it behind him. She walks over to double-check the locks on her room’s front door, and then she clicks off the television.
As Amanda digs through her bag for her pajamas, the sound of crickets floats in from the woods outside, filling her room with their soft chirping drone. Slowly, the tension drains from Amanda’s shoulders, and she finds herself actively listening to the crickets as she walks off to her bathroom to change.
She decides she likes the sound. It sounds like another sunrise really is coming.