The Hoax of a New World

Dahlia and Pepper, newly married—her third go, his second—clatter north to San Luis Obispo by train. Their carriage moves inexorably forward while beside them on the highway a glut of future fun is mired in gridlock: motorhomes dragging compact cars, SUVs with camping gear haphazardly bungeed to their roofs, trucks fuming with off-road bikes slumped in their beds. Pepper can even see several boats moored high on their trailers, desperate for water. It seems possible to him that the open space between here and where all those drivers want to be is already filled.

The train peels away from the snapshot of an exodus, leaving Pepper thankful for having had the idea to take the train. Dahlia, seated across from him in the two-person roomette, has tucked into The Hoax of a New World, a novel about Europeans in the 1500s who didn’t believe in the discovery of an entirely new hemisphere, despite the returning colonizer’s proof: novel vegetables and fruits, gold statuary, the newly enslaved. The quotes on the dust jacket state that it’s “a satire of modern doubt in the post-truth era.” Not Pepper’s idea of a fun read.

“Any good?” he asks.

“Mmm.”

Three years ago, when his first wife was still alive, Pepper would never have imagined that he’d one day find himself massaging the feet of a second wife while she devoured a satire of modern doubt in the post-truth era. Or that he’d retroactively think of his late wife as his first wife. The suddenness of this entirely new life of his continues to surprise him. There are long stretches, days even, when it feels like grief has lost his trail.

“Hungry?” he asks.

“In a bit,” she says, and turns another page. “Go on ahead.”

“I’ll wait.”

He doesn’t talk much about his late wife, and he’s become adept at paring back the “we” in his stories to a simple “I.” It’s not his intention to exclude his late wife. Rather, it’s to respect her privacy—and because mentioning her creates a natural bridge between then and now, and creates the necessity of confronting, however minutely, the reasons she is no longer here.

Dahlia has no hang-up talking about her previous husbands. There’s Carlos, her most recent. Married nineteen years, unhappily. She divorced him when he wanted to liquidate all their assets, mostly hers, to continue paying for his experimental cancer treatments. He kept enough after their swift divorce to help the researchers determine that their therapeutics, at least in his case, were fatally ineffective.

But it’s Dahlia’s first husband whom Pepper can’t get out of his head: a bona fide serial killer. Dahlia was clueless about his crimes until she found, in one of his notebooks, a sketch of her body enumerated with the cuts he’d need to make to dismember her—if she ever uncovered his true nature. She found the sketch while snooping through his belongings, on the hunch that he was carrying on affairs while he was away on his many business trips. She’d glimpsed what appeared to be love bites and claw marks on his body on more than one occasion. She thought maybe she’d find a receipt, a pair of ticket stubs, hotel stationary with a woman’s telephone number. Instead, she discovered the sketch and his list: tarpaulin, hack saw, deep freezer. She never dreamed that the business trips themselves were a complete ruse, or that the unnecessary deep freezer that had appeared in their garage the year before, holding nothing but pillows of frozen berries and a few pints of ice cream, had been measured for her own piecemeal internment.

Pepper finds it unnerving that she’s not traumatized by her first marriage, and confounding that she didn’t notice any of her husband’s psychopathic tendencies. He’s not sure how she’s managed to be so warm and well-adjusted, or how she can be seemingly uninterested in probing Pepper’s own transgressions, even if they are all of the misdemeanor variety.

“You’ve made me hungry,” she says, dog-earing her page and withdrawing her feet from his hands.

Dahlia stands and peers out the window at the view of sandstone hills, the city replaced with the rugged pass. She pries at the fabric under her armpits, then removes her top and then her bra. As she rummages through her bag for something lighter to wear, Pepper reaches forward and pinches together the roomette’s hallway curtains, in case anyone is passing down the aisle. His late wife always changed alone in the bathroom, door closed, at least until the final months of her illness. Dahlia uses the bathroom in their condo with the door open—even while he’s in it. He’s still acclimating to her candid physicality. In the large, he’s for it. It allows him the license, now, to fatten his lips and blurt out a fair slide-trombone rendition of “The Stripper,” that brash old David Rose tune, all thunk and holler. An entire band plays along in his head as Dahlia gives her chest an accommodating wiggle before a fresh blouse comes down on the tease, which is for the best: the bra’s elastic has left a raw impression around her torso, - - -, like that sketch by her first husband.

The train enters a tunnel just as they find the dining car, the rock walls shrieking back everything the train throws at it. By the time they’ve taken a seat in a booth, the train has stopped, reversed, then stopped again, grumbling in place in the dark. In the dining car’s dusky light, Pepper illuminates the menu with his phone and orders the Angus burger. Dahlia asks for the Caesar salad without the chicken. It appears to come with a bottle of Chardonnay. The waiter, impeccably mannered, says he’ll look into why the train has stopped.

“Dolly?! What are the chances?”

Pepper looks up at a man standing at their booth, a newspaper under his arm, two chubby fingers pressed down on their table for balance, even though the train isn’t moving.

“Marty!” Dahlia stands and embraces him.

Handshakes are traded and Marty is now sitting beside Pepper. The man is stout, double-chinned, with glasses that have no reflection and which Pepper is tempted to touch to see if they hold lenses at all. The man breathes heavily.

“Dr. Pepper?” Marty says, to a comment by Dahlia.

“The Ph.D.’s in education. So there’s the real joke,” Pepper says, his old self-deprecating, diversionary line.

An extra wineglass arrives for Marty. It’s hard to tell who Marty is—friend, acquaintance, former colleague? He mostly rattles off the status of his children: a post-graduate internship, a recent promotion, a third grandchild due soon. Pepper doesn’t have children, though he and his late wife wanted to, way back in the beginning. Dahlia never wanted kids.

Their lunch arrives and Marty leaves with a “bon appétit,” a wave, and a refilled wineglass.

“Former neighbor?” Pepper asks.

“My dentist.”

“Ah,” Pepper says.

Pepper doesn’t know his own dentist’s name. Always a new one at the place where he goes, which he also doesn’t know the name of. Dahlia comes from the kind of money where you can pick your dentist and have them for their entire career.

“Marty and I went out for a bit,” Dahlia says.

Pepper, chewing, tries not to imagine Dahlia being intimate with Marty, just as he’s tried to ignore that her first husband, Mr. Slash-and-Slay, once shared her bed.

“Proud of his kids,” Pepper says.

“You should see all the photos in his office.” Dahlia leans forward, conspiratorially. “Marty didn’t want his kids to inherit his…girth—or his hairline. So he fell for a stick with a mane. And she fell for him on some similar principle, I imagine.” Dahlia lifts her wineglass from the table and leans back. “Of course, trying to cancel out your worst defects that way doesn’t mean you’re at all compatible. They fought all the time. But at least they improved the state of their kids’ genes.”

“A happy divorce.”

She swallows her gulp of wine and replaces the glass. “They’re not divorced. Open marriage.” She double-taps her top and bottom front teeth together. “Caps at cost. Didn’t he do a great job?” She takes a handful of his fries and smiles.

Pepper doesn’t want to know anything more about Marty, Marty’s wife, or Dahlia’s connection to them. He tries to savor his meal, but the reek of diesel overwhelms his taste buds. People enter the stuffy dining car then turn around and leave, even though it’s lunchtime. The waitstaff clear their table swiftly, but still can’t explain why the train remains in the tunnel. Pepper checks his phone, but it doesn’t pick up any cell service or Wi-Fi.

He follows Dahlia back to the roomette and slides the door shut after her. She’s brought the corked remains of the wine.

“For later,” she says, and puts it into his hands.

Dahlia is one of those women who always seem a little tipsy. Not because she is, but because she has what tipsiness purports to provide: happiness. Having survived a serial killer and the prospect of bankruptcy, Pepper figures she has every claim on being happy. Since he first met her, he’s seen Dahlia as the way forward, lit by optimism and that brilliant smile. She latches the door to the roomette and turns to him and begins to unbutton his shirt. She hums that burlesque tune better than he could. The sex is efficient and treated simply like any other necessary bodily function, which still feels like news to him. Afterwards, Pepper pulls down the upper bunk so Dahlia can take a nap, then he searches out the observation car, not that there’s anything, yet, to observe. He finds Marty reading a newspaper in front of the large dark windows, his wineglass empty and holding a silky white wrapper. Pepper hesitates. Now that he’s been seen, turning around would be awkward. Continuing on, but then inevitably turning back again, would make him appear lost.

“Twenty-one ultra-marathoners killed by extreme weather in China,” Marty reads, slapping the paper with the back of his hand. “Even a regular marathon seems a death-wish to me.”

“The first one died,” Pepper says.

“Twenty-one, it says.”

“The very first marathoner. In ancient Greece.”

“There you go,” Marty says. “Bad idea from the start.”

Pepper wonders if this is how Dahlia, reader of high-brow satirical novels, feels around him: a smidgen superior? Pepper decides to sit down. A few drops of water fall on the window. He wishes he’d brought something with him, even Dahlia’s book. The oily stench seems worse here, the engines rumbling louder in their impatience. Pepper checks his watch. Dahlia’s naps are usually around thirty minutes.

“What do you think…at least an hour we’ve been stuck here?” Marty says, looking at his own watch. “Would have been faster to walk.”

Pepper notices that all of Marty’s smiles and laughter were spent on Dahlia. He’s getting the back-office Marty here. “At least an hour,” Pepper says. “You traveling with your wife?”

Marty nods. “She’s taking a nap. Migraine.”

On the cusp of an obligatory turn toward politics or sport, or to the twenty-one dead ultra-marathoners, Pepper is saved by the grumble of the locomotive as it grows louder. The couplings tighten and the carriage gives a slight lurch as it’s pulled forward.

“About time,” Marty says. “Must have been an accident at a crossing.”

They wait and wait and wait for the light to come in. When it does, it’s an oily orange glare. Pepper sees boulder-stacked hills with bands of deep flame licking upwards from burning chaparral. There are oak trees blackened and smoldering, shrubs reduced to line drawings of their former selves, the ground nothing but exposed sandstone and blasts of black char where tufts of bunchgrass once eked out an existence. Dark watery shadows of smoke and heat ripple across the landscape. Ash falls like burnt snow.

“Maybe we should have stayed in that tunnel,” Marty says.

The landscape is still burning as Pepper walks back to his carriage, the flames licking at the base of burned trees, the air smelling of creosote. He ducks into the roomette, closes the door, and sits. Greenery and civilization return quickly as the train picks up speed once through the pass. Pepper sees a neighborhood without a sign of the fire or the destruction behind them. He sees homes with green lawns and palms out front, driveways empty, fire trucks sentinel on the corner. A few more miles and they’re completely out from under the smoke’s reach. The roomette grows brighter, the light bluer.

Pepper jumps when a bare arm dangles suddenly from above. The arm resurrects and when Dahlia calls his name, he answers. She claims she was never truly asleep as she climbs down carefully. He helps her stow the bunk. She sits across from him again and picks up The Hoax of a New World. Sleep has etched lines across her face. She folds back the dog-eared page and places one of her feet in Pepper’s lap, waiting for him to resume his massage, which he does. This is something he never did with his first wife—the foot massage. He should have. He kneads Dahlia’s arch, feels the plump veins beneath his fingers, imagines that dark thing: that he’s giving his first wife a foot massage, that the two of them are headed north to visit their daughter (why not throw in a child?), that the well-planned future is abiding their wishes. He looks out the window at the view of green fields and the distant highway, then more fields and a blue hazy sense of the Pacific beyond. The traffic on the highway is light, everyone heading where they intended to go, moving faster even than the train.

By the time they reach San Luis Obispo, hours later, Pepper’s forgotten all about the delay in the tunnel—until Dahlia brings it up at their dinner out with her friends. It’s an anecdote to tell: her near-fictional story of danger and intrigue. Dahlia tells the table that they didn’t know if they’d make it out alive, and so they decided to have sex right there, on the train. Pepper doesn’t believe his sex life has ever been brought up in dinner conversation before, at least never of such an evergreen episode. Dahlia leaves out the hour of waiting. She leaves out Marty. She leaves out her nap and their slow, lazy lunch. But she keeps the important things in, and for this, Pepper plays her game.

“You do what you have to do,” he says, and Dahlia’s friends laugh, smile, push his shoulder like the old dog he’s pretending to be.

In their hotel room that night, Marty comes back to Pepper’s mind, specifically what Dahlia said about how he and his wife picked each other to cancel out their deficiencies—for their children’s sake. As he drifts, Pepper imagines Marty and his wife as two figures on an old-fashioned handcart, pumping up and down to move themselves forward on endless tracks. Never at the same position or seeing eye to eye.

A few hours later, Pepper wakes with regret for having eaten an overly rich meal. He finds Dahlia already inside the bathroom. She pushes the door in his face when he tries to enter, then locks it. There comes then the sound of Dahlia heaving, and it is only now, in this low moment of their getaway, as her dinner sluices into the bowl (and whatnot), that he discovers the limit of her intimacy.

Pepper turns on the bedside lamp and sits at the edge of the bed facing the bathroom door. He brings Dahlia’s book into the light, unfolds the dog-ear, and begins to read to her through the door, pausing in the noisier moments of her ongoing distress. He quickly discovers that the contents of the book do not match the book’s title. It’s not a satire of modern doubt in the post-truth era, but a pulpy romance hidden within the dust jacket for The Hoax of a New World. He can’t explain it, but her little act feels to him like kindness.

When Dahlia comes out of the bathroom a chapter later—after the many flushes of the toilet, and the toothbrushing and the gargling, and the mysterious rustling and clattering of all that goes into a woman’s toilet—she gives him a hug, this shivering, exhausted, cold-skinned creature that is not unfamiliar to him, and whom he loves even more now: the one here, and the one no longer here.