Lexicon

her.
    “Harry!”
    He grabbed his work bag from the living room and headed for the front door, buttoning his shirt. She ran to cut him off and thrust out the word. His eyes flicked to it and away. “Em. Please. Get out of the way.”
    She lowered the word. She couldn’t believe what was happening. She’d thought she’d planned for everything.
Immune?
And yet a part of her wasn’t completely surprised.
You knew he resisted persuasion. That was why you liked him.
    “Em. I’m serious.”
    “Don’t you love me?”
    “Em.”
    “Harry? Don’t you love me? If you love me,
come with me
. Trust me and
come
.”
    His eyes shifted. The thought bubbled in her brain, breaking into awareness: He didn’t love her. Not like she loved him.
    “I’m going to work,” he said.
    She raised the word. “
Love me!
” She knew it was useless but did it anyway. “
Love me!
”
    He pushed her aside. Her back hit the wall and her breath escaped in a rush. He went down the steps and by the time she went after him, he was climbing into the van. She ran and kept running as he shifted into reverse, thinking—what? To throw herself under it? Something. But he shifted gears and the tires tore at the dirt and he drove away, leaving her in the dust, naked, with her stupid, powerless word.
    • • •
    She gathered her clothes. She found her shirt crumpled under the bed and her underpants in the sheets. She went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet and began to dress herself. She didn’t know what to do. But she couldn’t stay.
    She left the house and climbed into her car. She put the satchel with the word on the passenger seat. She put her hands on the wheel. She felt stunned in some important part of her brain, stunned as in
estoner
, the French root that also meant
astonished
, a word used to describe sorcery. As if she was acting outside of herself.
    She turned the key, put the car into gear. She didn’t look in the rear mirror so she wouldn’t have to see the house disappear. When she reached the place where the road split, the town in one direction, everything else in the other, she turned the car on Broken Hill and drove away. A green sign went by that said ADELAIDE 508 and she couldn’t stop shaking. She slowed down to be sure of staying on the road. She could taste loss in the back of her throat so badly that she could vomit. She couldn’t believe she was driving away.
    She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Yeats. She shrieked and braked. The car slewed off the road and was enveloped in dust. There was no one. She had just imagined Yeats for a second. She began to drive again, shaken, but kept glancing in the mirror and the feeling grew that she was forgetting something. Or remembering, rather. She thought she was leaving Broken Hill in terrible danger, and Harry, too, because of Yeats. Because Yeats had planned something.
    She swung the car around. The tires slid in loose gravel but then she was pointed back at the town and she felt steadier. The closer she drew, the surer she felt that she was doing the right thing. She could feel the presence of Yeats. He was coalescing. She could almost smell him in the car. Around her were moving parts in a terrible machine, coming to smash Broken Hill flat. She pushed the needle and the car flew along the dirt road.
    She wasn’t too late. She could find Harry and warn him. Persuade him. She didn’t know how but she knew it could be done. The first buildings crawled around the mullock wall and she perceived a hammer above them, a great and unspeakable force that was falling, falling. Yeats drinking tea. The image flashed into her mind from nowhere. Yeats with a teacup, looking at her. Fear spiked in her heart. She didn’t know where that had come from.
    She blew through the town and left the car halfway up a curb and ran to the emergency room. Harry’s paramedic van wasn’t there but she burst in anyway. The room was familiar and she felt safer. She touched her satchel for reassurance. She went to the reception desk, which was staffed by an older man with thinning hair and glasses. He’d worked there forever, although she didn’t know why; he was permanently irritable. He always made her feel as if she were bothering him. She said, “I need to find Harry.”
    He looked down his nose. She was coming off as a little crazy. She looked like a woman who had spent months on a container ship and slept in the desert and left a man catatonic by the side of the road and had