unit, short-order grill-was obviously closed for the night. Dry-docked trawlers listed precariously in the parking lot. The scene felt illicit, excitedly so, as if we’d come to score drugs or rob someone. I thought, fleetingly, that I had found something to take the place of my fiercely coddled misery, but was quickly sucked under by those insipid strings, which dragged me to the bottom of the black sound.
The driver had a key to the restaurant. Darren ordered him to bring us beers and fry up some shrimp burgers. He said to me, “What the hell do you eat?”
“Not much from the looks of him,” called the driver from a kitchen, lit only by the lights of freezers he was rooting around in.
“I’m on a diet,” I said. A diet with its own soundtrack. The heartbreak diet.
“The thing about diets is all these people starving to death and these rich fuckers on a damn diet.” This line sputtered out from the darkened kitchen.
“Your point?” Darren said to the shadows.
“Ones that can afford to eat lobster every night going around starving. Bet they ain’t sending the money they save over to Africa.”
The driver brought us beers. I left mine untouched. Darren said, “His point is a good one, wouldn’t you say?”
“I’m not rich.”
“You’re just skinny and stupid.”
It seemed time to protest, to ask why we were here, alone in the south end of the county, where not only corpses but corpses still seat-belted into cars turned up in sullen lagoons. But instead I leaned forward and said, “I’m not real hungry.”
“Bring him some coleslaw,” said Darren. He squinted my way. “What's your problem?”
I said, “What do you mean?” though I knew exactly what he meant.
“Going off on Kirk for no reason, beating your head upside your car. Calling out for some damn dodgeball.”
“I guess I’m lonely,” I said. He widened his eyes, as if suddenly I had come into focus for him, and I added, “is all.”
“You ever had anyone die on you?” he asked, wincing slightly, as if it took great effort to send his words my way.
“Yes,” I lied. Maybe this was the worst lie I’d ever told-out of the dozens Fran knew about, the ones that passed undetected. She wasn’t dead; I was dead to her, maybe, but she lived and breathed and was, at that moment, getting on toward bedtime on a Wednesday night in late spring, no doubt moving against some Rick she met at a conference, and the thought of anyone else touching her in the places I’d discovered made me claim now all degrees of suffering as my own.
“You’re lying,” he said. The driver set a huge bowl of soupy coleslaw in front of me, a fresh beer for Darren. He laid out the place settings, lining up the fork and knife with a prissiness that amused me, given our surroundings.
“He's definitely lying,” the driver said, his words lingering as he disappeared back into the kitchen.
From the kitchen came the hiss of frozen meat dropped into a fryer. I tried hard to summon my song, those strings that had driven me out of the house and into the arms of fate; I tried to focus on the trucker's lament, but the tree frogs, the sibilance of fried meat, the buzz of the streetlights kept my song away.
“You think it's all up to you, don’t you?” said Darren.
I thought he wasn’t who he said he was. I thought Fran had sent him, or maybe the pathetic trucker wailing away the hours as he tried to scrub away his sins. My comrade in want, sending his messenger to set me straight. I thought Darren was not real and I asked him just who he was to the cashier. Friend? I said. Second cousin?
He looked through me and repeated: “Up to you, huh?”
I shrugged, mindful of what my shrug suggested: that the weight of the world was not upon me.
Darren shook his head, burped, pushed his chair back, summoned his driver, who had been eating back in the kitchen, as if he knew his place in the world.
“Get the bag out of the trunk,” said Darren. To me he said, “Let's get.”
I rose and followed, queasy from the coleslaw. I was thirsty, too, and exhausted, yet I felt oddly settled. Docility was the answer? I could have apprenticed myself to the migrants, their crooked crew boss, had I only known.
I followed Darren along the pier to its rickety end. I looked to the waters edge, the black sucking sand, beach studded with cypress knees and beyond-a stretch of water poised deceptively as earth. I thought that whatever happened to me then had nothing to do with the slow boy filling in for Deb at the market and everything to do with the times that my vanity had come uncaged in some tavern, dancing with some strange thing, maneuvering her around the dance floor by her hipbones while Fran scrubbed kitchen tiles and tried not to think of that person she did not want to acknowledge I was capable of up and becoming.
“Take your clothes off,” said Darren. I did so without question because I was gone-off on that flight that took me frequently and far back in time: Yeah, but I always came home alone, I was saying to Fran, I never slept with any of them, just a little lip, some here-and-there tongue. Never once betrayed us like you did with him. She did not get to argue the meaning of the word
Darren's driver arrived toting a gym bag from which he pulled a tangle of rope, some handcuffs, and greasy lengths of chain. He uncoiled the rope, surveyed my nakedness with scorn.
“I don’t relish getting wet over his bony ass,” he said to Darren.
“It doesn’t appear to be up to you,” I said.
This made Darren smile. But the driver, once he had me in the water and pushed hard against the piling at the end of the pier, wrenched the cuffs tight and lashed the ropes.
Above us Darren had fired up a cigar to ward off mosquitoes, but the smoke didn’t appear to be working; I heard him swear and slap himself. The driver bound me tighter to the splintery black piling, which smelled of creosote and rotting shellfish. Sound water lapped black and empty just above my shoulders.
“Wait for me in the car,” Darren told the driver, and when he was gone, he said, “You know, you brung this on yourself, chief. We wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t asked us to have supper with you.”
“No, actually it was the lottery ticket,” I said.
“Either way, you taking some crazy chances.”
I thought that this was a good thing, and almost said so, but I realized just before I spoke that I still did not know who Darren was, or what he planned to do with me. My situation seemed far worse, on the one hand, than it had just hours before, when I had left for the store. Yet there was this other hand. I could not say what it was. Nor was I even sure I wanted to know. Would it cure me, and would being cured mean that I would learn to live my life without loving her, wanting her?
There was a silence, then a puff of smoke arrived from above, seething through the space between the slats, clouding about my head.
“So she fucked you over, whoever she is. And now you get to go around feeling righteous, starving yourself, and beating up on grocery-store clerks?”
I had an answer to this, but he didn’t leave enough space.
“You know something about love, chief?” he said through the smoke. “It makes you scared of every damn thing, you all the time worrying about whether she's going to come back from the store or was I good enough and does her daddy like me and on and on. And at the same time it makes you feel free. That's what it does when it's really cooking, right?”
I waited for a puff of cigar smoke, but there was nothing, only mosquitoes feasting on my cheekbones, my bound hands straining against the rope.
“You saying you didn’t feel nothing like that?”
“I did.” I do, I thought to say, but I didn’t want to give Darren any more ammunition than he could divine by looking at me. He was picking up a lot just looking, and it unnerved me, the way he recognized himself in me, the way he described to the letter the way it felt to love Fran. I did feel scared the whole time I was with her, and yet I felt as free as I’d ever felt. But maybe I was loving her all wrong. Maybe what Darren had described was not love
