Beneath the Bonfire (11 page)

Pieter extended his long hand and said, “Pieter.”

“Kat.”

“I want your telephone number, please,” he said.

She reached into her purse, fumbling, struggling for a pen, a pencil, chalk, anything. Finally she found a pen, but the ink was gone, dried up. She threw it to the ground and continued searching. He knelt down for the pen, removed its cap, stuck the tip of the pen to his tongue, and said, “Never mind. Here's mine.” And then he took her hand, lifted her sleeve up, and began to write. Seven numbers in blue ink. He pressed hard enough that she worried, then hoped, the numerals would be like a tattoo. She studied the number.

“Now yours,” he said, holding the pen over his own naked forearm. She told him.

Harrison came running out of the restroom. “You must've had mushrooms for breakfast.”

Pieter smiled. “Bingo.” And then he waved and ambled away.

*   *   *

They moved through the cold darkness together, so close that though Kat could not see Pieter, she could feel his rubber-suited body, his flippers moving the cold black water. Here the world was a featureless vacuum, her body weightless, only the faint sounds of her own respiration and the tiny feel of bubbles brushing against her face and goggles. She simply moved forward, unencumbered, toward what she assumed were the vague lights of the city above: the distant lights of restaurants where she dined, bars where she drank, her own dull office, the state capitol's tall dome—her familiar world.

Reaching for the cord knotted to her arm, she jerked it slightly, then stopped and hung in the water, kicking her feet placidly, aware of her own lungs. Pieter came to her, his light turning slowly. He aimed the beam below her and for some time they were like that, facing each other, their hands cradling each other's elbows above the quiet pumping of their legs. They stared at each other; seconds drawn out into epochs, time crystallizing like molecules of water becoming ice. Then he let go and she followed him, back the way they had come, she supposed. Though she did not know.

She did not notice at first the absence of his light. Only after kicking for what felt like several yards did she stop and begin ever so slowly sinking. She looked ahead but did not see. Did not see Pieter or the single ray of his flashlight. And then, as her senses expanded and fear began to reach up from the bottom of the cold, black winter lake, she reached for the cord and felt nothing about her arm. Panicking, she touched one arm and then the other, swept at her arms as if they were covered in spiders, centipedes. She forgot to breathe and kicked up until she felt the lid of the lake against her scalp—the top of her own icy coffin—and began pounding futilely, the very bones in her fingers close to breaking.

*   *   *

Pieter had come home from Afghanistan, and nineteen days later his parents announced their divorce. He told Kat about the day he'd spent packing a U-Haul truck from the first bluing of dawn to the fading purple of dusk. His mother hadn't packed anything, so he'd had to do most of the work for her. Everything into cardboard boxes she had taken from behind a liquor store. Her knickknacks. Her sewing materials. Her collections of miniature silver spoons, odd-shaped mirrors, teddy bears. Her linens and clothing, her romance novels, her drawers of unlighted candles, her grandmother's china, old photo albums. Everything—her life. He wrapped it all in newspaper and walked it out to the U-Haul. She supervised the landing of every box, the placement of each piece of furniture.

Pieter's father had gone to the family's cabin in Door County, a peninsular thumb out into Lake Michigan.

Pieter's mother told him in summation, “We had just enough energy to see our marriage through until your return. We needed each other just enough to see you step off that plane. We couldn't have gone through it alone or separate. And my new guy, Dennis, he doesn't understand. Not really. But I can't be with your father anymore. The best thing we ever did, the best thing
I
ever did—was you.”

Pieter drove the U-Haul to a storage unit beside the highway and unloaded the truck, the headlights of the rented vehicle shining into the empty cave of space.

He slept many hours a day in his childhood bedroom, the blinds drawn, the bedroom dark. He had no nightmares. He rose only to visit the bathroom, eat a bowl of cereal, sometimes to watch ESPN for hours at a time, trying to detect minute differences in the
SportsCenter
program that repeated itself almost constantly from six in the morning until noon—the only thing he cared to look at. Young men, men his age, men like those he had befriended in Afghanistan. Athletic, sweating, running, screaming, attacking one another, knocking one another down. He would mute the television and watch helmet-to-helmet tackles, fierce cross-checks into glass and boards, home-plate collisions, tomahawk dunks. And he felt that.

Also, drugs. When his father returned, they drank together. United against the day-dark winter and the enshrouding blizzards. In spring, delighting in the melt off the gutters, in the push of daffodils and tulips, the greening of the grass. In summer they did not combat the humidity; kept the air conditioner off. What money his father figured he saved from conserved energy went into canned beer, cold and light and golden.

Pieter said to Kat one evening in bed, “You know how to maximize efficiency in a refrigerator?”

She turned to look at him and she was laughing softly, her hand on his shoulder. “No,” she said, feigning seriousness.

“You fill it with cans of beer. Bottles of beer. All that thermal mass. Glass or aluminum. Doesn't matter. Beer. The machine doesn't have to work so hard to cool something. The cold stays right in the liquid. In the containers themselves.”

And so father and son drank themselves right through autumn, mourning the dimmed-down sun and the burned-out leaves. Pieter introduced his dad to marijuana. They sat in the backyard and passed a little pipe.

That summer he visited the amusement park with a friend from high school, another marine who had served in Iraq. They'd begun spending time together, throwing horseshoes at the VFW or driving the backroads, flinging empties into the ditches. They didn't talk much to each other, too much time between them to bother filling, and it was okay because it was enough simply not to be alone. This friend Duane
did
have dreams, nightmares. Screamers, sheet-soakers, ghosts in his skull. The police had come to Duane's apartment four different times, and always in the middle of the night. The first three times they kicked in the door. By the fourth, Duane was leaving it unlocked. The neighbors had called 9-1-1; it sounded like a murder in progress.

They went to the amusement park because there was no entrance fee for veterans and because a therapist had told Duane that it was as good a place as any to
feel something
without filling his veins or nostrils or lungs. So they went four times a week, as if it were a job, arriving early and staying late. Sometimes they picked up a couple of girls and later they'd follow them back to a dormitory, a motel, a town house. They ate junk food: elephant ears and powdered sugar, corn dogs, soda, fried candy bars. They wore uniforms: sneakers, shorts, muscle shirts to show off their biceps and military tattoos, their shrapnel scars and the brands of super-hot cigarette lighters; the black moons of stubbed-out cigarette butts and the places on their bodies they pointed to drunk and told each other, “Titus grabbed my forearm right here. His hand was right here. His grip was so fucking strong that I thought he was going to break my arm in half.”

But despite Duane's therapist's best intentions, they rarely felt anything at all. Just an oddly intense desire to return to the action they'd once so detested.

“So, why did you keep going?” Kat asked him. “Why were you there that day?”

“I don't know,” Pieter said. “You have to try … You know? You want to feel something. Is it okay if we don't talk about it?” Then: “I feel something now. Here.” And he had placed his hand firmly, warmly, on her mons pubis and turned to her and said, “Is it okay if we fuck again?”

*   *   *

She didn't recognize it in the first few weeks as addiction. He was just incandescent, inexhaustible. They had sex, fucked, made love, before dinner and after. He woke her in the middle of the night, his head buried between her legs. And now that sex was enjoyable—a revelation—her body no longer muted or a disappointment but rather its own set of fireworks, she always acquiesced, always. They grew skinnier together, burning each other down, feeding each other nothing but motion and sweat.

They had their own places and she had her job, working as a graphic designer for the state's lottery. She sketched and colored the one-dollar scratch-offs found in every gas station from Beloit to Bloomer. Calling him, ringing the ancient telephone in his apartment at the end of her day, the promise of his body—all this made her days easier. And there were no commitments. Some weekends he was gone—to be with his father, to clean the cabin, to visit his mother and her new fianc
é
.

But she loved him. Did not yet
know
all of him or understand all of him, but she wanted to. She had not yet known him all of one season and wondered if they would always have the energy to expend on each other that they had then—their bodies young, everything still fresh and curious.

He had bought her a dildo for the times when he was away, and she would lay in her bed alone while he was gone, staring out the window of her apartment at the lights of the city and the flat white plain of the lake, but the purple toy only made her more lonely for him. She kept it inside a cotton bag in a drawer, the drawstring neatly bowtied.

She worried that she would get tired. She worried about so many things. She did not know how not to worry. In bed, without Pieter, she would think about work or her car and how it needed an oil change, a new windshield, more pressure in the balding tires. She would think about her sister, about how she ought to call her more. She would think about visiting her aging parents up in Cadott. About how she ought to exercise more. Why didn't she use the time she spent worrying to exercise more? Why didn't she leave her bed and lay on the floor, crunching her stomach muscles into Jillian Michaels's flatness? Why didn't she go back to school, graduate school? How many nights had she started applications before simply abandoning the process to gorge on hours of Netflix or Hulu? Hours and hours becoming whole days she'd never ever recover, totally wasted on television she'd already watched a whole decade before.

In the past, it had begun to interrupt and then dissolve her relationships with men. She worried about calling them or their not calling her. Sometimes in the nights, frequently on the cusp of too late, she did call them, her voice perhaps a little too earnest, the desperation in it a little too honeyed. It had shocked her that such a gesture, a friendly telephone call, could be enough to tip things into silence or anonymity. And then they disappeared from her world: her Facebook, her email, their telephone numbers changed, disconnected.

And then, undone and alone again, she tried to put the worry away. She would go out on a Friday night with a friend and drink too fast. Approach a man at a bar, even an ugly one, and try to take him home or get his number. But those nights were failures as well, her tack always too eager, too forceful, her face too shining, her eyes too clear or too sad. Something.

But with Pieter she felt swaddled. Swallowed by his strength. He would not let her get away or come unraveled. Even this, though, his gravity, worried her.

She worried about the near-invisible dimpling on her thighs. She worried about her student loans: $52,161.00. She worried about the shape and length of her pubic hair. She worried about her mother's increasing forgetfulness. She worried about the whiteness of her teeth. She worried about her inability to finish
Moby-Dick.
She worried about Pieter. She worried about love.

*   *   *

Just then and through the blackness, a light: bright white and cold and enough to make her heart stop its wild pounding. Pieter. He grabbed her arms and held her away from his body. But she would not look at him. He wrapped himself around her, held her face in place and stared at her. She sealed her eyes against him, against this underwater nightmare he'd dragged her into. When she opened them he held the cord, in his hands, pulled it, and her arm jerked gently, like a marionette. His eyes were calm. She could see that, the light told her that. He took her gloved hand and led them purposefully. In the distance she sensed a warm glow and a hint of movement.
The bonfire,
she thought. Her mind was foggy.
What were those other movements?
Freshwater dolphins? No. Great fishes? Seals? Her hands hurt and there was barely spirit enough inside her to move the flippers and propel herself through the water. She felt dragged along, the way she imagined a net followed a boat, the rope between them taut. They were moving quickly toward the light now, and she could see bodies in motion, the crash of divers plunging down, naked, their flesh very pale and some of the women not entirely nude, but wearing brightly colored lingerie. The thrashing of bare feet and sudden sweeping of hands unnerved her after so much time in such austere silence, stillness. Here, underneath the bonfire, the water felt warmer.
Could that be?
she thought.

And then,
Why did he leave me?

Pushing through the school of swimmers Pieter rocketed out of the water. A moment later, his two black-gloved hands plunged down and she took them.

On the ice he tore off her mask and she gasped in the cold air for several moments. A blanket came for her shoulders and he began stripping off the gear that all of a sudden felt impossibly heavy. He lifted her blanketed body up, carried her toward the bonfire, now substantially diminished, and though he laid her down some twenty feet away, she still felt as if she were bathing in the oppressive heat of a blast furnace. She stared at the fire. He touched her all over, rubbed her shoulders, ran his fingers on her face, held her head to his chest. His mustache had drooped over his lip, obscured his teeth.