Beneath the Bonfire Read online

  They remained that way for a minute or two, paddling their fins, floating, holding on to one another. She watched as the lanterns moved away from the hole and then there was just the flashlight around Pieter’s neck, sending a single shaft down into the nothing. She felt better again, her muscles relaxed. She nodded at Pieter and he took the length of rope from off his belt, tying it to her wrist. At maximum, it was fifteen feet long. He pointed and they moved away from the hole, toward a dim light some distance away.

  It was the bonfire, she realized, that they were seeing from below. From here, it looked like something in outer space burning, a distant collection of stars, though she knew how wide and tall the fire was up there, on the ice. But directly beneath it, the fire was its own strange aurora, expanding and contrasting, all the colors of the rainbow, roaring silently, the ice under the fire buckling at times and splintering. She was transfixed, wanted to touch it. Did touch the bottom of the ice. A translucent window. A forest of teenage trees, doomed from the start and piled lovingly for this end. She realized that in the spring, when the ice thawed, their skeletons and ashes would sink to the bottom of the lake, a strange aquatic burial.

  They moved away from the fire now, away from the light, the cord attached to her arm growing taut as Pieter disappeared into the unknowable gloom that swallowed him. She followed.

  * * *

  They’d met in the fall, one of the last days of October. A few persistent leaves still clinging to the trees. Kat had agreed to watch her older sister’s twelve-year-old, Harrison, for the weekend, though in truth she did not much like children. Her apartment was small, filled with books, and she owned no television. Her nephew was appalled to learn that she did not play video games. They spent Friday night and most of Saturday at the cinema, stealing from one movie theater to the next, taking breaks only to visit the bathroom or buy more popcorn. In the dark they did not have to talk. They watched whatever movies he wanted to see.

  But on Sunday she awoke stiff and yearning for fresh air. She roused her nephew and they went out for waffles. Then she drove them south, away from the city, to a giant amusement park. It was the last day of the season and the parking lots were largely abandoned, not a yellow school bus in sight. The tickets were cheap, and they strolled right into the park without waiting, no lines for any of the rides.

  She noticed Pieter as they approached the huge roller coaster. He was sitting at the front by himself, a few teenage couples generously spaced behind him. Some of the couples heavy petting, tonguing—no adult supervision at all. Pieter’s face was red, as if burned by the wind. He wore a red scarf around his neck, tightly tucked into a winter jacket. His eyes were very dull and red-rimmed, his lips pursed together seriously.

  “Aunt Kat,” Harrison asked, “can I have a few dollars to play video games? I need a break from these rides.” He stuck out his hand.

  “Just call me Kat, please,” she said, giving the boy two dollars. He looked at her and then at the two dollars and then back at her. She realized two dollars would not last him long and gave him two more. The weekend had grown expensive. She watched the boy duck into a nearby arcade, also abandoned, the screens of a few video games flashing.

  She watched Pieter ride the roller coaster repeatedly, the other riders disembarking each time while he remained motionless at the front of the car. She sat on a park bench, the day gray, a cold wind rearranging her curly brown hair, her cheeks pink. After a scant ten minutes, Harrison returned from the arcade and sat down close beside her. The roller coaster came to yet another stop and a few riders drifted off, giving each other high fives. Again Pieter persisted, just wiped his nose solemnly with a Kleenex. Harrison looked at her.

  “You want to ride that one?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said at last, “why not?”

  They ran to the snake of seats before the metal bars came down. Two protective harnesses swung down from above and rested snugly over and across their chests, Harrison looking small behind his. It was just the three of them. Kat and Harrison nine rows behind Pieter. The ride jerked forward, began to rise up its steep steel slope.

  At the top of the incline, the park spread out beneath them, her Subaru visible far away in the white crosshatched parking lot. And then the rush forward. Kat watched as Pieter disappeared down and away and felt her stomach lurch forward as the cars gained speed and the world slipped out from underneath them. She screamed and clutched the steel brace pressed to her chest. The rushing wind cut her face as they tore through the route of the coaster, metal on metal impossibly loud and her head jarring constantly so her perception of the world was as though she were watching a bad home recording, images jerking and bouncing. She stopped screaming and focused on breathing. Beside her, Harrison was cheering. The ride spun, as if a corkscrew shot from some giant cannon, and they twisted upside down repeatedly, Kat’s hair in her face, spare change dropping out of her blue jeans and plunking loudly against the steel car.

  And then the ride slowed and came to a stop at the same platform where they had boarded.

  “That was amazing!” Harrison said.

  The harnesses all lifted in a hiss of hydraulics and they were free to depart, but she could see that the lone rider up ahead remained where he was.

  “Want to ride again?” Kat asked.

  Harrison smiled, punched her lightly in the arm. “You’re kidding me, right? You were, like, dying back there!” He laughed.

  “Well, anyway,” she said, ignoring him, “I’m staying.”

  “Seriously? All right! All right! All right! Awesome!”

  The harnesses dropped back down into place and they rocked forward. She was focused on Pieter’s head, his rigid shoulders, the hands she could not see, but knew must be resting in his lap, as if he were at church. The roller coaster began its climb, then rattled down and around its course, Harrison giggling and screaming, his voice high-pitched as a girl’s. Kat’s eyes remained trained on the back of Pieter’s head. He never moved.

  It wasn’t as bad the second time around—the loop-de-loops, the hairpin turns, the three-g drops. And it wasn’t long before the roller coaster returned to its station; Pieter unmoving.

  “Come on,” Kat said to Harrison, “we’re moving up to the front, where it’s scarier.”

  “Awesome,” he agreed.

  As they installed themselves immediately behind Pieter, Kat leaned forward before the braces came down and said into his ear, “You all right up there? You haven’t moved in a half hour.”

  He started, which had the effect of startling her too, and turned to look at her. He was very handsome, the bones of his face well-defined. There were tears on his face.

  “Oh, you’re crying,” Kat said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just the cold. I can’t help it.” And then “I’m also a little high.”

  The harnesses came down again and they were off, racing through the pale slate sky, their voices alternating between shrieks, obscenities, and laughter. The world began to slow as they became accustomed to the reckless speed of the ride. Kat watched the landscape below: janitors chasing blowing garbage, vendors eating clouds of cotton candy, security guards smoking cigarettes. She watched Pieter’s head: his thick hair, the corded muscles of his neck, his perfectly shaped ears, like the shells of some beautiful species of snail.

  Finally Pieter rose from the ride, his legs for the briefest of moments wobbly. She watched him go toward a bathroom, where he disappeared. Harrison, beside her, almost uncontrollable with glee.

  “I heard you say fuck!” he said, punching her stomach and laughing. “You’re the best aunt ever!”

  She watched the restroom pavilion, its door marked MEN. Her heart, suddenly light, lost, unbound—how?

  “What?” Harrison asked. “Think he’s gonna puke or something?”

  “Let’s go see,” she said. They walked toward the restrooms, sitting on a bench, Harrison’s body beside her, electric with excitement and tremb
ling with the cold. She felt his yet-boy body beside hers.

  Pieter came out of the restroom, wiping his lips and forehead with a sheet of brown paper toweling. Kat stood from the bench but did not approach him. Suddenly her voice would not work and she could not recall her own bravery on the roller coaster, her ability there to speak to this beautiful man.

  “So, did you ralph in there or what?” Harrison asked.

  Pieter looked at them and smiled easily. As he approached them, she fell in love with his walk too. He seemed to move side to side even as he strutted forward, his knees more like leather hinges than bone, his narrow hips swaying, stomach flat as a barn board, beneath a wider, flat chest. He moved casually toward them, as if wading through a Floridian pool, gin and tonic in hand.

  Pieter looked at her and then down at Harrison, “All over the place,” he said after several beats. “Go check it out. But don’t slip.”

  Harrison ran off.

  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 scar
s 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 fiancé.