Red sun melts into hard stars.
We’re slicing down the highway at 82 listening to “the Volta.” My driver’s license sits in my pocket. He never bothered to get one. He’s driving anyway.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks.
I’m thinking about a news story I heard once about a home invader who attacked a vacationing couple in a lake house and left them with their eyes, ears, and tongues cut out, in mute oblivion forever. I’m thinking about how hopelessly dependent we are on things beyond our control. About how if I lost my phone I’d be completely helpless, like a naked vagrant dropped in the middle of a desert.
I don’t tell him any of this. I say: “I’m thinking about where we’re going to sleep tonight.”
“There’s a motel another hour down 96,” he says. “We can stop there.” He says it almost as if we know where we’re going.
I met him two weeks ago in a diner. He was huddled alone at a corner table, and I went and sat down across from him. No invitation, no explanation. I was desperate. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever taken a desperate action and had it work out in my favor. I think that probably means something.
Cedric’s voice is screaming out of the old car speakers. I go back to tapping aimlessly on my phone. A notification pops up. Then another, right away. My stomach tightens and my face goes cold.
“That fucking bastard,” I say. “He locked me out of my bank account.” My husband, who I’ll never see again.
“Well, that was inevitable.”
“We have no money now,” I say. “We can’t stay anywhere without money.”
“That’s a bold assumption,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. I have an idea.”
I look at his face, an expression of ophidian calm. Warmth blossoms from between my legs.
Twenty minutes later, we’re driving through a hillside district where the houses are stately, unblemished by porch junk and mostly lightless. Second homes. He parks the car in a dark part of a side street and says: “Get out.”
I freeze. “What are you going to do? Where are we going?”
“Alright,” he says. “Stay here. I’ll be back soon.” And he’s gone.
For fifteen minutes I squeeze my body into a ball and compress it against the passenger door, seeking a comfort that doesn’t arrive.
He reappears. “Come out now. It’s okay. The universe provides.”
*
The house is brick with patches of ivy, gabled roof and columned porch. The front door is unlocked. I don’t ask whether he found it that way.
We step into a palatial living room. Brown leather couches, white carpet, high windows. Large-scale art adorns the forest-green walls. A frame catches my eye. At first it seems to be a portrait of a wealthy gentleman, frock-coated, grandly seated in a room that looks oddly similar to this one. But on closer inspection, the proportions are all wrong. The man is too large, the chair too small. And his facial expression isn’t one of haughty remove. Instead, he wears a look of unguarded innocence and pure, devotional attention. I can’t help but think of a dog.
I’m overcome with a strange euphoria. My companion leads me, hypnotized, up the stairs.
The master bedroom halts my breath.
There’s a king-size bed, immaculately made up in a blood-red duvet. Glass walls overlook a night garden. And all around the room, arranged on a riot of shelves and pedestals, are dozens of wax anatomical models. Dissected heads with eternally open eyes, skull and skin cut away to reveal the brain or the vocal cords. Flayed men flaunting muscle and bone. And the centerpiece, positioned directly across from the bed on a divan: a wax woman reclining in apparent ecstasy, her abdomen subtracted to reveal the viscera, the string of pearls around her neck an uncanny accent to the gore.
He sits next to me on the bed and looks into my eyes. My breath hitches. I’m addicted to his eyes and his hair and his clothes. But most of all, I’m addicted to his patience. I adore how he can just stop and look at me at a moment like this. I adore that he wants to.
He slides the straps of my tank top off my shoulders, first the left, then the right. One arm encircles me, the other gropes my breast as he pulls me into a kiss. He’s testing me—testing my capacity, my composure, my nerve. I’m rippling all down the core of my body but I hold it together and kiss him back as if I’ve done this all before.
He grasps the back of my neck and guides me down onto the duvet. Across from me is the anatomical Venus, my mirror image, my teacher now as I lie back and open myself to him. This isn’t our house. He pulses his thumb over the place between my legs, and suddenly it might as well be our house.
He’s looking into my eyes as he tugs on the strings of my nervous system. My gaze darts back and forth between him and the languishing Venus across the room. Did I hear something down the hallway? We’re rumpling the sheets. The owner will be able to tell someone was here. For all we know, they could be on their way back right now, driving up the hilly streets whistling a tune of ignorance—
His fingers slip beneath my underwear, testing for entry. They slide into me without resistance. I can’t stop looking at the anatomical Venus across the room: the slick underside of her liver, rib cage viewed from the inside, chin upturned in worship. I think about how close his fingers are to my liver right now. I feel the slight impression of pearls against my neck that are not really there. His hand is driving harder now, controlling me. I could almost cry. I could almost scream. Someone might hear. He leans down and whispers something in my ear. An involuntary scream erupts from my throat.
At that moment, something moves. In the window’s reflection, I can see the doorway to the room behind us; and in that doorway looms a towering figure.
I let out a mutilated gasp and whirl around to face the stranger. My paramour faces him too. The stranger says nothing, doesn’t move. He’s a silhouette in shadow. All I can tell is that he’s enormous, rotund, the shape of a giant egg.
“Don’t move,” says my companion. Does he carry a gun? I wonder. He probably carries a gun.
But the stranger doesn’t listen. He takes a step into the room, into the light.
“Gna,” he says. And all I can do is laugh.
It’s the man from the portrait. That dog-like quality of attentive innocence animates him just as clearly in the flesh. I understand instantly that he is mute, his development arrested at some forgotten stage of early childhood. He smiles a beatific smile at us, depraved intruders in his world. I notice that he’s holding something in his hands.
With hardly a glance at the anatomical models, he lumbers across the room to stand before me. He presents the object to me, cradled in his upturned palms. It’s a music box.
“Gna,” he says again, jerking his head toward the box.
Hesitantly, I raise my hands to the box. I begin to lift it out of his palms—
“GNAAAA!” he screams, clutching the sacred vessel against his chest and scorning me with a frown of betrayal.
“I’m sorry!” I say, holding up my hands in dramatized surrender. “I’m sorry! I didn’t realize!”
“She didn’t mean it,” my paramour interjects. “Give us another chance.”
The giant looks at us both, carefully, for what feels like a very long time. Then, painfully slowly, he extends the box to me once more.
“Gna,” he says again, this time gesturing toward the key on its side. I reach out and turn it. The three of us stand still and listen.
At first, the sparkling little notes sound random, disorganized. I can’t make out a coherent melody. But then, something familiar slips into the music. It takes me a minute to place it, but finally it lands. It’s Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
My paramour realizes at the same time I do. I know because he gives me that look, the look of mutual recognition I first saw on that day at the diner two weeks ago, the look that made me run away with him. Then he starts to sway his hips. He sidles up to the giant, gently takes both of those overgrown hands in his own. And together, they start to dance.
*
The key winds down again sometime around the third hour. The giant is freshly asleep, one enormous arm flung across the duvet, chest rising and falling. We’ve been dancing. We’ve been playing other games no one has names for.
My companion pulls the duvet up to the giant’s chin, tenderly. I crawl onto his other side. For a moment the three of us exist together in the blood-red dark, and I stroke the giant’s head until I’m sure.
“Let’s go,” my companion says. “I found us some money.”
At the bedroom door, I turn back. The music box sits on the nightstand, a small and glorious thing. I put it in my bag.
*
The next evening, we stop the car at a lakeside to watch the crimson sunset.
“What are you thinking about?” he asks.
If I could open up my body, vivisect myself in clean ordered lines, expose my liver and spleen and intestines to the penetrating light of the bright red sun, I would. I don’t tell him that. I say: “I’m thinking about Frank Sinatra.”
I throw my phone into the lake. He throws his too.
“Get on your knees,” I say. He kneels in front of me.
I take the music box out of my bag and turn the key. Then we lie down together in the dirt. He pulls up my dress.