Morning Saturday, June 16th, 2012

A Frenchwoman whom a lustful man would think was either designed by God or sent by Lucifer, and would thank either for the gift and the temptation, pushed a stroller through a New Jersey mall. Surrounded by hundreds of strangers going about their shopping, eating, and socializing, she felt alone, angry, tired, stuck, misunderstood, alienated, depressed, homesick, culture-shocked, physically fatigued, unattractive, and she had worsened at an accelerating rate since becoming pregnant 22 long months afore. The misery had magnified since giving birth, and now it was hollowing her out.

The prospect, only in her mid-20s now, of living the rest of her life in this state caused her to imagine something she hadn't before. No, not suicide. The intrusive, cartoony, gory, evening news-narrated mental image of her husband arriving home, finding her hanging from the ceiling fan, discolored, and then discovering their baby floating face-down in the bathtub was so ridiculous to her that she laughed internally. But she fantasized about not existing, about having never been born, about blinking out of time and space, about willing herself into oblivion. An erasing, a deletion from the material universe, and a blotting of her name from the Akashic Records. A fantasy cosmique rather than mere mortality: retroactive ontological cancellation.

Their second wedding anniversary, not yet two weeks ago, had been shit. No date, no sex; just a card with a short message and a box of chocolates. Lyrou had reserved dinner, but Garin stayed late at work downtown, and she canceled it. The card still sat on her dresser beside the half-empty box.

Lately, Garin’s smallest habits annoyed her with an irrational intensity. The way he repeated a phrase he liked until it was worn out, the particular little sounds he made while eating, the work stories whose endings she already knew before he began them. She would look at him and know perfectly well that he was not unattractive, but she would not find him sexy if he was named Sexiest Man Alive on a magazine cover. Worse, she resented him when he was there for taking up the room, then resented him when he was gone for leaving her alone in it.

She had the sense that she had walked through a cell gate and heard the lock clank behind her. Wife. Mother. America. House next. Forever. It frightened her that none of these were bad things, and yet she felt trapped by them.

A few days earlier, Garin had come home animatedly relating how a semi-truck had nearly run him off an off-ramp. “Could’ve splattered me over the guardrail,” he joked. For one obscene instant, Lyrou imagined the relief of an accident having simply removed him from her life. No confrontation, no divorce, no choice she had to make. A knock at the door; two state troopers. Then she had gone into the bathroom and cried, horrified with herself, privately taking it back, apologizing to Garin where he could not hear her.

The new house should have excited her. She knew that. Lawn, room for little Alan, a better future, the whole banal dream. She tried to perform enthusiasm in hopes the performance would become real. It did not.

A man's deep voice saying "Hello" snapped her out of her daze. Fwooop! Mall.

"Excuse me." She stepped aside, rolling her stroller backward with her, assuming she had blocked his path.

But he didn't pass. Here stood a tall, bronzed, handsome man in paratrooper boots and a leather biker vest, blue Nordic runes tattooed around his collar, long, beefy biceps exposed, with a completely smooth-shaven scalp.

"Aren’t you the saddest lady I've seen?" He gave her a brief pouty face. Mocking her? Silly cheer?

She saw her reflection in his black wraparound sunglasses; she did look bad. "Oui? Should I be happy about something?"

Even frightened, she registered this man's physical presence in a way she had stopped registering Garin’s. Garin was handsome in the irritatingly curdling familiar way of a man whose face belonged among her furniture and family photographs. This man was a stray intrusion into her life, hard-edged and overlarge, and therefore impossible not to see.

Removing his shades revealed narrow, deep-set, hooded eyes under a heavy brow ridge. "The kid."

Lyrou nodded. Did he mean to tell her to count her blessings in having a baby? Fine. “Oh, he’s my every…”

“How much?" he interrupted.

She furrowed her brow and thought he might be an expectant father curious about the cost of raising a baby. "A couple grand per month. Are you expecting?"

The skinhead folded his arms and looked more closely at her baby in the stroller. "That's fair. I like what you're doing with the nappy, the teething ring. Say I lose the kid, like he crawls off?"

"Lose?" She hadn't caught on.

"Y'know... I'd like to buy your coverage and get a loss damage waiver." He put his finger to his chin.

She got it; he was joking that he wanted her child, right? "Oh!? What purpose might a big motor-head have with a tiny baby?"

He shrugged as if it were standard. "Baby-related tasks: eating pennies from under my refrigerator, smacking my television screen, waking me up at 3 a.m."

She cracked a smile. "This is the perfect baby for that, but I can't rent him to you."

The stranger played incredulous. "Whaaa? Why?"

She looked him up and down. "You're a creepy weirdo. And I'm this close to screaming for security because I don't know you and you're scaring the piss out of me." She let out a nervous little laugh.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, a war cry in peacetime, "Aaah!"

Lyrou nearly jumped out of her skin. Alan's eyes opened wide and his chubby fists balled in silent shock. Passing shoppers looked and muttered, not wanting any part of it.

"Putain," she said under her breath.

Placing his hand on the stroller handle next to hers, he said, "My name's Richard. Now you know me. What's your name?"

"I’m flattered, but… but I don't want to tell you my name." She squeezed the stroller handle with both hands, knuckles white. She meant for him to see her wedding ring and move along.

He looked down into her eyes. "I'd be happier to have your phone number than your name."

She wanted the fastest way out. "If I give you my number, you have to go away."

He nodded. "I promise." He readied his phone, holding it facing her. "Dial."

And she did, hitting the call icon, and her phone rang. Looking up at him under her brows, she said, "It's not fake."

The skinhead swayed ever so slightly, like a tall pine in the wind, tucking his phone back into his jeans. "You'll block my number as soon as I go. But I'll still get what I want to say through to you. You're going to worry about your safety. Don't. If we meet again, it'll be because you want to. Only then should you worry."

He released the stroller handle and ran his fingers over hers, brushing her ring, and walked on through the mall. But for his height, he might've merged into the shoppers. Yet so lofty, and with the Jolly Roger on his back instead, he seemed to float away over the waves of heads and faces like a high pirate mast. She let herself breathe. Had anybody seen that? She reached into the stroller and lifted her baby out, hugging and nuzzling him. “Alan, Alan. Viens là, mon lapin, mon petit cœur.”

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Evening Saturday, June 16th, 2012

Garin found Lyrou alone and said, “Hey, Lyrou. I'm sorry for telling you to shut up the other night. I think I wasn't really telling you that; I was trying to convince myself to just shut up and agree to be agreeable.”

“Merci,” Lyrou answered. She had already given Richard her phone number that morning.

Garin smiled and left her alone... again.

Lyrou told herself a story. "The actual reason was small and mean: after Garin told me to be thankful and shut up, giving my number to another man felt like a private act of spite, a symbolic little offense I did not intend to take any farther. And I won't."

Jamie Washington. Back in university. Lyrou thought about how she had dumped Jamie for Garin Keller. Not immediately, but shortly after meeting Garin. Jamie had cried; he'd kept repeating that he thought they were "real together."

"I insulted Jamie to help him get over me, or told myself that was why. Cruel. Immature. Regret that. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Garin. Couldn’t help it. Garin. Garin was the best of them. I knew it then. Why? What did he have over me, a magic spell? Ridiculous clothes. Ridiculous confidence. He thought he was such a catch. He was a catch. Nerves, though. He was intimidated talking to me and tried to hide it. I loved that. Parties full of rich brats behaving badly, beer and marijuana. Boys trying to get me away from whoever I came with, and they failed. I was with Garin. Caribbean Carnival. Movies. He took me fishing. He took me shooting; it was the first time I'd held a gun, fired a gun. Truly American, the real America I had come to see and hadn't yet. It was fun. Garin took my right hand, then my left, pulling me into him like he had every right. Walking, his fingers pressing mine, feeling my palm as if he’d never encountered a woman’s hand before. Showing off for me. Winning my teddy bear. I wanted him to know me. I wanted to know everything about him.

How did that become this?

What is wrong with me? Women would kill for this. I thought I would, too. Back then, I wanted him so badly.

That date, I dressed to fuck him. Low neckline. Let him look. He kept looking down my blouse and pretending he wasn’t looking, then looking again. I saw every glance. I liked every glance. Leaned across the table when I didn’t need to. Gave him another view. Apartment keys on the floor. An accident, genuinely an accident. But once they were down there? Opportunity. I bent low. Slowly. Lower than necessary. Stayed there longer than necessary. Let him look deeply enough to remember. I knew exactly what I was doing to him. He was walking around in public aroused because of me. I loved having that power over him.

I had decided already. Tonight. Garin.

And I was topless before anything else came off.

He buried his face between and under my tits.

While he suckled my nipples, I pulled his shirt off inside out over his head. He unbuckled and unzipped himself. I yanked his pants and briefs down, allowing his dick to spring out. I touched my fingertip to the tip of his dick like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam.  The sensation of my nail poking his glans caused his cock to visibly pulse in the way it would to shoot sperm, but he resisted the orgasm, and it expelled only plentiful, clear precum. That was my first sight and touch of Garin's privates, and I consciously registered that his dimensions were not disappointing. Spying his bulge in our pre-sexual dating had given me enough indication, but it was a great verification to see the full organ in question bared and engorged, ready for me.

I reached to twist the knob on the lamp by the couch, and he gently intercepted my hand. I looked up into his eyes. "Do you want the lights on? Why?"

He ran his thumb under my chin and set his cock on my lips. "I like it when a pretty face makes an ugly face."

I kissed the underside of his dick up and down, inhaling its scent. I cupped his balls in one hand, took his ass cheek in my other hand, and pulled him into my mouth.

Garin got too excited too soon and thrust a little too hard, causing me to gag a couple of times. On the third gag, I pinched his ass cheek. "Don't pinch me, I'm dreaming a very good dream."

It had become as if a dream. Where had that feeling gone? When I was eager to spread my legs wide, my hairy pink orifice bared to him, and let him press his glans into me, stretching me at my rim, and then diving deeper with such probing pressure, and the joy I felt at his out-stroke, and how he beat his pubis into me, his balls slapping against my taint, the slick and moist sounds, the labored breathing from us both, our tongues battling. Where had that spirit gone?!"

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