Persons of Bondage

We weren’t lost. We were wandering kings of Bohemia with chewed up tongues.

The air died and dried up on Monmouth Street and its half mile of sullen brick buildings and empty parking lots south of the river.

There were no cop cars patrolling the center of town after 3 a.m., and the suburban hucksters and the sloshed college graduates well past their prime had ambled home to friendlier fucks and fires.

Darren, because that’s what he was called when he was worth calling, walked the inside of the sidewalk, taking fingers along the craggy stone faces of the closed storefronts. I hopped one foot on the curb and left the other tripping into storm drains.

Behind us was Anthony, all burly six feet of meat, and Ryan, a tin soldier of thin limbs and wiry hair. They had conspired, cut past an Army recruiting station to White Street, waiting for Darren and me to notice. We hadn’t yet.

“They want to give me something,” Darren said. This was before he ran off to San Francisco, before he came back and ran off to New Mexico.

“It’s not so bad. It can level you out, maybe. It levels me out,” I said. “I kind of fell apart a while back.”

“I heard about that,” he told me, mumbling it into his hand.

My eyes stopped belonging to me. The gray horizon where Monmouth hit Maple Avenue looked like the end of the flat world, the black sky draping down behind it so certain and final and all.

I tried to blink the sight into the curve it was supposed to take. “I kept thinking I did things, said things—all sorts of wicked shit. But none of it happened.”

“And what they gave you made it go away?” he asked.

We stepped over a heavy chain hanging slack across the entrance of a gas station that had gone under years before.

A white Ford Taurus was parked next to an empty pumping station, the car’s engine left running. The dark-haired girl in the passenger’s seat pressed her long fingernails to her lips. The driver stood next to his open door, a thick fist raised over a scrawny guy twitching on the asphalt at his feet.

I screamed some fat, faulty syllable out at them. I couldn’t stop myself. Darren and I spun on our torn, spongy rubber soles.

“Anthony!” I shouted, my eyes searching for a body on the deserted strip behind us, finding none.

The driver threw the limp man into the backseat, the door slamming again and again off the heavy ghosts of the towering industrial buildings. The Taurus tore out over the curb and onto the empty street, blowing the light.

Anthony and Ryan came running from the alley behind the station.

“What happened?” one or the other or both asked.

I didn’t need to say anything yet. I could feel the pulse in my thumb and the scene curved right fresh in front of eyes that were holy and were mine.