THE BARGAIN

1 5 6 Y T H E B A R G A I N S T E V E N G E H R K E Together, they were the good pig, always checking locks, vats of water boiling in their fireplace, and still he came, pale and thinly bearded, drawn to the taste of moon inside their daughter’s room, her colic evicting them from sleep, the two rising to find their brickedtogether shelter turned a lighthouse to an aimless ship, that nameless, likely homeless, man pounding at their door past two most nights, her quickly on the phone to the police, him trying to dislodge the man, hoping a tide of passing cars would lift him from their fast-eroding shore. The cops, when they arrived, suggested they might pay him o√, tape a few dollars to their door, but they were too zombie, too fretful and sleep-deprived, too far from empathy, to see anything but a stray who, once fed, would add their house to the clots of blood on the map inside of his head. When he wasn’t there, they’d hear that knocking in the bathroom window’s broken latch, sense him wandering but closing in, like an electric pulse mazing through the grid. In bed, they’d lay awake waiting for the first knock to fall like a rubber hammer to the knee, wondering what secret open sesame this 1 5 7 R stranger might possess, thinking he might unscrew their hinges with a fingernail, lift a key from underneath his tongue, their anxiety reshaping him until they almost believed he was their own private Rumpelstiltskin, there to remind them that gold can always be restrawed, that their daughter could be recalled, perhaps not just by chance or their incompetence, but by that subtle bargain they had struck, the promise that, to keep her safe, they would love each other just a sliver less. Which might be why, once, when their nightly dose of trespass was delivered, the husband started dumbly knocking back, not out of anger or any simple wanting-out, but as if to say that they didn’t need this easy prophecy, didn’t need a scru√y Hermes in disguise, as if to say, this door can knock itself, because our house was already ringing on its own – wasn’t it? – the ladder swiped from beneath the belfry we had climbed, the two of us waiting for the echo of who-we’d-been to finally refund, but hearing only are and soon enough become. ...