I came along to this place called the Squirrel Ranch, where they had actual live squirrels and rabbits and a rooster in a big outdoor hut of mesh wire. A few deer wandered around in the grass. Postings announced that all these creatures had been rescued but not from what. A series of cabanas and tall fencing sheltered it all from the world beyond. On the varnished log walls inside hung the antlers, heads, and hides of all kinds of animals, antique-looking fishing rods, canoes, snowshoes, old traps. Several pool tables and a long bar overlooked a dance floor with a stripper pole. Large screen televisions hung around showing sports and pornography.

The patrons were mostly middle-aged couples. They had children in college, mortgages more than halfway paid, high-value insurance policies, retirement plans, disposable income, disposable time. But there were other types of visitors as well, an assortment of people, really: single males, not all of them desperate, and pretty young couples who had somehow glimpsed into the frightening future of tedium and disregard and so found themselves amongst those who had come to see what could be stirred up at the Squirrel Ranch.

This was at a time when I did not care about much of anything. Maybe this detachment was an act of will, or maybe it was an act of acceptance. I kept my eyes open, but I’d have a hard time getting hungry. There was no real longing in my admiration for anything. I would watch clouds float across the sky without needing to ascribe meaning to their shapes.

At the same time, I was seeing a woman, Brooke. She had come out to the Squirrel Ranch with her ex-husband many times before. She told me we might even bump into him there. I was aware of the possibility that he would enjoy watching me or other men doing things with her. I didn’t think I felt any way about it, and it turned out not to matter, because he did not come that night.

We wandered around upstairs. The place slowly filled up. People chatted and danced. Brooke told me that she and her husband had sometimes invited what she called vanilla friends to come along as tourists. Often, she said, they would end up playing, and then they’d become regulars themselves, at the club, and on websites for like-minded couples, and so on.

“You know how it is,” she said, “with boundaries.” She hopped over an imaginary line and turned and smiled and said, “Come with me.” And I hopped over, too. We went downstairs, where it was dim. There were little rooms with beds in them and curtains in the doorways. People could pull them shut for privacy or leave them open as an invitation for spectators.

In a community room we found swings and oddly shaped chairs, the uses of which you could figure out only after studying them. In its center was a large, raised mat on which people might intertwine, half-surrounded by vinyl covered couches. Brooke showed me a large wooden X to which a person might be affixed with wrist and ankle ties. A collection of paddles and ticklers hung on pegs beside it.

It was easy and loose between us. We weren’t burdened by pressing needs. We didn’t seek solutions to our secret pains in one another. We lacked real passion, and that was alright with each of us. Maybe we held hands in the stairwell, or while making our way back to the bar and getting our drinks.

Then a guy named Gary came through the door with his wife, Kristy. She was packed firm in a sheer blouse, her bright blue bra visible underneath. Her eyelids were the color of her bra, and I remembered several small skin tags on one of those eyelids—a problem, I guessed, that money could not solve.

Gary was short, tan. He’d wrestled in college, and the wrestling was a thing we had in common. Now, he was serious about handball. His hair had been thin when I’d known him the first time and was thinner now. In business of some sort, he was the kind of guy that kept getting ahead because he didn’t get hung up on worries about climate change or the living conditions of the animals on which he dined or the emotional well-being of the people around him. Probably, he slept well at night. He’d talk without listening, but he was warm in the way certain alphas can be, and that was enough, and enough, I thought, is probably what we should look for in people.

I saw them standing there in the line by the front desk where a staff member checked you in and put an ID number on a piece of tape on your liquor bottle so that it could be poured for you throughout the night by one of the two volunteer bartenders, swingers themselves. Neither Gary nor Kristy had seen me. They were flush with excitement in the perhaps enviable bubble their years together had built around them. There were plenty of dark places into which I could have stolen away, but there was no point in that. I came up and stood on the other side of a red rope barrier that separated the admitted from those not yet quite in. Gary noticed me first, his eyes going wide and uncertain. I’d never seen him like that before. He said, “There’s just no other place in the burbs people over forty can go to dance.”

And I said, “They are dancing here.”

I was wearing a shirt I liked. It had belonged to my father, many years gone. There were hummingbirds over each breast. You had to look close to see they were not identical. Even after washing it several times, this shirt smelled the way all my father’s shirts used to smell. I had come to realize I myself was now producing the odor, not an unpleasant one.

Brooke was dancing with a guy. He was tall and smiled in an easy manner I could rarely muster. I didn’t look around to see if he was with a woman. Brooke and I hadn’t talked about what was supposed to happen, what wasn’t. I think maybe she understood that I wasn’t concerned. I thought briefly of my ex-wife. The Squirrel Ranch would have been totally alien to her, the way a revivalist meeting would have been to me. The second-to-last time I’d seen her, I’d gone without thinking to the place where she now lived. The house was dark except for a light coming through a single basement window. When I crouched down and looked, I saw my ex-wife finish undressing and move across the floor toward a bathroom, steam wafting from the shower within. Her ass looked like nothing I had ever known. Then she stepped into the whited light and closed the door behind her. I saw her only once again after that, and that occasion was sad beyond telling.

Brooke was talking with her face close the man’s face. It didn’t bother me, but I had started to feel out of place. It was a common feeling, but it startled me every time I recognized it. I wandered out across the patio and into the grass. The sun was down, and people were fooling around in the cabanas. Women had their shirts off by the fire pit. Men stood around grinning ridiculously.

I put my earphones in. I lay in a hammock and listened to songs on shuffle. The sky was clear, the stars appearing. Eventually, I got up and knelt in the grass. A deer came by and sniffed me. I touched its forehead. Not many people can say they have done that. A year or so later, the health department would come to the Squirrel Ranch and round up all the deer, and, rumor had it, shoot each one. I must have sensed their future deaths, for I felt a sudden sadness and walked off in the helplessness that is the truth between you and everything you mean to love.

Inside, a divine old woman wearing only a garter belt was perched on a burlesque swing over the dance floor. She swung out from a little platform and through the circle of light and up into the space above the lights on the dance floor’s other side. There, she vanished. Just as you became certain she had gotten caught somehow in the dark, she came swinging back again. I watched her appear and disappear for a little while.

I couldn’t find Brooke upstairs. Halfway down the staircase, I stopped on the landing to ask myself whether I really wanted to go the rest of the way. Gary and Kristy came down, watching their feet on the steps in the dim light, she holding the hand of a pretty, plump woman. I pressed against the wood of the wall, feeling invisible with my earphones in, and let the trio pass. Then, I followed them the rest of the way.

Women and men were in various entanglements. I suppose for most of them sex had disconnected from the desire to become close to somebody. It had some other function. I could understand that. And, I suppose, some of them were secretly investing in just that endeavor, the project of intimacy, and this whole thing would prove to be just as heartbreaking as any of our other experiences in the world of love.

I was unable to tell if I saw Brooke or not, nor could I pick out Gary and Kristy and the woman who had gone with them. Then a choir version of “Amazing Grace” came through my earphones. I had downloaded it along with other music I associated with my mother, who had often cooked or baked while playing cassettes in our small kitchen in a time so different from any moment at the Squirrel Ranch it is hard to imagine how a single life could connect them. This was before she was killed in the rolling of our pickup truck one night. My father, not physically hurt somehow in this accident, stopped drinking for a long time after that. Any of those songs could cause in my belly that hurtful nostalgia for those things I will never have in any way again.

Gary emerged from the tangle. His shirt was all the way open, his pants undone, what was left of his hair mussed. What a sad thing our bodies all are, what sadder things they will become. But right then, it didn’t strike me like that. He was smiling. He sang out, “My wife is eating pussy!” He was truly happy. You can’t blame anybody for searching so hard for pleasure in the world. All around us, people fumbled for a reprieve from anything but this moment. Gary slapped my shoulder as he passed me. I felt myself smile at him.

He and his wife were not strangers to me. I had known them years ago. Their son played with my son when he was alive.

J Eric Miller is a professor of English at Metropolitan State University. His fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, and he is the author of the collection of short stories Animal Rights and Pornography as well as the novel Decomposition.