Sarah Hepola has turned her search for true love into a public auction held in a rented New Orleans warehouse, open twenty-four hours a day, where the only accepted currency is years of a man's remaining life. Bidding opened Monday at dawn and by noon the detective, the married man and the younger man had each taken a numbered seat on the concrete floor, forbidden to leave until they had committed a decade or more.
The rules, posted on a hand-painted board, require every bidder to state his age aloud each hour and subtract one year from his offer. The married man, who arrived with his wife, was told she could bid on his behalf only if she first surrendered her own claim to the flexibility she had defined differently. She left at dusk. The younger man, twenty-nine, bid nine years before his locomotive-factory shift began and was permitted to phone in the rest from the factory floor, where his foreman now keeps a tally on the wall.
The detective, the great love of Hepola's twenties, bid thirty years without blinking, then asked for a glass of water and was refused, because the auction's hydration rule states that only the highest bidder may drink. Hepola sat on a raised platform in a folding chair, sober, watching the numbers fall. «Desire feeds only on distance,» she said, «so we are measuring the distance in years.» By evening the warehouse had filled with single men from three parishes, each clutching a folding chair and a calculator, waiting for a turn to subtract.