by Lewis Shiner
He pinched little rolls of flesh on my stomach and attached the alligator clips to them. The whole apparatus looked like it came from an electric train and that image kept me from being as frightened as I might have been.
He twisted a dial on the little box and the pain was instantaneous. It felt like he was using a blowtorch on my stomach and I hallucinated the smell of burning meat as the shock arched my back up off the table and jammed my face against the forehead strap. The stomach muscles jumped and twisted even as they burned with pain and I felt the current all the way to the hair on my head and the ends of my toenails. It was the kind of intense pain that you can only really feel for a second, except that this pain went on and on, kept growing, until I was convinced that the wires were burning completely through my stomach and into my spine, causing grotesque, spectacular damage that no human body could survive.
I began to vomit. There was no food in my stomach, so all that came up was thick bile. I couldn’t turn my head or control my breathing, so it went down into my lungs and choked me. I knew that I was dying then and didn’t mind. Better now than to keep on enduring this kind of pain, only to be dropped out of a helicopter in the end.
When the current finally stopped, my stomach muscles continued to jump and heave. I couldn’t see through the tears to know who it was that unstrapped my head and right arm, turning me on my side and slapping my back repeatedly until I choked and spewed bile on the floor. Then I lay on my side and shook.
I was less than one minute into my first torture session.
I looked down and could not believe that my stomach showed no sign of the damage they had inflicted. Before I could fully process what I saw, one of the thugs grabbed my free arm and strapped it down again. I tried to resist and found out I had less strength than an infant. He pulled my head back and tightened the strap across it.
The man in coveralls took the clips off my stomach. The “I” inside my head was gone, the voice that commented on everything it saw, that made plans and sifted through memories and always wanted to fit things into narratives and patterns. In its place was an animal who only knew pain and the absence of it, and when there was no pain, that space immediately filled with mindless terror of the pain to come.
He attached the first clip to my left testicle. I was making noises, small whimpering sounds. He attached the second clip to my right testicle.
There was a second or two without pain. Then there was nothing else. It felt like I was ejaculating burning gasoline. At the same time my balls were on fire and white-hot shrapnel cut and burned the rest of my body in all directions.
I dimly sensed my body flopping like a drowning fish as the convulsions shook me. There was a point at which I thought I literally couldn’t bear any more pain. That was a ridiculous idea, of course. What does it mean to think, “I can’t bear it,” when you have no choice, no control, no alternative? The pain went on no matter what I thought about it, tearing, burning, shredding, destroying me.
And then there came a point where my nervous system shut down and I could no longer feel anything and after that I passed out.
I was not out long. When I came around, the current was off and the shit and piss that I had involuntarily let go of were cooling between my legs. The chill was faintly soothing.
«Wash him,» said the man with the coveralls. Someone filled a bucket at the sink and sluiced the mess off the table and mopped it up.
«Now I’m going to show you why we call it ‘the grill,’» he said. He did something with the electrodes and just before the current went on I realized he had attached them to the table itself.
Each kind of shock was the same and each one was different. This one was like being thrown into a pit of fire and also like a full body seizure. My heart was not beating so much as it was stopping dead and then starting again, lurching drunkenly against the waves of electricity. I understood that they had not killed me before and knew that they surely would now.
This time I passed out more quickly and I think I was out longer. When I was half-conscious again, he attached the electrodes to my gums.
I felt every nerve in every tooth scream, needles of agony that went straight from my jaw into my brain. It was like lightning striking my head, over and over, until the darkness came and stayed.
*
I woke up in the closet. I was still naked. They had given me an old, green wool Army blanket, musty and moth-eaten. My hands were free and they had taken the hood away. The single naked light bulb burned overhead.
I’d only been awake a few minutes when the pain returned. It was like my body had saved the sensations for me while I was unconscious so I wouldn’t miss any of them. It started with my teeth, which first ached and then burned. Then my testicles, which had swollen to the size of tennis balls. Finally my stomach convulsed and I crouched over the bucket, venting gas and a little foul-smelling liquid.
There was no paper to wipe myself with, so I used a corner of the blanket.
I lay down and covered myself and begged for sleep to come. All I could think about was the door opening and them coming back for me. A headache smoldered in my right eye and I pulled the blanket over my head to shield myself from the merciless light.
It had been like this in the first days of the headache. Then, I could find a position on the couch with all the lights off where I could hold perfectly still and keep the pain at bay for minutes at a time.
It was more difficult on a linoleum floor, with my entire body bruised and burned. Still I managed tiny slivers of sleep, one of them long enough that I fell into a dream, and in the dream they were taking me into a room with black and white checkerboard tiles and a metal table. I woke up with a loud grunt and huddled against the wall and shook.
And waited.
I tried to imagine what it would look like to fight back. I could picture myself doing violent things to all of them, chopping them to pieces with an axe, machine-gunning them against a wall, smashing their faces with a big rock. What I couldn’t see was how to get there from being naked and exhausted and terrified and hurt and locked in a closet.
When the door opened I started to cry. It was one of the thugs. I shrank from him, expecting him to reach for me, but instead he set a brown paper bag on the floor and left.
I had lost my sense of smell and for a while I didn’t understand what the bag was. Then I remembered the McDonald’s bag, and then I saw that this was a different kind, small and brown and plain. I looked carefully inside and saw a banana and two mandarin oranges.
My hands trembled as I picked up one of the oranges and tried to peel it. My fingers were weak and clumsy. Eventually I got my thumbnail under the skin and tore a piece off. I could smell it now and it made my saliva come so forcefully that the drool ran down my chin. I almost had the peel off when the door opened again and one of them grabbed my arm and the other knocked the orange out of my hand and they dragged me into the kitchen.
There was no CIA man this time, just the two thugs and the man in the coveralls. They were in the same clothes as before, as if no time had passed. The thugs strapped me to the table. The metal was freezing cold and I shivered as soon as it touched my skin.
The man in the coveralls didn’t have the electrodes this time. He had a small wooden paddle, the size of the sticks they used to give away at paint stores to stir with. He was slapping it against the palm of his other hand and it made me think of the ruler my father used to spank me with when I was little. It should have been a stupid, trivial thought. Instead it made me feel scared and guilty and desperate for a way out.
When I was strapped down, he hit me on the bottom of my right foot with the stick, then hit me again and again and again. The blows were not that hard. They stung, though it was nothing like the explosive pain of the electroshock.
They didn’t stop. He moved up and down over most of the sole, the stinging giving way to burning, the burning turning into spears of hot pain that stabbed down my legs.
First I tried to
will myself to black out. Then I remembered hearing about people who had detached their consciousness from their bodies and floated above themselves. I couldn’t get there because the pain kept calling me back.
Once when I came back I realized the man in the jumpsuit was saying something. I couldn’t see his face because of my head being strapped down and at first I couldn’t understand him. He spoke in a sharp rhythm that matched the rhythm of the blows.
«Where. Is. Pablo. Nuncio. Where. Is. Pablo. Nuncio.»
«Wait!» I said.
He stopped asking the question. The beating also stopped for a few seconds and then started again, harder. The man in the jumpsuit was suddenly beside me, leaning over me and I realized he’d given the paddle to one of the thugs.
He started talking again in time with the slaps. «Where. Is. Pablo. Nuncio.»
«Who?» I couldn’t keep the desperation out of my voice.
«Pablo. Nuncio. Where. Is. Pablo. Nuncio.»
«I don’t know who you’re talking about!» It came out as a squeak, all my ravaged throat could produce.
«Tell. Us. Tell. Us. Pablo. Nuncio. Where. Is. Pablo. Nuncio.»
«Who is Pablo Nuncio? I can’t tell you something I don’t know!»
His face went away and the beating moved to my left foot. The right foot felt huge and red and throbbing. A cartoon foot. I tried to laugh at the image and started to cough and the cough turned to dry heaves. The entire time the beating continued.
He chanted the question again. There was a pause while they changed thugs. I was wearing their arms out, I thought.
And then I thought, they are destroying my feet. I will never dance again. Even if I somehow live through this, I will never dance with Elena again.
“Noooooo!” I cried. It sounded like gargling. I arched my back and fought against the straps that had no give in them, and all the while the beating went on, rhythmic, indifferent, unstoppable.
They moved back to the right foot, which was sore as an open wound. The gentle touch of a finger would have been agony. They were hitting it, pounding it to jelly.
I screamed again and again and finally I lost the feeling in my feet and then lost my way in my head. I found myself in a nightmare from childhood, from the time I was 9 years old and fell down a hill and broke my arm, and they’d given me ether while they set the fracture. In the dream I was strapped to the inside of a giant metal spiral, slowly turning through infinite space and infinite cold. I was completely alone and completely helpless and trapped there for eternity.
*
When I came to, I was still on the table. I smelled cigarette smoke. The room was quiet.
The man in the coveralls came into my vision. He was staring at my groin. I felt his hand gently move my penis to one side. Then I saw his right arm come up. The stick was in it. He slapped my testicles with it and pain went up through my stomach and chest and into the back of my throat.
«Pablo. Nuncio. Where. Is. Pablo. Nuncio.»
“Please,” I said. I was so disoriented I was speaking English. “Please stop. I don’t know. I don’t know who you’re talking about. Please, just, please, stop. Please.”
«Pablo. Nuncio. Where. Is. Pablo. Nuncio.»
By the time his arm was tired and he handed off to one of the thugs, I was already going numb, a numbness like death, a hopeless numbness, the numbness of the irreparably broken.
*
When I woke up in the closet, the fruit was still there.
I moved very slowly, rolling up the blanket and putting it under my ankles to keep my feet from touching the floor, then lying carefully on my side, my knees as far apart as I could hold them to ease the pressure on my swollen testicles. I ate as slowly as I could and then I crawled on hands and knees to the bucket and tried to piss. All that came out was a few drops of blood.
I lay on my back, one arm over my eyes to block as much light as I could. Pain pulsed in waves from my feet and groin. I was completely exhausted, but any imagined sound in the other room would bring me wide awake, heart pounding. Finally, in desperation, I refolded the blanket and managed to get my legs extended up the wall, blanket under my buttocks, my head lowest of all, against the blue-gray linoleum. The yogis call it Deep Lake Pose and it’s supposed to bring serenity. Serenity was too much to ask, but it did take the blood away from my feet and balls. The bad news was that it brought that blood to the icepick pain in my right eye.
I put my left arm back over my eyes and used my right hand to push the hair away from my forehead, massaging the tenderness in my scalp that came with the headaches. Over and over, until my arm ached, and then I traded arms and used the left to rub my head. By this point my legs were sliding off the wall, so I curled into a fetal position, the blanket over my head and my feet radiating pain from the points where they lightly touched the floor.
I went in and out of a restless sleep. Thinking about Elena was unbearable, so I tried to imagine Sam there, sitting next to me. “D, these guys are such losers,” I heard him say. “I don’t want you hanging with them anymore.”
“Okay, Sam,” I said. “I won’t.”
The door opened. The two thugs came in and without a word pulled the blanket off me and jerked me to my feet. I couldn’t stand up, so one of them held me while the other hit me, punching me in the ribs and stomach and face, over and over. At one point I leaned over to spit out a mouthful of blood and there was a tooth in it. They hit me some more and then threw me on the floor and left.
I found the tooth later, lying in a patch of dried blood. It was a canine from the left side of my mouth and it looked so sad, yellow and worn and abandoned, the root broken off midway down, that I put it in the bucket so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.
The sequence of things began to get confused. The door opened at some point and there was another bag of food, not fruit this time, another McDonald’s bag. This was a different time than the first time because I didn’t say anything and nobody hit me and they left me alone with the food.
The Coke was too sweet to drink. There was still some crushed ice in it, so I fished the ice out with my filthy hand and ate that. I ate the French fries and I ate the lettuce and pickles off the hamburger. I couldn’t eat the cheese, which tasted like wax. I picked at the bun and by then the sweet smell of the meat had made me sick, so I wrapped the remnants up and put them by the bucket. Then I crawled to the far corner of the closet and spent an indefinite time trying not to throw up.
I was on the table again. The man in the jumpsuit had attached the electrodes to my ears. The CIA man must have told him he was using too high a charge because this time I didn’t go into convulsions. Instead it felt like high powered belt sanders were ripping the flesh from my skull.
Later he attached the electrodes to my little toes. He gave me a small dose of current, like I might get from a light switch that had shorted out, enough to make my battered feet blaze with pain. Then he sat on a stool next to me. I knew he was going to ask me about Pablo Nuncio. The tears were already rising in my eyes.
«Mateo,» he said. «Tell me about Mateo.»
*
I felt a rush of gratitude. I knew that name. I could answer this one. «Mateo,» I said. «Mateo is Elena’s father.»
He twisted the dial. The shock picked me up and rattled me like a dried bean in a jar. After he dialed down, I lay panting and convulsing in a pool of my own urine.
«Mateo is no one’s father,» the man said. «Mateo is a criminal, a murderer, a kidnapper. He is an enemy of Argentina. I know you are not from here, but I know you love this country. Mateo hates it, and he wants to destroy it.»
«No,» I said, honestly wanting to correct his mistake. «It’s not like that. He—»
The man twisted the dial again and the pain went straight up my spine, the way the yoga energy is supposed to do, only this was a path of white-hot destruction. At the end of it my teeth were chattering and my legs were shaking in the restraints.
«Mateo is a very
bad man,» he said. «Do you understand that?»
What I understood was that he wanted me to say yes, so I did. It took two attempts to get my tongue to behave and speak the word.
«Good. That’s very good.» He turned away from me and said, «Water.»
Later he had a water bottle in his hand. He had undone the strap around my forehead and was holding my head so that I could take a little water in my mouth. «Slowly,» he said. «Slowly, so it doesn’t make you sick.»
I was lying on the table and he was saying, «It is very important that we find Mateo. You want to help us with that, don’t you?»
This was hard. I knew the answer that he wanted and I didn’t think it was the right answer. If they found Mateo, they would strap him to a table like this one and hurt him too. That didn’t seem right.
The electrodes were on my testicles again. The pain was unbearable and I knew I couldn’t stay conscious, but somehow I did and it kept coming. I was making noises and the noises were numbers. They were something like the numbers of Mateo’s cell phone, except I didn’t remember the order.
He asked me for the number again and I gave him one, but it was not the same. I realized that and so did he and he sent the current into me again.
When he stopped I said the number again, the same as the time before, and I told him yes, I was sure, and I said the number yet again, and then I said the numbers to myself, over and over, so I would be sure to get them right the next time.
He put the electrodes on my nipples. I said the numbers I had memorized and he shocked me anyway, not a convulsive shock but a pain shock that went straight down to my penis and testicles. «Where is Mateo? Where is he now? How do I find him?»
It was too many questions and I couldn’t decide which one to answer so he hurt me again.
Later I was talking, or my voice was talking, without my knowing where the words came from. I couldn’t even understand them, they were babble, only they were about the little market and the stairs and the tunnels, the old factory. He was writing things down and saying, «Good, that’s very good,» and there was no pain except the pain from before that still hurt. And another pain inside that was not physical, that was shame and hating myself for what I was doing.
