by Lewis Shiner
Then I was telling him about the others, about Jesús and the small dark woman and the Middle Eastern man and Raul and all the others and the stones and the votes.
«Stones? Votes? What are you talking about?»
I tried to explain about Osvaldo. Osvaldo was the reason I was here. My tongue wouldn’t make sense and I wound up speaking English because I was delirious. He shocked me again to make me speak Spanish, but it was too much and I passed out.
I was in the closet and they were coming to get me again. I must have slept because it didn’t seem like that long since I’d been on the table the last time. Only it didn’t feel like I’d slept, it felt like I had sat against the wall with my eyes closed and my hands pressing against them, thinking about the fact that I had told them everything they wanted to know, that I had betrayed Mateo, who was Elena’s real father, and now they were going to kill him too and she would have no one.
They had brought fruit again. I couldn’t eat it because I didn’t deserve to be fed, didn’t deserve to live. I didn’t want it because it was a reward for betrayal, it was thirty pieces of silver, and I was sure I hadn’t slept.
One of the thugs was hitting my feet with the stick and the man in the coveralls was asking me for the phone number again, and I was sure I said it right, and I must have because he stopped hitting me. Then he wanted me to say the directions again and at first I didn’t want to, but then he was hitting me in the testicles with the little stick and it didn’t matter because I had already said them once and saying them again would make the pain stop.
He was holding a map of the city in front of me and my right hand was free and I was using it to point to where I thought the grocery was.
He was asking me to describe the others. I did, and that was when I saw there was another man next to the man in coveralls. He had white hair and a low forehead and a patchy gray mustache. I knew I had seen his picture, and then I recognized him. Emiliano Cesarino, the one who had run the detention centers and killed Marco Suarez. Osvaldo’s boss.
I was in the closet. There was an Egg McMuffin with no meat on it, so it must have been breakfast time. Was it only the morning of the second day? It was not possible that I had been there less than three or four days. There was orange juice and water. Marco Suarez had loved the smell of oranges. They made him think of the tropics.
I ate all the food, tearing it with my hands and putting it deep in my mouth to avoid my missing tooth, and then there was nothing.
I used the bucket to piss blood and expel some diarrhea, which was mostly noxious gas. I slept a little, I sat, I did Deep Lake Pose. I thought about Sam, but Sam had nothing to say to me because I had not stopped hanging with these losers like I said I would and because I had betrayed Mateo.
They were doing this on purpose, I realized. They were breaking any possible sense of rhythm to my days, to the meals, to the sessions, to wipe out my internal clock, to leave me with nothing, nothing at all.
I was alone in the closet for so long that I wondered if they were finished with me, if they had left me to die. I tried the door to make sure it was locked, and tried it again later, and again after that.
I was afraid to be alone. At the same time, I knew that if they came back they would torture me. It was an impossible choice that I could not stop thinking about. The more I thought about it, the more my head hurt, a spike going straight through my right eye and deep into my brain, hurting so much that the pain in my feet and my testicles and my chest and mouth could not compete with it.
Then I was on the table again and they were beating me with the stick, and I wanted to tell them it was time for the shock, not the stick, except that I was no longer sure, and I didn’t want the shock either.
«What is he planning? Mateo. What is he planning, eh? He has a plan. He is up to something. What is he doing?»
Too many questions again. I tried to explain that Mateo had no plans, or if he had plans I didn’t know anything about them.
The next time I was on the table there was no shock and no beating. This time there was only a pair of pliers.
«Mateo. What is he planning?»
«I don’t know.»
«Beto, I am very disappointed in you. Just like your father was disappointed in you when you were a boy, back in Virginia. Do you remember?»
He’d wanted me to play basketball. He’d never been good enough to play in college, so he wanted me to succeed where he’d failed. He’d put a hoop above the garage and sent me outside to practice every afternoon. He would come out to check on me, never to play with me, and he would find me sitting and daydreaming, or chasing an escaped ball down the twilight street. Disappointed in you, he would say.
How did they know that?
«You must try again, Beto. Tell me what I want to hear.»
«But I don’t know—»
He took hold of my left hand. Then he had just the index finger, pushing it down onto the metal table. I felt something touch the fingernail. It was the jaws of the pliers. The pliers began to pull on the fingernail.
«Try again, Betito.» His voice was kindly and patient. «Tell me what Mateo is planning.»
«I don’t know! I swear to you I don’t know!»
The pain started in the tip of the finger and then the whole finger and then the whole arm. I couldn’t see what they were doing and that made it worse, because I knew what they were doing and I was even more powerless because I couldn’t see it. The pain was terrible and cold, an absence, an unbearable loss. I thought of my sad yellow tooth on the floor of the closet and now this. My entire forearm vibrated with agony and then, mercifully, I was gone again.
In the closet. I was afraid to look at my finger. Eventually I had to. It was swollen to twice its normal size, fat as a sausage, and where the fingernail should have been it was puckered and covered with dried blood. Moving it through the air made it hurt, a pounding, savage, devastating ache. I cradled it with my right hand and curled my body around it and lay on the floor without moving.
On the table. The stick again. They had barely started when I nearly choked on the smell of cigarette smoke. One of the thugs stood over me, laughing. He took a drag from his cigarette and the end glowed bright red, like molten steel in a foundry, like the setting sun. He took the cigarette by the filter and brought the hot end down toward my face. It looked like he was going to put it into my eye. With that thought I realized that I had still been holding on to some hope of coming away from this alive. I let that hope go.
He put the cigarette out on my left cheekbone. The smoke from the cigarette and from the burning flesh made tears stream down my face.
The man in the coveralls loomed over me from the other side, the right side, the side with the eye that I could still see out of. «Mateo,» he said. «What is he planning?»
The thug lit a new cigarette with a wooden match. He shook the match out and dropped it on my chest. I remembered a joke from when I was little: Want to see a match burn twice?
«Don’t be difficult, Betito. You have been doing very well up to now. Tell me what Mateo is planning.»
The thug blew smoke in my face, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and pointed it at my chest.
«A bomb,» I said. I knew what he wanted. That was more important than the truth, he had showed me that.
The thug hesitated.
«He’s making a bomb. Una bomba de tubo.» I’d seen the word for pipe bomb in the newspaper one day.
The man in the coveralls waved the thug away. «Good, Beto. What is he going to do with the bomb?»
«Citibank. He’s going to put the bomb in Citibank.»
«When?»
«I’m not sure.» I hadn’t thought ahead. It had been the day before Halloween when they took me. How long ago was that?
I was too slow with the answer. The thug burned me where the skin was thin over the center of my collarbone, pulling the cigarette back before it went out and then puffing on it so that it filled the room with the stink of burn
ing meat. I was throwing up again and they had to release me enough that I could vomit onto my own left arm.
«Christmas,» I said, gasping and choking. Surely it wasn’t Christmas yet. «The bomb will go off at Christmas.»
«Where?»
«Citibank, I told you. Citibank!»
«Which one?»
«Calle Florida. Where all the shopping is.»
I was in the closet, because I could move my arms and legs, though I was sorry when I did. I couldn’t remember anything after Calle Florida. I didn’t know what they’d done to me to make me pass out. There was a burn on my face and one high on my chest, neither of them where I could see them. They both felt like the coal from the cigarette was still there, still smoldering. My right eyelid had drooped more than halfway down and my left eye was swollen nearly shut from the burn, making it hard to see. It was just as well, because I couldn’t bear to look at my finger, which was swollen and crusty and an inflamed red at the edges of the dried blood.
On the table. Electrodes on my testicles. I didn’t remember getting there. I didn’t remember the question. I could no longer differentiate where the pain was coming from. I heard faint voices that could have been in another room.
My eyes were barely functional, but something made me look at the face of the man with the coveralls. I was staring at him when the most amazing thing happened. His eyes started to pop out of his head. Then his forehead bulged, like it was made of soft clay and someone was poking it from the inside. Then big pieces of the forehead flew out, scattering bits of red and yellow-gray tissue and one of the eyes fell out and hung by a string.
Somewhere in there I also heard a loud noise.
I understood that I was making it up, that the last borders between my fantasies and reality had broken down. Yet when his body collapsed across my chest, it felt real and heavy.
There were more loud noises, three or five or ten of them, and maybe somebody screaming, which could have been me.
A man’s voice, far away, said, «Dios mio, what have they done to him?» I felt the electrodes come off my testicles, and then the body of the man in coveralls jerked away from me and landed in a heap on the floor.
A face looked down at me. I still didn’t understand what was happening. At first I thought it was Cesarino again, but it wasn’t, it was another old man. It was Osvaldo. The only other time I’d seen his face was in the street outside the restaurant, when Mateo kidnapped him.
«You,» I said.
He undid the strap holding my head, then the straps on my arms, then my legs.
«Can you stand up?» he asked.
«No.»
«I’m going to put you on your side. Go slow.»
I curled onto my side and didn’t want to move. There were new smells in the air. Cordite, which I knew from target practice with my father. And blood. I tried to vomit and came up empty.
«I’m going to sit you up,» Osvaldo said. «We have to get you out of here.» There was gentleness in his voice. He brought my legs down and helped me sit up.
The room was a slaughterhouse. The man in the coveralls lay at my feet, his face gone. The two thugs sprawled against the wall, dead. There were bullet holes in the plaster above them, stained with blood and gore. Three men stood with pistols ready, wearing black police uniforms and caps. I felt a tiny flowering of joy in my heart.
Osvaldo reached for me and I held my arms out to him like a child. He lifted me up and carried me into the daylight.
*
I caught no more than a glimpse of the neighborhood—a wide, cracked street lined with deserted offices and industrial buildings. The sky was hazy and the air smelled of car exhaust. I thought it might be afternoon.
He laid me down in the back seat of an expensive car. There was a sheet and a blanket on the seat and I wrapped myself in them to cover my nakedness and because the car was cool from air conditioning.
There were other cars parked behind us. Some of them must have belonged to the dead men in the kitchen. At least one of them must have belonged to the other men who had rescued me, because Osvaldo said something to them, then he shut the door on me and got into the front seat alone.
Once we were moving there was too much noise from the road and the traffic for me to talk. So I lay quietly and every once in a while I would see Osvaldo’s eyes in the rear-view mirror as he checked on me.
At some point we got on a freeway. The motion felt good, taking me away from the closet and the metal table, the farther and the faster the better. Sometime after that the car stopped and Osvaldo turned to face me.
“This is the British Hospital,” he said in English. “It is a good place. They will help you here. I am sorry I can’t come in. I have to leave you here. Maybe you understand.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I do this for my daughter. She loves you.”
“She called you…?”
“She called and say she will kill me. I tell her what I tell you now. I do not kidnap you. I keep my word, I tell no one what happen with Mateo. I keep my word in the future, too. But I am able to know who does kidnap you and this I find out. As you see.”
“Thank you. But who—” I couldn’t say the words “betrayed me.” Not after the way I had betrayed Mateo and the others.
Osvaldo didn’t seem to have heard me. “Cesarino is a very bad man. I am not finished with him, I think. But that is not for you to worry about. You must go now.”
He came around and opened the back door of the car. It hurt when he moved me and I understood that he couldn’t help it. I could see the hospital now. I still had my bad memories of the hospital in Durham, but at that moment the British Hospital was very beautiful. There was a new wing that was white with a red and blue logo on it, and grass and flowers. He carried me to the door, wrapped in the sheet and blanket, and set me down gently.
“Be well,” he said. “Know that I love Elena very much.”
He said something to the guard at the door and then he was gone. A few minutes later two orderlies came with a gurney and took me inside.
*
I waited a long time before anyone thought to examine me. Once they did, they gave me morphine and I went to sleep. I woke up in a semiprivate room by a window and it was night outside. Elena was there.
She saw that I was awake and started to cry. She pulled her chair next to me and put a hand on my face and one on my chest. The one on my chest was touching the burn and I winced and she took it away. She tried to say something that only made her cry harder. Finally she said, «I did this to you. Beto, I am so sorry, so sorry.» She was crying again.
The IV drip was in my right arm. My left hand was wrapped in bandages. I wanted to touch her, but it was difficult. I put my right hand on her hair. She had clearly not been sleeping much, but otherwise she was exactly the same. She was wearing Dani’s necklace and jeans and a T-shirt and one of my flannel shirts. She was so beautiful and I was so broken. It made me a little sick to see her next to me.
«What day is it?» I asked.
«Saturday. They had you for five days.»
«I betrayed them,» I said. «Mateo, Jesús, Raul, all of them. I didn’t even wait. I betrayed them as soon as I could.»
«Beto, they tortured you. How can you blame yourself? This is my fault, nobody’s fault but mine.»
«Are they dead?»
«Mateo and the others? No, no, they are all okay. I called them when you went missing. They left immediately, went into hiding somewhere. I don’t even know where they are.»
«Good,» I said. «That’s good.» It didn’t feel good. It felt hollow. My guilt was the same, whether they lived or died.
«Beto, I was so afraid they would kill you.»
I said, «It was your father—Osvaldo—who rescued me.»
«I know. He called me as soon as he left you here. This place is only a few blocks from your apartment. I came right away, but they wouldn’t let me see you until you were in the room.»
«He said you threatened to kill him.»
«Yes. When I thought he was the one who took you…»
«That was why he came for me. Because you called, because you told him that you…that you…»
«That I love you.»
«Because of that. So it was you that saved me.»
«Mi amor, I have to be able to touch you. To do that, I have to know where they hurt you.»
I let her take the sheet away. I was wearing a hospital gown underneath, so the first thing she saw was my feet, swollen like an elephant’s and wrapped in cold packs. She burst into tears again.
I lay with my legs open, feet turned to the sides. I lifted the gown so she could see my testicles, the size of grapefruit, also resting on a cold pack.
«You see what they took from me? My dancing, my sex. There’s nothing left for you to love.»
She got into the bed, carefully distributing her weight so she was beside me and on top of me, barely touching me. She kissed my split lip and said, «You must never say that. Never ever say that.»
In spite of itself, my penis stirred. It woke the pain, which made me go limp again. She had told me once that I didn’t have the history to be involved with her. Now she was the one who didn’t have the history.
«Show me the rest,» she said.
I showed her where the cigarettes had burned me, where the electrodes had been, the missing tooth, the missing fingernail, the bruises from the beatings, and she bit her lip to stop the crying.
«So I can put a hand here?» she asked, touching my right upper thigh.
«Yes.»
«And here?» She put her other hand on the left side of my chest, above the nipple, left of the burn.
«Yes.»
«And my head here?» She laid it gently on my left shoulder.
«Yes.» I could smell her hair. I had thought I would never smell it again. For the moment I refused to think about the hopelessness of it. I rested my right hand on the smooth curve of her waist and fell asleep.
