Senseless

by Fitch, Stona

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Message to Readers

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Introduction by Megan Abbott

  Senseless

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Senseless

  A Novel by

  Stona Fitch

  Concord ePress

  Copyright © 2011 by Stona Fitch

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Concord ePress

  152 Commonwealth Ave.

  Concord, Massachusetts 01742

  www.concordepress.com

  Originally published by Soho Press, New York City

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. All song lyrics or other quotations used are the property of their respective copyright holders.

  ISBN: 978-0-9835851-0-7

  Concord ePress Edition 1 (June, 2011)

  Thanks for Being Part of the Concord ePress

  This ebook is different. It’s from the Concord ePress, a group of like-minded writers interested in connecting with readers in new ways. When you buy one of our books, half of the money goes right to the writer. The other half supports the philanthropic goals of the non-profit Concord Free Press, the world’s first generosity-based publisher, which is connecting reading and giving like never before. To find out more—and to join our community of readers and writers—go to www.concordepress.com.

  For Ann

  “He should not perceive sound with his ears, nor feel touch with his skin. He should not perceive form with his eyes, taste with his tongue, nor gather scents from the wind. He should courageously reject the five agitators of the senses.”

  – The Mahabharata

  “Power resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state.”

  – Emerson

  On Senseless: The Novel as Lethal Enchantment

  by Megan Abbott

  First published on the fateful publication date of September 11, 2001, Stona Fitch’s Senseless is the kind of book spoken of in reverent, hushed tones among many readers of dark crime fiction. Originally a sly white volume with astigmatic cover type, it has led many lives: graphic novel, film, and more than a dozen international editions. The years and various incarnations have done nothing to smother its incendiary effect. Holding Senseless in one’s hand in this, its latest form, it feels more than ever like a grenade.

  The plot—barebones—is both au courant and primitive: Eliott Gast, an American economist, is kidnapped by anti-globalization terrorists whose particular brand of torture is as appalling as it is inspired. Old Testament meets performance art.

  But the plot, with its fable simplicity, is not the heart of the matter. Rather it’s the relationship between you, the reader and the object humming in your hands.

  Like Gast himself, you too are hostage, captive to the book’s horrors and, much more powerfully, its mysteries. It is book-as-lethal-enchantment.

  Holding your breath as the mayhem multiples, you cling to the spaces in between the scenes of escalating terror. And in those spaces you find lushly rendered reveries from Gast’s past, impressionistic memory fugues that provide shrewd parallels to his abject present. Recalling them, his escape is yours, and you reach for it desperately.

  But, you see, that’s the trick of it. The prose is the enemy. The terrorist. Its sleekness, its lyricism. The words tug you along, beguile you. It’s so satisfying, you feel so pleased, drawn into yourself, summoning up your own past, your own keen sense of the beauties of life, which you are sure are nearly as delicate as those offered by the book in your hands.

  In this way, you become as smug and self-involved as Gast, consumer and sensualist, a man whose lifestyle, prior to capture, meant business-class ease, spa treatments, gorging himself on gourmet meals, and a holy trifecta of heavy cream, Bordeaux, and Dunhills. A man who prides himself on sensual appreciations far more subtle, an interest in interesting things, architecture, fine music, history. The self-satisfied pleasures of restoring a Virginia farm with his wife, believing himself to a new pioneer, an outlier among his fellow Washington D.C. policy slaves.

  But, as these pleasures—and others—are torn from him, any judgment we might wish to render for his serene, buffered lifestyle slips from us. Who are we to distance ourselves from Gast? If we are sensitive enough to be seduced by his lilting childhood memories, the book insists, then how can we not to sympathize utterly and share his terror? And while we cannot envision ourselves the victim of elaborate, spy-novel torture devices, we certainly can imagine the sharp horror over these terrorists’ homespun techniques, which we recognize, lay our hands on every day.

  We cannot resist the dual seductions, lulling and forcible, and as a result the terror is fiercer, more appalling. But that’s the least of it. The push-pull of pleasure and horror is a masterfully rendered parlor trick that conceals the darker textures beneath. We want our reward for enduring. We want our allegory revealed. As we nod vigorously, we suddenly wonder what precisely we are agreeing is wrong, terrible, doomful about the world and its steep decline?

  But Senseless is a book where nothing fits together cleanly, not even to please our noblest outrage, our kindest natures, our most politically sound objections. Every tunnel turns back on itself. We think we’ve cracked the code, exposed the moral to its grim fable. But we are always wrong.

  At the end, we stand, the grenade sizzling in our palm. Hands, eyes, eardrum, mouth, tongue. Our own pulse under our own fingertip. Can we trust it? Is it beating?

  —New York City, April, 2011

  Picture the room where you will be held captive. You know there is one – everyone carries this room with them. A basement room from your childhood, shelves cluttered with forgotten toys and yellowed files. A classroom from your student days, each wall lined with blank blackboards. A bright apartment with a view of the city, the night avenues glistening with rain. The corner room of an old hotel, the glass transom over the door half open. Any room can become a prison. All it takes is a key and someone to turn it. Perhaps you will do the turning yourself.

  My father spent his days in the cell of his choice – a fine office in a sandstone building on the outskirts of Roanoke. My mother was high-strung and had trouble staying in the house for long. The sight of one insignificant item missing from our household would send her on a series of interlocking errands that could last all day. As a boy, I was a poor student and painfully shy, a combination that sent me into hiding with ailments more imaginary than chronic. I often found myself at home, reading in my bed, soup cooling on a wooden tray next to a tall glass of flat Coca-Cola laced with brandy, my mother’s universal remedy.

  I would close the door to my room and imagine myself confined not by illness or false illness, but by someone else. Bart, the blond bully from school with his huge hands and dead gray eyes. Or my father, perpetually frustrated with the laziness he found in me and my brother Darby. It could be him behind the door, turning the key and holding me in my room until I learned to respect all the blessings that we had been given. The captor wasn’t important. It was the prisoner who concerned me.

  I had read tales of pioneers held by Indian tribes, soldiers imprisoned in Andersonville, criminals stranded on the rock island of Alcatraz. The small scale of their lives entranced me the way that lead soldiers had when I was younger and that astronauts would when I was older. It fascinat
ed me that an entire world could be confined to a small place, that the Battle of Culloden Moor could be reenacted on the living room rug, that three men could live and work in a capsule even smaller than my room. Through these boundaries I learned the virtue of restraint, always the quiet boy’s excuse for not hurtling headfirst into the world.

  When the light faded, giving way to the slow gray winter afternoon, I would leave the lamps off, waiting in the dark to see who would be the first to come home. My father returning from the office. My mother back from her errands. My brother done with football practice. Each would enter our house with footsteps of varying strengths. My father’s boots thumped along as he went from room to room turning on lamps. My brother’s cleats stayed only in the kitchen, where he stood in front of the open refrigerator and scanned its contents. My mother’s heels clicked like a metronome. Eventually, one would climb the stairs to my room and twist the knob to find it locked.

  In my room, I would stare, paralyzed, at the rattling brass knob. My captor had arrived, bringing food and water, a scolding, presents, further confinement. Which would it be this time? Then I would break the spell and walk slowly toward the door, reaching up to throw the deadbolt that would let them in, let me out. As the door swung open, the prison walls would vanish as quickly as they had been created and I would be set free. But on another day, behind another door, a new captor waited along the golden horizon, for fear attracts its object as surely as desire. With my imaginary confinements, I set the stage for another, more peculiar imprisonment.

  Day 1.

  I met a group of software executives for dinner at Le Nez Fin, an elegant new restaurant just off the Grand-Place, not far from my office in Brussels. Filet de boeuf with black truffle reduction, stoemp sweated in goose fat, potée bruxelloise, and bottle after bottle of wine crowded the corner table where our group huddled. I identified the Pommard, the Vosne-Romanée, and the Chambolle-Musigny even when Monsieur Tas, the foreign marketing director, switched the glasses. They were impressed that an American could be so attuned to nuance. Years in Washington, London, and Brussels had left me rarefied.

  I spent much of my career at parties, dinners, receptions. My field was not theoretical. I was not tucked away in an ivory tower. I was out in the world, imperfect though it might be. Our table was the setting for careful intertwining of European and American interests. Our conversation turned now and then to various technologies that could be transferred, given the right conditions and other enticements to trade. I never thought in coarse terms of deals or contracts. I was simply a liaison. I brought the right people together the way an expert host does. Others in my organization endured interminable meetings in The Hague or Geneva. Most of my time was spent in restaurants and hotels, environments where I truly flourished, a night-blooming flower.

  Many hours after we entered, our group of six emerged from the restaurant, sated as honeybees in August. I must have had at least a bottle of wine plus a brandy with my coffee. I was not drunk, but thrumming with the heightened awareness that I often sensed walking the streets of Brussels in the blue hours close to dawn. I smelled the damp cobblestones, sour gutter rot, cigarette smoke clinging to empty cafés. Seen walking toward my apartment on Avenue Louise that morning – and I suppose I was being observed – I would have worn a bleary half-smile of contentment, blue overcoat pulled tight around my waist, collar turned up against the chill of an early fall.

  I can’t recall when I first noticed the grating tires on the road behind me. I thought for a moment that one of my dinner companions had driven up to offer me a lift back to my apartment. As I turned, someone rushed up behind me and pulled a pillowcase over my head. It happened so fast that I didn’t even think to fight the hands pushing me forward. Footsteps on the cobblestones. The click of a key in a lock. In seconds, I was in the trunk, my head banging against a spare tire as the car sped away. I pulled off the hood, gasping. In the darkness, my mind raced and I fought the rising panic.

  The car bumped through the night. Cobblestones gave way to highway and I sensed that we were on the ring road around the centrum. I tried to count the turns, the lefts and rights and stops. But there were too many. The air in the trunk warmed and turned stale. I recalled that there were cars with emergency latches. I groped around but couldn’t find one. And what good would it have done me? The tires hummed on the road just beneath me. After about an hour, the car stopped suddenly. I heard the doors open. Keys rattled and the trunk opened, hands reached in quickly to pull the pillowcase back over my face. They lifted me out and stood me on my feet.

  “Here, take my wallet.” I fumbled in my jacket pocket. A hard fist to my stomach was their only answer. I curled around it, the pain ending any illusion that this was all a joke. They hoisted me like a bag of sand and carried me a few feet. It took four men to carry such an awkward load and I could hear them straining. After a few feet, they dropped me unceremoniously on the gritty metal floor. The doors of a freight elevator slammed closed, then the elevator shook slightly. In a minute, the elevator stopped. The door opened and a kick to the small of my back pushed me forward. I stumbled and fell on the concrete floor. The doors closed again. Pressed against the cold cement, I listened, sensing that I was alone again. I struggled out of the pillowcase and turned. I ran to the wall. The space between the elevator doors was almost seamless. I tried to pry them apart, then slapped my hand against them. A small metallic echo ricocheted down the elevator shaft.

  “Stop!” I shouted, then realized I was probably better off alone. I walked back into the room.

  I found myself in a clean, empty apartment. The walls were painted painfully white and the room seemed half-finished, with the metal doorframes unpainted, small ducts poking from the high ceiling. The plate-glass windows of the first room, a large living room, were painted white as well, diffusing the dim morning light. I ran my fingernail across the window but couldn’t scratch the paint away. I walked through the open door to the adjoining room. In it, I saw a futon on the floor, new and smelling of plastic wrapping. Next to the futon was a box of mineral water in liter bottles.

  Nothing indicated that this apartment was prepared specifically for me. No one had called me by name. I assumed that they had mistaken me for someone else. I had been in the wrong place in the early hours of the morning, looking prosperous. I had read reports of pesca milagrosa in Colombia. Miraculous fishing. Roadblocks stopped all cars, weeding out the wealthy travelers like fat fish from a pond. Miraculous for the fisherman, less so for the fish. But this was Brussels, the polite heart of Europe. In any case, what would they think when they found out they had they caught only a mid-level American economist with relatively little money and even less power?

  The two windows in the bedroom were also painted white. I managed to pull away a paintbrush bristle that had been embedded in the thick paint, removing a line of paint barely wider than a hair. I took a twenty-franc piece from my pocket and scraped it along the hairline to widen it slightly. Squinting close to the line, I could see that this room faced the other side of the building, which was shaped like the letter E with the middle stroke removed. Far below, I could make out an indistinct, hazy landscape and the brick smokestacks of factories. I guessed we were on the outskirts of Antwerp, but I couldn’t be sure.

  I walked back through the living room to the third room in the flat. I scraped a tiny paint blister with my coin and peered through, seeing only the whitewashed windows of the bedroom I had just been in. This room was empty except for two black metal folding chairs placed facing each other. Adjoining it was a small bathroom with a shower, sink, and toilet. The tilework and plumbing looked as if it had been completed hours before my arrival. All of the rooms smelled sharp with plaster and paint.

  I paced around the three rooms and tried to summon up my training from so many years ago. More than thirty years had passed, time and neglect winnowing down what I once knew. When you are taken, you must remain
calm. To ensure your safety and eventual release, you must try to engage those who hold you in a dialogue. There was something else about how the negotiations had to work from two directions, from the embassy and from the hostage. But I had forgotten anything useful.

  Hostage. What an alien word it seemed at the time. Dimly from my training, I remembered that the key to avoiding fear – which made even the strongest man vulnerable – meant sidestepping any thoughts of potential danger. It was important to stay focused on the moment, on what one had, rather than what one was being denied.

  I was in a clean apartment large enough for a family. I had water, air, and light. I had a comfortable place to sleep. I even had a bathroom. For now, this would have to be enough. I lay on the futon and closed my eyes, giving in to sleep for a few moments. It was five in the morning. On any other day I would have been asleep in my apartment, comfortable, safe.

  Day 2.

  I woke at mid-morning sure that I was at home on our farm in Virginia. When I opened my eyes I saw a black wire ending in a small bulb no bigger than a scallion. It swayed slightly just above my face, a small red light glowing. I grabbed at the wire but it quickly retracted up into one of the ceiling ducts, an electrical snake. I stood on the box of water bottles and ran my hand up in the duct but found nothing. I walked into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, then rubbed my hands through my hair. I wondered whether someone watched me from the other side of the bathroom mirror. I pressed two quick crescents into the plaster next to the sink with my thumb to mark my time here.

  All the while, I stared into the mirror. The whites of my eyes were cloudy from last night, the flesh beneath them gray as an oyster. The skein of shallow wrinkles stretched around my eyes like crazing on an old vase. But in the familiar constellation of lines, moles, and discolorations, I saw nothing new, no sign that I wasn’t the same person I was yesterday, though I was no longer free. Freedom denied doesn’t show itself on the surface, like worry or fatigue or anger. It resided somewhere other than the face.