Senseless

by Fitch, Stona

  I wet my hands and ran them through my hair, graying but still thick and cut rather short. When we lived in London, I was occasionally mistaken for John Hurt, the British actor. I took this mistake as a compliment, but didn’t like being noticed. Being singled out was one of my childhood fears, that father would have me speak at the dinner table, that a teacher at Groton would call on me to discuss the cetology chapter of Moby Dick. My goal then, as now, was to be unnoticed, invisible.

  As I walked into the bedroom, I saw a paper bag next to the box of water bottles. Had this been here all along? Or had someone come in while I slept and left it here? I wasn’t sure. I opened it and found only a single apple. I examined it for pinpricks or any other sign that it had been tampered with or drugged but found none. I was very hungry. Had I been at the office, I would have already have stepped out for bread and coffee. I bit into the crisp apple and tasted its sweetness, almost too sweet. I finished it off in a few bites, then repeated a habit from childhood and ate the core as well, chewing the seeds to a wooden pulp, leaving only the stem. My mother had always joked that I would wind up with a forest in my stomach.

  I laughed, then wondered if I was still being watched, what they would make of their hostage sitting on the floor of an empty room, laughing at nothing.

  I spent the morning pacing around the three rooms, settling finally in the one farthest from where I had slept. I arranged the contents of my pocket on the floor. A wallet. A silver pen given to me for twenty-five years with IBIS. Several receipts, including the astronomical bill from last night’s dinner. My watch. Three twenty-franc coins. My cell phone was gone.

  I stared at this still life for a moment as if I could will it into something else. A gun. A knife. Something more useful in my present circumstances. I took out an American Express card and dropped it on the floor, then carefully pushed it under the bottom of the electric heater beneath the window. If I were moved today, the card would be evidence of my presence here. I put my wallet and pen back in my pocket, leaving only a twenty-franc piece on the windowsill.

  With the coin firmly in hand, I set to work scraping at the tiny line in the white paint, over and over. The building faced east, this much I knew. The sun hit the painted windows full force, warming the room. In an hour, I had cleared an opening about the size of the coin. Sweat dripped down my neck. Particles swam among the beam of sunlight that came through this small opening, my useless work for the morning. Even if I cleared more paint, what could I do next? I had thought of writing a note for help and holding it up to the cleared patch. But who would see it? Peering through the circle confirmed that all of the other windows in the building were also painted white. The cement plaza behind the building looked abandoned, without bicycles, rubbish, or other evidence that anyone lived here. Factories and other buildings hovered in the smoky distance, miles away. I abandoned my scraping, carefully hiding the twenty-franc piece above the window.

  I walked back through the larger room to the sleeping room. On top of the box waited two cardboard cylinders that hadn’t been here before. I opened them cautiously. The first contained warm brown rice. The smaller held a steamed green, kale, I supposed. Just my luck, I thought. To be held hostage by vegetarians. I wondered how the food, such that it was, had appeared here so effortlessly.

  There was a narrow door flush against the far wall of the bedroom, without a doorknob or exposed hinges. Placing my ear to the door, I could hear a telephone pulsing and people talking. It sounded more like an office than another apartment. I knocked on the door as hard as I could with my fist until it hurt but all I made was a muffled thump. When I shouted, my voice sounded ridiculous and so I gave up.

  Back on the futon, I reached into the first cylinder and ate a pinch of the greens. They were bitter but still warm. A little garlic. Possibly sautéed in sesame oil. I reached into the other cylinder and took a handful of brown rice, plain but satisfying to someone who had eaten only an apple all morning. Not having a utensil of any type, I ate with my fingers, which were soon sticky with rice. When I was done, I replaced the lids and walked into the bathroom to wash my hands. The water was cold and I left my hands under it for several minutes, closing my eyes and imagining that I could swim into the tap and down through the building, emerging in the waterworks in Antwerp or Brussels. When I was a boy, I used to pretend I was a shrinking boy who could travel unnoticed along drainpipes and telephone wires.

  When I came back into the bedroom, I saw a white plastic fork on top of the taller cylinder. I picked it up, then looked at the closed door. I was being watched, and carefully too. Someone was attending to my needs, though I wasn’t sure who. “How about a glass of wine?” I shouted. “Perhaps a white would be nice.” I thought about a cold glass of Graves, bone dry to cut through the gluey rice. Or a manzanilla served ice cold. But there was no response. The door stayed closed.

  I lay down on the futon and stared up at the ceiling. Aluminum ducts coursed through the entire apartment with grated openings every few feet. Through these came air, and, I suppose, cameras, microphones, and whatever else was being used to monitor me.

  “So now what?” I asked the grate.

  No answer.

  “So you’ve kidnapped an American. You could have done better, you know. No one is going to pay a cent for my return. I’m unimportant.” I spoke firmly, with conviction. “No one cares about me.”

  I wondered if anyone had even noticed that I was gone yet. My schedule was my own, and I very rarely went into the main office. I had already missed two meetings this morning and hoped that someone had called in, wondering where I was. Perhaps then I would be found missing. I thought of Alec Moore, the young chief at IBIS, so preoccupied with his meetings, his tedious presentations at The Hague with carefully tested statements supported by bulleted proof points. I was just a shadowy elder to him, a man from another generation, not particularly venerated.

  Maura, my wife, wouldn’t notice I was missing until our call at the end of the week. She was back on our farm, holding down the fort, as she put it. My schedule for the last few years – alternating months in Brussels and Washington – had disconnected us. Our time together had turned pleasant rather than passionate. After thirty years of marriage our passions were elsewhere. We didn’t call each other every hour the way we had when we were just married. In fact, there were days when I hardly thought of her. Now though, I wanted her to call, to notice my absence. But I knew that Maura, always dependable, would call only Friday night as we planned, still days away.

  I paced around the apartment. My thoughts turned inward, searching for a reason why I was here. Was it a chance that brought me here? Or had I been singled out? Perhaps the dinner was set up to trap me, keep me out late, dull me for capture without a struggle. I discarded this notion. I had worked with my dinner companions for years and they had all profited handsomely from our relationship – as I had. I doubted any complicity on their part.

  IBIS. The name sounded so beautiful, summoning up a white bird standing gracefully among the Everglades. In truth, our work was neither graceful nor beautiful. Over the years, the International Business Interest Sector had transformed from an obscure strategy group within the Commerce Department to an independent agency, a matchmaker among U.S. and European businesses. It certainly wasn’t the sort of work I imagined doing for the rest of my life back when I graduated from college. But what was life but a series of carefully considered compromises? I had certainly made mine.

  My life’s work was remarkably unimportant and I never did anything to raise anyone’s hackles. After all, our mission was strictly commercial, not political. The staggering U.S. trade deficit was our only stated enemy, although I now recognize it as unconquerable, a glacier to our tiny ice axes. At the root of my work was the simple fact that too many incoming foreign goods and not enough exports do not make for a sustainable economy. Earlier in my time with IBIS, I was ardent about this
growing inequity. I stood on the economic frontier, protecting the American worker. The matchmaking I did added up to millions of dollars in export contracts. I used to chart my results, confident that it made a difference. But I was merely a foot soldier in a European economic skirmish while the bigger battles raged in the Far East.

  As usual, this career review left me sullen. I paced my bedroom, skirting the edges of the futon, and took a kick at the wall, which I found to be of solid, Belgian construction rather than American drywall. I put my ear to the door and heard the distant voices again, a couple of electronic beeps, phones perhaps. Who were they? Certainly none of the IBIS member corporations, U.S. or European, harbored any grudge against us. Ours was a game in which everyone won. In any case, it was only business. No software developer in Amsterdam or manufacturer of printing plates in Leverkusen was going to take offense at my work. Marginal incursions into their market share was hardly reason enough to resort to taking hostages.

  Then again, perhaps this event was personal in nature. In this area, I had even less to worry about. As my work would suggest, I was sociable, hospitable, able to convince even the thickest, most provincial middle manager that I was his best friend. I was loyal to Maura, never straying in any way, not so much as a kiss. My personal life was remarkably without intrigue or duplicity.

  I gave up searching for someone to blame for my present circumstances. They would show themselves shortly, no doubt. All would be revealed. I lay down to sleep – not the deep, unburdened sleep of the innocent, but the fitful sleep of the singled out, the guilty held without charge.

  Day 3.

  Today’s insight – being detained is very boring. The day passed slowly. Hours of work at the window with the twenty-franc coin, the press of my thumbnail in the plaster to mark the day, a few notes written and tucked into corners of my apartment, the stealthy arrival of food cartons – these events did little to speed the flow of the day. In the long dull afternoon, whatever fear I had dissipated. If they were going to chain me to a wall and beat me, they would have started already. They wouldn’t be feeding me hot meals and keeping me in these relatively comfortable circumstances. I convinced myself that behind the seamless door, my captors had realized that they had grabbed the wrong man. Even Alec Moore, our feckless leader, wouldn’t merit much attention or money.

  I stayed in the bedroom most of the morning, hoping to catch sight of the invisible staff that spirited away my food after every meal and delivered more. If I left the room I laid a trap I thought clever, stacking three empty liter bottles against the door so they would topple over at the slightest motion.

  That afternoon, I went into the larger room for exercise hour. I assumed that exercise was an important part of the hostage experience, a way of staying healthy and sane. Stripped down to my boxers, I ran in circles until my heart pounded and the room spun. Sweat poured down my face and the air tasted sour with dust. I drank some water avec gaz – the box contained a mixture of still and sparkling, another sign that my captors were civilized. I did a few halfhearted push-ups. If my keepers were watching, certainly they would have pity on me. A life in Washington and Brussels did not make for health. A weekly jog, the occasional weekend with Maura at a spa in Maryland, the weekend chore around the farm that required lifting – these were my sporadic defenses against heavy cream, Bordeaux, and Dunhills.

  I turned on my back and did a few sit-ups, crunches, as they were called, implying that there was something to crunch. With each sit-up my soft stomach, usually hidden beneath a suit, revealed itself. I wondered when the sight of my own body had become so displeasing to me. The idea of being watched quickly brought my exercising to a close. I lay back on the floor and stared up at the aluminum ducts, wondering who was watching me now.

  “A book!” I shouted. “And new clothes – I’ve been wearing this suit for three days, for God’s sake. And a carton of cigarettes. Dunhills, in the red pack. Those are my demands. For the moment.” I gave a nervous laugh, hoping that my observers also had a sense of humor. Then I closed my eyes and waited for my heart to stop pounding from the run.

  When I woke, the light filtering through the painted windows had paled. In the empty bedroom, the beam of sunlight from my scraped circle projected a tiny orange sun on the wall. I had been asleep for hours. I walked back into the bedroom to wash up. The usual cartons of food waited next to the futon. Stacked next to them were a pair of lightweight tan trousers, three pairs of underwear, and three white undershirts. I picked up the clothes and found that they were all my size and of German manufacture. On the other side of the futon was a red carton of Dunhills and a stack of books. I picked up each book, found that they were used, with slightly torn covers. The prices penciled inside were in Belgian francs. They were all relatively inexpensive, in English, and apparently randomly chosen – an illustrated book called Ships of the World, a faded travel guide to the Congo that focused on the bargains to be found at certain markets, a volume of Cosima Wagner’s diary, and a book on metallurgy.

  “Thanks,” I said up to the grate above my bed. As a child, I personified certain places in my room – the chair next to the window was my mother, in the far corner dwelled friends from school. I was never alone, even at night. For now, the overhead grate was my overseer, audience, judge.

  Day 4.

  I settled into a routine that allowed me to convince myself that I had control, a comforting thought. In a way, I could do what I wanted, as long as it was within the confines of the empty apartment. Mornings I spent reading Ships of the World. Sailing was never of much interest to me, but now it all seemed fascinating. I read each paragraph carefully. The keel length of the Albans schooner. The route between New York and London that skirted the Grand Banks. I realized how little I knew about ships. I decided that once I was released, Maura and I would go on a cruise. For now, I did my best to forget that this apartment was not my own, that all the food, clothes, and even my books came from someone just beyond the door.

  My thoughts escaped my prison though I couldn’t. On weekends, Maura and I used to drive west from Washington through eastern Virginia, watching the city give way to towns, the towns give way to country roads. At some point near Tynsdale, we would stop the car and set out on foot. We carried only a small backpack with our lunch and some books to read. How simple and free that time seemed. It surfaced in my thoughts often during these early days – an antidote to the present.

  It was during a weekend trip that Maura and I first walked the long lane past two barns and grazing fields gone to high grass, all boundaried by toppled stone walls. At the end of the lane we saw the tall, two-story house, vaguely Greek Revival in style, but made of pale stone carefully pieced together and topped with a slate mansard roof. Weeds poked from the mortar and the slate was missing patches like a half-scaled trout. Above the front door, we could see words carved in the stone. Triangle Farm, 1819. The odd house awed us at first sight. What had driven someone to build a house so sturdy and formal so far in the country? I envisioned a Jeffersonian in exile, perhaps a lesser politician who wanted to build an empire. Whatever motivation led to its birth was now lost to history, leaving behind only the ruins, which we explored for hours.

  The idea occurred to us both slowly. We could buy the farm and restore it. We realized that we wanted to live in the country, not just visit it every weekend. It was 1980, the dawning of the awful Reagan years, a fine time to leave Washington. We were in our mid-thirties and idealism was giving way to less palatable realities. My work consisted of writing economic policy papers that rarely found their way further than a dozen or so readers, none of whom were in any position to act on my recommendations. Besides, the economy was sputtering, a gilded engine with corroded works. Maura worked at a small nonprofit agency that funded land conservation. The work that initially interested her had grown stale, and she was eager for distraction.

  Our marriage, too, was at a quiet point. T
he slowing of desire leaves a void. Some have children. Others have affairs. For us, the farm was to become our preoccupation, our forty-acre ward. The initial excitement at its purchase gave way to the realization of the enormity of the work ahead, which would drain the rest of our savings and more.

  While everyone else in Washington was having power lunches and darting about in limousines, we lived like ill-prepared pioneers. After months of hard work, the farm’s original beauty emerged, a landscape freed from yellow varnish. Weekend visitors laughed at our album of before photos, amazed at the transformation. With some satisfaction, I charted our tax assessment as it doubled, tripled, and more. Maura’s reward was less fiduciary. Triangle Farm gave her a purpose, a center to her life that she had not found before. It anchored her when I started travelling more, gave her an endless flow of responsibilities that she found rewarding, and made up for our less-than-perfect union. The name seemed prescient. Triangle Farm. The farm, Maura, and I formed a triangle as unlikely and solid as the farm’s stone walls.

  At midday, I became less convinced that I would be returning to the farm soon. The apartment hummed with a certain efficiency that hinted at permanence. It seemed set up for a long incarceration, perhaps months. I thought of the Iranian hostages back at the end of the Carter years. They were imprisoned for more than four hundred days. I remembered seeing the gaunt, bearded face of Terry Anderson staring from the cover of The Washington Post every now and then. As the years passed, he seemed almost an embarrassment, forgotten and lost somewhere in a Beirut cellar. Weeks in captivity, much less years, filled me with dread. I wanted my time as a hostage to be brief, a footnote, a story I could tell in meetings or after dinner.