by Fitch, Stona
I nodded to the ludicrous pirate, not sure what he meant. Behind him, Nin stood holding a large metal bowl, the kind used for mixing greens. If there was any emotion in her eyes I could not detect it. They held only the same glinting darkness that I had seen during her first visit.
Behind her, the thin doctor rushed around, white coat flapping. He hunched slightly in the way that children who grow too tall learn to reduce themselves. His skin was tanned, hair black and thin, bald on the top. He could be Basque, Arab, Algerian. It was not clear at all. Perhaps this was the reason why had such a perfunctory disguise. He was not particularly recognizable.
He seemed to be looking for something along the baseboards of the apartment. Near the windows, he found an electrical outlet. Then he reached into his black bag and took out an iron, a simple steel iron with its familiar chevron of holes for steam, a turquoise plastic handle, and a long cord, which he plugged into the wall.
The iron was an ordinary item found in any home, similar, in fact, to the one Maura and I had at home. Still, in this context it became freighted with a new meaning. We all watched the iron as it sat on the windowsill, clicking as it warmed. After a moment, the Doctor reached over and touched the surface with his fingertip, then turned the heat up to the highest setting.
Nin tapped her fingers on the metal bowl, sending a small ringing through the room. Blackbeard reached out and grabbed her wrist, jerking his head up at the grates. She stopped.
In a few more moments, the Doctor tested the iron again and found it to his liking. He nodded to Blackbeard.
Blackbeard shifted behind my chair and leaned his face close to mine. I could feel his beard bristling against my face. “Let’s begin, shall we?”
I nodded involuntarily, not knowing what was beginning. Sweat coursed down my sides and my breathing turned shallow.
The Doctor reached into his black bag and took out a syringe, which he carefully filled with a clear fluid from a small vial.
He held it toward me as if offering me a piece of fruit or a cigarette, eyebrows raised.
I shook my head, not sure what was in the syringe, but certain that it could do me no good. “I suggest you accept this injection gratefully,” Blackbeard whispered. “It’s merely a painkiller, intended to help you. Be thankful we’re not amateurs.” He reached over my shoulders and grasped the arms of the chair, effectively pinning me. I struggled but could only flail my legs. I’m sure I was shouting the entire time, involuntarily yelling no, stop it, let me go and the like. But I was deaf to my own words. I heard only a roaring in my ears.
I kept kicking until the Doctor reached into his bag and removed two lengths of rubber ending in metal clips. We used similar cords to hold our canoe to the roof of the car back at the farm. Bungee cords. The words sounded strange and ridiculous to me. Although I struggled, the Doctor quickly secured my ankles tightly to the legs of the chair. I could only try to lunge forward, which did little except to encourage Blackbeard to hold my shoulders even more firmly against the back of the chair. The needle stung my forearm, then a slow warming moved up my arm.
Looking straight ahead, I saw the Doctor approaching, a half-smile frozen on his tight face. In his right hand, he held a set of metal tongs with tan rubberized handles, the kind used in the kitchen to move pasta from a pan or to gather up asparagus. We had exactly the same tongs in our kitchen. But seeing such a familiar object gave me no comfort. The Doctor opened the tongs and reached toward me. I shouted again, and with that shout he grasped the tip of my tongue. The metal cinched together and I couldn’t get loose. He pulled so firmly that I thought for a moment he intended to rip my tongue out of my mouth. My mind raced despite the injection.
Nin moved closer, kneeling and holding the bowl beneath my chin, as if in a ritual. Her eyes darted from my face to the bowl to the Doctor.
I watched her eyes widen suddenly and realized that the Doctor held a long fillet knife in his right hand. With his left, he gave one last pull, so the pain at the base of my tongue was almost intolerable. Then he flicked the knife forward suddenly, like a waiter opening a trout. In that moment, the pain blossomed a thousand-fold. The entire length of my tongue blazed. He took a step away and I could see that the tongs held a thin layer of flesh curling one way and then the other like an eel. He dropped it in the bowl and I heard it ring. I screamed. Blood splattered along the metal. Nin deftly moved the bowl to catch it. I could feel my tongue slipping against my lips as I screamed again.
“Almost over,” Blackbeard shouted. He tightened his grasp firmly and I saw the Doctor coming at me with the tongs again in his right hand, the iron in his left, its cord trailing behind. In the eyeholes of his mask, I detected no particular expression. It was as if he were simply completing a task he had been assigned and doing it as efficiently as he could.
He reached out suddenly with the tongs and managed to grasp my tongue again, this time holding it by the sides. I felt Blackbeard’s hand on my jaw, holding it down. The painkiller had entered my system, making me feel a strange detachment from the scene, as if I floated up to the ceiling among the grates and black cables. I envisioned myself pinned in my chair, fearful and unwilling. At my feet, Nin held the ringing bowl like a chalice. Blackbeard’s firm embrace seemed almost brotherly. And the impassive Doctor seemed to be searching for the correct way to bring about a cure to my bleeding. Together, we created a perverse medieval still life. The Curing of the Damaged.
The Doctor brought the iron close to my mouth and it seared my tongue, sending the flames of pain rising again. Smoke drifted past my eyes and I smelled meat cooking on a grill. He pressed the iron down firmly for a moment and my eyes closed against all that was happening here in an unidentified apartment somewhere in Belgium, in the middle of a long autumn afternoon. I left the white room and travelled back to the farm, to walk along the trails through the deep woods, the maple leaves thick along the path, all pain gone from the world.
Day 9.
Now that I would never taste wine again, I spent the morning huddled beneath a blanket, remembering the particular flavor of Bordeaux. Each bottle fixes time at the summer harvest, growing more complex with each passing year. I always thought of drinking wine as a way to recapture summer in winter, to travel back to the past without leaving the dinner table.
At a quiet restaurant in Kensington, Maura and I had a 1945 Chateau Margaux to celebrate our last night in London. We had to convince the waiter that we wanted this particular bottle, that we were aware of the price. It was once one of the world’s finest wines. His hands shook as he opened the bottle and poured a tiny portion into my glass. The wine had been in its bottle for almost fifty years, a time capsule from another era. The harvest was almost forgotten until late August, when the grapes were overripe and bursting, as if the vines were celebrating victory as well. From my first sip I could taste the wine coming unraveled, the flavors drifting apart with age. It was a wine with pathos, my favorite. A dark, smoky flavor of sugar left too long in a cast-iron skillet gave way to the smooth, empty middle of the wine, pleasant where it had once been thrilling. The finish stung my mouth for a moment, then dropped off.
The wine took me back to my father’s dark study, lined with faded novels and smelling of cherry pipe tobacco, where he and my mother had danced when they heard the war was over. I imagined sitting on the floor and watching them, hearing Darby fire his cap pistol over and over out on the lawn. The rush of nostalgia overwhelmed me for a moment in the restaurant, bringing tears to my eyes. Maura watched me curiously and the waiter asked whether perhaps the wine was past its prime. I promised him it was very fine.
I longed to disappear into the past again for a few moments, but I was locked into the aftermath of yesterday’s brutal operation. Without distraction, the pain pierced me. I had suffered only ordinary, minor injuries in my life. A compressed vertebra made my right arm tingle for a month. A cut on my hand fro
m the gardening shears took five stitches to close. I bumped my head on the windshield when a delivery van ran into my Volvo one morning along the Beltway. The burning along the top of my tongue was beyond all of these. Wrapped now in gauze, my diminished tongue rested like a silenced bell clapper. Any movement set off the pain again. Nin, who sat cross-legged beside the futon, had helped me swallow two codeine tablets. They seemed only to free my mind, which could wander to Virginia or London. My body stayed here, trapped.
I could taste nothing. Perhaps there was a procedure that could reverse the work of the Doctor. It seemed unlikely. Rising out of my mouth came the inescapable sour smell. Only by rounding my lips and breathing carefully could I send it wafting away from me. The midmorning light filtering through the white windows was gentle and left no shadows. But the apartment had become soaked with pain the way a battle forever changes a grassy field. In one quick assault, everything was horribly changed. Nin, Blackbeard, and the Doctor were worse than jailers. They were no longer political activists with an extreme ideology. They were torturers.
More codeine, I scrawled on the black notebook Nin had given me. The bandages and the pain in my mouth left me able only to make noises. The extra pain of trying to speak was not worth the effort. Nin took the black book and read the note. She checked her watch, a child’s digital with a pink face. “Too soon. Fifteen minutes,” she said softly. Nin put the black book on my lap, then leaned back. She sat motionless next to the futon. At times this morning I forgot she was in the room.
The black book was filling up with questions, demands, denunciations – all received by Nin with equal detachment. In her eyes, half-hidden by her scarf, I tried to detect some evidence that she was capable of doing something so brutal. Earlier, when the Doctor came in to check my bandages, I had recoiled into the corner of the room. But behind his mask, I could see in his eyes that he had come to help, that he intended no further damage, at least during this visit. So I moved closer, allowed him to reach into my mouth, where he had caused so much pain yesterday with one swift stroke of the knife. Perhaps he would take pity when he saw his terrible work. I thought of dogs, beaten but still returning. My urge to trust seemed to win out over the need to fear.
I could still picture Nin kneeling to hold the steel bowl beneath my chin, a supplicant catching blood. I looked at her dark eyes, centered in the narrow band above the scarf. How ordinary they were. Her eyes were not a window on her soul, but a veil to it. No intention could be found there. The faces of murderers, guards from death camps, boys who sprayed bullets across their playgrounds – all were invariably unremarkable. Why was this such a surprise? If those who committed evil actually looked evil it would be too simple to single them out. The true measure of a person lay in what one actually did, not what one appeared capable of.
My mind wandered, retraced the coincidences that brought me here. I thought of this path as a white thread, fragile and innocent, knotted like a rosary. Following the white thread brought me to a spring afternoon, decades ago, when I was a senior at Princeton. Religious sunlight fell in a grid through the lead-paned windows of a cramped McCosh Hall office. My thesis adviser sat at his cluttered desk. At that time, he was an assistant professor of economics, a likable man with unruly dark hair and early jowls. Even then, he seemed to have great ambition, proven out years later, when he would join the Ford administration. On this May afternoon, we sat discussing my thesis, a serviceable exploration of the economic conditions that led to the French revolution. My point was that while others might view the revolution from political and social angles, economics was the real driving force behind this and so many other turning points of the eighteenth century – a point so obvious that it hardly needed two hundred pages to establish and prove. To read through my manuscript today would reveal the confidence of an innocent, the black-and-white judgments of an Aristotelian by default, unaware that the world was gray.
Outside, Cannon Green was quiet. The protesters had taken their bullhorns and signs home. Those who remained were apolitical, foreign, or committed more to academics than politics. The library stacks were filled with scholarly hiders who had burrowed into the endless floors of books while the ROTC building burned. I stayed because I found it laughable to think that by not completing school somehow the war in Vietnam would end. Besides, my father had made it clear that if I didn’t finish college, he would personally ensure that I spent the rest of my days as a junior clerk at his insurance agency.
After we discussed my work, my adviser moved closer to speak softly to me, though the room was empty. “Wouldn’t you like to do something more for your country than this?” He held up my thick manuscript. His gaze drilled intently at me. I paused for a moment. We had spent many office hours together and come to know each other well. But my adviser had misjudged me. I was not patriotic in any particular way, though I wasn’t unpatriotic either. My continued presence on campus was more due to fear of my father than love of my country. But unwilling to offend, I nodded. Yes, I would like to do something more for my country. With that nod, a world opened to me that opens to few others.
Princeton’s motto – In the nation’s service – was intended to convey to its undergraduates a sense of duty to the larger world. Like those who came before us, we would do selfless service in the public sector, or as fair-minded attorneys or crusading journalists. Some graduates went on to make their mark in the public arena – Woodrow Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Foster Dulles – all likable and honorable to various degrees. On a more covert level, Princeton had always been a fertile recruiting ground for invisible functionaries. They entered the hidden layers of government, joining agencies with missions unknown to most Americans, to most politicians even. My adviser began an induction that, as he put it, might lead to greater opportunities on the international front. My thesis topic, he assumed, indicated an interest in international affairs, an area where there were many avenues to explore. Eastern Europe. Cuba. The Soviet Union. For now, I was to apply to the Foreign Language Institute in Monterey, California, ostensibly to take classes. There I would receive further instructions.
At the end of our final hour together, I thanked my adviser, because at that point foreign languages seemed far more interesting than actuarial tables. I left McCosh and walked down the flagstone path carpeted with bruised, perfumed flowers of tulip trees. In a haze, I drifted past stuffy Whig and Clio Halls, skirted the reddish prow of Edwards Hall, and returned to Cuyler, the drafty gothic keep where I had shivered all winter as I wrote my thesis. I stood outside the courtyard for a moment and watched the sun lowering slowly over the empty playing fields, too perfect and beautiful to be real. I had been given my first glimpse into an elaborate machine, one that was slowly pulling me in. This unasked-for insight made the world seem staged and false, a cover for the real workings that lay hidden deep inside.
Few people know what they want, or what is good for them. Only in retrospect do choices reveal themselves as right or wrong. On that auspicious day, only serendipity guided me. I was pretending to make choices that had been already been made by others. Doors were opening for me, phone calls being placed. Like a blind man, I walked holding my white thread, unsure of where it would lead but unwilling to let go. I spent a year in Monterey, where my aptitude for languages and foreign service proved fatally low. I failed to exhibit the right characteristics, whatever they might be, that would have made me a better candidate for an illustrious career as a spy. I was given to introspection rather than observation. While my cohorts seemed to revel in the boot camp regimen, I went to great lengths to avoid it. I was too bookish to be James Bond, not glib or ambitious enough to be an embassy chief.
But the white thread led me on in its own haphazard, innocent way. My senior year, I had met a young woman named Maura Emory, one of the first women at Princeton, the object of much attention from the newspapers and outrage from alumni. We stayed in touch when she came west to take graduate courses
at Stanford. We spent our weekends driving down the coastal highway in her Corvair convertible, stopping in somber little restaurants in North Beach, the walls plastered with manifestos about the war. That fall, the last of the 1960s, we married and moved to Washington, a move that brought me one step closer to my Belgian prison.
“Eliott Gast.”
I turned to Nin.
“You may take your tablet now.” She handed me the codeine, the number 3 incised on its white surface.
When I stood, I felt unstable, a small boat in heavy seas. The combination of pain and painkillers, fear and boredom left me numb, a neutral value charted along the day’s wavering axis. I walked across the apartment to the bathroom, dragging my feet the whole way. In the mirror, I stared into my bloodshot eyes, saw the offending bandage, white tinged with reddish brown, lolling in my mouth like a gag. Taking medicine required that I push a pill past the bandage to the back of my throat. I got the pill in the right place, but suddenly found that I had no glass of water nearby. I turned on the tap, filled my hands, and carefully sipped the water to the side of my mouth, avoiding the bandage. By this time the tablet had adhered to my throat. I coughed but it didn’t move. I coughed again, then choked. Unable to move my tongue, I could do little else. I fell to the floor and felt panic run through me like electricity. Curled on my side, I retched up the little portion of watery rice that I had managed to spoon past my bandage this morning. Among it lay the white pill, dissolving now. I picked it out and put it back in my mouth, waiting for bitterness, but tasting nothing.
Rolling on my back, I saw the black cables just inches away, retracting quickly as I swiped at them with my arm. “G’way,” I mumbled.
They stayed at the edge of the duct, watching.
Day 10.
Blackbeard squatted down next to my futon, his mask close to my face, his booming voice waking me. “… was absolutely brilliant, Gast. The bit with the pill. The sympathy is pouring in… and the money too, of course.”
