by Fitch, Stona
Exhaustion and spartan meals had turned my face thinner and etched lines along my forehead and at the corners of my eyes. If I held one hand over my mouth and nose, I could almost pretend I was the same as before, just jet-lagged or hung over. But when I looked in my eyes, I saw a deadness that no amount of exhaustion could create. I saw the eyes of a dog that has been hit too many times by its master. They were lifeless and roving, looking for danger, as if this was all that the world contained. Then I moved my hand away and the change was clear. I counted the pink and black burns along the edges of my nostrils.
Opening my mouth wide sent the pain flooding back and I clenched my hands tightly into fists to keep from screaming. I gave a codeine tablet a practiced flick beyond the blackened crust and drank from my hands. There were no clean towels, so I dried my hands in my hair. The apartment, so carefully tended during my early imprisonment, had fallen into disarray. The floor of the bathroom was layered with dirty towels, bloody shirts, and half-empty food cartons. The sink was crusted with scabs and pus. Once vigilant, my captors had turned sloppy. No one even noticed the showerhead was gone, packed in a sock and hidden beneath the towels. I left everything where it lay. What was the point of keeping my cell tidy? With Nin’s help, I would be leaving soon. When the time was right.
Day 23.
I lay on my back and examined my hands in the dull light. The simple gold wedding band was encircled by skin, wrinkled and almost as lined as my father’s was when Darby and I lowered him in the ground a decade ago. My fingers were long and bent slightly at the ends as if ready to type a report.
Once my hands were part of my attraction, along with my manners, careful observations, and tendency to listen rather than talk. On our first date, Maura and I had drinks at the Advocat, a dark, quiet bar in Princeton where undergraduates rarely went. The bar smelled of wood polish and decades of cigarettes. On the tin ceiling, small fans circled in the warm air. Glasses of beer glowed along the bar and the narrow room seemed to be a portal north to New York or east across the ocean to Europe, where other ancient bars waited.
With undergraduate sophistication, we drank gin and talked about the war in Indochina, our impending graduation, watching each other’s faces for reflections of ourselves. Around us, old men in suits read the Packet and talked to the bartender, blind to the nascent romance at the corner table. She laughed at the things I said. Just sitting near her made me smile. Or as Yeats put it, she gave the moment wings. A professor we knew came into the bar and the spring wind blew down Witherspoon Street and through the open door to lift Maura’s napkin from the bar. It blew toward me like a leaf. Without looking, I raised my right hand and caught the napkin deftly between two fingers. Maura pretended not to notice, but years later would remind me of how graceful I was then. In just a few years, I had transformed myself from a boy who walked the creek beds of Roanoke into a polished, urbane Ivy Leaguer. I reflected on the cruel math; I was older now than the men in suits who sat in the bar that freighted spring afternoon when my hands moved with grace.
Above, the black snakes emerged to capture me as I was now, face pale and bloodless, nose marked by burns, tongue pink and scabbed. Is this what the world wanted to see?
I was tired of waiting, of doing nothing. I stood on the food carton and reached up into one of the ducts and pulled out one of the snakes. I turned the end toward my face and the red light flicked on.
“This whole… the entire… there’s no reason for this to continue.” Unlike Blackbeard, my monologue was unrehearsed. “Imagine what this feels like.” I stuck out my tongue. “Or this.”
I moved the camera closer to the burns around my nose.
“You can see me. You’ve seen what goes on here in this… this hellhole. I know that. But that isn’t enough. Just watching me. It’s like you’re looking out an apartment window into another building where something terrible is going on. But you’re not doing anything about it. You’re not making it stop. So you’re a collaborator. You’re giving them an audience. If you quit watching, it will all stop. If you keep watching, it will keep going. It’s really that…”
The red light flicked off.
Over and over I smashed the black bulb of the camera into the wall until bits of glass filled my palm. I opened my hand and watched the blood course from tiny cuts that didn’t hurt at all.
Day 24.
Places I would rather be. Sitting in the kitchen of our farm, drinking coffee and talking to Maura at the breakfast table. Walking through Brussels on the way to a meeting. Driving out in the country on a warm spring day, the thawing earth giving off the smell of worms. Anywhere far from this white-walled cell.
People could see the details recorded by the black snakes – the disarray of the rooms, the opaque windows, occasional visits from Nin. But they couldn’t know what it was really like here. At times, the apartment seemed deep within the ground, a bunker beneath the world where the normal rules did not apply. Other times it seemed trapped in the clouds, the white glow of the windows giving off a celestial light.
Sometimes I was sure that this was all a dream, that if I blinked my eyes enough it would vanish. But other times, no amount of hope or pretending could make it disappear.
Day 25.
I heard the sound of an airplane overhead again, on its way to Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt. It ground on for almost a minute. I thought of the last times I had been on a plane, and wondered how long it would be until I was on another. In isolation, the ordinary turned luxurious and strange. To fly on an airplane seemed impossibly complex, requiring a sequence of events – purchasing a ticket, packing a suitcase, getting to the airport, going through customs – that I would find difficult to complete in the correct order. How had I kept it all straight? Why didn’t the incredible freedom I once had stall me with its infinite choices? Just a few weeks ago, countless Sabena flights from Brussels to Washington were a regular part of my life.
Going home last month, the plane had landed early. A tailwind across the Atlantic shook drinks from trays the entire flight. I took a cab from Dulles and spent this stolen hour in the Potomac, a narrow basement bar on 19th and H, crowded and beer-soaked. Harsh voices made requests, one after the next – a beer, a pack of cigarettes, change for the pay phone. I was too exhausted to go look for a more peaceful place to wait. Maura was meeting me for dinner at the St. Regis in an hour. Later, we would drive back to the farm for a long weekend of rest.
I drank a glass of terrible red wine and watched the two televisions at either end of the bar. One showed a woman I recognized standing on the steps of the Capitol with a microphone jammed in her face. She was a lawyer who used to work at Commerce and had turned lobbyist. The sound was off and I couldn’t hear what she had to say, not that I much cared.
I turned to the other television and saw two tanned young boys slumped on the seat of a red motorcycle. There had been a horrible accident. A voice-over told how they had swerved off a road in Thailand and become impaled on a thin guardrail that pierced both through the chest. They were still alive, arms flailing and heads wobbling as emergency workers in yellow uniforms examined them ineffectually. The show cut away to the two boys seated on a talk-show couch. They looked serious as they told the host of their ordeal. Then came more footage of the emergency workers cutting the railing with blowtorches that glowed green. Freed finally, the two were carried to a waiting ambulance, still impaled, Siamese twins conjoined by steel. They were shirtless, and blood flowed freely as water from their wounds, their hands clutching the railing as if they could pull it free.
I shuddered. For a moment, a shadow of pain burned in my own chest. Around the bar, people talked and smoked, looked up occasionally to watch the boys in the operating room, where the steel rail was removed slowly as a splinter. Then they were on the talk-show couch again, raising their shirts to show off the white scars that radiated across their chests. In the bar, people re
ached for their beers, ate peanuts sticky with sugar.
I sensed evil hovering in the bar along with cigarette smoke. We all saw the boys writhing in pain. Perhaps some thought it was horrible. But we didn’t feel the pain ourselves. What a different world it would be if we felt everything we saw. Not all men felt empathy. Something inside protected them and let them watch suffering.
I was just as ambivalent. In less than an hour, I would be sitting at a table in the St. Regis dining room, trying to decide between the 1985 or the 1986 Pichon-Lalande, the sautéed dayfish or the halibut with artichoke hearts. The pain of the two impaled boys would be nowhere in my mind. The sufferings of one life – real or imagined, small or large – were enough to wrestle with.
So it was with my own ordeal. No doubt people were watching me as I paced the cement floor, the cameras bringing my bruised and disfigured face into their suburban homes. When the iron was pressed into my tongue, the woodburner pushed up my nostrils, they may have looked away. They may have felt a twinge. After it passed, they could still taste and smell. No damage was done to them. They ate and slept as if nothing had happened. They moved on.
I was still here, waiting for the next event. Nin’s forewarning did no good. There is only a moment between when the doctor tells you a shot will hurt and when the needle enters your arm. Imagine that moment stretched out for days, with nothing to distract you from thoughts of how much it will hurt, how thick the needle, how inept the doctor. Any possible distraction was swallowed up by the fear of what lay ahead.
Day 26.
A dull clanging came from the other side of the apartment and suddenly Blackbeard stood at the doorway. In one hand he held a cowbell, in the other a thick paintbrush. He marched in, hitting the brush on the bell, which I noticed was actually a cheese grater. A group of aliens followed him, green rats to his Pied Piper. One carried a bag of ice. Another carried a white plastic cooler. The last one held the silver bowl in front of him, hitting it with another paintbrush. A cold wave passed through me. The sight of the bowl – the same one Nin had held beneath my chin – sent me running to the corner of the room. I pressed back against the wall, jabbing a chair in front of me.
“Stay the hell away from me!”
They came closer. The Doctor entered the room last, still tying his white coat around his waist with a thin belt. Nin came in the room last, lingering back near the door. Her hands were at her side. She gave a small shake of her head.
“Greetings, earthling.” Blackbeard laughed and the aliens huddled around him. I stayed in my corner.
“Fetch.” He pointed toward me and the aliens sprang forward, hands out.
I glanced at Nin again and she shook her head firmly this time, eyes narrowing. This was not the right time to set our plan in motion. Still, I couldn’t just stand by and wait for whatever pain they had in mind for me. I hit the first alien with the chair and he fell back on the cement. As I swung again, three more surrounded me and pulled the chair away.
“Get away from me!” I sent one to the ground with a kick between the legs. Nin was right; there were too many of them to fight. They surrounded Blackbeard like bodyguards. They pulled me forward and forced me to sit on the floor.
As I caught my breath, I heard the ice pinging in the metal bowl, one cube at a time. When it was full, one of the aliens grabbed my wrists and thrust my hands deep into the ice. It felt good for a moment, the metal on my palms, the white cubes around my skin. Clean and cool. My hands turned painfully cold and I tried to pull them out.
Blackbeard leaned closer. “If I were you, I’d leave them in.” I tried to pull my hands out. The aliens pressed them down. Away from our struggle, the Doctor took a small glass jar of what appeared to be apricot jam out of the white cooler. He opened it and smelled it, pulled his face back quickly. He put the lid back on and looked at me for a moment, his gaze steady. What did I look like to him? A figure to be pitied or to be punished? Nin had said that the group was divided, and I could only hope that he was on the side less inclined to continue.
Blackbeard nodded and the Doctor pulled my hands from the ice. He dried them carefully with a plush towel bearing the emblem of the Georges V, a hotel in Paris where I had stayed several times, I recalled pointlessly.
The Doctor leaned down next to Blackbeard and picked up the cheese grater, made of steel with a white plastic handle at the top. Standard issue for any kitchen. He examined the four sides. The first had only three slots on it to peel off slabs of cheese, I supposed. He shook his head and turned the grater. The second side had dozens of slots, each curving upward like an open mouth. When Maura and I made lasagna, we used this side of the grater to shred mozzarella. This side he rejected as well. The third side was punctured by hundreds of tiny sharp holes. This was the side we used to turn a slab of aged Gouda into a bowl of shavings thin enough to melt on warm pasta.
This last side seemed to please the Doctor. His mouth crinkled a little and he gave the grater a little toss, catching it deftly. Then, with complete nonchalance, he reached out, pressed my wrist against the floor, and began to scrape the grater over the back of my right hand.
Shocked, for a moment I didn’t struggle. I watched as tiny pink pieces of skin fell to the floor. The pain started breaking through my numbed hand.
“Stop it! Stop it now!” I tried to pull away, but they held me firmly. The Doctor drew the grater down my hand in careful strokes, efficient as a carpenter. With each stroke, he pulled off tiny bits of flesh and sent blood coursing from my knuckles, five deep red circles among the pink wounds.
“Stop it! Please stop it!” I screamed.
“Good,” muttered Blackbeard. “Finally, a little action around here.” He patted his shirt pocket and wandered off toward the windowsill to look for my cigarettes.
The Doctor stopped for a moment and I kept screaming. Then he turned my hand over on the blanket and scraped the grater down my palm, doubling the pain. I tried to pull my hand back, but they held it even tighter. I screamed as loud as I could and pressed my eyes closed, as if not watching what was happening to me could somehow stop it. But the Doctor continued his efficient carpentry, grating the palm and pads of each finger until they were thoroughly raw. I opened my eyes for a second and saw what appeared to be a hand formed of raw hamburger.
One of the aliens passed the Doctor the pot of jam. He held out his hand and another assistant placed the paintbrush handle in it. The brush was black and short-bristled, the kind we used to make signs back at the farm. Yard sale. Squash and tomatoes for sale. An arrow to direct dinner party guests to the back patio. The Doctor began to paint my palm carefully, his brow lined with concentration. Whatever he put on my hand felt cool and soothing at first, then began to burn. I screamed as the chemical burn grew stronger, making my arm shake involuntarily.
Blackbeard leaned toward me, cigarette stuck in the mouth hole of his mask. “Bio-polymer,” he whispered. “It’s made with sheep’s plasma and resin. Usually they apply it underneath skin grafts to achieve the right kind of bond. Incredible stuff.” He turned to me. “And expensive, too. Unless, of course, you steal it from a hospital.”
“Just stop it now. Stop it! This is too much!” My shouting echoed through the apartment. Blackbeard nodded, then pointed to a spot on my index finger that the Doctor had missed. “Yes, perhaps. But what is too much anymore? We have an obligation to our audience.” Blackbeard glanced up at the ceiling, where the black snakes dangled far from their ducts.
“What about me?”
Blackbeard exhaled and rolled his eyes. I was being old-fashioned again.
“A little emoting would be good right now,” he said. He reached over to my left hand, still intact, and jammed it deep into the ice. Then he seemed to remember something and yanked out my hand. He pulled my wedding ring from my finger. It came off easily – my fingers were thinner. He held the ring out to me, then thou
ght better of it and pushed the ring into the mouth-hole of his mask. I saw the pink of his thick tongue, unmarked by any scabs. He swallowed.
“You just can’t beat the taste of American gold,” he shouted to the black snakes. “Nothing like it.” He leaned back his head and laughed, then turned to me and whispered. “If I find it in my shit, I’ll be sure to tell you.”
The Doctor took my left hand and pressed it down on the towel, spotted now with blood, bits of flesh, and the orange substance, thick as the glue that Darby and I used to put together model airplanes when we were boys. My whole body shuddered and I was going to be sick.
“If you’re going to vomit, be sure to turn to the left.” Blackbeard said. “That’s the best camera angle.”
As the Doctor began to scrape the top of my other hand, I saw the apartment turn gray at the corners. The aliens hovered, evil spirits in green. Sweat coursed down the Doctor’s tight face as he worked. Blackbeard’s eyes stared from behind his mask. Nin paced in the background, hands over her face. Bits of color swam before my eyes like fetid water beneath a microscope. I opened my mouth to say something but crumpled instead toward the corner.
“Don’t pass out on us now, Gast!” Blackbeard shouted. “The fun’s just started.”
But it was too late. The apartment turned darker and then vanished, taking everyone with it.
Day 27.
After my junior year in college, I took a summer job at a resort on the Virginia coast. I did the requisite things college boys do in summer – brought waitresses to my lonely hotel room, sat out on the beach late at night, drank lots of beer to counter the oppressive weight of the future. As part of my job, I bused dishes from the tables of the businessmen attending conferences that seemed to involve eating, drinking, and golfing.
On my first night in the kitchen, I dumped a full tray next to the dishwasher and headed back through the swinging door into the restaurant. I saw something in the vat of steaming rinse-water that made me stop. At the bottom of the vat lay a shining silver dollar. From my days collecting coins with Darby, I knew it was a Standing Liberty, a particularly beautiful coin. I squinted into the vat but couldn’t make out the date. I looked around me at the rest of the kitchen staff, all sullen year-rounders, all at least a decade older. They seemed too preoccupied with their work to notice as I pulled on the thick rubber gloves next to the sink and pushed my right hand slowly into the water.
