by Andrew Hart
“Brad doesn’t want anyone to know?”
“God, no. He’s living this trip like it will set the clock back. Take us all to where we were five years ago. I don’t understand it.”
“Things were good five years ago,” I said.
“They were OK,” she said. “We had fun. But for me, in all honesty, life is way better now.”
I said nothing, again lost for words. That was certainly not something I could say for myself. Five years ago I had been poised to do so many things. My collapsed college career notwithstanding, I had thought there were all kinds of possibilities on the horizon. I had still been thinking seriously about going to med school. I still had Marcus.
“You remember when we went to that cave?” she said suddenly. “Last time. The one where Zeus was born?”
It was as if she had seen into my head. I blinked.
“Yes,” I said, cautious now. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, gazing out over the sea. “Everyone is so weird about it. Like something happened that no one wants to talk about. Have you noticed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know why.”
She looked at me then, shading her eyes from the sun and fixing me with a steady, appraising gaze that made me suddenly sure someone had said something about my not telling the truth.
“Honestly,” I said. “I don’t know. I had been wondering the same thing. I noticed the way the others responded when you mentioned it before but . . .”
“I asked Brad,” she said musingly, “and he got . . . defensive. Hostile. It was not like him, even with all the work stress and everything. Scared me.”
That I had not expected.
“I could ask Marcus,” I said. “Not sure he knows anything about it, but . . .”
She nodded vaguely, looking back out to sea.
“Not Simon though, OK?” she said. “Not Mel.”
“OK,” I said.
“Something else,” said Kristen. “You remember the word we saw in the leaves back at the villa.”
“Or imagined we saw,” I said, not sure where this was going but feeling a tug of unease. “We thought it said Nanos or something.”
“Right,” she said. “I think it was Manos.”
I thought for a second, then nodded noncommittally.
“Could have been,” I said. “Why? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure the woman at the restaurant said it. Maria. The one who yelled at Mel. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but among all the screaming she said it. Twice.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I don’t know why the scuba mask bothers me so much, but it does. It feels . . . macabre. Horror movie stuff. I try to convince myself that it’s just because my captor wants to hide his face in the same way he’s hiding his voice, but that doesn’t help because it reinforces the possibility that he is someone I know.
If there’s an upside to the mask, it’s that concealing his face means he’s not decided for certain that I will die in this little stone box, chained to the wall. I might get out. I might walk away from this dank little cell and walk under the sky once more, and when people ask me who held me captive here, I won’t be able to tell them. If that wasn’t at least possible, he wouldn’t care whether I could recognize him or not. I wasn’t dead. Not yet.
So why don’t you believe it, this ‘upside’?
I’m not sure, but I don’t. It smells like a lie, a sour, deathly tang like rotten meat that I, old expert liar that I am, can detect at a hundred paces. He’s going to kill me, mask or no mask. I feel it. So the hiding in the dark, the voice concealer, really is just to scare me? To make me think I’m in some kind of nightmare from which there is no waking up?
Working pretty well, then.
I test the chain again, as I have a thousand times. I stand and stretch and inspect the floor with blind, crawling fingers, as if there is something I might have missed, but I sit down again with nothing: no progress, no discovery, no hope.
I know what I have to do. I’ve known it for a while, I think, but I wanted to believe there was an alternative, something less desperate, less awful. There isn’t, but I keep looking for it, like when you misplace your keys and you keep re-searching the same spot over and over, knowing they won’t be there, but half believing in something like magic, something summoned from despair and driving, animal need that will change the laws of the universe and set the ring of keys where you knew it should be but knew just as well it wasn’t. But I have searched my cell over and over, and the keys are not there. There is only one possibility left to me. It almost certainly won’t work, and the attempt will bring new levels of pain and misery, but it is all I have.
A year or two ago I caught some soft news piece about a woman who had been ravaged by her friend’s pet chimp. She had visited the house having had her hair cut in some new way, and the animal didn’t recognize her. It had ripped most of her face off and—and, for some reason, this was the part that had given me nightmares—torn her hands off. It had simply taken hold of her, one hand in hers, the other on her arm, and pulled her hand off, first one, quite deliberately, then the other.
I hadn’t believed that possible, or at least, the possibility had never occurred to me and not just because I didn’t know chimpanzees were that strong and aggressive. I just hadn’t imagined that with sufficient force and savagery, you could yank a hand right off at the wrist.
I feel my swollen wrist with my free hand, working the manacle as high up onto my hand as I can, pushing it back and forth, tilting it from side to side till it will move no farther. It lodges at the knuckle. There’s softness between my thumb and forefinger and actual space beneath the crevice at the base of my palm and the cuff. With my right hand, I squeeze the fingers and thumb of my left as hard as I can, gasping as the pain roils and swirls, reaching a steady simmer, and then I press the edge of my hand against the concrete of the bed platform, stand up, and push down on it with my other hand, using all my weight. The pain comes to a rolling boil, but the cuff shifts another half inch. It won’t come over the core structures of my hand, the bones that give it shape and form, but it needs to move no more than another inch and a half for me to be free.
Now it’s just a matter of the pain. And the sacrifice.
I’m sweating. My breathing is thin and ragged. My heart is throbbing. My eyes have begun to stream. I think of the chimp tearing the woman’s hand off, then push the horror away.
I consider stepping out of my dress so I can use it to staunch the blood, but I don’t want to wait any longer.
I’m satisfied that the manacle can be made to move no farther, not without altering those structures in my hand, the spur of which is where the rusted iron is most clearly stuck. I’m light-headed as I stand, and the pain swells and kicks as I let go with my right hand and lean out into the darkness, all my weight straining against the chain. I rock on the balls of my feet, tipping first toward the wall, then away, building force and speed with each agonizing pull, like a gymnast on the high bars, working up the momentum for an acrobatic maneuver. I take deep, rapid breaths through bared teeth, a weight lifter bracing, then I lean into the wall over the bed so that my hair brushes against it, and then slam hard away, trying to hit the opposite wall.
Once.
Twice.
The pain is bright as a flare, hard and sharp as glass. I feel the sinews pop, the muscle tear, the bones break.
Three times.
I fall heavily against the far wall, clutching my wounded hand and sobbing.
Free. Broken, but free.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Well, Mel is the lead singer, obviously,” said Brad, toasting her with his glass of red.
“Obviously,” said Gretchen.
“What about Simon?” said Melissa. “He’s got rock star written all over him.”
“I’m the unspeakably well-paid manager,” said Simon. “I found the rest of you pl
aying seedy nightclubs and made your careers. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“I’m lead guitar,” said Brad, putting his glass down and doing a little air guitar solo.
“Yeah,” said Melissa. “The bad boy of the band.”
We were all pretty drunk. We had eaten, but dinner had been heavy on Greek salad and phyllo pastries with spinach and feta, served by candlelight in the villa’s formal dining room: good, but light. I was still hungry, which meant I shouldn’t be drinking, but I was. We all were.
We had moved back to the living room, since its circuits were on the generator’s power supply, and were lounging around after abandoning a game of charades because Melissa was weirdly crap at it. She was fine at guessing other people’s clues, but when it was her turn, she either couldn’t think of any suitable hints and just sat there fretting and complaining or made unintelligible hand signals and then got mad when no one could figure out what the hell she was doing. It had been funny at first, hilarious in fact, but when it went on for a while, she got irritated and sour, which pretty much killed the fun of the game. I was disappointed because I’d been paired with Marcus and it was, for a moment, kind of like old times, but once Melissa has decided she’s not having fun anymore, that’s pretty much it, and if you insist on continuing you can expect to be on the receiving end of all the passive-aggressive weapons at her disposal. If she could harness that creativity for other things, she’d be a lot better at charades.
Anyway, we had abandoned the game, which was already getting fuzzy with drink, and had somehow fallen into this nonsense conversation about what we would all be doing if we were a band. I hated stuff like this. It always made me feel inadequate and unwanted. People with strong personalities love this kind of shit because everyone immediately knows how to peg them in ways that remind everyone how cool they are. Of course Melissa was the lead singer. Of course Brad was lead guitar. What about me? The Pluto of the group. The black hole. Everyone would forget me until the end and then pretend it was really great to be the band’s accountant or ticket taker or some damn thing.
I felt the heat in my face. I really shouldn’t have accepted another glass of whatever precious wine Brad had insisted on bringing with him.
“Kristen’s backing vocals and bass,” said Brad. “All sultry and hot.”
“See?” said Melissa. “Bad boy.”
“She is my wife,” said Brad.
“Oh, like that matters,” said Simon. There was a fractional, shocked hesitation, as if time had stopped, and then he added, “Bass and backing vocals sound good to you, Kristen?”
“I’ll take that,” said Kristen, not missing a beat. Since our chat at the fortress she had gone right back to being her old self, composed and easygoing, so I thought it again: she really was a better actress than I had assumed. “What about Gretchen?”
There was quite a different kind of hesitation, which Gretchen pretended not to find embarrassing. We didn’t know her and, frankly, there didn’t seem like there was that much to know. And that’s coming from the group’s black hole.
“Drums,” said Melissa, seemingly at random.
“Yeah!” said Gretchen, delighted, starting immediately to bang away sloppily on the edge of the coffee table.
“Careful,” said Brad. “You’ll spill the bottle.”
Gretchen looked crestfallen, but Simon came to her rescue.
“What about Marcus?” he mused aloud. “Roadie? Producer? The guy who gets the sound just right . . .”
“Sitting in the booth in the dark with a headset,” said Brad, liking this more and more.
“Sure,” said Marcus. “Fine.”
“And then there’s Jan,” said Brad.
“Can we just play cards or something?” I said. “Something grown-up, like poker?”
I’m a good poker player, but then you’d expect that, wouldn’t you?
“No, little Janice,” said Brad. “Everyone is in the band. You wouldn’t want to be left out, would you?”
I braced myself. There was something sharp in his face, something wolfish that made me want to disappear. When he was drinking and dropped his sardonic guard, he could be like a kid on the playground: maybe not the gang leader, but its principal enforcer, a master of minor cruelties, even if they were only manifested in comments and sneers.
“Rhythm guitar,” said Marcus quickly, “and,” he added before anyone could comment, “songwriter.”
“Huh,” said Simon. “Yeah, that’ll work. I think we’re all set to play the Grammys.”
“Woo!” said Gretchen, raising her glass predictably.
I shot Marcus a sideways look and smiled, but I couldn’t help noting the way Gretchen had squeezed up next to him on the couch. And the way he didn’t seem to mind.
“Oh my God!” exclaimed Gretchen. “I didn’t show you the bags we got!”
She leaped to her feet and began rummaging in a holdall behind the couch.
“Wait, wait!” said Melissa, also getting up and mouthing something at Gretchen, who dutifully stopped what she was doing and stood there, grinning about whatever was about to happen.
“You bought a bag,” said Brad, deadpan. “How shall I contain my excitement?”
“Wait, Mr. Snarky,” said Gretchen in a little-girl voice. Melissa had ducked out of the room at a run and was now shouting, “Hold on! I’ll be right back,” from somewhere upstairs. We waited. A door banged. You couldn’t hear her footsteps because she was barefoot, and the floors were ancient and solid, so her breathless reappearance was a minor surprise. She was dangling a boxy red leather purse like a runway model, her face a mask of haughty indifference for a posed second.
“Oh, that’s cute!” said Kristen.
“Wait, wait,” said Gretchen, frustrated by how Melissa had upstaged her moment. “See?”
She stood up, arms outstretched in a version of Melissa’s model pose. It was the same purse. Exactly the same in every respect. Gretchen scuttled over to the doorway and arranged herself next to Melissa to make the point, the two purses suspended side by side.
“Besties forever!” said Gretchen.
This was too much. I turned an eye-rolling look toward Marcus, but he was smiling at her and didn’t see me, though I wanted to grab him and shake him and say, “Oh my God, now she IS dressing like her! She is so fucking odd!”
Instead I looked away and, by way of cover, said the first thing that came into my head.
“So, Brad, what did you get up to this afternoon?”
“What do you mean ‘get up to’?” he said, giving me a hard look. “I didn’t get up to anything. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” I said, backing off hurriedly. I had assumed he was over whatever snit he had gotten into after the restaurant fiasco, but I was clearly wrong. “The fortress was pretty cool.”
“I’ll bet,” he said, his tone mocking and dismissive. “Got yourself a personal tour from Professor Marcus, no doubt. Next thing, you’ll be writing his name with little hearts around it in your exam book. You know, you two really should get together. Oh wait . . .”
He stared unblinking at me, his eyes showing none of the smile that pulled at his lips.
For a second I just looked at him, keeping my own eyes open in case blinking would release a tear.
“You can be a real son of bitch, Brad, you know that?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s quite the popular opinion of late. Still, I’m going to open another bottle of this rather excellent Shiraz and just for that remark, Janice, you won’t be getting any.”
I went outside. Though the power was still out, the storm had not come back, and the night was cool and crisp. Besides, I needed some air, and not only because the villa, with its locked-up windows, was stuffy, the air developing an old, recycled quality. I couldn’t wait to get out and clear my head, which frequently and inexplicably felt thick and slow when we were in the house.
I stood on the patio where Kristen and I had seen the pile of l
eaves swept, it seemed, to form the nonsense word Manos. I looked at the spot now, but there was no trace of it nor any sign of the telltale leaves. I scowled and looked around for more signs of cleaning up, wondering vaguely if the villa had a janitor or gardener who had never been mentioned. Ever since we had arrived and Simon mentioned that someone had left the front gate open, I had been fighting the sensation that there had been someone moving around the grounds just out of my line of sight. I kept stopping to look out, without any clear sense as to why, beyond the size of those floor-to-ceiling windows that made us feel so conspicuous when the lights were on and the world outside was dark. I didn’t feel watched exactly, just exposed, and Gretchen’s tales of nightmare inquisitors, combined with my own confused sense of people moving around the house at night, added to my unease.
“Jan.”
I turned, startled, spilling my wine. It was Marcus.
“Oh God,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .”
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s white.”
“I thought you didn’t like white.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Brad poured it for me and I just took it because . . . who the hell knows. I swear to God, Marcus, I find myself looking around all the time and thinking, Am I having a good time?”
He laughed at that.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know the feeling.”
“Right? I mean, is this something I would have chosen to do if I’d known what it was? Are these people I would have chosen to be friends with if we hadn’t bumped into each other on a beach five years ago?”
“I was wondering the same thing.”
“I don’t mean I dislike them or anything—though, I’ll tell you that Brad is getting on my last nerve—but I’m not sure we have anything in common except a kind of historical accident, you know? We met, and now we’re friends. Kind of. I don’t know how they vote or what they believe in. I don’t know if they have interests, hobbies. Not really. But then, maybe friendship is always like that: coincidence that becomes history. You’re friends because you’re friends.”
