by Barry Lancet
* * *
On the second day they doubled down and my buffer zone vanished.
Whenever I threatened to fade away, they slapped me back to consciousness. When brute force stopped working, they brought out smelling salts, then sharp needles. They continued to pummel me with questions about Anna, which meant the authorities had yet to find her.
The thought sustained me even as the continual electric treatment depleted my strength.
They upped the voltage and the smell of burning flesh seeped out from under my prison garb. Now the blisters would come. In stages, every nerve ending in my body went numb. My insides seemed to hollow out. Eventually my mind emptied out. I went to a place I’d never been. A place none of my previous trials had ever taken me.
I’d found a way station. A place where torture victims went to hide. I grew delusional. They carried on. Questions, shocks, slaps, needles, repeat. But their efforts penetrated less and less. Hallucinations began to dominate my conscious moments.
This was my mind seeking to cope. Clawing about desperately in an effort to protect me. Playing tricks to mask the pain. It had shifted into survival mode in the hope of whisking me off to a place my torturers couldn’t reach.
They found it.
* * *
I woke in my cell, on a one-inch-thick mattress with a blanket draped over my legs. The mattress was bare and stained with blood. Only some of it was mine.
A cracked plastic tray rested on the cement floor next to the bed. It offered up half a bowl of white rice and a cup of weak green tea.
The room was a replica of the torture room, down to the drain in the center. A low steel bed frame replaced the torture table, and a slop bucket stood in for the shelving. In a back corner a hand towel hung on a nail, over a water bucket. That was all.
I ate the rice and drank the tea and relieved myself, then crawled back into bed and slept. Soon after, I heard the cover of the peephole in the iron door slide back and snap shut. Then they came for me.
It had been a mistake to eat.
They strapped me on to the Death Bed and pounded me with questions about Anna. About our arrival, about our escape route, about the clothes she wore. The questioning was incessant and grew more insistent. The rice came up during the second round of shock treatment. Both men laughed. The tall one leered at me. His grinning countenance hovered over me. He began a new round of questions, rephrasing them, approaching the same subjects from different angles. I gave a verbal response each time and yelled with each dispensation of pain—whether electric or needle.
As long as they kept asking about Anna, I knew she, Pak, and Noda had not been captured. At least four days and conceivably as long as six, Pak had said.
Anna Tanaka was a highly desired target, so Pak had activated a plan usually reserved to extract top-level North Korean political defectors. The strategy would get her out of Changbai, even during a period of high alert, but from that point forward the length of her extraction from China depended on the intensity of the search.
When I next woke, I was back in my room, with no memory of being moved. I’d lost all sense of time and place and being. A bright display of high-intensity lights had dragged me back to consciousness. The original sixty-watt bulb was now outflanked by three rows of corn-yellow floodlights. They robbed the room of darkness and robbed me of the comforting blanket of blackness behind closed eyelids. I lost the ability to sleep soundly.
My days were filled with torture sessions and restless intervals in my cell followed by feverish stretches of sleep. I fought a constant battle with fatigue. My mind deserted me for increasingly longer periods. Every time I woke, my body throbbed in new places, some of them places I didn’t know could hurt.
By my count, Anna needed at least one more day.
Three at most.
I wasn’t sure I could hold out.
CHAPTER 81
ON day four, they deprived me of all food and drink.
There were no windows in the underground complex, and no clocks. But I’d figured out a way to count the days. Or, more precisely, the mornings. I knew another twenty hours had passed when my torturers arrived clean-shaven.
I needed to make it to six days . . .
They stripped off my jersey. They pulled the chains anchoring the ankle and wrist irons tighter so that when I thrashed around after a shock treatment, the steel manacles cut deeper. I was weakening. I passed out more frequently, often self-induced. Something in my decreased capacity allowed me to flip the switch.
My captors had seen the trick before, and when their initial revival methods yielded diminishing returns, the injections began—a series of ever-stronger stimulants to jump-start the heart and jolt me awake.
My physical stamina slid downhill. The floodlights in my cell stayed on around the clock. The temperature in the room hovered around ninety-five degrees. Sweat poured out of me. Which increased my thirst. Water was withheld. So was food. They woke me at odd hours, dragged me into the torture chamber, then threw me back in my cell. Then the routine changed. They marched me to a new interrogation chamber and threw me in a chair. A glass of water and a plate of food sat on a table just out of reach.
While the morose one hovered nearby, the tall one pointed at the meal. “Your salvation, Brodie Jim. Where going girl?”
”I don’t know.”
They tossed me back into my cell with force. The moment I dropped off to sleep, they hauled me back to the interrogation room. The glass of water remained but the food had been removed.
“Food no more, Brodie Jim. Where going girl?”
“I don’t know.”
The perpetual grinner stepped aside. I expected the prod but his moody partner held a knife in his hand.
“Girl?” he asked. His English was limited.
“No.”
He pushed the knifepoint into my right thigh maybe an eighth of an inch and I grunted in pain.
“Girl?”
“No.”
He inserted the blade an additional quarter of an inch and I howled.
“Girl?”
“No.”
When the morose one flashed me a grin for the first time, I knew trouble was coming. The knife went deeper, then he rotated the blade in the wound. My scream rose to decibels I’d never before reached. My leg jerked up and knocked the knife from his grasp. I passed out. I woke up in my cell, lying on the cement floor. The mattress, bed frame, and blanket had been removed.
The glaring floodlights above baked me, while below the cement leeched all the heat from my body. Curling up for warmth, I dropped into a fitful sleep. Next, the door banged open and a strong spray of water hit my body, then the walls and floor were hosed down. The floodlights were extinguished and the dousing continued all around me until the temperature dropped. They trucked in wheelbarrows of ice and dumped them over me. Whenever I crawled out from under one pile, they brought in another. The room temperature plunged. The iron door creaked shut. In the darkness and the cold, I began to shiver. As I drifted away, I wondered where Anna was now. Consciousness faded.
At least four days and conceivably as long as six . . .
Pak’s plan was ingenious. Anna would be given a chest wrap for “bosom flattening.”
“Was mother big in front her chest?” he’d asked.
“No, typically proportioned,” I said.
“Thas good.”
From the photo I’d passed over to him in Seoul, an artist sketched her as a man, without makeup, long lashes, and shaped eyebrows, then they sought and found a male look-alike. They paid him a fee, applied light makeup, trimmed his eyebrows, and took passport photographs. In the safe house, Pak would cut Anna’s hair and dress her in secondhand men’s clothing from Seoul. He’d named a price for the passport, the model, and the services he and his organization would supply from beginning to end and I agreed without hesitation.
Replaying Pak’s plan gave me some comfort in my more lucid moments, which grew infrequent. More often I was de
lusional. The earlier hallucinations came on more vividly. Thirst cracked my lips. My throat grew parched and brittle. Somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled that a person can live without food for up to three weeks, but only a week without water. Before I passed out yet again I remembered I was surrounded by melting ice. With what little strength remained, I licked up the water trickling over the cement toward the drain. I passed out before my thirst was sated.
Nightmares and flashbacks and fragments of dreams appeared in a whirlwind of disconnected images and voices. Jenny and Renna and Noda and Rie spoke in turns. I heard Jenny triumphant over her victory in the judo dojo. Renna grumbling about spooks. Noda reluctant to leave me behind. Rie begging me not to go.
I woke up with Rie’s plea ringing in my ears and my teeth chattering.
Was this what she’d seen in her nightmare?
The chill of the room grabbed hold of me. I was shivering and dizzy. I lay in a small pool of my own blood from the wound in my thigh. Some of it mingled with the water trickling toward the drain. I lapped up more water and tasted blood and grit. I looked down at my leg. Untreated, the gash still bled.
My captors had been sloppy or lazy.
I reached for my blanket before remembering it had been carted away with the mattress. The towel hanging over the water bucket had vanished with the water supply. My shirt had disappeared earlier. At some moment I couldn’t recall, I’d been stripped of my pants as well. I peeled off the plain white boxers I wore. With my teeth, I tore them in half and knotted one part above the cut to suppress the circulation. I gritted my teeth against the pain as I positioned the second piece over the wound, losing consciousness when I started to draw it tight.
When I next woke, I was still naked on the wet cement floor. The water coming off the melting piles of ice sluiced around me. My body convulsed. I developed the shakes. The bleeding had lessened but not stopped. Gingerly, and with trembling fingers, I adjusted the wrap and managed to stem the leakage without losing consciousness.
The mattress . . . the blanket . . . the towel . . .
Fading body heat . . . cold cement floor . . . blood loss . . .
“Lazy” was not part of the equation.
Letting me bleed out had been added to the agenda.
Someone had decided it was time for me to die.
CHAPTER 82
THEN the torture ceased.
The questions about Anna ceased.
The ice was hauled away and my bed and blanket were restored.
My wounds were treated.
Ointment was applied and bandages affixed.
I outlasted them, I thought.
But the idea turned out to be another delusion.
They were readying me for the next stage.
* * *
Two guards escorted me to the shower room, gave me a bar of grainy soap and a ragged towel with faded bloodstains, and informed me I had five minutes to clean up.
I washed and scrubbed every uninjured area thoroughly, then soaped up my hands and ran them gingerly over the tender spots, which constituted most of my body. Next, I lathered up the soap and shampooed my hair with the suds. I was soaping up my legs for a second time when the spray stopped.
“Not done yet,” I called.
“Time is done. This no hotel.”
“Too bad. I wouldn’t mind checking out.”
“You funny man, Brodie Jim. You no checkout.” They laughed. “Is one-way only.”
“For some.”
“No no, Brodie Jim. You here, you stay. Joining Bone Room is end.”
Bone Room?
* * *
They led me to a new chamber.
It had carpeting and air-conditioning. They nodded me toward a table and chair in the center of the room. The chair was padded. Not hardwood or steel. Sinking into the cushioned comfort felt like heaven. After days of trotting barefoot on hard cement, the soft carpeting underfoot felt like a massage against my soles. The cool air brushed across my skin with the gentleness of a cat against my leg. I wanted to stay there forever.
“Nice room,” I said.
“Yes, good treatment for you. You lucky.”
My eyes darted to a glass of water and a plate of vegetables on a desk beyond reach but plainly visible. The sauce looked like oyster.
“Nice view too.”
My stomach growled. I could no more stop the reaction than I could prevent my glance from straying toward the victuals.
“You see food?”
“Of course.”
“You want?”
“Of course.”
“You sign, you eat. All go easy. You be free.”
He slid a paper in front of me and set down a pen beside it. I squinted at the sheet with my one good eye. The other had closed up during the last beating. I wondered what my captor’s definition of free was. He didn’t say in his butchered English You’ll go free or You’ll be free to go. The phrase he used could include death by firing squad or hanging. Or execution in any form. In some people’s minds, that was a kind of freedom.
“What happens after?”
“First eat.”
“After that?”
“You drink.”
I tried a different approach. “What does the paper say?”
“You know what it say.”
“I don’t read Chinese.”
“You read Japanese and they are many similar. Japanese stole Chinese writing system, you know.”
He was right, up to a point. Centuries ago the Japanese adapted the Chinese system to their own purposes. They selected the characters that suited their way of life, then, over time, refined and simplified them. They devised new compounds and characters to express Japanese concepts. They developed two additional alphabets to be used in combination with the characters. The end result was two writing systems that were more like distant cousins living in distant lands: they shared an ancestry of some fifty generations past but were distinct and independent of one another.
“Stole might not be the right word.”
“It is.”
“I can’t read it.”
“In your heart you know what it say because you guilty.”
“Of what?”
“You American spy. You conspire to People Republic of China. You guilty, you sign.”
“So it’s a confession?”
“It is your truth giving. Just give your name and you can eat and drink.”
Throughout China, police routinely force confessions with repeated torture sessions. By law, or the inference of the law, confession proves guilt. After signing, the downhill slide is swift and irreversible. It starts with a trial behind closed doors. Without press or reportage of any kind. The right to a lawyer is not automatic, especially to an outsider like me.
“How about I tell you where the girl is heading instead?”
He waved the idea away. “We no more want.”
I hid my excitement. Pak had succeeded in spiriting Anna safely away.
His expression softening, the grinning one said, “You must repent. Sign and all go easy.”
“I repent.”
“Good. You sign, you eat.”
He nudged the pen closer.
“I repent. Tell your boss.”
“You must sign.”
“And then?”
“You eat and drink.”
“I know that.”
“You are spy.”
“I’m not a spy.”
“You are spy.”
“Does it say I’m a spy?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And if I sign?”
“You have trial.”
“So I’ll get a lawyer?”
“Why you need lawyer? You spy. You guilty. Paper say you guilty, so all finish.”
“That doesn’t sound easier to me. You promised easier.”
“You can eat.”
“Not a fair deal.”
“You get no more torture.”
“That’s a sta
rt. I need to know how I get out of here.”
“You get out but no checkout. We already say.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You are spy.”
“I am not a spy.”
“You are spy. We shoot you soon.”
“I don’t think so. You stopped the torture. You treated my wounds. You allowed me to shower.”
The grinning man translated my last volley for his moody partner, which led to a long round of shared merriment. It was several minutes before their laughter subsided.
“You funny man, Brodie Jim. I think time we visit you Bone Room.”
CHAPTER 83
I WAS lost for words.
Behind a floor-to-ceiling wall of glass was an unending stockpile of human skulls and ribs and legs and hands and all the remaining parts of the skeleton. Bones filled every square inch of the chamber to the top. They were bare and bleached with age. They had long ago been separated, either naturally or forcibly, from any restraining ligament, tendon, or other tissue that had once held them together.
“This oldest room,” my captor said in my ear, his eyes bright, the grin as wide as it could stretch.
He shoved me toward the next full-length window. Another room as densely packed as the first. In all, we visited twenty-three rooms of human remains—underground chambers the world knew nothing about. Room after room of a grotesque hoard, each gruesome collection a shade darker in tone than the last, as if the chain of chambers represented a march from absolute death toward life, but stopping cruely short.
“What think Brodie Jim?”
