by James Siegel
The surprise is for us, Paul thought.
Then he passed out.
ELEVEN
Blackness.
But not completely. There were endless visions and dreams flickering through the blackness. Like being in a movie theater for a very long time.
He was eleven years old and suddenly afraid of the dark. He hadn’t been afraid before, but he was now. Maybe because it was dark at the top of the stairs where his mother had recently taken up residence. Not just dark—a thick, suffocating blackness like a wool blanket pulled up over his head. Your mother’s resting, his father told him. She’s sleeping. Don’t disturb her.
He crept up the stairs, where it smelled unpleasantly medicinal. He listened outside the door and heard the distinct sounds of a TV game show: a buzzer, a voice, phony audience laughter.
His mom wasn’t sleeping, after all. It would be okay to open the door and crawl into her arms. But the darkness inside the room was even gloomier than the darkness outside in the hall. Only the soft glow coming from the portable TV with sadly bent rabbit ears made seeing possible at all.
It took him a while before he could make out the monster lying on the bed.
Last Halloween he’d gone trick-or-treating as a skeleton—all black, except for the white bones where his arms and legs were supposed to be.
It looked like that.
In the dream this skeleton lifted up a bony arm and waved for him to come closer.
Eventually, he woke up. Movie over.
“MORNING,” THE BOY SAID.
Just as he’d said it every morning since they’d taught it to him. Not on purpose. When Paul had finally opened his eyes after losing consciousness on Galina’s floor, the boy was there listening when he asked Joanna what time it was. Was it morning ? The boy repeated it several times as if trying it out. Now he used it to greet them.
This morning, which was either the third or fourth morning they’d been here, the boy waited for some kind of verbal acknowledgment.
“Good morning,” Joanna said.
Then the boy placed their breakfast—corn cakes and sausage—on the floor and left.
They were in a house somewhere in Colombia.
It was impossible to know where in Colombia, since they weren’t allowed out. The windows were boarded over. They could hear little from outside—the distant rumble of passing cars, occasional disembodied melodies trickling through from God knows where, a parrot squawking. All they knew was that it wasn’t Galina’s house.
They’d been transported somewhere else.
A claustrophobic room with a filthy mattress on the floor and two plastic chairs. There was a bucket in the corner.
That’s it.
That first morning, Joanna had woken before Paul. When she couldn’t rouse him—apparently, she attempted everything but jumping up and down on him—she’d tried opening the door. Locked tight. She managed to pry open a shutter, only to see solid wood staring back.
When Paul finally and groggily woke up, he was greeted with the sight of Joanna rocking herself back and forth in the middle of the floor. “Oh God,” she was murmuring, “oh God . . .”
He’d tried to comfort her, of course, even as he attempted to make sense of what had happened, to fight through a stultifying haze that seemed to have wrapped itself around his head. She seemed oddly distant, even with his arms enclosing her, as if she were obstinately holding a piece of herself back. He thought he knew why.
“I’m sorry, Joanna,” he said. “For not believing you.”
“Yes. Okay. Great.”
“It seemed ridiculous. Switching babies. I couldn’t imagine . . .”
“Where is she, Paul?” she cut him off. “What do they want?”
It was a hard question to answer.
The first day they saw no one but the boy. He was dressed in mottled green camouflage like the others. He carried a rifle that seemed far too big for him. He might’ve been all of fourteen. Except for his good morning s, he remained mute.
The next afternoon they were finally visited by someone higher up the food chain. A man in his mid-thirties, a face Paul thought he recognized from Galina’s house, just before he’d found himself staring at the ceiling.
“Look, we’re not political, ” Paul said when the man entered the room and locked the door behind him. “I work in insurance.” This reminded him of something else. “We aren’t rich.”
The man turned and looked at him. “You think we’re bandidos ?” His English was passable. He had what looked like a Kalashnikov looped around his shoulder, but he seemed neither violent nor unsympathetic.
“Where’s my baby?” Joanna said. “I want my baby back. Please.”
“I think I ask the questions here,” he said, not particularly rudely. Just as an unequivocal statement of fact.
“You’ve been captured by FARC,” he said, “the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,” spelling it out for them in case they weren’t up on their acronyms. “We are the legitimate voice of the Colombian people.” Paul thought it sounded like a speech he’d made hundreds of times before. “You are our political prisoners. Comprende? ”
Paul said, “We can’t help you. I told you, we’re not political. We have no money . . .”
He was interrupted by a rifle butt to his midsection. Delivered with enough force and precision to bring him straight to his knees.
“Paul!” Joanna recoiled, the obvious reaction when your husband is physically assaulted right in front of your eyes.
“When I ask a question, answer me,” the man said. “You must remember this.”
Paul attempted to get up, for Joanna’s sake, if not his own. He felt her fear as if it were a physical entity, cold and dense and implacable. But he couldn’t straighten up; his stomach was on fire. His eyes were tearing.
“You are political prisoners of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Comprende? ”
“Yes,” Paul said, still on his knees, still gasping from the vicious blow to his solar plexus.
“You won’t try to escape. Comprende? ”
“Yes.” Paul gave it one more try, gathered himself in an effort to scale what seemed like a sheer wall of pain, and finally managed to make it to a barely standing position.
“You step away from the door when we come in the room. You step away from the door when we leave. You stay away from the windows. Yes?”
“Yes, we understand.”
“How are you feeling?” He was addressing Joanna.
“I’m nauseous.” Her voice shaky if even-toned, as if she were desperately trying to maintain some semblance of composure, but pretty much failing. “I feel like throwing up.”
He nodded as if he’d expected this. “Escopolamina,” he said.
“What?” Joanna asked, breaking the don’t-ask-questions rule, this time apparently without consequences.
“A street drug. They use it to rob the turistas here.” He shook his head and uttered a dismissive sigh, as if that kind of thing—robberies and such—was beneath him. “We were late—she was frightened, huh.”
Galina, Paul thought. He was referring to Galina.
“She put something into our coffee,” Joanna stated flatly.
The man shrugged. “You’ll feel better tomorrow. Pretty much.”
He turned and walked to the door, then hesitated there as if waiting for someone to open it. He turned and stared at them with an expression of clear expectance.
What?
“Oh,” Paul said. He took Joanna’s hand and led her to the opposite wall.
“Good,” he said, as if addressing children who’d cleaned their room just like they’d been told to.
He walked out, locked the door behind him.
THEY SPENT MOST OF THEIR TIME ALONE REMINISCING.
They took turns remembering all the things they liked about New York. Even things that, oddly, they hadn’t liked before—holiday crowds, for instance. The swarm of visitors that executes a stranglehold on the c
ity from Thanksgiving to Christmas, creating bottlenecks from Times Square to Houston Street. Paul had always found the human traffic jams annoying and suffocating, only now he remembered them as joyous and even soothing. The inescapable smell of garbage waiting to be picked up was an aroma to be missed and cherished. The obstacle course of construction cranes, pothole barriers, and squat Con Ed vans every New York taxi was forced to navigate on its way from one side of the city to the other was a loop-de-loop of urban excitement.
It was all a matter of perspective. And right now their perspective was skewed through a rat hole in Colombia.
They remembered places outside the city too. They retraced every single one of their vacations.
The rough-hewn cabin in Yosemite, where they’d gone when they were just dating but already moon-eyed. The Sea Crest Motel in Montauk that opened onto the whitest sand they’d ever seen. The ridiculously expensive but extravagantly lovely George V in Paris—honeymoon heaven.
They tried to reconstruct every great meal they’d ever eaten—Prudhommes to Pinks. Eclectic appetizers, bountiful entrées, sugary-sweet desserts.
They recounted their first meeting—two tired business travelers sharing the same gate. They theorized what the odds were of running into each other like that, of falling in love, of getting married.
They did all of this as a way to pass the time.
They talked about the past so they could avoid thinking about the future. There was an air of complete and utter unreality about this. Was this really happening to them—it couldn’t be, could it? Kidnapped? Someone was going to yell stop and it was all going to end. It had to. It must.
Better to keep talking about the past.
ON WHAT MUST HAVE BEEN THEIR FOURTH DAY OF CAPTIVITY—IT was hard to keep count—Joanna said, “Why do you think they told us not to go near the windows?”
Paul, who’d gradually descended into listlessness, barely managed a shrug.
“Because we must be where people could see us,” Joanna answered her own question. “We must still be in Bogotá.”
“Okay.”
“We might be right on a street somewhere.”
Paul didn’t like where this conversation was heading. Joanna had that look, the I’m-ready-to-tackle-something look. The one he’d seen when she was going up against an entrenched superior, a human resources transgressor, the very look she got when she’d decided that hell or high water, she was going to have a baby.
“There’s just wood on the windows,” she said. “We can pry it off.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Our hands.”
“I don’t think we ought to do that.”
“Really? What ought we to do, then? Sit around and do nothing?”
Yes, Paul thought. So far, they hadn’t been told anything—why they were there, what was in store for them. The only thing that had actually been communicated to them was not to go near the windows. They’d been told that .
“Stay by the door and listen,” Joanna said. “If you hear them coming, I’ll stop.”
This was where he was supposed to volunteer for wood-prying duty. Or say no —it’s too dangerous, forget it, let’s just sit tight.
Joanna didn’t appear ready to be talked out of it.
Okay, he’d give it a try. The wood looked pretty well nailed in. One good shake with no results would probably be enough to dissuade her, send her back to the mattress, where they could continue to reminisce about old times.
Paul said, “I’ll do it.”
Joanna took up sentry duty by the door. Paul moved the shutters back, revealing two solid planks of wood. He thought he could hear faint sounds of traffic out there.
He was able to grip one plank by its bottom. He pulled.
There was some give there.
You could see the wood wobble before snapping back into place. Joanna could certainly see it.
“I told you,” she whispered.
Paul gave it another strong pull. This time the wood gave even more. He’d opened it a good half inch.
Yes, there was definitely traffic out there. Fairly steady too—they had to be close to a major thoroughfare. Somewhere people were going about their perfectly ordinary lives, shopping, eating, heading to work, all within earshot of two kidnapped Americans.
Paul resumed with renewed vigor, gulping in sudden streams of sweet-smelling air. He developed a steady rhythm, pull, rest, pull, rest. Slowly, bit by bit, the wood yawned open; he could see a red slate tile—a courtyard?
Joanna crouched by the door, a bundle of nervous energy urging him on with her eyes.
Suddenly, the wood snapped—broke right in half. It sounded like a gunshot, louder, and Paul stood there with half a plank of wood in his hands, waiting for the door to burst open with armed guards.
Joanna stiffened—put her ear to the door. Paul held his breath and waited.
After what seemed an eternity, Joanna shook her head. Nothing.
Paul allowed himself to breathe again.
He took his first actual look out the window.
Yes, it was the courtyard, all right. There was an adobe wall around it, holding several lopsided pots of cacti. A lone wooden table sat in the center of the garden with no chairs around it. And there was something else. A way in; a simple wooden gate led to the outside. Paul stared at it. There was a girl in a school uniform staring back.
Paul barely managed to stop himself from yelling help!
They were stuck in the room; the window was maybe two by two, and that was with all the wood removed. It was anybody’s guess if they’d be able to worm their way out.
Paul spoke to Joanna without turning away. He was afraid if he stopped looking at the girl, she’d disappear, like a mirage or a really good dream.
“There’s someone out there.”
Joanna immediately abandoned her guard duty, ran to the window.
For a moment the three of them simply stared at each other, as if seeing who would blink first. The girl looked to be eleven or twelve years old, clutching schoolbooks that appeared too heavy for her, and staring wide-eyed at what must have been two desperate-looking Americans staring back.
“Hola,” Joanna said to the girl—somewhere between a whisper and normal conversation.
The girl didn’t answer.
“Hola!” Joanna tried again. She stuck her hand through the window and waved, like a desperate wallflower hoping to be picked at the dance.
She remained on the sidelines. The girl continued to stare at them without offering the slightest response.
It was agonizing. They were staring possible rescue in the face, only that face was decidedly and maddeningly blank.
Paul racked his brain, trying to remember the Spanish word for help, but came up empty. Maybe help was universal. Maybe the girl took English at school. Maybe . . .
“Help!”
He didn’t recognize his own voice. It sounded high-pitched and desperate. “Help,” he said again. “Please . . . help us . . .”
The girl cocked her head, took a step back.
“We’re prisoners,” Paul continued, pushing both hands out the window, wrists together as if they were tied, in a kind of primitive pantomime.
It looked like a glimmer of understanding passed across the girl’s face. Then she turned to her left, as if someone had called out to her. She looked back at them, smiled sweetly, walked off.
“No!” Paul shouted.
He’d forgotten where he was.
In a locked room. Under armed guard.
It was just a matter of time.
He heard them seconds later. The sound of boots running on tile, of a key being jammed into the door lock, of nervous, angry jabbering.
He desperately tried to put the plank of wood back in the window, to shove it into place and hope they wouldn’t notice. Like a child trying to glue a smashed vase back together before his parents make it through the front door. It was useless.
The first man throug
h was the one who’d laid out the rules for them. It obviously didn’t escape his attention that they’d broken at least two of them. Thou shalt not go near the windows. Thou shalt not attempt escape. For a moment he simply stopped and stared at Paul, who was standing there holding the piece of shattered wood in his hand like a shield. It didn’t provide much protection. The man made it over to Paul in three quick strides and smashed him across the face with the rifle butt. Paul’s head snapped back and hit the wall. He tasted blood. The piece of wood clattered to the floor.
Paul could see Joanna’s ashen face staring back at him. The man swung his rifle again, clipping Paul under the chin. He bit his tongue, tasted bits of broken tooth. He retreated against the wall, hiding his face behind both hands.
“Put them down,” the man said.
This was real power, Paul realized. There wasn’t a need to force Paul’s hands away; he was going to make Paul do it himself.
“No,” Joanna said. “It’s my fault. I told him to do it. Leave him alone. Please. ”
“Put your hands down,” the man repeated.
“I said it’s my fault.” Joanna tried to insinuate her body between Paul and his attacker. “Hit me. Me. ”
The man sighed, shook his head, gathered the neck of Joanna’s dress in his fist, lifting her up off the ground.
“If you don’t move your hands, I beat her. If you put them there again, I beat her worse.”
Paul dropped his hands.
TWELVE
Sometimes they were given newspapers.
They were allowed this small luxury by the powers-that-be. An infinitesimal luxury, since neither of them spoke Spanish. But things were coming back to Paul—dribs and drabs, words and phrases, sometimes entire sentences.
Anyway, it gave them something to do. Paul discovered you needed things to do to keep your mind off the unspoken question of the hour. What was going to happen to them?
The boy dropped off whichever newspapers their guards had discarded—mostly of the tabloid variety.
The back pages were filled with the local scores. After a while Paul understood that the front pages were too. It was as if Colombia were one big soccer match, both combatants going goal for goal, playing to the death. Guarding the left goal were their captors, FARC, and guarding the right one, the USDF, with the government ineffectually attempting to referee.
