12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  At last they turned off Market Street and into a small alley. As the van slowed to a stop Nicola’s heart began to beat fast again.

  Davette swallowed. “Do the wallet first,” she said.

  They were going through her purse. Dave counted out the bills then he examined Nicola’s plastic cards: VISA, VISA Gold, YMCA ID and towel card. Her library card. Her driver’s license which expired last birthday and the renewal sticker behind it. Everything that listed who she was: Nicola Elizabeth Swain, thirty-one years old, divorced, no children, residence 3584A Santiago Street. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, allergic to codeine and hazelnuts. Five foot five, black hair, green eyes, good skin.

  How much did they want to know? How much was documented?

  “Here’s the ATM card,” Davette was saying. “Under ‘A.’”

  “What kind of person keeps their plastic ordered alphabetically?”

  “Look at all this. Pills in the pill case. Sunglasses in the sunglasses case. Pens in the pen holders. And all the pens have their original caps. It’s so, like, yin.”

  They talked as if she wasn’t there. That annoyed her. Her stomach clenched with hunger and Nicola remembered again that she hadn’t had dinner.

  “Life according to plan,” Dave said, zipping up his jacket.

  He jumped out of the van. As he slid open the back door a rush of foggy cold air blew in at her.

  “I’m going to take you out on the street and unblindfold you,” he told her. “Don’t do anything since I have a knife.”

  On the street he ripped the tape off her hands in a way that was really painful and Nicola found herself again the stereotype: rubbing her freed wrists. When he took off her blindfold she saw they were in an alley behind a small fenced lot. Several rent-a-Dumpsters stood between here and the next busy street—Seventh?—and there were other signs of recent construction.

  “This way,” Dave said.

  They walked behind her, each one holding one arm. What did they look like? She tried to calm herself by concentrating on what she would tell the police. They were heading for the ATM on the corner and when they got there the boy pushed Nicola toward it and told her to take out her maximum. As she punched in her secret code the girl repeated it, “four-nine-two-one,” the first line of a math puzzle Nicola had enjoyed as a child.

  She glanced over at them.

  “Don’t look at us!” Davette hissed. But Nicola couldn’t see anything—somewhere between the van and here the Daves had pulled cut-up watch caps over their faces, and for a second that freaked her.

  When she was done, Davette pocketed Nicola’s money while Dave retaped her hands, then they led her, again from behind, back to the van. No one came into the alley.

  I’ve got to do something, Nicola told herself. As she listened for the sound that meant car she found herself thinking of the summer she spent in Saudi Arabia, when she’d felt something similar to this: trapped and invisible. Her father went there to negotiate a deal which took longer than anyone expected. After a month he rented an apartment in Riyadh and brought his family over; after two months he hired a tutor in Arabic.

  Nicola, who was fourteen at the time, mostly sat outside by the apartment pool reading Harlequin romances whose covers had been ripped off by customs officials. The pool was usually empty, though sometimes sand cats with ears like pygmy elephants wandered in from the street and Abdul, the pool cleaner, chased them off with a plastic leaf net. Abdul would not look Nicola in the eye and when she came near him he muttered a curious phrase which the apartment manager once translated for her: it has been this way since the time of the Prophet.

  She learned to keep her shoulders covered and to receive change with her right hand. On the weekends her father took them to the desert for wadi bashing—a drive and a picnic—where they would see Bedouins driving small Isuzu pickup trucks with camels in the back. Everywhere she went old women in long black abayyas glared at her, reminding her of her lowly status, Nicola supposed. No one spoke to her. Plenty of Saudis spoke to Mark, her older brother, and even to her little brother, Eric, but never to her. It was as if they didn’t see her. Like she didn’t exist.

  When Nicola got back to the States things were different. She was in high school now for one thing, and here it seemed no one raised their hands in class anymore and the girls sat slumped at their desks with their legs stretched out in front of them looking like beautiful caged felines. Nicola was used to being the one who knew all the answers, but now this was uncool. At first she felt grateful to the Saudis for teaching her how to keep quiet until suddenly years later she realized she had gotten into the habit of not saying what she thought.

  And here she was, still not speaking. Well, there was the duct tape, of course. But why didn’t she shout when the boy first took hold of her wrist? Why didn’t she scream?

  They got back to the minivan and Dave began to fumble with the lock. Nicola steadied and centered herself. When he dropped his keys she thought, Okay. Quickly she turned to face the girl and brought her leg up heel first in a solid thrust-kick.

  “Whoa,” Davette said as she fell.

  “Hey, hey,” said Dave. He was still wearing his mask.

  Nicola turned and kicked out, but she missed his chest and got his arm instead. Her hands were still taped behind her. She kicked again and missed. The darkness was like rain; it got in the way. Also garbage bins, the Dumpsters, the sense of narrowness in the alley. She heard people laughing on another street and Dave made a grab for her. She kicked again but her footing was off. She kicked again. Dave’s fingers pinched her arms like an old woman and Davette got up and took hold of her other arm. They got the van’s back door open and together they pushed her onto the floor.

  “Shit,” Dave said. “What the fuck? Don’t you have a brain?” His voice ended with a squeak like a bath toy.

  “We’re not supposed to talk to her,” Davette reminded him.

  “We said we wouldn’t hurt you,” he went on. “I think I’m getting a bruise on my arm. What if I was a hemophiliac or something?”

  “You’re not a hemophiliac.”

  “If I was, I’d be dying right now.”

  When they spoke they seemed almost harmless. Just teenagers, Nicola thought. Davette helped Nicola up and got her back in the seat. She had pretty brown eyes behind her mask.

  “Hemophiliacs don’t bruise,” she said. “They bleed.”

  “They can bruise.”

  “Bleeding is the problem.”

  “I’m making a point.” He sounded annoyed.

  “Stop looking at your arm.”

  “Why the fuck did she do that?”

  Davette tied the silk scarf around Nicola’s eyes, but she made it a little looser this time. “Quit complaining. I was the one she knocked to the ground.” To Nicola she said, “Don’t do that anymore.” But she didn’t sound angry.

  Dave clapped his hands on his jeans and climbed into the driver’s seat. “To my mind, being tied up and all is a good reason not to start kicking around and hurting someone who could, you know, obviously hurt you more.”

  “She’s not as tame as she looks,” Davette said shrewdly.

  The minivan’s ignition bells rang. Dave backed the van up into a driveway and turned it around.

  Davette held onto the dashboard. “You’re going the wrong way,” she told him.

  “We need to get to, you know, the place.”

  “What I mean is, this is a one-way street.”

  Nicola, blindfolded again, her hands taped, strapped in by the seat belt, was annoyed with herself. She was sore and tired and hungry. Her purse, the template of her existence, was in the hands of teenagers. It was after eight, she guessed, the time of video previews. No one would miss her until Monday. Her mind was like a truck backing up in the street. She should have centered herself more between kicks. She should have run.

  Five

  Chorizo sat in the darkening room and waited for the girl to come to him. The shades were open—soon he wo
uld have to do something about that—but for now he was enjoying the haze from the streetlights, which lit the room to a perfect, soft degree. His rattan chair was uncomfortable. The bed would be even more so. He thought he could smell the faint rubbery smell of cast-off condoms and he willed his mind to narrow to the task at hand.

  She was standing next to the cheap wooden dresser, holding onto the edge.

  He said, “Did you know that if you meet a whore in the morning this brings good luck?”

  His father once told him this, or was it his uncle? The girl was blindfolded but smiling and he knew she was just feeling the high. It was a game to her, still a game. He had given her one pill after dinner and then, when she was in the bathroom, he broke up a second pill into her drink. They were Marlina’s pills, but Marlina wouldn’t talk; she needed the money he gave her and she needed that boyfriend of hers and she knew very well that Chorizo could get rid of both if he wanted to. Marlina was a prostitute and a former heroin addict. But these days due to circumstances—meaning Chorizo—she was willing to watch her boyfriend Ricky do the shooting up with junk bought with her money while she concocted little plans about how she was going to get some training in a hair salon or maybe go back to school, do the GED, and then go from there. Next month maybe, or the month after that. Every time she brought Chorizo the pills she had a different story. Tonight Chorizo had let Marlina use a first-floor room for her business, and so here he was now in her room, a prostitute’s room, though the girl didn’t know this.

  “Where are you?” the girl asked. She let go of the dresser and ran her foot across the ragged, run-down carpet.

  She was pretty, but thin. As Chorizo watched her, he twisted the chains of his bracelet and thought, Two pills, that would do it. Two pills would kill anyone but the most hardened addict, and she claimed she almost never did drugs. She was a liar, though, probably. And a slut. He himself took nothing, only sipped a little wine and pretended to take a pill when he offered her one, calling it Ecstasy. In a way he was right.

  A liar, a slut, a fool. What time was it now? He stretched his arms above his head, then went to the window, which was cracked in one corner, and looked down to the street. The motel was near the water, not too far from Fisherman’s Wharf, and outside it was gray and foggy and windy. Even from here he could hear tourists laughing as they ate their soft-shelled crabs, and the obese seals on the pier barking for food. He ran his fingers along the shade. He had to admit that he liked the motel’s seedy location—he loved San Francisco at night. He loved the transvestites, the junkies, the runaway trust-fund babies on speed. He loved how they could mix with rich corporate lesbians and tech support managers and everyone else who came to California looking for something. Everyone mixed with everyone, on this street at least. Everyone mixed with everyone else.

  The fog was like the lightest of snowfalls; it made the street cozy. And for a moment looking down Chorizo felt something in him relax; he felt almost at peace. He could do what was needed. He could do whatever was needed. Chorizo pulled down the fraying shade and went back to his low uncomfortable chair and held the rope in his lap. He was ready. Trained. Focused. The mind of a warrior.

  Two pills, he was thinking. It had worked before.

  “Come here,” he said to the girl.

  She was still standing on the thin carpet holding her own hands in front of her, blindfolded, stuck, not moving. She laughed again. It was only a game.

  “I’m trying,” she told him.

  Six

  It was after nine when the Daves drove into the garage of a narrow, two-story structure and parked. They got the candy and the purse, then led Nicola up a flight of uncovered steps to a room that was essentially a platform built above the garage.

  They were near the industrial part of the bay, one street over from train tracks. Upstairs it was cold and damp and smelled like plywood. Heavy sheet plastic divided the room in half. Dave went around the room pulling down blinds while Davette steered Nicola: “Stop. Now back a step. That’s it, okay, sit.”

  It was like a game Nicola played in grade school. Afterwards they would attempt to raise her prone body by chanting light as a feather, stiff as a board.

  Davette said, “I’m just going to tie you in.”

  Nicola tried to adjust her balance—she was sitting in an armless desk chair with wheels—while Davette wrapped a bungee cord around her waist, then hooked it to the back rest. Nicola’s hands, still taped, were pressed between the chair and the small of her back, which she thought was probably good for her sciatica.

  She was wondering, what now? It had not been difficult to follow their route here since Dave kept saying things like “We’re looking for Berry Street now.” Plus Nicola knew the area—the year she left Scooter she was working in an office south of Market, though not quite as south as they were now. On Fridays after work she and the receptionist visited all the nearby bars in search of the perfect Tom Collins. Leslie, the receptionist, was blonde and had the energy of a Mouseketeer, and she attracted a lot of attention. They met men and learned how to play pool passably, but even so the nights just got longer and longer.

  “There’s like one working light bulb,” Davette said after a minute.

  “I thought I checked those.”

  “And what’s that in the corner, a tarp?”

  “It’s for water,” Dave told her. He shook out a plastic sheet. “Holds thirty gallons. The spigot goes here.”

  Davette knelt down and began rummaging around in her backpack. “Here, hold out your arm.”

  “For what?”

  “The circle. Like I said. I need to get back some positive energy.”

  She struck a match. The air smelled of sulfur and dirt and Nicola could no longer smell the angel water she had put on that morning for Chorizo. She closed her eyes under the blindfold and found she was more comfortable this way.

  “I need a bowl, or even a mug would work. I wish there was some running water nearby.”

  “We could stand by the toilet,” Dave said.

  “Was that a joke?”

  They pushed some furniture around, then Nicola listened to them argue: Do you want this stone, no the white one, no that white one, okay get the book, no east is that way, no because the bay is over there. She began to seriously wonder about these two. They had stopped speaking to her again and it seemed like now they were just carrying on with their usual Friday night lives. The heat came on and Nicola counted how long it lasted, two minutes, but when it stopped she felt no warmer.

  “With this stone,” Davette chanted, “anger be gone. Water bind it, no one find it.”

  Her voice had dropped an octave and Nicola could imagine her standing there with sacred objects (the nougaty candy?) in her hands. She began to count the seconds until the heat started again, and found in this way she could keep track of the time.

  Focus on the details, she thought. What to tell the police.

  “Here we’re supposed to think about what we did wrong. You know like those kids, with the candy we stole. And then her.”

  Dave put his hands in his pockets. “JTRY, she did knock you down,” he reminded her.

  From the other side of the wall came a low muffled voice, or maybe it was more than one, and something else which took Nicola a long time to identify—a baby? a cat?—until she finally thought, birds. Green parrots, macaws, something large and tropical. She heard screeches and calls, another low voice, maybe the sound of a radio. The walls were so thin. Temporary housing, she wondered?

  “Okay, now, put all your emotional energy into the cup,” Davette told Dave.

  “Like, think about it going in there?”

  “All your anger and stuff.”

  “I’m not really angry,” Dave said. “I’m more like on edge, or I don’t know what exactly.”

  “Well just put it in.”

  Slowly the smell of incense worked the room.

  “Take a sip from the cup.”

  “What’s in there again
?”

  “Mine the cup, and mine the wine of life,” Davette chanted. “Drink deep!”

  They were quiet for a moment. The circle was done. Nicola pulled at the tape on her hands again, mostly just out of habit. Then she heard Dave say, “Now.”

  Still, it took her a second to realize they were looking at her. Dave came over to the desk chair and knelt down. For a moment he said nothing. Nicola could hear him breathing beside her.

  She sat very still. He touched the duct tape over her mouth then traced his fingers along her face, feeling the soft down on her cheek. His hand was cool and firm.

  “So,” he said to her. “You know this game, right?”

  * * *

  The girl was lying on the bed wearing a dark red nylon camisole that Chorizo had given her. He had taken off her blindfold. Her wrist was tied by a rope to the bed frame.

  “I feel funny,” she said.

  “You feel good,” he told her.

  He was sitting on the side of the bed, stroking her hair. She was very pretty and feminine lying there all tied up. Getting her to agree to the rope was easy. He knew it would be. All he did was tell her the first principle of Shambhala: Don’t be afraid of who you are. Then he held up the rope.

  It’s a game, he had said. The rope is a game in a night in a thrill with a stranger. Don’t be afraid of the thrill, he had said. Don’t be afraid of who you are.

  And she wasn’t. Chorizo touched her bangs. Frankly it was astonishing to him how unresisting they were, these women. How trusting. Of course, the drugs helped.

  “So what’s Shambhala anyway, a religion?” she asked now. She yawned, then giggled. “Maybe you can convert me.”

  Chorizo smiled. “Maybe I can.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  He stroked her hair and she stretched a little, a slight arching of the back, then a smile. A cat, he thought.

  “It’s all about waking up,” he said.