What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

by Leah Stewart

  The door to the house—a white door—swings open, and a young woman in a housekeeper’s uniform steps aside to allow them entry. Charlie swings his head to gape at her even as the gun in his back and the hands on his arms urge him forward. She waits for them to pass with a deferential air and then steps to close and latch the door. This has to be a dream. The walls of the hallway look as if they’d be rough to the touch. In some places the paint is peeling. To Charlie, the hallway is interminable, though in actual fact the house is a small one, the hallway a standard length. There’s nothing remarkable about the house at all, though to Charlie it’s the strangest place on earth, the hole beneath the world. They shove him past two open doors. He’s not able to glance inside, and if he could, he’d see nothing. It’s an empty house. Ahead of him is another doorway, and as in a dream, he knows he mustn’t go in there but can do nothing to stop himself. Even if he tried to scream, he wouldn’t make a sound.

  The room at the end of the hallway is very small, eight by ten, and like the other rooms, it’s empty. The floor is concrete, the walls painted the dark, dark blue of a sky on the verge of night, the one window covered with boards. Into the floor someone has hammered metal stakes. At the threshold, the scrum around Charlie separates so that nothing touches him but the gun in his back. The gun in his back, which nudges him gently forward, as a dog might nudge your leg. Does Charlie know that this is his prison? Deep, deep down he knows it. But sometimes the things we know take quite some time to understand.

  “Lie down,” says the person behind him. A male voice.

  “Where?” Charlie says.

  “Floor,” the man says.

  Charlie’s legs tremble so violently that lying down sounds like a decent idea. But his head shouldn’t be by the door, so he wants to turn around before he complies. Will that be allowed? He doesn’t yet understand the rules. He doesn’t want to make a mistake. “Can I turn around first?”

  The man hesitates. He is a very young man, only twenty-one, and though he’s doing a good job of concealing it, he’s quite nervous about all this. He’s intensely aware of the others watching from behind him in the hall. His English isn’t great either, and he’s not completely sure he understood Charlie’s question. “Slow,” he says, finally, with a persuasive threat in his tone.

  Charlie turns as slowly as he can. For good measure, he lifts his hands in the air as much as possible, bound as they are. He doesn’t stop to look at the people with the guns but turns his gaze toward the floor, trying to determine how to sit without his hands to catch him. Finally he drops rather painfully to one knee. From there, he falls to sitting, and then he lowers his back down and stretches his long legs out along the floor. Against the cold comfort of the concrete he can feel that his whole body is shaking. There’s a fuzziness at the edges of his vision that suggests he might black out again. He can’t see anything now but the ceiling. It’s an ordinary ceiling, with a light fixture that looks incongruously like the one in his childhood bedroom. Someone flips it on as he’s looking at it, so that he shuts his eyes and sees bright spots behind them.

  There’s movement near him, and then a hand on his arm, and then a tugging at the ropes. He opens his eyes to see a man crouching beside him, cutting his bonds. He risks a glance at the man’s face, but the man—an older one, who came in from the hall with his large sharp knife—keeps his own gaze fixed on the task before him. When the ropes separate, the man pulls them free, and Charlie instinctively rubs first one wrist and then the other. “Why are you doing this?” he asks, but the man doesn’t respond, indifferent to Charlie’s desperate need to know. There must be something Charlie could say to compel an answer. What’s the right line?

  The more kidnap victims believe it matters what they think or want or feel, the more they struggle to comprehend their loss of agency. If, in their normal lives, their actions, their decisions, and their words have power, they can’t help but persist in the idea that they can change what’s happening. They insist there’s a misunderstanding, an overestimation of their value or threat, and they try to explain that they’re not rich, that they’re not spies. I’m not the one you want. Like others in his situation, Charlie wants to say this. But in his case he knows it isn’t true.

  The man speaks over his shoulder to the young one with the gun, and that one brings over chains. Limb by limb, they attach Charlie to the four stakes in the floor. “You don’t need to do this,” Charlie says. “You have guns. Listen to me. You don’t need these chains. I’m claustrophobic. Please listen to me.” Do they speak English? They don’t answer. They don’t meet his eye. As they chain his second wrist, he begins an active attempt to get the older man to look at him. If there’s anything in the world he knows how to do it’s make someone look at him. He watches the man—the top of his thick curly head, the tip of his prominent nose—and puts all his energy into compelling his gaze. Finally the man meets his eye. He does it reluctantly and immediately looks away, but Charlie feels a surge of triumph that he made him look at him at all. That triumph is the only thing he’s felt except terror in what seems like hours, months, days, and he clings to it. He won’t be less than human if he can make them look.

  Their task completed, the men step away from him. Though they move at different times and in different ways, to Charlie’s confused mind they are as synchronized as dancers. What is actually a slapdash, on-the-fly operation—five novice kidnappers at this house, counting the woman who opened the door, and six with the other hostages—seems to Charlie confidently choreographed. The powerless ascribe to the powerful even more mastery than they actually have. That is one way power grows.

  The chains are painfully tight. Charlie strains against the ones on his wrists, a pointless use of energy leading to additional pain, but he obeys the instinct anyway. Though it’s nothing he can articulate yet, he’ll come to understand that effort, even pointless effort, is what staves off despair. “Who are you?” he asks. “What do you want? When will you let me go?”

  The men talk over him and he understands none of it. In his peripheral vision he sees their feet. They’re wearing running shoes.

  How did they know, how did they know who he was, where to find him? Someone must have recognized him on the street, at the bar. And then followed him, because he told no one about the hike. But why did they pick him up in the woods? Wouldn’t it have been easier to snatch him outside the bar or at his rental cottage? Woods is the wrong word. Not woods, not woods—tropical rain forest. He read his guidebook cover to cover. It said nothing about kidnapping. It said the people were friendly. On the plane he memorized the list of helpful phrases, phonetically spelled, and on land he successfully ventured Hello and How are you? But for the things he wants to say to these people he doesn’t have the words. What comes to mind is Where is the bus stop? He’d like to find the bus stop. He’d like to catch a bus now, please. He doesn’t want to be a person this has happened to. He doesn’t want to be someone people recognize.

  Before he was famous, Josie tried to tell him what it was like. She said that when Alter Ego was on, going out in public felt like walking past a pack of police dogs with a pocketful of drugs. As though people were not individuals but one enormous inquisitive animal, quivering and insistent. “You make it sound terrifying,” he said, and she looked at him with a mixture of sympathy and irritation, and said, “Because it is.” But for him, back then, those moments of recognition were rare, so it was still a novelty, a rush, when a stranger’s face morphed into surprised delight. He’d had a few uncomfortable encounters—the girl who kept insisting she knew him from a show he’d never been on, raising her voice, following him when he tried to walk away. But most people were sweet, encouraging, like the flight attendant who leaned in low when she handed him his water and stage-whispered her compliment. They were beneficent. Like they knew he needed them.

  Now he puts on a baseball cap like everybody else, walks with his head down. He’s been
accosted for an autograph while peeing in a urinal. He’s been asked to pose for a photo while fumbling drunkenly with a hotel key, while hustling his sister’s tantruming toddler out of a mall. Shivering on a hospital bed with food poisoning, fetal-positioned around a basin filled with his own vomit, he looked up to see a nurse beaming at him with childlike delight. “They told me you were here but I didn’t believe it!” she said. I’m here, yes, but don’t you see the vomit? The screaming two-year-old? The fact that my fly is down? He isn’t a real person anymore; he knows that. He’s the surprise cameo in someone else’s story.

  Josie used to say to him, before he was famous, Let’s quit. Let’s quit and be flight attendants. Let’s quit and open a bookstore. Let’s quit and open a bed-and-breakfast in Taos. Josie is from New Mexico and they’d intended to go there together sometime, but they never got around to it and now they won’t. Why didn’t he ever go with Josie to New Mexico? He’ll turn back time, take that trip instead of this one, and never do that interview at all.

  He tried to quit acting, or at least the show, after the article. He called his agent and asked how he could get out of his contract, and his agent said that would never happen no matter how mad the showrunner was. And she was mad. He was going to have to endure the sharp tone and caustic asides for as long as it took to achieve forgive and forget, and God only knew what embarrassing stuff she was planning for his character in season two. Whatever it was, he’d have to do it. He was going to have to buckle down and be the good boy he always, always had been.

  I tried to quit, Josie, he thinks now, chained on the floor, as if persuading her of this truth might release him. I tried. I tried.

  Though he doesn’t know it, he passes out again briefly and has a dream that he is asleep in a bed in a crowded room, Josie beside him. He returns to consciousness to find a woman bending over him. She is not the woman in the housekeeper’s uniform, but the one who appeared in the clearing with a gun. She stands with her hands braced on her knees, a considering expression on her face. She was debating whether to prod and wake him, but before she could nudge her foot into his side, his eyes opened. Her hair is in two long blond braids that swing down toward him, but he is not fooled into believing that she is sweet or girlish. She’s meeting his eyes without hesitation, without compunction, as if there were nothing at all strange about what’s happening here.

  “Hello,” she says.

  He tries to say hello back but his voice catches on relief. She speaks English. She’s speaking it to him. He swallows. “What’s happening? What do you want with me?”

  “We are glad to have you,” she says. Her tone is conversational, as if she were the innkeeper, he the guest. “How do you like our country?”

  He feels a flare of incredulous anger. “I liked it better yesterday.”

  She smiles a satisfied smile and nods, as if to say he’s pleased her. “We hoped for you,” she says. “And you are here.”

  Two.

  The island nation where Charlie Outlaw has met such terrible luck is very small, so small you’ve never heard of it. Site of many arrivals and skirmishes, it has perilous and confusing politics and a racially diverse population. If you ever did hear of it, it would be the same way Charlie did, from an article in a high-end travel magazine with a headline like “Hidden Paradise” or “The Last Eden.” Keep your gaze only on what nature has to offer, and the island is indeed a paradise: sparkling ocean, verdant land, bright singing birds. The human part of things is less ideal. Jobs are insufficient and poverty widespread while politicians, the small moneyed class, and foreign investors gain wealth from the one big resort and the smattering of rental cottages and boutique hotels. In one of those cottages are Charlie’s forlorn belongings: clothes, the shampoo he likes, his currency and passport.

  A second resort is in the planning, to be built by an American company, and crucial to the realization of those plans is the displacement of two small villages, one of which contains the house where Charlie is chained on the floor. The kidnappers are from these two villages, their plot hatched out of bitter complaining about the hotel corporation and America and their own government’s obsequious kowtowing to those two entities. There are eleven kidnappers in total, nine men and two women. They range in age from seventeen to forty-eight and come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. There’s confusion of purpose among them—some believe they should make political demands for the release of the hostages, some financial ones—but the man named Darius, the oldest of the group, had sufficient charisma to persuade them to enact this plan before they’d agreed on all the particulars. His own conviction—that they can and will use their prisoners to scuttle the resort—is so persuasively total that he believes the others must share it no matter their indications to the contrary.

  It would be misguided to assume that the kidnappers are less dangerous to Charlie because they’re amateurs with a half-baked scheme. Their rookie uncertainties are no guarantee that they won’t kill or otherwise harm him. They are nervous people with guns in their hands, and if they didn’t possess the all-too-human capacity to view another person as somewhat less than real, they wouldn’t be in this story. On day one of Charlie’s captivity, they leave him chained up alone for more than an hour without considering that he might need food or drink or the bathroom, or that a gap in the boards on the window is sending a beam of sunlight directly into his eyes. Every time he opens them, he winces into a blinding vision, but keeping them closed does nothing about the heat on his face, so that in addition to his numb terror he has to cope with the physical discomfort of feeling as if someone has stuck the top of his head in a microwave. These two feelings merge into one, so the heat seems to amplify his terror, his terror the heat, and then an itch develops on his ankle where a mosquito bit him. He wants to scratch the inflamed bump so badly that he keeps moving his hands toward it though they’re nowhere close to reaching. He tries to roll his ankle to scratch it on the floor, which does nothing for the itch and, in fact, seems to tighten the chain, and tears of helpless despair push their way from behind his eyelids, leaving a stiffening line of salt down his temples into his hair.

  From the swamp of fear and panic, a thought surfaces: He’s experiencing all aspects of this situation as if they were equivalent, the unreachable mosquito bite no less troubling than being chained to a floor. Then he notices the rapidity of his breathing, then the way he’s clenching his muscles as if to levitate off the floor. All this noticing is a trail of bread crumbs back to himself: Charlie is well practiced in simultaneously being and observing himself be. This skill, an essential one in his profession, can be a detriment in certain real-life situations, and he’s sometimes felt ashamed of the voice in his head registering the usable material in the midst of some wrenching disagreement, but right now the ability to step aside and watch is going to save him. He’s trained for this.

  He tries an observation exercise. Counting to one hundred, he looks around the room as best he can, then shuts his eyes to test what he can recall. Observation. Imagination. Memory. These are an actor’s tools, and as one of Charlie’s professors used to say, all tools must be sharpened. That professor was given to aphorisms that didn’t, on further reflection, apply as broadly as she seemed to think, but still she was a good teacher. One of Charlie’s classmates used to do an imitation of her, announcing, “All tools must be sharpened,” during lulls in the conversation or at moments when he might otherwise have been expected to offer sympathy or advice. There’s a memory for you, one Charlie can use to evoke amusement, nostalgia, and, yes, a hint of scorn, because that classmate always had to make a joke, never was quite brave enough to proceed with the necessary sincerity, so was never as good as he might have been and failed to understand why. To defeat criticism, you have to be amazing. To be amazing, you have to be vulnerable. That’s the real paradox of the actor, in Charlie’s opinion: Vulnerability is your best protection. Because the worst thing you can be is bad.

/>   The floor is a pockmarked gray. Not far from his face is a faded red streak about (he thinks) a foot in length, four inches wide. As if someone started to paint the floor and then thought better of it. His imagination says: blood. Imagination is no good to him now. Observation is what he needs; observation tells him the red streak is not blood, not the right color, too even in shape. Whoever painted the walls that midnight blue did a sloppy job: blue spots on the white ceiling, blue spots on the gray floor. It’s quite a dark color for such a small room. Where the ray of sun hits the wall—a thick diagonal stripe made irregular by the shadow of a shelf hanging above it—the paint is unevenly distributed. Hard to get those dark colors just right. Who painted the walls? Maybe one of the gun-wielding boys, to cover up the blood.

  There is no blood.

  The walls are made of cinder blocks. He didn’t have time within his self-imposed limit to count how many across, how many down. He’ll have plenty of time for that later, time enough to count them again and again. Don’t imagine that. The ceiling is white and has the snowflake look created by a spray gun except for a long smooth strip right above him that looks as though someone went over it with a roller. Why? To cover up the blood?

  He opens his eyes, squints against the sunlight. Yes, he got it all right—cinder blocks, paint, shelf, shadow. If there’s something on the shelf, he can’t see it from this angle. The room is longer than it is wide. He’s lying lengthwise, which is good because he’d feel even more claustrophobic on the short side, his head and feet just inches from the walls. As far as he can tell, both the door past his feet and the window behind his head are centered on the walls. The window is tall, or looks tall from this vantage point. It has a thick sill, also painted dark blue. The boards nailed across it look fairly new.