by Fitch, Stona
I imagined the video images of Blackbeard and me talking in the apartment alongside a map of Switzerland, pictures of the Alps, advice for tourists. “So how much money have you raised so far?”
“Why are you interested? Do you think this will somehow measure your worth?”
“No.” He was right. I wanted to know that the world had noticed my ordeal and wanted to make it stop.
“The money is not the point. We are nowhere near our goal. What is truly interesting is how people are voting.”
“What are the choices?”
Blackbeard shouted up at the ceiling. “Audio off!”
“Oui.” The bored, disembodied voice came from one of the grates, then a click.
“They can vote to have you released. Or they can vote to proceed.”
“How have they been voting?”
Blackbeard tilted his head. “So many questions. This must interest you a great deal, Eliott Gast.”
It did.
“The votes so far say we should move ahead.” Blackbeard held out his stack of computer printouts.
“Move ahead with what?” Certainly no one would want to see my imprisonment continue.
“The next level, of course.”
“Didn’t anyone vote to have me released?”
“Of course. But they are less vocal.”
I closed my eyes and shuddered. Much had happened in the world to inure it to suffering. Still, I had expected that most people retained a sense of right and wrong.
“Audio on!” Blackbeard poked out his cigarette on the windowsill, then stood to issue his final proclamation of the day. “Now you know what it feels like to be in the minority, Eliott Gast. To be controlled by the cruel wishes of the majority in the same manner of the Basques, the Flemish, the Irish…”
His list continued. I was no longer listening. My thoughts turned to the next level and what it would bring.
Day 14.
Nin, Blackbeard, and the Doctor walked slowly, silently into my room and stood in a row at the edge of the futon. I stood and scrambled toward the other room, screaming.
Blackbeard tackled me and held me down on my back, my arms trapped beneath me.
He leaned down and whispered in my ear. “Showtime, Eliott Gast. Give the people what they want.” The brandy on his breath smelled of old men in cafés getting ready to go off to a day of bricklaying.
My heart pounded. The Doctor stood above me, holding two white tampons, strings dangling.
“He wants you to put these in your nose.” Blackbeard failed to smile at this ridiculous request.
“What!” I pushed off with my feet, but my socks only slipped along the floor. Their arrival had caught me in my underwear.
The Doctor reached down. I twisted my head to the side, but he simply pressed my face against the floor with one hand, while pushing the tampon toward my nose with the other. A sweet, medicinal smell came from his hands. He pushed the tampon gently up my nostril, then harder, until a sharp pain came. The second one was harder to insert, and he guided it up into my other nostril with the palm of his hand, stopping only when it was deep inside. The pain I felt at first was gone, replaced by a tingling, then a numbness that spread across my entire face. I struggled to get free from Blackbeard, but he pressed harder, his grip on my arms inescapable. He bent closer and then ran his tongue up my forehead.
Blackbeard paused for a moment. “Fear tastes of white vinegar,” he said. “It would taste good on fried potatoes.”
The Doctor opened his black bag and rummaged around. He took out a small metal tool with a cork handle at one end and an electric cord at the other. I recognized this childhood toy, a woodburning tool. My brother and I would spend hours at the kitchen table burning galloping horses and the somber faces of the presidents into cheap pine. The Doctor plugged the cord in and we waited. I imagined that I must look like a trapped walrus.
In a moment, the Doctor pulled the cords beneath my nose, and I assumed the tampons slid out, though I could not feel them. He reached over for the woodburning tool, but the cord would not stretch to where I lay. He nodded at Blackbeard and together they slid me along the cold floor toward the wall, my undershirt rising up.
“Scream, damn you,” Blackbeard whispered. But I said nothing. I struggled as hard as I could when the tip of the woodburning tool approached, feeling its heat as it passed in front of me. The Doctor pressed firmly against my forehead to tilt my head back and steady it. I saw a thin ribbon of smoke drifting up toward the ceiling. I closed my eyes tightly. My deadened face felt nothing. The Doctor pressed close as he worked, his eyes intent, sweat dripping from his chin. Then he pressed more deeply and suddenly I felt a fire behind my face, somewhere up near my eyes. My eyes burst open and I gritted my teeth and strained with a low grunting sound of a dog.
“Make it new,” Blackbeard muttered. “More action gets more money. More money means you’ll be released sooner. Are you making this connection?”
Still, I stayed as silent as I could, an unwilling participant, not a collaborator. The Doctor shifted the woodburning tool and sent another puff of smoke drifting up toward the ceiling. I struggled again and Nin reached forward to help hold me still. I felt her delicate hand on my cheek. Then Blackbeard grabbed it.
“Here, nurse,” he said. “Your patient needs you.” He took the woodburning tool and wrapped her fingers around it.
“But I…”
“Get to work.”
I saw the fear glint in Nin’s wide eyes. The Doctor wrapped his steady hand around hers and together they scoured the other nostril, burning as they went deeper, like Sherman marching through the south.
The burning within me grew. I gritted my teeth and held back the screams that burgeoned inside me. What good would they do? Nin watched her hand in horror. She tried to be careful, to hurt me as little as possible, but her hand shook as if of its own volition. Smoke rose like an odorless incense. I looked up at the faces of my torturers, hovering close as moons, while beyond, the black snakes swayed above us all, taking the latest event to the world.
Day 15.
I was sprawled on the floor where they left me after the operation, the woodburning tool still lying next to me. I reached up carefully to touch my face and felt the rough edges of a bandage taped below my eyes and above my mouth. My nostrils were filled with packing and my tongue, clotted with scabs and blisters, had dried painfully from breathing through my mouth. I rolled carefully over on my side, then rose to my feet.
The windows were bright white. It was morning, a sunny fall morning somewhere in Belgium. For a moment, I imagined that I could simply walk over to the elevator doors, which would open and take me down to the street where I would call the police.
A nightmare ends with morning. There might be a residue carried through the day, an uneasiness, or the unsettled feeling that everything was slightly off, the world out of kilter. But these effects rarely lingered past noon. My ordeal seemed only to deepen with each passing day. I remembered Nin’s reassurance that I would not die. But on this morning, my face ablaze with pain, I wasn’t so sure.
I barely recognized the man in the mirror, half-obscured by a brown-stained dressing. I pulled at the tape carefully and lowered the bandage. My nose was swollen and bluish-red, with black marks along the nostrils like the burns of cigarettes left too long on the edge of a table. Yellow fluid dripped from the packing. I pulled at it gently and felt a pure deep pain, so strong that I quit moving and breathing for a moment to stop it. I left the packing where it was and replaced the bandage carefully below my eyes, bloodshot and wild. I reached over and carefully marked the day in the plaster with my thumbnail, each mark a day lost to pain and boredom.
I opened my mouth and saw my blackened tongue, dry and cracked. I filled my hands with water and raised them up slowly, taking a sip, th
en gulp after gulp, drinking as fast as I could. Bits of scabs and drainage travelled along with the water, but I drank more. I rubbed a little water around the exposed parts of my face, then ran my fingers through my hair. I looked slightly more like myself, but damaged, changed for good. As I walked back into my room, each step jarred the pain at the center of my face so that I crept forward with my hands held out like those of a tightrope walker.
Blackbeard lay in my bed with the blanket pulled up to his chin. He ran his fingers over his face and mocked me.
“Oh, my nose… oh, my tongue… it hurts so bad, Mommy. Make it stop.”
“Fuck you,” I whistled, the words triggering a new blaze of pain.
Blackbeard jumped up. “You talk in your sleep, you know. Calling out for people. Talking. Last night something about a meeting in Berlin.”
I said nothing.
“Perhaps you will someday spill your secrets, pass along the names of others involved in your so-called work. When you do, we will certainly be ready.”
I put one hand against the wall and leaned on it. “Shut up, will you.”
“Blackbeard shook his head. He walked over to the windowsill, took a cigarette from the pack, and lit it. He gazed out the white window for a moment. “It’s a beautiful day outside, Gast. A touch of what you Americans call Indian summer, a last few warm days before the fall rains begin. Lovers out on blankets along riverbanks. Schoolchildren out for excursions. Tourists everywhere. Unfortunately for you, you cannot enjoy this beautiful day because you are otherwise engaged.” He shrugged. “A shame.”
“Haven’t you done enough already?”
“No. There is much to do still. Besides, yesterday’s activities did not generate the level of interest that we expected.” He walked closer and whispered close to my ear. “I have to ask you to work with us a little more closely. Your resistance is simply prolonging your suffering. Practice your screaming, please.”
I said nothing, then asked the question that had been on my mind for days. “Why don’t you just shut up and kill me now?”
Blackbeard paused, then rolled his eyes. “That would be so obvious. So crude. So… Archduke Ferdinand,” he said with great disdain. “It is easy to kill. In your country, children go to school and do it. What a typically American idea, that I should just kill you. How should I do it, Eliott Gast? Should I strangle you?” He walked over to me and put his heavy hands around my throat. Though his rough fingers only shook me slightly, they triggered new pain that made the room turn gray at the corners.
“Stop it!”
He lifted his hands away from my neck, then reached around his back. “Perhaps I should shoot you?” He placed the snubbed barrel of a dull silver pistol between my eyes.
As its cold metal pressed into my skin, I stared straight ahead.
“Or should I set you on fire?” He put the pistol back in the waistband of his jeans and held the glowing end of his cigarette toward me.
“Or should I assfuck you to death.” He sidled around behind me and began to knock against me, again triggering new bursts of pain with each jolt.
Blackbeard leaned toward me. “My thick cock would make short work of you.” Then he whispered just inches from my ear. “People are certainly finding this scene intriguing and disturbing, don’t you think, Eliott Gast?” He nodded up to the ceiling, as if we were actors and the audience watched from above. In the days since we first spoke, Blackbeard had taken to striding around the apartment in a much more overblown way, a conqueror surveying a captured city. He sickened me.
“No one is amused by the pain of others.” I leaned against the wall, steadying myself with both hands. Closing one eye seemed to make the pain dissipate a little.
Blackbeard bent over laughing. His eyes glistened behind his mask. “On the contrary, people are always fascinated by pain and suffering, as long as it is not their own. There is a word for it. In German, of course.” He paused for a moment. “Schadenfreude. To take pleasure in the misfortune of others. This urge is as old as mankind, a part of human nature, yes?”
“Perhaps. But people have empathy as well.”
“You amaze me, Eliott Gast. A man who singlehandedly affected the lives of millions for the worse now talks of empathy. If you had any, you would not have played the role that you did in the American economic conspiracy.”
I waved him away and turned toward the wall. “Go now,” I said quietly, hoping that Blackbeard had an ounce of compassion.
“Oh yes. One more thing. Your nurse is off-duty today.”
I paused. Nin was my only possible way out of this apartment. She had hinted that she was willing to help me, but she seemed so powerless.
“She is meeting with others in our group so we can reassess her… personal resolve,” Blackbeard said, with seriousness. “But you should not doubt her conviction. She is the most radical among us. Don’t let her appearance fool you. What is happening to you was all her idea, you know.”
Could this be true? A new wave of pain interrupted and I pressed the side of my face against the cool wall.
“She sends you this.” A sudden jab in my thigh made me jerk forward painfully into the wall. Looking down I saw Blackbeard’s hand on a syringe. He pushed the plunger quickly. When he was done, he left the syringe hanging from my leg and walked quickly from the room.
I pulled the syringe out and threw it after him. My leg burned and I hobbled over to the futon.
I lay on my back and let whatever drug Blackbeard had injected me with take effect.
Day 16.
A lost day spent sleeping and recovering. I turned to find Nin on the windowsill at one point, an apparition. She was beautiful, the white window behind her like the clouds of heaven, the checkered scarf transformed into an ancient vestment. I stared at her in drugged pleasure, my nurse and angel, so still and powerful.
When I looked back again, the angel was gone, replaced by the Doctor, who squatted close to me, his hands full of bandages splotched yellow and brown. When he saw my eyes open, he smiled and gave me a quick wave, as if we were friends off on an adventure. Of the three, I found the Doctor the most puzzling. He was both torturer and healer. I relied on his expertise, such that it was. While Blackbeard seemed to be responsible for my ordeal – and I believed that all ideas came from him, not from Nin, as he had hinted – it was the Doctor who had to carry them out. Behind his Zorro mask, his black eyes stared intently at me, charting my progress and recovery, swabbing my mouth with green disinfectant.
Even with my torturer so close at hand, I fell back asleep. I could not control the will of my body. It urged me to eat, drink, sleep – protecting me from my own mind, which wanted to do nothing at all. I sensed inside me the powerful instincts that had been hidden among the surface cravings and thoughts. My will to survive outweighed my current, damaged state. I drank water from the bottle, lay still to let time heal me, slept in the face of danger.
Day 17.
Why is this happening? The question that had haunted my thoughts since I first found myself in the white apartment circled back once again. I knew the reasons that Blackbeard had given. They wanted to do something new. They wanted to leave me alive but punished, as an example to the world.
But this afternoon, half dreaming from codeine, I tried to discern what led my captors on. Their anti-American, anti-EU stance was clear. What they were for was less so. During one of his rants, Blackbeard had spoken of Flaams Blok, a group that had been in the news often during my time in Brussels. Most of my colleagues regarded them as dangerously right-wing and definitely bad for business. Blackbeard had complained that the Flemish Block was not committed enough to its cause, unwilling to do more than rattle the sword of nationalism. Perhaps Blackbeard was trying to impress someone, possibly a former colleague. I was simply part of a price war of decency and kindness, devalued and sinking lowe
r. Although I regretted my role in this terrible game, I had to wonder what the response would be. What would it take to one-up Blackbeard? Ten online hostages? Live execution of innocents? Anything seemed horribly possible.
I slept to free myself from imagination, which I knew to be both a comforter and tormentor.
Day 18.
I found myself waiting for Nin to appear, listening for her steps. Her absence worried me. Had Blackbeard sensed that she was going to help me and punished her for it? I revisited every conversation, wondering whether something we had said had marked her as a collaborator. Blackbeard would not take kindly to dissent among his group. I imagined Nin imprisoned in another hidden room somewhere, trapped as I was, awaiting Blackbeard’s lectures, his punishment.
I sat on the futon with my back against the wall, steadying myself against any movement that might trigger new pain. I had come to think of pain as an evil jockey riding my body, digging in his heels every now and then, applying the whip. Fueled by pain and frustration, I decided to stop waiting for something to happen, for some miracle to set me free. During the long, empty day I plotted and planned, moving in and out of a codeine haze that blanketed my mind but also gave me ideas, pure inspiration that would lead me out of this room. I was David to Blackbeard’s Goliath. I needed a strategy that would let me bring him down fast and hard. Its elements started to appear and come together in a way that made me smile, that gave me hope and some version of courage.
While trying to spoon a few grams of rice down my throat for dinner, I heard what sounded like a jet coursing through the white sky. I looked at the painted window but could see nothing. Its distant roar reminded me that this was not the first time I had been a hostage. The first incident happened so long ago that I had almost forgotten it, relegating it to a second-tier tale for dinner parties.