by Fitch, Stona
Nin shrugged. “No one cares what happens to a senator.”
“Your indifference truly astounds me. Imagine if I were your brother. Or your husband. How would you like to see him mistreated like this?”
During the long pause, Nin’s eyes stared and mine stared back.
“I have no husband,” she said quietly.
So much shouting made my head throb, and I had to sit down on the floor.
She broke off and walked toward the door. “Our files on you are open to the public now,” she said. “They can decide whether you deserve this treatment or not, Monsieur Gast.”
She marched from the room and I stared after her. I picked up a half-full food carton and threw it, making a convincing splash of cold broth along the wall. Nin was my only hope for escaping the apartment, and now she seemed to be under as much scrutiny as I was. How would I tell her about my plan? Who could possibly survive under such a close watch? Who doesn’t carry something with him that he wouldn’t want revealed to the world – a scheme, a secret, a sin?
When I was eight, my brother and I turned into businessmen. We melted down lead weights and molded them into soldiers, which we painted and placed in cedar boxes that we decorated – a forest for a medieval knight, the Tower of London for an English guard, a line of bushes for a Confederate sharpshooter. We took our soldiers door to door through Roanoke and sold them for fifty cents each. Darby and I did a good trade with the boys in our neighborhood and started to make money, which wasn’t very hard since my father had given us the molding kit for Christmas and the local body shop let us take as many lead weights as we could carry away.
Our proud father marched us into the Old Dominion Savings and Loan, where a special account was set up for our business. We were both issued passbooks stamped with the same blurry purple ink I sometimes saw on the white fat of supermarket steaks. After that, my father let us wander farther and farther from home in the afternoon, and our expanding sales route gave us license to go to previously forbidden parts of town.
One afternoon we found ourselves in Simms, where the houses tilted and the lawns were threadbare as attic rugs. We knocked on the front door of a corner house that looked slightly better kept than the others. A big-shouldered black dog with dripping jowls was tethered to the porch swing, but it only came forward to sniff us.
The door opened slowly and a thin black boy about our own age stood behind it. He wore a dirty short-sleeved shirt and tan shorts. His feet were bare and I could see that his toenails were as long as claws. A gray cat rubbed around his narrow shins.
“Whatch you want?” His voice was surprisingly deep. Black wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes and he kept his head cocked to one side when he spoke.
My brother and I glanced at each other, both realizing that he was blind. Our pity quickly gave way to a more immediate question – what would a blind boy want with a lead soldier? For a moment, we felt foolish and embarrassed. We both thought of running away. But then Darby spoke. “We’re selling lead soldiers. They’re fifty cents.”
The boy stuck his hand forward. His fingers were pocked with pink scars, his fingernails long and untended. Darby put a soldier in his hand, a Union rifleman, I noticed. Perhaps he felt this would be more compelling. I was already backing away from the porch. We should have gone over to the new developments on the outskirts of town, where the houses were close together and filled with scrubbed white families with salesmen fathers, mothers who were Brownie leaders. The pink pads of the boy’s fingers rubbed over and over the soldier as if he were trying to decipher it. Finally, he stopped rubbing and bent down to set it carefully on the floor.
“I’ll take one.” He turned and walked back into the house, trailing his hand along the wall. I followed him with my eyes and saw the long grease mark that bisected the house about four feet off the floor. When he retraced that line a few moments later, he carried with him a women’s cigarette purse with a pack of Kools and a Zippo lighter poking out of the brown suede. He turned over the case and reached into the other pocket, fishing out a folded wad of bills. His fingers peeled apart the ones, and tens, then carefully handed us a bill from the stack.
“Here.” He pushed a twenty at me.
I looked at Darby. He shrugged. I turned back and stared at the boy’s hands. My honesty was being tested by God and a blind black boy with greasy fingers who couldn’t tell one bill from another. I looked again at my brother, who kept his face perfectly still, abstaining from this particular test of character in a way that I immediately found cowardly. Perhaps it was greed, perhaps it was anger that my brother didn’t at least offer his advice – a quick shake of his head would have steered me toward honesty – but I took the twenty. Then I handed the blind boy two shining quarters bearing the grim, neutral face of Washington, who could never tell a lie.
“Thanks,” I said. And I meant it. Thanks for the money. I could already see the purple stamps in the passbook edging up. Thanks for letting me get away with something for once. My brother had always been the troublemaker, but now I had disgraced him and claimed his role as the baddest. We turned and walked back down the shattered walkway, then ran all the way home.
That evening, Darby told our father every detail of the event, adding a white lie about how he had warned me not to take the money. The next morning, I found myself back at the house in Simms. I handed the blind boy the twenty and a set of a dozen of our best soldiers. Then, while my father watched intently from the convertible, I mouthed a laughably self-abasing paragraph he had helped me write. In a choked voice, I admitted I had stolen the money deliberately, that I had sinned, and that I hoped that God and His goodness would rescue me from my low tendencies. I had taken advantage of an affliction and for that had demeaned not only myself, but my family, the state of Virginia, and my race.
At the end of my speech, the blind boy picked up the soldiers, pocketed the twenty, and gave a small smile. For a moment I wondered if the joke was on me. Darby said he was almost positive blind people could tell the difference between bills.
The screen door slammed closed and the blind boy’s fingernails scraped back along the wall into the dark center of the house. I got in the car, relieved and drained. My father said nothing as we drove away, then stopped the convertible so fast my head bumped the dashboard.
“Go tell ’em what you did.” He pointed at the next house, a gray-boarded farmhouse with rusted metal chairs jammed on the porch.
I rubbed my forehead. “What? They don’t know anything about it.”
“They will now.” He reached over and opened my door, then pushed me out with his boot. In all, I played the role of penitent more than a dozen times, enduring the laughter and empty stares of strangers. Once my father’s lesson was complete, it burned into my soul so thoroughly that it could never be erased. It was my first true sin.
It was no wonder that people held in captivity eventually confess to anything. Here I had hours, days even, to do nothing but revisit my mistakes and wonder if they were to blame for my present state. It was hard not to cast Blackbeard as St. Peter, judging all real or imagined strayings from the way of the righteous. In my youth, there were girls I lied to in order to bed them, or car them, or field them. At Princeton, I turned in my thesis, as well as a list of a dozen SDS members from Campus Club. For this, my thesis advisor thanked me and added that my government thanked me too. At the language institute, I cheated on a Spanish test to qualify for an embassy position. That cheating led to a year-long internship in the Santiago embassy, where I taught the young, spoiled sons of Pinochet’s henchmen how to speak English and blow smoke rings and do the famed Tiger railroad cheer. Then there was IBIS, and the work that Blackbeard and the others found so reprehensible. But my sins didn’t end there…
Nin rushed into the room quickly. “We don’t have much time, Monsieur Gast,” she said.
I sat up and buttoned m
y shirt. “Time for what?”
“To talk in confidence.”
I pointed up at the ceiling. “In confidence?”
“I have a friend who is handling the documentation this afternoon. He has promised that the system will experience a brief loss of transmission.” She glanced at her pink watch. “Starting now.”
“Please help me,” I said. “Get me the hell out of here. Please, do whatever you can.”
She shook her head. “All I can do is tell you what I know so you can prepare.”
“Prepare for what?”
“For what comes next.”
“Don’t they have their money yet?” I had hoped that money would draw my time as a hostage to a close.
“They have reached their goal and more,” she said curtly. “This is where our group is in disagreement. Some of us, and you cannot mention this to anyone…”
I nodded.
“Some of us think that this has gone too far already, that the threat of what we were doing was more effective than the actual doing of it.”
I said nothing, but the possibility of an end to my ordeal lifted my heart. I took dissent within Blackbeard’s ranks as a good sign.
“We are convinced that continuing beyond this point will be self-defeating. We have sent our message. Any more of this would be unnecessarily cruel and repetitious. But others are insistent that we proceed and make more money, reach more people.”
“And keep me here longer?”
“Yes. And I must say again that none of this was my idea, Monsieur Gast. Our group is diverse by its nature. Various factions are at odds with others.”
“Just help get me out of here.”
“There are too many controls, too many safeguards.” She glanced at her watch. “We are wasting valuable time discussing the impossible.”
I opened my mouth and pushed out my blackened tongue at her. A pulpy crack the color of a ripe persimmon ran down the center like a faultline of pain. Every word I spoke or breath I took brushed a nerve.
She gathered her scarf around her. “My God! Stop it.”
“This is your work. If you aren’t proud of it, then apologize for it.”
The apartment was quiet for a moment. I could hear the air whirring out through the ducts, where the black snakes were still for once. The glass windows ticked softly like a radiator, as they did late in the day when the sun began to fail.
Nin turned to me, her brown eyes glistening with tears. “Of course I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you. I’m so very sorry.”
“Then help me.”
She nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”
I knelt next to her. “I want to unmask your pirate friend.”
“He’s well known to the authorities. This has made him extremely vigilant about secrecy. You’ll have to kill him first.”
“I can stun him for a moment, but I’ll need your help. Together, we should be able to bring him down and show his face to the cameras.”
“The cameras are not always on,” she said. “Besides, there are often many people around him.”
“Then I need you to tell me when the time is right.”
“I’ll give you a signal… I’ll raise my right hand high.”
“Good,” I said. “We’ll need to do it when he least expects it. I’ll hit him on the head.”
“With what?”
“Something. A weapon. I’m working on it. He’ll be surprised, stunned. That’s when we can pull down the mask.”
“It will be very dangerous.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you,” I said, unsure how I would keep that promise.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Open the doors. Show me the way out of here.”
Nin stared at me for a moment, then leaned forward and pressed her fingers against my forehead gently. She held them there for a moment, then drew back again, as if surprised by her own actions. Her touch sent tears to my eyes. “We have only a few more moments, Eliott,” she said softly. “I must tell you something else.”
“Yes?”
“You must know that what comes next will be very difficult.”
“What could be worse than what they’ve done already?”
“Believe me, it is worse.” Nin turned to me and I saw her dark eyes darting behind the folds of her scarf. “Let me end with the most important point. I cannot stop the others from continuing. But I can tell you this. Your body makes you a monkey. Your mind makes you who you are. Your mind will survive intact even when your body is damaged.”
I smiled thinly. “I’d prefer to have both. Body and mind. They tend to work well together.”
“Of course. But our situation now is less than ideal.” Nin paced around the room. “They are committed to moving ahead to the next level.”
“Because there is so much money coming in?”
“This is one of the reasons. But there are others… more personal.”
Before I could push for more information, one of the black snakes lowered slowly from the duct. Audio on, said a bored voice. “… and as I suggested,” Nin began in her schoolteacher tone, “you might use the time you have to reflect on your life.”
“I have done little but that,” I shot back, playing the role of angry hostage. It was true. There were no distractions any more. I couldn’t read without being reminded of the absurdity of reading. I couldn’t exercise without realizing its futility. The hours slipped by in a lost sort of way, as if I were on a long airplane flight with an uncertain destination. Our conversation gave me new hope. With Nin’s promise to help me, I was no longer alone.
She handed me a packet of codeine tablets. “These are to be taken one every four hours. No more.”
“Or what? I might accidentally die peacefully and deny the world the pleasure of watching me suffer?”
“I have said enough for now. You have your instructions.” Nin stood, her eyes distracted. She had taken a risk talking to me, and seemed unsure whether she had gotten away with it. She walked toward the other room, trailing one hand across the back of my neck as she passed. It had been weeks since I felt the hand of another, except for when I was being tortured. Her touch, even so fleeting, brought tears to my eyes again, and I turned my face toward the wall to hide them.
Day 22.
Old bottles. Drowned dogs. Water-logged Playboys. Darby and I used to walk the creek beds and riverbanks looking for whatever might have washed up. We found a wad of money stuffed in a pair of tights once, fifty dollars or so, and that kept us going for weeks. I suppose this was the ongoing theme of our childhood, looking for money.
On a warm October afternoon, I was far ahead of Darby and too busy looking at my feet to notice that we weren’t alone any more. Three older boys I’d never seen before trailed me on the riverbank. They all wore denim jackets, black jeans, and boots. I could hear a jangling of wallet chains. Every now and then, one would shout something in a thick, backwoods accent or throw a rock at me. I pretended not to notice. Then they rushed ahead and stood in a line ahead of me. I tried to walk between them, but they tripped me and bent my arm behind me.
The boys dragged me quickly across the creek bed and pushed my face down in a scum-covered pool edged with green. I held my breath and waited for them to let me free. Then, as I ran out of air, I opened my eyes and stared through the tobacco-colored water blotted with darker leaves. Bubbles ran from my nose like silver droplets of mercury set free from a thermometer. My chest ached and when I arched my back toward the surface, the boy who held my hair tightly intertwined in his fingers pushed down even harder. I could hear muffled laughter through the water. I struggled as hard as I could, and then I couldn’t any more. I breathed, and the tainted water made me choke and convulse so hard that the boy let me loose.
Or
so I thought. One of the boys stumbled across the creek bed, his hand over a bloody patch on the back of his head. Darby had finally caught up. I lay on the creek bed and watched my brother chase the boys with half a brick in his hand. He threw it and hit the last boy in the small of his back, propelling him into the woods. They moved on, a pack of wild dogs.
Darby walked over to where I lay. “Leave you alone for a minute and you go and get yourself in a bind.” He wiped my face with his shirtsleeve.
I coughed and spat out the sourness in my mouth.
“They’re from Gallensberg, mark my words. They’d drown you for smokes.”
“I don’t have any smokes.”
“Then for the fun of it. The way farm boys do with kittens.”
I didn’t like being the comparison. “I never did anything to them.”
Darby shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Being innocent never meant you wouldn’t get beat up.” His brow furrowed for a moment. “Matter of fact, it generally means you will get beat up, as far as I can tell.”
“Next time I see them, I’ll kick their ass.”
Darby shook his head. “Next time you see them will be in the newspaper when they get arrested for doing something stupid. Until then, steer clear of them.”
We walked back up the creek bed, me spitting, my brother checking the banks for any other boys from Gallensburg. We never walked there again.
In the empty room, I could hear my breathing and nothing else. I stalked through the apartment, checking for anyone else who may have come in. My brother wasn’t here to protect me any more. I was on my own.
I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror. As a boy, I had spent hours studying my face, entranced by the fast flow of emotions, one after another like the shimmering reflection of leaves on a bedroom wall. Young boys are the world’s most avid narcissists. As the years passed, I avoided mirrors, displeased with what time was doing to me. I had a new reason to look – to survey the damage.