Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  But it meant a month away, followed by him tethered to the computer in what little free time he had. Wilmington was a three-and-a-half-hour drive, and with my work schedule . . . we wouldn’t survive that. Not then. I knew it with the kind of certainty of things beyond thought: that water is wet, that fire is hot. It was a given.

  I knew it as clearly as I knew that it was wrong to delete the message, though that was what I did, as wrong as lying about it when he got more and more restless about not hearing from them. And he knew, with exactly the same kind of surety, that I had lied when he finally reached the school—too late to be admitted to the course—and was told that they had indeed called and left a message to get back to them. It could have been a mistake, of course, a wrong number or a faulty answering machine, but he saw through those possibilities right away and called me on it.

  Maybe I should have kept on denying it, but I always know when the jig is up, and I had never wanted to lie to him. So I told him the truth, and then I said the worst thing I could have possibly said.

  “I did it for us.”

  And while that was true, in a way, it was what killed us. How’s that for irony? Not the Alanis Morissette kind, but the real deal, hard and bitter, like the sword you drew to defend yourself turning into a snake in your hand. I swore I’d never lie to him again, but that didn’t matter. It was over. He moved out the following week. My biggest, most reckless, most desperate of lies had backfired, as they nearly always did, and secured the very thing it was trying to prevent. Marcus walked out and never came back.

  Not helping, I tell myself.

  I sit up with my feet on the concrete floor, feeling along the edge of the bed platform under the thin mattress. In parts the cement edge is almost sharp. I pull my left hand down toward it, thinking that if I can strike the manacle hard against the edge, it might break, but the chain isn’t long enough. I shuffle down the bed, as close to the ring in the wall as I can get, and try again. I’ve bought myself two, maybe three extra links of chain.

  It’s just enough. With care, I can move my left arm in a short arc that will bring the iron cuff down on the edge of the bed platform. I push the thin plasticky mattress aside and, when it snaps back into place, fold it back and sit on it. I practice the movement, raising my left hand to shoulder height, then moving it down till the manacle meets the concrete lip. I do it four, five times at quarter speed, then I brace myself.

  The manacle is everything in your life that is broken, I think. It’s your job and your loneliness and your stupid impulse to lie, to wreck whatever you have that is good . . .

  I take a breath, holding my arm out, my teeth gritted, then I slam it down, hard as I can.

  The pain screams through my wrist, where it meets the concrete, and I know that I cry out even as I hug it to my chest, cradling it in my right hand. I missed the manacle entirely, and the full force of the blow seems to have caught my radius. I can’t tell right away if it’s broken, but it feels like it might be.

  Stupid.

  I hug my wrist against my breasts and rock silently back and forth, trying not to sob, the heavy chain stretched to its limit. After a moment like this, with the initial agony draining away, turning to an insistent ache that spikes with the slightest movement, I start to test the wound with the cautious fingers of my right hand. I feel no bloody slickness, no obvious tearing of the skin and flesh. The pain is all in the bone. I twist my left hand minutely, and for a moment it feels like it might be OK, but then it blazes, and it’s like a light comes on in my head, a hard, burning light, impossible to look at.

  I go still again, and now I realize that the tears I have been resisting are running down my cheeks. I let them fall, sitting motionless for perhaps as much as five whole minutes, and then I lift my injured arm carefully, feeling the way the tug of the chain makes my wrist groan. Bracing myself with my good hand, I lift my feet up onto the mattress and kneel as close to the wall as I can, facing it. I find the most neutral position I can for my left hand and begin to feel along the chain with my right. If I can’t break the manacle, maybe I can find a link that could be twisted apart, or a gap in the ring mount on the wall.

  My fingers work slowly, methodically, inspecting every surface, every inch, working my way from the wall up the chain to the manacle.

  “What did you do?” my captor had asked.

  I keep thinking he, but it could be a woman. The voice was being altered. I am sure of that. But the English sounded good. So not a local Greek. I think back but the memory of the voice in the dark is like the memory of the house, and I can’t home in on its specifics. But then a detail comes back to me.

  “What did you do?” he had asked. But then, the next time, after I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, he had added, “What did you see?”

  Strange. I search my memory of our last visit to Crete, but all I can think of is sun and drinks on the beach and laughter and, of course, Marcus, wonderful, diffident, brilliant Marcus, slipping slowly away from me. I had known it by the end of the week, days before the fiasco of the phone message. There was something in his manner, something weary, drained, and sad, like a lost child. I had felt it, even if I denied it to myself, lied about it. It was the best week of my life, but by the end of it, something was wrong, broken.

  And now that I think about it, it hadn’t just been him and me. We had done everything together, the six of us, for five days, but on the last day, the day after the cave, things had been different.

  The cave.

  My hands have been working along the links of the chain, probing, checking, but I stop, suddenly chilled. The half memory of the cave sends a ripple of unease through me, though I don’t know why. My hands are still as my mind tries to focus.

  It had been our one excursion, a tour to a little monastery in the mountains, followed by a visit to the cave where, in mythology, Zeus was born. The ride had taken ages, and we arrived tired and irritable, wishing we had stayed on the beach. The cave itself was at the end of a hike. Melissa had rented a donkey to ride and then complained how much it smelled. It was a deep cave, full of connected caverns, whose stalactites and draperies were lit with specially positioned flood lamps. It had been chilly and atmospheric and . . . what?

  Unsettling. Creepy. Something.

  We split up. Explored separately, but when we got back on the bus, everything was different. Tense. Quiet. We went back to the beach at the hotel, but it wasn’t the same. That afternoon Simon ran his Jet Ski aground on the beach and got into a huge shouting match with the guy in charge of the rentals about where he had been and how fast he had been going, and Melissa went to bed early. The whole week had ended under a cloud that I, obsessed with my souring relationship with Marcus, had managed to forget.

  What had happened in the cave, and how can I not remember? All my other vague amnesia is about the last few days. This was years ago. I remember the rest of the trip perfectly. Why not this, and why do I think it is what my captor wants to hear about?

  But that makes no sense. Our mood that day had just been about boredom, tiredness, and a little sunstroke that triggered some petty domestic disputes. What could any of that matter to anyone else? It’s not related. It can’t be. And even if it is, I have nothing to offer my interrogator that might make my situation any better. I remind myself of what I already know.

  You have to get out.

  I feel cautiously around my wrist. The wound is still not bleeding, but it is beginning to swell, and that will only make the manacle tighter. I finish checking the chain for damage. Nothing. It’s all quite solid, and the chain itself doesn’t seem to have any of the rust-bitten characteristics of the ring or cuff.

  New, then. Set specially.

  I don’t like that, but I can’t think about it, as I can’t think about the pain in my wrist. The chain feels strong, solid. The ring is older and more weathered, but it is thick and crude and solidly embedded in the wall. That leaves the manacle on my wrist. The hinge is simple: one ha
lf of the cuff fastened through a hole in the other. The workmanship feels rough, almost certainly handmade rather than done by machine, and I wonder just how old the manacle is.

  Ottoman. Venetian, I think, remembering the age of the house.

  Is that where I am? Some ancient cellar of what was once a fortress? Images come to me: a bedroom window looking out over the cliffs, stone countertops in a long kitchen, a spacious living room, its windows dark and rain streaked . . .

  The dark red pool on the floor.

  Something lying behind the overturned armchair. Someone. Hair matted with blood, face streaked with black and red, thick and awful and . . .

  I stiffen, the horror of the thing stopping my heart. A memory? I can’t be sure. Everything is too confused, though the other flashes of the house seem real, other sleeping parts of my body and mind stirring to them in recognition. But the blood? The body? I force myself to look closer at the image, but I feel only dread and a kind of awestruck revulsion.

  I do not know who it is.

  I have been sitting very still as these things go through my mind, and the pain in my wrist has ebbed out of my consciousness, but after the initial paralysis, the impressions of what I may have seen remind me of how badly I need to get out of here. I push down the throbbing tenderness in my wrist and refocus on the manacle.

  The lock is crude, barrel shaped. Perhaps with a pin or something similar, I might be able to trip it.

  Better chance of that than of shattering the cuff against the concrete bed, even if you don’t break your arm in the process.

  I feel around for my solitary sandal and inspect it with my fingers, hoping for the prong of a buckle or something I might use, but it’s all soft parts. I feel my bra, but it has no underwiring, and the clasp at the back is tiny and plastic.

  No use there.

  I scoot carefully to the edge of the bed, doubly cautious now about overtesting the length of the chain, feeling its weight starting to wake the ache in my wrist, and drop my feet to the floor again. I stretch out my left arm to give myself as much range as I can, bite back the mounting pain, and reach down with my right hand.

  Maybe there’s something—a nail or discarded screw—that I might use . . .

  The floor feels swept clean, and I can reach no more than a few square feet before the angle of the metal cuff against my wounded wrist becomes more than I can stand and I have to stop.

  I sit up again, nursing my wrist, my breathing rushed and uneven, and I try to decide how much more floor I might be able to cover if I push through the agony a little more.

  Not much. The chain is less than a yard long, and my reach is not just about pain. If I ignore the agony and stretch as far as is physically possible, I’ll get a few more inches at best. The chance that those inches will contain my lifeline seems slim.

  But it’s possible, so I have to try. I find myself wishing that I could somehow detect a usable object with some sci-fi device, like the kind they use on Kristen’s show, something that would light up and show me exactly how far I have to get to reach it. Going through the pain I am about to inflict on myself without even knowing if there is anything out there to be had is maddening.

  But I climb back down onto the floor, this time twisting the chain carefully to make sure it doesn’t knot in on itself, and I think I have bought myself an extra couple of inches right there. For a moment I squat where I am, my right hand tracing the places I have already been, lightly, as if smoothing someone’s hair, trying not to think about what else might be there in the dark, the bugs and rodent droppings . . .

  Rats?

  Even there, with all the other horrors crowding in on me, the prospect of rats sends a visceral shiver of revulsion through my body. I hate rats. I saw two back in Charlotte only a few weeks ago in the dumpsters behind the store: long and brown, furtive but unafraid.

  I swallow, then put my hand lightly, palm-down, on the ground, fingers splayed, feeling for something, anything, tracing a rough, expanding oval on the floor.

  Then farther, the pain mounting.

  Farther.

  The manacle is lodged against the heel of my hand—bone, muscle, and sinew roaring in protest as I strain against it, right hand sweeping. I pull harder, and my oval expands another half inch. And another. A cry rises in my throat and comes out of my mouth, a long, teeth-set, relentless wail of fury and desperation. It comes out of me as a shout and keeps going as I reach and claw for whatever might . . .

  There!

  I touch something. Small and hard and long.

  A nail?

  But the pain is making me move too quickly. I brush it, and I hear it shift, a thin tinkling sound as it rolls out of reach.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “There was this guy during the war,” said Marcus. “A Brit called Jasper Maskelyne. Good name, huh? He was a stage magician in the thirties and forties.”

  We were sitting on the patio at the back of the villa while Simon and Brad hovered over the burgers, chicken, and bell peppers sizzling on a charcoal grill; and Melissa carried a bottle of chilled white wine, topping off everyone’s glass whether they wanted her to or not. It was a beautiful, warm evening, but the clouds were gathering again over the sea, so Brad and Simon, conferring like surgeons planning someone’s bypass, had opted to fire up the grill as soon as we got back from Knossos. Their focus seemed to open up a space for Marcus, and he had launched into his story without preamble or explanation.

  “Maskelyne figured he could put his knowledge of sleight of hand and illusion to work for the war effort,” he said. “So he joined the Royal Engineers. Studied camouflage techniques and added his own stage trickery. He didn’t want to just hide stuff from the enemy—he wanted to mislead them, right? They say stage magic is all about misdirection, about drawing attention to one hand while the other one does all the real work.”

  “So what did he do?” asked Simon, moving to the burgers with a spatula only to get a headshake from Brad.

  “I already flipped them,” he said.

  “The German invasion of Crete was a nightmare for both sides,” said Marcus. “Heavy casualties. The Allies were massively undersupplied and only had a few aircraft, while the Germans had to come in by glider and parachute and then consolidate their position. There were brutal attack and counterattack moves for the next two weeks, but the Nazis had massive air superiority in the region, and the Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, local partisans, and other ragtag imported troops didn’t really have a chance. There’s a monument in Rethymno commemorating them. The fighting was all along this coastline. Awful stuff, and after the Nazis won, they led reprisal raids against the nearby villages, rounding up people, imprisoning them, executing them—”

  “Well, this is cheery vacation chat,” said Melissa.

  “What was left of the Allied force limped off to Alexandria on the Egyptian coast,” said Marcus, ignoring her. “Ferried at night by whatever bits of the Royal Navy survived the German air assault.”

  “What does this have to do with your magician?” asked Brad, nibbling something he had fished off the grill with a long-handled fork.

  “He was in Alexandria,” said Marcus. “Which was the Allies’ only toehold in the region. It was the spot they used to launch their counterattack against Rommel and the Italians in North Africa, then the Allied assault on Sicily and the backdoor into Germany. After the Battle of Britain, take the Russians out of the equation, and holding Alexandria becomes the Allies’ most significant achievement in the war. Without it, they lose, plain and simple.”

  “Is this what you’re like in class?” asked Simon. “I feel like I’m in school again. It’s freaking me out.”

  “Shhh,” said Kristen. “I want to hear.”

  Marcus smiled. It probably was, I thought, what he was like in class, and that was why he seemed so at ease, so in control of his story. I liked watching him, hearing the way he built the narrative, laying it out like one of those Greek myths I had so loved in college. It was se
xy.

  “So there’s Jasper Maskelyne,” said Marcus, “and he knows—everyone knew—that if they lose Alexandria, they are toast, so he puts his mind to using all those old sleight of hand tricks he had learned, and he comes up with this amazing idea: make the enemy think that the Allies are stationed somewhere else and, to make sure the city doesn’t get flattened anyway, hide it.”

  “What?” exclaimed Simon skeptically. “How?”

  “Well, the first part of the misdirection is to draw the eye to the stuff that doesn’t matter, right?” said Marcus. “So he gets the army to lay out big painted sheets that, from the air, look like buildings. They add plywood aircraft models and inflatable tanks, all stuff the Brits would do again in southern England in 1944 before the D-day landings so that the Germans wouldn’t know where the attack was going to go. He makes sure Alexandria is in full blackout at night, and then sets up fake lights farther down the coast, including a lighthouse, so that when the Nazi night raids come, they bomb the wrong place. He claims he even used a complex mirror system so that when you looked at the city in daylight, it appeared to be several miles from where it really was.”

  “Claims?” I said, getting a sinking feeling.

  “Yeah,” said Brad. “What does that mean?”

  “Means it almost certainly wasn’t true,” said Marcus, smiling. “Maskelyne was a deceiver by trade. A liar. And like a lot of liars, he was ultimately feathering his own nest, building his reputation by claiming responsibility for stuff that was done by other people or that never actually happened at all. He got a lot of press, made some money, but came under more and more critical scrutiny and eventually died a poor and embittered drunk.”

  There was an odd, baffled silence. I got up.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  I went back inside at the closest thing to a walk that I could manage but then ran up the stairs, locked myself in the bathroom, and vomited into the toilet.