John stepped back. They’re going to kill me, he thought and felt cold terror crawling up his back. His heart and throat turned to ice. They will come down and kill me.
He fell to the mattress and asked himself how they would do it. Shoot him, or stab him? Would it hurt? And here, my God, in this hole that stank like urine. What an end for a man chosen to fulfill a prophecy. A choking ironic laugh spewed out of his lungs. How lucky the Padrone had been — to die peacefully after a long life and in the belief he had successfully accomplished his task, just in time not to have to witness how wrong he had been after all. Ursula had told him all along. The belief he had in the prophecy was nothing but a comfortable excuse not to have to make his own decisions. That would mean him taking responsibility. It was so convenient to say it was God’s will. Whatever happened, it would not be his fault. An easy way out for cowards.
John stared at the pale door his murderers would come through. He felt the flames of faith that had burned inside him until now simply die — a flame that had burst into life was suddenly extinguished without leaving ashes. Didn’t people say that when you're about to die you see your whole life flash by before your eyes? John saw every episode of his past in painful clearness … how he was always looking for someone who would tell him what to do. He saw his parents, his brothers … he moved away from home because Sarah wanted it. Marvin had told him to take the job at Murali’s pizza service. Cristoforo Vacchi told him he had a destiny, and Malcolm McCaine knew how this destiny was to be fulfilled. Damn, even going to bed with Constantina was set up by Eduardo. And Ursula? He didn’t listen to Ursula when it really mattered. The only time he had listened to her was when she wanted to go to Germany without the bodyguards.
The door remained shut. No footsteps could be heard. His murderers were not coming.
He looked at the pipe and decided not to listen anymore. He did not want to know if anyone was still up there. He did not want to know if they had run away and left him behind to die, never to be found.
He just sat and stared into the dim light and stopped thinking about his life. Actually, he stopped thinking altogether. He just stared straight ahead and did nothing but breathe. Time stood still, the light got darker, and then it was gone. Sometime later he finally heard footsteps.
It knocked on the door. “Hola? You wake?”
“Yes,” John’s voice said.
“You lie down — face on mattress.”
They were still going to keep this up! He had listened to other people his whole life, so why stop now? He got on his stomach, closed his eyes and surrendered to the inevitable.
The door opened, and this time several men came in. One hand reached for his head. John felt himself shudder within and clenched his teeth — just don’t beg for mercy! They pulled something over his head. Someone pulled his arms back and tied his wrists together. The cuffs were removed. Then strong arms pulled him to his feet. “Come,” the unknown man said.
They went up a set of stairs, down a hallway, where his shoulder bumped into a piece of furniture. He was told to watch for the step, and then they went down some more steps into a room that smelled of sawdust and diesel. Maybe a garage, because they lifted him up like a toy and put him into the spacious trunk of a car. He heard a door opening and the engine start. Then they drove away.
The drive seemed endless there was no point in even attempting to remember the way … whether they took a left or a right. To make matters worse, exhaust fumes were coming in from somewhere, making him so nauseous that he had to do his utmost not to vomit into the sack pulled over his head.
They finally stopped. Someone got out, returned again after a short while and got back into the car. The car turned around and drove in reverse over uneven ground and then stopped. The trunk was opened. Now his legs were also tied together with wire that cut into his flesh. John protested, but they paid no attention. Instead, they took him out of the trunk, carried him a bit, and then threw him into the air. John yelled.
He landed fairly softly on something that felt like cloth and paper, mixed with hard, sharp objects. The landing hurt him but not badly. There was a foul stench. He tried to turn around, but with every move he made he had the impression that whatever he was lying in, would let him sink deeper, so he remained still, his arms and legs tied together, his face downward. He heard the car drive away.
After a short while, a terrible odor entered his nose, a stink he had never encountered, like an incredible mixture of rot and decay and decomposition, a foul confusion of mold, mildew, and rust. The air in his dungeon had been a delight compared to this stench. Scarcely able to believe it, he realized what his abductors had done. This was a garbage dump. They had discarded him like trash.
$41,000,000,000,000
THE COLD CREPT up on him, persistently working its way through his clothing, through his skin, and all the way down into his bones. And the colder it got the quieter it got. At first, he had heard traffic far away and the sound of a machine. But the machine was turned off at some point and the flow of traffic died down, until the only thing he heard was his own breathing. Then he heard the sound of things crawling around down below him, things that curdled his blood: rats.
He flinched involuntarily. He tried to turn around and slipped further into the mess, but then stopped moving in horror. Naturally, there would be rats in a garbage dump. Rats that could bite — that could seriously injure a human being and maybe even kill. He could not help but imagine a horde of squirming, furry creatures with sharp teeth and naked tails burrowing through rotting kitchen waste and fermenting garbage. His body squirmed without him consciously telling it to until his arms felt like they would break.
Maybe if he lay still, maybe they would leave him alone then. He dared not breathe, listened, tried to keep track of every sound, his senses fine-tuned to the maximum, ready to thrash around wildly as soon as an animal even touched him, ready to shout and squirm to scare it away. Staying awake and alert was the only thing that could save him. He closed his eyes to concentrate …
He was startled as suddenly a hand touched his shoulder, realizing he must have been asleep. The noise of traffic was back, the boom of the distant machine too. And there were footsteps. He was freezing, as if he had slept in a refrigerator all night. His arms had turned into numb fleshy appendages, and his bound feet felt as if they had died.
“Help,” he croaked and shook his head, almost suffocating from the sackcloth, clammy and sticky now. “Please, untie me!” He could hear voices. Children’s voices. One of them nudged him with a foot, as if he were road kill. “Please, help me!” He shouted and wiggled around to prove he was not dead. Damn his lack of Spanish. Was it so hard to see what he wanted? “Please, untie me. Please!”
He felt hands on his body again, small hands with quick fingers. But they did not untie any knots or remove any wires. They were groping around, searching through his pockets instead. The voices sounded disappointed when the fingers found nothing, no wallet, no watch and no money.
“Hey, dammit!” he screamed, but the children made no effort to help him.
They seemed to discuss something, then their footsteps went away, rustling and crunching in the garbage heap and all his shouting did nothing to get them to return.
He lay there, helpless, abandoned, sweat running down his body. Sweat — that would attract animals. This was all Ursula’s fault, wasn’t it? If she hadn’t left him he’d never have fallen into the kidnappers’ trap. One day when his corpse was found, she would feel guilty, and it would serve her right.
He heard someone whimper, and after a while John realized it was him. He was shivering uncontrollably, making his entire bound body ache, but he couldn’t stop. He was totally miserable. The stink was so bad he could even taste it. It was probably seeping into every pore on his body, and he would start to decompose alive. Now he was hot, so miserably hot. His tongue was dried out and felt like a rubber ball.
A rustling sound was approaching. Footsteps? Ra
ts? Let them eat him, who cares? But they did not eat him, they ate the straps that tied his arms to his back, and when the straps were eaten through his arms just dropped down lifelessly, like a rag-doll’s. They didn’t feel as if they were a part of him anymore. They just throbbed and pulsated and threatened to burst.
Then they went for his throat, but they were not teeth, they felt like hands — hands that undid the knots, and pulled and yanked and finally the hood was removed from his head. The bright light made his eyes water. He only saw an endless grayness above him and the blurred face of a woman — of a dark-haired woman. “Ursula,” he said happily. Ursula said something too and he was wondering why she spoke Spanish.
He felt an itch in his legs as the pain around his calves started to go away. She reached out a hand — she had a wide, angel-like face, deep dark eyes. She helped him to get up, and the child with her also helped him. It hurt to stand and his feet ached, as if they had open wounds. When he glanced down he saw that his shoes were gone. “That was mean,” he told the woman, “they were custom made John Lobb shoes for six thousand dollars.”
She only looked at him, and he leaned on her as they slowly went down the hill of garbage. They reached a hut with an entryway covered by a plaid cloth. It was dark and narrow inside and there was a place to lie down, so he did. Suddenly someone lifted his head and gave him some warm water to drink — water that tasted like metal. But it was wet and covered his tongue and throat and was absorbed by his body and when the cup was empty he was allowed to lie down again and to sleep.
He kept awaking from a restless sleep filled with feverish dreams and fear and desperation. He sat up shouting. Suddenly a hand held a cup of water to his mouth and then made him lie back down. There was a soft voice he did not understand, but it talked to him soothingly until he sank back down into numb darkness.
His heart raced, and his mind knew time was passing but he was so dazed he had no idea how much. It seemed to take half a lifetime to drive the poisons out of his bloodstream, to destroy the bacteria and to sweat through his nightmares. He was bathed in sweat, lashed his arms out, and heard himself crying and complaining and moaning until things he had forgotten brought him back again.
She talked to him, sang odd songs. This was not Ursula, no. This woman had velvety dark skin and sad eyes. She cooled his forehead with a wet cloth when he was hot, his eyes burned or his heart threatened to explode. And from time to time she placed a hand on his chest and seemed to pray to unknown gods, until his eyes got heavy and sleep took him.
John woke up to find the fever gone. He was weak. Even sitting up made his heart pound. But his head was clear, his body felt light, and he could see properly. He remembered what happened, and he knew that he had been saved.
There was the curtain, just as he remembered it, the plaid curtain, glowing because it was daytime, and the sun was shining. He heard voices, calls from afar, people talking nearby, hundreds of people all around. Metal clanged, stones were thrown on stones, and there was commotion all around. Everything was tainted by a caustic smell of garbage, smoke, rot, and decomposition. The air was filthy. He was filthy. His skin felt like it was covered in talcum powder. His underwear felt sticky and awful, and his head itched terribly. When he reached for his chin he felt a beard, a longish one. Great God, for how long had he been sick? The hair on his face was no five o’clock shadow; there were long hairs, longer than he ever had before.
He looked around. It was a miserable little shack made of corrugated sheet metal and cardboard. Only one wall was made of brick, though it was crumbling. He had lain on the only bed in the place: a knotty, ripped old mattress with a gray blanket. There were crates for oranges and a crooked, faded, woven basket with a few bits and pieces in it next to him. A charred picture of the Madonna was the only decoration. A shard of broken mirror hung below it, and standing on the floor in a row was a line of dirty, green bottles filled with water. There was also a box with wilted vegetables and other odds and ends and a pair of high-heeled shoes.
He turned around stiffly so that he could look into the mirror fragment. His face was unrecognizable: hollow-cheeked, his hair a total mess and then the strange beard. Not even his own mother would have recognized him. He must have lain here for two weeks or even longer; that was if this was really him that he saw in the mirror … if his soul had not been put into the body of an older man by some magical trick or illegal operation … into a vagabond and trash collector.
The curtain was pushed aside and light flooded into the shack driving away whatever minute aura of picturesque rusticity it might have had and revealing its wretched poverty. John turned around, batting his eyelids. It was her — the one who saved him — picked him out of the garbage dump, freed him, and nursed him back to relative health. She was a small, brown-skinned woman, with a broad Indian face and oily black hair, wearing a plain dress of some indistinguishable color. She stood there looking at him.
“You well?” she asked him.
“Yes, thank you,” John said nodding. “I’m feeling much better now. Thank you very much for saving me. I thought I would die out there in the trash.”
Her head moved side to side as if trying to work out what he had said. “You go,” she told him. “One hour, then come back, okay?”
John looked at her confused, unsure if he understood her correctly. “I should go away for one hour?”
“Yes. One hour away then lay down.”
“Okay, no problem.” He got up to go but realized it wasn’t that easy. He had to support his body against the stone wall until the fluttering images in his vision were gone. “No problem,” he repeated, despite the effort, and struggled to his feet. The ceiling was far too low to stand straight, so out he went, through the curtain and into the bright sunlight.
“I you call,” he heard her tell him from inside; a blurry figure in front of the bright background.
“It’s okay,” John called back, nodding vigorously.
He groped his way along an old wall that was waist-high. He did this for some time until an animal whooshed between his legs. It was a cat, and it reminded him not to stray too far from the hut. He wasn’t that well yet, far from it. With watering eyes he looked around for somewhere he could sit down for a moment. The smoke burned his nose and eyes, and he rubbed them with the back of his hand. That was when he discovered the smoke was coming from a fire close by. A dented pot sat on top of the flames with something cooking in it, which smelled like vegetables and corn. Two scraggy dogs were lying next to it, their tongues hanging out. An old hunch-backed woman appeared. She stirred the soup and croaked something that he did not understand and he was not even sure if she was talking to him or the dogs. But he got up again and wandered away.
There was a whole settlement here at the foot of the garbage mountain. A village made of sheets of metal and plastic, cardboard, and wooden boards, embedded in rubble, mountains of rotting newspaper, and plastic bags. John looked in awe at the children and adults working their way through the mountain of refuse, picking out whatever was still usable, such as scrap metal, piling it into large heaps, guarded by other members of this bizarre army of trash-pickers. He saw people flattening cardboard boxes, going through plastic garbage bags, pulling out old clothes, car batteries, bottles, cans and other rubbish. The elders wore old baseball caps and had cloth tied over their noses and wore gloves, and the children wore jeans and short-sleeved, striped polo shirts; they didn’t even look desperately poor. They only seemed to be playing hooky from school and killing time sifting through the trash.
Suddenly, a wave of excitement passed through the crowd of men, women and children; a heavy motor was rumbling somewhere above. There was a sound of crunching and screeching and then a large truck appeared at the top of the mountain. It maneuvered into place while the people below struggled to get into the best positions. With a groan and roar of its engine the dumper rose into the air and dropped a fresh supply of garbage down the slope of the mountain. It looked absurdly
like a cornucopia of blessings being dumped on the people beneath.
There was an immediate scuffle below for the choicest pieces. One person got out a cable, another one dragged away a sack full of clothes, and a third one got a dented old microwave oven. Bottles were taken out and put in bags. Wood seemed to be usable regardless of size. Tin cans were crushed before they were thrown into bags.
Then John spotted a few well-nourished people off to one side, sitting on old mattresses and easy chairs. The garbage pickers went to them with what they scavenged. What they found was weighted and they were paid. Each one of them seemed to be responsible for one certain material, like metal, plastic, gadgets, one large woman bought glass and a fat man bought wood. So this was also all about money, just like everywhere else. If he asked enough questions he might even find out that in the end that all these people here were working to help increase his wealth. He felt ill at the smell, at the sight, at anything, and everything.
Someone called. It took John a moment to realize they were calling to him. “Come you,” the woman hollered to him from the hut and waved.
He struggled to get to his feet and stomped through rubble and shards. He bypassed a pool of brown water that oozed from beneath the mountain; the water had a thin, multi-colored surface. He saw a man appear behind the woman coming from out of the hut, still closing his pants. Now he realized that she was a prostitute.
The fever returned and practically burnt him alive The woman missed out on no end of clients because of him. Once, he awoke in the middle of the night and saw her light a candle in front of the Madonna, praying. He thought either she was praying for him to get well again, or that she could get rid of him in some decent manner. When he woke up during the day he saw a boy sitting beside him putting a wet cloth on his forehead.
One Trillion Dollars Page 62