by Kim Powers
“Actually, now that I think of it, the choice is mine. My freedom of choice,” TJ added, yet more words he didn’t know he had, words of power. “And I choose that you’ll be the one to make the flyers for us to pass out tonight. And if you don’t show up, you will definitely fail. You can paste Skip’s picture on a sheet of paper and see all those flyers come pouring out from the Xerox machine, time after time, two hundred times maybe, with these words under the picture: ‘Have You Seen This Girl?’”
TJ paused after his monologue. He needed a ta-da.
“Sure beats writing ‘I’m an asshole’ on the board two hundred times, don’t you think?”
The class laughed. For once, with him, not at him.
They already called him “Little Ethan” behind his back, although there was nothing Ethan-like about him, except for their shared love of all things ancient. They were Mutt and Jeff, Frick and Frack, Laurel and Hardy, without the funny bits: Ethan filled out his clothes, wore bicep-busting T-shirts to class; TJ always dressed like he was cold, even in the spring and summer, his skinny, pale arms always covered up. Ethan, coming straight into class from a run, looking like he could step into GQ; TJ always looking like he got dressed in the dark, pulling on whatever he could find, his hair a mousy brown rat’s nest, no matter how many times he had run a comb through it. You’d think he’d be fat from all the sugar he consumed, the cheap slices of cake he lived off of from Claire’s Cornucopia, the hippie bakery off campus. Big slabs of cake you could get extra buttercream icing on, for just a quarter. And all those carbs in his containers of Oodles of Noodles. But with all the nervous energy he had, it just melted off him. He’d look okay if he just worked out; maybe he should, to be more like his mentor. Mostly all he lifted were the heavy books in the library, the dusty old tomes that would still be there when the end came, that couldn’t talk back to him or reject him.
The sugar kept him going during the day; the library kept him going at night. No one was supposed to sleep there overnight, but since his own apartment was a shithole, he did, no one the wiser. He brought in a throw pillow and a blanket for his study carrel on the fourth floor; whenever the librarian walked by on her nightly pass-through, before she closed up shop at midnight, he’d hunker down below the one tiny window so she wouldn’t see him.
Once she was gone, TJ would sneak out with a flashlight and wander through the stacks, where he could disappear into the words and worlds of the past, the world of books and paper and bindings and spines and the stories that were inside them. He especially liked looking for Ethan Holt’s name in the back of the books in the 292 section, from the days when students actually had to sign their names to check out a book instead of just swiping an ID card. Ethan’s old signatures in faded gray or blue ink, that told what he had read when he was eighteen and nineteen and twenty, when his brain was being formed as much as his body. It was homework for TJ; not just hero worship. Or imitation. TJ wanted to know what had made Ethan the man he had become. Those were the books TJ sought out, late at night, an autobiography of his mentor better than any book; better than even Herc Holt: My Story, which TJ had also read.
TJ never told Ethan that. There was so much he hadn’t told him, but he would discover it all soon enough.
Like TJ’s surprise—and excitement—when he had first written down on some form that Ethan was his mentor, and seeing the word in print, rather than just saying it, came to realize how much it had in common with ‘tor-mentor.’
TJ wondered if he could go back to one of his dead languages and find an explanation for that. He could find so much among the dead.
Mortui vivis docent.
The dead teach the living.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The chapel was deadly quiet; a tomb, inside the middle of a bustling hospital. Stained glass windows, red velvet cushions on the pews, flowers up front, and the carpet freshly vacuumed, but it still smelled like a hospital. Sick odors, chlorine, ammonia; nothing could hide the fact of where I was, shooed out of Wendy’s room while the doctors looked her over. But it was a good place to escape to, to think, for just a minute; the stained glass reminded me of the finger paintings Skip used to make. To me, they were just squiggles and dots and streaks on paper, but Skip could look at them and tell me whole stories from them: monsters and good guys, in crayon.
It’s right there, Daddy. Can’t you see?
No baby, I can’t, not yet. But you tell me what you see, and then I’ll bet I can.
And always signing her name and age to them. Why did kids do that, always put their ages there? Did their kindergarten teachers tell them to, something on Sesame Street? Skip said she did it because it helped her to remember.
Remember, at four and five. Six. Seven. Eight. Remember what?
Were those scribbles, those mirrored balls up in the attic, all I was going to have to remember Skip by now? That set off another wave of crying; surely not the first person to ever do it in this chapel, wiping off my tears and snot with my bandaged arm.
No. Don’t go there. Again.
Who was the monster in this nightmare? I needed Skip to tell me.
I needed everything else to disappear, except for the monster and the good guy, so I could just focus. And think. And find Skip.
It wasn’t Mark Casey who’d taken her, that was for sure. He’d been my monster but not Skip’s. He was like the stained glass windows in here. Macula hyalus fenestra, in Latin. Fenestra meant window, like the thing in a wall, but also opportunity, breach, loophole. Macula was stained, but not really in a color sense. More like your moral character: pollute, dishonor, taint. Scandal. Fuck up. That was Mark Casey in two words: a fuck up, and he was dead because of it. For years now. That’s why I’d never mentioned him to Mizell.
“He’s dead, and you didn’t think that’s . . . ” she had snapped at me in Wendy’s hospital room, just minutes ago.
“A lot of people I know are dead. That’s why I know they’re not suspects. So instead of focusing on everybody it can’t be, can we please for the love of fucking God focus on who it could be?”
“Janice Miner,” she’d said, as she left the hospital to go back to the station. “That’s our deal. You tell me the truth, and I tell you. For the love of fucking God.”
But if it wasn’t Casey then who was it? Who wanted to hurt me so badly that they were taking revenge on me like this? Sig and I had been trying to figure it out—coming up with all those lists of enemies that Mizell wanted—but nobody fit the bill. Guys I beat out, sure, but nobody who was violent, other than Casey.
And my father, but he didn’t count either; he was dead too, after nearly killing me in order to turn me into a champ. He hadn’t made it in his day, to the winners’ platform, so I was his last, best hope. His only child. I was naturally athletic, born with that gift, and my father pushed it as far as he could. Maybe he saw dollar signs in it, if I made it big, after not making much money himself. All I’d ever done was exercise and practice and get pushed by him to win. That was his church, winning, and he taught me to worship there. He’d made me a believer. One Sunday at our house, my father pushing me on—no rest, working out, seven days a week—he wouldn’t give me water, until I got through two hundred fifty pushups. I looked up through the sweat and sting in my eyes and said to him, “My Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”
He didn’t think it was funny. I didn’t either. I meant every word of it.
I started picturing a monster in my head, to make me run faster. A monster that would scare me more than my own father, although he’d be hard to beat. If I could only imagine someone worse than him, chasing me; something I’d have to outrun.
Fire. That was it. Flames, chasing me.
So one drunken night, I went out and got two tattoos: a flame, on each ankle. I thought if I could look back at my legs when I was running and actually see myself burning—my legs on fire, starting at my ankles—then I would run even faster, to escape being burned alive.
It hurt like he
ll getting the tattoos put on, but my father saw them and said they weren’t nearly enough.
Why just imagine? he said.
Son of a bitch. Bastard.
He took out his old-fashioned, fake gold cigarette lighter, clicked it on—a spark, that intoxicating smell of butane—and moved it toward my ankles, while he sat on my thighs to hold me down. He said actually feeling the fire would truly make me a champion.
If I didn’t have the fire in my belly, like he did for me, at least I could have it on my skin.
The tattoo guy had missed so much: he just used orange and red on my ankles, but as my father briefly held the lighter in front of my face, I saw that fire had so many other colors: not just orange and red, but blue and purple and yellow and even green.
My father got closer and closer to the tattoos—I could feel the heat from that one little flame, as I squirmed to get away—then he suddenly changed course and held the lighter to his own ankles. First his left, then his right.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his lips going white he was biting down on them so hard, to keep from showing any pain. He never looked at his ankles, just at me, as I literally heard the crisping of hair on his legs, and smelled something like singed rubber.
“Dad, no . . . ”
The grimace on his lips turned into a leer as he just as suddenly clicked the lighter closed and stood up, unsteady on his feet. He tossed the lighter to me—maybe at me was more his intention—and I missed. The first and only toss of my life that I missed.
“Miss at the Olympics, and I will set you on fire.”
My Father, why hast thou forsaken me indeed?
My mother told me to pray for him; that was her solution to everything: pray, and do good works. She cowered in their bedroom, a slew of unexplained illnesses and depressions. The only time her eyes came alive is when she’d drag me to church—a real church, not the gym. She’d get her Bible out and look up passages that she thought told her she had to stay subservient. She always found the answer she needed in her Bible, no matter how she had to twist things to see it. And despite being on the fence about my own belief, her Bible is one of the few things I took from their house, after they died. You just can’t throw away a Bible, or give it to Goodwill. Skip looked at it sometimes; it was the only Bible in the house, but . . .
Wait. A chapel. A Bible . . .
The story of Daniel and the Lions’ Den. What if . . . I’d thought the poem from the kidnapper was just about the rhyme scheme—Lions’ Den rhymes with your girlfriend, Wen—but what if it was about more than that? What if he had actually meant something about Daniel? From the Bible? What if I just hadn’t worked out the clue completely? It was like a translation in Latin; everything there had a purpose. Nothing was extraneous, or left out. Everything mattered. What if Daniel mattered too? What if the thing I was supposed to finish figuring out—maybe even do next—was actually in this room with me?
Rummaging around, I found a Bible up front behind a speaker’s stand and started flipping through to the book of Daniel. I didn’t remember the details—I was working out on Sundays, not going to church—but I knew it had some kind of happy ending. Daniel came out alive. The words he said in the cave, or the power of his prayer . . . something he did silenced those lions and shut their hungry jaws.
Just like what Mizell had done, to save me.
I flew over the tiny print on the delicate, paper-thin pages—something so old-fashioned, for such a modern version of the Bible—until I got to the part where Daniel was interpreting the dream that the evil King Nebuchadnezzar had.
You looked, and you saw a large image. This big image was in front of you. It was very bright and it frightened people. The image’s head was pure gold. Its upper body and arms were silver. Its lower body was bronze. Its legs were iron and its feet were partly iron and partly clay. As you looked, someone cut out a stone. But no human hand did this. The stone hit the image on its iron and clay feet and broke them into pieces. They became like powder. The wind blew them away, until nobody could see them.
There it was, in black and white. In print. The story of my life, same as the dream of Nebuchadnezzar: I’d worshipped an idol made of precious metals, the most precious at the head. Gold. That’s what I’d dreamed for, trained for, sacrificed everything for: gold, when my feet were really made of clay.
Somebody knew. Somebody knew what I had done and they were going to punish me for it, through Skip. And if I didn’t do what they wanted, they were going to kill her.
For if you do, it’s little Skip’s life; only question is, bullet or knife?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Skip had tried to come up with a way of keeping track of time, but she had no idea when an hour even ended. Before this, she would have thought she could. Sitting in class, she could feel every minute tick by; she could sense when the bell was about to ring. But in this room, tied up, just waking up from being shocked, everything was off-kilter. The volts were like the Taser sting at her house, when they first took her, but a million times worse; she didn’t know how long she had been passed out, only that everything hurt when she came to. Her body still felt like it was buzzing, and her tears were coming out in short spurts, as if the flow of them had been interrupted by the current, but the cutoff switch she had for them in her brain had melted: she couldn’t turn them off. She couldn’t stop crying. Maybe because it just hurt so much.
Her friend Adelaide had epilepsy, and once she had a seizure in front of the whole class. She kicked and bucked so much one of her shoes went flying off. Afterwards, she was embarrassed; she just lay on the floor of their classroom and cried, and sort of curled in on herself; she told the teacher she didn’t want an ambulance, which the teacher had already called; she just wanted to go home. Adelaide said it felt like getting jolts of electricity in her brain, jolts that traveled all the way down to her toes. Skip secretly wanted to have one, a seizure, just to see what it felt like, and now she had. She didn’t want to have one again.
She was sorry she ever thought it would be fun to have a seizure. If she ever got out, she’d apologize to Adelaide; confess to her about how she’d wanted one, but now she knew it wasn’t any fun, and then she’d . . . she’d what?
She couldn’t think anymore. Her head hurt, like the worst headache ever. Maybe the electricity had wiped out her memory. She’d heard it did things like that.
She had to get away, whatever it took. He was going to shock her again, and worse. She didn’t want to die, tied up like this, all messy and dirty and terrified and full of electricity.
Maybe if she had a “biological clock”—she’d heard about it but didn’t know if she was old enough to have one yet—it would have told her how much time she’d been here, but it didn’t. But she could still tell a lot, even with the folds of gauze around her eyes. She could see it was dark, or at least it felt that way, but with it getting dark so early now, even her sense of nightfall was screwed up. But she felt it, somehow—the room cooling off a little bit, like the sun had gone down. She couldn’t hear much, but if she got extra quiet, if she tamped down her panic and slowed her breathing as much as she could, she thought maybe she could hear a difference outside. Like things were settling down for the night?
It was the start of her second night. She had figured out that much.
And there was a third person. She’d figured that out too. There was just too much going on, for the main kidnapper and the other man whose voice she’d heard. They’d tried to feed her, but she had resisted, afraid of what might be in the food, so it was surprising she’d still gone to the bathroom three times. That was a number she could keep track of, but it was only the last time that he—or they, it seemed like more than one person—let her go into a regular bathroom, instead of just squatting over a pot. They kept her hands tied behind her back, and her blindfold on, so she had to back into the seat and feel it with her legs. Pulling from the back of her jeans, with her tied-up hands behind her, she got her pants down by herself.
She didn’t know if anybody was looking at her, but she thought somebody was, and she couldn’t go.
“I thought you had to go.”
“I can’t, not with you looking. Not with anybody looking.”
She meant it, but she also said it to get an answer, to see how many people were there. She’d felt hands lift her up, off the desk she’d been tied to, but she was too hungry and dizzy to tell if it was one person or two. One on each side, or just the one big one, the one who didn’t have any trouble getting his breath, picking her up from behind?
She knew the man she’d talked to the most wasn’t looking at her; she could hear his voice heading away from her, not toward her. Only then could she finally let herself go. But she couldn’t wipe, and she didn’t want anyone else to do it to her, so she said “I’m done.” She felt with her elbows to flush the commode. No one touched her where they weren’t supposed to.
The same hands—one pair, two?—moved her back to the school desk, and taped her back in. Not her ankles anymore; her feet were free, she could stretch them out. She’d heard about something called “economy class syndrome” on an airplane, where you got a blood clot if you sat cramped up in your seat and didn’t move around and stretch your feet enough, so she lifted them out and flexed them, to get the blood moving. She’d seen it on Good Morning America when she got dressed for school one day.
“They die on airplanes, you know,” she said out loud, to see if anyone would answer her back. “You come back from flying across the ocean and you’ve been all cramped up in coach but you don’t think anything’s wrong and then ‘Bam!’ You’re rolling your suitcase to the taxi stand and you’re dead all of a sudden and nobody knows what happened. Not until they give you an autopsy and find out you had a blood clot or something.”
She wanted to hear them say something, and they did. He did. The main one.
“I’ve often wondered how they. Sent your father. To the Olympics. Coach? First class? Charter?”