by James Siegel
He concentrated; tried to fine-tune his hearing. Blood was pulsing into his eardrums; his breathing was tight and shallow and noisy.
The scratching sound seemed faint and muffled.
Okay, he thought, the apartment door.
He slid off the bed and resisted the temptation to crawl underneath it. The front door was locked. He was still master of his domain. He could keep them out—he could protect himself.
He was dressed only in boxer shorts. When he glanced at the full-length mirror against the wall, he looked comically vulnerable. He stood stock-still, craned his neck to listen.
Scratch, scratch.
It’s those assholes with Uzis and kerosene I’m worried about.
The men from the swamp, he thought.
Or.
It’s the man with CCCP tattooed on his arm.
He was at the front door. The one Lisa had squinted through, which, if memory served him correctly, was locked tight.
Even double-bolted.
He gingerly opened his bedroom door. He stepped out. He stared at the front door as if seeing it for the first time. Really looking at it. It appeared solid enough—in need of a paint job, sure, but strong as steel. This analogy comforted him.
He could swear he’d double-bolted it but couldn’t remember whether the oblong knob was supposed to be vertical or horizontal.
He suddenly realized he hadn’t heard a sound since he’d walked out of the bedroom. He realized this because he heard it now.
This much closer, it seemed raw and amplified. The fog comes on little cat feet—a poem he remembered from childhood. But this wasn’t a cat, and this wasn’t childhood.
A weapon.
His eyes zigzagged around the apartment, jittery, in circles, like a fly caught between windowpanes.
The metal paperweight from Sharper Image. Maybe.
The polished African walking stick Joanna’s parents had brought back from Kenya. Possibly.
A dull glass egg sitting in the middle of the dining room table. No.
The dining room table.
Knives.
He stared at his kitchen, trying to remember where Joanna kept the steak knives.
He resisted the overwhelming urge to run there.
Walk. Tiptoe. Float like Muhammad Ali. They didn’t know he was here. They were guessing. They might get tired of trying to jimmy the lock. They might give up.
Not if they knew he was in here.
He drifted to the kitchen, visualizing himself as light and noiseless, even though he felt heavier than lead, aware that the sounds at the door were growing louder and more insistent.
They were trying to fit something into the lock—that’s what it sounded like. Frustration was setting in. They were trying to force it in, like date rape—first polite and consensual, then insistent and brutal. The lock was screaming no. The intruder didn’t give a shit.
Paul opened a kitchen drawer. It squeaked.
The scratching stopped dead.
Silence.
You have to do something about these drawers, Paul. If Joanna had said that to him once, she’d said it a thousand times. And a thousand times Paul had told her to hire one of those guys in the back of the Pennysaver.
The handymen had remained unsummoned. The drawers continued to complain every time they were opened.
The people behind the door knew he was in here.
More bad news.
The open drawer contained Joanna’s phone book, some pencils, paper clips, a take-out menu from Hunan Flower.
No knives.
The scratching came back. Harder.
The second drawer down, he hit pay dirt. It contained the entire Ginzu Knife Collection, for which they’d sent $49.95 in five easy monthly installments. Those remarkable knives you saw cutting through tissue paper in thirty-minute infomercials. Forged by actual samurai masters in Yokohama. He wrapped his fingers around a cool plastic handle and pulled one out.
He turned and faced the door.
Maybe ten feet from it. From them. It seemed inconceivable and ridiculous that a mere door could save him. He could almost smell their need. He was sure Joanna could’ve.
Call 911.
This time he could actually tell them his address.
He could summon a patrol car. Scare them away.
Make them think they were coming any minute.
The phone was on the other side of the apartment. It seemed as vast and impassable as the Sahara.
Wait. He didn’t have to call. He just had to pretend to.
“Yes, is this the police?” he suddenly shouted. “Yes, I’m at 341 West 84th Street, apartment 9G. Someone’s trying to break in . . . Yes, that’s right . . . You’ll be here in two minutes? Thank God.”
Oddly enough, his fake phone call didn’t cause the man or men to stop. No.
Maybe he should’ve asked himself why?
Maybe if it wasn’t five in the morning, and if he wasn’t scared out of his mind, and if he was just a little brighter about these things, he would’ve.
Then he would have understood that the only reason a fake phone call to the police wouldn’t deter someone from breaking into your apartment is if they knew it was a fake phone call.
And the only way they could know that is if they knew you didn’t have a phone.
If, say, they’d taken the precaution of disconnecting it.
THIRTY-THREE
He felt his sheer strength at first.
The overwhelming, undeniable thereness of it.
The knotty muscle. As if the door weren’t made of steel, but the man who’d burst through it was. CCCP, he thought.
One moment Paul was standing ten feet from the door with the Ginzu in his hand. The next, an amorphous black shape was hurtling straight at him.
He lunged at the black apparition with his knife, but the man deflected his arm with almost comical ease.
The knife went skittering off somewhere on the floor.
Before the man could kill him, Paul kept going.
Momentum carried him past the man’s swatting arm and back into the kitchen, where he attempted to ransack the second drawer without slowing down. But he cut himself on one of the other Ginzus—perhaps the apple-corer they’d received free because they’d acted now. His hand came up bloody and, more important, empty.
The man was right behind him. He could hear him breathing hard, as if the exertion of kicking in the door had tuckered him out.
Only momentarily. Not enough to make him stop.
Paul zigzagged into the bedroom like a broken-field runner. He slammed the door shut.
No.
The man had made it to the other side of the door just before Paul could actually close it.
He was pushing back.
Adrenaline was a kind of drug, Paul thought. He could feel every single muscle crackling with energy. He felt powerful, relentless, even indomitable.
He didn’t stand a chance.
Adrenaline could only do so much. The person on the other side of the door wasn’t human. He was a freakish force of nature. The door was moving backward.
One inch.
Two inches.
Paul’s hand was slipping in his own blood.
“Fuck!” Paul shouted. “Fuck!” Grunting, trying to summon a last reserve of strength.
He could bellow all he wanted. He could push and scratch and fight and pray. He was going to lose.
It ended with a bang and a whimper. The door slammed into the wall with a loud crack. Paul went backward; no—he flew, soared, catapulted. He careened off the bed. He grabbed for the phone—dead.
The man came for him.
Paul put his hands up to defend himself. He screamed. Nothing came out.
The man had put one hand around his mouth, the other against his windpipe.
He felt like a rag doll whose head was about to be smashed.
But the man didn’t smash Paul’s head.
He spoke to him.
Whi
spered even.
“Breathe,” he said. “Nice and easy. That’s it.”
There was no Russian accent. No Colombian accent either. That was the first surprise.
There was another.
LATER, AFTER PAUL HAD STOPPED SHAKING, THEY TALKED ABOUT old times.
Not really old times. Fairly recent in memory, just far enough away from now to be ancient history.
The delay in Kennedy.
The layover in Washington, D.C. Eight excruciating hours sitting on the tarmac with nothing to do.
Only it hadn’t seemed excruciating for the man. No. He’d sat there with utter calm staring at the seat back in front of him.
He was used to waiting, he’d said. Remember? he asked Paul.
He was a bird-watcher.
THIRTY-FOUR
J ungle gym.
The Jungle Book.
In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.
Jungle boogie.
Joanna was reciting the entire known canon of jungle references. She was being her own google.com. Some of these jungle references were clearly sanitized, the jungle made friendly. Something to dance to, sing to, for four-year-olds to innocently clamber over.
There were other, scarier references.
The concrete jungle.
It’s a jungle out there.
She would just as soon not think of those.
The real jungle, the humid infestation of invisible buzzing, shrieking things and rotting, tangled vegetation, was scary enough.
For one thing it was dark.
Darker than dark.
A suffocating canopy of branches blotted out whatever moonlight there was. It was like stumbling around a closet—the kind children are convinced harbors hideous monsters.
There were definitely things going bump in the night. She could hear them directly above her head. Rustling branches, sudden growls. Monkeys? Or something worse?
Jaguars, ocelots, boa constrictors?
Joelle had woken up soon after they’d made it down a small clearing and into the thick trees. She’d begun wailing for food—or because she was cold or just plain sick. Joanna didn’t know. She was still learning the foreign language of infancy—something Galina seemed to have down pat. It didn’t matter. She had no baby formula with her, and she couldn’t do anything about the surrounding chill the baby blanket was doing little to counter.
“We’re going home,” she whispered to her daughter, though it was solely for her own benefit. Speaking out loud helped pierce the darkness, let her know that she, at least, was present and accounted for. Of course it might’ve been doing the same for any animals in the vicinity. Human or otherwise.
Occasionally, invisible flying things smacked her in the face. She nearly swallowed an enormous moth—just managing to spit it out, then bending over and retching when she realized what had been fluttering around her mouth.
She had no idea where she was going.
She’d decided she’d maintain a straight line from the house. Even if she didn’t know where she was headed, she’d know where she was headed from. There was a problem, though—as with all thought-out, rational plans of attack. The enemy had a vote.
The jungle wasn’t cooperating. There were innumerable obstacles in her way—massive tree trunks, several of which she almost walked into, sudden steep drops, a black stream complete with invisible waterfall that sounded, for one instant of comfort, like TV static.
She kept making detours till she felt like it in blindman’s buff. She’d been spun around too many times to know which way was which. She desperately needed someone to tell her if she was getting warmer.
Right now she was getting colder. And hungrier. And more frightened.
The simple rocking motion of putting one foot before the other lulled Joelle back to sleep. Joanna was tempted to join her. In the morning she’d at least be able to see—survey her surroundings and make an educated guess where she was.
She was worried someone would peek in the room—Tomás or Puento. That they’d send out searchers who knew the jungle and, more important, knew how to track someone in it. She had to keep moving.
She stumbled into a large clearing.
It was as if someone had flicked on the room lights. She could suddenly see her legs, Joelle’s sleeping face, the sky. She hadn’t seen the sky since . . . well, she couldn’t remember. She was momentarily stunned at the tapestry of glittering stars—so many of them that it seemed artificial, like an enormous disco ball. She stood there and caught her breath.
Odd. Here she was in the middle of a jungle, but if she didn’t know any better, she would’ve sworn she was standing before a field. Something cultivated, regular, attended to. There was a dank but distinct odor in the air. What?
She stepped forward till she stood on its very edge.
Of course.
Coca. She’d stumbled across an illegal cocaine field, the kind they grew deep in the jungle to shield from government patrols.
Joanna felt a surge of—what? Hope?
She was trespassing on dangerous ground. But at least it was ground trod by humans.
If she waited till morning, someone might come—the farmer who tended it. But what if it wasn’t a campesino looking for a little supplemental income? What if it was one of—them? Maybe they grew their own fields—maybe this was one of them. She felt caught between competing and equally compelling inclinations. She would do anything not to go back into the jungle. If she stayed, if she lay down and curled up till morning, she might end up having waited for the wrong people.
Go or stay?
Then it was decided for her.
The field itself was an indistinct blanket of mostly black. Even as her eyes grew accustomed to her moonlit surroundings, it stayed that way. Black.
It had an odor with an almost physical dimension—wet, pasty, and bitter.
Then she understood. The field looked black because that’s what it was.
Black as ash.
It’d been burned to the ground. She could see it now—a tangle of five-foot coca plants reduced to shattered, twisted stumps.
A government patrol had discovered and torched it. Or the USDF. Or the farmer who grew it. Maybe they practiced a kind of slash-and-burn agriculture.
Anyway, it was abandoned. No one would be coming in the morning.
She had to keep moving.
Which way?
It seemed like you should be able to tell from the stars. How? Paul knew this kind of stuff—she’d bought him a telescope for his thirty-fifth birthday that proved virtually useless on the roof of their apartment building. The bright lights of New York City didn’t just blind starry-eyed newcomers—they did a pretty good job on amateur astronomers. Still, more than once Paul had tried to point out one constellation or another to her. She wished she’d paid more attention.
Okay, which direction?
She swung her arm in an arc and decided she’d stop it when it felt right. Like throwing darts blindfolded.
When her arm stopped moving, it was pointing left.
She kissed Joelle on the top of her head and moved back into the jungle.
MORNING WAS COMING FAST.
The light had changed from deep black to charcoal gray. She stopped having to worry that each footstep might land her in quicksand, or into a hole, or on top of some animal’s head.
That was the good part.
The bad part was that she could see some of the screeching, growling, slithering things that she’d only heard up to now. Imagination might be scarier than reality, she decided, but not by much.
What looked like a kind of baboon swung past her by inches, emitting a threatening screech that almost shattered her eardrums. It landed in the crook of a tree branch four feet above her head and shook a vine in her direction. It displayed its teeth—they looked large and frighteningly sharp.
Joanna turned to her right and stumbled through the underbrush, hoping the monkey wouldn’t come after them.
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It didn’t.
Later, she saw a tree branch suddenly move right in front of her. Literally get up and begin detaching itself from the trunk of an enormous tree dripping lacy veils of green moss.
Of course it wasn’t a tree branch. It was a snake—clearly enormous and clearly alerted to her presence. It was as thick as her arm, with dead yellow eyes and a black flickering tongue. Scared stiff and trying not to scream, she watched it uncoil for what seemed like minutes.
It slid off into a thick patch of ferns.
With the growing light came the heat. It covered them like a wet towel and left her drenched in sweat. The insects seemed attracted to perspiration; clouds of white gnats descended on her from all directions. She tried swatting them away, but they were as oblivious as New York City pigeons—short of actual gunfire, they weren’t budging.
Then there were the mosquitoes—or their very large cousins. She was a movable feast for them—her bitten arms were covered in red bumps, as if she’d broken out in hives.
Joelle had started crying again and didn’t seem in any mood to stop.
Even to someone unschooled in the lingo of infants, it was obvious that while Joelle might be hot and uncomfortable, it was all about hunger now. For the first time, Joanna wondered if she’d done the right thing. She should’ve planned—stockpiled baby formula. She was guilty of criminal lack of foresight.
Nothing seemed to calm Joelle down; soon Joanna needed calming as well. Fear lodged somewhere in the pit of her stomach and physically constricted her, as if her legs were bound by rubber bands. She was living through one of those dreams of being chased, where you can’t, for the life of you, move.
They were as lost as lost can be.
The jungle had swallowed them whole—eaten them alive. They weren’t going to get out.
She kept walking anyway—something inside her ordering her to lift one leg, then the other. Sheer stubbornness maybe.
Walking songs—front and center.
I’m walking, yes indeed, I’m talking, yes indeed . . .
These boots are made for walking . . .
Walk like a man . . .
She decided she’d keep walking till she couldn’t. That was fair. Go as long as she could and then drop. Fight the good fight.