“Go mail this. Overnight it,” he commanded to Hardy and when the man left, Laurel told X, “It’s better that I don’t leave you two alone.”
When Hardy came back, he had breakfast sandwiches for him and his accomplice. They didn’t offer any to X, just ate in front of her while she tried not to watch. She asked the men for a drink, and at first they refused.
“Please,” she begged, “I’m so thirsty.”
Finally, Laurel let her have a drink of some of the watered down soda in his cup. X drank the diluted liquid that in other circumstances she would have shunned, but in her thirst she didn’t care, just held the cup in her hands (her wrists sore because they had put the cuffs on so tightly) and drank as much as she could as fast as she could. She had never felt so pathetic, the blood smeared over her face, begging a scumbag for a drink from his cup.
For hours, then, X watched the light that was coming through the slats move across the floor. When she spotted a figure on the sidewalk outside, a mailman doing his deliveries, X thought about screaming for help, but Laurel, who by now had pointed the gun at her, told her to keep her mouth shut if she wanted to live.
The video would be in California the next day, X guessed. Hopefully, Compton wasn’t gone on a business trip. And if Compton decided to pay the ransom, they would have to work out a way to transfer the money. Ah, fuck, X thought, I’m going to be here for days.
They let her piss in the backyard at regular intervals, and around dinner time, they let her eat a cheeseburger and a few French fries from a fast food joint.
When she asked the short one for a cigarette after she had finished eating, he replied, “If you suck my dick you can have one,” and after that X didn’t ask again.
When darkness came, they told her to sleep on the mattress, and she had lain down on the filthy thing, thinking that she would feign sleep and then try to escape as soon as her captors were asleep.
The tall one, as if he knew what she was thinking, cuffed her to a rusty radiator, and X closed her eyes and listened as Hardy shifted around on the ratty couch and Laurel played games on his cell phone as he sat on the beaten up wing chair.
After an hour or so of thinking about what would happen if Compton refused to provide these men with their ransom, X finally fell asleep, immune temporarily to the sounds of the cell games and the seemingly never ending snores.
9.
Terry Compton sat at his desk looking at a piece of paper, a perfect square, wondering what he would create today. Maybe nothing, maybe something; the possibilities were nearly limitless. He rested his hand onto the paper. Sometimes the paper would tell him what to do, disclose its potential through its texture, and then he would begin a series of folds, shaping it into what it was meant to become.
Long ago he had mastered the techniques: valley fold, mountain fold, pinch crease, pleat fold, reverse fold, rabbit ear, swivel fold, sink fold, squash fold. It was about seeing the ability of a thing to change shape and dimension and then executing the necessary movements to create it. There was the challenge of not destroying the paper along the way, though there had been plenty of times that he had been forced to crumple a project, toss it into the wastebasket, and begin again.
Sometimes when he was at a restaurant with other business men or on a date, he would fold the cloth napkin into a Bishop’s mitre or a pixie boot. He had folded cheap paper napkins into swans or roses like the one he had given to X in the limousine. Compton had folded maps, newspapers, Japanese washi, metallic and patterned papers, foil, bags, even currency. Once, when he was stuck in South America because of oil riots, he had folded a rare 16th century letter into a peacock and then put a match to it just to watch it burn.
He could sit at his desk and do nothing if he wished, fold paper all afternoon. Steinberg usually left Friday afternoons open for Compton to do whatever he wanted. It had been a long time since he had done real work. Sure, he had cleaned X’s toilet and cleaned her bathroom floor on his hands and knees, but besides that, the man couldn’t remember the last time he had dusted the furniture, mowed a lawn, or tried to fix anything. Work was for people who weren’t smart enough to figure out that people never got rich doing real work, but only by having others work for them. His mother had worked all her life making shoes for other people and her retirement had been an early grave. No, Compton analyzed. He predicted. Wealth was created unfettered by arcane terms like production, supply, and labor.
He noticed the pencil that X had given him. It sat near the edge of his desk in an Indonesian ceramic cup that had been a gift from Steinberg. Compton lifted it out of its container, ignoring the square of paper for a moment. Did people still use pencils and pens? Of course they did. Sometimes he used one when signing a contract, credit card slip, or even an occasional autograph.
X had told him that the pencil had been in her vagina and that she hoped that he would use it in his office. He hadn’t believed her, not for a moment. What a beautiful lie had come out of her mouth. The lie was lovelier than if the pencil had actually been in her sweet little cunt.
There was a knock at the door. It was Steinberg. He brought Compton an envelope, one the man had been expecting. Steinberg told his boss that it had come from New Mexico, and then Steinberg left the man alone. Compton couldn’t ask for a better assistant and contemplated the amount of the man’s next bonus. Steinberg understood when to make himself scarce. If only women could do the same thing.
Compton had been expecting the video. He knew that X had been kidnapped and that the men would be asking for ransom. He had demanded a video of X and now he had it. A few moments later, Compton opened the manila envelope and put the small disc within it into a player.
The video was a black screen at first with just some background noise, and then the person recording it took off the lens cap. Finally, a jerky image appeared, one of X sitting on a dirty mattress. Compton saw that X’s hands were cuffed in front of her and that her left eye had been blackened. A haze of blood had discolored her chin. Her hair clung together in greasy tendrils, and the white sleeveless top she was wearing was dirty and bore a few dark stains of blood.
X looked at the camera as if she were looking directly at Compton. Her begs came then with a subdued urgency.
“Terry, these men are going to put a hole in my head if you don’t give them two million dollars. They want two million dollars. Please give them the money. I can give you back everything that you gave me.” Tears began to stream down her cheeks and then fell off the precipice of her jaw. “I’m sorry I left, Terry. I’ll come back. I just needed to get my head together.”
Then, the screen went to black.
Seeing her on the screen before him, he was able to notice the slight movements of her face that he had never before been so thoroughly aware of: the way that her brows furrowed and rose; the way she pressed her lips together between sentences and how sometimes they trembled before the words emerged; the darting movement of her eyes when she looked away from the camera. He wanted her to be able to see herself as he was seeing her, removed from her gestures and yet still defined by them, to witness the quiddity of her being.
Compton watched the video again, unzipping his pants and whacking-off into a wad of tissues as it played. Then, he removed the disc and placed it back into the envelope before placing the envelope into his safe.
X had never begged him for anything before. She thought that she was the one who should be begged, not the other way around. The woman had blackmailed him and then taken off with the money, had been planning to ditch him all along.
He wondered if X had offered the men any of her own money in order to buy herself out of this predicament, and he guessed correctly that she had. Her kidnappers, however, had been told not to take any of her bribes because she was full of shit, the woman didn’t have any money, she was a painter. Artists were lucky to squeak by with enough to have a place to live. The place she was staying wasn’t even her own.
He took the square piece of paper of
f his desk and placed it in the upper drawer before opening another drawer and removing a fat stack of $100s that he had set aside for this purpose. The next several hours were spent folding, pinching, and creasing the bills, locking them together, adding unit upon unit until he had created five interwoven tetrahedrals. As he assembled his creation, a thought remained, a feeling that never parted, this being the realization that he had never seen X look quite so beautiful.
Even so, he had no intention of giving the men two million dollars even though it was just a tiny fraction of his wealth, ruminating that even a hundred thousand was probably too much.
10.
X had spent a restless night on the filthy mattress, her sleep disturbed every few hours by the men’s conversations, the short one’s snores, or the persistent ache in her arm from being handcuffed to the radiator.
She awoke as the first gentle light came through the windows, ones that had been left open through the night to let in the cooler air. X saw that Laurel was awake. He sat almost meditatively on the ragged wing chair, staring out the window between glancing at the cheap watch on his wrist or gnawing on his ragged fingernails. He was nervous about something.
From a half-closed eye, X watched him, wondering how the day would unfold before them. She didn’t know if Terry Compton would agree to their ransom and wondered what they would do to her if he decided not to pay them the money. But she knew what would probably happen. If Compton refused, maybe they’d send him a part of her ear or one of her fingers to convince him that they were serious. But ultimately if he refused, she believed, they’d pop a cap in her head and she’d die in this broken down crack house on the dirty mattress and end up in the morgue as a Jane Doe. Maybe they’d be able to identify her somehow and get her remains to her brother, and he could put her ashes in the mortuary niche next to the urns of their mother and father. Just as likely, the police would assume she was a crack whore and send her corpse wherever they sent the corpses of the unknown and unclaimed.
X needed to urinate. She was thirsty and hungry. So many little things she had taken for granted, things like using the bathroom when she wanted or getting a bite to eat when the need arose. To these men, X was an object, a commodity, nothing more than that. They believed that she had value to a man who did not value her. Mentally nearly defeated, X realized that the control she had thought she had was, for the most part, an illusion. Life changes or ends in a split second. So many things are out of our control. And what had Simeon said to her so many months ago? Life is an illusion of choice.
When X asked Laurel if she could use the bathroom, he uncuffed her and led her to the backyard. Her car was still there. X tried to calculate how far she could get if she began to run, then decided against the attempt. She peed in the sand then went back inside.
Once back in the building, Laurel woke up Hardy who was still asleep on the couch.
“What time is it?” the groggy man asked.
“Twenty till six.”
“Fuck. I’m not used to getting up this early.”
The man removed a cigarette from his pack and lit it. X was surprised when he held the pack out to her and asked if she wanted one. But when X reached out to take one, he pulled the pack away and thrust his hips towards her a few times.
“Suck on this first,” he said, and X turned away from him in disgust. She didn’t need his cigarettes anymore; didn’t need them at all. She was going to quit one way or another that day, through death or by her choice, she was permanently extinguishing her habit.
X was directed to sit on the couch, the cushions still warm from the slumbering body of the short man. And then, unexpectedly, there was a knock at the door. Who came to the door at six in the morning?
“Lay down on the couch! Don’t make a sound!” the tall man whispered to her, and then he covered her with a blanket, an old army issue wool blanket that smelled like urine, sweat, ejaculate, and moth balls. And once she was covered, he went towards the door.
11.
Simeon loaded his gun as he sat in his SUV. He had pulled into a parking garage, turned off the engine, and made a quick survey of his surroundings. He knew that X had been kidnapped and that the men were asking Compton for a ransom amount that the man would never provide them.
These last couple of months, Simeon had known that X had been in Santa Fe, knew where she was staying, in fact, all due to a tiny transmitter that had been planted in the Mercedes. Sure, he could have followed her and dragged her back to California, but he hadn’t. His superior had told him to wait on it; the bitch needed a break.
Simeon held the gun in his lap as he sat in the vehicle, closing his eyes for a few minutes and mentally rehearsing what was about to happen. It went something like this: he would knock at the door, and if the men asked who he was, he would respond that he was a Census worker. As soon as the door was opened, he’s fire his gun at both of the men. Bang bang, thump thump, easy as that. And if for some reason they didn’t open the door, well, that would be a problem, but Simeon felt secure that the scenario would play out as he envisioned.
As he exited the vehicle and closed the door behind him, a minivan rolled by, the hollow sounds it made echoing through the concrete of the garage. It was early but hot, and Simeon wore his suit jacket to conceal his weapon. He walked down the stairwell, one heavily tagged with graffiti and smelling of urine, then paused once he reached the street. The house where X was being held was a few blocks away from the garage. He slid his sunglasses on and then began to walk towards his destination.
If anyone had watched Simeon as he walked, the sunglasses concealing his light eyes, his dark hair tightly cropped and even above the crisp collar of his suit, they might have been surprised to see such a well-dressed, official-looking man in such a run-down neighborhood. Men like that only ever visited that particular neighborhood for business, typically that of an illegal nature.
He looked at his watch. It was nearly six in the morning. Simeon had chosen this time precisely because he knew that most of the people in the nearby houses would still be asleep. Soon, the heat would simmer out a shimmering mirage above the asphalt, but Simeon planned on being gone before then. In and out. Bang bang, thump thump.
When he saw the small house with X’s car in the driveway and parked towards the rear, he knew that X was inside. He wondered what they might have done to her, knowing that the men who had kidnapped her were unpredictable. There was a danger in unpredictability. The men had probably hurt her, he knew. Men like that sometimes couldn’t help themselves. But just as long as they hadn’t killed her.
One last time, Simeon scanned the street. When he saw that it was empty, he looked at his watch. Three minutes till six. Once the gun was in his hand, he walked to the side door.
What a shit hole, he thought. He had been told that the place was an abandoned crack house and it fit the description. The stucco, dirty and broken, had begun to crumble onto the sandy, weedy grass below. Through the glass of the dirty windows, he could see the broken blinds and thought he saw some movement inside, but he couldn’t be sure.
He knocked. When there was no answer, he knocked again. The index finger of his right hand sat gently above the trigger of the gun and he couldn’t wait to unload it at her kidnappers, get this whole thing over with.
“Go away!” a man shouted from inside.
“This is the U.S. Census,” Simeon said. “I have a few confidential questions that will only take a few minutes to answer. If you don’t come to the door, I’ll have to come back later.”
Simeon heard the lock being undone from the other side of the cheap door which separated them. The tall man opened it.
“Make it quick,” he said, and Simeon fired his gun, releasing the second shot at the other man. They both dropped to the floor with heavy thuds and Simeon stepped over them. Now, he would need to get X out of the building before anyone came around to see what was going on.
A soft whimper came from the couch. Simeon went to it and pulled off t
he blanket that covered her, revealing X underneath it, her arms wrapped around her head. She was trembling, not sure who had shot whom.
Finally, she opened her eyes and saw Simeon. “Where are your keys!” he asked her frantically.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Close your eyes,” he said, “don’t look,” and X obeyed as Simeon pulled the keys out of the tall man’s pocket. Once he had them, he scooped her up in his arms, the blanket falling off of her and to the floor in a crude heap, and he carried her out to her car, gently placing her into the passenger seat. He drove back to the parking garage, and once they were next to his SUV, he asked her if she was alright to drive.
“I think so; yes,” X said.
Then he told her to get in the driver’s seat of the Mercedes, and as he entered his own car, he told her simply, “Follow me.”
12.
X took refuge in the womblike cave of sleep. Simeon had given her a pill to calm her down and the thing had knocked her out. Her slumber was deep and dreamless, interrupted occasionally with a quick jab of adrenaline, primal and serrated. She would awaken in a frenzy and then she would remember that she was safe now. Her kidnappers were dead. Simeon had shot them and then taken her back to the house where she had been staying, commanding her to get her things, telling her that it wasn’t safe to stay there anymore. X had packed her clothes and the few belongings she had brought, tossing the Van Gogh on top of everything before zipping up her suitcase and heaving it into the Mercedes.
Yes, now she was safe. X stretched in bed, not wanting to get out. The sheets smelled like Simeon, the scent carrying with it hints of sex and smoldering masculinity.
The intensity of the day was leaking through the window blinds and there would be no going back to sleep. What time was it? X looked at the digital clock. It was 3:10 p.m. X tried to remember the date and had to backtrack to the day she had been kidnapped. She added on from there and confirmed that it was indeed June 21st, the solstice, the longest day of the year. Her birthday.
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