The Worst Thing

by Aaron Elkins

  We had bought the house off West Lake Sammamish Parkway (or W LK SAMM PKWY, as the cost-efficient street signs put it) in 2000, when we were married. Redmond had still been a relatively sleepy little town then, well away from the influence of booming Seattle. The house was about sixty years old, a simple, gray-shingled structure on a pleasant grassy acre that sloped down to the lake, probably built originally as a weekend retreat, one of a row of similar places that lined the shore. In the ten years since we’d moved in, Redmond had come into its own as a super-hot place to live; being headquarters for Microsoft hadn’t hurt property values. Many of the longtime owners had sold, and the buyers—newly rich Microsofties, usually—had promptly torn down the old, perfectly serviceable weekend houses and put up huge new mansions complete with gorgeous docks, sailboats, cruisers, and boathouses.

  As a result, our house, once about average, now comprised the low-rent district of the neighborhood. Moored to our dock, instead of the usual handsome, tethered sailboat or cruiser, were a couple of battered plastic Necky kayaks.

  But the ducks and the geese and the soft lapping of the water in the dark were as lovely as they’d always been. At a quarter past two, unable to make my brain quit churning, I’d given up on sleep, gotten quietly out of bed so as not to disturb Lori, slipped a parka on over my pajamas, gone out onto the deck, and turned on the light. The rain was still misting down, but I found a dry lounge chair under the roof overhang, pulled it within the small, friendly circle of illumination, and sank into it. Annoyed by my presence, a flock of mallards sleeping on the shore below clacked and squabbled for a few minutes but soon resettled themselves. I lay in the chair, my parka zipped up to the neck, fingering a thin file folder and thinking.

  Would I?

  I had a belief, not formed from books but from personal experience, that each life has a defining moment, an episode that shapes and colors, for good or ill, all that follows. It might come early or relatively late. It could be calamitous or outwardly trivial: an unjust punishment in grade school, a parent’s death, involvement in a war, a disastrous prom date, a lost love, a failed business. Sometimes the person recognizes it for what it is but it will do its work just as well without being identified or understood.

  About my own defining moment I had no doubt. It had come early—more than thirty years ago, when I was five years old—and it had been calamitous. Almost everything that I was, the good and the bad, derived from it. Could I indeed go back now, after so many years, and somehow “do something about it,” reprogram myself into someone else?

  If so, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d tried. Fifteen years ago, when I’d hit one of my lowest points, I had gone to a highly reputed psychiatrist but had quit after three sessions, finding the psychiatric theories and explanations either wildly baroque or naively simplistic. The one useful thing that had come out of them had been the narrative of the incident that the psychiatrist, Sky Benson, had asked me to write. The idea, Dr. Benson explained, was that the act of setting it down on paper might enable me to separate myself from the experience and so move on with my life. That hadn’t come close to working, but I’d kept my essay and had read it many times since, sometimes with a perverse gratification, basking in the fascination of bygone horrors, but most often for the reassurance of knowing that I had indeed lived through it, that I had come through alive and whole—or at least relatively whole—and if I could survive that, what couldn’t I survive? It was that narrative that was in the folder on my lap now.

  I looked up at the thin, luminescent clouds and at the hazy, shimmering moon sailing behind them, took a breath, opened the folder, and began to read.

  In the winter of 1978, when I was five years old, I was kidnapped from the children’s play area behind the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul. I had been playing with my seven-year-old brother, Richard, under the eye of a guard from my father’s company, when four gunmen burst onto the scene, pulling me from the slide, brushing Richard aside, and shooting our guard to death. A chloroformed rag was clamped over my face, and I was thrown into a waiting car. At the outskirts of the city, semiconscious and hysterical, I was stuffed into a potato sack and transferred to a farm truck in which, under a load of manure, I was taken to an isolated house in a remote farming village near the Bulgarian border.

  My kidnappers demanded a $5-million ransom from my father’s employer, Driscoll Construction Enterprises, a Los Angeles–based company then engaged in repairing and extending the military runways at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport. Despite the frantic pleas of my parents, the firm’s board of directors held back, and in the end the kidnappers accepted a ransom of $250,000, $75,000 of which was personally raised by my father, the project’s on-site engineering superintendent.

  For this they waited fifty-eight days and nights, during which time I was kept in an unheated, six-by-six-foot underground cell, the rough stone walls of which streamed with moisture and glistened with cockroaches. The furnishings, from beginning to end, consisted of a plank bed bolted to the wall, two blankets, a gallon jug of water sporadically refilled, and a plastic bucket.

  My largely silent captors, with their frightening, eye-slitted black hoods, seemingly had but one English phrase: “Shut up.” And even that they rarely used. My food needs were handled by means of a tray placed in the six-inch-high space at the bottom of the heavy wire-mesh door, so that I had to go down on my hands and knees to get it, and I generally wolfed it down on the concrete floor, except for the many, many times when I was too ill or too sick at heart to eat. The menu consisted of porridge, rice, root vegetables, and various unidentifiable soups, with an occasional gobbet of chicken or something like chicken. No utensils, no napkins. And always bananas, so that by the time I was freed all I had to do to throw up was to look at one. How often they fed me, or how regularly, I never knew. Because there were no windows and the light was left on twenty-four hours a day, I had no way of distinguishing day from night, let alone one hour from another.

  Elimination needs were taken care of by the plastic bucket, which was sometimes emptied in the morning, and sometimes not. When it overflowed or got too smelly the guard on duty, who naturally would have preferred leaving it for the next shift, usually got angry about it and I quickly learned to scuttle under the bed whenever the door was swung open, so that cuffing me around required more trouble than it was worth.

  When I was “bad” I was screamed at, threatened, slapped around a little, and shackled to my bed, sometimes with a chain around my ankle and sometimes by a metal collar locked around my neck.

  The need for bathing wasn’t handled at all.

  As proof that they had me and that they meant business, the little toe of my left foot was mailed to my parents about a week after they got me. Thank God, I have no memory of their actually doing it, so probably I was chloroformed again. I hope so.

  When I was released on the fifty-ninth day, still in what was left of the clothes I’d been wearing when they took me, doctors found two dozen ulcerating sores on my body as a result of malnutrition and poor hygiene. I had lost nine pounds—more than twenty percent of my body weight—I had gum abscesses, infections in both eyes, and a raging case of dysentery. I was too weak to walk.

  It was the day before my sixth birthday.

  Dr. Benson had wanted me to write more, setting down my recollections of the aftermath, but by then I had lost confidence in the whole thing. Besides, my memories of the next few months were jumbled and blurry, too confused to put on paper in a coherent way. There were dimly recalled doctors and a hospital stay during which the rough-and-ready surgery that the kidnappers had done on my foot was repaired to the extent that anything could be done. My parents refused to openly discuss the abduction in my presence (although, like any kid, I picked up plenty of inferences in their conversations that they assumed I couldn’t possibly decipher) and slowly, slowly, the terrible memories had been laid to rest and covered over.

  It was the agitated honking of a flight of low-flying Canad
ian geese that woke me; that and the welcome, unexpected warmth of the sun clearing the firs on the far shore of the lake and glinting off the water and into my eyes. The file lay beside me on the wet deck. It was about seven-thirty a.m., I judged; I’d fallen asleep and been outside for more than five hours, and although my hair was dewy and my face and my bare feet chilled, I was otherwise cozy and relaxed in my parka, not yet ready to move, and still inclined to reflection.

  Laid to rest and covered over; was that the way I’d put it to myself during the night? Not quite, I thought now, closing my eyes again for the pleasure of feeling the sun on my eyelids. Covered over, yes. Laid to rest, well, not exactly. The bodily lesions had healed with no ill effect beyond a slight hitch in my stride, unnoticeable except when I was tired, but the mental wounds were a different story.

  Now thirty-seven, I still suffered from sporadic nighttime panic attacks. Always the same: I would wake up with a strangled yell, thinking that I was back in that Turkish dungeon with that chain around my neck. That would start the whole megillah: heart racing, overwhelming, indescribable terror, and all the rotten rest of it. For these, always at the ready in my bedside table there was a bottle of Xanax, which brought me back to sanity inside of three or four minutes. Without them, the panic could go on for an hour or more before it wore itself (and me) out.

  I even had a small vial that I carried with me when I was away from home. My motto, I sometimes joked with the very few people who knew about it, was “Don’t leave home without it.”

  I also had a continuing horror of being trapped in confined places, one of the effects of which was that it was impossible to get me onto an airplane without drugging me up to my eyeballs. And even then you’d have to fight me. Getting me onto a train or a boat was possible (but not easy) because there was at least the hypothetical possibility that one could leap from a moving train or boat if necessary and hope to live. Cars were much the same, although when I was at the wheel there was no problem at all; I was able to tell myself that I was in control, so that if things got to be too much for me I could always switch off the engine and get out.

  There were other, more trivial things. Nobody loves cockroaches, but I positively loathed them. If an Orkin commercial came on the TV, I got up and left the room. About bananas I was better than I used to be. Being in the same room with one no longer bothered me, but if someone started to peel one in my presence, I found an excuse to go and do something somewhere else. The smell of burlap made my stomach tense up, and my routes to and from work were chosen to avoid as much as possible the smell of manure from local farms.

  Oh, I almost forgot. I also lived with the conviction, the certain conviction, that somehow, somewhere, I was going to get myself kidnapped again. It was simply in the cards, that’s all. The gods had it in for me, and there was nothing I could do about it. For a while I even carried a gun to fight my attackers off. But, finally, having read and reread the statistical probability of being kidnapped for ransom in the United States (one in one-and-a-half million), I convinced myself to stop carrying it on the grounds that doing so was paranoid, and I wasn’t paranoid.

  Besides, if it was in the cards, what good was a gun supposed to do me?

  Despite these little, ahem, idiosyncrasies, I considered myself a reasonably sane, reasonably capable human being, even brave where physical courage or endurance were required, and generally able to cope with daily life pretty much as well as anyone else. Long ago I had come up with a mental process in which I could usually put my various mental quirks into an imaginary box, close the lid, shove the box in a drawer, and slam the drawer shut. They were there, all right, and never very far away, but they were a separate, walled-off part of my life. “That’s the nutcase part,” I’d once explained to Lori. “That’s the ten percent of me that’s certifiable. But the other ninety percent is one hundred percent functional.”

  I believed it too. With a little care, after all, how hard was it to keep clear of manure and bananas? And as long as I didn’t leave the United States, there wasn’t anywhere I couldn’t get by means of a train or a car. As for the occasional unavoidable crisis or those nighttime screaming meemies, there was always the Xanax.

  Certainly, I had as active a social life as did most men in their thirties, plus a few close friends. I’d been married to Lori, joyfully so, for a decade. And I successfully held down not one but two steady, responsible jobs. I was a senior research fellow at the Odysseus Institute, at which I specialized in issues relating to kidnapping and extortion. I was also a one-course-a-year adjunct professor of management at the University of Washington, where my specialty was the development of corporate crisis management and security policies.

  Which, on the face of it, posed the great paradox of my life: How could anybody with the mental hang-ups I had, especially someone with my particular history, choose to continue to have anything to do with extortionists and kidnappers? Why in heaven’s name would I want to? Even I couldn’t say for certain, but Lori’s theory was that my abduction had left me with some extremely heavy baggage to lug around, but also with a compulsive interest in, or perhaps even an obsession (her term) with, kidnapping, extortion, and captivity. That is, I was scared to death of anything to do with them, but fascinated at the same time.

  It made sense to me. My work at the university and the institute was a way to satisfy the fascination and avoid the fear. I wrote policy papers, I did research, I prepared course lectures and training materials; but it was all from a theoretical, safely removed vantage point. What I could not do, would not even try to bring myself to do, was to participate directly in hostage negotiations, victim-counseling, or anything else that required actually dealing with kidnappers, hostage-takers, or their victims. That would have been getting too close; a lesson I’d learned the hard way. Even talking about the subject—as opposed to writing about it, which was more removed, more abstract—was something I stayed clear of. Hence, my running screaming from putting on that training program, even though I’d written it myself.

  Well, I said it made sense to me. I didn’t say it would make sense to you.

  “Hiya, Shep, how’s it going this morning, buddy?” I said, offering my hand for nuzzling when the elderly golden lab came slowly through the dog door from the kitchen and made his arthritic way across the deck. He was having hip problems now, and his back legs weren’t working as well as they once did. The silvered muzzle nestled in my palm for a few moments before he settled stiffly down on the deck with an aged sigh. I stroked the soft ears and let my hand hang down over the side of the chair so he could lay his snout on it the way he liked to when he dozed off. After his rough tongue scoured my palm a couple of times, he settled his jaw securely into its hollow, snuffled like the ancient he was, and went peacefully to sleep beside his master.

  I’d been collecting myself to get up and brew some coffee, but now dropped the idea, unwilling to disturb Shep’s repose by moving my hand. Amazing, when you thought about it. Here I was, a grown man—with a PhD, no less—who was yearning for a cup of coffee, but who, rather than going to get it, sat there motionless instead, with his hand lying somewhat uncomfortably on the deck, palm up, so that he wouldn’t disturb the dog who was resting his snout on it. Now that was really crazy. After a while I must have dropped off again, because it seemed to me that Lori had materialized out of nowhere to stand by my chair.

  “Oh, Bryan, you haven’t been out here all night, have you?”

  “I guess I have, honey; most of it. I must have fallen asleep without meaning to.”

  “Is everything all right? Nothing’s the matter, is it?”

  “Everything’s fine. I just couldn’t turn my mind off, that’s all. Just one of those nights.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” I hated to hear the concern in her voice. Did I really seem skittish enough that last night’s session with Wally might have set me off on a nighttime “episode” of some kind? Maybe I was more of a nutcase than I thought.

 
“I’m sure. In fact, I could hardly be more comfortable. It’s beautiful out here this morning, isn’t it? Feel that sun.”

  “Mmm. It’s wonderful after all that rain. Coffee?”

  “Please. How would you feel about brewing up a pot and coming out here and having it with me? It’s Saturday, no jobs to run off to.”

  “You’re on. Come on, Shep. Morning biscuit time for you.”

  The magic word got the old guy on his feet and off he shuffled after her. Shep was coming to the end of his years now. It was going to be hard when the time came, when the pain in those corroded old joints got to be too much for him and for us, and we had to put him down. I hated thinking about that day. He’d been with us such a long while; with me right from the beginning.

  In a few minutes Lori was back with the coffee pot and a couple of mugs on a tray and with Shep trailing along behind her, one end of a bone-shaped biscuit sticking out each side of his mouth. She handed one of the mugs to me and looked around for another chair.

  I shifted my legs off the lounge chair, sat up, and moved to one side to make room for her, and she sat down and poured our coffees. Shep, who liked to be close to us when he ate, sank grunting to the deck at our feet. His once-mighty jaws clamped on the biscuit and the two ends broke off and fell onto the deck. Unconcerned, knowing they were safe, he chewed placidly on the middle part. Lori stretched with a sigh, her eyes closed, her lovely face turned up to the sun. Just looking at the graceful curve of her throat and chin made the day a good one already.

  I looked at her with affection. I love you, I thought. Ten years. We are actually getting to be an old married couple, the way we used to say we would, and it’s not so bad, is it?

  She opened her eyes. “You’re looking at me.”

  “Why shouldn’t I look at you? You’re beautiful.”

  “Because a gentleman would wait until a lady has had a chance to put on some makeup and do something about her hair before he looks at her.”