Method 15 33 (2 page)

A country breeze whooshed in as though rushing past my captor to console me. For a quick second, I became washed in a
cool caress, but his presence loomed and broke the spell almost as soon as it came. He was partially masked to me, of course, given the half-on, half-off blindfold, yet I felt him stall and stare.
What must I look like to you? Just a young girl, duct-taped to an armchair in the back of your shit van? Is this normal for you? You fucking imbecile
.

“You don’t scream or cry or beg me like the others did,” he said, sounding like he’d grasped some epiphany he’d been struggling with for days.

I turned my head fast toward his voice, as though possessed, intending in my motion to un-nerve him. I’m not sure if I did, but I believe he shimmied backwards a fraction.

“Would that make you feel better?” I asked.

“Shut the fuck up, you crazy little bitch. I don’t give a shit what you fucking sluts do,” he said loudly and fast, as though reminding himself of his position of control. From the high decibel of his agitation, I surmised we were alone, wherever we were.
This can’t be good. He’s safe yelling here. We’re alone. Just the two of us
.

By the tilt of the van, I could tell he grabbed hold of the doorframe and hoisted himself in. He grunted from the exertion, and I took stock of his labored smoker’s breathing.
Typical, worthless, fat slob
. Shadows and slices of his movement came toward me, and a silvery sharp object in his hand glistened under the overhead light. As soon as he got into my space, I smelled him, an old sweat, the stench of three-day-old body odor. His breath was like fetid soup on the air. I winced, turned toward the tinted window, and plugged my nostrils by holding my breath.

He cut the duct tape melding my arms to the bolted chair and put a paper bag over my head.
Ah shit-breath, so you realize the blindfold doesn’t work
.

Comfortable in the evil I came to accept in that traveling armchair, I had no clue what was in store for me. Nevertheless, I did not protest our move into what must have been a farm. Given the aftermath scent of cows grazing all day and the high blades and stalks that slapped my legs, I reasoned we entered a field of hay or wheat.

The night air of Day 2 cooled my arms and chest, even through my lined, black raincoat. Despite the bag and the drooping cloth on my face, light from the moon illuminated our trek. With his gun on my spine, and me leading a blinded way with only the moon as my pull, we waded through knee-high stalks of America’s grain for one set of sixty. I stepped high so as to punctuate my counting; he sloshed behind in a gunman’s shuffle. And such was our two-person parade:
one, swish, two, swish, three, swish, four
.

I compared my sorrowful march to the watery death of mariners sentenced to the gangplank and considered my first asset:
terra firma
. Then the terrain changed, and I no longer sensed the moon’s presence. The ground gave a bit with my unnecessarily forced and heavy steps, and, by the sprinkle of dry dust around my exposed ankles, I supposed I was on a loose dirt path. Tree limbs scratched my arms on both sides.

No light + no grass + dirt path + trees = Forest. This is not good
.

My neck pulse and my heartbeat seemed to catch separate rhythms, as I remembered the Nightly News’ account of another teen, who they found in the woods in some other state, far from me. How distant her tragedy seemed to me then, so displaced from reality. Her hands were severed, her innocence taken, her carcass dumped in a shallow grave. The worst part was the evidence of coyotes and mountain lions, who took their share under the evil winks of devil-eyed bats and the mournful glare of night owls.
Stop this…count…remember to count…keep the count…focus…

These dreadful thoughts caused me to lose my place.
I’ve lost count
. Pushing my horror aside, I steeled myself, swallowed a jug of air, and slowed the hummingbird in my chest, just like my dad taught me in our father-daughter Jiu-Jitsu and tai chi classes and just like the lessons in the medical school books, which I kept in my laboratory in our basement.

Given my quick blip of fear upon entering the forest, I recalibrated the count by three digits. After one set of sixty in
the dense wood, we skidded into short grass and back under the unencumbered illumination of the moon.
This must be a clearing. This is not a clearing. Is this? This is pavement. Why didn’t we park here? Terra firma, terra firma, terra firma
.

We hit another patch of short grass and stopped. Keys clattered; a door opened. Before I forgot the numbers, I calculated and logged the total time from the van to this door:
1.1 minutes, walking
.

I did not get the opportunity to inspect the exterior of the building we entered, but I pictured a white farmhouse. My captor led me immediately up stairs.
One flight, two flights…
Upon landing on the third floor, we turned 45 degrees left, walked three steps, and stopped again. The keys clanked. A bolt slid. A lock popped. A door creaked. He removed the bag and blindfold and pushed me into my confines, a 12’ × 24’ room, with no way out.

The space was lit by the moon through a high triangular window on the wall to the right of the door. To the front was a queen-sized mattress on a box spring, directly on the floor, but strangely surrounded by a wood frame with sides and slats and rungs and all. It seemed like someone ran out of energy or perhaps forgot the boards for the box spring and mattress to rest upon. Thus the bed was like a canvas that had not yet been secured, only rested crooked within its picture frame. A white cotton coverlet, one pillow, and a red knit blanket dressed the makeshift bed. Above spanned three exposed beams, parallel to the door: one over the threshold, the other cutting the rectangular room in two, and the third running over my bed. The ceiling was cathedral and so, with the exposed beams, one could surely hang—if they so chose. There was nothing else. Eerily clean, eerily sparse, a quiet hiss was the only decoration. Even a monk would have felt bare in this vacuum.

I went straight to the floor mattress, as he pointed out a bucket as a bathroom if I had “to piss or shit” in the night. The moon pulsed upon his departure, as though it too let out the air it was holding in its galactic lungs. In a brighter room, I flopped
backwards, exhausted, and schooled myself on my roller-coaster emotions.
From the van, you went from anxiety, to hatred, to relief, to fear, to nothing. Get even or you won’t win this
. As with any of my experiments, I needed a constant, and the only constant I could have was steady detachment, which I endeavored to keep, along with copious doses of disdain and unfathomable hatred, if those ingredients were needed to maintain the constant. What with the things I heard and saw in my confinement, those additives were indeed necessary. And easy to come by.

If there is one talent I honed in captivity, whether seeded by divine design, by osmosis from having lived in my mother’s steel world, by instruction from my father in the art of self-defense, or the natural instinct of my condition, it was akin to that of a great war general’s: a steady, disaffected, calculating, revengeful, and even demeanor.

This level repose was not new to me. In fact, in grade school, a counselor insisted I be examined due to the administration’s concern over my flat reactions and apparent failure to experience fear. My first-grade teacher was bothered because I didn’t wail or jump, screech or scream—like everyone else did—when a gunman opened fire on our classroom. Instead, as the video surveillance showed, I inspected his jerky hysterics, slicks of sweat, pockmarked complexion, enlarged pupils, frantic eye movements, track-lined arms, and, thankfully, fruitless aim. I recall to this day, the answer was so clear, he was drugged, skittish, high on acid or heroin, or both—yes, I knew the symptoms. Behind the teacher’s desk was her emergency bullhorn on a shelf under the fire alarm, so I walked over to both. Before pulling the alarm, I shouted “AIR RAID” through the horn, in as deep a six-year-old voice I could muster. The meth-head dropped to the ground, cowering in a puddle of himself as he pissed his pants.

The video, which placed the issue of my evaluation on the front-burner, showed my classmates bawling in huddles, my teacher on her knees imploring God above her, and me atop a stool, trigger-fingering the bullhorn at my hip, and hovering as though directing
the mayhem. My pig-tailed head was cocked to the side, my arm with the bullhorn across my baby-fat belly, the other up to my chin, and I had a subtle grin matching the almost wink in my eye, approving of the policemen who pounced upon the culprit.

Nevertheless, after a battery of tests, the child psychiatrist told my parents I was highly capable of emotion, but also exceptional at suppressing distraction and unproductive thoughts. “A brain scan shows her frontal lobe, which supports reasoning and planning, is larger than normal. 99
^th
percentile. Well actually, frankly, 101 percent, if you ask me,” he said. “She is not a sociopath. She understands and can choose to feel emotion. But she might choose not to, too. Your daughter tells me she has an internal switch that she can turn off or on at any given moment to experience things such as joy, fear, love.” He coughed and said, “ahem,” before continuing. “Look, I’ve never had a patient like this before. But one need look no further than Einstein to understand how much we don’t understand about the limits of the human brain. Some say we have harnessed only a fraction of our potential. Your daughter, well, she’s harnessed something. Whether this is blessed news or a curse, I do not know.” They didn’t know I was listening through the crack in his office door. I recorded every word to the hard drive in my mind.

The bit about the switch was mostly true. I might have simplified things. It’s more a choice, but since mental choices are difficult to explain, I said switch. In the very least, I was lucky to have such a good doctor. He listened, without judgment. He believed, without skepticism. He had a true faith in medical mysteries. The day I left his care, I flipped a switch and hugged him.

They studied me a few weeks, wrote some papers, and my parents yanked me back into a somewhat normal world: I returned to first grade and built a lab in the basement.

Upon Day 3 in captivity—first day out of the van—we began the process of setting up a pattern. Three meals a day, served by
him, on that stupid china plate, milk in a white mug, small cup of water, followed by a larger, lukewarm cup of water. After each meal, he would retrieve the tray with the empty plate, mug, and cups and remind me to knock only when I needed the bathroom. If I did not get a response in time, “use the bucket.” I never used the bucket. I never used the bucket for relieving myself, that is.

From there, our developing process-setting was punctuated by a couple of visitors. Yes, I was blindfolded correctly for visits, so I did not then ascertain their full identities. But after what happened on Day 17, I set out to catalog all of the particulars so as to later exact revenge, not only on my captor, but also on my jail cell visitors. What to do with the people in the kitchen below, however, I did not know. But let me not get ahead of myself just yet.

My first visitor came on Day 3. Certainly medical, he had cold fingers. I labeled him “The Doctor.” My second visitor came on Day 4, accompanied by The Doctor, who announced, “She is doing well, considering.” In a hushed tone, the second visitor said, “So this is her?” I labeled him “Mr. Obvious.”

When The Doctor and Mr. Obvious left, The Doctor advised my jailer to keep me calm and to allow me tranquility. But nothing changed to afford me calm or tranquility until the end of Day 4 when I asked for Assets #14, 15, and 16.

And so, as the light began to fade on my fourth day in captivity, the floorboards again rattled. Through Asset #8, the keyhole, I noted the time,
dinner
. He opened the door and handed me the tray with the nonsensically-patterned plate, mug of milk, and cup of water.
Quiche and bread again
.

“Here.”

“Thank you.”

“More water?”

“Yes, please.”

Locks door, pipes clang, water runs, he returns: more water.
Why, why, why does he do this?

He turned to leave.

With head to chest and in the most submissive, insipid
voice I could tolerate, I said, “Excuse me. I can’t really sleep and I wonder if this hurts…anyway, maybe if I watched TV, or listened to a radio, or read, or even drew, a pencil with some paper, would maybe…help?”

I braced myself for a brutal, verbal tirade and even physical violence for my insolence.

He stared me down, grunted, and left without acknowledging my request.

About forty-five minutes later, I heard the now familiar floorboards rattle. I figured he was back, as was the established routine, to collect my plate, mug, and cups. However, when he opened the door, resting on his wide chest, he carried an old nineteen-inch television, a yard-sale radio about twelve inches long, a pad of paper tucked under his left arm, and a rather long, plastic school-kid case. The case, pink with two horses on the side, was the kind you buy for the first day of school and lose in a week. I wondered if I was in a schoolhouse.
Must be abandoned if I am
.