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  “Yes, sir.”

  Um, so…..Um? You? And then you? What?

  Part of me, the unemotional side, was, admittedly, a bit intrigued by the details, the bizarre steps he’d taken to retrieve one of his victims. It was as though he’d built himself an elaborate underwater trophy. Frankly, I’m not quite sure of the physics of his contraption. Standing there, listening to him, I figured this trophy of his must not be too old. The tension of the pull between wakeboard, which would want to rise, and the cement block, which would want to stay put in the bottom muck of the quarry, would constantly pull on her continually decaying flesh. Thus, eventually, the very rope holding her tethered underwater would tear through her muscles, her organs, and her skeleton and her corpse would be torn apart. Pieces of her would either float to the surface or sink to the bottom.

  Must have just thrown her in?

  “Moved this bitch to the basement when I brought you here. She was on her way out. Yeah, bitch. Cut her baby out a few days ago, right up there on top of that rock, all while you sat on your ass, staring at your wall.”

  I cannot even begin to explain my emotions in that moment. I don’t normally allow many emotions at all, but when he actually showed me the spot where he took a baby, when he pulled to give me proof, I experienced the only prolonged time in my life of involuntary fear, a five-minute period, give or take three minutes, when the fear switch turned itself on. I must have been in a state of shock, unable to flip any off switch in any lobe of my brain, for the horror of watching him pull an unknown girl out of the murky black knocked me into a void of pure oblivion. I do recall fixing on just one thing, a red cardinal, high on the highest limb of an oak at the top of the quarry. I kept waiting for him to swoop down and pick me up. I believe it was my only thought.

  My captor resumed his effort, his body a heaving machine. A gurgling of the surface of water began, bubbles flooded the middle, as though a cauldron from hell boiled over. The cardinal flew away.

  With a quick plunk, a rotting head of long hair broke the surface. Soon followed her whole bloated, decomposing corpse. The rope tied in a harness around her chest was, as he said, tied to a wakeboard, purple with black lettering. I assumed the cinder block was beneath her torso, waiting to plummet into the water grave just as soon as he let go the rope. He held her suspended as though he were a magician who had raised a straight-laying lady above a long steel table. Nausea overcame me in a hot wave from my belly, through my lungs and heart, riveting my shoulders, my neck, and swallowed my face.

  Floating right before my eyes was the corpse of a girl with her abdomen sliced open, hip to hip. The gash, having festered in the water, appeared burnt at the edges, like paper burned in a fire. But these weren’t burn marks, they were the stigmata of rotting flesh, the bacteria of the still water eating away at her open wound.

  “Cut that baby out. Baby was dead. The doctor was too drunk to get his ass over here. So I did it. Yeah. Threw the bitch in here. Baby too. He’s tied to a rock himself, way down there at the bottom with the others. She was still crying, bleeding all over my tarp. I’ll have to buy a new one just for you, bitch. You’re almost ready now.” He pointed to the top of the rock wall. “Did it all out here so she wouldn’t spill her trail of blood all over the house. Learned the hard way the first time. Doctor wants you to deliver naturally. Thinks we don’t have to cut the babies out. But, we’ll see about that. I’m so sick to shit of you. Not sure I want to wait much longer. So don’t go giving me your evil fucking eye anymore.” He let go the rope. She sank.

  And since I allowed the emotion in, I wobbled. I fainted.

  There is a sweet grayness that comes upon waking from deep unconsciousness. It’s like a blank slate, with nothing coming before and nothing expected. There is a weightless feeling in this space, the mind not clinging to any past of any sort and not planning either, not sure if it should sink back into a black or allow the white to wake it whole. There are no colors, only a gray fading to white, and with the white comes the beginnings of sounds, fading in and fading out, with an undulation back to gray, then the littlest of sounds again with a return of white.

  A stick snaps at your resting head.

  A cough.

  Some words.

  A quick slip into black, then gray again, then stark white when a push is felt at your back.

  “Wake….p,” you hear.

  “Wake up,” you hear more clearly.

  Definite shapes begin behind your closed lids. Some colors come into play.

  A push is felt, this time on your shoulders.

  “Wake up, you damn bitch,” is definitely heard.

  You open your eyes, the nausea returns. You are lying in moss at the edge of a quarry. Your arms are tied behind your back.

  “Stand the fuck up. Now we’ll see if you look at me like you do anymore.”

  We walked back along the skinny, winding trail to my jailhouse, this time with him holding the end of rope tied around my wrists as though he were walking me, his dog. I did not focus on one single solitary thing. If you’ve never been in shock, you should understand that your senses are not talking to your conscious self. You do not see anything. You do not hear anything. You do not smell anything. So I did not register the color, the shape, the siding, the height, not even one window about the building we returned to. After, I still did not know what the exterior looked like, so I continued to imagine it a white farmhouse. The only fact I clung to in those horrifying moments was the fact that we were returning. We’re returning. I am not dead. He did not throw me in. He did not take my baby. He did not cut me. We’re returning. This was the only time in my life I welcomed the cell.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DAY 32 IN CAPTIVITY

  These blank days, of nothing and empty skies

  Behold, closer, beyond the void

  A comfort comes

  When everything goes mercifully white

  –S. Kirk

  Two days post Kitchen People. Two days post quarry. And all I wanted was a bath. A nice lavender-salt bath, the kind where the water encases me in a hot quicksand. The kind I’d take in Mother’s custom jet, extra-deep tub, with a view of the television she had mounted in her female-only, white marble bathroom. The kind where when my skin got too wrinkly and my core too heated, I’d slosh onto her fluffy, white bathmat, cocoon into her thick white robe from the Ritz, and enter her adjoining walk-in closet to parade naked on a fictitious runway in her Jimmy Choos, her Manolos, and her strappy Valentinos, the pair with the crystals. Wishing for this white comfort, I looked around my dusty, brown jail cell and at my grimy skin and wished for the end. Plus, I was pretty exhausted from the double acting load I’d taken on since Day 30. I had started to perform amazing monologues of wailing fits, adding a chorus of incoherent pleas for my weak-ego’d captor to free me—and my baby.

  He needed to feel powerful.

  I gave him what he needed so he’d stick safely to our practiced routine.

  And although I craved a bath like a lawyer craves coffee, I wasn’t about to deviate from practice and interrupt our choreographed days with any new requests. I could have used the comforter as a cloth, dipping a corner into my cups of water so as to sponge bathe some critical body parts, but I’d wrestle a viper before I’d waste a single drop of liquid. I’d never squander an asset.

  After a lunch of shepherd’s pie on Day 32, I waited for him to collect my tray. I stood and shook, repulsed with my own body, the film on my legs, the grease in my hair. My efforts to cloth wash myself with a dirty, dirty washcloth in the bathroom each day, really were not good enough—frankly, given how used that cloth was, I think I made matters worse.

  Day 32 blossomed warm under the brightness of the sun against the cloudless sky. My room, with the pine-lined walls, became a sauna, even hotter than the days when the Kitchen People came and their scents and oven steam rose like fire smoke into my cell.

  Here came the rattle of the floor, announcing psycho on his way to snatch my empt
y tray. I sat on the bed, counting the number of pine boards from my feet to the door and from there, crawled my eyes up the white plaster wall and counted the cracks that veined out from the doorway. I already knew the answers, but I counted anyway, as I always did, as a way to memorize every pattern everywhere in every one of those days: 12 boards of varying width; 14 cracks, including the small tributaries.

  Keys clanged against the metal outside my door, and I toggled my head in boredom at this whole routine. Sniffing the thick vapor of unmasked sweat from my armpits, I fought back exhaling in disgust. I sat up straighter when at last he opened the door and stepped to his regular spot on Floorboard #3.

  “Give me your tray. Bathroom?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Hurry up then. I haven’t got all day.”

  You haven’t got all day? What the hell do you do all day? Oh yeah, nothing. You do nothing all day. You’re worthless.

  But I didn’t shoot any smart looks, no evil eye, like I might have before. I lowered my gaze, handed forth the tray gingerly, and squirmed, nervously, to the bathroom, as he moved to block the stairwell down, as he always did.

  Inside the bathroom, leaning against the door, I stopped to marvel at how big I’d become. Baby moved within, but slow, like an unhurried whale breaching the ocean with his hump. At full size then, my child folded onto himself in his cramped quarters. Although, I don’t know how he could have been cramped: my torso was as large as a Weber barbecue.

  I pat the baby and scanned the room. I haven’t described the bathroom yet, have I? It must have been a former closet, since the square footage matched, well, a large closet: a wedge of space, crammed within an eave. The ceiling slanted over a claw-foot tub that took up nearly the entire floor space. You had to shimmy sideways past the tub and sit perfectly straight to use the white toilet. Sitting so, you might pontificate life by resting your bent elbow on the white pedestal sink beside the toilet. A cheap square of mirror hung slightly crooked, literally glued to the wall above. Crammed between toilet and sink was a one-foot-high, white trashcan, in which were two white plastic bags: the active one for trash, and one under the one in use. I had left both bags in place, for I hadn’t come up with a use for them. They were those flimsy, annoying things they give you at the grocery store. The variety in which the bagboy inexplicably places one item per bag: ketchup bottle in one, milk in another, bread in another, and so on. You end up with fifty million bags. I hate these bags. I really, really hate these bags.

  But, I digress.

  The bathroom floor was made out of the same pine boards as in my bedroom. I’d scanned this white room so many times for assets, but everything visible was either bolted or glued in place or not terribly useful. I might carry the trashcan, but what was I going to do with a tiny wastebasket? The dirty washcloth on the sink was just a 6” × 6” piece of filth. Beyond these items, the bathroom had been cleared of any regular items that might have been assets. No evident cleaning chemicals, no nail clippers, no tweezers, hell, even floss would have been a great weapon.

  Despite my acceptance that the bathroom was void of any useful items, after clicking the door shut, I scoured the small space once again and again found nothing. I shimmied sideways to the toilet—and, if you really must know, emptied my bladder. My baby belly touched the rounded rim of the bathtub, and my left elbow rested upon the sink. When complete with my afternoon relief, I stood and bent to place my face under the sink faucet to swallow as much water as my dry mouth could take. With the skanked washcloth I’d used for weeks, I quickly wiped my pits and elsewhere.

  I twirled on my feet as I worked, ogling the tub with an animalistic desire. Oh, but to twist the “hot” knob and slip in, soak in heated liquid, and burn the stench from my body. I placed my left foot on the toilet seat, balancing on my right, and stretched to scratch my hairy leg, struggling with my girth in the packed quarters to reach the area above my ankle.

  In this struggle, when my head was cocked downwards and sideways just so, I noticed something that had been waiting for me all along. So hidden, so coy. But very much, very literally, under my nose the whole time.

  A bottle of bleach.

  Right there. A one-gallon bottle. The label was missing, and because it was tucked so tight in the inward groove of the back of the toilet, the bottle was quite camouflaged. And don’t you know, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, when I squatted to extract my new find, sure enough, I found that glorious albino chameleon ¾ full. Sodium Hypochlorite, welcome to the party. Asset #36.

  My plan did not require this bonus Asset. Yet, even in these final hours, I thought of a perfect use for Clorox: an extra flourish of pain, something I hadn’t realized I needed until I set eyes on that magnificent white vessel. I allowed a frivolous and unhinged moment of psychosis in thinking I might fall in love with bleach. Perhaps I did dabble in a couple of seconds of insanity when I hugged the plastic body to my engorged breasts and kissed the blue lid.

  At the bottom of the trashcan was the extra plastic bag. I grabbed it and placed it in my pants: Plastic Bag, Asset #37.

  I replaced the bottle. I wouldn’t be able to extricate the bleach on this trip, but with the whole hot afternoon ahead, I thought I’d map out a plan.

  “Get the fuck out,” he yelled, while predictably banging his fat fist on the door. The wood bounced. Every time he did this, I feared the antique paneling would crack and cave.

  “Yes, sir. Here I come. Sorry, not feeling well.” Which wasn’t true, but, in the quick interim of returning the bottle and watching the door bend to his pounding, I figured out how to safely extract the bottle. I didn’t really need the afternoon to think on a plan.

  “So sorry, I’m hurrying, just feeling queasy.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Get the fuck out.”

  I opened the door, rounded my shoulders in the posture of the inferior and submissive, and scampered quick to my cell.

  He locked me in with his stupid ring of keys.

  What are the other keys for? Who cares.

  For the next hour, I conjured sick and disgusting visions. I spun myself dizzy, and then quickly stopped to drop on all fours, dipping my head to balance a quick second on the crown of my skull, repeating and repeating. The sickest and most grotesque thought was, of course, the real memory of the girl’s torso in the quarry. So I thought of that. Over and over. Then, I invented a mini-movie of myself licking my captor’s twin’s back. Sure, Brad, his back had to be hairy and pimply, so I imagined dragging my tongue through his wiry back hair while popping his back pimples, all while he’d be licking a plate of blood-oozing veal. With this awful imagery firmly in my mind, I spun again, kept licking, kept popping, the veal bloodier each time, the pus thicker, embedding in the hair I licked, and twirling, and twirling, and when so dizzy and so disturbed, I jammed my finger down my throat and finally, finally, vomited. It’s harder than you think to make yourself throw up. And it’s not something I’ve done since, nor do I recommend self-purging as an appropriate act for practice. Sometimes, however, these vile acts must be done on a one-time basis for the greater good.

  The blob splashed well away from the doorway, exactly where I aimed, and nowhere near where he’d step. I didn’t want him to ever have any hesitations in entering my room and stepping in the exact same footpath he always followed.

  Should I sit until dinner with this acidic odor, steaming in this heat? Or, should I call out to him, like I sometimes did when a bathroom emergency seized my physical self. I had no clue where he went between his visits to my cell. Perhaps he sat in some room below, perhaps he left to do errands, somewhere where I could not hear him. Eight out of the twelve times I had banged on the door and requested a special bathroom trip, in-between the regular mealtime bathroom visits, he had barged up the stairs, playing the annoyed prison guard. Thus, his stats on responding were high, eight out of twelve times. And I figured that was because he didn’t want a mess to clean up. So, with the likelihood he’d respond again, and because eigh
t out of twelve times made it safely part of the routine, I chose to call him to my room.

  Plus, the awful odor of decay, which seemed accelerated in my fire-pit room, invaded my nose and pierced my brain, and reinforced my decision.

  Oh hell no, I’m not smelling this all afternoon.

  Rubbing my hands together, I waltzed to the door. I pictured myself a master healer, heating holistic hands to massage broken muscles for an absolute cure. With hot palms, I banged upon the door.

  “Excuse me, sir. Excuse me. I got sick,” I yelled.

  Sure enough, movement began in some pocket of the building below me. Then a pause, which I presume came because he questioned whether he heard anything.

  “Excuse me,” I continued to bang and yell. “Sir, I’m sick. I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Mother of all fuck, son of a damn bitch,” he shouted, as he stomped up the stairs.

  I backed away from the door, and in he came.

  “Holy What,” he said, pinching his nose, while finding the source on the floor.

  “I’ll clean it, sir. I’m so sorry. Please, please. I saw some bleach in the bathroom. Can I use it? Should I use it?” I fell to his feet, begging him, “I’m so sorry.”

  Still squirming in the smell, he backed up, took his position at the top of the stairs to indicate I should enter the bathroom, and said, “Well, go on. Clean this shit up. And hurry the fuck up.”

  Still on hands and knees, I crawled to the bathroom, grabbed the trashcan, the washcloth, the bleach, and crawled back. Quickly, I scooped the mess into the trash and poured two caps of cleaning chemical on the washcloth to rub the boards. Setting the bottle aside after scrubbing the spot, I took up the trash and cloth, returned to the bathroom, dumped everything in the toilet, rinsed the trashcan in the tub, wrung the cloth under running water, and returned to my room.

  “Thank you, sir. I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t fucking puke again. I’m watching Matlock,” he said, while once again locking my door.