Method 15/33 Read online

  My father is a physicist and a black belt in jiu-jitsu, trained by the navy. With these two industries, he taught the benefit of using an aggressor’s weight and movement against him in battle. I knew from my mother, a hardened cynic, “You should never underestimate a person’s stupidity or laziness.” Any opponent will eventually slip up, and thus, to her teachings, “Never waste an opponent’s moment of weakness. Do not hesitate in slicing an exposed jugular.” She meant it figuratively, but I tried in vain to apply it literally.

  My captor displayed numerous moments of weakness, of stupidity, of laziness. I’ll sum them up: the van, the Kitchen People, the pencil sharpener, the setting and following of patterns, the inability to fight his own weakened ego, the decision to put the barrel of a gun on my unborn baby, the offers for more water, the TV, the radio, and finally, the act of leaving his ring of keys in the door whenever he unlocked it to enter.

  By Day 33, I was secure concluding the Kitchen People would be absent until Day 37. The Doctor and The Obvious Couple would not visit, for I had shown no signs of labor—nor would I have shared them with my captor anyway. Brad, I presumed, had been successful in flying the coup.

  It will be him and me alone, just as 15/33 requires.

  The dangling radio said it was 11:51, nine minutes to showtime. I stood in my designated spot and tried to fix upon the time, suspended in the air on the radio which spun on the rope to which it was tied. The minutes were so slow then, and so was my heartbeat. I believe the only anxiety I felt was the anxiety of getting this gig over with. The practice I’d had to this point was as though I’d memorized a passionate love speech, one that at first writing might have elicited trembles of heartbeats and perhaps even tears, but after ten thousand recitations had become a mass of words, disconnected to human feeling—much the way a President might read from a teleprompter or a bad actor might deliver lines when reading straight from a script. “I love you” is said as three robotic words, no dip of voice or shoulders, no hand extended on the “love,” no pupils dilated, no crease of the forehead to emphasize the point. “I. Love. You.” is simply said while the speaker simultaneously checks the time on his watch. There is no love with such a declaration if he checks his watch; but love is felt, indeed the room pulses, when he says as much and fights his knees from sinking to the ground or fails to blink from the blinding light invading his widened eyes.

  And so, much like the tin man declaring love, my practiced hand itched to complete the task. I probably could have killed him blindfolded and asleep at this point, the actions I planned had been repeated so often.

  At 11:55, I signaled my star, a bag of bleach, to take its place in the spotlight. Bleach is corrosive. I once read an article in which Scott Curriden of Scripps Research Environmental Health and Safety was quoted as saying, “Bleach can drill a hole through stainless steel.” So I waited as long as I could to pour my ¾ gallon of bleach into the flimsy plastic bag and pinch the bag by loosely tying the top with some of the red yarn I’d unraveled. Next, standing by the door, I pulled the other end of the yarn, which was thrown over the beam closest to the door, along with another cord holding another item—wait for it—so the pouch of bleach rested beneath this other heavy item. Both objects dangled directly over Floorboard #3.

  Bleach is corrosive, as I’ve mentioned, which we know from scientists. And bleach burns like a Mother You-Know-Whater when it’s splashed in your eyes or your mouth or your face, which we know from common sense.

  The clock ticked to 11:59 and the sun simultaneously flared, sending a beam to cut through the dust particles in the air. The smell of my own sweat fogged me in the tight space I quarantined myself to, firm against the wall by the door. I’m sure my odor hadn’t increased due to any nervousness, but rather was abundantly apparent as I prepared to say goodbye to all the details of that horrible den.

  An ever-so-slight tremble began. The floorboards rattled. Lunch. I plastered my back to the wall, solid in the designated spot by the door. Outside, he placed the tray on the floor. The click clack of plastic against wood signaled me to stand rigid and ready.

  Keys jingled and metal scraped within the keyhole.

  The door opened.

  He opened it wide, just what I needed, just as always, just as expected, as planned.

  After collecting the food from the floor, he bent without looking up and stepped to the exact spot he always did, just as I had marked and measured three times a day since Day 5. Floorboard #3. He looked straight ahead at the bed, which was now a contraption of death. What did he think, expecting me to be sitting there waiting for lunch but seeing…the mattress tipped, wedged between the bed frame and the wall, and the box spring on the floor, cut open and hallowed, lined with that plastic, and filled with water, and thus, transfigured into a literal pool. A quarry with cotton sides in the house, only steps from the door. In the second of insight I allowed him, I hoped he saw a ready canvas, waiting only for its main subject, him, and thus would be my completed masterpiece. I hoped he would chastise himself for giving me plastic on that box spring, chastise himself for being too lazy to remove it and properly place the bed on slats. His vision would be of that box spring now expertly layered in the plastic, half-filled with water, and the standing mattress against the wall, like an opened lid to this well, waiting to close once he entered. The wood frame of the bed, he should have noted, had several skinny rungs missing. Did he wonder where those had gone? And hanging and twirling and singing in the sky above was the radio on a rope made out of a red knit blanket. The radio’s plug was in the socket at the foot of the bed.

  Did he connect water with electricity? Did he feel the rising zap in the room, coming from the socket, my plan, my head? Did he sense the tension so high in the blaring opera above the bed, so high I thought bolts of lighting flashed around the room?

  I’m sure if I had allowed another second to pass, he’d have cranked his head to see me standing to his left and by the opened door. He’d have asked a bewildered and grunted How? I never gave him the opportunity, of course, but I have a chance now for a quick explanation.

  On that working night from Day 4 to Day 5, I used the razor from the pencil sharpener, which had been summarily dismantled by the sharp end of the bucket handle, and cut the plastic covering and the fabric on the inside of the box spring. The cutting is what took so long. I had only the razor to work with and it was small. Even a microscopic tear might foil the plan, so I worked methodically, like an art restorer to a damaged Rembrandt, precious square inch by precious square inch, ensuring each cut was surgeon-worthy straight. I kept the plastic on the sides and bottom of the box spring and secured it in place with the flat tacks, collectively Asset #24. I’ll explain about the tacks in a minute. I lined the box spring between its now exposed support boards with the cut plastic and secured the inner well—now an empty pool—with more of the flat tacks. I reinforced certain spots with a patchwork of pieces of my black raincoat, which I had torn apart. He never noticed it missing.

  “Your opponent will often be blind to your design, being consumed with his own. Do not subconsciously seek accolades of your ingenuity and thus call attention—be sated by your own approval. Be confident you will win,” so said the quote, scrawled on a napkin and framed in my mother’s home office. My father was the author, having written the inspiration before jumping from a plane in his navy wetsuit to extract some kidnapped figurehead from an island prison. Such were the subjects of our family dinner conversations, even after mother’s trial wins became the norm and even after my father retired to a full life of science.

  On Day 33, he likely could not believe the spectacle of this box spring well, filled with the lukewarm water he offered me at every meal—by the way, when I guzzled water from the bathroom faucet, this is how I got the hydration needed for my condition. Above the bed-pool hung the radio, plugged in to the outlet on the wall by the headboard. A symphony of unparalleled voracity blared.

  Wild notes. Oh wild melody. Rage on.


  Just before my captor arrived on Day 33 to deliver my lunch, I marveled at this scene myself. When I said, “Thank you,” each time you offered me more water, I meant, “Thank you. Thank you for letting me drown you, electrocute you.”

  The band is beyond divinity at this point, so furious I can no longer hear a single note. What music, what rapture. I am overcome.

  One second after he entered the room and stepped in the place I had studied for weeks, I let go the pouch of bleach (Asset #36), and also the ultrasound machine’s extension cord (Asset #22), which held the TV suspended above his head. The pouch hit first and burst, only to be squished further a millisecond later by the crash of the television. Both missiles hit squarely on what was once the soft spot of his newborn skull.

  The bleach must have reached his eyeballs because instead of cradling his crushed head, his weak arms, weak because he was passing out, went to his eyes as he gave out a high-pitched moan. I hold freeze-frames of his actions from this point on. Frame-by-frame, he rocked his left eye with the back of his left hand, while his right arm did the same with his right eye. Even in memory, I do not hear, as I did not hear in those microseconds, what must have been spitting swears and screaming coming from his wide-open mouth. I heard that radio offering praise from an opera. I heard a violin scream a high note of approval. And I heard the crackle of urgent electricity, seeping from the socket and anxious to play its part. Water in the box spring rippled from the sudden thud of the TV when it crashed to the wood floor, after falling from his head to his right shoulder and bouncing off his back. A metal corner gouged somewhere along his neckline, releasing blood to run down his spine—like a ribbon on a balloon.

  Before his complete collapse, I moved on to my next weapon, which I picked up in the same motion as when I released the bleach and TV. The loose floorboard in my hands became a battering ram. I laid it flat against his back from his left side where I stood. Using his falling motion, I pushed the requisite force—based on his weight and height—to drop him to his knees, propel him forward, and insure he’d fall headfirst in the water—which he was primed to do anyway. He splashed into my quarry, and I slipped out behind his now fallen feet to the hall, looking in. Simultaneously, I unhooked more of the red yarn, which I’d braided to form a rope, from a nail by the door. I fashioned the rope out of the yarn from the red knit blanket, Asset #5, which I began unraveling, as you know, on Day 20. He never noticed the uncoiling because I folded the blanket on its own disembowelment every single morning at dawn. The once dangling radio hit the water where his bleached and crushed head and torso lay, submerged. The crack and the sizzle of electrocution filled the room. Me outside, him within.

  All of this took less than ten seconds, about the time he took to nab me from my street.

  Now that, my friends, is justice. Cold, hard, burning, skull-splitting, electrified justice.

  15/33 consisted of a three-part escape plan: TV, with unnecessary but added bonus of bleach pouch, electrocution, and drowning, each of which could have caused his death. If the TV missed, I still would have picked up the floorboard and pushed, expecting him to likely trip. If necessary, I would have mustered physical force and whaled him with the floorboard until he collapsed, then I’d turn to my failsafe and shoot him in the eyes and neck and groin with the bow and four arrows in the holster strapped to my back.

  Arrows and holster? I had so many assets. The bow was constructed of the elastic from the attic and my trusty now unbent bucket handle. The arrows were sharpened rungs I had removed from the bed frame and whittled with the ends of the TV antennas—the rungs and antennas being falsely re-secured each morning into their intended, decorative/sort-of-functional spots. The holster was the sleeve of my raincoat, pinch-tied at the bottom with more of the yarn, the strap made out of wiring I ripped from the guts of the ultrasound machine. Thankfully, the arrows were superfluous, then, which is why I didn’t fret over the inability to use them in practice. Praise God and his black angel butterfly, for I had the positional advantage, the element of surprise, and from my relentless study, I knew his movements, patterns, gait, steps, height, and weight so precisely, I very well could have metamorphized into the man.

  What about those tacks? You’ll remember, on the first night in the van, I slept less than he did. It’s funny what sweat will do to duct tape and that van was hot and I had extra pounds. I felt the magic of my heat on the tape all of Day 1, and slowly but surely, my thin wrists loosened within my confinement. Finally, while he snored, I tested how far I might pull an arm free. Sure enough, fifty minutes into his slumber, my right arm slid out. Unsure of how long I had, and since the olive oven barred the side sliding door and a chain barred the back doors, I was likely out of time to free my left arm and legs—although I continued to fiddle. I bent to the backpack, retrieved the tacks—a commercial-sized pack of one thousand so stuffed the tacks didn’t rattle—and pocketed them in my lined, black raincoat. He stirred. I sat up straight. I put my hand back through the duct tape, slouched, and pretended to sleep. He yawned and turned in his chair. I felt him look at me.

  “Stupid fucking whore,” he’d said.

  Idiot. I will kill you with these tacks, I had thought.

  Thirty-three days later, I froze outside my jail cell as his sizzling and muscle-jumping body rounded out. When he fell, his body was limp, his legs collapsed and sprawled on the floor in pigeon-toe, but his torso lifted to slump over the low bed frame and in the water in the box spring. The oddest part of everything was how his hips kept rising with every zap of electricity and banging the side of the bed—as if he were dream-humping the long board while sleeping submerged in the water. The water appeared blue with yellow streaks, swirling and spilling around him and to the floor. Sparks poured from the wall socket, threatening to catch and burn the whole joint, but didn’t, given that they burned to black dots on the floorboards. Pops accompanied the sparks, as did bubbles of his breath when his body settled into death and the angered electricity calmed. I waited until all popping stopped, like when you microwave popcorn, those last, slow seconds of one, two-three, silence, a fourth and final kernel pops. “Ding!” the microwave blares, “All done.”

  A drone of dying lights sent a warping over the house: the electrocution had shorted the electricity. Although midday, the musty hall fell dark and a quiet dropped a cloth of eerie silence. I reached for an arrow on my back, standing as still as a stone statue in the park, mid-step, sword unsheathed. No noises came from his chamber of death. No footsteps fell behind me, above me, below me, or anywhere. I was outside my room. I shut the door and locked him within. I took the keys.

  Silence.

  My heart beat loud in my ears.

  A swallow fluttered by the window in the stairwell, a herald tweeting, “The coast is clear.”

  I hope you enjoyed your swim in my little pool, motherfucker. I spit on the door.

  I went downstairs and entered the kitchen. I had imagined it so often with the floral print fabric, wood worktables, white sink, and apple-green mixer, I felt deceived to find something wholly different. The truth in the vision winded me. Instead of a country kitchen, before me were two long stainless steel tables—commercial-kitchen style. The stove was big and black, the mixer, boring egg-white. There were no colors in this room. There were no aprons with pink piping. No fat cat lounging on a rug. And, there was another surprise for me too.

  Upon the steel table closest to me, I found a second china plate of food. This was surely not mine; mine was shattered upstairs, under the electrified remains of my perpetrator’s feet. This plate was wrapped in plastic with a Post-it on top. Beside it was an identical mug of milk and cup of water. I stepped closer. The note said, “D.” I looked in the trash. On top, plain as day, was another piece of saran wrap with a Post-it, but this one said, “L,” my first initial. How did I not see this before? We were not alone in the building. Another girl. And her name begins with D.

  Still, this diversion was not a part of my p
lan. Stay focused, finish 15/33, and then re-plan. I found some envelopes with the address and a phone, dialed 911, and demanded the chief of police. I got him.

  “Listen to me carefully, write this down. I will talk slow. I am Lisa Yyland. I am the pregnant girl who was kidnapped a month ago from Barnstead, New Hampshire. I am at 77 Meadowview Road. Do not come in a cop car. Do not put this on the radio. Do not make a scene. You will jeopardize me and another girl they’ve taken. Come in one regular car. Come quick. Do not put this on the radio. Do not make a scene. Are you following this?”

  “Yes.”

  I hung up.

  Now I could attend to this other victim. I stepped outside. Finally, the full architecture. For once I was right, it was white. As I had noted previously, the footprint housed four different wings, three floors to each with a common attic adding a fourth level. A faded sign on the side said, “Appletree Boarding School.” The kitchen was so new though; the peeled paint of the exterior seemed misplaced. I thought of the scene in Romancing the Stone when Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas visit Juan to get a ride in his “Little Pepe,” a truck. Juan’s house was a run-down shack on the outside, but a virtual palace on the inside.

  The girl, D, might be anywhere, and I was not about to go climbing all sorts of stairs looking for her. I wasn’t going to yell either. Fortunately, something caught my eye. In the far left wing was a matching triangular window, at the same height as mine. I walked around the whole structure. There were no other windows like them. Instead, all of the other windows were large, some taking up the whole wall of a room. I concluded that had she been in any of those rooms, there would be curtains. I looked up again at the triangular window and I swear the black butterfly fluttered in the pane, as if pointing the way.

  I opened the doorway of this far-left wing and climbed three flights of stairs. The stairwell matched mine exactly. The third floor housed the same bathroom, in the same spot.