Method 15/33 Read online

  He gripped my forearm and pulled me so hard off balance I nearly collided with the bucket. Unfortunately, my foot brushed the side and for three heart-wrenching seconds, I watched the handle tilt and rock on the rim. If it falls, he’ll inspect closer. He’ll find me out or he’ll give me a different bucket, which might not have a metal handle. Don’t fall. I need you. Don’t fall. Don’t, don’t fall. Don’t fall. Don’t, don’t fall. Still it tilted and rocked. With head backwards as I was yanked forward through the doorway, I saw upon the butterfly’s blessing that Godsend handle defy gravity to bend to my will and stay put. It didn’t fall. It didn’t fall. It didn’t fall.

  Out on the landing, where the walls were papered in a brown and dingy-pink floral print, he stalled. The cool, musty air and low lighting in this space reminded me we were in an old country house or building.

  Twisting my wrist to near breaking, he peered over the railing to the steps leading down and then the narrow stairs leading up. Between these two choices, he shifted his gaze, seemingly unable to decide. A knock broke the stilted air. I presumed an unexpected visitor was at the door off the kitchen below. He froze. A hare trapped by hunter.

  With the posture of a lizard who knows his camouflage has betrayed him, he hissed on low, “If you make one bloody sound, I will find your parents and cut their hearts out with a dull knife.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As though we were some derelict soldier team, chest crawling through high grass, he beckoned me with folded elbow forward, “Move quietly. Go up these stairs now. Hussle, hussle, hussle.”

  Yes, Captain.

  I did as told, him at my heels, his head so close to my ass I felt like saying, Get your head out of my ass, but I didn’t. He pushed me mid-spine to move faster.

  “Faster,” he hissed.

  At the top, I found myself in a long, steep attic. It was this view of open space, about three-quarters of a football field in length, when I realized I was in a colossal building. The sides jutted out in four spots, four wings, one of which was mine.

  “Walk straight down the center to the closet at the end. Now!”

  I practically skipped because he was pushing so hard. “Faster,” he repeated, whispering madly. Unfortunately, there was nothing to see along the way—whatever may have been stored up there must have been moved and the floors swept cleaned. Not even a mousetrap remained.

  When we got to a free-standing, double-door wardrobe with top vents, he stuffed me inside, shut the doors, and padlocked the handles from the outside. Through the slits in the door, he burned his droop-dog, jaundiced eyes.

  “If even an itch comes from you, I will kill your parents. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He left.

  The only sound was him running down all four flights. I may have heard a slight, slight talking as he opened the door to greet whoever was knocking, but I was so far up and closeted, I’m sure I only imagined whispers. Cold silence, like in our house when Dad’s sister died. Stillness of all, sound bleeding from your ears. Where did my butterfly go?

  I had not one clue who had arrived below. In a strained hope, I pictured a skeptical detective who wouldn’t believe the imbecile at the door wasn’t guilty of at least something. I contemplated blowing my vocal chords in blood-curdling screams and stomping and shaking and rattling my new cage. As it turns out, it’s a good thing I chose not to take any chances on sound.

  When reality sunk in, I turned lengthwise within the cabinet and slid to sitting. I had a finger-width margin on both sides to wiggle for comfort. My pupils took thirty to forty seconds to adjust to this dim light, but then everything was visible, and with night-scope vision, that’s when I saw it. Like a diamond ring on a branch in the woods, an improbable fortune hung from a hook in the opposite corner: a one-inch-wide, three-foot-long segment of white elastic, the kind Nana would sew into the waistband of her homemade, polyester pants. Nana. I grabbed the elastic and placed it deep within my panties for safekeeping. Asset #28, elastic band.

  Cat urine was the pervading scent of the closet, which triggered my gag reflex, but also made me think of my mother.

  Mother is never wrong when she makes an affirmative statement. “There is a cat in this house,” she said once.

  “We own no cat,” my father said, laughing.

  But to my father’s assurances that her nose was only betraying her and to his suggestion that the rooms were simply stale having been sealed all winter, Mother protested, “There is a cat in this house, as I am the mother of this child.” She pointed to me in her passing tirade, as though I were Exhibit A; her non-pointing arm was on her hip, her back erect, neck high, chin tipped. “There is a cat in this house and I will prove it,” was her opening statement, delivered to her jurists: my father and me.

  She grabbed my father’s flashlight, which he kept in a tool box he hid from her, for reasons such as the one unfolding. She searched until three a.m., upturning every closet, crawlspace, attic, shadow, and basement crevice; she poked cracks in the garage and hollow logs in the yard, high, low, loose, and light; she flipped everything until the bulb dimmed from white, to yellow, to egg-yolk orange, to brown, to gray, to black.

  She unearthed not one cat whisker, yet every hour she’d proclaim to her weary jurists—which actually was only me by midnight—“There is a cat in this house and I will prove it.” The next morning, my father, the only soul permitted to reproach her, informed Mother she could not continue her “effort to fly faster than the speed of light or prove the existence of a non-existent cat.”

  Notably, I never once denied Mother’s claim. I may also have guided her search.

  While my father convinced my mother to stop, I slipped through our screen door and skated to a bald spot in a grove of white birch behind our house. Yellow dandelions carpeted this circular, open area, and so my hiding place was a yellow floor, white walls, and blue sky ceiling.

  They didn’t know where I was.

  I returned quickly.

  I said nothing.

  Mother continued her relentless insistence about a cat in the house.

  The odor dissipated over the course of the week.

  Still, I said nothing.

  With the waning smell, so waned Mother’s interest. By the following Sunday, not a hint of cat vapor remained. Mother sat in her study in her pinched leather, Dracula’s throne chair, editing a Motion for Summary Judgment with her silver Cross pen.

  “Mom,” I said from the doorway.

  Her eyes strained up, horn-rimmed glasses perched upon her nose, the legal brief unmoved in her hands. This was the most invitation to speak I would get. I cradled an old, scrappy cat in my arms.

  “This is my cat,” I said. “I got rid of the acidic odor with a mixture of vinegar, baking soda, dish detergent, hydrogen peroxide, and a layer of charcoal dust. I’ve been keeping her in a cage in the birch grove since she wet in the house, but she’ll need to be indoors now.”

  Mother plunked the brief on the coffee table in exaggerated drama. I’d seen this same motion of hers once when she reached the climax of a closing statement in a federal trial I was invited to attend. “Son of a…I told your father I smelled cat.”

  “Yes,” I agreed stoically, as though confirming the Queen’s dictate on a law of taxation.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I wanted to solve the problem before presenting her.” I had no emotions in her room. I didn’t feel the need to allow them.

  “Well.” She averted my gaze. I might have been the only person who could disarm her, which, I fear, unsettled her. It was as if I was an ever-growing thorn bush she was required to prune from ten feet away. But I didn’t wish to trouble her; I only wanted to provide the facts.

  “The cat is female. I’ve been testing a sonic collar for the purpose of dispelling fleas and ticks. She was roaming around the dumpsters at school. No tags. She’s not feral though, definitely domestic and abandoned or lost. She likes humans. She only peed
on the basement stairs because I didn’t get a litter box until a day after I found her. I’ve hidden the box behind my sterilization unit, by the hydrogen chamber.”

  I did not ask, as I think most children would have, if I could keep the cat. In my mind, she was not only my pet, she was also part of a lab project. I did not need permissions as far as the latter was concerned.

  “Name?”

  “Jackson Brown.”

  “For a girl?”

  “I thought you’d like the nod to your favorite musician.”

  “How can I say no to Jackson Brown?”

  I didn’t ask for permission, just approval, which is different.

  The psychiatrist later theorized that my mother’s approval of my choice to tell her of the cat after I solved the urine problem, led me to hide my pregnancy—until I found a solution, I suppose the doctor supposed. But the only thing I solved in the first seven months of my hidden condition was my intention to name the baby Dylan, Mother’s other favorite musician. This resolution, however, never materialized, since my baby’s name changed in the course of captivity.

  Indeed, on Day 20, lacking clear air in that casket of a closet in the attic, I began recalibrating my child’s name, wanting to give him more meaning.

  The closet-cage seemed doused in thick, acidic cat urine, and with little ventilation in that hot spring attic, I began to sweat and gasp for air. If I thought my room below was solitary confinement, the wardrobe was like being untethered to a spaceship and left to tumble through vacant space. There goes my pod. There goes my planet. Gravity betrays me, lifts me hazardly beyond stars.

  Will he leave me here all day? Longer?

  I believe an hour passed.

  I blacked out from the heat.

  I came to when he unlocked the closet and I sprawled to the floor, my head banging upon his boots.

  “Son of a…,” he screeched. He shimmied his feet out from under my skull as if I was a scurrying rat.

  Hyperventilating, gasping for life, I lay like a fish flopping on the dock.

  “Ah, she-it,” he said while stomping. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  He kicked lightly at my ribs as his method of checking my pulse, too bothered to bend and help me breathe. As he pigeon-pecked my chest with his steel-toed foot, I labored against practically collapsed lungs, wheezing, coughing, gagging along, until finally reaching a plateau and normalized rhythm. Not once during my struggle did I open my eyes or did he stoop to help.

  When I could regulate the draw of air through my nose, I lay in a crescent position and cracked open my right eye, the one closest to the ceiling. Unfortunately, I met both his searing eyes, and thus a stalled moment of mutual hate suspended us in a dangerous stand-off.

  He made the first move.

  In a swift, downward swing, he swooped his right hand to grab a fistfull of my splayed hair. Upward he jerked my neck and torso to an involuntary and quick sitting, only to drag me bumping backwards along the floorboards, my tailbone taking the brunt of the hard wood planks.

  Let me describe the pain. Imagine emptying ten tubes of superglue into a hat and placing the hat upon your head, allowing the inner rim and cotton skull to merge with every follicle in the spreading metastases of hardening adhesive. Now hook the top of the hat to a tree branch just slightly higher than your height. Stand. There is just enough room for the hat to yank each strand to within a micro fraction of snapping and the scalp skin to stretch to almost tearing. Rip, rip, slicing heat, rip.

  Along he pulled me, while I flailed, skip sliding, seeking intermittent relief and traction with my hands upon his forearm and my searching feet that would catch and fail, catch and fail. My head felt like fire, burning, raging, crackling, white-hot fire. No foothold was secure enough to withstand the toppling force of his pull.

  My body twisted left and right, a fighting tuna with raging fins being reeled out of the sea.

  Naturally, with so much torque, the invaluable new asset—the elastic band—in my underpants slipped out and shimmied up to the bottom of my soaring waist. Its placement became so precarious, if I were to keep flailing my feet for traction, the angle and jostling would surely loosen the contraband further, off my rounded belly, and onto the floor. I had a choice: fight the pain or save the elastic. Elastic. I slackened my legs to straight, allowing him to freely pull my hair, and like a master pickpocketer, snaked within my pants, hooked the band, and squeezed the slithering life out of it.

  He noticed nothing, immersed too deeply in his effort to harm me. When we came to the top of the stairs, he dropped me to the bare floor, my backside dotted with a hundred splinters, my tailbone bruised, possibly broken, but my resolve beyond a thousand mountaintops, beyond a billion billion galaxies, beyond God, His angels, His enemies, and beyond a million mothers of missing children. He would die in pain now.

  “Stand up, bitch.”

  I did, slowly, nursing my wounds, but with closed fists behind my back.

  Again we stood in a standoff. I wanted him to go down the stairwell first so he couldn’t see me slip the elastic to safety.

  “Go, you moron,” he said.

  You’re commenting on my intelligence? Really?

  A second slipped, two seconds. Tick. Tock. He ground his teeth and lifted his arms.

  And then a phone I didn’t know existed rang on the floor below.

  “Oh, holy hell,” he said, as he slammed the stair treads on his way to the phone. “If you’re not down here in three seconds, I will drag your ass.”

  “Yes, sir,” moron, sir.

  I slid my prize into my waistband and smiled.

  As I limped down the stairs, I strained to hear the conversation. I got his side, which was enough.

  “I told you this place was too open. For damn sake, two Girl Scouts came to the door with their mother. The mother wouldn’t freaking leave. I can’t raise any damn suspicions, you say. Lay low, play the part, you say. Aren’t I some guy caring for his elderly parents out here? Oh, isn’t he the sweetest man, renovating the old building into a big home for his mother and father? Isn’t that what you said they’d say? For fuck’s sake! This is your dumbest idea yet, Brad. I had to give this Girl Scout bitch fucking tea, Brad. This is a shit idea of a cover. I fucking…I fucking…shut the fuck up, Brad. I fucking told you…Of course I’d-a shot them all if this bitch had screamed.”

  He winked at me when he said this, the kind of expression that says, yes, I would have shot you all. I’m most definitely not on your side, to which I thought: Don’t wink at me. If I get the chance, I will cut your eyes out for that gesture. I’ll laminate your pupils in resin and carry them on a keychain.

  Back in my room, I allowed myself to rest on my side, what with the bruising and thin wood shards in my back. I lay on top of the white coverlet, the butterfly a distant phantom at this point, running through my ordered assets. …Asset #28, string for a bow, aka, elastic band. Thank you, black angel, for the warning and the gift.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Numerous Days, The Monotony

  “The Shadow: And I hate the same thing you hate: the night; I love human beings, because they are devotees of light and I’m pleased when their eyes shine as they discern and discover knowledge—untiring knowers and discoverers that they are. That shadow, which all things cast, if the sunshine of perception falls upon them—that shadow am I as well.”

  –Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow

  Thales is generally accepted as the first Greek scientist. He invented what is known as “Shadow Reckoning,” an indirect method of measuring the height and width of an object that might otherwise be difficult to measure. Thales practiced this method on pyramids. My version of Shadow Reckoning not only calculated my captor’s height and width, but also from there, his weight.

  After the day in the attic, I already had enough assets to kill my captor five times over. What I needed, therefore, was to confirm a few things about him and also, like standing to the side of skipping ropes, cal
culate the precise time to enter the double-dutch and strike. Not yet, soon, soon, soon, it’s coming, wait, wait….

  I also needed to hone weapons, calculate and test my theories on his weight and gait, and practice again. So if you’re wondering why I write only of the days someone visits or of the days I acquire something significant, it’s because otherwise I’d be telling you hours and hours of repetition, such as was documented in the tiniest of script on several pieces of paper—my makeshift “lab book”—which I buried within the cotton and feather stuffing of my top mattress. I’ve included an excerpt below, in which I refer to him, the subject captor, as this symbol: the evil eye. The evil eye is universally considered in many cultures as an omen of misfortune on the person on whom it is cast. Oh, every single chance I got, I cast my hulking keeper the evil eye; I carried my wish of misfortune upon him even within my writing.

  You might be wondering why I would include the evil eye in a scientific lab book; isn’t such a symbol mere myth and superstition? Perhaps. But let me illustrate my motivation with a bit of a side-story.

  When I was eight years old, my Ecuadorian nanny picked me up from an after-school play rehearsal. She stood by the gym door with the other mothers. Naturally, she eavesdropped on their conversations. The play we rehearsed was Our Town, and I was the precocious child who yells a lot. In one scene, our director had me run down a ramp and shout my lines. I have no clue why. I did as I was told since play-acting was a prescription from the child psychiatrist.

  “Perhaps some theater would assist her in overcoming the harsh reality of the school shooting,” he had told my mother after I made the mistake of informing her of several machine gun nightmares over the last month. Little did Mother realize, this was no bout. I had these dreams constantly, for I invited them. Having read much about the brain from age six to eight, I learned of the brain’s work during sleep to heal itself. Grow stronger. So I forced the replay of the pop, pop shooting nearly every night to work a weaving magic and forge an even tighter coil of neurons in the folds of my amygdala. I’d lay in bed flipping through an ammo catalog and a deer-hunting magazine I’d found at the dentist office and hid in my underwear drawer, hurriedly burning the images to my hippocampus, like a teenage boy with Penthouse.