It would be hard to prove without an exceptionally precise slow-motion replay, but I am the one who gets to his feet first. I am fractions of a second ahead of him. The business of balance is tricky. I sway from one side to the other, watch myself teeter in the echo of his totter. I am, I believe, ready to risk my first step.
I watch him stumble while awkwardly, at seeming great risk, retain his precarious balance.
We are now moving irrevocably toward the other, though in what seems like mock slow motion, huffing and raging, while making virtually no progress.
As we get closer, I work on the rudiments of a defensive strategy.
Perhaps if I punch him in the face before he can land the first blow, it will be sufficient to claim victory. It strikes me that it might be prohibitively difficult to maintain my balance while thrusting my clenched fist in his direction.
“Back off,” I say to myself, to him, to myself, but he keeps approaching and so do I, so it is hard to tell who is closing the distance faster.
We are at the moment no more than two small hesitant steps apart.
As the space between us recedes, I trip and fall toward him with my arms out. “Watch it, Pops,” he says.
“Watch it yourself.”
We grab at each other as we meet, holding on to keep from falling, caught by the hidden camera in a parody of an embrace.
95th Night
They come during the night, two men in stocking feet, and lift me out of the bed, while I am still, for all they know, asleep and carry me between them down a narrow hallway that seems to go on forever. We are serenaded by night cries from unseen quarters as we shuffle along to a door that leads to a narrower hallway and then to another door. And through the second door into the moonless night.
I am dropped off onto the back seat of a black van which stays in place only long enough for the door that admitted me to be slammed shut.
I have been pretending to be asleep, though I’m not at all sure if it’s the most useful way to go on this occasion. This is the first time I’ve been outside the prison/hospital complex since they brought me here blindfolded, however long ago it was.
A heated discussion goes on in the front seat between a man and a woman — the man in the driver’s seat — in a language that is not one of mine.
It’s all in the tone of voice. As I hear it, the man is arguing for a quick and painless slaughter while the woman supports a more subtle and dire retribution.
After a while — perhaps I’ve misunderstood all along — I am pulled out of the car from behind and dumped like a bag of trash in the wet spiky grass of an overgrown field.
“You are lucky soldier,” the woman calls to me in heavily accented English moments before the unmarked van races off, spraying exhaust and dirt in its wake.
I collect myself as if I were several different random parts held together with tape.
The exhilaration of being my own man once again lasts a few ragged moments. “I am free man,” I say to myself in imitation of the woman’s fake accent. No doubt, they’ve left me here to die.
I don’t know how much time has passed when someone — perhaps the wind — asks, “Are you alive?”
When I open my eyes (how else can I know?) there is a small person — perhaps a child — standing over me, prodding me with a long stick.
“What about you?” I say. “Are you alive?”
He takes a step back, offering in the process a barely perceptible nod.
I hold on to the end of his stick. “You have any food, a cookie, chips, fruit, nuts, anything?”
He takes another step backwards, testing his options, looks as if he’s about to run away. Then slowly, divesting himself of his stick, backing up as if I might not notice if he were quiet about it, he edges away.
I do what I can to keep up, move after him on all fours. He can lose me if he wants to, but he turns back from time to time to keep me in sight. Or so I interpret his turn of the head gesture until at some point he flat out vanishes.
“Hey,” I hear myself say, but when the thin echo of sound is gone, it’s hard to imagine it ever was.
I continue in my subhuman locomotion, hoping to pick up his trail when the indistinct path I seem to be following splits off into two opposing indistinct paths.
Too weak to make a meaningful choice, I lie down at the crossroads and listen to myself breathe as if it were the latest news.
It may be five minutes later, it may be the next day, but the child — the boy — is standing over me again. a larger person at his side. The larger person has something round in her hand which she extends in my direction.
I assume it is some kind of food and, in no condition to be picky, I reach out for it with open mouth, rotted teeth at the ready.
The larger person pulls back her hand with a startled cry and whatever she was holding drops to the ground, unclaimed on either side.
The boy retrieves what may be an apple and holds it close to my face (for inspection?), an inch or so from my mouth.
After sniffing my prize to determine that it is as sight advertises, there seems nothing else to do but take a bite out of the apple.
The boy claps his hands, jumps up and down, and I have to pull my head out of the way to avoid an approving pat.
“Can we?” the boy says. “Please.”
“If it will make you happy,” the woman says, not without some reluctance. “I’m going to need your help, Bobby. I can’t take something like this on all by myself.”
They help me to my feet, and I am upright for a few seconds before collapsing to the ground.
“Don’t fall too far behind,” the woman says to one or both of us as I follow them on all fours to a cabin in the deep woods where the boy and his mother apparently live.
Once inside, I am able to stand by leaning against a wall.
After they feed me — a chicken thigh reheated for the occasion with a side of apple slices — I am treated to a series of questions not unlike those from my former interrogators.
“Could you tell me where you were approximately 10 years and 9 months ago?” the woman asks. She is sitting in a kitchen chair facing me while I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. The boy sits on the floor at her feet, studying me.
I have fallen into the habit of evasion and so stall by asking her to repeat the question, which she does.
“If you could show me a newspaper for the day in question, it might help refresh my memory,” I say.
“Of course,” she says and opens an old trunk I hadn’t noticed before, and after some shuffling of papers, presents a San Francisco newspaper for the very day she had inquired about.
“Checkmate,” I say which enlists no reaction from the woman. The boy laughs.
“It’s an important question to Bobby,” the woman says.
I say I can barely remember yesterday let alone 11 years ago, though I will do my best. “Yesterday, to the best of my recollection, I was lying on a bed of thorns when a boy showed up…”
“That was me,” Bobby says.
“And asked me if I was alive.”
Two days ago or was it three, I was in unofficial custody at some nameless prison hospital.
Months before that, Molly was kidnapped with her consent by a posse of rogue government agents and taken to an unspecified island off the coast of Maine. Or so it was rumored.
Almost two years ago, I was a guest scholar at the Villa Mondare in northern Italy, reworking the first sentence of a new novel.
At some semi-distant point in the half-forgotten past — it could have been ten years ago — Molly announced that she was leaving me and was out the door before I could insist on an explanation.
When Molly left, I was vulnerable to the touch of air.