There’s no sawdust under the bandsaw table. Beyond it is a piece of machinery he’s never seen before: big and yellow and boxy, almost the size of an industrial HVAC unit. Jorge decides that’s what it must be, because there’s a rubber hose going through one paneled wall, but he’s never seen one like it. If there’s a brand name, it’s on the side he can’t see.
He looks around the cage, and what he sees scares him. It isn’t so much the bottles of Dasani water standing on an orange crate serving as a table. It’s the blue plastic box squatting in the corner, beneath the sloping ceiling. That’s a Porta-John, the kind invalids use when they can still get out of bed but aren’t able to make it all the way to the nearest bathroom.
Jorge doesn’t feel capable of standing yet, so he crawls to it and lifts the lid. He sees blue water in the bowl and gets a whiff of disinfectant strong enough to make his eyes start watering again. He closes it and knee-walks back to the futon. Even in his current fucked-up state, he knows what the Porta-John means: someone intends for him to be here awhile. He has been kidnapped. Not by one of the cartels, as in his novel, Catalepsy, and not in Mexico or Colombia, either. Crazy as it seems, he has been kidnapped by a couple of elderly professors, one of them a colleague. And if this is their basement, he’s not far from his own house, where Freddy would be reading in the living room and having a cup of—
But no. Freddy is gone, at least for now. Left after the latest argument, in his usual huff.
He examines the crisscrossed bars. They are steel, and neatly welded. It must be a job done in this very workshop—there’s certainly no Jail Cells R Us that such an item could be ordered from—but the bars look solid enough. He grabs one in both hands and shakes it. No give.
He looks at the ceiling and sees white panels drilled with small holes. Soundproofing. He sees something else, too: a glass eye peering down. Jorge turns his face up to it.
“Are you there? What do you want?”
Nothing. He considers shouting to be let out, but what would that accomplish? Do you put someone in a basement cage (it must be the basement) with a puke bucket and a Porta-John if you mean to come running down the stairs at the first shout, saying Sorry, sorry, big mistake?
He needs to pee—his back teeth are floating. He gets to his feet, helping his legs by holding onto the bars. Another bolt of pain goes through his head, but not quite as bad as the ones he felt when he swam back to consciousness. He shuffles to the Porta-John, lifts the lid, unzips, and tries to go. At first he can’t, no matter how bad the need. Jorge has always been private about his bathroom functions, avoids herd urinals when he goes to the ballpark, and he keeps thinking of that glass eye staring at him. His back is turned, and that helps a little but not enough. He counts how many days are left in this month, then how many days until Christmas, good old feliz navidad, and that does the trick. He pisses for almost a full minute, then grabs one of the Dasani bottles. He swirls the first mouthful around and spits it into the disinfected water, then gulps the rest.
He goes back to the bars and looks across the long room: the vacant half just beyond the cage, the stairs, then the workshop. It’s the bandsaw and the miter saw his eyes keep coming back to. Maybe not nice tools for a caged man to be contemplating, but hard not to look at them. Hard not to think of the high whine a bandsaw like that makes when it’s chewing through pine or cedar: YRRRROWWWWW.
He remembers his run through the misty drizzle. He remembers Emily and her husband. He remembers how they deked him and then shot him up with something. After that there’s nothing but a swatch of black until he woke up here.
Why? Why would they do a thing like that?
“Do you want to talk?” he calls to the glass eye. “I’m ready when you are. Just tell me what you want!”
Nothing. The room is dead silent except for the shuffle of his feet and the tink-tink of the wedding ring he wears against one of the bars. Not his ring; he and Freddy aren’t married. At least not yet, and maybe never, the way things are going. Jorge slipped the ring off his father’s finger in the hospital, minutes after Papi died. He has worn it ever since.
How long has he been here? He looks at his watch, but that’s no good; it’s a wind-up, another remembrance he took when his father died, and it has stopped at one-fifteen. AM or PM, he doesn’t know. And he can’t remember the last time he wound it.
The Harrises. Emily and Ronald. Or is it Robert? He knows who they are, and that’s kind of ominous, isn’t it?
It might be ominous, he tells himself.
Since there’s no sense shouting or screaming in a soundproof room—and it would bring his headache back, raving—he sits down on the futon and waits for something to happen. For someone to come and explain what the fuck.
The stuff they shot him up with must still be floating around in his head because Jorge falls into a doze, head down and spittle slipping from one corner of his mouth. Sometime later—still one-fifteen according to his Papi’s watch—a door opens up above and someone starts down the stairs. Jorge raises his head (another bolt of pain, but not so bad) and sees black lowtop sneakers, ankle socks, trim brown pants, then a flowered apron. It’s Emily Harris. With a tray.
Jorge stands up. “What is going on here?”
She doesn’t answer, only sets the tray down about two feet from the cage. On it is a bulgy brown envelope stuck into the top of a big plastic go-cup, the kind you fill with coffee for a long drive. Next to it is a plate with something nasty on it: a slab of dark red meat floating in even darker red liquid. Just looking at it makes Jorge feel like vomiting again.
“If you think I’m going to eat that, Emily, think again.”
She makes no reply, only takes the broom and pushes the tray along the concrete. There’s a hinged flap in the bottom of the cage (they’ve been planning this, Jorge thinks). The go-cup falls over when it hits the top of the flap, which is only four inches or so high, then the tray goes through. The flap claps shut when she pulls the broom back. The meat swimming in the puddle of blood looks to be uncooked liver. Emily Harris straightens up, puts the broom back, turns… and gives him a smile. As if they are at a fucking cocktail party, or something.
“I’m not going to eat that,” Jorge repeats.
“You will,” she says.
With that she goes back up the stairs. He hears a door close, followed by a snapping sound that’s probably a bolt being run.
Looking at the raw liver makes Jorge feel like yurking some more, but he takes the envelope out of the go-cup. It’s something called Ka’Chava. According to the label, the powder inside makes “a nutrient-dense drink that fuels your adventures.”
Jorge feels he’s had enough adventures in the last however-long to last a lifetime. He puts the packet back in the go-cup and sits on the futon. He pushes the tray to one side without looking at it. He closes his eyes.
He dozes, wakes, dozes again, then wakes for real. The headache is almost gone and his stomach has settled. He winds Papi’s watch and sets it for noon. Or maybe for midnight. Doesn’t matter; at least he can keep track of how long he’s here. Eventually, someone—maybe the male half of this crazy professor combo—will tell him why he’s here and what he has to do to get out. Jorge guesses it won’t make a whole lot of sense, because these two are obviously loco. Lots of professors are loco, he’s been in enough schools on the writer-in-residence circuit to know that—but the Harrises take it to a whole other level.