Bill stood near the entranceway, about fifty feet from the oval desk and directly in front of the register that listed the building's occupants. He could see Scott waiting just outside, standing at the far end of a shop window that jutted at an angle from the recessed entranceway, forming a border extending to the sidewalk. He carried a small package, books probably, and had his back to the shop window. Bill stepped away from the glass doors and smoked a cigarette. He stood in thought, his arms folded and his head cocked slightly left. His gaze seemed to end at the tip of the cigarette dangling from his right hand. When he peered out again, Scott was nearer the entranceway but had turned to look in the shop window. Bill walked across the front of the lobby past two sets of revolving doors. He exited by the last single door, peeling the visitor's badge from his lapel and moving out onto the sidewalk, where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd.
PART TWO
The boy took off the prisoner's hood when he came to feed him. The boy also wore a hood, a crude cloth piece with ragged slashes at the eyes.
Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was. When he spat up blood he watched the pink thing slug into the drain and it carried time quivering in it.
It made the prisoner anxious, not knowing why the boy needed to be concealed.
They drove him here in a car with a missing door. He saw an old man with no shirt who was stuck to a coil of military wire in a sewage meadow somewhere.
Be alert and note the details said the conscientious tape running in his head, the voice that whispers you are smarter than your captors.
The prisoner felt the boy come close to pull away his hood and stuff his face with food and he looked into the eyeholes of the boy's own hood.
Time permeated the air and food. The black ant crawling up his leg carried time's enormity, the old slow all-knowing pace.
Poor old guy probably lost at night wanders dizzy into the wire, senile, shirtless, pinned, still living.
He waited for the moment when he could count the launched rockets flashing. When he heard the rockets he also saw the flash although he wore a hood that had no eyeholes.
He was new at this and eager to succeed. All the time he chewed his food he estimated meters wall to wall. Measure the walls, then the bricks in the walls, then the mortar between the bricks, then the hairline cracks in the mortar. See it as a test. Show them how advanced you are.
He saw laundry lines going through shell holes in gray masonry, looking through the missing door.
The boy pulled away the hood and fed him by hand, always too fast, pushing food into his mouth before he was finished chewing the previous handful.
He conceded the fact of his confinement. He admitted to the presence of the plastic wire they'd used to fasten his wrist to the water-supply pipe. He conceded the hood. His head was covered with a hood.
The prisoner was full of plans. With time and tools he would learn Arabic and impress his captors and greet them in their language and have basic conversations, once they gave him the tools to teach himself.
The boy tortured him sometimes. Knocked him down, told him to stand. Knocked him down, told him to stand. The boy tried to pull his teeth out of his mouth with his bare hands. The pain extended long past the boy's departure from the room. This was part of the structure of time, how time and pain became inseparable.
And there were authorities to impress as well. At his release they would take him to a secret place and recite their questions in the same voice he heard on the instruction tape and he would impress the authorities with his recall of detail and his analysis of facets and aspects and they would quickly determine the location of the building and the identity of the group that held him.
He knew it was evening by the war noise. In the early weeks it began at sundown. First the machine-gun clatter, then car horns blowing. It's interesting to think of traffic jams caused by war. Everything is normal in a way. All the usual cursing complaints.
The boy had him lie on his back with legs bent up and he beat the bottoms of the prisoner's feet with a reinforcing rod. The pain made it hard for him to sleep and this stretched and deepened time, gave it a consciousness, a quality of ingenious and pervasive presence.
He thought of the no-shirt man caught on the wire. His memories didn't extend past the moment of abduction. Time started there except for small dim snatches, summer flashes, compact moments in a house somewhere.
But even with authorities, what do authorities know, did he really expect authorities to learn important things from the length and width of a brick even if there were bricks to count and measure and there weren't, or meaningful sounds that barely petered through the walls.
There was no sequence or narrative or one day that leads to another. He saw a bowl and spoon at the edge of his foam mattress but the boy continued to feed him by hand. Sometimes the boy forgot to replace the hood after mealtime. This made the prisoner anxious.
The mortars came next, a sound of dust in the heavy crumple of the shells, slow-motion dust, dust specks colliding by the millions.
It was hard to think about women except desperately and incompletely. If they could send him a woman, just once, for half a second, so he could set eyes on her.
The only meaningful sound he heard was the VCR on the floor above. They were looking at videos of the war in the streets. They wanted to see themselves in their scuffed khakis, the vivid streetwise troop, that's us, firing nervous bursts at the militia down the block.
The ants and baby spiders transported time in its vastness and discontent and when he felt something crawling on the back of his hand he wanted to speak to it, explain his situation. He wanted to tell it who he was because this was now a matter of some confusion. Cut off from people whose voices were the ravel of his being, growing scant and pale because there was no one to see him and give him back his body.
The boy forgot to replace the hood after meals, he forgot the meals, the boy was the bearer of randomness. The last sense-making thing, the times for meals and beatings, was in danger of collapse.
If they could send a woman wearing stockings who might whisper the word "stockings." This would help him live another week.
Then what he was waiting for, the sound-flash of the big Grad rockets sliding off multibarreled launchers, twenty thirty maybe forty at a time in the incandescent dusk of a major duel across the Green Line.
He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, place it in the world.
He refused to exercise or count bricks or make up bricks that he might measure and count. He talked aloud to his father early in the morning, after the war died down. He told his father where he was, how positioned, how tied to a pipe, where in present pain, how in spirit, but with assurances that he was hopeful of rescue as they say on the instruction tape of Western man.
He tried to make them up, women in nets and straps, but could only manage drifting images, half finished.
There was something about the sound of launched rockets that induced a cortical flash, the brainlight under the hood that meant the Christians and the Muslims, that meant the sky was glowing, the city banded in rhapsodies of light and fire all the way to morning, when men came out of stifling shelters in their underwear to sweep away the rubble and buy bread.