"Please sign the letter," the Angry Parent commands. "Now place your cloth back on your eyes." He gathers up the paper and pencil and walks to the door. "Thank you," he says, and closes you back in on nothing.
Worse than nothing. The sound of the clicking lock forces you under, into a despair like the closing of a metal crypt. It's Sacred Conflict. The group that brought down the American embassy like a stack of mah-jongg tiles. The ones who slammed a car bomb into a crowd of Lebanese scrambling to grab American visas. The group whose eager foot soldier, smiling as he ran his truck through an armed checkpoint, blew himself away with 2,000 pounds of TNT, taking 241 Marines along with him to the heaven of martyrs. The one group in this Babel of factions that you prayed it wouldn't be.
Sacred Conflict: their balance sheet is so huge, so mysterious, that you can't be anything higher than an expendable pawn. These men have the consortium of rational nations on the run, reeling from the power of their conviction. The terrorist group of the hour, just now enjoying their moment on the geopolitical stage, their suicidal, scene-stealing walk-on. Your letter gives them one more holy weapon to brandish at a cowering world.
The day after your exercise in dictation, you fall ill. Your body gives in to the infection it's been fighting since capture. A steel chill spreads from your extremities into your chest. You lie huddled on your mattress under the cheap acrylic blanket, shivering in the slip glaze of your own sweat. Sleep is a four-reel hallucination where radical factions take turns inscribing the details of your confession onto your abdomen with the point of an electric needle.
The next day's ten-minute sprint through the latrine does not last you through the morning. By the time the Shiite Cronkite brings you your pointless lunch, a demon — hot, yellow, and liquid — splays its claws against the wall of your intestines.
"Toilet," you croak. "Merhadh."
"I ask Chef"
"No ask Chef. Tell Chef."
He disappears. You wait an eternity—150 seconds or more. Then you must defecate or die. No time even to scream for a can. You run as far from the bed as you can get, tear down your pants, and aim for the mouth of your urine bottle. Amazingly, almost half of the silty stream finds the bottle. You leave the putrefying rest and crawl back into bed, fetid, sticky, lower than an insect, a dung beetle. You fall into a raging fever.
You wake up, someone kicking you in the back, thumping you with an Adidas cross-trainer toe. AH is shouting, "Hey. Hey! Why you shit all fucking over the floor?"
Your blindfold is on. He must have replaced it before commencing to kick you. You roll over and place your face in the path of his blows. He stops. You feel your power over him, power that comes from your total indifference.
"Sacred Conflict," you say. "Holy War."
"Hey," he bleats. "You gotta eat your food." The gotta learned dutifully from some Top 40 song.
Eating is death. Anything you eat now will pass right through the frictionless tube you have become. All you can do is squat it out, hope the virus dies of dehydration before you do.
"No eat," you say. "Hunger strike."
Your refusal enrages him. He shrieks deep in his throat. "Eat!" He kicks you again, in your mercifully emptied gut. He crouches down and inserts the cold tip of his pistol in your nostril. "Eat."
His growl sounds like a bad James Coburn. Even this wasted, you must laugh. He screams again, his rage ever more impotent. "What you want? What the hell you want?" "Medicine. I need medicine."
"Bukrah," he says, shaken. "Tomorrow." Neither word means anything to you.
In your dream, Gwen reaches into your throat, deep in, deeper than you ever suspected a hand could go. She pulls up half-digested forms, eroded Cracker Jack prizes covered in decomposing clay, the hair and slime that accumulates in sink pipe traps. She holds out a handful, and the two of you lean in for a closer look. The crowns of your heads touch, the first kind touch you've suffered in months. You bend over the slime, examining. It crawls with tiny amphibians, pink cave newts no bigger than termites.
The medicine arrives by special delivery. Whether it is tomorrow or not, you cannot say. The room is anyway pitch-black. The medicine is a grayish powder. Ali, by flashlight, jabs a fistful into your hands, telling you to take it with water. The drink tastes like mine tailings. It gags you. But by now, so does the neutral air on your opened mouth.
"Is this poison? Are you trying to kill me?"
"We are not killing you," Ali counters. "America is killing you."
You sleep again. You wake as light seeps in under the cracks of the corrugated iron stapled over your French windows. You are hungry. At first you don't recognize the gnawing, so archaic is it, so unlikely. Even after several deep breaths, nothing hurts. You feel — well—well. You feel the reacquaintance that comes only after illness. Exhilarated, in spite of all cause.
You rise up on your stumps and walk, as far as the chain allows.
"Hello? Hey. Someone?"
Someone is there, opening the door. From the gentleness, you guess it to be the Shiite Walter.
"What you want?"
Blindfolded like justice, you point toward the smear of fecal accident in the corner. "Something to clean that up with." You pantomime rag, pantomime bucket.
"Yes. OK."
"Also… an orange juice, an Indonesian highland arabica, and a double order of eggs Benedict. Easy on the hollandaise." Silence from your captor. Mute, threatening, ambiguous. "Food, please." "Yes. Sure. No problem."
21
The world machine bore on, in the face of the unbearable. Its overburdened angel engine failed to overheat. Not right away, in any event. Not all at once. It survived the latest massacre of hunger-striking students. It absorbed the intimate documentation, the grainy aerials and close-ups, the midrange establishing shots that saturated video's every free market. Knowledge returned, civilization's bad penny, even this late in the scheme of things. It played and replayed the rote vignette: armies firing on unarmed crowds. Only the scale, the mechanical efficiency, the presence of cameras made this round seem in any way unique.
History and its victims kept their hands to the plow, broken, exhausted, like an old married couple trapped for life in love's death lock, unable to break through to that sunlit upland. The future, under construction, leveraged to the hilt, could only press forward, hooked on its own possibility. Hope not only persisted; it made a schoolgirl spectacle of itself, skirt in the air, all shame on view.
Fall was well into its return engagement. The rains signaled an early and long winter. Adie Klarpol grieved for current events until she could no longer feel them. Then another shame gripped her, more private and local. She'd lived here for the better part of a year and had not yet learned the first thing about this town. It was as if she'd had room in her for only one exploration at a go. Now the days began to lose their length and weight, heading to winter. She vowed to get out a little, while there was still time.
She laid out a box around the downtown, one of those numbered grids that archaeologists use to inventory a virgin field. She rode to the top of the Space Needle, fixing a shorthand map of the streets' layout. From that bird's-eye view, she picked out sights to acquire over the next half-dozen Saturdays. She turned over every inch of the City Center. She got the Woodland Park Zoo out of the way early, racing past the various forms of captivity. She paid her overdue pilgrimage to the Asian Art Museum and the Frye, blasting through them with the same guilty squeamishness.