The advance of this commando raid unhinges the guard, routs him. He scrambles for a place to hide. You check his hands; he is weaponless. Wilder still, you look down at where you stand. The blast that tore your radiator out of the floor by its roots has also shed your chain. Freedom goes unnoticed in such concerted dying.
In a heartbeat, you weigh him. He stands a full foot shorter than you, and though he has fed better for the last year and a half, the match is no contest. Beyond him lies an emptied corridor, a stairwell, a street full of men scrambling for their lives. No risk; no need for caution. You are worse than dead already. You lock eyes, trade an eternity of mutual knowledge. He gazes into you, sees a man with nothing more to lose. You shake your head, grinning, stupid with the richness, the ancient history. He slides two steps backward out the door and bolts it behind him.
The squad that tries to ambush your guards pulls back or falls in the rubble. Over several confused hours, all the Partisan guards surface, intact. You stay docile and bowed, in the fury of regrouping. But still your punishment proves severe. It comes with the noise that you'd hoped never to hear again so long as you lived: the snick of packing tape tearing off the roll. The sound of live burial.
They tape you without mercy. You fight to keep a gap around your nose and mouth. They seem vague about your continued breathing. Tape revolves around you, passed from hand to hand, binding you in a cocoon smaller than your body. They smash you down the stairwell that only yesterday stood wide open.
They insert you into the old death truck's recessed well. Your muscles refuse the memory. It can't happen again. You won't survive that exhaust-filled coffin. Your whole body begins to buck, but the tape holds you immobile. You scream from the base of your lungs, but your mouth won't open. The sound goes up through your head and stops, trapped against the layers of insulation.
They put you into the well wrong, wedged. The fumes suffuse your brain even before the truck starts up. The truck's broken shocks send each stone in the road through your kinked body. You pray. Pray for quick death, a willed heart attack, suicide by self-made embolism. Anything but this creeping suffocation. Fifteen minutes in the fume-filled secret compartment and no imaginable future is worth holding out for. Deliverance comes as a drop into oblivion. A trapdoor in your coffin opens into an enormous gray staging area, empty and still. Then the warehouse gray refracts into all the colors of a furnished paradise. The room goes light, wondrous, spare, waiting for you. All here again: the shirt, the towel, the toiletries, those few crooked paintings on the wall. All human misery vanishes from the earth. You curl up under the moth-eaten red feather tick, intent on sleeping the sleep of the completed.
But someone's mouth tickles you awake. A set of lips on your lips, a pair of lungs pumping yours. Gwen's as you sleep, but a man's as you come to. A man's dark face, sobbing in a familiar foreign language. The shout of joy at your first movement just as quickly turns vicious. A circle of men take out their relief, kicking at your corpse, which, for a few moments longer, still evades feeling, immune to everything human. They slap your neck and punch your head. Every blow delivers you, and you grab at the rain of hands to kiss them.
Under your blindfold, you see night. Night out of doors, on the eastern Mediterranean, somewhere in Phoenicia, beneath the same stars that olive traders steered by, stencils of the world's first myths. They've moved you from the city, forestalling any new attempts to seize you, a living shell game inside the shell of a larger one, a coy three-card monte that will go on for as many millennia as empire continues to dream its dream of cleanness and faith continues to resist in its holdout pockets.
They prop you up and walk you through the bracing night. Who would have thought that life still had so much breeze in it? This same continuous wind once swept down out of the Caucasus, slipped over the Andoman, and scattered through the Great Rift Valley. You'd forgotten about wind.
They push you stumbling forward. This will be your last hundred yardsout in the open for years, maybe for forever. Your check muscles inch the blindfold up a hairline. You scramble to take some hostage of your own back with you, into whatever new hole awaits. Some glimpse to ground you in the floating nowhere that lies ahead.
The greasy cloth rides up the bridge of your nose. You tilt your head back, raising the slit as high as you dare. The sight on the horizon stops you dead. Off at a distance too shadowy to calculate, thrown into relief against the night sky, stand the ruined columns of the temple of Jupiter. Baalbek — already a thousand-year-old backwater by the time the Romans set up their imperial tax stations and linked the town into their network of command and control.
You hoped to play tourist here once, long ago, in a world past reconstructing. Now you do, checking off the night-etched silhouette against the one filed away in your mental Baedecker. Six eerie Corinthian capitals, six stray verticals — all that's left of the belief they stood for. Jihad could not have built a more surreal set for your safekeeping. This glimpse of awful otherworldliness trips you up. You stumble, and someone cracks you across the crown of your skull. Then looking is over for
this lifetime.
When the blindfold comes off, your new home opens onto blackness. But in the morning, real light streams through a million louvered slats. It pins you, blinded, to the bright, clean floor. What should have been another slime-covered cave is instead the opulent country villa of some wealthy sympathizer.
The room is a bare but blazing white. The floors are a handsome hardwood, and the ceiling's scalloped medallion surrounds a hollow socket that once fed a chandelier. French shutters stand clasped together. Most glorious of all, there is no radiator. No place at all to attach a leg chain.
You rise and walk. It's like one of those avant-garde plays, where the lead goes to heaven and doesn't realize he's dead until the fourth act. You edge sideways to the shutters, shielding your eyes against the concentrated blast. When your pupils at last attenuate — peeling back a year and a half of shadow — they refuse the evidence. Outside your window is a farm.
All morning, you trace tight, excited circles. You live here. You live here. Luck beyond rolling. At the first sound at the heavy oak door, you slip on your blindfold and wipe the stray canary feathers from the corners of your grin. But your guards arrive with drills, hammers, industrial staple guns.
You huddle against a wall, weeping. It no longer matters who sees you. The room goes dark, to the sound of sheet metal riveted over the French windows. Then worse: the sound of a brace being set into the floor. When the redecorating party leaves, you lift your blindfold. Your chain is back, attached to an iron staple large enough to moor a ship. Next to it on the floor lies a thin mattress whose stains trace a map as familiar as that of Iowa.
No prior breakdown can compare. No zero degree where the dead-drop bottoms out. The trench of depression rises up around you without limit. You grab hold of anything to slow the frictionless slip — the glimpse of silhouetted temple, the daylight farm. Drafts gust in through cracks in the wall. A brush of wind, the scent of grass, the rustle of a place that predates politics. But all of memory is not enough evidence to keep you here.
Days pass when the thought of what lies behind your sheet tin — all that has been taken away from you — plunges you into a place not worth surviving. Worse, this torment pays for nothing. Your whole sacrificed life does not right a single wrong committed against your holders. Half the world, held hostage, would be too little to fix history. And that thought cuts you loose to drop still deeper.