Last thing. Know that your mother’s safety hinges on your conduct here. Now, you’ve had quite a journey. Rest as much as you like, and when you’re ready to learn why I’ve brought you here, knock on the door.
I returned to the bed and, leaning against the barred window, looked out again upon the desert. My eyes filled with tears as I beheld the wilderness. Aside from the windblown motion of the tumbleweeds dispersing their seed, there was no movement. It was a wasteland, a deadened landscape, which at another time might have been serene. But in my present condition, it only enhanced the foreboding. Wiping my eyes, I rose from the bed, and my heart galloped as I approached the door.
4
A slot six inches high and a foot wide had been cut into the center of the sturdy wooden door. I knelt down and pushed on the metal sheet, but it wouldn’t budge. Standing again, I drew a deep breath. Weak and hungry, it was impossible to know how long I’d lain unconscious in this room. My arms were sore and speckled with needle pricks.
Timidly, I knocked on the door and then retreated to the bed. Footsteps soon approached, clicking softly against the stone outside. The metal panel slid up, and I glimpsed another room: bookshelves, a stack of records, a white kerosene heater, a breakfast table….
In place of the panel, a flap of bubble wrap descended. Someone stood before the opening, though only a form without detail, blurred behind the sheet of quarter-size plastic bubbles.
"Come here," he said. I inched toward the door. When I was a few feet away, he said, "Stop. Turn around."
I turned and waited. The bubble wrap crinkled, and I assumed he’d lifted the plastic and was now appraising my condition. After a moment, he said, "Come to the door." The slot had been cut at waist level, and when I reached the door and knelt down to peer out, he said, "No, no, don’t look at me. Sit with your back to the door."
I obeyed. Though it terrified me to be in proximity to him, I emphatically reassured myself that he hadn’t brought me into a desert just to kill me in my first moments of consciousness.
"How do you feel?" he asked, and in his voice I sensed true concern. He sounded nothing like the man on the phone. His voice had a slight buzzing quality, as if he spoke with the aid of a speech enhancement device. Though his voice was familiar, I couldn’t place him, and I distrusted my perception after spending an indeterminate number of hours unconscious under a slew of narcotics.
"I feel groggy," I said, my tone as demure as possible. I didn’t want to excite him.
"That’ll wear off."
"You wrote those letters? Killed that teacher?"
"Yes and yes."
"Where am I?"
"Suffice it to say that you’re in the middle of a desert, and were you to escape, you’d die of thirst and heat exhaustion before you reached the outskirts of civilization."
"How long will I —"
"No more questions regarding your quasi-captivity. I won’t tell you when or where you are."
"What will you tell me?"
"You’re here to get an education." He paused. "If you only knew. The substance of your learning will become manifest, so be patient."
"Can I please have my things?"
He sighed, the first sign of frustration boiling under his breath. "We’ll talk about that later." Then his voice softened, shedding its edge. "Pretend you’re an infant, Andrew. A tiny, helpless infant. Right now, in your room, you’re in the womb. You don’t understand how to use your senses, how to think, how to reason. Rely on me for everything. I’m going to teach you how to see the world again. I’ll feed your mind first. Fatten it up on the most brilliant thinkers in human history." A white hand pushed through the bubble wrap and dropped a book onto the floor.
"Your first meal," he said as I lifted a hardback of The Prince. "Machiavelli. The man’s a genius. Undisputedly. Are you familiar with Hannibal, the general from Carthage who ransacked Rome? Marched his men across the Alps with an army of war elephants."
"I know who he was."
"Well, he marched his army all over the Mediterranean coast and Eastern Europe, but what made Hannibal’s army singular was that there was no dissension among his soldiers. Different nationalities, beliefs, languages, and no dissension in the ranks. You know what made that peace possible?" he asked. "In the words of Machiavelli, Hannibal’s ‘inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valor, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.’ " He was silent for a moment, and I could hear only the dry, scorching wind pushing against the glass panes and my captor’s escalated breathing. " ‘Inhuman cruelty,’ " he repeated. "That gives me chills." His voice had turned passionate, as though he were speaking to his lover. "So," he said, "start reading that tonight, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Are you hungry?"
"Yes, I’m starving."
"Good. I’m gonna make dinner now, so why don’t you start on that book. I hope broiled shrimp on angel-hair pasta sounds good to you." He ripped the bubble wrap away and shoved the metal panel back over the opening. My head dropped in relief that he was gone, and I sat motionless in my white bathrobe, staring vacantly into the floor.
A small lamp, screwed into the wall, exuded dim, barely sufficient light onto the pages. Because he’d yet to give me the duffel bag, I didn’t have the aid of my glasses, so my eyes were failing me.
I dropped The Prince onto the floor, having finished half of it. I hoped that would be enough for him. When I reached up and turned off the lamp, the placid light of a full moon flooded in between the bars, soft and soothing. I would’ve dreaded to spend my first conscious night in the perfect darkness of a new moon.
The room had grown unbearable from a day’s accumulation of sunlight, and though the heat had dissipated from the desert with the onslaught of night, it had lingered in my room. So I’d opened the window when the sun set, and now the dry chill of the desert night infiltrated the room, forcing me to burrow under the fleece blankets.
Closing my eyes, I listened. Through the open window, owls screeched and coyotes or wild dogs yapped at the moon, though they seemed a great distance away. Since dinner, I hadn’t heard a peep from him. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing.
For the last hour, jazz music had filled the cabin. It came quietly at first, stealing in like a whisper, so that I heard only the guttural rumblings of a bass. The volume rose, and the ride cymbal pattern and the offbeat swish of a closing hi-hat pulsed into the room. When the piano and trumpet and saxes climaxed through the wall, I suddenly recognized the song, and it took me back twenty years, to a different time, a different life. It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing "All Blues," a moody, blues form piece in 6/8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.
An acute scream soared above the music. I sat up and listened. Another scream ruptured the night. Clutching the iron bars, I turned my eyes on the desert, but saw nothing save miles of moonlit sagebrush. Again, a scream — a woman’s, closer than before.
Fifty feet away, a figure stumbled through the desert, choking for breath. When it was halfway past the window frame, a second, larger figure entered on the left side. It lunged upon the smaller figure and drove it into the ground at the foot of a greasewood shrub.