With respect to time, I knew only that it was late May. Since I’d been drugged during my abduction, I couldn’t be sure which day I’d come to consciousness in the desert. Several days might have passed between that stormy night at the motel and my waking in the cabin. So I labeled my journal entries "Day 1," "Day 2," "Day 3," et cetera, beginning with my first day of consciousness. I couldn’t understand what drove Orson to keep the date hidden from me. It seemed like an irrelevant, useless fact in my present situation, yet it bothered me not to know.
As for the location of the cabin, I didn’t have the first clue. It could’ve been anywhere west of the plains. I pencil-sketched views from the front porch and my barred bedroom window, including the mountain range to the north and east and the ridge of red bluffs in the west. I also sketched the local plant life: sagebrush, tumble-weed, greasewood, lupine, and several other desert flowers that I happened upon during early-evening walks.
Some nights after sunset, when just a blush of red lingered in the sky, I’d see herds of antelope and mule deer moving through the desert. Their silhouettes against the horizon pained me, for as they trudged slowly out of sight, I envied their freedom. I recorded these observations in the journal, too, along with sightings of jackrabbits and long-tailed kangaroo mice. Though I never saw one, barn owls screeched constantly through the night and turkey vultures frequented the sky in the heat of day. I hoped that through the observations I recorded, I could one day locate this desert again. But in truth, I had no way of knowing if I would ever be allowed to leave.
I lay awake in bed. Having finished my journal, it was late, and Orson had disabled the generator for the night, so the cabin was silent. Outside in the dark, only the wind disrupted the oblique stillness. I could feel it pushing through cracks between the logs. Always blowing.
A memory had been haunting me for the last hour.
Orson and I are eight years old, playing in the woods near our neighborhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, under a bleached August sky. Like many young boys, we’re fascinated with wildlife, and Orson catches a gray lizard scampering across a rotten log.
Thrilled with the find, I tell him to hold the lizard down, and with a devious smile, he does. I extract a magnifying glass from my pocket. The sun is bright, and in no time a blinding dot appears on the lizard’s scaly skin. The sunlight burns through, and Orson and I look at each other and laugh with delight, enthralled as the smoking lizard squirms to escape.
"It’s my turn!" he says finally. "You hold him."
We spend the entire afternoon torturing the creature. When we’re finished, I throw it into the grass, but Orson insists on taking it with him.
"I own it now," he says. "It’s mine."
8
Day 6 (after midnight?)
Took another shower today. The thermometer read 95°F when I scrambled naked across the blistering ground to the well. I loathe that icy water. Feels just a few degrees above freezing, and it takes my breath as it spills over me. I washed as fast as I could, but by the time I’d rinsed all the soap from my body, I was shivering.
At sunset, I wanted to go for a walk on the desert, but Orson locked me in my room. From my bedroom window, I saw a brown Buick heading east on a slim dirt road that runs perfectly straight into the horizon. He’s been gone several hours now. It feels safer here without him.
The Scorcher is probably hitting the bookstores now, and I’m sure Cynthia has about nine ulcers. I don’t blame her. I’m supposed to start a twelve-city book tour any day now. Signings, radio programs, and television appearances will be canceled. This is going to dampen sales; this is breaking contract with my publisher…. But I can’t dwell on these things now. It’s out of my control and only makes me crazy.
I’m still reading like a madman. Poe, Plato, and McCarthy in the last two days. I still don’t understand what Orson wants so desperately for me to see. Hell, I’m not sure he even knows. He spends his days reading, too, and I wonder what he’s searching for in the thousands of pages, if he thinks there’s some character, some story or philosophy he’s yet to uncover that might explain or justify what he sees in the mirror. But I imagine he only finds morsels of comfort, like that cruelty bit from The Prince or the psychopathic Judge Holden in Blood Meridian.
I hear a car approaching in the distance. This is the first time he’s left me alone, and that worries me. Perhaps he just went for groceries. Good night.
I walked from the bed to the dresser and placed the pen and paper inside the middle drawer. It would be useless to try to hide my journal from Orson. Besides, he did display a sense of decorum when it came to my writing. At least I didn’t think he’d read my journal yet. He respected what he called intrinsic urges, which was writing in my case.
I crawled back into bed, reached over to the beside table, and smothered the kerosene lantern, which I’d been using the last few nights instead of the lamp. The slam of a car door echoed through the open window. I didn’t want to be awake when he came inside.
His voice whispered my name: "Andy. Andy. Andrew Thomas." My eyes opened, but I saw nothing. The sotto voce whisper continued. "Hey there, buddy. Got a surprise for you. Well, for us actually." The blinding beam of a flashlight illuminated Orson’s face — a smile between blood-besmirched cheeks. He turned on the lamp above the bed. My eyes ached.
"Let’s go. You’re burning moonlight." He set the flashlight on the dresser and yanked the covers off me. Glancing out the window, I saw the moon high in the sky. Still exhausted, I didn’t feel like I’d been asleep long.
Orson tossed me a pair of jeans and a blue T-shirt from my duffel bag, which lay open in a corner. Impatient, almost manic, he resembled a child in an amusement park as he paced around the room in his navy one-piece mechanic’s suit and steel-tipped boots.
The waning moon spread a blue glow, bright as day, upon everything — the sagebrush, the bluffs, even Orson. My breath steamed in the cold night air. We walked toward the shed, and as we approached, I noticed the Buick parked outside, its back end facing us, the front pointed into the double doors. The license plate had been removed.
Something banged into those doors inside the shed, followed by a brief lamentation: "HELP ME!" When I stopped walking, Orson spun around.
"Tell me what we’re doing," I said.
"You’re coming with me into that shed."
"Who’s in there?"
"Andy…"
"No. Who’s in —" I stared down the two-and-one-eighth-inch stainless steel barrel of my .357 revolver.
"Lead the way," he said.
At gunpoint, I walked along the side of the building. The shed was bigger than I’d originally thought, the sides forty feet long, the tin roof steeply slanted, presumably to protect it from caving under the crippling winter snows, if we were, in fact, that far north. We reached the back side of the shed, and Orson stopped me at the door. He withdrew a key from his pocket, and as he inserted it into the lock, glanced back at me and grinned.
"You like buttermilk, don’t you?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, though I couldn’t fathom the possible relevance.
"Did you always like it?"
"No."
"That’s right. You drank it ’cause Dad did, but you came to love it. Well, I think it tastes like shit, but you have an acquired taste for buttermilk. That’s sort of what’s gonna happen here. You’re gonna hate it at first. You’re gonna hate me more than you do now. But it’ll grow on you. You’ll acquire a taste for this, too, I promise." He unlocked the door and put the key back into his pocket. "Not one word unless I tell you." Smiling, he motioned for me to enter first. " ‘Inhuman cruelty,’ " he whispered as I opened the door and he followed me into the shed.