As for a weapon, I took the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and scooped the dust out of its bag. I replaced the vacuum in the closet, and checked Damon on the monitors. He was already in the kitchen making breakfast.
I carefully took the dust in my arms and carried it like a baby into the bathroom. It was actually the size of a baby. I stepped into the bathtub, closed the shower curtain, and waited.
It didn’t take long for Damon to arrive. He knocked on the bathroom door for a while before opening it. He drew back the shower curtain. I shoved the dust in his face, leaped out of the tub, and tried to grab his gun on my way out, but failed. I rushed to the cell door. He hadn’t locked it. I had noticed the day before that sometimes he didn’t bother locking the cage after entering it; he didn’t need to, since he had his water gun to control me. But no longer, now that I had my padding. I ran out of the room and down the hallway. Rather, I wobbled (my cushiony armor made me into a very fat person). My aching muscles didn’t help things. The bath mat was sliding out of my sleeve. I hopped down the stairs, and by the time I had reached the bottom step, Damon had reached me. He dragged me back upstairs, flung me in the cage with him, locked it, sat me down at the breakfast table, and screamed, “Eat!”
The breakfast consisted of unappetizing whole grain sugarless cereal with skim milk, toast without butter or jam or honey. And orange juice.
I wanted to tell him that I was dying without sugar, that I couldn’t act if I didn’t eat sugar, that if I ate sugar, I was alive. But it didn’t feel like the right time.
I ate through the breathing hole in the sheet.
After we had finished, he looked at his watch and made me sit on a pillow on the floor, with my back against the bars of my cell and my hands behind my back. He handcuffed my wrists to the bars and tied my legs together. He took out of his bag two pieces of cloth that looked like scarves, made of the same thin and transparent material as his clothes, and tossed them next to me. They fluttered lightly to the floor. He could strangle me with them. Or hang me.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
He left the room. From where I was sitting, I could only make out some indistinct movement on the monitors, which occasionally traveled from one screen to the next. I waited. Damon hadn’t made me take off my armor yet. The pillow under my sweater protruded in front of me like a huge beer belly. I was hot.
An hour and a half went by, and then the doorbell rang, which first stunned me, and then threw me into a state of intense turmoil. Damon rushed into my cell and roughly pulled the sheet off my head. He picked up one of the silk scarves and shoved it in my mouth, and wrapped the other one over my mouth, tying it tightly behind my head. I gagged. My nose started running from my choking.
Someone was coming in the house, and if only I managed to make enough noise, I might get their attention. As soon as Damon left the room, I tried screaming, but the only thing that came out was a hum. I tried different pitches of humming, hoping one would be louder than the others, but they all came out at about the same volume. I tried banging my feet against the floor. I tried getting up, but a horizontal bar was preventing the handcuffs from sliding up. I tried banging my head back against the bars, but did not do it more than once — the sound was small and the pain big. I went back to humming frantically. My throat started hurting, and I choked at intervals, and my nose ran more, but I never actually threw up inside my mouth, which pleasantly surprised me. And then I heard voices of men. I stopped humming for a moment, but couldn’t make out anything they were saying. I banged my head against the bars once more. The voices faded. I cried. I forced myself to stop that, however, because my nose was getting clogged and I couldn’t breathe.
Five minutes later Damon opened the door and ungagged me. This was too bad because it meant the man, or men, was gone. But I screamed anyway, just in case. Damon did not seem to care, which confirmed my fear that they were gone, but I continued, in case he was bluffing, which I knew was illogical, but I wanted to be thorough.
“It’s okay,” he finally said, “you don’t have to keep screaming. They’re gone.”
“Who were they?”
“The deliverymen.”
I was still handcuffed on the floor, but by twisting my head I glimpsed a big machine in the doorway. Perhaps a torture device.
I was not entirely wrong. It was the bicycle, the recumbent bicycle.
“This is so exciting,” said Damon, pushing the massive, electronic device into my cell. He positioned it facing the TV monitors and plugged it in the wall.
Sitting on it, he said, “The pedaling is so smooth.” He pressed various buttons, lighting up the screen.
Removing my handcuffs, he told me to go change into more comfortable — and fewer — clothes. I felt sad and defeated in the bathroom, as I took off my armor amid the dust.
Damon then made me pedal on the bike and told me to keep pedaling until the screen had indicated that I had burned eight hundred calories.
“Eight hundred calories! But that’s two or three hours of bicycling!” I said, horrified. I knew this because I occasionally went to a friend’s gym and used the bikes there.
“It’s two hours, at the level I’m setting it to. When I come back in an hour, you better’ve burned four hundred calories. If you haven’t, I’ll be very mad and you will deeply regret it. Now I’m going to do some work in my lab. Pedal well.”
I pedaled, watching the calories add up on the screen and wishing I had a cigarette. Or chocolate, to give me energy. I watched him on a TV monitor, futzing in his lab. I became absorbed by what he was doing.
He took the glass covers off the clouds he had made yesterday and experimented on them. I assume they were experiments, unless he was just trying to kill time.
After an hour, he came in to check on me and saw that I was right on schedule, calorie-wise.
As he was about to return to his lab, I asked him, “Why were you hitting your clouds with raquets?”
He seemed taken off-guard. “I was testing the density of my clouds by checking the speed at which they go through the grooves of the racquet. I was comparing the speeds, or resistance, of the different clouds.”
“And why were you sucking them up with eye-droppers and turkey basters?” I asked, panting from the exertion of bicycling while talking.
“I was again testing their density.”
“And why were you stomping on them, sitting on them, and trying to slice them with a knife?”
“I was mad because my clouds were not as dense as I had hoped.”
“Why were you sitting on the floor with fans blowing around you?”
“I was trying to think of the solution.”
“To what?”
He looked at me with a puzzled air. “To increasing their density.”
“How do you expect to do that?”
“By changing the way the water is whipped. I told you my bonsai clouds are created by mixing the water in a particular way, with my whipping machine. It’s a sort of blender. I can make the blending prongs blend in different positions, create different patterns and combinations of whipping, and vary the speed of whipping.” He paused, then told me more: “Whipping is like knitting. It stitches the cloud together, but with floating stitches. I want to figure out how to make the stitches stronger, while retaining their lightness. I spent the last three years of my life trying different speeds and whipping patterns, in the hope of making the cloud’s fabric more tightly knit.”
“How dense do you want to make your clouds?”