“What kind is it?”
“The sick kind. I was altered. Against my will.”
“What do you mean!” she asked, hysterically.
“Oh no, it’s nothing big like plastic surgery. I’m okay. I’m still the same. I just was taught some skills, and stuff like that.”
“You were taught to kill?”
“What? No! I said I was taught some skills.”
“Oh. Not skills to kill?”
“No! Are you disappointed?”
“Of course not, I just thought you said kill. I saw a movie, Nikita something, that stuck on my mind.”
“La Femme Nikita. I wasn’t taught killing skills. I was taught acting skills. But I’ll tell you later.”
“Your father is somewhere in the building fixing air conditioners. He’ll be so happy …” She choked with emotion.
She then said she would drive up with my father right away and take me home.
The police took me to the hospital to be examined. I then waited for my parents to arrive, while the police continued asking me questions in the hospital waiting room, which I preferred to the police station.
Finally my parents, and my brother, arrived. They rushed through the corridor. As they got closer to me, their faces changed. It was subtle, but I noticed.
And then they all, more or less, gasped.
“You look great,” said my mother.
My father gave her an annoyed look and hugged me. “No she doesn’t. She just went through nine months of hell. How could she look great?”
“I don’t know,” said my mother.
The police asked us if we wouldn’t mind spending the night in town so that I could be further questioned in the morning. I told them I would rather be questioned all night rather than have to try to sleep in this part of the world again.
Then report came in that Damon had not been found, nor any machines that produced fog, nor any fog (I had told them the house was filled with fog instead of clouds, not wanting them to think I was crazy). They said the cage had been found empty, with its door open. There was only blood, and half a finger.
I was very upset.
The police sent out reports to hospitals to be on the lookout for a man with an amputated finger.
Finally, at 3:30 in the morning, we drove back to the city. My mother cried in the car. And to my astonishment, my brother cried. My father seemed lost in thought. A couple of times he said, “How could anyone do that?”
I slept at my parents’ apartment that night. When I woke up in late morning, my mother had a troubled, careful expression on her face, which piqued my curiosity.
“The police called,” she said.
“Yes?”
“They know how Damon escaped.”
“How?”
“Apparently … there were fifteen keys hidden in the cell.”
I stared at her, stunned, and said, “No.”
She frowned and shook her head. “I told them I found that hard to believe, that I was sure you would have found them. At least one.”
I was silent for a while, thinking, and said, “I didn’t even look, really. What reason would I have to think he had hidden keys in my cell? What reason could he have?”
“He did it in case he died. So that then you wouldn’t die. Of starvation.”
“Are you guessing, or do you know this?”
“At nine o’clock this morning, while the police were still inspecting Damon’s house, a video was broadcast on one of the monitors in your cell. It was a written message on the screen, saying that in case Damon died unexpectedly, or disappeared, or was, for any other reason, unable to tend to you, there were fifteen keys hidden in the cell. Then he describes in detail the fifteen hiding places. Evidently this video was programmed to go on every day at 9:00 A.M. unless he turned if off each day.”
“So where were the keys?”
“I only remember a few of the places, but the police can tell you the others if you want. I know one key was in the rod of the shower curtain. Another was taped behind the toilet. There was one in the leg of your bed. One was inside one of the monitors. Another was hidden in the vacuum cleaner. One was stapled under the carpet. And I forget where the others were.”
Chapter Twelve
The days passed, but I had trouble adjusting to the real world. It weighed on me. I was not used to facing life without Damon’s interruptions, without having to change into character many times a day. I felt caged within myself. When I fought with people now, it bothered me that I was not ordered, suddenly, to “act singular” or “bald” and was instead actually expected to continue the argument until its bitter end. It was suffocating.
I had the urge to ask my family and friends to make me act in any way they wanted, at any time. But I never dared ask, afraid they would either take advantage or think I was insane. Instead, I settled for ordering myself, out of the blue and at awkward times, to do “angry” or “suspicious” or whatever. And I would do it, subtly, I thought, but probably not subtly enough, judging from people’s gazes.
I had other problems as well, other confusions.
One of them was my escape, or that strange thing I had participated in. What had it been? An escape, or a release?
Also, I felt disturbed about having cut off Damon’s finger. Especially after hearing about the keys.
And that was another problem. The keys. Fifteen, no less. They touched me. They moved and affected me. I didn’t need these new emotions in my emotion salad, a huge salad composed of already too many miscombined, hard-to-digest states: slices of sadness, slivers of stress, crushed exhaustion, ripe indignation, bits of bitterness, anger rind, grated outrage, hard-boiled horror, soft-boiled perspective, steamed embarrassment, a teaspoon of denial, cubes of contempt, superiority peel, canned tolerance, crunchy curiosity, dried humor, leaves of relief, a pinch of guilt, melted melancholy, and a dab of fresh fear.
And now I was adding chunks of being “moved” and “affected”? Movement and affection were not good ingredients to add to my salad. My brain would throw up, or my heart, or my soul; wherever emotional fruits get digested. A brain throwing up; how does that manifest itself? Is it insanity? Yes, it must be; insanity is the vomit of the brain.
But since one has little control over one’s emotional salad, the fifteen keys did, in fact, move me, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. In addition, I was furious at myself for not having searched the cell more thoroughly. What kind of a kidnapee was I?
But the biggest problem I had after my return to the real world was that I no longer knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was tempted to abandon acting, just to spite Damon.
After thinking about it, I decided that the great victory, of course, would be to not let Damon make any difference to how I ran my life.
Nevertheless, something was frequently on my mind: the pursued woman. Armory Jude, the female impostor who had pretended she was the legitimate pursued woman, had, during my kidnapping, starred in three low-budget movies, due to all the attention she got. She was considered a mediocre actress with no future, but still, it was better than nothing. Nothing — that was what I had. It made me jealous; it disturbed me. It made me wonder whether I might not like to be in her shoes. I was nagged by temptations to reveal to the media that I was the real pursued woman. I fantasized about it. I tried not to, but couldn’t help myself. I decided to go and ask my mother for advice.
I agreed to bout with her, as this was the best way for us to have a serious conversation.
The clink of our foils echoed in the entrance hall of the building to which my father was the super. We bouted in silence for a few minutes, absorbed, ignoring the doorman or the residents who went in and out.