“Jesus,” I whisper, and it’s almost a sob.
I’d judged Heather Hollister. It’s a natural reaction. We see someone sicker or weaker and we’re stronger and healthier and we assume at some unconscious level that there’s an innate difference between us and them. Be it luck or karma or inner strength, we must somehow be superior, else we would be like them.
I sit now in the darkness and the silence and the
“I’m sorry, Heather,” I say aloud.
I have no problem speaking to myself. I’ve done it, off and on, since the loss of my former life. I realize it’s not healthy, but it was my original truce with insanity. It’s worked so far.
“We’ll have whole conversations, Alexa, if I’m here long enough.”
Terror shoots through me like an electric shock, strong enough to make me swoon. I’d been thinking about talking to a dead child. What about the live ones? Bonnie can’t lose another mother. I reach down with my cuffed hands and touch my belly.
What’s going to happen to this baby?
An image of the camera in the first room comes to mind, and I jerk my hands away from my abdomen.
What if he’s got an infrared camera going in this room?
It would make sense. I resolve to hide the pregnancy for as long as I can.
The silence and the blackness are numbing. I hadn’t realized how much of my sense of self is wrapped up in the visual perception of my body. You walk and see your arms swing from the corner of your eyes. You pass a window and see a shadowed reflection in the glass. You exist. In the darkness there is only thought, touch, smell. It doesn’t feel like enough.
“Then make it enough.” I say the words loud, but the concrete sucks them away, preserving the hush.
I decide to concentrate on why I’m here. Why did he grab me? I’m not particularly surprised that he knows who I am, but why grab me now? What purpose does that serve?
I hear a faint sound in the hallway. The lights in the room go on, and I scream in shock as the world disappears in a sheet of white. I’m blind again, blinded by light this time rather than by dark. I press the heels of my hands to my eyes but see only spots. I register the sound of the door opening, and then I feel something press against the side of my neck. A moment later an electric shock jolts me, causing me to cry out in pain and making my muscles contort. It goes on and on, and I feel my bladder let go a moment before I black out.
I wake up a few seconds later. I’m facedown on the floor. I try to say something, but only a parched moan comes out. I feel a needle in the crook of my arm and get the sense of something being forced into my veins. A great dizziness washes over me, and then I’m blind again, overwhelmed by a whirlpool of warmth and white.
I come to again facedown, naked, bound to a metal table, blindfolded. My head is clearing quickly. Whatever he used metabolizes fast.
I cringe into myself, overwhelmed with a sense of shame about my vulnerability and nakedness that is all too familiar. Though I know rape isn’t his thing, all I can think of is, here I am again, that place I swore I’d never be. A man who is not my husband is looking at my body, taking in both its beauties and its flaws. I want to vomit in despair.
I ache everywhere. My eyes and throat feel raw from the pepper spray. My wrists are sore from the cuffs. The muscles in my neck are spasming from the stun-gun hit. Shooting pains run screaming to the base of my skull, promising to turn into a bad, bad headache soon enough.
“This is just a demonstration,” Dali says.
He no longer sounds bored. The quality of his voice has changed in a subtle way. He doesn’t sound excited so much as attentive. Whatever it is he’s about to do, he assigns importance to it. It deserves his concentration.
I break out into a sweat.
“We’re all meat, you see? We are creatures. Animals. We can fool ourselves, but in the end, Pavlov’s dog lives inside every one of us. If you want a man to obey you, all that’s required is the ability to inflict more pain on him than he can handle. It’s not enough to say it. You have to prove it. Prove it enough and he’ll fall into step. Appeal to his fear, not his intellect. Terror is much more reliable.”
I smell something now. It’s not an unpleasant scent. The odor of aftershave, faint but recognizable.
“The most important thing is to keep your promise. If you say ‘don’t do this’ and someone does it anyway, then you have to provide the penalty. In your case, I told you to stay away. You chose to hunt for me instead. Thus you are being punished, and your punishment will serve as an example to others.”
“That’s crazy, Dali. Do you have any idea who I am? I was just chosen by the director of the FBI to head up a national strike team investigating serial offenders. I’m a federal agent on the president’s radar. People are going to be looking for me, in force.”
The bravado falls flat. I can hear the tremors of fear in my own voice, and I despise my own weakness. Later, if I escape, others will tell me in soothing voices that it wasn’t my fault, but it won’t matter.
“They may look, but they won’t find you. The next time my name comes up, they’ll remember what happened to one of their best and think twice.”
He sounds calm, reasonable.
“Do you really believe that?”
“It’s a universal law. A certainty of fear and pain is the best guarantee of obedience.”
“You’re wrong. They’ll never stop. You’ve underestimated them.”
“Initially, maybe, but an animal with a badge is still an animal. Pain and fear will always eventually supersede belief. You just have to provide it in adequate quantities and make it a certainty. The FBI will look for you, but they will not find you. They’ll start thinking about what that means for you, what you’re experiencing, and they’ll realize the truth: It could just as easily be them.”
The room is far too warm. I feel drops of sweat pooling in the curve of my lower back. The sensation of my damp skin against the metal of the table is somehow grotesque. I’m sweating at my hairline, underneath my breasts.
“Debate is never fruitful in the face of hard reality. Let’s say a man speaks against you. Hit him in the face with your fist, make him eat your knuckles. Splinter his teeth and split his lips. Then ask him to repeat what he said. What do you think he’ll do?”
“Tell you to fuck yourself.”
“You can say what you want, but I’m going to provide you with a demonstration of my tenets regardless. You can make up your own mind about their efficacy.”
“Wait,” I say. He ignores me, continuing on as though I hadn’t spoken. He’s unhurried, patient, like a golem or an automaton.
“I’m going to whip you. It’s going to hurt, particularly with all that sweat that’s covering your body. You will scream and cry and beg, but I will not stop. I never stop. I don’t take pleasure in doing this. I do this to show you what to expect in the future if you disobey me. Do you understand?”
The bored tone is back, which frightens me the most. “Wait,” I say again.
Something thin and leather snaps down against my upper back. The fact that I couldn’t anticipate it makes it somehow much, much worse than it normally would be. There’s a split second of numbness, followed by an unbearable burning pain. I start to scream but manage to bite it back.
“You should go ahead and let yourself scream,” he says. “You will, anyway.”
It ends in silence. I’d been trapped in a haze, a miasma of agony and flashing bright lights, like lightning captured inside a thundercloud. I had screamed, until the screams themselves became too much of an effort, as the brain shut down and all I could do was writhe.
It ends as it began, without warning. I wait for the next crack on my flesh, but it doesn’t come. I continue to cringe anyway, a reflex response to the rhythm he’d set up. I realize it’s over and I allow myself to cry. I hate it, but I just can’t help it.
My whole body hurts. The cuts in my back and buttocks and on the backs of my legs burn as the salt from my
