Dead Sleep

circulation, no clear reflection exists. Not the end of the world, my father assures me. You can guess where the horizon is -

The anguished sobbing has stopped.

I sense that Wheaton is lying on the floor somewhere, but I can’t see him. As I try to make out objects in the room, an amazing new reality comes to me.

My muscles are under my control.

Leaning back, I look up at the silver line of my IV stand. The hanging bag is flat. Whatever was keeping my muscles in limbo has stopped flowing into me. But my mind is not yet clear. It seems unnaturally focused on the idea of the stars and where I am. But this information is important. New Orleans lies roughly on the thirtieth parallel. If I can verify that I’m on the thirtieth parallel, I can reasonably assume that I’m still in New Orleans, that Wheaton has not flown me to some distant killing house, where the other victims await me like the living sculpture Thalia has become. Of course, Polaris will not tell me my longitude; so the thirtieth parallel could put me in Bermuda, the Canary Islands, or even Tibet. But these are outside possibilities. For me, thirty degrees latitude will mean a real chance of rescue by the FBI.

Control of my muscles brings to mind another possibility: that of saving myself. After flexing most of my cramped limbs, I decide I can probably get out of the tub. The problem is Wheaton. He’s close by, even if I can’t see him. Is he close enough to stop me from breaking out of this glass room? Surely he’s thought of that. But do I really need to break out to save myself? I was wearing a pistol on my ankle when he overpowered me at the gallery. It must be here somewhere. But before I look for it – or do anything that entails risk – I must know how close he is, and what he will do when he hears noise. Reaching out with my right hand, I turn the hot-water tap and wait.

For twenty or thirty seconds the new water is cold. Then it begins to warm, and blissful heat flows under and around me, bringing blood to my bluish skin. The bathwater can’t be that cold, I tell myself. No colder than the temperature of the air, which Wheaton must keep at close to seventy degrees because of his hands. It doesn’t have to be that cold, my father reminds me. You lose heat to water thirty times faster than you do to air. Sustained immersion can kill you. Without regular infusions of hot water, Thalia might already have died of hypothermia.

The faucet continues to run, but Wheaton doesn’t come to investigate. When the level approaches the rim of the tub, I shut it off. I want to get up, but a soft wave of whatever has kept my mind hazy resists my intention, and I lie back against the enamel. Sleep wants to enevelop me, but I force my eyes open and watch the slowly changing sky. The bathwater cools, then becomes cold. As I lie shivering in the dark, every star above me wheels slowly across the sky. Except one. Bright and stationary, it hovers just above the treetops.

Polaris.

It’s a matter of seconds to estimate where the horizon is, guess the angle between that imaginary line and Polaris, and subtract that number from ninety degrees. The answer sets my heart racing. Thirty degrees. I’m almost certainly still in New Orleans. If John Kaiser looks hard enough for me, he will find me. This possibility warms me more deeply than hot water could. And yet… I can’t rely on rescue from outside.

Reaching up with a shaking hand, I turn the hot-water tap again, but this time I don’t sit and wait to be warmed. This time I stand on shaky legs and climb out of the tub.

My muscles still aren’t quite my own, but they do function. The IV tube in my hand presents a problem, but the IV stand has wheels, and the floor appears to be painted concrete. With careful steps, I drag the stand over to the glass wall of the conservatory. What I find is discouraging. The first four feet of glass above the brick wall supporting the conservatory is encased in a diamond-shaped metal mesh. Smashing the glass with something heavy will get me nowhere. There’s a glass door leading outside, but it too has mesh between its metal struts, and a heavy padlock ensures that the door remains closed.

The space my body displaced in the tub is filling quickly. What options do I have? Creep into the house proper and try to slip past Wheaton? Surely he expects this. And the sobs I heard before came from close by, not far away. He may be lying on a sofa in the next room, my pistol in his hand. Or the gun may be nowhere in the house. He probably still has the taser he used on me at the gallery. He may have a dog. Is it worth the risk of looking? When I think of his eyes as he screamed denial of the rapes, that option strikes me as rather like sneaking into a dragon’s lair. Do dragons really sleep? If they do, I fear, it’s only lightly.

Think, says my father. What do you know that he doesn’t? What’s near to hand that can help you?

What do I know? That I’m more than half addicted to Xanax, which is a cousin of Valium. It’s probably a cross-tolerance between those drugs that’s made it possible for me to wake and tiptoe around while Wheaton believes me to be asleep. What is near to hand that can help me? I don’t see any weapons. Not even paintbrushes. The table from which Wheaton took the hypodermic is bare. The room is as sterile and empty as a prison cell. Which it is. Not quite empty, I realize. On the floor behind my end of the tub sits the Igloo ice chest and the grocery bag. Conrad Hoffman’s things.

I drag the IV stand toward them.

The bag is half filled with the same junk food John found at Hoffman’s apartment. Pop-Tarts. Potato chips. Hostess Twinkies. Beef jerky. I stare at the boxes and bags, sensing important activity deep in my brain, but not quite understanding it. Slowly, the logic makes itself known to me. These aren’t weapons. They are defenses.

Reaching into the bag, I quietly open the boxes and remove three shining foil packs of Pop-Tarts and a handful of cellophane-wrapped Twinkies. These I stash between the claw-foot tub and the mirror Wheaton uses to help paint himself into his picture. As I climb back into the tub, I realize I forgot to look at Wheaton’s painting-in- progress. Understanding that image might help me. But not as much as that ice chest, I think. How long has it been sitting there? How long since I saw Hoffman swirling away in the Mississippi? Moving to the Igloo, I say a silent prayer, then pop open the white fastener and lift the lid. It’s dark inside, so I blindly push my hands toward the bottom. They plunge into a rattling Arctic ocean of ice and water, with floating islands that feel like beer bottles. In seconds, pain radiates up my arms.

God bless you, you sick bastard, I say silently. My heart pounds with new hope, but I can’t linger here. Warm water is lapping at my feet. The bathtub is overflowing, and not quietly. But this too is good. The spillover will wipe out the wet traces of my journey around the room, and perhaps convince Wheaton that I’m still in poor control of my faculties. Shutting the Igloo, I shove it a foot closer to the tub, then climb back into the near-scalding water.

I’m reaching for the tap when I hear a noise in the dark. I lay my head back and close my eyes. The water runs on.

“What are you doing?” bellows a groggy voice.

I reach out and take hold of Thalia’s hand beneath the water. Footsteps approach the tub, stop.

Wheaton must be looking down at me.

“Beautiful,” he says, sending a chill to my core despite the burning water. The tap squeaks, and the faucet stops running. Then something dips into the steaming water, and warm waves lap against my breasts. Wheaton’s hand covers my left breast, gently, as though he’s reliving some distant memory. I force myself to breathe with a regular rhythm. The hand slides over my heart, feeling the blood beating there, then slips beneath the water. It covers my navel, kneading the little pad of fat there, then slides down between my legs.

A sensation of falling nearly makes me scream, but numbness saves me. It spreads outward from my brain and heart, a numbness of self-preservation, born in the jungle of Honduras, neurochemical armor to help me endure anything in the cause of survival. Wheaton’s fingers tremble as they explore, but I do not. I lie still and breathe, in and out, in and out. His hand is not the paw of a brute, but the inquisitive hand of a boy. The fingers entwine in my pubic hair and cling with childlike tenacity. In the silence of the dripping faucet, a long, keening moan of grief cuts me to the quick. Like the cry of an orphaned animal beside its mother, it reverberates through the glass room, terminating in a sob. Then the fingers uncurl, and the hand vanishes.

Footsteps move away, and I hear a clatter in the other room. Then the footsteps return, this time behind my head. My IV bag rattles in the stand. He’s changing it.

“Soon,” he hisses. “Tomorrow.”

As he walks away, my wrist begins to burn. Valium, I tell myself, even as my eyes try to close. Not insulin. Insulin doesn’t burn. But just in case, I reach between the tub