'Do we really want to do this?'
'Probably not.'
'We're next,' Charlie said.
'I'm next, you bastard.'
'I want the new book, Bill.'
'I'm still working.'
'Whatever relationship you maintain with the old dusty lovable skinflint house.'
'I'm in the final pages.'
'Whatever crumbling remnants of a contract, there are ways around it.'
'I'm polishing. That's what I'm doing.'
'I want this book, you bastard.'
They stirred in their chairs. Charlie flexed his right knee, grimacing. They got to their feet at the same time and stretched, working their shoulder muscles. Bill looked out the east window into a sky mural of bridge spans and ship cranes, factory smoke over Queens.
'You're not the hermit, the woodsman-writer, you're not the crank with a native vision. You're the hunted man. You don't write political novels or books steeped in history but you still feel the clamor at your back. This is the conflict, Bill.'
'I think I got rooked on these shoes.'
'You'll call me about London at home tonight. Here's my number. Or tomorrow at the absolute latest, right here, by noon if possible. I'm taking a night flight. It's something I think you need to do. Remember. One less writer in the hands of killers.'
The guard was waiting in the reception area. Bill asked him where the men's room was. The guard had a key and stood by the drying machine as Bill went through his pockets looking for the tin with his mixed medications. He took precut segments of three brands of amphetamine tablets out of the tin. The colors were a blue, a white and a pink. He placed them on his tongue but when he realized the tap would not deliver water unless he kept his hand on the valve he took the pill fragments out of his mouth so he could ask the guard to turn on the cold water for him. The guard was willing to do this. Bill put the pieces back on his tongue, cupped his hands under the spout and brought the water to his mouth and drank, throwing back his head when he swallowed. The guard looked at him as if to ask whether everything had gone as planned. Bill nodded and they went out to the elevator and rode to the lobby together.
Bill stood near the entranceway, about fifty feet from the oval desk and directly in front of the register that listed the building's occupants. He could see Scott waiting just outside, standing at the far end of a shop window that jutted at an angle from the recessed entranceway, forming a border extending to the sidewalk. He carried a small package, books probably, and had his back to the shop window. Bill stepped away from the glass doors and smoked a cigarette. He stood in thought, his arms folded and his head cocked slightly left. His gaze seemed to end at the tip of the cigarette dangling from his right hand. When he peered out again, Scott was nearer the entranceway but had turned to look in the shop window. Bill walked across the front of the lobby past two sets of revolving doors. He exited by the last single door, peeling the visitor's badge from his lapel and moving out onto the sidewalk, where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd.
PART TWO
The boy took off the prisoner's hood when he came to feed him. The boy also wore a hood, a crude cloth piece with ragged slashes at the eyes.
Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was. When he spat up blood he watched the pink thing slug into the drain and it carried time quivering in it.
It made the prisoner anxious, not knowing why the boy needed to be concealed.
They drove him here in a car with a missing door. He saw an old man with no shirt who was stuck to a coil of military wire in a sewage meadow somewhere.
Be alert and note the details said the conscientious tape running in his head, the voice that whispers you are smarter than your captors.
The prisoner felt the boy come close to pull away his hood and stuff his face with food and he looked into the eyeholes of the boy's own hood.
Time permeated the air and food. The black ant crawling up his leg carried time's enormity, the old slow all- knowing pace.
Poor old guy probably lost at night wanders dizzy into the wire, senile, shirtless, pinned, still living.
He waited for the moment when he could count the launched rockets flashing. When he heard the rockets he also saw the flash although he wore a hood that had no eyeholes.
He was new at this and eager to succeed. All the time he chewed his food he estimated meters wall to wall. Measure the walls, then the bricks in the walls, then the mortar between the bricks, then the hairline cracks in the mortar. See it as a test. Show them how advanced you are.
He saw laundry lines going through shell holes in gray masonry, looking through the missing door.
The boy pulled away the hood and fed him by hand, always too fast, pushing food into his mouth before he was finished chewing the previous handful.
He conceded the fact of his confinement. He admitted to the presence of the plastic wire they'd used to fasten his wrist to the water-supply pipe. He conceded the hood. His head was covered with a hood.
The prisoner was full of plans. With time and tools he would learn Arabic and impress his captors and greet them in their language and have basic conversations, once they gave him the tools to teach himself.
The boy tortured him sometimes. Knocked him down, told him to stand. Knocked him down, told him to stand. The boy tried to pull his teeth out of his mouth with his bare hands. The pain extended long past the boy's departure from the room. This was part of the structure of time, how time and pain became inseparable.
And there were authorities to impress as well. At his release they would take him to a secret place and recite their questions in the same voice he heard on the instruction tape and he would impress the authorities with his recall of detail and his analysis of facets and aspects and they would quickly determine the location of the building and the identity of the group that held him.
He knew it was evening by the war noise. In the early weeks it began at sundown. First the machine-gun clatter, then car horns blowing. It's interesting to think of traffic jams caused by war. Everything is normal in a way. All the usual cursing complaints.
The boy had him lie on his back with legs bent up and he beat the bottoms of the prisoner's feet with a reinforcing rod. The pain made it hard for him to sleep and this stretched and deepened time, gave it a consciousness, a quality of ingenious and pervasive presence.
He thought of the no-shirt man caught on the wire. His memories didn't extend past the moment of abduction. Time started there except for small dim snatches, summer flashes, compact moments in a house somewhere.
But even with authorities, what do authorities know, did he really expect authorities to learn important things from the length and width of a brick even if there were bricks to count and measure and there weren't, or meaningful sounds that barely petered through the walls.
There was no sequence or narrative or one day that leads to another. He saw a bowl and spoon at the edge of his foam mattress but the boy continued to feed him by hand. Sometimes the boy forgot to replace the hood after mealtime. This made the prisoner anxious.
The mortars came next, a sound of dust in the heavy crumple of the shells, slow-motion dust, dust specks colliding by the millions.
It was hard to think about women except desperately and incompletely. If they could send him a woman, just once, for half a second, so he could set eyes on her.
The only meaningful sound he heard was the VCR on the floor above. They were looking at videos of the war in the streets. They wanted to see themselves in their scuffed khakis, the vivid streetwise troop, that's us, firing nervous bursts at the militia down the block.
