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“I’ll leave the food, shall I? When I come back and the plate is clean—juice, too—you can have the water.”
No reply, and animal or no animal, Professor Emily Harris (emerita) realizes she’s angry after all. No, furious. Castro ate; Dressler ate; eventually Ellen will eat, too. She won’t be able to help herself. Em turns away and starts for the stairs.
The girl says, “It’s horrible, isn’t it?”
Em turns back, startled.
“When people won’t do what you want. It’s horrible, isn’t it? For you, I mean.” And the girl actually smiles!
Bitch, Emily thinks, and then what she would never in a billion years allow herself to say except in her diary: Stubborn black bitch!
Em says (gently), “It’s Thanksgiving, Ellen. Give thanks and eat.”
“Bring me a salad,” Ellen says. “No dressing. That I will eat.”
The nerve! Em thinks. As if I were a serving girl! As if I were her ladies’ maid!
She does something then she will later regret, because it gives away too much of herself. She takes the bottle of water from her apron pocket, raises it to her lips, and drinks. Then she pours the rest out over the railing.
The girl says nothing.
2
A day later.
Professor Rodney Harris (Life Sciences, emeritus) stands in front of the cell, cogitating. Ellen Craslow looks back at him, calm. Or so she seems. There are a couple of blisters on her lips now, there are pimples on her forehead, and the smooth cocoa loveliness of her skin has turned ashy. But her eyes—a startling green—are brilliant in their deepening sockets.
Roddy is a respected biologist and nutritionist. Before his retirement he was a teacher sometimes revered and more often feared by his students. A bibliography of his published work would fill a dozen pages, and he still keeps up a lively correspondence in various journals with his peers. That he considers himself first among those peers doesn’t strike him as conceited. As someone wise once said, It ain’t bragging if it’s true.
He’s not angry at this girl the way Em is (she says she isn’t, but they have been married for over fifty years and he knows her better than she knows herself), but Ellen certainly perplexes him. She must have been disoriented when she woke up, the way the others were, they use a powerful drug to knock their subjects out, but she didn’t seem disoriented. If she was hungover—and she must have been that, too—she didn’t complain of it. She didn’t scream for help, as Cary Dressler did almost at once (must have made his headache that much worse, Roddy thinks) and as Jorge Castro had eventually. And of course she has refused to eat, although it’s been almost three days now, and over two since she finished off the last of the water she’s been allowed.
The liver Em brought down yesterday has darkened and begun to smell. It’s still edible but won’t be for much longer. Another few hours and she’d probably vomit it back up, which would make the whole thing pointless. Meanwhile, time is flicking past.
“If you don’t eat, my dear, you’ll starve,” he says in a mild voice his students of yore wouldn’t recognize; as a lecturer, Roddy had a tendency to be rapid, excitable, sometimes even shrill. When talking about the wonders of the stomach—serosa, pylorus, duodenum—his voice sometimes rose to a near scream.
Ellen says nothing.
“Your body has already begun to digest itself. It’s visible on your face, your arms, the way you stand, slightly slumped…”
Nothing. Her eyes on his. She hasn’t asked what they want, which is also perplexing and (admit the truth) rather disturbing. She knows who they are, she knows that if they let her go they will be arrested for kidnapping (only the first charge of many), ergo they can’t let her go, but there has been no bargaining and no begging. Just this hunger strike. She told Em she would gladly eat a salad, but that is out of the question. Salads, whether dressed or undressed, are not sacrament. Meat is sacrament. Liver is sacrament.
“What are we to do with you, dear?” Sadly.
At this point he would expect a prisoner—a normal prisoner—to say something ridiculous like let me go and I won’t say a word to anybody. This girl, hungry and thirsty or not, knows better.
Roddy pushes the plate with the slab of liver on it a little closer. “Eat that and you’ll feel your strength return at once. The feeling will be extraordinary.” He tries a thin joke: “We’ll turn you into a carnivore in no time.”
There’s still no response, so he starts for the stairs.
Ellen says, “I know what that is.”
He turns back. She is pointing to the big yellow box at the far end of the workshop. “It’s a woodchipper. You’ve got it turned to the wall so I can’t see the intake, but I know what it is. My uncle has worked in the woods up north all his life.”
At his age Rodney Harris would have thought himself beyond surprise, but this young woman is full of them. Most extraordinary, almost like discovering a canine prodigy that can count.
“It’s how you’ll get rid of me, isn’t it? I’ll go through the hose and into a big bag and the bag will go in the lake.”
He stares, mouth agape.
