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As he reaches the top of the ramp, bent almost horizontal now, arms outstretched and running shoes flexed, a bug stings the back of his neck. Feels like a big one from the way heat is spreading out from the source, maybe a wasp, and he’s having a reaction. Never had one before but there’s a first time for everything and all at once his vision is blurring and the strength is going out of his arms. His shoes slip on the wet ramp and he goes to one knee.
Wheelchair’s going to backroll right on top of me—
But it doesn’t. Rodney Harris flips a switch and the wheelchair rolls inside with a contented hum. Harris hops out, steps spryly around it, and looks down at the man kneeling on the ramp with his hair plastered to his forehead and drizzle wetting his cheeks like sweat. Then Jorge collapses on his face.
“Look at that!” Emily cries softly. “Perfect!”
“Help me,” Rodney says.
His wife, wearing her own running shoes, takes Jorge’s ankles. Her husband takes his arms. They haul him inside. The ramp retracts. Rodney (who really is also Professor Harris, as it happens) slides into the leftside captain’s chair. Emily kneels and zip-ties Jorge’s wrists together, although this is probably a needless precaution. Jorge is out like a light (a simile of which the old poet would surely disapprove) and snoring heavily.
“All good?” asks Rodney Harris, he of the Bell College Life Sciences Department.
“All good!” Emily’s voice is cracking with excitement. “We did it, Roddy! We caught the son of a bitch!”
“Language, dear,” Rodney says. Then he smiles. “But yes. Indeed we did.” He pulls out of the parking lot and starts up the hill.
The old poet looks up from her work notebook, which has a picture of a tiny red wheelbarrow on the front, sees the van pass, and bends back to her poem.
The van turns in at 93 Ridge Road, home of the Harrises for almost twenty-five years. It belongs to them, not the college. One of the two garage doors goes up; the van enters the bay on the left; the garage door closes; all is once more still on Ridge Road. Mist revolves around the streetlights.
Like halos.
4
Jorge regains consciousness by slow degrees. His head is splitting, his mouth is dry, his stomach is sudsing. He has no idea how much he drank, but it must have been plenty to have a hangover this horrible. And where did he drink it? A faculty party? A writing seminar get-together where he unwisely decided to imbibe like the student he once was? Did he get drunk after the latest argument with Freddy? None of those things seem right.
He opens his eyes, ready for morning glare that will send another blast of pain through his poor abused head, but the light is soft. Kind light, considering his current state of distress. He seems to be lying on a futon or yoga mat. There’s a bucket beside it, a plastic floorbucket that could have come from Walmart or Dollar Tree. He knows what it’s there for, and all at once he also knows what Pavlov’s dogs must have felt like when the bell rang, because he only has to look at that bucket for his belly to go into spasm. He gets on his knees and throws up violently. There’s a pause, long enough to take a couple of breaths, and then he does it again.
His stomach settles, but for a moment his head aches so fiercely he thinks it will split open and fall in two pieces to the floor. He closes his watering eyes and waits for the pain to subside. Eventually it does, but the taste of vomit in his mouth and nose is rancid. Eyes still closed, he fumbles for the bucket and spits into it until his mouth is at least partially clear.
He opens his eyes again, raises his head (cautiously), and sees bars. He’s in a cage. It’s roomy, but it’s a cage, all right. Beyond it is a long room. The overhead lights must be on a rheostat, because the room is dim. He sees a concrete floor that looks clean enough to eat off of—not that he feels like eating. The half of the room in front of the cage is empty. In the middle is a flight of stairs. There’s a push broom leaning against them. Beyond the stairs is a well-equipped workshop with tools hung on pegs and a bandsaw table. There’s also a compound miter saw—nice tool, not cheap. Several hedge trimmers and clippers. An array of wrenches, carefully hung from biggest to smallest. A line of chrome sockets on a worktable beside a door going… somewhere. All the usual home handyman shit, and everything looking well-maintained.
There’s no sawdust under the bandsaw table. Beyond it is a piece of machinery he’s never seen before: big and yellow and boxy, almost the size of an industrial HVAC unit. Jorge decides that’s what it must be, because there’s a rubber hose going through one paneled wall, but he’s never seen one like it. If there’s a brand name, it’s on the side he can’t see.
He looks around the cage, and what he sees scares him. It isn’t so much the bottles of Dasani water standing on an orange crate serving as a table. It’s the blue plastic box squatting in the corner, beneath the sloping ceiling. That’s a Porta-John, the kind invalids use when they can still get out of bed but aren’t able to make it all the way to the nearest bathroom.
Jorge doesn’t feel capable of standing yet, so he crawls to it and lifts the lid. He sees blue water in the bowl and gets a whiff of disinfectant strong enough to make his eyes start watering again. He closes it and knee-walks back to the futon. Even in his current fucked-up state, he knows what the Porta-John means: someone intends for him to be here awhile. He has been kidnapped. Not by one of the cartels, as in his novel, Catalepsy, and not in Mexico or Colombia, either. Crazy as it seems, he has been kidnapped by a couple of elderly professors, one of them a colleague. And if this is their basement, he’s not far from his own house, where Freddy would be reading in the living room and having a cup of—
But no. Freddy is gone, at least for now. Left after the latest argument, in his usual huff.
He examines the crisscrossed bars. They are steel, and neatly welded. It must be a job done in this very workshop—there’s certainly no Jail Cells R Us that such an item could be ordered from—but the bars look solid enough. He grabs one in both hands and shakes it. No give.
He looks at the ceiling and sees white panels drilled with small holes. Soundproofing. He sees something else, too: a glass eye peering down. Jorge turns his face up to it.
“Are you there? What do you want?”
Nothing. He considers shouting to be let out, but what would that accomplish? Do you put someone in a basement cage (it must be the basement) with a puke bucket and a Porta-John if you mean to come running down the stairs at the first shout, saying Sorry, sorry, big mistake?
He needs to pee—his back teeth are floating. He gets to his feet, helping his legs by holding onto the bars. Another bolt of pain goes through his head, but not quite as bad as the ones he felt when he swam back to consciousness. He shuffles to the Porta-John, lifts the lid, unzips, and tries to go. At first he can’t, no matter how bad the need. Jorge has always been private about his bathroom functions, avoids herd urinals when he goes to the ballpark, and he keeps thinking of that glass eye staring at him. His back is turned, and that helps a little but not enough. He counts how many days are left in this month, then how many days until Christmas, good old feliz navidad, and that does the trick. He pisses for almost a full minute, then grabs one of the Dasani bottles. He swirls the first mouthful around and spits it into the disinfected water, then gulps the rest.
He goes back to the bars and looks across the long room: the vacant half just beyond the cage, the stairs, then the workshop. It’s the bandsaw and the miter saw his eyes keep coming back to. Maybe not nice tools for a caged man to be contemplating, but hard not to look at them. Hard not to think of the high whine a bandsaw like that makes when it’s chewing through pine or cedar: YRRRROWWWWW.
He remembers his run through the misty drizzle. He remembers Emily and her husband. He remembers how they deked him and then shot him up with something. After that there’s nothing but a swatch of black until he woke up here.
Why? Why would they do a thing like that?
“Do you want to talk?” he calls to the glass eye. “I’m ready when you are. Just tell me what you want!”
