Stephen Dixon - Love and Will - Twenty Stories

If I could escape I would. But my bedroom window has a double gate on it and in all the times I’ve tried I’ve never once freed my arms or legs from the ropes. After three months of this I say to them “I can’t stand it anymore. Either you release me immediately or I’m going on a hunger strike till you let me go.”

“All right,” they say. “Cut your nose off to spite your you-know-what,” and carry me to bed and leave me alone there for three days without anything to eat, drink or listen to and nothing to look at but the ceiling, walls and window shade. I get so hungry, thirsty, dirty and bored that I shout “Ivy and Roz?” They come in and Roz says “No false alarms?” and I say “None. From now on I’ll be a good little boy and eat and drink regularly and won’t ask again when I’m leaving here.” They pat my head, clean and feed me and sit me in front of the TV, but only to programs they want.

A few times I plead with them to give me some physical work to do. “Anything, even for eight to ten hours a day straight without pay. Just to do something to get my body back in shape and spend my time some other way but watching television and wasting away here.”

“If we free your arms or legs you might swing at us or gallop out of here,” and I say “Then give me something mentally stimulating to do, like a crossword puzzle to look at and work out in my head or a newspaper or a book with words in it on pages which I can turn with my nose.”

“Concentrate on improving your personality and conduct further. Because for someone of your incorrigible willfulness and stubbornness, that’ll be work and time spent well enough.”

“Please, you’ve got to, I’m going nuts here,” and they say “Want to go on another hunger strike though this one organized by us?” and I shut up.

It takes a few months more before I do everything they say or what I figure they want me to, except every third week or so when I have to scream out my frustrations about staying here and having nothing to do, and then I get gagged and slapped and strapped to my bed without food and water for a day.

Fall goes, then winter and spring, then summer and fall again, seasons, years. Because my behavior’s tremendously improved they say, once a month I’m allowed to sit by the living room window for an hour during the day and look through a slit in the blinds to the street. It ends up being the event I look forward to most in my life, other than getting out of here. I watch the old buildings being renovated and pray that the owner of this one sells the building and it gets gutted and renovated too. I watch the styles of cars and clothes change, new tenants move in, old ones move out, neighborhood kids get taller and fuller and rowdier year after year.

While I sit behind that slit I often crave that someone will notice my eyes somehow — maybe through a roaming pair of binoculars or just from above average eyesight — and discover that I’m almost constandy blinking the S.O.S. signal with my lids for the hour a month I’m there. Or maybe someone will think how odd it is that once a month only, a pair of twitching eyes looks onto the street for an hour, at least odd enough to wonder about it to the point of perhaps one of these months phoning the police to check out this apartment.

The only outsider who ever comes to the apartment is the building’s super, who every other year or so is called in to fix a pipe or light switch. When that happens I’m gagged, strapped to the bed and locked in my room and the super comes and fixes whatever’s the matter without knowing I’m here.

Once, two years ago, someone else did ring the bell. It was the only other live-in tenant in the building, the nameless one from the fifth floor. I was quickly gagged but overheard her say through the door that she was going out of town for a week to a funeral, so if Ivy or Roz hear anyone lurking around upstairs late in the evening, to call the police. “Will do,” Roz said and the woman said “Thank you and have a good week,” and that as far as I know was the last time she came by.

After being here for several years I long for something like a tornado to sweep through this part of the city and destroy every building in its path, though without anyone getting hurt except Ivy and Roz, but especially this building. Or that only this one catch fire somehow, when the factories are closed and the nameless tenant’s out, but really anytime if it has to come to that, just to give me some small chance of getting away or being found alive.

I hope for a disaster like one of those for about a year and then decide to make one of my own. Twice a year on their birthdays they put a candle on the dinner table and the sister whose birthday it is blows it out at the end of the meal. I make my plans during Ivy’s birthday dinner, rehearse it to myself day after day. When Roz’s birthday comes several months later and they’re in the kitchen preparing a special dessert and I’m sitting at the table with my arms and legs tied, I manage to stand and roll my body across the table and knock the candle to the floor. The rug starts to bum, just as I intended it to, and I get on my knees and blow on the fire to make it spread. The sisters smell the burning rug, run in, douse the fire with water before it becomes anything more than a small blaze, then gag me, light the candle and hold my hand over it till my skin sizzles and the gag almost pops from my soundless screams.

“That’ll teach you never to play with fire or spoil my party for Roz,” Ivy says and they take the gag off and I tell them I won’t try any tricks like that again.

“You do and you’ll get worse, much worse, maybe twice as many years with us than we planned for you,” and I say “I promise, never again.”

That’s the first definite hint that my stay here won’t be forever, unless they’re lying. But it does get my hopes up somewhat that I’ll be released eventually and I don’t question them on it or make any trouble in the next three years. I become the model prisoner: courteous, obedient, uncomplaining, silent except to their questions and demands, always responding how they want me to and keeping out of their way. In that time I grow bald, my skin and body hairs turn gray, muscles continue to atrophy, I get so thin and weak from no exercise and their inadequate food that I can no longer turn myself over in bed, and my teeth ache night and day from my years of untreated cavities here, which they don’t give me anything for but two aspirins a week.

Then, eight years to the day I got here, they take my ropes off after dinner and say “All right, you can go.” I say “Thanks,” not believing they mean it, and sit there at the table, taking my pleasure in being free of the ropes for the first time in eight years and wondering how many minutes it’ll be before they’re put back on.

“What are you waiting for,” Roz says, “another eight years? You’ll get it, though we sure as shoot don’t want you around for that long again, if you don’t move your behind out of here now.”

Maybe they’re not kidding, and I try to stand but am so unused to it this way that I drop back in the chair and it falls over with me to the floor. They help me up and say “This is the way to do it: spread your legs apart — rest — then one step after the next — rest … you’ll get the knack back in time,” and walk me to the door.

“My things,” I say. “What I came here with and probably all I got left in the world,” and Roz says “If you mean your wallet, watch and ring and stuff, all those are partial but final payment for your room, board and care these years. You’re getting off cheap, Charles,” and they push me a few inches past the threshold and shut and lock the door.

I still think they’re playing with me and will suddenly throw open the door, knock me to the ground and carry me back inside. I only begin to believe I’m really free from them when I reach the bottom landing and open the vestibule door.