Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

“Seriously,” he said. “Whatever it is, shut it down. I can’t work like this. You need to stop sweating.”

And what could I say? Was I supposed to tell him that, after all this, it seemed possible I might not be able to breathe in the shared car space of my ex-husband?

59. Eyes closed. And when they open, it is to a handheld mirror, eye level. Hello, I say. Greetings. I am sixty-three. I am five-two without the platform shoes I’ve never been seen without. I am rotund. My hairline has withdrawn midway up my skull; it hopes to reach the summit by 2012, Year of the Perfect Strong and Prosperous Nation. I wear girly glasses, but I am a man at heart. I like women who take off their clothes for money, and ravioli with pumpkin filling. My favorite garment is the anorak; my favorite color is brown. I am mysterious and unreachable, North Korea cannot live without me, and just now I am about to meet a gentleman from the United States who will tell me about the Helix and its plans to bring our people together. We will drive around Pyongyang. And a few hours later, when I ask about his family, he will say things about his wife and child with a subtext of longing whose content is the loneliness we’re born into and cannot shake, but so what, so what, so what. It is the wife who matters now. The wife and child, nothing else. And for this information, I will begin to rethink my life.

60. So now it’s on record: How dangerous is Thurlow Dan? Not so much. When he was in North Korea, all he did was tour the city with his sweetheart in disguise.

The chairman wiped his brow. It was getting on 4 p.m., the sleepiest time of day. He thought if this were Spain or Israel or any country more attuned to the circadian needs of the body, he could at least recess for a siesta. But no. They would carry on until the very Western hour of 5 p.m., the happy hour. The hour a chairman returns to his wife and her cause du jour — the weeding of our SWAT and HRT personnel for those with jiffy finger: boys who don’t think, just shoot. Was there any chance the hostages got sniped and no one was telling him? Doubtful. His private theory? The four detained by Thurlow Dan were dispersed throughout the country, having escaped the Helix House hours before it blew and wanting, horribly, to escape everything else. The chairman understood. Were he not accountable to the people for answers, he might even have wished them luck. Either way, those stories would out.

Anne-Janet, the set should reflect the times.

All things considered, this wasn’t so bad. A cot in the Helix House. A chance. An emotional context for events that might never transpire elsewhere, events called kissing and touch. Anne-Janet planning it out; Ned was her target. Anne-Janet taking the reins because she had survived cancer and incest and was not about to be cowed by a dark place in a dark time.

“You okay?” she whispered, and she put out her hand, which he couldn’t see or did not take.

Not cowed, but maybe a little discouraged. And unhelped by the warfare in her head. Half going: Kudos for exploiting alone time with a guy you like, AJ! Half going: Um, in the hours since being kidnapped, you have done nothing but augment an attraction that was already burlesque, and some ideas any sane person would dismiss. Among them: if you were kidnapped with a guy you liked, mutual duress was supposed to hasten the intimacy between you. Forget the barter of secrets and memories in the afterglow of sex, forget the dating and twaddle and rollback of your defensive line until you either had to love this person or kill yourself. Forget the prelude, just head straight for what your heart needed, which was a place to go when you were scared and lonely and, in this case, detained in a cult leader’s house in the suburbs of Cincinnati.

Right? Wrong. And Anne-Janet wasn’t stupid. She had not forgone self-doubt. She could never forgo self-doubt, since amid the miscellaneous fallout of being a victim was the constant suspicion that your feelings were nuts. If you’d fallen prey to the world’s incapacity to bring people together but were thinking only of how to get kissed by Ned Hammerstein, it was likely your priorities were askew. And if the task of releasing your lips from a burlap hood and clamping them around his hard-on was more pressing than escaping environs that might be your last, you were, arguably, a crackpot.

It was getting late. Three or four a.m. Their wrists were still cuffed behind their backs. They had each been assigned a bed, two on either side of an opaque screen that partitioned the room and was bolted to the walls. Presumably this was to guard against rebellion in numbers and to ensure the four could not see each other, though Anne-Janet thought the precaution redundant, since they’d already been given hoods. In any case, it didn’t work. On their first night they’d tried to band together. What the hell was happening to them? There were expletives and incredulity and sentences that fell off the ledge (But — What the — Why in God’s name—). They felt, in the main, duped by the arm of government known as the Department of the Interior and, worst of all, lacking the means to recompense themselves for the wrong done them. But that was as far as their shared feelings went. While the others groused, Anne-Janet had the sad thought that the kidnapping would not do for her what it would likely do for them, which was to make inconsequential, even silly, all the bewilderments and crises that had obsessed their lives to date. Quite the opposite. She had experienced such hardship that this check on her perspective only confirmed how dreadful it all had been. The others were panicked, she was calm, and in this calm managed to foreclose on just one more way to feel a part of the group.

Well, to hell with the group. She might have been paired with Olgo or Bruce, but the guards had chosen Ned and in this was a call to action. Even the layout of the cots was a call to action. That, or it was just having to sleep in a cot at all, but the arrangement invoked for her the bedtime dogma of summer camp and, in tow, feelings you tended to experience more acutely at camp, the bleating heart and onus to complete rites of passage before the summer was out. Anne-Janet was so behind on everything that the rites were as looming and fearsome as they were for girls half her age, and probably, for being so deferred, they were worse.

“Ned,” she said. “You awake?”

“Like anyone could sleep in this nightmare.”

“Want to talk?”

“What’s there to say? This isn’t happening.”

“I dunno. You could ask me about me. Pass the time. Chitchat.”

No sooner said than she rolled her eyes to China. Half her head going: Good one, AJ! The other yelling: Crackpot! She’d already told Ned about her mother and the hip, and, from what she could gather at work, everyone knew about her cancer because on her second day, a hospital renowned for strides in oncology but not discretion had called every extension on the floor looking for her.

The cancer had happened so fast. One second she was just bloated; the next she was having a colorectal neoplasm excised by a doctor who said she was lucky to get away without a colostomy, because there’s always that chance, and what young lady wanted her colon popped out her small intestine? She was irradiated. Poisoned. The skin of her hands and feet turned horse hoof. Her cancer was on the move, her cancer was in retreat. Move, retreat. Stage three. It was hard to imagine herself into next week, and for this shortsightedness she wanted the payoff. A reconfigured mental state. To live without fear. Go out on a limb. Do drugs whose effect you cannot predict, have sex with people you do not know. Surely this was someone’s idea of fun — why not hers? The months went by without a recurrence. And since she had done nothing to inch out on that limb, the rest was easy. Did she want to go to Cincinnati and share a hotel room with one Ned Hammerstein, on whom she had a crush? Absolutely. Because the refurbished mental state and drugs and edgy lifestyle were all fine and well, but what Anne-Janet really wanted before she left this life was intercourse. Intercourse with a man who liked her and might even look at her the way they did in the movies and who, if she had to say it, was not related to her in any way.