Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

"Please. I hold. You leave."

"OK." The man fumbles the container into your hands. "You take."

"Thank you. You go now. Goodbye." He walks off a few feet. But no door closes. It will have to do. Under the blindfold, by force of will, you imagine the room empty. Your boarded-up hole, bare but for the mattress and radiator. The floodgates open; coarse yarn pulls out of your urethra at high speed.

You collapse against the wall in relief. Your head falls back, slack against the plaster. "Merhadh." Toilet. "Merhadh" you sob, all fluids flowing out of you at once.

"Yes, yes," your captor laughs. "Merhadh, merhadh. I understand."

Not the word a native would have used. Pronunciation not even close. Failing to come until long after you needed it. Yet these two syllables, on his tongue, send him into delight.

"Good, good. I leave bottle here. You use… all the time. Make water only. No shit. Shit, mornings only. I come take you. Empty bottle. Good? Yes, please?"

"Listen. Can you bring me something to drink? Water. Another bottle for water. I am very dry…" You make obscure hand gestures meant to signify dehydration. Dust in the throat. "Not good. Not healthy. I must have water. A bottle to drink from." You will work on fluid for now. And put forward the concept of nourishment later.

"OK. No problem. I bring for you. Soon. Inshallah"

God willing. You pray the tag line is just a formula.

The door closes upon silence. You lift your blindfold to the emptied room.

"Listen. Can you bring me something to drink? Water. Another bottle for water. I am very dry…" You make obscure hand gestures meant to signify dehydration. Dust in the throat. "Not good. Not healthy. I must have water. A bottle to drink from." You will work on fluid for now. And put forward the concept of nourishment later.

"OK. No problem. I bring for you. Soon. Inshallah"

God willing. You pray the tag line is just a formula.

The door closes upon silence. You lift your blindfold to the emptied

room.

How long have they held you? You need some mileage markers. On the day of your capture, you refused to entertain any block of time longer than an hour. The crisis called for small steps, one in front of the other. Even figuring in days conceded defeat. To reckon in weeks already lay a week beyond survivable. Now survival depends upon the peace that only a calendar can give.

Taken on Tuesday, the eleventh of November. Armistice Day, it now hits you. After that, a long questioning, long enough to induce hallucination. Then a stretch in the Hole, where total darkness cut off the passage of time. Interminable transfer by van followed by a stint of unconsciousness. Now, around the edges of the sheet-metaled French windows, you see the last declarations of daylight, brackish, disappearing into darknesses salt sea.

But which day? You can't say, and it crazes you. You've lost count, by as much as two full days. Lost your link to the world that they've stolen you away from. Market day, school day, wash day, holiday, birthday: you fall into limbo. You can't live, without a date to live in.

You run the sum of hours every possible way, landing on different calendar squares each time. You walk in chained arcs around the radiator, trying to force up the real date as if it were a forgotten phone number. Here, in this empty cube, you choke like a child lost on a packed midnight train platform in some mass deportation. You'll call out. Yell for your captors. Trade a beating for today's date.

Then, through the muffling wall, a signal reaches you. The background hum of traffic modulates. The air erupts in a spectral cry, then its echo. The sound reverberates, a civil defense drill. Electronic muezzins pass the fugue, back and forth, like shoeless street kids passing around a soccer ball. The size of this call to prayer decides you. A smile floats up your throat to take dominion of your face. Friday. Holy day. Friday the fourteenth of November. 1986. You close your fingers around the prize and cling to it for sweet life.

Days go by. With each, so does the prospect of a quick release. You consider scratching each one into the soft wall plaster with your fingernails, stick men herded and tied diagonally into docile groups of seven, down the chute of time's slaughterhouse. But the gesture seems too cheaply cinematic, too much of a surrender. Instead, vague light and dark, a cycle of repugnant meals, the morning blindfold trip to that cesspool opposite your cell all keep time for you, sure and metronomic.

The days cross off more easily than the hours. You look inward for some diversion, a fidgety Iowa kid in the backseat of a Yellowstone-bound Rambler who exhausts the possibilities of license-plate bingo long before washing up on the lee shore of Nebraska. Your head is a gray-green, tidal emptiness. Your mind rebels against the smallest admission of your fate. Thought becomes a blur. Nothing there. No more than a reflection of the formless pit where they've pitched you.

Surely you knew something once, learned things, stored up diversions that might help pass the brutal infinity of an afternoon, the wall of minutes so monumental that your pulse can't even measure them? But your brain, ever vigilant, refuses to be caught exploring any other prospect than immediate release.

You talk to yourself, as to a stranger on a transatlantic flight. You study your resume from above, hoping to remind yourself of some topic that interests you. Favorite sport. Musical instrument. No thread lasts for more than ten minutes. And you must slog through a hundred ten-minute intervals between any two bouts of blessed unconsciousness.

You sleep on the soggy mattress, a life-sized grease stain seeping along its length. The stench so gags you that, even lying on your back, you're afraid to slip off into unconsciousness. But with each new night, you habituate to the toxic fumes. You learn to doze intermittently, suppressing the reflex to retch.

Mornings they unchain you and march you through the latrine. You fix your blindfold to let you look down your cheekbones to your shuffling feet. You fake a blind stumble, so the guards don't catch on. Then, for ten precious minutes, time returns, its sudden fast-forward mocking the previous twenty-four fossilized hours. You jump like a galvanized corpse, rinsing out your urine bottle and filling your canteen, fighting the giant roaches for a corner of the sink, shitting at the speed of sound, using any remaining seconds to scoop cold water over your head, armpits, and groin, a surreptitious shower that gets you no cleaner and costs you hours of mildewing chill. Yet it seems a guerrilla blow for decency, the smallest symbol of order keeping you alive.

Meals come capriciously, two or three times a day. They vary in quality, from inedible on downward. Breakfast usually consists of stewed okra scraps rimed with smashed chickpea. Lunch tends toward the chewed-over soup bone, what you pray are pickled tomatoes, and half a circle of khobez. Dinner arrives, at best some self-deluding parody of baba ghanouj.

Hostage: each passing day adds another letter to the hangman's word. It grows hourly harder to deny that you've become the next victim in a serial crime that you thought had exhausted itself in pointless-ness. Just one more naive Westerner picked off the streets for nothing, an uncashable token held to impress an enemy who doesn't grasp the first thing about the rules of exchange.

Independence Day passes on the twenty-second. At least it's the twenty-second by your private count. The street below your cell signals

no celebration.

"Am I a hostage?" you ask the guard, the knife-voiced one, one morning, as he delivers your breakfast bowl of spotted cucumber rinds and curdled yogurt.