Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

This shuts me up. He proceeds to apply ointment to my back. It’s painful, but I endure it. When finished, he uncuffs me from the table and undoes my other bonds.

“From this point on you’ll be naked. You don’t need clothes in your room. The good news is, you’ll also be uncuffed. Isn’t that better?”

I don’t reply, and this earns me another slap. It’s hard enough that I cry out. I grit my teeth and fight back my rage. “Yes,” I say. “It will be better.”

He maneuvers me into a sitting position.

“Stand slowly. You’re going to be a little unsteady.”

He’s right. I ease off the table, and my knees almost buckle when I try to stand. Dali keeps me from falling.

“Walk forward as I direct you. Do you understand?”

Back to rote and bored.

“Yes.”

He marches me forward. I sense a temperature change against my body and surmise that we’ve gone through a doorway. We go down a long hall, turn twice, then stop.

“Why didn’t you drug me for the trip back to my cell?” I ask.

“Room,” he corrects me. “Better if you look at it that way, trust me. You should be too weak to resist after what you’ve just been through. If you’re not, then I want to know that too.”

I’m surprised that he answered, so I push my luck one last time as I hear the door open.

“How do you see all this, Dali? What you’re doing to us?”

The briefest pause, then:

“Doing to you? I’m not ‘doing’ anything. I’m just storing meat.” He yanks off my blindfold and pushes me forward into darkness.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I travel behind my eyes, inside my mind, and I speak to both the living and the dead. Matt is there, Alexa is there, my faceless, unborn child is there. Bonnie is there as well, but she is mute again and her eyes are full of sadness.

It was darkness when I closed my eyes, because it’s always darkness. Three times a day a rectangle of light appears at the bottom of my door, and food is dropped inside. It’s always the same: oatmeal and oranges in the morning, ham or roast beef sandwich with an apple in the afternoon, hot dogs and lettuce in the evening. A packet of vitamins also comes with each dinner. And water. Always plenty of water.

“Eat it all,” he told me. “Not just because I’ll punish you if you don’t, but because I’m including what you need to survive. I’m giving you meats for protein, and fruits and vegetables to prevent scurvy. The vitamins are a new thing. I’m working to find a balance that doesn’t cost me too much per head but prevents loss of teeth due to a lack of calcium. Milk spoils too quickly. We’ll see how it goes.”

I’ve had no further experiences in the punishment room. I long to defy him, but I can’t chance it. I have a baby growing inside me, and it, along with the light behind my eyes, has become my lifeline.

Three weeks have passed. Three weeks of darkness and ennui. There are no books, no TV, no radio. There is nothing to do but think, and eat, and exercise, and walk from one end of the cell to the other, and use the toilet, and sleep. Once I started to masturbate, simply to relieve the crushing boredom, but then I remembered that he might be watching on a camera, and I stopped myself.

Once a week, as promised, he visits to make me brush and floss my teeth. It’s always the same. The lights go on without warning, blinding me. The door opens and he shocks me with the stun gun. Then he blindfolds me. When I’m able to stand again, he guides me to the pail of water he’s brought with him. He hands me dental floss and I floss my teeth. He gives me a toothbrush, with toothpaste already applied, and I brush and rinse. He shocks me again, turns me face over as I spasm, removes my blindfold, and exits the cell, returning me to solitude and darkness.

The first time, he talked. He said: Excellent, number 35. That’s what he calls me. Number 35. I file it away into the numbness I’ve become.

The last two times, he said nothing at all. I sat on the floor while he waited for me to finish. His patience is becoming the thing I hate the most. It is indifference, and in this place, indifference is a poison all its own.

It’s only been three weeks, and I already feel myself wanting to break down. I want him to say something to me. I hate him, but I long for him to speak, or to yell, or to hit me. Anything that involves interaction with another human being, however twisted.

Is this the same loneliness that keeps battered women with their abusive spouses? Is that what it’s like for those women? A stony solitude of hushes, where the silence and the lack become a living pain? If it is, I’ll never judge them again, at least not in the same way.

I long for anything to acknowledge my existence. It doesn’t even have to be human. I saw a movie once in which a prisoner of war made friends with a rat. I was repulsed at the time. Now I wish for my own rat.

The darkness and the silence and the solitude grind on that least protected thing: the soul.

That’s right , I said to myself, just the other day (day? Or night?). The soul.

I’m done wondering. Once you turn out all the lights and the body disappears from sight and you are left alone, what is it that remains? The sense of self, the me , the am that I am.

If that’s not the soul, what is? I don’t care to hear the answer.

Madness in this place and places like it, I think, comes from too much thought. Thought is all you have. It’s the one thing you can do that can’t be taken away. The problem is, once you start thinking, it can be hard to stop. Like getting a tune stuck in your head, your mind can get rolling, grooving, heading down the highway, and you can watch as the sun rises and sets and the trees go by but find, when the sun sets, that the brakes have failed. You don’t coast to a stop, you writhe on your cot instead and curse, or rage, or weep.

I worried in the beginning about Leo and Alan. As time moved on, and my sense of time became a floating thing, I found less and less desire to consider either.

Just three weeks, and it’s already a hell on earth I could never have imagined.

I hold on to my sanity with tricks taught to me by Barnaby Wallace. His seminar, as it turns out, was a hell of a good investment.

Fear comes from too little certainty or too much. Torture is about denying one or the other, or both. The torturer takes away your certainty through different methods. Sleep deprivation. Sensory deprivation. No clocks or windows so you can’t track the time. He gives you too much certainty by promising to give you a good shot of pain and then delivering on that promise. So how do you conquer that fear? He stopped then, a hand going absently to a scar on the side of his neck. First thing you need to know about torture: Everyone breaks eventually. There’s no foolproof method, not for anyone on this earth. Give a dedicated man enough time, and he’ll crack the bravest down the middle. Period. What I can teach you is how to delay that breaking point. How to put it off in the distance. Will it work for you? He shrugged. Everybody’s different.

One of the methods he talked about had to do with a kind of self-hypnosis. Creating a world behind your eyes , he called it. He showed us a video of a Japanese man deep in meditation. Various people try to distract him, first by screaming into his ears and then, later, by smacking him in the back with boards and rods. He remains serene throughout, a half smile on his face, even when they once draw blood.