He woke from a dream about the White Room.
The White Room was on B1, but he’d decided to make it the first part of the tour whenever they got that going. He wasn’t sure how many people would want to tour, but people took their families to chocolate factories and breweries, especially those rich fuckers out of Manila, so why not there? People had an obsession with seeing where the stuff they loaded into their traps came from. That was why he’d replaced the old steel containment crates with ones made of acrylic glass. It was expensive, but he figured they’d pay for themselves when the tourists came through. He’d get Stanhill on it to advertise the hell out of the place.
In the dream he was walking down the main aisle, the containers like giant aquariums on either side. The lights above filled the room with the obnoxious, sterile brightness of an electronics outlet, and all the containers were full to the brim, overflowing in some places. The walls and ceiling down there ran with mostly gray piping, some of it painted green or red for easy identification: the guts of the beast.
It was always quiet in the White Room, and he could be alone there whenever he wanted. It was the place he could really see what the plant was doing. Every full container meant tens of thousands of bottles. Thousands of bottles meant thousands of dollars. It was a good feeling, because as soon as he emptied those containers, looming on both sides of him like a blocky alien forest, they would fill up again just as quickly. Their contents sparkled with the whiteness of deadly mushroom caps in the forest—whiteness that made things shrivel up and die. Somehow, though, looking at all of it was such a good feeling.
At first Alex had no idea where he was. He stared at the ceiling, puzzled. There were some bare light bulbs up there that seemed to be providing the light, and doing a damn good job too—he was surprised at how he could have been asleep with those things beating down on his lids. He turned to look at the far wall on his left, featureless and beige except for a photograph of a sunset in a peeling frame. In one corner there was a pot that looked like a rusting coffee can.
His heart sunk. He knew this place. He’d been here when he’d closed his eyes to go to sleep.
Alex sat up quickly. The springs of the mattress underneath him squealed, but sunk obediently under his ass. He wanted to lie back down immediately; it seemed he could do with a few more minutes of sleep.
Memory trickled back to him like water out of a busted faucet. He’d been leaving the plant. It was nighttime, after 10:00. He’d gone back to his car, gotten in, and then there’d been that man. Yes, he remembered that very clearly. A man had come shambling into the beam of his headlights before Alex had even put the Stingray in drive, turned around and leapt right up onto the hood like he was sitting down to stargaze. He was trashed, or high on something or other—Alex had heard that some of the old bastards around there huffed paint in the fishing shacks, where the week’s catches were kept in rattling Mitsubishi freezers from the eighties. The man on the hood couldn’t seem to maintain his balance, and his clothes were a mess. He looked like someone wandering home from a day spent under a car, wrenching and ratcheting through some filthy undercarriage. Alex had tooted the horn once, twice, and then, impatient and feeling dirty just looking at the frail wreck, he’d lain on the horn. The guy hadn’t moved. In fact, he’d laid down on his back until Alex could see the greasy black mat of hair on top of his head. Alex had loosened his tie and undone the top button of his shirt in a huff, then exited the car, rolling up his sleeves, hoping he wouldn’t have to actually touch the POS. Then . . .
And then there was a blank spot. He couldn’t recall anything beyond getting out of the car. Something had happened, obviously, but it was as clear as a mud puddle after a week-long dry spell. Which was to say his memory was dirt.
He’d woken up here yesterday, if woken up was the right term, but had no idea where here was. Maybe not yesterday either. His phone had disappeared and that’d been his only time piece. There were no windows in this room.
Alex rolled over and got his feet on the floor, then lurched upwards. He stumbled before he was able to come to standing and almost fell to the boards. He regained his balance and made it to the wall. The room couldn’t be any more than five by five meters. Not big by a long shot, but at least spacious enough to stave off his tendency toward claustrophobia. He took his hands off the wall, taking the experimental step of a newborn. Then the floor fell away under him. He made a short yelp, falling halfway to his knees before stopping himself with a hand on the boards.
“The fuck . . .?”
The floor moved again—except it didn’t. It was the whole room. The room was tilting and he was tilting with it. Alex scrambled back to the wall. The room heaved forward again, the motion unmistakable now. He was on a goddamn boat.
He fixed his gaze on the door across the room from him. He knew he’d seen it the day before. He couldn’t recall trying to open it—couldn’t recall even standing up for that matter; he must’ve just sat there on the mattress like a newborn chick in its nest. He wondered if he was drugged, or had been.
He caught himself breathing hard. He made a point of slowing his inhalations now, straining his ears. Not a sound came to him, not even the wind.
The rocking was fairly steady, more agreeable now that he’d gotten a feel for it. He left the wall and walked over to the door. It was a steel sliding door and there was no knob, just a metal handle that had been mostly rubbed bald of its brassy furnishing. He pulled on the handle. The door didn’t so much as jiggle in its jamb. Maybe its rollers are rusted, thought Alex, and giggled impishly as he pulled a second time. The door didn’t budge.
Panic began to eat its way into his stomach, and as it did he realized that it had been incubating there all along. He pulled on the door once more, to no avail. It was as though it had been cemented into place. He eyeballed the area around the handle closely, as featureless upon close inspection as it had first appeared. There was no lock to be found, just gray steel, any luster that had once been present dulled with age.
Alex knocked twice on the door, with the polite rap of a visitor.
“Hello?” he called.
He waited and heard nothing. He knocked three more times, knuckles thudding flatly.
“Hello?” he tried again, louder.
Hellooo! Anybody in there? he’d once asked an employee, knocking on his hardhat. The guy had left a valve on the water main open after checking the silt traps, so they’d been using twice the energy the whole day pumping seawater in while half of it was jetting out onto the dunes. That was the flourish with which Alex said hello this second time, and again he was met with nothing. His heart picked up pace in his chest and it made the back of his head throb. He hadn’t noticed that before. He reached up a bit hesitantly to give it a feel, bringing his fingertips slowly towards the patch of skull above where the knobs of his spine disappeared and dispersed their filamentary nerves into his brain. Even before his fingers reached their target they came across the bump. The outside of the protuberance was strangely numb, but it ached faithfully to the rhythm of his pulse. What if his skull was cracked under there, he wondered.
He felt like he was choking. He grabbed the knot of his tie and wrenched it loose. He undid the top buttons of his shirt. It was far too warm in the room. He would almost say hot, but maybe that was going too far. It definitely felt like a room where the sun was beating down hard on its outer walls, because he couldn’t imagine anyone running heat—no one needed to run heat in this country, ever.
One of his sleeves was still rolled up to his elbow; the other had fallen down, wrinkled, back to his wrist. He rolled this one up too. His arms were muscular and bronzed. He kept in shape: gym three evenings a week, weights at home on the other nights, and pushups and crunches in the mornings. He made protein drinks using whey powder, sweetened with xylitol, which he ordered from the Stride-X Center in bulk. He drank one at lunch and one after working out. It would have been an expensive habit a few years before, but now it was chump change. The labor came cheap here, as did the property.
He stepped back to the door and raised his fists. He hammered twice on it, and it shook a little this time, he was sure of it.
“Hey!” he called. “Hey!”
Hay’s for horses, he could hear his uncle saying.
He drummed on the door, throwing some of his weight into it. Sweat broke out on his brow in miniscule beads and his underarms grew drippy. “Open this fucking door right now!” He tried to keep his voice a deep baritone, strong and authoritative. He kept hammering, then stepped back and undid the next two buttons on his shirt, breathing hard. He’d warmed further with his exertion and the cool he felt on his damp chest was small and short lived.
“Listen, if you’re out there, I think there’s been some sort of misunderstanding. You can let me out and we’ll just forget about this, no harm no foul. I’ll walk away.”
No you won’t, he thought.
“Did you hear me?” He spoke as loudly as he could muster while keeping his voice steady. “It’s no problem, we can talk and sort things out. Let’s be honorable about this, how ‘bout it?”
Nothing.
“Can you hear me at least? Knock on the door if you can hear me.”
He waited.
“I said knock on the door if you can hear m—”
There was a sound. He stopped dead. His last word was absorbed by the walls instantly and the silence filled back in like gelatin. The air had become moist and his skin itched and prickled. Was that a knock? It had to have been—that’s what it was.
“Did . . . did you knock?” Alex fixated on the bald expanse of the door. “Do it again,” he said, forcing the words out commandingly. It was the only way he really knew how to speak, the only way he’d spoken since he was a teen. “I’m listening!”
There was nothing. Alex put his ear to the door, his cheek sliding against it greasily with his sweat. He could hear a hum, one that he wasn’t sure had been present before or not. It was low and steady. The engine, perhaps? A room this size couldn’t be on a boat powered by sail, no way. He’d never seen a sailing ship anywhere near that size around the islands. This had to be at least a good sized yacht. There were plenty of those cruising about, especially near the marina down in Cebu.
He waited for a full minute like that, eyes closed and waiting to detect even the weakest tap. No telling how thick the door was, not that it was apt to make a big difference—whoever was on the outside had clearly heard him. There was nothing besides the hum, and even that sounded so distant as to be questionable. There’d been a knock though. There had been a goddamn knock all right, he was sure of it.
“Aw, you shit-eating bastard,” he cried. “Just knock on the door!”
He put his ear back against the steel, holding it there firmly and counting down from twenty. When he reached zero and told himself that the rocket had blasted off, he fell away from the door and collapsed onto the mattress, its surface barren save for his discarded navy blue tie with the cartoonish little water bubbles that his fiancé had given him before things went sour. He only wore it on Fridays. Looking at it made him long to be at home with a beer and maybe a nice steak, or anywhere—the restaurant, in the Stingray with the music jacked up, or at a bar where he could be on his weekly prowl for some easy pussy to slide over his cock.
He was hungry and thirsty. When had he last eaten, or for that matter drank anything? Lunch time at work, and he’d had a coffee in the afternoon. How long had it been since then? His belly was clenched inside like a fist, refusing to growl, but it would soon. In the end hunger was like the tide and nothing could stop it. When he was younger he used to build sand castles while on vacation in Cali; he’d tried to beat the tide again and again, building them high, fortifying their bases with stones, but it never worked. No matter what you put up against the ocean it would succumb to the waters sooner or later. Usually sooner. Hunger was like that: no matter what you piled into your stomach, your guts would burn through it, steady and uncalculating, and be left aching for more. It was all just a matter of time.
At length Alex began to feel drowsy. He laid down, telling himself he’d just close his eyes and think for a moment. There would be a simple answer and it would come to him if he just shut his lids and went over the situation. As he thought about it he drifted off into a dark, dreamless oblivion, as warm and silent as a womb.
He woke up because there’d been a sound. When he opened his eyes the light bulbs were burning above him unchanged—but something had made a noise. He whipped his head around frantically and saw movement at the door. He flailed and flopped on the mattress for a moment like a fish pulled up onto the riverbank. Something was on the floor and the door was sliding closed.
“Hey!” He got his feet under him and tried to propel himself to the narrow opening. The floor dipped and his sleep-muddled legs betrayed him, pitching him onto the boards within an arm’s length of the quickly dwindling space. He cried out again, not a word this time but a pointed shout, aimed at the ear beyond the last crack left between the edge of the door and the jamb. Then the crack was gone.
Alex stared for a dumbfounded moment, still on his hands and knees, then leapt for the handle. As he gripped it there was a deep, metallic sliding noise from the other side, followed by a firm clink. Alex chose not to hear it; getting his feet under him again, he heaved backward while holding the handle firmly, fingers white with strain.
The door didn’t move, didn’t budge. He roared with anger, beating at it with both hands until it became an insane drum beat, ferocious and oddly rhythmic. When the sides of his fists grew sore and the impact of each strike sent reverberations down his arm, he stopped.
“Goddammit you prick!”
His breath was coming in thick huffs and beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead. The place was like a sauna. He looked down to see what was on the floor, suddenly wary that it might be something dangerous. It would be best not to panic—panic would get him nowhere in here. He could claw at the walls until his finger nails chipped off, but that would be a significant dead end. Alex didn’t know a whole lot about dead ends—hadn’t faced a lot of them in his thirty-two years—but he knew they were always there, waiting predatorily for someone like him to misstep. The world loved to threaten people who sifted themselves out from the rest of the shit.
Whatever was sitting at his feet was in a plastic bag, and it didn’t appear particularly threatening. The inside was beaded with condensation and its contents were something whitish spliced with faded yellow. He felt that he recognized what was in there very well, but couldn’t quite place it. Returning to his hands and knees to examine the bag, he realized that they were apple slices. Something like Golden Delicious.
“What?” he asked the room, and wondered if maybe it was bugged and someone would actually hear him. He doubted it was, but couldn’t rule out the possibility until he did a full search. Even then he wouldn’t be able to be sure, since he knew shit-all about bugs—and who cared if someone was listening anyway?
He poked the bag with his finger, like a child might poke at a dead animal, then grabbed its knotted top and took it over to the mattress. He sat down on the edge with his feet on the floor and the bag between them, working it open. The aroma that rose out of the bag was sweet, floating on a puff of humid air. Alex’s mouth watered instantly, as much with the anticipation of moisture as food. His stomach growled. The apple’s flesh had only just started to brown. The slices looked like little smiles, all jumbled together. He could almost taste them on his—
What the hell was he doing? He couldn’t just put that into his mouth like some stupid fucking gibbon in a cage. Those slices could be peppered with poison. For all he knew they were dusted with cyanide powder. Get hit over head, wake up locked in some room on a boat, food tossed in by unseen person, eat food immediately: one of those things didn’t belong.
He smelled the slices again, concentrating on the scent this time. He didn’t detect anything, but then again cyanide was supposed to be odorless.
Oh, for—there’s no cyanide on the damn apples slices! Wouldju just shut-up and eat?
That was his uncle again, the one that had told him just how easy it would be to secure the land for the plant in the first place. Ironically it was his clamoring voice that wouldn’t shut-up. Even more ironic, considering that fact, was that his talkative uncle was dead. He took the wrong girl home one night, a 16-year-old, and refused to pay her when she finished a blowjob. He’d told her in his broken Tagalog that she hadn’t eaten his meat like she was hungry, so he damn well wouldn’t believe she was starving. That’s what she claimed in the police report. She’d slit his throat with a kitchen knife and gone to jail for probably the rest of her life. Alex hadn’t been in the country at the time, but it turned out he’d been left a handsome enough sum in the old guy’s will, so he decided to follow up on his advice and move his fledgling project from Honolulu to the sunny beaches of the Philippines. Overall he couldn’t say it had been a bad decision; looked like creepy old uncle Jack had known a little bit about the desalination business after all, not that Alex would ever mention their connection to anyone.
Alex’s stomach rumbled again. He popped one of the slices into his mouth. It was warm and juicy. An eruption of saliva mixed with the juices and leaked out the side of his mouth. He wiped the drool away with the back of his hand and ate another slice, the first barely chewed one tumbling down his esophagus. He took stock of himself after it reached his stomach. No ill effects, no nothing. He ate the rest and entertained the idea of licking the inside of the bag before discarding it on the floor.
He went back to the mattress and sat. Just the act of eating had made him start sweating again. Salty beads ran down the side of his face like rain on a windowpane. God it was hot in here. Night had to fall outside eventually, and then it would cool.
Cool . . .
He thought about walking through the White Room, just like in his dream. It was always cool in there, and dry. The room was tightly secured so that the outdoor humidity couldn’t get in, even if the air conditioners went down for some reason. Humidity would make the salt crystals begin to stick together in the big containers and that would make it harder to empty and clean them. The humidity was as thick as glue outside all year round. The air conditioners had never broken, though, at least not yet, and thank Mother Ignacia del Espritu Santo for that. The machines kept the air dry and brisk, making the White Room a glorious retreat 24/7, like walking into a refrigerator.
They extracted a shit-ton of salt at the plant. It was amazing how much was out there in the oceans, it really was. But people liked the sea, they felt free there, they liked to bathe in it, they felt it refreshed them. They would drink it up if they could. That’s how Alex had come up with the Ocean Fresh brand. All the goodness of the ocean, none of the nasty. And now, after just a year in business, their water was being bought up everywhere like the stuff was running out—Bangkok, Jakarta, Hanoi, some Canadian cites and all over the States, including Hawaii, smack dab in Honolulu where he’d had red tape and land restrictions shoved down his throat for two years—yum yum, you fucking trendies, Ocean Fresh goodness for you.
It was a higher-end kind of brand—that’s how they marketed it. It wasn’t so hard when you slapped on the right minimalist image of a swelling turquoise wave. Distilled From the Pure Philippine Sea! Also when you bottled about 40% of your product in glass rather than plastic. They usually sent the former to the cafes. People apparently felt fresher when they were drinking water from glass containers, especially after a five-dollar coffee.
Alex lay down and closed his eyes. He didn’t think he’d sleep, but for the moment he felt drowsy. He’d just close his eyes for a bit, give them a rest, digest the apple. The fruit had done little to quell his hunger, but he could forget about that for a little while, gather his thoughts.
Images came to him, and eventually he knew that he was in that tenuous half-awake, half-asleep state. He could no longer feel the mattress beneath him, nor was he aware of the boat’s rocking. He was looking at that oily mop of black hair again, connected to the body sprawled across the hood of his car. That bastard was behind this in a big way.
Alex went back a bit further in his addled memory, watching the events unwind before him with ‘80s VHS clarity. The drunken man had come wandering into the beam of the headlights and . . . had there been some familiarity there? Where did Alex recognize him from? He analyzed what recollection of the man’s face he was able to grasp, little more than a glimpsed side profile. In his mind there was just a blur there for a most part—or no, not a blur, but shifting features: the faces of all those old coots out there on their crooked wooden wharves and barnacle encrusted rocks, what teeth they had in their head worn down to the nubs, casting their lines into the water or dinking around in their ramshackle boats reeking of fish guts. They were all baked in the sun like raisins, arms sinewy, spitting streams of yellow saliva as they hauled their catches onto the docks, eyes lifeless with monotony and whatever shit they were sucking into their lungs out there, probably half blind from sun glare off the water.
Except one thing stood out now: the guy in front of the car had been smiling. He isolated the feature in his mind’s eye, narrowing his focus upon it. The face drifted toward him, most of it just as unclear as before, except for the mouth.
Yes, that mouth had a little forlorn smile on it.
Alex’s eyes flung open. Something had made him jerk back to full consciousness, but he couldn’t determine what. He tried to recall what he’d just been dreaming about, but it slipped away like fine sand through his fingers. Something about what had happened before he got out of the car . . . the man on the hood . . .
A new sensation had crept into his body, and with it came a long, whining gurgle in his lower bowels. He had to shit. When had he last been on the toilet? He still didn’t know how long he’d been in the room, but less than twenty-four hours was safe to say. His large intestine gurgled again, louder this time, the pressure building on his sphincter.
Alex rolled off the mattress and swayed to his feet. The floor wasn’t so bad now and he was able to keep his balance quite easily. He went to the door and banged on it. His hand was still sore from the previous pounding he’d done, the ache more pronounced now. He’d been hopped up on adrenaline before, or anger, or something. He had to keep his cool.
“Hello?” he inquired, trying to sound congenial. “I have to use the bathroom. Now.”
There was no answer. Not that Alex had expected one.
“Hello out there. Anyone?”
Keep calm. You just keep calm, champ, and they’re gonna come.
He brought his volume up as high as possible without breaking into a yell. “I have to use the bathroom. Do you understand?”
He was rooting about in his head for the appropriate words of Tagalog, if they were even there, when the reality of the situation came down on him with sudden, sledgehammering severity. And the reality was that he was kidnapped. The panic that had been lingering a hair’s breadth away—the panic he’d been dancing around since awakening in the room—flooded into him with an icy, constricting rush. It could be one of the militias. He’d been told they stuck mostly to the deep jungle and that he should never go there alone, or basically without a small army in tow, but Jesus Christ he’d been nowhere near . . . well, not that near—but he’d heard stories. People just disappeared sometimes. They’d hold him for ransom, and if they didn’t get just what they wanted they’d kill him. They’d hack off his head while he begged for mercy.
He was about to call out again when he heard something, barely audible, no louder than the whisper-beat of a dragonfly’s wings. There were voices on the other side of the door, speaking rapidly. A moment later there was a clank and it began to slide open, only a crack. Alex jumped away at first, then craned his neck forward trying to see out the other side, but the door hadn’t opened enough for anything to be visible. He was entertained by a brief vision of himself grabbing the handle and wrenching the door open, but he suddenly felt deflated and weak. It would never work like that; they’d be holding the door firm on the other side, and if he did get it open, what then? There were at least two of them, probably armed with knives at the very least, machetes most likely, if not semi-automatic weapons. A muffled voice barked something short and gruff.
“Toilet” Alex blurted.
No response.
“Kasilyas,” he tried weakly.
“Deh pot!” came the voice.
“Toilet,” Alex said. “I need the toi—”
“Deh pot!” yelled the voice. “Go deh pot!”
“I don’t understand, you fuck!” He shook with anger. The need to relieve himself was pressing now—he could feel the shit piled up in his rectum like a train that had hit a wall.
“Deh pot,” came the voice again, sounding ludicrously like a giant parrot. “You go, you go deh pot!”
Alex turned around, exasperated. His gaze fell on the pot in the corner, the one that looked like a rusted coffee can. He’d forgotten all about it. He hobbled across the floor to it, undoing the button at the top of his pants and unzipping his fly as he went. The pot had some black sludge on the bottom with several cigarette butts stewing in it. A winey smell drifted out as he picked it up and took it away from the wall. He let his pants fall down around his ankles and as he did the door slid home into its jamb. Alex squatted precariously, wondering if he’d be able to hold his piss in until he’d finished shitting—not how it worked in his experience.
The room stunk up immediately. On the other hand, since the heat of his prison had dehydrated him, and save for the apple slices he hadn’t ingested any liquid, he didn’t end up wetting the floor. He cursed those on the other side of the door under his breath. Only when he finished did he realize there was no toilet paper.
“Paper!” he hollered. “I need toilet paper!” He sounded pathetically helpless in his own ears. Still squatting on the can—the thin rim was pressing into his flesh, hard enough to break the skin if he settled his whole weight on it—he looked over his shirt, wondering which part he could tear off most easily.
The breast pocket, that would have to be it. If not that, then he would just take off his underwear and use it instead. What the hell did he need underwear on in here for?
It wasn’t a cheap shirt, so the material didn’t give easily. He tugged and pulled at it, and then there was the snip-snapof a few stitches breaking. After that a small tear formed and he ripped at it savagely, furious at his disgusting situation. When it came free it took a patch of the shirt material with it, leaving a hole through which the damp skin of his chest was visible. Screw it, he could buy another—he could buy many anothers.
He reached under himself with the pocket material over his fingers and wiped as much of himself as he could with one swipe. That was all he was going to get. He dropped the dirtied strip into the can and stood, wincing at the cry from his stiffened knees. When his pants were up around his waist again, he took the can back to the corner, trying not to look inside. Out of sight, out of mind, though out of sight meant shit-all, literally enough.
With the can back in its original place he returned to the mattress, the squeak of the springs already familiar. The mattress was becoming a bit like a magnet, or a safe zone. He was returning to it as if he were playing a children’s game and the floor might turn electric. More than anything, he guessed, it was just the only place that wasn’t a hard goddamn floor.
Save your energy, he told himself. That’s what you need to do now. Relax and save it, there’s not much you can do. Alex believed himself. He rarely questioned that voice in his head. It had led him here, after all. Not the stupid boat, but here where he’d been able to knock down some shacks and plow a bit of land under for a nice parking lot and a state-of-the-art facility.
The building plans had been the most expensive part to get together. He’d had to enlist engineers and architects to get the designs and mechanics of the place down, something to give it an efficient edge on the competition, but the buildingof the place had been damn cheap. People would do a lot for a little around here, oh yes they would.
He was dozing a few hours later when the meal came. He woke up to the thunkof the first bag hitting the floor. By the time he was springing to action, two more had been tossed in, the door already closing behind them. He hadn’t known whether it would have done any good for him to jump into view; at any rate, in a half-awake brain the strategic side was usually still fast asleep.
The bags were the size you might get at a convenience store. They were opaque white plastic with the tops knotted so he couldn’t see what was in them. Alex’s first step was to approach them and watch carefully for movement. He imagined there could be a poisonous snake curled up inside one, or another unsavory creature. They remained crinkled and motionless, and he experimentally lifted the one that had been thrown in first, holding it by the knot at the top. It didn’t weigh much. He dropped it to the floor with a mushy thud. Food again, it had to be. He was starving and decided to forgo the knot, tearing into the bag with his fingertips.
Inside was white rice. Just rice. He snatched up a handful of it, salivating in a way that he had never done for such fare, and dug in greedily. A few grains stuck to his chin and fell off his lips as he chewed. He barely bothered to work his jaw, and when he swallowed most of the grains hadn’t met his teeth. The rice was utterly flavorless, unless the water they boiled it in constituted a flavor, but the texture of starch on his tongue was enough to keep him eating until his hunger’s vicious edge had been dulled. He explored the other bags. In one there was a half-full bottle of water, which was hardly enough to make up for what he’d been sweating. In the other there were two lemons.
Lemons.
Was this a joke? One of them was still unripe and half green for fuck’s sake. He threw that bag onto the mattress and guzzled the water down. When he’d eaten enough rice to make him feel swollen he returned to the mattress. He hadn’t left much in the bag and considered that it might have been better to save some of it for later, having no idea when or how much food was going to be delivered next time. But he had to eat—had to—he needed at least that much food to keep some semblance of strength up.
In what he estimated to be an hour he was getting hungry again. The ballooning feeling in his belly had died down not long after eating and his appetite returned with new vigor. He scooped out the last of the rice left in the first bag, right down to the final grains, licking them off his fingers. They were pasty, and he had to swirl them around in his mouth to even feel them there before he swallowed. He already wished he’d saved some of the water.
For a while he leaned against the wall with his knees drawn up to his chest, zoned out, and smelling his own shit waft into his nostrils once in a while. The air seemed perfectly static, but it was evidently moving.
There was a tiny bit of grating in the ceiling, less than a foot across and probably connected to a ventilation shaft. If so, that shaft was either long and winding, very well sealed, or both, because he couldn’t hear any noises from outside. That disconnect was starting to get on his nerves: it was like being in the White Room, although the White Room had the constant woosh of the wall-mounted air conditioning units and the fans of the air exchangers.
The rice hadn’t contained much energy. He didn’t feel weak yet exactly, but his body was as sluggish as the heavy air. At length, his thirst coming on strong, he reached for the bag of lemons. The green one would ripen later, if he was in here long enough (don’t think like that, he warned himself). Right now it would be a joke trying to get through its tough skin with his fingernails and separate it from the fruit inside. Plus it would taste even worse than lemons normally did anyway.
He tried to think of when he normally encountered lemon wedges. They came with salads at some of the steakhouses in Manila, but he pushed them off the plate with his fork as soon as they arrived. He only sucked on them after tequila shots, which was pretty much the only thing fresh lemons were of any use for, unless you were a kid trying to make five bucks at a sidewalk lemonade stand.
He dug his thumbnail under the skin of the first one, beneath the wrinkled bump on the end where the stem had been attached. It looked like he was digging into a yellow tit—not the bird, though eating one of those would probably have been more desirable. Peeling it was a nuisance, and a few times the juice spurted out, once onto his cheek just below the eye.
He didn’t like the citrus tang that filled the air. He didn’t like citrus, or even fruit. Every foreigner he met around there, including most of his upper-level employees at the plant, loved the fruit drinks all over the place, especially with a squirt of juice from those gross calamansi lime things. He had to see those damn smoothies every day, then watch the flies hover around the sticky cups in the trash afterward. He was thinking about telling Stanhill and the other desk jockeys in the main office that he was putting a new rule into effect: no fruit smoothies at work. They bought them from these shabby stalls that had opened up on the road to the plant—the road Alexhad paved. Besides the plant, the only things at the end of the road were the last of the shacks and huts and whatever else he hadn’t cleared out, and they mostly just housed the people that had stuck around to sell their shitty smoothies to his workers, just beyond the property line. They were lucky he hadn’t torn their last flimsy little power lines down too—he’d paid off the local “police” enough to look the other way indefinitely. Considering his current situation, he thought, maybe he should have paid them a little extra to do their fucking job once in a while.
He finished peeling the lemon and broke it apart, wincing in anticipation of the additional jets of acid it was going to eject. When he had a slice of it isolated, the juice dripping over his fingers and stinging his hangnails, he popped it in his mouth, face puckering instantly. Jesus, why was he even doing this? As if it weren’t bad enough, there were also seeds sloshing around in his mouth. He bit into one accidentally and its bitterness cut through the sour on his tongue. He spit the rest out and chucked the remains of the lemon into the bag with a scowl. Not worth it.
The next meal of the day was a bag of white rice and an additional baggie with a handful of nuts that looked similar to almonds and tasted like chalk. That must have been the end of some kind of cycle, because after that it was the same stuff over and over again: a baggie of apple slices, then rice, half a bottle of water, and some pieces of fruit (mango, jackfruit and rambutan made an appearance, and once an offensive hunk of god-awful durian, which he’d choked down just so he didn’t have to smell it anymore), then rice and nuts again. It didn’t take him long to guess that those three meals constituted a day.
By the end of three days, or nine food deliveries, Alex was still rational enough to determine that he was slipping toward mental instability. He’d only defecated one more time since the first, and it had come out looking like rabbit pellets. He didn’t move around the room, and fell asleep whenever drowsiness took him, then later lay awake on the mattress until he could fall asleep again. He waited for his captors to talk to him, but they never did, and their last words to him (deh pot!) rolled around in his head over and over like an echo in a cave that never wore itself out.
At first he’d gone to the middle of the floor to stretch after waking up each time, telling himself that he needed to stay limber because a chance for escape might come at any moment, but he’d soon faced the fact that he wasn’t the protagonist in an action movie, and there wasn’t going to be a moment where he mightily forced the door open at food time, punched out the bad guys, tied them up and took control of the boat. That all those weights he’d lifted and protein drinks he’d guzzled meant nothing was a depressing revelation that he’d rather not have had.
By the time a week had passed, Alex had begun to sing aloud in a warbling, off-key voice, and subsequently to speak to himself. It helped to pass the time. He’d also made a little activity where he’d see how high he could bounce on the mattress in a sitting position without moving his hands. That one made him tired easily.
He didn’t feel hungry anymore. The worst pangs—the ones that had for a long time refused to subside—had finally numbed, his body’s way of putting a clamp on pain that it knew wasn’t going to be relieved any time soon. He’d stopped salivating at the sight of food, but forced himself to eat anyway, shoveling the tasteless rice in and chew-chew-chewing it into paste. It became a bit of a struggle to swallow it down.
Still his captors didn’t speak a word to him. The can in the corner was less than half filled with shit, but the first flies had gotten in, probably through the ventilation in the ceiling, and he knew they’d multiply eventually. He also knew there was no way to stop them.
One day, after he’d finished what he’d started thinking of as his dinner rice, he sat on the mattress, rolling to one side and then the other, hoping sleep would come. It wouldn’t be anything more than a nap—the lights above never went out and never let him drift far enough into the dark—but it would be sleep and a state of unknowing nonetheless. It was while he was lying there that he thought he heard children laughing. It wasn’t loud, or even clear; if anything it was disembodied, as substantial as the ringing in one’s ears after a loud bang. He decided the sound hadn’t come from anywhere outside of his own head, but as he finally drifted into uneasy slumber the sound came again, and then somewhere in the depths of sleep it was given a face.
It wasn’t one child, but a group of three, running about on their spindly brown legs. Their hair was always matted or full of cowlicks, and they had patches of drying mud on their arms and necks. They’d been coming forward and stopping at a distance, staring at him and giggling with eyes wide in fascination. That was when he’d been talking to the guy through Wise, his translator. The workers were already being paid for their first day of prep work on the property and this bastard was out there giving him problems again. Alex had given him three full weeks to get his family out, including the girl standing off to the side. That was his daughter, who was a bit taller than the little boys. It must have been her laughing before.
“He says he already told you he can’t leave,” said Wise, looking at Alex sheepishly, as if ashamed to even be passing this on.
“Uh huh, and I already told him he has to. I bought this piece, he didn’t. Law’s on my side. Case closed.”
The man had erupted into a flurry of chatter, waving his hands, blada blada bablada, face distraught and infuriatingly ignorant on the reality of the situation. Wise nodded and motioned for calm, sighing.
“Okay, so what he’s saying is his family has always lived here, and they do fishing, and he needs to do fishing for food and money.”
“No.” Alex stepped forward, brushing Wise out of the way and jabbing a finger in the fisherman’s face. “We’ve already had this conversation. I told you three times already. Now the dozers are coming, so get the fuck out of here.”
The man looked at him, a mixture of confusion and defiance in his eyes. It enraged Alex and he felt ready to lash out and beat the round, whiskerless face in.
The man began to speak again, but Alex slapped his words out of the air, pointing to the girl between the two boys. “I said take your goddamn kids,” he screamed, “and get the fuck out. The dozers are coming in—you fucking get it yet?” He shoved the man in the chest, hard. The guy was middle-aged at the very least, and small; he stumbled backward and fell on his ass in the dirt. Alex heard Wise gasp and fall silent again behind him.
The fisherman scrambled to his feet and stared at Alex for a moment, shock and anger carved into his face like reliefs in stone. He turned and walked quickly in the direction of his shack by the water, limping slightly, as though one of his legs were asleep. He snapped something at his daughter without turning around. The girl exchanged glances with the two boys and followed. Her face was frightened.
Alex woke up with a start, staring in mute confusion at the ceiling. The dream was already fading. Except it hadn’t been a dream, really, but a memory. The only dreamlike quality of the whole thing was that he’d been able to relive it so vividly. He hadn’t felt great about himself after that day, no, but he didn’t feel terrible either. When he’d gone back out there to the shack, just before noon the next day, it was empty. There were no plates or cups left inside, and no fishing gear. The man’s old boat was still on the beach, straddling the line between sand and water, tied to a tree with a frayed gray rope. Oh well, couldn’t be expected to take everything.
After that the bulldozers did come in, along with the cleanup crews, and made short work of the place. Two months later the Ocean Fresh facility was three quarters finished construction and the main influx pipe stretched right over that patch of beach into the sea, like a long straw. The place ended up being a lot bigger than Alex had imagined, especially when you included the parking lot and the garage for the 18-wheelers, even after they’d cleared most of that shitty little village out for room.
He was about halfway through the next week—10th or 11th day in total, he’d lost track of which—when something in him broke. It was “lunchtime,” and he sat on the mattress, pressed against the wall like a lab animal that’s been receiving electric shocks, waiting while the door slid open just wide enough for the three usual bags to be tossed in. He crawled over to them, not bothering to stand. The rice was there, so was the bottle of water, but this time was different. The bottle was only about a quarter full rather than half. And he was thirsty as hell. He was always thirsty.
“You guys made a little mistake here,” he said. That’s what it was, a mistake: the guy filling the bottle hadn’t been paying close attention. Tomorrow would be better.
He unscrewed the lid and took one sip, a small one, but was unable to stop himself from taking another, and another. He halved the amount of water in seconds. Save the rest, he told himself—save it for after sleeping.
He opened the last bag. There were two lemons in it. The previous two were still in the corner behind the shit can, rotting in the heat. This time both of them were very green, and picking one up he found that it was hard as rock.
His hands began to shake. He’d been shaking from time to time recently, all of him, the whole shebang. At first he thought he was sick, or maybe more dehydrated than he’d imagined, if shaking was even a symptom of such a thing, but now he knew that it wasn’t either of those. It was rage, pure and simple. It was the rage of a trapped wild animal.
He’d already tried getting out, with as much effort as he was going to be able to manage in his state. He’d banged the walls with his fists trying to find the place where they were thinnest, but he’d had no luck. They felt uniformly thick. Then he’d started kicking. He’d find a spot and kick and kick and kick at it, waiting to for it to splinter and crack. He waited to see the blue of the sky or the water. That precious blue—cool, sparkling, splashing, wide. But it didn’t work, and he’d had to stop when his foot started paining him, and even his leg, as though his bones were rusting iron rods rubbing against the meat of his dry muscles. The next day he’d started kicking with the other leg, but soon given that up too. His hands were useless, arms weak.
He thought about that as he shook now. And he thought about the lemons; useless, green, woody lemons; sour, low calorie (no calorie?) lemons. What was the saying, ‘If life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?
“Well just how the fuck am I supposed to make lemonade?” Alex yelled at the wall. He burst into laughter. He picked up one of the lemons, squeezing it tightly, and brought it to his face. “Just how am I supposed to turn you into lemonade?” he asked it, pouting his lips. “Answer me, lemon, or you join your brothers in the shitty corner!” He hurled it as hard as he could against the wall. It bounced off, unaffected by the impact. He picked the second one out of the bag. “Anything to say? No?” He whipped this one away as well. It flung at an odd angle from his hand and hit the framed photo hung near the opposite corner, knocking it off its hook. The picture fell to the boards face down, glass smashing to pieces beneath as the fruit rolled back across the floor toward Alex. “Look what you did,” he said, and kicked the lemon aside as he hobbled over to the frame, keeping an eye out for stray shards. He lifted the picture. The broken glass stayed on the floor in a tidy pile. He tore the back off the frame and found, concealed behind the generic print of palm fronds silhouetted by a saturated orange sky, a second photograph, this one black and white. He pulled it out. The paper was thin and not glossy, crinkling where he pinched it between thumb and forefinger.
There were two men in the photo. The quality was no better than an old Polaroid shot, but larger than those. The men were both shirtless, both lean, but one was a bit shorter than the other. They were standing in front of a small boat. Alex saw the shorter man’s round face, and there was a moment when his mind, rebelling against the incoming information, refused to acknowledge its own act of recognition. Even though the man wore a smile in this photo there was no mistaking the hardened eyes and straight, oily mat of hair above them. The boat he and his companion stood in front of, a line of hooked, gleaming fish hanging over its side, bore its own horrible familiarity.
Alex dropped the photo and it drifted smoothly to rest on top of the shattered glass. How had he not recognized the bastard when he walked in front of his car that night?
“They all look the same to me,” he’d told Stanhill once over beers. “I’m serious, they fuckin’ do.” Stanhill had grinned halfheartedly and taken a long swig from his glass, but hadn’t said anything in response.
Alex stamped on the photo and ground it as if he were putting out a cigarette. The glass crunched and squeaked beneath it. He picked it up again and tore it to shreds as easily as newspaper, and when it was in tiny enough pieces he threw them into the air. They settled across the room like sooty snow flurries. Maybe when the door opened again he could toss as many of them as he could manage through the crack, see how they’d like that. He could probably get a handful of glass and throw that too. Yeah. That’d show ’em.
He flopped down upon the mattress. The springs squeaked their mindless welcome. His whole body was clenched, racked with rage. Soon that feeling gave away to one of despair, and finally to sadness. He knew he wouldn’t cry—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done such a thing, and even if he could he wouldn’t. He had to save the tears. Tears were precious, precious water, especially if his rations were going to be lowered to a quarter bottle from here on. Precious, precious, like the wide blue sea.
The water ration had indeed been lowered for good, as the next three days proved. Alex was getting lightheaded every time he stood up or moved after waking. He slept more and more, and when he was awake he tried to remember some textbook or other he may have read about how much water the body needed to survive, especially one that was perspiring slowly and consistently at all times. His thoughts were disjointed, as were many of his memories. The present was leaking into the past and the past to the present, and he had to keep rushing back to break them up. The two didn’t seem to be fighting, or embracing each other, but rather having some sort of angry, loveless sex, with no product and no future. With each passing day that strange, fleeting union became slightly more violent and drawn out, and what Alex kept trying to see in them was just what series of events led him to his current imprisonment. He’d known at some point, and sometimes he still caught it again, but then it went drifting away and all he could think about was water—cool, life-giving water.
Another week passed, twenty one more meager and impossibly bland meals, and Alex neared his estimated twentieth day in the room. He got his bags. Apple (there seemed to be less and less slices), rice, water, then a little bit of rice again, just a handful, and several utterly plain nuts. And lemons. Every day it was lemons: green, uneatable.
He tried to break the lemons open to squeeze the juice out, but these ones were too young to get anything more than a few bitter-sour drops when he managed to pry under the skin. He’d been stashing them by the shit can, not yet three quarters full, but eventually there were too many to be held in place in the corner behind it, so they just rolled about with the eternal motion of the boat. Every day, every lunch time, he would take out the lemons, regard them for an unnecessary, stupefied moment, then drop them to the floor, and when he was finished with the bags and the bottle, he lifted the mattress and stuck them under. Why he bothered with this he didn’t know, and by now the mattress had enough under it to be lopsided.
Somewhere after the three week mark, Alex had a long sleep, very long, so that when he woke his dinner and breakfast bags were waiting for him on the floor. That happened several more times, and it occurred to him that he might be shutting down, one day at a time.
By the end of what his hazy (but best) estimate was a month in the room, while he was sleeping after his lunch of rice, he had a dream.
Alex was back in the White Room, although it seemed bigger than ever before. The acrylic salt containers were towering, massive, their contents powdery and whiter than snow, whiter than ivory. Gorgeous. Alex passed his hand over them as he walked down the central aisle. The acrylic was as smooth as regular glass—of course it was, it was the same thing they made those giant public aquariums out of, and people liked to put their hands and face right up against those to look at the sharks and rays and turtles and . . .
And now there was water, too. He hadn’t noticed it at first, but there it was, cascading out of the air conditioner units. It landed in a nice clean trough on the floor (ah, so that’s why they put that in there) and gushed like a small river across his path. Glorious water! Clear and cold! He fell to his knees and stuck his mouth right into the stream, drinking deeply as it splashed against his face. It tasted better than any other water, ever; it filled him and puffed him up, reenergizing his entire being. But he wasn’t complete yet, oh no, something just as important was about to come. His body screamed for it. His tongue salivated madly with the fresh influx of water, water, water pumping through him. The salt, he needed the salt. He rose to the side of the container next to him and slapped a palm against it. It didn’t even jiggle—that stuff was tough. Could he climb over it? If he could all that crystalline wonder would be his, but no, it was far too smooth. He flailed against the surface like a gecko, trying to find some sort of invisible purchase for his limbs. He turned around, leaned up against it and pushed. Maybe he could flip the whole hulk of a thing over.
Wait! Good fortune had come floating down the little river in the floor. A green lemon, bobbing along in the rushing water. It must have tumbled right out of the air conditioners! Haha, he loved how that happened sometimes! Crazy place. Crazy Ocean Fresh. They had built it on an old Native Filipinian burial ground, or something like that, and the ghosts were up to their old tricks. He lunged forward like a cat pouncing on a mouse and snatched the lemon out of the water, let out a triumphant laugh and threw it hard at the container. The acrylic shattered, pieces big and small tinkling and thundering onto the floor. They melted into it like magic gel and disappeared. The salt held its shape for a moment and then avalanched toward him. It came up to his knees and he scooped it to make a salt ball. It stuck together just like snow. Who knew? He licked at it as he would an ice cream cone. The flavor was perfect. It was every savory food he’d ever consumed, every meat, every sauce, every gravy, every soup, every French fry and noodle. It was nourishment and life, and when he was done licking he went back to the water and drank deeply again, then took another handful of salt—all for him, so enough for all—and licked it more.
Just in front of him the flowing water had met the spilled bounty and it was forming a lovely saline pool. That pool grew and grew and grew, as the trough overflowed, and now it was spilling over his shoes—cool, thick, nourishing—the fluid of cleansing, of blood, of life . . .
Alex wakened gradually, feeling too weak to roll over and leave the mattress. And there was really no point to it anyway. He was still half dreaming as it was, because he felt a breeze blow welcomingly across his moist forehead.
And it came again. The breeze.
Alex cracked his eyes open, and they grew wider as he turned to see the door. It was open.
“Huh?” he croaked.
A fresh stream of air flowed into the room, so palpable against the heavy, dead stench inside that he imagined he could see it, like a beautiful spirit in a long flowing gown, tropical flowers trailing from her hair. Alex rolled over and got his feet under him. That’s when he smelled it, mingled with the scent of blue skies and clean emptiness: the sea. The scent was incredible, rich, alive, wet. It was the most delicious aroma that had ever been. The vent, it had to have been closed, because it felt like he was smelling the ocean for the first time in his life, and it ignited a hunger in him that he’d never known—a desperate drive as primitive as life itself—the need to consume, absolute and undeniable.
He shambled to the open door, senses now awake and razor sharp. Adrenaline surged as though he were hunting or being hunted, one of the two. A narrow hallway was in front of him, and through a doorway at the end the blue of the sky was visible, with even a puffy white cotton candy cloud hanging in it. There was no one in sight and no point calling out: they had left the door open, so whatever was going to happen was going to happen.
He stepped cautiously into the hall and made his way down it, the sky at the end filling his vision. As he reached the end of the hall a railing came into the view, and then there was the sea. Oh God, the sea! Vast, liquid, mother of life. It called to him, it blighted his senses of touch and sound. He felt faint, he was reduced to paper, and it was the nourishment he needed, all together in one place. Its aroma was overpowering, he could taste those limitless waters on his tongue. He lurched onto a metal walkway and distantly felt the wind buffeting him from the side.
The boat was large. It was indeed a yacht, he saw. An enormous one. He looked one way, then the other. There was no one visible fore or aft. He was starboard. And now was his chance.
Alex stepped shakily to the top of the railing, grinning wildly, and leapt. There was a moment, in mid-air, when he couldn’t believe he was getting away with it. He struck the water feet first a second or two later, mired in the cool depths, but when he propelled himself clumsily to the surface again he was faint and seeing stars. The lights were almost out, and if they did go dark it was all over. He had to infuse himself now, get what he needed. That was how he’d played the whole game. That was the only way he rolled, shit heads: he got what he needed and he won.
“Mine, you motherfuckers!” he howled into the wind, fighting to keep his face above water. His vision was blurred too much with brine and dizziness to make out the boat well, but it appeared it wasn’t moving. “I’m gonna come back for you!”
Then he lowered his face and drank, opening his mouth cavernously and sucking down the broth he was immersed in. At first he almost gagged, but he knew, knew that was only because he wasn’t accustomed to it anymore—that much water and saltiness. That’s what happened to your body, it forgot things, and you needed to re-teach it. He suppressed the gag reflex, face contorted in concentration, and gulped deeply. The water rushed into his stomach, cold and thick. He started to choke, and then he knew something was wrong. Going down the wrong pipe and—
But he opened his mouth and sucked the ocean in again. He had taught it, he had taught it well, and it knew what do now. And he was choking and choking, but the sea was trickling down deep, deep, deep; salty, nourishing, necessary.
On the roof of the boat four men stood watching Alex flail and sputter in the water below. He’d been screaming something, but it had been garbled and unintelligible even to the English speakers. He would go under soon, they all knew, but for a while no one said anything. Maybe he couldn’t swim. Maybe that’s what he’d been yelling about. He was still flailing, albeit less violently, when his head finally slipped below water and he drifted down out of sight.
Andres, the shorter of the two Filipinos, spoke a single word quickly and crisply, as if he were aiming it at the water.
“What did he say?” asked Stanhill.
“Prick,” Wise said solemnly, and spat into the ocean.