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  “I don’t usually,” he said, without turning his head. “Smoking reminds me of prison, in fact. But I found a pack lying around in the kitchen, and I’m suddenly in the mood.”

  “Why does it remind you of prison?”

  “The guards smoked.”

  “That reminds me—I keep meaning to ask you, how come you gave me mouth-to-mouth? Isn’t that for when people drown?”

  He continued to stare at the wall. “I couldn’t think of anything else.”

  “Do you work in a hospital?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I guess you saved my life.”

  “I endangered your life.”

  “You like anatomy and all that stuff, I can tell.”

  He paused, then said, “My father was a physician. I began studying medicine too, but I was arrested before I got very far.”

  “Do you live here? In this house?”

  “No.”

  “Does the woman?”

  “Don’t ask so many questions, Chloe.”

  “I’m coming out. I guess I’m feeling better. Will you stay? We can watch another movie.”

  I grabbed a towel and stepped out of the bath. I didn’t feel like getting dressed right away. Instead, I lay on the bed with the towel wrapped around me.

  “I’m desperate for a massage,” I said.

  I didn’t think my more-than-obvious ploy would work, but to my surprise he said, “If you get dressed I’ll give it a go.”

  I pulled on the sweats and a T-shirt and lay on my stomach. He kneeled next to me on the bed and slid his hands under my T-shirt. For a few seconds his hands lay motionless on my back, as if I were a specimen from outer space that he was curious about. Then slowly he began locating different muscles. I never imagined I could derive so much pleasure from mere touch. I felt myself falling into a semi-trance; at the same time it was as if I was discovering my own body. A body that had once been my obsession as I worked for hours each day, trying to make it stretch and spin and land in precise ways. But this was different. It was an exploration, not just for him, but for me too.

  When he finished, he lay down next to me and we held each other in silence. I forgot about the no-touching rule, or maybe now that we were so close I assumed it didn’t apply any longer. I reached out and touched his cheek.

  It was a small, spontaneous gesture, but his response was almost violent. He pushed my hand away forcefully and sat up. He seemed to be under immense strain. “I asked you not to do that,” he said angrily.

  I had no idea what was going on. He wasn’t struggling with desire—it wasn’t that at all. Something about my gesture had upset him. Something that had nothing to do with me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”

  He shook his head, no longer angry. “No, it’s I who should apologize. I had some memories intruding.”

  “Is it from your time in jail? Did the other prisoners … you know—try things with you?” I knew I shouldn’t be asking, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t that sort of prison. We were barely even able to talk to one another. We sat in a large cell and we were more or less watched all the time. You had to bribe the guard just so he wouldn’t punish you for whispering.”

  “Tell me what it was like for you there.”

  “I don’t want to talk about my time in prison, Chloe. It would upset you, and there’s no point.”

  “But I’d like to know. It’s an important part of your life.”

  “I’m not sure I’m up to it. I don’t want to go back there, even in conversation.”

  “You can give me a shortened version.”

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Tell me what an average day was like.” It wasn’t only that I wanted to know. I felt he was carrying the weight of his experiences, and that it would be better for him if he talked about them.

  He paused, trying to decide whether to continue.

  After a long silence, he said, “The biggest problem in the beginning was fear. When you first arrive, they’re after you a lot. But then they get bored, or maybe when you get weaker they want to move on to someone who will respond more. After a while I was only called every few weeks, mostly because some influential friends on the outside were paying bribes. Three entire years I was forgotten altogether, and I was beginning to think that it was permanent. But then out of the blue I was relocated. Relocation is always dreaded—because almost always it’s for the worse. And there was one guard everyone feared. It was said that no one survived once they’d been put in his charge.”

  His face was different as he spoke. He didn’t look impassive now. He looked like someone in an old painting, one of those classical paintings with men in robes looking puzzled.

  “What do you mean, called? You mean for interrogation?”

  “Yes, in theory. Interrogation under torture. But my friend—the one who’s the reason you’re here—he helped me with that as soon as I arrived. He told me that at first it might seem there are no boundaries, but that in fact there were boundaries and that I didn’t have to fear the unknown. He told me exactly what to expect. Even if they threaten, they won’t go past a certain point.”

  He paused, then went on. “You have to think of it as intimidation. It’s true that you’re too disgusted to admit to things you haven’t done. It’s preferable to die. Death at least puts an end to pain. That’s why sometimes they torture your family members instead. I can’t think of anything worse, but I was spared that particular nightmare. What my friend explained to me is that there isn’t anything you can say to make them stop. First, you haven’t got any information. It’s just a way to increase the prison population, by being able to say, well, such and such a person, while only half alive by the way, said you were subversive. If you admitted you despised the regime, you had to give the names of all your friends. If on the other hand you lied and said you were loyal and obedient, they wanted proof in the form of a name. And then if you gave a name, it meant you were guilty, because you had that knowledge, and it meant you had more names and probably also that you should in fact be executed. The paranoia and ignorance—it was beyond anything. On the other hand, you could be released suddenly, if someone with money or influence was making an effort on your behalf. It was Kafka territory. Or maybe Swift.”

  I was having difficulty grasping everything he was saying. “What about that guard?” I asked.

  “Yes, the guard. I don’t know what happened, something slipped in the system. Bribes were coming in on my behalf, and I wasn’t supposed to end up with him. But either he got his eye on me or a bribe got stolen in transit. I was taken through a tunnel to an underground cell. There was almost no air, and I was on my own, and I had one arm and one leg chained. The heat in that cell was indescribable, the light was on all the time, and I can’t begin to describe the dirt and stench. It’s strange, but the body goes into different gear, a hyper-protective mode, and things that ordinarily would kill you, don’t. It would be very interesting to study that phenomenon and see how it works—we could make good use of it if we understood it better.

  “Well, I wanted to die and I tried to die, but my body refused. And then after a week or two I got lucky, as I saw it then. I got septicemia, which is fatal without treatment, sometimes even with treatment. I was relieved that the suffering would be over and I was finally going to die.

  “But the man who’d helped me was working on my behalf. He managed to bribe a guard to contact my friends outside and let them know I was in danger—because everyone in the prison knew about this guard. My friends began frantic efforts on my behalf, and the day I diagnosed myself, I was pulled out of my cell. I was sure they were taking me for execution and I was glad. But I found myself in the back seat of a car with my two friends. I was sure I was hallucinating. They began to protest that they were given the wrong prisoner because they didn’t recognize me at first. I had a beard by then, and I was probably only hours away from
giving up the ghost.

  “Anyway I pulled through, thanks to that man. I owe him my life.”

  We sat in silence for a while. I didn’t trust myself to talk, and I also felt he didn’t want me to say anything. I knew that what he most wanted was for me to relate to him in exactly the same way as before. When he told me about these things, he was trusting me not to change the way I felt about him, not to see him differently. I would have to force myself to be as casual as he was.

  But I had goose bumps, and I was in pain. For him it was in the past, but for me it was in the present, and I was filled with grief.

  The silence became oppressive; it was separating us from each other. I had to find a way back to him. I asked, “How did you survive five years in a place like that? Psychologically, I mean.”

  “Well, I didn’t entirely. I lost myself for a while.”

  “Lost yourself?”

  He got up, used the toilet, and came back to the room. He leaned against the bureau and gazed down at me. He looked almost amused. “Yes. I had strange habits for the first year. I couldn’t bear for anyone to touch me, not even to shake my hand. In the hospital I took my own blood pressure, gave myself injections when possible, I even tried to put in my own IV. When someone touched me I jumped. I think it was partly neurological, some neural damage probably, and it takes a while for the nervous system to repair itself. The rest was really neurotic. I would only eat food I made myself—I couldn’t eat at restaurants or other people’s houses. Eating meat was out of the question, I couldn’t even watch other people eat meat, it seemed to me they were eating human flesh. I could no longer stand up to urinate, I had to sit, otherwise I’d feel faint. I read books backwards, starting at the last page and moving back page by page. Sometimes I couldn’t see, everything went black. Nights were hard, I had enormous guilt about my friends who were still in prison. So I spent my nights just walking through London—that’s where I was at the time. I felt like Dracula, haunting the dark streets before getting back into my coffin. Weirdest of all, I identified with objects. I projected feelings onto them. If I saw a cup with a broken handle I felt bad for that cup.”

  “I can hardly bear to think of you in that state,” I said.

  “It’s interesting—physical pain can be forgotten. No matter how terrible it is, how helpless you were, you recover. Your body repairs itself, and though you might be depressed afterwards, you don’t really remember the pain. But sexual degradation is completely different. It haunts you, it just won’t let go. No matter how hard you try to get rid of it, you can’t. And it’s the hardest thing to talk about, too.”

  “I’m sorry I was so insensitive.”

  “How could you have known? Anyway, that’s the last word I’d use about you.”

  “But rationally you know you weren’t degraded,” I said. “That guard degraded himself. You managed to survive, but he’s not even human.”

  “He’s very human, that’s the problem. It’s as if there was a camera there and the whole world saw me. It’s as if everyone can still see it. Rationally I know that’s not the case, but I haven’t succeeded in convincing myself emotionally.”

  “Mr. Hostage-Taker?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re still lost.”

  CHAPTER 24

  For a while—I don’t know exactly how long—I was all right. I exercised until I was on the verge of collapse; it was the only way I could deal with the confined space. I ran in place, I did four hundred jumping jacks, I got through as many push-ups and sit-ups as possible. I soaked in the bath, played video games, watched movies.

  My hostage-taker usually came to see me in the evenings, after I’d eaten. His visits kept me sane. His visits and my love for him.

  My breakdown happened suddenly.

  We were eating an Indian curry and watching Brief Encounter when suddenly, out of the blue, I lost it. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the room—being cooped up in that tiny place without even a window to let me know if it was day or night. Even in solitary confinement, prisoners are probably allowed into a courtyard once a day.

  Or maybe it was the barriers my hostage-taker kept putting up between us—he never let things progress beyond kissing, and he never allowed me to touch him.

  And he didn’t talk about himself again. He listened when I described my school, my friends, things that had happened to me. But he said nothing more about his past, and we didn’t discuss our feelings for each other. I began to feel that he was kissing me as a kind of favor, out of a sense of obligation, because he knew I needed it and didn’t have the heart to refuse.

  Or maybe my breakdown had to do with what my hostage-taker had been through in prison. It took a few days for what he’d told me to really sink in, and then the images he’d conjured began to haunt me. At night when I shut my eyes I saw him chained up in a filthy cell with that monster, or sitting with all the other prisoners, waiting to be called.

  What did they actually do to him? I didn’t dare ask—I wasn’t sure I could bear to know. I wondered whether he wore long sleeves because he had scars on his arms.

  Whatever the reason, I suddenly jumped out of his arms, swiped the laptop to the floor, and began throwing myself against the walls. I was weeping and thrashing and screaming hysterically. I had to get out of that room. It was a physical need. I felt I would die if I had to stay in there one more minute.

  My hostage-taker tried to hold me, but I escaped from his arms. I wasn’t myself; I was like someone possessed. “Let me out, let me out!” I shouted. I would have run out the door, but he was standing in front of it.

  At last I calmed down enough for him to speak. He said, “If you give me a few minutes, Chloe, you can step out.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t have spoken even if I’d wanted to; uncontrollable gasps and sobs were half choking me.

  He went out. I heard furniture being moved, footsteps retreating, returning, more sounds of things being moved. I curled up in a fetal position on the floor, moaning. My hostage-taker came over and said, “You can come out now, Chloe.” He didn’t say it in his usual detached way. His voice was soft, almost inaudible.

  I stepped into a larger space, about the size of a billiard room. White sheets had been draped over the furniture. There was nothing to see, nowhere to go. It was a larger room and better than nothing, but it was empty, windowless, and bare.

  I lay flat on my back on the polished hardwood floor, exhausted and ashamed. I stretched my arms sideways and muttered, “I’m just a drama queen.”

  He lay down next to me on the floor, placed his hand on my belly. I pulled his hand to my breasts; I felt almost faint with longing and love. I felt at that moment that I would have done anything at all for him—I would have given my life if I had to.

  He said, “Wait,” and left me there, lying on the floor, dazed and emptied out.

  When he came back he shut off all the lights. Though I could hardly believe it was happening, we both undressed. I hoped he would not see the tears of emotion—a whole universe of swirling emotions—welling in my eyes.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Do you believe in fate?” I asked. “Our meeting seems so wild, so unlikely. But now that we’ve met, it’s as if it had to happen.”

  We were sitting on the polished wood floor, eating potato chips from a large bowl. He’d dressed in the dark and gone to get the chips while I bathed. I felt pure and clean and happy.

  “One could probably define all of human history as a series of wild and unlikely events,” he said.

  “You know, you’re a very pessimistic person, in some ways. I mean, I guess taking a hostage in the hope of getting a superpower to release some prisoner is a pretty optimistic thing to do. Or maybe that’s just recklessness, not optimism.”

  “I believe there are good people in the world,” he said. “I suppose a pessimist would not see that, or would not care.”

  “Listen. We need to plan how we’re going to meet in the future. We can set a time and a pl
ace—the Met, for example, in New York. In the Rodin room.”

  “You can’t seriously think you’d get away with such a scheme, Chloe. I’d be an immediate suspect.”

  “You told me you weren’t the sort of person anyone would suspect.”

  “I was referring to the people who know me.”

  “There has to be a way,” I insisted.

  “I can’t think of one.”

  “But they’d have to prove that you were my hostage-taker. Suspicion is one thing, but if we get married and you’re a citizen, that’s that. People can gossip and guess all they want.”

  “It isn’t so simple, Chloe. You’d never be able to carry it off. Nor should you. You can’t live your entire life in a lie.”

  “Would you marry me if you could?”

  “Chloe, you’re going home tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow! I couldn’t believe it. “Was your demand met?” I asked, my shaky voice betraying me.

  “Yes.”

  The thought of seeing Mom and my friends, the thought of being safe at home, of being free to go wherever I wanted—it seemed almost surreal, as if my past was some sort of dream-world that no longer existed.

  I shook my head. We had to come up with a plan first. I couldn’t bear leaving him without something to hold on to.

  “We have to have a plan, something,” I said, almost in tears.“

  “There isn’t time. The longer you stay here, the more dangerous it is for me.”

  I knew he was right. Leaving right away was the best thing I could do for him, for us. But I couldn’t accept that we were parting forever.

  I said, “What about the woman, your parents’ friend? Maybe she can say she’s a journalist. She can come to the States to interview me. And you could be her photographer. No one would suspect anything, especially after a few months have passed.”

  “In a few months your feelings will be completely different, Chloe. You’ll wonder how you could have been so deluded.”