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“What will you tell me?”
“You’re here to get an education.” He paused. “If you only knew. The substance of your learning will become manifest, so be patient.”
“Can I please have my things?”
He sighed, the first sign of frustration boiling under his breath. “We’ll talk about that later.” Then his voice softened, shedding its edge. “Pretend you’re an infant, Andrew. A tiny, helpless infant. Right now, in your room, you’re in the womb. You don’t understand how to use your senses, how to think, how to reason. Rely on me for everything. I’m going to teach you how to see the world again. I’ll feed your mind first. Fatten it up on the most brilliant thinkers in human history.” A white hand pushed through the bubble wrap and dropped a book onto the floor.
“Your first meal,” he said as I lifted a hardback of The Prince. “Machiavelli. The man’s a genius. Undisputedly. Are you familiar with Ha
“I know who he was.”
“Well, he marched his army all over the Mediterranean coast and Eastern Europe, but what made Ha
“Yes, I’m starving.”
“Good. I’m go
A small lamp, screwed into the wall, exuded dim, barely sufficient light onto the pages. Because he’d yet to give me the duffel bag, I didn’t have the aid of my glasses, so my eyes were failing me.
I dropped The Prince onto the floor, having finished half of it. I hoped that would be enough for him. When I reached up and turned off the lamp, the placid light of a full moon flooded in between the bars, soft and soothing. I would’ve dreaded to spend my first conscious night in the perfect darkness of a new moon.
The room had grown unbearable from a day’s accumulation of sunlight, and though the heat had dissipated from the desert with the onslaught of night, it had lingered in my room. So I’d opened the window when the sun set, and now the dry chill of the desert night infiltrated the room, forcing me to burrow under the fleece blankets.
Closing my eyes, I listened. Through the open window, owls screeched and coyotes or wild dogs yapped at the moon, though they seemed a great distance away. Since di
For the last hour, jazz music had filled the cabin. It came quietly at first, stealing in like a whisper, so that I heard only the guttural rumblings of a bass. The volume rose, and the ride cymbal pattern and the offbeat swish of a closing hi-hat pulsed into the room. When the piano and trumpet and saxes climaxed through the wall, I suddenly recognized the song, and it took me back twenty years, to a different time, a different life. It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian “Ca
An acute scream soared above the music. I sat up and listened. Another scream ruptured the night. Clutching the iron bars, I turned my eyes on the desert, but saw nothing save miles of moonlit sagebrush. Again, a scream—a woman’s, closer than before.
Fifty feet away, a figure stumbled through the desert, choking for breath. When it was halfway past the window frame, a second, larger figure entered on the left side. It lunged upon the smaller figure and drove it into the ground at the foot of a greasewood shrub.
I heard a female voice, crying, shriller screams, pleadings, but the words were indecipherable when they reached my ears. The larger figure kicked at the ground. Then it knelt down, thrusting.
More screams, the loudest, most piercing yet. Silence.
Now only the large figure stood, staring at the ground. In a measured pace, it walked back in the direction from which it had come, pulling by long black hair what it had chased through the desert. I heard the footsteps and what it dragged sliding through the dirt, the woman’s legs still twitching.
Suddenly, it turned and looked in my direction. Moonlight, bluish and surreal, streamed across the stranger’s face.
I froze. My brother, Orson, stood smiling on the desert.
5
A stiff purple dawn unfolded on the desert, ending a terrible, sleepless night. I realized from here on out, whenever I closed my eyes, I would always see a man on a moonlit desert, dragging a woman through the dirt by her hair.
At the approach of footsteps, I sat up in bed. A dead bolt turned and the door swung open, revealing a man of my proportions: same thin, muscular build, same stark blue eyes. Similar but not identical, his face looked like the ideal of mine, more handsome in its superior proportionality. He stood gri
I couldn’t speak. It was like seeing not the ghost of a loved one, but the demon. Tears burned in my eyes. This is not real. This ca
“I have missed you so much,” Orson said, still hovering in the doorway. I could only stare back into his blue eyes.
Orson had disappeared from Appalachian State University our junior year, my last image that of him standing in the doorway of our dorm room.
“You won’t see me for a while,” he had said. And I hadn’t, from that day to this. The police had given up. He’d just vanished. My mother and I had hired detectives: nothing. We feared he was dead.
Now he apologized. “I wouldn’t have had you see that last night. The consequence of using old rope, I guess.” I noticed fresh scratch marks on his neck and face. Specks of glitter glinted on his cheeks, and I wondered if they’d come off the woman’s fingernails when she struggled. “You want breakfast?” he asked. “Coffee’s brewing.”
I shuddered, repulsed. “Are you kidding me?”
“I wanted to keep you in here for several days before bringing you out and revealing myself, but after last night …well, there’s really no use is there?”
Sweat slid down my sides.
As he bit again into the apple, Orson began to walk up a short hallway. “Come on,” he said.