SOL
Hunger is hell. All the women in Lucien’s basement had learned that they’d never truly experienced it until being taken. Even Sol had not understood. Although she’d made the trip through the desert, she hadn’t really felt hunger until after enjoying America’s abundance for half her life only to be deprived. She’d watched Chiqui break down. Cocoa hadn’t even been able to sing away that pain. Asante had done 180s and 360s from failed hunger strikes to gorging on a week’s rations and anything else Lucien had fed her. Nihla’s hunger had been of a different sort, but by her fifth day in the basement, with no chemical sustenance, even she’d become desperate for ice cream of all things. But none of them had ever experienced the hunger of being in the third trimester of pregnancy with no access to timely or decent food, let alone the stuff that would satisfy raging cravings. The murderous symptoms of pregnancy mirrored some of the symptoms of withdrawal. All the women had watched and empathized with the pregnant one most. But they’d all been there in hunger’s hell.
In the beginning, hunger had been the most acutely felt sensation, but not the first deprivation to hit. There was the absence of fresh air and its extreme—odors that made them want to vomit. The cold and damp of a cramped cube made of steel, stone, and trampled dirt had made them long for the humble places they’d lived. The cold was incurable even with covers that each had to earn from their captor. They’d slept upright, unable to acculturate themselves to the hardness of the bare floor made of semidried packed mud, decomposed and hardened shit, and the frail bones from carcasses of things they couldn’t decipher. The darkness—not merely the absence of outer light but the terror of the unknown—had outstripped the fear of the unseen. The acknowledgment of a total loss of control over their environment and their bodies messed them up worse than their captor’s touches.
Sol had not resigned herself to her circumstances until Lucien had taken Chiqui and brought her to hell. She’d finally accepted the absence of light to comfort her sister, who was still afraid of the dark. He had always controlled the darkness. He’d leave with the matches or inexplicably rescind the sundry of sanctified votives. He’d vacillate between luminous generosity and the tightfistedness of a Third World post-storm blackout. Without warning (there was never any warning), he’d plunge them into a darkness so deep it wiped away sound. He might crack the door, so they could see slivers of the bathroom’s light that had not only alleviated the darkness temporarily but had given them hope that they might use the toilet or the shower. On a whim, he might let one out into the habitable parts of the basement, the living room cramped with antiquated entertainment options, the rape room graced with an actual bed with blankets, sheets, and pillows; a carpeted floor; mirrors on the ceiling; painted and wood-paneled walls; a breathable scent like a man’s tolerable musk after a few days without a shower. The wonder of sound, audible only to those who’d spent months hearing nothing but their own heartbeats and the breathing of Zero, One, Two, Three, or My in utero. He’d downright tease them with vacations upstairs, where windows appeared as if they could be opened or, as a first or last resort, shattered and ecstatically climbed through. They’d dance to see doors, front or back, made of wood that looked hackable, locks that looked pickable, and narrow vitrines that appeared expandable. Sol had tried to escape more than once, only to be thrown back into the back room that he’d try to fortify to prevent that possibility.
Having heard him describe his first test, she’d remained quiet and docile, lest he bring some animal to terrorize them in the back room. Years before renting Asante the basement, he’d performed an elaborate experiment to ensure the safe room’s inescapability, to test the efficacy of its soundproofing, and to try out the one-way intercom. A starved German shepherd, a pregnant she-cat, and, later, her litter of six had been his first prisoners. He’d eavesdropped through the intercom and peeked in periodically to check their status and see who was winning. Sitting in the bathroom, he tried to hear the shrieks of the hungry dog as it approached the ex–alley cat. Hearing nothing, and too curious to endure the silence, he’d go to the first intercom outlet installed to listen to their street fights. He shook with glee when the cat went into labor. He waited to hear if the intimidated dog would seize its opportunity to attack. After a month, the cat and her entire litter were all dead. He never found any remnants of the succulent kittens. The only evidence of them was excrement he never bothered to rake up.
He’d then experimented with the dog’s starvation over the course of a year. He’d fed it once a week for four months and then gave it nothing but water at the same interval for half the number of months. He would subsequently resume the weekly feeding schedule and then stopped altogether, not even providing water. He listened and peeked daily, shutting the heavy door until the weakened, emaciated dog ceased to approach, saving its strength to mine all edible options, by a starved dog’s standards. The longer he waited, the cleaner the once feces-laden floor became. It took an additional three months for the dog to die.
His animal trials completed, Lucien let the remnants of the dog’s decomposition and unmined excrement ferment before deeming the environment fit for human testing. He spent one night a week there until he was willing to piss off Marie-Ange by renting the basement to his for-fee, sucky-ducky tenant, Asante.
Sol had tried not to reveal how tortured she’d been by stories he’d recounted to terrorize her into submission. He’d been able to trick Asante into the safe room because of her desperation to be hidden from the DEA and her paranoid, vengeful boyfriend. He’d turned her into Zero and recorded her every move in her new prison. She’d hugged the stone wall nearest the door and balled herself up like a bean. One white eye open in the darkness. The other eye swollen shut. No, he’d never hit her. She’d done it to herself. Throwing a tantrum, knocking over the lone candle, then knocking herself unconscious against the moldy stone in the self-created darkness. One eye open, searching out a crack of light. The other turned inward behind a throbbing wound the shape and color of a ripe plum.
Asante had remembered Roots, the nine-hour miniseries that she’d watched on the new color television set in her mother’s living room when it was first released. This was what African captives must have experienced after being seized or tricked (the same thing, really) from their villages, thrown into the hold, awaiting the unknown darkness lit up by smells so sharp they made them see. It lit their way to the pit of the waiting ship. The shit was the least of it. The decay of the abducted ones, living and gone, penetrated the TV screen, and she could smell the death rot. There she was, incarcerated in an abyss she used to rent, battered by her own stupidity, ingesting the dampness of the darkest place, smelling herself dying slowly.
Sol had used every ounce of her courage not to break down while listening to Lucien’s tales of the cats, the dog, and his first human experiment. She hadn’t doubted their veracity because she’d experienced his worst. She’d wanted to weep, hearing how he’d broken Asante, who had been in the “why did I?” stage of her captivity. Refusing to assume the blame-load alone, and with her misjudgments and his voice in her head, she’d started in on her kind: Women are simple bitches with simple motivations, easily manipulated and deceived. They feed their own fantasies and buy into anything that seems to confirm or fulfill the tiniest piece of their dreams and desires. There was no reason to believe that she’d had him on lock, that what she’d had with him was ever a relationship, let alone love. She’d loved that he had chosen her, opted to disrespect his wife and make her the woman of the house, in a way. S-T-U-P-I-D. He hadn’t beaten but he had, well, cheated. Obviously! And protection? So much for that. There she was, the worst of her kind, worse than a simple bitch with a bad attitude—a simple bitch with no options whatsoever. She could only be who, what, and how he wanted her to be. He controlled everything in and around her. But that was the stupid part. She’d allowed it.
After the activity of her mind had given way to emotion, then crept into the realm of bodily sensation, her hunger had ripped her from the inside out like a clawed beast in a bad horror flick slicing its way out of its cocoon. Hunger had been the self-eviscerating quadruped that left her too weakened to even think. But after it had withdrawn its claws and fallen asleep out of pure exhaustion, thought had returned.
Sol had known this all too well, not just from following Asante through Lucien’s lens, but from watching each captive soul break against her own mind. Asante and all the women who’d come after had experienced it. If their hunger had been hell, then the process of thinking had been its ninth circle. And the physical sensation had been felt only after the mind cracked the door to allow that feeling to slip by. Upon being tricked, shoved, dragged, or rolled into the back room, each of the five had tortured herself with thinking. The what-ifs, the why-me’s, the why-did-I’s had scurried around in their minds, reaching the what-the-hells, the how-could-he’s, the why-would-anyone’s, and then they’d sprinted and hurdled over to the how-the-hells, the what-if-I’s, finally landing on the how-do-I’s, the what-should-how-can-we’s.
Sol remembered how the answers to these had come later. How the fantastic declarations had come later, much later, after the wounds of self-flagellation had been adequately licked, the calm (not peace) of self-convincing cooler heads had finally prevailed, the self-consoling caresses had been accepted. Later, much later. Long after they’d nearly been broken by hunger, assuaged for minutes with nibbles of fingernails, flesh from fingertips, and flagrant cuticles that had grown wildly in the dark. After they’d progressed to the same edible parts of their toes. After pinches of the dirt floor had become palatable. After, long after, they’d finally paused, forcing themselves not to think but to hear and see, they’d realized that there were things far worse than hunger in the back room: silence, darkness, fear, and getting fucked involuntarily in whatever ways he wanted. At some point, each woman had come to the realization that his preferred position was the one he’d forced them into in absentia. He’d contorted their thoughts and turned them into pregnant she-cats strategizing how to scare off a hungry predator ten times their size before entering the vulnerability of giving birth.
Sol had witnessed the complex and innate masochism of the human mind. She’d known how thought could gain control of a being and drag her everywhere until it tired out or completely defeated itself, opting for silent self-protection. The women’s minds had tortured them with thinking about everything they’d missed and experiences they never could have imagined. They’d lamented practical goals and fantastic aspirations—educations, careers, affluence, basic female independence. They’d bawled their eyes out over first kisses they’d never have or that hadn’t met their expectations. They’d grieved at never having fallen in love or for becoming enthralled and in lust with the wrong men. They’d tried to imagine what they had not experienced, to rekindle what they’d shooed away out of arrogance and ignorance, or taken for granted as if life owed them something it would award later when they were good and ready. They’d listed: traditionally structured families of their own, hot dates with rich men, entire apartments to themselves, home and business proprietorships, multiple paid-for cars, hotel-and-airfare-included vacations to magazine paradises. Shiiiiiiiiit! They’d listed: learning how to drive. Flying in an airplane. Man, oh, man! Damn! Choices! Remember choices? Ham or turkey? Takeout or delivery? School or sleep in? Work or hooky? Sing or rap? Answer the call or let it go to voice mail? Lights on or off? Candles, lamps, overhead, or iPhone light? Pig out or diet? Earrings, necklace, both, or neither? Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton 2.0, Michelle Obama, or Hillary Clinton 3.0? Or, damn, that next one?! Dammit! I should have voted! C-H-O-I-C-E! Asante had been on the inside before Condi. Sol had been taken just after Senator HRC caused a ruckus in New York. Chiqui had also gotten a glimpse of 2.0. Only Cocoa had been able to revel during the reign of the greatest FLOTUS ever, MLRO. All of them had had to rely on Lucien to share newspaper clippings with pictures, but no dates, and his versions of stories about one or more of these women. He’d even shown them photos of the most recent, unnamed FLOTUS, a rumored captive Zero in her own right.
Sol had watched the others’ reactions to Lucien’s political commentary after each had returned from a story session with him. She had seen their anger over his opining on inconceivable aggravations they’d wished they could experience again—heat, cold, rain, snow, traffic, the high prices at the supermarket and gas pump, daylight saving time, winter’s impact on solar patterns, too-late sunrises and too-early sunsets, the tardiness of people with payments and for appointments. They’d wanted to slap the stubble off his face, if for nothing else than his complaints about things he caused them to experience in the extreme—insomnia, oversleeping, resentment toward inadequate, absent, and missed loved ones. They’d wanted to head-butt him and knock themselves unconscious in the process for the things he’d said, in part or fully intentionally, to push them into tortuous thinking that had driven them mad.
Only Sol had ceased the incessant, uncontrollable thinking. She had mastered thought; she’d overthrown the mind regime, taken her soul out of the trunk and put it in the driver’s seat where it belonged. She’d relegated thinking to merely mechanical and functional—a cup holder, windshield wipers, a hubcap—made important and useful only when the driver chose to drive the car and employ it because it made things a little more comfortable or safer. She’d made it optional like heated leather seats, five-way headrests, powered seat positioning. She’d used it as a rearview mirror when her past would be useful and help her to avoid some perilous situation or individual who might sneak up on her. She’d used it as a paper map she could fold away when she wanted. Her mind was not her. The thinking it did, the thoughts it reproduced (it could only recycle information, not create it), the stories it told and retold and then told again in different ways to call attention to itself, did not define her. She was so much more. That should have been a no-brainer for any simpleton. Soul, which is to say true Self, sublimated space and time. Being didn’t just think or believe; it knew that transcendence is not the leaving of one’s body and mind. It was not a disembodied pair of hands folded in prayer. It was the full integration and harmonization of all parts within the purview of the endless, timeless Soul.
Sol had known, knows, and is knowing the five Fs. That fear generates four, not three, responses: fight, flight, freeze, and freedom. Transcendence. Even before her abduction, before her migration from south to north, she’d known. She’d controlled her faculties the way she’d played with light switches to entertain baby Chiqui in their single room. Later, she’d tried to explain to her sister this control over and integration of mind and body to experience life, whatever the outcome. Chiqui had misinterpreted much of the lesson. Sol had been disappointed to watch her sister conduct her physical and mental faculties like instruments, forcing them into perfection, competition with others, and overachievement. Chiqui finally came to understand her cellmates and sympathize with the pregnant one.
During their many post-rape story sessions, Sol had come to the realization that she and Lucien had had to have certain experiences in common, that his evil could not have come out of nowhere. There had to have been something they’d both seen, felt, and known, but her knowing had come differently. They’d both experienced fear, but not only did they opt for different Fs at different speeds; they’d chosen their Fs based on a different knowing. Maybe it was because she’d been younger and less hardened or less privileged and more open. Pliant, liquid, and light, she’d gone through, not over, the wall and emerged as pure spirit. At three years old she’d become as knowing as the universe itself. She’d maintained it because of the absence of formal education until the age of seven. By the time she’d started her passage through the back room she could have escaped any circumstances she chose. Mere months into her captivity, she’d even progressed toward the realization that she could get herself out of the back room anytime she wanted.
Sol chose not to reveal herself to Lucien—not yet. She chose to let him believe that she was merely rebellious and cunning, and certainly no match for him. In reality, she was freedom. She just couldn’t let him know. Not yet.
SOL DID not say a word when Lucien’s rescuers came, hollered, lifted him out, and left. She watched Cocoa break down again and wished she could console her. Cocoa couldn’t take it anymore. She could taste the snow outside, she was so ready to be free. She had been counting the days since Nihla’s death and My’s birth. After the fire, she’d dropped all pretenses. No more coquettishness or pretentious optimism. She was ready to get out. She showed an aggression that, if not managed, would result in a brawl with Asante. She would slap the pessimism and the taste out of the older woman’s mouth. Sol reached for Cocoa’s hand and held it. That would have to do for now. Now was just a blip to Sol, but it felt like the one-third of a lifetime that it was for Cocoa.
Sol had always known that the restraints that held back the anger of those with Cocoa’s sweetsy, cutesy demeanor were tenuous. They were stretched to their limits as they tried to maintain their balance and optimism under the worst assaults. They had to eventually snap. They were never permanent. Sol understood well, and she knew that Asante did too. A belt can hold for only so long. Holding in shit while being force-fed distends the belly. It all must come out of one or both ends unless these are concurrently sealed. Then the person has no choice but to blow herself to bits from the inside out and die. Sol had always known what Cocoa could not see, that Asante’s aggression had always been survival. And that Cocoa’s purposeful restraint would eventually kill her if she didn’t unbuckle the belt. Like all of them, Cocoa was being stuffed with every minute in the back room, her lips sewn shut. The frequency of her bowel movements had always been controlled by him. More than that, he’d plugged her anus just for kicks. “Let it out every chance you get,” Sol had heard Asante say even through her angry silences.
Sol knew that Cocoa would crumble or blow, just like Asante had. They’d each had a breakdown. Cocoa had tried to sing hers away. She’d pushed it down into her diaphragm and released it in measured notes. But that was not enough for the kind of hurt Lucien had inflicted. His had never been microaggressions, slights pardonable by devout Christians, women, and minorities everywhere or high-road victims.
It was living four hundred years or more, awoken from death during the transatlantic crossing to find oneself enslaved in the Americas, then killed by whipping or ripping, being drawn and quartered or overworked, then being raised from the dead and transported to the North-South border only to be killed in a Civil War battle, resuscitated again to live through lynching, assassination at the Audubon, raised from the dead again and assassinated again on a hotel balcony, backhanded into a roadside police beating, pistol-whipped and injected with liquid crack, hanged in a jail cell while doing time for possession only to be awoken by a broomstick or plunger up the ass, surviving that then being gunned down for wearing a hoodie a few steps from your own doorstep, waking up to find yourself dead in another cell after a routine traffic stop, shaken up and then choked out in front of a bodega, revived and shot for being unarmed again and again and again across ten states, knocked awake sideways all the way to Kabul, Mosul, or Baghdad only to be stoned, set on fire, decapitated for trying to go to school or rejecting a rapacious husband at twelve, with your head sewn back on you wake up in a secure confessional to be raped, silenced, raped again, and murdered in the name of…rising from the dead after three days’ rest to find yourself brown or black or female or immigrant or poor or young in a school or a boardroom brothel, sodomized in another safe room while awaiting deportation. The real real.
Sol could see what Cocoa could not: that the brown girl had swallowed four hundred years, swallowed harder, sucked in her gut, and emitted silent gas. Sol had never said this but had seen Cocoa’s belief. She’d convinced herself that it would all pass, which confirmed the correctness of her conditioned response to adversity. Cocoa had always wanted to be right about herself. She never wanted anyone undoing more than what Lucien had already undone. She’d swallowed until her throat became sore, until she couldn’t even sing, until she became constipated, unable to pass anything from any orifice. Her rage would not just pass. Not this kind. Not during or after him. She’d thought that she was saving it all up to appropriately channel it into something beautiful when she got out. She wouldn’t succumb to the knowledge that she was a rag doll he could unsew at any seam or rip open at any unintended spot. He could stuff her full of whatever he wanted, including a baby, and sew her back up, leaving no openings for her to relieve herself, not even narrow windpipes or parted lips out of which to sing the way he loved. He understood the need for an outlet for rage. They were all there because of it.
“I’m going to fuck that niggah up when we get out of here!” No one had ever heard Cocoa swear before, but Sol had seen it coming. They’d all seen and heard what they’d believed was the worst in one another. But each time any of them did something to surprise the others, it was like a new cellmate had been brought in.
“Uh-oh. Goody-goody ’bout to lose it now.” Asante shrank back a little as she made the comment.
Sol held Cocoa’s hand tighter. Chiqui placed a hand on Cocoa’s shoulder. My huddled closer.
“If you even…” Cocoa started crying before she could finish the sentence. She always cried when she was angry—even with Lucien, who’d interpreted her tears as weakness and submission. Each time, he’d believed that he’d broken her just a little bit more. “That niggah ain’t here, but you his bitch. I ain’t nevah been on his leash. I’ve held my own since I’ve been in here. But if you even…I will whip you with his leash instead of fucking him up like I want to. You do not want to get on my Southside.”
“I ain’t even…” Asante didn’t get to say studyin’ you!
Cocoa broke free from what was supposed to be the soothing restraint of her three beloveds. She grabbed an unlit votive and leaped on top of Asante. “You ain’t gonna kill me like you killed Nihla.”
Chiqui held My as tight as a secret. She sealed her hands over his ears protectively.
“I’mma kill you first. I ain’t no Little Orphan Annie, but you can bet your bottom dollar on that.” She huffed as she hit Asante with everything except the glass she was saving for the death blow. “I ain’t white. I never been high unless you count falsetto or losing it to the music. I’ve never hoed. I still ain’t never sucked a dick. Bam. Not even his. Bam.” Cocoa stood up because her words had become harder hitting now. “Bam. Cuz if I deep throat a muthafucka, I can’t sing right. Bam. And that muh’fucka believed it.”
As much as Asante wanted to scream, That’s not how you get pregnant! she held back to prevent further blows.
“Bam. Now you know. Now you know, bitch. Ain’t nobody gonna kill Cocoa.”
Sol understood that referring to oneself in the third person was always an escalation.
“Not him, and Cocoa sure as shit ain’t gettin’ killed by his little bitch.” Cocoa dropped down and got in Asante’s face. “You’ve seen Cocoa, but guess what? You ain’t nevah seen Colette Jean-Baptiste. Now that you done made me tell you my government, you ’bout to see both Cocoa and Colette!”
Sol saw Cocoa’s hand in the air, pulled back into a fist. She shrunk back and held Chiqui and My, so they wouldn’t see what was coming.
Cocoa landed the first ferocious blow into Asante’s upturned eyes.
Blauw! She didn’t give her a chance to recoil or recover. She pulled her arm back and launched her fist like an arrow from a bow. One at a time, she spat out her words like bitter olive pits.
“I!” Blauw! She synchronized the punch with the word.
“Ain’t!” Blauw! She raised her fist and dropped it on top of Asante’s head.
“Dyin’!” Blauw! Asante defensively covered her head with her arms.
“Down!” Blauw!
“Here!” Blauw!
“Bitch!” Blauw! To give her knuckles a rest, Cocoa opened her hand and slapped Asante across the face, knocking her into the stone wall.
“And in case you illiterate, skanky, hateful piece of shit wasn’t countin’, that was six!”
Blauw!
“Now seven! One for every year I been down here. I should give you one more for good luck. Cuz only luck and my mama coming through that door could save your ho ass right now.”
Sol saw Cocoa raise the hand with the glass in it.
“Don’t!” Chiqui screamed. “If you’re gonna do that, blow out the other ones. Don’t let him see it.” She had already started smothering My between her breasts.
Sol understood Cocoa’s rage. She was releasing everything she’d held back all those years. She had been suppressing her fear of and anger at Asante since Nihla disappeared. Sol was not surprised that Asante had not fought back. She’d felt Asante’s crippling guilt since Nihla’s disappearance. Sol lay down to rest. She was exhausted from the fight she’d just witnessed. She heard Asante crying over Cocoa’s panting. She could feel Asante sinking. Cocoa had knocked her into the full awareness of what she’d done to Nihla.
Thursday.
Like the others, Asante had been afraid that, if Lucien broke his pregnancy-induced sex fast, he would come after them with a vengeance after a long reprieve. He would rip the pregnant one apart. Asante figured that he still had not touched Nihla except to move her from the safe room to the bedroom. He hadn’t fed Nihla, who’d just started to feel and express hunger for food. But that could have been part of her involuntary detox delusion. She marveled at her tattoo of three side-by-side hot-air balloons that she scratched at continually because she felt the tiny orange lines of the flames burning. She hadn’t been able to explain to Asante when or why she’d gotten it and had no idea who belonged to the monogramed initials in each. At least she was clean, sort of. At least she’d stopped talking, finally. At least she’d saved her worst for the privacy of the bedroom, where the others could not witness her cutting.
Asante had known why Lucien had left the back-room door open. He’d wanted them to hear the sounds gushing out of Nihla. He was daring them to try to escape. He wanted to test their submission and their will to live. Asante had listened closely as if waiting for his instructions. She heard Nihla ask him for ice cream. She had not had it in years, she claimed, and volunteered to make him feel good in exchange. It was either that or a hit of whatever he was willing to give. She was even willing to settle for a joint. Asante could hear Nihla jumping on the bed and talking in a singsongy voice. She heard her hit her head against the mirrors on the low ceiling and waited to hear the scream that never came, even when one broke and fell. Nihla plopped down hard and excitedly examined a small shard of broken glass. This was the tool she needed to make her sundae. Asante heard Lucien let out a long groan and knew there was trouble.
He ran to the back room and grabbed Asante by the arm. The women knew that something had gone awry with Nihla because Lucien never took them out two at a time. The pregnant one hoped that he was setting a new precedent and that she would not have to give birth in the back room and at least one of her cellmates would accompany her. Asante did not want to be involved in whatever plan he’d devised to subdue or get rid of Nihla. However, she welcomed the chance to get out for a moment. She did not expect to see blood.
She didn’t give away her repulsion when he asked her for help without saying a word. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. Asante looked at Nihla from the corners of her eyes and gagged when she saw the girl cutting herself. Using her tattoo as the stencil, Nihla was tracing the three scoops on her arm. She did not look at them once while slicing off flesh. She laid the sections on the largest piece of the mirror. The girl squealed, and Asante thought that Nihla had finally felt the pain from the cutting, but she had done so not out of pain, but because the blood resembled:
“Strawberry topping! This is just a strawberry sundae. No banana, dude!” She looked up at Lucien for the first time. “Strawberry ice cream too. No vanilla.” She smiled at him. “No dulce de leche, no chocolate, or whatever you are.”
Asante sat back to watch, waiting for Lucien’s invitation to help. She could see that he had stopped counting the cuts. He hated blood. He finally grabbed Nihla’s wrist to stop her. To stop the bleeding, he snatched the bedsheet from under her. He decided then and there that he would get whatever drug she needed to get her to stop the cutting.
Friday.
Lucien brought enough ice cream and cocaine for both women, but Asante never got a taste of the latter. Nihla was ravenous and, worse yet, willing to do anything and hurt anyone to get her fix. Asante let her have whatever she needed, as long as she stopped trying to get at the mirrors on the ceiling to complete her strawberry sundae. Asante wanted to save some ice cream for the pregnant one. She took advantage of Lucien’s predicament and, on the pretext of going to the back room to get her favorite brush, brought three of the four pints of Häagen-Dazs to the others. She returned to the bedroom to Lucien’s pleading eyes. She responded to his request by dictating how they would handle the situation.
“More coke. See if you can get your hands on some needles and some H. It has to look like a real overdose. I’ll get her ready. Bring me my makeup bag. I know you still have it.” Under her breath she whispered, “You probably been trying to dress up in some of my clothes.”
Lucien came back with the bag too quickly, as if he had not hidden it even after all those years.
“You got my clothes too?” She did not need to tell him to bring something tight fitting and provocative because that was all she used to wear. “I need a blow-dryer and my curling iron, if she’s gonna look right.”
Lucien came back with everything, the hair supplies, heroin, plus his souvenir handgun.
“I forgot to ask you for my jewelry.”
Feeling her first high in more than five days, Nihla started to perk up. “I’ve got my own jewelry. Where is it, Lulu?”
Asante was surprised to hear his nickname pronounced like a little girl’s name. No wonder Nihla trusted him so much.
The rings, necklaces, and especially the earrings looked familiar to her. They should have, since most of it had been hers. The rings Chiqui had counted as her inheritance and Cocoa’s hollow door-knocker earrings with her name across the middle rounded out the collection.
“She’s ready.”
Bandaged, dressed, and made up, Nihla looked like someone Lucien might have considered taking. But she still looked like a streetwalker rather than a homegrown brothel prostitute.
“Do what I told you. They’ll think she overdosed.”
Asante was not about to let him shoot the girl in the basement. That would be the point from which none of them could return. If he got a taste for blood that he himself had drawn, enjoyed the snuffing out, the silencing, the doll-like stillness of a dead dressed-up girl, then this new fetish might take over. She might be next to take a bullet to the head and fall face-first onto the bedroom carpet. He could kill them all at any time. But, thus far, he’d never used force, just coercion, blackmail, the imminent threat that he would hurt the others if one of them failed to cooperate. If he started outright killing, she would be responsible for two lives taken at once when he turned on the pregnant one. He would save her, his first, for last, and he would take his time. He might not even use the gun again. He would devise some new mechanism or replicate Nihla’s slicing so he could see blood that he was no longer afraid of. He’d memorized their cycles, counted the days for each, and avoided menses like a cat dodging a hungry dog. But he acclimated to new situations quickly. Blood no longer scared him. Killing still seemed to. She needed to keep it that way. She would not do his dirty work. She could show him how. She was hoping that Nihla was as hard-core a user as she’d seemed, so she could bounce back from a dose that would have been lethal to a lightweight.
Saturday.
Asante had watched Lucien inject Nihla himself. He half carried, half dragged the girl out of the basement. What he’d done after that, Asante could only guess. She’d given him the instructions. All he needed to do was follow them. He had to give Nihla the final dose at 9:00 p.m. as he stopped pretending to look for parking on Haven Avenue in Washington Heights. Unable to find a spot, he’d pull up slowly to the emergency room doors. He didn’t need his .22. The hood of his coat and his scarf wrapped around his face up to his eyes were enough of a disguise. He’d have popped off his license plates. He’d stop and roll her out of the van without coming to a complete stop. He’d be grateful that at least the passenger-side rear automatic door still worked so he didn’t have to get out to open and close it.
One day early! Lucien had set Nihla free one day early, which was why Sol and the others continued to believe that their former cellmate was dead and that Asante had helped kill her. Neither Asante nor Lucien knew if Nihla was still alive. Lucien had not bothered to try to find out. Asante had always hoped that Nihla had survived. Lucien had hoped she hadn’t. Neither had ever mentioned the white girl again.
Whenever one of the others would ask about Nihla, Asante would quickly correct her: “You mean the seven-day slut, or should I say six? He let her go early.”
Sol had asked only once. Like the others, she did not believe that the issuance of such a dehumanizing title could come from a merciful mouth. Asante was a murderer as far as Sol was concerned. She hoped that none of them ever got sick or became delusional enough to warrant extrication from the back room. They’d come to fear a transfer to the bedroom even more than before. Although they’d each wished that Lucien would kill them while raping them, they didn’t want to die in whatever mysterious way he’d killed Nihla. The rape room had become the kill room. What a place to give birth.
I am not Zero. I am One. I am knowing voices. I cannot hear. I am not broken. Like this room. Burning. Like this house. I am smelling fire and smoke, snow and cold. I am not begging. I hear him scream, “Help, help, help!” They come for him. Footsteps go. Voices go. Zero, Two, Three, and My are sad. Three is noise. She is cry. She is scream, “Here! Here! Here!” It is not our time. I am knowing. But I feel for Two, Three, Four (she dead), My, and even Zero. Three say to My, “Come here, baby.” I am hearing them cry.