Let’s try this again. Let’s look at it from the beginning, doing the math, the physics, the science, the art of launching my chair backward—literally up and backward—to get airborne—shoving myself off the floor as hard as possible to generate the momentum needed to flip over—somehow avoiding a concussion in the process—land on the ground, crack the strut, free my hands, free my legs, then roll to my knees so I could get up and bull-rush him. Bull-rush, right? That’s a thing? To topple him. To blitz him. Which would stun him, right? Which would give me, what, about two and a half seconds to scramble and yank the knife out of his hands?
If he had a knife.
He had a wrench, a large plumber’s wrench. I saw that much. I wouldn’t know what to do with a wrench—obviously wrest it from his grip—but if I could get a knife, if I could get a knife, I could immobilize him, then undo this rope, then undo this clamp, then undo this nightmare that’s got me stuck here, trapped in a basement, somewhere in Paris—somewhere underneath it—where every single aspect seems stolen straight from the depths of hell—a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a rusted door, the wet air, the barren walls—an unimaginably harsh location where this guy asked me his one question, literally his one question, his only question in the past five hours, before saying absolutely nothing else.
“Where is she?”
He said it with a slight accent—Eastern bloc, or maybe Scandinavian, maybe German—and I’d replay those words in my head repeatedly, pathologically, over and over again, analyzing all the implications, over and over, chopping up my thoughts into a thousand fragments, trying to find some way to answer the unanswerable. Where is she? I tried every response. I tried everything I could to convey to him what I had. Theories. Assumptions. Guesses. Verbiage. Excuses. Where is she? I’d offer an answer. I’d wait again. I’d answer again. I’d wait. Talk. Wait. Panic. Talk. Panic more. Stop. Wait again. Talk again. Over and over. No solution came. No progress was made. Instead, after an eternity, I’d arrived at the sickening sensation that he was now standing behind me, on the verge of an exponentially increasing explosion of violence.
Where was she?
I had no idea. The only thing I knew was that something sinister was smoldering back there inside this unknown man and a limit had been reached and an amount of time had run out and the slow footsteps I was now hearing behind me were the footsteps of an adversary who was approaching me to speak up after hours and hours of saying nothing, after a full day of watching me fail to oblige him, bending toward the back of my neck to utter five horrific words, which he hardly raised his voice to deliver. “You . . . now have . . . sixty seconds.”