I became aware of a great field of flowers basking in the sun, gently swaying in the wind, left to right, front and back.
A dim salty taste.
Ugh, snot collecting in my throat. I tried to move it away with my tongue and accidentally swallowed.
“I think he’s coming out of it,” said a voice to my right. I realized that my eyes were closed and that now was probably not a good time to open them. I went as limp as I could. “Never mind, false alarm,” said the man.
“You clocked him good,” said Ju-lan. Her voice was prickly. “When I said ‘lights out,’ I meant for you to tie the blindfold around his head.”
“Blindfold? Naw, that doesn’t do the job. He could count the turns and figure out where he was going.”
“Even so, put the blindfold on him now.”
“All right, all right,” said the man. Under his breath he added, “Fuckin’ bitch.” He twisted and exhaled heavily with effort. He’d recently been eating spicy rice crackers. The man wound fabric around my head, sometimes pulling a hair or two. I managed to not cry out. He tied it tight enough for me to feel it in my eyeballs. Is it possible for the head to go numb?
The car turned to the left and I allowed myself to slump on the man’s shoulder. Thanks for not putting on my seatbelt, guys.
Ju-lan wasn’t done with chewing the man out. “Do you understand that he’s no good to us if he looks injured?”
The man stretched his legs, propped me back into my seat and held up my chin. “There’s not a mark on him. Well, not much anyway.”
“That doesn’t matter. Do what I tell you to do. Understand, Li-min?”
The man tapped the door handle. “Fine. I will obey you.”
We slowed into a turn. I heard a siren nearby and a loud scraping sound. It must be a parking garage door opening. We eased our way forward and the car tilted down.
Shit, where were they taking me? I slumped against the man to my left. He felt oddly bony and seemed to know where exactly to place his elbow to force my body to fold in half. I eased myself away from him as naturally as I could pretend.
I don’t know how many levels we went down. At certain points I could hear our car engine amplified due to proximity to a wall. Other times loud echoes clanked back from the other side of a space that must be as big as the warehouse Tong-tong had been held in.
At a certain point, the car slowed to a stop and I heard something big slither by. Was that a dinosaur? We eased forward and the dinosaur retraced its steps behind us.
We stopped again. I heard Ju-lan swing her door open and step out. “Has Jing-nan rejoined us?” she asked Li-min.
“Lemme see,” he said and pinched me inside my right thigh, right next to my balls. I hadn’t been expecting it so I couldn’t stop my legs from jolting. I might have cried out a little bit, too. Li-min laughed through his nose again. “He’s up.”
“Let’s get him out. We don’t have any time to waste.”
“Should I get the equipment out, too?”
“Of course. Let’s set it up and get something on the Internet soon.” Li-min creaked his door open, put his feet on the ground and grabbed my arm. “You think you can walk on your own, kid? I’m going to have my hands full.”
I took my first full breath of air in ages. “Can I take off this thing so I can see?”
“Sure. Take a good look around you.”
I fingered the knot tied behind my left ear and pulled one of the loops until I felt it loosen. Soon I managed to untwirl the entire thing from my head. I blinked in the clinical light of fluorescent bulbs and rubbed a sore spot under my right cheek.
“Sorry about that, but I had to,” said Li-min as he stepped out from the car. The shades had been pocketed, revealing a flabby, boyish face marked with a faintly apologetic smile that heidaoren have perfected. I’m a criminal, the smile says, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a fun guy.
Li-min backed up, allowing me to ease my way out of the car. I stood and tried to stretch. Gravity feels strong when you’re recovering from being knocked out.
“Excuse me, Jing-nan,” said Li-min. “I gotta get that stuff in the back.” I stepped out of the way and he leaned in and reached for the other man in the back seat. Only it wasn’t a man. It was a tripod and some other equipment covered with a tarp. Li-min stuck the fedora on his head.
He saw me staring at him. I was still shocked it wasn’t a man I had been sitting next to the entire ride. Li-min dipped the brim of his hat at me and winked.
“A gentleman never wears a hat in a car,” he said, kicking the door shut behind him. Both of his arms were full.
I nodded and looked around. If I had seen an open door, I would’ve bolted. We seemed to be in an unfinished private parking spot connected to a garage. Apart from that sliding concrete barrier, there were no doors or windows. Linear fluorescent light bulbs dashed across the encrusted spray-cement ceiling, which was about ten feet high. Electrical wires spilled out of the fixtures like flower filaments.
The entire space smelled moldy. I could see puddles of groundwater here and there. It was difficult keeping water out of underground developments because it required using a good sealant and following building codes. Both were pricey, too pricey, especially if the building was going to be knocked down again in a few years and rebuilt as something else.
I looked carefully along the lines where the walls met the ceiling. I heard Li-min laugh out of his nostrils again.
“What are you looking at? Are you going to dig your way out through there? Look, Jing-nan, you’re gonna be here a while. You might as well settle in and make the best of it.”
Ju-lan approached. “Well, if they’re smart, he actually won’t be here long at all.” She slipped out her phone and tapped away. “Li-min, let’s get him set up.” She gave him a hard stare and just to make sure there was no misunderstanding, she added, “Let’s cuff him to the wall and get that equipment set up. I’ll be back in a few hours.” She gestured to a wall through which passed a pipe wide enough to accommodate bowling balls.
Li-min nodded. “Right. Got it.”
“Let’s get him cuffed before I leave.”
Li-min put everything down and rubbed his palms against each other. He opened a small sack and pulled out a pair of handcuffs and a chain leash with links thick enough to hold back a crocodile.
“Let’s go, Jing-nan.”
“Don’t forget,” said Ju-lan. “I still have my gun.”
“I’m more scared of this guy,” I said. It was true.
The driver, a slight and stooped man with a face worn featureless by regret, padlocked one end of the chain to a lag-eye bolt in the wall. He drew out the other end of the chain and handed it to Li-min, who looped one cuff through the last link and locked it. He shook the open cuff at me, the metallic claw swinging.
“Jing-nan, I need one of your wrists. You choose which one.”
“He’s right-handed,” snapped Ju-lan. “Lock up his right hand.”
Li-min gave her a withering look. “Why would you want the stronger arm to be in the cuffs? It’s easier for him to break it!” He had caught her off-guard.
“Then . . . put the left hand in there.”
“Why would you want to do that and leave the stronger hand free to pick the lock?”
Ju-lan chuckled in disgust. “All right, I see what you’re doing. Just cuff him and be done with it, already.”
Li-min turned to me. I lifted my left wrist to him as quickly as I could. He snapped the cuff around it and tightened it.
“Good choice,” he said. “Are you really right-handed?”
“In reality,” I said, “I was born left-handed. But my grandfather forced me to use my right hand and punished me when I used my left.”
Now it was Li-min’s turn to chuckle. “Don’t you hate all our stupid superstitions?”
“Hey, no one hates them more than me. I don’t even like praying.”
Ju-lan threw her shoulders back and regarded me. “Honestly, a few prayers right now wouldn’t hurt, Jing-nan.”
The driver read her body language and scrambled away to the car like a bug avoiding a slipper-swat. He had it started in seconds.
Ju-lan opened the passenger door. Her final warning was for Li-min, not me. “Like I said, have everything set up and ready to go by the time I get back. You shouldn’t have a problem. The salesman said a high-school kid could figure out the camera.”
The concrete wall began to slide open. It reminded me of those old Japanese monster movies with bad special effects. Small pieces fell off as it moved. Was the wall made cheaply? Or maybe the track it was running on was laid down by an underpaid and undocumented worker.
It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. In any case, it wasn’t built to meet public approval.
The car curved out and waited until the wall shut before driving off. Li-min bunched up the tarp in his arms and laid it down at my feet.
“It’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, but it isn’t bad.”
I took a step to the side to look it over fully. It didn’t seem booby-trapped. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Well, you can sleep on it, if you want. It is four in the morning.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
Li-min rubbed his earlobes. “I’ll tell you what, I’m pretty sure I can. No funny business while I’m down.”
“But isn’t Ju-lan coming back soon?” I asked.
He rummaged through the pile of things he had unloaded. “She won’t be back until the afternoon. She’s just giving me a hard time.” He pulled out a rolled-up inflatable mattress.
“Hey, can I get one of those?”
“Naw, naw, there’s only one. I’m one of the captors, so I should definitely get the nicer bedding.” He brought over a kid’s plastic sand pail. “You can have this, though.”
The object filled me with dread. “Do you have any toilet paper?”
He shrugged. “I’ll tell you what. She’ll definitely bring some. She’s in hospitality, you know.”
Li-min walked off to the other side of the cavernous room. We could see each other plainly and yet the distance gave some sense of privacy. I spread out the tarp and lay on it. We were underground and the insulation from the surrounding earth provided moderate warmth. I could feel every bump in the concrete floor through the tarp but that didn’t stop me from falling asleep instantly.
I woke up to the same ceiling lights. Should I be awake? I didn’t have my phone, so I had no idea what time it was. I saw Li-min still laid out on his nice air mattress, comfortable as a zoo bear. I could hear his hibernation snores clearly and I felt bad for anyone else who had been subjected to it. I rolled to face the opposite wall and felt the chain snake across my chest and back.
I think I knew part of what Ju-lan had in store for me. She was going to stream some video of me. Why? I wasn’t sure, but the timing seemed to indicate it was a retaliatory action for Wei-yin being found out and deported.
How did Ju-lan even know about Mr. Lee? He hadn’t made the news, and he wouldn’t. Her association with a hired heavy such as Li-min, however, indicated that she was connected and knew a wide range of people.
She certainly knew how to find me.
I closed my eyes and tried to think her story through. Then it hit me. Ju-lan didn’t hear about Wei-yin on the news. She found out about it because she was also a part of China’s spy network.
I heard some distant rumbling, cars driving through the parking lot. Maybe I should try screaming. No, that would only end with Li-min socking me in the jaw again. He might not want to, but he would to shut me up.
Li-min seemed to be a nice guy at the core. At some point in the night, he had left a paper cup filled with water within my reach. I felt parched as soon as I saw the cup, and drank all the water immediately. I had to piss right after, and made sure to aim at the side of the pail to minimize the sound and not disturb Li-min. When I was finished, I lay down again. Maybe if I managed to fall asleep again, I’d wake up and find this was all a dream.
Instead, I began to wonder what Li-min’s story was. Not all gangsters were pricks like my uncle. A lot of these criminal types are people who have fallen through the cracks in Taiwan’s hypercompetitive society. Maybe the parents had split up or lost their jobs and the kids couldn’t afford cram school, hurting the chances of getting into the top high schools and colleges. Maybe the kids who weren’t in cram school weren’t so focused on professional development. Maybe they all went shoplifting together, got busted and tagged with a juvenile-delinquency record. Once that happened, most of the legitimate paths to upward mobility were cut off for good.
I’d seen that story unfold in a popular soap opera that was praised for its gritty realism. I can’t remember exactly how it ended but there was definitely a scene where one of the gangsters was on his hands and knees before his parents, crying and begging for forgiveness. It made some valid points about society, but all the stars of the show were so light-skinned and thin, they were nearly transparent. The lead hood was played by an actor who had been a pre-med major at Taida, the same prestigious university that Nancy attended.
In our country, even the fuckups are portrayed by the overachievers.
In our country, I was a fuckup.
Never mind that I was a successful businessman. Any matchmaker who selected me would be banished from the profession, if there were a governing body that exercised oversight. I wasn’t a doctor. Hell, I didn’t even have a college degree.
But I had Nancy.
I rolled on to my back and heard my chains rattle. I wondered what she was doing now. Did she know that I was missing already? I would never leave the apartment without leaving a note or email. If she tried to text me, she’d be startled by my phone’s chirp in the bedroom. Then she’d know something was seriously wrong. I never forget my phone. I don’t always have it charged, but I don’t forget it.
I wasn’t so much worried about what was in store for me as I was concerned with how worried Nancy would be. I guessed she might try calling Dwayne and Frankie. Maybe Peggy at some point. Man, I really hoped she’d never be desperate enough to ring up my uncle Big Eye, because he was the nuclear option.
I wound the chain around both hands and tugged lightly. There was zero give. I looked over at Li-min. When I saw that he was still checked out, I stood up and pulled with all my weight, planting my feet in the tug-of-war against the wall.
Nothing happened. Not even a crumb of cement broke off.
I stopped and massaged my sore wrists. Even if I had managed to break away, how would I be able to leave the room, never mind avoid Li-min, whose fist had an undefeated record against my face?
I wondered about the guys, Dwayne and Frankie. Surely Nancy would get in touch with them before it was time to open Unknown Pleasures. Would they just go ahead and operate the stand without me, hoping I would turn up at some point?
I heard a dog bark and I jumped. Li-min rolled over, groaned and hit something on his phone, which made the barking stop. Ten minutes later the alarm went off again and Li-min repeated his actions. The next time the alarm sounded, he turned it off and got up on one knee.
“Jing-nan!” he called over.
“Yes.”
“Let’s get up.”
“What time is it?”
“Eight.”
I stretched and yawned as if I had just woken up while he rummaged through a small box. Then I yawned again, this time for real. I was usually up an hour or two before this, so I shouldn’t be too tired. Then again, my sleep routine had been interrupted.
“Do I have to do anything?” I called out.
“Actually, you don’t, unless you want to piss in the bucket.” Li-min approached and set up the tripod about five feet away from me. It was close enough for me to see the threads of the height-adjustment knobs.
I could swing my legs around to snag the tripod. Then I could take it up in my hands as a weapon. No, that wouldn’t end well. I was still chained to the wall. I decided to remain quiet and wait for a good opportunity.
Li-min unfolded a shaky fabric-and-wire chair next to the tripod and began to toy with a video camera. It had two flip-out control panels and several indicator lights that immediately signaled that Li-min didn’t know what he was doing.
This was the initial setup stage. The user is expected to set parameters such as the date, time and WiFi connection. The more reputable brands allow you skip this step so you can start shooting right off the bat. This camera wasn’t a Sony or Panasonic product, however. It wasn’t even Samsung. The name on the strap was “Hatiss.”
After a few minutes, Li-min heaved a sigh and set the camera on the tripod. He picked up the manual and flipped through the first few pages. Growing flustered, he went to his phone to read up on the camera.
A doorbell alert went off and Li-min read whatever text or email had just come in. It must have come from Ju-lan because he groaned. Then he put in his earbuds and turned the phone sideways to watch a video. That led to another video and another. Then I think he started playing a game, one that required the player to turn the phone in order to steer a tank through a battlefield or guide a marble through a maze.
It’s not much fun watching a guy on his phone, whether or not he’s playing a game. But he was more interesting than the floor, the walls or the ceiling, so I continued to observe him.
While he was distracted with the game, I contemplated pulling the tripod and camera over. Once I had the camera in my hands, I could threaten to destroy it if he didn’t release me.
No, that wouldn’t work. For one thing, even if I destroyed it, Ju-lan could get another camera in about 10 seconds in Taipei. Besides, Li-min might just beat the crap out of me before I could articulate my threat.
Think of something else, damn it!
Li-min had been acting like a nice guy. He just might be amenable to letting me help him set up the camera.
I couldn’t snatch it right away. I should help set it up and hand it back to grow his trust in me. No funny business.
“Say, Li-min?”
He looked at me, slightly startled upon emerging from some virtual world. He fumbled to pause his game. “Yeah!”
“I couldn’t help but notice that you were having trouble with the camera. I could give you a hand.”
He did a slow blink and snapped his head back. “Why should I give you a chance to fuck up the camera?”
“I won’t mess it up, I promise. After all, you guys are going to stream me on camera, right?”
His face turned to steel. “Yeah. Well, I guess that’s pretty obvious.”
“I need the camera to work so you guys get what you want and then you let me go, right?”
“How do you know what we want?”
“I don’t. All I know is I want to get out of here, and that’s only going to happen if the camera’s working. So let me give it a shot.”
Li-min pocketed his phone and locked his arms around his chest. A scowl ripped across his face as he thought. He was probably imagining how badly Ju-lan was going to chew him out for not being able to figure out the device. If I could do it for him, however, he would be in the clear.
Li-min stared hard at me.
I tried to make myself look as innocent and helpless as possible. Being chained to a wall helped quite a bit. I ran a hand through my greasy, unshowered hair and smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “One thing, though. If you get this thing working, don’t tell Ju-lan you set it up. For all she’ll know, I did it all by myself.”
“Of course,” I said. “Anything.”
He leaned over to pick up the camera and brought it over to me in both hands. “Don’t mess with this thing,” he warned me. “Don’t drop it or break off any pieces. Anything you do to that camera, I’m going to do to you. Got it?”
I immediately thought of the wise answer, You mean you’re going to turn me on? Of course I didn’t say it. At some point in the future, my thoughts might return to this very moment and I could laugh out loud at what could have been. Right now, though, my job was to get to that future and in as healthy a state as possible.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Li-min,” I said. “I will handle everything.”
He didn’t believe me at first, as he kept his hands underneath the camera, at the ready, like a new dad allowing someone else to hold his baby for the first time.
“Don’t do that,” I told him. “You’re making me nervous. It’s bad enough that I have one hand cuffed.”
“I don’t want you to drop the camera on the ground!”
“I told you I wouldn’t.”
“How can I trust you?”
I shrugged in frustration. “If I want to wreck this thing, I could just throw it against the wall!”
He jerked as if I had been spitting in his face. It was entirely possible that I had. I was disoriented from being tired, dirty and hungry.
Li-min backed off and retreated to his chair. He issued me a final warning before resuming his game. “Don’t fuck up. Ju-lan will literally kill you.” After a moment, he added, “Probably kill me, too, after.”
I calmly nodded. It was good to know the animosity between them wasn’t play.
I flipped out both touchscreens and realized that the camera wasn’t registering the taps from my fingers. Then I noticed a small pop-up message: If you are setting up for the first time or resetting, press and hold the black buttons behind each touchscreen.
Ah, so that’s what tripped him up. I’ll bet half the camera’s users missed the pop-up. I held down the buttons and the camera beeped.
“What did you do?” Li-min asked in a threatening manner.
“I’m initializing the flash drive,” I said. He grumbled because, as I expected, he had no idea what I was talking about.
A menu prompted me to enter the date, time and location. I was about to ask Li-min what time it was when I noticed another small message: Click here to connect to WiFi and autofill this form.
I clicked on it and several networks popped up. Some personal ones. A few cafés. But the network with the strongest signal was the one with the name that interested me the most: Taipei 101 Parking.
I tapped the network and after two cycles of a digital globe, the forms autofilled. For GPS location, it filled out 25°2’1”N, 121°33’54”E. I licked my lips. I wished I was some map geek who knew where that was. Was I currently in the parking garage beneath the landmark building or in a space near it?
To frustrate me even more, the camera also filled out, “Taipei, China.” I tried to change the country manually, but the scrolling list went from “Syrian Arab Republic” straight to “Tajikistan.” No “Taiwan.” Well, I’d have to live with it. The key point being that I planned to continue living past this hardship.
I went through the rest of the setup menu. Maybe there was some way I could send a message out to let people know that I was being held somewhere near Taipei 101. If I managed to get out even the most hopelessly vague signal, I had to hope that Frankie was out there watching and would be able to decode it.
I selected only the second-highest resolution for the livestreaming function because I figured it would help save battery power. This camera was going to be my lifeline out to the world, one way or another, and I wanted it to function as long and steadily as possible.
The camera prompted me for an account for streaming. That would be good for me to know.
“Uh, Li-min, I need some information.”
“What?”
“What site are you going to use for streaming and what is your account and password?”
He shook his head and smiled. “I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. That’s something Ju-lan is going to enter herself. Are you done, already?”
“No, I still have a little ways to go.”
“Well, just skip that step. How much longer are you going to take?”
“It’s hard to say. I have to make these annoying adjustments.”
“Well, don’t take too long.”
I planned to drag this out as long as possible to learn as much as I could about the device. Once I handed it back, I might never have my hands on it again.
“Sure,” I told Li-min. “I’ll finish up as soon as I can.”
I opened the advanced settings menu and as a set of options unfurled across both touchscreens, I became hopeful. There had to be something that could help me.
Slow-motion mode adjustment? Not quite.
Calibrate display? No, thank you.
Motion adjustment? What exactly did that mean?
I tapped it, revealing an option for the camera to activate upon detecting a movement. That might be what I needed! I toggled it on. When Ju-lan or Li-min were gone or asleep, I could activate the camera and send out a desperate SOS.
I exited out of the submenu and scanned the main settings. Give me something to save myself with!
Energy-saver settings. I tapped it and discovered an adjustment that proved to me that a higher power truly did exist. Turn off indicator lights it read. I tapped “Off.” That way the camera could be on and streaming and neither Ju-lan nor Li-min would be the wiser.
I handed the camera back to Li-min and tried out my sincere pitching voice.
“When you’re done filming, put this setting on ‘standby.’ If you put it on ‘off,’ then all the settings will get zapped and you’ll have to start all over again.”
I said it with the soothing timbre I used with wary tourists.
Li-min responded as if I had allayed his fears of all technology. “Thank you, Jing-nan. I really appreciate it.” To show how grateful he was, he promptly went back to gaming.
I bent my knees. All this standing wasn’t good for my legs. “Say, Li-min, could you do me a favor? How about a stool or a crate to sit on?”
Li-min tapped his game on pause and raised an eyebrow. “I’m not supposed to let you have anything.”
“You let me have the tarp.”
He snorted. “I can’t let you have anything that you could use as a weapon.”
“I promise if you give me a chair, I won’t attack you with it.”
He looked thoughtful. “How about this. I’ll let you have a stool, but when Ju-lan shows up, you have to give it back so she doesn’t catch you with it.”
“Sure,” I said, even as I schemed. “I promise.”
He went over to the store of stuff while I imagined a scenario where I could slam the backrest of a metal folding chair against his forehead. I certainly had nothing personal against him. I was starting to like him a lot.
He came back and slid a child’s plastic stool over to me. It made a farting sound as it scraped along.
“I can barely fit my ass on that thing,” I said.
“Take it or leave it.”
I righted it and sat down. It was better than sitting on the ground like a stray dog.