You look for him. The person who roofied you. You assume it’s a guy. What are the odds? You try to find out. You grab your laptop and look up “drink spiking statistics,” “drink spiking perpetrators,” “people who roofie other people.” You can’t find what you’re looking for. People like you don’t report what happened to them.
Everyone on the street is a suspect. The guy in front of you at the coffee shop. The yoga instructor, the bus driver, your professors. No one above suspicion.
You stop sleeping through the night. Every evening around seven, a shadow descends upon you. Before bed, you check that the door is locked. Check, and check again. You look inside closets. You check the bathroom. Check under your bed. You search and search and search for the threat following you like a shadow.
You listen to the stories. You read them. There are podcasts, online threads unraveling the mysteries for you. You learn about the student who went out with friends and never came home. The wife who went missing and her husband definitely did it, but they didn’t catch him. The girl who went on spring break. The woman who crashed her car and vanished before dispatchers arrived at the scene.
Perhaps you absorbed so many stories they ended up absorbing you.
You lose the ability to focus. Your professors’ lectures fade into the background. You fall asleep in class and stare at the ceiling at night. Your grades plummet. You stop drinking, cold turkey. You stop seeing friends. You stop texting Matt, your almost-boyfriend. You just stop.
After a while it’s just you, Julie, and the ghosts. Julie never gives up on you. “I worry about you,” she says after you get kicked out of Media Law for snoozing at your seat.
“I’m okay,” you tell her.
“No, you’re not,” she says. “It’s fine.”
“I think I just need a break,” you say.
Julie tells you that’s fine, too. So you take a break. You speak to your academic adviser and go online searching for trees, air, and silence. For the opposite of the city.
THE CABIN IS small. Ranch-style, one bedroom. Crucially, it belongs to a European woman who has installed shutters on all the windows. The woman believes in locks, in a robust security system. There, you will be safe.
The shuttered house is two hours out of Manhattan. You drain what’s left of your meager savings—four years’ worth of summer jobs, of internships fetching coffee and groceries for editors who don’t bother learning your name—to rent a car. One Sunday evening, you pack a suitcase full of leggings, soft sweaters, and quirky little books. You drive upstate. You put your clothes in the European lady’s drawers. Finally, you take a breath.
Leaving the city is like a massage for your brain. That week, you go to bed early and get up whenever the birds start singing. You keep up with schoolwork to a degree, but mostly you drink tea and read your funny little books and nap a lot. You find a nature book and study birdsong. You start believing in a new world.
THERE IS A place you like. In the woods. Not too far off the main road. You walk there in the morning, after the sun rises but before it starts giving off any warmth.
Your place is a clearing, of sorts. Grass surrounded by trees. Trees in a circle. Your place is green, then brown, then green again, and then blue. It’s always quiet, except for the softest sounds. Wind whooshing in tree leaves, swirling through blades of grass. Woodpeckers and squirrels. Birds you can’t identify despite your best efforts.
You like to sit down and close your eyes. Feel the humidity seeping through your leggings and let the ground hold you up. Tune out the world to feel yourself exist in it.
One morning, you are walking home from the clearing. You are not in the woods, exactly, but you are not in the town center, either. It’s a country road. Not enough traffic to justify a sidewalk. It’s a place where no one sees you. If you were to scream—this has occurred to you a few times—no one would hear you.
That day, there is a car. It puts its siren on. A Pavlovian response ticks through you—you hear a siren, you think the person at the wheel is in charge.
You glance behind your shoulder. It’s not a cop car. It’s a white pickup truck. Cops do that, you think. They drive unmarked cars all the time.
Through the windshield, the man behind the wheel motions for you to stop on the side of the road. You stop. A safety rule drilled into you since childhood resurfaces: you remain at a distance from the truck.
The man steps out. You take him in. Your brain sizes him up. Friend or foe, ally or attacker? Shake his hand or run?
The man looks clean. He smiles. Lines crinkle at the corners of his eyes. White teeth, parka, jeans. The hair, freshly cut. The hands, clean.
In this moment, you are ready to trust him. In this moment, you do not fear.
THE MAN STEPS closer. He smells nice, too. You never expect evil to smell nice. What kind of devil wears cologne?
Later on, you think about carnivorous plants. How they glow to attract insects. How they trick them with tantalizing nectars before feasting on them.
It takes you a second to see the gun, black pistol, black silencer. You see it, and then you feel it. For the first time in your life, a weapon digging into your shoulder blade.
“Don’t move,” he tells you. “If you try to run, I will hurt you. Do you understand?”
You nod your head yes.
“Wallet? Phone?”
You surrender your possessions to him. You have thought about what you’d do if you were robbed at gunpoint, and promised yourself you would give everything in exchange for your life.
“Gun? Pepper spray? Knife?”
You shake your head no.
“I’m going to check, and if I find out you lied to me, I won’t be happy.”
He pats you down. You stand still. This is the first test, and you pass. You haven’t lied to him.
“Jewelry?”
“Just what I’m wearing.”
He waits for you to remove your necklace, slips it into his pocket. In another timeline, this is where it ends. This is where he returns to the truck and you walk away slowly, then run, back to the house and back to the city. This is where you find people and tell them what happened.
In your timeline, the man with the gun throws your phone to the ground and smashes it with his boot. He waves the gun in the direction of the truck.
“Get in,” he says.
Here is what it feels like, the moment your life becomes a tragedy. The moment you’ve anticipated. When your life stops being yours and turns into a crime story.
It feels like your legs are turning to lead, your rib cage is freezing into place, your brain skimming through a list of possibilities—run, scream, comply. But mainly, it feels like nothing. The earth doesn’t split open. You are still you. It’s the world around you that changes. Everything changes but you.
Run, scream, comply. Running is out of the question. You could beat him, but you don’t run from the man with the gun. Not if there’s any chance he’ll catch you. Scream? Only scream if you know you’ll be heard. You are on a quiet road with no one else in sight. You do not scream.
Comply. You do not know, at this point, what the man wants. If you comply, there is a chance he will let you go.
You get into the truck.
He walks back to the driver’s side. Calm and smooth. The soft focus of a man used to the world obeying him.
He tucks the gun into what you guess is a holster strapped around his hips. You do not look at him directly; eye contact feels like a lethal idea. You stare straight ahead through the windshield. As you try to focus on your surroundings, something stirs in the back of your brain. You saw something. Just a few seconds ago, as you were leaning to get inside the truck. Your gaze caught on the backseat and you saw. A shovel, rope, handcuffs. A roll of trash bags.
The man presses a button. Doors lock on both sides.
All the hopeful parts of you die together.
He keeps quiet, eyes on the road. Focused. A man inhabiting a routine. Someone who has done this before.
Talk. The only thing you can do. You can’t run, you can’t scream. But you can talk. You think you can talk.
You swallow. Search for words, bland but personal. A bridge from you to him. An escape trail under a bed of leaves.
“Are you from around here?”
It’s the best you’ve got, and it gets nothing out of him.
You detach your gaze from the road and look at him. Young, you think. Not bad-looking. A man you could have met at the grocery store, in line at a coffee shop.
“You know,” you say, “you don’t have to do this.”
He ignores you still.
“Look at you,” you insist. Then, timidly, your voice fading: “Look at me.”
He doesn’t look.
You think about the stories. The podcasts. The news articles. The tabloid headlines, long and convoluted, with the most outrageous WORDS in all caps. Some of the stories came with tips. Humanize yourself to your captor. Hold your keys between your fingers and use them as a weapon. Jab them in his eyes. Hit him in the nose. Kick him in the nuts. Scream. Don’t scream. Surprise him. Don’t surprise him.
What the stories never said: at the end of the day, if a man wants to kill you, he kills you. It’s not on you to convince him not to.
You look out the window. You think: Almost. Something bad happened to me, and I thought I was going to die but I didn’t, and I almost made it. It just wasn’t meant to be.
You don’t want to die, but death makes sense to you.
Something surges through you. Maybe you stop being afraid. Maybe you’re more terrified than ever, and it unlocks the reckless parts of you. You keep talking. You say a bunch of bullshit, like you don’t care anymore. Talking is the only thing that belongs to you, and you’re going to use it for all it’s worth.
“The weather is so nice up here,” you say. “I watched a movie the other night and I expected it to end well but it didn’t. Don’t you hate when that happens?”
He raises an eyebrow at you, just barely.
“I don’t even watch that many movies,” you continue, “precisely for that reason. I don’t like investing two, three hours of my time only to end up disappointed. Or sad.”
His fingers flick an invisible speck of dust off the steering wheel. Long fingers, strong hands. Bad news everywhere.
“Shut up,” he says.
Or else? You’ll kill me?
You stare back outside. He’s driving down a stretch of road you don’t recognize, trees and mud as far as you can see.
Then, a deer. He sees it coming from afar and slows down, waits for it to cross. A responsible driver. Now’s not the time to crash or stall out. What would he do, call AAA? How would he explain the quivering girl in the passenger seat, and all that stuff in the back?
You watch as the deer gets away. She’s not coming to save you. But behind her, you spot them: black birds, at least ten of them, pecking at a tree trunk.
“It’s called a murder,” you say.
The truck rolls past the birds. They turn their beady eyes up to you, like your presence compels them to believe in something.
He takes his foot off the gas pedal. The truck stops. He turns to look at you. Really look at you, for the first time.
Blue eyes, you think. How dare you have blue eyes? How dare you ruin that for everybody?
“What did you just say?” he asks.
You tilt your head toward the birds.
“That’s what they call a group of crows. Not a flock or a fleet or anything. A murder of crows.”
His Adam’s apple bobs up and down. What you just said, it must mean something to him. You don’t know if it’s good or bad. You don’t know if it’s anything of value.
You don’t know it yet, but this man has a family. A daughter and a wife, whose cancer has just returned.
You don’t know it yet, but this man has trouble believing in anything. For the first time since he started killing, he has trouble believing in himself.
He turns to face the road. His fingers grip the steering wheel, white knuckles on black polyurethane.
Outside the truck, a crow flies away.
The truck starts again. He gives it some gas, then veers to the right. The truck comes to a halt. He steers the other way, across the road, and hits the gas pedal. Your body shifts against the seat, rocked by his maneuvering.
A U-turn.
A fucking U-turn.
You have no idea what this means.
He takes one hand off the wheel and shuffles around the glove compartment until he finds a bandanna.
“Put this on,” he says.
You don’t move.
“Over your eyes,” he says impatiently, like Don’t make me change my mind.
You bandanna yourself blind.
He drives and drives and drives. It could be forty minutes or sixty or two hundred. You hear his breath, slow, with the occasional sigh. The tap of his fingers on the wheel. Pedals groaning underneath his feet.
Some jerks, followed by a never-ending straight line. The truck slows down. You hear the brakes, the gearshift squeaking this way and that. The engine goes quiet.
A tug at the back of your head. The bandanna slips off your face. You try to look around, but he grabs your chin so you’re forced to focus on him.
“We’re going to do this quickly,” he tells you. He’s holding the gun again, waving it in your face. “We’re going to get out of here and walk together.”
Then, the rules. “If you try anything—anything at all, we’re going back to the truck.” He waits, like Did you hear what I just said?
You nod. He steps out of the truck, grabs a couple of items from the backseat—the handcuffs and the rope, from what you can see—and collects you on the other side. “Don’t look around,” he says, “just keep your eyes on the ground.” His hand clasps your left arm, so tight you feel bruises forming.
He walks you away from his truck and down a long, winding dirt path. You sneak glances. Already, you are learning to take what you can. You catch a flash of the house and the matching buildings surrounding it on the property. No neighbors. His garden, lovely and well tended. You want to cling to it all, but he is a man with a purpose, climbing a hill. He is a man taking you to a shed.
The door shuts behind you. You don’t know it yet, but this is when it happens. This is when your world freezes into a new shape.
At this point in time, the shed is a work in progress. Tools strewn across the floor, a bag of fertilizer in a corner. Foldable chair and table, a pile of magazines—porn or guns, you can’t tell for sure. Probably a mix of both.
This is his space. You will find out later on that he has started preparing it for the faint, distant, entirely theoretical possibility of someone like you. Someone he might like to keep. He has soundproofed it. Padded the floor with a rubber mat, run his hands on the walls and plugged every last gap with caulk. It’s not done, though. You are not the one he meant to keep. You are a spur-of-the-moment decision, an impulse buy.
He will return the next day to finish the job. He will nail a chain to the wall. He will remove his stuff, clear the space. He will make it yours. For now, he brings your hands behind your back and handcuffs you. Ties the rope around your ankles, knots it around the door handle.
“I need to go to the house for a minute,” he says. “I’m the only one home. If you scream, I’m the only one who will hear you, and I won’t be happy. Believe me.”
You believe him.
As soon as the door shuts behind him, you try. You wriggle your wrists, twist your ankles, reach for tools. But he knows how to handcuff someone. He knows how to tie a knot. And he knows to move his tools out of reach from the woman he just tied up in his garden shed.
You need to trust that people will look for you. Your photo will circulate on social media. Your parents and Julie—your throat closes at the thought of them—will put up posters. They will give interviews, plead for your safe return.
You need to trust that this is temporary, and one day the world will find you.
But there are things you know that he doesn’t. Things that will work to his advantage. Anyone who knows you will say that you haven’t been yourself. That prior to your disappearance, you became withdrawn. You fell asleep in class. Your grades suffered. You packed your belongings, left the city you loved and the people you knew.
A new story will emerge. Days will go by, weeks, months. People will say it to themselves at first, and then, as they get more comfortable, to one another: Maybe you went missing on purpose. Maybe you drove somewhere and allowed yourself to slip out of existence. You jumped into a ravine, fell into water. Maybe you started over somewhere else. Maybe you are free, finally, of your demons.
No one waits for their dead to come back to life.
Eventually, people will stop looking for you. They will stop showing your picture. They will let you fade away. They will stop telling your story, until one day you’re the only one left to remember it.