I’m writing these words in complete darkness.
I can’t see this pen or paper in front of me.
I’m forming these words carefully in straight lines across the paper—assuming this handwriting will be clear enough to read—whoever ends up reading it—if anyone ends up reading it.
I’m writing this purely by feel. Like everything I do in here. The darkness is so black, so absolute, my eyes are useless. Still in working order presumably, but with no current function. I’ve never seen what surrounds me here, and if I am brought out of here the way I was brought in, I never will.
I can only feel for, and imagine, what it looks like around me. I’m reduced, literally, to my imagination. Sometimes I catch myself wondering if there’s anything really there, at my ink-black periphery. But of course, I know there is. I know too well the solidity, the thickness, that is there.
I gave up kicking. I kicked furiously for a little while, then began to worry about conserving my energy.
I gave up screaming. The screaming made me feel better—a release—but only for a moment. It’s such a tight, close space, my eardrums rang from my own screaming. Soon enough I knew it was pointless. It was only wearing me out.
I can only speculate about where I am. My initial kicking yielded only a sense of the solidity of my container. And the solidity of what surrounds me, beyond my container. The solid, discouraging thunk and thud of thickness, of substance. Of don’t-kid-yourself-you-ain’t-goin’-nowhere.
It’s about three feet high, give or take, too low to stand up in, so I periodically clench my legs, pump them, shift them, have done that since I got here. I keep count, track the repetitions in my head, to make sure I’m doing it long enough to qualify as exercise, to keep my blood flowing.
Not surprisingly, you quickly lose all sense of time. You have no way to gauge it. They took my watch, of course, its dim dial a beacon of order and organization. Who would have thought I’d miss its seconds, minutes, and hours so acutely?
It’s dank. Which is why I assume I’m belowground. How far belowground? Three feet, fifteen feet, a hundred? In an old mine shaft? An abandoned well? An industrial fill site? An old cave? I have no idea. Or is the dankness just my own mustiness at this point, my own anxious sweat, a coating of worry?
It’s silent. The noise of life totally gone. I hear only my own sounds—the beat of my breathing, my shifting—which I am acutely conscious of one minute, then forget about the next, and am again conscious of the minute after that. Part of the antipodal rhythm in here: hyper-self-awareness, and then, a moment later, no sense of a self at all.
The air pipe is about eight inches wide. It lets them drop me food without my ever setting eyes on any of them. Without their risking my seeing them, identifying them.
Potatoes. Fresh fruit. A can of beans. A carton of juice. There’s a little porcelain bowl in the corner. My hands stumbled onto it when I first felt around me, and its function was immediately obvious. The stench I have to bear. Overwhelming at first—you gag as it marinates at such close range, but then, as the days wore on, it was hardly noticeable. Smell, like sight, is a sense that can be suspended by circumstance, apparently. And when (on the second day? the third day?) they lowered a clean bowl balanced in a simple rope sling, I understood well enough. I took the clean bowl off the sling and carefully—very carefully—put the filled one in it.
It feels like a coffin. But it’s not a coffin, I remind myself. It’s somewhat taller, a little wider. If it felt too much like a coffin, if it felt too much like you were buried alive, you might go crazy. It needs to feel just enough like it is not a coffin. They know this, I’m sure. They know how to keep you—they need to keep you—just this side of sanity. Crazy, you have no value to anyone—and that’s not the condition they want you in.
No noise, no sound, except the slight scratching of this pen skating across the paper, the click of my punctuation landing on the page, correctly, I hope, in the otherwise utter, exaggerated silence around me.
This thick stack of paper, these dozen pens, mysteriously here for me, greeting my searching hands on my arrival.
Trying to keep straight lines, keep enough space between them, not bunch them too close. I’m carefully rotating the pens, switching to a new one every few pages, to maximize the chances that my words are actually making it onto the page.
I’m writing this as fast as I can, because I don’t know how much time I have.
Maybe only another minute. Maybe another week. Maybe a month. Maybe eternity. (I’m trying not to think about that last too closely, trying to push the thought away, but it’s hard to push anything beyond these thick dank walls.) And although there is the chance they want me to write only to see what I know—and then they’ll bury it along with me—there’s also the chance they want me to write it for some actual, future use, where my story, my version of events, is genuinely valued.
Because the paper and pens are presumably here for a reason. Merely to keep me sane? Or to drive me crazy? Or for some purpose opaquely between those two?
IF YOU WERE awake, alert to the world around you, if you were honest with yourself, you saw it coming. We all did.
The only surprise, really, was that it hadn’t happened before.
You could certainly hear it, couldn’t you, in the commentary of your coworkers, delivered in a jaded tone of inevitability. You could read about it in the sober news articles, see it quantified in the accompanying charts, couldn’t miss it in the strident, alarm-bell editorials.
You could hear the phrases—the verbal shorthand—passed slickly, knowingly back and forth like hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party. Bandied around by the cable commentators, by your frail and alarmist eighty-five-year-old neighbor, by the couple behind you in the theater just before the film starts.
Growing income disparity. Richer and poorer. Two Americas—separating fast.
Disappearing middle class. We’re becoming South America.
(You were at those dinner parties, weren’t you, where you discussed or at least acknowledged the two Americas, in the form of outrageous CEO pay and equally absurd minimum wage, and the dangerously growing chasm between rich and poor, the protesters camped in city parks across the country—and yet blithely and eagerly and with no sense of irony in the next moment you exchanged recommendations on landscape crews or designer clothing sales or highlights of your last golf round. No inherent accusation. I saw you at those parties. You saw me.)
If you were alert, you saw it coming—a by-product of the slow-motion collapse of our financial system—its immense granite and marble pieces in their thunderous fall to earth sending out a vast rising cloud of unemployment and a billowing dust of anomie, desperation, and foreclosure, on homes, futures, lives—combined with a government that, it turned out, couldn’t protect its citizenry in the aftermath of a bad Gulf storm, or win little wars of its own devising against third-rate countries with crackpot dictators—a government paralyzed by partisanship and infighting like a parlor full of quarrelsome aunts—so how could it ever be effective against the guerrilla nature and craft of what was coming….
So it became in a way inevitable, and finally, it was here: our latest import. Like fresh flowers from Peru and Uruguay. Like our silent diligent busboys and landscapers and masons from Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras. Like our coffee from Colombia and Brazil. Simply the latest South American product.
Kidnapping.
Not like snatching the Lindbergh baby, though, with catchphrases and newspaper headlines and newsstand sales. Not disenfranchised white-trash moms or laid-off dads using a stolen kid as a pawn. Not taking a kid from a mall parking lot. Not kidnapping for emotional leverage in a disastrous marriage or as a political statement, but much more pure and direct than that.
Kidnapping for money. Simple commerce. The business of kidnapping. A business we’d never had. A vast new enterprise galloping onto the American economic landscape, with a cottage industry of security firms, private police, alarm systems, tracking devices, springing up around it.
Yes, at some level, inevitable. An utterly logical extension of social forces and events—illegal immigration, income disparity, economic meltdown, and our battered but still mythic virtues of private enterprise and free-market capitalism.
A broad social problem that fractured like a fragile jigsaw puzzle into individual problems, each piece its own island of woe. A social problem, arriving where you never really believe broad social problems will arrive—at your own doorstep.
SPEAKING OF DOORSTEPS: follow me now across this particular one… that of a fancy building where the hum of Fifth Avenue goes suddenly silent behind me as I enter the building’s vaults and coolness. Where I announce myself and my destination, which solicits a raised eyebrow of appraisal and then a quick nod of approval from the uniformed doorman. Where the whispering whoosh of soft oiled mechanics is all I hear ascending in the dark cherrywood elevator—with a plush bench with embroidered cushion along one side for a weary matron or pampered child. My entry into the apartment is closely supervised by the uniformed maid, leading me along a corridor of original neoclassical, Impressionist, and New York Brutalist canvases, and antique maps dating to the Renaissance, letting out in a mahogany den anchored by an immense Louis XIV desk—huge leather chairs facing it, and a fireplace behind it where perfect blond logs smoke and crackle.
It could be the apartment of a corporate law firm’s senior partner, or the New York residence of a multinational’s CEO, or the Manhattan retreat of a Midwestern industrialist or a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It is in fact the home of my brother.
He could be any of those. It doesn’t much matter, for the purposes of this record. In fact, his social group crosses the borders of all those occupations. They whack the little white ball around together expertly, second nature, while they throw deals each other’s way.
We occupy different universes, which intersect, only glancingly, on Thanksgiving and Christmas. His adorable young daughters have never flown commercially. His goateed chef, Armando, travels everywhere with them. I’ve observed a steady process of increasing insulation—big tracts of land, private schooling, home delivery of groceries and goods—anything to cut off interaction with the world at large.
But the more our lives have diverged, the more our bonds of love must be proved to each other, and provide proof to ourselves—See, it’s not about worldly circumstance, it’s about something deeper—to reaffirm the pride in our connection.
He just bought an island off Nova Scotia. He’s also got one in the Caribbean. His friends are buying them, too—it’s the thing to do. The island of their existence was at first merely metaphorical. Now they’re isolating themselves physically as well. Islands used to be an impractical fantasy—inaccessible, wildly impossible to build on and maintain. But personal jet travel—and the absurdly outsized returns in a previously humming world economy—have revived the allure of island life.
“Coming along,” he says of his Nova Scotia property. “Guesthouse and dock are done. Main house has a ways to go. I’ll have you up soon.” I’ll get my few days, shoehorned in between his high-powered, like-walleted guests—his friends.
We rarely talk business. He’s an investor, a capitalist. I’m an investigative journalist. (I’m a freelancer, and the small circle of online publications I work for now each want their own coverage of, their own angle on, the kidnapping story—a story too pervasive, too personal to not be covering—and like all my assignments, it will help pay my modest but rising rent.) He is establishment, the power structure, there to maintain it and enhance it; I’m there to question it, challenge it, rattle it, shake it up. We are like brothers lining up on opposite sides of the scrimmage line, brothers divided by a civil war—but have rarely said anything to acknowledge it. In truth, we both enjoy it, I think—bracketing the world, encompassing the world, from its opposite sides.
But now our lives are at risk of intersecting beyond the holidays. Because if certain criminal parties learn that an investigative journalist on their trail is the only brother of a wealthy financier, grabbing me both silences me and promises a payday—maybe too tempting a combination to resist. So I owe my brother this visit, to say what I’m working on (I wouldn’t let him deter me, and he wouldn’t bother to try), and to warn him how it makes us both a target.
And once pleasantries are aside, and I explain the nature of my latest assignment and my concerns, I double-check—only in passing, making the assumption—that he is already carrying some kind of kidnapping insurance.
He pauses a long beat, looking at me. Examining me. “I have no kidnapping insurance.”
The risk professional? The consummate arbitrageur of risk and return? My puzzled expression asks: Why not?
He smiles grimly—his shifted lips a parallelogram of irony—and mutters gruffly: “Too expensive. Can’t afford it.”
Meaning what?
“Me, my wife, my kids, we’re uninsurable,” he says. He looks out, explains in simple terms to the neophyte. “To take the risk of covering me, anticipating what kidnappers would ask, an insurance company would want… well…” and here, I can tell, he is careful to avoid the specifics, “… it would come to a sum that you, that I, that anyone, would find incomprehensible. So it’s just not worth it.” He smiles at the irony. “We’ve got too much money to be insurable.”
I’m silent. I’ve never imagined such a problem.
He explains a little more. How it’s actually worse than that. More complicated. The insurance companies can’t tell what he’s worth. “So they can’t assign a value or formula to me. And they won’t work without their formulas.
“But here’s the thing. My business life has been built on risk. Assessing it, quantifying it, minimizing it. Being proactive and anticipatory about it. Acting on risk. This is just another case of risk. That’s how I’m looking at it.”
Proactive and anticipatory. Acting on risk. Calculating life down to the financial, to its plus and minus columns. That’s how he’s gotten where he is.
He turns serious, dutiful. “I’ve started interviewing guards,” he says. “Seen some impressive candidates. It’s not a terrible arrangement, for them or me. These guys will be your fourth for golf or tennis. They’ll drive your ski-boat. Even make a decent meal or two on the chef’s night off. Ex-military, most of them. Physically fit, mentally sharp. Of course, you’ve got to watch your womenfolk.” He smiles wolfishly.
So he is protecting himself and his family, at least. But we both still know that he is sitting across from his greatest liability. A condition that long precedes my accepting the kidnapping assignment. For the wealthy, poor relations are always a burden. Their ruined evenings and sleepless nights. For everyone like my brother, it will always be someone like me—someone entrenched in the messy daily world he tries to absent himself from—who will define and demonstrate where familial responsibility begins and ends.
AND NOW, OF course, it has come to pass. And if the kidnappers know what they are doing, they have begun with my wife, given her an impossible sum for us to cobble together, but one that he can handle—not without a wince or two—so that it is she who must approach him. With her anxiety, with her tears, with my two- and four-year-old daughters in tow, she’ll presumably make a far more effective salesman on his threshold than some cold South American voice on the phone.
I see my wife there in that same lonely leather seat opposite his massive Louis XIV desk, or standing by his plane amid the wind and engine noise on an agreed-upon tarmac, making the case to him, wondering why she even should have to, resenting his somber nod, knowing he has already decided what to do, or what not to. Already, perhaps, without her knowledge, through his network of contacts, engineering my release.
AND NOW LET me pull you into the dark with me again. A far different quality of dark than the one that surrounds me now.
Wait with me… pulse pounding… in the dark of a storage closet of an insurance company that happens to sit two floors above the trading floor of a brokerage firm—a brokerage firm where my research, my interviews, my tips, my instincts, have all led me.
A dark alive with anticipation, with a sense of mission and purpose.
A dark that I controlled, that I had chosen and arranged. By flowing in with dozens of glum wordless workers, who assumed I was simply reassigned from another building, as a number of the other workers actually seemed to be, so all my carefully practiced excuses were never needed—in fact, I never had to say a word. This silent, invisible army of the underclass, the army of night, in which a new soldier with his ID and brown uniform isn’t even noticed, much less questioned. (ID and brown uniform copied from photos on the Internet site of the maintenance company that had the building’s cleaning contract.) I earned only a wan welcoming smile or two from squat matronly Filipinos and Malaysians with no English.
Pushing my cart of supplies around the halls of the insurance company—restocking bathrooms, dumping office trash cans, replenishing my cart from the various supply closets, learning the floor’s layout as I go. Toward the end of the shift, slipping silently into the storage closet I scouted earlier, arranging the packs of paper towels and rags and smocks just so, to settle into the black silence….
Post-9/11 New York fire laws require that during office hours, stairwells between floors (and between companies) in high-rise buildings must be open and accessible.
So that when the brokerage firm’s trading day is in full swing the next morning, a new mailroom attendant (in the required uniform of pressed black slacks and white button-down shirt) is working the day shift, already out on his morning rounds….
Hushed carpeted lobby, expensively coiffed receptionists, paneled walnut and mahogany walls, a serene corporate preserve high above the street, far above the fray, operating as if unshaken, untouched, by the utter turmoil of the markets it serves, as if all is well, nothing is changed, like a man in top hat and tails strolling through the rubble of a bombing—and moments later, my dowdy mail cart and I are bursting through the regal matching mahogany doors as if through swinging saloon gates, onto the trading floor—vast cacophonous sheer space filled with computer monitors and white-shirted loose-tied bodies—leaning forward, slouching back, striding confidently, rocking nervously, a dense Bosch tableau of headsets and torsos and screens. A futuristic locked-away warehouse of men and their blinking machines, and you couldn’t ascertain which were beholden to which, which the masters, which the servants.
And as I stroll, head bowed—docile and dull—down the central corridor of this cacophony—traders murmuring, shouting, declamation, tintinnabulation—I have the sense of all commerce passing through these electronic portals, all the pounds and bushels and barrels and crates of oranges, coffee, lemons, rubber, salt, rapeseed oil, bioengineered corn and soybeans—all digitally routed through, paying homage and tithe to, this electronic crucible. The economy is in collapse, but this gear of it spins ceaselessly on an unstoppable flywheel—the continually floating, continuously adjusting assignment of value to products, of money to goods, of dollars to donuts.
I pass the desks at the end—quieter here, something more measured and mundane traded here—and push my mail cart—by instinct, by intuition—through a further, interior-most set of double doors, to another trading area—same monitors, same white-shirted young traders—but the room is much smaller, a narthex off the nave, and when I enter, a few traders turn, and look at me, and frown suspiciously.
I step closer to the monitors—an aborigine drawn to the blink and gleam.
On the monitors there are first and last names, with a five- or six-digit number next to each name….
I become light-headed, breathing deeply to steady myself. Comprehending fully, bluntly, irrevocably, what I am seeing. The blinking numbers, the tiny digits, as fragile and as clear as a life. A life, assigned a value. I watch, dumbstruck.
Listen to the smooth explanatory pitch I was subjected to over the next few days, as various silver-tongued spokesmen tried to justify, to dissuade me from my article, to educate me. “It’s clean. Antiseptic. A marketplace solution. Matching buyers and sellers. It’s a redistribution of wealth. We broker it. We’re middlemen. The South Americans know they’ll get their money—they don’t want to be in the business of killing, they prefer the business of not killing. We assist them in assigning a value—in determining that fine trading point between what they can get and what they can’t, what the maximum reasonable payout is, above which they likely won’t get a thing. And on the other side of the ledger, the victims’ families, they know we’re the experts. They know we have the experience in what the kidnappers will take, what they’ll accept. So they turn here. They know we’ll stake them, work out a payment plan they can afford.
“And as middlemen, as providers of the stable marketplace and the necessary and reliable software and experience and expertise, we take our cut. And for that cut, there’s almost no killing….
“It’s contained. Systematic. Gives the kidnappers an organized clearinghouse. Keeps them calm. Keeps people alive.”
Bring kidnapping to America, and we will Americanize it. Streamline it, polish it up, PowerPoint it.
Pork bellies, soybeans, coffee, lives, freedom.
Trading freedom.
Freedom—America’s signal promise—converted now to supply and demand.
What’s a life worth? On the one hand, of course, that can’t be determined. We’re not in a position to judge. It’s the exclusive, murky province of philosophers and of God.
On the other hand, we determine the worth of lives all the time. Every salary review. Every war reparations board. Every carat of every engagement ring. Three thousand perish, and we appoint a special master to examine and assess each claim, to distribute based on future income potential, current earnings, current responsibilities, current and future suffering. A life’s worth can’t be determined, and yet we do it every day.
And I was therefore sure, looking at those monitors, that somewhere, in data, on disc, there was a system. A score. Like a credit rating, which every financially functional American adult has assigned to them, so why not something similar? Your worth rating. What will it take, what will it cost, to get one/you/him/her back? A shorthand, a set of metrics, within which the traders negotiate, they parry, they get to yes.
And it occurred to me that such a rating wasn’t measuring something so vague as “a life’s worth.” It was measuring something far more specific. Something unaccustomed to measurement.
It was measuring love.
How much did a spouse love a spouse? How much did a family love a child? How much exactly? Because that’s what determined the price. The price to get them back. And those prices in aggregate in turn helped determine a proprietary algorithm, and the question was how you stacked up, rated, on the algorithm. Did your family want you back more than the mean? Or less than the mean? Did you want your child back more? Or less?
One’s freedom—all it required was enough love.
Those monitors: an enormous blinking Love-O-Meter.
Love, quantified.
Love, American style.
WHEN I CURL into sleep in this blackness—for a few minutes or a few hours, I can’t really tell—I pull up my knees, pull my collar up over my face, to make some recognition, at least, some gesture of order, of a differentiated state, to aid my descent into slumber. And I have another tradition that carries over from curling into sleep in my own bed in my own home. I think of my daughters. I minutely construct their faces, their big swimming wide curious eyes, their smooth soft cheeks. I picture them folding into sleep themselves—blissful, unconscious, as natural as breathing, and their example leads me, instructs me, inspires me.
My brother’s two daughters are only a few years older than my own. They are surrounded by adults—day nanny, night nanny, ubiquitous chef Armando, maids and handymen and gardeners. The girls have gotten the sense that they’re on more than equal footing with the adults. That they are, in some way, in charge. They have picked it up, presumably; felt it in the air. The predictable result? An insolence, an arrogance, a bossy willfulness. First-class brats—literally.
Yet he dotes on his girls, my brother does, lights up when they float silently into the study or kitchen in the morning, often not yet dressed, in their silk catalog pajamas. He watches them fascinated, admiring. And I understand. They move in a rarefied realm, a magical sphere, and when you are with them, you move within it a little yourself. That’s how it is for dads and daughters. A helpless addiction to their aura. No different from my own.
His daughters are lightweight. Trusting of adults. Easily transportable. Perfect kidnap candidates. But they weren’t taken. Instead, it was me.
AS I THOUGHT about the numbers on those screens—later looking closely at the photos of them I snapped with my unobtrusive little palm camera—I could see that each blinking number, each “price,” included a fraction. Which confirmed that the traders were earning a percentage. We take our cut, as I’d been told. But it wasn’t a simple fraction. It didn’t take a genius to see it was a fraction of a fraction. Which presumably meant that some other party was taking a cut, too—an unchanging, consistent cut, given the math. My brother’s words in passing returned to me: They won’t work without their formulas.
Insurance companies, I thought. After nearly choking themselves in a feast of their own toxic CDOs and credit default swaps and other exotica, going back to their roots. Their core competency. Insuring lives. Because everyone was upping their life insurance, buying more, lining up for it. To say nothing of kidnapping insurance, which had always existed for executives on South American business trips, but now there’s suddenly a broad new need for a host of new kidnap financial products. And are the insurance companies just the dumb-luck beneficiaries of this chaotic new world, or do they have a hand—a substantial, steady hand—in creating it? The percentage of a percentage revealed on those screens in that dark, quiet, interior trading room would seem to be giving me my answer.
And to maintain the value of the policies? To keep customers paying their premiums? To motivate a steady stream of new buyers? It was obvious to me that the marketplace would require the occasional killing. The killing must go on to some degree, to hold insurance rates steady; to stabilize income and guarantee return.
The insurance companies: using death and chaos as a hedge.
Death and chaos. Always a smart hedge.
You can generally count on them.
The insurance company where I crouched waiting in the dark—it wasn’t just fire doors and stairwells that connected it to the trading floor of the brokerage below it. It was an idea—the same cynical, practical, highly profitable idea. I had passed between the two companies as easily, as permeably, as fluidly, as the cynical idea itself.
OF COURSE, THERE need not be the traditional envelopes of cash anymore. The transactions could all be paperless—wire transfers, bank account to bank account, made and confirmed on the Internet from a laptop anywhere. With neutral, third-party “holding” accounts for the cash in transit, while the deals, the drop-offs, the physical transfer and reclamation details, are finalized. That’s how it would work. If the marketplace I discovered did not need to keep itself secret.
So to camouflage the existence of such an organized marketplace, there are still the smudged, crumpled envelopes of cash. To make the kidnapping continue to look primitive, dangerous, uncontrollable, criminal.
I’m pulling one of those envelopes out of my pocket now.
A white stationery envelope like any other.
A discarded envelope. Its contents already removed. Precisely the kind of envelope that could have held cash. But it was not stretched or creased or crumpled that way. It looked fairly pristine, as if it had held, if anything, only a note, and it seemed somewhat out of place, of course, there beneath me on the dirty car floor behind the front seats, where I had just been shoved forcefully, facedown, out of sight.
An envelope I scooped up and stuffed into my pocket in the brief few seconds before—hovering above me, working silently—they tied and adjusted my blindfold, bound my hands with duct tape, and delivered the little pinch in my arm that would put me out.
An envelope I scooped up because I recognized in an instant—from childhood, from my past, in a millisecond ignition from my unconscious—my brother’s handwriting on it. Which I still might not have recognized, but for what was written in it. In his distinctive arrogantly looping lettering, precisely the words I had seen written before, on cards with gifts, on previous envelopes, so many times over the years: my own name and address. But here, the address underlined repeatedly, for emphasis—and next to it, some further instruction I had no time to decipher.
I have the envelope out now. I am turning it in my hands in the dark. I have been taking it out of my pocket, turning it around in my hands, putting it back, since I got here. I can’t see it, of course. I can’t check or confirm here in the dark what my instincts told me in an instant, can’t get another look at that handwriting. But I have had nothing but time to think through, to imagine, what would be written on the note inside it.
On the back of the envelope, I can feel an embossed return address. I have run my fingernail along its ridges slowly, incessantly in the dark, trying to carefully count the letters in the embossed name, to see, to feel, whether they correspond to my brother’s. Trying the same thing with the next line, the street name and number.
This is my brother. This is where he lives. Go ahead. Take him. I offer him up to show you that you can’t threaten me. That you don’t frighten me. To show you that I am bigger than the emotions that you rely on, better than the game you play. I am in control—not you. As proof, I give you my only brother. To show you that my money, my holdings, my assets, will always come first, and that I will make any sacrifice necessary to protect them. A sacrifice all but biblical. My own brother. To show you by example that I will pay for no one. Are you contemplating grabbing any of my family? I am showing you the outcome before you even try.
Proactive. Anticipatory. A contrarian play.
True to his profession, a hedge. A hedge against calamity.
There are multiple possible versions, of course. I mull them obsessively here in the dark. Maybe something like this: Someone I know, someone I’m close to, is about to blow the story wide open. Expose the insurance companies, the collusion, the vibrant market behind closed doors. But I know how you can gain six, eight months. Six, eight months more profit. Kidnap him. Take him. You won’t hear from him, you’ll buy yourselves, the industry, months more profitability. Millions more in policies and assets. Yes, he’s my brother. Which shows you where my loyalties lie, doesn’t it? And what would I like in exchange? To avoid the same fate. Make sure we’re left alone—me, my wife, my girls.
Or maybe it was cash. The simplest deal of all, the deal tailored best to the blunt mentality on the other side. Some money in the envelope now. More to come, when you prove you have him. My brother paying his modest tithe to the system—paying what he is comfortable with, what he decides, setting the terms himself. And if those who took me decide to then try for more, they will soon see he doesn’t play games. A deal is a deal. He won’t go higher by one dime. I am the proof. I said take him, and I meant take him.
Yet how could I really think it’s my brother? Is there really any evidence beyond my brief glance at that envelope (I’m fingering the embossed return address again now, counting the letters, matching them to his own name, to our family name)—amid, after all, their hustling and jostling me, pushing me down, sandwiching me between the rows of seats, the car jerking and squealing into motion…. With any chance to examine the envelope again, to verify, having disappeared into the darkness with me….
Yes. A far more compelling piece of evidence, really. In front of me, in front of you, all along.
The pads and pens.
They would have been put here only if someone knew this box would host a writer. That this box would shortly contain someone who felt he had something to say, a story to tell. There’s even more reason for these pens and paper if someone knows roughly what I’m going to write, and wants me to write it to see what I know.
But I can’t help thinking there’s more to it. A larger, sardonic purpose of my brother’s own.
To demonstrate to the writer how useless it is to write it down. To mock him by giving him all the materials, all the time, yet while he works he knows that it will very likely be buried with him. How impotent, how futile his commitment is. How childish, how unrealistic, his view of his own importance, his own hushed, determined bid for immortality.
Go ahead, jot away. Scribble into the darkness. Because the metaphor is the reality: it is scribbling into the darkness. As unseen by you as it is likely to remain unseen by anyone else. It is mere artifact before it is even out of the box.
The world moves not by words, not by ideas, but by money. Mammon trumps all. My being inside the box, or outside the box, is merely a matter of cash.
Write to your heart’s content, he is saying to me. Rip the lid off an industry, expose fraud, right wrongs, summon justice. The world goes on without you. The world tramples you underfoot, figuratively and literally. You are a voice deep beneath the ground. A voice unheard.
It is a mockery, a lesson, a puzzle, a deal—all rolled efficiently into one. The operational efficiency he always strives for, my brother. The stack of empty paper, the pile of unused pens. It bears his signature. It’s what he has written to me. Clear in message, clear in tone. Without resorting to words at all.
I HAVE BEEN here long enough, pondered the possibility, toyed amateurishly with the physics. How long will I have if the air supply is cut, if the eight-inch pipe is stuffed up with a rag or crumpled T-shirt? That’s how they would do it—not to have to see the victim, or think about him or her. How long would I have? A half hour? Fifteen minutes? Ten? Five? In which case, will I go bleary? Illogical? My mind and writing hand sloping toward the nonsensical? I’m no scientist, but certainly it would be a process… the oxygen slowly decreasing, competence vanishing, the brain giving in before the body. My mind—my trusty, true, sole, final companion—giving out just before the rest of me, sacrificing itself as if selflessly, in some ultimate, elaborate hallucination, some final incandescence, before the permanent dark. The CO2 gathering, hanging in the blackness, starting to explore the seams and crevices and crannies of my box as if with curiosity, as if in reconnaissance, until it coils in on itself, until there is no more for it to explore….
Voices.
Voices above me.
A murmur—I can’t hear specific words. But it isn’t the silent delivery of the daily food drop. It’s multiple voices, movement up there.
My brother’s voice? I think. The negotiator, making the deal?
Trying to be a faithful scribe here. Keeping pen to page.
Heart pounding with anticipation…
Hands shaking…
Head spinning…
Short of breath…
All the signs of my own excitement…
Suddenly muffled.
Fainter now…
Do I still hear them?…
Did I ever?…
I AM WRITING these words in the light.
Stunned to be blinking in the brightness.
Stunned by what I see.
A huge warehouse of thick concrete containers… dozens of them…
Each with an air pipe extending from one end…
Each container twenty, thirty feet from the next… thick enough, far enough apart to fool us each into thinking we’re alone…
The air pipes extending up, like chimneys, to fool us into thinking we are buried deep…
Extending up to a high catwalk, from which the food is obviously dropped…
Thick concrete containers in orderly rows. A graveyard of the living.
Organized. Institutional. I should have imagined such efficiencies of scale—a trading floor, after all; corporations, after all. Why could I not imagine that my unseen tenders were tending all of us, like a herd of animals in a barn? Keeping us fattened up to fetch our price at auction.
I should have imagined something like this….
Victims wouldn’t normally be allowed to see this, I’m sure. I’m sure you’re released as you were brought in—blindfolded.
So why the exception for me?
My brother. He must have paid. I must have been wrong about him. He has saved me.
Then where is he?
Where are my captors who have finally let me go?
Where is anyone?
The concrete containers are all still sealed. But I am somehow outside mine….
Moving alone through this light-flooded warehouse…
Imagination my only companion…
The warehouse is so vivid…. The light is so strange….
Pen still up. Like a sword for battle. Writing, writing it all…
And at last I can see these words and letters as I write….
I can see them, even in this utter darkness….
So am I released from mine?…
I must be.
I am.
I am released.
Pen down.