“Bring me a salad,” Ellen says. “No dressing. That I will eat.”
The nerve! Em thinks. As if I were a serving girl! As if I were her ladies’ maid!
She does something then she will later regret, because it gives away too much of herself. She takes the bottle of water from her apron pocket, raises it to her lips, and drinks. Then she pours the rest out over the railing.
The girl says nothing.
2
A day later.
Professor Rodney Harris (Life Sciences, emeritus) stands in front of the cell, cogitating. Ellen Craslow looks back at him, calm. Or so she seems. There are a couple of blisters on her lips now, there are pimples on her forehead, and the smooth cocoa loveliness of her skin has turned ashy. But her eyes—a startling green—are brilliant in their deepening sockets.
Roddy is a respected biologist and nutritionist. Before his retirement he was a teacher sometimes revered and more often feared by his students. A bibliography of his published work would fill a dozen pages, and he still keeps up a lively correspondence in various journals with his peers. That he considers himself first among those peers doesn’t strike him as conceited. As someone wise once said, It ain’t bragging if it’s true.
He’s not angry at this girl the way Em is (she says she isn’t, but they have been married for over fifty years and he knows her better than she knows herself), but Ellen certainly perplexes him. She must have been disoriented when she woke up, the way the others were, they use a powerful drug to knock their subjects out, but she didn’t seem disoriented. If she was hungover—and she must have been that, too—she didn’t complain of it. She didn’t scream for help, as Cary Dressler did almost at once (must have made his headache that much worse, Roddy thinks) and as Jorge Castro had eventually. And of course she has refused to eat, although it’s been almost three days now, and over two since she finished off the last of the water she’s been allowed.
The liver Em brought down yesterday has darkened and begun to smell. It’s still edible but won’t be for much longer. Another few hours and she’d probably vomit it back up, which would make the whole thing pointless. Meanwhile, time is flicking past.
“If you don’t eat, my dear, you’ll starve,” he says in a mild voice his students of yore wouldn’t recognize; as a lecturer, Roddy had a tendency to be rapid, excitable, sometimes even shrill. When talking about the wonders of the stomach—serosa, pylorus, duodenum—his voice sometimes rose to a near scream.
Ellen says nothing.
“Your body has already begun to digest itself. It’s visible on your face, your arms, the way you stand, slightly slumped…”
Nothing. Her eyes on his. She hasn’t asked what they want, which is also perplexing and (admit the truth) rather disturbing. She knows who they are, she knows that if they let her go they will be arrested for kidnapping (only the first charge of many), ergo they can’t let her go, but there has been no bargaining and no begging. Just this hunger strike. She told Em she would gladly eat a salad, but that is out of the question. Salads, whether dressed or undressed, are not sacrament. Meat is sacrament. Liver is sacrament.
“What are we to do with you, dear?” Sadly.
At this point he would expect a prisoner—a normal prisoner—to say something ridiculous like let me go and I won’t say a word to anybody. This girl, hungry and thirsty or not, knows better.
Roddy pushes the plate with the slab of liver on it a little closer. “Eat that and you’ll feel your strength return at once. The feeling will be extraordinary.” He tries a thin joke: “We’ll turn you into a carnivore in no time.”
There’s still no response, so he starts for the stairs.
Ellen says, “I know what that is.”
He turns back. She is pointing to the big yellow box at the far end of the workshop. “It’s a woodchipper. You’ve got it turned to the wall so I can’t see the intake, but I know what it is. My uncle has worked in the woods up north all his life.”
At his age Rodney Harris would have thought himself beyond surprise, but this young woman is full of them. Most extraordinary, almost like discovering a canine prodigy that can count.
“It’s how you’ll get rid of me, isn’t it? I’ll go through the hose and into a big bag and the bag will go in the lake.”
He stares, mouth agape.
“How do you… why would you think that?”
“Because it’s the safest place. There’s a TV show, Dexter, about a man who kills people and gets rid of them in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe you’ve seen it.”
They have seen it, of course.
This is terrible. Like she’s reading his mind. Their mind, because when it comes to their captives—and the sacrament—he and Em think alike.
“You have a boat. Don’t you, Professor Harris?”
This girl was a mistake. She’s a sport, an outlier, they might not come across another like her in a hundred years.
He goes upstairs without saying anything else.
3
Em is in her study. It’s crammed with so many books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves that there’s barely room for her desk. Some of the books have been set aside in a corner to make room for a thick folder with WRITING SAMPLES printed on the cover in neat block letters.
Two framed pictures flank her desktop computer. One is of a very young Roddy and Em, he in a morning suit (rented) and she in the traditional white bridal dress (purchased by her parents). The other shows a much older Roddy and Em, he in a joke admiral’s hat and she with a common sailor’s Dixie cup cocked rakishly on her beauty shop curls. They are standing in front of their newly purchased (but gently used) Mainship 34. Em has a bottle of cheap champagne in one hand, which she will soon use to christen their boat the Marie Cather—Marie as in Stopes, Cather as in Willa. Their marriage has always been a partnership.
On the screen of her computer, Em’s watching Ellen Craslow sitting on the futon in her cage, legs crossed, head in hands, shoulders shaking. Roddy bends over Em’s shoulder for a closer look.
“She stood there until you were gone, then just collapsed,” Em says, not without satisfaction.
The girl raises her head and looks up at the camera. Although she’s been crying, her eyes look dry. Roddy isn’t surprised. It’s dehydration at work.
“You heard everything?” he asks his wife.
“Yes. She’s intuited a lot, hasn’t she?”
“Not intuition, logic. Plus, she recognized the woodchipper. Neither of the others did. What are we going to do, Emmie? Suggestions, please.”
She considers it while they look at the girl in the cage. Neither of them feel pity for Ellen, or even sympathy. She is a problem to be solved. In a way, Roddy thinks the problem is a good thing. They are still relatively new to this. Every solved problem adds to efficiency, as every scientist knows.
At last she says, “Let’s see what happens tomorrow.”
“Yes. I think that’s right.”
He straightens up and idly thumbs the thick folder of writing samples. This spring semester’s writer-in-residence at Bell’s greatly respected (almost legendary) fiction workshop will be a woman named Althea Gibson, author of two novels that reviewed well and sold poorly. As with several previous in-residence authors, Gibson has been more than willing to have Emily Harris do the initial applicant winnowing, and although the pay is a pittance, Em enjoys the work. This was an offer Jorge Castro declined, preferring to go through the stacks of writing samples himself. Thought having Emily do the pre-screening was beneath him. Em has noticed how many fags are uppity, and thinks it’s probably compensation. Also… all that solitary running.