Woke Up Lonely (16 page)

I think, too, that the press will want to sensationalize what’s going on here, but I prefer the facts and a list of my doings: The seeding and growth of a therapeutic movement whose recruits are legion. A snatching from the Frenchies of philosophy the whys of bereavement and isolation. A crusade for the idea that if companionship makes you feel twice as lonely as you were before, it’s because you’re not doing it right. Disclosing, sharing. Principles! They’re in the charter book, no need to labor them here.

Other behaviors that might warrant the
crazy
moniker if taken out of context: a blossomed rapport with North Korea; an intent taken up by some of my people to declare sovereign multiple counties nationwide; and, yesterday, the detaining of four federal employees, for which I bear full load.

And so this video, to be distributed in the event this doesn’t work out as planned. Because there are other facts you can’t know unless I tell you directly. For instance: Two weeks ago, I saw my wife and daughter for the first time in nearly ten years. After, I spoke to my wife for about ten minutes, during which conversation she promised or at least strongly implied she would be in touch. But she has not. Not in person, not at all. And I have not been able to locate her or my daughter since. Another problem? I cannot carry on this way without them. And so: I consider these desperate times. Why
wouldn’t
they call for desperate measures?

The four people imprisoned in my den—I found them snooping across my lawn. In coveralls and work boots. They’d come in a repair truck, which idled by the curb. It bore the Cinergy logo and tag, The Power of Change, which claimed for the gas and electric company more esteem than it was due. I took down the license plate and had my head of security check it out. Then I waited. I sat on a couch, which felt like plywood.

I hate being here. This place is a clink. Three stories, fifteen rooms, stone facade, lintels. A Renaissance Revival in a corner of Ohio. See those windows? My head of security—his name is Dean—says they’re bulletproof, UV resistant, and self-tinting. I think my Murphy bed is some kind of escape vehicle. And at night, when I’m scrubbing my teeth with the electric toothbrush he gave me last month, I think it checks my vitals.

This part of Cincinnati was his choice, too. A couple miles north of the four-block nexus called downtown, with its stadiums and street-name blandishments, Rosa Parks Street and Freeman Avenue. Since 1990, people have been fleeing this town in droves. Mine was the first new place to go up in years, which meant that every contractor in town wanted in. And yesterday, when we needed extra rebar—because what is a kidnapping without a cell?—the material was here ASAP. Not that rebar is the incarcerating metal of choice—the stuff bends, after all—but the point is verisimilitude.

Dean called back to say Cinergy didn’t have any trucks with the plate number I gave him—no surprise there. And yet a little surprising. What sort of infiltration party was this?

I watched the four technicians clod through the snow. Their coveralls were insulated and bulky, so that one guy looked like he walked on the moon, another like he had a pillow between his legs. They’d come under the pretense of wanting to dislodge a manhole cover. Who had the crowbar?

The third tech was Indian and held his clipboard upside down. The girl had trouble with her tool belt. One of the guys stared up at the sky like maybe my house had launched itself there. The tech with pillow pants had a video camera. He held it to his eye with his index finger on the zoom. I looked at his face; he looked almost happy.

Next they hopped the fence and were closing in as though they meant to ring the bell. I thought about going out there myself. Instead, I buzzed for Norman, COO of the Helix, who seemed to have anticipated the call and was here in three seconds. In a double-breasted blazer and chinos. A button-down that fought with the insurgency of his waist. A tie and kerchief.

“I saw them,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

I could feel my Adam’s apple ascend but not come down. “Taking pictures,” I said. “We can’t have that.”

“It’s not a problem. And there’s nothing to see anyway. Just forget them. They’ll leave eventually.”

“And then what?”

Norman shrugged. He has a way of looking depressed no matter the context, as though his face were stuck in range of a vacuum hose hitched to his neck and always on. He is barely five-five, and alone with his color on this side of town. I’ve been told Cincinnati is the sixth-most segregated city in America, and to the extent that Norman is the only black man I’ve seen in months, I can only imagine what the first five are like.

“We go on with our work,” he said. “There’s an event with Pack 3, Colorado, in two days. You’re expected.”

“Our work,” I said, and I moved away from the window. How much was I really caring about our work? I tried to picture my daughter. She’d been so well bundled on the street, I could barely see her face. God knows what she must think of me. If she even knows I am alive, it’s possible she despises me in ways she feels without words but will put words to soon enough. She is almost ten, which is when your kid feelings petrify and cornerstone the prison that becomes your psychic life from then on.

I asked Norman if any of my people in D.C. had checked in. They had not. He wanted to know why, but I didn’t tell him. There are just some things you cannot share. Even with your oldest friend. Poor Norman. He’s been my wingman ever since we were kids. He has flirted with Centers for Change and Reevaluation Counseling, est and the Way, and lived in New York with Fred Newman’s crew on the Upper West Side. By the time he came to the Helix he was already steeped in a version of Manichaean paranoia: from his toil could develop an end to grief but in his sloth would be the demise of man. Talk about pressure.

He asked if we could just get on with the day. He said we had a lot to do.

And I knew he was right. I should forget about the techs, the snoops, the surveillance, and get on with my life. What I’m trying to say is: It’s not like I didn’t understand what this situation would do to Norman and the Helix. I even scanned his face and tried to find in its expression qualities that
wouldn’t
get trashed when this thing was over. I went: Hope, trust, loyalty, faith, and ticked off each one. But that didn’t stop me. Because what kind of life am I having without my family?

I said: “Norman, this is what I want. I want you to bring those four people in. They are trespassing. We can’t have it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I want you to bring them in and keep them here until further notice.” And with that I turned my back on him, knowing that in some way, it’d be out of my hands from then on.

“But we don’t even know who they are. And we certainly don’t need that kind of attention. Florida just cleared five thousand. I’m going down there next week to make the Pack official.”

“Great. All the more reason to protect ourselves. Now just do what I say.”

His mouth opened, but he knew the discussion was over. He backed out of the room. His face seemed to drag across the floor.

On his way out, I told him to get them hoods. I didn’t want to see their faces, didn’t want to know their names.

Which brings me to the present. I now have four hostages I will gladly exchange for my wife and child. I will make a ransom tape and make my demands clear. But I don’t know if it will work, and if it doesn’t, then I would like to ask for something else, which is this: the chance to humanize this story so that among those for whom the expiry of my life will come as good news, there are two who might someday know of the sorrow wrought in my heart for them.

Thurlow put on his gym pants and a long-sleeved polyester crew and made for the sauna. Five pounds in five minutes, sweat therapy. He was what the professionals call TOFI: thin outside, fat inside. A skinny fat person, no muscle tone at all. His body fat percentage was 25, which he knew thanks to a medical resident, a dietician, who came once a fortnight to tell him how close he was to heart failure. She looked grim every time.

He opened the sauna door and found his crew waiting, as always, for the morning meeting. In attendance were Norman, Grant, Dean, in a sweat born of the excitement to which they were newly wed. That and the heat, 168 and rising. Norman wet the coals. The walls were Nordic spruce with burls that dilated in the grain if you stared at them too long. Thurlow sat on the top bench. His tennis socks were wet and printed the wood like flippers.

They’d had the hostages for twenty-four hours. Now it was time to deal.

Norman said, “I found a lighting crew in the area. And someone for hair and makeup. So how about we schedule filming for three o’clock—can we say three?” He swiped a finger across his brow and flicked what was there at the tile.

Dean’s voice surged above the wheezing stones. “I was hoping to get you first. For gear and training. It’s a brave new world. But we’re ready.”

Grant stared at his toes, which were bound in sandals and swelled with blood. He was the youngest there, twenty-nine and schooled in technologies that kept the Helix current. “We’re gonna need more bandwidth, that’s for shit sure. Our site’s gonna pop.”

“Totally ready,” Dean said, with fists upraised. “Bring it on.” He was dappled red in an allotment that seemed miserly in this context—it was 172 by now—but enviable the rest of the time. He never looked flustered; he was totally ready.

“A ransom tape,” Grant said. “So excellent. It’ll go viral in two minutes, so we have to be prepared.”

“Exactly so,” Norman said. “And with it, we will get our message out worldwide.” He flung his arms as if to compass
worldwide
but stopped quick. “Which is the point, right?” And here he looked at Thurlow, whose eyes closed immediately. Norman’s will to believe was profound. He had to believe; what else did he have? “We were stagnating,” Norman said. “Of course. I can see that now. I slept on it, and now I can see it plain. So we’ll use the tape to raise awareness. To let everyone know how dire the situation is out there by having these people
perform
what it feels like to be alone. To be severed from the world. So really, this isn’t a kidnapping so much as social art. Is that right?”

“Correct,” Thurlow said, though the word seemed to drop from his lips like a brick. “Now get going.”

Meeting adjourned. But Thurlow didn’t move. And when he checked in with his will to move, all evidence suggested this torpor would be ongoing. Brave new world? Gear and training? He’d had one night to indulge the romance of what he’d done before the logistics rained out the wedding.

The four hostages worked for the Department of the Interior, which was odd, to say the least. Who would send these people? They didn’t seem to know themselves.

Thurlow got changed and went to the den. The hostages were sitting on the floor in burlap hoods, with hands cuffed behind their backs. One of them had been unable to coerce his gams into the lotus position, so he’d taken to flapping them like butterfly wings. Another was davening, less in prayer than distress, like one of the nuts you see in the ward or someone who needed a bathroom. The girl was unmoved, and the Indian—it was like his body hair was about to ignite for the tinder of being here and for the way he hated the Helix. Thurlow could feel this, though the man hadn’t said a word. But it didn’t matter. In a few hours, Thurlow would be in a director’s chair. In the room: four hostages who had no burden except to hold up the day’s newspaper and appear not dead. In his head: his wife and child and the bliss of their return, for which he’d ransom the four alongside the faith of every person who believed in him. Starting with Norman.

Thurlow adjusted his chair. Turned on the desk lamp. Turned it off. This was all wrong. The angle, the shot, the lighting. He felt like an anchorman for the nightly news. No affect for the relay of trauma, no stake in its outcome. This would not do for broadcast into every home in America. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t know what happened to a cult leader’s footage in the aftermath of a siege. Especially if people died. Especially if the cult leader died.

He looked at the camera again. He went: Roll tape, and said, “Now, look: I am not a crazy.”

But it was impossible to maintain the pretense of dignity with his earpiece vibrating every two seconds. It had been vibrating for hours. It was vibrating now. The Helix was in the news, and everyone wanted to know, What the hell. What the hell, Thurlow? What have you done? He took every fifth call. This time it was Norman, bearing word: The hoods were a bust. They didn’t breathe or wick, and one of the artists—he was calling them artists—the Indian, was getting a rash.

In the meantime, three calls had been forwarded to his voicemail. The messages were brief. They said: What the hell. Also: Close the blinds. It was hard to know what forces would mass out there against him, but he expected the usual: special ops, trained to kill.

But don’t worry, Dean said. Message four. The house could take it.

He looked back at the camera. He felt a little sick.

01:41:11:09: What else should I say for starters? Nobody wants to hurt this much. Even people who court the hurt, who
need
the hurt by way of self-recrimination and penance—they do not want this much of it.

And not for this long. Because after this long, it’s hard to acknowledge that hurt—
this
hurt—resolves into years of poor judgment.

On his computer:
If my wife comes here with Ida jubhjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj.
He lifted his head and felt where the keyboard had imprinted his cheek. He was in his study. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that receded into the wall. He had planned this room down to the grain of its boards, and yet its blessing was owed to chance. The lights were energy conscious and would turn off for lack of movement after five minutes. This meant that whenever he got to self-immolating about the past, the overheads would go dark and he would come round. Only this time, he’d fallen asleep.

Norman was at the door. He said, “Working on your speech? Great,” and he marched in to have a look. Thurlow hid the screen.