Page 31 of The Pakhan's Captive
The compound goes quiet in stages.
I hear it happening through the walls, the gradual thinning of movement and voice and footsteps until there’s nothing left but the skeleton crew on the perimeter and the two men on the lower level and the particular silence of a building that used to have my father somewhere inside it and now has only me.
I pour the third drink.
I don’t touch it either.
My father would have known what to do with all of this. He would have sat across from me in the chair Mike just vacated and said something that cut directly to the center of the problem without any of the noise around it.
He had that quality, the ability to look at a complicated thing and find the single true sentence living inside it.
I used to sit across from him and wonder how long it would take me to learn it.
I’ve run out of time to learn it from him.
That lands differently tonight than it has the other nights, heavier, and I sit with it and let it be heavy and don’t try to make it into something manageable because it isn’t.
The drink is doing nothing.
That’s the thing about grief that nobody tells you, that the things you reach for don’t reach back.
The Scotch sits in my blood and produces no warmth and no distance and no version of numb that I can use, and I’ve been sitting here long enough that the ice I didn’t add has become a metaphor.
I get up.
I tell myself I’m walking the compound.
Checking the perimeter in the way I check it when I can’t sleep, a habit my father built into me young.Know your ground, Razvan. Know every corner of your ground.I walk the east corridor, the north hall, the back passage that runs alongside the kitchen, and I know when I start descending the stairs to the lower level that I am not checking the perimeter.
I am not checking the perimeter at all.
The two guards see me and step aside without a word.
I stop outside the cell door and my hand rests on the frame and I stand there in the quiet underground with the Scotch still doing nothing in my blood and my father three days dead and her on the other side of this door, and I don’t know what I’m doing here.
I open the door anyway.
7
LENA
This is wrong. This is so wrong. This is every shade of wrong that has ever existed.
I’ve been sitting with that thought for hours now, turning it over and over in the dim cell light, and it hasn’t gotten any more useful.
My body doesn’t care about useful.
My body has been running its own quiet mutiny since he stood over me with his hand around my throat and his eyes on my mouth and said what he said, and no amount of mental authority I try to throw at it is making any difference.
I’m wet. Have been for hours.
That’s the humiliating, unforgivable truth of what’s happening in this chair, this slow insistent heat that has worked its way into my blood and sits there humming no matter what I tell it to do.
I’ve tried thinking about my father.
I’ve tried thinking about the tattoo and what it means and what I promised myself in that Vienna street.
I’ve tried cycling through every piece of hatred I have stored up for the man on the other side of this door.
