Mao II - Don Delillo [43]
PART TWO
8
The boy took off the prisoner’s hood when he came to feed him. The boy also wore a hood, a crude cloth piece with ragged slashes at the eyes.
Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was. When he spat up blood he watched the pink thing slug into the drain and it carried time quivering in it.
It made the prisoner anxious, not knowing why the boy needed to be concealed.
They drove him here in a car with a missing door. He saw an old man with no shirt who was stuck to a coil of military wire in a sewage meadow somewhere.
Be alert and note the details said the conscientious tape running in his head, the voice that whispers you are smarter than your captors.
The prisoner felt the boy come close to pull away his hood and stuff his face with food and he looked into the eyeholes of the boy’s own hood.
Time permeated the air and food. The black ant crawling up his leg carried time’s enormity, the old slow all-knowing pace.
Poor old guy probably lost at night wanders dizzy into the wire, senile, shirtless, pinned, still living.
He waited for the moment when he could count the launched rockets flashing. When he heard the rockets he also saw the flash although he wore a hood that had no eyeholes.
He was new at this and eager to succeed. All the time he chewed his food he estimated meters wall to wall. Measure the walls, then the bricks in the walls, then the mortar between the bricks, then the hairline cracks in the mortar. See it as a test. Show them how advanced you are.
He saw laundry lines going through shell holes in gray masonry, looking through the missing door.
The boy pulled away the hood and fed him by hand, always too fast, pushing food into his mouth before he was finished chewing the previous handful.
He conceded the fact of his confinement. He admitted to the presence of the plastic wire they’d used to fasten his wrist to the water-supply pipe. He conceded the hood. His head was covered with a hood.
The prisoner was full of plans. With time and tools he would learn Arabic and impress his captors and greet them in their language and have basic conversations, once they gave him the tools to teach himself.
The boy tortured him sometimes. Knocked him down, told him to stand. Knocked him down, told him to stand. The boy tried to pull his teeth out of his mouth with his bare hands. The pain extended long past the boy’s departure from the room. This was part of the structure of time, how time and pain became inseparable.
And there were authorities to impress as well. At his release they would take him to a secret place and recite their questions in the same voice he heard on the instruction tape and he would impress the authorities with his recall of detail and his analysis of facets and aspects and they would quickly determine the location of the building and the identity of the group that held him.
He knew it was evening by the war noise. In the early weeks it began at sundown. First the machine-gun clatter, then car horns blowing. It’s interesting to think of traffic jams caused by war. Everything is normal in a way. All the usual cursing complaints.
The boy had him lie on his back with legs bent up and he beat the bottoms of the prisoner’s feet with a reinforcing rod. The pain made it hard for him to sleep and this stretched and