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"How long will I —"

"No more questions regarding your quasi-captivity. I won’t tell you when or where you are."

"What will you tell me?"

"You’re here to get an education." He paused. "If you only knew. The substance of your learning will become manifest, so be patient."

"Can I please have my things?"

He sighed, the first sign of frustration boiling under his breath. "We’ll talk about that later." Then his voice softened, shedding its edge. "Pretend you’re an infant, Andrew. A tiny, helpless infant. Right now, in your room, you’re in the womb. You don’t understand how to use your senses, how to think, how to reason. Rely on me for everything. I’m going to teach you how to see the world again. I’ll feed your mind first. Fatten it up on the most brilliant thinkers in human history." A white hand pushed through the bubble wrap and dropped a book onto the floor.

"Your first meal," he said as I lifted a hardback of The Prince. "Machiavelli. The man’s a genius. Undisputedly. Are you familiar with Hannibal, the general from Carthage who ransacked Rome? Marched his men across the Alps with an army of war elephants."

"I know who he was."

"Well, he marched his army all over the Mediterranean coast and Eastern Europe, but what made Hannibal’s army singular was that there was no dissension among his soldiers. Different nationalities, beliefs, languages, and no dissension in the ranks. You know what made that peace possible?" he asked. "In the words of Machiavelli, Hannibal’s ‘inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valor, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.’ " He was silent for a moment, and I could hear only the dry, scorching wind pushing against the glass panes and my captor’s escalated breathing. " ‘Inhuman cruelty,’ " he repeated. "That gives me chills." His voice had turned passionate, as though he were speaking to his lover. "So," he said, "start reading that tonight, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Are you hungry?"

"Yes, I’m starving."

"Good. I’m gonna make dinner now, so why don’t you start on that book. I hope broiled shrimp on angel-hair pasta sounds good to you." He ripped the bubble wrap away and shoved the metal panel back over the opening. My head dropped in relief that he was gone, and I sat motionless in my white bathrobe, staring vacantly into the floor.

A small lamp, screwed into the wall, exuded dim, barely sufficient light onto the pages. Because he’d yet to give me the duffel bag, I didn’t have the aid of my glasses, so my eyes were failing me.

I dropped The Prince onto the floor, having finished half of it. I hoped that would be enough for him. When I reached up and turned off the lamp, the placid light of a full moon flooded in between the bars, soft and soothing. I would’ve dreaded to spend my first conscious night in the perfect darkness of a new moon.

The room had grown unbearable from a day’s accumulation of sunlight, and though the heat had dissipated from the desert with the onslaught of night, it had lingered in my room. So I’d opened the window when the sun set, and now the dry chill of the desert night infiltrated the room, forcing me to burrow under the fleece blankets.

Closing my eyes, I listened. Through the open window, owls screeched and coyotes or wild dogs yapped at the moon, though they seemed a great distance away. Since dinner, I hadn’t heard a peep from him. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing.

For the last hour, jazz music had filled the cabin. It came quietly at first, stealing in like a whisper, so that I heard only the guttural rumblings of a bass. The volume rose, and the ride cymbal pattern and the offbeat swish of a closing hi-hat pulsed into the room. When the piano and trumpet and saxes climaxed through the wall, I suddenly recognized the song, and it took me back twenty years, to a different time, a different life. It was Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball"