Edge Play X

Act 1

1.

The woman awoke on a firm bed in a dim
room, a room that looked very much like a hotel room, not an upscale one or a
rent-by-the-hour one, but instead very much like a medium-priced one in a
medium-priced town off of a medium-sized freeway.  

As the woman came back into the full
awareness of her body, she noted that her hands had been cuffed together, and
likewise, so had her feet. A feeling of slight nausea lingered in her
midsection and her skin tingled, was cold almost, a side-effect of the drug
that had been forced upon her. She shivered.

Kidnapped
, she thought,
I
have been kidnapped
.

She remembered the last few moments
before she had lost consciousness. She had been about to get into her car when
another vehicle had entered the lot next to her apartment building. The smooth
rolling momentum of their SUV had caused her to look over at it gliding on the
pavement, she thinking that there were no open spaces in the parking lot and
that maybe they were hovering behind her car because they intended to take her
space. 

Another memory arrived, that of a
suited man exiting the passenger side of the black SUV in which he had
ridden. The tall man had asked her if she knew how to find a certain
Tibetan restaurant his friend had told him about, “They serve tea that is made
with salt, as salty as the ocean,” he had said as he had come closer and still
closer to her as she had breathed in the cooling fall air that came in from the
California coast.

The man had entered her personal
space, that area slightly larger than an extended arm where strangers do not
enter except by verbal or non-verbal communication, accident, close quarters,
or express invitation. She remembered how she had tried to kick the man in
the groin to no avail as he had placed a damp rag, one soaked in some potent
pharmaceutical-grade anesthetic, she guessed, over her mouth. The bitterness of
it still lingered on her lips.

She assumed then that after her world
went black, the man had caught her in his strong, long arms as she collapsed,
and with the help of the man who had been driving the SUV, had thrown her onto
the backseat of the vehicle before any other person could notice. And now she
was here, in some sort of hotel room.

The woman sat up, trying to shake off
the last remnants of the drug that had been forced on her. Oddly, as the woman
came fully into consciousness, the image of the man’s eyes came to her, blue
like the horizon of a cold winter sky, lighter somehow than other blue eyes,
more Nordic perhaps, certainly caused by a gene originating in the upper
latitudes of the British Isles or Scandinavian region, genes developed and
refined over millennia of limited ultra-violet exposure.

Finally, the woman, barely in her 30’s
now, placed her shackled feet onto the low-nap of the carpeted floor, stood up
from the bed, and hopped over to the door which she attempted to open. Locked:
of course it was locked. If it had been left open, this woman would have hopped
out into the hallway or portico or whatever was lying behind the closed door.
Instead, she made her way over to a wall of heavy curtains, the thermal kind
with foam backing, and grabbed the separation between these thick and new-smelling
window coverings, pulling them apart quickly, revealing a plain white wall, a
perfect blank palette of a wall with no windows or pockmarks or anything other
than fresh paint.

She spent the next few moments
surveying the room, moving around it and taking inventory of her surroundings:
a bed, a closet nearby empty of coat hangers or ironing board, a small round
table with two square upholstered chairs, a bathroom near the door, a
television, a dresser. Above this dresser was a large mirror, and the woman
noticed that there was a sense of something being wrong with this mirror, a
sense of flimsiness to the presence of it, and then it occurred to her that it
was a two-way mirror and that she was being watched.
 

The door opened. The sound and
movement of it caused the woman to turn her head and watch as the man with the
pale blue eyes entered. She looked him up and down, involuntarily almost, the
same way she did to men she found attractive, and he noticed the movement of
her eyes along the vertical line of his body, he noticed as her gaze lingered
at the gun that sat in a holster above his left hip, a weapon no longer hidden
by the coat of his suit.

This man, younger than her but nearly
the same age, nonchalantly placed a manila folder onto the small round table
and then he told her to sit down. She stood still long enough that the man
began to wonder if perhaps he should repeat himself, if perhaps she had not
heard him, but then finally he said to her, “I’m not going to tell you again.”

The woman continued to stand mutely
and then the man took the gun out of his holster and pointed it at her.

“You aren’t going to kill me,” she
said, but she was unsure if the man ultimately planned to put an end to her
life. He wanted something from her first—maybe he wanted to rape her, or beat
her, or sell her, or a combination of the three, but he wanted something
first—that much she was sure of.

The slightest of smirks became evident
on his face, exposing canines and incisors wet with saliva and in the beginning
stages of discoloration from coffee.

“How do you know?” he asked her
cynically, entertained by what she had said.

“If you wanted to kill me,” she
answered, “I’d be dead already.”

Her eyes went back to his gun, pulled
away from those light eyes. She looked at his left ankle and judged from the
hang of his pants that another gun was there.

“Sit at the table,” he told her, an
angry spray of sputum coming out with the words, but the woman stayed where she
was. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way, your choice.”

She was testing him in her refusal,
questioning his nature.

“I’m going to ask you one more time,
go sit at the table.”

“You didn’t say the magic word,” she
said, and then he took the gun from its holster and pistol-whipped her on the
side of the head, knocking her onto the floor and down to all fours, giving the
woman an answer to her question. When she opened her eyes to look at him, she
saw tiny pricks of light appearing and disappearing in the air between them, a
cartoonish
display coinciding with a very real pain.

“I would appreciate a thank-you for
not hitting you harder,” he said.

“Fuck you,” she said, her head
throbbing.

He returned the gun to his holster,
grabbed her under her arms, and dragged her body, limp in protest, over to the
table.

“Get in the chair!” he said, “before I
do it again!” and after a few moments she climbed into the chair and sat
down.
 

“Can I have a drink of water?” she
asked, holding the throbbing side of her head with her cuffed hands.

“Yes,” he answered, and he went into
the bathroom where he filled a short glass with water from the tap before
returning and placing it in front of her on the table.

The woman picked up the glass with her
cuffed hands and took a sip. It occurred to her then that even though she had
struck men before, had made then yelp and whimper and had even drawn blood on
occasion, that never before had she really wanted to kill a man. It was a
foreign feeling but she allowed it to overtake her.

“Please take my handcuffs off,” she
implored.

“Not yet.”

The woman picked up the glass again
and took a sip, thinking how foolish he was for bringing her a real glass
instead of a flimsy plastic cup, this thought coinciding with the idea that
almost anything can be used as a weapon—a chair, a pen, a rock, a shard of glass—and
then those thoughts were gone and there was only her slamming the mouth of the
glass onto the edge of the table and then pushing the broken remains of it
toward his neck.

Surprised, but still fast with his
reactions, the man lifted up his arm to shield himself, and the force of the
collision sent the weapon out of her hands and flying into the wall. She saw
the gashes she had left on his forearm and how his blood, the dark claret red
of it, had started to seep out from his injury in little round droplets, and
then, immediately and ferociously, he tackled her onto the floor as another man
entered the room. As the blue-eyed man pressed his weight against her, holding
her to the floor, he whispered in her ear, “You’re a tougher bitch than I
thought you’d be.”

Blackness again.

*

This time when the woman awoke, she
was lying on the floor. Her kidnappers hadn’t bothered to put her onto the bed,
a punishment for thrusting the shattered glass at the blue-eyed man. It would
have been a shame to damage that face, really, a handsome enough face but one
that already bore a jagged and faded glyph of a scar along the right jaw line.

When she came back to consciousness,
she noticed that her hands had now been cuffed behind her back and that her
feet were still cuffed together. Her wrists and ankles were sore where the
metal had dug into them, as was her right arm—the limb was asleep from lying on
it awkwardly. She rolled onto her stomach until the painful pinpricks gradually
shifted into a dull ache, and then finally her arm returned to normal. An
uncomfortable pressure had built up in her bladder and she knew that soon this
burden would need to be released.
 

Weary now from being knocked out twice
in such a short period of time, she pushed herself onto her knees and stood up
before hopping into the bathroom and hooking her thumbs over the waistband of
her jeans. She tried to push them down but was unsuccessful in getting them
over the curved crescents of her hips. Soon, she would not be able to hold it
anymore and she would pee her pants, she knew, pee them like a kindergartener—a
warm wet spot would begin at her crouch and then extend down her thighs,
trickling over her socks and shoes before pooling on the tile floor.

Another mirror was in the bathroom
above the long sink, another magic mirror, she thought, and the woman said to
it, “I need to use the bathroom.”

She heard the door open and then her
kidnapper came into the bathroom. His right arm was bandaged, wrapped tightly
with medical tape.

“Please take off my cuffs,” she
implored.

“I’m not going to take your cuffs
off,” he said, laughing at her request.

“I can’t get my pants down,” she said,
desperate now.

He was a tall man, almost a full-head
taller than her, and he walked gingerly over to where she was standing in front
of the simple white toilet. She noticed that the man’s dark hair looked as if
it had been recently trimmed; she noticed the small mole that hovered above his
right eye. The man stood in front of her silently for a moment, casually, and
the woman wondered if he was going to strike her. But instead of striking her,
he reached his hands down to the waistband of her jeans, unbuttoned and
unzipped them, then quickly yanked the jeans and her butterfly print panties
down to her knees. The woman sat on the toilet immediately but it took a moment
until her urethral sphincter relaxed, and as she sat there waiting for it to
open, he said, “There you go. Pee.”

She urinated, amazed at the amount of
liquid a full bladder can hold, and when the organ was emptied, the man told
her to stand up. He pulled up her panties and then, with somewhat more
difficulty, her jeans, which he zipped and buttoned. The act gave her a sense
of being a child again, it returned her to some basic memory of potty training
and of her own mother helping her pull up her pants after she had finished
(that was the really difficult part, learning to pull up your pants and button
them). And as she remembered this she noticed a bulge in his own pants as he
stood before her, her wrists still cuffed behind her back, and quickly she
diverted her eyes, hoping that he had not noticed her fleeting look. It
disturbed her that the man was aroused.

“I would have un-cuffed you if you
hadn’t attacked me,” he said.

There was a drawn silence and then she
reminded him, “You kidnapped me.”

The truth of her statement sat heavily
between them, carrying with it a sense of shame and dismay.

He motioned to her to go out of the
bathroom, and she obeyed.

“You’re right,” he said. “I did. But I
don’t want to hurt you. You aren’t going to fight me again, are you?”

His statement was less of a question
and more of an assessment of the situation, a statement to which the woman
shook her head no, although she hadn’t fully decided if she would fight him
again or not. He came over to her, close now again, this man whom she didn’t
know so
close
to her, and she was
reminded of how her brother used to say
fuck
me or fight me
when people got so near as to make him uncomfortable, but
she did not say this to him. Instead, she stood still as he removed the cuffs
on her ankles and wrists.