Edge Play X (35 page)

“How much do you think you are worth
to your boyfriend?” Hardy asked.

“Terry Compton isn’t my boyfriend,” X
said.

Hardy backhanded her after X said
this, making her nose bleed again. A thick stream of blood flowed out of her
right nostril and over her lips and chin before landing on her white sleeveless
shirt. She tried to wipe the blood off her face with the back of her hand,
continued to paw at it until her lower face and hand were covered in a hazy red
smear.

X didn’t know if Compton would
surrender that amount of money, didn’t think he’d hand over the ransom even if
the men did threaten to kill her, especially since she had just blackmailed
him, took the car he had given her, metaphorically given him a one finger wave
goodbye, and split.

She would make the video and hope that
Compton
would hand over the money and that these men
wouldn’t kill her.

A few narrow beams of morning light
were coming through the broken slats of the mini-blinds which hung on the
windows.

The tall one pulled a small video
camera out of a duffle bag and pushed a few buttons to turn it on. X didn’t
speak until he took off the cap that covered the lens. And then, X made her
appeal to the camera. Once she was finished, the man removed the disk, put it
into a case, then placed it into an envelope that was already addressed to
Terry Compton.

“Go mail this. Overnight it,” he
commanded to Hardy and when the man left, Laurel told X, “It’s better that I
don’t leave you two alone.”

When Hardy came back, he had breakfast
sandwiches for him and his accomplice. They didn’t offer any to X, just ate in
front of her while she tried not to watch. She asked the men for a drink, and
at first they refused.

“Please,” she begged, “I’m so
thirsty.”

Finally,
Laurel
let her have a drink of some of the watered down
soda in his cup. X drank the diluted liquid that in other circumstances she
would have shunned, but in her thirst she didn’t care, just held the cup in her
hands (her wrists sore because they had put the cuffs on so tightly) and drank
as much as she could as fast as she could. She had never felt so pathetic, the
blood smeared over her face, begging a scumbag for a drink from his cup.

For hours, then, X watched the light
that was coming through the slats move across the floor. When she spotted a
figure on the sidewalk outside, a mailman doing his deliveries, X thought about
screaming for help, but Laurel, who by now had pointed the gun at her, told her
to keep her mouth shut if she wanted to live.

The video would be in
California
the next day, X guessed. Hopefully,
Compton
wasn’t gone on a business trip. And if
Compton
decided to pay the ransom, they would have to
work out a way to transfer the money.
Ah,
fuck,
X thought,
I’m going to be here
for days
.
 

They let her piss in the backyard at
regular intervals, and around dinner time, they let her eat a cheeseburger and
a few French fries from a fast food joint.

When she asked the short one for a
cigarette after she had finished eating, he replied, “If you suck my dick you
can have one,” and after that X didn’t ask again.

When darkness came, they told her to
sleep on the mattress, and she had lain down on the filthy thing, thinking that
she would feign sleep and then try to escape as soon as her captors were
asleep.

The tall one, as if he knew what she
was thinking, cuffed her to a rusty radiator, and X closed her eyes and
listened as Hardy shifted around on the ratty couch and
Laurel
played games on his cell phone as he sat on the
beaten up wing chair.

After an hour or so of thinking about
what would happen if Compton refused to provide these men with their ransom, X
finally fell asleep, immune temporarily to the sounds of the cell games and the
seemingly never ending snores.

9.

Terry Compton sat at his desk looking
at a piece of paper, a perfect square, wondering what he would create today.
Maybe nothing, maybe something; the possibilities were nearly limitless. He
rested his hand onto the paper. Sometimes the paper would tell him what to do,
disclose its potential through its texture, and then he would begin a series of
folds, shaping it into what it was meant to become.

Long ago he had mastered the
techniques: valley fold, mountain fold, pinch crease, pleat fold, reverse fold,
rabbit ear, swivel fold, sink fold, squash fold. It was about seeing the
ability of a thing to change shape and dimension and then executing the
necessary movements to create it. There was the challenge of not destroying the
paper along the way, though there had been plenty of times that he had been
forced to crumple a project, toss it into the wastebasket, and begin again.

Sometimes when he was at a restaurant
with other business men or on a date, he would fold the cloth napkin into a
Bishop’s
mitre
or a pixie boot. He had folded cheap
paper napkins into swans or roses like the one he had given to X in the
limousine.
Compton
had folded maps, newspapers, Japanese
washi
, metallic and patterned papers, foil, bags, even
currency. Once, when he was stuck in
South America
because of oil riots, he had folded a rare 16
^th
century letter into
a peacock and then put a match to it just to watch it burn.

He could sit at his desk and
do
nothing if he wished, fold paper all afternoon. Steinberg
usually left Friday afternoons open for
Compton
to do whatever he wanted. It had been a long time
since he had done real work. Sure, he had cleaned X’s toilet and cleaned her
bathroom floor on his hands and knees, but besides that, the man couldn’t
remember the last time he had dusted the furniture, mowed a lawn, or tried to
fix anything. Work was for people who weren’t smart enough to figure out that
people never got rich doing real work, but only by having others work for them.
His mother had worked all her life making shoes for other people and her
retirement had been an early grave. No,
Compton
analyzed. He predicted. Wealth was created
unfettered by arcane terms like production, supply, and labor.

He noticed the pencil that X had given
him. It sat near the edge of his desk in an Indonesian ceramic cup that had
been a gift from Steinberg.
Compton
lifted it out of its container, ignoring the square of paper for a moment. Did
people still use pencils and pens? Of course they did. Sometimes he used one
when signing a contract, credit card slip, or even an occasional autograph.

X had told him that the pencil had
been in her vagina and that she hoped that he would use it in his office. He
hadn’t believed her, not for a moment. What a beautiful lie had come out of her
mouth. The lie was lovelier than if the pencil had actually been in her sweet
little
cunt
.

There was a knock at the door. It was
Steinberg. He brought
Compton
an envelope, one the man had been expecting. Steinberg told his boss that it
had come from
New
Mexico
, and
then Steinberg left the man alone.
Compton
couldn’t ask for a better assistant and
contemplated the amount of the man’s next bonus. Steinberg understood when to
make
himself
scarce. If only women could do the same
thing.

Compton
had been expecting the video. He knew that X had
been kidnapped and that the men would be asking for ransom. He had demanded a
video of X and now he had it. A few moments later,
Compton
opened the manila envelope and put the small disc
within it into a player.

The video was a black screen at first
with just some background noise, and then the person recording it took off the
lens cap. Finally, a jerky image appeared, one of X sitting on a dirty
mattress.
Compton
saw that X’s hands were cuffed in front of her
and that her left eye had been blackened. A haze of blood had discolored her
chin. Her hair clung together in greasy tendrils, and the white sleeveless top
she was wearing was dirty and bore a few dark stains of blood.
 

X looked at the camera as if she were
looking directly at
Compton
. Her begs came then with a subdued urgency.

 
“Terry, these men are going to put a hole in
my head if you don’t give them two million dollars. They want two million
dollars. Please give them the money. I can give you back everything that you
gave me.” Tears began to stream down her cheeks and then fell off the precipice
of her jaw. “I’m sorry I left, Terry. I’ll come back. I just needed to get my
head together.”

Then, the screen went to black.

Seeing her on the screen before him,
he was able to notice the slight movements of her face that he had never before
been so thoroughly aware of: the way that her brows furrowed and rose; the way
she pressed her lips together between sentences and how sometimes they trembled
before the words emerged; the darting movement of her eyes when she looked away
from the camera. He wanted her to be able to see herself as he was seeing her,
removed from her gestures and yet still defined by them, to witness the
quiddity
of her being.

Compton
watched the video again, unzipping his pants and
whacking-off into a wad of tissues as it played. Then, he removed the disc and
placed it back into the envelope before placing the envelope into his
safe.
 

X had never begged him for anything
before. She thought that she was the one who should be begged, not the other
way around. The woman had blackmailed him and then taken off with the money,
had been planning to ditch him all along.
 

He wondered if X had offered the men
any of her own money in order to buy herself out of this predicament, and he
guessed correctly that she had. Her kidnappers, however, had been told not to
take any of her bribes because she was full of shit, the woman didn’t have any
money, she was a painter. Artists were lucky to squeak by with enough to have a
place to live. The place she was staying wasn’t even her own.

He took the square piece of paper off
his desk and placed it in the upper drawer before opening another drawer and
removing a fat stack of $100s that he had set aside for this purpose. The next
several hours were spent folding, pinching, and creasing the bills, locking
them together, adding unit upon unit until he had created five interwoven
tetrahedrals
. As he assembled his creation, a thought
remained, a feeling that never parted, this being the realization that he had
never seen X look quite so beautiful.

Even so, he had no intention of giving
the men two million dollars even though it was just a tiny fraction of his
wealth, ruminating that even a hundred thousand was probably too much.

10.

X had spent a restless night on the
filthy mattress, her sleep disturbed every few hours by the men’s
conversations, the short one’s snores, or the persistent ache in her arm from
being handcuffed to the radiator.

She awoke as the first gentle light
came through the windows, ones that had been left open through the night to let
in the cooler air. X saw that
Laurel
was awake. He sat almost meditatively on the
ragged wing chair, staring out the window between glancing at the cheap watch
on his wrist
or
gnawing on his ragged fingernails. He
was nervous about something.

From a half-closed eye, X watched him,
wondering how the day would unfold before them. She didn’t know if Terry
Compton would agree to their ransom and wondered what they would do to her if
he decided not to pay them the money. But she knew what would probably happen.
If
Compton
refused, maybe they’d send him a part of her ear
or one of her fingers to convince him that they were serious. But ultimately if
he refused, she believed, they’d pop a cap in her head and she’d die in this
broken down crack house on the dirty mattress and end up in the morgue as a
Jane Doe. Maybe they’d be able to identify her somehow and get her remains to
her brother, and he could put her ashes in the mortuary niche next to the urns
of their mother and father. Just as likely, the police would assume she was a
crack whore and send her corpse wherever they sent the corpses of the unknown
and unclaimed.

X needed to urinate. She was thirsty
and hungry. So many little things she had taken for granted, things like using
the bathroom when she wanted or getting a bite to eat when the need arose. To
these men, X was an object, a commodity, nothing more than that. They believed
that she had value to a man who did not value her. Mentally nearly defeated, X
realized that the control she had thought she had was, for the most part, an
illusion. Life changes or ends in a split second. So many things are out of our
control. And what had Simeon said to her so many months ago?
 
Life is
an illusion of choice.