III. The Body Box - Part Two

He asked questions. I let him.

"How long?" he said. About an hour after I got in.

"I don't know."

"A week? A month?"

"Longer than a month."

"How much longer?"

"I don't know. There's no light. There's no way to — you lose it. Time. You lose time first. Before you lose anything else, you lose time. You count heartbeats for a while and then you stop counting because the counting doesn't go anywhere and the heartbeats don't mean anything and the day and the night are the same thing and the same thing is the dark and the dark is always."

We passed a gas station. Closed. The sign was lit — Mobil, the red O glowing against the dark — and the light came through the windshield and hit the dashboard and for a second the cab was red and then it was orange again and I said, "There was a light. One light. It came on when it was time to eat. I don't know what kind of light. A bulb, somewhere above me, behind a grate. When the light came on, a panel opened in the wall by my left hip and there was food. Not a plate. A tray. Plastic. Like a cafeteria tray, the kind with compartments. The light stayed on while I ate. Then the panel closed and the light went off and the dark came back and the dark was the same dark it had always been and the food was the only way I knew that time was passing at all because the food came and the food came and the food came and I counted the trays for a while — twenty, thirty, I got up to forty-something — and then I stopped counting because the number wasn't telling me how long I'd been there, it was just telling me how many times I'd eaten, and those weren't the same thing because I didn't know if the food came once a day or twice a day or every twelve hours or every thirty-six hours and there was no way to know."

Gill was quiet. The road hummed. A truck passed us going the other direction, the headlights sweeping across the cab and then gone, and the sound of it — the diesel engine, the air displacement, the doppler — reminded me of the generator. The building had a generator. I could hear it through the walls when everything else was silent, a low vibration that came through the slab and into my bones, and the generator was the only proof that the building existed around the room because the room was all I could see and the room was all I could feel and the room was so small that it was easier to believe the room was the entire world than to believe the room was inside a building on a road in a town in a state in a country where people drove trucks and drank coffee and hung pine tree air fresheners from their mirrors.

"He came in sometimes," I said. "Not into the box. There was a door. I could hear the hinges. He'd open the door and he'd stand in the doorway and I could see his shoes — work boots, tan, the left one had a scratch on the toe — and he'd stand there and he wouldn't say anything. For minutes. Five minutes. Ten. I'd be lying on the floor and he'd be standing in the doorway and neither of us said anything and the silence was a kind of conversation, the kind where someone is telling you that the silence is theirs, that they own the silence, that the silence will end when they decide and not before."

"Good Lord," Gill said. Quietly. To the windshield.

"And then he'd say something. Something small. 'How's the temperature.' Or 'You need water.' And his voice was — it was normal. That was the thing. His voice was completely normal. Like a man asking his wife if she needed anything from the store. The voice was the worst part because the voice made it ordinary and the ordinary was — I don't have a word for what the ordinary was."

I told him about the stages. Not all of them. Enough. The box was stage one — lying in the dark, learning the dimensions, learning to fit. Stage two was sitting. A different room, slightly larger, but only large enough to sit in, knees to chest, head bowed. You sat there. Hours. Days. Your body learned to fold. Stage three was standing. A room you could stand in but couldn't stretch your arms. You stood and you didn't move and the walls were at your shoulders and the ceiling was at the top of your head and you learned to exist in the vertical space the way you'd learned to exist in the horizontal space, and each stage was a slightly larger box and each slightly larger box felt enormous after the stage before it, and the feeling of enormity was the trick, the whole trick, because by stage four — a room you could take two steps in — the room felt like a cathedral. By stage four, the world outside the building was unthinkable. Not frightening. Unthinkable. The way the bottom of the ocean is unthinkable. A place that exists but that your body is not built for.

"The women who finished the stages," I said. "They didn't want to leave."

I stopped talking. I watched the road. Three miles. Four. The white line on the right side of the highway flowed past like a stream.

"Why didn't you go to the police?" he said.

I said, "Have you ever been in a police station?"

"Once. Twice."

"What's it like?"

He thought. "Rooms," he said. "A lot of rooms."

"Right."

He got it. I watched his face and I watched him get it. His eyes changed. Not pity — I didn't want pity and I would have gotten out of the truck if he'd given me pity. Understanding. A specific, concrete understanding of a specific, concrete problem: a woman who cannot be in a room.

"The cab is okay," I said. "The cab moves. The vibration. The road changing under us. Nothing that moves is the body box."

He looked at his hands. He looked at the road. He said, "I can keep driving."

"I know. That's why I got in."

I said, "Take this exit."

He looked at me. "This exit?"

"Two-nineteen. Coming up. Half a mile."

"Why?"

I didn't answer. He took the exit. The truck swung down the ramp and the wheels hit county road and the road was two lanes and unlit and the dark outside the windshield went from highway dark to country dark, the kind of dark that has weight.

"Left here," I said. At the intersection. A stop sign, a gas station that had been closed long enough that the pumps were gone and the canopy was sagging.

"Where are we going, Dina?"

"Keep driving."

"Are you taking me somewhere?"

I looked at him. He was gripping the wheel. His face in the dashboard light was orange and the lines in it were deep and his eyes were the eyes of a man who had picked up a woman on the highway at 2 AM and had listened to her describe a room the size of a coffin and was now following her directions onto a county road in the dark and was beginning to understand that the directions were not random and the destination was not away.

"I'm going back," I said.

His foot came off the gas. The truck slowed. He didn't brake. He just stopped accelerating and the road took the speed from us and we were down to thirty, twenty-five.

"No," he said. "I'm taking you to a police station."

"No."

"Dina — "

"There's a girl in there." I said it fast, before the words could arrange themselves into something reasonable, because reasonable was the wrong shape for what I was saying. "Stage one. She's in stage one right now. She's been in the box for — I don't know how long. Days. Maybe a week. She doesn't know what's coming next and I do and the police won't find the place, Gill. They won't find it. It looks like a machine shop. It looks like nothing. You could drive past it every day for ten years and never look at it twice. The only people who know where the room is are the people who've been inside it."

"You don't have to go back."

"Yeah, I do."

"You can tell the police where it is. You can draw them a map."

"I don't have an address. I have a route. I have turns. I have the feeling of the road under the tires when the pavement changes from county to gravel. I have the sound the gate makes. I can get there. A map can't get there."

He pulled the truck to the shoulder. He put it in neutral. The engine idled. The cab vibrated. He turned to me and his face was the face of a man who was looking at something he did not understand and did not want to understand and could not look away from.

"How do you know there's a girl in there?"

"Because there's always a girl in there. That's how it works. He doesn't take one at a time. He takes one and starts the training and when the training reaches a certain point he takes another one and the first one — the first one helps. That's stage three. The first one helps with the second one. And the second one helps with the third."

I stopped. My hands were shaking. I put them between my knees the way I used to put them when I was in the box and the shaking started and I couldn't stop it — pressing my hands between my knees until the pressure did what the control couldn't. The posture came back. It came back without my permission. The knees together, the hands pressed, the eyes dropping to the floor. The body remembering the dimensions.

I wiped my face. I straightened. I looked at him.

"Keep driving," I said. My voice was flat. I heard it go flat. The woman who'd been telling him about the room was gone, the woman who'd been shaking was gone, and what was left was the part of me that he'd built, the part that moved through small spaces without panic and obeyed the body's memory of the walls and could walk back into the building because the building was the only space my body knew how to navigate without error.

"Keep driving. I'll tell you when to turn."

Go to the next part:
https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/iii-body-box-part-three