Comfort Food (2 page)

She’d insisted it was no different than rape. I suppose she was right, but I’d never seen it that way. I’d for some reason never had the normal emotional response. I’d gotten off on it. Something was different in the way I was wired and that, perhaps, was the only thing that had saved me. Over time I developed an intense shame about it, not because I’d been violated, but because I wasn’t properly traumatized by what had been done to me. Because I sometimes still touched myself thinking about it.

I thought he’d left me alone again, but then I heard another metal chair scrape against the floor. His heavy weight fell into it, and he placed something on a table. My breath hitched.

Moments later, a spoon was prodding at my lips. I opened my mouth, and warm chicken noodle soup slid down my throat. Comfort food. Oh, sweet irony. I wasn’t worried he’d drug me. Why would he?

Drugging had been a convenience of transport. He had me where he wanted me, no doubt in some eerie sound-proofed basement cell. I heard him crumble crackers into the soup before feeding me another bite. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Intense fear tends to shut down the hunger response.

After the second bite, his hand gently fondled one of my breasts through my clothing. I stiffened and flinched away. He didn’t yell or hit me. He simply placed the bowl back on the table and got up. Then his footsteps started to recede in the direction they’d come from.

So this was the game he was playing? Either I would accept his touch, or he’d starve me to death? I hear it’s a horrible way to die, second only to drowning or suffocation. Those things could still be on the menu. It was early yet.

“Please . . . wait.” I hated myself for saying it. Hated myself enough that had my hands been free and a razor been nearby, I might have pressed the blade into my skin and bled out right there in front of him.

I was already bargaining, doing the
appease the captor and maybe he won’t hurt you too bad
thing. In turn, he would show a small kindness here or there to gain my total dependence on him And voila . . . instant Stockholm Syndrome.

His footsteps stopped, and I heard him turn, still as silent as ever. After a moment, he returned and sat back down in the chair.

I was trying not to hyperventilate. I wasn’t sure what I’d have to allow him to do to let me breathe into a paper bag. This was how our agreement began. He never said a word, never made any kind of verbal threat. He didn’t need to.

It was a tacit agreement. I would give him what he wanted, or else. Right now the bargaining chip on the table was food. I was still arguing with myself over that one, berating myself for not being stronger, not holding out longer. He hadn’t tried to fuck me yet. Having my breast fondled was a small price to pay to eat.

The spoon prodded at my mouth again and I opened up for the warm liquid. He’d gotten the good crackers. The oval-shaped Townhouse kind. The kind I liked. I had a moment of almost hysteria wondering how long he’d watched me, how much he knew about me. Did he know this particular food somehow idiotically made me feel safe?

I tensed as I heard the spoon clank into the bowl again. I knew what that meant. Every cell in my body felt poised, on edge, trying to inch away as his hand closed over my breast once again. He hadn’t moved to take any of my clothes off. He seemed to want me to agree to every step of my desecration.

I didn’t want to respond, but his thumb caressed over my nipple through the layers of clothing so gently, so enticingly that I found myself arching toward him. I wanted to jerk away, but if I did he’d leave and take the food with him. This time my begging might not bring him back.

This pattern repeated itself over and over. First a bite, then a fondle, until the soup was gone. He wanted to make sure the conditions were clear to me, that nothing would be given to me freely. I would pay for it all.

I kept rewinding the day in my head. What if I’d done something differently? What if I’d never left the table? Had it been necessary to reapply my lipstick that close to the end of the day? Had a tube of waxy color called Sassy Vixen really been the catalyst to take my freedom from me?

I knew it was crazy to think that way. He would have gotten me sooner or later if he was determined enough. That moment in time wasn’t the definitive moment. I would have had another unguarded moment later and would have paid for it then.

We’d gotten through the bowl of soup and an awkwardness descended. It was as if he’d only planned this far and had no idea what his next step should be. Maybe he was waiting for me.

Okay.

“Please tell me why you’re doing this.” My voice was stronger now. Maybe it was the captive/captor alliance we seemed to have formed. He didn’t seem the kind to lash out with no planning. He instead seemed the type who could wait multiple eternities for everything to work to his desire.

No reply.

He placed his fingers on my lips, gently silencing me. He had no intention of answering the question, and I had no power to make him do so. He knelt on the ground beside me and I heard the knife as it cut through the ropes binding my legs to the chair.

I had the urge to kick him in the face, but I didn’t. If I kicked him, I was escalating the situation to real physical violence, and he would no doubt retaliate. This wasn’t someone with gentlemanly scruples. Before I could make a solid decision against kicking him, my chance slipped away, as he moved behind me.

He sliced through the ropes around my wrists. I hadn’t realized how much they’d cut into me, but they burned now that the air hit them. He came back to stand in front of me, bringing my arms around with him, placing my hands primly on my lap like I was a posable doll. I could barely feel myself breathing.

I have a deep and abiding fear of knives. Honestly, I don’t know many people not afraid of knives. For most, a knife is scarier even than a gun. If someone kills you with a gun, it can be quick, painless. Knives don’t offer that possible luxury. They are intimate and violent in a way a gun could never hope to be.

Despite my hands and legs being free, I still didn’t fight back. He had a knife, and I was blindfolded. It didn’t take a mathematician to work out those odds. Before I could reach up to remove the blindfold, his hands were encircling my wrists, rubbing them, as if he were actually concerned he’d hurt me.

But I knew that wasn’t the case. Anyone who drugs you, kidnaps you, and locks you in a cell doesn’t care if they hurt you. Maybe he just didn’t want to hurt me, yet. In one quick movement, he ripped the blindfold away.

Although the scrap of dark fabric hadn’t been pleasant, it had acted as a sort of safety, a filter. Now there was nothing between us. I looked into the coldest, blackest eyes I’d ever seen, fathomless pools of something I couldn’t quite recognize as human. There was an otherness about him, something that made him different from me, from anyone I’d ever spoken to before.

I expected him to start the verbal threats now that the mystery of my captor was over, but he didn’t. He just stared. I was his science project.

In another situation I would have found him attractive. He was muscular, had a firm jaw, great hair, not an ounce of body fat. I imagined this was what Ted Bundy’s victims felt at some point, that it was utterly impossible he could want to hurt them and be so beautiful at the same time. The unbelievable shock someone so attractive could be a predator.

Why would he have to be? Didn’t women just fall at his feet automatically? I had the sudden bone-chilling terror that this man wanted something he couldn’t get from a date, perhaps my body chopped up in little pieces and arranged in neat white paper in the freezer. I shuddered at the thought and quickly tried to block it out.

Monsters aren’t supposed to be beautiful. It’s the rule. The Hunchback of Notre Dame was ugly. Frankenstein’s monster was ugly. Nosferatu . . . ugly. Ugly was in the rulebook. And yet the man kneeling calmly before me wasn’t ugly. Not on the surface. Look anywhere but into his eyes and he was the man women fantasized about from puberty onward.

He stood and backed away from me then, his gaze pinning me to the chair. He wasn’t holding the knife in a threatening way, but he still held it. He started toward the door, then thinking better of it, he turned, came back to me, and pulled me out of the chair. I was almost to the begging point again, but he wasn’t interested in me.

He stacked my chair on top of the one he’d been sitting on, folded the card table, and took the bowl and spoon.

I could have spent hours, days even, berating myself for not at least trying to run past him for the door, but I was glad I didn’t. There was a combination keypad on the wall. Leaving required a retina and thumbprint scan. Whoever had me, had some discretionary funds. Maybe I was part of a secret government study.

The door shut loudly behind him, and I was alone in the cell with nothing but the clothes on my back. Concrete floor, concrete walls, unknown ceiling composition, all gray. A toilet sat in one far corner with no lid and there was an odd drain in the floor a few feet from the toilet. It was like prison without bars, or windows, or a bed.

I didn’t know what time it was or why this mattered to me, but there was something disconcerting about not knowing whether it was day or night. When would I sleep? Not that it mattered. There was nothing to do but sleep.

In the movies, there’s always a way out. It doesn’t matter where the bad guy traps you, there’s a way out. You can pick a lock, or use some kerosene, a match, and some sort of fuse and make a bomb to blow the door off. You can crawl out through the ceiling tiles, or smash a window, or find some weak point in the wall and start chipping away at it with a sharp tool you just happen to have in your pocket.

My cell was a fortress. It made the movies seem very contrived. It really isn’t that hard to create an inescapable fortress if you stop to think about it. All you need is a solid floor, walls, and ceiling, and one exit using fingerprinting and retinal scans.

TWO

I once read somewhere that predators conduct something called
the interview
with their potential victims so they can determine if their intended prey is worth the risk. Of course they don’t call it
the interview
; that’s criminal profiler talk.

I wondered if I’d been interviewed. I was known to give several talks a month. Had he been at one of them? Pulled me aside? Asked me charming, disarming questions? Pegged me as a lamb? A Red Riding Hood?

I didn’t know. But surely I would have remembered those eyes. And if I hadn’t seen him for the predatory animal that he was, I would have noticed his good looks. Would I have gone to dinner with this man if he’d looked at me a fraction less coldly?

I wondered how long he’d stalked me and how easy I’d made it. Had I been careless with door locking, thinking no one was watching and just this once it was okay? Had he been in my home, rifling through my underthings? Making a checklist of all the items in my cupboards?

I had a lot of time to think about these things but not that first night. After being left alone in the cell, I escaped to dreams. I could feel the drugs still swirling around in my system, so despite the circumstances, it hadn’t been that difficult.

I dreamed about the luncheon, that he’d been there. We’d made eye contact, and he’d flirted with me. I don’t remember if in the dream I flirted back.

When I woke, it took me several minutes to separate fact from fiction. Waking in the cell was the real nightmare. The dream had been so vivid. Colors, sounds, and smells more alive and immediate than I’d ever remembered them in life. I drank them up to hold onto them, somehow knowing it was the only sensation I would get for awhile.

The cell was kept at a steady temperature, never too hot or too cold. There was a vent in the ceiling, but it was too high to reach even standing on my toes or jumping. I stood under it a few days in a row, just waiting for some temperature fluctuation, anything that felt like something.

Everything was too constant here. The vent existed only to taunt me over what I couldn’t have: a simple brush of air on my face.

The second day set up what was to be the routine. I’d been up for what felt like several hours, pacing back and forth. Part of it was the fact that I had no idea what was in store for me. This man held the power of life and death and everything else in his hands, and he wouldn’t even make verbal threats I could psychoanalyze.

I decided this was by design. If he’d stalked me for any length of time, he knew how I craved social interaction. To speak to me would be to give me something he didn’t want to give. Toward what purpose, I didn’t know. If his intention was to drive me insane, he had a winner of a plan.

It wasn’t until the second day that I noticed the lighting. It wasn’t bright or super dim; it was this monotonous low illumination that stretched evenly over the ceiling. Like fluorescent lighting, but not quite bright enough for that. Maybe fluorescent lighting that had dimmed some. I couldn’t begin to guess at the psychological makeup of someone who would buy lighting and run it constantly til it had dimmed to just the right level to torment me. Maybe that part was all in my head, and I was already going crazy.

Finally, I drifted to sit in one corner of the room, farthest from the exit. I pulled my legs up against my chest, resting my chin on them, and watched the door like it was going to do a trick. It was. Eventually it would open. Some part of me wanted it to because then at least whatever fate awaited me could happen and then be over.

When the door opened I changed my mind, silently begging for more time alone. My heart hammered in my chest so hard I was sure it was going to burst out. I took slow, measured breaths, trying to keep a level head. I’d considered rushing the door, but I had no chance of getting there quickly enough.

The door shut behind him with finality. That was it. Game over. That shot was gone. Not like I had any real shot, but when you’re in no-win situations, you have to play this imaginary game in your head, the fantasy where you beat the bad guy and escape.