Collecting Cooper

chapter six

Cooper can taste carpet and dust and something metallic, along with something he can’t place, something that makes him think of decaying coffins being opened in ancient black-and-white movies, where the inside lids have claw marks and the dead men have torn and broken fingernails. His eyes are too heavy and sore to open. The darkness is connected optically to a mind that feels raw. His head is pounding and he wonders what sort of hangover this is, and quickly decides it must be the worst kind, the kind where you wake up and wish you were dead instead of drunk. There is a ringing in his ears and his chest is burning.

The first memory to return is the heat wave. A city under siege by the sun. That could be why he started drinking. Hell, it’s a good reason for anybody to start. Drink what you can then pass out someplace cool, because wherever he is at the moment, it is certainly that. He bets his wife is equally as drunk somewhere before remembering he doesn’t have a wife anymore, that they separated three years ago though he can’t quite remember why, not off the top of his head, and since his wife there haven’t been any other women, not serious ones, and there’s nobody at the moment, so probably he started drinking alone. Only he’s given up drinking, or so he’d thought. In the past the drink has gotten him into trouble. He rolls onto his side, the bed squeaking and grinding beneath him, not his bed, though, because he doesn’t recognize any of the sounds. Then he thinks hospital. He’s been in an accident, that whatever has happened has nothing to do with an indulgence of too much scotch. He listens for but can’t hear the chatter of patients, the scuffle of feet, the bing bong of the intercom shouting code blue or code red in room one-oh-something. Last time he stepped into a hospital was two years ago when his uncle was sick, his uncle being eaten alive from the inside out by cancer. He remembers another old man in the same room having to shit into a plastic container suspended beneath the seat of a chair next to the bed, the stench of it wafting through the room enough to make him leave. None of that is with him here, none of the sounds or the smells. This isn’t a hospital.

He massages his closed eyes with his fingertips and winces when he finds a bump on his forehead sticking out like a golf ball. He gets his eyes open and everything is blurry and gray-looking. He blinks heavily until things start to clear a little, but it doesn’t help. Wherever he is, there isn’t much light. His face is grazed and stings to the touch. He remembers walking to his car after closing the garage door. He was carrying his briefcase and he can’t remember why, there’d be no purpose for that, and then there was. . was. . what?

“Oh Jesus,” he says, and he tries to stand up, but his body won’t work, he manages to get up onto his elbows before collapsing back down, his arm banging off the edge of the bed, his knuckles hitting the concrete floor and scraping away the skin. He sticks them in his mouth and the blood tastes sweet. He needs to get up. Needs to get away from wherever this is. The man. The man asked him for the time and then. . and then he lost control over his body. He lay on the ground with the sun in his eyes until the man shadowed it. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t even speak. There was confetti on the ground next to his face and he couldn’t figure out why it was there. The man crouched down and held a cloth over his face and there was nothing he could do to fight it. Then. . then this.

He pushes his hands into the bed. Forces himself upward, slower this time, trying to maintain control, desperate to get onto his feet, pausing to sit on the edge of the bed while the world spins. His eyes begin to adjust. The room comes into focus, but there’s not much to see. It’s some kind of bomb shelter. The only light coming into the room is through a small glass window in a door. Everything is concrete and steel. With small cramps and electrical-like charges, feeling begins to arrive to the rest of his body. First pins and needles through his feet and hands, then it spreads up his limbs into his core. He stands up. There’s a heavy ache behind his eyes. He’s tired and scared and has no idea how long he’s been unconscious.

He realizes he was shot by a Taser. That’s what the confetti was. Tasers spit out twenty or thirty bits of paper with serial numbers on them every time they’re fired. It identifies the user. Then he was drugged. He remembers the rag on his face, the smell, the darkness.

He supports his weight against the wall and makes his way to the door. It’s a short walk. The room is twice the size of a prison cell, with a view out to what looks like another prison cell, this one not as dark, with light coming through an open door that he can just see the bottom of on an upper landing. The window in the door is clean, but has some scratches on this side of it and, if broken, wouldn’t leave a hole big enough to climb through. The window fogs up from his breath, he wipes his hand over it, his thumb following some of the scratches. He doesn’t want to think about the people trapped on this side of the door who made them, not yet anyway. There’s a bookcase out there but he can’t make out any of the titles. There’s a couch with holes big enough for him to see, through which springs are sticking out. He looks back at the bookcase. He keeps staring at it, the shapes becoming clearer. . if only there was a little more light. On the top shelf he thinks he can see the thumb he bought in the auction, and suddenly it all makes sense to him-the auction was a trap. Whoever sold him the thumb never intended to part with it-in fact, all along the seller wanted more thumbs to add to his collection. Next to the bookcase, the leather scuffed up and one of the catches twisted, is his briefcase.

The nausea hits him like a punch to the stomach. He turns around and everything is dark until he moves from the window. There’s no sink or toilet, only two buckets. There’s a cup for drinking and a toothbrush, which indicates the seller’s intent isn’t murder, at least not immediately. He picks up the empty bucket and sits on the edge of the bed and throws up into it, wiping the bottom of his shirt across his mouth when he’s done. His head is pounding, and having to squint to see a goddamn thing isn’t helping. He rubs his hand over his chest and finds the two small holes where he was shot by the Taser, the barbs pulled out by his attacker.

He closes his eyes and takes himself back to the moment he first saw the man, he holds on to the image, and no, he’s sure it’s not somebody he’s ever seen before. How many other people did this man post that thumb to and then abduct? It’s a hell of a signature. A hell of an MO. One he’ll teach about if he ever gets out of here.

He moves around the cell, slowly exploring the walls with his hands, the back of the cell almost in complete darkness. The stench of his vomit hangs in the room with nowhere to go, making him feel sick all over again. There are bolts jutting out of the floor and the walls that he finds when he trips on one and lands against the other. Once something large used to be in this room. There are pipes leading up into the ceiling that have been capped off, and a thick piece of steel that’s been bolted into the roof, probably covering a hole. If the hole is close to the size of the piece of steel, then it would be big enough to squeeze through. He steps onto the bed but can’t reach it. He tips the bed up onto its side and scales it and when he’s within reach he sees that the nuts on this side of the metal have been filed into a smooth surface. Even if he was strong enough to loosen them with his fingers, there’s no way he can grip them. He tries digging his fingers under one of the edges of the plate but it’s no use. He climbs down and resets the bed to how he found it. On another wall an iron eyelet has been welded onto another of the bolts, this one half a meter from the ceiling. There are a couple of holes in the walls that have been filled in with cement. Whatever was taken out of this room was taken for the purpose of turning this place into a cell, and that’s exactly what this place is. Christ, it’s like something out of a textbook. Something he would teach.

Is that the point of this? Is that why he’s here?

He checks his pockets. There’s a piece of tinfoil that he didn’t put in there and a couple of coins which he did. He unwraps the foil. There are two painkillers. He wraps them back up. He studies the ceiling looking for signs of surveillance and sees none. He has two options: keep waiting, or start banging and yelling.

He pounds against the door. “Hey? Hey? Who’s out there? Hey? Where the hell am I?”

No answer. He pushes at the glass, not expecting to see it flex, and flexing is exactly what it doesn’t do, nor break, nor shatter. He bangs against it with the heel of his fist and each bang vibrates through his head, making the headache worse. He takes off his shoe and bangs with the heel of it and gets the same result. He looks out at the bookcase. The harder he stares at it the more his head hurts, and he finds peripherally he can make out some of the items, but when he looks straight on they merge with the darkness. Before disappearing, he’s sure what he was looking at were weapons and ropes and pieces of clothing; things he himself has collected.

He starts banging again. He keeps his eyes closed and tries to ignore the throbbing deep in his brain. His arm is getting sore from swinging his shoe into the door. He switches from hand to hand and is getting ready to give up after five minutes of it when the light coming through the door upstairs dims, and he knows somebody is standing up there. He stops banging and his headache thanks him for it. When the man comes down, he comes down surrounded by a cold blue glow. Cooper sees him in stages, the feet are first, brown leather shoes scuffed from use. Pants frayed around the hems with a couple of coin-sized holes-not the kind of fraying with holes that are in fashion, but the kind that comes from years of wear. Then the hips, the top of the pants coming into view, a leather belt, then he sees the lantern, a battery-powered lantern for camping, not bright enough to hurt his eyes. The man carrying it is wearing a short-sleeve white shirt with a thin leather tie, and the same corduroy pants from earlier. He reaches the bottom of the stairs and turns toward him. The lantern gives his skin a pale sheen. His hair is slicked to the sides with wide comb teeth marks through it, with a clump of it falling over his forehead. He has brown, droopy eyes and chapped lips and dozens of acne scars. He reaches the cell door, the lantern to the side of a tray carrying food that Cooper can’t smell.

Then the man smiles. “Welcome to my collection,” he says.