The Summer I Died

CHAPTER 21

The wheezes became more labored and further apart. Jamie was dying. I wanted to get the collar from behind me, get down to business, get the flying fuck out of here, but I stopped myself. Somehow I knew I only had a few minutes before she gave in, and no amount of struggling was going to get me out of the cuffs in time to save her. Either I made my peace with it or I’d go mad.

“Jamie,” I said into the void, “I’m right here. I’m right beside you. Listen to my voice.”

I didn’t know what to say, nothing in my past came close to anything of this magnitude. All I knew was I couldn’t let her die thinking she was alone. She had to know I was here. My last attempt to say goodbye was only a notch above sniveling. I wanted so much to take her place, to take her pain for her, and it was killing me both mentally and physically. My insides were a knotted mess of brambles, ripping apart and twisting about. I couldn’t let her die alone. I wanted her to know she was special.

“Jamie, oh God, Jamie. Do you remember the Christmas you gave me the Darth Vader model kit?” What a dumb thing to focus on, but I found myself unable to stop. “I thought Mom bought it and put your name on it, like always. Then a few weeks later I heard Mom and Dad talking in the kitchen and Dad was upset because I’d watched a horror film and had nightmares the night before, and he said he wished you hadn’t bought me the model because it looked so menacing in the dark, and he thought it was giving me bad dreams. But, Jamie, I had no idea you spent your own money on that. I never said it, but it was the perfect gift. I’m sorry I never told you.”

I wanted to tell her I still had the model, but the memory was too painful. Somewhere, probably in some dumb comic, I had read that a person’s last thoughts followed them into the after life, and true or not, I wanted Jamie to be happy wherever she was going so I said the first thing I could think of.

“Jamie, we’re at the park near home,” I said, “and there’re kids playing catch. Mom and Dad are sitting on a towel nearby, drinking iced-tea. There’s a good-looking guy over there checking you out. He looks just like Brad Pitt. You’re gonna get a burger with him later, and then someday he’ll marry you and you’ll be wealthy and happy. Do you see the kids? Watch them, Jamie. Look at them run.”

Suddenly, I was crying so hard the words were almost gibberish.

Though I’d been on a roller coaster ride of fear and exhaustion since my capture, it was the first time I realized-really realized-I was going to die, and die alone. Tooth had been my courage and Jamie my urgency, but now it was just me. And while I’d had moments of strength, it wasn’t until Jamie’s breath stopped a minute later that it really hit me no one was coming to save me.

No one knew where I was.

And perhaps that’s why it was easier to tell myself to be a man for once and fight, say fuck you to fear. I knew if I had any chance of escape, it was now, it was up to me, and it was going to take every ounce of muscle I had. Not just physical, but mental as well.

So I swallowed my sobs, said goodbye to Jamie, grabbed the dog collar and twisted it in my hand to locate the buckle. Unfortunately, in the darkness I couldn’t see the keyhole of the cuff, couldn’t get my fingers on it. I already knew the buckle arm was too big, but if it was thinner, then what? Could I really pick a lock?

The answer came from somewhere, maybe my mind, maybe an angel whispering in my ear-yes.

It wouldn’t be easy, though. I didn’t know how to do it; I had never seen anyone do it. But I’d read my share of stories and comics and thought that maybe, just maybe, I knew the mechanics of it. Same way I knew that if these were the newest police standard cuffs I was probably screwed. A new set of police handcuffs would never unlock without the actual key, improvements in the last decade had made them virtually failsafe. But I didn’t think these were regulation, they looked out of date, ovoid in appearance. They must have come from the Internet or an army navy surplus store. At least I hoped.

Jamie is dead. The thought punched me in the brain, an unpleasant reminder of what just happened. No, I thought, don’t give in to it. Not yet. Get back to the cuffs.

And so I thought hard about everything I’d ever read that related to handcuffs or escapism.

Thanks to some brilliant comic book authors who had done their research, I knew that handcuffs had a bit on the inside that needed to be pressed back to trigger the release. I knew they had another pin on the outside that locked the cuffs in place so they wouldn’t tighten themselves. And I knew they could be picked, somehow, with a small thin object provided it was shaped properly.

A small sharp object. That’s what I needed. And it’s exactly what I didn’t have. What I had was a fat buckle on a dog collar.

With tears drying on my cheeks, I rested my head against the wall and racked my brain for a solution. Jamie is dead assaulted me again. I shook my head, slammed it back and let the physical pain push out the mental. The cold cement felt oddly refreshing on my scalp, like a compress. I was suddenly sleepy, sapped of energy, on the edge of forfeit. This was it, my last chance. How to make the buckle arm thinner? How to make it skinnier?

I played the mantra over and over in my mind, until it felt like it was eroding my skull. And that’s when it dawned on me-I needed to erode the buckle.

With a prayer, I placed the buckle arm against the concrete wall. . and rubbed.

It scraped over the concrete, flaking off bits of cement like dandruff. I did it a few times and then touched the tip. It was hot. It hadn’t gotten any skinnier, but I felt certain it would.

With black all around me, and silence filling my ears, I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed. I don’t know how much time passed. I don’t know how loud it actually was, though to me it sounded like a car engine. I just scraped that little piece of metal against the concrete until my biceps flared up, until I was gnashing my teeth like a child waiting for a tetanus shot. Little cold specks of cement tickled the backs of my legs as they flew up then drifted to the floor. After a long time, I stopped to check my progress and felt an incredible heat radiating off the metal. It had thinned ever so slightly, not enough, but it was enough to know this plan might work.

So I went back to work, and I rubbed and rubbed some more. My eyelids grew heavy; I had probably been up over forty hours by now. But sleep meant nothing to me; I had to keep rubbing.

Time was kept in relation to sounds from above. The television, a laugh track, Skinny Man talking, someone walking around, a voice I recognized, David Letterman, Skinny Man again. After awhile the television went silent. Maybe he was retiring for the night; maybe he was listening to them. Movies claimed the night was witching hour, and if so, shouldn’t he be on his way down? Maybe he thought the night was too quiet for screams, maybe he worked, maybe he was just tired. Who knew?

I didn’t stop again until my shoulder felt swollen, until the passing hours became a blur. Then I touched the small piece of metal and smiled. As I'd hoped, it had thinned into a pin. I couldn’t believe it, it had worked! Now all I had to do was pick the lock using the exact hand that was bound. Why, I thought vexingly, was every jumped hurdle met with an even larger one beyond it?

It was an issue of Chaos Legion, number twenty-one or twenty-two, if I remember correctly, where Stanley Horner-aka Greymatter, so named because he could steal your mind and leave you babbling like a retard-had to get out of handcuffs before a bomb turned him into what would be considered a delicacy in my present whereabouts. As a mental mutant with no elevated physical strength, he’d saved himself by pulling a nail out of a floorboard and using it as a key.

I sifted through the debris in my mind trying to remember the context of the comic. Bits and pieces started to come back to me like roaches to an open trash can, and soon I could visualize the page, the words, and the illustrations. Inside a handcuff was a sloped lever that allowed the cuff teeth to slide forward but not backward, so that the cuff tightened and wouldn’t slide open. Additionally, a tiny pin on the outside of the cuff, when pushed in, slid in over the sloped lever and blocked the cuff from sliding forward anymore, preventing the cuff from tightening itself further. But this pin could very easily be pushed out from the other side with something thin.

I decided to attack that challenge first. It took a few attempts, what with my hands all gimped up by the cuff, but by using my leg and the wall, I pushed the pin on the right cuff back out with the sharpened buckle. After I had done that, I swung the collar to my other hand and did the same thing over there. Now I had to be very careful; I could easily tighten the cuffs and snap my wrists.

Back inside my head, I reread Chaos Legion. What was Stanley telling me? Handcuff keys end in a small flag, like a P, which is turned to flatten the sloped lever and allow the cuff to slide back without the teeth hitting it. The flag is essential. Stanley had used the leg of his chair to bend the nail.

Using the wall and the cuff itself, I began bending the tip of the buckle arm at a ninety-degree angle. Despite still being hot and thin, the metal was as strong as the Hulk’s erection and I had to strain to get it shaped into a small hook. It wasn’t a flag but it was probably close enough, or so I hoped.

I put the buckle in my belt loop, the collar strap hanging down near my leg, leaving the buckle arm sticking straight out. Slowly, with grandma speed, I slid the cuff’s keyhole onto the “key” and pushed it in as a far as it could go. Then, using my wrist, I rotated the cuff.

The buckle arm fell out of the keyhole.

Shit, I mumbled, welcome to Dexterity 101. This wasn’t going to be easy.