by Elazarus Wills
(05/30/07)

How can I describe the darkness? Absolute. A plywood box. I could brush both sides with my fingertips, arms straight out. Maybe three feet high. When I sat up, after awakening from the drugs, my forehead struck the top with a dull thud. Three-quarter-inch plywood with a couple of feet of jungle soil on top.

I knew how deep I was because the men who took me from my car at the roadblock had explained it to me before I went into the box.

'Abigail, please speak slowly into the microphone and explain that if they fail to pay, you will slowly starve to death inside a wooden box buried in a shallow grave and you will be thinking of them the whole time. Their selfishness. Their lack of...concern.'

I did as I was told. I had seen this movie before.

The first moments were pure terror, a waking from dream into a different, more terrifying, dream. I sat up, and hit my head. Then, the return of memory. I screamed until I couldn't abide the sound of myself in that space. About one hundred and forty-four cubic feet, I thought later, multiplying height by length by width. Over and over.

It was cool in the box, much cooler than the sweltering, tropical heat above. Almost pleasant.

One thing they didn't tell me was that I wouldn't be alone. As my mind quieted, I could hear her breathing. A person was in the box with me. Her. A woman, not a man. I knew that instantly from a dozen half-conscious clues. My hand encountered cloth, radiating warmth from flesh underneath. I withdrew my touch. The breathing was shallow and even: this other woman, sharing this tiny space, was unconscious, as I had been.

I remembered something they had said and began methodically searching the top of the wooden box. A few inches from the intersection of side and top on my left I found it -- the end of a cut end of garden hose. The air line they had promised. I raised my head and put my lips around the hose and drew air from above into my lungs. It seemed so sharp and pure, I almost choked on it.

'The air line can deliver air...or other things. Many other things. Water, gasoline, maybe bleach. If this tape doesn't convince them they may become very angry. Convince them to do the correct thing, Abigail.'

I had done my best to accomplish this, while praying to a God I didn't believe in that the multi-national which employed me, but which I despised, would pay. I cried, pleaded and begged. I had no shame or honor. My sole purpose was survival.

"Where the fuck am I?" The question came like an explosion inside the box. The woman was awake.

"Didn't they tell you?" I asked, taking another panicked draw into my lungs from the air hose.

"They? No..." The voice was deep for a woman, with an accent: British, Australian, or something more exotic. "We were driving. There was an explosion -- and now I'm here."

"Are you injured?" I reached out to touch her, feeling the texture of denim jeans. She didn't flinch like I would have.

"I don't know. I don't think so." I could hear her shift her body in the darkness. "I'm sore in spots and I have one bastard of a headache, but otherwise . . ."

I told her about the box. The air line.

"Fuck," was all she said. With one word, she made me fully ashamed of my fear.

"I'm Abigail."

"Vai."

"Good to meet you, Vai." I reached over to find her hand and shook it. She laughed. It was a wonderful sound. Like a puppy ringing a bronze bell. I wanted to make her do it again.

"We were delivering solar panels to be installed at a school. For poor kids," Vai said. "Probably just like the fucking poor kids that set off the bomb in the road." She said it without apparent bitterness.

"I was here to talk with a coffee farmer's cooperative about next year's crop. Shade grown. Preserve the rainforest. Fair trade. Like that," I said. I had spent four seasons in Central America as a coffee buyer for a famous American coffee company that wanted to be more appealing to yuppie one-worlders.

Hours passed. We took turns sucking air from the garden hose and telling each other our life stories. I was single. She had a husband of two years, a structural engineer in New York. No kids. They weren't getting along. I went to Smith, she'd been a British student at NYU. We took turns visiting the lidded plastic bucket of kitty litter in one corner that they had told me about. After a while we noticed that the box was getting warmer. Not drastically, but definitely warmer. With our combined body heat in the small space, things were getting warm and damp.

"I'm taking stuff off," Vai said. "I'm starting to sweat." I listened to her grunts of effort, her knee banging me occasionally, and then I pulled my own sweatshirt off over my head. I rolled the shirt up for a neck rest.

"This must be what it is like to be blind," I said. Two inches from my eyes, my own hand was invisible.

"Will they pay? Your people, I mean. Mine don't have any money," Vai said.

I laughed. "You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette?"

"Yeah, right," she said. "The logistics of that here are not workable. A guy I work with says that a lot. The logistics of that here are not workable, he says."

"I don't smoke," I said into the darkness. Her bare arm was touching mine. "I think my company will pay. Cost of doing business. Just add a tenth of a cent onto the wholesale price of a sixteen-ounce can of dark roast."

Vai said, "I wouldn't mind a cup of coffee. Even from that nitrogen-packed crap in a can."

She took my left hand in her right. She had calluses at the base of her fingers. She squeezed gently. "That's nice," I said, meaning it. "Thank you."

Time passed. I felt calmer. We fell asleep holding hands.

When I woke, we were cuddled tightly into one another. Vai seemed to be entirely nude. I still had my jeans on. Her breasts felt quite large. Her prominent nipples became even firmer as they pressed against the flesh of my right palm. I lay there between dreaming and waking, letting the sensations flow, amplified by the darkness. The terror was still huddled there with me, but the intimacy of our contact was comforting. She murmured and I removed my hand and started to roll away.

"No. Stay," she said. She pressed my palm back onto her breast. "Do you ever think about dying?"

"Right now?" Her breath had a pleasant odor that reminded me of fresh mushrooms.

"No, not now, because of this. Before. Ever?"

"I'm thirty-two, too young to think about death. I'm still immortal," I said, making an attempt at lightness, hugging her tightly. I shuddered violently. I could feel every detail of the texture of her naked breast, the pulse of blood beneath. It took the edge off of my urge to scream. I pressed my cheek to her bare shoulder.

"I always think about death," Vai said. "Every day. That's why I'm here. Fourteen million children under the age of five die every year in the Third World. Ten thousand kids every day of fucking diarrhea-related dehydration."

"I guess I'm self-centered yuppie scum," I said. "But I'm thinking about death right now. Less than fifty percent of all kidnap victims here -- even with their ransoms paid -- are released. I took a class." My lips brushed the skin at the curve of her shoulder and neck.

"About the same chance you have of making it to the age of five in some places," Vai said. "And they won't let us do much. Some people here are pretty happy with the status quo. Cheap labor. People die. So what? Plenty more lined up to work."

The muscles in my arms trembled against her. "If we die here, it'll be pretty insignificant."

"Not insignificant. I wish we were, but we're not," she whispered fiercely into one ear. "We're the chosen people. The...fucking...chosen...people."

I took the flesh over the hinge of her jaw between my teeth and bit down firmly. I held it, tasting the texture.

"Thank you," she said. "Bite me when I get too pontifical. Bite me hard."

"It wasn't that," I said. "I just need to feel something. I'm feeling right at the edge of something bad. Isn't this freaking you out?"

"If we die, thousands of other people will die that wouldn't have died otherwise," Vai said. "Some will die just because we were kidnapped." She suddenly rolled over to face me. Her left arm snaked about my back, holding me to her with surprising strength.

"Why?"

The one word was all I could force past my lips; my teeth were locked onto a new territory of her neck flesh.

"Because we're fucking Americans -- even if I'm a Brit. We matter more than Honduran peasants. We shouldn't, but we do." Her fingers danced between my vertebrae. "The doctors and aid workers will stay away. The place will be seen as too dangerous, or ungrateful. Without the aid, people will die."

Vai crushed me to her with both arms and began to shake, her breasts pressed tightly to mine. For a moment I was confused, then I realized she was crying, massive sobs racking the whole of her damp body. I stroked her neck and back. I wished with all of my being that I could see her; could look into her eyes.

"Fuck these people," Vai wheezed. "The people I'm trying to help are the same ones who probably did this. They think that having more money to fight the government is good. It's like trying to free a lion with his foot in a trap. You try to help while he's trying to kill you for trying."

We both cried -- for our captors and for the world. When we calmed, we took turns on the air line for a while.

Finally we kissed with a tenderness that disavowed the existence of time.

We slept again. I dreamt of a place where the sun was shining.

I awoke in darkness. Vai was kissing the center of my forehead, then both eyelids, and finally my dry lips. "Wait," I said in a barely audible whisper, not knowing what I meant. I lay there, eyes closed, trying to think what I should think. Maybe it was time to move beyond thinking. Maybe I should just feel.

"Shhh," Vai said. "It doesn't matter. I need to do this." I felt her unsnap my jeans.

My world felt a million years away. I lifted my hips and my jeans and panties slid off. Vai's breathing was ragged against my face.

"We're human beings," she hissed. "Human fucking beings. Hang onto that, Abigail." Hearing her say my name was a shock, more of a raw shock than the moment later when her hand ferociously cupped my exposed vulva. It was as if I had been about to slip beneath dark water for the last time when that hand, Vai's amazing hand, pulled me up to the light.

"I want..." I began.

"...you," she finished, two fingers bracketing my sex, a thumb feather-soft on my clitoris. I was acutely away of every square millimeter of skin to skin contact: breast, belly, thigh, ankle. My mouth on hers, my hand moving down between us to her crotch, where I mirrored her touch.

She growled with pleasure when my fingers began caressing, and then penetrating, one, two, finally three in unison.

Her own fingers entered easily into my vagina. Her thumb became a secret, sweet metronome. We moved into something close to music as the sweat trickled over our slick bodies. It was another conversation we were having, just as meaningful as the ones before, spoken with touch, with the lengths of fingers, the tips of tongues on nipples and earlobes. And with the small temporary death of orgasms.

I screamed -- a gurgle from the back of my throat -- thrashing as Vai shoved me unmercifully past the vestibule to unbearable pleasure, swept the broken glass aside and climbed in after me. It had been months since my last orgasm -- self-administered and perfunctory.

As I fell into the abyss I thought that this was the best climax ever. Maybe it would be the last.

Then it became the first of many.

After a number of periods of sleeping, waking, and making love had passed, when we had both lost the ability to remember the past in any linear way, time no longer existed inside the box. We became hungry, but instead of eating we devoured each other's passion. We became incredibly thirsty, but with no water or food in the box, we drank each other. Devising a game of touch, we took turns tracing a finger over one another's body from head to toe, the goal being to cover every square centimeter of naked skin.

Waking and dreaming became indistinguishable. Triggered by hunger, shock, or approaching madness -- who could know -- from time to time the box vanished. Sometimes I found myself at home in New York dreaming that I was buried in a box in the Honduran jungle. Vai was there with me in my bed, clean, perfumed and enticing but with a form and face I couldn't quite make out.

"That's funny," said the unclear Vai of my dream. "I've been having the very same one. That must mean that I love you."

The lovemaking in the dream was ferocious and focused, even though Vai's body was not. Lips, tongues, fingers, damp, warm, naked flesh, throbbing, pulsing and exploding. Or maybe it wasn't in the dream at all. I couldn't tell. I couldn't remember.

Then there came a moment when we became Vai-Abigail. Abigail-Vai. Sharing memories in voices that cracked and faded. Memories that seemed to overlap my own memories until I wasn't sure which were mine and which were Vai's. Or if I was Vai or Abigail. Or who it was that kept saying, "I love you," which felt like lighting matches in the dark? Quickly there and gone, but instead of sulphur, a lingering odor like lilac.

I woke to water dripping onto my bare shoulder. It was coming from the air line. I held the tube between my lips for several minutes, letting the miniscule but steady flow soothe my parched lips and throat. I woke Vai-Abigail and passed the line to her. "Oh God. It must be raining," she said.

Sometime, an immeasurable eternity later, the water...became wine. Human intervention. This we took as a sign that things were going well, that we had not been callously forgotten; we both became delirious -- as well as eventually intoxicated.

The ransom had been paid, by someone, enough of it to matter. People came and dug us up and overwhelmed us with questions, pity, curiosity and compassion. Then more questions in Tegucigalpa, posed by more serious sorts of people before they put us both on a plane back to New York.

Vai and I smiled shyly, looked suitably haunted for the photographers and film crews, made up answers...and waited. And waited: a pale blonde and a tall, striking black woman with skin the color of moonless night shadows, holding hands.

Patience is effortless compared to many things. Normalcy would eventually return for everyone else, but it would never return for us. Not that we wanted it to. Our respective employers gave us temporary jobs that didn't involve travel until we were "better." We shared my small apartment in a building that had a neighborhood bar and a used bookstore on the ground floor.

For a while people from the government visited every few weeks to ask more questions. Friends that each of us had had in the city before asked questions too. They found it odd that Vai and I lived together. They found it bizarre that two apparently straight women had become lovers. Why? Because we had spent six days together buried in a wooden box? "You need to talk to someone," they said. "There are drugs you could take. People don't just change like this."

I pled guilty to shedding my old self like a moth emerging from its cocoon, but the deepest change wasn't that I loved Vai. It was that I too thought about death. And that I had begun to care. Really care.

In the end, no matter how earnestly we tried, we couldn't explain to our friends in words that they could understand anything that could make them accept how completely the world had changed for us. And we finally realized that their understanding wasn't the point of it all. It certainly wasn't our goal.

Some months later we packed the few things we had that still seemed important or useful, and took a cab to the airport.

We lie together naked on top of a double layer of down comforters in the bedroom, in a new place. Sunshine and the smell of recently picked coffee beans drying enter through an open window. The sound of a child laughing.

Someplace. I won't say where. Vai rolls on top of me, breast to breast, pressing down with her whole body's weight. The world seems very small. I am thinking about death ---- and joy and sex.

I can hardly breathe.

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