The Lioness(72)

“I do know that,” he’d agreed.

“Lord, I didn’t know anyone had used that expression before Fitzgerald. ‘Dark night of the soul. It’s always three o’clock in the morning.’ Something like that.” The professor had grown ruminative.

“It often did feel like three a.m.”

“What was the longest amount of time you can recall being locked in there?”

“I spent whole nights a couple of times.”

“What did you think about?”

Now, in the dark night of the hut, he tried to recall what he had thought about, because as horrible as those nights were, they were a hell of a lot less frightening than this. And he wasn’t concerned he had only one functioning kidney and the nose of a monster.

Mostly, he supposed, as a boy he had thought how unfair life was. How much he hated his parents, but how he hated his mother far more. He contemplated what would happen if he ruined the coats and boots and shoes in there by peeing on them like a cat. But he never did, because who knew what punishments Glenda Stepanov could invent that were worse (far worse) and that Roman Stepanov would tolerate because he just didn’t give a damn? When he was first tossed into the closet, there had always been a sliver of light along the top of the two doors—not along the bottom because of the plush entryway carpet, and not where the two doors met because they met perfectly—and he knew as boy that the deep creepiness would really began later when his parents went to sleep and turned off the hall light. Because then that sliver of light would be gone, the last of the sun surrendering to the horizon and the sky utterly moonless. That was the dark night of the soul, where he would curl into a ball and shiver and cry until, somehow, eventually he would fall asleep.

When he self-diagnosed his own demons, he attributed his fear of flying to that closet. It wasn’t really about being five miles off the ground, it wasn’t the idea of traveling 550 miles an hour; it was about being trapped in a metal tube from which there was no escape. It was about claustrophobia.

At the moment, he was trying to remain sane and calm by thinking of his little boy, Marc. It took his mind off the relentless susurrus of the Serengeti’s infinite array of vermin and bugs, and the pounding ache in his nose. Every breath sounded like a wheeze when he tried to inhale with his mouth shut, as if he himself were but one more of the myriad species of insects in and around the boma. He tried to move chronologically, finding memories from the moment the boy was born until the afternoon when Billy had dropped him off at his mother’s house a couple of days before leaving with Margie for Africa. It was the last time he had seen him. He had taken the child to see Mary Poppins that day. His son had seen it with his mother when it had first premiered in August, but he’d loved it, and so Billy had taken him to it again. Billy hadn’t seen it then, but he’d been inundated by the commercials and the billboards and he’d read the reviews, and so he knew what to expect. The cinema had been almost empty because the movie had been out for months, but that meant that Marc, who was only four years old and about three and a half feet tall, had had an unobstructed view of the screen, and they had been able to sit smack in the middle of the theater. Billy found himself focusing now on the scene in which Dick Van Dyke was dancing with the animated penguins, and he supposed that his mind was going there because penguins were wild animals and he was in a world of wild animals.

But the worst of the wild animals? The humans. The people who had kidnapped him. Perhaps they could be reasoned with—unlike a charging rhino or a hungry lioness—but they were at least as dangerous. And they were senselessly cruel. A lioness hunted to feed her family, and put its victims out of their misery quickly. Not so these men. They were just torturing them all.

He also passed the time in the hut by counting. There were sixty seconds in a minute, so every time he managed to count to six hundred without losing track, another ten minutes had elapsed.

They’d brought him a tin cup with some rice and beans and a little water for dinner, but he had no idea whether that was two hours ago or a mere forty-five minutes. They no longer had his wrists and ankles bound, but the luminescence on his watch hands was now gone, and so he couldn’t make out the face. That was the other thing about the dark: it crippled a person’s ability to gauge time, because the light never changed. He considered going to the entrance and peering out into the boma—surely, he’d be able to read the watch there—but they’d told him to stay where he was. He knew there was a guard outside. Was knowing the exact time worth pissing them off and getting tied up again? Nope. Absolutely not. He didn’t think he could stand that.

And that supposed that tying him up was all that they did.

The one who’d brought him his rice and beans had joked that he should make a run for it in the night. He’d be better off getting shot in the boma trying to escape, because at least then he wouldn’t be eaten alive.

Still, as he sat alone in the dark he imagined himself using that tin cup to dig his way under the wall of the hut. Isn’t that what they did in The Great Escape? He’d emerge before dawn, maybe, and then he would…

He had no idea what he would do. Just none. He sure as hell wouldn’t have a motorcycle waiting for him à la Steve McQueen.

And then, of course, there were Margie and Katie. He couldn’t stop worrying about them. The fellow had reassured him that his wife and his sister were fine, as were David and Terrance.