Castles Made of Sand (38 page)

‘It’s not for money!’ shouted the old white guy, the gun shaking in his hand. ‘We’re not interested in your fucking money!’

‘Hey, we
do
want money!’ countered one of the two stocky guys, in a hurry, as if fearing Whitey would wreck the deal.

‘Yeah, but this isn’t
about
money!’ repeated the older bloke, furiously. He sprang forward and gave Ax a smack in the face with the side of the gun that knocked his head back, ringing, stinging. ‘This is about the blow!’

‘I don’t have any cocaine, either. Not on me.’

‘I mean the MARKET! This is about what
you did
, you bastard. And you’re going to fucking UNDO, or you will never see the light of day again!’

‘This is not personal,’ said the man from Dupont Circle. He put his arm around Ax’s shoulders and leaned in close, warm breath, a sickening jolt of fear. ‘You know, Ax, I am your biggest fan. I admire very much the Rock and Roll Reich. Fiorinda, the Powerbabes, the Reading Festival, I am there. Be good to each other, I believe that. But you have to help us. You don’t know what you did. I know you’ll help us when you understand.’

The white guy started ranting again. The others joined in, saying things that were slightly more coherent, no less lunatic. They were in the drug business, or they had been, until the market crashed. Their careers had been wrecked by the legalisation of recreational drugs in Europe—above all, the synthesis of artificial cocaine. They held Ax Preston responsible. He had ruined their lives. What they expected him to do about it was unclear. He was a hostage—

That seemed to be it.

Deathly afraid, he lived for days in that room, chained to the wall, taken twice a day, handcuffed and blindfold, to a toilet: talking whenever they would let him, trying to romance them, trying to find out where he was, hoping he would get to speak with someone rational. He got nowhere. It dawned on him that there was no one rational, no one in charge. He was dealing with an amputated limb, a flailing poisonous tentacle no longer connected to any organised body. He could not call Fiorinda; the b-loc link was one way. But it was okay. She would realise something had gone wrong and call him again. All he had to do was stay alive, she would send the cavalry. Unless… Unless the the nightmare he’d envisaged, just before this disaster, was real, and it had intervened.

The kidnappers were volatile, but not violent. Not even older Whitey, apart from the tantrums; which grew less. They didn’t hurt him anymore, though he knew it was in them: especially in João. After a few days they let him do without the blindfold except for the toilet trips. They gave him food, rice and beans; and water from the sink. João kept saying he would borrow a guitar so that Ax would feel at home. Ax Preston, he always has his guitar. Like Jimi Hendrix.

One day, maybe the tenth or fifteenth from Dupont Circle, the six of them arrived together, with another man. The newcomer wore a suit of white overalls, like a house-painter. He was carrying a rigid metal briefcase.

Ax’s heart stood still.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what do you want me to do? I didn’t cause a global recession, and I can’t disinvent synthetic blow, fuck’s sake, can’t put the genie back in the bottle—’

‘Ax, we have to prove that we’ve got you,’ said João, reasonably. ‘This is a
good
thing, be calm, don’t worry. When we have proved that we really have Ax Preston, then we can have the ransom paid, and everything will be fine. We are not bad people, Ax.’

‘Take a photograph,’ he whispered, his lips scarcely able to move.

‘That’s fucking stupid,’ said one of the stocky pair (only ‘João’ had a name, so far). ‘Don’t be
stupid
, Ax. Pictures can be faked. What would a photo prove?’

‘Blood sample. Tissue sample.’

They already had his ring, the ring Fiorinda had given him, along with everything else he’d been carrying. They had plenty of ID.

‘We could cut off your hands,’ said João. ‘But we will only take something that you don’t need, that losing it will not make you less of a man, but more.’

The man in the painter’s overalls set his briefcase on the floor and opened it, with the stoic expression of someone who knows he should be in a better job. Ax couldn’t see into the case, but he could see the man donning a pair of slick medical gloves. He watched, rigid with fear, as older Whitey and João confabulated over a needle and a syringe, works that had been travelling loose in Whitey’s denim jacket pocket. Is this a clean needle, are you sure? It doesn’t
look
very clean. Oh fuck.

‘Don’t put me out,’ he said, urgently. ‘
Don’t put me out
. I have to be conscious!’

He struggled furiously, things having reached the point where there was nothing to be gained by staying calm. They got him strapped down, face down, on his bed of boards. Okay, okay, I’ll keep still. Don’t knock me out!

But they did.

When he woke again he was still lying in the dirty room. His wrists were cuffed in front of him, but not fastened to the wall. He put both hands to his head and found a crusted, sticky dressing over the place where they’d shaved a patch of hair and cut open his skull. If that gets infected, I am fucked. He could not remember his own name, but he could feel it, like something he could touch through a veil, through water. All kinds of knowledge were immanent in him. The engine was working just as it had been before, but the syncromesh was gone.
If that gets infected I am fucked…
The person who could put that thought together knew everything, but like an amputated limb, a lost arm of the sea.

He tried to get up and fell off the bed. Right arm and leg (or maybe left arm and leg, same side, anyway) were not responding. He tried to crawl and found that the limbs that felt paralysed moved, more or less: but he couldn’t think about it or everything went haywire. He remembered effects slightly like this from, whoooh, long time ago, long time ago. When the chip was first put in.

Says the amputated limb, the lost arm of the sea.

He crawled in the direction of the daylight, the place where he’d always known the window must be. He pushed himself up the wall, with great difficulty, and touched glass. He was looking out of a window after all this time (not a fuck of a clue how long, at this moment). Aha. Beard. Touch his chin. The beard is grown way past where it was, it is soft and sparse. I don’t grow much beard, but what there is is strong enough for a daily shave, annoyingly. I will not grow a beard. He remembered promising Fiorinda that.

Says the amputated limb, the lost arm of the sea.

He could not make sense of what he saw. He noticed for the first time that he couldn’t make sense of
anything
he saw. Not his own hand in front of his face. Light and shadow, greyscale; other than that, scrambled pixels.
I cannot do this
. He turned and let himself slide down again with his eyes closed, tears burning his eyelids. Oh fuck, oh Fiorinda, I can’t get there,
what’s happening to you?

He stayed for a long time in the same position, in the sweltering damp heat of the dirty room. Nobody came. Every few hours, or maybe every few minutes, he had no way of telling, he opened his eyes and tried again. The need to shit will come. Where will I shit, where will I piss if they don’t take me to the toilet? I’ll choose a corner. I can handle getting the pants down and up, cuffed. I think can do that. There’s water in the sink. Live on water, for a long time. Someone will come. I’ll think of a way to beat this. I will. He opened his eyes and tried again.

He opened his eyes and tried again, and had the strangest sensation of the whole input being
there
, but unavailable. The animal can see perfectly. Ax can’t.

Now this is what Sage warned me about. The brain becomes parasitical on the chip, routing everything through there, so if the chip goes you are fucked: and I
wouldn’t listen
, because I couldn’t consider giving up my special stuff. Poor Sage, he must have been scared to death. What an arrogant stupid wanker I am.

He opened his eyes and tried again, he opened his eyes and tried again, not knowing whether he would lose everything that had been left to him, but giving thanks to God for what he had. I have Sage, I have Fiorinda, I can think of them. God is merciful.

He thought of them. The faces were not clear, but he could feel them, filling his heart.

It could have been days later: he opened his eyes and tried again, and the dirty room took shape. God is good. God is great. It looked different. Could be a different room, for all he knew. He listened, am I deaf? There was not a sound. He pushed himself up the wall and looked out of the window. The dirty room was on the first floor of a breeze-block building in a row of similar buildings. It seemed to be on the edge of a town. The street below was broken up, and trailed away into red stones and earth. He could see derelict industrial things beside a broad, nearly-dry river-bed. On the other side of the nearly-dry river, the green rafted towers of the trees began. They go up forever. They go on and on.

Where the fuck am I?

It took him many weeks to come back from losing his chip. The neurological effects were terrifying, but most of them passed quite quickly. Psychological withdrawal was in ways much worse. The shakes. Disorientation, inability to concentrate, inability to eat, or even to swallow—and a fathomless, engulfing despair that wouldn’t give up. He had lost England, he had lost the Qur’an. He had lost his mind, become an animal like these animals his captors. It was like being in Hell, because there was no escape. The cartel took care of him; they wouldn’t let him die. He would wake to find one or other of them spooning sugar-water into his mouth.

They brought him fresh clothes, they brought a slab of foam and a sheet for the boards of his bed. They cleaned the dirty room a little; they fetched in some furniture. João brought the promised guitar, and an amplifier so they could have a real concert. There was no power in this building but apparently there were others nearby that were still hooked up. The kidnappers ran a cable to Ax’s room: João told Ax he must try to play the guitar. He must try to get better.

He discovered they still had the chip. João carried it around in a dog-eared Jiffy bag. The cartel would sit looking at this Jiffy bag, in Ax’s room: arguing about where to send it and getting nowhere, bewildered by the task. They were afraid they would be traced by their DNA on the package. It had them (especially Martín, old Whitey with the hair-trigger emotions) crying in frustration. How could they send something to England? An unreal place. Buckingham Palace Road, London. Beyond imagining.

Ax had fallen into the hands of the unculture. They were grown-up toddlers. They had no idea how to follow through, how to make a project work.

He tried to convince them to send it to Kathryn Adams in Washington (he had no qualms about using her name. They knew about his US sponsor. They knew everything). They wouldn’t. They weren’t taking that kind of risk. Eventually the bag vanished. He supposed they’d sent it somewhere, but they wouldn’t tell him anything. He sat in the corner of his bed, cuffed to the wall again except for the toilet trips, trying to calculate the time that had passed while he was incapable. Three months? At least three months since he had been kidnapped… He must get to England at once. Fiorinda was in trouble. The terrible urgency coursed through him, scouring his blood: there was nothing he could do.

He thought of how his lovers had pleaded with him to be more careful. Sage saying,
Some nutter’s going to walk up to you and shoot you in the head, Ax. Have mercy on me, take some precautions.
But Ax wouldn’t listen, because Ax Preston mustn’t go that way. No bodyguards, no armoured limousines, no razor-wired VIP lounge,
fuck
that. So he had carried on impressing the punters with his attitude, and his darlings had let him behave like an idiot, because they’d known he could hardly stand the life his choices had forced him into. They’d let him try to stay human. They didn’t know about the petty kick he’d got out of walking modestly among the common people, with his secret all-areas pass. Knowing that at any moment (even in Washington DC), he could get treated completely differently. Such balm for all the years of being not-famous. He thought of that sneaking thrill now, with cruel shame.

So this is where I end up, this is how I pay.

I knew I would have to pay.

The dirty room was in a ghost town. When he’d woken up cuffed but not drugged he had held off from screaming for help, because he was Ax Preston and he wanted to rescue himself. He’d been angry with himself about that, later, but maybe it’d been for the best. If he hadn’t been killed straight away by trigger-happy Martín, it would have done no good. No one lived around here. When his hearing recovered he sat and listened to the silence for hours on end (a branch falls, a bird cries, something four-legged trots along the ghost town street). He knew that the emptiness went on for miles and miles. He would hear the cartel’s battered RV drive up; or the rust-bucket Ford that belonged to Martín, jolting over potholes. He would hear them coming from a long way off, and he would hear them leave, the noise slowly dying away.

Martín and João were Brazilian. The others were US, except for Orfeo, the black man, who was a Cuban. But Ax didn’t think this could be Brazil, he couldn’t see how they could have transported him so far. I travelled by road for a long time, I think… I think I’m in Mexico, or, what comes next? He could not remember the names of any Central American countries. His thoughts crawled around the gaping hole where the chip had been, like lost souls. It’s more than three months. But now I’m stronger. Now I can get started. Escape. Befriend them, romance them, get the cuffs off.

There’s a road, I can follow the road.

His arm and leg weren’t good. Getting better, but not very fucking good.

He was rarely alone. Most often at least two of them sat in the dirty room with him, night and day, and the others would be in the RV. They swopped around. Someone (João?), was wise enough not to allow anyone to have a special relationship with the prisoner. It was no burden to them, apparently, to spend their whole time hanging out in this dump. They had nothing better to do. He kept a count of days on the wall. When they spotted it (the marks were fingernail-faint) there was a long discussion, and they decided to let him continue. But all the days were the same. He improved his Spanish, and learned to speak some Portuguese.