Love and Will Read online

  “You coming quietly or need help, dear?” she says above me.

  “No, I got to go,” and make it to one knee.

  “Last time,” and I say “I already told you,” and she comes down on my head with something like a stone a few times and I drop to the ground.

  Next thing I know they’re carrying me into an apartment. Next thing after that I’m sitting on a couch, arms and legs bound, head wrapped with a bandage, the two women washing my hand wounds. The one who yelled out the window to me says “Listen, why you giving us such a big fuss? We just want you to hear our little story, and then if you’re a good boy and hear it all without squawking, we’ll let you go. Now here’s two aspirins to take care of the pain that must be in your head and mouth.”

  She puts them on my tongue and her sister gives me some water to swallow them and after a few minutes of watching them bandage my hands I fall asleep.

  They don’t tell me any stories or let me go. They just keep me there and go about their regular routine it seems, shopping and cooking, ironing and cleaning, embroidering and watching TV, when they’re not taking care of my needs.

  They give me their bedroom and I’m always bound in ropes, even when I sleep, usually my arms and legs both, and carried to the various places I have to be carried to to eat, bathe, sit, rest, go to the toilet and other things. At first I shout and complain a lot about my predicament, calling them crazies, harpies, sadists, and they say “Don’t use such ugly words around the house,” and slap my face and hands and gag me and a couple of times wash my mouth out with soap. I shout and complain much less over the next few weeks because the slaps and gags hurt and the soap tastes awful, but every so often I have to let it out of me and I get more of the same.

  They never talk to me or treat me like an adult. “Want some more foodie, Charles?” they say and I either nod or shake my head. If I shake my head they still put the food on a spoon and jam it against my lips till I open them and eat the food. Once a week they sit me in a bathtub with my arms and legs tied and bathe and shampoo me. “Close your eyes or they’ll burn,” they say, and I do because if I don’t they’ll let the suds run into my eyes till they burn.

  Otherwise they mostly ignore me. They turn the TV on and we all watch it or just I watch it while they put away groceries or read or play cards. If they talk about the TV show or what they read in the newspapers that day, they never include me in the conversation. When I try to get in it, just to talk to someone as an adult and maybe pass the time faster, they say things like “You know the old adage, Charles: Children should be seen and not … what?” If I don’t answer them they say “And not what, Charles, and not what?” and hold their hands above my face ready to slap it and I say “And not heard,” and they smile and pat my head. If I still try to get in their conversation they always slap and gag me.

  Once a week or so I ask “When will you tell me your story so I can go?” and they say “Be still.”

  “Then when will you just let me go?” and they say “In time, dear.”

  “How long is that?” and they say “In time means in time, now you want the gag or to get slapped or maybe both?”

  If I then say “Then just tell me what the hell you’re keeping me here for,” they say “Now watch your tongue, Charles, or you really will get gagged and slapped and maybe more.”

  Twice I yelled after they said that “Okay, slap me, gag me you old crabs, you hags, you crazies, you homicides,” and they ran over to me and shoved the gag into my mouth and slapped my face and pulled my hair and knocked me off the chair and kicked me in the chest and head and then carried me to my bed and said “You’ll be let out and fed when you get to have better manners to people in general and respect for your elders in particular, which might be only one of the reasons we brought you here,” and locked the door and didn’t open it till around the same time next day.

  If I could escape I would. But my bedroom window has a double gate on it and in all the times I’ve tried I’ve never once freed my arms or legs from the ropes. After three months of this I say to them “I can’t stand it anymore. Either you release me immediately or I’m going on a hunger strike till you let me go.”

  “All right,” they say. “Cut your nose off to spite your you-know-what,” and carry me to bed and leave me alone there for three days without anything to eat, drink or listen to and nothing to look at but the ceiling, walls and window shade. I get so hungry, thirsty, dirty and bored that I shout “Ivy and Roz?” They come in and Roz says “No false alarms?” and I say “None. From now on I’ll be a good little boy and eat and drink regularly and won’t ask again when I’m leaving here.” They pat my head, clean and feed me and sit me in front of the TV, but only to programs they want.

  A few times I plead with them to give me some physical work to do. “Anything, even for eight to ten hours a day straight without pay. Just to do something to get my body back in shape and spend my time some other way but watching television and wasting away here.”

  “If we free your arms or legs you might swing at us or gallop out of here,” and I say “Then give me something mentally stimulating to do, like a crossword puzzle to look at and work out in my head or a newspaper or a book with words in it on pages which I can turn with my nose.”

  “Concentrate on improving your personality and conduct further. Because for someone of your incorrigible willfulness and stubbornness, that’ll be work and time spent well enough.”

  “Please, you’ve got to, I’m going nuts here,” and they say “Want to go on another hunger strike though this one organized by us?” and I shut up.

  It takes a few months more before I do everything they say or what I figure they want me to, except every third week or so when I have to scream out my frustrations about staying here and having nothing to do, and then I get gagged and slapped and strapped to my bed without food and water for a day.

  Fall goes, then winter and spring, then summer and fall again, seasons, years. Because my behavior’s tremendously improved they say, once a month I’m allowed to sit by the living room window for an hour during the day and look through a slit in the blinds to the street. It ends up being the event I look forward to most in my life, other than getting out of here. I watch the old buildings being renovated and pray that the owner of this one sells the building and it gets gutted and renovated too. I watch the styles of cars and clothes change, new tenants move in, old ones move out, neighborhood kids get taller and fuller and rowdier year after year.

  While I sit behind that slit I often crave that someone will notice my eyes somehow—maybe through a roaming pair of binoculars or just from above average eyesight—and discover that I’m almost constandy blinking the S.O.S. signal with my lids for the hour a month I’m there. Or maybe someone will think how odd it is that once a month only, a pair of twitching eyes looks onto the street for an hour, at least odd enough to wonder about it to the point of perhaps one of these months phoning the police to check out this apartment.

  The only outsider who ever comes to the apartment is the building’s super, who every other year or so is called in to fix a pipe or light switch. When that happens I’m gagged, strapped to the bed and locked in my room and the super comes and fixes whatever’s the matter without knowing I’m here.

  Once, two years ago, someone else did ring the bell. It was the only other live-in tenant in the building, the nameless one from the fifth floor. I was quickly gagged but overheard her say through the door that she was going out of town for a week to a funeral, so if Ivy or Roz hear anyone lurking around upstairs late in the evening, to call the police. “Will do,” Roz said and the woman said “Thank you and have a good week,” and that as far as I know was the last time she came by.

  After being here for several years I long for something like a tornado to sweep through this part of the city and destroy every building in its path, though without anyone getting hurt except Ivy and Roz, but especially this building. Or that only this one catch fire somehow, w
hen the factories are closed and the nameless tenant’s out, but really anytime if it has to come to that, just to give me some small chance of getting away or being found alive.

  I hope for a disaster like one of those for about a year and then decide to make one of my own. Twice a year on their birthdays they put a candle on the dinner table and the sister whose birthday it is blows it out at the end of the meal. I make my plans during Ivy’s birthday dinner, rehearse it to myself day after day. When Roz’s birthday comes several months later and they’re in the kitchen preparing a special dessert and I’m sitting at the table with my arms and legs tied, I manage to stand and roll my body across the table and knock the candle to the floor. The rug starts to bum, just as I intended it to, and I get on my knees and blow on the fire to make it spread. The sisters smell the burning rug, run in, douse the fire with water before it becomes anything more than a small blaze, then gag me, light the candle and hold my hand over it till my skin sizzles and the gag almost pops from my soundless screams.

  “That’ll teach you never to play with fire or spoil my party for Roz,” Ivy says and they take the gag off and I tell them I won’t try any tricks like that again.

  “You do and you’ll get worse, much worse, maybe twice as many years with us than we planned for you,” and I say “I promise, never again.”

  That’s the first definite hint that my stay here won’t be forever, unless they’re lying. But it does get my hopes up somewhat that I’ll be released eventually and I don’t question them on it or make any trouble in the next three years. I become the model prisoner: courteous, obedient, uncomplaining, silent except to their questions and demands, always responding how they want me to and keeping out of their way. In that time I grow bald, my skin and body hairs turn gray, muscles continue to atrophy, I get so thin and weak from no exercise and their inadequate food that I can no longer turn myself over in bed, and my teeth ache night and day from my years of untreated cavities here, which they don’t give me anything for but two aspirins a week.

  Then, eight years to the day I got here, they take my ropes off after dinner and say “All right, you can go.” I say “Thanks,” not believing they mean it, and sit there at the table, taking my pleasure in being free of the ropes for the first time in eight years and wondering how many minutes it’ll be before they’re put back on.

  “What are you waiting for,” Roz says, “another eight years? You’ll get it, though we sure as shoot don’t want you around for that long again, if you don’t move your behind out of here now.”

  Maybe they’re not kidding, and I try to stand but am so unused to it this way that I drop back in the chair and it falls over with me to the floor. They help me up and say “This is the way to do it: spread your legs apart—rest—then one step after the next—rest … you’ll get the knack back in time,” and walk me to the door.

  “My things,” I say. “What I came here with and probably all I got left in the world,” and Roz says “If you mean your wallet, watch and ring and stuff, all those are partial but final payment for your room, board and care these years. You’re getting off cheap, Charles,” and they push me a few inches past the threshold and shut and lock the door.

  I still think they’re playing with me and will suddenly throw open the door, knock me to the ground and carry me back inside. I only begin to believe I’m really free from them when I reach the bottom landing and open the vestibule door.

  “Fresh air,” I say. “The moon and stars—they’re really there.” My legs get wobbly and I sit on their building’s stoop and take lots of deep breaths and then stay there because all my energy got used up making my way downstairs. It’s almost dark, about the time of night when I was first on this block nobody on the street or at the windows, no passing cars. “People—help me,” I want to shout, but my voice is too weak for even the next door first-floor tenant to hear.

  Someone must have seen me and phoned the police—maybe even the sisters—because a squad car comes especially for me a half-hour later. I put my arms out to him and he says “Too much to drink tonight, eh pal?”

  “Not it at all. I’ve been kidnapped by two sisters in this building for the last eight years and was only just now released.”

  “Eight you say. Good story. Why not ten years?—let’s go for twelve. At least yours is a little better story than the next wino’s, though you’re in a lot worse shape than most,” and calls for an ambulance.

  In the hospital I tell the police I’m no drunk and never was. “The doctors can vouch there’s not a drop of alcohol in my blood or on my breath, and if you phone my best friend, if he’s still alive, he’ll tell you how I all of a sudden disappeared from this city eight years ago today.”

  The police call Ben and he comes right over with his wife. At first they don’t recognize me and Ben says “This guy isn’t Charles Kenna. Did he have any papers on him?” and the policeman says “Not one.”

  “Ben,” I say, “remember the fountain pen complete with ink in it no less that I gave you for your thirteenth birthday? And Jill, you can’t forget the swanky dinner I treated you both to on your fifth wedding anniversary and the pram blanket I gave for Tippy the day she was born.”

  After they finish hugging me I say “Now tell the police if I was ever a liar or drunk in my life.”

  “One glass of wine at dinner,” Ben says, “and one only. He always said he had to have a clear head and settled stomach for the next morning if he was to do his best at work, which he also took home weekends.”

  “And his word?” Jill says. “He never uttered anything but the absolute truth, just like his actions: a moralist not to be believed. He used to make me ashamed of myself just for breathing, till I realized what a burden of unexamined guilt he must be carrying on his head, and then I began feeling a bit sorry for him.”

  The police go see Ivy and Roz. They deny everything, I’m told. “Charles Kenna? We’ve never known a Kenna or Kennan or any kind of name like that in our lives. And the only male to enter our apartment in thirty years was the super and he only to fix things.”

  The police tell me there’s no proof I was ever in their apartment. “The sisters are known as eccentrics in the neighborhood, mostly because they keep so much to themselves, but they’ve never been in trouble with us or the city or anyone. Far as visitors go, they said nobody but that super and a lonely spinster friend from childhood who came twice a year for tea till she died recently and a few times the upstairs neighbor who they said came to the door for this or that, but no one else.”

  “I don’t remember the friend at all. As for the neighbor and super, when she was at the door, I was bound and gagged behind it, and when he came inside, I was locked in the bedroom.”

  The police won’t investigate further till I come up with more evidence for them. My lawyer tells me if I take the sisters to court I’ll not only lose the case but be countersued for slander and in both cases I’ll have to pay their legal fees.

  So I don’t pursue it. I never had much savings, so have to borrow from Ben and Jill to move into a hotel, get my teeth fixed and keep myself going till I get back my health and buy some clothes and find a job in my old field. All my belongings were put on the street eight years ago after I didn’t pay my rent for three months.

  A month after I’m released and when I’m still recuperating, I get a phone call in my hotel room.

  “Surprise, it’s me,” Roz says. “We only today got a telephone put in after all these years and I wanted you to be my first personal call.”

  “Oh boy, thanks loads, but how’d you find me?”

  “There are only so many Charles Kennas in hotels, you know. How are you?”

  “I’ll tell you how I am, you witch. I’m getting stronger every day, so don’t try to mess with me again, you understand? If I didn’t think you had a lethal weapon of some kind or I’d get in serious trouble for it or at least could do it in a way where the police would never know, I’d club you both over the head till you woke
up in hell.”

  “For what, dear?”

  “For what? Hey, I know you’re both out of your skulls, but this much?”

  “Who you speaking to, love?” Ivy says, picking up what I suppose is the extension.

  “Oh, some nice wrong number I got by mistake when I dialed the hardware store.”

  “If he’s that nice ask him to come over for lunch and a chat. That’s the main reason we got this contraption for, isn’t it: to widen our social life?”

  “I already did. He said no.”

  “I didn’t hear you ask him.”

  “You were in the other room.”

  “But I was listening at the door.”

  “All right, maybe I didn’t. My mind might be slipping, just like yours. Excuse me, sir, but could you? My sister and I are two extremely lonely though I think reasonably intelligent and interesting elderly ladies and would love to have male company for a change. We’re quite honestly bored with each other and ourselves, which you must have picked up during our harmless hostile exchange just now.”

  “Maybe another day,” I say. “But Ivy, you know damn well who this is, so how about an explanation from you or Roz as to why you put me through so much for eight years?”

  “Explanation?” She laughs. “Oh you poor love. We thought it was obvious to you. And this is who I suggested we invite for lunch?”

  “It wasn’t obvious,” I say. “Maybe my mind suffered some irreversible comprehensive damage or psychological breakdown or whatever it was while I was with you two, so explain to me slowly and clearly so I can once and for all understand rather than just rack my brains and guess.”