He turned. The man with grey hair looked at him, head tilted to one side. ‘I told you not to open that door…’ he said. He said it softly. He seemed sad. Then he made a minute motion with his head and Joe started to turn, could hear them behind him, knew it was too late even as he  –

‘Don’t knock him out,’ the man with grey hair said. Something dark and velvety fell over Joe’s head, blocking out the light, muffling sound. He was grabbed from behind, his legs kicked out from under him. He fell, was caught. Was lifted.

He heard someone saying, ‘What’s going on?’ the man with grey hair replying, ‘CPD.’ Then he was carried, lowered carefully into a small, enclosed space. Something closed shut above him. He thought – the trunk of a car. He heard an engine start off, the vibrations thrumming through the hold. Then the car was moving; it took him with it.

dark Arabica

——

The darkness tasted like dark Arabica. There was a faint whirring sound far away, like a coffee grinder switched on, turning small roasted beans into a soft dark powder like a cloud-wrapped night. There was peace in that darkness. He was tied to a chair. He had been on that chair for some time. His hands and feet were tied to the chair. There was a sack over his head. It was very hot inside the sack. There were small holes cut into the cloth to let in air. The air tasted unused. The rope, where his hands were tied, cut into his skin. He needed, badly, to pee. His bladder was like a nuclear reactor threatening to go off, unstable isotopes excitable, protective shields decaying. But somehow he felt distanced from his body. Somehow none of the reports sluggishly returning to his brain – the pain in the wrists, loss of feeling in left leg, bladder pressure, lungs rattling like an empty can – none of these affected him. There was drool in the corners of his mouth. When he giggled it came out as a tiny warbling sound through the spit, the sound of a drowning bird trying to sing through water. There was a cold numb feeling in his neck where there had been a short, sharp pain earlier.

Sometimes the prisoner tried to sing to himself. The songs had no discernible lyrics nor, if only the prisoner had given it thought, any tunes. They could more accurately have been described as a humming, a low, long, constant thrum that could have come from hidden pipes behind the walls, from rows of moving cars somewhere beyond the walls, from the electric charge of storm clouds rubbing against each other in the place where sky-scrapers met the sky.

Sometimes the darkness that bound him seemed to expand outwards, into an infinite bubble of space, became a silent prehistoric sea through which he swam, as light as loose leaves, though there was never any shore in sight. Sometimes it constricted about him, and those were the bad times, when the darkness shrunk into a tight, hard ball, like the compacted load of a dung beetle, and he was trapped inside it, unable to breathe, his body defined in sharp lines of bright-light pain, in landing strips marking the drunken flight paths of the fat dung beetles. And sometimes it was as if the darkness was a vast abyss, and he was standing on a precipice of black granite above it, looking down, and a word came and floated up at him from that impenetrable vastness, like the name of a world beyond the world, a reality beyond reality, accessible to him only if he jumped. The word was Nangilima; which seemed a nonsense sound to him, like Heaven. It was a made-up word, or perhaps a name heard once and then forgotten, the memory hiding like a dormouse in the recesses of his mind until now, hinting at a world beyond; if only he could fly.

He couldn’t jump. Unseen wires held him suspended above the abyss, and though he pulled at them and thrashed and raged they wouldn’t break. Then there were more and more periods of grey, patches of nothingness eating at his world, growing bigger, lasting longer, times in which he was nowhere and was nothing, but even those went away eventually and the world shrank and there was pain again, a little at first but steadily growing, the world shrinking around him and over his face. It smelled of dark Arabica.

clear and present danger

——

Light hurt his eyes. The room seemed to move around him, wouldn’t stand still. He tried to fix his eyes on one spot but as soon as he did the room rotated away in an anti-clockwise direction. His hands felt very light. They were rising up of their own accord. ‘Give him a moment,’ the man with the grey hair said. Joe tried to focus on him but the man was spinning away with the room. Maybe they were in one of those rotating restaurants, Joe thought. Only there were no windows here, and no tables, and no diners, and the walls were stained in fantastical shapes the colour of rust. There was a pair of shoes beside him, polished, meeting dark pressed trousers. He leaned towards them.

‘Son of a –’ He heard someone shout, felt something hard connect with the back of his head. Pain again, but all he could do was open his mouth wider, the blood pounding in his head like a jungle beat, as he spewed out a thin jet of foul water onto the floor. He heard the grey haired man’s chuckle, saw one black shoe walking away, leaving footprints of sick behind it. ‘You’ll feel better in a minute,’ the man with the grey hair said. Joe rather doubted it. He dry-retched; there was nothing left to spew.

‘There’s a basin to your right,’ the man said. Joe turned his head, blinked sweat away. His eyes slowly focused. There was a concrete toilet hole and a concrete sink and both were decorated with the same rusty stains. He pushed himself up; staggered; ignored the man’s ‘Take it easy, now’; and dragged himself to the sink. The water tasted cool. Its touch on his face hurt, but only for a moment. There was no mirror. He was not unhappy about the fact. The pressure on his bladder returned, multiplied. Suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world. His hands shook as he –

‘There’s nothing like a good piss, is there,’ the man with the grey hair said.

Joe ignored him. He still felt divorced from his body though the sensation was fading. It was like putting on a suit that had sat in the closet for a while. It took time before you stopped noticing it. When he was done he washed his face again. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. Leaning on the basin with both hands, he turned his head and looked at the man from the CPD.

Silence stretched between them like the moment between two chess players before a check. Or perhaps it was a checkmate. Joe wasn’t entirely sure. He felt pretty beat-up. He didn’t think chess players usually kidnapped and drugged each other. When he thought about it, chess seemed like a lousy metaphor. The silence, however, stretched. It hung in the air like a delicate kite, assembled with paper and glue and hope, needing only a tiny breath of air to shatter it and send it tumbling. It seemed a shame to spoil it with words.

‘Cigarette?’ the man from the CPD said, proffering a pack.

Joe shook his head, though the movement made him nauseous. ‘I quit,’ he said. The man shrugged and returned the pack to his pocket. Joe stood up, stretched slowly. Aches alternated with numbness, his body a chequered map of opposing states. He patted himself, found a pack of cigarettes, crumpled, and his lighter. Shook one free, put it in his mouth, lit up.

‘You said –’ the man with the grey hair said.

‘I changed my mind.’ He blew out smoke. A smile left the man’s face. It looked like it had just packed up its bag and moved out for the winter. It didn’t look like it was set to return any time soon.

‘How do you like it?’ the man said. His gesture swept over the room. Besides the basin and the toilet there was the chair Joe had been tied to and a narrow bed with a grey blanket and a pillow the shape of a brick and the colour of a pumice stone.