The Youngest
by Shane O'LearyThe knife whistled through the stale air and thudded blade first an inch deep into the worn wood of the far wall. The boy stepped forward, re-gripped the hilt and wedged the blade side to side until it slid back from the splintered gap. Kara watched from below, curled in the corner with her right elbow pillowed between the concrete floor and her right cheek. She had a rat's eye view of the rectangle room, of the shadeless lamp and moisture-stained walls, of the boy's hairless chin and thin wrists. She timed him again, counted off each second with a click of her tongue against her teeth. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.
He was the youngest of the five, the smallest, the least attentive, a narrow-shouldered adolescent, no taller than her. They watched over her in rotating shifts, each one handing the knife over to his replacement. The youngest was the only one who consistently turned his back.
She would wait and watch. Surprise would be the key. She had already loosened the cord they had used to tie her hands to an exposed pipe behind her back. They only had one knife between them. Escape was all that mattered now, from this room, this city, this country.
She would do what she had to.
Kara sunk her head deep into her pillow and hugged her knees to her chest. The sheets were clean, the comforter warm, the temperature regulated. It was her room, her bed, her clock flipped face down on the bedside table. She had told Dr. Collins that sleep would be easy, but a residue of captivity lingered in the soreness of her joints and in a smell that clung despite dozens of showers, a mix of rot and damp air.
She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. The comforter suddenly felt too tight against her throat. Her skin flushed with the memory of confinement. She tried to fling the blankets from her bed but could not lift her arms. She pressed her palms against the mattress and pushed, but an equal weight pressed down upon her shoulders. Tears streamed back from the outer corners of her eyes.
A voice moved in her ear.
"I will tell you a story."
Her ceiling shifted. Her room slipped away. She was suddenly upright, outside, in an alley surrounded by piles of garbage. Four boys stood with her, boys with familiar faces.
Kara tried to scream.
"This is the alley where Rodrigo had gathered us. He was the oldest, the largest, the surest. We had run as five for many years, away from the police, away from Americans yelling for their fat wallets."
The largest boy folded his arms; fists bunched beneath his biceps. He said something in Spanish.
"He says that wallets are not enough. He says that Americans are worth more than what they carry. We all understood. The words were common.
"Kidnap. Ransom."
Dr. Collins was not surprised when she told him. "It's post-traumatic stress of a sort." He was a tall man with shining eyes and a fatherly beard. "We can work through it, Kara."
Kara stared out his office window. The view was sedate and lovely, a rectangle of trackless snow, four evergreens and a wooden fence. The purity of winter captured and framed, as far as could be from sweat and humidity. She placed her hands on her knees to keep both from shaking. The psychiatrist had not understood her. She tried again to describe how it had felt.
"I couldn't move! I couldn't speak, couldn't open my eyes! It wasn't a flashback. I've never been in that alley!" Kara stopped herself as the heat rose in her skin. She would not allow frustration to control her.
"Sensations of powerlessness are a common response to a trauma of this nature, as are images of your captors."
"But the name Rodrigo, I never learned it."
Dr. Collins took on a compassionate expression.
"Your ordeal has been heavily reported, Kara; television, radio, the newspapers. You must have overheard the name and incorporated it into your guilt."
A deep flare pulsed through Kara's chest. She exploded. "Guilt?! They would have raped me! Killed me! I did what I had to!"
Dr. Collins made calming noises, urged her to sit, to explain how she felt about that. But she did not want to explain; she wanted to tie him to his chair, to bar the door, to make him understand how confinement felt. Instead, she sat and endured the remainder of his advice in silence, every word of it useless.
The boy took six seconds to cover the distance to the wall, two seconds to pry the blade free, then six seconds to return to his throwing position. Another second passed while he turned his back on her and raised the knife over his shoulder and one more while he paused with the blade pinched between his fingers before the next release. Each time was the same. He never glimpsed at what lay in the corner, never removed his attention from the shine of the knife. Kara was grateful she was filthy and dull-edged in comparison, incapable of reflecting the light in his eyes.
She could not find him in the memory of her capture. She had been walking alone, against State Department advice for Americans in Bogotá, but she had felt herself sufficiently disguised, dark hair, tanned skin, average clothes, no expensive handbag or fancy camera advertising tourist. She had actually believed herself to be part of the flow, had begun to feel the urban energy as it swelled her lungs and warmed her fingertips.
The city was larger than she had expected, noisier, more crowded, but nothing like the noise and crowds of home. Sound and activity were required here; no one shouted or ran just to be stared at. She had walked for hours, fearless with discovery, passed restaurants, offices, apartments, each unique in its functional shabbiness. By dusk she had found herself in a crumbling residential zone, free of crowds and streetlamps.
It almost happened too fast for fear; four faces blocked her progress, eight hands pinned her arms and covered her mouth, a sting pricked her thigh and the first heart-clenching stabs of panic evaporated as a thickness pushed in from the edges of her eyes.
She had woken in the rectangle room.
Perhaps the youngest had stood watch; perhaps he had not touched her and never would. It would earn him no sympathy. She would do what she had to.
Kara stared out her apartment window. Cars and pedestrians flowed below. Steam puffed from hundreds of throats, tiny clouds that rose and mingled into a seamless fog, an extension of the city's blanched homogeneity. Though she was home, Kara found she could not reconnect, as though too aware in some way to proceed through life as others did. She had not gone back to Dr. Collins. His advice ran in too tight a loop; confront your guilt, accept your actions, don't repress, don't run.
She left the window and found her bed. She had hardly slept since the images of the south had intruded, a full week of sidewalk shuffling and nights of television she could no longer endure. She understood that the relationship between time and trauma was two-faced, that some wounds were healed but others fed. But with enough will she should have the strength to choose her way. This was her home, the place she had escaped to; if she could not find comfort here, then where?
She laid down, closed her eyes and swam back in search of a memory that could safely ease her transition into sleep. She sifted and sifted and seized upon an image of her mother, tall and young and years from the cancer that would take her. She was seated at Kara's childhood bedside, smiling and telling her daughter not to worry, that there was nothing in the closet, nothing under the bed, nothing that could harm her, now or ever. Kara tried to believe it, but even her eight-year-old self had doubted.
The image cracked. The room spun. Kara's perspective was lifted and flipped. She stood looking down, eyes on a bed. Not her eyes. This wasn't her memory. This wasn't her mind. It was invasion, violation. She had been subsumed. She wanted to claw these eyes from her head, but these fingers were not her fingers. She was forced to take in the scene. A woman slept on a thin mattress, the skin badly bruised beneath her left eye, yellow and swollen.
A voice moved in her ear.
"I will tell you a story.
"I did not wake her. She deserved to sleep. She did not deserve to be struck each time she dropped a plate or failed to shine a fork until it sparkled. I thought about Rodrigo's words and what they could mean for our future.
"Americans are worth more than what they carry."
Now.
Kara tensed the muscles of her calves and forearms in preparation for movement. There would be pain. She had been curled stiffly for unknown hours and her muscles would protest when she stood. As long as she did not whimper or stumble before she reached him. He would not turn unless she gave him cause. The boy was locked in a cycle of meditative motion.
He was so young. She could not help wonder why had he done this. Had the others bullied him? Forced him to take part? The questions stiffened Kara's joints and soured her saliva with doubt. She swallowed hard. There could be no secondary victim here. She was the prisoner. He was the captor.
He completed his loop, turned his back on her, lifted the knife and held it in place, blade balanced in his fingers, hilt extended backward.
Kara rose. No sound. No breath.
The others would come if he struggled or screamed. They would take back the knife. They would hold her down. They would take out their anger.
No struggle. No scream. She could not allow it.
He had not heard her rise. He was unsuspecting.
Kara reached for the knife.
Kara strode through her apartment in thin cotton pants and a t-shirt. She lifted every window. She inhaled, willed the cold to cleanse her. She lowered the thermostat all the way. No half measures. No lingering heat. She pulled off her shirt and lay down on the tile floor of her kitchen. The cold punctured her shoulder blades and elbows with a thousand stings. Dots of light invaded the rims of her eyes, then darkness, pure and empty.
She needed a perfect void, formless and flawless, no access points and no exits, no bread crumb trail, no tracks in the snow. She had somehow been followed, all the way home and all the way north. But the cold could help her if she let it, it could freeze the pursuant humid damp, crystallize it, shatter it. Kara felt her shoulders lift from the floor as the void enwrapped her.
A breath of heat brushed her face. No, please no. More heat touched her, clung everywhere, a heavy second skin. Lines appeared in the void, a shape, two shapes, side by side within a canvas sack.
A needle and a knife.
A voice moved in her ear.
"I will tell you a story.
"Rodrigo said the needle was all we would need to take her, and the knife was all we would need to keep her. He claimed to have stolen both from a veterinary clinic. We stood in an alleyway and waited. We knew that someone would come eventually, someone foreign and alone and without sense enough to stay were they belonged.
"That morning my mother had left for work without speaking. A bruise can be ignored if necessary. But it should not be necessary.
"I was ready."
Kara opened her eyes.
Ice stiffened her joints and tightened her lungs. The cold had failed her. Frustration burned through her chest. She would not feel guilt. Self-preservation was justification enough for what she had done. She'd had a right to act in the defense of life. She gripped a chair and pulled herself up. Dizziness weakened her knees and she sat down heavily. She blinked as an image swam over her eyes, the swell of a bruise over a woman's cheekbone.
A right to act in the defense of life. Was that right hers alone? Connecting lines suddenly appeared, running foreword and backward from a bruised cheek.
Kara pulled her suitcase from the closet and began to pack.
She was fast, smooth, silent.
Her fingers closed on the hilt. She pulled the blade free of his fingertips then curled the cutting edge down beneath his jaw.
No scream. No struggle.
Self-preservation.
She pulled the knife back until it met resistance in his flesh, then jerked her elbow out to the right. The boy stepped away from her, hands at his neck. He managed one stride, two, then fell. Kara stood above, muscles screaming, throat constricted, chest stuck in mid-exhalation, and watched as he curled on his side, unable to stop the red from spilling through the fingers pressed to his neck.
A dull thud shook the dust from the walls. Heavy boots pounded near. Kara barely heard. The boy rolled onto his back, coughed blood. His chest rose and fell. The door crumpled inward in a shower of splinters. Men in uniforms crowded through. Two stepped to her side. One pulled away the knife. The other took her elbow.
The realizations came slowly. They were police. It was a rescue.
The boy's chest was still.
One of the officers pointed at the dead child on the floor and nodded at Kara, as if to say, well done.
The flight was half empty. Few Americans flew to Bogotá, fewer still with each new story like her own. Kara stared out the window as the plane moved south. She closed her eyes and opened herself, willingly this time. She remembered the rectangle room; the whistle, the thud, the six strides easily timed, the back of the youngest as she approached unheard, the hilt of the knife hovering above his shoulder. She waited for the shift, didn't fight when it pulled her forward; her eyes to his. She saw the wall, the target, felt his focus as he aimed.
A voice moved in her ear.
"I will tell you a story.
"Rodrigo thought the police would come. He said we should get what fun we could from the woman, then kill her. No money. No ransom. I wanted to run. But Rodrigo would find me; demand an answer, demand loyalty, demand everything.
"Then the knife was pulled away. First there was shock, then relief.
"I would not have to kill, I would not have to run."
Kara felt the cold steel slip across his skin, felt the warmth poor through his fingers, felt his legs give out, rolled with him onto his back, tasted his blood as he coughed, looked up at herself standing stricken and still, breath stuck, knife forgotten. She heard the thud, heard the boots, loud, then dimmer and dimmer. The moisture stained walls faded but she glowed in his eyes. She felt his urgent need to attach something of what remained to this other, felt the effort, the act of will as his breathing slowed, and finally, was carried as his eyes rose to hers.
"I am sorry."
She understood. The words were for her but also for another.
"Please tell her I am sorry."
Kara found the building, number 1403. The list she had found had sorted them by age. The youngest was Carlos Rios, age fifteen. The entryway was doorless. Kara stepped inside. She wanted apartment number six. A hall stretched back, even numbered doors on the left, odd on the right.
Carlos Rios. She moved through his images, Rodrigo in the alley, his mother's bruise, the knife in the sack, the moisture-stained walls of the rectangle room, the feel of the knife pulled from his fingers.
Door number six. She knocked without pause. A woman answered, thirty five or forty. The recognition went both ways. Kara's picture had been in the papers here too, most often beside that of the boy she had killed in her attempt to escape.
His mother waited, eyes drained of color.
Kara began. "I will tell you a story."
©Shane O'Leary
Shane O'Leary is from Halfax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is twenty eight years old and is a history graduate from Dalhousie University. His story History Does not Repeat Itself is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of Liquid Ohio. Shane O'Leary can be reached at shane_t_oleary at hotmail dot com.