Thank God, Mark thought, thank fucking God that he and Chris had fought about how he never wanted to do anything anymore, and that he had been pissed off enough at the oft-repeated criticism to decide to be an asshole about the whole thing: to leave Chris in the bar and drive off alone in their old Chevy Nova with the alignment so fucked-up the steering wheel shuddered in his hands when the speedometer’s needle touched the five in the fifty glowing above the dial.

Chris, earlier, had slurred peevishly: Mark used to want to do things, and now he never wanted even to go to lunch with their friends, and maybe it made sense that he didn’t feel like going out to bars anymore, but even when the plans didn’t involve drinking, like, like…going to plays, even then he just wanted to stay home like an old man, like his father, so maybe that was his problem, maybe he should think some more about that, should try to resolve, or do some—should make an effort, at least, to address that.

Mark didn’t bother pointing out that they were, in fact, in a bar, but all that was happening was the same thing that would have happened at home: Chris was complaining, bitching at him, about him.

So he just left.

He slipped out while Chris was gesturing at the bartender, trying to order another gin. Part of it was wanting to teach Chris a lesson:

Topic: How to Complain Appropriately in a Drinking Dialogue

Learning Objective: Developing the evaluative skills for determining which criticisms can be made to a conversational partner when inebriated.

Examples:

• • Appropriate—You need to warn me before you take money out of our account, because I am the one who pays the bills and I need to know that the payments will not bounce.
  • Inappropriate—You used to be fun when you were drunk, and I’m not saying you have to get drunk, like your father, but there must be something wrong with you if you can’t be fun otherwise.
    

Length: 30 minutes.

But truly, mostly, it was wanting to get away, for just a few minutes, from Chris’s voice.

So he had been an asshole. But again, thank God. It was good that he had been an asshole, because, face it: had he waited and apologized and gone through the forms of making up, Chris might be with him, here, right now, locked in the trunk of their car.

When he had first come to, he hadn’t known he was in the trunk: he’d known only that he was somewhere cramped, dark, and lurching. He realized where he was after groping around and feeling the gritty, mosaic-like surface of the spare tire, which was shoved all the way to the back.

What had he been doing? He had been driving, thinking about turning around and going back to drag Chris from the bar. He had turned around, though. But then, on the way back, there had been something in the road. Branches? No, Christmas trees, four or five of them stretched on their sides across both lanes. He had figured, Kids. He had stopped the car, had gotten out, had tried to drag the trees to the side. He could smell the pine sap on his fingers.

He was on his right side, facing the rear of the car. He blinked in the dark, and worms of pain twisted swiftly around his neck. He touched the back of his head. It was wet. A minute later, his fingers turned sticky.

Had someone used Christmas trees to set a trap for him? Someone had. Someone had gathered the fucking mid-January Christmas tree discards and had scattered them across the road to catch whichever idiot stopped to move them. Him. He was the idiot.

Or what if whoever did this wasn’t just after the first person who stopped? Could someone have been tracking or…or stalking him and Chris? Was that what this was?

Chris had been so proud about getting the tickets to the play, some modern take on six or seven of Shakespeare’s works, including the possibly lost one, Love’s Labour’s Won. Because the announcement also listed The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, and Troilus and Cressida as separate resources for the amalgamation, Mark assumed that the adapters sided with the critics who thought that Love’s Labour’s Won was not a play in its own right, that it wasn’t lost at all. Some critics, he told Chris, thought that the title referred to one of Shakespeare’s other, known works. They thought it was just an alternate title. The adapters either agreed or had decided to create the missing source, and they were simply listing Shakespeare plays in their promotional material without rhyme or reason.

“Oh Jesus, why do you even care?” Chris groaned. “What does it matter to you? You’re not in the stupid play.”

“Because, Chris, I teach this stuff.”

“Oh, you teach high school English. Private high school English. It’s not like you’re at Columbia, or you’re Mr. Chips or Laurence Olivier or something. Or Peter O’Toole, is it?”

“Peter O’Toole played Mr. Chips in the film. Olivier was in several films based on Shakespeare’s plays. But, actually, I’m not sure what comparison you’re trying to make, so—”

“You make me so tired. I’m not one of your goddamn teenage students. You know, it was work to get these tickets—it was sold out, but I called everyone I knew and I just barely managed to get them because I thought it would be something we could do.”

“All right, all right. We’ll go.”

But they hadn’t gone. They had tried, but Mark had been late getting home from grading papers in his classroom, and that had made them too late to get past the truly regimental ticket-taker at the entrance to the theater, and then they had ended up in some fratty bar and Chris had started yelling at him for never wanting to do anything that didn’t involve the living room sofa, and now here he was.

 

Their first date was miniature golf. Back in Texas, in their first year of college, at that crazy place with the giant statue of Peter Pan. The statue wasn’t part of the course. In fact, nothing in the course had anything to do with the story of Peter Pan. It was as if the statue was already there, and the owners decided the hell with it, and then they went ahead and built the course around the statue and put in all the generic obstacles and named the place Putter Pan’s Mini Golf.

You could see that stupid deformed statue for blocks, with its giant head topped with splotchy red curves of metal that were supposed to be its hair but looked more like the fragments of a shattered helmet. That was one Peter Pan who hadn’t flown in forever.

Chris trounced him, laughing the whole time. “Get ready now, son,” he said, straddling the ball and lining up his club, “’cause I’m about ready to cover myself in eternal glory here.”

Then they went next door, to that place with the 24-hour breakfast buffet, and Chris piled a plate high with bacon, twenty pieces, it had to be. That was when he still had his Texas drawl, before he drained it from his voice. He thought people were less likely to give money for public radio if a donation-seeking caller had an accent. He cleaned that plate, all by himself. Just a big, healthy cowboy.

The car stopped. Mark held his breath, listening and clutching the flashlight in both hands, close to his chest. They were just sitting, apparently. He twisted, trying to bring his ear closer to the car’s interior, straining to hear the muffled voices. Someone laughed. A man, probably, but he couldn’t tell for sure. The back seats, the heavy old car, the blood in his ears—everything obscured the voices. He couldn’t even tell how many people were up there. Now they were all laughing. They were all up there laughing, about him, he had to assume. About him, locked in the trunk.

You know what they sounded like, really, all of them up there, laughing like that? Kids. They sounded like a classroom full of kids right after you slipped up, wrote the wrong date on the blackboard, said the name “Balzac” without enunciating that fucking Z, couldn’t come up with an easy answer about why they should care about some old dead guy who couldn’t make up his mind whether his father’s ghost was real or he was just crazy. They sounded like the kids he had spent one hundred and eighty days a year with for the last twelve—thirteen?—years.

He felt among the lumps on which he lay, trying to identify them. What was that? Too thick to be a tire iron, too…rubber on the end, there—the flashlight! The heavy, skull-busting flashlight that Chris’s hulking cop father had given them to keep in their car that day he kept going on about D.C. neighborhoods. So now he could just, where did it click—he pressed the button, shook the flashlight, and pressed the button again. Nothing happened. The batteries were dead or missing. That was just like Chris and his father both—keep a goddamn flashlight in the car but don’t put any goddamn fresh batteries in it, no, you want to look prepared, that’s what counts, not being prepared. Of course, it was his flashlight, too. He could have taken two minutes to pick up batteries at the grocery store.

Kidnapped. Abducted. Snatched. Captured. Hijacked. Waylaid.

What else?

The car started moving again. It went over a series of something—ruts, potholes, rubble—and Mark whimpered as he held the flashlight closer, pulled it to his chest, practically hugging it.

He pushed against the various surfaces with his hands and elbows and feet, straining and trembling in the void, but nothing would give. Either he couldn’t get the necessary leverage, or he just wasn’t strong enough. He had always thought strength would come in a moment of desperate need. Wrong again.

Come on, then. Other words for “kidnap.”

 

He had planned to be a college teacher. He did the work; he spent seven years getting his doctorate. That meant, he thought, he would be teaching college students. But he hit the job market right in the middle of the biggest academic downturn in decades, when all the jobs seemed to run away and hide in towns in squarish states in the center of the country, villages he’d never even heard of, practically, and then he didn’t get interviews even for those isolated positions, the ones he had formerly scorned and then coveted fiercely.

So, after Chris began rolling his eyes and sighing every time an envelope with a window fell through the slot in the door, Mark found himself making the rounds of the high schools in D.C., and then he found himself in orientation meetings, and then he found himself in front of his first class of various faces, some bored, some vaguely attentive, some clean-scrubbed, some with bits of metal jutting and chains hanging from them. And he realized that he was making the face. All those times in his high school years, when adults had pulled their mouths back and down in mild disgust on seeing the rows of tiny studs around the borders of his ears—he was making that same face right now to these teenagers.

His first semester, he went to each class with a sheaf of tight notes. He never even finished his lectures. He was forever yelling after students to remember ideas for the next day: destiny and genre and the Other and shame. And then, at the end of the semester, half his students turned in papers that were seven pages short of the required ten, lacking resources or even quotations from the main text, whichever text the student was supposedly analyzing. And on top of that, nearly every stapled cluster of fragments was a variation on the same effort:

If you want to read a nice good story read the Dead by Ms. Joyce James it is a good story because it deals with things like family and Christmas. Who are the Dead in the title we can never know. Throughout history the Dead have been cymbals of our fears such as mortality and graveyards. So if you want to read a good story try the Dead.

Mark, of course, knew that this was going to be the bulk of his reading from now on. The pages of every novel, short story, poem, and play that he loved would fade from his memory, and other pages would take their places. Instead of reading works of literature, he would read student papers about uncanny, unknown texts, faintly similar to the ones he had assigned, but with warped characters, plots, and titles. "The main character of Paradise, Lost, Satin, said he would rather rain in hell than accept the Lord Jesus." "In Donald Quixote Sancho Panzo went through many adventures." These were the sentences that would be etched in his brain. Poor Milton and Cervantes didn’t stand a chance.

“Lord, you talk and talk and talk,” Chris had complained just two weeks before. “You say so much, and you interrupt, and you always think you’re right about everything, no matter what you’re talking about or who you’re talking to. You could be talking to…to Abraham Lincoln about the Civil War, and you would be all, ‘Well, actually, Mr. President, the Southern states would claim that the incursions of the North blah, blah, blah.’ Or whatever. You know what you would say.” And Chris was right, basically. As those semesters went on, Mark’s lecture notes became sparser and sparser, until he was sauntering in each day with a handwritten list of truncated, code-like phrases:

• Arrangement of dwellings.
• Grendel—the hero’s mirror.
  → Face?
• His poor mother.
• His poor paw.
• Aging warrior.
• Dragons and treasure.

And then he would sit on his desk and just talk away. Just talk and talk and talk and talk.

What were they listening to up there? Fast beats, then silence, and then fast beats again—Rush? Jesus.

His freshman roommate had tried to make him love that band. Writing out lyrics and leaving them on his desk, scattering magazines with interviews, chanting biographical details.

“I mean, the guy has a master’s in English—this is a real musician, a professional—a poet, even— a guy like you should be into him, Mark!”

That was how he met Chris, or started spending time with him, at least. He retreated to the study lounge every night to get away from the Rush Fest in his room, and he ended up talking night after night to the lean Texas boy with the asymmetrical blond hair. Until they decided one night to go off, just the two of them, to that crazy Putter Pan place they had both seen on their separate drives into the city when their parents had dropped them off at the beginning of the semester. So maybe he should like Rush. Or should have, at least. Maybe he should have taken the time to appreciate Rush.

His right shoulder and hip were starting to ache, like they did every night when he slept, waking him at two in the morning and forcing him to turn onto his left side. And then a couple of hours later back to his right. And so on. He had taught himself to turn slowly, a piece of his body at a time, so that he wouldn’t wake Chris every two hours.

He tried to turn in the trunk, but his back and feet hit several angles of resistance before he made it even halfway. Too many things were in his way: in his back, the spare tire; behind his legs, the stupid boxes of books that he had meant to take to class but had just left back there for three weeks; against his elbow, the ridges on the inside of the hood itself. He settled back on his right side and tried to ignore the ache, like thin branches growing through his joints along the right side of his body.

Shanghai. That was a synonym for kidnap. Kind of a racist one. Xenophobic? He had been shanghaied. Or was it shanghaid? Shanghai D. That sounded like a vitamin drink marketed under a faux-Asian theme. When the Shaolin monks travelled to the Eternal City, they revived themselves with Shanghai D.

Last year they had watched that documentary about Portland, Oregon, where, supposedly, there was a whole network of tunnels in which an underground city had once flourished, a shadow of the one above. Where the unwary patrons of underground bars (and some aboveground bars with trapdoors) might just disappear, whisked away and forced into lives of slavery on ships sailing around the world—a bit of blurred vision after drinking a beer, shocks in the fingers and toes after a thud to the back of the head, and then there you were, in the middle of the sea, learning how to tie knots and raise sails.

Chris had been dubious. “It just has the stink of an urban legend,” he crowed. “Things like that don’t really happen.”

“Maybe not so much these days, in our particular circle,” Mark said. “But in the 19th century, in a port city that was still basically the frontier? We wouldn’t have stood a chance. We would’ve been snatched right up.”

“Speak for yourself. You’ve been reading too many books, you have.”

Was that what was happening to him now? Was he being sold into slavery? Unlikely.

When would Chris realize that he wasn’t just off in a huff? When would he head home to their empty house, mad above having to hoof it from the Metro and looking to continue their argument about how boring Mark had become? When would Chris realize that something else had happened, something different, something unrelated to their argument, something he would probably never learn the truth about?

His face was wet. Tears. He hadn’t even realized he’d been weeping—his eyes had apparently just sprung steady leaks, with no need for the hydraulics involved in audible crying.

They were going fast now, and there were no bumps—they were on some smooth highway or interstate, going God knows where. With the increased speed, the inside of the trunk was loud, like he was trapped in a cramped wind tunnel. He couldn’t hear anything from the interior of the car, no muffled voices, no music, nothing.

The tears on his face dried slowly, cooling and tautening his skin, and he realized he had to piss. He tried to steer his thoughts into thickets of other topics—the design of that stupid putt-putt golf course, the opening lines of Moby-Dick, after the “Call me Ishmael” bit (some years ago never mind how long precisely some years ago never mind how long precisely some years ago)—but they stubbornly flitted back to the growing tension below his stomach and the inevitable, coming collapse into release. Everything was bubbles and vapor and the creek bed he used to shuffle along when he was six, building dams from logs and stones that fell apart every time, each and every goddamned time.

He had just been kidnapped. Now he was going to be kidnapped and covered in pee.

Fine. Why not? Let them deal with it, if they ever opened the fucking trunk.

On his right side in the lightless, droning trunk, Mark relaxed his abdomen and groin and let warm liquid flow and spread through the cotton of his slacks.

 

They had rented a U-Haul truck with a trailer to tow their car. The truck was supposed to be big enough for three rooms of their belongings, but they had managed to fit, at most, two rooms, cramming it full, from floor to roof. They had to leave their sofa, their futon, their bed, and their shelves. They would just have to get new ones. They wouldn’t have to look for books or cooking utensils, though—really, that seemed to be all they had managed to pack.

The truck felt like everyone should have to go through six months of training to get behind the wheel. Chris tried to take the first shift, but after a block-and-a-half he stopped right in the middle of the road and slid across the seat. “Nope, uh-uh, you go on and hop right over me,” he said. “You’re just going to have to drive it the whole way.”

So Mark did, all the way from Austin to D.C. The deal was that Chris would stay awake to navigate and entertain Mark, but an hour from D.C., in the late afternoon, he fell asleep. That was how was how they arrived in their new city: Mark clutching the wheel and tensely hewing to the center of the lane as he glanced over at Chris again and again, distracted by the slanting sun as it hit the hair and the skin and the freckles and lit them all up to golden cobwebs and curves and flecks of fire.

The car had been slowing, and then it turned to the right and crunched over something, gravel or shells, and then it stopped.

Mark imagined five possible outcomes:

1. They killed him then and there, before he could even climb from the trunk, just shot him or stabbed him or strangled him or bludgeoned him or set him on fire.
2. They dragged him from the trunk and killed him using any of the above methods or something else, like hanging or drowning or dropping off a cliff.
3. They still dragged him from the trunk, but then they tortured him or forced him into some form of slavery, sexual or menial, at the end of which they killed him using any of the methods above, or he died from hunger, thirst, trauma, or exhaustion.
4. He managed to fight his way from the trunk and incapacitate them or get away from them.
5. They revealed to him that he was the victim of a brutal, savage practical joke, and they let him go.

One and Two seemed to him the most likely of the five outcomes, but he was beginning to think Three might be a contender. Four was unlikely, but it obviously was the most desirable. And Five was the desperate fantasy of his brain, which had apparently accepted the external facts of what was happening to him but was still groping for alternative interpretations. If anyone had done this as a joke, if any collection of backwoods dickheads had traveled to the city to pull a kidnapping prank just because they were bored, he might kill them all and go to prison at the end of this nightmare anyway.

 

Two years before, he and Chris had rented the film The Vanishing—the original Dutch-French version, not the Bullocky Americanization that he stumbled onto now and then when watching late-night cable but was never able to make it through. Chris hadn’t wanted to rent the film—in the store, he had asked for something else, something light, or happy in the end, Sense and Sensibility, hadn’t it been? And Chris had been right, because for weeks after Mark had been plagued by dreams of being buried alive, dreams that eventually became waking reveries so detailed, so realistic, that they were nearly hallucinations. He obsessed over how Rex might have escaped at the end of the film—was there any way he might have turned himself over, gotten his legs under himself, so that he might have gained enough leverage to break the boards and force his way upward through the earth? Was that even possible?

Now he knew. If he couldn’t turn over in this trunk, Rex probably wouldn’t have been able to turn over in a box in the earth. No, Raymond, that measurer, would have left Rex with no extra inch to do anything.

Finally, Chris had become frustrated by Mark’s constant claustrophobic adjustments in their bed.

“What is it with you lately?” he wailed. “Have you developed restless leg syndrome or something? Do you need me to go sleep on the couch? What’s got you so nervous about being next to me in bed?”

So Mark confessed. He told Chris about his nightmares and the images that had been looping through his thoughts since the night they had watched the film. And Chris had pushed the blankets, sheets, and pillows onto the floor. First, he made Mark turn facedown. He raked his nails gently and slowly down Mark’s back, working his way from the left shoulder to the right. Then, he made Mark lie on his back. He combed his fingers slowly through the hair on Mark’s chest, bending now and then to touch his lips lightly to Mark’s left eyelid, his right eyelid, his lips. At three in the morning, Mark slipped into a deep sleep, held in place by the slow circles of Chris’s fingertips.

 

The trunk vibrated abruptly, once, twice, thrice, as the doors of the car slammed shut. So, three of them, probably. Mark moved his arms and legs a few inches back and forth, trying to loosen them.

Something thudded softly on the lid of the trunk: a hand, probably.

Mark lifted himself slightly onto his right elbow. He pressed his right hand against the rubble beneath him and pushed with his feet until he found ridges where they would hold. He took a breath, readying himself to spring from the trunk, or fall halfway out of it at least.

Metal clattered against the lid, and then the key scratched and ratcheted in the lock. There was a muffled pop as the latch released.

Mark clutched the dead flashlight in his left hand, like Chris’s father had taught him. (“Hold it near the light, with the end back. Shine the light in their eyes, and then just swing the end forward—pop ’em right on the old noggin.”) He couldn’t shine the light, but he could try the rest.

The lid opened an inch and then stopped. Someone murmured something outside. Cold air wafted into the trunk and wicked the meager remaining warmth from Mark’s piss-soaked pants. He shivered slightly, watching the gap to the outside, waiting for the lid to move and for the five possibilities to collapse into one—for all his guesses, interpretations, and possible futures to become his final irrevocable fact.