Edge Play X Read online

  EDGE PLAY X

  by

  M. Jarrett Wilson

  Delusion Press

  This book is fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 M. Jarrett Wilson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author.

  ISBN 10: 0-9844798-1-3

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9844798-1-8

  Cover photo of MJW by Jennifer Cavalet, © 2001.

  “The energy of delusion is the search for truth in a novel.”

  Victor Shklovsky

  Other work by M. Jarrett Wilson--Submission: Interactive, a playful follow-up to Edge Play X.

  For DAF and LSM

  "My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others! "

  Marquis de Sade

  “Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself—as though that were so necessary—that men still are men and not the keys of a piano…”

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Notes from the Underground

  Act 1

  1.

  The woman awoke on a firm bed in a dim room, a room that looked very much like a hotel room, not an upscale one or a rent-by-the-hour one, but instead very much like a medium-priced one in a medium-priced town off of a medium-sized freeway.

  As the woman came back into the full awareness of her body, she noted that her hands had been cuffed together, and likewise, so had her feet. A feeling of slight nausea lingered in her midsection and her skin tingled, was cold almost, a side-effect of the drug that had been forced upon her. She shivered.

  Kidnapped, she thought, I have been kidnapped.

  She remembered the last few moments before she had lost consciousness. She had been about to get into her car when another vehicle had entered the lot next to her apartment building. The smooth rolling momentum of their SUV had caused her to look over at it gliding on the pavement, she thinking that there were no open spaces in the parking lot and that maybe they were hovering behind her car because they intended to take her space.

  Another memory arrived, that of a suited man exiting the passenger side of the black SUV in which he had ridden. The tall man had asked her if she knew how to find a certain Tibetan restaurant his friend had told him about, “They serve tea that is made with salt, as salty as the ocean,” he had said as he had come closer and still closer to her as she had breathed in the cooling fall air that came in from the California coast.

  The man had entered her personal space, that area slightly larger than an extended arm where strangers do not enter except by verbal or non-verbal communication, accident, close quarters, or express invitation. She remembered how she had tried to kick the man in the groin to no avail as he had placed a damp rag, one soaked in some potent pharmaceutical-grade anesthetic, she guessed, over her mouth. The bitterness of it still lingered on her lips.

  She assumed then that after her world went black, the man had caught her in his strong, long arms as she collapsed, and with the help of the man who had been driving the SUV, had thrown her onto the backseat of the vehicle before any other person could notice. And now she was here, in some sort of hotel room.

  The woman sat up, trying to shake off the last remnants of the drug that had been forced on her. Oddly, as the woman came fully into consciousness, the image of the man’s eyes came to her, blue like the horizon of a cold winter sky, lighter somehow than other blue eyes, more Nordic perhaps, certainly caused by a gene originating in the upper latitudes of the British Isles or Scandinavian region, genes developed and refined over millennia of limited ultra-violet exposure.

  Finally, the woman, barely in her 30’s now, placed her shackled feet onto the low-nap of the carpeted floor, stood up from the bed, and hopped over to the door which she attempted to open. Locked: of course it was locked. If it had been left open, this woman would have hopped out into the hallway or portico or whatever was lying behind the closed door. Instead, she made her way over to a wall of heavy curtains, the thermal kind with foam backing, and grabbed the separation between these thick and new-smelling window coverings, pulling them apart quickly, revealing a plain white wall, a perfect blank palette of a wall with no windows or pockmarks or anything other than fresh paint.

  She spent the next few moments surveying the room, moving around it and taking inventory of her surroundings: a bed, a closet nearby empty of coat hangers or ironing board, a small round table with two square upholstered chairs, a bathroom near the door, a television, a dresser. Above this dresser was a large mirror, and the woman noticed that there was a sense of something being wrong with this mirror, a sense of flimsiness to the presence of it, and then it occurred to her that it was a two-way mirror and that she was being watched.

  The door opened. The sound and movement of it caused the woman to turn her head and watch as the man with the pale blue eyes entered. She looked him up and down, involuntarily almost, the same way she did to men she found attractive, and he noticed the movement of her eyes along the vertical line of his body, he noticed as her gaze lingered at the gun that sat in a holster above his left hip, a weapon no longer hidden by the coat of his suit.

  This man, younger than her but nearly the same age, nonchalantly placed a manila folder onto the small round table and then he told her to sit down. She stood still long enough that the man began to wonder if perhaps he should repeat himself, if perhaps she had not heard him, but then finally he said to her, “I’m not going to tell you again.”

  The woman continued to stand mutely and then the man took the gun out of his holster and pointed it at her.

  “You aren’t going to kill me,” she said, but she was unsure if the man ultimately planned to put an end to her life. He wanted something from her first—maybe he wanted to rape her, or beat her, or sell her, or a combination of the three, but he wanted something first—that much she was sure of.

  The slightest of smirks became evident on his face, exposing canines and incisors wet with saliva and in the beginning stages of discoloration from coffee.

  “How do you know?” he asked her cynically, entertained by what she had said.

  “If you wanted to kill me,” she answered, “I’d be dead already.”

  Her eyes went back to his gun, pulled away from those light eyes. She looked at his left ankle and judged from the hang of his pants that another gun was there.

  “Sit at the table,” he told her, an angry spray of sputum coming out with the words, but the woman stayed where she was. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way, your choice.”

  She was testing him in her refusal, questioning his nature.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time, go sit at the table.”

  “You didn’t say the magic word,” she said, and then he took the gun from its holster and pistol-whipped her on the side of the head, knocking her onto the floor and down to all fours, giving the woman an answer to her question. When she opened her eyes to look at him, she saw tiny pricks of light appearing
and disappearing in the air between them, a cartoonish display coinciding with a very real pain.

  “I would appreciate a thank-you for not hitting you harder,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” she said, her head throbbing.

  He returned the gun to his holster, grabbed her under her arms, and dragged her body, limp in protest, over to the table.

  “Get in the chair!” he said, “before I do it again!” and after a few moments she climbed into the chair and sat down.

  “Can I have a drink of water?” she asked, holding the throbbing side of her head with her cuffed hands.

  “Yes,” he answered, and he went into the bathroom where he filled a short glass with water from the tap before returning and placing it in front of her on the table.

  The woman picked up the glass with her cuffed hands and took a sip. It occurred to her then that even though she had struck men before, had made then yelp and whimper and had even drawn blood on occasion, that never before had she really wanted to kill a man. It was a foreign feeling but she allowed it to overtake her.

  “Please take my handcuffs off,” she implored.

  “Not yet.”

  The woman picked up the glass again and took a sip, thinking how foolish he was for bringing her a real glass instead of a flimsy plastic cup, this thought coinciding with the idea that almost anything can be used as a weapon—a chair, a pen, a rock, a shard of glass—and then those thoughts were gone and there was only her slamming the mouth of the glass onto the edge of the table and then pushing the broken remains of it toward his neck.

  Surprised, but still fast with his reactions, the man lifted up his arm to shield himself, and the force of the collision sent the weapon out of her hands and flying into the wall. She saw the gashes she had left on his forearm and how his blood, the dark claret red of it, had started to seep out from his injury in little round droplets, and then, immediately and ferociously, he tackled her onto the floor as another man entered the room. As the blue-eyed man pressed his weight against her, holding her to the floor, he whispered in her ear, “You’re a tougher bitch than I thought you’d be.”

  Blackness again.

  *

  This time when the woman awoke, she was lying on the floor. Her kidnappers hadn’t bothered to put her onto the bed, a punishment for thrusting the shattered glass at the blue-eyed man. It would have been a shame to damage that face, really, a handsome enough face but one that already bore a jagged and faded glyph of a scar along the right jaw line.

  When she came back to consciousness, she noticed that her hands had now been cuffed behind her back and that her feet were still cuffed together. Her wrists and ankles were sore where the metal had dug into them, as was her right arm—the limb was asleep from lying on it awkwardly. She rolled onto her stomach until the painful pinpricks gradually shifted into a dull ache, and then finally her arm returned to normal. An uncomfortable pressure had built up in her bladder and she knew that soon this burden would need to be released.

  Weary now from being knocked out twice in such a short period of time, she pushed herself onto her knees and stood up before hopping into the bathroom and hooking her thumbs over the waistband of her jeans. She tried to push them down but was unsuccessful in getting them over the curved crescents of her hips. Soon, she would not be able to hold it anymore and she would pee her pants, she knew, pee them like a kindergartener—a warm wet spot would begin at her crouch and then extend down her thighs, trickling over her socks and shoes before pooling on the tile floor.

  Another mirror was in the bathroom above the long sink, another magic mirror, she thought, and the woman said to it, “I need to use the bathroom.”

  She heard the door open and then her kidnapper came into the bathroom. His right arm was bandaged, wrapped tightly with medical tape.

  “Please take off my cuffs,” she implored.

  “I’m not going to take your cuffs off,” he said, laughing at her request.

  “I can’t get my pants down,” she said, desperate now.

  He was a tall man, almost a full-head taller than her, and he walked gingerly over to where she was standing in front of the simple white toilet. She noticed that the man’s dark hair looked as if it had been recently trimmed; she noticed the small mole that hovered above his right eye. The man stood in front of her silently for a moment, casually, and the woman wondered if he was going to strike her. But instead of striking her, he reached his hands down to the waistband of her jeans, unbuttoned and unzipped them, then quickly yanked the jeans and her butterfly print panties down to her knees. The woman sat on the toilet immediately but it took a moment until her urethral sphincter relaxed, and as she sat there waiting for it to open, he said, “There you go. Pee.”

  She urinated, amazed at the amount of liquid a full bladder can hold, and when the organ was emptied, the man told her to stand up. He pulled up her panties and then, with somewhat more difficulty, her jeans, which he zipped and buttoned. The act gave her a sense of being a child again, it returned her to some basic memory of potty training and of her own mother helping her pull up her pants after she had finished (that was the really difficult part, learning to pull up your pants and button them). And as she remembered this she noticed a bulge in his own pants as he stood before her, her wrists still cuffed behind her back, and quickly she diverted her eyes, hoping that he had not noticed her fleeting look. It disturbed her that the man was aroused.

  “I would have un-cuffed you if you hadn’t attacked me,” he said.

  There was a drawn silence and then she reminded him, “You kidnapped me.”

  The truth of her statement sat heavily between them, carrying with it a sense of shame and dismay.

  He motioned to her to go out of the bathroom, and she obeyed.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I did. But I don’t want to hurt you. You aren’t going to fight me again, are you?”

  His statement was less of a question and more of an assessment of the situation, a statement to which the woman shook her head no, although she hadn’t fully decided if she would fight him again or not. He came over to her, close now again, this man whom she didn’t know so close to her, and she was reminded of how her brother used to say fuck me or fight me when people got so near as to make him uncomfortable, but she did not say this to him. Instead, she stood still as he removed the cuffs on her ankles and wrists.

  I don’t want to hurt you, he had said. The words turned over again and again in her head. Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt me, she thought, but he would. He would hurt me.

  He sat down at the table and told her to join him.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, and she nodded her head yes, staring at the floor, not wanting to look at him, ashamed somehow to admit her hunger and to have had to urinate as he watched. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed since the morning, but it was enough that her stomach was empty and uncomfortable. It gave out an angry growl.

  Immediately after she had confessed to her hunger, another suited man brought in a tray of food which he placed on the table in front of her. A plastic lid covered the plate, making it resemble hospital food. A small plastic cup of apple juice sat at the corner of the tray. She put a straw into it and sucked down most of the liquid in just a few gulps, suddenly aware of her thirst. Next, the woman lifted the cover from the plate, revealing a stuffed chicken breast, asparagus, and a baked potato with sour cream. A chocolate chip cookie sat next to the plate, and she picked this up and took a bite. They had only given her plastic silverware which she picked up and used to eat the hot food on her plate and quiet her growling belly.

  When she finished the food, the man took the tray and put it next to the television. The woman watched him do this through narrow eyes, trying to make sense of this strange man. There was violence within him—that much she was certain of. But the reason why he had kidnapped her, the motives behind why he had struck her and then fed her, these things eluded her. Why the cruelty and then the kindness? A rage burne
d up inside her when she realized that she could not understand the man’s motives, might never really, even if he might ultimately try to explain them.

  “Would you like a beer?” he asked. “A glass of wine, perhaps?”

  She was surprised that the man was offering her alcohol, but after only a moment of hesitation, she told him, “A beer, and a cigarette would be nice, too.”

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” her kidnapper said.

  “I don’t, usually,” the woman answered, not wanting to tell him that it had been almost five years since she had smoked a cigarette, that such a long period of time had passed where she had been free from the addiction, a period almost spotless with the exclusion of the dozens or so she had smoked after her mother had died. The woman had decided to request one because she recognized the possibility that the man sitting with her had every intention of killing her after he had gotten whatever it was he wanted.

  The man who had brought her tray in shortly before again entered the room with a large plastic cup filled with beer, a drink which he put onto the table in front of the woman along with a brand-new pack of Camel Lights. The suited man handed a lighter to her kidnapper before picking up the tray by the television and leaving again.

  “You take a drink first,” she said, wanting the man to prove that the drink wasn’t drugged, worried that after a few sips that she’d be unconscious on the floor.

  The man picked up the beer and took a long gulp.

  “It’s not drugged,” he said.

  Believing him, the woman took a sip from the beer, a beer that tasted like heaven, a beer better than other beers somehow, a taste improved by her need for it, by her thought that perhaps this will be the last beer of her life, the last beer before these men torture her and rape her and kill her or sell her into some kind of modern day slavery. She pounded the pack onto her palm before opening the cellophane, pulling away the silver liner over the cigarettes and tossing it onto the table. The woman removed a cigarette and put it between her lips: it was like seeing a long-lost friend, having that cigarette between her lips. The man, lighter in hand, leaned over and lit it, and she took a couple long puffs before flicking the ashes onto the floor. She worked on the beer and he sat there silently as she did so.