Pines(81)

“Actually, I do,” Ethan says. “You will torture me, break me, and eventually murder me. I know exactly what’s coming. I just have one request.”
This elicits a subtle smile.
“What?”
“Quit telling me how much of a stud you are, you piece of shit. Whip it out and show me.”
* * *
All day, Aashif shows him.
* * *
Some hours later, Ethan snaps back to consciousness.
Aashif sets the bottle of smelling salts on the table beside the knives.
“Welcome back. Have you seen yourself?” the man asks him.
Ethan has lost all concept of how long he’s been down here in the brown-walled room without windows that smells of death and rancid blood.
“Look at your leg.” Aashif’s face is beaded with sweat. “I said look at your leg.”
When Ethan refuses, Aashif reaches his bloody fingers into an earthenware vessel, comes out with a handful of salt.
He flings it at Ethan’s leg.
Screams through the ball gag.
Agony.
Unconsciousness.
* * *
“Do you understand how completely I own you now, Ethan? How I will always own you? Do you hear me?”
Truer words.
* * *
Ethan has placed himself in another world, trying to follow a line of thought that leads to his wife, to her giving birth to their firstborn, and him in the hospital with her, but the pain keeps dragging him back into now.
* * *
“I can make it end,” Aashif purrs into his ear. “I can also keep you alive for days. Whatever I want. I know it hurts. I know you’re in more pain than you even knew a person was capable of experiencing. But consider that I’ve only been working on one leg. And I’m very good at this. I will not allow you to bleed to death. You will only die when it pleases me.”
* * *
There is undeniable intimacy between them.
Aashif cutting.
Ethan screaming.
At first, Ethan hadn’t watched, but now he can’t tear his eyes away.
Aashif forces him to drink water and shovels lukewarm beans into his mouth, all the while talking to him in the most casual tone, as if he were merely a barber and Ethan had popped in for a trim.
* * *
Later, Aashif sits in the corner drinking water and watching Ethan, studying his handiwork with a mix of amusement and pride.
He wipes his brow and rises to his feet, the hem of his dishdasha dripping Ethan’s blood.
“Tomorrow morning first thing, I will castrate you, cauterize the wound with a blow torch, and then go to work on your upper body. Think about what you want for breakfast.”
He turns off the light on his way out of the room.
* * *
All night, Ethan hangs in darkness.
Waiting.
Sometimes he hears footsteps stop outside the door, but it never opens.
The pain is titanic but he manages to think clearly about his wife and the child he will never know.
He whispers to Theresa from this dungeon and wonders if she can hear him.
He moans and he cries.
Trying to come to grips with the idea that he is meeting this end.
Even years later, it will be this moment—hanging alone in the dark with nothing but the pain and his thoughts and the waiting for tomorrow—that will haunt him.
Always waiting for Aashif’s return.
Always wondering what his son or daughter will look like.
What their name will be.
Always wondering how Theresa will get on without him.
She will even say to him four months later, sitting at the breakfast table in their kitchen in Seattle as the rain falls, “It’s like you never came back to me, Ethan.”
And he will say, “I know,” as the cries of his son come through the baby monitor, thinking, Aashif didn’t just take physical pieces out of me.
* * *
And then the door finally opens, razor blades of light streaming in, bringing Ethan back to consciousness, back to the pain.
When his eyes adjust to the onslaught of daylight, it isn’t the silhouette of Aashif he sees but the bulky profile of a SEAL in full gear holding an M-4 with an ACOG whose barrel gives off wisps of smoke.#p#分页标题#e#
He shines a light on Ethan and says with a thick, west-Texas drawl, “Jesus.”
* * *
Theresa thinks the leg wounds are from the crash.
* * *
The SEAL is a sergeant, last name Brooks, and he carries Ethan on his back up a narrow flight of stairs, out of the basement dungeon into a kitchen where pieces of meat are burning on a skillet.
Breakfast interruptus.
Three Arab men lie dead in the hall, and five members of the SEAL team occupy the cramped kitchen, one of them kneeling down beside Aashif, tying a strip of cloth around his left leg above the knee, which bleeds from a gunshot wound.
Brooks lowers Ethan into a chair and growls at his medic, “Get away from him.” He stares down at Aashif. “Who cut up this soldier?”
Aashif responds to the question with something in Arabic.
“Me no hablo whatever the fuck you just said.”