Free Set Free by Anthony Bidulka Page A

Coffee. A ringing cell phone. A mirror. Happiness.
    By any standards, the conditions of my habitation were deplorable. I relieved myself through a hole in a wooden bench. There might have been an access point outside the rectangle through which someone could clean out the refuse, but to my knowledge that never happened. After my first full week, I stopped noticing the permanent stench permeating the area. My hair grew; my face itched from an unruly beard. Growing a beard was something I’d never done in real life. I was vaguely curious to see what I looked like—until I remembered that no reflection in any mirror could show Jaspar Wills. He was gone. My teeth felt spongy from weeks of going unbrushed; my nails grew long and unkempt, my skin tight and dry. I was in dire need of a change in wardrobe. Not only were my clothes—the same jeans and shirt I’d set off in from Boston—filthy and torn, but the pants only stayed around my shrinking waist if I held them there. My kingdom for a belt.
    With patience, and sustained up and down motion, the water pump would provide enough trickles of water to keep me reasonably hydrated and clean. But without so much as a pail or basin, the process was often painstaking—and on bad days, of which there were many, exhaustion easily won out over a full bath.
    I worried about my health. As a tourist in Morocco, I would never drink water from a tap. As a prisoner, I was forced to. In the early days I constantly experienced diarrhea, which contributed to my already feeble state, but not so much any longer. I don’t know if my system eventually adjusted, or if there was just too little of anything left in reserve for my body to expel.
    Prolonged near-starvation is never a good thing. I could tell from my decreasing levels of energy and my sustained lethargy that its frightening effects were overtaking me. Although generally a person who enjoyed robust health, in the real world I reinforced it with a daily intake of vitamins, various supplements, and medication to control a genetically-induced cholesterol problem. Without those pills, who knew what was happening to my body. Wouldn’t that be a farce? If, despite everything else, I ended up being taken out by a coronary attack caused by unchecked low-density lipoproteins.
    The only aspect of my situation that could be judged as improving was the state of the injuries I’d suffered at the hands of Hun. Despite the conditions I was forced to endure, with no beatings to perpetuate or aggravate my legion of cuts and bruises, they were slowly beginning to heal.
    Physically, I was holding on. My greatest concern was for my mental health. In the real world, I was bombarded by mental stimuli. If I wasn’t writing, I was researching. If I wasn’t interviewing someone, I was planning a book tour or outlining a new idea or communicating with readers, booksellers, agents. I enjoyed challenging conversations and the odd feisty squabble with my wife. I watched movies and TV, read books and magazines, listened to news radio and a wide variety of music. I thrived on travel. Sure, on occasion I enjoyed a rainy Sunday afternoon catnap or a mindless walk in the park, but generally I was the kind of guy in a perpetual dance with the world around me—the more stimulation, the better.
    Now my dance partner was monotony. The same rectangle. The same shitter. The same begrudging water pump. The same stone pedestal. The same metal grate. The same dry bread. I spent every day huddled in my lean-to, hiding from the harsh rays and blistering heat of an unrelenting sun, and every night on top of a rock, curled into a fetal position, reciting stories to a ghost, tortured by my own mind.
     
    Why didn’t Mikki’s captors pick up the money?
    It was a question asked millions of times. By me. By Jenn. People who knew us asked the question. People who only knew us by our story asked the question. The unspoken answer haunted all of us. Only one seemed likely: somehow,