He also passed the time in the hut by counting. There were sixty seconds in a minute, so every time he managed to count to six hundred without losing track, another ten minutes had elapsed.
They’d brought him a tin cup with some rice and beans and a little water for dinner, but he had no idea whether that was two hours ago or a mere forty-five minutes. They no longer had his wrists and ankles bound, but the luminescence on his watch hands was now gone, and so he couldn’t make out the face. That was the other thing about the dark: it crippled a person’s ability to gauge time, because the light never changed. He considered going to the entrance and peering out into the boma—surely, he’d be able to read the watch there—but they’d told him to stay where he was. He knew there was a guard outside. Was knowing the exact time worth pissing them off and getting tied up again? Nope. Absolutely not. He didn’t think he could stand that.
And that supposed that tying him up was all that they did.
The one who’d brought him his rice and beans had joked that he should make a run for it in the night. He’d be better off getting shot in the boma trying to escape, because at least then he wouldn’t be eaten alive.
Still, as he sat alone in the dark he imagined himself using that tin cup to dig his way under the wall of the hut. Isn’t that what they did in The Great Escape? He’d emerge before dawn, maybe, and then he would…
He had no idea what he would do. Just none. He sure as hell wouldn’t have a motorcycle waiting for him à la Steve McQueen.
And then, of course, there were Margie and Katie. He couldn’t stop worrying about them. The fellow had reassured him that his wife and his sister were fine, as were David and Terrance.
“Can I see them?” he’d asked when the Russian had brought him his food. His voice sounded like he had a stuffy nose.
“No.”
“But—”
“It’s like you don’t trust me,” the guy had said. He was smirking, and Billy knew not to press. But the gunshots and the car engines had left him deeply unnerved, even when the fellow had promised him that the noises had been nothing, nothing at all.
And so Billy counted and thought of his little boy and the cartoon penguins, and just like in that closet, his own personal—fuck that professor—oubliette, eventually he fell asleep.
* * *
.?.?.
“So, the coaster had all this condensation on it from my soda. My apartment was an inferno and the ice melted, and when I picked up the glass, all these drops of water just cascaded onto the photo of my mom, and it was wrecked. Blotchy and smeared. And I was weeping and couldn’t stop,” the woman was saying to Billy. The recollection alone had the patient’s eyes filming up, and he handed her the box of tissues. The cardboard design had big, garish daisies. Suddenly this spring, everything had big, garish flowers of one sort or another. Wallpaper. Album covers. Tissue boxes.
“I mean, my mother was the sweetest woman on the planet,” she went on. “I loved her so much. She loved me so much. You know what that’s like.”
“I do,” Billy lied.
“And that picture of her was going to be on the funeral card, and now it was worthless. And it was all my fault.”
He didn’t remind her that the loss of the photo was a bearable disappointment; that death tended to pervert one’s view of the world, at least until the grief had begun to taper to mourning. Instead he said, his tone ruminative, “I suppose it felt rather like you had lost her again.”
She blew her nose. “Yes. Exactly.”
“Did you find another photo?”
“I did. It wasn’t as perfect.”
“Were your brothers upset about it?”
“No. They didn’t even know that I’d been careless and ruined my first choice.” She sat up. Her internal clock knew that their time was winding down. She used her middle fingers on each hand to push identical locks of cinnamon-colored hair back behind her ears, and then brushed her hands across her skirt. She was fine. Or she would be fine. It never ceased to amaze him how fucked up he was compared to the people he cared for. She reached into her purse and handed him the picture that she felt she had ruined. For a moment he was surprised she carried it with her, but then, no: it was inevitable that she would. She carried with her guilt and shame and disappointment the way most people carried car keys and wallets. He noticed that one of the drops had landed squarely on her mother’s face, but he still had the sense that the woman had been very pretty. She was wearing a cardigan and holding a bouquet of tulips—yellow, he suspected, but that was conjecture because the photo was black and white—and they reminded him of the flowers that his first wife had carried when they had been married. The photo, Billy supposed, was from the 1920s.