Method 15 33

METHOD 15/33

A Novel

SHANNON KIRK

Copyright © 2015 by Shannon Kirk

FIRST EDITION

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-1-60809-145-4

Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing Longboat Key, Florida

www.oceanviewpub.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Michael and Max, my loves
.

“Brain development can be characterized as the gradual unfolding of a powerful, self-organizing network of processes with complex interactions between genes and environment.”

-Karns, et. al., July 11, 2012, Journal of Neuroscience,
Altered Cross-Modal Processing [title truncated]

Many thanks to my supportive family for giving me the time and encouragement to write. To my husband, Michael, who routinely brings coffee to my writing office, I could never have completed much of anything without you. You inspire me to never give up. To my son, Max, who, although so young, finds ways to prop me up and who unwittingly provided the emotion of “love” wherever it may be found in this tale. To my parents, Rich and Kathy, who read every draft of whatever I write and provide not only encouragement, but also excellent feedback. To my brothers, Adam, Brandt, and Mike, I feel bolstered in this world because I know you always have my back. To Beth Hoang, a cousin who is a sister, without your edits and tough love, there is absolutely no way I could ever have a final product. To all my friends and family, thank you for never leaving me alone in this. A special note of appreciation to my brother, Michael C. Capone, an accomplished rap/blues musician. “
Focus. Please. Focus. Breath
,” as used in this novel, is a line from his song “Hate What’s New Get Screwed By Change.” Mike’s music is a muse to my writing, and I thank him for all his lines.

As a lay person, I relied upon many sources to explain such complex topics as Cross-Modal Neuroplasticity, Altered Cross-Modal Processing, and other scientific topics that are far beyond my comprehension. The following publications provided invaluable background: “Super Powers for the Blind and Deaf,” Mary Bates,
Scientific American
, September 18, 2012; “Altered Cross-Modal Processing in the Primary Auditory Cortex of Congenitally Deaf Adults: A Visual-Somatosensory MRI Study with a Double-Flash Illusion,” Christina M. Karns, Mark W. Dow, and Helen J. Neville’s,
The Journal of Neuroscience
, July 11, 2012.

To my agent, Kimberley Cameron, thank you for giving me a chance. Thank you for taking the time to see through the slush pile, making the call, and changing my life. You are a joy to work with, the definition of grace. To Oceanview Publishing, Bob and Pat Gussin, thank you for giving
15/33
a chance, and for your enthusiasm, invaluable guidance, and support. To the Oceanview team, Frank, David, Emily, Lee, Kirsten, thank you for all the support, thank you for accepting me into the Oceanview family.

~Carpe diem every day~

METHOD 15/33

I lay there on the fourth day plotting his death. Compiling assets in a list in my mind, I found relief in the planning…
a loose floor board, a red knit blanket, a high window, exposed beams, a keyhole, my condition…

I remember my thoughts then as though I am reliving them now, as though they are my present thoughts.
There he is outside the door again
, I think, even though it’s been seventeen years. Perhaps those days will forever be my present because I survived so completely in the minutiae of each hour and each second of painstaking strategy. During that indelible time of torment, I was all on my own. And, I must say now, with no lack of pride, my result, my undeniable victory, was no less than a masterpiece.

On Day 4, I was well into a catalog of assets and a rough outline of revenge, all without aid of pen or pencil, solely the mental sketchpad of piecing together potential solutions. A puzzle, I knew, but one I was determined to solve…
a loose floorboard, a red knit blanket, a high window, exposed beams, a keyhole, my condition…How do they fit together?

Over and over I reconstituted this enigma and searched for more assets.
Ah yes, of course, the bucket. And yes, yes, yes, the box spring is new, he did not remove the plastic. Okay, again, go over it again, figure it out. Exposed beams, a bucket, the box spring, the plastic, a high window, a loose floorboard, a red knit blanket, the…

I assigned numbers to give a dose of science.
A loose floorboard (Asset #4), a red knit blanket (Asset #5), plastic…
The collection
seemed as complete as possible at the start of Day 4. I would need more, I figured.

The sound of the pine floor rattling outside my jail cell, a bedroom, interrupted me about midday.
He’s definitely out there. Lunch
. The latch moved from left to right, the keyhole turned, and in he burst without the decency of even a pause at the threshold.

As he had at every other meal, he dropped a tray on my bed of now familiar food, a white mug of milk, and a child-size cup of water. No utensils. The slice of egg and bacon quiche collided with the homemade bread on the plate, a disk of china with a rose-colored toile of a woman with a pot and a feather-hat-wearing man with a dog. I loathed that plate to such an unnatural depth, I shudder to remember. The backside said “Wedgwood” and “Salvator.”
This will be my fifth meal on this salvation. I hate this plate. I will kill this plate too
. The plate, the mug, and the cup looked to be the same ones I had used for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Day 3 in captivity. The first two days I spent in a van.

“More water?” he asked, in his abrupt, dull and deep, monotone.

“Yes, please.”

He started this pattern on Day 3, which, I believe, is what kicked off my plotting in earnest. The question became part of the routine, him bringing my meal and asking if I wanted more water. I decided to say “yes” when he asked and steeled myself to say “yes” each time, although this sequence made no sense.
Why not bring a larger cup of water to begin with? Why this inefficiency? He leaves, locks the door, pipes clang in the hall walls, a spit and then a burst of water from the sink, out of eyesight through the keyhole. He’s back with a plastic cup of lukewarm water. Why?
I can tell you this—many things in this world are unsolved, as is the rationale behind many of my jailer’s inexplicable actions.

“Thank you,” I said upon his return.

I had decided from Hour 2 of Day 1 that I’d try to feign a schoolgirl politeness, be thankful, for I soon discovered I could
outwit my captor, a man in his forties.
Must be forty-something, he looks the same age as my dad
. I knew I had the wits to beat this horrible, disgusting thing, and I was just Sweet Sixteen.

Lunch on Day 4 tasted like lunch on Day 3. But perhaps the sustenance gave me what I needed because I realized I had many more assets: time, patience, undying hatred, and I noted, as I drank the milk from the thick restaurant mug, the bucket had a metal handle and the handle ends were sharp.
I need only remove the handle. It can be a separate asset from the bucket
. Also, I was high in the building, not below ground, as I had first anticipated, on Days 1 and 2, I would be. By the crown of the tree outside my window and the three flights of stairs it took to get here, I was most surely on a third floor. I considered height another asset.

Strange, right? I had not yet grown bored by Day 4. Some might think sitting alone in a locked room would cause a mind to give way to dementia or delusion. But I was lucky. My first two days were spent traveling, and by some colossal mistake or severe error in judgment, my captor used a van for his crime and this van had tinted side windows. Sure, no one could see in, but I could see out. I studied and committed our route to the logbook in my mind, details I never actually used, but the work of transcribing and burning the data to eternal memory occupied my thoughts for days.

If you asked me today, seventeen years later, what flowers were growing by the ramp of Exit 33, I’d tell you, wild daisies mixed with a healthy dose of devil’s paintbrush. For you I’d paint the sky, a misty blue-gray rolling into a smudged mud. I’d re-enact the sudden action as well, such as the storm that erupted 2.4 minutes after passing the patch of flowers, when the black mass overhead opened in a fit of spring hail. You would see the pea-sized ice-balls, which forced my kidnapper to park under an overpass, say “son-of-a-bitch” three times, smoke one cigarette, flick the spent butt, and begin our trek again, 3.1 minutes after the first hail ball crashed the hood of that criminal van. I morphed forty-eight hours of these transportation details into a movie I replayed every single day of my
captivity, studying each minute, each second, each and every frame, for clues and assets and analysis.

The van’s side window and how he left me, sitting and able to survey our progress, led to a quick conclusion: the harbinger of my incarceration was a witless monkey on autopilot, a soldier drone. But I was comfortable in an armchair he’d bolted to the floor of the van. Suffice it to say, despite his many protests to my sagging blindfold, he was either too lazy or too distracted to tie the oil cloth properly and I, therefore, ascertained our direction from the passing signs: west.

He slept 4.3 hours the first night. I slept 2.1. We took Exit 74 after two days and one night of driving. And don’t even ask about the colossal embarrassment of bathroom breaks at deserted rest stops.

When our trail came to an end, the van rolled slowly down the exit ramp, and I decided to count sets of sixty.
One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi…
10.2 sets of Mississippi later, we parked, and the engine sputtered in a lurching stop.
10.2 minutes from the highway
. From the topmost corner of my drooping blindfold, I made out a field cast in a twilight gray and glazed with a swath of full-moon white. The wisp-scratch branches of a tree draped around the van.
A willow. Like Nana’s. But this isn’t Nana’s house
.

He’s at the side of the van. He’s coming for me. I’ll have to leave the van. I don’t want to leave the van
.

I jumped at the loud metal-on-metal scrape and bang of the van door sliding open.
We’re here. I guess we’re here. We’re here
. My heart ticked to the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.
We’re here
. Sweat accumulated at my hairline.
We’re here
. My arms lost all slack, and my shoulders stiffened to straight, forming a capital T with my spine.
We’re here
. And my heart again, I might have trembled the earth to quake, I might have roiled the sea to tsunami, with that rhythm.