Set Free (2 page)

When I was a child, my parents were not the type to issue dire warnings. They never said, “Don’t answer the door if you’re home alone,” or “Don’t get into cars with strangers.” They were more the type to suggest, “When you meet someone new, say hello and introduce yourself. Ask questions. Don’t just talk about yourself.” To them, the world was a friendly place.

Parents aren’t always right.

By the time I wised up to the fact that my driver and I were not bound to become best buddies and I was in a dangerous situation, it was too late. I demanded he stop the car and let me out. He disagreed with the suggestion, a point made abundantly clear when he used his free hand to point a gun at my face. I guess I should have asked a few more questions when we first met.

“Sit back,” he ordered.

Our eyes met in the rear-view mirror. I’d like to say his were malevolent and oozing with murderous intent. But they weren’t. They were just eyes. Dark. Moist. One noticeably larger than the other. I wondered what he saw when he looked at mine. Surprise? Anger? Fear?

The gun was sufficient motivation to do as he asked.

Nothing about my life to that point had prepared me for this moment, unless you count having watched too many action movies. In no way was I a tough guy. Not in a beat-their-brains-out, knock-them-down, blow-them-up, or any other kind of way. Even if I’d had a gun, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. The only fights I’d ever been in were with my wife, Jenn, and those always turned out the same way: with me flat on my back, in a headlock, in about three seconds tops. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Don’t let the movies fool you about how easy it is to be a hero. Or worse, give you unreasonable expectations for your significant other’s performance in dire circumstances. Most of us, no matter how many hours we’ve clocked pumping iron at the gym, mastering tai chi, or watching UFC, would be at a loss sitting on the cracked leather back seat of a stinking hot car barreling down an unfamiliar street in an African city with a pistol kissing their face. Fodor's definitely doesn’t cover this.

I wasn’t a complete idiot about what was happening in this part of the world. I’d done my research. One needn’t look too far back in history to find reasons to practice caution. Scores of unhappy Moroccan rebels had taken part in Arab Spring revolutions. Activists were regularly staging mass protests calling for government reform and constitutional amendments to control the powers of the king. In 2011, seventeen people—mainly foreigners—were killed in a bomb attack on a Marrakech cafe.

And the problems extended far beyond local and continental politics. There’d been plenty of tension between this country and mine. As recently as 2013, Morocco canceled joint military exercises with the United States when Washington decided to back the UN’s call to monitor human rights in Western Sahara. Instead of seeing the move as supporting its people, Morocco saw it as an attack on its sovereignty. Apparently they don’t like that kind of stuff around here.

Sitting back, trying to calm my nerves and figure out what the hell to do, I stared out the window. A blur of traffic swept across a backdrop of earthen-hued buildings hunkered low beneath sun-bleached sky. Despite my best efforts, fear began to take hold, menacing, snarling, clawing. In the past, whenever I’d been scared, either I knew it was coming—like on a roller coaster or visiting a haunted house on Hallowe’en—or it appeared suddenly. This fear was different. It began as a pinprick, somewhere in the back of my head, then grew like an exotic flowering tea bud, blooming as it steeped, suddenly expanding to many times its original size, invading my brain until it consumed me. Only when I was fully diseased with dread did it carry out its merciless endgame, communicating the very real possibility that I might soon be dead.

The rumors of what happens in the moments before you die proved untrue for me. I didn’t see my life passing before my eyes. I saw faces. A procession of the people I cared for most. My mother. My father. My brother James. His quirky, funny wife. My twin nieces for whom the word precocious was invented. I began to concern myself with how worried they’d be when they first heard the news that I’d never arrived at my hotel. That would only be the beginning. Mom would cry…

Screw that!

I couldn’t sit back and let this happen to me. Okay, I was a writer, and yes, a nerd, and I might suck at most sports. But I work out. I look after myself, eat healthy. I could be forceful if I needed to be. And boy, did I need to be.

“Where are we going?” I demanded to know, pulling myself up against the front seat. I was close enough to smell the driver’s heavy cologne, barely masking the acrid scent of perspiration.

Again with the gun.

My last words were stupid ones. “You can’t shoot me and drive at the same time!”

When I awoke, the first thing I knew was why I’d been asleep. It hadn’t come naturally. There was no mirror in sight, and my hands were bound behind my back, but I didn’t need them to know there was a giant lump on my forehead. It might have been the size of an asteroid for all its throbbing intensity, radiating pain into every nook and cranny of my skull.

Without moving, I tried to figure out where I was. I’d been tied up, gagged, and laid out on a floor. The space was small, dark, perhaps a storage room. A single window—little more than a narrow opening near the ceiling—let in just enough light to coax black into muted grey.

Wincing from the wound, I pulled myself up so I was sitting with my back against a wall. Everything hurt, not just my head. The worst of it originated from somewhere on the left side of my torso. My eyes moved to the spot, the effort triggering excruciating jabs of pain. A small splotch of red penetrated the fabric of my shirt: a pathetically inconsequential clue as to what had just happened to me, and what was about to.

When considering taking a trip, does anyone factor in the possibility of dying? Figuring out how many pairs of underwear to pack, selecting the right swimsuit, making sure you’ve got all the relevant travel documents—do people think to themselves, even fleetingly,
I may never come back
?

Maybe some people. Nervous flyers. Chronic pessimists. An article I once read estimated that every year, two hundred people die on cruise ships, and about the same number in plane crashes. In the United States alone, there are over forty thousand automobile-related deaths annually. Travel is not for the faint of heart.

On the day I left for Morocco, pulling khakis from the closet and stuffing socks in my shoes, I never gave my lifespan a second thought. I’ve traveled all my life. My parents were—still are—travel enthusiasts. Some have gone so far as to describe them as modern-day gypsies. Even when my brother Sam and I were very young, they’d regularly bundle us up and whisk us off to faraway places.

My first travel memory goes back to when I was five. It was a family trip to Africa. I don’t remember exact details of how we got there or how long we stayed, but I do remember seeing an elephant up close; so close I could smell its breath. I remember being surprised by how the Zambian scrublands looked nothing like where I imagined Tarzan would hang out, and spending hours enthralled by a family of baboons as they picked insects out of one another’s fur (an action my brother and I imitated with great hilarity for months afterwards). All the while, Mom and Dad would take trillions of pictures and fill copious journals with their observations, a habit I picked up and continue to this day. Ever since that first magical, mystical, long-ago adventure, I get antsy if there isn’t at least one planned trip in my future. Fortunately, when I grew up, I found a way to turn my travel addiction into a career.

Although my primary reason for being in Morocco was work, it seemed a waste of a perfectly good foreign country not to pad the itinerary with some personal recreation. Then again, for a guy like me, the two are rarely mutually exclusive. The only downside was that Jenn was staying home.

Generally, work trips are not holidays. But every so often, whenever life allowed, Jenn would tag along. God knows we both needed to get away. We needed time together, somewhere far away from what our day-to-day lives had become. But the law firm she worked for was struggling—eternally—and Jenn was perpetually working killer hours. She’d convinced me the trip would do me good. Getting back to work would do me good. Being on my own would do me good.

How did I get so lucky as to score a woman like Jenn? There was certainly nothing special about me when we met. I was an English major, with aspirations of writing the great American novel: how original. I’d never had a real girlfriend before. Not because none would have me, but because all my free time and attention were spent chasing literary inspiration in whatever far-flung destination my habitually starving bank account would allow.

Jennifer Flanders, on the other hand, was remarkable. The first time I laid eyes on her was at a campus pub. My buddies and I were drowning our sorrows after some no doubt less-than-stellar performance on the soccer field. She was our enabler. Yup, my wife was a shooter girl.

From there our love story is standard stuff. Not to us, but to pretty much anyone else who hears it. I pawed her a few times that first night. She soundly rebuffed me. The next morning I was royally hung over, but nowhere near enough to forget how completely enamored I’d become with this goddess. I vowed to do whatever it took to find her again. Admittedly, that wasn’t much of a vow—in order to go on making enough money to stay in school and keep ramen noodles on the table, Ms. Flanders had to keep showing up for work. And when she did, I was there. As a paying customer she was obliged to pay me a middling amount of attention. That led to me downing a shockingly stupid number of shooters over the course of the next few weeks, until she finally agreed to go out with me.

I confess: my first round of attraction had a lot to do with the deadly combination of a certain tank top and tequila. But the heavenly creature that showed up at the off-campus diner we’d agreed to meet at was something else altogether. The hair was still blond, but now in a way that made you think Laura Linney, not Tara Reid. She walked with the poise and confidence of a sophisticated, grown-up woman. And there I was, still the nerdy manling, sporting flaming-hot cheeks, a wrinkled plaid shirt, and a dopey smile. Content to sit there and watch her for the rest of my life, I almost forgot to say hello.

If they’re talking to another girl or somebody’s mother—and they’re not complete idiots—when asked what they find most attractive about a girl, most guys will go with something like: sense of humor, intelligence, sparkling eyes. Suddenly I was beginning to comprehend how maybe some of those responses weren’t utter bullshit. Jenn had all of those things and more, and they were turning me on to the highest decibel level. Only dogs could hear how much I was into this girl.

Over the next three hours, with tea for her, two beers for me, and something that may have been burgers and fries but I don’t remember because I never took my eyes off my date to actually see what I was eating, I learned everything I needed to know about Jennifer Flanders. About how she was from a small town, the first in her family to pursue a college education, on scholarship. About the pressure she felt to prove to everyone she’d left behind that she could succeed. I knew right off she needn’t worry about any of that stuff. She was pretty much the smartest, most capable person I’d ever met. She just didn’t know it yet.

Jenn asked and I told her stuff about me too. Mostly middle class boring stuff and how I lived and breathed writing and travel. I told her about the few pieces I’d had published, all in local print rags no one ever read. She seemed genuinely interested.

We slept together right away. It’s just what college kids do. We didn’t call it love, at first. But I did get the distinct impression that if Jenn hadn’t been feeling something close to what I was—freakin’ smitten—she would’ve said her goodbyes at the door of the diner that night and that would have been it.

Seventeen years later she’s still kickass smart, steaming hot, married to me, trying to make a name for herself at a law firm that doesn’t deserve her. Me, I’d done some much-needed growing up. I was a committed slave to writing and travel. And I’d just made the decision that would end my life.

I was tied up, gagged, hurt and alone, locked in a dark room. I didn’t know exactly where I was. Yet all I could think about was whether my credit card would be charged for my full stay at the
riad
, because I hadn’t canceled within the required twenty-four hours of my failure to arrive. What was wrong with me?

Finding a comfortable position in the small, hot room was impossible. The air was stagnant and smelled of mothballs and decay. I had no idea what time it was or how much of it had passed since I’d been taken and beaten into unconsciousness. Like everyone else, I’d stopped wearing a watch a couple of years back, relying solely on my iPhone. But my phone—along with the rest of my belongings, except for the clothes on my back—was gone. How long had I been in here? It couldn’t be days, I quickly concluded. If I’d been out that long, I’d feel woozier and my face would itch with stubble.

With nothing to look at, and nothing to listen to—the place was like a tomb—I was left with what was going on inside my head. Even that seemed a fool’s game. Try as I might, I couldn’t manage to focus on anything of importance, instead always coming back to fretting over the cost of that damned
riad
. Whenever my mind dared veer into the deep dark place that was reality, it snapped away like an elastic band, not wanting to deal with what was there.

I was on the verge of falling asleep when I heard the noise. A muted, low grumbling coming from somewhere below me. My first clue telling me I was in a room above another. There was either a basement beneath me, or I was on a second floor or higher. I strained to hear, to identify the sound. The lack of any other stimuli made it easier to concentrate.

Voices.

People. There were people in the building.

Were they here to save me or hurt me?

Should I thump the floor with my feet and scream bloody hell through my gag? Or should I remain deathly quiet?

The garbled sound continued. At least two people were having an exchange. Probably in a language I wouldn’t understand. Were they talking about something important? Were they talking about me? Time passed. Whatever the discussion was didn’t seem to lead to someone coming for me. I didn’t know if I should be disappointed or relieved.

The conversation continued so long that I began to nod off, the muffled chatter a bizarre lullaby. It reminded me of falling asleep to the sound of my parents talking in the living room, their voices low, sometimes stifling laughs, always cognizant of their slumbering sons. Desperate, I grasped onto that pleasant memory. I eventually found myself easing into a drowsy recollection of my final conversation with Jenn, the day I left Boston.

It had been snowing for two days. Winter: a time of year I’d always loved for its coziness and the fact that a string of bad weather always seemed to inspire a blitz of good writing. Until now. I didn’t love winter anymore. Or summer. Or autumn. Or spring.

I’d gone outside earlier to shovel a skiff that had accumulated on the driveway. My bag was packed and sitting by the front door. I was hungry, but decided I’d grab something quick at the airport. I didn’t want to put Jenn through the trial of a drawn-out farewell meal, sitting across from each other, food sticking in our dry throats as we tried to make light conversation.

“The yard guy should be here on Monday to take care of the leaves.” We should have done the raking ourselves, but we’d waited too long. Too many other things going on. Now it was winter and I was going away.

“Okay.” Jenn was on the couch in the living room, feet tucked under her, laptop perched on her right thigh—a favorite position.

I walked over and switched on the lamp nearest her. Left on her own, she’d go half blind before thinking to turn on a light. One of her peccadilloes.

“Thanks,” she said, looking up briefly, a distracted look bothering her pretty face.

Conversations move much quicker when sentences consist of one word or less. It had been like this for weeks. Ever since the trial, and the long, frigid fallout that came after it. It was as if we’d somehow managed to live through a nuclear blast, and now we were waiting to find out if we’d survive or die from its poison.

I dropped into the armchair closest to where she’d set herself up in a nest of work. “I don’t have to go.”

“Of course you should go. We’ve talked about this. Why are you bringing it up again now?”

She was right. We had talked about it. Made a decision. My cab was five minutes out.

“It feels wrong, leaving you here alone.”

Her eyes rose from the computer screen, the line of her mouth tight as wire. “Nothing’s going to happen.” The words barely slipping through.

“I know that,” I said quickly. “That’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?”

Yes, Jaspar, what did you mean?

“I want you to be okay.”

“I think we both know that’s not going to happen,” she said, her expression turning her into that person I wouldn’t have recognized six months ago. “Not right now. Maybe never.”

I let out a breath, doing my best to ignore the acidic bile eating away the walls of my stomach. The feeling was always there now. I had to concentrate to keep it from making me physically ill.

“Jenn, we can’t let this happen to us.”

She sighed. “It’s too late, Jaspar. It’s already happened. It’s not like we had any say, any control. We didn’t do this. It did.”

“Not all of it.” The biting words leapt from my mouth, even as every fiber of my being warned me to keep them inside.

She looked away. Eyes back on the screen. I knew what she was trying to hide. Anger. And guilt.

“I’m sorry, Jenn. I shouldn’t have said that.” I was only half convincing. “You’re right. We’ve talked about this. I just don’t want you sitting here for the next two weeks being miserable.”

I pushed myself to the edge of my chair, closer to her, wishing I could be the bigger man, wishing I could reach out and touch her. Wishing I really wanted to. Like I used to. Such a small thing, a simple move, so effortless, so pleasurable. So impossible. “You’re right,” I said, my voice sounding like a stranger’s. “It happened. We’re damaged. We had no control. But that was then. We have to change this. That’s what this trip is about. I’m trying to make a change…”

“Jaspar, it’s okay,” she assured me, eyes back up and nearly—
nearly
—on mine. “I told you that. I think what you’re doing is good. It’s the right thing for
you
to do.”

An accusation
? “For
me
to do. But not for you, right?” God, I hated feeling this way, sounding so pissy and defensive.

“What do you want from me? I told you to go. I told you it’s okay with me.”

“Tell me you’re going to be alright while I’m gone.” I needed this.

Now it was my wife’s turn to swallow a deep breath, and force truth down my throat. “I won’t be.”