Day after day, week after week, I heard it again and again.
I can’t even begin to tell you how demoralizing it was. It wore on me like a constant drip of emotional acid. And I became convinced that he would do it. I became convinced that even if he was captured, he had friends who would kill my family. He seemed to have a lot of people who would help him. How else could you explain his seeming ability to produce food and drugs and alcohol out of nothing? How else to explain his ability to go down into the city without fear of being captured? He had to have others who were helping him.
The more I thought about it—and I thought about it every moment of every day—the more I began to feel that my primary responsibility was to my family. I could not endanger them. I had to keep them safe.
*
It wasn’t long before Mitchell started going down into the city three or four times a week. Every time he went down, he’d bring back alcohol. And never just beer. No way he was going to haul a couple of six-packs around. It was rum and scotch and whiskey. It was gin and vodka, too. Every time that he brought back alcohol, he forced me to drink it with him. Then he started rolling cigarettes and forcing me to smoke them. A couple times he forced me to smoke some of his dope, but watching me fail to inhale it properly, he decided to keep it for himself.
After a while, I began to realize that Mitchell had an inordinate interest in the “descending below all things” phase of becoming a great prophet.
*
I knew the fourth of July was coming. When every day is like a century, it has a way of making you acutely aware of the passage of time.
I had been begging Mitchell to let me go up to the top of the mountain to watch the fireworks. I was desperate for any kind of diversion from being cabled to the tree. More, I thought I might have a chance to escape. Maybe we’d meet someone on the top of the mountain who had hiked up to watch the fireworks as well. I knew it was unlikely, but I was desperate for any reason to have hope.
The day before the Fourth, Mitchell had gone down to the city to get supplies. Along with his usual assortment of alcohol and crackers, he also brought back a chicken for a special Fourth of July treat. It sat all day hanging in a plastic bag from a tree, and I imagined it being full of germs, but still my mouth watered at the thought of a hot meal. Real food. Warm. Seasoned. I could hardly wait. On the afternoon of the Fourth, we cleared an area in the brush right below the latrine and started a cooking fire, the first fire we had had since I’d been taken. Barzee brought out a blackened Dutch oven and placed it in the middle of the coals. I watched her pull the chicken apart and hand me the meat. I rolled the meat in flour and spices, then dropped the pieces into the oven. The oil popped and spat as the chicken began to cook. I watched it hungrily as it turned a golden brown.
The chicken couldn’t cook fast enough for me. For one thing, I was hungry. For another, Mitchell was on one of his rants, going on and on about all the great food he and Barzee used to eat when she had a full kitchen to tend to. I had a hard time imagining her in a flowery apron, working over a stove. This was the woman who watched me get raped every day, hardly my idea of a happy homemaker. Soon, the lecture turned to another of his favorite subjects; the books of the Seven Diamonds Plus One. He went on about how fruit was the most perfect food on Earth. It was supposed to be the main thing that we ate every day, but the greedy processed-food producers and medical industry didn’t want us to be well, so they kept pushing their nasty products and medicines down our throats. He told me that at one time, he and Barzee had eaten nothing but fruit for an entire year. They would go to the Dumpsters behind the local grocery stores and dig out the old fruit that had been thrown away. While they were on the fruit diet, neither of them ever suffered a single ailment. They had more energy. They never got sick.
I wanted to ask him why, if eating fruit was all it took to be in such miraculously great shape, they had abandoned the plan, but I didn’t want to prolong the conversation. All I wanted to do was eat!
Later on, after more begging that we be able to go to the top of the mountain to watch the fireworks, Mitchell suddenly unlocked the cable, allowing me to walk free. He didn’t announce anything; he just walked over to the padlock, pulled out the key from around his neck, and set me free. I still had the other cable around my ankle, but at least I wasn’t tethered anymore. “Don’t try to run!” he commanded after he had unlocked me. “I will kill you if you run. I will come and kill your family. You understand me?”
I nodded compliantly. I understood.