Right to Life

She felt permanently stunned to find herself here. The feeling colored all reality. As though suddenly she were not even who and what she thought herself to be anymore. The Sara Foster she knew had come unstuck, uprooted from everything that grounded her. The Sara Foster who taught English and drama to LD kids at the Winthrop School on 74th Street, who was daughter to Charles and Evelyn Schap of Harrison, New York, lover to Greg Glover and pregnant with his child, who was once the mother of a wonderful beautiful boy drowned in a lake, who was ex-wife to Samuel Bell Foster and best friends with Annie Graham since childhood – all these people who had cradled her identity in embraces loving and not so loving for as long as she could remember meant nothing here. Were now almost irrelevant. What mattered was not the known world but the unknown world beyond the box.

These people.

They mattered.

What the dark held mattered. The meaning of the box.

And when she heard the footsteps on the wooden stairs they mattered. So that her heart began to race and the air seemed to thicken so she couldn't seem to get her breath, worse as she heard them on the landing and then move toward her, shoeleather scraping concrete and she began to twist and turn inside the box in a frenzy to get out of there to whatever freedom or whatever fate those footsteps might imply, clawing at the box, slapping at the box, her voice a shrill high-pitched squeal in her ears and while still she gulped for breath. And when she heard the man's laughter at the sounds of her fear and struggle and heard his fingers rattle the lock outside the headboard, rattling it again and again, playing with her, her body betrayed her utterly and she saw a sudden burst of red and fainted away.

***

He lifted her out and placed her on the bare stained mattress. Studied her a moment.

She didn't move. She wasn't faking.

He lifted her head and set it carefully into the headbox.

Then he clamped it shut.

The headbox was half-inch plywood about the size of a hatbox, split in two and hinged at the top, with semicircular neck-holes carved into its base on either side and a padlock to secure the halves together. It was insulated and carpeted inside. It muffled all sound, shut out nearly all light.

He'd tried it on himself.

It was scary.

The red plush carpeting pressed close to your face, sending your breath right back at you no matter how shallow your breathing. It was hot and claustrophobic. About ten pounds of weight sitting on your shoulders. And once it was on there was no way in hell you could get it off again. It was sturdy. You could bang it against a concrete wall all day long and do nothing but buy yourself a concussion.

He'd done a good job on this one.

The first two tries were failures. The problem was mostly weight, too much or too little. He'd built the first out of quarter-inch ply and when Kath tried it on she pointed out to him that if you pressed your face into the carpeting and held it that way, making space between your head and the back of the box so you didn't bash your brains in, one good slam against a wall could crack the plywood.

She proved this by demonstrating.

Back to the drawing board.

He built the second box of three-quarter-inch ply and it was tough as nails. But the damn thing also weighed about twenty pounds. You fell with that on, it could snap your neck.

The new box halved the weight. Ten pounds was still a lot and he'd have to watch for that but he felt satisfied it was manageable.

Kath had worn it all day long once just to see. She hadn't wanted to but he explained to her that a trial run was a necessity. He knew she hated the thing from the minute he put it on her. Knew it scared her, made her dizzy and sick to her stomach and later she said it pinched her neck all the time she was in there but that was just too damn bad in the long view, somebody had to try it and it wasn't going to be him. Besides the point was could a woman wear it all day long, not a man. Could a woman stand it.

When he let her out at dinnertime her collarbone and shoulders were chafed red and sore and she complained about a stiff neck for nearly a week. Nothing that wasn't going to go away. The point was that yes, it was manageable.

He smiled. If Miss Sara Foster here thought the Long Box was scary – and she obviously did – wait till she woke up again and found herself in this one. He'd have put her in the thing in the first place but he was afraid she might vomit from the pentothol. And vomit was easier to clean off the base panel of a pinewood box than to get out of carpeting.

He'd have to keep an eye on that too. On the vomiting. Kath had said the headbox was stifling and made her queasy in and of itself, never mind the pentothol.