Perpetual West by Mesha Maren

Author:Mesha Maren [Mesha Maren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

fourteen

The basement at Neto’s compound was reached by a series of stairs that wound down past a glass mezzanine with a tiled Jacuzzi and then on past the ground floor. The men had marched Alex with his arms cuffed behind him, and as they dropped down, he had expected darkness, but it only got brighter. The basement was huge and white. Tall windows and doorways were cut into the far end of the expanse, rectangles seemingly open to the outdoors, not yet fitted with wood or glass. The men pushed him ahead and turned him to the left and prodded him into a square room with a metal gate across the front and nothing, absolutely nothing, inside. The gate was padlocked. It was the only thing that was not white.

The men left, except for two who stood on each side of the door, only the edges of their shoulders and their holstered guns in view. Alex stood, shaking, in the center of the room and felt the bite of the handcuffs against his wrists. The smell of roses from the roof garden still clung inside his nose. The guards lit cigarettes and grew quiet.

After a long while Alex managed to lower himself to a seated position on the floor. He was afraid of falling, afraid of calling the guards’ attention to him. He bent his legs, wobbled, sank to his knees. There was a sandy film on the floor. He sat cross-legged facing the gate. The relief of sitting washed over him. Past the guards he could see out into the rest of the basement, the windows and doors he had spotted before: open cavities facing a dry red embankment. The house must have been built into a small rise so that the southern side was underground and the northern side exposed. The room seemed to be under construction; the white paint stopped three-quarters of the way down and there were bags of concrete mix near the open doorways. Open. Alex stared and still did not believe it could be true, just open, nothing but a metal gate between himself and . . . He remembered the view from the roof. Hundreds of thousands of acres of desert. Not even a single tree to hide behind, and plenty of planes for hunting.

After the relief of sitting ebbed, Alex realized he was cold and still shaking. If he focused on his breath, long and slow, he could almost stop it. Just wait, he told himself, just wait. If he could wait silently enough for long enough, Mateo would come. He would be saved. These men knew now that he was American. Someone would be looking. Elana. The room pulsed white around him. Elana must be back now. She must . . . what day? It was Thursday, was it Thursday? No, it must be well beyond Thursday. He focused on the bars of the gate and tried to parse time. It had been Tuesday and he’d been feeling less sick and

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