The Girl in the Cellar Ch. 02

CHAPTER TWO: THE GIRL IN THE CELLAR

The report of the autopsy flashes onto my laptop screen. Even though the body is suspected to be that of the man who had held me captive for ransom, the police are still keeping mum on the details of the case. Because of my position as a public defender, a lot of people in the criminal justice system owe me. I have called in a lot of favors to gain access to this document.

When the the trunk of the car in which I had been confined while being transported to who knows where was opened, I first gazed upon the figure of a man silhouetted against the bright cloudless sky. I sighed with relief, startled that Faceless, my kidnapper, had somehow survived the fusillade of bullets that had been rained upon the occupant or occupants of the vehicle in which I had been imprisoned.

But when I sat up, the silhouetted figure was wearing a blue shirt and the shield of a police officer adorned his left breast. I looked to my right. Stretched across the ground was a man lying motionless in a pool of blood. He was clad in a short sleeve white shirt and red streams were still oozing from the holes in his chest made by the police bullets.

The dead man seemed shorter and stockier than the man with whom I had fallen in love. His black hair was wavy, his arms hairy, and his skin was olive. Faceless was tall and lean, but his visage had always been hidden by a mask.

So I wondered, had I projected the image of my ideal male onto the anonymous creature that had ravished me? But Faceless had one feature I'm sure I had not imagined. My lover was circumcised.

I scan the autopsy report. Would the pathologist have bothered to comment upon such a trivial finding? After all, the body had been matched to the name and photograph on his driver's license. But the search conducted on his apartment had yielded nothing to connect him to my abduction so the police have been keeping mum on the details of my case, lest other perpetrators remain at large.

I scroll down the document. At the beginning is a narrative about the manner of the subject's demise. Following is a general description of the body and deceased's height and weight, and then finally, the findings:

Abdomen: Gunshot wound to the left upper quadrant...

Then blah, blah, blah followed by medical jargon about the condition of the internal organs including the weights of the liver, spleen, and kidneys.

I try to scroll down more. While not a fan of crime scene shows, from my limited professional experience I know that Genitourinary should be next.

But the hourglass icon flashes onto the screen. I tremble as I wait for the server to respond, dreading the "timed out" message that will flash if the municipality's clunky information system crashes before I finish carrying out my illicit search.

The hourglass disappears. The box within the scroll bar jumps down and at the top of the web page appears Genitourinary. I take my eyes off the screen. Tears stream down my face. My orange tomcat jumps onto my lap, hiding the screen, temporarily halting my quest for the truth about the man who fell in a hail of police bullets.

My cat purrs as I stroke his head. He walks across the keyboard and I lift him away, lest he press a key and send my browser to another web page. With the feline no longer blocking my view, my gaze involuntarily falls upon the screen of my laptop.

My eyes alight on the words "uncircumsised male" and from deep within my soul emanates a scream of joy.

******

The laptop is lying closed on my lap. Atop it is my cat, purring softly, mercifully preventing me from doing more snooping and causing myself more trouble. The room is dark except for the red glow of the tip of my cigarette dangling between the index and middle fingers of my right hand.

The sun has set as I sit on my sofa from which I have not moved for hours after learning that the man killed during my rescue was not my lover. Who was the man driving the car, I wonder.

But even more important to me are the whereabouts of the man I grew to love, whose face I long to nuzzle up against, the face on which I have never laid my eyes. I long to make love with him, but he has vanished without a trace.

But on the internet there is a group for anything. I typed 'kidnap victims' in a search engine. The first result shown is 'RECOVERING WHAT IS MOST PRECIOUS: YOUR OWN LIFE AFTER IT WAS STOLEN'. The words underneath go on to say that kidnap victims from across the world share their stories in the forum.

I choose the login name, 'MOURNING_FOR_CAPTOR', using all capital letters hoping Faceless misses me and will connect me to the moniker of someone who misses their life as a captive. I then fill in the demographics, revealing that I am an American who had recently been held captive.

"My captor and I made love before I was set free when he was killed." I type and then press 'SUBMIT'. The words appear in cyberspace but the end of the sentence is a lie; I know it was not the man with whom I had fallen i love who was killed. But Faceless may believe that I think he is dead. I do not know if he will be pleased by my pursuit of him.

'Girl get a life!' pops up as a reply a few minutes later. A forty year old woman from Colombia has replied, and I find in her biography that she had been held captive in an equatorial rain forest for three months before her family sold their house to pay her ransom. She had little love for her kidnappers.

I exchange a few messages with a Russian man who claims to have been kidnapped by one of the many organized crime groups that terrorizes Eurasia, losing his right pinky during his captivity. I close the chat box when he asks me my bra size.

I turn off the computer and cry, wondering if the love Faceless showed me was true, or even if there is truth at all in the Information Age. I get off the sofa and pop a bagel into the toaster and eat just half of it before polishing off half of a bottle of Merlot.

Nothing worth watching is being broadcast on any of the hundreds of channels provided to me by my cable system. I finally settle on the 'Smooth Jazz' music channel. 'The Girl from Ipanema' is playing. Though not Brazilian, as a dark skinned outcast among my WASP relatives, imagining myself as a stunning dark skinned siren turning the heads of all the men on the beach became a fantasy of mine.

I would fondle myself, imagining myself in a bronze-skinned surfer's arms, our lips locked together, grinding on his erect cock as waves crashed on the rocks of the private stretch of beach that we had made ours. Tonight I imagine the surfer has blindfolded me as we share our forbidden love, for the image I hold in my mind as I pleasure myself is that of Faceless.