Chapter 36 #2
I thought for a minute. “Stopped and looked.”
“Exactly.”
Progress. Damn… there was that feeling again. I didn't like someone controlling my emotions like that.
I reached a wider corridor where the ceiling showed a bright blue sky from end to end. The path opened so far, I could stretch both arms without touching either side. Ahead, I saw the light again. It was brighter now. Had to be the exit. My heartbeat picked up.
For a second, I imagined walking out of here and seeing approval on the doctor’s face.
Maybe he would write a report. Maybe somebody important would read it and see I was not what they thought.
Maybe my aunt Marguerite would hear I was doing better.
Maybe my mama would stop crying and looking disappointed every time we were alone.
Maybe Theory—
I killed that thought immediately. Theory was ungrateful.
That was just the truth. I had loved her too hard, wanted too much.
And maybe I had held too tight. But she made me that way.
She was all softness and cute attitude, all bright eyes and thick curves and smart little comments.
She knew what she was doing. She knew how a woman like her could make a man like me crazy.
We were okay, til she started thinking she was better than me. Til she thought—
“Chauncey.”
I blinked. The ceiling above me was cloudy. The path narrowed while I stood there thinking.
“Damn,” I muttered, stepping back quickly.
“Where did you go?”
“What?”
“You left the exercise. Mentally.”
I swallowed my irritation. “I was thinking.”
“About?”
I hesitated. The doctor waited. Sometimes, I hated when he did that.
“Nothing important,” I said finally.
“Most things we call unimportant are things we don't want to talk about.”
I kissed my teeth. “You know, sometimes you sound like a fortune cookie?”
A low laugh came over the intercom. “Sometimes.”
I smiled reluctantly. The path widened again as blue returned overhead. I walked on.
A few minutes passed. At least, I thought that's what it was. Time felt strange inside the maze. There were no windows, no clock. Just walls, sky tiles, and the doctor’s voice.
Then he said, “May I tell you something personal?”
I frowned up at the ceiling where the speakers were buried. “Personal like therapy-personal or weird-personal?”
“Like help-you-understand-the-maze personal.”
I ain't know about that. “That sound like both.”
“You can say no.”
I turned right after checking the ceiling. Blue. Good.
“Nah, go ahead.”
He paused, then his voice came back quieter.
“I fell in love with a woman who scared me.”
I laughed. “You? Scared of a woman?”
“Yes.”
That answer was too honest to make fun of. I kept walking.
“She’s not scary like you might think,” he continued. “She’s beautiful, yeah, but a lot of women are beautiful. She’s intelligent as hell, but I've known some smart women.”
The path stayed wide with blue sky overhead. I focused on listening.
“The first time I saw her, she made me feel like if I wanted something badly enough, I could have it, could make it real. That's dangerous.”
I snorted. “Yep. That’s how they get you.”
“Maybe.”
“You still love her?”
“Yeah.”
He didn't hesitate. Something about that made me uncomfortable. The doctor had always seemed controlled, almost cold. Hearing him say he loved somebody til it was crazy made him sound like just anybody else.
“When I met her, I finally understood what it was like to want something more than you wanted your next breath.”
The ceiling stayed blue. I kept walking and listening.
“She’s a traditional girl, comes from a place where family means something. And she has a big one.”
A cloud drifted across the tile above me. I slowed.
Louisiana and Mississippi had families like that.
Hell, every family I knew had cousins everywhere, grandmothers in everybody’s business, grandfathers who were the kind of men these young hoes whined about.
Big families weren't always good. If Virginia wasn't worried about family, maybe she'd quit tryna hide me in places like this.
“She writes stories,” the doctor said.
I stumbled. The ceiling above the next turn turned cloudy. I stopped before taking it.
“What kind of stories?”
“All kinds. But she mostly writes about love. People finding their way to themselves and to each other.”
My mouth went dry. The path in front of me narrowed slightly even though I had not moved. I looked up. More clouds. I swallowed, but my mouth still felt dry.
“Why you telling me this?” I demanded.
“Because I told you the exercise was designed for people like you.”
“That don’t answer shit.”
“It does.”
The doctor’s voice remained calm. Too calm.
I backed up and took another turn. The corridor widened, but not as much as before. The ceiling overhead brightened only halfway, the blue fighting against gray.
“One of the things that I love about her is her eyes. She has honey-colored eyes.”
I stopped. No. I was being stupid. Lots of women had brown eyes. Lots of women wrote. Lots of women came from big families. My mind was reaching because I was trapped in a weird room listening to this man talk in riddles.
I started walking faster. The panels shifted. One rose in front of me. I cursed and turned. Another panel lowered from the ceiling, blocking the way. The path narrowed.
“Slow down,” the doctor advised.
“Stop talking.”
“No.”
I glared toward where I thought the nearest camera would be. There had to be cameras. Places like this always had cameras.
“She survived a man who told her loving her means that he owned her.”
My heart thudded. The walls moved. A panel slid closer to my right shoulder. I moved left. Another panel moved there too.
“Man, I'm done. Open this shit up.”
“What do you notice?”
“I notice you fucking with me.”
“What else?”
I looked up. Clouds everywhere now. No blue. The path behind me had narrowed too.
“Chauncey.”
The sound of my name in his mouth sounded different.
Somehow, I knew that voice, but not how I thought I knew it.
But no, I didn’t. Couldn’t. I had been meeting with this doctor for six weeks.
He had sat across from me. Talked to me.
Helped me. He wore glasses sometimes. Kept the lights low.
Had that trimmed beard, that calm mouth, a voice that—
My stomach dropped.
No.
No.
“She needed to heal. She learned to do that without me,” he was saying. “That was the part that hurt, I think. Coming back and realizing she had done what was almost impossible. She had survived him. Then, she survived losing me. And she was doing good, looking good.”
The maze shifted faster. Panels rose and lowered around me with heavy sounds. I turned once, twice, trying to find the light. It was gone.
The exit was gone.
“Who the fuck are you?” I asked, hating the nerves I heard in my own voice.
The speakers hummed. No answer. I started moving faster, ignoring the ceiling now, pushing down a narrowing corridor. My shoulder scraped metal. I hissed and shoved at the panel.
It didn’t move.
“She was on a date when I came back. Really trying to move on.”
The voice was back, almost amused.
“With a man who had no idea how close he came to dying for touching her.”
I started thinking. About the first time Kemp’s loud ass told me Theory had some Russian-connected nigga.
About the way those niggas started trapping me, toying with me.
About Aunt Marguerite talking about Sidorovs and getting leverage and demanding blood.
About Virginia crying about “Chauncey, please, let it go.” I thought about how I laughed at first. A woman like Theory wasn't gone forever.
She valued love, family, relationships. She wanted a good man who would put her in a big house and help her fill it with kids.
She would remember how we used to be, what we planned to build.
She would come around. She always did before.
“She became my wife,” the doctor said.
My breath left. The walls moved again. Closer. I stumbled backward and hit metal.
“She’s becoming what she was always meant to be.”
“Targen,” I whispered.
The intercom stayed silent.
My own breathing sounded loud in the tight space. Then the doctor laughed softly. Not the doctor.
Him.
“About time,” he taunted.
The rage came first. It beat the fear for maybe half a second.
“You bitch ass nigga!” I roared, slamming both fists into the panel beside me. Pain shot through my hands. “Open the door! Open it!”
The ceiling overhead darkened as the tiles moved. It was all storm clouds now. There was no blue, just gray and more gray. The path narrowed again, slow enough for me to understand he was doing it on purpose.
Targen’s voice came through the speakers, stripped of all that professional softness.
“You spent six weeks telling me about the woman you thought belonged to you.”
I punched the wall again.
“And every story ended the same way. Somebody disrespected you. Somebody made you angry. Somebody made you do it.”
“Fuck you!”
“You never asked why your hands were always on somebody.”
My chest heaved in and out as I spun around, searching for escape.
“You don’t know shit about me,” I ranted.
“I know everything about you I need to know.”
“You don’t!”
“I know you tried to take her. You tried to take the best thing that ever happened to me before she could even happen to me. You know how fucked up that is?”
The words were so cold that I had no response. The panels moved closer. My elbows bent to keep from being pinned.
“Let me out,” I snapped.
“No.”
There was no anger in his voice. Just that calm that I now found fucking annoying.
“Ay. Ay, listen. Man to man,” I began, trying to hide the nervousness in my tone. “You got her. You won. Whatever you think I did, it’s over.”
“No.”
“I can disappear.”
“You already tried.”
“I can leave the country.”
“You tried that, too.”
My stomach turned as I remembered Zurich and Rome.
I thought about the villa where I had slept better than I had in months before I woke up in a warehouse with no windows and a big ass Russian humming some old song while he cleaned a knife.
All those times I thought I had almost gotten free.
After all those times, I had still believed I would.
“Your brother crazy as fuck and you just like him!” I accused.
He laughed. “Yeah.”
The agreement pissed me off. But more than that, it terrified me.
“But this… this was all mine,” Targen said,
The panels stopped moving. For one second, hope bloomed inside me. Then the floor beneath my feet vibrated. The section ahead opened, not wide, but I might be able to squeeze through sideways. Beyond that, I saw light, a way out. Relief almost left me boneless.
Then, I moved. I pushed into the narrow opening, scraping my chest, my back, my arms. Metal pressed against me from both sides. I sucked in, cursed, and pushed harder. That light was waiting ahead. Close… so close.
Targen’s voice returned, calm again.
“Now, what did we learn today about impulsivity?”
The walls moved inward another inch. I cried out, completely stuck. Panic spread through me, desperate and terrifying.
“Stop it! Stop! Stop!” I screamed.
“Observe patiently,” he said.
“I can’t move!”
“What do you notice?”
“I notice I’m stuck, nigga!”
“Why?”
“Because you trapped me!”
“Nah.”
The light ahead dimmed. The ceiling above the narrow opening showed storm clouds so dark they looked almost black.
“You saw something you wanted and stopped thinking. You forced your way into a space that was not meant for you.”
I was breathing fast, too fast.
“You did that with Theory, too.”
I thrashed around, but the metal held.
“You did that, but see, she wasn't some problem to solve or some thing to conquer. You couldn't beat her into the shape you wanted; you shouldn't have tried.”
“Shut up!”
“She was a woman.”
“Shut up!” I yelled, suddenly hoarse.
“My woman.”
I screamed at that because she couldn't be his. She was mine. Everyone knew she was.
I fought harder then, my skin tearing where the metal bit into me.
I cursed him and her and all of them. Virginia.
Kemp. The Sidorovs and Russians in general.
The doctors. Everybody. Everybody had done this to me!
Everybody had pushed and pushed and pushed until this was where I ended up.
The light went out. Darkness engulfed me. The intercom clicked.
When Targen spoke again, his voice sounded eerily close. Was he in here? Had he come to free me?
“Please,” I begged, beyond anger and pride and a lot of shit that suddenly didn't matter. “I’ll give you anything. J-just please let me go. I promise I’ll leave and never come back. Just p-please… let me leave in peace.”
There was silence. Then… “Peace? Do you know how hard she had to fight for every minute of peace she's had since you tried to fucking butcher her?
Do you know that she can't have true peace as long as your weak ass walks this Earth?
Talking about peace. You better hope there's peace in hell,” he spat.
“Targen—”
“You asked me once in session what accountability would cost you,” he interrupted, suddenly calm again.
The way he could do that made my skin crawl. I squeezed my eyes shut.
“I finally got an answer for you.”
The panels around me began to move again. Slowly. Intentionally.
But they weren't moving away. I whimpered as they steadily pressed closer, the metal none forgiving, the sudden pain none ending, my breath non-existent.
“Accountability for what you did to her…” He stopped, thinking, as I felt my bones begin to submit to the incredible pressure. “Nah, my baby is better than that. You know what accountability for what you tried to do to her is gon’ cost you?”
Targen’s voice lowered, but still I heard him.
“Everything.”