id="u05f4992a-4153-558c-8999-2e358cd2b61b">
For KAREN QUINTAL
All the many loyal and loving years are deeply appreciated.
Here’s hoping there are just as many more to come.
Thanks, pal.
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY/MONDAY, AUGUST 3–4, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1969
SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1969
SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 1969
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1969
THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 1969
FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969
SATURDAY/SUNDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 16–17, 1969
SUNDAY, AUGUST 17, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1969
SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1969
MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 1969
TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1969
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 1969
SATURDAY, AUGUST 30, 1969
SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 1969
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1969, LABOR DAY
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1969
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1969
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1969
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1969
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1969
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY/MONDAY, AUGUST 3–4, 1969
He had no idea it was midnight. In actual fact, he didn’t know whether the sun was shining or the stars were twinkling. Nor could he work out how long he’d been here, so timelessly did time pass. One moment he had been free, smiling with happiness, at the center of a world that had opened its arms wide to embrace him; the next moment he had fallen into a sleep so deep that he remembered not even the tiniest fragment of a dream.
When he woke he was here, to live a different life. Here, in a big, featureless room that contained a padded toilet and a plastic water bubbler that produced a slim fountain whenever he put his foot down on a button in the floor below it. So he could drink, and he had a tidy place in which to excrete. Here only had one color: a dirty beige, not from squalor but from the poor lighting of one dim bulb, center-ceiling behind a tough glass case wrapped in steel rods.
He was stark naked, though he wasn’t hot, and he wasn’t cold. Everything was oddly soft—the floor and the walls sighed and gently gave way wherever he touched them, akin to leather squabs on a car seat. What at first he thought were seams around the bottom of the walls turned out to be the exact opposite of seams: tucks, as if this cushioning surface were rammed down inside a crevice, together with the edges of the floor. No matter how he tried to dig with his fingertips, the fabric refused to move one single millimeter.
Soon his ravenous hunger became the be-all and the end-all of his entire existence, for though he could always drink, and as much as he wished, he had no particle of food. At times, coming in and going out of the sleeps, he vaguely remembered a taste of food, and understood that he was fed something that sat in his belly like a coal of such glorious warmth and comfort that even the most fleeting memory of it caused him to weep.
His panics belonged to differently befogged and shrouded periods, when he had screamed on and on and on, crashed against the walls, flailed his fists against those yielding surfaces, howled like an old dog, bleated and bayed and bellowed and bawled. No one ever answered. All he heard was himself. Emerging from the panic exhausted, he would drink thirstily and sleep the sleep of the dead, featureless, his last thought the hope of food.
He had nothing to do, nothing to look at—not even a mirror! Nothing to pass the time, he who had passed so much of it gazing at his own reflection, marveling at the perfection of his beauty. All he had to do to get what he wanted was to smile. But in here there was no one to smile at. Just one little chance to smile, that was all he needed! A smile would get him out—no one could ever, ever, ever resist his smile! A smile would get him food. It always came in his sleeps, the food, therefore he must go to sleep smiling.
He was weakening, it seemed the way a snail dragged itself around, with mind-numbing slowness and enormous effort, a visible labor just to hold the house of his life up off his head, for if it slipped, he was gone like a drop of slime on a white-hot stove. He didn’t want to part with his beauty yet! Or his smile!
“Why are you so cruel?” He smiled. “Who are you?”
This time his awakening brought changes: he was still hungry, and he was in pain.
No glowing coal of food lingered in his belly—it hadn’t fed him! But at least the pain said he was still alive, and it wasn’t agonizing—more an ache in the groin. One of the things he couldn’t fathom was its attention to his groin, stripped of all hair, since it had never, as far as he knew, subjected him to any kind of abuse. This wakening’s pain made him doubt, and he groped for his penis; it was there, unharmed. No, the soreness was behind it, in his ball-sack. Something was wrong! Each testicle should roll under his fingers as if it were free inside the sack, but no testicles rolled. His ball-sack was empty. Empty!
He shrieked, and a voice spoke from every square inch of the room, impossible to pinpoint.
“Poor eunuch,” it
