REKT - Chapter 26

Stainless Steel

The view out the car window is endless scrub brush, unworked fields, abandoned attempts at fencing off the frontier. I stare into it, absorbing nothing, emptying my mind. My brain has had enough, and I’ve activated my space face. Every couple of miles the driver stares into his rearview at me. We have not spoken since getting on the interstate. The last thing I asked for was silence. There’s no radio I’m interested in, no conversation I want. All I want to do is stare into an abyss of freeways and fields. Someday, there won’t even be this. Someday, the empty fields will turn into exurbs, the exurbs will turn to suburbs, the suburbs will be absorbed by Austin and San Antonio. Someday this drive will not give peace. It will become busy, full of rushed commuters hustling from a job that doesn’t care about them to a takeout meal that won’t satisfy them. The billboards will pop up, the road signs will turn to LED screens, and the videos will run. Traffic will back up, no one will be able to blur by these intrusions, so the ads and the marketing will feed their anxiety, the traffic will get worse and the urgency to get from one hollow experience to another will become overwhelming. Someday, the never-ending gong of commerce will lay claim to this corridor too.

The driver pulls into the right lane, there’s an exit half mile ahead. I turn from the window and look into the front seat.

“Need gas. Sorry, it will be quick,” he says.

“No problem.”

I pull my phone out, open my messages and look at Andy’s last one. ‘BSTR trade isn’t happening. Money in Frankfurt on Monday.’ It gives me comfort. It allows me the release to turn my brain fully off work. I haven’t been home this year. My folks are getting older now, Dad isn’t moving like he used to. I’m a shitty son for putting the bubble above them. I’m a shitty son for not coming back sooner. Having the Frankfurt problem squared away will allow me to be present in the moment in Phoenix. I’ll be there with my sister and our folks instead of being lost in the fog of the financial system. I won’t be caught in a cage of complicity.

I can see the gas station off the cloverleaf. It’s a generic station in a nothing of a town. I can’t even tell if it’s open. No one is filling up. The lights are dim behind the windows. We coast down the off ramp, roll through the stop sign and cross the median. I hear the door locks click and look into the front seat again. He has his eyes on me, at least I assume he does. I can’t make them out behind his dark sunglasses. He’s got his baseball cap pulled low, a week of scruff on his face. There’s nothing distinguishing about this man.

The energy around me changes too late. My danger radar has failed because now I sense something is wrong and it may already be too late. The car pulls past the gas pumps around the back. I throw my weight against the door, pulling hard on the handle. It doesn’t give. The window won’t go down either. Fuck this guy. I undo my seatbelt and lunge into the driver’s seat, grabbing at him. I haven’t been in a fight since high school. Half my body makes it up front. I’m trying to find something to grab at. I have no leverage at this angle, my head is facing down facing towards the floorboard. Grab his fucking nuts and pull them off.

My hand reaches out, grabs a hold of his junk and squeezes hard. He screams and slams his foot on the gas. Don’t let go, keep squeezing them with everything you have. This fucker is trying to take you. The car accelerates faster. I pull my head up. We are flying through the backlot of the gas station. The car leaves the pavement, starts bouncing up and down across a scrub field. What the fuck is a dumpster doing here? Impact. My body is being pulled away from him. It’s being thrown against the windshield. The noise is deafening. Let go of his nuts and grab onto something. Airbag burning across my face. The explosions shredding my cheeks, the bag taking off skin.

This fucker is hitting me, hitting me. Jesus Christ that fucking hurts. Ringing, burning, thud, thud, thud. The pain is tremendous.

***

It takes me a couple minutes to gain hold of my senses. At first, I fight to remain asleep. I linger just below the surface of consciousness, trying not to tear the film. There’s a part of me that knows there’s nothing good waiting when I wake up. That’s my brain trying to protect me. My body, however, cannot handle the pain anymore. I’m sore all over, my hips hurt, the ground is hard. Moving triggers spasms in my neck, my face burns as I open and close my cotton mouthed jaw. Then the memories awaken. I was attacking a man in a car. The car was racing. We crashed. I slammed off the windshield, the explosion of the airbag contorting me in ways I’m not supposed to bend. The man kept hitting me, metal on brain. God that’s the throbbing. Fuck the hurt.

I open my eyes and pull myself up off the floor. It hurts to stand, but I need to stretch my body. I have no sense of time, no sense of place. This room is not familiar. Something is deeply wrong here. I am naked, and my body is torn up.

The room is five by five and ten feet tall. It's lit bright with the searing white of LEDs turned to infinity. They deliver the raw nakedness of an operating room, magnifying everything so that the smallest speck of imperfection can be found. Only there is none because the room is sterile, uniform, and empty. The floor is made of stainless steel. The walls are made of stainless steel. The ceiling is stainless as well. I can't tell where the light is coming from because there's no gaps for fixtures. There's no gaps anywhere. The walls, floor, and ceiling are constructed from one perfect piece of continuous steel that's been folded and turned into a box with no entry or exit.

The water starts thirty seconds after I’m standing, after I’ve had a good look at my prison. The room, my stainless-steel box, begins to fill with water. It seeps from the walls, out of the ceiling. Beads form into heavy droplets that are pulled down. The walls are bleeding, but they are bleeding cold, clear, and wet. Water starts to run down the walls. It falls from the ceiling like a giant shower head. Each time a drop disappears from its perch, another replaces it. The process accelerates, forming puddles, then puddles form pools, until the floor is filled, and cold water covers my feet. Goosebumps run up my legs. I shiver and shake, and it becomes difficult to see across the room. There's water in my eyes, there's water in the air. There's water dripping down the walls until I lose sight of the slick silver steel. Everything is blurry and panicked. I'm cold and alone. This shit is seriously wrong. I need to get out of here.

Banging, banging, banging. There’s nothing but the sound of water, the sight of water. Water in my eyes, ears, mouth. The panic kicks in when the water covers my nipples. At that point, it's rising an inch per second, and I'm shivering so bad that I'm afraid I won't be able to swim. That idea takes hold of me. I am going to drown. The water is rising so fast, and I’ve forgotten how to swim. I stretch onto my tippy toes and hold my nose up above the rising pool. Then I am submerged. I thrash and I kick and eventually, I rise off the floor. I can swim. I've gotten past that problem. Only the water is still rising, and I am running out of room in my stainless-steel cell.

When I'm about a foot from the ceiling and there's nothing but a cascade of droplets plunging twelve then eleven then ten inches into the water, an imperfection finally forms in the steel. I hear it underneath me. The whirring of blades at a billion rotations per second. Suction forms at the bottom of the floor, and I feel my body caught in a twisty, tight whirlpool that rips me under. A new sensation rushes through me, absolute terror. I'm about to be chopped into bits. My hands reach out, trying to grab something, anything before I get pulled under. Only there's nothing to grab onto. The room is smooth, the steel has no imperfections. My hands slide down, my body goes under.

There's the briefest moment of relief as my feet get sucked against a grate in the floor. I won't be chopped to bits. My body will remain intact. That's erased by the realization I am going to drown to death. The suction is so strong that I cannot escape the grate. I cannot swim up to safety. It feels like an eternity as I thrash and fight and try to pull myself off the grate. My lungs pass the point of burning, every fiber of my being begs me to open my mouth. I'm fighting to hold on, fighting to escape, to find air anywhere just so I can live another moment. Then I feel my hands in the air. I'm still trapped against the grate, but the water has stopped falling. It's draining. I look up and can see the searing white light of the LEDs getting closer. I know if I can just hold on a little longer, I can make it out of this nightmare. Only the burning is getting worse, it's beyond tolerable, so I open my mouth and try to inhale. The pressure instantly tells me I'm wrong, that I’ve come up just short. Had there been only a little more fight in me, I'd have made it. Only I don't. I get ready for the rush of water into my lungs, for the coughing and spasming or whatever the fuck happens when you drown. Oh, God no.

***

Blackness. I am alive, but I am slow to think. Everything is a blur in the black. I am alive. I did not drown. It hurts to breathe. My throat is ragged and coarse like I have been puking over and over. There was water in my lungs, water in my stomach. My belly hurts. I can feel the pain in my abdomen as I breathe. I can feel the pain all over, but it’s not a sharp pain. It’s the blurred numb pain of an opiate mask. I’ve been drugged. Someone is keeping me alive. I’m not going to die here today. I’m not going to die tonight in the blackness.

***

I feel hands on me, probing, prodding. Instruments take my blood pressure and measure my heart rate. Bandages are changed. Arm hair tearing off my skin pulls me into the full light of consciousness. It is bright in the room. The sun spills in through a window opposite the bed. Two men are speaking in Spanish. My reactions are slow. I can’t bring myself to move. I’m still in a fog. One takes my arm, flips it over and disconnects a tube. A sharp sensation slides out of my vein. I remember this action from my past. It’s the removal of a saline drip.

The men walk off to the far side of the room. I can see them in a blur. One is older. He’s the doctor. The other looks like the driver, but he isn’t the driver. Maybe he is. I cannot tell in the blur. The room is made of blue painted cinder blocks. Blue pastel, but not the dull blue pastel of a school classroom. It is the bright blue pastel of the Greek islands. Those houses on Mykonos or wherever the tourists all go. Nikola was going to take me there, back before all of this.

The men shake hands. The doctor leaves. The other guy walks towards me. He’s wearing jeans, boots, a black T-shirt. He has sunglasses on, his baseball hat down low. His face is covered in scruff. He could be Hispanic. He could be a white guy with the deep tan of a man who spends his days outdoors. He could be both. He could be anyone. I’m having a hard time focusing. Concentrating makes my head pound. The light is so fucking bright in here.

“Concussion,” the man says to me. “From the car. You were hit in the head with the butt of a gun until you passed out. You’ve got a thick skull. You can take a beating. We were impressed by your tolerance for pain. We didn’t want to hurt you like that, but you brought it on yourself.”

“Ehhh.” Words hurt.

“You’ve been kidnapped. You are a big shit in this Bitcoin world. We want your bitcoins. Your partners have been notified. We’ll see what they do next.”

“Kidnapped. Who?”

“Me, obviously. I have friends too. We are not giving out our names though. I hope you understand.”

“Why?”

“Money obviously. Who are you but money? As far as I can tell, you are no one, but you have money, so this should be easy. We’ll let you go when we get the money.”

I roll over onto my back. It hurts like hell, but my side was starting to spasm. The ceiling is some sort of cheap cream stucco or adobe. I can’t tell. There’s a brown lizard in the corner above me. I try to smile at him. He scurries off.

“That steel room with the water? That was punishment for trying to get away,” the man says. I shudder at the thought of the room. He continues, “Yeah, some real scary shit that room huh? We use it for torture and interrogation, but we also use it to teach lessons. I hope you learned yours. Next time you try to escape, we’ll put you back in that room and run the process over and over again until you get too weak to fight it and drown before the room drains. Don’t try to escape. There’s nothing out here. Either you leave when they pay, or you leave for the steel room. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“The doctor will be back tomorrow. I’ll bring food later. There are pills on the sink next to the shitter. I put a couple of books on the table next to you. Drink your water and settle in. This is going to take several days. We are asking for a lot of money.”

“That fat fuck Fritz,” I moan.

“I don’t know no Fritz.”

“Andy.”

“We’re in touch with Andy. He’s working on the money, at least that’s what he tells me. If he gets cute, we’re going to shoot you and bury you out back in the nothingness of the desert.”

Out back in the nothing. His footsteps get further and further away until the door closes behind him. I struggle to lift myself high enough to take a sip of water. Reclining hurts worse than getting up. I lay flat on the bed, hot and cold, breathing fast then slow. In time the room starts to go dim and I cry myself to sleep.

***

I'm on the roof of the Four Seasons in Kowloon. I'm a hundred forty stories high in an infinity pool. I can see Hong Kong across the bay. I can see into China. I can see the Great Wall. Past that, I can see acres and acres of Mongolian warehouses. They slave away twenty-four seven mining imaginary money. They suck power out of the ground and turn it into coins. They are relentless.

And I can see a match spark. It's a tiny light, just a flicker oh so far away, but it starts a blaze. It catches the warehouses really quick. They burn up, burn out of control. Thousands of crypto mining rigs are gone in the blink of an eye. Fire consumes everything. The Great Wall burns up. China burns up. Fire rushes towards me and takes down Hong Kong. Skyscraper after skyscraper is consumed by flame until it reaches the sea. I'm right on the edge, just across the channel. Fire is coming for me too.

The base of the hotel starts to burn. Smoke is everywhere. Windows pop out and shatter on the pavement below. I'm in the pool, surrounded by water, but I'm not safe. Either I'll be boiled alive, or I'll plummet a thousand feet in a swimming pool before going splat against the ground.

Then I hear the whirring blades of a sleek black helicopter. It swoops around the roof. The Rock is leaning out its door. Dwayne Fucking Johnson has come to save me, just like in the movies. I reach up and his jacked arm pulls me out of the pool. He tosses me into the helicopter just in the nick of time. I give him a big thumbs up and we haul ass out of there. We take the helicopter out into the ocean, far away from the flames.

To safety.

Just as my heart stops racing and I think that I’m the luckiest bastard alive, he grabs me with both hands. He lifts me up and holds me out the door of the chopper. Above me the blades rotate at a billion revolutions a second. Five thousand feet below is the South China Sea.

The Rock looks me right in the eye and says, "This is for the troops you Ponzi scheming son of a bitch." Then he throws me into the shark infested ocean like the piece of shit I am.

I wake up on the bed in the cinder block room. Breathing hard, a cold sweat all over my shirt. I stink. I smell of pill sweat. I smell of oil and grease. I smell of pus and scabs and band aids. There’s a towel in the corner of the room by the sink. There’s a bar of soap in a dish on the sink. These are new or I’m coming to my senses. I get out of bed and walk across the room, to the bathroom corner. There’s no door, no walls, just a toilet and a sink in the corner. I don’t care. What’s there to see of me that wasn’t exposed in that stainless-steel room? That room haunts me in my sleep, it scares the shit out of me when I’m awake. China going up in flames and the Rock throwing me into the ocean was a welcome change of nightmare after the stainless-steel dreams.

The man comes when I am asleep. He waits for me to take my pain pills and knock myself out, then he comes and leaves food, water, and other necessities. It’s been two days since the doctor made his follow up visit. I have not seen a soul since. This morning’s breakfast is pop tarts and two oranges. I am famished. Hands tearing foil, devouring pop tarts. This is the first morning I’ve felt normalish since waking up at the hotel in Austin. This is the first time my brain has been able to focus, to string together thoughts since it bounced off the windshield and got hammered with a gun. The ringing is still in my ears, the headache still there, but I can think again. I’m hungry again. I’m not dead either. It’s been at least four days. Four fucking days, so it’s Sunday or maybe it’s Monday. Hard to say. It could be Tuesday. It’s possible that I slept through a day or lost track of time. Why am I here? For money. Everything is always about money. Who knows we have money? That’s the question. Whoever knows we have money also has to think that Andy and I are still tight, that Andy would give up his money for me. I’m not sure that’s the case.

Dread. Deep dread as close to a feeling of oblivion as I can conjure. Will Andy give up the money for me? I can’t say for sure. How shitty a feeling is that? That I’d die out here somewhere in the emptiness of the Southwest because Andy valued fake magical money more than me. Still, it’s a possibility. That I’m alive means Andy plans on paying, or he’s playing the kidnappers to buy more time. Maybe he’s gone to the police with this. Maybe they are looking for me somewhere. They can tell from my cell phone where I went missing. I was in the middle of an Uber ride when I fell off the fucking map. There’s a starting point.

It’s been over forty-eight hours. If someone goes missing and they are not back by then, the probability of return plummets. This isn’t a normal situation. We’ve got a fortune in fake money. These guys have a stainless-steel water bleeding room torture chamber. This isn’t their first kidnapping. A situation like this requires more than forty-eight hours to resolve. The man said it was a lot of money. He said I could be in here for a while. Now, who knows how much money we have?

Bull God. He’s a good guess. Last I saw him, he was in one of our brokerage accounts trying to sell off BSTR. Maybe he saw how much money was in there and got greedy. Possibly. What do we know about him besides Nikola found him on Telegram and he’s a shitcoin scammer? Very little. Could be him. Harvest Financial. They knew we had two hundred million dollars, but they are an institutional mutual fund. They see that sort of money all the time.

Deacon Joe? No. He’s about freedom, not imprisonment.

Fritz? He’s shaken us down once. He knows what we have in our bank account. He has no idea that me and Andy have fallen out. It’s possible, but we have insurance on him. No, it’s not him.

Andy. Why? Because Andy is behind everything bad happening to you lately. Because the two of you are fighting. Because you asked for the money back and threatened to expose the embezzlement to our clients. Bing, bing, bing. But he said that he called off the BSTR trade. But he’s been lying to you for weeks now. Why does it take so long to pay off a ransom on a kidnapping? Andy wants you sidelined. He’s behind this. He wants you to know what it feels like to be locked up against your will.

Impossible. Andy doesn’t have the resources to do something like this. It’s so far beyond him to pull off a kidnapping on the timetable he had. You went missing sixteen hours after giving Andy the ultimatum. This was not a simple job. You are with some heavy-duty people who do this regularly. Andy does not run in that world. Don’t let paranoia push you into the realm of irrational thought. Someone is after the two of you guys for your money. You’ve been shaken down once. Why not twice? This is karma biting you in the ass for being too stupid to quit.

I could think a lot better if they let me out of here for some air. If we really are in the middle of nowhere, maybe I can get outside and stretch my legs a bit.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

Nothing.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

Nothing.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

Nothing.

Peel an orange and start pacing the room. See if that brain of yours can come up with a better theory. Right now, the Bull God looks like the most obvious suspect.

Why aren’t you scared shitless? Why aren’t you freaking the fuck out Ryan? You should be worried that you are going to die. You should be pissing your pants with dread over this situation. Why aren’t you losing it Ryan?

Because you know who has done this. You know it’s Andy. You know he doesn’t want you dead. You know he just wanted you out of the way to do whatever stupid fucking thing he was planning on doing. Like buying BSTR. Like not giving the money back. Andy kidnapped you. Andy locked you up. Andy nearly got you killed. You are going to have nightmares for the rest of your life because of that room, that water, that steel. That shit is going to haunt you. That should piss you off. That should scare you something bad.

You’re not freaking out because he’s broken you. You’ve been removed from position on the board. You’re not in the bubble. You’re not in the game. You’re in jail. The system has a jail. It’s where the broken people go. You are in jail because you won’t give yourself up and risk real life jail. You are in limbo. You are nothing, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your kidnapper doesn’t even bother talking to you. That’s how much of a nothing you are. No one even bothers you and what have you done about it?

I pick up my bedside table. It’s a cheap fucking thing from Ikea, all particle board, plastic screws, the barest amount of metal possible. The table is much lighter than I expected. I’m holding it high over my head. My ribs, belly, and abdomen scream as they stretch with the lift. My eyes dart around the room, looking for something to throw this at. Something to create a scene with. Something to make the man come into the room and address me. I run over to the sink and slam the table onto it. The table breaks on the sink in the least satisfying way, just a dull splitting thud and a warping of the particleboard. I slam it again and again and again. The sink does not yield. It laughs at my bratty display. The table won’t splinter, the cheap wood is treated with an adhesive epoxy that keeps it from coming apart. I cannot. I cannot fucking. I cannot fucking believe how useless this is. The limp bedside table hangs from my hands, connected, but broken like a crab a seagull picked clean and dropped back into the ocean. This fucking thing. I run across the room swinging the table at the window. It smacks against the thick plexiglass. Over and over, I swing it at the window until there’s a thin layer of scratches on the plastic window. The table comes undone and falls apart at my feet. I’m breathing hard, bent over at my knees, staring down at the impotence of my outburst. The room is silent. No one is coming. No one cares. I bet there’s no one even here. They probably leave me alone all day, like I’m nothing. Like I’m fucking nothing.

***

Oh God, the headache. The fucking headache. My head is pounding so bad I am afraid to open my eyes. Just take a minute. They drugged your food. Just take a minute. Why am I not laying down? I’m in a car. I’m in a car in a parking garage. I’m in the driver’s seat in a car in a parking garage at the airport.

Which airport? Whose car?

I’m alone. I’ve been let go. Is this how it happens? Do you just wake up alone in a car at the airport with a pounding headache and no one waiting for you? Maybe that’s what happens when you’re nothing.

Maybe that’s what happens when you weren’t really kidnapped but sidelined. No one comes for you when your kidnapper is also your ransom payer. The cover over the center of the steering wheel has been jammed back into place and taped shut. This was the car taking me to the airport. Ha, we’ve arrived at last. Where’s my phone? I need to give this trip one star. God the headache. Just close your eyes and relax for a little bit. No one is coming for you, good or bad. You’ve got time. Let’s think about this and not do anything stupid.

My phone starts ringing. Where is it? Where is it? On the dashboard, right in front of you. That’s your phone. Pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Ryan, it’s Andy. Are you okay?”

“My head hurts.”

“Anything else?”

“Um, I don’t know. I just woke up.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in a car, in a garage, at an airport.”

“We’re here. We’re coming. What floor are you on? Where are you?”

“Give me a minute. I need to get out of the car.”

I exit the car. My head pounds, but the rest of me feels okay all things considered. I’m in a back corner away from the elevators, far from the traffic. There’s a painted label on the cement support pillar five spots down.

“Long term parking. Section 3C.”  

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