The Corridor

by Tabaré Alvarez

conclusion

But then something caught his eye as he rounded a turn. His mind seemed to refuse the information at first and strained to offer alternate explanations, but it soon became unequivocal: the park was on fire again.

A fresh plume of white smoke was rising above the corridor. The firefighters had left; no first responders remained, no ambulances or police cars, just a few red-and-white barriers, like sawhorses, and that yellow tape he had assumed was only for murders.

He told Mrs. Medina, and she called the fire department. Dutch tried to follow the source of the smoke: it was clearly not in the park proper, but he couldn’t yet pinpoint the exact location inside the corridor. There was no vehicular access to the middle of the corridor, of course, so he had to decide: the southern entrance, here by the park, or the farther one, the north one, by the river.

He pulled over and checked that he had his cell phone on him. He told Mrs. Medina to drive to the river; he would stay on this end. “Keep your cell phone on you,” he said, and he took off at a dead run toward the mouth of the corridor.

The sky grew dark. The park lights came on. There was a man sleeping on a park bench; Dutch stopped, and after some difficulty, managed to rouse him. “There’s another fire, my man,” Dutch told him. The man asked him for money, and Dutch said no. The man ambled off, not really hurrying.

Dutch’s cell phone rang.

“You’re already there?” he said, genuinely surprised. The impulse to warn her against reckless driving rose automatically in his throat, but he checked it.

“There’s a... person here with a mask on,” Mrs. Medina said. Dutch could hear the river, but no crackling of burning wood. “Someone made a few cuts in the chain-link fence,” she said, “and the person with the mask — he, she, I don’t know yet — has his arm in all the way to the forearm. He won’t talk. It looks like it hurts a lot. The tips of the clipped wire are cutting into his forearm. There’s some blood. I’m... I’m not sure he’s not keeping it there voluntarily. I think he could take out his arm if he wanted to, it doesn’t appear to be stuck. Dutch?”

“What kind of mask is he wearing?” he said, finally.

“It’s black,” she said, “with a sort of zipper across the mouth. Were you serious that time when you said you knew about these things?”

He had once told her that most of his television viewing consisted of documentaries and porn. Looking back, he couldn’t believe he had said that, but at the time it had seemed an organic step in the sequence of the conversation.

He explained to her what he knew of BDSM, and she just listened, occasionally acknowledging with a small sound, to let him know she was still on the line. For his part, he had started running again, toward the corridor: if the fire wasn’t on that end — which was a relief, and part of the reason he had sent her there — it had to be closer to this one.

“I understand,” she said. Then, with a change in her voice, she said: “Stop running.” He asked her what she meant, but he stopped all the same. “Don’t let yourself be seen,” she said.

He stepped out from beneath a lamppost, away from the light. He had been about to ask By whom?, but of course she was right: if the guy with sharp wire digging into the flesh of his arm was the Submissive, there had to be a Dominant.

She whispered to him, presumably so the sub wouldn’t hear: “This one won’t talk. But he has a two-way radio. Find out if the person on your end is a man or a woman.”

He didn’t understand, but he complied: he ran as fast as he could, weaving around the pools of light cast by the lampposts. At the mouth of the corridor, he ran through the police tape, breaking it, and almost stepped into a hole in the ground. There was less light here, and for a moment he had forgotten about the transplanted trees.

Ahead, he saw no fire, no Dominant, so he surged forward, as fast as he could carefully do so, and soon he had passed all the holes, and the difficulty came from avoiding the tree trunks in the darkness. But soon he noticed, faint at first, an orange glow ahead, and he was there.

There was a woman, and she had a walkie-talkie on her belt, and two tanks with her, the sort with which you fumigate or spray crops. They were both on the ground rather than on her back, and from one of them, with a hand pump, she was spraying what looked like gasoline onto a tree that was on fire. I thought pyros were men was the thought that sprang into Dutch’s mind.

But everything was wet, the grass, the dirt, the trees, and the fire would occasionally sputter as though about to die out. She was wearing regular clothes: khaki pants and a white blouse and a little green visor on her head; she could have been an accountant or a croupier. Maybe he should just charge at her now. The other tank could have water in it, and he might have time to put out the fire completely. He took a step back and called Mrs. Medina.

The tree came to life: a living fire that rose from the base of its trunk and swept up the branches and leaves, momentarily replacing them completely in silhouette, so that the substance of the tree was not so much being eaten as being replaced with this pure orange energy that moved with the hunger and elegance of a predator.

The fire jumped to a neighboring tree, and the whole thing happened again. The wind was blowing south to north, from the Gulf and in Mrs. Medina’s direction.

The woman set down her hand pump as though satisfied.

Mrs. Medina kept the line open. He could hear her telling the sub: “She has new instructions for you.” That was all Mrs. Medina had wanted: the gender of that first pronoun, the better to sell the story. No one said anything, and then maybe she just walked away, a bluff, because then Dutch heard a new voice, the masked man’s voice, call out: “Wait!”

Mrs. Medina came back on. “Dutch, it’s a man.” She told Dutch to step back out of earshot. He retreated as far back as the place where the holes began, wondering the whole while why he wasn’t hearing sirens yet.

One thing the woman had done better this second time was start the fire further north, with the wind blowing away from the apartment buildings around the park. But Mrs. Medina had already made the call back in the truck; Dutch didn’t understand what was taking so long.

“Have you inhaled any smoke?” Mrs. Medina’s voice was asking him.

“No,” Dutch said. “The wind is blowing toward you.”

“Yeah, I can see the fire coming this way.” She had said it in an almost flat tone, not nervous but merely disappointed. “Touch the fence.”

Baffled now, he went over to the fence and gingerly touched it.

“Is it hot?” she said.

“No,” he said. He almost asked: You wanted it to be hot?

She said, almost absently, as though the words were merely an incidental product of her thinking: “Is there a warmish rock you could touch or something?”

“A warmish rock?” he said; this time a little indignation had come up, and he had let it through.

He could see her, her old self again, bashful now, biting the side of her finger. But she said nothing, and when next she spoke it was in the new voice.

“Get yourself in some pain,” she said. “I need you to mimic this guy’s voice. It has to be convincing.”

“How?” he said. The word had just come out; he hadn’t known he would say it.

She took him through a quick progression of stomping on his own toes, biting the inside of his cheek, twisting his ear. In her search, she was also protecting him, he knew, finding the most pain for the least amount of irreversible damage. “Ah, I know,” she said, “give yourself a muscle cramp.”

She proceeded to explain how he was to clamp two fingers into his calf and, in one swift motion, dig in and pull back. “Don’t do it yet,” she said. “You have to concentrate on what you’re going to say.”

He asked her what that was.

Mercy. Safeword. Red. “Say them all,” she said.

According to her, he would speak into his phone, and Mrs. Medina would place her phone face-to-face with the sub’s walkie-talkie — which she proudly explained that she had appropriated — so that, when the woman heard the words coming out of her radio, she would assume — if the deception worked; if the fire was making enough noise to camouflage the differences in voice — that it was the sub speaking.

Still, no sign of the firefighters or of the police. Dutch allowed himself a shake of the head, a few moments of blinking.

“Is the fire close to you?” he asked Mrs. Medina.

“Never mind that,” she said. “She’s not omniscient.” What was their working assumption? That the Dominant, the park employee, if that’s what she was, would let the fire reach the guy with his arm in the chain-link fence until — from the pain, from the heat, from the smoke, from fear for his life — he cried uncle? She couldn’t stop the fire even if she wanted to — though easing off on the gasoline would certainly be a step in the right direction.

He retreated further back, past the holes and into the park, so he could scream freely.

“Get ready,” Mrs. Medina said. He sat down on a bench, rolled up the hem of his jeans, and tested the calf muscle with thumb and middle finger. The tentative pressure felt warm, almost pleasant, as cramps always were: extremely painful, but also pleasurable in a certain way, comforting, so localized, so concentrated, they almost made you want to laugh with pain. “Do it,” she said, and he did.

* * *

No one ever came. At least, no one he saw. Later he found out the Mayor had ordered the fire trucks to approach in silence, stationing themselves at both ends, with instructions to intervene only if the fire spread over the river into the woods or past the holes and into the park.

As for the corridor, the order had been — and Dutch confirmed this later from several sources — to let it burn. And it did: Mrs. Medina convinced the masked man that the play — the encounter, the session, the scene — was over, and she put him in the truck and drove back around to the park, and the fire traveled up the corridor all the way to the river where, for lack of anything to burn, it died out.

Dutch had inched up to the woman, who had set down the hand pump and stood there as though entranced by the fire, and he had taken off with a tank in each hand, and he had run until a fire fighter had materialized in front of him and taken possession of the fuel.

Whether the woman, whose name was Patricia Morris, had been moved to act more out of a genuine concern for the habitat of the park’s small fauna or out of fear of losing her job if the park’s wildlife died out or out a real positive pleasure she derived from the endeavor, Dutch never found out: the Mayor settled the matter privately and only deigned to tell Dutch that she seemed to conflate all of it in her head. As for the man, Mrs. Medina said that he was an air traffic controller and that he had asked her out.

“What did you say?” Dutch asked her. She had driven back, and the two of them, Dutch and Mrs. Medina, were walking down the park — he with a slight limp. They already knew the firefighters were there, though the fire continued to rage undisturbed behind them.

“What do you think?” she said, in a way that implied the answer would be obvious to him. But he had no idea, and there was no elegant way of following through on the question.

The Mayor called. After fumbling with the buttons for a few seconds, Mrs. Medina put him on speaker, and he dodged all her questions. He had called, he said, to tell them his new idea.

“Of course you did, sir,” Dutch said.

“Shut up, Dutch,” he said, rather affectionately. The name on Dutch’s birth certificate was Holland, and he was grateful to the Mayor for the nickname, which he had given to him 15 years ago. The Mayor was too tactful — or too concerned with deniability — to mention it now, but Dutch knew he’d be getting a nice cash bonus for this day’s work; Mrs. Medina would get something in kind, like a set of good knives, and she, too, would be happy with that.

“There’s going to be a party there tomorrow night for Halloween,” the Mayor said. “At the park. I’ve already called the president of Sans Souci College and he’s organizing buses for the whole student body. It’s going to be a fundraiser for the corridor.”

He kept going for a while. Dutch and Mrs. Medina listened to him as they walked. Once the Mayor said goodnight and hung up, Dutch stopped. They were by a bench, the same one where Dutch had woken up the homeless man.

“The Mayor should send someone tomorrow night to make sure no one else starts any fires,” Dutch said.

Mrs. Medina laughed. “The Mayor should.”

Dutch thought for a second. “If someone asked you for a completely random sentence, what would you say?”

Mrs. Medina quickly looked up at him. During their walk, she had picked up a thin bit of branch from the ground, with leaves on either side. In the most casual, most sensible tone in the world, she said: “I used to ride horses.” And with the switch in her hand, she gave the bench a good swat. Here, tomorrow night, I’ll be the one with the riding crop in her hand — and, perhaps, I will pretend not to know you. “How about you?” she said.

He thought for a bit. “My neighbor has a Ghost Rider jacket. Black leather, bit of chain, perhaps, across the chest.” With his hand, he touched the same spot on the bench she had swatted: Yes, ma’am.

They got to the truck. “I’m driving,” she said.

He gave a slight bow of the head. “Please.”

to Challenge 382...