INTRODUCTION
Unknown place
December 14, 2011
Miren Triggs
Alone in the depths of silence,
we can hear each other
with perfect clarity.
I wake up to the sound of my own breathing, and when I open my eyes, I instantly know that I have made a serious mistake. I’m out of breath. My soul hurts. My heart thunders loudly inside me and I can hear it so clearly that I almost understand what it is saying between each beat.
Boom, boom.
“Ask for help, Miren.
Boom, boom.
“It all ends here, friend.”
I don’t know how many hours I’ve been on this site. The ground is cold and wet. In the complete darkness, I use my fingertips to sit up and feel its roughness. My head hurts.
-Hello! —I scream loudly, but only the echo answers me—. Aid! Anyone there?
I’m dizzy. My head is going to explode. Sporadic memories of the last few days assail me and I travel through them trying to reconstruct the story, but I am unable. I’m missing the last piece. The one that is placed in the last crack in the walls of my memory and makes everything make sense.
«Remember, Look, remember. How did you get here?
I see Jim’s eyes at home. A cassette tape. He was helping Inspector Miller…find Daniel. That is. I was looking for Daniel. His son. Lost for… how many years? They found a bicycle. And there were cassette tapes. Yes. With the last tape everything was precipitated. Or was it that eye that watched me? I called on the phone and…, that’s it. The call. The icy breath…, the unanswered question. What happen after?
“Think, look, think.”
Something tells me that I have to hurry, that I have to get out of here. I feel my pulse quicken and I have the sensation of hearing my own thoughts too loudly. And behind them, in the background, between each word, I hear a voice whispering to me: «You won’t forget me, Miren. Do you hear that? That constant howling in the background as soon as the noise dies down? It’s you. “They are your screams that night in that park.” I long for calm in this strident world, but absolute silence scares me, because I am terrified of facing my inner voice, the one that is the guardian of the stories that I have chosen to forget.
“Quickly, Miren,” I whisper to myself. She thinks. What have you done? What brought you here?
I see Jim next to me in the car. He leaves disappointed. I remember my reflection on the screen in the Manhattan Press newsroom and he comes to mind that night in 1997. I recognize the same dizziness. The same feeling of having lost control. A handful of pills in a hand in front of me. What have I done to myself? The flash of a fire appears in my mind, illuminating my eyes. I was close. But… what was burning? Why do I feel like I’ve lost everything? Where I am?
I reach out in the dark and they collide with something cold and harsh. A wall. I approach it and run my fingers through it, looking for a way out of it. A switch. Something. I walk afraid of tripping. The blackness is so thick that I can’t even notice the movement of my hands. I come to some kind of cold metal plate and notice a protuberance coming out of it.
A shooter. It’s a door. The exit.
I grab it decisively, push and then pull in the stupid hope that I can get it open. But it’s of no use. I struggle in all directions, I use force with my body, I start hitting the metal with my shoulder, but I can’t even get the door to dance within the frame. My hands are burning, panic attacks me. I feel the seams of my soul tearing in places I thought were healthy, but in reality it was always in tatters. I want to ask for help, but suddenly I realize that I don’t know what’s on the other side. Maybe I can’t make noise. “Have I lost my sanity?”
“Remember, Miren,” I say to myself in a low voice. Think if you are in danger.
I don’t know how to answer, I can’t connect one suspicion with another, organize the story, review the path taken. I feel my pockets and feel the adrenaline rush through my body when I notice the rectangular shape of the cell phone.
-Good. Run, Miren,” I whisper with a terrified heart. She calls the police before anyone comes. He asks for help. He finds a way out.
I turn it on and discover on the wallpaper the image of my parents next to me in a photo we took in Bryant Park when they visited me in New York two months ago. I have a hard time unlocking it and I only see the clock, which shows half past nine at night. My hands are shaking, I’m cold. The humidity sticks in my throat, I notice the taste of earth on my lips. I dial 911, but immediately the message appears that the connection could not be established. I read “No Service” on the screen, and in the top corner, a single battery line.
—Shit, shit, shit.
I try again, it doesn’t help. I hold out my phone in front of me, and the screen illuminates the room in which I am in with bluish light for the first time. There is a white metal door full of rust on the frame. Steam comes out of my mouth. The cement walls are peeling and unpainted. I turn around to look at the rest of the room and scream in surprise when I see a dark, motionless silhouette in the center, a few meters away.
-Who are you?! —I raise my voice—. What do you want of me?! —She screamed at him, terrified.
But he doesn’t respond. She doesn’t even move.
From the complexion I know it’s a man, I have no doubt, and something tells me that only one of us will get out of here alive. He seems strong, despite the calm he conveys.
—Please let me go. I know nothing. I do not remember anything.
Some more images crowd my mind while my heart does not stop sending me warnings that the end is near. My body trembles, I have no weapon with which to defend myself. My story began with a search and could not end any other way than by becoming the lost object of someone out there. All stories end at some point, and destiny is always ironic and sometimes plays to turn your death into a joke of what you did in life. I have seen it so many times with other people, with people who disappear from the world without a trace, that it is not difficult for me to imagine how my mother will hang posters with my face on it, I know that Jim will speak on my behalf surrounded by candles at a vigil and that the Manhattan Press will cover in a brief column on an inside page that Miren Triggs, an investigative journalist from its own newsroom, disappeared on December 14, 2011. She will describe the clothes I was wearing—jeans and a black blouse—and, hopefully, as someone who had spent a few years at the newspaper, she will show my face, and people will notice my sad eyes and sense my inert soul. . Some readers will remember at that time what she was writing or the story of Kiera Templeton. Surely those who read the book will comment on something on Twitter and then move on to something else. In a few days only my ephemeral footprints will remain on the edge of the world: the dark stories I pursued, the photographs I took, the articles I wrote. And after several weeks, the waves will begin to erase everything, to eliminate my life, my history, those of every injustice that I persecuted… And the entire world will learn between the lines the lesson that evil wants us not to forget: “Don’t ask questions, don’t raise your voice, don’t try to find out how rotten humanity is, stay silent.
The dim light of the screen does not illuminate in detail who it is, but I sense that it could with me without effort.
“Let me go,” I repeat, certain that he won’t.
And then I realize that the shadow barely reacts to my words, doesn’t even move to shake its head or sympathize with me. He is sitting in a chair, with his hands behind him, looking down at his thighs.
-Fuck…
I swallow and, suddenly, I see a clear detail in my memory that makes everything start to add up. I get a little closer, afraid to discover that detail on his body, and, just when I see that it is Jim and that he is gagged with a tape that covers his mouth, my mind explodes full of images, traveling to the beginning of everything. , and only then do I remember.
