Bridge of Sighs

then, seeing that in reality I had no choice, that nothing I said or did would change what was about to happen, that my eyes began to leak. Yes, I told them. Yes, I’d join.
    “Look,” one of the boys said, pointing. “He’s so happy he’s crying.”
    All that remained, they said, was the initiation. Did I know what an initiation was? When I said I didn’t, they pulled up the lid of the trunk.
    Inside, it was dark except for a thin crease of light at a seam, and the air reeked of urine. “Hey, look who’s here,” I heard a voice say after the trunk’s lid was fastened. Had somebody new just arrived? Was I about to be rescued?
    “I just thought of something, Lucy.” Jerzy’s voice was confidential, mere inches away. “You
can’t
join our club. Take a guess why.”
    I tried to stop blubbering but couldn’t, because now that the possibility of membership had been withdrawn, I knew I should’ve agreed to join right at the start.
    “Tell him.”
    Came the chorus, “
No girls allowed,
” followed by much laughter.
    Then Jerzy’s voice again. “Guess what happens next.”
    That was when the sawing began.

    W HEN I AWOKE, it was pitch black and the silence outside the trunk so profound that for a moment I wondered if I was home in bed, having dreamed my imprisonment. But my room was never this dark, the tree branches outside my window always reflecting the ghostly glow of the streetlamp in front of the building. Still, it was only when I tried to stretch out my legs that I knew I hadn’t dreamed the trunk.
    How long had I lain there in the dark? Probably not so very long, though upon awakening I remember feeling for the first time the dreamlike peace with which, over a lifetime, I would become so familiar. Exhausted from my earlier screaming and pleading, as well as from the panic of seeing sawdust filtering down through that thin crease of light, I’d waited in abject despair for the saw to finally come through the trunk’s lid and rip my flesh. But then a strange thing happened. Realizing that my struggles were fruitless, I’d surrendered and simply gone to sleep. I remember thinking of this as an actual solution, that if I could somehow will myself into unconsciousness, then perhaps what was happening would cease by virtue of my not, in a sense, being there to witness it. While I didn’t recall putting that plan into effect, I must have, because here I was, awake again, my ordeal apparently over.
    Gradually I became aware of two things: time had passed, and I was alone. The sliver of light was now gone, from which I deduced that night had fallen and, from the complete silence outside the trunk, that my captors had vanished. Instead of being terrified anew, I felt an exhausted, inexplicable, yet very real sense of well-being. Through some act of will, it seemed I’d made my tormentors, their laughter, the ripping of the saw, all of it, disappear. But if true, this begged an important question. If I’d banished the boys by falling asleep, would I now bring them back into existence by awaking? Would the whole process start over again? Somehow I thought not, and just lay there quietly, sleepily content for each moment to pass without additional terror. True, I was curious how much time had elapsed and whether my mother and father were out searching for me. These considerations seemed remote, though. I was locked in a dark trunk, and it was possible, even likely, that I’d never be released, which should have terrified me but didn’t. Rather, it seemed I’d simply entered a new, quite natural phase of my life inside the trunk, breathing the heady mixture of stale air and urine, some of which I understood to be my own, where I would await further developments. About these I felt more curiosity than fear, as if I’d already expended my entire store of the latter emotion.
    I may even have drifted back to sleep, because when my eyes opened again, I heard singing, first far off, then nearer, and I remember not wanting the singers—for there seemed to be two voices, a man’s and a woman’s—to find me. Then, when their voices suddenly got louder, I realized they must have entered the covered structure.
    The woman was laughing now, and there was a slapping sound. “Stop, stop, stop!” she urged her companion. “You don’t know the fucking words.”
    “I know the words,” the man said, then started up again.
    Another slap. “Stop! You don’t know—”
    “Here’s one thing I
do
know,”