Gone Tomorrow

stayed where I was. You have to ration your opponents’ victories. You have to mete them out, slowly and meanly. You have to make your opponents subliminally grateful for every little bit of compliance. That way maybe you get away with giving up ten small losses a day, rather than ten big ones.
    But the two feds had had the same training I’d had. That was clear. They didn’t stand there getting all beaten and frustrated. They just walked away, and the guy who had fitted the chains called back from the door and said, “Coffee and muffins through here, any old time you want them.” Which put the onus right back on me, exactly like it was designed to. Not stylish to wait an hour and then hobble through and wolf stuff down like I was desperate. That would be getting beat in public, by my own hunger and thirst. Not stylish at all. So I waited just a token interval and then I slid off the cot and shuffled out of the cage.
    The wooden door led to a room about the same size and shape as the one the cages were in. Same construction, same color paint. No window. There was a large wooden table in the center of the floor. Three chairs on the far side, full of the three feds. One chair on my side, empty. Waiting for me. On the table, all lined up neatly, was the stuff from my pockets. My roll of cash, flattened out and trapped under a sprinkling of coins. My old passport. My ATM card. My toothbrush. The Metrocard I had bought for use on the subway. Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card, that she had given to me in the white-tiled room under Grand Central Terminal. The phony business card that Lila Hoth’s local crew had given to me on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 35th Street. The computer memory I had bought at Radio Shack, with its loud pink neoprene sleeve. Plus Leonid’s clamshell cell phone. Nine separate items, each one of them stark and lonely under the bright bulbs on the ceiling.
    To the left of the table was another door. Same gothic shape, same wooden construction, same new paint. I guessed it led onward to another room, the third of three in an L-shaped chain. Or the first of three, depending on your point of view. Depending on whether you were a captive or a captor. To the right of the table was a low chest of drawers that looked like it belonged in a bedroom. On it were a pile of napkins and a tube of nested foam cups and a steel vacuum bottle and a paper plate with two blueberry muffins. I shuffled over in my socks and poured a cup of coffee from the bottle. The operation was easier than it might have been, because the chest was low. My chained hands didn’t hamper me much. I carried the cup low and two-handed to the table. Sat down in the vacant chair. Dipped my head and sipped from the cup. The action made me look like I was yielding, like it was designed to. Or bowing, or deferring. The coffee was pretty bad too, and only lukewarm.
    The fed leader cupped his hand and held it behind my stack of money, as if he was considering picking it up. Then he shook his head, as if money was too prosaic a subject for him. Too mundane. He moved his hand onward and stopped it behind my passport.
    He asked, “Why is it expired?”
    I said, “Because no one can make time stand still.”
    “I meant, why haven’t you renewed it?”
    “No imminent need. Like you don’t carry a condom in your wallet.”
    The guy paused a beat and asked, “When was the last time you left the country?”
    I said, “I would have sat down and talked to you, you know. You didn’t need to shoot me with a dart like I was something escaped from the zoo.”
    “You had been warned many times. And you had been markedly uncooperative.”
    “You could have put my eye out.”
    “But I didn’t. No harm, no foul.”
    “I still haven’t seen ID. I don’t even know your name.”
    The guy said nothing.
    I said, “No ID, no names, no Miranda, no charges, no lawyer. Brave new world, right?”
    “You got it.”
    “Well, good luck with that,” I said. I glanced at my passport, as if I had suddenly remembered something. I raised my hands as far as they would go and leaned forward. I shuffled my coffee cup well out of my way, which left it in the space between my passport and my ATM card. I picked up my passport and squinted down at it and leafed through the pages at the back. I shrugged, like my memory had been playing tricks on me. I went to put the passport back. But I was inexact with its placement. A little hampered by the chains. The stiff