The Never List

alleviated the soul-crushing boredom of my day-to-day existence. By then I didn’t have much of an emotional range beyond that.
    Tracy finally scraped her way back over to her mattress, sprawled out on it, and turned her face to the wall. At first I didn’t think she was going to say anything, that she wasn’t even aware of my presence just a few feet away.
    Christine was asleep again.
    “Stop looking at me,” Tracy finally said, in a stronger voice than I would have anticipated given how weak she was.
    I looked away. Finally, she rolled over. I sat, leaning against the wall, on my own mattress, steadfastly staring in the opposite direction. Despite my fear of her, though, after a few minutes I couldn’t keep my eyes from darting over to see what she was doing. I was too curious.
    She noticed, of course, and snarled at me viciously like a rabid dog. Instinctively I shrank away, my chain rattling loudly.
    Christine stirred, opened one eye for a second, and went back to sleep.
    I was always awed by Christine’s capacity for sleep. In a way it was the most perfect example of the power of human adaptability. She was able to shut out this experience in a way the rest of us couldn’t, and in the end, maybe that saved her. Maybe that was the key to it all. Sleep.
    But I could manage it for only ten hours at a stretch, max, no matter how hard I tried. And that was on a good day. Perversely, my regimen of near-total physical inertia resulted in bouts of insomnia. I had to make up the rest of the hours either by losing myself in my imagination or by trying to lure one of the others into conversation. Either way was painful.
    But there were times when talking definitely helped. When we all got along, in a manner of speaking. When even Christine pulled herself away from her dark private place and we talked almost like normal people. Times when I supposed the others were every bit as bored as I was, as tired of fighting against their own interior torments, and we were able to put our own issues aside to keep our minds functioning, if only at a bare minimum.
    We told each other stories, about our past, both real and embellished, anything to keep time moving forward, though toward what, none of us knew.
    That was the kicker. We were waiting. Always waiting. As though we wanted something new to happen. Often wishing it would, because the boredom made you even crazier. But when something new did happen, it usually hurt, and then we ended up taking all our wishes back.
    That day, though, Tracy clearly didn’t want to talk. She was pale and sweaty, despite the cold of the cellar. She closed her eyes again. She usually didn’t sleep so much. Something was wrong.
    I waited until her breathing became even and regular, and then, convinced she was truly out, I pulled myself over to her. It must have taken me a full fifteen minutes to make it there without my chains giving me away. I carried as much of the metal strand as I could, carefully placing a few links onto the cold cement a little ahead of me each time, so they wouldn’t make a telltale scraping sound when they dragged. When I finally made it to where she lay sleeping, I looked her over, scanning her flesh for some sign of life.
    And then I saw them.
    There on her arm, faint but distinct, were track marks. Seven small spots in a perfectly even line on her pale skin. I could see where the needle had gone in, and I could even identify today’s fresh mark by its slightly reddened outer rim.
    He was giving her heroin. Not out of pity. Not as an escape. No, he was punishing her. Making her an addict so he could gain even more control over her.
    He would not have chosen this particular form of torture randomly. There was always a method to his madness. Somehow he must have discovered what that drug meant to her, the significance it held in her life. He must have known that almost nothing would be more painful to her than the pleasure and release offered by that particular poison.
    But how? Tracy was so steadfastly resolved to keep him away from her memories and out of her mind. He must have pushed her very hard. Had she had a moment of weakness and told him about her mother, about that night at the club?
    After I saw the marks, I returned to my spot as fast as I could manage without making noise and waited for her to wake up.
    It was several hours before she rose and made her way slowly to the bathroom again. I heard her vomit some more, and then watched her haltingly drag