Page 13 of Trapped: Until The Darkest Of Night

I can’t do this. I just can’t do it. Too many colors, too much noise, too many people.

I take a deep breath through my nose, reach for the cell phone on the passenger seat, and look at an old screenshot of Lou. She winks at me and I immediately feel the warmth flow back into me.

Come on, Bren, she seems to be saying. It’s really easy.

Is it, sun girl?

She is beaming. Of course!

Of course! A smile flashes through my mind as I start the engine. Everything’s kind of easy for you, isn’t it?

I drive on with sweaty hands and only calm down again when I come to a familiar area.

I’m home, I think mockingly.

I park the RV in a secure parking lot on the Los Angeles River and walk the stretch toward Compton. The rows of flat-roofed houses are only a few miles from Hollywood Boulevard. Even from here, I can still make out the skyscrapers downtown: a gleaming silhouette of black and silver. Huge, yet tiny compared to the gigantic mountain peaks of the Yukon.

I walk along the concrete Los Angeles River where artists have left their colorful graffiti and come to the abandoned railroad tracks. That’s where, at the age of twelve, I passed the initiation for one of the most notorious gangs: two minutes of gang beating and a round of waterboarding. After that I was one of the Bones, one of many youths in the ghetto who had fallen through the social cracks. Except I wasn’t African American, Latino, or Chicano. Luckily, that didn’t matter to the Bones. The gang slogan became my personal religion: Fight or die. After fleeing my stepfather, I wanted one thing above all: never to feel weak again. Life in the slums is hard. If you can’t fight, you will eventually become a victim again—of the state, of rival gangs, or of starvation.

I jump the rails and pull the hood of my sweater down over my face. Nobody should immediately recognize me. A lot of time has passed. I have no idea which gang is in charge here at the moment, who has beef with whom, and whose territory borders whose. Also, Jordan Price’s brothers may still be searching for me. A week after the fight, they put a bounty on my head for whoever would bring me to them alive. In our circles, nobody owes anyone anything. And I haven’t paid up yet.

Warily, I look around, but it’s quiet. Only two African Americans with black scarves walk by me. Black Bloods. Both no more than twelve, still too young to be dangerous to me.

After a few blocks, I come to the border between Compton and Lynwood. Strange feelings of alienation, self-loathing, and old fears well up inside me, familiar companions with a common cause. I had vowed never to come back here, but when Ramon asked me where I wanted to meet him, I told him Thorson Ave. without thinking. The street where I was trapped until I was twelve and where I saw little more than the dusty stretch in front of the front door.

I slow down the last few feet, the hot Santa Ana wind on my face. This stretch of Thorson Ave. is unpaved and my feet whirl a mixture of ocher sand and dirt through the air. I remember kicking up the pebbles when I escaped.

Why did I choose this particular place, this street, as a meeting place?

I look around with a strange feeling in my stomach. The shabby residential area looks deserted as if the residents had left years ago. For a long time, this might have even been the case for the last house on the left. According to Ramon, my stepfather disappeared a year after my escape.

My heart starts beating faster. The house seems different than I remember. The bulky lattice fence surrounding the property is gone, leaving only a low brick wall and a waist-high gate. I stop directly in front of it and let my eyes wander carefully over the building.

The crumbling gray stucco has given way to a white façade and two royal palms have replaced the overgrown undergrowth in the front yard. Curtains with turquoise squiggles hang in the windows to the left of the door and a blue curtain with fire engines billows in the wind in the one on the right. A teddy bear mobile dangles directly from the glass.

A strange sight—the house looks like a foreign body in this area.

Had I truly been trapped behind those walls for so long? Chained to the concrete walls of the closet, not seen by anyone else on earth? Why didn’t the neighbors notice what was happening behind those walls over the years? Didn’t they care? Did they even know I existed?

I circle the property. The yard is still surrounded by the same bushes, but through a bare spot, I discover the rotten staircase that leads from the outside area to the basement. The tiny elderberry bush on the corner has grown as tall as a tree and next to it the privet blooms, in front of which Blacky lies buried.

A shivering chill runs through my arms despite the warm temperature. The smell of fresh wood and varnish fills my nose. And I smell him. His sour sweat, the cheap aftershave, and the whiskey.

No. I shake my head vigorously. My name is Brendan, I’m not a child who can’t defend himself anymore. I’m twenty-two. The little boy from back then doesn’t exist anymore.

The smell fades, sinking to the spot in my mind that doesn’t age. This place holds too many memories. Too many—and yet too few. Back then, it had seemed to me as if time stretched out endlessly. After my escape, I suddenly had the feeling that I had hardly lived. During my imprisonment, there were too many identical days, always the same feelings. Too much fear. too much loneliness. Infinite loneliness. And even boredom. I toiled in his workshop until I dropped, and naturally, I didn’t have any friends. My playmates were the school books he gave me, that’s all I owned. Two gray pants, two gray shirts, always alternating every three weeks—much too cold in the winter. The silver coin I had hidden in a crack in the floorboards was the only thing that belonged to me. I remember the hours I did skill exercises with it, finger exercises, heads-or-tails games. I stared at the bird and the treetops on it for several months until I could have drawn it by heart. But I had neither paper nor pens in the windowless room, I only got them for my assignments.

“Bren?”

The voice pulls me out of my thoughts. I turn and spot Ramon less than ten feet away.

“Shit, it really is you!” he exclaims and takes a step back. “I can’t believe…” He stops and narrows his eyes at me.

“Ramon.” I don’t know what people say when they meet again for the first time in years. I can’t even tell if I missed him. I just stand there for a moment and stare at him. He still wears his short, dark dreadlocks, which protrude from his head like a halo, looking like a cross between a punk rocker and Jesus Christ. Somehow, the sight of him calms me, I can’t say why. I force myself to nod to him. “Nice to see you again.” I guess that works.

“Such a polite Slumdog Prince. Brendan, he who knows the Latin name for every bone he breaks…” Ramon grins, but then becomes serious again. “Dammit, Bren…” His fingers tremble as he strokes his spiked dreadlocks. “What are you doing here? If you came for the cash…”

“You don’t owe me anything,” I say quickly. But I owe you so much. Only now do I realize how thin he’s gotten. His crystal-blue eyes are bloodshot and it’s not only his fingers that are shaking. But I won’t ask him what happened to him like he never asked what happened to me. A rule of decency in a life devoid of morals.

---