Hostage Negotiation
frances mckittrick
The day the hostages got to speak to the outside was the very first day that I slept with the businessman on the third floor. My mother told me I wasn’t allowed to cry until the hostages were let go, so I drew steaming hot baths and tried to see how long I could last with my head under water. It was the middle of July when the hostages were first taken and my mother kept Fox News on full blast for 24/7 coverage of the crisis. I was sixteen and bored. I ate a lot of sunflower seeds and read a lot of Ellen Gilchrist and masturbated — though never when I could hear the TV. It felt sort of sick to do that with all those people stuck in that building and probably not able to masturbate at all. My mother tells me I think about things no one should ever have to think about. We sat with Tiger and Mina on our couch while their mom got drunk and feisty and whenever I asked a reasonable question regarding Stockholm Syndrome or basic human instinct my mother would look at me and say, Tina, I’ll not ask you again to please keep your thought process hidden from our guests.
When my mother went out with her newest boy-toy, Franky, and it was just me, Tiger, and Mina, we would eat cereal instead of tofu and they would let me ask whatever questions happened to pop into my mind. Even when their mom sobered up the next day and they went home and my mother went to work and I was meant to be working on my summer school work, I found myself in the habit of watching every bit of live coverage I could. I watched while brushing my teeth and eating cereal from the box and having dinner and pretending to work in my SAT practice book and making iced tea and picking the skin on my arm. Soon, I was growing pretty tired of watching people long for their families, since I’d never really felt that kind of longing for my own. I was growing tired in general—of tedious algebra equations, of waking up and lying with the pillow on my face until I got hungry enough to leave my room, of feeling like my brain was different from everyone else’s. That’s probably why the whole thing with Gordy Ha even started.
Gordy Ha lived in the apartment directly below mine, so I only ever saw him in the elevator, on his way to work. He spoke four languages, and he especially liked to speak to people in their native tongue so they saw him as someone they could trust. He told me this while flipping through the photo album from his latest trip to Tanzania. He asked for his mail in Chinese, said thank you to the doorman in Spanish, and greeted my mother and me in Greek, which meant that half of the time I had no idea what he was saying. He wore lots of clean suits, he carried a briefcase like a real businessman, and on his 27th birthday his mother sent him flowers which he kept in a little holder outside of his front door, like a floral mezuzah. That was all I knew about him before we started sleeping together.
The first time was at noon on a Saturday while my mother was at work and we could hear the TV in the kitchen; Fox News was playing messages from the hostages. Gordy Ha said that I seemed stiff, was I sure I still wanted to do this, and I said yeah, I did, but would he please turn the TV off so I didn’t have to hear the woman talking to her son back in Kentucky. He did, but I swore I could still hear, I’m Okay, I’m Okay, I’m Okay, every time the headboard hit the back wall and made a thumping noise.
In the bath that night, I made it 3 minutes under water. When I got out Tiger and Mina were on the couch and Tiger had a bruise on his cheek that my mother was holding an ice pack to. He smirked. I grimaced. Mina said, there’s something different about you. I said, no there’s not. My mother said, there’s never anything different. I sat on the arm of the couch and we turned up the volume.
Back when I was little, my mother and I used to be really close, but when my dad moved to Maine with Gary, she started thinking that I wished I’d gone with them. My asthma would probably be a lot better, but I’d never want to live on a lobster farm. I don’t even really like lobster. But my mother couldn’t get over there being the possibility of me leaving, so I guess she tried to distance herself so it hurt less. I’m sure if Dad had left with a woman it would have been worse, but either way my mother doesn’t think she’s all that pretty anymore.
After the hostages were allowed to speak out on TV, the public view split two ways. Gordy Ha, after seeing that they were alive and well, relaxed a bit and was able to go back to focusing on his own life. Other people, however, like my mother and Tiger, got more stirred up. They craved more and more from them.
I wish they’d let them speak again, my mother said.
I told her she was developing an unhealthy fascination with real people in trouble. I told her, it’s not the Kardashians, you know.
She said that she didn’t even really get to watch the news all that often, that she spent all day at work while I sat on the couch and got to watch them as much as I pleased.
If Tiger and Mina were home, I would have worried that they’d give me away. I hadn’t been keeping up with the hostages at all, since I made Gordy Ha turn off the news whenever I went over there.
He was starting to develop into a real character around me. The only two books I could find in his house were The Catcher in the Rye and My Struggle, by that Norwegian guy whose name I forgot as soon as I read it. He liked to watch old “America’s Most Wanted” reruns, and he worked out every morning before work. I don’t know what he actually did for work, but it was something that included a real business man-like briefcase and lots of free time to sleep in and sleep around.
I wondered if I seemed different to my mother. One of the hostages was a young woman who was only a few years older than me. I wondered if my mother liked to pretend that was her daughter, instead.
In the mornings, I woke up groggy and mean and so did my mother. She would pour herself coffee, open the SAT workbook, look at it and say, hmm. If only I knew someone who could tell me what the … um… what the quadratic equation for the given line would be. Then she’d look at me. Too bad I don’t, she’d say, and go to work.
One morning I sat on the couch with Tiger and Mina—who had started staying overnight, wearing hand-me-downs from my closets and sitting silently in the bathtub while I poured in epsom salts—and said, I really wish I had a different mom.
They looked at me with baggy under-eyes and the look you give someone that you know is really stupid, but in a way they can’t help. Then I went downstairs to see if Gordy Ha was home. He was, and he was reading a collection of short stories about immigrants. I just want to really be able to relate to them, he told me.
Empathize, I told him.
He didn’t understand.
I said, you can’t really relate to an immigrant unless you are one. But you can empathize with one.
He still didn’t understand.
If I like SVU, he said, and an immigrant likes SVU, then we can relate to one another.
I said, you can relate to liking SVU. But you can’t relate to them having immigrated.
He said I was close-minded and in a bad mood. I told him he was right, and then we went to the bedroom.
Some days I stayed in bed so long that once I came out my mother would already be gone. I’d turn the TV volume on loud and listen to the hostages’ families talk about how much they missed and loved the person that was gone and it made me wonder who would miss me if I was gone, too. My mother probably would, just in that mother way. But I don’t know that she would miss me, like me as a personality around the house. Tiger and Mina barely talked to me anyway. Gordy Ha would write an op-ed, or maybe he’d go to work the same way he did every morning.
When I got home from Gordy Ha’s apartment, I sat between Tiger and Mina on the couch. Tiger handed me his bowl of cereal. On the TV, the announcer went on, but I had tuned him out. Tiger took the cereal bowl back, and the three of us chewed slowly and watched the faces on the TV who longed for home.