Television by Mirko Neumann

Television
by Mirko Neumann

I woke up with a heavy weight on my chest and a bad piercing head ache. I noticed that my arms and legs were immobilized. When I opened my eyes, I saw the gape of an ass on my chest. Lying on top of me was whimpering woman. She couldn’t move either because all our extremities were tied to the posts of a big metal bed. I asked the women quietly, trying not to aggravate the obvious state she was in, what her name was. It was a very strange situation because both of us were naked and tied to each other in a very compromising way. She told me her name was Edna Winter. I knew Edna, she was one of our cleaning women at the office. I told her who I was, trying to reassure her but which had the opposite effect. She started cursing and crying and then she told me that we’ve been tied to each other for hours and she had been screaming trying to wake me up and finally thought me dead.

The room was lit by a sterile neon light and I was trying to scan it to find out about our whereabouts. It seemed we were in some kind of modified shipping container. I saw that beside the bed and a small table there weren’t any other furniture in the room. Next to the door was a sink, another door and above the entrance door a giant TV. I saw at least five small cameras, one in each corner pointing in various directions and one above the entrance door right below the TV. The floor was covered with a multicolored carpet. There were two windows to the side which were now blacked out.

Edna was very upset and I tried to calm her down explaining to her that it was probably only an elaborate prank. But our hands and feet were tied very tightly to the bed posts which convinced me otherwise.

I kept pulling and pulling trying to free myself and Edna but to no avail. The only way was to push one arm of mine and the leg of hers resting on it all the way up to the end of the bedpost. We tried and tried but it would have meant to dislocate her hip and my shoulder.

I finally realized if this wasn’t a prank and nobody would come to help us and that our strength would fade and finally we wouldn’t be able to even free us that way so I kept pushing up my left arm and Edna’s left leg. Edna was screaming and cursing me and finally fainted. I kept pushing and pushing and heard a big plop when I dislocated her left hip. Now I had to dislocate my arm too without losing consciousness and it took me a while to make up my mind and gather all my forces. I made one big push almost a leap with Edna’s weight bearing down on me and I freed both her left leg and my left arm but due to the intense pain I fainted. After what seemed only a short moment I regained consciousness and noticed that I hadn’t dislocated my shoulder. Finally, I was able to untie us and free us from this predicament. I rolled Edna over and laid her onto the floor, she still wasn’t conscious and my left arm hurt but otherwise seemed alright. I felt relieved because I had no idea how to reset a shoulder but still there was Edna’s hip. I noticed on the floor were two white silken bathrobes and two blankets. I put on one of the bathrobes and covered Edna with a blanket. I slowly went to the door which was unlooked. I opened it and was almost blinded by the extremely bright sunlight which seemed different from what I was used to, so much more intense. When I was finally able to make out the surroundings, shielding my eyes I saw an ocean of sand. It seemed like we were in a desert, or near a beach. I screamed to whoever would hear me but it seemed there was nobody, no sign of life, no tire tracks, nothing.

I returned and saw Edna still lying unconscious on the floor but breathing – Thank god! I shook her trying to wake her up but she wouldn’t react. I went over to the sink and washed myself a bit and drank some water. The door next to entrance door led to a bathroom. I got a wet towel from the bathroom and wiped Edna’s face. I shook her and slapped her very lightly but still didn’t get a reaction. I looked at her leg which, under the white blanket was twisted away from her body in an unnatural way. I felt desperate because I had no idea what to do.

I left the container wanting to explore more our surroundings. It seemed like they held us in two metal shipping containers fitted together, the kind they use for construction to accommodate an office for the foreman, lockers for the workers and the like. We were surrounded by dunes but it didn’t feel like we were close to the ocean: there wasn’t the typical sound of the sea with waves crashing onto the shore, no seagulls nor the typical salty smell in the air.

I went back inside looking if there was any food but I couldn’t find anything. I lay on the bed and before that I checked one more time on Edna really quick but she was still out, unresponsive. I dozed off. It was the whirring sound of a helicopter that woke me up. I ran to the door and saw a black military helicopter taking off. In front of me stood a black Styrofoam icebox which, when I opened it, contained food and bottles of water. I dragged the box inside and ate a couple of sandwiches. I checked again on Edna, wiped her face again with a wet towel, listened to her breathe for a moment and then lied down on the bed again. I drifted off again but woke to the sound of the TV. A Japanese game show was on and the audience was clapping and laughing. To my great surprise, they showed on their studio TV screen Edna and me in our room trying to free ourselves from being tied to the bed. The audience was going wild and they were interviewing a couple of them and everybody was laughing and goofing around. It actually seemed like they were taking bets but then the TV in our room was turned off. I was looking for Edna but she was gone – they must have taken her. The sun was about to set and strangely enough even though I had slept a lot, I soon got tired again and fell into a dreamless sleep.

I woke to the sound of the air condition and the blinding sunlight, after what must have been hours and hours of sleep. I went outside and felt the smoldering heat of the desert, of at least what felt like 40º Celsius or more. I rushed back into the container.

I ate and drank some more of the provisions in the ice box and eventually the TV came back on – the Japanese game show again with the same host and again another wild audience. There were five naked Japanese girls, of which one was jerking of a blindfolded Japanese man. The audience went nuts screaming and cheering. It looked like after having been jerked off and the blindfold taken off the man had to guess which girl had masturbated him by looking at and touching their hands. It seemed he got it right because all the sudden he was making a victory dance and the audience was applauding him. It looked like he had won a trip with that girl to some exotic place because they gave them what looked like plane tickets, flower leis and they showed a short TV spot of a hotel on a tropical beach with the typical beach bar with a thatched roof and a lot of beautiful people with almost no clothes on. After the TV spot, they all left and after a short introduction and the audience going bananas their studio TV came on again. A naked Japanese studio hostess led, after a short introduction, a pig into a stall which exposed its backside and then in the same manner a sheep into another stall next to the first one– the crowd was cheering, the pig squealing, the sheep bleating. Shortly after brief introduction with the audience cheering like crazy a pretty girl came on – kind of a Japanese model very beautiful, also naked but apparently famous. She went to the third stall also exposing her backside. Finally, a middle-aged blindfolded man was introduced. He didn’t speak but didn’t seem Asian at all rather Caucasian because he appeared paler and was hairier. One couldn’t make out his facial features due to the blindfold which covered most of his face. He was dressed in a white silken bathrobe with a hoody covering his head but underneath apparently, he was naked because now one of the studio hostesses came and jerked him of a bit until he had an erection. Finally, they pushed him in the direction of the stalls. He apparently was able to hear and see through the blindfold because he reacted to the cheering of the audience and the hosts and was able to orient himself in the studio. At first he was hesitating for a moment, like weighing his options but then went straight for the pig and had, which seemed like 5 long minutes of intense intercourse with the animal which was squealing but seemingly not of joy. All the while the audience was cheering him on. The camera showed individual people of the audience which were laughing, some screaming and others crying of joy or pain I couldn’t say. When the man was finished with the pig, they led him back to the host, took off his hoody and his blindfold and to my great surprise and horror I realized that that man was me – drugged, hypnotized or both because I wasn’t saying anything. The Japanese crowd in the TV-studio was going nuts. How could this have happened? I had no recollection of this happening to me. Finally, my TV was turned off and the windows blacked out again and I didn’t have much time to ponder the latest events because slowly I drifted off again.

The next day, which seemed after counting, the third day of my imprisonment, I noticed a new Styrofoam ice box in the room with fresh food and water. I thought about disabling the cameras provoking an encounter with my capturers but then I realized that I was alone in the middle of the desert and it seemed like either they put something in the food or a sedative was introduced into the room through the air-condition but it seemed I was being drugged all the time and they had complete control over my state of consciousness. That moment I realized that it would be better to wait out what would happen next. I still had no recollection of what had happened to me on that game show and it was also very frightening not to know what could happen next. I became desperate – I wanted to get away from that place and went outside running and climbing up a dune to see what was beyond those dunes. But there were, as was to be expected, only more dunes and sand and more sand… a lot of sand… hot burning sand under a hot smoldering sun. Afraid to get burned by the sun I went back inside, closed the door and waited for the sun to set, for another night and a new day, maybe a better day. I felt it was the time to take a shower but surprisingly I didn’t feel particularly dirty and I even smelt soap and cologne on my skin. I ate more sandwiches – and for a moment it seemed like there was nothing else left to do for me in this world but eat those goddamn sandwiches and wait. Soon I became tired again and I lay down on the bet and drifted off to a world which seemed not too different from mine.

Again, I woke up to the sound of the TV – the news were on. A Japanese news reporter was presenting a story about Kim Yung Un, the north Korean dictator, and then showing bombed and destroyed cities, people running around naked screaming, ambulances, it could be an American city, maybe San Francisco because I kind of recognized the Golden gate bridge fallen into the bay, then more images of more cities, in Japan, in Europe, Tokyo, London, Paris, Prague, Moscow all bombed and destroyed. The news reporter showed a global map of all the cities that had been bombed and cities on all continents seemed affected even Auckland in New Zealand. Then the news were turned off and white noise came on. This was a nuclear holocaust I thought – the end and me left to my fate without anybody to talk too, alone – me and my icebox. Will there be more iceboxes after what happened? Or am I here to starve or die of dehydration. I felt great despair and hopelessness. I was in the desert far away from anything. I didn’t know what continent I was on, in Africa, Asia, Australia or America – I had no idea which of the continents had this kind of sandy desert with dunes, probably all of them. And strangely, when the moment of panic and despair passed I felt calm again so calm even after all what had happened me having had sex with a pig in front of an audience and aired on TV, ridiculed and exposed to at least a considerable part of the Japanese population. But it didn’t matter anymore – all was gone, there was a global war on, people dying all over the world. I wondered how many more survivors there were. But then depending on help which probably would never come I wouldn’t last more than a few days.

I lied down on the bed but couldn’t fall asleep for what seemed for hours. The white noise of the TV and my thoughts kept me awake. Panic took hold of me again and my mind which now almost seemed to have a life of its own, went rambling on and on. I was clearly losing my mind, literally losing it and those thoughts kept racing from one horror scenario to the next imagining me dying and suffering in all kinds of ways. But then after a while I felt calm again and peaceful, almost reassured and protected in that container, my container – while the world outside was falling apart with people killing themselves on all continents with all those deadly powerful nuclear weapons and for what? That was the question. For what? Why? Why now? I had no answer…. Finally, when the sun was rising my mind stopped resisting and I was able to fall asleep.

I awoke with the urge to go to the bathroom. I went and relieved myself, and noticed that nobody seemed to operate the shades of the windows anymore. The white noise of the TV was still on and still very annoying. I went outside behind the container to see if there was some kind of power generator, but I could only find what seemed a huge battery, probably fed by solar panels on the roof. Next to it hanging on the wall was a large water tank. I checked on the icebox and I realized that I had food left for maybe two more days and drinking water for three days but then I already drank the water from the sink and didn’t get sick so maybe I could even last longer with the water from the tank but without any food there was no way to tell. I figured if I didn’t move much and stayed in bed I wouldn’t waste too much energy and maybe could stay alive a bit longer, I just had to discipline myself to eat very little.

And it seemed 3 more days went by and by then I didn’t feel that calm anymore and cursed myself for not having had the courage to leave that place when I still had the strength to maybe find a village, a settlement, an oasis, anything – but then my capturers already had me conditioned not to do so. At that moment, I was even more desperate but it seemed unrealistic to leave then. I ‘m not an engineer and didn’t have any survival skills to produce water and food in the middle of a desert from nothing so there was no plan or anything even resembling it but I didn’t give up hope. I ate a sandwich a day and drank about 2 liters of water per day. I thought about collecting and drinking my urine but felt this still could wait a little longer. I slept a lot and kept to the bed and this way I didn’t waste too much energy. I walked to the door a couple of times a day to stretch my limbs and get my circulation going.

The fourth day since the last icebox came it was the sound of the helicopter that woke me again and now I was hopeful that my capturers came finally to rescue me. But when I reached the door, after which seemed an eternity, already weakened by the lack of food – I really couldn’t go faster, I noticed the same military helicopter was already about to take off again. I screamed at the top of my lungs but to no avail. I couldn’t move my legs – I was too weak to run and they took off without even looking back.

When I turned around looking for an ice box I noticed that next to the door stood a black metal tray cart. There was no icebox but on the cart sat a small flat elongated elegant black box with a red ribbon tied around it. I undid the ribbon and opened the box and as I looked inside I had to swallow hard because what I found to my great surprise and horror was ….

…a remote control.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Mirko Neumann 2017