The Never List by Koethi Zan

was allowed upstairs was almost magical. I had been held captive for one year and eighteen days when I was finally selected for that honor. I had begun to think I would die in that cellar without ever seeing any more sunlight than the sliver that sneaked in through the boarded-up window. I almost didn’t care why I was being led up those cellar stairs in chains, as I counted off the steps in my head.
    I remember my surprise when I had my first look at the living areas of the house. I had imagined, for whatever reason, a rundown 1970s aesthetic. In fact, while the furniture was not new, it was classically nice, some heavy antiques from the Empire period, lots of dark woods and high cathedral-beamed ceilings. Solidly upper middle class. Well designed. Tasteful.
    The space had an ethereal glow to me, as a light wind delicatelyblew through the open windows. It was damp out. A soft rain had just finished falling, and the leaves dripped slightly. I had been through periods without food and evenings filled with electrical shocks. I had been tied up in various unseemly positions for hours, until my muscles ached and burned. But I could almost forget all that for the delicious pleasure of feeling the air on my skin again. I looked at Jack Derber with gratitude. That’s what it does to you.
    He didn’t speak to me for a long time but merely pulled me along through a hallway with several doors. Barely turning my head, for fear of seeming resistant, I peered into the kitchen at the back of the house, an immaculately clean room, cheery even, with a flowered dish towel draped over the edge of the sink.
    That caught my eye for some reason. This dainty little hand towel that he must have used carefully and, I knew, meticulously to dry the dishes … he … this same person who had made me suffer so much, who had ripped my life out of its socket and put me in this hell also dried his dishes and put them away every night. It seemed to me he lived in accordance with an orderly and regular routine, and our punishment was just a part of it. For him, just an ordinary part of his ordinary day, and then at the end of a weekend, he’d drive back to that bustling college campus and go about his business, as if nothing had happened.
    That first time, he led me into the library. The room seemed enormous, with high ceilings and walls lined with expensive-looking oak bookcases, the shelves brimming with volumes. Each one was covered in an off-white binding, so I couldn’t tell much from their spines. They were labeled in some way, and even though, over the next several months filled with trips upstairs, I stared at them to take my mind off the pain he was inflicting in that room, I could not decipher their titles. The words were in English, but I seemed to have lost the capacity to comprehend even that.
    In the middle of the room, there was a large rack I would laterfind out was a reproduction of an actual medieval torture device. It was set up to look like a novelty item, a decorative piece, a joke. But it was no joke. When we were upstairs, we would go on the rack.
    On a good day, he simply did what he wanted with your body. And you could bite your lip or scream or do what you needed to bear the pain and humiliation.
    On a bad day, he talked.
    There was something about his voice, something about the way he modulated his tones for you, that made you almost believe for the first instant that he was filled with empathy and warmth for your plight. That he really hated to have to do all of these distasteful things to us, but he really had no choice. He had to keep on, for the sake of science, for his studies. Or sometimes it was for our sake, so we could understand something beyond the physical world.
    Maybe I wasn’t smart enough at the time, or hadn’t read enough to understand what he was talking about, but now I know some of the references he made, in his long, rambling speeches: Nietzsche, Bataille, Foucault. He talked a lot about freedom, a word