They Haven't Taken My Phone Yet (extended)

They wore dark pine green overall uniforms with a sort of pale blue plastic device fused onto the lapels. It seemed to make some reference to global something or other. One of them was built like Zorro’s Sgt. Garcia and the other one looked like Lewis’ Marshwiggle, but the same spirit seemed to animate them both. Pure bullocky hatred and a sort of snively officiousness.

Yes, I fought them. They made no allowance for gender either. I fought them as dirty as I could, like a woman fights for her life. But it’s hard to tear out eyeballs and kick crotches when some ape has your elbows pinned behind you. I’m a big girl, but not that big.

When they finally subdued me, I was missing a couple of teeth, some hair, had a broken left hand, various scratches and bruises and my right eye would be turning black soon. Would Jessie recognize me? I was not sure. He had never seen me after a fight for my freedom, and neither had I.



I had been driving home from shopping when the pulsing blue light atop an official looking vehicle alerted me. I wasn’t sure who they were, but I pulled over anyhow. I couldn’t have run from them in any case. I was driving an old Honda, and you know, they’ll find you somehow anyhow.

I had not been speeding. I broke no traffic laws. I got into no road rage altercations with anyone. I ran over no dogs or cats. My car was not smoking, and all my lights and signals worked correctly.

This happened just before twilight on a two-lane highway ten miles out of our neighborhood. There were no streetlights nor any houses or people nearby to hear me screaming as I fought them. There were only the two rows of darkening fir trees mixed with some alders and undergrowth. There was no witness to this arrest.



I was cuffed and a sort of belt put around my ankles and then they tossed me into the backseat of their SUV type vehicle. Neither Garcia nor Wiggles spoke to me. I was pleased to see some bloody scratches here and there on their faces and hands. Neither one of them was good looking at all, but I had not improved either of them. I know I sound somewhat jocular, but I was more frightened than I had ever been before, because I didn’t know who they were or why they had grabbed me like they did. I was the kind of frightened that feels cold and remote. My insides were upset too. I was also very worried about what Jessie would think about me not coming home. He was a sort of decisive man, and I really had no idea what he would do about it.

We had no children. So, I didn’t have that worry.

OK, the truth of the matter is that like so many, I was a talker. I talked online. I talked about everything. No subject was off the list. I told the truth as I saw it. I talked in person. I interviewed anybody who would put up with me. I left little handwritten signs on benches and in bus stops and on the outside of stores. Like that. I buttonholed people in the coffee shop and asked them what they thought. Maybe I had buttonholed the wrong character! I was known to preach some. I appealed to God Almighty in my dissertations and pleadings. Maybe that had something to do with it?

Maybe I was a dangerous character. Me. One 37-year-old white American female. In a sad way it was encouraging. But also, very scary.

They drove into town, and through town, heading further south. They headed to a section of rather anonymous looking industrial buildings. This did not look like regular cop infrastructure. I imagined a photo of the scene. My solemn, bruised white face peering out of the backseat window of the car as night came down and we came to a stop by one of the buildings.

Did I mention that I still had my phone in my jacket pocket? Well, I did have it. I fingered it with my unbroken right hand. It was still there and had not fallen out in the scuffle and they had not searched me and taken it either. I wondered if that was an oversight, just incompetence or if it had been for some reason. This phone was nothing special. I just bought it at the Apple store like anyone else.

Oh! My name is Beth Norris. Now you know.

There was a garage door in one of the gray buildings. Garcia, who was driving, pulled a remote out of the console and pointed it at the door which began to roll up. He squinted at me in a nasty sort of way in the rear-view mirror and grunted. Wiggles giggled a hollow dry inhuman sound, and into the building we rolled. It was dark in there, but there was a lit doorway at the far end of the room.

Wiggles opened my door and pulled my feet to where he could get at them and removed the belt. I didn’t think it was a good time to start kicking so I didn’t.

“Get out Beth,” he said. Now there was a data point. They knew who I was.

“Walk to the door.” I did. My arms were still behind me in the cuffs, so I wasn’t very dangerous right then.

We entered an industrial looking hall. There was a huge old metal desk there with a woman sitting behind it fooling with her phone who looked like that Flo chick who sells Progressive insurance on tv.

She looked at Garcia and said, “put her in 6.” She barely looked up long enough to register that I was there at all. I was not interesting to her! Garcia removed my cuffs. I was of course, sore and stiff. But I didn’t take a swing at him just then.

No. 6 was a plain gray room with a bench in it. The floor was concrete. There was window in the door which faced an outside door which also had a window in it. I could see that it was well and truly dark outside.

My mind went to Jessie and what he must be doing. Pacing the front room, I thought, and wondering what to do. We only had the one car. He couldn’t go looking for me far and wide.

It bothered me that I still had my phone. I couldn’t figure that out. The first thing law enforcement does at an incarceration is impound your pocket litter and your phone. I sat on the bench in the fluorescent light and thought about it. Maybe it was a trap of some sort. Maybe they thought I was dumb enough to start calling people. Maybe they thought I would lead them to all my friends and family?

Of course, as far as I knew these jokers were not law enforcement. I didn’t know what they were, besides kidnappers.



It was cold in this room. I was trying to understand who these people were and what they wanted with me. Also, I hurt all over. My mouth was really sore where the teeth had been broken off. I was starting to feel all the bruises and learned about some new ones that I had not noticed before.

I was thirsty and hungry and needed to pee. I was very angry.

I took my phone out of the pocket of my jacket and laid it on the bench down at the end and just looked at it. It looked inert and harmless. Its screen was as dark as a sort of rectangular pool of black water.

As I looked, I saw something happening on the side of the phone where your thumb would normally go. A sharp little protrusion about half an inch long came out of a tiny hole that I had never paid any attention to before. As I watched, a tiny drop of liquid swelled at the point of the tiny needle. I am not kidding. The world changed right there before my eyes.

I realized a number of things all at once. First, these devices were not merely what I had thought they were. Second, they expected that I would be frantically calling someone and thirdly, that needle was meant for my thumb or whatever part of my body it came into contact with. I realized that I was now officially dead.

It is funny how well your mind can pull together some facts when you are really in a bad situation. Well. I was brought here to disappear. That was obvious.

I tucked my broken left hand loosely in my jacket pocket for support. I stood up feeling all the bruises and walked to the door and looked out the window. I saw no one. I tried the doorknob.

They were so sure of my demise that they didn’t even lock the door. Silently, I opened the door and stood listening. Nothing. Not a sound.

I stepped across the six feet of polished concrete floor to the outside door and tried the handle on that door. Now I believe in miracles, and I know when the Almighty goes before me. That door was also unsecured.

I stepped out into a mild dry fall evening, shut the door behind myself, and walked away.

Dead and free.

Where is Beth

Jessie Norris is at home. He is wondering where Beth is. This is not like her. He tries to phone her. Nothing. Not even a recorded greeting. It’s like her phone has ceased to exist. He has never heard this silence on the other side before.


He wishes now that he had gone to the strip mall with her. It had crossed his mind, but he had let the thought go. Beth was not the kind of girl who needed help with everything, he had told himself complacently.

Jessie is just short of six feet tall. He weighs 175 pounds and looks leggy. He is dark, with nearly black eyes and short curly black hair. He is a couple of years younger than his wife. He works in a shop building handmade furniture. He is good with his hands. He is also known to be quick-witted.

Beth took the Honda of course. So, he is stuck out here without wheels.

For whatever reason, he is not ready to call the police yet. He feels a little sense of not now.

She should have been home two hours ago. They should have eaten dinner by now and be cleaning up the kitchen together.

He is all questions and conjectures. He is not frightened yet.

He walks the room. His eyes fall on things, but his mind is elsewhere. His handmade furniture, the pictures. None of it makes any impression on him.

He hopes she is just somewhere deep in a serious conversation. But, just sitting and waiting and wondering are not his style. So, he puts on his heavy woolen jacket, stuffs his phone and wallet in his jeans pockets, and makes sure everything that should be turned off is turned off. He thinks it might be good to bring a flashlight, so the last thing he does is get it out of the junk drawer in the kitchen. It's one of those little super bright ones.

He steps out into the dark on the little wooden porch, sighs, locks up the house and sets out walking toward the little mall where she shops at a Trader Joe’s. He has a ten-mile march in front of him.

Man, it’s dark out here, he thinks. But then his eyes adjust, and he can see the driveway and the surface of the road dimly as he begins his walk.

Jessie is not a fearful man, but this one is hard. He thinks it’s these little phones. They got us all used to being in contact at any time, made us intolerant on not knowing. Now, if the phone doesn’t work, we feel something is very wrong.

Jessie is a pretty good runner, so he pounds out a couple of miles running easily through the soft night. He is looking for anything out of the ordinary on the road. He slows to a long walking gait. Incredibly he is a little sleepy. It’s all dreamlike. The night is silent. Where is Beth?

About four miles out he sees that there is something up ahead in the road, or off to the side actually. It looks depressingly like his own car. Well, it is his car, an old navy-blue Accord. This one is a 2009 model. They really do never die.

Fearing the worst Jessie sprints up to his car and finds the driver’s side door open, the key in the ignition and his wife missing. The two bags of groceries are still sitting on the back seat. No one has stolen the car or even taken the groceries.

Jessie steps back from his car. He looks at the verge and the pavement, with the aid of the small bright flashlight. There are a lot of scuff marks in the soil. He sees a woman’s shoe prints and then they disappear. There are two other sets of prints. There is some blood when he gets down close to the pavement and really looks hard, shining the beam of light sideways along the asphalt surface.

Jessie Norris, alone on a dark highway, has a big problem now and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He gets into the driver’s seat and sits there thinking.

He takes out his own phone at last and calls 911. He gets the police dispatcher and explains the situation. Then he waits for them to come and look at what he has discovered.

But he doesn’t feel good about this at all, and he doesn’t know why. His impulse is to flee before the police car arrives. He fires up the Honda and takes off driving southward trying to look like any other car on the highway. Nothing special here, sir.

Jessie feels very very alone. He has a crawling feeling in his stomach. He wishes that he had not given their names to anyone.

‘Jessie. I don’t know where I am for sure.’

I’m sure glad they didn’t break one of my feet! Garcia looked like a perfect foot stomper, but he missed me. He missed me, alright for sure. I bet they are in big trouble when I turn up missing. No body in the gray room to take away and incinerate secretly.

‘Jessie. Jessie! They hurt me!’

I tried to assess something about my location. Really, I felt like I was somewhere in Lynnwood. This collection of ubiquitous industrial type buildings was near the freeway east of town. The business of having no phone was a real hassle. I had no idea where Jessie was.

I was not sure I wanted anyone to see me in my present condition, black eye and missing teeth. But I set out walking westward away from the freeway and toward the old highway, then I would go north.

Every doggone step hurt my hand and my mouth was throbbing!

I had a fixed idea in my mind that I had to locate Jessie somehow. I kept thinking of just bumping into him on the road somewhere.

‘I think I’m in Lynnwood Jessie. I’m walking toward the highway if I’m right and I think I am.’

Maybe he found the car if he walked down the road toward town.

He kept thinking of her voice as she said his name. When she called him by name, he always felt her love. Just the way she said it. ‘Jessie.’

He tried to silence fear and just be open to any sense of leading as he drove through the night down the two-lane highway. It seemed like he was the only driver out there tonight. No one drove behind him. No one drove toward him.

He wondered what the police officer would do when he found no blue Honda waiting for him on the road, with a worried man inside it. Would that be some kind of legal offense, or would the cop just shrug and head back to town? He figured that it would have to go into some sort of report.

Jessie felt like getting on old 99, so he drove west until he reached that larger four lane highway. His heart picked up a little and he began to feel somewhat expectant. There was no reason for this, it just was.

He thought of her voice again. ‘Jessie.’ He felt something like the old children’s game where a blindfolded child is searching for someone and being told warmer or colder depending on how close he was to his target. He definitely felt warmer. He thought of her name. ‘Beth.’ He kept driving southward. The two bags of groceries rattled around in the backseat some. He hoped there was no ice cream melting in one of the bags.

He wasn’t sleepy at all now. He was fully alert. He didn’t really know it, but he was more alert now than he had ever been before. He was wide open and searching, finding a signal. Love drew him ever southward.

‘Jessie. I’m walking north now.’ 

‘I’m super tired.’ I am super hungry too, and thirsty. Even though I had my wallet I couldn’t afford to leave the open roadway, so I kept walking. 

He drove clear into Lynnwood, but it wasn’t right. He turned around and drove up north a few miles again. He didn’t see her, but he heard her.

‘Jessie.’

He decided to go south again even though he had already been there. He felt like he had been wasting a lot of time but continued southward.

The sun was beginning to come up when he saw her. He would have known that figure anywhere on earth. She was still a couple of blocks away. The brightening light revealed her. She was walking painfully slowly and looked rough when he pulled up beside her.

He parked the car. He got out and walked over to her. They looked at each other in total amazement. ‘How in the world…’

Tired Jessie and Beth tried to explain to each other what their nights had been like. She battered but free. He searching and finding.

Neither had any idea who the men in the green suits were or why she had been kidnapped by them. Neither knew how he was able to find her.

He carefully put her in the passenger’s seat, buckling her in himself. There were tears between them. It hurt to see her injuries. She was terribly tired, but they stopped by McDonald’s because it was open. She scuttled into the lady’s room, and he bought them a little breakfast. She was only able to eat some of the scrambled egg from her sandwich. She drank the cheap coffee with pleasure. Then they drove the miles to their little house on the tree-lined highway.

Beth was asleep when they got home. She woke and cried a bit more on the way in.

There was no melting ice cream in the bags when he brought them in.

He put her to bed after cleaning her up a little and giving her some OTC meds for pain. He splinted her hand also. The break did not seem to be displaced.

He called work and begged off for the day saying he had a stomach bug. He sat thinking for a long time, while Beth slept.