He scratched
at an imaginary itch on his right hand (just below his thumb) in order
to take his mind off the man in the lab coat who sat across from him at
the beaten, scarred, wood table. It didn't work. And whoever this man
in the lab coat was, he was insistent about paperwork. He had three
inches clipped onto a weathered clipboard which he flipped through with
precision.
"Can I offer you a glass of water?" asked the boy's captor in a calm,
sensitive tenor.
The boy, Kurt, continued to scratch the imaginary itch, which had
leaped magically from his right hand to the left. Eventually the
falseness of the itch would be deduced, and the lab coated man would
disappear out of the cell and return with... God knows what. Kurt had
seen torture hundreds -- if not thousands -- of times on TV, and he was
glumly aware that there would be no commercial breaks for him.
"Can I offer you a glass of water?" The question was repeated without
urgency, as if the speaker was an absent-minded waiter. The itch now
leaped with the dexterity of a trained flea onto the boy's leg, and the
dutiful fingers followed.
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