The Girl in the High Tower - Chapter 3

Roger winced when the drone made touchdown — not the most graceful of landings, and for a moment, he was concerned that the small craft had come in too hot and that he might have broken the thing. But the most cursory of inspections revealed that the machine still worked. And with that, Roger powered down the unit, picked it up, and ran across the roof to the stairwell. 

His apartment door never felt so far away as it did at this moment. And with each step closer, his mind spun faster and faster with anticipation. If he would have had his phone with him on the roof, he would have already logged into his long-dormant Instagram account. 

Instagram, right? That had to be the one. Roger didn’t keep up with social media too much, so for all he knew, there could be any number of apps that used similar handles. But it seemed like the most likely option. 

In one movement, Roger opened his front door, speed walked into his apartment, deposited the drone clumsily on his kitchen counter, and spent 30 agonizing seconds scouring his living room for his phone before finally finding it lodged in the sofa cushion. With laserlike focus, sweaty hands, and a magnified impatience, he opened his Instagram app and logged in. 

A small flutter of notifications: random likes, a few new followers, a notification that there were some new direct messages. But Roger’s thumb tapped the search icon.

And then, it froze. What was the username she had written on the journal? There was a 9… Followed by “Nadya.” Totally sounded like a Russian name, which confirmed answers to some of his questions. And the first word… What was it?

Roger couldn’t stand the thought of opening the camera on his drone, retrieving the SD card, plugging it into his computer, and fast-forwarding to the correct set of frames — that could take minutes!

He tried a couple of options. “@nadyakotka99? No results found. @nadya99kosca? Nothing. But there was a 99 in it… and he knew Nadya was a name… but what was that second word? His fingers were frenetic. Reverse it? @koska99nadya? No… @nadya99koska? Or was there a “shh” noise in that second word? @nadya99koshca? No results found. 

Roger was on the verge of referring to the video… until the last entry yielded a result: @nadya99koshka. A matching username that was accompanied by an illustration of a red bird. Clicking on the icon led to a page — a private account with 0 posts, 0 followers, and 29 following. Roger wasn’t the most savvy social media guy in the world, but he could tell the signs of a bot account. It was such an unremarkable profile, that he considered confirming the username before wasting any more time sending a follow request and a hastily worded message into the ethers, especially if it was just going to be a waste of time... Until he noticed the brief block of text in the bio line: 

“Nadya 

Just girl in high tower”

It was her. It had to be. Before his brain had a chance to register, his thumb flicked to the Follow button; as if to tease his impatience, the button was replaced by a white box: Requested.

Pacing back and forth in his apartment, Roger flicked the screen downward, again and again, refreshing her profile page. Was she going to be on right away? Later? Was she just messing with him? The last option didn’t make sense… He recalled her face… The expression of mild desperation and… almost loneliness. She wanted to talk. To him. Even though all she knew about him was that he was a man insane enough to launch a drone with a camera to spy on her? What did that say about her? What did it say about him…

Roger was on the verge of putting the phone down. This could go on all night, he thought, and she still might not show. As he resolved himself to the idea of taking a shower and returning in a few minutes, he gave the screen one more flick. The white box returned to blue: Following. And her follower count now read “1.” How on earth could he be the only one following a woman like this?

Before Roger could press the message button, he say a small red dot that indicated a new message. It was from her. Roger felt a pulse rush through the skin on his neck. He felt dry for a moment. A tightness formed in his stomach as he opened her message:

And with that, the green active light on her profile blinked off, and Nadya was gone. It took Roger a moment to realize that 45 minutes had passed, and that he had been standing in the same spot the entire time. Stumbling for a moment, he lurched over to the sofa, and flopped onto it, eyes staring through the ceiling.

What the fuck, Roger thought. As had been the case so far in his limited experiences with the mysterious girl (Nadya, as he now knew her), every answer he received just yielded more questions. 

He massaged his closed eyes with his fingertips as he tried to piece together the conversation that had just taken place. All in all, it went well — better than he could possibly have hoped. God knows he had never expected his stealthy nighttime flight to result in a near-hour-long text conversation.

So… he thought, using his mentally catalogued collection of gigantomastia cases as a frame of reference.

Presumably, he worked his way down the mental rabbit hole. She was a normal girl from a small town in Russia. Then, at some point is school, she began to develop, probably earlier and faster than the other girls. School girls are the same the world over, so they were mean to her, and made fun of her pretty relentlessly.

Then, at some point, her condition became too severe and she had to drop out of school. Probably lived at home, and from the sound of it, a pretty isolated life without a lot of the comforts. And over time, her condition became more severe, and her breasts grew unchecked. And grew, and grew… Roger felt a tightness in his pants. 

Roger knew Russia wasn’t a third world country or anything. But he had seen enough videos of what can happen to a woman’s body if it’s left to its own devices without access to the type of medical care so commonly available in his native country. 

But then… what? How did she get from her small village to the big city a continent and an ocean away? It must have had to do with this mysterious man she mentioned. His rules… “I will send you to the United States, and put you up in a multi-million-dollar apartment, and your every need will be tended to while you receive treatment for this condition… Oh, and you have to stay in your apartment, and avoid all contact with the outside world, or people will laugh at you, and you don’t want people to laugh at you, do you?” 

It didn’t add up. Not in the slightest. First of all (and Roger considered himself somewhat of an expert on the subject, if his countless hours spent scouring the internet was any indication), there was no “treatment” Roger knew of for gigantomastia… aside from surgery, of course, but that could be done in her own country… It just didn’t make sense.

There was one line that stuck out for Roger… the one about “other women with her same kind of disability, and how this treatment worked for them?” What other women? He was sure Russian wasn’t overflowing with women who had breasts on par with the size of their own bodies. Was that just what she was told?

And he was helping to take care of her family back home? And how it wasn’t safe for him? Was there a threat in there that she was passing along? And the fact that her only method of communication was a secret phone that only she knew about? 

It did make sense, Roger thought. A naive woman who lacked the experiences that made a normal life, desperate for anyone to talk to — anyone different, and the only criteria is that they not… laugh at her. Is that what she had been led to believe her whole life? That she was some kind of freak who would be ridiculed to tears the moment she stepped out into public?

It all just seemed so… lonely. He felt a deep pang of sadness for this woman… there she was, alone, with only a nursemaid to watch over her like a hawk, likely shipped here by some eccentric billionaire. Her family paid off, and her contact with the outside world effectively non-existent, there she lay, in her bed, right now, he thought. A trophy. The crown jewel in some King of the Universe’s collection. It seemed obvious enough to him… but she seemed to believe otherwise? Was she… gullible? Desperate? Both?

Roger didn’t foul her for her lack of comprehension for the English language. He couldn’t imagine how she learned what she did know… television, maybe? He knew a few people who learned the language that way… And goodness knew, in her state, watching endless hours of television was probably the only thing she really did regularly. 

But behind the simplistic verbiage, there was an underlying simplicity to the woman herself. A naivitay. She struck him as observant, smart even, though understandably defensive… But there was a reason he asked her age; for a moment, he was horrified to think that the maturity of her body belied her, and that she was much younger than he had initially assumed. He shuddered to think of the version of himself who had been obsessing over a child this whole time. But thankfully, his initial observation was confirmed. Twenty-four, going on 25. 

But even so… he wondered if she had stopped, emotionally, at some point, whenever it was that she dropped out of school. How long had she been isolated in such a way? What had this solitude done to her? It was hard to say. 

He felt the same enormous, abstract attraction to her that he felt for weeks now. But after their conversation, that attraction was tempered by something else… affection? This dire male urge to be protective over something rare and vulnerable? He couldn’t tell. But it was something.

He looked at his phone; just a little past 8. She had gotten off the phone quickly, and he would be stressing that he would never talk to her again, were it not for her cryptic last sentence: to “fly again at 2300.” If he was correct, that would mean that he would be standing on the roof of his building, again, in less than three short hours. Hours that would pass like torture. 

Roger was tired. Exhausted even. And though he normally kept a later bedtime, 8 pm seemed much later than it was. But he wouldn’t dare nap. He’d hate to be late.

###

The drone hummed along the same path it had taken earlier in the evening: up the towering side of the neighboring structure; across the roof; and pivoting backward, descending over the bright streetlights below. 10:59 p.m.

From a distant vantage point, the view of Nadya’s apartment was different than it was before. Roger squinted his eyes to make out the darkened details of the building’s top floor, hoping that the camera would compensate for the darkness of the windows once he moved closer, out of frame from the ambient light of the skyline. 

It did, once he moved closer, perhaps only 10 feet away from the side of the structure. He started again at the same end of the apartment he had before; the terrace with the elevated pool. Dark, of course. As the drone slowly made its way to the right, edging along the bank of windows, the view was repetitive. The darkness of the apartment was obscured beyond a thin, running sheet of curtains which had been drawn since his last visit. Window after window, the view was the same. Glass with curtain, metal beam; glass with curtain, metal beam. 

He was afraid he had misunderstood. 2300… what else could it mean? Figure of speech? Address? A riddle or something? As the drone panned to the right, he was worried that the building would end, and that he would be greeted with a view of the skyline, once more.

But then… a change in the pattern. The vision wasn’t crystal clear, and for a moment, he had to process the overall shape of what he was looking at. He knew what that shape was. He just wasn’t equipped to believe it. The drone edged closer, until it was on level with the window, just a few feet away, the pane of glass occupying the entire frame.

Roger’s heart froze. 

Standing between the curtains and the glass, it was her. Standing upright and staring straight at him. Her auburn hair was gathered in a long, loose braid that snaked down her shoulder, and as much as there was for Roger to take in, the first element that struck him were her eyes. Large, blinking nervously, but with a confidence that told him that she wanted to make this contact, and only hoped that she was doing a good job in the attempt. She bit her lower lip a little, and aside from a few micro expressions in her face, stood perfectly still. It was almost as if she was presenting herself to him: “Here I am. This is me.”

Her hands lay on her upper chest, resting lightly at the top of the flaring curve that emanated from her torso. She clutched a book… possibly the same black journal she had used to communicate earlier? Her fingers lightly finessed the surface of the book, a reflection of the same confident nervousness he had seen in her eyes. 

She wore a robin’s egg blue nightgown with white lace around the neck, sleeves, and lower hem — a garment that would have been outrageously oversized on just about anyone, but on her, it failed to completely cover the areas of her body he knew she wanted to preserve, for modesty’s sake. Extending beyond the bottom hem of the flowing sleep dress, two half moons of flesh were exposed, each capped with a wide patch of darker skin that pointed only slightly toward the bottom of the window. 

Her feet were impossible to see in the shadows. But he could tell that if she had been fully visible, her breasts would have hung on level with her ankles. He imagined for a moment that if she would hunch over, even a little, that they would easily make contact with the floor. But for the moment, her impossible back muscles sustained them, giving the impression that this head, and those slender arms, were hovering atop a pair of immense pale teardrops that flared, inexplicably, downwards and sideways, obscuring her body completely.

It may have been a few seconds; it may have been minutes. Roger was lost. Until she released one of her hands from her book and lifted her palm toward the drone that hummed in the night sky. The universal symbol for “hello.”

Glancing down at her book, she opened it to a page she had bookmarked, and pressed a pair of pages to the window, returning her gaze solidly to the red light on the drone’s camera. 

Roger read the words on the page, and his heart swelled at the capital letters:

I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND TO

He could have suspended this machine in the air all night, and have been utterly content. But before another moment could pass, she closed the book, returned it to her chest, and once more, raised her palm. The universal symbol for “good bye.”

Shuffling to the side, with deliberate care and attention to the balancing act of each step, she edged toward the side of the window. With one movement, she fluttered the curtain around to the front of her body, still never removing her eyes from the red light. And with that, again, Nadya was gone.