The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  “I need your pant size and shirt size.”

  “No, no, no,” I said.

  I put the Quran down, got up from the prayer rug, and walked all the way back to the corner where the little bathroom’s half wall provided some shelter. I was still very upset, and I think I went into that corner as a physical sign of resistance, making a statement that I wouldn’t cooperate.

  “I’m not changing into the dishdasha. I’m not giving you my clothes sizes. I’m not surrendering these clothes I’m wearing now.”

  “Please, Mr. Sam,” the guard said, almost pleading with me, “I need your shirt and pants sizes and your shoe size.”

  When he said those words, asking not just for the shirt and pants sizes but also for the shoe size, the whole conversation changed. All of us knew the guards only asked for your shoe size when you were getting out. It had long served as something of a magic word. The few fellow prisoners we’d seen released had been asked for their shoe size and shortly thereafter given shoes or at least a pair of shibshib, which is what we called the prison slippers. Between the three of us in that cell, just as between me and Haitham and the cell mates in my first cell and between those in my second cell, we’d shared but a single pair of shibshib, using them to keep our feet out of the filth around the edges of the open pit toilet, but then going barefoot at all other times.

  Shoes represented not just a luxury but a link to freedom.

  As soon as this guard told me he needed my shoe size, the guys in the cell looked at me and jumped up and said, “You’re getting out. You’re getting out.”

  I dropped to my knees, right there in the bathroom corner, and just broke down in tears—keeping the guard waiting uncomfortably at the door.

  “I’m a nine,” I said at last, after I caught my breath and my heart slowed a little.

  Yet even as I said this, I started having misgivings. I’d seen similar things happen quite a few times in cells next to us, all the signals and hints and steps being taken to make it look like one of my fellow inmates might be released, only to see them brought back, with negotiations having failed or the guards having finished whatever psychological torture, whatever mind games they’d concocted in their boredom and sadism. I cried at being asked for my shoe size, sure. And this made me feel like they’d gotten me, like they’d gotten to me, which immediately brought to mind all the feelings and doubts and worries about how tenuous this could be, about how much it depended on chance and might only be the beginning of an elaborate ruse.

  Nevertheless, I had only one course before me, and that course I knew I must follow to the end, wherever it might lead: I had to cooperate. I started praying, thanking God. The guys in that cell demonstrated genuine happiness for me—despite our different backgrounds and situations. They danced around, held hands, helped me to my feet, and slapped me on my shoulders. Those in the cells next door could hear what was going on and joined in the celebration, banging on the doors, shouting, “Farah, farah!”—enjoy, enjoy.

  The guards of course immediately told us all to be quiet, but no one listened to them. I remember doing this for others, the dancing, the shouting, the celebration—a way to mark time and keep our chins up. We’d wish joy to the departing person, and peace, and tell them not to forget us. We’d tell them not to forget to pray for us from the outside, once they got there. We’d say, “Ma’salama, ala ameena”—go in peace and righteousness.

  We’d tell each other one other important thing: that getting out of “The Grave,” as we called that prison, needed to be looked upon as something akin to a miracle. In fact, to those lucky enough to get asked for their shoe size, we said, “You’ve got a new birth. Use it wisely.”

  I gave the guard all my sizes, all my sizes as I remembered them before coming to the prison and losing many, many pounds. He wrote them down and departed, and I remained behind, just where I had been for all those unending days, except now I sat in joyous expectation. This made time dilate, seeming to slow down. The guard had only been gone for about an hour before returning, but it seemed like an entire day.

  They didn’t bring clothes, not quite yet. Instead, two guards opened the cell, just like always, and called for me. But they didn’t blindfold me. Nor did they shackle me. They just led me out the door and set me down in the hallway next to a bathroom that had all along been intended for use by the inmates. Up until that moment, though, I hadn’t even seen its doorway, let alone used it. The door was propped open. From where I sat, I could see inside: rows of sinks and a communal shower space. One of the guards entered, took a leak in one of the stalls, and looked over his shoulder at me, smiling. I tried not to watch him, but my mind—so long deprived of new information of any kind—frantically grasped at even this bit of trivia, a communal bathroom with hot water right there under our noses, never used! It made the place seem brand-new, foreign, and even amazing after such a long time of sensory deprivation in the three utterly bleak and similar cells that had been my nearly exclusive habitat for the previous six months.

  I was left in the hallway, sitting alone against the wall, for about five or ten minutes.

  Then they brought Scott.

  They let us talk to each other, which we started to do as soon as he took his seat beside me, whispering, embracing. I hadn’t seen him for a month and a half since we’d met in the sunshine of the courtyard on our one trip outdoors.

  We looked at each other, and we were like, Is this for real?

  Tears came to his eyes and to mine. Both of us spoke, all at once, asking and answering questions as rapidly as we could, garbling everything.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” I remember saying. We were guessing who might have been conducting the negotiations for our release. We were examining the signs of our imminent potential freedom, trying to decide whether each of them might be real—the lack of blindfolds, the lack of shackles, the fact we could just make a run for it right at that moment if we wanted, the promised newly sized clothes the guards were bringing.

  Then one of the guards returned with an electric razor and told us to shave our beards, which had grown to eight or ten inches, unruly, unkempt.

  Another guard came with the new clothes, one pile for me, one for Scott. He handed each of us a bag within which we found a T-shirt, underwear, belt, socks, shoes, pants, and a button-down shirt, all of it brand-new, smelling of the market and the outdoors.

  We clutched the bags to our chests as they took us downstairs, leading us into a regular office room, three or four desks in it, chairs, kind of a spare room of sorts, not used for too much. In one corner two of those Chinese privacy screens cordoned off private spaces. We stepped behind them, one of us behind each, and put on the new clothes: draping, baggy, enormous because of the pre-confinement clothing sizes I had provided. But I couldn’t have cared less. They were the visible badge of an impending departure—of a future different from the weeks and months I had just endured. They represented home, sunshine, outdoors, family, and the freedom of self-determination. They represented a definite end to the possibility of more beatings. They represented life.

  Or, as our cell mates reminded us, just before we left them, they represented a new birth.

  Of the items they inventoried at the beginning of my captivity, the guards returned only my computer bag, two rings, one of which was my Marine Corps ring, and my watch. All the rest, the money, my handgun, the electronic components and cameras from the house, my cell phones, my computer, all of that was gone. Also they took my Mont Blanc pen, an expensive pen, which had been a gift. It was a diamond edition, with a real diamond up top, and I bet they didn’t even know what it meant. It seems like a trifling thing, but it poured a little salt in the wound, and it points to the mercenary and thievish quality of all of this. The money amounted to about $6,000, gone, never to be seen again.

  The Marine Corps ring presented some consolation. It meant a lot to me because I’d had it for thirty-six years at that time, and this experience of captivity had only
solidified the Marine Corps as part of my identity. I went into captivity a retired Marine. I came out feeling like I’d endured, and endured well enough, the most frightening thing that the Marines had ever tried to prepare me for, this hostage situation.

  Still, I couldn’t help thinking about the missing inventory items. Though it amounted to pushing my luck, I asked, “Where’s the rest of our stuff?”

  They said, “It’s on its way. We’re going to give you everything back.”

  But we never saw it again. Frankly, although it irritated me not to get my things back, it did not diminish my joy at being set free.

  After we changed, they brought out written documents and made us sign them with thumbprints. “Here you go. If you want to leave, you’ve got to sign these.”

  “What are these?”

  “Confessions.”

  I knew we weren’t supposed to sign confessions, but they didn’t let us read them, and frankly, with release so close at hand and the captivity so patently illegal, I didn’t really care. Nor did Scott.

  We signed. To this day I still don’t know what my “confession” said or what sort of words they put into my mouth, even though I didn’t actually confess to anything. Whatever they made up, they made up. Mine wasn’t a short document. It extended a full seven or eight pages in total, crammed with lines of script. I put my thumb on their inkpad and pressed it down next to my name, and that was that.

  Scott went through a slightly more arduous process. They took him outside the room and videotaped him saying something, probably some sort of propaganda or something related to what he’d already told them. I never asked. They didn’t video me. When they videoed him, I could see a couple of the interrogators pointing their fingers right in his face in what looked like threats. I thought I would be up next, made to stand in front of the rolling camera, but they didn’t require the same from me.

  After that, we sat around for another two hours, waiting in the office area. My long military career prepared me well for this, a routine we call “hurry up and wait.” I knew things wouldn’t move fast. I knew many cogs were turning outside and that patience was really our only choice. Still, the minutes seemed to tick slowly, slowly. We spent the time talking to two of the interrogators, in fact the last two guys who had been trying to “befriend” me via qat chews. They’d begun chewing already, getting out a plastic shopping bag filled with fresh branches and plopping it on one of the tables in that underused office room. They offered some to me, and I accepted it, both to calm my nerves and because I just didn’t think it would be right to refuse them at that moment.

  The qat kicked in. We became a bit more gregarious. The passage of time didn’t matter quite as much. Then things started to happen again.

  One of the guards received a call on his phone.

  They blindfolded us once again.

  It felt weird. With the taste of freedom in our mouths, uncertainty still clung to these actions. Who knew where they were taking us. Perhaps they were still playing with us, carrying out one of their threats to take us up to Saadah. Perhaps they’d just shoot us after all.

  The blindfolds awakened memories of trauma, so many moments over the last months of being herded out of the prison cells, down the unseen hallways, past rooms with no known purpose, just gaping voids in our sensory-deprived understanding, gaping voids we could hear and feel but never see. Blindfolds that led us to beatings. Blindfolds that represented our initial bagging and kidnapping. Blindfolds that told us, in no uncertain terms, that we had once again lost control over our destinies and must rely on our captors to lead us, to treat us right, to keep us safe, that we must bear whatever punishment and pain they intended to mete out.

  But we had no choice. We had to go along.

  The blindfolds were worrisome, but we felt reassured in our new clothes and shoes and by the fact that we wore no shackles. I could bear the blindfold. I’d become an expert in wearing it! I could bear it with all this potential freedom ahead of me.

  The guards guided us out. They put us in a vehicle, a smallish SUV, me and Scott and one other guy crammed three across in the backseat. Up front both seats were filled. The driver, strangely enough, seemed to be the guy in charge. This also gave us hope, because if they meant to torture us, kill us, or play some other sort of terrible joke, they’d surely have more people with them for support, and the type of individual who took pleasure in such games wasn’t the type to drive his own car. Sadists loved having others do the menial work. Sadists wouldn’t be pretending to drive us to our freedom.

  About five minutes after we left the facility, they took the blindfolds off us, and we saw the outside world for the first time in months. We were on Airport Road, one of the main arteries in Sana’a, a north-south thoroughfare running along the east side of town, right below the US Embassy and the Sheraton. It was midday by this time. There was an eeriness to the world. Everyone outside the windows was going about their normal day, though Sana’a looked terrible—the buildings bombed, the faces of the people gaunt and haunted, dust and decay everywhere. I was torn between the intense stimulation of having something to look at and the sadness I saw outside.

  On the drive, during a lull in the edgy, uncomfortable, nervous conversation, I again mustered the courage (or foolishness?) to ask about the missing items they had taken and inventoried. The driver, the boss of this expedition, turned to me and very politely explained, “It’s at another location, at the Old Sana’a location, our headquarters there. If you want your stuff, that’s fine. We can go back and wait in a cell until someone can fetch it all.”

  Those last words had an edge. We understood the threat immediately. Scott looked at me. And I looked at him. And we shook our heads at each other in unison, in a definite “fuck that” expression. I dropped the questions about our missing gear and never brought the subject up again.

  When we arrived at the airport, they took us to the VIP lounge, secluded from the main terminal. We sat in overstuffed leather chairs, guards still around us, uncomfortably comfortable for another hour.

  As a means of mental resistance and religious strength, I had fasted for five of the six months of this captivity. I was fasting that day, like most days, and so did not avail myself of the cappuccino stand in the corner of the VIP lounge or the snacks. They seemed unreal. Scott did not touch them either. We just sat, on the edge of our seats not in a physical way but certainly in an emotional one.

  The Omani plane landed, a huge 737, one of the only civilian planes we’d seen on the runway.

  It touched down, and our hearts stirred, as if we could get up right then and run out of the lounge directly onto the tarmac. It was right there. Right in front of us, just a glass door away. We could run out to the big passenger plane and grab hold of the wheels and simply signal to it to fly away, not to linger, not to chance it. We could hold on. We would hold on until we crossed the border with Yemen.

  Whatever it might take. We could do that, even in our weakened, emaciated state.

  We didn’t make a run for it.

  We waited.

  We gripped the leather armrests.

  We watched the seconds tick by on the gaudily ornate clocks in the lounge. We listened to the news, each word as slow and uninteresting as molasses.

  We watched the guards finger their weapons, pick at their nails or their noses, look at us, at the plane, at the door, at the ceiling, at their shoes.

  Finally, the plane pulled up, almost right up to the door of the VIP lounge.

  One of the guards opened the door. The backwash from the jets buffeted the room. They beckoned for us to stand, to approach. A stairway was maneuvered into place alongside the jet. The door opened. We climbed in, and the guards prodded us past the first-class seats and into the front row of the economy class.

  It was just the two of us sitting there for perhaps another ten minutes. Then other people started arriving, filling up the seats. Within an hour, the seats had filled completely with people who were in
jured, going for treatment in Oman, accompanied by their families, doing whatever they could to get the heck out of there. We became something of a ticket to freedom not just for ourselves but for all of the passengers boarding that day. Part of the deal must have been for the Omanis to stay neutral and keep the peace talks going, and by bringing that plane in and taking the injured out, they were doing the Houthis a favor. They also brought a Houthi delegation, including Muhammad Abd as-Salam, the chief negotiator for the Houthis, heading to a round of talks in Muscat.

  After the plane filled, when we still sat motionless before the VIP lounge, the Omani pilot came on over the loudspeaker and said, “We’re waiting on a third American to take off.”

  Scott and I looked at each other. We didn’t know of another American being held—though of course, we knew nothing of what had happened during the previous six months.

  We saw this as a positive though, thinking, Alright, one more American being freed.

  After another moment of pondering, Scott turned to me and said, “You know what, this is great. I think my mother’s birthday is coming up. This is going to be a great surprise for her.”

  “Really, wow! When’s her birthday?”

  “September 20.”

  “Scott, today is September 20.”

  “Oh, man. I’m going to call her as soon as we get to Muscat. Going to call her on her birthday.”

  His hopes were sky-high. I could see it in his eyes.

  This made me nervous.

  I didn’t want to see his spirit crushed. But I knew a million things could still go wrong, everything from administrative issues that might ground the plane and force us to remain in the VIP lounge or the terminal or a temporary holding cell for a few more hours to the whole shebang getting called off. Back to prison we might still go.

  I didn’t say any of this to Scott though. I just smiled at him, patted his hand.