“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
“Albert Gaines told us about you,” the woman said. The mention of the name caused an involuntary twitch in Sarat, but she said nothing.
“That’s right,” the woman continued. “Albert Gaines gave you up. He told us you’re an insurrectionist. Do you want us to believe him, Sara? Do you want us to treat you the way we treat insurrectionists?”
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
The woman shook her head once more and rose from her seat. “This can be easy, Sara, or this can be hard. The choice is yours.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat.
The woman left the room. Soon a masked guard appeared. Even before he removed his mask, Sarat recognized him by his frame and by the thickness of his neck. Some of the guards were always careful never to show their faces to the detainees, but this one did not seem to care. He drew close and looked at her with hollow, contemptuous eyes.
Before she could turn her head, he slapped her across the face. Her head snapped but the rest of the body, chained in place, did not move.
“You dumb Red dyke,” said Bud. “We’re going to make you sing.”
The soldier called a pack of four others into the room. They wore blue gloves and had covered faces and were made larger by the shells of their armor.
“Take her to the Light Room,” said Bud.
She was transferred to a room in the basement of another building. The room was made of concrete and was empty save for two anchors bolted to the ground. A set of large white floodlights covered the entirety of the wall opposite the anchors.
The guards chained Sarat’s ankles to her wrists, and both to the anchors in the floor, such that she was forced into a deep and immobilizing squat. The guards left the room, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the floodlights came alive with a loud electric pop, and the room was drowned in eviscerating whiteness.
Sarat closed her eyes. The white light now turned a hot red against her eyelids. She lowered her head and for a while the onslaught was bearable. But soon the room began to grow warmer. Sweat dripped from her skin, her knees burned with the weight of her body.
On the third day, the door opened. A masked guard stepped forward and dropped a bowl of food and another of water on the ground where Sarat was shackled. The bowls were made of a soft rubber and half their contents spilled on the floor where they landed. The guard left and the door swung closed.
One bowl contained a thin brown gruel speckled with white flakes. Unable to move her arms, Sarat struggled to get at the food. She grasped at it with her fingers and leaned as far forward as she was able. Feebly, she tossed it toward her mouth. The gruel tasted sulfuric, rotten. But she wolfed it down, deranged with hunger. Soon her jumpsuit and the ground surrounding her were splattered with remnants of the meal. Under the heat of the floodlights, the gruel began to decompose. Every other day, the guard returned and dropped two bowls on the ground.
By the tenth day, the throbbing in her head and her knees consumed her. The room filled with her shrieking, and the small red darkness she lived in while her eyes were closed now seemed to exist even when her eyes were open. On the twentieth day, the guards removed her.
In the Visitation room, the woman in the neatly pressed suit asked Sarat if she’d had a change of heart.
“I didn’t do nothing,” said Sarat, slumped in her shackling chair.
The woman stood and left the room. Soon Bud returned. In the fog of her damaged vision he seemed to move in place, blurry as a half-remembered dream. He grabbed her by the fuzz of hair that had grown back on her skull during her time in captivity.
“How do you think this is going to end?” asked the guard, his breath hot on the side of her face. “Do you think this ends with you winning? With us giving up? You’re going to sing, I promise you.”
He let her go and called the guards back in. “Take her to the Sound Room,” he said.
IN THE MONTHS BETWEEN VISITATIONS, Sarat lived in a cell in Camp Saturday. The cell was square, and standing in its middle with her arms outstretched, Sarat could brush all four walls with her fingers. The walls were of concrete and were painted the color of margarine. A metal cot and a metal toilet bowl occupied opposite ends of the cell, otherwise it was bare. An overhead light shone at all hours of the day and night, erasing the difference between them. Deprived of the cycle of the day (and, in time, the seasons), the mind made do with the only indicator of passing time available to it: the footsteps of the guards outside.
The guards walked up and down the corridors of Camp Saturday at all hours. Every three minutes, the slit in Sarat’s cell door would open, and a pair of eyes would inspect the room, and then the slit would close again. In time the sound of metal slits opening and closing all along the corridor became a kind of metronome, against which Sarat measured the dawn and death of the day. Eventually she came to know the peering eyes by heart, and gave their owners names of her own invention.
Sometimes she heard screams from the nearby cells. Sometimes the women waited on a guard to open the slit in the door and then tried to throw cupped handfuls of shit and piss in their eyes. A few minutes later a small troop of masked guards would rush the agitator’s cell, and the woman would be carried kicking and screaming to the Non-Compliance Area. In a week or two she would return, and no more noises would come from her cell.
The woman in the cell next to Sarat’s was named Elena. She was from Mississippi, and had lost her mind. Softly she spoke to Sarat through the concrete, in a voice that passed so clearly through the wall that for months Sarat believed it to be a fabrication of her own torture-fevered brain.
Elena said she had been born in this place, caged here from birth because the Blues knew her to be a terrorist from the day she entered the world. She said Sugarloaf had once rested on a vast outcropping of land and was free of cages and free of fences. She sang songs about alligators and swamps and talking rodents.
Amidst the shuffling of the guards’ feet and the rambling screams of the women, Sarat listened to her neighbor’s voice the same way she listened to her own breathing—passively, without thought. But at other times it was the only thing she could hear, a reminder she was still alive.
Sometimes Sarat talked back to the voice sliding softly through the walls, and in these times she lied. When Elena asked her where she came from, she said South Carolina, and invented an elaborate lie about her escape from the illness unleashed upon that state. She enjoyed lying to her faceless neighbor, and enjoyed that the neighbor seemed to believe it. During the worst of her Visitations, when after weeks of mistreatment she returned to her cell hallucinating with pain, it provided some small comfort to retreat into a wholly fabricated existence.
Still, she resisted. The Visitations came in waves—sometimes the woman in the neatly pressed suit didn’t come to see her for months at a time, until Sarat allowed herself to believe that perhaps the interrogations had finally come to an end. Sometimes, the woman seemed a permanent resident of the island, and would call on Sarat almost daily. Weeks alone in the rooms of Sound and Light dulled her senses, until the world beyond arm’s reach became a muddled nimbus she could no longer decipher. The positions in which they shackled her slowly wore the cartilage from her knees and warped her back into a curving column of pain. Still, she resisted.
IN HER THIRD YEAR on the island, Sarat participated in a hunger strike. Elena said women from every camp were taking part, refusing to eat or drink anything but water. She said some women had already been doing it for weeks. She said one had even died from it—a suicide of sorts, something the guards called “Going asymmetric.”
She said the women had a list of demands, chief among them freedom. Failing that, they wanted their loved ones flown in to visit; lawyers from the Red to represent them; and the right to something whose name sounded foreign to Sarat’s ears (she assumed it to be a drug or a religious text). The women in the solitary cells demanded time in the communal yard,
a chance to see the sun.
Sarat made no demands. She could no more imagine negotiating better treatment from her captors than negotiating the stinger away from a scorpion. Her silence was the one weapon they could not pry from her; to hand it to them in the form of hopeless appeals seemed to her an act of high cowardice, a tacit admission that the brutal kinetics of Sugarloaf obeyed some kind of law. For the same reason she refused to meet the ones they called humanitarian envoys, who swooped in on Sugarloaf every few months with looks of stern disapproval plastered on their faces, for the same reason she spat in the face of the woman with the neatly pressed suit, for the same reason she tore the pages of the one book they allowed her and glued them with smeared shit to the slit of her cell door—for the same reason, Sarat made no demands.
Instead she simply refused to eat. In starvation she took the levers of torture out of her torturers’ hands and placed them in her own. In starvation she found agency, control.
A week into her strike and concussed with hunger, she was taken by the guards to the medical facility.
She was led into a room with high white ceilings. Black sheets covered the windows and muted the sunlight. The room smelled familiar to Sarat—it was the smell of rubbing alcohol. She remembered the last time she saw her sister.
A single cot, raised to the incline of a dentist’s chair, stood in the center of the room. Laid out on a steel table nearby were a set of hypodermic needles, a coiled rubber tube, a box of disposable gloves, and two bags of clear fluid.
The guards lifted her onto the bed. She felt straps tighten around her wrists and around her ankles and around her chest. Viselike restraints locked her gaze to the white empty ceiling.
At the edge of her periphery she saw one of the soldiers standing at the table. He wore a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck but she knew he was a soldier. He uncoiled the rubber tube and affixed it to one of the fluid bags, which he then attached to a metal stand. She watched out the corner of her eye as he began applying a glistening, mucuslike substance to the end of the rubber tube, before Bud the guard stopped him.
“No need for that,” Bud said. “She’s a big, strong girl.”
Amidst the convulsions that followed, they fed her. The white ceiling to which her eyes were locked began to fill with brilliant stars. The cot shook; she felt the hands of the guards holding her in place. The acidic aftertaste of the feeding fluid crawled up her throat and leaked out her slack mouth. It tasted of her insides.
Midway through the feeding, a gust of wind sheared the black sheet from one of the windows. A beam of sunlight entered the room. Sarat closed her eyes and felt the warmth that grazed the very ends of her toes. Faintly, very far away, she heard the sound of children playing.
FOR THREE DAYS in January a storm rattled the island. The rain made a sound like the patter of huge insects crawling on the prison walls. The women huddled and screamed in their solitary cells.
The storm spared Sarat her daily feeding. Hunger returned this time as mercy. On the fourth day, her cell door opened, and Bud came inside. He arrived with the usual entourage of guards but he made them wait outside. He closed the cell door behind him.
She knew it was him before he appeared, the meter of his steps down the hallway a fingerprint. It amazed her sometimes, how much she knew about a man she was supposed to know nothing about—the way his cheeks reddened when he cursed her, as though the sound of his own voice infuriated him; the way his upper lip drew closer to his nostrils in a feigned expression of disgust whenever he told a lie. She knew him the way animals know the weather, and from some indefinable thing living in the very presence of him, she’d learned to divine the severity of impending storms.
But today she could not read him. There was a calmness about his hollow eyes; the veins of his neck untensed. She detected in his stocky face the expression of a child on the eve of Christmas, impatient and electric with anticipation.
He sat at the foot of the bed. Instinctively, Sarat recoiled. She smelled the mess tent breakfast on him, the smell of fryer oil. He looked at the place by the bed where Sarat’s last trickle of vomit had dried into a sand-colored crust. He chuckled.
“Tell me, do you believe in any of that Hindu shit?” he said. “They got a book about it in the library here; got so bored one night I started reading it. You believe any of that stuff about coming back as a toad or an ant or something if you were real bad in your last life? I mean, I saw what you did with that Bible we gave you; I know you’re no Christian, so maybe you believe in that stuff.”
Sarat said nothing. Bud cracked his knuckles. She waited for the cheeks to redden, the vein to emerge, and she readied her mind to take her to a faraway place.
“I’ve been thinking about that for a while now,” Bud said. “Because I got to thinking I must have done some real terrible shit in my last life—burned down an orphanage or something. That’s got to be why I ended up here, stuck playing babysitter to a cageful of goddamned animals.”
The slit in the doorway opened. A guard looked inside. Bud waved him away. In that moment Sarat imagined lunging at his sweat-glistened neck, digging into the skin with her teeth. But what her mind imagined, her body no longer had the strength to do, and when again he turned to her and put his hand on her knee, she spat in his direction but what came out was spittle.
“But see, then I got to thinking I couldn’t have done anything too bad, right?” said Bud. “I couldn’t have done anything too bad, because then I would have come back as you.”
He patted her softly on the knee and then he stood.
“Remember when you first got here?” he asked. “Remember how you used to press your face against the cage like a dog, trying to get a look at the water? Well, guess what, Sara Chestnut? We’re going to take you to the water.”
SHE WAS MOVED by the guards to a different place, a small building she had never seen before. The building was white and unmarked; it stood at the edge of a fenced and barricaded complex that resembled Camp Saturday but was much smaller. The complex lay near the edge of the island; as the guards led her inside, Sarat could hear the distant crashing of waves.
They took her to a windowless room, lit harshly by the halo of an old, prewar incandescent. The bulb hung on a string from a low white ceiling.
Just as in the place where they fed her, a cot stood in the center of the room. The same people were present: soldiers in guard uniforms and soldiers in white coats. But this time the ones in the guard uniforms stood near the cot, and the soldiers in the white uniforms stood in the periphery of the room; when Sarat looked at them they looked away.
Once again she was strapped in place, and although she caught no sight of the usual implements on the bedside table, she closed her eyes and waited to be fed. But instead she felt a sheet of soft cloth laid upon her face, and then she heard the voice of the woman in the neatly pressed suit.
“If you want this to stop, Sara,” the voice whispered, “you’ll cooperate.”
The voice went away. The room turned silent. And then Sarat was drowning.
The water moved, endless. She entered and exited death, her body no longer hers. Spasms of light and heat encased her; the mind seized with fear and panic. She drowned yet death would not come. It was in this way her captors finally broke her.
To end the drownings she admitted to all the crimes with which they charged her—complicity in all manner of insurrectionist violence, things she’d never heard of before. She admitted her role in the killing of three Blue informants in the New Fourth Ward and in a car bombing on the outskirts of Columbus. When asked about insurgents she knew, she said all she knew; when asked about those she didn’t, she made up plausible lies. The woman in the neatly pressed suit presented to her reams of written confessions and she signed every page. There was no lie too big that her fear of drowning couldn’t make it true.
THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED brought relief. Slowly she was allowed the small precious things previously denied her—packets of soap
and shampoo; books other than the Bible; black shades to block the overhead lights; spider-venom painkillers to dull the screaming of her knees and her back. For an hour a day she was led into the recreation yard, where she lay on the warm concrete at the foot of the fence and took in the sunlight, content as a house cat. They brought her food and she ate it all, voracious. The food was fatty and bland; soon she began to gain weight, because there was little to do but sit in her cell and eat. But she ate every bite, and they never had to force-feed her again.
Every other Friday, when the guards came to cut her nails and trim her hair, she sat still and let them. And on the Thursdays before they came, when her nails were longest, she dug them deep into the skin of her inner thighs until she felt the warm trickle of blood. The guards who looked in on her every few minutes must have thought she was masturbating; they let her be.
The following summer, the guards rotated, and Bud Baker left for good—but it didn’t matter one way or the other to Sarat when Elena whispered the news through the cell block walls, because the girl whose soul the thick-necked guard had slowly strangled was also gone. The day assimilated the dark, the dark assimilated the day. Years passed.
ONE DAY, long after her last Visitation, two guards came to Sarat’s cell and took her back to the old building in which she had confessed. As she was led down the hallway, she recognized the place, but it felt dilapidated, unused. There was now a fine layer of dust on the chairs and on the table. An old, handwritten sign on one of the walls read, “Clean Up After Yourself.”
Once again they sat her down, but this time the guards did not shackle the prisoner to the bolts in the ground. The soldiers left and soon a woman Sarat had never seen before entered the room. The woman was young and dressed in a formal blouse and skirt.
Sarat was gripped with a cold, crippling fear at the sight of her new visitor. She stared mute and motionless at the woman, and quietly she resolved to herself that if they tried to take her once more to that small white room, she would claw her own throat out before she let them strap her again to the drowning chair.
American War Page 28