The Prisoner of Guantanamo

by Dan Fesperman

  Then, finally, after hours more, the plane thudded hard against the ground and came to a throbbing stop. Light poured in through the blindfold and sack as he heard the rear hatch wrenching open. There was shouting, some in a foreign tongue and some in a rudimentary Arabic, telling him to stand while someone unlocked him from the frame of the plane. His knees buckled as he tried to rise. Then a stick knocked against his calves, and someone shouted into his ear, incomprehensible, before hands grabbed him roughly beneath the armpits and hauled him forward, his legs full of pins and needles. He smelled sea air, and felt a windy blast of dust and grit rake across his hands. The air was a humid blanket that he would wear from that day forward.

  When they finally took off the blindfold and hood he was in a chilly white room seated in a metal chair with his legs shackled to the floor. For hours on end they asked him the same questions that the two men in Afghanistan had asked. Where did you train? Who paid you? How did you recruit them? When he replied again and again that he didn’t know, they shut him away in his burrow. Not the one where he lived now, but a sort of glorified cage among other cages. He had come to his present home later, while still clouded by fears and strangeness.

  Weeks ago this new world had finally begun to come into focus for him. It happened after he realized that the only way to reclaim equilibrium was by imposing his own natural order. He would name and classify the things around him, sort and list them in his own fashion. And he had settled on the idea of hawks and snakes as the first zoological labels, a taxonomy that he hoped to expand through further careful observation.

  Some aspects of this universe resisted easy categorization. Day and night, for instance. The fluorescent panels of Camp 3—he had overheard a hawk speaking the number of this place—cast a harsh perma-glow. It was a chill limbo between sun and moon, which left Adnan’s compass spinning without anchor until he rediscovered the lodestone possibilities of prayer. Now he oriented each day by the five calls that came regularly over the prison loudspeakers, falling to the narrow floor in famished zeal. He aligned himself toward Mecca by a small black arrow marked on the floor at the foot of his bed, then knelt on a thin foam mat.

  There was little space for much else. The room was six feet by eight feet, eight inches, with the bed taking up about a third. It was his home for almost every hour of every day, except for those times when he was forced back into the white room, the clean but cold den of the snakes. Otherwise, there was only a once-weekly trip to the showers, when he was escorted at gunpoint to bathe beneath coils of razor wire, plus a half hour each day of “exercise,” a bit of idling on a small cement corner while he stared across the grounds toward the burrows of other mice who spoke in other tongues.

  He had few belongings, only what they had given him in a small bag on the very first day, replenishing his supply as each item ran out: his orange jumpsuit, flip-flops for the shower, a white cloth prayer cap, a foam sleeping mat plus a sheet and two blankets for his bed, a washcloth, two small towels, a stubby toothbrush that fit onto a fingertip, soap, shampoo, the prayer mat, and a copy of the Quran that came in a plastic bag.

  The toilet in his room was a hole in the floor in one corner. In another corner was the sink, where the water emerged in a pale yellow stream that was as warm and stale as the air. He had to stoop to wash his hands, and he had to stoop lower to get a drink, gulping straight from the faucet. The hawks wouldn’t give him a cup. A security risk, they said. You might use it to throw your own shit and piss at us, the way you did earlier—he didn’t remember any of that now, but had no reason to believe it wasn’t true. Or you might make something out of it, a weapon even. They told him the sink was built low to make it easier for him to wash his feet for prayers.

  But Adnan no longer bothered with ablutions, because piety no longer motivated his prayers. He had been religious back in Yemen, and even more so in Afghanistan, when his hopes for adventure had turned bleak and hopeless in the face of gunfire and deprivation. Whenever death came near, God had seemed to lurk right over his shoulder, a fine warm breath upon his neck. But in this place he sensed God only as an absence, a void. God, in his infinite wisdom, had escaped and taken no one with him, vanishing without a word into the vapors of the heat. So prayer became merely a wheel in Adnan’s timepiece and, when meshed with the clockwork of mealtime, told him the approximate hour of the day. In a world without horizons beneath a sky with no stars, calibration was its own salvation.

  The wheel of his day turned like this: dawn prayer, breakfast, shower time (but only once per week), sick call, noon prayer, lunch, a half hour in the exercise yard, mail call, sunset prayer, dinner, evening prayer.

  The only events that always came upon him without warning were the summonings to the dens of the snakes. In the beginning—or what he could remember of it—he had been taken to them daily, locked into chains and shackles by the hawks, then delivered to the dens. The hawks hobbled him onto a cart that glided across gravel paths. The vipers’ chambers were divided into eight rooms all in a row, like a giant egg case, a place where perhaps they gestated, reproduced. Or, no, he decided, amending his version of the natural order, perhaps these rooms were instead aligned like the stomachs of a camel, each with its own digestive function. But he was always taken to the same one. Always the third door and, behind it, the same two men working in tandem. And sometimes a third behind a mirror, where he could detect just enough movement when the light changed to know that the mirror was really a window. Eventually he discarded this image of the camel stomachs and began thinking of the rooms instead as holes in the ground, deep places where the snakes lay in wait behind their mirrors and beneath their tables.

  In the earliest days the snakes splayed him, stripped him, and held him wide open to their hissing. They circled and swayed in the manner of cobras, broadening to show their hoods, while the rollers of their chairs emitted mouse squeaks to echo his own as they circled toward him to strike. Prim men who spoke Arabic sat to one side—jackals, he later named them—translating snake words into Arabic. Sometimes the questioners rose up from their seats to tower above him, then pierced him with fang and venom. Other times they tried swallowing him whole, their bones crushing his own until every juice was ingested into their systems.

  His vague recollection was that in self-defense he began to babble, to talk nonsense, but they only squeezed harder, until he was no longer sure of what he was saying. Or maybe he was saying nothing at all, the poison rigid in his jawbone, locking it shut. That must have been the case, because finally the day came when they left him alone, casting him back into his burrow for a few weeks of rest beneath the shadows of the circling hawks, who no longer came for him in the floodlit night.

  It was during that interval that he began to recover his sense of order, the clockwork of his days, then began to name and classify. And it was around that time that the newest of the creatures arrived. He, too, demanded Adnan’s presence in the lair of the snakes, but he was different. Quieter. Slower. He circled at a distance, and he didn’t hiss in the tongue of the others, or depend on a jackal to interpret his words. His use of Arabic was at first alarming, as if he must have crept into the family home in Sana, stolen the words of Adnan’s parents and sisters, and then twisted them almost beyond recognition with his serpent’s accent. Even as his mouth shaped Yemeni vowels and offered the buzzwords of the bazaar, his accent betrayed him as an interloper. But at least he never bared his fangs. Sometimes he even chose to circle with the hawks, especially at night, in the quiet hours when the permalight was at its harshest, or in the bleakness before first prayers, when Adnan’s sense of time was at its weakest.

  Like every other beast inhabiting the world outside Adnan’s burrow, this one offered no name. So Adnan came up with one of his own, settling on the Lizard. Still a reptile, but without the snake’s bite. More like the big green creatures that he had seen beyond the fences, which were probably just other interlopers in disguise, waiting to shed their skins to take the form of huma
ns.

  Adnan decided that by keeping the Lizard happy he might gradually improve his life, and thus began their dialogue, cautious and wary at first, but harmless enough that Adnan began to almost welcome their sessions, now finding it a relief to leave the burrow. The Lizard never said much about himself, but he didn’t have to. You could learn a lot about a creature like him just by paying attention. He had been a soldier once, that much Adnan was sure of. And he had lived in this place before, at a much earlier time. His lack of uniform meant he now must be working for one of the security services that practically everyone in the world had heard of, even in Sana—the CIA or the FBI. All of this had piqued Adnan’s curiosity for reasons he wasn’t yet ready to reveal. When Adnan returned to the burrow from one of their meetings he did something he had never yet tried—so far as he could remember—and shouted to the other mice in the cells all around him.

  “I told them nothing!” he yelled, having heard others shout the same thing.

  There was applause, a few words of encouragement in Arabic.

  “Allahu Akbar!” someone offered, missing the point entirely. It was not about God anymore. It was about spreading the word, filling in the blanks, passing along the news of this new world that he was finally beginning to comprehend.

  Up to now, he supposed, he had been a broken link in the chain of communication that often spread news among the cells of Camp 3. Newer arrivals had passed word to them that they were in Cuba. Others had told them that the whole world knew of their existence. Every bit of information added dimension to his new sense of things. Word went around that a few dozen men had actually gone home, back across the water on the same plane that had brought them here. Adnan, who had always stayed out of these cell-to-cell conversations, mended his ways and joined in, telling the others even more than he had told the Lizard. Because he had secrets. And he now knew intuitively that if the snakes and the Lizard wanted those secrets, then perhaps they could also be of value to the other mice.

  Last night the Lizard had surprised him, even scared him a little, by coming for him at the worst of hours. It had thrown him off balance and made him want to hasten their conversation along. Perhaps that was what had jarred loose one of his deeper memories from his days in Yemen, an item that until then had been irretrievably buried. It was the name of Hussay, the man who had paid Adnan’s way across the seas. Both travel agent and sponsor, Hussay had been yet another foreigner with a bad accent.

  But Adnan’s revelation seemed to have no effect. The Lizard seemed to think Hussay was just another Yemeni, and he infuriated Adnan by insisting on asking for a family name, as if people such as Hussay ever gave them. To make matters worse, one of the snakes of old then burst through the door. Adnan immediately recognized the reptile grin, the gray coat that had always been shed like an old skin whenever the squeezing began, peeled off against the chairback to stay in place as the snake rose from his seat, preparing to strike.

  So Adnan refused to say anything more, even when it seemed that the Lizard was as angry at the snake as he was, an oddity that he wasted no time in reporting to his neighbors once he had returned to the burrow.

  Adnan was still contemplating the implications of the matter as he rose from his bed at the hour—by his reckoning—of about 10 p.m. It was time for a journey, a walk through his hometown of Sana. These walks were another recent addition to his schedule. By pacing back and forth in his cell, he dreamed his way back home, step by step. If he shortened his stride just a little, he could squeeze in four steps for each trip across the floor, then make four more crossing back. It generally took about ten minutes before he left this place behind and found himself upon the streets and alleys of home, where the odd and timeless architecture made every building look like an iced layer cake of pale stones and white paint, with adornments on every door and window. Where to go today, then, on this late afternoon with the sunlight creeping low across the mountains, a cooling butterscotch that softened every corner and roofline. He crossed cobbles, and then pathways of packed mud, working his way east through the alley of the qaat parlors, where everyone chewed the intoxicating leaves and spit gobbets of brown juice onto the floor. Men crouched on their haunches upon wooden platforms raised before every storefront along the way. Onward he walked, climbing now, first up a hill and then up some stairs, to a third-story roof and its view across the city, Sana spread below him with its marketplace sounds clanking up to him across the rooftops. The smells came, too, of cardamom and of clean mountain air. His bare feet were cool upon the plaster. Then down to the bazaar he went, passing Ahmed’s butcher shop, where the severed heads of five goats dripped blood into a plastic tub by the door. Ahmed sang as he skinned and trimmed the carcasses, shooing flies with each whisk of a long, glinting knife. Then came a voice calling out from far away. Adnan stopped in his tracks and saw himself facing the wall of his cell.

  “Adnan!” It was one of the hawks. The door of his burrow unlatched, and a flurry of words came at him, all of them incomprehensible except the last, which had become a countersign that meant it was time to see the Lizard.

  “Get moving, Adnan. They want you in interrogation.”

  His first stop was at another burrow, a bare one where he always waited for the cart that took him to the lairs. But this time the routine was different. They bundled him onto a truck, a big green one like the ones that armies used on the march, with canvas flaps across the back. They bolted him down, then drove on. And, wonder of wonders, they drove through one gate, and then through another. He could see their progress through a space between the flaps.

  Was it really possible? Was he leaving this place? Was he going home, back to the airplane that would fly him away to freedom, and to his mother and his sisters?

  The ride proceeded into blackness, his first experience of true nightfall in ages. This natural darkness was like a balm, not frightening at all, and it was cooler out here as well, the air smelling like plants, like dirt, a world where your feet would feel the ground instead of concrete. In his growing excitement he allowed himself a sigh of relief. The bus climbed a hillside, and when the driver paused to shift gears, Adnan thought he heard the chorusing bugs of the night desert, which stirred him even more deeply.

  His hopes sank, however, when the bus stopped at yet another gate, where hawks in smaller numbers circled with flashlights and shouted to one another, ushering the truck inside. He knew this place, he realized. It lived in his vaguest, most muddled memories from his arrival. It was where he had stayed for months before winding up in his current burrow. This was the place where the cages had been stacked from end to end. But now, even in the darkness, he could see they were empty and overgrown with vines that had spread across them from the adjacent hillside, this hated old home given over to the jungle.

  They took him off the bus, his steps shortened by the irons around his ankles, and they shoved him toward a trailer like the one that contained the lairs. A door opened onto a lit room with a table, two chairs, and a mirror on the wall. But this time the Lizard was nowhere to be found.

  Then the snakes arrived. There were two, both unfamiliar to him. One wore the mottled green plumage of the hawks. The other was in more typical snake’s clothing, although not in the gray skin that some of them liked to shed. It was frigid in here. It felt about forty degrees after the heat outside, and the box in the wall blowing the cold air seemed to be turned as high as possible, wheezing loudly.

  A hawk shackled his leg irons to the ring in the floor. Then the snake in mottled green muttered an order, and the hawk pulled Adnan’s shirt up over his head. He knew better than to struggle, but it was freezing without his shirt. There seemed to be some confusion about what to do next, until finally the hawk unlocked his leg irons just long enough to strip off his pants, then his shorts, before hastily locking him back into place. When Adnan made a move to climb into the chair, the gray snake shoved him in the back until he fell to the floor. The hawk then handcuffed him and produced a chain, which
he looped through the leg irons, pulling it tighter until the second snake barked a command. Adnan was hunched and chilly, a tickle rising in his throat and his sinuses clogging. A hood went over his head, and now he began to resist, but it was too late. Some sort of rope was pulled around his neck, just tight enough to keep the hood from slipping free. Then he heard furniture moving and chairs scraping the floor. A few moments later music began to play, like the screech of something electronic and rasping, a throbbing sound like a heartbeat, and all of it blended in a way that hurt his ears. Then it was louder still. He could barely hear the voice of the snakes over it all.

  This went on for what seemed like hours until finally the music abated. His ears rang, aching from the noise and the cold. Then he felt one of the snakes leaning closer, the breath upon his ear, almost welcome if only for its warmth.

  The snake spoke in its own tongue, then one of the jackals offered the words in distorted Arabic: “Tell me about Hussay, Adnan. Tell me about him and everyone else he worked with. Where was Hussay from, Adnan? You know, don’t you? Where did he come from? Where was his home?”

  Adnan didn’t even bother to shake his head. The snake waited a while and then asked the same questions a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth. And when Adnan still did nothing he sensed the snake easing away from him. Then the music resumed, louder than ever. And someone took the chain bolted to the floor and wrenched it tighter. The aching in Adnan’s bent joints and arched back made it feel like someone was wringing him like a wet rag, and the coldness made his bones throb.

  What was it that he had called this bit of information about Hussay, this memory that he had offered up to the Lizard only yesterday? His great gift. Yes, a gift that he now wished he had never offered. One of the snakes, it seemed, must have figured out exactly how great, even if the Lizard hadn’t. If that were true, there was probably no way they would be stopping this treatment anytime soon. Not until they had the rest of his secrets.