From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel

by Alex Gilvarry

  “We really shouldn’t stay here,” he said. “Best to get the check and go somewhere else.”

  He suggested we venture over to a club where his girlfriend, Star Von Trump, was performing that night. Von Trump was a transgender singer who performed at many of the city’s popular karaoke clubs. She had a successful following in Manila.

  I paid the check and we caught a taxi headed for The Fort, the city’s Fort Bonifacio district (formerly Fort McKinley, a U.S. military base until 1949). In the cab Boy took off his sunglasses. It was approaching twilight. The early evenings in Manila were otherworldly; the smog created a vibrant, almost radioactive sunset.

  Boy directed the driver in Tagalog, and there was a moment of confusion. The driver seemed to be ignoring him, and Boy became irate and started to raise his voice.

  “What did you say?” I asked, once we were moving.

  “I called him an idiot.”

  “Why?”

  “He called me one first. He’s an asshole and a homophobe. Aren’t you?” Boy said to the driver.

  “He proboked me, sir.” the driver said, politely. “He proboked me.”

  “Oh shut up,” said Boy. “Keep your eye on the road and drive.”

  The man did as he was told. The argument was over. The rosary beads dangling from the cab’s rearview mirror swayed back and forth as we merged onto the highway. I tried to put on my seat belt, but the female part of the buckle was missing.

  “Jesus saves.”

  “I’m sorry?” I said.

  “Jesus saves,” Boy repeated, pointing to an advertisement for a megachurch on the back of the driver’s seat sandwiched between an ad for Reebok and a spectacular shot of Michael Jordan, air bound, advertising nothing.

  Boy sat back in his seat and took off his wig. His hair was short, and I couldn’t help but notice how thin it had gotten. I then tried to diffuse the tension in the cab by asking him about some of the designers we both knew. Boy immediately began to liven at the subject. He was like a different person when talking about fashion. The success of Vivienne Cho’s fragrance line had surprised him. “It’s actually quite good,” he admitted. “They sell it here. She’s in duty free.” He admitted to buying a bottle for Von Trump. I told him Vivienne was planning to open several more stores in Singapore and Tokyo.

  When the conversation turned to Boy’s former classmate, Philip Tang, who had helped him significantly in New York, Boy just shook his head. He was bitter over something Tang had been quoted saying in the tabloids. “Oh, my fair-weather friend,” Boy remarked. “I have so many of those now.”

  On the way to the club, Boy pointed out where he was living. It was a luxury apartment complex called Manhattan City, a small replica of Midtown Manhattan in the heart of The Fort. Manhattan City had five buildings, no one higher than thirty stories, each fashioned in the image of a different New York landmark. Boy’s rented apartment was in the tallest one, a mini Empire State Building. There was also a mini Chrysler Building, a replica of Rockefeller Plaza, and even a MetLife building towering over an ambitious and fairly ornate Grand Central Terminal (actually a bus and train station called the GCT). Approaching The Fort district from the highway, one could see a mirage of the Midtown Manhattan skyline, perhaps as Boy had seen it from Queens on his first day in America.

  He took out another wig from his carryall and admitted it was Von Trump’s clothing he was wearing now. “I borrow from her when I have to go out. It’s funny how I’ve made women’s clothing for most of my life and I still can’t get used to dressing like this.”

  “You felt you needed to disguise yourself when you came home?”

  “No. It was after I got here. I moved in with my mother, into the room I grew up in. After a few weeks I began to notice that I was being followed by a white van wherever I went. If I went out shopping, there it was. One night I even saw it parked outside my family’s house.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “I didn’t question who it could have been. I just left Manila for Samar, the island where my mother was born. My family still has a house there on the bay. The setting was familiar in more ways than one. That’s where I met Star, actually. She saved me, you know.”

  “How so?”

  “I went out there with the intention of never coming back. My father had a banka that I had played in as a child. It’s just a small dinky boat. I planned to take it out into the bay as far as I could.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. It wasn’t even there anymore. The sea had washed it away. The caretaker had a banka, but I was too ashamed to take his only one. I offered to pay him for it, you know, but he said just take it. He wouldn’t accept my money. He wanted to lend it to me. At this stage the idea was getting complicated. The whole point of the boat was that it would be there when I arrived.”

  “Were you followed to the island?”

  “No. I saw no white van, nothing out of the ordinary. And then I met Star. She was performing at a small club that my cousin owned in Calbayog City. The next day I saw her on the beach from my window. I went down and said hello. She stayed back on the island, and soon my idea of going out into the bay started to fade. Star was pushing me to come back to Manila with her, but I was reluctant. Then one night, when we were playing around, trying on wigs—she has the most fabulous wig collection—I said all right. Though I decided I would need to take precautions.”

  “And is it working? Are you still being followed?”

  “I’ve seen the van, but not as of late. I take several cars at a time. One to the mall, Greenbelt, or the Galleria, and then I switch cars, or switch wigs in cars. If I do this when I go out, they can’t keep up with me. Coming here I took three cars just to be safe.”

  Boy put on a short brown wig, a pixie look. He straightened it using the driver’s rearview mirror.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  In the club we watched a few run‑of‑the-mill drag queens perform top-forty pop songs. The selections were typical of any karaoke bar. Von Trump was the club’s headliner that evening. She was like an ideal woman seen through the eyes of a middle-aged American tourist: olive complexion, perfect breasts, a tall hourglass figure, long legs. Tonight she was blond; tomorrow she could be a redhead. She was beautiful in her own pretense. Though she didn’t possess a great voice, she used it to a seductive effect. It bled sexuality. She closed with “Bésame Mucho” and did an encore of “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” Now and again she looked over in Boy’s direction. We didn’t say much to each other during the set. We only watched and listened. After, Boy suggested we move to a private karaoke chamber where we could talk.

  A hostess led us to Boy’s favorite room. He was a regular. Von Trump had been performing at the club for several months now. She brought in the crowds, and Boy came once a week to watch the show.

  The subject turned to his ex‑girlfriend Michelle Brewbaker, the aforementioned playwright whose debut, The Enemy at Home or: How I Fell for a Terrorist, enjoyed a short run on Broadway before the BEHAVE movement eclipsed it entirely. Boy, as one can tell from his treatment of Brewbaker in his confession, was rather unforgiving when speaking about her. “In prison I spent a lot of time thinking about the two of us.”

  Brewbaker insists she intended for the play’s title to be ironic. According to her, she didn’t set out to make a grand statement on Boy’s case. She thought she had written a topical character study of two people caught in the net of post‑9/11 paranoia. Brewbaker, who is now seen as a right-wing darling, has made serious attempts to shake this image.

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “I’m too bitter to ever forgive Michelle for writing that play.”

  With the remote control he chose a song by Chloë, the actress-singer-songwriter who starred in the Broadway production of The Enemy at Home. For a moment we just watched the words of her hit single, “Chas-titty,” fill the screen over a slide show of photos from around the world: London, Bangkok, Amsterdam,
Helsinki.

  “It baffles me how things turned out,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Boy.” It was all I could think to answer.

  “I have a confession,” he said.

  This made me quite nervous. I was afraid he was about to violate the gag order, and even though I wouldn’t write about it, I feared that the Pentagon would somehow find out anyway. “You don’t have to say anything, Boy. I’m here as a friend. Not a journalist.”

  He laughed. “No, I wouldn’t lay that on you, man.”

  What followed was the first I heard of the document Boy had been assigned to write for his federal interrogator. Catallano had been working on getting the Pentagon to release it into Boy’s possession and was fairly optimistic about retrieving it, in part because it was used as evidence in Boy’s CSRT and should be made public.

  “I want you to read it for me,” he said. “If you could, I’d like you to tell me whether it can be published. It’s important to me that it’s handled by someone I know…who knew me before all this.”

  The confession, as Boy explained, detailed his life in America leading up to the time of his capture. What I did not know was that it was also a portrait of the island prison during its most volatile period.

  I agreed to help him.

  Boy once again brought up the Brewbaker play. He couldn’t come to terms with it being the only written work about his life as the fashion terrorist. If he could only get his confession out into the world, then his time in prison wouldn’t be a complete waste. This was Boy’s way to regain control, to take back the power his former captors still held over him. If his words had carried the strength to convince the convening authority in Washington of his innocence, then, he believed, they might also reverse his exile. For Boy, the publication of his confession could be the first step in his journey back to America.

  There was a knock at the door, and Von Trump joined us. She was still wearing the red sequined tube dress and blond wig from her show. After she introduced herself to me, she took a seat next to Boy on the plush sofa and placed her hands in his lap. Once again the conversation turned to fashion. He wanted Von Trump to know just how big he had been in New York, how his name had popped up in conversations, how his clothes had appeared in fashion editorials in all the major magazines. He wanted her to hear what other designers had thought of him, what I had thought of him, and he couldn’t disguise his own need to hear it too. His mania and his momentum made it seem like he was bouncing around the carpeted walls of the small red room. Von Trump said she’d never seen him like this before. He put his arm around her and asked, “Gil, what was the piece you wrote about me called again? Tell her, I forget.”

  “It was ‘The Fall of Boy.’ ”

  I knew he hadn’t forgotten. He couldn’t have. But he needed to know someone else remembered. And then his eyes went distant, as if he were looking through me, imagining everyone who once knew him by his name.

  1. Hicks was the first to be tried and convicted under the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and was released to Australia in 2007. Al‑Shihri, who was also released in 2007, has most recently appeared in an al‑Qaeda propaganda video in which he implicates himself in an embassy bombing in Saudi Arabia. Al‑Shihri was released into Saudi Arabia’s custody, where he underwent a rehabilitation program for former jihadis, only to fall in with al‑Qaeda once again.

  2. OGA: other government agency.

  3. “Panic in Tallapoosa,” New York Post, June 4, 2006.

  4. I suspect that the administration purposefully left this typo in order for the charges to have more gravity. It is, however, amended at the end of the charges.

  5. The second Cooperating Witness in the Hernandez case was later identified as Hajji, also known as Habib Naseer.