The Sleeper

by Christopher Dickey

  There was nothing I was going to say. Not to him, not then, and not in front of anybody in any of these cages. I just stared straight into him. Then he turned away, followed by the sergeant and a couple of privates.

  The food came in a clear plastic bag full of smaller plastic bags: barbecued potato chips, a pack of peanuts, a couple of cereal bars; there was a box of sugar-frosted cornflakes and there was a little pack of raisins. It was like I had America in my hands—my old America from when I was a kid lying on the sofa munching in front of the tube. There were Tony the Tiger and Mr. Peanut, and that was the Sun Maid, who smiled at me from the plastic, her hair covered by a red bonnet and dark locks falling over her shoulders, her arms reaching out over a big basket of grapes. She looked different than I remembered her. Her skin was lighter. Why was that? Who was this Sun Maid who’d never seen the sun?

  “Bosnian?” The voice came from behind me, a loud whisper almost next to my head. “You Bosnian?” In the cage that backed onto mine was an Arab with a boyish face who looked like one of those foreign students at Kansas State who wear backward baseball caps instead of headdresses and spend more time at Hooters than the mosque. “Are you Bosnian, brother?” the Arab asked again. “Or Albanian? Where are you from?” His English was very easy to understand, with almost no accent, like he’d grown up in California—but not quite. I remembered that kind of accent from the Gulf War. “I am from Kuwait,” he said. “Where are you from? When did they get you?”

  I half smiled at the Kuwaiti, but said nothing. Let the prisoners spread the word I was Bosnian Muslim. Hell, I used to think I was. Let them believe what they wanted.

  Dusk seeped around us and a loud electric crack split the air. Current hummed above our heads and the cold rays of floodlights filled every cage. Now loudspeakers crackled. “Allahuuuuu-akbaaaarr.” God Is Great. They were playing a cassette of the call to prayer. That’s pretty damned politically correct, I thought. This never happened in the carrier. And one by one we stood up in our cages.

  I did not look like anyone around me, but at this moment I knew how to be part of the umma, the great Muslim mass of the faithful. Whatever I believed, I knew the routine. With water from the bucket I washed my feet and my hands and my face, and I turned my back on the sun. I bent my head in prayer, and prepared to kneel in submission to God—facing due East.

  “Qibla?” someone shouted. The direction to Mecca. I looked up. The one-eyed Sudanese who had paced off the inside of his cage like a linesman looked in the direction of the lost sun, and toward the creeping shadow of night beyond the halo of the floodlights. He turned in a circle searching, like a dervish turning, looking for a sign that would tell him where Mecca might be.

  Captain Jackson’s superiors didn’t think this one through, I guess. In Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, in Pakistan and Indonesia, Mecca lies to the West. But not in this place, a world away in the middle of nowhere. The faithful didn’t know which way to turn. “Qibla!” the Sudanese shouted again and again, louder each time. “Qibla!” shouted another voice in the next set of cages. Others took up the chant. “QIBLA!” Where was the holiest, the most adored of cities? Where was the Ka’aba? Guards shouted, telling the prisoners to calm down. But no one listened. Some of the men in the cages were pushing and pulling the storm-fence walls, pushing-pulling together to make the whole structure rattle. Others stood half-naked, their towels in their hands, looking for a place and a way to pray. The Sudanese threw a flying kick at the door of his cell. The man to my left did the same. Now the whole umma of Guantánamo was shouting, cheering, chanting. And now the call to prayer was drowned by the howl of an alarm.

  A squad of Marines, helmeted and padded like the guards on the ship, rushed into the gravel alley in front of our cells. Still the chanting continued. They faced the doors of our cells. They were looking for the leader. But there was no leader. Behind them, outside the fence line, Marines with M16s and M79 grenade launchers deployed as a second line of defense in case the guards lost control. One of the padded Darth Vaders stepped forward toward my cage door. “What’s this kibble shit?” he said.

  I smiled, said nothing, turned to the East and spread out my prayer towel.

  “You!” the guard shouted.

  I shook my head and closed my eyes, making a quiet show of speaking to God, then heard a heavy vehicle rolling over the dirt road outside the fence. I said the first lines of the Fatiha, which is the Lord’s Prayer of Islam. “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate…”

  They were bringing up a water cannon. “Desist!” shouted a voice over the loudspeaker—a woman’s voice. The men in the other cages looked at each other and up at the nearest guard tower, where a heavy woman noncom in BDUs and cap with a blonde ponytail was trying to shout them down. The black Arab climbed up the inside of his cage and pounded with his fist against the inside of the corrugated roof. Other prisoners did the same until a kind of thunder rolled through the camp.

  The nozzle of the cannon drooled for a couple of seconds then exploded, knocking us off the walls of our cages, off our feet, forcing us back like twigs hosed off a sidewalk. Most of the men hung back at the far side of their cells after that first blast. But I stood up—stood in the center of my cage, turned East, and thinking “fuck you all” started again the routine of prayer. My eyes were closed now, but I could hear the water turning toward me like my own perfect storm. It hammered my head and ribs. I tried to brace myself on the slippery concrete floor, I steadied, I stood. The water moved on. I stood up and walked back to the middle of the cage and began again to pray. The water came back and this time it didn’t let up, battering me, drowning me, shoving me across the floor of the cell. A phalanx of four guards assembled outside the cage door. The Kuwaiti looked on wide-eyed from the far side of his cage, then signaled something to the Sudanese and to other prisoners I couldn’t see. From a human throat nearby came the wail, again, of the call to prayer. Suddenly the water stopped. I saw in the next cell and the next and the next, all the prisoners turned toward the East, taking the direction I had set. Then the Darth Vaders were on me, pinning me to the wet cement. For just a second I saw myself lying in a puddle on the driveway in Westfield on a hot summer day when I was three or four, just smelling the water and the cement and feeling good about it, like I was home.

  I was cuffed, shackled, carried away.

  Chapter 23

  “Did you sleep well?” A doctor in hospital green was leaning over me, a dark shape outlined against the white canvas roof of a hospital tent.

  I shook my head and pulled against the restraints on the gurney.

  “I thought they’d given you something,” he said.

  “They did.”

  “I see.”

  The doctor came into focus. He was about thirty-five or forty, a big man with the beginnings of a potbelly, and as he talked he filled up the airspace over my head. His scrubs were wrinkled and looked like he’d slept in them. He had a day’s growth of stubble and his eyes were red but alert. From what I could see lying there on the gurney, nothing about this doctor was stupid rules and regulations and drink-from-the-

  clean-bucket. He looked completely out of place in this military base. If he was good at his job of doctoring, then that was probably all he was good at, and that was enough.

  “Doc—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m an American.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sounds like it.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got a wife and a little girl.”

  “Can’t help you with that. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I’m under water and can’t get back to the surface.”

  He looked at the chart hanging off the gurney. “Yes. I can imagine. Looks like they went a little heavy on the dosage.” The doctor looked me up and down. I was naked except for a towel somebody had dropped over my crotch.

  “How did you get these bruises on your right side?”

  “Water cannon.”
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  He touched them and I felt his fingers make contact. There was a delay. Then I felt the pain.

  “So you were making a little trouble for Captain Jackson?” he said.

  “I was minding my own business.”

  “That’s why you’re here. You’re just an American family man minding his own business.”

  “Doc?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Navy Reserves.”

  “You’re doing your duty for America.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So was I.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because—because the government is confused.”

  “Confused?” He smiled. “Confused is an interesting word.”

  “Doc?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is America okay?”

  He thought for a minute. “Yes,” he said.

  “Was there another attack after—”

  A screen of suspicion crossed his eyes. “Don’t ask me for that kind of information,” he said.

  “If you know somebody—”

  “I can’t help you with anything but your health.” He listened to my chest with his stethoscope.

  “Marcus Griffin, CIA,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Just get a message to Marcus Griffin, CIA, that I’m here.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Langley will know where he is.”

  “I can’t help.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. But if you could.”

  “Will you lie still or do I give you something else to calm you down?”

  “I’ll lie still.”

  “You do that, and I’ll see what I can do,” he said in a soft voice that was reassuring, but not completely convincing. Then he headed for another gurney, an unconscious strapped-down detainee on the far side of the tent. He just wanted to shut me up, I thought. His act was just bedside manner. Gurney-side manner.

  “Doc?”

  He looked back over his shoulder, but didn’t stop.

  “My name’s Kurtovic,” I said. “Kurt Kurtovic.”

  By mid-afternoon I was back in the cage. As the guards took off my chains I heard a couple of other prisoners shouting: “Qib-la! Qib-la!” But this wasn’t prayer time. I didn’t understand. “Qib-la!” they yelled.

  “That’s your name,” said the Kuwaiti in the next cage. The black one-eyed Arab on the other side heard him and grinned. “Qib-la!” he shouted.

  “See?” said the Kuwaiti. “You showed us the way to Mecca. And look”—he pointed at the guard tower, the one where the woman guard with the ponytail stood shouting at us the day before—“they put your name up on the guard post.” A big white cloth banner hung from the tower due east of us. On it written in green was the single word “qibla.”

  I sat down in the opposite corner of the cage and looked north and west toward Kansas. “Won’t be long,” I whispered to myself. “Won’t be long.” I put my head against my knees and went back to the house in the meadow by the pond: my big, empty house that still needed so much work. None of the walls were painted yet. The kitchen wasn’t in. There were so many decisions to be made that I couldn’t seem to make, or at least couldn’t make by myself.

  The sky had darkened, the prayers had passed. It was after midnight as I watched the Guantánamo mosquitoes swarming around the floodlights. I let myself be hypnotized by clouds of suicide bugs plunging toward the gold heat, veering away, then coming closer again and again and again until they died.

  “Qibla?” The Kuwaiti again. “Qibla, you awake?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He speaks,” said the Kuwaiti.

  “Yeah.”

  “You think they will keep us here a long time?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Qibla, you are Bosnian?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You are a brother?”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t remember you from Kandahar.”

  “No.”

  “Or Gardez. Or Tora Bora.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where did they get you?”

  Wasn’t his business. No need to say.

  “When did they get you?” he asked.

  “And you?”

  “End of Ramadan.”

  “Ah. So you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “The wedding.” I said.

  “Many weddings,” he said.

  A knot drew tight in my stomach. “Many,” I said.

  “Oh yes. Bigger than New York. Bigger than Washington.”

  “Yes! But when, brother?”

  “Soon.”

  “Hamdulillah,” I said. Praise the Lord.

  “Soon, brother.”

  “Shhhhhhh,” I said.

  “I hear you,” he said and fell silent.

  Soon, he said. So the second attack hadn’t happened. Hamdulillah for that. The information from Abu Zubayr might have helped stop it. And my prize? This flood-lit storm-fence cell, invisible to the people I loved as they were invisible to me. The light went out. The mosquitoes scattered away from the lost heat, but in the dark I thought I saw the swarm of suicides go on.

  Chapter 24

  There were a couple of Guantánamo mornings when I woke dreaming of my father, and of Charles Atlas.

  At our house in Kansas my father never talked about Islam, which had been his religion in a whole world and a whole life I knew nothing about when I was a kid. If my father worshiped anybody, it seemed to me then, it must be Charles Atlas. “He was the one who brought me to America,” my father used to say, although strictly speaking that wasn’t true at all. And when I was a little boy he used to hold Charles Atlas up to me as a great example of what any man could do for himself. He always used the same word: “ ‘Resurrection’ is what it is,” he’d say. “This Charles Atlas was a ninety-seven-pound weakling, you see? And he made himself the most perfect body in the world.” When my father was just a kid in Yugoslavia he ordered one of those Atlas pamphlets through the mail and somehow it made it all the way there. It was the first book he ever read in English, he would tell me, and when he showed it to me, as he did many times, it always reminded me how old he was, how much he came from—not just another place, but another time.

  I was the baby of the family, much younger than my sisters, and only eleven when my father died of a stroke at the age of sixty-eight. So when I looked at the brown-ink pages he showed me when I was nine or ten it seemed they could have come from another century. But I don’t think he saw that in my eyes. At least, I hope he didn’t.

  “The Atlas method is ‘dynamic tension,’ ” my father would say as he pushed his big hands together and the muscles bulged up on his chest and shoulders. “No weights. Just using your body working against itself and what’s around you. They give it fancy names now. But it’s always the same. One muscle works against another muscle. Brillll-iant.” His accent came out in words with double l’s. “Brillll-iant. And you know where he learned this?”

  “In the zoo, Papa.”

  “In the zoo. That is correct. He watched the panthers in their cages. He wondered how they stayed so strong, with such muscles, in those little cages. And he saw them leaning against the walls, pushing, you know. This is dynamic tension.” Charles Atlas was the god of my father, I thought, and the idea made me smile, because his spirit was with me now in my cage. It was a real long time since I’d thought about dynamic tension, or Atlas, and a long time, too, since I’d let myself think about my father. But the human zoo at Gitmo, it was just ready-made for dynamic tension.

  The chaplain showed up, finally, after about three days: a short man with a gut like he’d swallowed a beach ball, he wore BDUs that weren’t quite creased. His skin was dark gray, like a well-done steak; his beard was streaked with white; his hair was buzzed short under a white crocheted skullcap. The chaplain stopped at every gate to every cage that morning, introducing himself as Ah
med al-Bakhsh, and talking to whoever wanted to talk. The one-eyed Sudanese always let him pass by, and when he came to me I just stared at the ripples in the corrugated roof. But the Squatter almost always talked to the chaplain, and in a language they both understood. I wondered how this man of God got his job. I wondered who vetted him.

  “He is a spy,” the Kuwaiti whispered to me through the wire one morning.

  I nodded silently. Yeah. But who for?

  As the days passed we got to know the guards better, and their routines—especially the hefty blonde woman with the ponytail. She stood on the watchtower with her binoculars and looked at everything below on a 6 A.M. to 11 A.M. shift. We pissed, we shit, we slept, she watched. Most of us didn’t wear the jumpsuits anymore. Towels were enough. And when the ponytail was the one in the tower she got a special show from the one-eyed Sudanese.

  He had about as big a dick as I’d ever seen. Hanging down, it looked like a riot club. When the ponytail was on duty, the Sudanese watched the lenses of her binoculars, waiting for them to swing in his direction—and they had to, because she had to keep an eye on everyone. Then the towel would drop. He’d put his hands on the wire above his head and just stare at her; didn’t even touch himself, just pumped his hips a little to make the thing swing back and forth. It grew hard and grew fast, swelling like a fire hose. The binoculars turned away, but he knew they’d be back. Had to be. Like a mortar at sixty degrees his dick aimed straight at the guard tower and he focused his one eye on the ponytail. When he knew the binoculars were coming back, then, finally, he wrapped his hand around the shaft of his cock. The touch did it. A thick spurt shot against the wire of his cell. There was no reaction in the tower. The glasses kept panning over the cages, and over the animals inside.