He’s directing her to lie facedown on the pallet. Before she buries her eyes in the scratchy wool she catches a glimpse of his sandaled foot in the lantern light, curly black toe hairs gleaming, and the rifle barrel, her senses so attuned she can pick out the dust and carbonization on the flash suppressor dangling there beside his knuckled toes, inches from her head. He’s breathing hard and fast like he’s just run a sprint. Her palms are drawn instinctively to the back of her neck, her face pressed in the wool, eyes closed, better not to know, see, expect. Of these, expectation is the worst. She’s reduced to paralysis, not a weakling or a coward but a soldier, she who’s persisted where others have folded insensate. And yet the gun barrel forces itself between two of her clinched fingers and she allows this to happen; it digs into the hollow directly above her spinal cord. What jujitsu could she use to wrest it from him and blow him away?—but that’s Hollywood bullshit talking. He’d kill her, or someone else soon would. For the time, fighting is not what affords her the best chance.
“You are bad,” he says again, and begins to grope her. A callused hand slides beneath her dress, squeezing and rooting in her flesh, between her legs. He removes the gun from the back of her neck to get a better purchase. She can smell the tartness of his breath, his unwashed body, her every muscle gone rigid with revulsion and alarm. Feels like she’s being robbed. The maddening unfairness of that. Never in her life has she allowed a man to do this. She’s sobbing, choking hiccupping sobs.
“Please, don’t. Please. You don’t have to. This is wrong. You shouldn’t do this. A good Muslim wouldn’t do this.”
The words escape her like a stumbled-upon incantation. The way a smart person can figure the exact right move to get her way with a stranger. To wheedle, to praise, to hurt. To provoke a swift, different, and violent response.
He jerks his hand from between her legs and strikes the back of her head with the heel of his palm. She smells blood iron and sees silver. He’s straddling her and cursing. “Shut fuck up!” His tone is outraged, indignant, like she’s committed some contemptible transgression against him and not the other way around. “I do not need you. I am looking for weapon. This is it.”
It’s an absurd excuse for what he’s done.
“I don’t have anything, okay?”
He takes his rifle and again uses the barrel to pin her head to the floor, this time with enough force she fears her skull might crack, impaled on a steel spike like rotted fruit. It was a desperate gambit, and she’s said the wrong thing. Challenged his religion, his manhood. Now he’ll kill her for it. Ready as she can be. Eyes scrunched, face buried, sobbing, reduced completely. But the pressure lets up. He doesn’t pull the trigger. He must know he couldn’t get away with that much. She has value, maybe more than he does himself. He shoves her head against the floor one last time and spits on her back and leaves.
Cassandra walks four paces and reaches out with her wounded arm to touch the wall with splayed fingertips, then does a right face and this time walks five paces before touching the wall again in precisely the same way. She’s just traveled half the perimeter of her cell. Without pause she does the other half and adds the lap to her mental tally of how many she’s completed so far this session—the number is thirty, representing 1,620 feet—having earlier measured the cell’s perimeter with her hands, which she estimated to be six inches from base of wrist to tip of middle finger.
She’s forgotten the exact number of feet in a mile. Sharp with numbers but never had a memory for that kind of thing, which is why she assumes the military, unlike the rest of America, is on the metric system. Not remembering the exact length of a mile, she’s substituted 5,400 feet as a reasonably convenient approximation. Convenient, because it’s the distance traveled in one hundred laps of her cell. Close enough for her purpose which, simply put, is distraction. She walks and lifts her arm to strengthen it and indulges in hate fantasies of what she’d like to do to Annas, the whole time keeping up with the math in her head. Her arm has healed enough for it to have stopped throbbing but the scabby shrapnel wound still itches like it’s mosquito bit. That curative sort of itch, the body making shiny new red skin. There doesn’t seem to be any permanent damage to her tendons or elbow; the worst of it was to the meat of her bicep, with a few splotchy scars there, and pinprick scabs on her hip where entered flecks of steel no bigger than sand. The real damage comes later and is intangible. Goddamn men. Nature, with its two-bodied disregard for fairness. For the first time in a while she thinks about the unsolved rape at Camp New York, which she knows was just a thing that happened, and not even to her, a thing in the past that’s unconnected causally in space and time from what’s happening now, and a forewarning of it only in the sense that war is hell and men are men everywhere.
She walks and keeps the tally and envisions how Annas’s face will look after she puts a bullet through it. Complete darkness. Trusting the sameness of her stride and the touch of the walls to guide her. It gets to where she doesn’t need to use her hands and can feel a wall coming in the dark with a phantom sense like a bat’s sonar. Not just her imagination, either, but something about how the timbre of sound changes as she circles the empty room. Probably the best thing she could be doing right now, distraction is good, and also there’s the sheer practicality of exercise, the best way to prepare for the unknown, her intelligence consumed by the physical activity, hateful fantasy, spatial mindfulness required to navigate without sight, the tallying of distance, the illusions of forward progress, revenge, survival: together, enough to totally occupy her mind.
Five paces, right face, four paces, right face, now exploring a new and very twisted way to kill him: fake-seduce him and take him in her mouth and bite off his rigid cock, bleed him to death from his bitten-off cock stump; Jesus, girl; fifty more laps, and having slain him fifty more ways, she reverses direction, right faces become left faces, going counterclockwise to build muscle evenly. She’s amped, ready. Yesterday she did four miles before she couldn’t go any farther, her wounded arm tiring before her legs. Today her goal is to beat what she did yesterday. She’ll walk for seven, eight hours. Until she can’t anymore.
She completes a mile and takes a break, moving to the center of the cell where she’s dragged her pallet and set the plastic pitchers of water and her waste pail so as not to stumble and spill anything. She has to ration the water, especially with working out like this, but allows herself the luxury of a long satisfying drink, forgetting for a moment its questionable provenance, the taste metallic, over-iodinated. At least someone has tried to purify it. At least there’s that.
She sets the pitcher down and guesses by the difference in weight that it’s a quarter gone. Clicks on the penlight to check. Pretty close. Just then she’s startled by McGinnis crying out in his cell, a yelp of pain and surprise. In a moment she’s in the corner with her ear to the drain, listening. She can’t remember hearing his door open. Whether a guard is in there. Sounds like he’s muttering to himself now. She taps to get his attention.
O-K—O-K—O—
He taps rapidly to Y, as in Yes, I’m OK.
She taps, W-H-A—
He interrupts and races to Y again; taps, F-E-L-L.
How
Tried climbing cut arm on bolt falling
Cut bad
Not too, he says.
Window solid
Never reached
Sorry you hurt
OK
Sorry about before too
OK I sorry too, he says.
Why
Heard what he did to you
She takes a while to respond.
Nothing happened
There’s a guard outside her cell messing around with the lock. She stops her pacing and goes to the far corner and drags the pallet atop the grated drain to muffle the sound so that McGinnis won’t have to listen this time to whatever’s coming. The door creaks slowly open. She sits on top of the pallet directly over the drain and wraps her abaya over her face, as they�
��ve instructed her to do whenever they enter. No look. Cover eyes.
“Hello. It’s okay to take off.”
She lowers the fabric, recognizing the voice as Hafs’s. Of all the guards she’s had dealings with—besides Walid, whom she encountered more often when she was delirious with fever—Hafs is the best English speaker. Perhaps because of this, he’s also the one who’s shown her the most kindness. He enters the cell and leaves his rifle propped near the door, setting it there out of reach and taking care, during their meeting, not to let her come between it and himself.
“I bring food.”
“Thanks.”
“Eat, eat.” He gestures magnanimously at the plastic sack he’s placed beside her. He retreats to the door and leans against the jamb uneasily, a posture of forced coolness, watching her while she takes a bite of flatbread. Eating in front of him feels wrong. Too intimate, like using the toilet in front of someone you’ve just met, but she forces herself to do it because he seems to want that, and she thinks obliging his desires could do her some actual good, that his desires are neither as cruel nor as dangerous as Annas’s and might even be to help her. She does her best to savor the bread politely, and the greasy olives wrapped in the bottom of the sack, but still finishes the meal too quickly. She’s ravenous, has lost a lot of weight already, ten pounds or more.
As a surprise he produces from his pocket a Jaffa orange, tossing it underhanded across the cell. She flinches at the quick movement and fumbles the catch. The orange rolls between her pallet and the wall. She reaches for it, her first fresh fruit in well over a month, since Camp New York. Rotating the orange in her hands, marveling at its salamander sheen in the lantern light: it’s the most vibrantly alive thing she’s seen in a long time.
Hafs has also brought one for himself. He stands in the doorway, peeling it.
“You are Christian?” he asks casually, swallowing a bite. The question immediately recalls her first conversation with Haider at the traffic circle. This time she isn’t going to answer, at least not truthfully, any questions about her faith or lack thereof.
“Yes,” she says, trying to sound genuine. “But I have a lot of respect for Islam. The little I know about it. I’d like to learn more, though.”
She makes this statement knowing that Muslims tend to regard Christians in a better light than they do atheists. Christians and Jews are the People of the Book. More factoids culled from the cultural-sensitivity brief, which may prove to be the best piece of army training she ever got.
Hafs appears immensely pleased. He’s just about beaming, giving her a goofy teenage grin like she, the most popular girl in school, has just bestowed special attention on him. “Good, good,” he says. “You are already one-half Muslim. You know, if you say the Shahada, you go to paradise.”
He smiles again. She forces herself to smile back. His guilelessness amazes her, but then again, he’s devout, even for this bunch, and devotion is the enemy of guile. Through the cell door she’s heard him praying, salaaming and chanting out there in the hallway during his guard shifts; once, she listened as he prayed so hard and fervently, he worked himself into a crying jag through nothing but the power of his own overwhelming spirituality. She wonders how it’s possible for him to be touched so deeply by a thing he can’t even see, and yet, at the same time participate in caging a fellow human being in these conditions.
“If you want,” he says, “I bring you Qur’an.”
“That would be good. Yes, definitely.” There’s no need for her to fake enthusiasm at the prospect of having access to reading materials. Anything would be welcome, even holy scripture, a type of literature she’s never been much interested in. At this point, however, she’d gladly read the phone book. “But, Hafs,” she adds, “I could never read in here. It’s way too dark whenever you’re gone.”
His smile melts into a frown and a studied look at the lantern. In his zeal he’s forgotten this overriding limitation of her existence.
“Is no problem,” he says. “Soon, I look in bazaar. I bring better light. I bring English Qur’an. Arabic is best, but I can teach. You can help my English.”
“Good,” she says. “It’s a deal.” He takes a smiling bite of his orange, the juice dribbling over his chin. She eats hers more carefully, not wanting to waste it, and thinks over what might happen if she were to tell him about Annas. That one of his fellow guards has mistreated her. The calculus is whether suffering the inevitable reprisal by Annas will be worth whatever punishment he himself might receive at the hands of his superiors. Whether they’d care at all. She weighs the choice and decides it isn’t worth it, not yet. Better to keep her mouth shut for the time being. What she needs now is not to set a grand plan into motion but to think smaller. What she needs is more information.
“Hafs, can I ask something? Are you Iraqi?”
He appears to find it amusing, the suggestion he might be from this place. “No, no. I am soldier in the Islamic army. Since two years, jihad.”
“What’re you going to do to me? Do you all want money? What’s going to happen?”
You shouldn’t have just come out and asked that, she thinks; the fear in her throat is like an invisible hand playing at strangulation. She watches him considering how to respond, probably gauging how much he should divulge, whether he is betraying his cause and comrades by telling her anything at all. The boy looks sympathetic but with a prickly sort of impatience, like she should’ve known better.
“There is no problem, sister. Inshallah.”
They’re brought from their cells to be interrogated on video. They’re brought one by one, and she’s last to arrive. When the blindfold comes off she sees McGinnis and Crump kneeling to her left and right. She’s also been made to kneel, swivels her head to check what’s behind her—the first thought, it’ll come from behind—but there’s nothing there, just a bare wall with some kind of black Islamic flag hung on it. The room is lit by sunlight through a slatted window, long thin slats, the window reachable from the ground; this is some other room than McGinnis’s cell. She hasn’t seen the sun in two weeks, and it hurts her eyes like standing too close to a hot fire.
She recognizes a few of the guards. Hafs, Annas, an older man named Mohammed, and the tall aristocratic one who had a cold when she first saw him; there are also several others she doesn’t know by name. All are armed, kitted up like they’re about to go into battle. It’s not hot but she’s sweating through her abaya. She doesn’t look closely at them or make eye contact, holding her gaze mostly at the floor, stealing sidelong glances at her friends. McGinnis and Crump are looking haggard, grubby sallow skin and neck beards, Crump especially grizzled, wearing an eye patch, face all bruised up. Each man has lost twenty pounds, easy. Makes her wonder what she looks like. Not out of vanity but it’s disconcerting not to know.
There’s a broad bandage around McGinnis’s right arm. The cut from when he fell trying to climb his wall. The gauze is stained puss yellow in places, and the skin on his exposed arm looks sunburned, taut. She thinks of his allergies and whether Walid has something other than penicillin in that aid bag. Her eyes meet McGinnis’s and then she wishes they hadn’t. The contagion, fear. She looks away, at Crump, who refuses to engage with her or anyone, staring fixedly at the slatted window with one eye bleary and angry; unlike her or McGinnis, he’s had his hands bound in front of him with a plastic zip cuff. A number of things can be inferred from this. Crump is pissed. Crump is unruly. Crump has been driven berserk by the dark solitary cell.
The door opens, and the guards make way for Walid, who isn’t armed. He carries a clipboard and is dressed all in black except for a white rounded skullcap. The outfit makes him look like a severe cleric. He moves confidently through the room and approaches the prisoners, punctiliously handing each one a sheet of paper as if he’s an instructor distributing teaching materials.
“We’re going to make a video,” he says in his British-inflected accent. “Look at these words and put them into your heart
. You must say them like they’re your own. You’ll have twenty minutes, then we’ll rehearse and film it.”
She looks down at her paper, the print in neat block letters like those an engineer might make.
My name is Cassandra Wigheard. I am an American soldier. I have been tried and found guilty of supporting the United States’ invasion of Muslim lands. My life is in danger. Please help me. This is not a plea to President Bush, because his lack of concern for those sent to this hellhole is well known. This is a plea to the people of America. I am asking for the release from captivity of all Iraqis. I am asking you to petition the government to end this war. Please, do what you can to save my life.
She looks up. The kid, Hafs, AK-47 in hand, has wandered across the room and sidles up next to her. While Walid is occupied with staging, directing his men as they rig a tripod supporting a photographic light, Hafs smiles and leans in and pulls back the charging handle of his rifle. There’s a banana clip in it, but when he operates the charging handle, the bolt slides back a couple inches to reveal an empty chamber, both the rifle and the magazine unloaded.
“See?” he whispers. “Is okay. Is just for video. Like I say to you, no problem.”
10
SLEED: COLLATERAL
1 Day After
IRAQ (TRIANGLETOWN)
The shamal hit. Those bastards were smart to time their attack right before it did. We kept on going through the dust and sand blowing around, but it made the search almost impossible. There were a couple crucial hours we couldn’t get birds in the air to spot for us, and when the weather did clear, we still hadn’t found the three MIA. They weren’t sheltering in the palm grove near Triangletown like we’d hoped, weren’t lying facedown like Worthy in a ditch, or inside any of the ramshackle houses and outbuildings we raided. By that time, most of the brigade had been called out to help. Navy divers were on the way to dredge the canals. Psy-ops teams drove trucks rigged with loudspeakers that broadcast warnings in Arabic and messages of support in English. Colonel Easton was on scene, supervising the whole shit show.
Spoils Page 14