“How are you?” asked the emir.
“We’re hungry,” I said.
He immediately told one of the punks to get us food and he ran off to do as he was told. The emir then started speaking in Arabic, pointing all over the room. He told the guards to cut a hole in the wall above the door for ventilation—the walls were covered with a layer of moisture that made them impossible to lean against—and to give us a light because he didn’t want us to get sick. Both of these things were done the next day, the guards stringing a wire from where the fixture used to be in the ceiling, with a bulb dangling at the end. The emir also instructed Yassine to give us a bath and scissors to cut our beards, which had grown considerably long, mine dark brown with a silver stripe up the chin.
The hole above the door did little to help with the condensation problem, but it was a great source of light. A natural steel-colored glow burst through it, making it possible during the day to see across the cell. As usual, light made everything a little better for me, but Theo continued to stay under the covers as if it were some kind of sanctuary. Unfortunately, the hole also created a new problem, letting in giant mosquitoes and adding to the number of creatures feasting on our blood. It was so cold we were always under the blankets and barely had any exposed skin for them to land on, but at night as we tried to sleep they’d harass us by flying around our heads, that buzzing sound enough to drive anyone mad. Whenever the light went on, the first thing I’d do was search the walls and ceilings for those vampires and kill them where they sat—but, just like the jihadis, there were always more to take their place.
We weren’t the only prisoners in the building—once I thought I heard the voices of some of the POWs I’d been kept with at the hospital coming from the cell across from ours, but I couldn’t be sure. There were new people all the time, mostly guards we had never seen before. It was obvious that we’d been singled out for extra abuse. Some days they would blast loud music right outside our door for hours on end, just to drive us crazy—and it usually worked. It was so loud I pictured giant six-foot-tall wall speakers on wheels.
Outside our doors it was like some kind of postapocalyptic scenario where only the youth had survived and so had inherited the Earth. One night they had an indoor soccer game in the hallway outside our cell. As they kicked the ball back and forth, laughing and shouting, it was obvious they were having the time of their lives.
“This is insane,” I said. “This is the worst time of our lives and the best time of theirs, right?”
“Yeah,” answered Theo. “It’s Lord of the Flies out there.”
And he was right. It was Lord of the Flies, only instead of being armed with spears and bows, they had AK-47s and RPGs. The more time that went by, the more I hoped they would just kill me already. Between the cold, the dark, the mosquitoes, and Theo, this place was truly hell, and that’s exactly what we came to call it.
One night when the electricity was out, we heard a crowd of militants gathering outside our door. Flashlights shone from beneath it and lit the keyhole. We didn’t recognize any of the voices, and concluded from the tone that they were mostly management. After a few minutes of talk we heard the door to the cell across from ours open, the same door that I suspected held the POWs. Someone was removed before the door was closed again. Within a minute we heard the screaming.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
“This is so much worse than the hospital,” said Theo.
Whatever they were doing to this prisoner, it was being done in the hallway, practically right outside our door. His cries sounded like the screeching of a cat, and they echoed, bouncing from wall to wall like a laser in a room full of mirrors. All the while the guards were interrogating him: Theo heard them ask about the location of a certain general, but couldn’t make out much of anything else.
Once they were done with this prisoner they moved on to another, and then two more after him. They all screamed like hell except for one, who took it and barely made a sound. It was a good twenty minutes before they returned the last prisoner to the cell and locked it without removing another. Then they turned their attention toward us; I saw the blue ray of a flashlight beam straight through our keyhole.
“Oh shit, they’re comin’!” I said, turning on my stomach and facing the wall with the covers pulled over my shoulders.
The key slipped into the lock and turned. Our door opened and we heard several men standing in the entrance, having a short conversation. The first half ended in a word I knew: “moswer,” “photographer”—they were talking about me. The second part also ended in something I recognized: “CIA,” which meant they were talking about Theo.
“C-I-A, yala!” one of them yelled at Theo; he got up and was taken from the room without uttering a word.
The door was locked and I was once again in the position of waiting for my turn to be tortured. I didn’t move, just locked my hands together and started praying out loud as hard as I could, over and over.
“Please God, don’t let them hurt him too bad and protect me! Please God, don’t let them hurt him too bad and protect me!”
I heard them talking to Theo, but all he said back was, “No, wait! Please, please, please!”
Then his words transformed into screams. Within seconds of the first blow Theo capitulated and told them what they wanted to hear.
“Okay, CIA! CIA! CIA!” he cried out.
As soon as he did this the beating stopped. They loved showing off their CIA agent to visitors. I knew my time was coming, so I prayed even harder.
“Please God, protect me and keep me safe! Please God, protect me and keep me safe!”
The door opened and Theo was thrown violently into the room, landing directly on my leg and causing me to let out an involuntary scream. My turn—but our jailors had different ideas; they slammed the door and locked it. I had been spared.
As soon as the door closed Theo leaned his head on my shoulder, panting uncontrollably.
“You okay, man?” I asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, just don’t move!” he answered. “Don’t move!”
“Ohh-kay.”
So I lay still, as he leaned and breathed on me like a dog. After a few minutes it kind of got uncomfortable.
“Are you all right, man? You want me to rub your feet?” I asked seriously.
Theo let out a laugh, not realizing I meant it.
“No, that’s okay,” he said.
“They give you the tire?”
“No, no, they didn’t have one, so they threw a rope over the pipe and strung me up by my feet and hit me like that.”
Even right on the other side of the door I could not picture what that must have been like—strung up like a pig in the dark, with only the blue rays of the flashlights swirling around the hall. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life, and nothing had even happened to me.
Now that we had a light, we could disrobe and hunt for bedbugs again. Even when it worked, which was rarely, the light was dim due to lack of power, so I picked through my clothes sitting directly under the bulb, at the foot of our bed. I removed the label from the Pepsi bottle I pissed in, folded it in half, and crushed the bugs inside it to keep my blood and the insects contained. Needless to say, after being in the dark for a while I was crawling with them.
“I guess I’ll look too,” said Theo. “It kills time.”
Theo unzipped his jacket.
“Holy shit!” I said in shock.
What I saw was something not even James Cameron could have made up. His entire shirt was covered with bugs, like something straight out of a science fiction movie. Theo froze, wide-eyed, looking down at his colonized shirt.
“Yo, what’s that on your shoulder?” I asked.
He shifted his attention to his shoulder, where sat the biggest bedbug in the history of man.
“It’s just a piece of fuzz,” Theo said.
“Illlll, man, no way! It’s moving! It’s alive!”
Theo peeled off his shirt, and
I noticed that his skin was infected. He had sores, red bite marks, and deep scratches from his nails all over his torso. He looked like a leper. I couldn’t believe I had to share a bed with this guy. There must have been a thousand parasites crawling on that shirt, and I could only imagine how many of the ones on me came from him.
“I told you to look before, but no!” I fumed. “You didn’t have any!”
“I didn’t! These are from these blankets.”
“Yeah, whatever, keep tellin’ yourself that.”
When Theo picked the bugs from his clothes he placed them on the floor next to our bed and crushed them with a fingertip. This I did not like. I found it disgusting and in violation of my personal hygiene standards.
“Don’t do that!” I told him, over and over again.
“Okay, okay,” he’d say, without looking at me. He’d crush the next couple underneath our bottom blanket, like I’d asked him to, but he always returned to killing and leaving them on the open ground.
One day, after I’d watched him kill about twenty bugs this way, he got up, took a piss, and then walked back to our bed, stepping in the blood and the guts of the bugs he’d just killed along the way. It was not the first time I’d seen him do this, but it was the last.
“What the fuck did I tell you about walking in the blood and trackin’ it and the dead bodies onto our bed?” I asked, as he sat back down.
“You know what? Shut up!” said Theo. “I’ll do what I want. I don’t have to listen to you!”
“Oh really?” I asked.
A second passed as we stared each other down, and then I spontaneously punched him in the face.
“Ooooh, you fucking terrorist!” he yelled, rocking back and forth, as enraged as I’d seen him. “You’re just like them! You fucking terrorist!”
This provoked a reaction from me, considering all that I had done for him in the way of procuring extra food, blankets, and baths, so I jumped to my feet, grabbed him around the throat, and pinned him to the wall.
“I’m a terrorist?” I asked. “If I were a terrorist I’d steal your bread. If I were a terrorist I’d steal your blankets. Now don’t fuckin’ crush any more of those bugs where you walk! Do you understand me?”
“Yes! Yes! Just get off me!”
I let him go. I’m not proud of this outburst, but I was bent on keeping my humanity intact, no matter what—on not becoming the animal they were treating me as. I refused to let anyone drag me any lower.
It was around this time that I started trying to talk Theo into another escape attempt.
“We gotta get outta here or they’re gonna kill us,” I said, trying to motivate him, “or else just leave us here to rot.”
“I know.”
“We have to try and escape again. If only I could get a hanger or something to pick that lock.” To my surprise, Theo didn’t argue.
As we discussed our options it became clear that we didn’t really have any, but this didn’t deter me. We were thinking as one, and for just a few moments we had the bond that we should have had all along. Through the dimness of the cell I looked deep into Theo’s eyes and he stared back. We locked hands like brothers and made a pact that no two people should ever have to make.
“Either we escape together, or we die together,” I said.
“Yeah,” Theo agreed, and he squeezed my hand.
As time went by only one viable possibility presented itself. Almost every time the door opened, there was more than one person on the other side of it—one with the food and the other with a gun—but once in a while Yassine would pay us a solo visit for a late-night feeding. My plan was simple: I get up to give Yassine a fist bump and as soon as he raises his hand I grab it and pull him into the room, slapping on a choke hold until he is good and dead. When they moved us to this building I’d seen how quiet the complex was at night; I was confident that if we could just get outside we would make it out alive. Theo, of course, was against it. He said he didn’t want to kill anybody, even Yassine, who beat him practically every day. Since he’d already admitted he’d kill me for freedom, this kind of pissed me off, because it proved that his refusal wasn’t about taking a life; it was about fear of repercussions for the life he took.
“All you gotta do is cover his mouth if I don’t slap the hold on him right away, and shut the door,” I promised.
“No! If we kill one of them they’ll put the word out to every checkpoint and we’ll never make it out of the country alive. Then they’ll really make us suffer.” Like we were doing so great now.
“Come on, man, the FSA controls all the checkpoints to Turkey. These guys aren’t that organized, although I agree they’d probably try.”
“Forget it.”
“Come on, we made a pact! Escape together or die together, right?”
“No, forget it. I changed my mind.”
“What?”
“I’m not committing suicide with you,” Theo snapped in a bitchy tone.
“Well, if we stay here that’s exactly what we’re doing. At least if they kill us during an escape attempt we go out like men instead of dying on our knees.”
I kept talking, but it was useless. He was back under the covers, waiting to be killed or rescued, whichever happened to come first.
I couldn’t stop staring at our keyhole. It was one of those old-fashioned ones, like for a skeleton key, big enough to look through. I knew that if I could just get my hands on a hanger or some other kind of wire I would be able to pick it. So I started thinking about where I might get wire and I remembered my first apartment, back in Amityville, New York: it had a small stall shower, with wire rings holding up the curtain. I’d never looked at the rings on the shower curtains here. Later, when Yassine took us to the bathroom, the first thing I did was scope out the rings, and I could not believe my eyes. They were exactly the same as the ones I remembered. The shower was by the toilets, just out of sight of where Yassine stood in the door with Theo a few feet away by the sinks, so right before I entered the stall I unfastened one of the rings and left it in place. I wanted to see if it would be noticed and refastened by our next visit.
When we got back to the room I told Theo my plan. Of course he was dead set against it, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. The only thing I needed now was a good hiding spot, but this wasn’t exactly easy to come by. Except for us, the blankets, a bucket, and the water and piss bottles, the cell was completely empty. I knew if they found contraband of any kind, our punishment would be even more severe than the last time. The lights were working, so I took a good long look around the room. The only spot that seemed logical was the hole in the ceiling where the wire from the lightbulb was fed. Naturally, in order to check it out I’d need to stand on Theo’s shoulders.
“Come on, Theo, we can’t just sit here like this until they kill us. We have to get out of here and if I get that ring back here we can do it.”
“Because you have so much lock-picking experience, right?” he said sarcastically. “Why don’t I stand on your shoulders for once?”
“Because I have a bad back. I told you this a hundred times!”
That was a lie. There was nothing wrong with my back. I just didn’t want his filthy bedbug-crusted feet standing on my shoulders.
“Whatever, I’m not your butt boy.”
For the next hour I focused on annoying the hell out of him until he agreed to get up and let me check out the hole.
“All right, if I lift you up will you shut up?” he said.
“Yes, I promise.”
A few seconds later I was climbing up on his shoulders. To balance, I held on to the wall with one hand, and once up and turned around I was in reach of the hole, which was round and about the size of a poker chip. As I reached to put my finger through, it grazed the wire ever so lightly, and several sparks shot at my face like something out of a pyrotechnics display during a Metallica concert. Just after that, the room went black.
“Shit!” I said, getting down.
“Great!” said Theo. “I told you this was a bad idea!”
“I know, I know; you were right,” I apologized. “I’m so sorry. Boost me back up. Maybe I can fix it.”
“No, forget it!”
And I did. I was furious with myself. That light had been priceless to me. It protected me from the thoughts that would otherwise race through my mind in the darkness: How long will I be in this room? Do they know I’m Jewish yet? Does anyone back home know where I am? And the constant chorus: What the fuck did I do to deserve getting locked in a room with a guy like this?
Later, as I sat there staring at the light streaming in through the keyhole, I imagined how I was going to pick the lock, step by step, and planned out what I’d do after the door was open. It had a calming effect on me, but it didn’t last long.
Within three hours of unhooking the shower curtain ring the worst possible thing happened. It began with the sound of someone hammering nails into our door.
“No!” I said. “Don’t tell me they’re putting a padlock on there!”
The next time the door opened I saw a padlock affixed to it, about three-quarters of the way up. I couldn’t believe our luck. As soon as I had something that gave me hope, they took it away. I was devastated. It felt as if God were looking down and singling us out for maximized suffering. A few hours before, I’d had light and a possible escape plan, and now both had been taken away, leaving me with nothing but darkness.
We were in the dark for seven straight days this time. The hole above the door helped some during the day or when the electricity was on at night, but that was a rare treat during this period. Fed late at night, we ate in the shadows and had to stay under the covers to keep warm; without utensils it was nearly impossible to avoid dropping food onto the bed we slept on, and then there was no way for us to clean it up. Theo was back to emerging from the covers only when it was time to eat, which didn’t help my increasingly hopeless state of mind. Every time Yassine took us to the bathroom I begged him to fix the light, and every time he gave me the same answer:
The Dawn Prayer[Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison] Page 11