“All right,” I said to Yassine, with my head down. “I’m a CIA agent.”
As soon as the words left my mouth Yassine ran from the room, ecstatic, to brag about being the one who’d finally gotten me to say the magic words. I heard him telling Kawa the good news, and then he returned to take me back to my cell with no further abuse.
When I got back into the room, Theo and Abdelatif greeted me with identical raised brows and inquisitive looks that said: Well?
“I did it,” I told them. “I confessed.”
This was no surprise to either of them, especially when they heard what had happened after Kawa took me down to the boiler room. Theo smiled and looked ecstatic that I had at last been brought down to his level. About two hours later the door opened again; this time it was Abu Dejana, Kawa’s assistant. He led me across the hall and into the kitchen, where a video camera sat on a tripod. Kawa stood beside it, holding an orange jumpsuit. Next to him was Chubs the Canadian, wearing his usual black mask. In his hand was a small notepad.
“How’s my investigation goin’?” I asked him sarcastically.
Chubs didn’t answer, just translated Kawa’s instructions to put on the jumpsuit as he handed it to me. I pulled it on over my clothes with a deep sense of dread. Making one of these videos was one of the two things that I’d feared the most during my imprisonment, because of what it would do to my mother. The other one was decapitation. Once the jumpsuit was on I turned to Kawa and held out my arms.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“Take off your hat,” Chubs translated.
“Oh, come on, man, don’t make me take off my hat!” I said. “Please. I look terrible.” I pointed to my bald head and the scruffy hair at the sides that I always kept shaved back home.
“He said to take it off,” Chubs countered.
“But I don’t want my mother to see me like this.”
“He doesn’t care. You have to take it off.”
“Well, if I take it off, can I get some yogurt and bread for me and the boys?”
When Chubs translated this, Kawa looked down, shaking his head and smiling as if to say, The balls on this fuckin’ guy. Then he nodded and answered:
“When we’re finished.”
I could tell right away he wasn’t used to negotiating with Jews.
And so, with great reluctance, I removed my hat and took my place in front of the gray wall facing the camera. It was obvious that this video was going to have no production value at all. There were no flags behind me or masked men standing in the frame holding weapons. I can’t explain it, but even while overcome with dread over this video and the pain it would cause those at home to see it, I also had the distinct feeling that this was all bullshit and the video would never see the light of day.
Chubs went through the questions that were going to be hurled at me on camera. The first few just focused on my background to establish my identity—my name, address, occupation, and the names of my parents. The last two questions were the most important to Kawa, as those were the ones that would prove my guilt.
“Why did you come to Syria?” Chubs asked.
I gave my usual answer—that I was there to take photos—and he told me to amend it to say that I was there to take photos for the CIA.
“And who did you send these pictures to?”
“Who did I send them to?” I asked, confused. I didn’t actually know anyone at the CIA, so I wasn’t sure what they wanted from me.
“Yes, who did you send them to?”
My first instinct was to say Art Vandelay, the name George Costanza used in Seinfeld whenever he had to lie about something, but then I thought of all the hilarious-but-potentially-deadly-to-me comments Americans would post should the video ever be uploaded to YouTube and reconsidered. Humiliating the jihadis like that would probably make them put the tire on me and never take it off.
“I sent them to some guy at the CIA,” I responded.
Surprisingly, this was good enough for them, so Chubs hit record on the camera and we went through the whole routine twice. I wanted to give the impression that I was perfectly okay, or as okay as I could be under the circumstances, so I spoke in an enthusiastic, game-show-host kind of voice that I knew would crack up my friends back home, being careful not to be so blatant that they’d make me redo it. After we were finished I turned to Kawa and extended my hand. For the first time, he shook it.
“Are you happy?” I asked.
“Yes, Jumu’ah,” he replied.
Abu Dejana led me back to the cell and took Theo for his turn. While Theo was gone I filled in Abdelatif on what had transpired in the kitchen. My “some guy at the CIA” answer gave us both a chuckle.
“You should have said Agent Theo Curtis,” he said, and we laughed.
When Theo returned he told us he’d been given the same questions as I had been, only instead of sending photos to the CIA he was told to say he sent reports.
A few minutes later Abu Dejana was back yet again. He handed me three pieces of bread and a bowl. When I saw the bowl was filled with halawa, I looked up at Abu Dejana with a What the fuck? expression.
“Hey man, I asked for yogurt!” I said.
He rolled his eyes and slammed the door in my face.
“I think you guys should become Muslims,” Abdelatif said often.
He said it would increase our chances of release, which I knew was probably true, and that it would keep us safe because the Koran says Muslims can’t kill other believers—apparently nobody outside our walls had gotten to that page yet.
The truth was I’d been thinking about this for a while. My first week in captivity I’d tried to plant the seeds for a possible conversion by asking for a Koran in English, but they refused to supply me with one. I’d figured I could pretend that reading it, over time, led me to find Allah, and thought that discovering the faith “naturally” this way would make it more believable, and not only enhance my chances of survival but also improve my treatment. Another motivating factor was the possibility that conversion would create an opportunity to escape. Once I switched teams I could try nagging the emir and guards into taking me to a mosque to pray. Some of those mosques had thousands of people praying in them on any given day, which meant I might have a real chance if I managed to melt into the crowd. Once the Moroccan joined us in our cell I got the idea to convert by pretending that I felt God in the room every time he prayed.
For now, whenever he made his conversion pitch I pretended to be intrigued by it, but not convinced, anxious not to appear too eager and give away the fact that I was a complete phony.
Sometimes Abdelatif awoke in the middle of the day babbling in French and Italian. Due to his broken leg he always slept facedown, and when this happened he’d raise his head in panic with fear etched into his face. As he muttered whatever it was he was saying, I’d have to shake him back to consciousness. I had never seen anyone so scared before in my life, but I guess spending a week in the boiler room will do that to a man. I can only imagine what he saw in his dreams.
Awake, though, he was stubborn and confident, with the kind of bullying, rigid personality that insists on dominance. He may have been the youngest man in the room, but in his mind he was in charge. For one thing, he was both an Arab and a Sunni Muslim, and according to him these two characteristics made him fundamentally superior to us in nearly every way. He could spend hours pontificating on the reasons behind his racial and religious superiority, not just when he was trying to get us to convert, but whenever he was frustrated about what he considered unfair treatment. I’m not the type to sit around being berated and insulted, so we would often get into arguments over his opinions, and I constantly cut off his ranting by telling him to shut the fuck up already. Our disputes inevitably became loud and borderline physical, and it was during these that our once solid relationship began to steadily deteriorate.
Theo seemed overjoyed by these arguments, and would come out from under the covers to watch, wearing a n
auseating, smug expression on his face. The fact that he was universally despised while I was not was hard for him to understand, and I think he hoped that the rift opening up between Abdelatif and me would give him an ally at last. To build this alliance, Theo began offering the Moroccan his services.
“You want to do some physical therapy?” he asked.
When they began these sessions, Abdelatif could barely bend his leg or put any weight on it at all. Theo would lift the injured leg up and down in stretches and usually end with a massage. I thought the whole routine was bullshit considering Theo had no experience in the field and the guy still had a bullet in his broken thigh, but one day at a time the Moroccan’s ability to walk and bend his leg improved—all thanks to Dr. Curtis.
Unfortunately, like all of Theo’s plans, attempting to ally himself with Abdelatif would backfire. Soon he was helping the Moroccan with everything, including disrobing on bathroom trips, where his injured leg forced him to shit in a bucket because he could not hold himself in a squat to use the toilet. It became common to find Theo clenching our cellmate’s soiled underwear in his bare hands as he waited for him to finish, and while one might expect a ritual like this to bring two captives closer together, it didn’t. Instead, it only brought Theo further under the Moroccan’s thumb, until he was Abdelatif’s own personal prison bitch.
The Moroccan liked to make rules, and one he was especially adamant about was that no one could eat off his side of the bowl that we all shared—he said that even his mother did not eat off the same side as him. This was fine with me because it worked both ways; Theo, of course, didn’t pay attention to rules or requests, whether they were about bedbugs or bowls. Abdelatif must have warned him close to dozen times not to eat from his side, but as soon as the next meal was dropped it was as if these conversations had never taken place. Theo would rip off a piece of bread, reach right over his portion of the food, and scoop some from the Moroccan’s side of the bowl. One morning, the camel’s back finally broke.
“Theo, what did I tell you?” the Moroccan shouted, picking up a plate of olives and throwing it aside.
“What the fuck!” I yelled.
Abdelatif may have had a busted leg, but you would have never known it from the way he pounced on Theo, gripping him by the throat with one hand and pinning him to the ground, throttling him with a fist cocked above his face. True to form, Theo didn’t make a sound or fight back at all. He didn’t moan, he didn’t squirm; he didn’t even grab the wrist of the man strangling him to death.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” the Moroccan screamed over and over, and Theo just lay there, arms outstretched, waiting as always to die or be rescued.
Being that Theo had provoked this reaction by ignoring the man’s reasonable request, I let it continue for a few moments so that he could learn from his mistake, but once he started turning blue I had to step in. Did I hate his guts? Yes! Did he ask for this? Yes! But I was sticking to my code, and Americans back each other up on the battlefield, whether they get along or not.
“Come on, man, get off him,” I said.
“I’ll fucking kill you!” Abdelatif was still screaming, spit flying out of his mouth.
Seeing that my words were having no effect, I stood up and gave the Moroccan a stern tap on the shoulder and repeated myself. Finally, I grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him off.
“He can’t breathe!” I yelled. “Get off him!”
When Abdelatif turned to me, his eyes were filled with such intense rage that it became instantly clear: if I hadn’t been there, he really would have killed him.
“You okay?” I asked Theo.
“Yeah,” he croaked in a hoarse voice.
After placing the rinsed olives back on the plate we all sat down and ate, like the dysfunctional family we had become. Nothing more was said, but Theo stuck to his side of the bowl, this time and every time after.
Despite what had happened, within an hour or two Abdelatif was lounging on the floor with his wounded leg on Theo’s shoulder as he kneeled before him, massaging away like a slave. I was truly embarrassed for him, and half surprised he didn’t offer to finish his master off with a happy ending.
Because Abdelatif was an Arab and a Sunni, we all thought he had the best chance of being released. Seeing that this was an opportunity to get word of our fate to the outside world I pounced on it like a cheetah. Convincing a self-proclaimed jihadi and member of Jabhat al-Nusra to walk into a US embassy was going to take a little finessing; to overcome this challenge I had to get inside the crazy fuck’s head and exploit the one thing he wanted more than anything in the world: to be reunited with his wife and kids in America. I got to work on it, and eventually had him convinced that if he presented himself at the US embassy in Turkey and told them everything he knew about what had happened to Theo and me they would take him in, fix his leg, reunite him with his family, and throw in US citizenship for his troubles. By the end of my spiel, the Moroccan looked like a little kid who’d just seen Santa for the first time. If they’d opened the door and freed him at that moment, Allah himself could not have stopped him from getting to an American embassy.
Then he asked Theo for his opinion.
“No, they’ll arrest you,” he said. “Just send an email.”
Abdelatif shot his attention my way and I scrambled to convince him that Theo didn’t know what he was talking about, but the damage was done. Theo had shown he would rather advise an admitted terrorist on how to avoid arrest than agree with anything I said, and he’d created doubt in the mind of the one person who could possibly help us about whether or not he should.
We were never quite sure what caused the food poisoning, but it was either the spoiled yogurt or the contaminated water we were forced to drink. Whenever the water was out at the hospital we’d fill our bottles from a hose that was fed into the bathroom and slung over one of the faucets. The hose water was so brown it looked like watered-down iced tea, and at first I refused to drink it, but seeing that they would let me die of thirst before they invested in bottled water or boiled it made me realize that Gandhi would have been fucked in this place, so I drank up.
It was early in the day when my stomach started to gurgle discontentedly, and before I knew it, I was pounding on the door.
“Bathroom, please! Bathroom! Emergency!” I screamed in Arabic.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred times when you knocked, whoever answered the door would say they’d come back in five minutes and then return in five hours, but on this day I must have been pretty convincing because when the guard opened the door I was taken without delay. As soon as we got to the hallway, I broke away from him and ran blindfolded to the bathroom.
Once inside the stall I tore my pants down and dropped into a squat like I’d just had a chair pulled out from under me, and a split second later I was spraying shit into the toilet like a busted fire hydrant. There was absolutely nothing solid coming out of me, and when I looked into the toilet there was nothing to see; it just ran down the sides like rain. Between bursts I would stand and squat, stand and squat, hoping that my stomach would turn over so I could get the next round out before I was locked in my cell again. But there always seemed to be another round after that, and so when the guard came to take me back I grabbed a bucket before heading down the hallway, just in case.
Reentering the cell I realized I had a serious problem on my hands. My colon was nowhere near through with me, but maybe with enough willpower I could hold it off until our next bathroom trip. After pacing a few laps I decided to lie down and try to sleep as much of the morning away as possible, but as soon as I lay down my stomach kicked back into full swing. I definitely didn’t want to be the first one to shit in a bucket, so I just bitched and whined until I couldn’t take it anymore. Once again I pounded on the door and once again the same guard answered. We called him the Fat Man—he was one of the new guards we’d met upon our return; he’d seemed okay, but on this day he proved that he was much better than that. I
must have knocked on the door close to a dozen times before evening and almost every time I did, it opened to reveal the Fat Man on the other side, wearing the goofy grin that came with helping the American with the runs.
By nightfall the sickness had not improved and the medication the guards gave me did little to stop the flow. In fact, I’m pretty sure the pill they gave me for diarrhea was the same one they gave Abdelatif for his broken leg. This made me remember the Holocaust literature I had read again, and how diarrhea had been one of the main causes of death in the camps. I started worrying that I had dysentery, and my pacing and fretting began to get on my cellmate’s nerves.
“Just handle it,” said Abdelatif. “Be a man!”
This was easier said than done—as he would learn for himself later that night.
Theo and I were sound asleep when the Moroccan jumped up, hobbled over to the door, and started pounding.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I gotta shit!” he yelled in a panic. “Grab the bucket!”
“Come on, man, just knock—”
“Grab the fuckin’ bucket!” he screamed, heading right for me.
Realizing there wasn’t a second to spare, I leapt up, grabbed the bucket, and placed it on the floor behind him as he ripped off his pants. A second later Theo was holding him by one hand and I held the other as we lowered him down to the bucket, which was about the size of a pail kids use to build sandcastles at the beach.
“Just be careful, man,” I said. “That shit spills and we’re in trouble.”
The sound effects discharged by Abdelatif’s asshole rivaled any artillery shells we had heard going off outside. We must have held him over that bucket for a good five minutes before he gave us the okay to stand him back up.
The Dawn Prayer[Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison] Page 14