by Shane Bauer
They must be taking us to see Josh. I jump up and start pacing the room, feeling the initial excitement of activity succeeded by doubt and unbearable tension. I order myself to take ten deep breaths. One, two, three . . . Then my cell door opens, and a female guard hands me my blindfold and motions for me to get dressed. They lead me to the same small, mirrored room. When I take off my blindfold, I see Josh and Shane sitting next to a table stacked with food.
“Josh,” I say, throwing my arms around him and kissing his cheek, “I’m so glad to see you!”
“Don’t talk too much,” a voice says from behind the glass. “Only eat.”
Josh smiles at me and we all begin to eat eagerly, chomping down on juicy beef kebabs that we wrap in flatbread and dip into some kind of creamy yogurt dip, washing everything down with orange juice. As we eat, we share snippets of information under our breath. Josh tells us that he’s just now breaking his fast.
“They lied to us,” Shane says. “They told us you’d eaten.”
“At least we know the hunger strike worked,” I say, making a mental note never again to take the interrogators at their word. “I think they might let us out soon,” I continue, “and they clearly don’t want us to look famished when they do.”
“Josh, are you okay with asking them to fly us to Beirut?” Shane asks. “It will be a good place to feel things out and see if it’s safe to go back to Damascus.”
“Josh, you’ll love Beirut,” I say.
Josh’s eyes are red, like he might have been crying before they brought him here, and he looks tired. Looking at him makes me feel uncomfortable—almost responsible for his pain. I can’t imagine how he’s been surviving this last week alone.
“Sarah, isn’t it your birthday in two days?” Josh asks.
“Yeah, thirty-one. I really hope we’re not here,” I say.
He places something in my hand under the table. I use my fingers to identify the two objects, my glasses and a tube of lip balm. “Happy birthday,” he says, and smiles.
“I can’t believe you still have these. Josh, are you really okay? We’ve been so worried about you.”
Before he can answer, the guards are back, snapping their fingers and ordering us to get up. Shane and Josh are up ahead of me. Shane angrily turns his face toward the interrogator and says, “When will we see each other again? If we don’t meet in two days, we’re going to start hunger-striking again.”
There’s no reply.
14. Josh
Two days later I stop eating because they don’t let us see one another. It’s now been six days since then and I still haven’t eaten. I assume Shane and Sarah are fasting too, wherever they are.
I think I could stand up if I really wanted to. But why waste the energy? I try to conserve every possible calorie. I used to feign weakness in front of the guards to gain sympathy or to make them fearful I’d become sick. Now I still tell myself that I am pretending to be tired, but, somewhere along the way, pretend fatigue became real fatigue.
The sweet scent of dying flowers wafts through the cell’s window. Hunger makes my sense of smell acute. My body is in emergency mode; my mind jumps from one thing to the next. The only consistent thought is my yearning for hours to pass so I can eat again.
Is this really worth dying for? I tell the interrogators that I will not eat until I am out of solitary confinement. I am bluffing. I’d eat before I’d die. But how much longer should I fast? Shane, Sarah, and I promised one another not to eat for at least five days before the first hunger strike, but we didn’t have an opportunity to discuss this one.
It is evening already. Perhaps I’ll eat tomorrow night. I could drink my own urine like Gandhi . . . Years ago, I went without food for three days in the Sierra Nevadas with a bunch of friends. It was an inner cleanse and a meditative experience. Now, I just feel like a trembling, empty body, alone in the world.
Half-consciously, I stand up and move toward the door. The guard must have summoned me. He watches me grab the tray of shining white rice and a slab of kebab that has stared at me from the corner of my room since lunchtime. I dodder over to the trash can and pause for a moment. I hold out the food as if to give the guard one last chance to stop me. Then I let go, letting the meat and rice thump against the bottom of the garbage can.
I walk back to my cell. The guard sets dinner on my floor. The hot lentil soup smells delicious. The head guard appears briefly. “Shane and Sarah are nearby. If you eat,” he says, “you can see them again.”
Finally! The hunger strike worked again! I bolt my food. Even as I eat, I cannot wait for breakfast. I cannot wait to see Shane and Sarah. I shape my hair with my hand and some water, I tear the stray threads from my uniform, and I bide my time for the guard’s return. A guard peeks in the window to ask, “Did you eat?” I show him the empty plastic bowl; then he leaves.
Hours drag on and he never returns. I realize I’ve been tricked. I bang on the metal door. I must see Shane and Sarah.
A guard turns off the lights for sleep, but I keep banging in the dark. I switch hands because my knuckles swell up. The metal clangs obnoxiously into the hallways. It must be almost midnight. Eventually, the head guard returns. Between the bars on the six-by-six-inch window in the door, he slips me The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, the book that Sarah brought on our hike. When I demand to see her and Shane, the guard makes an empty promise, then leaves me in my dark cell: “Fardo.” Tomorrow.
15. Sarah
She must have heard me weeping from down the hall.
I’m curled up on the bathroom floor when the guard comes into my cell. The last week has been the longest of my life. Shane and I decided not to hunger-strike again. Shortly after our visit with Josh, my interrogators told me if we stop eating, it will delay the investigation, which they say will be over soon. We can only hope Josh, wherever he is, has come to the same conclusion. I sing loudly much of the day, especially when I hear the slap of sandals in the courtyard outside my window. I’m hoping the sandals might belong to Josh, and that he might hear me.
No guard has ever come inside my cell before. I look up at her through a cascade of blurry tears. I take her hand and she swiftly pulls me to my feet, wrapping her arms around me and holding me tightly to her chest for several minutes as I sob and wail.
I can’t believe her kindness. She’s young and beautiful. Her voice sparkles, bringing images to my mind of light scintillating the surface of a pond; of a soft, warm wind seducing branches to stretch and sway. She reminds me of a cartoon character, like Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella; it seems like the birds start singing when she comes to the door of my cell.
“I love you,” she says to me in shy, broken English, putting her hands on my shoulders, looking me in the eyes, and raising her eyebrows like a question mark as her voice goes up an octave at the end of the sentence: “I love you?”
Her English has the wonderful quality to it of being a mere sound—she pushes out each syllable as if playing her mouth like a new instrument. Someone must have taught her the phrase and this is the first time she’s had the opportunity to use it. Her eyes tell me she’s waiting to see if the words will work.
Next, she helps me get dressed, helps me put on my sandals and blindfold, and leads me downstairs to the courtyard. This is where the guards take us twice a day to walk blind circles in the sunlight. All I can see out of the crack at the bottom of my blindfold is the area around my own two feet. For a few minutes I let my feet guide me, tracing figure eights in the concrete. My breathing slows and I begin to gather my thoughts. I don’t understand how she does it. How does this young guard remain so cheerful in this dismal place? It’s the first time I’ve broken down in weeks and she was there in an instant to rescue me.
Then she does the most miraculous thing. When I pass her in the courtyard, she begins stomping on the dry, dead leaves scattered across the yard. She smiles at me, inviting me to join in, to release some of my frustration, to play.
My legs feel heavy and we
ak, but I manage to make a few small, feeble stomps and smile back. When we get back to my cell, I hand her my blindfold and outer garments. I look into her eyes with gratitude.
“I love you too,” I say.
16. Josh
In my mind I am already running. My feet patter quickly on the brick floor. All day, my energy is dammed up, but in the courtyard, energy courses through me. They take me for two half-hour sessions per day. I’m allotted a single lane next to other blindfolded prisoners in nearby lanes. I jog back and forth blindfolded. It’s the only time I feel alive all day—when I’m out here and thinking about escaping.
Escaping can’t be as easy as it seems. I used to do the high jump in track and field, and I’m sure I can make it over this small wall. I peek under my blindfold while I skip to see over the wall. But I can’t make anything out. I shouldn’t run yet. I lob a date pit over it to hear the texture of the ground on the other side. It sounds like more asphalt.
I can’t leave without Sarah and Shane, but I’m starting to worry I’ll run on impulse. I worry that I will forget how crazy it is to think that freedom is beyond this short wall. Just because I don’t see a guard in the normal lookout spot doesn’t mean nobody’s watching. First, I’m wearing a blindfold that I can barely see under. Second, there are windows looking out on the courtyard and probably cameras everywhere. I need to control myself.
There must be a way to escape this isolation. But the guards won’t let me see Sarah and Shane. They’ve grown tired of my screaming into the hallway, “I want to see my friends!” They want me to stop pounding on my door. I don’t know what else to do. The guards barely speak to me, even in Farsi. When they do, they hide behind the door and avoid seeing me.
I look forward to interrogations, but they come only once a week. The questioning forces me to reflect on my past. Why did I study environmental economics? Why did I leave my parents’ home when I was eighteen? Why have I visited Israel? I get to justify why I went hiking, why I came to the Middle East, why I taught on a study-abroad program last spring, why I did community organizing in Oregon, and why I built cookstoves for villagers in Guatemala. These sessions remind me that I have ideals to stand by.
Otherwise, in the cell, the blankness is my enemy. I don’t have a better word for it, but it’s dulling my mind. It’s a world where I can only reference myself in circular loops, where nothing makes sense, where I feel guilty and worthless and think that everyone—friends, family, coworkers, lovers—must hate me and I can’t do anything about it.
Memories sustain me. My starved mind conjures up images from my life to keep me going: the exhaustion of my cross-country bicycle ride before arriving at Niagara Falls; scoring three last-minute three-pointers to win the playoffs in the junior Jewish basketball league; marching twenty-five miles in the rain with a group of seventy-five protesters from small-town Oregon to our congressional representative’s office to protest U.S. wars in the Middle East. Every image has a function: persistence, triumph, protest. I don’t seek out these memories consciously, yet my mind knows where it needs to go to dredge up nourishment.
Every day, I recall a different year of my life as a way to remember who I am. I remember friends—Shane and Sarah, of course, and I think of my friends on the outside too. They’ll wonder where I am. They’ll worry when they don’t hear from me for a while. Someone must know someone in Iran. I have a Persian ex-girlfriend. She’ll do something. My brother. He’s well connected and politically savvy. Alex will get me out. He’ll notice I’m missing. He knows I went to Iraq. He told me that he loves me. I remember that. I wish I could tell him how much I love him. I wish I could see him. “Alex!” No response. “Alex!”
I have nothing to do in here. Having read and reread The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, I try to memorize the whole index—I have noticed that a page for Ibn Jubayr is mistakenly indexed for Jubail.
Once, when I heard a helicopter whirring near the prison, I deluded myself into believing freedom was imminent. I decided U.S. officials must be negotiating our release and that I’d be free within three days. I felt certain of this, though all I heard was a helicopter’s blade.
Now I cling to the idea of being released on Day 30. In the corner of my cell, the corner most difficult to see from the entryway, there are a host of tally marks scratched into the wall. I check the mean, median, and mode of the data sample. The longest detentions last three or four months, but most markings are less than thirty days. I remember an Iranian American was recently detained and released from prison. How long was she held? Thirty days seems like a fair enough time for the interrogation to run its course and the political maneuvering to sort itself out. In my gut, Day 30 feels like the day we’ll get released.
17. Sarah
“Shane,” I cry out, knocking on his wall. We both jump up on our sinks and press our mouths to the vent. “Shane, do you hear that?”
“Yes, baby, it’s terrible.”
“It’s a man screaming. It sounds like they’re killing him. He is being tortured.”
“I know, I know, it’s so terrible.” Shane sounds distraught. I feel my own eyes, wet with rage.
“It’s not Josh. It can’t be Josh.”
“No, it’s not. Baby, whatever they’re doing to that man, they won’t do it to us.”
We stand there with our ears pressed to the vent, saying nothing, as the screaming continues. It’s coming from outside my window, probably from the courtyard.
“I’m going to ring the bell and ask the guard what the fuck is going on,” I say.
After a few minutes, a guard opens the door. It’s the beautiful, young guard who told me she loved me last week. I immediately grab her hand—relieved it’s her. I point toward the screams and then wrap my hands around my own neck, mock-strangling myself.
She looks back at me, concern in her face. “Nah, Sarah,” she says, shaking her head. She raises her hand, palm out, motioning for me to wait, and closes the door. Moments later, she comes back with a smug smile on her face. She points in the direction the screams had come from and says, “Futball.”
“What?” I know right away what she’s getting at, but I don’t want to believe it.
She points again and says, “Futball, Sarah, futball,” a proud smile on her face. She’s telling me that what I heard was sport, not torture.
I look at her with a mixture of horror and disgust. I get the impression she’s repeating someone else’s words, as though she just went and asked her boss what to tell me. I shake my head and she smiles back.
This is the woman who stomped on leaves to make me feel better. She held me and whispered sweet, unintelligible things into my ears. This woman is an accomplice to torture. There is a man being tortured outside this window, we both know it, yet she doesn’t look concerned. She can even smile about it.
18. Shane and Sarah
Shane
Sarah and I are housed in the female section of the prison—I know that by now. Today, something is off. When we spoke through the vent earlier this evening, Sarah told me the female guard on duty seemed sick. When male guards bring me my dinner, they give food to Sarah too. They have never done that before—only women guards feed Sarah. When the men came upstairs this evening, I didn’t even hear them coming as I normally do. Usually, they say “Allah, Allah” loudly as they walk up the steps to make sure the women have enough warning to cover themselves properly. This evening, they have been silent. The female guard must be gone.
After dinner, two men come around with a bucket of muskmelon. They open my little window and hand a slice of the fruit through. Then they insist I watch them pass Sarah’s through the little slot at the bottom of her door. It’s like they are making sure I know there is no foul play. Then, in their preoccupation with having me watch them feed Sarah, they forget to close my window.
My mind immediately leaps to what has been my preoccupation these days: escape. Recently, I realized that the little metal clips that hold the plumbing together at the bac
k of the toilet could be used to pick the padlock that holds my window closed, not the tiny window on the door, but the one that lets in light from the outside. I don’t know how to pick locks, but that’s only a detail. I have plenty of time to figure it out. Never mind that reaching the window would be impossible unless I found something to stand on, which I’m sure I never will.
Sarah and I have talked about escape. Through our tube, after particularly difficult days or long interrogations, I’ve told her that I know where the guards hang the keys to the cells. I’ve told her that a guard once trusted me with a razor to shave with. I had to pass it back through a little window before he would let me out of the shower. I told her that usually the guards lock my cell door and take the key with them, but that sometimes they just leave the key in the lock.
I collect these details. Can there be any prisoner alive whose mind does not, voluntarily or involuntarily, collect and file the details that could one day lead to his or her escape? My plots and secret mental maps soothe me. When I imagine how Sarah and I would sneak down the hallways at night to find Josh’s cell, I feel brave and strong. I need to always believe that, if I so choose, I—we—can become free the day that I just can’t bear it any longer.
Today, the stars are aligned. When they gave me muskmelon, they left my door’s window open. I look through the window and see the key is also in Sarah’s door. There are no guards upstairs. If ever there was a time to act, this is it.
I reach my hand through the little six-by-six-inch window in the door of my cell, trying carefully not to touch its edges so as not to jostle the door. I reach all the way down to the door handle and feel around with my fingers. The key is there. I turn it slowly because I’m afraid that a click will echo through the silent hallway. My arm is barely long enough to pull the door handle down, but I reach as far as I can and when the bolt comes out of the latch, the door opens slowly against my body weight. My heart hammers in my chest. Will they hear it? I pull my arm back in slowly and carefully, stick my head out the door, and peek around the corner. A barred door separates our cellblock from the area where the guards normally sit. Somehow, I’ve never known that before. No one is there at the moment. The lights are off. It sounds like someone nearby is watching television. Maybe someone is up here. There are no cameras facing our cells. I pull myself back in and close the door quietly.