A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  Back in my cell, the hours don’t go any faster. I try to distract myself by studying Farsi script—which is almost the same as Arabic—on small scraps of paper and plastic wrappers I’ve collected from the trash at the end of the hallway. I sound out the words and memorize them, with the intention of trying them out with a guard later and maybe figuring out what they mean.

  When the evening call to prayer finally echoes down our hallway, I turn on the faucet to wash my hands, head, and feet—the way Leila taught me—and kneel down to pray. Suddenly, I hear a familiar sound coming through my window. It must be coming from hava khori. I spring to my feet.

  It’s cautious at first, a slow, smooth whistle coming to me like honey in the air, like a scent or a color. My heart feels like a train in my chest—it feels like it could easily tear through my skin and spill out onto the floor. I leap up on the bed and stand on my tiptoes in the corner of my cell closest to the window, stretching my neck as high up as it will go.

  “‘Now I’m feeling so lonesome and I can’t get you out of my mind,’” I hum to myself. I know this song. This is our song!

  The tune is an ancient memory, Jolie Holland’s “Sascha.” Shane once sang it to me when we were in Beirut. After a night of dancing we were back at our hotel, my head on his lap, his fingers drifting through my hair. What happened to that relaxed, sensuous couple? I picture myself this morning in hava khori, yelling and flailing my arms in the air, speaking to God. What’s happened to me?

  When Shane was captured, he was wearing a silver necklace around his neck. The day I gave it to him, our apartment in Damascus was brimming with life—the music was blasting and people were passing around bottles of wine and araq, bowls of fruit and platters of pita bread, hummus, and pickled vegetables. Shane and I were ensconced on a small couch with two friends between us. I leaned over them to pass him a bottle of wine and put the necklace in his hand at the same time. He looked at it and gave me one of his huge, charmed smiles.

  “There’s a note inside,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A note,” I mouthed, and pantomimed pulling off the end of the silver capsule.

  He knocked out the tiny scrap of paper and read it. “A part of me is yours forever.” That’s what I wrote. For one long moment our eyes locked across the smoke and din of the room. “I love you,” he mouthed.

  “I love you, Shane,” I whisper. I close my eyes, let my head drop against the white wall of my cell, and imagine Shane’s slender frame tracing circles outside in hava khori.

  The memory of that moment in our loud, smoky apartment feels like another life—a life I’ve lost forever.

  “I love you, Shane,” I say out loud again. Something is coming to life in me.

  The sound travels to me, through bars and night and lavender air, from deep in his body, briefly touching his lips. It circles my ears and dives into my soul like sweet love and pure emotion. With Shane so far away from me, it’s sometimes hard to remember how things used to be. I’ve even questioned whether I made the right decision—moving to the Middle East, partnering up with someone so connected to this part of the world. Is all of this suffering worth it?

  Shane’s whistling is getting louder now, making his music splash like paint on these dreary walls. Something about the whistle reminds me of the old Shane—the man who’s more passionate about life than anyone I’ve ever known. A few days ago, I was having chest pains, so Leila took me to the nurse to get checked out. I peered under my blindfold as I passed Shane’s hallway, and there he was—stumbling blindfolded in my direction and carrying a small bag of trash. He looked so weak, so frail and submissive—so much like a prisoner. I inch higher up the wall, trying to erase that image of Shane from my mind; wanting to get closer to the beautiful man I love.

  I’ll never let this place come between us, I tell myself, letting my hands pass over my neck, remembering Shane and inhaling the sweet air that is him. No matter how long they keep Shane from me, he will be a part of me forever. Josh is a part of me now too. Everyone I’ve ever known is still a part of me—is still with me in here, and we’re all a part of God. I close my eyes, a slight smile washing like a breeze across my face, and then the music stops.

  The next morning the first thing I see when I open my eyes is a thin sliver of sunlight cutting across my cell. I must have slept in. I’m usually awake for hours, waiting for this slow march of light to begin. The stream is thick with dust motes, teaming inside it like fish in the belly of an ocean. As I stare at them, each gold speck of dust becomes a unique individual. That one is my mom, I think, and there are Shane and Josh. As I stare, each speck of dust becomes its own planet, then its own galaxy, and there I am, far below, crouched in the corner sitting on the floor in my cell. It’s perhaps the most beautiful vision I’ve ever seen. What a universe, I think, amazed and strangely comforted. What a big, beautiful universe.

  34. Josh

  Time is passing. The autumn chill makes me worry about the oncoming winter. Weeks crawl by with no interrogation, no Shane, no Sarah—nothing to make me think I’ll be released.

  A tall well-built guard charges down the hallway. I recognize him by his voice. He yells at my neighbor, who is returning from the bathroom. The prisoner, himself well over six feet tall, recently became the fourth person in the neighboring cell, which is also ten by fourteen feet. He barely wears his blindfold in the hallway, leaving it practically up on his forehead. I’ve listened to guards yell at him about it all week, but he refuses to obey. I’m very impressed by his defiance.

  The charging guard and the prisoner clash a few feet from my door. I hear a single smack. I rush to my door to listen as I cringe at the cruelty of this place. The prisoner releases a desperate yell. Then the drizzle turns to thunder. I hear each blow as they rain down on him just eight feet from where I stand. He screams as if being impaled with stakes. The whole prison must be able to hear him. A nearby inmate bangs on his door in solidarity. Almost immediately I chime in along with everyone else—all of us banging on our doors to protest the beating. The uprising is contagious, and the sense of rebellion has my blood rushing. This is our moment of power, our moment of instantaneous and blind solidarity. The guards can’t shut us up, though they run frantically up and down the hallways trying. They seem scared and uncertain—emotions usually felt only by us prisoners.

  We continue banging and yelling even after the beating stops.

  The belligerent guard bursts into my cell. Fire rages in his eyes. His fists clench by his side. He’s the one who did the beating and he’s wound up like a bulldog on a leash. I take a few steps away from the door. He charges forward, fuming. Facing the beast eye to eye, I feel calmer and more alive than I have for weeks. “I DON’T WANT TO FIGHT!” I yell at him even though I know he doesn’t understand English. He stares at me, deciding my fate.

  He backpedals out of my cell as though yanked by a leash.

  By late afternoon the sounds are long gone. The fight unleashed the violence that always simmers just below the surface. On my way to hava khori, I see the bulldog guard with his back against the wall, arms crossed and head bowed. He is now a contrite puppy. He raises his head slowly and gently takes hold of my arm. He enunciates slowly as if he’s rehearsed the English words, “Excuse me.”

  Winter 2009/2010

  35. Shane

  The old guard who smells like cigarettes is at my door. I am shirtless and a little flustered because he walked in on me exercising, running in place on top of a stack of blankets. I don’t like it when this happens. I prefer to hear them coming so I can be mentally prepared, steel myself, and appear cool and unaffected by them. When I’m exercising, I’m in another world, running around Lake Merritt in Oakland or along the beach somewhere. He opened the door and snatched me out of it.

  “Jamkon,” he says, and waves his hand generally over my things. I’ve been through this before, and I hate it. He’s telling me to get my stuff together. He’s making me move.

 
I know the particular grief of cats when they switch homes. I know the nausea, the discomfort, the need to explore every corner and the many days it takes to settle in. I have switched cells five times in four months and I never know why they make me do it. Is it just to rob me of my little gains of stability? The cells are almost all identical, but when I have to move from one to the other, I feel uprooted. When I came to this cell, I panicked for the first time in two months. I was physically farther from Sarah’s hall. The light was dimmer. The floor was covered in blankets instead of carpets.

  But I quickly adjusted and appreciated the fact that this cell was farther from the guards’ desk. It had a few plastic hooks on which I could hang my clothes. There was a little crevice I could use as a shelf. And the sink was out of view of the door, so I could sponge bathe in relative privacy. Now I don’t want to leave this cell; it’s my home.

  The worst part about switching cells is that while I sit with my things neatly bundled up, waiting for the guard to return and take me away, I have to battle my own hope. I try as hard as I can to destroy the notion that we might be getting free. Maybe they are moving me to a cell with better heating, I reason. Now that winter has begun, the furnace in my wall has been blasting so hard it makes me sweat.

  When the guard returns, he is smiling slightly, which I’ve never seen him do. I carry my bundle of blankets and he takes me to the door of a cell with a fridge—an object I know to be the privilege of only a few prisoners—sitting outside it. Can it be true? The guard opens the door and there is Josh, genuflecting with his head on the ground. He jolts up, looking stunned. “What’s going on?” he says.

  “It looks like I’m moving in,” I reply. He leaps up, and we hug and laugh. The guard is now smiling widely. The cell door closes behind us.

  This isn’t the first we’ve seen of each other recently. For the past ten days, they’ve been allowing the three of us to meet for half-hour sessions at hava khori. These meetings have been mostly frantic, each of us desperately trying to unload what we’ve been storing in our minds for months.

  During our first week in a cell together, Josh and I come back to life. The possibility of having a conversation on any topic for any length of time is overwhelming. We talk about Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to an absurd extent, reading passages at random to discuss them as though they were Scripture. Josh gives me a lesson on the musical career of Bob Dylan and I school him on the Balkan Wars. Since we aren’t allowed pens, I draw an invisible map with my finger on the wall. Josh tries to remember the Hebrew alphabet, which he learned in Hebrew school when he was nine. He teaches me the letters by writing them with sunflower seeds. The task becomes stressful because we have to destroy the letters every time we hear footsteps, lest we give the guards “evidence” that we are Israeli spies. We stay up late at night and discuss Josh’s ideas about influencing the city government in Cottage Grove, Oregon. We make lemonade with the lemons from our lunch. We shoot hoops with a wad of paper and an empty box. We draw a ring on the floor and see who can toss the greater number of candies inside it. We tell each other “Good night,” every night, before we go to sleep.

  On our first day together, we come out to hava khori and see Sarah. “Guess what?” I say to her. “Josh and I are in the same cell now.” I can barely contain my excitement and for some reason I expect her to be excited too.

  She takes a deep breath. “It’s okay,” she says. “I’ve been expecting this to happen. I’m not jealous.”

  The next day, Josh stays behind so I can be alone with Sarah for the first time in months. I stride into the courtyard as though I am bringing her a gift, expecting her to gasp in surprise to find us alone and throw her arms around me. Instead, when I pull my blindfold off, I see her at the opposite end of the courtyard, hunched over and staring at me with cold, angry eyes I barely recognize. I rush over to her and she steps back, like a cowering animal. My mind and heart are racing. What has happened? For every advance I make, she makes a retreat, always scowling. Then, her frigid eyes begin to tear. “It’s not fair, Shane,” she whimpers.

  “I know, baby,” I say, reaching my hand out. “It’s not fair.” I step toward her again.

  As soon as I touch her, she starts screaming, kicking and punching the wall with each word she screams. “It’s! Not! Fair!” Her explosion of violence clashes starkly with the stillness that surrounds us. The walls, the few leaves on the ground, the dust in the corners, none of them are stirred. No one bursts through the door to make sure we are safe. Nothing, except me, reacts to this terrible human eruption, which makes it at once pitiful and terrifying. I throw my arms around her, pull her away from the wall, and don’t let her escape as she tries desperately to pull away from me.

  “It’s okay, baby,” I say. In my mind I’m saying these words softly, trying to soothe away her enormous pain, but in fact I’m shouting, trying to get something through, competing with her screams and writhing body. What do these words mean when they are shot like a bullet out of my throat? “It’s okay! Sarah. Stop! It’s okay.”

  “It’s okay?” she says sharply, looking at me like I’ve just smacked her. “It’s not okay, Shane. This is not okay!” She’s right, of course. It’s not okay that she is alone and I am not. But I don’t know what else to say. How can I possibly soothe her? Eventually, her rage shifts into sorrow, and something in her gives. She lets me hold her.

  But it doesn’t feel like she has found comfort in me. It feels like something is fundamentally broken, in me, in her, and between us. I feel like an accomplice in torture. Should I have refused to join Josh in his cell? But I didn’t even know where they were taking me. I was never asked anything I could refuse. My body was just shipped around as it has always been, beyond my control or will.

  But some questions start to gnaw at me: What if they’d asked me if I wanted to cell up with Josh? Would I have refused? If I could have, should I have? Every time I laugh or share a meal with Josh or stay awake longer than I would if I were alone, part of me feels like I’m turning my back on Sarah.

  I remember when the Israelis bombarded Gaza at the end of 2008, while Sarah and I were living in Damascus. Suddenly, pictures of bloody, dead children popped up in bus stations around the city and all of the New Year celebrations in Damascus were canceled, from major concerts to small house parties. When I asked a Palestinian friend what he was doing for the holiday, he said, “How can we celebrate when people are being killed?” I couldn’t really understand this at the time—didn’t they want to forget about it, if just for a night? Now I get it. I know now that when people are completely powerless, the only solidarity they really have is in commiseration. But how do you keep yourself in misery and stay afloat at the same time?

  A few days later, the three of us are sitting outside. Sarah is silent. Her jaw is clenched. Josh and I are on either side of her, sitting quietly, unsure what to say or do. Finally, she speaks.

  “You could have refused.”

  36. Sarah

  Fuck you, body, I think as I get out of bed. My head is a balloon filled with water, my shoulders are slack and lifeless, and my eyes feel like glass. I slowly pull on my pants, walk three steps to the sink, and drink two cups of water. My stomach makes an ugly sound, so I ring the bell for the second time even though I know it won’t make the guards come any faster.

  The “bell” is a round, black rubber button on the wall. When I push it, a green light, which the guards can see but often ignore, comes on outside my cell door. Fifteen minutes have passed since the first time I rang and I need to use the bathroom, so I begin to pace the length of my ten-by-fourteen-foot cell, punching the air like a boxer with my eyes fixed on my bare feet and the brown carpet. I let out a cry of frustration, pick up a plastic cup, and hurl it at the wall. I decide to pee in the sink.

  Ever since I found out Shane and Josh were put together, I’ve been full of uncontrollable anger at everything and everyone. And hate—an almost violent hate.

  I feel like I’ve really l
ost them. No matter what I do, I hurt. If Shane and Josh can get through this, so can I. That’s been my motto since we came here. Even during the months we didn’t see each other, I knew they were enduring the same empty hours I was. Their pain was my pain. Their hope was my hope. Now that they are together in one cell, there’s a rupture between us, a distance I don’t know how to bridge. I want to believe that their gain doesn’t have to be a loss for me, but the truth is, as Shane and Josh become closer every day, I feel more and more alone.

  When I’m with Shane and Josh in hava khori, I almost feel worse. Every touch reminds me of the absence of touch. Their situation seems heavenly to me—they’re out of solitary! What could be better than sharing a leisurely game of chess, listening to endless stories about each other’s lives, being able to connect without the fear of harsh, brutal interference? They are halfway there, halfway to sanity and normalcy, halfway to freedom! I want to feel happy for them, but the reality is that I don’t know how much longer I can hold it together in this cell alone.

  My time in my cell has become less and less structured as I get more depressed. I talk to myself, eat my food with my hands. Like an animal, I spend hours crouched by the slot at the bottom of my door listening for sounds. Sometimes I hear footsteps coming down the hall, race to the door, and realize they were imagined. Or flashing lights will dart across the periphery of my vision—but when I jerk my head around to see, they’re gone.

  These symptoms scare me. I’m certain solitary confinement is having an effect on my brain. Sometimes when I try to read, I can’t focus and end up reading the same line again and again, finally hurling my book across the room in frustration. I’ve also become extremely paranoid about my stuff, afraid the guards will take things when I’m gone. I hide the food and other junk I hoard all over my cell—under the carpet, in my mattress—and check it compulsively. I jam the notes I’ve collected on scraps of paper and cardboard everywhere—inside the bedpost, under the sink, and inside a thin crevice on the back of the TV they gave me last week.