A Sliver of Light

by Shane Bauer

  He takes us to the restaurant. Back with the interrogators and guards, I feel the constraints of detention re-envelop us. Shane and I sit alone at a table and open a menu. I order a fresh-squeezed carrot juice, French fries, and vegetarian pizza. The guards and interrogators, sitting at the neighboring table, order a round of Coca-Colas.

  “Coca-Cola?” I say to them. “Aren’t you guys anti-American? That’s Americana at its worst—it’s bad for your health and it’s addictive. Coca-Cola is the epitome of imperialism!” They are much more intrigued by my carrot juice. Their whole table laughs at me.

  Dumb Guy explains the laughter to me with a Farsi word, “Parandeh. A bird. You are like a parandeh for drinking carrot juice with vegetable pizza.”

  I also eat fries with spicy salt, and I laugh with Shane as he pours ketchup on his pizza. We savor our food, clinging to these tastes as if they were the taste of freedom itself. When we’re done eating, we walk down the path to where we entered the park. The bushes that beckoned us upon arrival continue to call my senses. I notice their flowers in full bloom as I approach the van.

  Nearing the prison gates, I prepare to put on my blindfold. My mind returns to marking time. It’s 4:30 p.m. It is June 14. We’ve been gone for four hours. I remember that we’ve not received letters for almost a month. In the changing room I relinquish my jeans and collared shirt. I brace for the sadness of the cell. All I can think of is receiving letters. I call out to Dumb Guy. “You know in four days you will owe us letters. We’ll have to hunger-strike if you don’t come back with them in four days. Also, it is Shane’s birthday in a month.”

  “Really?” Dumb Guy retorts. “Then this trip was for Shane’s birthday too. I just did you a big favor. You should appreciate it!” He hands us off to a guard who escorts us inside.

  I walk down the familiar hallways to my cell with a broader chest, a more open heart, and a more relaxed gait. I inch my blindfold up to my forehead, trying to act like the prison’s rules are irrelevant. No guards pester me, except one, who meets me in my cell to point and laugh, saying, “Parandeh.”

  97. Shane

  The prison doctor says I’m anemic. He took my blood the other day. I’ve lost about six pounds this month. When I run our little loops at hava khori lately, I finish exhausted.

  My body is falling apart. Sometimes, it feels like there is an animal in my guts running all around. Other times, it’s as if there were a lead weight in my belly. I almost always feel like there is something poisonous in there.

  Lately, I’ve been sleeping eleven hours a night. Josh lies in bed for the same amount of time, but he spends much of it trying to fight himself into sleep. I sleep deeply in a world of dreams where I find myself free, and having to quickly return to prison. When I wake, I am glad to know I have skipped the morning and that it is almost time to eat lunch. Josh and I have become more slothful. When we first celled together, we would wake up around six, exercise, and have breakfast before going out to see Sarah at eight. Now, we spend most of the day in our own beds.

  I have been on various pill cocktails over the last year, none of which have worked, so one day they take me to a hospital in the middle of Tehran for more tests. Inside, I stand in a bathroom and remove my clothes. I am supposed to give a stool sample in a little cup, but I just stand in front of the mirror, naked, and stare. The person I see is me, but different. My ribs are showing. My head looks larger than normal, and my arms are spindly. There is a vacancy in my eyes. Actually, vacancy is not quite right—it’s more a look of circumspection, as though the person behind the glass were looking at a former friend he no longer knows how to relate to. It’s not just my body that’s withering away, but something deeper. It’s not an anguish I see so much as a dimming light. I don’t feel much anymore. Everything is just a dull, unhappy drone. The free parts of me are fading. This does not sadden me, really. It is just a fact and, like most everything else lately, I just observe it as it floats past my consciousness.

  Being out of the cell helps me see the person who lives in the cell, sort of like the way going on vacation helps you see your domestic life from a fresh perspective. I see that for many months now, I have just been rolling along. I don’t mind taking orders from the guards anymore. In fact, once I gave in to the prisoner-guard dynamic—I don’t know when it happened exactly—things got easier, more pleasant. There is something comforting about it. It’s a depressive comfort, sure, but once you look at it a certain way, it’s not so bad not having to make decisions. It’s not like I acquiesce to everything. We have our hunger-strike game over the letters, but that has become routine. We committed to striking whenever they neglect to give us letters for thirty days, but usually, whenever we near the mark, I’d rather just let the letters slide than hunger-strike again. They will come eventually. And why stir things up?

  I squint at myself in the mirror, looking deeper. Something is wrong with me, I realize. I have been letting my life slip away. These ideas of acceptance, this Buddhist seduction, it’s all bullshit. The spring air, books by Eckhart Tolle, Ram Das, and Pema Chödrön—all these have been singing me into a stupor. I thought it was spiritual—and maybe it was—but I don’t want it anymore. I meditate daily with the goal of staying present in every moment. Sarah almost became a Muslim, and now I’m becoming some sort of quasi Buddhist. It’s the same trap. I’ve been feeling at home—at home—here. I have been getting closer and closer to figuring out the big secret—how to be genuinely content anywhere, how to live in the eternal moment. But all this is just the flip side of my old obsession with standing up to the guards and interrogators. Both are just ways to trick myself into feeling free inside prison. But I’m not free.

  I am just becoming institutionalized and cloaking it in spirituality. Thinking about the outside—about freedom—just makes me suffer, so I have locked those thoughts away. I don’t even think about Sarah much anymore, except when I get letters from her. Josh and I have kept up the commitment we made to her—to have a moment of silence and think of her every day during the evening call to prayer—but even that has become rote. I am becoming less and less able to pull her image up in my mind. My thoughts wander. We have pictures of her all over our walls, but it’s hard for me to bring even those to life.

  I shit in the little cup, dress, and rejoin the guards in the waiting area. There are couples everywhere. A long-haired old man and a short, hunched woman approach the reception desk, holding hands. A toddler waddles across the room, her parents trailing behind. I don’t know the last time I’ve heard a din of conversation like this.

  Josh and I need to get out. I know if I wait any longer, I will give in. I think we both will. We have already gone through the first four stages of grief: disbelief, yearning, anger, depression. Now we are a good way into acceptance. We need to do something before the outside becomes a total fantasy. This month, with our trip to the park and this trip to the hospital, I have seen more trees, more women, and more babies than I have in over a year and a half. We can’t keep missing the outside world.

  In the coming weeks, I take more trips to the hospital and other clinics to take tests for my anemia. I record little details in my mind. I come to know that behind the hospital there is a warren of residential housing. I know that two perpendicular streets alongside the hospital are big and busy and usually clogged with cars, so if someone were to run, it would be hard to chase him down by car, especially if he were running against traffic. When they take me out, they usually like to put me in civilian clothes and tennis shoes. They give me real laces to replace the strip of T-shirt fabric we usually tie them with. They always take me in a regular little car with clear windows. I am never in restraints. The guards are usually different each time, but they tend to be old or overweight, or both. And they are almost always wearing pointy dress shoes. I know I could outrun them, even barefoot. I am young, I exercise daily, and my freedom is at stake.

  For weeks, I ask myself if I am really ready to do it. I decide that I am. I c
an’t go through another winter here. All I need to do is convince Josh.

  We used to talk about escape, but our plans were just stories, always of the jailbreak sort. We’d punch out a guard and lock him in our cell, then let all the prisoners out and make a dash for it. Or we’d open our cell door by reaching through the little window—which we used to be able to do in our old cell—and creep down the stairs at night and get into the trunk of someone’s car. Then we’d wait for the morning.

  One day over dinner, picking at my plate of potato salad, I gather the courage to say to Josh, “I think we should escape.” He looks at me like he isn’t sure where this is going, but he is curious. “I think I know how we could do it,” I say.

  He leans back and sets his eyes in a way that lets me know he has my full attention. “Let’s hear it,” he says.

  I explain that one of us would go to the prison doctor and complain of intestinal problems. I reason that I should probably do that, since I’m the one who’s been having issues. They would put me on a medication like they always do; then after two weeks or so, I’d go back and say the problem was getting worse. They would put me on another medication. This would set the stage, so they would feel like I have a problem they can’t figure out. Shortly after that, Josh would go in and complain of the same symptoms. Over the period of a week, he would complain of it getting worse. Eventually, they would take us to the hospital for more tests.

  Josh is absorbed by my scenario. I pull the pen out from under the carpet, grab one of our old letters from home, and draw a map of the area around the hospital. “Every time I’ve gone, they’ve parked on this street,” I say. “I have walked fifteen to twenty feet away from them without a fuss. Their guard is always down for some reason. We would get out of the car, walk leisurely ahead, then book it around the corner. At least one of them would chase after us and another would probably get in the car and get on the phone right away—”

  “Don’t you think they would shoot us?” Josh asks.

  “They don’t have guns,” I say. He looks at me skeptically.

  “No,” I say. “I am certain. I’ve looked closely at their waistlines and pockets. They don’t carry guns to the hospital. For some reason they try to keep a low profile . . . So, we run against traffic and outrun whoever is chasing us. We just run until we lose them and we hide out in a Dumpster or a rooftop till nighttime.

  “Then we start to walk to Azerbaijan. No one will expect it. We walk only by night, following roads at a distance. If we stay near the roads, we’ll be able to see road signs that can tell us where we are going. We find spots to hide and sleep during the day. The problem is we won’t have money and we won’t be able to talk to people, so we’ll have to steal food too.”

  “Wow,” Josh says. “They would be looking for us everywhere. This is pretty crazy.” He pauses. “But I am interested. I’m obviously going to need to think about this for a bit.”

  In the following weeks, our runs at hava khori are more intense. We run faster and I don’t let myself skip it if I am tired or lazy. As I turn those circles, the walls become buildings. I scan them for doorways to duck into. I feel a guard always on my tail.

  Josh and I refine the plan and turn over different options. Should we steal a car? Maybe. Could we jump someone for a cell phone, call our family, and have them wire us a ton of money we could use to bribe someone to smuggle us over the border? Probably not. We piece together a map of Iran in our minds from the short intervals that maps of the country appear on the news. We judge that if we walked three to four miles per hour, we could do at least thirty to forty miles a day, getting us to Azerbaijan in about two weeks.

  One day, we see a topo map on TV and my heart sinks. The region north of Tehran is full of mountains. I had an image in my mind of us walking through fields with the road in sight, but if it is mountainous, we’d probably have to walk on the road much of the time. We’d get caught for sure.

  “What about the Swiss embassy?” I ask Josh days later. “We could get in a taxi, go straight there, and get inside even before the word got out. The Swiss would have to take us in. And they couldn’t turn us back over to the Iranians. It would surely break some international law. We are being held without trial here. We would be asylum seekers.”

  As the days and weeks pass, Josh gets more tense. He talks less and looks depressed. He always seems to be brooding, looking blankly at the floor when he isn’t reading. He breaks the silence only when he thinks of new contingencies we could come up against. How will we get water? How little can we eat in a day? What if it does snow? What will happen if we get caught? Is Azerbaijan even the best destination? What about Turkmenistan?

  I dream nightly about escape. I find myself in the empty streets of Tehran in the middle of the night. I am on the lam in California, hiding out in beachside hotels. I walk with Josh through long plains of knee-high grass.

  One day, at the end of June, we see a ticker: “Americans to Go to Trial July 31.” We postpone our decision for two weeks, and we wait to see what happens in court.

  98. Josh

  That ticker makes it feel real. The momentum seems to be building on the campaign: in May a phone call, in June the trip to the park, in July our “final” court date. Perhaps the most universally revered living Muslim, Muhammad Ali, amped up his support. I’m feeling secretly confident. Ramadan and the UN General Assembly—which coincided with Sarah’s release—soon approach. Alex keeps writing a new Dylan quote in his letters, “Freedom just around the corner for you.”

  Yet, with all this momentum, the most embarrassing thought springs to mind: I want to stay in prison longer. There is more that I want to read. And I want to finish the novel I’ve started writing. The protagonist struggles to admit that he cannot find freedom behind bars, no matter how hard he tries, and eventually he decides to escape.

  Oddly, the desire to stay in prison used to menace me when I was most desperate, in solitary confinement. In solitary, I wanted to prolong my imprisonment in order to memorize an expanded multiplication table, or to work my way up to one hundred squats and fifty pushups in a row, or to perfect the Morse code, or to juggle dried oranges fifteen hundred times in a row. Back then, the thought was functional. It validated my daily activities, making them feel worthwhile. Now, in much better conditions, this temptation to stay in prison resurfaces.

  Anyway, what do I have to look forward to? My family probably resents me for putting them through this. I still dream of my friend Jenny, but Shane thinks I’m delusional for focusing on her. He’s probably right. Mom writes that Jenny’s on the rolling hunger strike, but for all I know, she may be married with children. In prison, at least I have a good excuse for feeling crappy.

  Alex’s Dylan quote loops in my head again and again: “Freedom just around the corner for you.” He never includes the next line: “But . . . what good would it do?”

  99. Shane

  Josh grabs a bottle from the garbage can on the way to hava khori. It is one of those green plastic ones—a one-liter. As soon as I see him grab it, I tense up inside. I know he wants to add it to our collection. We have seventeen plastic bottles in the cell right now, all of them filled with water. Six of them are stacked in a pyramid under the bed and eleven are standing under the sink in our tiny bathroom. Then there are four or five paper juice bottles, each also filled with a liter of liquid. And we have about eight little quarter-liter bottles of dough, the salty yogurt drink. We use all of these as weights, putting them in plastic bags and lifting them. But there are never enough. When one person is doing the bench press—lying on a stack of blankets and benching a bar we broke off the bed frame with bags of bottles hanging from each side—there aren’t enough bottles for the other person to do tricep extensions at the same time. Josh doesn’t want his exercise routine to be dictated by mine, nor do I want mine to be determined by his. So we keep amassing bottles. But today, I feel like we have too many.

  We used to have all seventeen bottles under the bed,
but a few weeks ago I proposed moving them to the bathroom. We could put them under the sink and along the wall, I said. It would be easier than reaching under the bed to stack them every day after exercise and it would clear up some of that space. Josh rejected my idea initially, then said he would agree to it if we kept six bottles under the bed. Josh doesn’t like to feel crowded by bottles when he is standing in front of the sink or squatting over the toilet. Everything has to be a compromise. Nothing is easy anymore. Where is he going to want to put this new bottle?

  When we get to hava khori, he doesn’t say anything about the bottle, just tosses it in the corner with the blankets we brought out to stretch on. I don’t say anything either, just start stretching my legs to start our running routine.

  These moments, like the majority of our time together, tend to be silent lately. Ever since we found out that a new trial date is coming up, they have been quieter than ever. When we learned about the trial, we acknowledged to each other that things usually get difficult in here when some significant date is pending. We committed to being vigilant about supporting each other, easygoing. But it isn’t always so easy.

  We each start walking the perimeter of the courtyard at opposite ends. After a few laps, I say, “Ready?” and we jog. I count thirty-five rounds, then yell, “Switch!” We turn around, Josh counts thirty-five more, and we switch again. We do this six times, which, according to our measurements, is a little over three miles. One lap is eighty-five shoe lengths around and a shoe is eleven inches. We know this because we measured a shoe against a letter sent from home and we know a piece of printer paper is eleven inches long. As we run, I can’t stop thinking about Josh and his bottle. Is he going to ask me about it?