by Shane Bauer
“Mom, we made it,” I say, pressing our bodies together. “We made it.”
I think of the 781 letters she sent me; of Alex crying at the vigils; and of Dad blaming himself for my imprisonment. I clutch each one and don’t let go.
We continue hugging and kissing until a cameraman interrupts and asks for a photo. We pose together. Sarah watches my family, her cheeks wet with tears. When I see her smiling face, I rush out of the photograph. She lets out a yelp when I hug her. Swaying back and forth with her on the warm tarmac, I close my eyes and rest my head on her shoulder. I lean back to look her in the eyes. I stay in Sarah’s arms until security guards usher us indoors.
In the airport, everyone stands together in a circle and the ambassador tells us that the media wants a statement from Shane and me. A discussion ensues; everyone has an opinion: Should they speak? What should they say? Should a family member make a statement for them? I feel overwhelmed.
“They’re free now,” Sarah says. “Let them speak for themselves.”
“Anyone have a pen?” I call out.
One of the U.S. embassy staffers instantly hands me pen and paper. I twirl the pen in my hand, remembering the months of nagging the interrogators for one. I imagine us hiding in the corner of the room every time we’d write with a contraband pen.
Shane and I huddle to write a brief statement to the press. Salem asks us to thank the Supreme Leader, but we don’t want to do it. Together, we draft four sentences, but Shane and I both want to say the same two lines. We’re familiar with this kind of conflict. Shane wins the coin toss.
We sit down to practice our speech. Our families are looking at us and talking, trying to figure out how damaged we are. My brother videotapes Shane and me rehearsing.
“Josh, you keep forgetting to say ‘His Majesty.’ It’s ‘Our thanks to His Majesty Sultan Qaboos of Oman.’ Okay?”
We get in front of the cameras and I say, “We are so happy we are free and so relieved we are free. Our deepest gratitude goes toward His Majesty Sultan Qaboos of Oman for obtaining our release. We are sincerely grateful to the government of Oman for hosting us and our families.” Shane adds, “Two years in prison is too long, and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America and Iran.”
A few buff, straight-faced security guards usher us into cars and to the American ambassador’s residence.
As soon as I enter the residence, a young woman pulls me aside. She has a sweet face and long, black, shiny hair. She asks if I’d follow her into a private room.
In the room, Shane is already seated and waiting. She tells us that she works for the U.S. State Department, and asks us to sign some papers. She offers to get us anything we need. Then she asks if we will speak to an FBI agent. Shane and I hesitate.
“Maybe you know something that will be useful,” she suggests.
“We don’t know anything. We were highly isolated and couldn’t speak to people,” Shane says.
“We think that Iran has been holding another American prisoner incommunicado since 2007.”
“We didn’t have contact with any Americans,” I say. “And nobody mentioned another American to us.”
Shane and I consult privately about what to do. Neither of us wants to meet with the FBI. We’ve already told them we don’t have any information. What else do they possibly want? Before prison, we would never have collaborated with U.S. intelligence agencies. We won’t now either. I don’t want to play into the mutual hostility that created this mess or take sides between the U.S. and Iranian governments.
114. Shane
I get up and walk around the house. Everything seems so familiar, but somehow disjointed in my mind. There are bedrooms with ruffled suitcases, open laptops, a treadmill, a big TV, books on random tables. Everything carries some profundity that I can’t place. I go into the kitchen and open the cupboards. I pour salsa into a bowl and scoop it up with chips. Then I have a bowl of cereal followed by cookies and ice cream. My mom and sisters smile as they watch me eat. I can see myself being watched. I can see that everyone is more sophisticated than I am. They can talk to me and observe me and one another all at the same time. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can’t do that. I can see that people are communicating with one another in many subtle, nonverbal ways, but I don’t understand them. Josh I can understand. I can watch him and see his happiness, his confusion, and his uncertainty. I can read the lines of Josh’s eyes, the turns of his mouth. Everyone else’s body language is impenetrable to me.
Sarah guides me through the hours, motioning for me to talk to my dad or to go to my sister when she is crying. It’s like she knows something about what is happening to me that I don’t. It’s like she can think for me.
A group of us goes up to the roof. It’s dark outside. From the edge, I can see waves lapping onto a shoreline illuminated by the glow of buildings and streetlamps. A brightly lit ship floats far out in the blackness. I put my arm around Sarah. Her head rests on my chest. The air smells of ocean and apple-scented smoke. Nearby, a man is sitting outside a shop and smoking a water pipe. The waiter comes and goes, and they engage in the quiet conversation of friends. A warm sensation of familiarity washes over me. I realize that I have forgotten the way that time passes out here, the evening walks down the street, the after-dinner smokes and thoughts. Then, I am seized by a desire.
“Let’s go out there,” I say to Sarah and Josh in a tone that suggests I am proposing something daring. I think of the woman Josh and I spoke to. She suggested we shouldn’t go outside.
“Are they holding us prisoner?” I say to Sarah and Josh. “We are free. Finally, we can go outside. I want to go out and walk.” I am trying to convince them that we can go outside, that we should insist on it. I don’t realize that this is the only way I know to get what I want. I have trained myself to be either acquiescent or defiant, with little in between. I don’t understand that I am actually free, and if I want to, I can just walk outside.
Sarah smiles. “Let’s do it,” she says.
115. Josh
The water is alive. It actually sparkles. With water up to my thighs, I make waves of glittering light with every slow, deliberate step I take. I skim the surface with my hands, creating ephemeral designs of light in my fingers’ wake. The bioluminescent water twinkles like the stars above.
I lean forward and plunge the rest of my body into the warm sea. I feel buoyant—able to swim with ease, held by the ocean. In prison, I read a book called Big History, which said that there is the same percentage of salt in seawater as there is in tears. I think of the Passover ritual of tasting salt water to remember the tears of oppression. I imagine this ocean to be trillions of tears—mainly sorrowful tears from family and friends, from Shane and Sarah, and from my eyes. As I swim farther from the shore, I imagine a splash of joyful tears giving blessings to these dark waters.
Turning around, I face the sky, and I float between the starry night and twinkling ocean. There is splashing nearby. I hear Nicole, Shannon, and Alex giggling. Shane and Sarah swim together toward the horizon. My mother stands shin-deep in the water, holding towels in her arms so we won’t be cold when we get out.
I swim back toward the shore, and Sarah swims beside me. The water is only a couple feet deep, but I’m not ready for dry land. I stay horizontal, holding the sand with my hands as I let my body ebb and flow with the tide. I turn to Sarah. I’ve been reading her letters for the past year, but she has barely heard a word from me.
“I’ve so much to tell you, Sarah. You’ve meant so much to me.” She listens intently. “I thought of you so much. Your letters were so special to me. I feel like I understood you even more after you left. I came to appreciate how you held us three together, how strong you were. I’ve been wanting to tell you that for a year.”
“You mean so much to me too!” Sarah says. “This is just the beginning of your journey, Josh. There is so much that I want to share with you!
When we were in prison, you were so there for me. Campaigning this past year felt like my way to make it up to you. This is just the beginning, Josh—remember that. It takes a while to adjust to freedom. Take it slow.”
Sarah asks about the guards and the interrogators. I’d like to stay in these shallow waters and catch up with her for hours. But the rest of our group beckons us to walk back to the residence.
I float along with the tide for another moment. Big History also states that the percentage of salt in seawater is the same as the salt in a mother’s womb. I step out of the coruscating Persian Gulf and feel myself reborn.
116. Shane
Hours pass and the sky begins to light up. The three of us go back up to the roof, where Sarah hands me a bottle of champagne. I shoot the cork off into the air and pour three glasses. We toast and look at one another, into one another. We don’t speak at first. We sip and look out to the place where the sky and ocean meet. The cold ocean depths touch the air, which is the beginning of the sky, and the sky never ends. I take another sip and look in the other direction. The narrow corridor of houses is hemmed in between the shoreline and a range of short, rounded mountains. The three of us sit down and hold one another’s hands, resuming the position we used to get in at hava khori, our way of giving one another strength and reassuring one another that everything was okay.
Sarah breaks the silence. “I have a song I wrote for you guys,” she says. “I wrote it when Salem told me in July that the Supreme Leader said he would release you.” She sits up straight, closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath. Josh and I don’t lie down and look at the sky like we used to when Sarah sang. We sit up with her, facing her.
The words roll out of her. “I’m not free until you’re free. And we’re not free until they’re free.” The sun edges over the mountain and tears run down my face. Sarah is crying too as she sings about tearing down prison walls and dancing and not being afraid. Josh’s eyes are dreamy. I don’t know whether what I am feeling is sadness, happiness, relief, love, or loss. It is like all emotions are piled on top of one another, like some part of me that has been tucked deeply away has been suddenly unlocked and its contents are now pouring out. Everything is making me cry: the growing warmth of the sun on my skin; the small, elegant clouds that texture the bright blue sky; the flock of blackbirds that fly between that sky and us; the sound of Sarah’s voice and the love and sorrow it contains.
When she stops, the three of us fall toward one another. Josh squeezes my shoulder. Sarah runs her fingers through my hair. We hold one another, and we cry. And we laugh.
Epilogue
Sarah
“I feel I deserve to know,” I type. “Where exactly is the border?”
It’s been almost three and a half years since the day we were captured by Iranian soldiers. I’ve played and replayed the events of that day countless times in my head. Now, I’m sitting behind my desk at my office in Oakland, California, chatting with an anonymous man on Facebook who says he’s one of the soldiers who drove us into Iran.
“What about the scarf?” he asks, eluding first my question. “Do you still have the adventure scarf?”
He’s referring to the headscarf the soldiers stopped to buy me on the way to the police headquarters in Mariwan. I write back that no, I wasn’t allowed to keep the headscarf. Still, that detail alone doesn’t prove who he is, since I’ve mentioned it in the media many times.
“Remember WC?” he types. “I say WC and you smile.”
I do remember WC. About an hour after we were detained, the three of us were sitting on the porch of the small military shack. Dozens of curious soldiers were clustered around us, trying in vain to communicate while their commander waited for the call from Tehran that would determine our fate. I asked if I could use the bathroom.
“Water closet?” one soldier responded. Language classes in Iran must teach British English instead of American, I thought.
“WC?” he said again. “Yes. Come with me.”
Now, persuaded he’s telling me the truth, I type, “Please why won’t you answer me? Where is the border between Iran and Iraq? I have had a very bad time in your country; I deserve to know.”
“I am very sorry,” he types back. “I hope you are better now. What is your question? I don’t understand.”
“Is the line between Iran and Iraq (a) the path, (b) the spring, (c) the round building, (d) the ridge?”
“It is C,” he says, confirming our long-held belief that we were lured over the Iran-Iraq border deliberately. The soldiers didn’t want to risk crossing into Iraq to approach us, so they motioned to us from the top of the ridge and—from their vantage point at the building—watched as we unknowingly walked into Iran.
“Thank you,” I type. “I appreciate your being honest with me.”
It’s taken me a long time to find closure. Five days after Josh and Shane were released, I woke up in a small bedroom decorated with antique Victorian dollhouse furniture. I could hear Shane and Josh talking in the kitchen downstairs—we’d come there with our families directly from the press conference Shane and Josh gave in New York. My first thought when I opened my eyes that morning was, I need a new mission. Now that Shane and Josh were free, and no one else’s life or freedom depended on me, what was the purpose of my life? Without a new mission, I couldn’t see the point in getting out of bed.
In the following weeks and months, I fluctuated between happiness, rage, and depression. One morning I woke curled up in a fetal position in the corner of a friend’s guest bedroom, mortified by my partial recollection of horrible, spiteful things I said the night before after drinking two bottles of wine. Was I really that full of rage? Why did it only come out when I was drunk? I’d woken with a debilitating headache, and I was scheduled to meet a prospective book publisher on the opposite side of Manhattan in forty-five minutes.
Months later there was another incident that revealed a lot to me about just how much healing I was going to have to do. I was deboarding a plane when the power suddenly shut off. Paralyzed with fear, I was convinced we were all about to be gunned down. Before I could scream—I was going to tell everyone to “take cover” or something equally cinematic—the lights came back on, and the flight attendant spoke over the loudspeaker, apologizing for the inconvenience. Later, back in our apartment, I lay awake the entire night, too terrified to move, waiting for the cabdriver who drove us home from the airport to come back and kill us.
These delusions, drunken rages, and panic attacks scared me. I decided to limit my alcohol intake, lessen travel, start doing yoga—which helped with my breathing and anxiety—and spend as much time as possible reconnecting with people I love. Shane and I, sometimes frantically and other times gracefully, began the process of putting our lives back together. We filled our apartment with color and comfort, planted succulents, bought new bikes, stocked our kitchen, and began to plan our wedding and our future.
Years later, I’m still healing. Though my sleep patterns are back to normal and my panic attacks less and less frequent, no aspect of my life is or ever will be as it was. The most empowering and challenging part of free life has been choosing what parts of prison I want to integrate and what parts are best left behind. Solitary confinement opened up existential questions that were too uncomfortable to sit with, so in that situation I sought answers. Worship and the notion of a personified God helped me tremendously in prison. I needed a higher power I could speak to, a relationship through which I could orient myself to the world I’d lost. I even started using the pronoun “he” for a divine personality, which never made sense to me before and has no relevance now.
I still believe in an abstract higher power, a force and intelligence behind the interconnected nature of all things, but I’m no longer religious. Now, I meditate, I pray, I try to find new ways to respect and worship life every day. Basically, I try to be guided by a vision of a reality greater than myself. My spiritual path is by no means complete—I haven’t figured every
thing out and frankly don’t expect to—but I’m still on it. I’ve always been on it.
When I first got out of prison, some people accused me of being brainwashed. A few well-known bloggers said that my insistence on saying positive things about Islam and the Middle East could only be explained by what psychologists call Stockholm syndrome—feelings of trust or affection a hostage develops for her captors. This accusation was racist and ridiculous—I didn’t have to be brainwashed to appreciate the beautiful, diverse cultures I’d experienced in the Middle East. I’d spent one of the best years of my life there before I was captured. Still, I’ve come to see that there were elements of my behavior in prison—particularly my obsession with the interrogator I revealingly called Father Guy and the period when I considered converting to Islam—that can be explained by this diagnosis. In an attempt to please my captors, to elicit their respect and mercy, I subconsciously tried to become more like them.
Once I was free, those symptoms passed very quickly—I remember not wanting to show my arms or legs in public at first; now I wear whatever I like—but it didn’t take away my tremendous respect for the Muslim faith and love for the Middle East.
An important way to integrate my experience in Iranian prison has been connecting my own suffering with the suffering of others. Even after the recent election of a more moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian government continues to do what it did to us, and much worse, in an effort to suppress the demands and aspirations of its own people. Being held hostage directly after the zenith of Iran’s popular movement for democracy left me in awe of the determination of the Iranian people, including the women whose bold, beautiful faces I often saw pass by my cell at Evin Prison. Their courage made me glad that our story brought attention to this brutal regime, and hopefully even played some small part in speeding its downfall. Though the movement for democracy in Iran has been largely dormant in recent years, the extreme paranoia of the Iranian government and the brutal repression it continues to exact are an indication that it still feels threatened.