They didn’t beat Theo on this occasion, just put him against the wall as if they might execute him on the spot as they searched the room for the pen.
The first time I saw Yassine hit him I have to admit I almost laughed—which sounds horrible, I know. Look, judge me after you’ve spent time in a terrorist prison. Anyway, Yassine stood at the door, holding an AK-47 by the barrel. He called Theo over and then balled up his free hand.
“I know karate,” he said, wearing a big smile.
“Really?” Theo replied.
And then Yassine demonstrated his Wu-Tang style by punching him, right in the rib cage.
“Do you want to see more? Do you want to see more?” he asked enthusiastically.
“No, no, that’s enough,” said Theo.
It was weird seeing that side of Yassine. With me he was always respectful and even protective, but with Theo there was nothing but pure, brutal hatred. Our captors all hated Theo, the spy, and I only really realized how fortunate I was in my treatment when I compared myself to him. At first I tried sticking up for him when the guards beat on him, but I quickly saw that my attempts to do so were futile. They just enjoyed it too much.
Another time, the Little Judge came storming into the room and kicked him in the chest while wearing bubblegum-pink Crocs. I had seen these slippers through the bottom of my cap while on bathroom runs on many occasions, but never knew who was wearing them. All I knew was that whoever they belonged to always tripped Theo and then booted him in the ass as he stumbled like a clown. I don’t even know why he kicked him that day. He just busted into the room, stomped Theo’s chest, and then started yelling at him in Arabic with his hands on his hips. He was so mad spit was flying out of his mouth and all over Theo. Then he left as suddenly as he arrived and slammed the door behind him. I think he was just blowing off some steam.
Picture being locked in a room with your polar opposite, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with no end in sight. Sharing a cell with another American could have been something that made me feel less alone, but it didn’t work out that way; instead it made things worse, being that it kind of felt like I was locked in a room with John du Pont. As much as I felt sorry for Theo, I began to despise him almost as soon as I met him. Not because he was stupid or because he was weak—I despised him because he didn’t seem to have an ounce of loyalty in his entire body, or even really understand the concept. To me, his motivation for entering Syria in the first place demonstrated this perfectly.
“So you came here to try and make money off of Tice?” I’d asked, early in his story.
“That’s the point,” he said.
To me this meant that if I had gone missing first, he would have been just as eager to use my bad luck to make some money and give his career a boost. The fact that he was there to exploit the misfortune of another American who was in the exact same position as me was hard to accept. It was a blow to my morale; in my darker moments it made me wonder what I had done to deserve the same fate as someone who had all but asked for what happened to him by letting greed and ambition completely obliterate common sense.
Theo told me that besides being a journalist who’d written two books, one of which “briefly examined” Islamic extremism, he was also a professor (which turned out to be a lie), and that his goal was to become an expert on Middle Eastern affairs and give lectures on the region for boatloads of money, like the guy in The Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, things didn’t seem to be working out for him at the moment, and his once-impressive résumé, along with the fact that he had lived in Yemen and Damascus and yet didn’t have a soul in the entire country to vouch for him, all only made him look more like a spy. When I asked how exactly an American citizen goes about living in Damascus for two years, he said the government didn’t know he was there, at one point going so far as to say he was “undercover”—yet at the same time he had a valid visa, issued by the Syrian government. Nothing he told me ever added up. He even had two names, Theo Padnos and Peter Theo Curtis; the jihadis didn’t know about the first one, which he asked me to keep between us.
Along with Arabic, Theo also spoke French, German, and Russian.
“Why would they ever think you’re a spy?” I remember saying when I heard that one.
As if having them think he was a spy wasn’t bad enough, he’d “confessed” immediately the first time he was tortured, saying whatever they wanted in order to get them to stop after just one lick. No matter what he told them now, he remained an “admitted” CIA agent, a prize the jihadis weren’t about to give up. At first I admit that I wondered about him myself, but it was so obvious from the way the guy took a beating that he’d never been in so much as a playground scuffle, much less had any type of formal training.
I think what bothered me most was that he was such an arrogant prick, thinking that his PhD and the five languages he spoke counted for anything in this environment. Well, they counted, but not as the assets he seemed determined to believe they were. He wasn’t on a college campus; school was out, and he was in a secret Syrian terrorist prison where all of these skills worked against him. Not only did they make him look more like a spy, he couldn’t seem to help showing them off. No one likes a show-off, and every smart eight-year-old I’ve ever met knows how to act around bullies if you want to keep from having the shit kicked out of you. The man didn’t seem to have a shred of common sense or any street smarts at all—and this put me in considerable danger. In the three months he’d been there he hadn’t bothered to learn the name of a single guard, or attempted to build any kind of rapport with them. When I explained that this was why they were so hard on him and suggested he change his tune, he just snapped at me.
“I don’t need your advice,” he said.
It’s a good thing he wasn’t a spy. If the CIA ever employed this guy it would be the end of America as we know it.
To pass the time we started playing 20 Questions. At first it was great, because we both loved history and literature, but once we went through pretty much everyone in those two categories the game went downhill fast. Theo kept giving me either people who were impossible to guess or those I had never heard of, like Ray Kroc.
“Who the fuck is Ray Kroc, man?” I asked, pissed.
“He founded McDonald’s,” Theo replied.
“What? You mean it wasn’t founded by a McDonald?”
“No.”
“Who knows this stuff ?” I said. “Look, you have to choose people everyone knows!”
One time I gave him Betty White and he didn’t know who she was, so we got into a fight about that.
“How can you not know who Betty White is?” I asked.
“I’ve never heard of her,” Theo answered.
“How can you never hear of Betty White? Every American knows who Betty White is! She’s a Golden Girl!”
“What’s a Golden Girl?”
“Oh my God! I gotta get out of this fuckin’ room!”
The next game I picked was feeding each other famous lines from movies.
“Say hello to my little friend!” I said, in a horrible Cuban accent.
A silence ensued.
“I don’t know it,” said Theo.
“Come on, man, how can you not know that? I’ll do it again for you: Say he-llo to my lee-tle friend!”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, man, you’ve never seen Scarface?”
“No.”
“How could you have not seen Scarface? I mean, what did you watch when you were growing up?”
“We didn’t have a TV.”
“Were you poor?”
“No.”
“So what did you do for fun?”
“We read.”
That game lasted less than five minutes.
Another thing I tried was ridiculous “what if” questions.
“Hey, Theo, what if they came in here with a pistol and one bullet and said ‘Kill Matt and we’ll let you go’? Would you do it?”
“
Yes,” he said without hesitation.
“Really?” I asked, taken aback.
“Yeah, this is war. You have to do what you have to do to survive.”
It took me a few moments to absorb this information—and the fact that he was completely serious.
“Well, I would never do that to you, because I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror again after I went home,” I said, disgusted.
An uncomfortable silence followed.
“Oh, I take it back,” he said, eventually.
I knew I had gotten in over my head in Syria, but I could hold my breath for a really long time. Theo had drowned a while ago. I don’t think he realized that some shit you just couldn’t take back—like telling somebody you would kill him for a ride to the border. This was one of the most revealing conversations we had in our first few days together, because it let me know that I could never trust him, or ever tell him that I was really Jewish.
Sometimes they would leave massive dried-up pools of blood on the floor for us to see on the way to the bathroom, and the traumatized look on Theo’s face resembled that of a kid who just walked in on his dad having sex with another man. Once in the bathroom I would bullshit with Yassine while Theo was taking care of his business, but if Theo finished first, making conversation was up to him. I had really tried to teach him how to work the guards, and some days he seemed to be getting the hang of it. It was good to see Theo speaking to them so he could try to form some kind of a relationship and improve his treatment. I tried to support him, out of patriotism if nothing else, because maintaining American principles and values in this place that despised them was very important to me—and Americans are always supposed to stick together in war.
One day, I came out of the stall to find Yassine and Theo discussing a very sensitive topic—women.
“How many girlfriends do you have in America?” Yassine asked.
“Uh, none now, but I’ve had about nine,” Theo replied.
“Nine!” said Yassine, wide-eyed.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I mumbled, knowing that this was haram.
“Jumu’ah, how many girlfriends do you have in America?” Yassine asked me.
“Zero,” I said. “I’ve only had one in my life and I was with her for over nine years. We were supposed to get married, but it didn’t work out, and I’ve been looking for a wife ever since.”
This answer was only half true, but safer than Theo’s—I basically admit that I’ve had sex, but not with more than one woman; only with the one I thought would become my wife. After this, we headed home to our cell. It was a conversation Yassine would not quickly forget.
Sometimes to help myself keep it together, I would imagine that there was a camera transmitting everything that happened in the room back home to every house in America, kind of like in The Truman Show. It was a great way to shift my perspective, to stay strong and cut down on the unavoidable moments of overwhelming despair. On the other hand, this tactic also created a new problem, namely how to entertain all my viewers, who weren’t even real. After all, the days weren’t exactly eventful. To make sure my ratings stayed high, I figured I had to make the audience laugh on occasion, which was, of course, where my cellmate came in.
I remember, while Theo snored a foot away from me, staring at his piss bottle—a green two liter with the label ripped off that had obviously once held 7Up or Sprite. Then I’d shift my vision over to his water bottle, which was also green without a label.
I cannot tell you how many times I thought about switching them so I could watch him drink his own piss, and maybe end the entire nightmare by laughing myself to death along with everyone watching back home.
The first time I almost lost it and beat the shit out of Theo was about a week into our time together. I was sleeping soundly . . . until a sound woke me up.
Click! Click! Click!
The sound was coming from Theo’s mouth. He was cleaning his teeth with a shell he’d saved from a sunflower seed. I very politely asked him to stop so I could get back to sleep, but he was feeling confrontational that day.
“No, I’m brushing my teeth,” he said, clicking away.
“You have all day to brush your teeth. Can’t you just let me sleep as much of this day away as possible?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s gonna be pretty hard to do that without any teeth in your mouth,” I said.
“Are you threatening me?”
“Absolutely! Stop makin’ that sound or I’m gonna fuck you up!”
“Okay, I’ll stop for twenty minutes.”
Now I was really getting angry. Again I warned him to lay off his fucking teeth. He gave me some smart-ass answer, but he stopped, so I closed my eyes and tried to drift off. About fifteen minutes later he started up again, only louder. I leapt from my bed screaming obscenities and he rose, too. As soon as he talked back I attacked him, ready to rip his head from his body, but he responded by immediately falling to the floor, flat on his face with his hands out, shaking like a scared little kid.
“Go ahead!” he cried. “It’s bad enough that these assholes torture me! Now you’re going to do it, too?”
I’d been standing over him, clenched fist raised and ready to drop with the force of a cinder block, but the fact that his defense mechanism involved falling helplessly to the floor made me feel ashamed of myself.
“Just stop makin’ that noise! I’ll fuckin’ kill you—and they hate you so much they’d probably let me do it!”
He agreed to stop until later and I lay back down under my covers, but I was too agitated to return to sleep.
Back home, Theo still lived in his mother’s house on eighty-five acres of land in Vermont, with a lake and a barn. But he wasn’t exactly a farm boy—it was obvious that he’d never worked a hard day in his life, the result being that whenever Theo had a job to do, he would fuck it up. About once a week one of the guards would dump a few tubs of soapy water in the room and bring us a squeegee and a broom to clean the floor with. I had done this a couple of times in solitary and knew that we didn’t have much time once the door was closed, so I grabbed the broom and got right to work, scrubbing my way from the back of the room to the front. Since the electricity was out, we were doing this task almost blind. About five minutes later, the door opened so we could push the water out. Theo, for some reason, decided to start doing this from the center of the room.
“Theo, what are you doin’?” I said, shaking my head. “You start in the back and then you work your way forward! Why are you starting there? You’re just gonna get it wet again!”
“Okay, okay,” he said, walking to the back of the room.
A minute later the guard came back to the door and started rushing Theo, which didn’t help. When he’d finally squeegeed what he thought was the last of the filthy water out into the hall, the broom and squeegee were taken away and the door was locked. As soon as I took a step, my foot landed in a huge puddle . . . right in the middle of the room.
“What the fuck?” I said in disbelief. “Ahhh! You can’t do anything right!”
“Oh God, you know what? If it’s not them, it’s you,” he said.
“Oh, pardon me, man, for being pissed that you left Lake fuckin’ Superior in the middle of our room!” I screamed at him. “It’s gonna take like two weeks for that to dry! I swear to God, if you were a Bad News Bear you’d be Timmy fuckin’ Lupus!”
I was on the verge of madness, and it wasn’t because of the terrorists. It was because of this guy. I began to accuse Theo of being squeegee negligent as if it were a real crime—and knowing those Sharia courts, it probably was. He was lucky the puddle wasn’t a little deeper, or I might have tried to drown him in it.
One night, I started to itch. It began on my legs and I scratched all night, waiting for the lights to come on so I could check my clothes. I thought I’d avoided bedbugs by keeping my distance from the POWs, but it turned out the bugs weren’t from the front lines, they were fr
om the blankets. When the lights came on I lifted my shirt and saw two of them right away, crawling across the fabric.
“Oh no,” I said.
They were each about the size of a kiwi seed, and must have been feasting on me for a while because when I squashed them against the wall they left huge smears of my blood behind. I was infested from my underwear out—every article of clothing I had, except my hat and socks, were crawling with the critters and the eggs they left behind. Theo refused to check himself, saying that he didn’t have any. I could tell right away that he was in bedbug denial.
It’s a traumatic experience being covered in parasites, feeling them crawling all over you and growing fat off of your blood. It makes you feel like an animal. “American dogs,” we came to call ourselves.
The Little Judge had visited me several times in solitary, holding my credit cards and asking for the passwords, but I kept explaining that they weren’t ATM cards and pretending not to know what he was getting at. He even sent a couple of armed thugs to ask once, but neither spoke English so they didn’t get very far either. On January thirty-first, exactly one month since my arrival, he brought in some English-speaking jihadis to clear that problem right up.
It was late when our door opened and I was ordered from the cell. A guard led me across the hall into the office and placed me on the floor by the stove.
“How are you?” asked someone with a French Canadian accent.
“Never better,” I said as he lifted my cap.
I was sitting in a circle with five people: the emir, three young guys in black masks, and an older man with an air of authority lying on his side, Buddha style. The emir immediately placed a tea glass in front of me and filled it to the brim. There were guns everywhere, but none were being pointed at me.
One of the three wearing masks took the lead in the interrogation. He was in his twenties, with droopy eyes and some red in his beard. He sat to my right with his AK across his lap. Another of the young men, a pudgy one, sat to my left, and next to him was the third masked man, who I sensed was the leader among the three. He was big and wore black-rimmed glasses over his mask.
The Dawn Prayer_Or How to Survive in a Secret Syrian Terrorist Prison Page 7