by C. E. Smith
Burkett slept with her even when he knew his brother truly loved her. It was all so long ago, yet he had half expected to find among his brother’s belongings some memento of the woman who came between them.
During the game, Burkett’s eyes keep drifting to the single wall decoration, a photograph pinned up where Akbar sleeps: a masked Islamic militant pointing a rocket-propelled grenade toward the sky. He’s studying the hand-drawn decorative border when he realizes the others are waiting for him to roll the dice.
‘One of his friends?’ he asks, nodding to the photograph.
Nick’s interpretation obviously does away with the sarcasm. He speaks of the photograph in an admiring, even fearful tone. Akbar nods, clearly pleased with his photograph, but it is Sajiv, impatient to go on with the game, who has to tell them that the masked warrior is Akbar himself.
The following week, when the boy and the woman return, Burkett and Nick are sifting the tiny stones from a bag of rice. An old newspaper keeps the rice out of the dirt. Akbar, who is out hunting, has meticulously blotted all human faces from the advertisements and pictures.
The boy has a new pot of stew, the woman another basket. Burkett glimpses an edge of the burqa just as Sajiv shuts the door.
From the basket Sajiv takes a scrap of paper with a few handwritten lines. This method of communication seems remarkably primitive given the Heroes’ reputation for clever cyber attacks. Locked in a metal box in the cowshed is a satellite phone – Burkett saw it when they unpacked the car – but for now the jihadists seem to prefer passing notes, any of which could mean death: Kill the Americans. Photograph their heads.
But Sajiv refuses to share the contents of the latest missive. He folds it into his pocket, dismissing their pleas with a shake of his head and a half smile. Nick presses him with questions. Any news on the ransom negotiations? What about their request for books? When will they be released? Sajiv shrugs. He knows nothing. All he can do is promise to tell them immediately if they’re to be killed or set free.
Burkett takes little comfort in this. If the death order comes, he’ll fight his way out of this place. He tells himself it is better to die fighting. Besides, Sajiv would expect him to fight. It seems to Burkett that Sajiv would either refrain from telling him or kill him at the very moment of receiving the order. So what good is the promise?
For now, Sajiv assures them, negotiations are in progress. The ransom must be agreed upon. But with whom are the jihadists negotiating – IMO? How much would IMO be willing to pay? To afford the ransom, no doubt exorbitant, would they have to lay off workers? Shut down some medical clinic? Burkett regrets his lack of connections, a wealthy donor to make a contribution on his behalf. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for IMO to stall: they’d gain time for raising money, time for the ransom to drop. Two men cost more than one: surely IMO would prioritize Nick over Burkett. Would they purchase freedom for one and not the other? Would they hold out for an execution?
Akbar announces his arrival by tossing a gutted marmot on the floor near the fire. It seems he expects Sajiv to prepare the animal for cooking, but since their neighbors have provided stew, there’s no point in taking the trouble, at least not tonight. Akbar only recognizes this after setting aside his rifle and dousing his face from a bucket of water. They have no freezer, no salt for preserving meat. He glares at the pot of stew, and for a moment seems ready to kick it over. Instead he takes the unappreciated marmot and hurls it over the wall of the compound.
Burkett and Nick have formed sketchy portraits of their captors: Sajiv, who worked as a bricklayer on an American-funded project but turned to jihad when the government in the north humiliated his family by filming his younger sister with drones. Sajiv on the whole seems less interested in wielding a gun than simply studying the Qu’ran. His hardbound volume, given to him by his father, is adorned with intricate tessellations of gold on a background of dark blue. He hopes one day to teach in a madrassa, which doesn’t strike Burkett as much of an aspiration, since Akbar seems to have graduated from one without knowing how to read. At least that’s what they gather from his audio version of the Qu’ran, and his request for Sajiv to read aloud when the player runs out of batteries.
Akbar’s surly detachment falls away when he’s given a chance to boast of singlehandedly killing over a hundred members of the Khandari special forces in six different battles. Burkett and Nick are skeptical, even if the facial scar adds an element of authenticity. It seems odd for such a great warrior to be relegated to guarding prisoners. On the other hand, the guarding of prisoners might not be such a menial assignment if he were expected to torture and murder them as well.
16
Burkett lies on his back with his eyes closed. The silence in the courtyard must resemble that of a monastery. He is attuned to the faintest scrape of stone or snapping twig in the woods outside the wall. Scissors snip from across the courtyard, when Akbar begins trimming Sajiv’s beard. It is about time for Voice of America, but Sajiv’s radio has run out of batteries.
He envisions an operating room. On blue-draped tables gleam the rows of instruments he needs for a laparoscopic gastric bypass. Yesterday it was a cholecystectomy. His mind seems to be working on parallel tracks: one listing the steps of the operation, the other recreating the sights and sounds. But today he has trouble sustaining the dream. To keep himself focused, he introduces a series of complications – unexpected bleeding, a cardiac arrhythmia (which in reality would be managed by an anesthesiologist), and a malfunctioning bovie that sets the drapes on fire.
Maybe he should feel guilty for having so much useless time, when time has been cut short for his brother. Or furious that these fanatics would turn what time he has into a means of torture.
He abandons the surgical conflagration when he hears Nick beginning his daily push-ups. Burkett sits up and watches, irritated by Nick’s rigid technique. The way he keeps his body straight and times his breathing, he could be a fitness instructor in a video. When he finishes the first set, dirt clings to his moist skin at the hairline. It reminds Burkett of their captors after prayer.
A month has passed since they arrived at this moldering compound. At first, when Nick began his workouts, Akbar in particular found much to ridicule, but today he spares only a glance from the delicate work of clipping Sajiv’s beard.
Between sets Nick leans against the wall with his eyes closed and his head bowed. Whatever the benefits of prayer, perhaps for Nick it serves also as a means of avoiding conversation. How can the two men, in such close quarters, go so many days saying so little? Burkett waits for the mumbling devotions to fail, the performance to fall apart. At some point, Nick will have to open his eyes and face the reality of their situation.
What could he possibly be saying? A problem with prayer would be the difficulty of composition, not having enough to say. Or perhaps Nick merely sits there repeating himself. Perhaps he recites the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. Or something shorter, simpler: Lord be with me, forgive me, be with me, forgive me. Perhaps God hears the intentions rather than the words.
When Nick resumes his push-ups, Burkett does a set of his own. He strains to reach thirty, well aware of the sloppiness of those final repetitions – his body angled at the waist, his head too shallow. During the break that follows, Burkett expects some comment from Nick, but no words pass between them. Nick doesn’t even acknowledge Burkett’s exertions, except to do him the courtesy of lengthening the period of rest. But it’s still not long enough for Burkett: the next set, he fails to reach even ten.
How he’s weakened over the years, the muscles atrophied to fat. A hundred push-ups came to him so easily when he was a wrestler. It was part of his daily warm-up before practice.
‘In college we used a deck of cards,’ he says.
Nick nods. ‘We did that, too.’
‘Face cards and aces twenty.’
‘We counted the aces as t
wenty-five,’ Nick says.
‘That’s impressive.’ He should leave it at that, but he goes on: ‘It was something we did on our own, above and beyond the two daily workouts with the team.’
Such boasting, it seems childish even as he speaks, and more so in the silence that follows. Who knows what Nick endured as a Navy Seal? Whatever the hardships of college wrestling – the incessant workouts, starving to make weight – at least no one was trying to kill him.
In the following days, Burkett finds in push-ups another way of passing the time, creating noise. But they serve yet another purpose, one he doesn’t immediately recognize, and when he does he keeps it to himself. What he wants is to wrestle them – either Akbar or Sajiv, but preferably both, though once he beats the first he’s unlikely to have a shot at the other. Akbar is the one he’d like most to manhandle – first Akbar, the warrior, and then if possible Sajiv, the intellectual. He doubts either of them actually murdered his brother, but the circumstances seem designed for revenge: that these particular jihadists would happen to be wrestlers.
In his mind he sees the two of them at the roadside with their Kalashnikovs, watching Owen bleed to death.
He can’t imagine entering the ring in his present condition. It’s been years since he last broke a sweat from physical exertion. He’ll never again know the strength of a college wrestler – not at this age, not without the driving presence of his brother.
It takes him six days to match Nick’s two hundred push-ups in thirty minutes. Another week and they add sit-ups and squats, and later wall-sits at one-minute and eventually five-minute intervals. For endurance they resort to jumping jacks and imaginary jump rope. Their endless laps in the courtyard draw outright mockery from Sajiv and Akbar. The Americans running in circles like dogs chasing their tails. Burkett would like nothing more than a long distance run, but their few daily excursions outside the compound are limited to the noisome pit where they relieve themselves, or the stream where they bathe and fill buckets.
Inevitably each tries to outlast the other – two men in their thirties trying to validate the training of their younger days. The ex-Navy Seal versus the ex-college wrestler, each with his own repertoire of brutal exercises, such as Burkett’s one-legged wall-sits or Nick’s flutter-feet. The mindless strain permits a kind of escape, at least from the boredom, and while he likes Nick well enough – on some level even respects him – he’s beginning to realize that exercise is the only thing keeping his chronic irritation at bay. If nothing else it creates a point of shared interest. Something to talk about for two men who otherwise have nothing in common.
Aside from the occasional buzz of a drone, the threat of violence has become almost abstract. It’s been only two months since they witnessed a man’s severed head. Burkett has to search for the name. Tahir, a lawyer. The head seems to have receded into a haze of memory, an image that comes uninvited, a lolling orb with pale lips and bared teeth. The rest he can’t bring into focus – not even the eyes, if they were open or closed. He’d ask Nick, the only one he could ask, but the question would come across as ghoulish or perverse. Why would anyone want to remember such a thing?
If Nick is any indication, Owen must have spent countless hours in prayer, but Burkett never witnessed a single moment of it. Or maybe he did without being aware of it. He tries to imagine how his brother looked while praying. Did he take on the same posture and expression as Nick, who sits Indian-style with his hands resting on his knees, with his eyes closed, head tilted back, and lips twitching inscrutably?
He recalls those words from his brother’s notepad: Grant me the words to pray as You’d have me pray.
He hopes a memory of Owen in prayer will come back to him, a moment forgotten, but the strangeness of seeing someone in prayer isn’t something he would forget.
Owen tends to appear when Burkett’s thoughts are elsewhere, as if the memory were jealous for his attention. There are innumerable memories of Owen, but separate from those memories is an idea of him, a presence that seems to operate of its own accord. Like a spirit coupled to Burkett’s mind, tampering with it, shuffling memories like playing cards, and saying Remember this not as a question but as a command.
A day comes when Burkett feels prepared to wrestle. He’s lost weight from the exercise and meager diet. His body has hardened, lean and agile, and in his limbs and trunk he recognizes hints of that old strength. For the first time in years he thinks he could hold his own against his former self.
Akbar and Sajiv face each other shirtless and barefoot. The distance between them widens then narrows again with grunts and slaps. Knees dip toward the ground, hands fumble for purchase. Moments of tense equilibrium are punctuated by bursts of activity.
After watching for a time, Burkett approaches and asks for a bout. He pantomimes by bending his knees and gripping an imaginary opponent, even while Nick interprets the request. Sajiv seems to consider it, but Akbar takes obvious offense, turning away and spitting in disgust. Constant sin has left Burkett unclean, as evidenced by his foul odor and even rumors of seizures. The taint of sin might infect them like a disease, and cause them to suffer epileptic fits in this life and who knows what deprivations in the next. On the day of reckoning, Akbar would hate to give up any portion of his reward just because he’d agreed to wrestle with some infidel.
Sajiv brings up another point: given the blackness of Burkett’s soul, and Islam’s mandate to destroy sin, could they justify fighting him without intending to kill him? To wrestle Burkett would create a moral dilemma they would rather avoid. Burkett catches a glint in Sajiv’s eye, a hint of amused sarcasm, but in Akbar’s grim expression he finds nothing to match it.
‘Come on,’ Burkett says, almost pleading. ‘You think you can beat me?’
Akbar reaches for his Kalashnikov before even hearing Nick’s interpretation.
‘All right,’ Burkett says, backing away.
For the rest of the day he sequesters himself in the basement chamber, emerging only for food and a trip to the septic pit. Nick goes about his usual exercises, but Burkett refuses to participate. After dinner, when Nick tries to coax him into a game of chaupar, he says he’ll only play when Sajiv and Akbar agree to let him wrestle. But he can’t follow through on his threat. Since the game calls for either two players or four, a boycott on his part would have the effect of excluding Nick, who enjoys the game more than any of them.
That night his brother appears to him, a face hovering in darkness. Burkett begins to speak, to offer him the promise of revenge, but all of a sudden it strikes him as ridiculous, this idea of vengeance through wrestling. What does he hope to accomplish? Does he think he can catch Akbar in a stranglehold and choke him to death before Sajiv intervenes? Will scoring back points or takedowns ease his brother’s suffering in death?
His brother reaches for him but the space between them begins to widen. Come back, Burkett says, but realizes he is the one drifting away. His brother recedes into the distance till all he can see is a pinpoint glint from the ring on Owen’s finger, the ring that was stolen, either by the ones who killed him or the ones who handled his body.
Burkett was there when Owen discovered that ring on a creek bottom almost twenty years ago. They were jogging in the woods near their high school when Owen stopped and knelt by the shallow water. Burkett remembers the mud seeping away to reveal the silver in Owen’s palm. A sign, Owen called it, apparently having prayed for one just as the gleam caught his eye.
He had the ring inscribed with a verse from the Bible. Burkett can’t recall the words – something from Genesis, when Jacob wrestled with God. Or was it an angel? That story always had great importance for Owen: wrestling as a collision of the human and divine. He seemed to think of himself as a man wrestling with God.
Lightning flickers in the high window on Nick’s side of the chamber. Rain patters against the corrugated roof of the cowshed. He’s heard abou
t the wet season, ponderous and unceasing: over a hundred inches of rain. They’d expected to be released before the start of the monsoon. It was over three months ago that they were taken – he never imagined their captivity lasting this long – and with the rains limiting travel, especially in the mountains, they probably won’t be leaving for another month at least.
Boredom never came easily to him. His entire adult life – which is how he thinks of his years after wrestling – he’s devoted almost all his waking time to sex and work – and the invariable problem of keeping himself drunk enough for the former and sober enough for the latter. But now there is nothing: a void of meaningless hours. Till now he’s operated under the assumption that he would return to his former life and simply pick up where he left off. He’d accept the required rehabilitation, reclaim his medical license, and take a job in private practice. Now he wonders if anyone is even negotiating for their release. He could spend years in this intellectual vacuum, gradually regressing, forgetting. How long would it take to lose his skills as a surgeon? To become officially incompetent? He wonders what he’s forgotten already.
If a man is defined by his work, then what is Burkett becoming? A master of push-ups and chaupar, a practitioner in the science of boredom. Even if they released him tomorrow, he suspects he would return home a different person. He sees his life as a succession of identities: brother, wrestler, and surgeon. Now he is none of those things. He is a captive, nothing more. Who will he be when he re-enters the life he knew?
17
It is the second week of near constant rain. Burkett sits shirtless at the fire picking mud and carob seeds from his beard. The bones of a rabbit, Akbar’s latest kill, lie in the embers, the head still impaled on the gambrel.
The rain hasn’t prevented Akbar from hunting. Quite the opposite, his excursions have become more frequent since the basement flooded and the four of them began sleeping in the same room. Almost every day he goes out with his cherished hunting rifle, which he keeps sheathed in plastic, presumably till he finds something to shoot.