These speculative minutes can last forever, without an outside tick to clock it. A single afternoon supplies all the endless time in the world to figure out who put you here. To figure out where you've put yourself. Just another slumming American, priding yourself on acing the interview, on marketing yourself with a bit of fast talk. How exhilarating it was, that sense that you'd gotten away with something. Now you see that the school would have taken anyone at all. Anyone who could speak English. Anyone not insane. And even that requirement, they went ahead and waived.
You've brought this all on yourself. Walked open-armed into a civil war. You've negotiated with it since childhood, this sick desire for event. You weigh every other explanation and come back to the only one possible. The happy, affable, well-adjusted guy with his whole life in front of him wanted to sample prison. But not even your old self-destruction could have imagined this.
Dinner saves you from more self-punishment. But your dinner guests turn out to be total duds. Conversation is sporadic and banal, and no one seems to have any sports scores fresher than three months old.
The smashed chickpeas do help to fortify. With something inside you, the crush lifts a little. So what if you were trying to kill yourself by coming here? Beating yourself up about it now won't help. Truth has less to recommend it at this point than survival. You must outlive whatever part of yourself that wants something else.
You double back on the healthier obsession of figuring out which innocent student turned you in. But that fondled theme fails to divert you all the way up to sleep. You graduate to trying to work out exactly which group you've been handed over to. Three million people. Sixteen officially recognized religions. You read once that twenty different militia groups can rule a single refugee camp. Two dozen autonomous armies have carved up this country, staked out their sovereign checkpoints. Two dozen independent nation-states, laws unto themselves, rove from the Bekaa to the coast, armed with anything that the Security Council countries will sell them, their assault rifle butts stenciled with everything from verses from the hadith to decals of the Virgin Mary. And you can name only five of these groups at most.
So much rides on figuring out who has taken you. And so much doesn't. The means for finding out are somewhat limited. You decide to ask them, point-blank. You've gotten pretty good with the blindfold. Putting it on, when anyone shows, so that a wide swatch of the world remains visible beneath. And your ears have attenuated, too, to the point where you can tell your guards apart by the way they rattle your cage.
There are at least three regulars. You assemble them from bits and pieces, in gauzy darkness. One of them, the Angry Parent, is short, with a belly potting if not already pot. He wears a khaki pseudo-uniform and must be in his fifties, although you'vee yet to make out his face.
The second you've gotten a hurried look at. He came into the room once without knocking, as you scrambled to fit the blindfold onto your head. The bare bulb of the hallway threw his outline into high relief. White hair, a medium build, alert but bemused features. The Shiite Walter Cronkite.
The third is the Crazy Child. The one who beat and threatened you with his gun. You keep your head bowed when he is in the room. You know him from his knees on down: pencil legs, always the same pair of blue jeans ending in, God help you, a spanking red-and-white pair of Adidas.
You sniff out each of their walks, easily telling them apart even before they open the door. But you want more chance to study their voices. The Shiite Cronkite brings you dinner one night. "Salaam alaykum" you try him.
After a pause, he replies with a polite "Alaykum as-salaam." The longest conversation with a real person that you Ve had for a week.
You try it out on the Crazy Child. "Salaam alaykum" you greet him, the next time he bangs on your door with his pistol butt.
"Heh? A! Salaam, salaam! How do you know? Where do you learn salaam, hey?" He giggles, a low, hick chuckle. "We talk my talk now?" He releases a high-speed stream of syllables that sounds like abuse in any lexicon.
"Who are you?" you try, without a hope in hell that he'll tell you anything.
"Who?" Another throaty giggle, but slower. Mountain kid in the big city. Trying to enjoy himself and make it back home without getting fleeced. "Me? I am Ali."
It's your turn to giggle. You run the risk of pistol-whipping, or worse. But you cannot help yourself. "Hold on. Let me guess. Ali… Smith?"
"Hnn?" You brace for the blow. "Ali Smith?" He laughs like a jackal. "Yes, good! I am Ali Smith."
"Who are your people? What is this group that has taken me?"
But Ali just clucks with his tongue: What do you take me for?
Days later, the next time the Angry Parent hustles you to your morning sprint through the latrine, you try your greeting on him.
"Salaam alaykum. Salaam alaykum"
The Angry Parent makes no reply.
Your beard grows in. You play with the two bald spots on each side of your mouth, the spots that have always stopped you from growing a beard in real life. For the first time ever, you have the luxury of growing facial hair without any social consequences. You twist the longest chin strands into twin points, untwist them, repeat. It's good for what feels like hours at a shot.
You peel off a wafer of plaster from behind the radiator large enough to balance over the opening of your urine bottle. You keep the makeshift cap in place at all times. It reduces the room's stench. You find a way of lying along the radiator so that you can do sit-ups and push-ups without the chain chafing. You jump in place, run two-meter laps in a shrunken oval.
Ali hears your morning workout. He bangs on the door to break it up. "Hey? What you doing in there?"
"I need exercise. If I don't exercise, I will grow sick and weak."
"You stupid shit," he explains.
But no one intervenes when you start up again, quieter.
Knowledge of who is holding you arrives by the worst of couriers. The Angry Parent shakes your door late one evening, the signal to submit and cover your eyes. He enters your cell and places something on the floor in front of you. Then he circles around behind your back.
"Take off your cloth, please." His English, though thick, is surprisingly fluid.
You remove your blindfold. The sight on the floor in front of you turns your eyes hot and viscid. A pencil and a sheet of blank paper, your first since captivity.
"You must write a letter." He sounds forceful, but not violent.
"Oh yes. Oh, bless you. Thank God. al-Hamdallah."
His hand on your head prevents you from turning around in joy.
"No, no," he corrects, patient as a first-grade teacher. "I tell you what you must write."
You must write: To the people of the United States.
I am alive and healthy. I am being kept by the soldiers of Sacred Conflict, a unit fighting for God's Partisans. They are not terrorists. They do this thing as the only way to win justice.
I am being treated and fed well. I will not be hurt in any way, as long as the United States and its leaders act honorably. I will be freed as soon as the demands of Gods Partisans and of Gods higher laws are met. If they are not, then the failure will be upon you. And the failure will be serious.
You spell several words wrong. The Angry Parent doesn't notice. This is your desperate code, the only word you can smuggle out to the outside, the lone assurance that you know the letter is nonsense. Your mother will tell them. The Chicago office, Gwen: anyone who knows you in the slightest. Nothing if not a perfect speller.