"I am here because I am a Westerner." A suicidal one, who thought the war could not touch him. Who walked into this massacre with open arms.
His silence flows outward, marvelous. "How many Westerners do we keep?"
"You tell me."
"You may count them on your hands and feet. Twenty, twenty-five, maybe. Not all belong to our group. For any one Westerner, a hundred Lebanese are in prison. Two hundred. Sunni, Shiite, Druze, Christian. Thousands of Lebanese hostages. How many of these prisoners get the books they ask for, do you think?"
"How are they held? Are they alone? Can they talk to each other? Can they tell each other stories?"
More silence. It can have only one source. He is thinking. Thinking about what you say. Hands that wanted to crush his esophagus now want to embrace his shoulders. The first conversation. The first real talk you've had for more months than you can remember how to say.
"What is it that you need from these books? What can you learn from them?"
How can you tell him? On every urgent page, in every book born of human need, however flaccid, puerile, slight, or wrong, there is at least one sentence, one where the author is bigger than the writer, one that sheds the weight of its dead fixations and throws off the lead of its prose, one sentence that remembers the prisoner in his cell, locked away nowhere, victim of the world's shared failure, begging for something to read.
"I… I can learn from them how not to be me. For an hour. For a day. You are crushing me, Muhammad. I need someplace to go. I need something to think about. Somebody else, somewhere else."
"Go here," he commands you, touching your sternum. "Think about what is inside you."
"I can only think about that… for so long."
"We have a saying. Everything in life is imagination. But in fact it is reality. Whoever knows this will need nothing else."
"I need… someone to talk to. I need… to hear someone else thinking."
"Mr. Martin, do you believe in God?"
The syllable is one of those auditory hallucinations manufactured from the faint puffs of artillery barrage in the air outside your crypt. A phantom, bizarre query, like the ones Gwen floats you sometimes, as you toss sleepless on your damp pallet.
Can he really be asking this? You will tell him anything he wants to hear. Tell him about your mother's youth, her feats of religious memorization in a foreign language, beating the Qur'an against her chest in public processions, that believer's life she led before landing in the Hawkeye state.
"That… that's not the shape that my… astonishment takes."
Silence stretches out between you. A small preparation, readying you for the coming moment when silence will be total.
The year makes its lurch toward spring. Your rear right molar begins to throb. The Chief, the big one, whoever he might be, ignores all requests for a dentist. There are no dentists. Dentists have ceased to exist. All dentists have fled this city, taken themselves off to the Anti-Lebanons, to airier altitudes — the mountains beyond the mountains.
You take to killing your roaches and assorted vermin, shipping their corpses out with your dirty dinner dishes. A ceiling leak wets the corner above the radiator. Over the months, the steady waterfall cultures a green-algae streak running down the length of wall. The slime necklace threatens to continue down the nape of your neck.
You point it out to the latest phantom on the far side of the blindfold who comes to feed you. "You see that green stain?" Hoping, behind your blindfold, that you point more or less in the general direction. "You must get rid of it. A man cannot live this way. It's unclean."
But this guard doesn't even bother to return the traditional bukrah, the annihilating inshallah. The rage of countless months courses up through the veins in your neck and spills over.
"OK. That's it. I've had it. I'm not paying you people a sou more in rent until you make a few improvements around here."
There is a silence as wide, as violent as history. You brace for the coming punishment. Then the voice of Muhammad says, "We are taking it out of your salary."
They come one day to make you submit to a haircut and shave. For the better part of a year, you have not looked on your own image. You don't need to. For the first time in your life, you can see your own hair and beard without benefit of a mirror. The effect must be something like a bad painting of Christ on velvet, only a little more Middle Eastern than he's usually depicted. It has been one of your lone comforts, to twist a five-inch hank around an idle fist for hours at a shot.
"No thank you," you tell them. The hair has become a source of strength, extruding daily out of your follicles. Your Samson fantasy: power proportionate to its untended length. The plaster behind the radiator has gone soft with heat and damp, and one well-timed, concentrated shove will one day push the soggy Philistine temple down on all of you. Your hermit hair, your curling strands of beard have become your private project, the sole vestiges of growth in a growthless place. Your visible badge of defiance, your rosary of focus. The measure of your captivity.
"Not to worry. I don't need a haircut just now."
They advance in a group, at least four of them. One of the voices you have never heard before. The others speak an Arabic in front of this stranger that denies even knowing you.
"Honest, gentlemen." You giggle. "I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to."
They unlock you and prod you to your feet. Their touch incenses you. They will not; they have no right. You push out blindly, shoving the hands off you. The knot of them falls back, startled by this madness. Then the zeal of retaliation, of method released. A knee jacks into your back, shattering your kidney and sending your spine into your stomach. One of them goes for the head, batting with the butt of a piece of metal that, even as you fall and ball up, you realize must be the electric-shears.
It is over quickly. They drag you out in the hall, under a lamp. Crippled all the way down into your rearranged gut, you stop resisting. Three of them hold you pinned, while the fourth tears into you with the croaking shears. They prune your secret strength back to your skull, your scalp clipped repeatedly in the electric blades. Your face follows, beard more ripped off than severed.
They deposit you back on your mattress, continuing to vent their rite of group rage as they shackle you back up. Sobbing will not stop, nor your body quit convulsing. No food comes that night, or all the next day. No one comes to let you off the chain for exercise. When you reach up to feel your head, you feel only raw hide, patchy and diseased.
You lie dead for two days. You cannot open your left eye. Something in your abdomen has ruptured. Pain immobilizes you. Your pelvis has been smashed under a boulder. Even making a quarter-turn on the mattress ruptures you. Holding still is a duller agony, but lasts much longer.
You try to talk to Gwen, but you cannot raise her. Her image can't seem to hear you or tell that you're there. But then she can. She is crying. It seems to be for you. And then it isn't.
She is crying, because she is thirty-two and her life means nothing.
I'm a worthless, divorced waitress who's ten thousand dollars in debt. How can you stand being around me? You know what I should do? I should do something with my photography. I'm thinking about going back to school in the fall. Art school. You know what I've always wanted to get good at? Acting. You know: I can write pretty well. I've been thinking about doing some reviewing for The Reader. You know, they run these ads? Training to be a dominatrix? Men who just want to be disciplined a little? It's completely safe, they say. And it pays incredibly well. And it won't cost me a dime, except for the photo portfolio.