A clicking the size of a cricket keeps you from falling forever. It plays one day for the space of a few minutes. It sounds like the metronome a rat pianist might use when struggling to tame a rodent sonata. A tentative, regular ticking in the pipes of this rural chateau. The chirping of an artificial sparrow. A doll's clock. It dies out a measure and a half after it starts.
Then, two days later, it comes back.
Three shorts, three longs, three shorts. The international distress call of all ships at sea. It forces a whoop from you, then another, softer. A laugh, wet, spastic, soft enough to evade detection. Your east wall is another man's west. Just on the far side of those six inches, someone lives. Just as suddenly, the broadcast breaks off once more. The dispatch quits, unanswered. Fifteen hours will have to pass before you're off the chain, before you can reach the wall to send back a reply. You pull on the metal staple in panic. The sender has given up on you, on your empty cell. You'll never hear from him again.
Then it occurs to you: this guy isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
The hours until your next exercise creep like a slug in a headwind. As the moment nears, thoughts vanish in an ecstatic buzz. Unleashed, you run an agonizing couple of diversionary laps until the guard disappears. Then you fall down convulsed in front of the altar wall, thrilled
into silence.
It's as if the skies have finally cracked open with a message from beings a thousand light-years away. And now, after the thousand-year passage, Earth must send its one summary greeting that will take a millennium to return. Morse is not an option. Nor is any other compressed transmission. All you have is that ancient trick, the cumbersome, cuneiform stupidity: one tap equals A; two equals B…
You cannot waste time with anything so irrelevant as "hello." Just tapping M-A-R-T-I-N at a comprehensible pace with clear pauses between letters — making the inevitable fumbles and improvising a rapid-burst signal for "start over" — burns up a terrible fraction of your allotted thirty minutes off the chain.
Every letter risks detection. You tap softly, checking as you cycle through the alphabet for any hint of movement behind your door. Detection here would mean death or worse.
You come to the final N of your name and wait for a response. But the bottle-message drifts off into resounding silence. You repeat the whole word, although the act costs you more precious minutes. A second silence, even rounder than the first. Blackness comes on you at the inexplicable failure; the signal vanishes into the void.
But maybe he, too, can get free to tap only at certain intervals. The thought saves you long enough for another attempt. You struggle over what word should follow, the second most important disclosure after that meaningless first one. And raging against the inevitable choice, at the idiocy of having to say it, you tap A-M-E-R-I–C-A-N.
You quit while still safe, a full day's work. When the guard comes to lock you back up after your run, you're more winded than usual.
Some hours later comes a reply.
Junot. French. The answer dashes your vague fantasy of free and unhindered romps through English with a native speaker. You'd dreamed of a shorthand version of those rambling letters your brother Kamran would send each month, trapped in a Peace Corps-ravaged Mali: "Yours in appropriate technology." You'd hoped for the desperate consolations of shared diction. You'll have, at best, a hurried pidgin.
The next day, you telegraph him back: bien. A lie, by implication. The bulk of your French consists of your mother's Pahlevi-corrupted pas vraiss and merzis, all the cosmopolitan affectations of the Shah's courtier class. But a harmless enough lie, to which you attach another: courage. At least any French he responds with will be slowed to a crawl. And you'll have a day to decode it.
Junot's next reply skirts the language issue altogether. Jihad, he tells you. Hezbollah.
You can think of nothing, in fifteen hours, to answer with but oui. Shorter, by a few precious clicks in your shared language, than its English foster brother. You add: I know. You look for some semaphore to compress all that you know, all that you've learned in this private school. Eighteen months. You?
You kick yourself for having said nothing. But on his next turn Junot picks up the English thread as if it signifies. Thirty-six weeks. I know, and as the words unfold in agonizing click-tedium, you wonder why he wastes such urgent time and risks such danger to say them. Then he adds your. Then he adds name.
The word splits open and heaven air-drops manna. This man, this total stranger in the next cell, whose existence you were not even aware of until a few days ago, has heard of you. He recognizes the name you've told him. He has heard it, sometime in the year between your kidnap and his. The world has not lost track. You haven't disappeared. Your mother knows your fate. Your brother. Gwen.
Now time, your old torturer, changes color. There aren't enough hours in the day to digest what the Frenchman tells you and to think up replies. You hurry through your words, stumbling, losing count of your clicks, starting all over. You spin in torment as he types, willing him to hurry, fearing that each breathless pause means discovery.
You never dreamed that words took such numbing redundancy. You invent a code for "et cetera," faster and shorter than your original "do over," which Junot picks right up on. Improvements come piecemeal, improvised. You spend nights inventing whole new codes, drastically more efficient in their transmission. But their rules would take days to convey. And you can't stop saying things long enough to streamline their saying.
Tick by tick, teaspoon by teaspoon, talk returns you to its appalling density. You communicate daily, but never more than a handful of words at one go. Completing a simple dialogue takes a week. Sometimes you go a night without hearing from him, awful interludes in which you toss on your bed like a cheated lover.
Junot says that the English churchman sent to negotiate for the hostages' release has himself been taken, perhaps even killed. The news is at least half a year old, but it hits you with the force of a wire flash. He says the Syrians have occupied West Beirut, putting an end to the city's anarchy.
But not, you reply, a bitter day later, to the war. You ache to cut through the waste of politics and ask him about the good stuff. What's new in music? Who won last year's Series? Any out-rageousness at the Oscars? He can't know, and you don't ask. Nor can you give him the diversion he must crave.
You share all the insights of your protracted stay, the names of all the guards you have garnered, their assorted psychopathologies and soft spots. You learn of your awful luck.
Junot has begged for reading matter but has not yet gotten a single scrap. You tap out short surahs from the Qur'an for him, like singing in the dark after bedtime, delighting in written syntax all over again. All the while you live in danger of detection.
What you could not do for yourself you rise to do for him. Release can't be long in coming, you tell him. All the rational evidence is on your side. The two of you: each other's confidant, each other's clinical physician, each other's clown. You lie for hours at night, giggling at his ridiculous shaggy-dog jokes, the ones that take three days to get to their belated punch lines. The ones that open with the telegraphic formula: Three. Tourists. Chinese. Indian. American.
One day, the line goes dead. It seems at first a minor annoyance. You've suffered interruptions before. Some guard has almost caught him, and he must lie low for a cooling period. Or he is on some protracted punishment, restricted to his chain.