For a while you tap on into the darkness, hoping he can still hear you. But long silence wears away the sense of anything at all on the far side of the barrier. This Frenchman has let you down, has raised your hopes, then hung you out to dry. Your daily dispatches get shorter, more perfunctory. You want to save the good stuff for his return, when you can hear his live reaction.
The day comes when you admit Junot will not be back. You say freedom. You say release, although there are more frugal explanations. This abandonment makes last spring's hopelessness seem like a mercy killing. You hate the man, for reviving desire and all its gruesome reminders. For telling you that you persist in the world's memory.
His words are no better than those pieces of fruit that Ali sadistically tosses, just out of reach.
In your dreams these nights, you lean out through a bright, open window. But the window sash falls like a blade on the back of your neck, as crisp as that old French political expedient. Joy looks out on all that it is not, your book says. But bitterness sees only itself.
Sayid brings you your supper late one evening, some day in what must be late August. The air wears that oppressive stillness, but here it is not so stultifying as the city was, this time last year. Your country estate, the subtle shifts of its noise and breezes, has blessed you in a million ways, all powerless to make any difference. Sayid comes to bring you your usual plate of gristle, and you hear him weeping. It stuns your ear to learn of a grief that isn't yours. In its strange depths, his pool of sadness at once dissolves yours.
What in all the world can this bewildered, accepting soul have to weep about? His suffering twists the air around him. You cannot help yourself; some dead root in you, left over from years ago, twitches in this rain. You want to know what happened. So long as you live, it will hook you, the hint of word. You hear him set down the plate and back out to go. He, too, will leave you without disclosing the source of his bitterness. Then a discovery larger than your life: you can just ask him.
"Sayid." The movement stops, but not the muffled sorrow. "Sayid. What is it? What has happened to you?"
He searches for a way through his loss. "Hussein." Unsure how to go on. "Hussein is dead."
Some family member or close friend. Another victim of this eternal
civil suicide.
"I'm… so sorry. When? When did it happen?"
The question baffles him. "When? At Karbala!" A thousand and a third years ago.
Pity, astonishment, and disgust — the whole grab bag given the human animal — pass through you in quick succession. But the flood of feeling recedes with Sayid, leaving behind only a single, sharp thrill. You know what day it is.
For the first time in months, you can locate yourself in time. Today is Ashura, the anniversary of the ancient sacrifice. The tenth day of Muharram, the month of mourning. Some quick thought and the application of your mother's formula produce the year: 1409.
But when is 10 Muharram? You spend the rest of the month — both months — worrying the problem. Like trying to derive the quadratic formula too many years after high-school algebra. The moon and the sun deny each other's cycles. By the time you conclude that mental conversion is impossible, you've lost count again, in any calendar.
You wake from a deep sleep, a creature gnawing at your face. You scream and spasm, sending some kind of beaked mammal flying across the floor. The guards ignore you, used to your nighttime apparitions.
But this beast is real. It glares at you from the corner where you've whacked it. You make it out: a mouse, feral and sniffing, no longer than your thumb, although a little fatter. Ounce for ounce, it looks at least as needy as a human. But infinitely more harmless.
The scared gray thing gives you a project to absorb another winter. It takes weeks to overcome your bad first impression and win her trust. You surrender the best scraps of each meal, always more than you can afford. In your moments off the chain, you leave stockpiles as far from human contamination as possible. When she comes out to examine the stash, helpless in the tug of its aroma, the human giant is there, lying still, just looking on, passive and given.
Each feeding station that she accepts gives way to another, imperceptibly closer to the giant's base camp. Desensitization takes forever, but it's precisely forever that you have on your hands. You've forgotten what it means to work steadily toward some goal. By the time she'll come within ten feet of you, she already forms your unwitting solace, your joy, your day's significance.
But she remains skittish as the day is long. Something about the disparity in your sizes. Something about being smacked across the room before formal introductions. There comes a day when she'll nibble just outside arm's distance. You're too ashamed to admit the name you've already given her, even to yourself, even at night when she wriggles her nose, inquiring, at your motionless body.
Conflicted for a reason. Conflicted for a reason, as the old televised talk-show public therapies liked to say. Pushing with the same hand that she used to pull you toward her.
Resenting any suggestion that you owed each other anything. But lashed together so tightly that even the vicious pulling away, even the cursing and eternal swearing off amounted to deepest intimacy.
In the days just after capture, your survival could spare no energy for any thought so trivial as love. Six months brought your radical education: happiness and desire were private distractions that allowed states to do their nightmare work unnoticed. A year embittered you to the fact that states had no more wherewithal than the most vicious of quarreling lovers. Eighteen months erased all human pretension past eating and sleeping, staying cool and dry, or calming your bowels until the next bathroom run.
Two years returns you to that first, unaffordable triviality.
More time passes. She comes almost right up to you. She'll take food out of your hand, if you hold it way out, palm open. She no longer turns and runs the second she's finished.
Late fall, the guards bring you a birthday cake. A single-layered, multicultural monstrosity of confectioner's sugar and identity politics, too freakish to assimilate. You don't want them to see you happy. To think that your stupid ecstasy has anything to do with this blundering
kindness.
Joy snubs out when they bring the present. A Minicam, sitting on some bag-headed mercenary's shoulder like a handheld rocket launcher. You are to eat and enjoy this cake — just another well-catered day in the Beirut Hilton — while they videotape you for the pleasure of the home audience.
You eat to keep them from seeing you destroyed. You eat left-handed, a subversive signal to any National Security Agency official inspecting the video for clues. You eat bare-faced, no evidence of ever having had to scramble with a blindfold. You look at this man filming you, stare at him. Even with the lights and blocking camera, even through the makeshift hood, his features will stay with you longer tharr the tape will remember yours.
Muhammad stands off camera, out of vision, saying, "Talk to your family. Say hello to your friends." Throw yourself off a high place. Change stones into bread. You eat slowly, savoring the cake, despite yourself. You make your face a blank, a mask onto which the world can project whatever dream it is struggling to realize.
Who do these clumsy directors think they're fooling? What message can they hope to send? And yet your family will see this. Your friends. Impossible. Communication from beyond the grave. You see them seeing you. You look just happy enough for your mother to imagine that
you're well.