Lebanon Hostage Ch. 02

God, I am so fucked up.

* * *

I have a fantasy about Makmoud. Not that kind of fantasy. I never have that kind of fantasy, not in this place.

In my fantasy, Makmoud comes to my cell to feed me or take me to the bathroom and finds me in the fetal position on my mattress. He kneels down and shakes my shoulder gently. "Jérémie," he says, concerned. "Jérémie."

I turn to face him—or rather, I turn my blindfolded face toward him. I've been crying. "I can't do this anymore, Makmoud." And then I'm crying again, burying my head in my arms.

Makmoud's conscience is stricken. That night, while the other guards are watching television, unarmed, relaxed, he draws his weapon and orders them down into the cellblock. He locks them together into one of the tiny cells. Then he races to my cell, pulls me up from my mattress, rips off my blindfold. I blink, shocked, stare for the first time into his broad, swarthy, earnest face. He speaks urgently. "Jérémie, come!"

He pulls me along behind him by my hand, down the cellblock. "What about the other hostages?" I ask. But there's no time, not now. We'll get help, the police, the Marines, we'll come back for them. The other guards stand at the grate of their cell, screaming helpless imprecations at Makmoud, vows of vengeance, as he and I race up the stairs.

Up the ladder, out the trapdoor. There's a getaway car in the garage; Makmoud has the keys. He motions for me to get down on the floor in the back seat, for my safety. He screeches out of the garage in reverse, races through the streets. After a while, he tells me it's safe to get up. I sit on the backseat, panting with relief and elation, sucking in the air of freedom. Makmoud throws a glance back at me, to make sure I'm all right. I'm crying, but they're tears of joy now. He breaks into a wide smile.

He drives me to the American embassy. We hurry inside the building, now I'm leading the way. People in suits stare at my beard and pajamas. "I'm Jeremy Lawrence. I was a hostage, I've just escaped. This is the man who freed me. There are still other hostages—he can take you there. But you have to help him, get him out of this country, with his family, for their safety."

After that, it's just mopping up. The prison stormed. The hostages freed. The guards apprehended. Back at the embassy, I meet Makmoud's young wife, their two small children. The embassy has given them visas, is preparing to relocate them to the United States. Makmoud's wife cries as she thanks me in Arabic. Makmoud, holding his toddler on one arm, reaches out to put his other hand on my shoulder. He doesn't know how to say "thank you" in English, so he just says, "Jérémie, Jérémie," his deep voice thickened by emotion. He's a good man, caught up in something evil as a result of forces not entirely in his control. And now he is free. He has freed us both.

I know this is a silly, childish fantasy. I even think it is a dangerous fantasy, dangerous to what remains of my mental health and emotional stability, because it encourages me to hope for things that cannot be.

But I also think: No, this could happen. This could work.

* * *

They are doing things differently today, which immediately I feel does not bode well. Instead of holding onto my arm to guide me to the bathroom, this guard stands behind me with his hands on my shoulders. He frog-marches me out of the cell, turns me to the right, then shoves me ahead of him, releasing me, so that I am now standing in the open cellblock, blind and without a guide. "Go," he orders.

I recognize that voice giving that order. It's the guard who hit me when I was pacing in my cell. The Bully. He wants to play a new game...

I reach out to either side, feeling for walls—with my knuckles, since I'm holding a bottle in each hand. The Bully tells me, "No!" and steps toward me long enough to slap my arms down. I take small, cautious steps, hardly lifting my feet from the floor, afraid that he's planted something in my path for me to trip over. Normally, after just a few paces, I would make the mysterious zigzag turn. Is he going to tell me when?

I turn hesitantly to my left. "No," he barks. I resume walking forward. Even granted that I've been taking smaller steps than usual, I feel like I've gone too far. "Yes," he tells me, which I take as the signal to turn left. "Yes, go," he says, adding, "Yallah." He wants me to hurry. I take a couple steps forward, faster this time.

Pain explodes in my knee: I've collided with something hard. The shock makes me drop my pee bottle. Thankfully, it has a lid; God knows how they would punish me if I spilled my urine all over the floor. I hear the bottle rolling away somewhere beside me. I use my now freed hand—my left—to see what I collided with. It's a concrete barrier, waist high, that runs on to my left and right as far as I can reach. What the hell is this thing for? My knee aches intensely. Please don't let anything be broken.

"Come. Come," the Bully orders me. I transfer my empty drinking bottle to my left hand so I can use my right to feel my way along the top of the barrier as I shuffle back toward the guard. There must be a gap in the barrier, that's why the zigzag turn. I tip my head back so I can see a slice of floor in front of me under the bottom of the blindfold, searching for the lost pee bottle. There it is. I squat down, painfully because of my knee, recover the bottle, and tuck it under my left arm.

"Yallah," the Bully orders, impatiently. I resume walking toward him alongside the barrier until my right hand falls off concrete into empty air. The gap. I turn, walk through.

The Bully is now right behind me again. He grips my shoulders, turns me to the right, and makes me run in front of him. After a couple of steps, he hurls me forward, unguided again, yelling, "Yallah!" I stumble, grope, dropping both bottles this time. I'm trying to slow down, knowing that at any second—

I collide with the steps up to the bathroom and fall, smashing the same knee as before, along with my wrists and chest. The combination of pain and humiliation and fear sets me crying. The Bully hauls me up by my pajama collar. He cuffs the back of my head and hisses at me to be quiet.

By now the Bully's partner has caught up to us. The partner says something reproachful to the Bully; the Bully snarls back. The partner, I think, takes my arm and leads me up the steps into the bathroom. He hands me my pee bottle to empty. While I'm in the bathroom, the two guards continue to grouse at each other on the other side of the shower curtain, though neither sounds very upset. When I reemerge, I'm pretty sure it's the partner who returns me to my cell, by himself, without the Bully accompanying us.

The Bully returns for the next day's toilet run. He stands behind me again with his hands gripping my shoulders, but he doesn't make me walk or run unguided. He just frog-marches me in front of him the whole way, roughly and quickly.

At the entrance to the bathroom, we stop. He releases one of my shoulders but keeps gripping the other, holding me in place.

He runs his free hand through my hair. Slowly. Intimately. Sinisterly.

He puts his lips to my ear.

He whispers: "I love you."

He shoves me forward, away from him, into the bathroom and jerks the curtain closed between us.

My arms are shaking as he frog-marches me back to my cell. I am more terrified than I have been since the interrogation when they threatened to electrocute me. What is going to happen when we reach my cell? As usual, there's a second guard accompanying us, but I can't tell if it's the same man as yesterday. Will the second man's presence protect me? Or has he been promised a turn? Should I scream and fight, or will that just make it worse?

Dear God, don't let this happen, please, I'm begging you...

The Bully pushes me into my cell. The door closes behind me.

I am alone. Thank God, alone.

I collapse on my mattress. Lately my crying has been downgraded to more-or-less quiet weeping, but now my sobs are as hard and loud as my first days here.

The Bully repeats this latest game during future toilet runs. On the way to the bathroom, he whispers that he loves me; at the end, nothing happens. With every repetition, my fear diminishes by tiny increments but is far from disappearing. Maybe he's toying with me, cat and mouse, letting my terror and his anticipation mount before he finally does it. Or maybe—please let it be this—he simply enjoys scaring me and has no intention of following through. Maybe—an even more optimistic scenario—he was reprimanded for the earlier mistreatment, and "I love you" is sarcastic overcompensation.

Then the Bully stops coming, as near as I can tell in my blindness. I want to believe this means he's gone for good, that he has dropped from the rotation as suddenly as he showed up, but I don't know that. Every time my door opens, it could be him. As the days since his last appearance accumulate, the suspense simply stretches farther and father. How long can it stretch before it snaps?

* * *

I can't pet myself anymore. It makes me think of the Bully, running his hand through my hair. He has robbed me of one of my very few sources of comfort.

I hate him so much. But it is a helpless hatred. There's no energy to it, I can't draw any power or strength from it. Just black ashes and despair.

* * *

If I shattered my tea glass to make a shard, sharp enough to cut my wrists—would I have the guts to go through with it?

No. No, I wouldn't. Goddamn it. Goddamn it.

* * *

Why do I bother taking my blindfold off at all? I have nothing to do, nothing I need to look at.

I lower my blindfold, and the half dark becomes full dark. Just like a power outage, except I'm in control. I have turned off the world. Now there's just me and the mattress underneath me. The mattress is floating away on the darkness, carrying me with it. I can imagine I'm anywhere, can conjure up for myself whatever surroundings I please.

At first this is soothing. Then I become frightened. I take the blindfold off. Like suicide, insanity is tempting, but I'm afraid of taking that decisive, irreversible step out of reality. I know it's only a matter of time before the reality of this cell destroys me. I want to get out. I need to get out. But I don't have the courage to step through either of the two doors that I have any chance of being able to open: turning loose my mind or opening up my veins.

That's how pathetically, utterly weak I am. Too weak to survive. But too weak to end it. Too weak to do anything but go on being weak.

* * *

"Hello, Jérémie," Makmoud says.

He has come to my cell alone. To offer me cigarettes? Just to visit? I never find out why, because as soon as I perceive that he's alone, a mad surge of hope splits my brain in two. This is it, this is my chance...

I'm on my feet, staggering blindly toward him. He reaches out to steady me, confused no doubt. I grip his arms, I'm babbling. "Makmoud, I can't do this anymore. You have to get me out of here, please, I can't do it... "

He pushes me away from him to wrench free from my grip. Then he grabs my shoulders and shakes me. "No, Jérémie!" His voice is stern.

Suddenly, I am enraged. I open my mouth, and a geyser of pressurized anger I didn't realize was there comes spewing out. I scream, "You're supposed to be my friend! Help me! Help me!"

He beats a hasty retreat, slamming my cell door shut. I stumble forward—it doesn't occur to me to lift my blindfold—and pound on the inside of the door with my fist. I become aware that I am still screaming.

My tiny cell is full of guards. They are holding me down on my mattress in a sitting position. One or two hold my legs stretched out in front of me. Another holds my torso in a crushing embrace from behind, my arms folded across my chest. As they were wrestling me down, my blindfold slid off my eyes; they've reknotted it so tightly it pinches.

I'm not struggling now, though. I'm happy. I hear tape being stripped from the roll, and I know this means that they are packing me up to send me home.

They wrap my chest, tightly, until my folded arms are completely encased in a packing-tape straitjacket. Then they bind my lower legs together, followed by my thighs. Perhaps because I've quieted down, they do not gag me.

They leave me stretched out on my mattress on my back. Superfluously, they lock my cell door as they go. I lie there, absorbing the realization that I am not, in fact, going home. I am in a hostage's version of "time out." I start to cry, but I have to stop; crying is physically painful because of the tape constricting my chest.

I lie there all day. Tightly cocooned in tape and a blindfold, I am uncomfortable but at the same time I feel strangely safe—safer than I have felt since my kidnapping. I do not move or struggle, I have neither the energy nor the will.

My rage is gone. Where has it gone? Expelled from my body? Subsided back into my subconscious, to erupt again later? I feel... nothing. It is a welcome change.

After a while, I need to pee. The urgency mounts, becomes unbearable. In my blasé state, I think: Why not? I release into my pajamas, basking in the warmth and the relief. I am an infant in swaddling clothes. Someone will come to change me. I wait for hours more. My clothes turn clammy.

Two guards return to untape me. When one discovers I have wet myself, he curses and boxes my ears, making them ring. I am taken to the bathroom. A guard with sufficient English orders me through the closed curtain to rinse my clothes in the shower. I wring out my pajamas and underwear as thoroughly as I can, then stand by the curtain, holding my damp clothes in a bundle in front of me, naked except for my blindfold, waiting to be taken back to my cell. When the guard opens the curtain and sees me, he yanks the curtain closed again and shouts at me, offended, to get dressed. I pull on my cold, wet clothes for the walk back to my cell, where I strip again and lay the clothes out on my mattress to try to dry them some more. I wrap myself in my blanket and huddle on the bare floor.

* * *

"Hello, Jérémie," Makmoud says, tentatively I think. He's serving me breakfast.

"Hello," I reply. My voice is low and defeated. I feel I ought to apologize to him for my outburst the other day. But I am afraid that if I say anything more, he might think that I'm having another meltdown. Or if I start to speak, maybe something inside me will go off again unexpectedly, and I will have another meltdown. Better to say nothing beyond the usual "Hello." Try to show him that I am back to normal. Quiet. Passive. Uncomplaining. Unresisting. If I go crazy, I will go quietly.

* * *

Periodically, I can hear someone in a cell across the way shouting in French in a high-pitched voice that makes me picture a deaf old man. This is a new development in the cellblock. But it is of little interest to me. I am losing interest in everything.

* * *

Staring at the far wall, I realize that I haven't remembered to make a notch to count the days in... well, obviously, I don't know how long. Several days at least. I haven't left my mattress in some time, apart from toilet runs.

It takes me a while to conclude that it's worth mustering the strength to go over and examine the tally, three feet away. I roll across the floor, it's too much work to crawl, much less stand.

Six weeks plus three more notches. I can't remember now if I made notches to represent the couple of weeks that I thought had passed before I started to keep tally. If I didn't, then I've actually been here for eight weeks—or had been whenever I stopped keeping tally. All of this assuming that I had ever been keeping something close to a decent count.

This is confusing. But it doesn't matter. I don't know why I bothered coming over to look. Knowing certainly doesn't make me feel any better.

* * *

I stretch out on my back, squeezing my legs together and folding my arms tight across my chest, trying to recover the unexpected feeling of safety I had when they taped me up during "time out." Sometimes I am able to approximate the feeling. Other times, I just feel stupid.

* * *

I am stupidly naive for having come to this country despite all the warnings. I am stupidly narcissistic for having thought that some warped sexual urges were a life-or-death crisis worth flying halfway around the world to whine to Bernie about. I am stupid for having gone to that wretched gay bar. I am stupid for having gone home with a stranger. I am stupid for having given him my phone number. I am stupid for having agreed to see him again. I am stupid for having complicated my life in that way for the sake of satisfying some stupid perverted curiosity and enjoying a few stupid orgasms. I wouldn't be here now if I hadn't been so stupidly self-indulgent. I wouldn't be here if I hadn't been so weak that I couldn't resist the temptation to go to the bar, or to go home with Dale, or to return his calls, or to run panting back to his bed, or if I weren't so weak that I couldn't just sort out my own shit without running to Bernie in a country that everyone told me was dangerous. I am stupid and weak and perverted and disgusting and now I am trapped and it is my own fault and I am too weak to do this and it is going to break me down or kill me and I have no one to blame but myself because I am weak and stupid and worthless and disgusting and weak and dirty and worthless, worthless, worthless, and why I am still here taking up space and air and food in this world I don't understand because there's no point and I just want to stop, stop thinking, stop being, just stop.

Stop.

Stop.

Stop.

* * *

I've finally stopped crying. Now I sleep, all the time. I can sleep soundly through the noise of the ventilator or the static. I have become inured.

One morning, when breakfast arrives, there's an untouched dinner in my bowl that I don't remember them bringing me. A guard tells me to dump the rice into my little garbage bag, which he then takes away. I should rinse out the bowl, for my health's sake, but I can't be bothered, I just want to go back to sleep.

I lie on my mattress, listlessly holding the dry cheese sandwich they've just brought me. I make an effort, eat half, leave the rest on the mattress beside me. I slip back off.

I'm awakened by the sound of the guards reopening my cell for the toilet run. Even though I need to void myself, I'm too tired to get up right away. One of the guards thrusts the uneaten half of my sandwich under my nose. Am I sick? he asks. No, I tell him. Then eat, he orders. I'll do it later, I think, petulant. But he makes me finish the sandwich before they take me to the bathroom.

That night, a guard again watches to make sure I eat. I move the food blindly, mechanically, from bowl to mouth to stomach. I'm not afraid of the guard, although somewhere in my head a voice buried under cobwebs is trying to warn me that I should be. I'm doing what he wants just so that he'll go away and let me sleep.

* * *

I am awakened by a guard slapping the shower curtain. "Yallah!" The sound is mere inches from my ear. I am sitting on the bathroom floor, my back to the wall, my head resting forward on my naked knees. My pajama bottoms and underwear are clumped around the base of one leg.

How did I get here? I labor to remember: the march to the bathroom, the awkward exhausting squat, feeling too tired to stand up afterward...

The guard opens the curtain. I expect him to yell at me: it's just what they do, it's the weather of this place. Instead he stands there for a few moments without reacting. Then he and his partner haul me to my feet. They pull my blindfold down for me: I didn't realize I'd forgotten. They still don't yell at me, not even for that. Huh. Odd. Whatever.