Lebanon Hostage Ch. 03

Allan makes short work of dispatching my concern: he'll melt the base of the candle and stick it to the bottom of his tub, it will be perfectly fine. He insists we ought to have access to a light source we control. Someday the battery powering the fluorescent light is going to die, or the bulb will need to be changed, and we could be left sitting in the dark for hours until the guards come down and discover what's happened. A couple weeks, even, if they haven't planned ahead and they have to bring new bulbs or a new battery up from Beirut when they return for their next shift.

This all sounds sensible. I wonder, though—but do not ask—if a guaranteed light source matters so much to Allan because, perhaps, he has a phobia of the dark. I don't like the thought of him being susceptible in that way. I want him to be immovable.

Anyway, we never get a candle.

* * *

I jerk into consciousness. "Stop it!" Allan is shouting. "Don't hurt him!"

I sit up. Allan is lying next to me, he's having a nightmare. I shake him awake. The guards have also been awakened. The trapdoor opens, but no one comes down the stairs, they just stand up top listening. After we've remained silent for several tense seconds, the trapdoor closes.

Allan looks bewildered and a little frightened. "What happened?" he asks. I tell him what he said in his sleep. He lies down again with his back to me. "I was dreaming about something that happened in my last place," he says in a dull voice.

I wait for him to tell me more. I'm afraid to know more, but I would prefer knowing what actually happened to inventing my own terrifying scenarios. He can sense I'm waiting. Without looking back around at me, he says, "I'd rather not talk about it, if you don't mind."

I lie down, but I can't sleep. Allan hasn't gone back to sleep, either. After a while, he sits up and smokes. I pretend to be asleep to give him privacy.

The nightmare recurs two more times over the next few nights. After the third time, Allan tells me what the nightmare is about, but he waits until daytime to do it. There's absolutely no difference in terms of how much light we have in our cell, but I guess I can see why it would make a difference to him psychologically.

When Allan arrived at his first prison, there was a very young man in another cell—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, maybe—who screamed a lot and was beaten for it repeatedly. Then, a couple days later, there was an incredibly loud gunshot, and the young man never screamed again.

This story puts me in a panic. "This is why I didn't want to tell you," Allan says. I'm wounded by the bite in his voice, but I rally myself: I'm not the one who experienced the trauma, for God's sake.

"I'm sorry," I tell him. "I don't know what to say. Jesus."

I would like to give and receive some physical comfort right now—arms around shoulders, even just pats to the shoulder—but such moments only ever occur when Allan initiates them because I don't have the nerve. He doesn't initiate one now. But he offers me the verbal comfort that our captors aren't going to "do that" to either of us. We're Westerners, our lives are worth more to them.

Telling me what happened seems to have helped. Allan experiences the nightmare only rarely after that.

One night after Allan has told me, I wake up needing to pee. I do it kneeling at the foot of my mattress, as quietly as I can, trying to aim against the side of the bottle instead of directly into the reservoir at the bottom. When I lie back down, Allan is sleeping with his face turned toward me. We always go to sleep back to back, but he has rolled over at some point in the night.

I lie on my back with my head turned so I can gaze at his face, dimly lit by the fluorescent light entering through the fan. He looks soft and vulnerable as he sleeps. I used to imagine that seeing Allan vulnerable would unnerve me, but now the sight fills me with tenderness. I want to comfort him for the horror he witnessed in his last prison. I want to reach over and cup the side of his face.

Of course, I can't do that; it's a gay gesture. It frustrates me that I have somehow grown up never learning the socially acceptable ways for men to touch each other. This is why I can never touch Allan. I'm afraid of doing it wrong, of giving myself away.

Still, the fact that I want to comfort him—the fact that I am capable of tenderness and empathy—makes me feel like a better person, a bigger person. I'm not bigger than the horror. But I'm big enough to struggle against it.

I wish I knew the right physical gestures to support Allan as he struggles, too.

* * *

Allan's parents are both alive, and he has two siblings: an older brother, Michael, and a younger sister, Kathy. Michael is married and has a daughter; Kathy has a boyfriend whom Allan predicts she will marry. Allan has never been married, but before coming to work in Beirut, he lived for two years in London with a girlfriend, Emily. I have a hard time understanding why he would live with a woman for two years—he wasn't just "with her" for two years, he actually lived with her that long—without marrying her somewhere along the way. I guess that's the well-trained Catholic in me.

The fact that I have never had a girlfriend escapes scrutiny: Allan takes it for granted that I'm young and still in school and therefore not looking to be tied down. Perhaps when I tell him I've never had a girlfriend, he assumes that I mean I've never had a very serious girlfriend, or a live-in girlfriend. Naturally, I don't clarify.

Allan doesn't explain why his relationship with Emily ended. "I still don't know exactly what went wrong." But he does tell me that when he reached a point in his career at which he wanted to take a post somewhere overseas, Emily had a job in London she wasn't willing to leave. Then they broke up—for additional reasons, I gather—and the position in Beirut opened, and he took it. He hasn't been in a relationship since his breakup with Emily.

Allan says, "I'm not sure I know how to live with another person." He laughs in a half-hearted way that convinces me he's actually getting low. It will kill him, he says, if he gets out of here and finds that Kathy has married in his absence. It will be a bad omen, it will doom him to spend the rest of his life as the guy who turns up to every family get-together with a different woman each time.

I don't grasp the superstitious logic of that, even as a joke. But clearly Allan feels inadequate about his ability to maintain a relationship and fears being the only one of his siblings who can't pull off marriage. Trying to be encouraging, I tell him—in response to his comment about not knowing how to live with another person—that I find him pretty easy to live with.

He laughs a little at that. And then keeps on laughing. I would feel insulted (why was my compliment funny?) if I weren't telling myself that the laughter is just emotional release, he's breaking through the low feeling. He appreciates me saying that, he tells me. He works hard at trying to be easy to live with—and he appreciates how hard I work at it, too.

But of course it isn't the same thing, he continues, living together in this cell versus trying to be in a relationship. Here in this cell, trying not to be a bastard is basically the only thing he has to do, the only thing he has to worry about. So, yeah, he can pull that off pretty well. He isn't also trying to juggle two people's careers, and keep house together, and figure out who's responsible to do what, and deal with each other's friends and family, or decide who gets to do what they want this weekend, or if and when to have kids, not to mention trying to make sure everyone's satisfied in the bedroom...

He trails off, and there's a lull in the conversation that for me, at least, feels very tense. Allan sniffs and rubs his finger across his nostrils in a way that makes me wonder for a moment if he's crying. But when I glance over at his face, I can't make out any sign of tears in the dim light, and his voice, when next he speaks, is unchanged.

Allan shifts the subject sideways. How are we doing? he asks. Is there something he could be doing, or not doing, that would make him easier to live with?

Since he's asked, I confess to him, for the first time, how much his smoking bothers me. That could be a serious problem, Allan tells me in a somber voice. He really, really needs to smoke to calm his nerves. As it is, he's already been forced to cut back, even with me giving him my ration. (Good God, did he used to be a chain smoker?) And it's doubly hard never being able to have a fucking drink.

I'll get used to it, I assure him. It's just... something I have to live with. I'm sure I do things that he finds challenging to live with.

He doesn't nibble at that. He doesn't assure me, "No," or say, "Well, now that you mention it...," followed by mention of some not-too-embarrassing faults I'm already aware of. He does thank me for being willing to put up with his smoking.

I feel like the conversation has penetrated to a greater depth of intimacy. So I build up a little courage and tell Allan that I'm very glad he's here, I don't know how I'd manage if he weren't.

He smiles at me—not the big triangular smile of his that I find so adorable; this is a closed smile, but still warm—and says he feels the same way. Then I suppose the conversation must be getting too touchy-feely for him, because he says, "How about a film?" which means that one of us will fill some time by narrating a movie in close detail, ideally one the other hasn't seen.

* * *

I am extraordinarily lucky. From inside my head, I frequently launch spontaneous prayers of thanks that my captors put me with Allan. Not thanks that they put me with someone—that they put me with Allan. What if they had paired me up with the Praying Hostage? Or the Handcuffed Hostage? Obviously I don't really know anything about either of those men, but the mental pictures I have of them based on what little I do know persuades me that being cellmates with either of them would be harder work and less nurturing.

Allan is a considerate, even-tempered, good-natured person; at work, he must have been a likeable boss. He has a confident but easy-going masculinity, understated, slightly nerdish. If he were more of a jock, I would feel intimidated and unequipped to relate. Instead, he is someone I can have an intelligent conversation with, but also someone I can easily picture in a pub after work with his buddies, his mates, his top button undone, his tie loosened, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled halfway up his forearms, drinking beer from a tall glass, laughing with the rest of his pack. It's an attractive image—partly, I know, because I find the scenario erotic, which is a problem, but also because Allan's masculinity comforts me. It helps me feel safer, more relaxed, as if he could protect me, even though I know that's illusory. Despite a youthful air, Allan has a deep voice, which I find soothing, much like Makmoud's.

When we first meet, I feel that I don't know what Allan really looks like because of the unkempt beard hiding part of his face. That changes a week or so after we arrive, when the guards give us summer haircuts. They do it in the room just at the top of the stairs. Each hostage is taken up one at a time. When it's my turn, they sit me in a chair, remove my blindfold ("No look!"), then cover my closed eyelids with wads of tissue held in place with squares of tape to make sure I can't peek at them. They use electric clippers to buzz my hair and beard down to stubble, a quick operation. I have no access to a mirror—here as in my first prison, there isn't one in the bathroom—so I don't know what I look like either before or after. Allan, after his haircut, looks from the forehead up like a skull with fuzz. But the beard stubble they've left him is discomfortingly sexy. That is a look that would work very well for him in normal life.

I react so strongly to Allan's stubble that I feel an impulse to tell him how good it looks. That wouldn't give me away, would it? Straight men compliment each other's appearance that way, don't they? I envision saying it to him in the form of a joke: "Up top makes you look like you have cancer, but the beard is working now." Or I could just ask him straightforwardly if he ever tried the unshaven look in normal life, "because I seriously think you should consider it." In the end I don't say anything. I'm afraid to be the one who brings the subject up, and he doesn't say anything complimentary about my appearance that I could reciprocate. His comment is, "This must be how sheep feel."

I consider it providential that Allan's beard stubble is his only facial feature that rouses sexual feelings in me. There is nothing attractive to me about his scraggly beard, and when it's gone I can see that without the lingering sexy stubble, his face would look quite dorky. It is very much a white-collar face, a real white-collar face, not, as on TV or in clothing catalogues, a model's hypermasculine features costumed in office dress. Allan has the face of a nerd, of someone who spends his work day sitting behind a desk, or in front of a screen, and loves it. Not that I should be throwing stones on that count. But that's my point. Like me, Allan does not have a face that communicates virility—even if, unlike me, he has mastered a body language that does.

Again, this reality is providential: it makes it easier for me to live with Allan. I don't have to worry so much that I will look into his face in a way that betrays sexual desire.

Dorky though he looks, Allan has an adorable smile. When he lets himself go, it opens down, into a triangle, making him look exuberantly, boyishly happy. When he smiles like this, I understand where the cliché "my heart melted" came from. I feel lighter when he does it. I want... I don't know what I want. I want him. But not in a sexual way, I don't know how to explain it. Unlike sexual attraction—the attraction that makes me want to secretly ogle his body—the wanting I experience when Allan smiles doesn't feel dirty. It feels... wholesome, uplifting.

I love Allan, I understand that. I could never tell him that in so many words because I can't trust myself not to inflect it in the wrong way. But the fact that I love him is not, per se, a problem, I am not ashamed or guilty or afraid of it. My love for Allan is normal and positive inasmuch as it is a response to the things he does that nourish me. And hopefully, my love leads me to do things that nourish him.

What is a problem is untangling the feelings I have for Allan that are normal and positive from the feelings that are gay.

Untangling the two would be easier if we didn't have bodies.

* * *

Living in a 6-by-6-foot space, it is as if Allan and I spent all our time sitting or lying together on top of a king-sized bed. In such intimate quarters, we are forced to come to terms with our bodies in ways that we would have room to evade in normal life. Discretion and privacy are available to us in the tiniest of slivers.

I am vividly, painfully aware of the various odors my body produces. Thankfully, with toothpaste in our tubs, I can keep bad breath under control. Our diet encourages flatulence, which Allan jokes about until he recognizes how uncomfortable that makes me, at which point the etiquette becomes not to pass any comment beyond a quick, "Sorry." My underarm odor is my greatest humiliation because unlike morning breath or flatulence, this odor is constant, apart from a brief respite after each weekly shower. Allan never says a word about how I smell, but I'm convinced that I'm revolting. I avoid lifting my arms, especially when we sit close to one another to talk. Allan's odor doesn't have the rotten, sickly sweet edge that mine does: his is pungent but not intolerable. In time I come to think of his odor as one of his masculine qualities, which turns it into a source of emotional comfort, although intellectually I find that weird.

Each of us stores his pee bottle at the foot of his mattress, in his respective corner of the cell; that way, when one of us uses his bottle, he has his back turned to the other. I am self-conscious that I pee more frequently than Allan. I'm so self-conscious about it that for a period I try to retrain myself to hold my pee longer than I'm used to, but I find this discipline too taxing to continue. I don't think Allan gets up during the night to pee, as I do. Every morning, when he wakes up, he takes a very long, powerful piss. I can't call what Allan does "peeing," that word isn't sufficiently virile. Allan pisses. The force of his pissing makes me feel inadequate—my pee streams are shorter and have a tendency to tinkle delicately. My peeing sounds gay to me; his pissing sounds properly masculine.

There's an erotic charge to hearing Allan piss. It makes me think of men stripping in locker rooms, or the communal bathroom in my first college dorm, where young men moved about in various stages of undress. The same discomfort I used to feel in that dorm bathroom or in locker rooms, I now feel when Allan is pissing. I want to try to catch a glimpse of his stream, his penis, and I feel perverted for wanting that.

As desperately grateful as I am to have Allan with me, as badly as I need him, I am also stressed by the sexual attraction that lurks around his presence. The attraction is not as strong as it could be, for which I literally thank God. Allan does not have the kind of body that is my greatest temptation: dark hair, hirsute limbs, furry torso. Allan's hair is a non-descript brown. He has thin, light hairs on his forearms and legs, a rather sparse diamond-shaped patch in the very center of his chest, a pencil-thin line wriggling down his stomach—the line begins a couple of inches above his navel, without connecting to the hair on his chest, which I find freakish. I'm hairier than he is, which I don't think is saying much.

I'm being terribly judgmental, of course. But this is a good thing: it's good that I find Allan's body aesthetically flawed. If Allan looked more like... Adnan, let's say... I would be in deep shit.

As it is, I am distressingly fascinated by Allan's body. If I were free, living my normal life, surrounded by the usual diverse array of male bodies competing for my guilty attention, I would find it easy to ignore Allan's. Here, however, Allan's is the only body clamoring for my attention. It's there, right beside me, all the time. His body is the only object available for my sexual impulses to direct themselves to—and they are perfectly content to do so.

Allan unwittingly provides me with ample opportunities to lust after him. He is freer about his body than I am. Why wouldn't he be? He doesn't know he has any reason not to. The very first night we're brought together, when we've finally stopped whispering and are going to sleep, Allan strips off his dress shirt and slacks, the same clothes he was kidnapped in two months ago, leaving himself in nothing but an overworked pair of boxer shorts. (Another object of erotic fascination for me: they seem manlier than the briefs I have always worn.) I tell myself I'm not going to let my eyes roam below his head, but as soon as I know he's asleep, I do—and hate myself for it.

On our first shower day after we arrive, the guards instruct all the hostages to leave our clothes, socks and underwear included, in a growing pile in the giant sink in the bathroom. We never see those clothes again. To replace them, the guards give us each a plastic bag containing the summer version of our hostage uniform: a white tank top, a pair of silky briefs that bear a disagreeable resemblance to panties, and a pair of boxers. Basically, we will spend the summer wearing nothing but underclothes. For my relationship with Allan's body, this is not helpful.