Lebanon Hostage Ch. 06

"Huddling" is Allan's term for what we do. I think of it as "snuggling," but I train myself not to use that word, even in my own head, so I won't ever slip and say it out loud.

We agree that it would be unwise to let the guards to catch us huddling, although why we feel that way remains unspoken. So how will we make sure we don't get caught? There's a mosque in the vicinity that broadcasts the pre-dawn call to prayer loudly enough to routinely wake us up. I would feel safest using that as the cue for one of us to move back to the mattress, but Allan thinks that's ridiculously early. The guards are in no hurry to come take care of us. The sound of people on the streets and the sight of daylight through the outside grate will let us know it's time to expect the guards. What if we sleep in late? I worry. As frequently as we wake each other up, that's not going to happen, Allan assures me. He offers the same assurance about huddling during the afternoon. We just have to remember, every time one of us comes out of a doze, to check the grate to see if it's getting dark or if the electric light across the alley has come on.

In addition to the problem of fitful sleep and the risk of being caught in bed together, huddling brings, for me, the problem of sexual tension. That problem proves less persistent, though, than I'm initially worried it might be. I've reached a point in accepting my sexuality where I don't feel guilty about enjoying the huddling per se, despite knowing that as a gay man I enjoy it for reasons beyond the physical comfort that Allan derives from it. Probably Allan derives some kind of emotional comfort as well. For me, however, the intimacy of the huddling fills a huge emotional gap, which I assume isn't the case for Allan. Snuggling with a man wouldn't fill that gap for him; he'd need to snuggle with a woman. I've indulged before in comforting fantasies of spooning with Allan. Huddling is as close as I'm going to get to turning those fantasies into reality.

Again, I feel no guilt about that. Even if God doesn't want me acting on my homosexual impulses, I can draw a clear line between snuggling and sex. I've read enough historical and cross-cultural scholarship on same-sex relationships to know that in different times and places, social mores have allowed men to express intimacy more freely than my society does. If I lived in a different society, I could meet my emotional need to snuggle with a male friend while remaining perfectly chaste. So I don't need to feel at all guilty about that aspect of enjoying huddling with Allan.

On the other hand, such close proximity to Allan's body is sexually exciting, too. To the point where every now and again, I get hard. Every time it happens, I am terrified Allan will discover it. I can't believe it's happening. I've always assumed that my suppressed sex drive was linked, in part, to being undernourished. So why am I getting fully aroused now, when I'm eating more poorly than I have at any time during my captivity? It must be because of how intensely the huddling satisfies me emotionally. Every so often, my body manages to take that satisfaction to another level.

Whenever I go hard, I breathe very deliberately, four slow beats on the inhale, four slow beats on the exhale, concentrating on the count, denying myself any sexual thoughts, until my damn dick wilts again. It's the strategy I used back in junior high, when I slammed into puberty and began spontaneously springing erections in the middle of class. Please, God, don't let Allan catch me. If possible, please stop me from getting hard at all. I honestly don't want to experience the huddling as sexual. Let it be intimate in a different way.

One night, I jolt awake—Allan must have moved in his sleep. Now he's awake, too. He grunts in annoyance, settles back down. I begin to drift off again. Then Allan says, "Shit."

"What?"

He gives a little sleepy laugh. "Peter thinks you're somebody else. So don't be alarmed if you bump into him."

"What?" Is Allan is talking in his sleep?

He laughs again. "I've got wood. He must be confused."

I suddenly need to swallow, but I'm afraid that as close together as our heads are, Allan will hear it if I do. I feel thrown, and uneasy, and excited. I try to envision where Allan's erection is in relation to my body. I wonder how big a tent it is creating in the lap of his pajamas. I want to see the tent. I want to brush it with my hand. I want to stop wanting those things. I am breathing slowly and deliberately but as quietly as I can. I am willing myself not to get hard.

Allan is silent and unmoving, as if he's sleeping, but his breathing isn't heavy enough to convince me that he's actually dropped off again. He can tell that I haven't gone back to sleep either, because after a while he says, "It's all right now, it's gone. Sorry if I made you uncomfortable."

"That's okay," I say automatically. It's what I always say when Allan apologizes to me for something. I decide to take a mild risk, thinking that it's in my interest to appear as at ease about the situation as he is. "It's happened to me too before."

"It's natural." Allan's mumbling, he wants to go back to sleep. "We're just reacting to having another body so close. It's a good sign. If we can still get it up, our health can't be too far gone yet."

After that, I am able to enjoy the intimacy of the huddling without fear. I know that Allan won't interpret an erection as a revelation that I'm gay. My erections have an alibi. And an erection on either of us doesn't have to turn the huddling into something sexual. If I get hard, if Allan gets hard, it's just a joke to him. He gets hard on a couple more occasions that I'm aware of. When it happens, he announces casually, "Peter's back." It happens to me more than a couple times, but I only acknowledge two or three instances. The line I invent for myself is "Head up," which Allan tells me is clever.

Joking about our erections feels improper, but in a way that makes me feel thrilled rather than guilty. Allan and I have transgressed a line together, we've broken a taboo together, and in doing so we have achieved a new degree of intimacy. A safe intimacy, though, an intimacy within the bounds, evidently, of what Allan regards as permissible for heterosexual men.

Allan continues to ask the guards for blankets every time they're here, but we don't feel quite as urgent anymore about that request. We like to huddle. At least, Ithink Allan likes it. He doesn't mind it, anyway. We do it a lot. In a 24-hour period, we probably spent more time huddling than everything else we do put together.

There are periods of the day when we need to get away from each other, to recover some personal space. We do our workouts, I pace, Allan jogs. One of us will retreat to the other mattress for some "alone time," even to nap alone for a while. We'll sit or curl up on separate ends of the bed, chatting. Or we'll sit side by side on the bed with our backs to the long wall, similar to how we used to chat in our cell in the Shouf prison, with the blankets laid across our laps or pulled up to our chins, depending on how cold we are. That arrangement is halfway to a huddle, but it's not quite as intimate.

We huddle every night, starting as soon as the guards leave and continuing until morning. We huddle off and on throughout the day, usually dozing, sometimes chatting, sometimes just lying awake together in silence. As the temperature keeps falling—we're in December now—huddling makes our life in this cold back room endurable. It's cozy. It's comforting. It's a pleasure.

***

It's a pleasure until we're caught.

We're huddling in the afternoon; we've both drifted into a warm nap. Perhaps we slept more soundly and longer than usual, perhaps the guards turned up earlier than usual. All I know is, Allan is shaking me awake, desperate. "Jeremy, they're here!" They're unlocking the door to the back room as we're struggling out of our cocoon. The door opens just as I'm throwing off the blankets and rolling out of the bed onto my feet. Stupidly, with our guilty haste, we're making the situation look more illicit than it is.

A guard shouts, and they rush us. I realize with horror that I have forgotten to lower my blindfold. In the yellow light flooding in through the open door behind the guards, I glimpse an enraged face before I close my eyes. Thin mustache, no beard—I shouldn't have seen that, I'm dead! The guard yanks my blindfold down into place, screaming incomprehensibly.

I stand beside the bed, blind and trembling. The guard slaps me across the face. I cry out. Allan is still sitting on the bed; they make him stand up, too. One of the guards launches into an Arabic rant, which concludes with him slapping each of our faces while shouting, in English, "Bad! Bad!" As if we're dogs.

"We weren't doing what you think." Allan's trying to speak calmly, but his deep voice quavers. "We were sleeping. That's all."

Allan is slapped again. The guard rants some more. He storms into the front room and clomps around, apparently looking for something. Returning, he sets whatever he's brought back with him against the wall with a metallic clink. My heart is racing.

Amid impatient orders we can't understand, Allan and I are pushed down onto our knees and made to lace our fingers behind our heads. Metal scrapes across cement as the guards drag the bedframe away from the wall. I hear them doing something to Allan, shifting his position. The bed creaks. "We didn't do anything wrong," Allan protests in a mysteriously muffled voice. Hisses and blows dissuade him from saying anything more.

Someone grabs my sweater by the neck hole and starts pulling it up and off me. As the sweater is removed, my blindfold gets dragged toward the top of my head, so I keep my eyes clamped shut, but that doesn't stop both guards from yelling at me as they retie the blindfold. Then they press the sweater up against my face and tie the sleeves behind my head. I breathe with my mouth open, sucking air through the wool. What in God's name are they doing?

They make me walk on my knees until I reach the edge of the bed. They bend me face down onto the mattress, positioning my arms so that I'm reaching over my head to grip the mattress's far edge. Allan must be in the same position beside me. Jesus Christ... I realize that the sweater covering my face is to muffle the cries they anticipate from me. If I'm lucky, they're planning to beat me. But I'm terrified they're positioning me to be sodomized. A punishment to fit the crime.

One of the guards stands between the bed and the wall so he can press our faces down into the mattress. The other beats our buttocks and the back of our thighs with a metal pole, maybe a broomstick. He alternates between us, a blow to me, a blow to Allan. He's beating me through my pajamas, not on bare skin, which I presume makes it hurt a little less. I'm able to restrain myself somewhat: I make noise, but not as much as I really want to. Allan is more stoic.

The beating goes on and on. If the guard is administering a prescribed number of blows, I haven't been keeping count. I'm losing my self-control, I'm bleating more loudly now. I feel shame in addition to the physical pain.

The guard decides we've had enough. Behind my sweater, hot tears burn my eyes. My arms and shoulders are shaking, but I'm forcing myself not to break down into sobs. I want to preserve some shred of dignity.

The guard who is holding our heads keeps us in our bowed-over position. Meanwhile, the guard who administered the beating drags the second mattress away from its position near the bed to the far end of the room, where the filing cabinet and cupboard are. He makes a return trip for the tub and bottles, kicking the tub across the floor in front of him.

The guards stand me up. They allow me to put my sweater back on, then they haul me across the room to the mattress. I have to lie face down with my hands laced behind my head. I'm dreading thatnow they may pull my bottoms down, but they don't. Back on the other side of the room, I hear them make Allan climb up on the bed.

One guard leaves the building while the other remains in our room, keeping watch. He paces slowly, in silence, except for hissing if one of us moves.

Maybe half an hour later, the other guard returns. He has brought short, thin lengths of chain, the kind you might use to lock a bicycle or leash a dog, and a few small padlocks. As I continue to lie on my stomach, they wrap one end of a chain tightly around my ankle and lock it in place. Then they remove the bottom drawer from the filing cabinet and smash a hole in the side so they can loop the chain through and back onto itself with another padlock, thus chaining me to the cabinet. They chain Allan's ankle to the bedframe.

"We don't deserve this," Allan insists. "We didn't do anything wrong." A guard picks up the broomstick and delivers a few more blows to Allan's buttocks.

As further punishment, the guards deny us our evening sandwiches and toilet run. As usual, though, they leave us alone through the night. Despite the chains, we're able to turn over onto our sides to sleep rather than on our stomachs, and we can clamber up onto our knees to use our pee bottles.

The guards forgot to give me one of the two blankets on the bed before they left. Allan throws a blanket into the middle of the room, not close enough for me to reach it, but he hopes this way the guards will realize in the morning to give it to me. He tells me he isn't going to use his blanket as long as I don't have one. I tell him he should use his blanket anyway. To put some kind of protective layer between me and the cold air, I curl up tightly at the foot of the mattress and fold the head of the mattress over on top of me. The cramped position is made more uncomfortable by how tender and increasingly stiff I am from the beating, but being folded inside the mattress does conserve some of my body heat.

Allan and I lie awake, miserable.

"I hope they don't separate us." My voice catches as I say it, and I start to cry.

"Me too," is Allan's dull response.

I beg God not to let it happen. Please. I need Allan. I love Allan. You brought him into my life. Don't let them take him away.

The next morning, the guards unchain us to take us to the bathroom. I crane my neck around to try to see the damage to my backside. I glimpse ugly bruises on my thighs, but the skin doesn't appear to have broken. The guards rechain us lying face-up, which causes some pain because of the bruising but is better for our backs.

Now that we're chained, the guards can't throw or hand us our sandwiches under the door anymore. When they approach Allan's bed to give him his breakfast, he tells them that he will not eat until he is allowed to speak to a chef. He speaks slowly and clearly, with determination. The guards understand enough of what he's saying to become angry. The guard who did all the ranting yesterday berates Allan, again in Arabic, to which Allan keeps responding like a broken record, "I will not eat until I speak to a chef."

Allan hadn't told me he was planning to do this, but I immediately announce to the guards that I won't eat either. The guard keeps jabbering menacingly at us, but he doesn't become violent. Finally the guards leave the building. We toss the sandwiches they left on our mattresses out of reach.

Allan tells me I don't need to do this. I insist I want to. He thanks me, but he makes me promise that I'll stop whenever I feel the need to, for whatever reason I feel I need to. "No guilt, all right?"

The guards don't return that evening. I imagine they're letting us think things over. By the time they return the next morning, Allan and I have gone 48 hours without eating, because when Allan announced the hunger strike, we already hadn't eaten anything since the morning before that. During my trip to the bathroom, I fill my stomach with water from the tap in addition to refilling my bottle. I'm suffering, but I want badly to stand beside Allan to the end. I've heard of people having to fast 48 hours before medical procedures, and I've read that Jews fast for 48 hours during Yom Kippur; I've been repeating those facts to myself as proof that there's no reason I can't do this. Now that we're crossing the 48-hour threshold, I'm getting scared.

I get scared for a different reason when the guards bring me back from my toilet run. They chain me face-down on the mattress, then peel my sweater up so as to cover my face and force my arms above my head. A sandwich is pressed into my hand, and I'm asked a question in Arabic whose meaning is easily inferred. I shake my head and refuse to hold on to the sandwich. Allan has done the same. We are again beaten on the buttocks and thighs with the broomstick. Because I'm being beaten on top of my bruises, I can't stop myself this time from howling at each blow. This beating is shorter, perhaps because I'm making so much noise. Again the guards try to give us sandwiches. Again we refuse. Again we're beaten.

By the end of the second beating, I'm wailing incessantly. This prompts the guard who's been administering the beating to grab my hair and yell at me.

The second guard intervenes. He talks in a tense, unnecessarily quiet voice—like he wants to have a private conversation and isn't thinking about the fact that Allan and I can't understand them anyway. Both guards retreat to the front room and close the door.

"I'm sorry, Jeremy." Allan's voice is muffled and wretched.

Behind my sweater, still tied over my face, I'm crying, but my mood is defiant. "I'm fine," I sob. "Fuck them." I ache and sting, and I'm famished and weak and frightened of another beating. But I'm also furious. The beatings have actually strengthened my resolve, enough that I'm able to hold all the other feelings in check. For the moment, my fury is in charge. Robert Berg went through worse and survived. If I finally fold, it won't be because of the beatings. It will be because I can no longer endure the hunger.

Through the gap under the door, we can hear the guards talking in the other room. One of them sounds like he feels things have gone too far; the other sounds indignant and self-justifying. My guess is that the one having qualms is the one Allan calls Less a Bastard, the one who we think used to pass our sandwiches under the door, instead of throwing them, and who was amenable to giving us cigarettes. It would be in character for Rat Bastard, the sandwich-tosser, to be the unchastened one. I imagine he's the one who's actually been administering the beatings. The two of them argue for a while. Less a Bastard is alternately cajoling and firm, but he's not backing down.

Abruptly, our door flies open. A guard stomps into the room. Rat Bastard, we now discover, has known some English all along. He addresses Allan angrily.

"You want chef? Okay. I call chef. I say him what you do.Louti!" He spits out the unfamiliar word. Later, Allan will inform me thatlouti is the Arabic equivalent of "poof" or "queer."

"We're notlouti," Allan replies. I admire him for managing to sound only slightly nervous. "Bring the chef, so we can tell him. We did nothing wrong."

"You lie!" The guard is so enraged, he screams at Allan in Arabic for several sentences before he's blown off enough steam that he can return to English. "You lie to chef, he beat you. He say me, I beat you,inshallah. You want? You want I beat you more?"

"No," Allan replied. It's a statement of fact, not a plea for mercy.

"Too bad for you.I want. Chef come, we see what. You be sorry fucker." He slams the door as he storms out.

The guards leave the building shortly afterward, at which point Allan and I work our sweaters down from around our faces.