Flight or Fright: 17 Turbulent Tales

The Fifth Category ^{Tom Bissell}

John awoke somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. He felt statically electric, his brain malnourished. Oddly, though, he did not remember falling asleep, or even wanting to fall asleep. He didn’t sleep on planes, ever. He worked. His last memory: drinking a Diet Coke, chatting with his neighbor, Janika, a tall Estonian woman with a mischievous-wood-sprite face, who told John she was on her way to the United States for her first visit. John certainly did not remember pulling the blanket up to his chin or inserting behind his head the wondrously soft pillow he now felt there. And he would have remembered. A bedtime habit of his, dating from childhood, was putting a memory lock on his sleeping position--the spoon, the scissor, the dead man, the fetus, the sprawl--just before the final fade. Only twice in his life had he found himself in the same position upon waking. John thought sleep was a kind of time travel. Things happened, thoughts formed, body parts moved--and you would never know.

Janika was gone. She had probably opted for a stretch. Europeans and their in-flight calisthenics, their applause on landing. The cabin’s every lozenge window shade had been pulled down. The only illumination was provided by the glowing orange ellipses of the cabin’s running lights. John lifted his window shade. What he saw could not be. His flight landed in New York at 4:00 P.M. It was not a night flight. And yet, outside: night. Janika’s seat, John now realized, was not the only vacant one. The remaining forty-odd business class seats were also empty. He lunged for his seatbelt.

The cozily paired thrones of business class were spread spaciously throughout the cabin, and no overhead luggage compartments hindered his movement around them. Many were draped with twisty blankets. Others had headphones still plugged into their armrest jacks. Half a dozen pillows littered the floor. Carry-ons remained stuffed under a number of seats. One aisle over, someone had left the seat tray extended, and on it sat a perfume-sized bottle of red wine and a plastic glass. Hovering above every seat was the same sense of sudden abandonment.

Something had happened, he thought, that gathered everyone’s attention back in coach. A drunken Finn punching out a flight attendant. A heart attack. He drew a crisp mental X, for now, through any other possibilities. John whipped aside the thin blue curtain that allowed those in coach merely to imagine their deprivation. His hand sought the steadying reality of the gray, white-speckled partition from which the curtain hung.

Before him spanned thirty darkened rows of unfilled seats. Out of shock he took a single step forward. He reached for his iPhone, sensing its absence before his hand even touched his pocket. Despite the darkness, he saw a few crude shapes on the first row of seats: paperbacks, newspapers, a briefcase. It grew darker the deeper into the rows he walked, as though he were entering a synthetic jungle.

How fundamentally wrong it felt to run down the narrow aisle of a commercial aircraft. When he reached the tight dark aft quarters he felt trapped in a bewilderingly unfamiliar closet. His hands fumbled for the Braille of the visible world. The attendants’ jump seats were up. Adjacent to one of them was a mounted flashlight, which he pulled from its cradle. He slashed a blade of light across the kitchen, its long silver drawers looking like they belonged in a submarine, and over an unloaded dinner cart pushed into the kitchen’s deepest recess. He turned, the light passing an overhead container marked FIRST AID, then brought the beam to bear on one of the plane’s exit doors—an immense thing, less like a door than an igloo’s facade. Out of its tiny porthole John saw layers of wing-sliced cloud swirl in the starless night. He turned to the attendants’ control panel, complicated by numerous knobs and buttons. Even though it was a Finnair flight, everything was in English. At the bottom of the panel was a red EVAC button. He worked his way up past several CALL buttons (all dark), a small green screen glowing with utterly unfathomable information, a public announcement button, and finally the lighting panel, which held not buttons but knobs, all of which he began turning.

In the harsh new light he opened the door to the lavatory, half expecting to find a magically immense room in which the several hundred people who boarded this flight were waiting with pointy party hats and confetti. But it was empty, shockingly white, and smelled of shit and spearmint. Transparent blisters of standing water adorned the sink’s metal basin.

He charged back up coach, through business class, and found himself at the cockpit door, which had a thick, reinforced look. “Hardened,” was the technical term, he believed. How to proceed was unclear. Any display of forcefulness so close to the pilots seemed to John both unwise and potentially unlawful. So he knocked. When no one answered he attempted to open it. Locked. He knocked again. He noticed a small, knee-level cabinet. Inside were four yellow life jackets and some kind of heavy steel air compressor. He looked at the fore’s exit door, another glacial immensity he was not sure he could figure out how to open if he tried. But why would he want to? That he was already considering this a possible exit did not, he realized, bode particularly well.

He was sweating now. His body, as though having at last accepted, analyzed, and rejected the information his mind had sent forth, began some pointless counterattack. From his stomach, the staging area, his body spit his most recent meal into his intestinal coils. He stood there, clenched, listening to his heart pump, his lungs fill and empty. The curtain hanging between voluntary and involuntary function had been torn from its runners. His nervous system seemed a single concentration lapse from going off-line.

He pounded on the cockpit door, shouting that something had happened, that he needed help. When, finally, he stopped, his forehead came to rest against the door’s hardened outer shell. His breath was as sour and microbial as a Petri dish. He felt weak, white-bellied, and exposed. He then heard something on the door’s other side and jumped back. Slowly, he closed back in, fitting his ear within the cup his hand formed against the cold metal. On the other side of the door, in the cockpit of a plane with no passengers, someone was weeping.

He had been advised not to travel outside the United States by his lawyer, his sympathetic university colleagues (he had more than most would have guessed—John was nothing if not the soul of faculty-meeting affability), and those few from Justice to whom he still spoke. But when an invitation to speak at a conference (“International Law and the Future of American-European Relations”) in Tallinn, Estonia, was first extended six months ago, John did what he always did: he talked to his wife.

One of the things he appreciated most about leaving government service was that he could, once again, talk to his wife about work. Anyone who lived within his mind to the degree that John did asked for nothing more perfect than a companion able to step inside that mind when invited and leave before asking was necessary. For the last two years she had been his confidante, sentinel, nurse, and ballast. It was, nevertheless, one of his marriage’s longer, more difficult nights when a number of his so-called torture memos were leaked, and then, without any warning to him, declassified and disavowed. His wife was not the only person with whom he had proved able to clarify his intentions in writing the memos. Any journalist who took the time to see John invariably came away admitting that the purported werewolf seemed a decent enough sort.

After telling his wife about the conference invitation, he admitted, “My first thought was to say no. But I think I may want to go.”

Two years ago, a complaint accusing John of war crimes had been filed in a German court; the gears of this particular justice had since scarcely turned. Another suit was filed six months ago, in a California court, by a convicted American terrorist and his mother, who claimed John’s memos had led to his maltreatment while in U.S. custody. John did not dispute—though of course could not admit—that the wretch had been poorly treated in custody, but drawing the line back to him evidenced a kind of naive legal creationism. While John’s travel was by no means formally restricted, the thought of leaving American airspace filled him with unfamiliar apprehension. This shocked him. It also emboldened him.

“Don’t route your flight through Germany,” his wife said. “Or France. Or Spain. I’d avoid Italy, too, for that matter.”

She thought he was joking about wanting to go, he realized, and he waited a moment before telling her what he liked about Estonia, a young country with memories of actual oppression. He had always been interested in the nations of the former Soviet bloc and post-communist countries in general. (His parents’ flight from Korean Communism was, after all, the only reason he was an American.) He did not think he had any cause to fear Estonia, which was an official American ally in the war. Was his wife aware that there were only a million Estonians in the world? Maybe it was a Korean thing, but he felt strange kinship with small, frequently invaded, routinely pushed-around nations. He admired, he said somewhat grandly, their parochial ambitions. He was now shamelessly appealing to his wife’s own complicated feelings concerning her Vietnamese heritage.

She asked how he could be certain it was not simply a trap to publicly humiliate him. To that he already had something of an answer. The event’s organizers had promised, unprompted, that no topics would be discussed beyond John’s willingness to discuss them. They were aware of the lawsuits and promised him full escape-pod capability during any line of questioning. (“Escape pod.” His words, not theirs. Like any nerd who grew up in the 1970s, John was always good for a Star Wars reference.) The U.S. embassy, moreover, was “aware of” John’s invitation. (“Aware of.” Their words, not his. A middling embassy like Estonia’s was no doubt heavily staffed with Administration flunkies and professional vacationists. Given that John was the only former member of the Administration who insisted on talking about the decisions he had made while part of it, he was as popular among them as a leper bell.)

“But you’ll talk about it all anyway,” she said, “won’t you?” John often reduced his lawyer to similar frustration. He was not afraid to defend himself, provided his interlocutor was not obviously carrying a torch and kindling. After John had granted an interview to Esquire his lawyer did not speak to him for a week. Then his lawyer read the not entirely unflattering profile that resulted. “You’re a smooth one, Counsel,” he told John.

John smiled at his wife. Of course he would talk about it all. He knew what he could and could not say. He was a lawyer.

When he told the event’s organizers he would be able to come, they expressed as much surprise as excitement. He would be the only American, they said, and as such an invaluable part of the discussion. It was agreed he would speak alone, at the close of the conference, for an hour, and then answer questions, some of which, they warned, might be hostile. It all sounded fine, John emailed back. He had faced more bloodthirsty rooms than he imagined Estonia could muster. Before agreeing, he checked in with the embassy in Tallinn. They acknowledged the conference and wished him a successful trip. The last he would hear from them, he suspected.

Six months later, he spent two hours laid over in Helsinki’s airport. When two Finnish security guards stopped near John’s exit to chat, he was not sure why he felt so nervous. It was not as if Interpol had issued a warrant for his arrest. But what man could truly relax knowing that courts on two continents entertained the possibility he had committed crimes against humanity? He supposed he was brave for being here. No, actually. This thought disgusted him. He was a teacher and a lawyer, in that order. He did not recall the last time he raised his voice. He did not recall once, in his four decades, having intentionally hurt anyone. The Finnish guards walked away.

He boarded the flight to Tallinn with reenergized anonymity. By the time he saw his spired, red-roofed, seaside destination appear outside the starboard window, he knew he had made the right choice. It was noon by the time he reached his hotel in Tallinn’s Old Town. Check-in was surreally pleasant. The conference’s organizers had sent flowers. He called them to ask for directions to that night’s conference hall, which, as it happened, was less than three blocks away, in another hotel, the Viru. No, no thank you, he could make his way there on his own. His talk was scheduled for 8:00 p.m. This meant he had an afternoon to spend in Tallinn. He did so by sleeping off the circadian catastrophe of shooting across ten time zones.

By 5:00, he was awake, showered, dressed in a cement-colored suit with a blue shirt (no tie), and wandering Tallinn’s Old Town in search of dinner. The organizers had offered to send someone, but no. He wanted to announce his conference presence with the same powerful abruptness he used to enter his classrooms. If any of the conference’s participants were indeed seeking to confront him, the fewer pressure points with which they had time to acquaint themselves the better.

The charms of Tallinn’s Old Town were myriad and entirely preposterous. No actual human beings could live here. It looked like a soundstage for some elvish epic. The streets—the most furiously cobbled he had ever seen—appeared to shed their names at every intersection. Most took him past pubs, restaurants, shops selling amber, and nothing else. It was easy to distinguish the tourists from the locals: everyone not working was a tourist. Outside a medieval restaurant off the town square, young Estonians dressed like the maidens and squires of the Hanseatic League watched as their co-workers reenacted a swordfight. On one block-long side street, a blast of methane wind took hold of him: the sewage coursing through three-hundred-year-old plumbing was one bit of Tallinn’s past in no need of recreation. The similarity of the Old Town’s many ornate black church spires confused him. Every time he settled on one as his compass back toward the Viru, he realized it was the wrong tower. For two hours, he was always at least slightly lost.

From its height and brutalist design, he correctly surmised that the Viru had once been the Intourist Hotel during the Soviet era. In its lobby he found a Wall of Fame listing some of the hotel’s notable guests: Olympians, musicians, actors, Arab princes, and the President himself. A note written to the hotel manager on White House letterhead was framed: “Thanks also for the good-looking sweater and hat.” After inquiries at the front desk, an elevator ride to the conference floor, and an olfactory napalming courtesy of a perfumed woman riding up with him, John walked down a lushly carpeted hallway toward the registration desk. The young man sitting there pointed further down the hall, toward a small group of people politely waiting outside the conference room proper for the current speaker to finish. John was on in half an hour. He joined the waiting listeners outside the conference room, a golden and chandeliered cavern.

The speaker was German. From the translation projected onto a screen behind the woman (in French, Estonian, and English—he, too, had been asked to send the text of his talk beforehand to the organizers, after extracting from them a promise that native English speakers would translate it) John knew he was in for a slightly rougher night than he had been anticipating. He had heard all the tropes of the German woman’s talk before. She finished to applause and answered questions, after which a ten-minute break was announced. As people rose from their seats, another woman near the back of the room turned, spotted John, and, with a smile of recognition, walked toward him. John met her halfway, maneuvering through the human cross-stream of intermission.

This was Ilvi, one of the organizers, his contact and a professor of law at the University of Tartu. A very young professor of law, which warmed the still-youthful-looking John to her instantly. They shook, after which Ilvi began knotting her hands as though shaping a small clay ball. Pleasantries, then: flights, sleep, Tallinn. She asked, “Are you ready?” John laughed and said he thought so. She laughed, too, her enamel giving off a slight yellow tinge. Ilvi had chapped lips and a mushroom of curly brown hair. Her long and angular face was almost cubist, its unusual prettiness cohering only after you spent some time looking at her.

For some incomprehensible reason, Ilvi guided John to the German speaker who had just finished condemning his country. She was speaking to four people at once, all of whom stood around her. She appeared accustomed to being the center of attention; they appeared accustomed to providing it. These conferences were all the same. Attendees may as well be given scripts and assigned parts. At Ilvi’s announcement of John’s name, they all turned to consider him. He smiled, his hand thrust out. Only one person, an older man wearing a heavy wool sport coat, deigned to shake, though he did so with the dutiful air of a prisoner meeting his warden. John’s smile was now a dying man’s attempt at serenity. No one said anything after that.

For far longer than John appreciated, Ilvi—whether mortified or oblivious he had no good way of surmising—stood beside him, then escorted him to a few other small bundles of conference-goers. He was received with only a few more calories of warmth. Finally, she led him to the dais. He plunked down upon the lone chair and withdrew his talk from a breast pocket. Ilvi stood at the maple podium, schoolmarmishly looking at her watch.

He was by now inured to the pariah treatment, which was not to say it did not wound him. Sometimes students (never his; his classes were always over-enrolled) wore black armbands and stood in silence on the steps outside the law school, waiting for John to pass en route to his office. A couple of times they had worn Gitmo-orange jumpsuits. He always wished them good morning. Once, and only once, he had stopped to talk to them. Their complaints were so numerous and multidisciplinary it had been like arguing with Beatnik poetry. He came away from all such experiences less befuddled than disappointed. John did not want them or anyone else to agree with him. He respected considered disagreement. All he wanted was someone other than himself to admit that it was complicated.

Early in the war, two detainees were captured. One was an American citizen, the other an Australian. What laws applied to them? As John learned, you had to go very far back in the history of American jurisprudence—the Indian Wars, piracy law—to find legally appropriate analogies. Some members of the Justice Department wanted the captured American Mirandized, but every court on this planet accepted that more amorphous laws governed battlefield conduct. Treating these men as criminals meant the loss of what they knew. The American and Australian detainees did not, John argued, enjoy the protections granted to prisoners of war under Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions. Enjoying no rank, no clearly defined army, and no obvious chain of command—prerequisites upon which war-prisoner protections under Common Article III were dependent—these men could not be considered prisoners of war in any legal sense.

When the third-highest ranking member of al-Qaeda was captured in Pakistan, John was asked to provide the CIA with legal guidance. This took much of the summer of 2002, and John could not recall having worked harder or more thoroughly on a memo. He had to determine whether interrogation techniques used by the CIA outside the United States violated American obligations under the 1984 Torture Convention. So he looked at what these obligations entailed. The first thing he learned was that torture was “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.” “Severe,” then, was part of the legal definition. The United States had attached to its instrument of ratification a further definition of torture as an act “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain.” What was “severe pain”? What did “specifically intended” actually mean? John checked the relevant medical literature. Could a doctor define “severe pain”? A doctor could not. Did the law itself? The law did not. The fact was, you could look far and wide in legal documents for a working definition of “severe pain” and never find it. So John, with no relish, provided one: in order to constitute torture, the “severe pain” must rise “to a level that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” As for “prolonged mental harm,” another bit of unexplained language from the Torture Convention, it appeared nowhere in U.S. law, medical literature, or international human rights reports. Again, John had to provide his own definition. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, thus satisfying the legal requirement of “prolonged mental harm,” the end result, he judged, must be akin to post-traumatic stress disorder or chronic depression of significant duration, which is to say, months or years. John had intended these guidelines to apply only to the CIA and only with regard to what were known as “high-value intelligence targets,” never to common prisoners and especially not in Iraq, where Common Article III of the Geneva Convention absolutely applied. Due to the interrogation limits the FBI agents at Guantánamo were insisting upon—they wanted everything gathered from the prisoners to hold up in court, forgetting (or choosing to forget) that none of these men would be tried by anything but military tribunals—prisoners could not be offered so much as a Twinkie without it being deemed coercive. Until John’s memo. Shortly after its guidance went into wide and, to John, unanticipated effect, the FBI’s head counsel wrote his own memo that claimed the interrogations his agents were seeing at Guantánamo were illegal. The day John’s memos were declassified, Gonzales disavowed them at a press conference, claiming they “did not reflect the policies of the Administration.” For this John would not forgive him.

The audience clapped, at least, after Ilvi’s introduction, an idle plagiarism of the curriculum vitae John had sent her. He made his way to the podium, leaned toward the mic, glanced at the screen behind him, leaned toward the mic, and glanced again at the screen behind him. Leaning toward the mic a final time, and making sure his already soft voice was as mild as a child’s aspirin, he said he was not sure which speech should begin first. A few scattered chuckles, then actual laughter. John turned to the screen one last time to see that his talk’s first block of translated text had obligingly appeared. Okay, he thought. Good.

He flattened out the first page of his talk, which he had given several times, and looked out on the facial pointillism of his audience. Three hundred people? Their expressions were more curious than hostile, he thought. Something then popped into his mind as suddenly as the words had appeared on the screen behind him: This was too far to have come. He was a tenured professor of law at a major American university. He wondered, once again, why he was so determined to defend himself. Was the solace of knowing he could that important?

At the beginning of September 2001, John was 34 years old and reviewing a treaty whose most legally substantive issue involved polar bears.

Before returning to his seat John tried a couple of things. He hit the cockpit door with the steel air compressor approximately four dozen times. He then returned aft, held down the PA button of the attendant’s control panel, and screamed. Becoming hysterical solved nothing. Calmer now, and sitting, he tried to formulate a reasonable explanation for what was happening. He did not think he had been drugged. He had eaten nothing that day and drunk only a can of Diet Coke shortly after boarding. The attendant had given the can to John and he himself had opened it.

He replayed various short-term-memory fragments. The morning flight from Tallinn. Forty-five minutes in Helsinki. The bovine ordeal of boarding. He recalled as many fellow passengers as he could. Chatty Janika, the Estonian on her way to the United States. The neckless, bullfrogish man John had sat beside at the gate. The amply eyebrowed young woman in the Oxford sweatshirt who smiled at John as she passed his seat on her way to coach. (No Asian man forgets a white girl who smiles at him, unibrow or no.) A young man he recalled only because he was black. A studious, string-haired girl in a loose white blouse. A kid in his early twenties in a YOU SUCK tee shirt. The female flight attendants in their powder-blue pantsuits. John had been conscious of his Asianness on this Finnair flight, in this northern clime, and recalled, now, anticipating his relief at returning to California, his university town, its sidewalks of multiracial buffet, its music stores and eateries, the varieties of its cannabis enfleurage.

But there was the matter of his iPhone. Someone had clearly taken it. He had looked for it under his and every other seat in business class. What would he do? What could he do? The air compressor had done real damage to the door, denting its hardened shell and knocking off the handle. The handle was now in John’s pocket, in case he needed to fix it later, though he had no idea how he might do that. He found some tools in an aft storage cabinet, which were now on the seat beside him. The door itself had not budged.

In sudden need of the transporting thereness of an outside item, he pulled a magazine from the mesh basket on the side of his seat, its heavily laminated cover as cold and slippery as glass. Finnair’s in-flight shopping magazine. Even under his present circumstances, the appeal of shopping while aboard a plane remained mysterious. He nonetheless slapped at the crisp, thick pages. Fifty-euro pearl necklaces. Twenty-euro sticks of Dolce & Gabbana deodorant. Thirty-euro Glam Bronze Sunset & Glam Shine foundation by L’Oréal. Pages of European chocolates and confections. He came to the last pages, electronics, and stopped at a 245-euro solar-powered BlackBerry Curve 8310 Smartphone. Almost certainly, dozens of passengers aboard this plane had been carrying phones, any number of which might still be in their carry-ons. While getting reception was unlikely, he might find a device that allowed the sending of a stored email or text once the plane reached a lower altitude.

As he rose, the plane shook as though withstanding atmospheric reentry. He sat and buckled his seatbelt. His fear, having almost come under the control of his hope, felt newly feral. He breathed. He was not sure what time it was, or how long he had been on this plane, but his window shade, like every other window in business class, was now open, and once again he stared into the freezing darkness of the troposphere. He thought of his wife, his students, their concern for him, and, yet again, rose.

John felt strangely better once he had all the business class carry-ons gathered around his seat. Remaining close to his appointed seat seemed important, though he could not explain why. He worked his way through the bags, most of which were small. People who paid business class fares did not hesitate to check their luggage. They had no cab line to beat; they landed to find Jordanian men holding small white signs bearing their last names. Unzipping luggage, John slipped his hand into one opening after another and felt and squeezed and searched. He did not want to unnecessarily disturb anyone’s items. Anything that felt at all promising he pulled out through its zippered caul. By the end of his search he sat among shaving kits, digital cameras, iPods, duty-free bottles of vodka with Cyrillic lettering, several Montblanc pens, and a smooth pink plastic torpedo he had realized only incrementally was a sex toy. Also accounted for were half a dozen computer cases, every one of them empty.

He moved on to coach, but before he had managed to empty a single overhead container, his stomach sent another dose of fiery waste toward its point of egress. He staggered to the bathroom, unbuckling his pants, and sprayed before he could get himself atop the metal-basined toilet’s plastic ring. The smell had no equivalent he could name. It was, somehow, an orange smell. His intestinal spigot opened again; waste escaped him in avid bursts. He was sick now, and dizzy, his brain an invalid whom no one had thought to visit in months. When he was finished he washed his hands.

Decorousness no longer concerned him. He walked down the first aisle opening overheads and savagely throwing their contents to the floor. Soon enough it was knee-deep with baggage. Would he really go through all of it? No. His anger was too overriding now, and he had to allow himself to regenerate the care and attentiveness searching the bags would require. He moved to the second aisle, pushing overhead release buttons as he traversed it. After a satisfying pop the doors slowly lifted open. So much of this plane was kept in place by plastic hinges. He was within a metal tube, sailing just beneath the fringe of outer space, while huge engines fifty feet from him spewed invisible 1,000-degree fire. Was this any less remarkable than the reality that he was now trapped inside?

He found Janika in the aisle’s third-to-last overhead—though given that the overheads were triply connected, she occupied all of them, however unhappily she fit. Her bruised, cross-eyed face and masking-taped mouth sent John to the floor as resoundingly as a blow. When he finally looked back up at her he saw that one of her arms had slipped from its containment. Her hand vibrated lightly in turbulence he could no longer feel. He carefully removed her from the overhead. When the last of her body pulled free she seemed to gain one hundred spontaneous pounds. John fell back, Janika on top of him, onto a bed of carry-ons and their jutting contents.

Janika’s crossed eyes, so close to John’s own but unable to meet them, seemed troubled by some final, unwanted knowledge. Dried red crumbles of blood filled her nostrils. Her cheeks were spider-webbed with broken capillaries, the veins of her forehead and temples subcutaneously livid. John pushed her away and made long loud primate sounds. He tried pulling the masking tape from Janika’s mouth, but the sound of dead skin tugging against musculature was so nightmarishly sloppy he stopped and ran screaming back toward business class.

He decided to once again beat the cockpit door with the air compressor. This time, however, he would not stop. He entered business class to find that the screen upon which the pre-flight PSA had been broadcast was lowering. The lights went soundlessly out. Panic spun him around. Two steps into his flight he stumbled and fell. Unable to see and crawling back toward coach on an uneven reef of luggage, his thoughts turned Neanderthal. Back, back to shelter. But there was no shelter. What he had been feeling until now was not fear. Fear was liquid; it traveled the bloodstream; it sought the reservoir of the brain. Real fear, he now knew, took its power not from what could happen but what you realize will happen. Above him was a sound of small, whirring industry. He recognized it for what it was: throughout coach smaller screens were lowering into place. John looked at the closest one. It was on but blank. The screen glowed like vinyl: darker, somehow, than actual darkness.

Then, an image of crisp digital-video quality, though its bottom edge vaguely flickered with waveform. John was too far away to make sense of it. He stood. What he saw when close enough was a small plywood room filmed from the impersonal high-corner angle unique to surveillance. In this room were two figures. In a chair, behind a small table: a woman. Circling her: a man in boots, loose black pants, black tank top, black ski mask. The audio was tinny, faraway, obviously unmic’d. In the blizzardy imperfection of poorly lit digital video, John did not immediately recognize Janika. She appeared to be tied to her chair and was crying in a steady and quietly hopeless way. The man looked at the camera, walked toward it, and finally reached up and grabbed it. The camera was not fixed in some surveillance perch at all; it was a hand-held. The image went whirlwind but quickly stabilized, save for a few hand-held jiggles.

A second man, identically dressed, entered the room through a hitherto unnoticed door. Looking directly into the camera, he pulled the door shut with a strange gentleness. The first, camera-wielding man must have gone into zoom as the second approached: his ski-masked face less filled the screen than violently annexed it. John stared at this man staring back at him. This too was time travel. Now that she was blocked from sight, Janika’s soft, wet sobs were sharper, more keening. Or perhaps she was simply reacting to the second man’s entrance.

The man himself said nothing. His eyes were animate in no remarkable way. When, at last, he turned away, he busied himself at the table. The man was writing something, John realized, and once he had finished he again faced the camera. He held out a piece of thin white cardboard filled with letters of nearly perfect contiguousness. John did not expect the sign to say what it did. He nonetheless felt grateful, for now he understood what was happening, and why. The man placed the sign on the table before fixing his attention upon Janika, who now screamed. As for the sign, John could still see it: CATEGORY 1.

After his speech, Ilvi asked John if he would like to join her and some others, including the speaker who preceded him, for drinks in the Old Town. Was this woman truly that stupid? John extricated himself from the offer with an obsequious bow, a claim of exhaustion, and multiple thank-yous. He was beginning to feel both ghostly and loathed here, less a man than an unpleasant idea. As he made his way toward the exit, people scattered from his path as though he were lobbing lit firecrackers. How much longer, he wondered, would this be his life?

A few of the questions he had taken were indeed hostile, the most pointed posed by an older woman in the front row with a face as tight-skinned as a kayak. She had huffily asked what John would do in the event of a formal accusation of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. John told her he did not anticipate that happening and then lied: “I’m not that worried about it, to be perfectly honest.”

John had another day scheduled in Tallinn. At the first thought of this, he stepped into a men’s room off the hallway outside of the conference room and stabbed at his iPhone until he was online. The conference had paid for John’s flight but, at his request, left the return ticket open. Within a couple of minutes his ticket was changed. Magic. Less magical was the fact that he was now $1,500 poorer. It was hard to regard this as anything but a bargain.

John exited the men’s room to find a gleamingly clean-shaven man waiting for him. His outfit was a Halloween version of a tech-industry executive: navy blue sport coat, no tie, jeans, cross-trainers. He was obviously American. His face filled with an expression of unilateral recognition John had still not grown used to, probably because it was an expression that always failed to acknowledge itself as unilateral. He knew who John was; therefore John would be happy to meet him. Everyone was the star of his own story.

He said John’s name and extended his hand. A business card emblazoned with the embassy seal materialized. RUSSELL GALLAGHER, CULTURAL LIAISON OFFICER. In John’s limited experience, words such as “cultural” and “officer” tended to serve as camouflage for intelligence work.

John tried to give the card back but Gallagher insisted John keep it. John put it in his pocket and asked, “Are you my envoy?”

Gallagher had a boyish, I’m-being-tickled laugh, though age was beginning its work around his eyes and had begun pushing back his hairline. “I’m not, unfortunately. You’re not too popular at the embassy. You probably know this already but they tried to get you uninvited to this thing.”

John was aware that, among the remaining loyalist vestiges of the Administration, he could expect no grata shown his persona. But that an embassy would attempt to block his appearance at an international conference seemed astonishing. Did these people not have anything better to do? “As a matter of fact,” he told Gallagher, “I did not know that.”

This indiscretion was cause for yet more Gallagher laughter. He was trying too hard, John thought.

“It turns out your friend, Professor Armastus, doesn’t like to be pushed around. She also has friends. The harder the embassy lobbied the more determined they were to get you here. Great speech, by the way.”

“Tonight is the first time I met her. But thank you.”

“Look,” Gallagher said, aware that whatever he wanted to talk about was now thunking along the berm, “I’m here, under my own volition, to tell you that a lot of us are grateful to you and what you did.”

“Thank you again.”

He looked at John, his face sweetly bold. “My father was a Vietnam vet, seventy-one to seventy-two. One of the things he was involved with was the Phoenix Program. He always said the reason it got such a bad name was because it was created by geniuses and carried out by idiots. But even then it was the most effective thing we ever threw against the Viet Cong. The Communists admitted as much after the war. My dad was in Saigon, and he told me that by 1972 the average life expectancy of a Communist cell leader in the city was about four months. And nothing you argued for was worse than what my dad was proud to have done with Phoenix. Just wanted you to know there are a lot of us who admire you.”

While drafting his memos John had actually looked into the Phoenix Program. He learned the CIA had made internal promises that Phoenix would be “operated under the normal laws of war.” He also learned that several American officers involved with Phoenix asked to be relieved of their duties because they thought what they were doing was immoral. John stood there looking at Gallagher. His posting in the target-poor environment of Estonia spoke for itself. His father hunted down Communists. The hottest action the son could scare up for himself was defying his embassy in order to tell John to keep his chin up. The conservatism of which Gallagher was doubtless a disciple was not a proper philosophy. It was a bad mood. Neither of them said anything for several seconds.

“You want a drink?” Gallagher asked. “You look like you could use one.”

John did not want a drink. He could, however, use one. They walked out of the Viru together and into the enduring 10:00 p.m. sunlight of a Tallinn summer evening. John asked Gallagher how long he had been posted here. “I was in Greece before this. Ten years in. Before that, the Marines. Made captain in 1998. Got out too early for any of the fun stuff.”

They walked toward the center of the Old Town. In the weakening light the buildings seemed as bright as animation cells. People were drinking in the cafés along the sidewalk, drinking while they walked, drinking while they waited for ATM slots to stick out their tongues of currency. John noted the packs of young Russian men with hard eyes and unsteady gaits, the singing arm-entwined Scotsmen, the wobbling smokers standing outside every pub. He also noticed the tiny old begging women dressed in tatterdemalion, seasonally inappropriate clothing, every one looking as though she had suffered some unbreakable gypsy curse. John asked Gallagher, “With what sort of culture do you typically liaise around here?”

Gallagher looked at him. “You might be surprised. But it’s a fun place to live, even if Estonians are sort of inscrutable. A buddy of mine plays bass, and he told me that wherever he’s lived in the world he’s always been able to show up at open mics. Everyone needs a bass player. When he got to Tallinn he’d show up at an open mic and there’d be five Estonian guys standing there with their basses, looking for a lead guitarist. This is a nation of bass players.”

John’s eyes snagged on two high-heeled Freyas in dermally tight jeans walking toward him. These two carried themselves with the steel-spined air of women secretly covetous of constant low-grade harassment, which they were getting. In their wake they left all manner of shouted Russian entreaties.

Gallagher noticed the women, too. “And, of course, there’s that. In Tallinn even the ugly girls are kind of pretty. This is offset by the fact that even the intelligent ones are kind of stupid.”

Gallagher went on as they walked. Talk of women became talk of Finland, which became talk of the Soviet Special Forces, which became a condensed narrative history of the 1990s. Segues were nonexistent. Soon the soliloquy returned to his father. John was no longer listening. Instead he considered Gallagher. His hair was thin, limp, the color of rye, and Gallagher was often petting it forward—a naughty schoolboy tic reactivated in middle age to conceal his retreating hairline. Discussing his father left Gallagher wallowing in unspecified grievances, though he still insisted on laughing every third or fourth sentence. “And that’s what my dad always said,” Gallagher closed.

John, having failed to catch the gist of Gallagher’s finale (there may not have been one), nodded.

Gallagher did, too. Then: “He died only last year, you know.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“When your memos were leaked we even talked about it. I asked him for his opinion. He predicted that the terrorists were going to use our own courts against us. He said, ‘Shit, I personally violated Article III of the Geneva Conventions. Several times!’”

Gentle crinkles of preoccupation formed across John’s brow. This was a mistake.

“Here we go.” Gallagher was pointing to a belowground bar just off of Pikk, an absurdly pretty street John had wandered up and down earlier that day. Christmas lights were strung up in its basement windows; there was no sign. John did not drink, at least not in any way that conceptually honored what people meant by “drinking.” A glass of wine every few nights, always with a meal; an occasional imported beer on hot Sunday afternoons; a good single malt after an expensive dinner. When Gallagher mentioned a drink John had imagined the two of them sharing a tumbler of cognac in a wine bar. It was one of those social laws you broke only at great risk: never go anywhere with anyone you don’t know well.

John followed Gallagher down concrete bomb-shelter stairs. Already uncomfortable, he became more so when Gallagher pushed open the door—a hail fellow, well met—and instantly repaired to the bar, where he had words with the gorgeous apparition toiling behind it.John decided to play a little game with himself to see how long he could last there. He found a table and waited for Gallagher to join him, but when he looked back, Gallagher was holding the bartender’s hand. He turned it over and traced with his index finger some elaborate fortune-teller augury on her palm. Smiling, the bartender pulled her hand free and worked the tap while Gallagher looked smugly around. She air-kissed him while handing over two pints. Gallagher raised the glasses to her. The moment his back was to her she stopped smiling.

As for the bar’s other patrons: there did not appear to be any. John had chosen as his landing site the most centrally located of the room’s four tables. Sparsely arranged along one wall’s tragically upholstered booth were half a dozen cross-armed young women staring at the ceiling, their purses in their laps. At the other end of the room another woman danced on a stage no larger than the table at which John now sat. Thankfully, she was not stripping, and did not appear interested in stripping, but rather moved in a languidly bored way to music so timidly broadcast John could barely hear it. The walls and carpet were inferno red—the only recognizable motif. That this was exactly what John imagined hell looked like did not abate the impression. Gallagher planted himself in the chair across from John and pushed a beer toward him. “It doesn’t usually get hopping around here till one or two.”

John motioned around. “What is this?”

In mid-sip, Gallagher’s eyebrows lifted. When he lowered the glass his tongue agilely shaved off his froth mustache. “A place for discerning gentlemen. Don’t worry. It’s nothing you don’t want it to be.”

With that the dancing woman came and sat next to John. She was violently pretty and wearing a black dress that could have fit inside a coin purse. Her dancing had left her sweaty and luminous, an ecosystem in miniature.

John looked plaintively at his host. “Gallagher, please.”

Gallagher laughed again. “One drink, Counsel. It’s a nice place to relax if you let yourself.” To the dancing woman he said, “Sweetheart, davei. Come sit next to me.” She did. The next woman who came over Gallagher tried to wave off; she sat next to John anyway.

John shook her hand. Her legs were ruinously thin, her stretch pants tight around her thighs but barely holding shape against her calves. Her neck was a veiny stalk. She sniffled in an affected way and pulled two silver clips from her black hair. They were purely for show: not one displaced strand fell into her face. She scrutinized the clips as though she had panned them from a riverbed. She was waiting for John to speak. She replaced the clips and studied her foot as she tapped it against the red carpeting, which looked as though it had been the recipient of many gastric sorrows. Her toenails were the color of aluminum foil. John still said nothing to her. Gallagher, meanwhile, was getting along well with the dancing girl. Honestly. It appeared they were having a fairly serious conversation. The woman next to John lit a cigarette and took one of those long, crackling drags that actually made cigarettes seem appealing. Smoke leaked from the corners of her mouth. After another minute of this, she left, and John was alone with his beer.

What they did not ask after his speech was whether he had suffered any reservations at the time he had written his memos. John did have occasional reservations. They all did. John worried first that interrogators might not feel restrained by the same moral qualms that he, John, would. He also worried about what was called “force drift,” where force applied unsuccessfully had no choice but to become force applied again, but more intently. After all, enhanced interrogation was excusable only if the person being interrogated was assumed to know something. This was why he never imagined it being applied to anyone but al-Qaeda members.

John understood his arguments were controversial and sometimes even repellent, but they were legal rather than moral judgments. John did not craft policy or devise what form “enhanced interrogation” actually took. He simply measured legality against relevant statutes. His memos had been concerned with eighteen methods, and they came in three categories. The first category was limited to two techniques: yelling and deception. The second category comprised twelve: stress positions, isolation, forced standing for up to four hours, phobia exploitation, false documents, removal from standard interrogation sites, twenty-four-hour-long interrogations, food variation, removal of clothing, forced grooming, deprivation of light, and loud music. The third category, intended for use only against the hardest cases, broke down into four techniques: mild physical contact, scenarios that threatened the death of the detainee or his family, extreme element exposure, and simulated drowning. There was also a fourth category, which, thankfully, he had never been asked to rule on. The fourth category was also the loneliest. Its one technique: extraordinary rendition.

John had told himself, while contemplating leaving Justice, that it would be better outside. Walks across an autumn quad, adoring students waiting outside his office, all the intramural atmosphere Washington could never provide except in venal approximation. Justice was a museum, and its cold marble hallways led to a kind of intellectual progeria: even the young there quickly became old. Addington was the saddest to see John go. Do you really, Addington asked, want to teach spoiled rich kids who give murdering proletarian mobs a good name?

Within months after John’s departure, many of his judgments were withdrawn and then suspended. John later learned that Addington protested this by saying the President had been relying on John’s views. In that case, the answer came back, the President may have been breaking the law. Five months later, Abu Ghraib. Seven months later, John’s memos were declassified. Gonzales, at the press conference, claimed to want to show the media that due diligence and proper legal vetting had occurred at every step in the enhanced interrogation process. That was what he actually believed was at issue.

John would never forget the rattlesnake energy coiled in those War Council meetings. They were all as confident as Maoists. Feith, Haynes, Addington, Gonzales, Flanigan—men one step away from the President. The lawyer’s lawyers. The nation had suffered a heart attack and they were holding the paddles of defibrillation, working together to improvise legal strategies for something no law as yet existed to contain. They met in Gonzales’s office in the White House, sometimes at Defense. Simple, uncatered, unrecorded meetings in which the most luxurious staples were a few Diet Cokes. John often looked at himself and Gonzales during these meetings. John was a first-generation American, Gonzales the son of immigrants so impoverished they did not even have a telephone. And yet here he was, drafting policy during the most serious national-security crisis in half a century, serving as personal counsel to the world’s most powerful man. This was the America John had been willing to do anything legal to protect.

Then you had Feith and Addington, androids who regarded other human beings as little more than collections of interesting mental malfunctions. The dimples within Feith’s rumpled Muppet face were venom repositories. He circulated memos without buckslips so no one could be sure to whom they were routed or cc’d them to people who never actually received them. He made speeches on the sanctity of Geneva only to heighten the incongruity of its sacred shroud being filthied by terrorists. His was such manifestly confusing lawyering that those who heard Feith talk about Geneva came away believing Article III would apply to everyone the United States captured. By the end of one of Feith’s monologues he had one of the Joint Chiefs mistakenly believing that all eighteen enhanced interrogation techniques were sanctioned by the Army’s Field Manual. Not one of them actually was. The idea to launch a new intelligence agency called Total Information Awareness, the logo of which was a crazy Masonic eye overlooking the world? Only Feith.

As for Addington: the eyes of a Russian icon, the bearing of Lincoln, the disposition of a hand grenade. After the attacks, Addington began carrying a copy of the Constitution in his pocket so worn and flimsy it looked like it served as a hankie or coaster or both. Whenever anyone disagreed with him, he pulled it out and started reading from it. It was Addington’s special genius to frame every legal and moral argument in warlike terms, whereas any argument about actual warfare came draped in diaphanous euphemism. Maybe that was why, out of all of them, only Addington escaped. Only he had managed to keep his name off every relevant document.

They had attempted to legislate within an atmosphere in which the ticking time bomb was the operational assumption rather than the outlying statistical Pluto it was. Now John could see that, but that was only one way of thinking about it. Another was this: intelligence was the ability to discern the applicability of incoming outside information. The better part of knowledge was knowing what you were allowed to forget.

Three people had been subjected to waterboarding. Three people. And for that he had to answer questions about war crimes. John had heard that his successor allowed himself to be waterboarded before supplying a decision about whether it was over the line. The answer: it was. But for all that, for all the debate and decapitated careers, the CIA was still allowed to use simulated drowning (John actually preferred this more honest term), just as John had originally argued. His core arguments were still in place. Of course, no one in Justice wanted to sign off on CIA use of the technique, but the President found his man. He always did. But that was bitterness. John was not bitter. He would have liked to see Feith or Gonzales or Ashcroft, or any of them, alone in a European city, answering questions on policies they had endorsed and were now ashamed of.

John looked into his pint glass, now an empty crystal well. Somehow he had drunk his beer. He could brood here, he knew, all night, and let the dark wave carry him.

“I’m ready to leave,” he told Gallagher, who was still having his edifying conversation with the dancer.

He looked at John. “I hope you’ve made time to see the Museum of Occupation tomorrow.”

“I can’t, actually. I’m leaving in the morning.” John looked at his watch. It was already past midnight.

Gallagher sat back. “A shame. Tallinn’s a nice place to spend a day in.”

“Thank you for the drink,” John said, standing. “Feel free to stay. I can find my way back.”

Gallagher remained seated but extended his hand. “I hope someday we might meet again. Have a good flight tomorrow.”

At the door, John turned for one last glimpse of Gallagher. He was already on his cell, bent over in his chair, the dancer getting up to leave. Gallagher noticed John lingering in the doorway and shot him a not-very-sharp salute. Hard to believe that guy was a Marine. John wondered, though only for a moment, to whom Gallagher might be speaking.

Janika’s interrogation film had been over for twenty minutes or two hours. It was impossible to keep track of time in the darkness. Light gave time’s passage handholds and markers. Time passed in the dark was like driving through cornfields—an endless similarity, full of the unseen.

What the exercise was intended to provoke in him he did not know. He was no more or less sympathetic to those he had helped doom to torture than he was before it began. They misunderstood him. They did not comprehend what he had actually argued for. Those in command of this plane and, now, his life, had nothing to gain from him, other than invigorating their sadism. He, in return, had nothing he could give them, other than the gift of his torment. Torture, he had written, was a matter of intent. He now knew that torture was many more things than that. The exchange of dark knowledge, a revelation of hidden capacities, the annihilation of connection.

Suddenly John was staring at the plane’s ceiling, its vaguely surgical nozzles gushing air. The lights were back on. He wrenched around in his adopted coach seat and was not quite prepared to see Janika’s broken body, still tangled in luggage. When he stood, gusts of sickness-spiced air pushed through the cloth chimneys of his clothing.

After Janika’s tormentor had moved through Category I and the more visually operatic techniques of Categories II and III, several other men entered the room. What happened next was as dreadful as anything John had seen. He refused to watch most of it and opened his eyes only after the sounds of her struggle had ceased. While the men were verifying the extinguishment of Janika’s vital signs, the film stopped.

John returned to his designated seat. Upon it sat his iPhone, white as a wafer. A dumb flood of thought branched off toward what few remaining lowlands it could. One of them was Gallagher, the only person who knew that John had changed his flight. Gallagher’s card was still in his breast pocket. He took it out and looked at it, his thumb playing over the raised embassy seal. He wondered how Gallagher knew he would not throw the card away. He wondered how it could be that Janika was wearing the same clothes in the interrogation video as she had been on this plane. He wondered how long he had actually been unconscious and whether this was the plane he had boarded. He wondered where on this plane those who were doing this to him were hiding. He wondered, too, how his iPhone was receiving any service, but there it was: two bars of reception. An answer came to one of his questions: Gallagher had not anticipated John keeping his card. John was four digits into Gallagher’s number when the recognition application tripped. It had been added to his phone.

Gallagher answered after the third ring. “Tallinn is a nice place to spend a day. You should have listened to me.”

What could John say? They had what they wanted.

“Nothing to ask? I don’t blame you. You have bigger problems, Counsel. Right now you should probably turn around.”

He did. A man in a black ski mask, and a YOU SUCK tee shirt, hit John in the face with an instrument of formidably metal bluntness. When his knees met the carpet he saw the item clearly: the same air compressor he had used to beat the cockpit door. John’s head turned mutant with pain. He did not remember the second blow but it must have come, because he woke, once again suddenly, in a plywood room, tied to a chair. One of his eyes no longer worked. Some of his teeth were gone and his tongue felt as swollen and bloody as a leech. He looked down at his shirt: a butcher’s apron. The plane’s engine was still in his ears. Turbulence shook the room. He could hear weeping somewhere close by. Sitting across from John was Gallagher, whose hands were folded atop yet another sign. He did not show it to John, but John could read it. Gallagher told John he could promise questions but not answers. He also told him this was new territory for all involved. Not even he was sure where this would go. “Are you ready?” Gallagher asked him. “I need to know if you’re ready.” John nodded, feeling somehow covetous of his mouthful of blood. The door behind him opened. Footsteps. Hands like toothless muzzles took hold of him. Category V had begun.