Plowing the Dark

38

The Qur'an runs out. No more need for it; no schedule left to preserve. You find yourself sitting blanked, your brain playing teatime host to the virus that consumes it. You look down in wonder at your arms and legs, where they tremble out of control. Hours mold. Your eyes fail to latch anywhere. From far off, in this perpetual dusk, you watch yourself stare at nothing. A translucent globe of light materializes in front of you, suspended on nothing, a spirit on air. Only as it covers your face in a silk thread does it occur to you: a spider.

You curl up fetal, your chin tucked between your hands. This close to your ear, your nail, rubbing up against your cheap cotton collar with every inhalation, sounds like the bobbing of boats against their ropes at anchor. There is a creaking like the creaking of rope on wood. There is a creaking that needs gulls, that says waves, insists sea.

Shapes spawn from the room's shadows, then dissolve in the startle they produce. But livid aftertaste lingers in the spots where these phantoms flicker. You turn back into that child of eight, pulled from a deep night's sleep, three hours past the reach of reason. A boy swimming to half-consciousness in a room not his own, its lumps of furniture a forest too tangled to navigate, without measure, without bearing, where north could be anywhere and the walls are as wide as dread.

All your life, you've awakened in this placeless place. Always the same, in its alien layout. Even as an adult, you felt it come to nuzzle, this other man's interior decoration. As late as three years ago you cried out loud, a groan forced up through sleep's thick opiates, scaring the wits out of the woman sleeping next to you. Your bed, your room, your Gwen, asking, What is it, sweetie? What is it?

You couldn't tell her. You couldn't say. You did not yet know. Not the deep trace of infant trauma. A warning of the trauma that awaited you, a glimpse of your last, furnished efficiency, this northless one. One and the same: the room that forever troubled your sleep is this one that you finally wake up in.

The deed, the title to the place is yours now, and it's way past time to remodel. You go with a bookshelf in deep cherry, and next to it, a tawny leather sofa long enough to stretch out on. The sinister shadow that cowered for decades in the far right corner becomes a mission-style chair and footstool. A record player, neat on its cart, appears in what had once been fear's worst alcove. The swelling shelf of records crawls with your guilty favorites.

Nowhere can you find a phone. You don't seem to own one, or much miss it. Now and then there's a knock on the door. One that you can ignore or humor at your will. When it's not Ali or Sayid with your dinner, it's Gwen, come to see if you'd like to do anything.

It all feels a bit suspect, really. How nice she's being. She never had ten consecutive minutes for you, when minutes were real. Now she hangs around all the time, if only because her place is still a dump while you've done up yours to comfortable perfection.

You tell her yes, you wouldn't mind taking a walk. The two of you, outdoors, on this glorious day. And maybe you could talk, just a little, about what went wrong. Turns out your place is on the third floor. Turns out you're living in a decent neighborhood in Lincoln Park, eight blocks from the lake.

The light hurts your eyes. For a minute, you can see nothing. She understands your day blindness, and leads you by the hand. As if she has always loved you, and there is no fear between you. You walk west, along a street whose name you can't make out. Cars, bikes, and pedestrians swarm the thoroughfare. Every oak doorway, each bay window stupefies you.

She tells you about a new plan she has for making a living. She's decided to become practical. Live in the real world, like you. She's going to freelance, designing and creating business presentations. It will leave her more time. She won't be as stressed. She'll be happier, easier to get along with.

But in the same breath, she says that the stress was all your fault. You never accepted her. You never loved her as she was. She couldn't give you more than she was giving. You spooked the shit out of her. She could never satisfy you. You wanted out. You wanted to change her. You wanted an impossible synchrony. You wanted her bone marrow.

A shock rips through the afternoon air. The Howard El explodes into a blazing fireball. Then another blast, from the direction of Lake Shore Drive, the Corniche. Someone off beyond Grant Park is shelling the city. Gwen looks at you in animal panic. You grab her to you, and in an instant, you are back inside the apartment, huddled together

behind the leather sofa.

Something in the scent of violence — the war, the sound of things detonating, about to be revealed — excites her. The clutch of fear turns into its other. She grips you, cowering behind the thin plaster skin that one stray caprice of geopolitics could turn into your crypt. The city is coming down around you, grinding itself to rubble, and she wants her last minutes of body. She's inside your ear, wetting it, withdrawing her tongue only long enough to repeat, You can do anything you want

with me.

You debate the wisdom of bringing yourself off — in this, one of the rare opportlhities you have to do it, the guards distracted by the greater chaos outside. Comfort versus cost, the fleeting injection of well-being versus the expense of energy in a place where dinner's pita crust and stale chickpeas barely cover the calories involved in lying still.

You decide in favor, as quietly as you can. You focus on estranging her, resolving her, posing her in the multiple welcoming and inflaming postures, the dress-ups that she never knew you wanted from her, positions she would have begrudged you had you ever suggested them. You feel the terms that desire condemns you to, the male life sentence, the need to possess the thing that refuses to know you. You need to escape tonight, more than you've ever needed any pleasure — escape not into this stranger fantasy, but out from under it. But where can the heart run to, finally, except the known? Your lust seeks out those mourning features, all her furtive Kodak poses that have for years absorbed your eyes, instructing you in her perfect confusion, drilling you in its inflections, all the familiar terrors of the native speaker…

At the moment that she joins her extremities to yours, her commitment is unthinking. Her grip is as utter, as unconscious as any between two needy animals. But vacant as well, absent, far away somewhere, deep in a formulating image. Who knows whose?

The mortar pounding falls off, its rounds expended. The two of you lie side by side, silent in the gulf that climax creates. Returned, you need to know. To ask her where she was just now, since she wasn't here with you.

Where was I? The question maddens her. She will not be bullied. East Moline, she tells you. How's that? I was in East Moline. With?

With fifteen dollars. Burning a hole in my pocket.

To see?

To see a man about a dog.

Even her kindness is arch, deflecting. Nothing like a little more nuzzling to shut a man up. You have no choice but to honor her offer. You slide her toward you, prelude to your coming together again. But just as suddenly, she stiffens.

You ask her what's wrong. What you've done this time.

/ don't like being moved. You're too much bigger than I am.

You throw your hands in the air. Affection is over for the evening. But your bodies stay close, flush, frayed, afraid to move away from each other into the wider chasm.

/ would love to see you happy, you tell her. I would do anything to see you at peace.

You hear the false note, even as you make it. Love, that placating condescension. Aren't we past that yet, so late in this distance run?

Look. Gwen. Trying for softness. Trying for balance, for some good-faith connection. I came into this relationship pretty easygoing. You wouldn't know it; I'm really very generous by nature. But you are slowly turning me into exactly the controlling, manipulative male that you're afraid I am.

I don't think you're controlling, she states. / don't think you're manipulative. She dares you to call it a concession.

The world is all militias, you want to tell her. All power, factions, and revenge. There is no place else but the one place we can make.

Everything bloody and dead, except the two of us. But even that much would be begging.

I don't think I should have to second-guess myself every time I need… something from you.

I don't think you should have to, either.

You hear it again, her arms curling up in a defensive clinch. The bitter readiness to stay at war forever.

Truce, sweetie? White hankies? Halfway out between the trenches?

She detonates. It's never enough for you, Tai. I am meeting you halfway. You don't want me halfway. You want me ten feet past you on the other side.

Look. Pointless syllable, buying time until you stop shaking. Look. Just tell me. Do you want to be with me? Make a life? Is it worth all this

endless…?

A silence. Finally, she will be wide, will return, in kind, the surrender you want to give her. Finally she will leap free, meet you for that smallest mutual swap of sovereignty, the first exchange of trust you both so badly desire.

Well. Of course it's worth… But you make it sound like it's my—

Just say. Just say you love me. Once. Without countering.

Tai. What…? How…?

The rage courses through you again, as powerfully as when she spoke these words to you for real. Oh to hell with you. Why don't you just pack your fucking antiseptic overnight bag and… You swing your hand around to point at the window, or where the window would be, if it weren't sheet metal. This sealed aperture, twisted around in mental geography to align with your old southern exposure, the true-to-life direction of… go home.

Oh God. She falls away from you, cowering, as from the silenced mortar. Her voice goes spectral. Spooky. On the edge of an ocean you don't want to imagine. You were going to hit me.

All night long and into the following day, you redirect the scene. You adjust the mistaken angle of your backhand. You alter the words, change the pacing, fix the crooked gesture. Pay the penance of replay, summon up all the correction that editing can offer. Do everything in explanation's power to heal the misunderstanding. You reshoot everything for hours, trying to convince her, convince yourself, that the blow she ducked would never have been possible. That the anger you were feeling and the anger she saw were not the same.

Someone knocks on your door. You rise to open it, amazed to find her standing in the dingy, unguarded corridor. She has come back, in tears, wanting some better last word. You rush out to meet her. But the speed of your advance scares her, and she turns to run.

You rush after her, to prove that you can't hurt her. No guards stop you; it happens too quickly. She flees your attempted comfort, terrified. She stops, cowering, her arms above her head. You take her arms gently, to lower them from her face once and forever. She stiffens, and you pull harder.

In the flash of an instant, the tug escalates into the full contest. Now you could truly hurt her, slap her hard, to stop her struggle, to carry her back into the room's safety before the larger insanity finds you out here. And in that moment of violence, you are everything she has feared in you, everything she always knew was knocking around inside you, awaiting only this awfulness to be born.

She disappears. Throughout that dry season, she will not come back. But she leaves behind something more useful than remorse. For in that impulse chase, she has taught you how to spring from this prison down to the street below.

You pace yourself. You draw out the exercise in stages. You work up the block of Lincoln Park immediately outside your building. The goal is largesse, weight, a map on the scale of an inch to an inch. You stand still until every contiguous brick and block of concrete reconvenes. No gaps: you refuse to step down the street until every fuzzed foot fills out with casements and moldings.

Seventeen doors on your side of the street. Twelve, plus two shops and a parking garage on the other. Four stories of apartments, shoulder to shoulder, each one occupied with lives scavenging for scraps of love, scrambling to keep current, scrabbling to survive on the crust of the world's collapsing infrastructures. You move through this staggering set, a denser network than your eye ever made out when you actually lived there. Half a residential block lays out a universe so nauseatingly profuse that you need the safety of your cell even to consider it. Your Qur'an is right: the God of Creation is as close as your own jugular. And as far.

Your cell sits inside a similar hive, the hive in its own warren, the warren in a neighborhood as dense as the one you reconstruct. You try to walk abroad here, too, but every attempt fails. You can no longer resolve the school, or the faces of your students. For all the weeks that you lived there, your Beirut compound now stands locked to you. You can't even say what floor you now inhabit, let alone the size of this building. From the sound of traffic, the street lies no more than two flights below you. You try to fall quietly to this pavement, but can't. You open the door and take the stairs, but the city waiting at the bottom of the stairwell is never this one.

Lives swarm on all sides of you, through these walls, across the gully of street that the sun must surely warm and expand. Other lives live out their existences not a hundred feet from you: other Westerners, bargaining chips in a game the point of which even the principal players no longer remember. You hear their scrapings, their muffled back talk to the guards. You savor the evidence of their hurried ablutions as you rush through your own bathroom runs. But you can't see them, can't

make them out.

A hundred meters farther out, two hundred, half a kilometer: your throw nets tear under the haul. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all denominations live locked away in holes that bless yours by comparison, with no world superpower, however impotent, to demand accounting for their treatment. You put yourself in these streets, but they vanish beneath your feet. You've learned the ability to venture forth at will. Full-color, high-resolution. But always only Chicago. Always the near North Side, life before lifelessness found you out.

Through long practice, applied urban renewal, you fill in every surface of your former block. There you reprise your old existence, an invisible tourist, threading through the mass pageant. Incubus again, among the lives that you depended on for every particular, people that you fed off without even bothering to learn their names. What you liked to call a private person, a solitary one, all the dress-up terms for parasite. Now that you'd knock on their doors, enter their living rooms give yourself wholeheartedly to your bit part in the improvised script you can't. Your neighbors pass right through you on the street. You an the phantom you worked so hard to be.

They give you the keys to the city, abandon you to free excursion: deeper downtown. You make a left on Clark and head down past the Historical Society. Jog over to Dearborn or La Salle, depending upon barometric pressure. The weather is always spring. When you stop, a Gilded Age mansion or pretty brownstone façade slides into focus. But you don't often stop, short of your destination.

The approach to the Loop, always on Michigan, picks up definition. The Hancock, the Water Tower. On the bridge, the full panorama comes back. The newspaper buildings, Marina Towers. But bit by bit, even the throwaway filler solidifies, the tumbleweed concrete thrown up in the alleys and interstices. You start to remember buildings you can't ever have registered in all your years living in this town.

But this is still not what you've come to see. You click off the last mile, down the superb stretch that the two of you took at most six times, in all your two and a half thousand opportunities to walk it together. The line of the lake opens. Buildings to the left of you fall away, leaving on your right a sheer cliff face of masonry and glass. When the explosions issue from the direction of Navy Pier, you hold them at bay. Nothing human can harm a single pane of this illusion.

Twin carved lions enlarge in front of you, proving your forward motion. The sensation is uncanny, like sitting on a stationary train while another backs up on the next track. If you can mount the stone steps, get past the coat check, the bookstore, the ticket booth, if you can climb up the grand central staircase without some street detonation or strip assault by sadistic guard, you are home free.

Once you reach that second floor, nothing can harm you. Time lies crumpled in a heap, back downstairs at the coat check. Always a footrace; you can't enter the museum except through that long walk in from the North Side. The slightest tracer can defeat you, any block along the way. But once you're here, the soul-pithing dullness of existence has no more say.

The day still advances at its old rate, but you no longer feel it. Your heartbeat races or freezes, turns on a pin, floats on a seascape, jumps through a circus hoop, does whatever you tell it to do. It trawls in the afternoon light, downstream from an old mill. It ascends into heaven with the Virgin. It dawdles, designless, at a cafe full of boaters. It floats in a porcelain footbath full of water.

Hours may pass in your absence. Sometimes you come back, and the gaping wasteland between lunch and dinner has vanished. Sometimes the day has not budged since you set off, and all you have to show for your weekend away is swollen feet. But so long as you are here, you are safe from both hope and its opposite. There is no long, no short, no tedium, no delay. Only the dimension-free now.

Time here is caught in the thinnest frozen section, sliced off and held to the light. At every inhabited moment, someone has needed to make these plays of line, these shorthands for elsewhere, for ever. You came here too rarely to fix in your mind more than a few dozen of these trapped eternities. But how many eternities does one person really need? Any one will fill all the space you give it.

Surviving to find your way here, you're free to range at will. You lie back in a manicured green park on what seems a riverbank. You stand on a platform in a glass-roofed railroad station, filling up with steam. Who would have thought you'd have such a memory for color? You cannot remember the color of Gwen's eyes, but you can make out the girl at the half door's, down to their nearest wavelength.

Here, in these galleries of hypothetical, your Qur'an turns its true face to you. You've failed to grasp it until now, the flash point of all faith, the law against depiction. The men who have taken you still adhere to the same ban that the West started out with — its second commandment, for God's sake. You stroll through the banned images, the forbidden fruit, heaven's stolen fire. This is the war that steals your life. Its front stretches out before you, farther than you can see. You've strayed into a factional flare-up, fluke regional politics. But even yours is just a tiny salient in the global sacred conflict, the millennia-long showdown between those who would fabricate God, forever sculpting and perfecting, and those who would suffer Him unseen.

Even being here indicts you. You're guilty, aligned. You are graven image's man, hostage for a reason. You can hope for no sentence less than the general bonfire. Imagination may be worse than the thing it would save you from. But what you will not abandon, you must live in. A place past hope. A place past place. A now indifferent to what happens next.

You press through the jumble of rooms, searching for that picture that you can't picture, the view that would make even death livable. On this upper floor, the two of you once stood looking. The simplest arrangement imaginable. Nothing: an open shutter, a few sticks of furniture. You turned to Gwen, to see what she saw. And she was weeping. Staring through wet lenses at that painted taunt, timeless and still, sadistically refusing her entry.

You should be able to summon it up in your sleep. But no; you must thread your way to where it hangs and look on it. No other way. Must have it there, in front of you, stroke for stroke.

The galleries are too many, the catalogue of old urgencies too wide. They maze you. The halls loop back inside their own folds. You have trouble steering your mental proxy. The puppet is willing but the strings are weak. Paint's apartments disappear down receding corridors, a nightmare rococo palace that lengthens with each step, its chambers filled with nativities, crucifixions, state-sanctioned agitprop, flattering bourgeois makeovers, pretty pastel picnics, nostalgic landscapes sprinkled with faked-up ruins.

Days unfurl when it feels as if you are closing in. All but there. A glow issues from down the hall, three archways away. You pick up the pace, forgetting, in your excitement, the original goal of killing time. She'll be standing, stilled and well, across this last threshold, waiting for you in the southern light, on the smooth-planked, scarred varnish floors.

Holy War always tears you back. For weeks it can leave you rotting, only to choose its moment of maximum intrusion. Ali, yearning for his school days in the States, bounds into your cell to chat about the Final Four. Some argument among your overseers, tuning their crippled TV to the latest Arabic-dubbed Dallas or Knots Landing, escalates to signs of innocence, but he ignores you. No sin you might commit can

penetrate him.

His twisted lips spit out Amal. Arabic for "hope." Impossible. This assault force laying siege to the nest of Western hostages: Amal? Hope and God's Partisans are on the same side. You'd have sworn your sanity on it, if not your life.

The advance of this commando raid unhinges the guard, routs him. He scrambles for a place to hide. You check his hands; he is weaponless. Wilder still, you look down at where you stand. The blast that tore your radiator out of the floor by its roots has also shed your chain. Freedom goes unnoticed in such concerted dying.

In a heartbeat, you weigh him. He stands a full foot shorter than you, and though he has fed better for the last year and a half, the match is no contest. Beyond him lies an emptied corridor, a stairwell, a street full of men scrambling for their lives. No risk; no need for caution. You are worse than dead already. You lock eyes, trade an eternity of mutual knowledge. He gazes into you, sees a man with nothing more to lose. You shake your head, grinning, stupid with the richness, the ancient history. He slides two steps backward out the door and bolts it behind him.

The squad that tries to ambush your guards pulls back or falls in the rubble. Over several confused hours, all the Partisan guards surface, intact. You stay docile and bowed, in the fury of regrouping. But still your punishment proves severe. It comes with the noise that you'd hoped never to hear again so long as you lived: the snick of packing tape tearing off the roll. The sound of live burial.

They tape you without mercy. You fight to keep a gap around your nose and mouth. They seem vague about your continued breathing. Tape revolves around you, passed from hand to hand, binding you in a cocoon smaller than your body. They smash you down the stairwell that only yesterday stood wide open.

They insert you into the old death truck's recessed well. Your muscles refuse the memory. It can't happen again. You won't survive that exhaust-filled coffin. Your whole body begins to buck, but the tape holds you immobile. You scream from the base of your lungs, but your mouth won't open. The sound goes up through your head and stops, trapped against the layers of insulation.

They put you into the well wrong, wedged. The fumes suffuse your brain even before the truck starts up. The truck's broken shocks send each stone in the road through your kinked body. You pray. Pray for quick death, a willed heart attack, suicide by self-made embolism. Anything but this creeping suffocation. Fifteen minutes in the fume-filled secret compartment and no imaginable future is worth holding out for. Deliverance comes as a drop into oblivion. A trapdoor in your coffin opens into an enormous gray staging area, empty and still. Then the warehouse gray refracts into all the colors of a furnished paradise. The room goes light, wondrous, spare, waiting for you. All here again: the shirt, the towel, the toiletries, those few crooked paintings on the wall. All human misery vanishes from the earth. You curl up under the moth-eaten red feather tick, intent on sleeping the sleep of the completed.

But someone's mouth tickles you awake. A set of lips on your lips, a pair of lungs pumping yours. Gwen's as you sleep, but a man's as you come to. A man's dark face, sobbing in a familiar foreign language. The shout of joy at your first movement just as quickly turns vicious. A circle of men take out their relief, kicking at your corpse, which, for a few moments longer, still evades feeling, immune to everything human. They slap your neck and punch your head. Every blow delivers you, and you grab at the rain of hands to kiss them.

Under your blindfold, you see night. Night out of doors, on the eastern Mediterranean, somewhere in Phoenicia, beneath the same stars that olive traders steered by, stencils of the world's first myths. They've moved you from the city, forestalling any new attempts to seize you, a living shell game inside the shell of a larger one, a coy three-card monte that will go on for as many millennia as empire continues to dream its dream of cleanness and faith continues to resist in its holdout pockets.

They prop you up and walk you through the bracing night. Who would have thought that life still had so much breeze in it? This same continuous wind once swept down out of the Caucasus, slipped over the Andoman, and scattered through the Great Rift Valley. You'd forgotten about wind.

They push you stumbling forward. This will be your last hundred yardsout in the open for years, maybe for forever. Your check muscles inch the blindfold up a hairline. You scramble to take some hostage of your own back with you, into whatever new hole awaits. Some glimpse to ground you in the floating nowhere that lies ahead.

The greasy cloth rides up the bridge of your nose. You tilt your head back, raising the slit as high as you dare. The sight on the horizon stops you dead. Off at a distance too shadowy to calculate, thrown into relief against the night sky, stand the ruined columns of the temple of Jupiter. Baalbek — already a thousand-year-old backwater by the time the Romans set up their imperial tax stations and linked the town into their network of command and control.

You hoped to play tourist here once, long ago, in a world past reconstructing. Now you do, checking off the night-etched silhouette against the one filed away in your mental Baedecker. Six eerie Corinthian capitals, six stray verticals — all that's left of the belief they stood for. Jihad could not have built a more surreal set for your safekeeping. This glimpse of awful otherworldliness trips you up. You stumble, and someone cracks you across the crown of your skull. Then looking is over for

this lifetime.

When the blindfold comes off, your new home opens onto blackness. But in the morning, real light streams through a million louvered slats. It pins you, blinded, to the bright, clean floor. What should have been another slime-covered cave is instead the opulent country villa of some wealthy sympathizer.

The room is a bare but blazing white. The floors are a handsome hardwood, and the ceiling's scalloped medallion surrounds a hollow socket that once fed a chandelier. French shutters stand clasped together. Most glorious of all, there is no radiator. No place at all to attach a leg chain.

You rise and walk. It's like one of those avant-garde plays, where the lead goes to heaven and doesn't realize he's dead until the fourth act. You edge sideways to the shutters, shielding your eyes against the concentrated blast. When your pupils at last attenuate — peeling back a year and a half of shadow — they refuse the evidence. Outside your window is a farm.

All morning, you trace tight, excited circles. You live here. You live here. Luck beyond rolling. At the first sound at the heavy oak door, you slip on your blindfold and wipe the stray canary feathers from the corners of your grin. But your guards arrive with drills, hammers, industrial staple guns.

You huddle against a wall, weeping. It no longer matters who sees you. The room goes dark, to the sound of sheet metal riveted over the French windows. Then worse: the sound of a brace being set into the floor. When the redecorating party leaves, you lift your blindfold. Your chain is back, attached to an iron staple large enough to moor a ship. Next to it on the floor lies a thin mattress whose stains trace a map as familiar as that of Iowa.

No prior breakdown can compare. No zero degree where the dead-drop bottoms out. The trench of depression rises up around you without limit. You grab hold of anything to slow the frictionless slip — the glimpse of silhouetted temple, the daylight farm. Drafts gust in through cracks in the wall. A brush of wind, the scent of grass, the rustle of a place that predates politics. But all of memory is not enough evidence to keep you here.

Days pass when the thought of what lies behind your sheet tin — all that has been taken away from you — plunges you into a place not worth surviving. Worse, this torment pays for nothing. Your whole sacrificed life does not right a single wrong committed against your holders. Half the world, held hostage, would be too little to fix history. And that thought cuts you loose to drop still deeper.

A clicking the size of a cricket keeps you from falling forever. It plays one day for the space of a few minutes. It sounds like the metronome a rat pianist might use when struggling to tame a rodent sonata. A tentative, regular ticking in the pipes of this rural chateau. The chirping of an artificial sparrow. A doll's clock. It dies out a measure and a half after it starts.

Then, two days later, it comes back.

Three shorts, three longs, three shorts. The international distress call of all ships at sea. It forces a whoop from you, then another, softer. A laugh, wet, spastic, soft enough to evade detection. Your east wall is another man's west. Just on the far side of those six inches, someone lives. Just as suddenly, the broadcast breaks off once more. The dispatch quits, unanswered. Fifteen hours will have to pass before you're off the chain, before you can reach the wall to send back a reply. You pull on the metal staple in panic. The sender has given up on you, on your empty cell. You'll never hear from him again.

Then it occurs to you: this guy isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

The hours until your next exercise creep like a slug in a headwind. As the moment nears, thoughts vanish in an ecstatic buzz. Unleashed, you run an agonizing couple of diversionary laps until the guard disappears. Then you fall down convulsed in front of the altar wall, thrilled

into silence.

It's as if the skies have finally cracked open with a message from beings a thousand light-years away. And now, after the thousand-year passage, Earth must send its one summary greeting that will take a millennium to return. Morse is not an option. Nor is any other compressed transmission. All you have is that ancient trick, the cumbersome, cuneiform stupidity: one tap equals A; two equals B…

You cannot waste time with anything so irrelevant as "hello." Just tapping M-A-R-T-I-N at a comprehensible pace with clear pauses between letters — making the inevitable fumbles and improvising a rapid-burst signal for "start over" — burns up a terrible fraction of your allotted thirty minutes off the chain.

Every letter risks detection. You tap softly, checking as you cycle through the alphabet for any hint of movement behind your door. Detection here would mean death or worse.

You come to the final N of your name and wait for a response. But the bottle-message drifts off into resounding silence. You repeat the whole word, although the act costs you more precious minutes. A second silence, even rounder than the first. Blackness comes on you at the inexplicable failure; the signal vanishes into the void.

But maybe he, too, can get free to tap only at certain intervals. The thought saves you long enough for another attempt. You struggle over what word should follow, the second most important disclosure after that meaningless first one. And raging against the inevitable choice, at the idiocy of having to say it, you tap A-M-E-R-I–C-A-N.

You quit while still safe, a full day's work. When the guard comes to lock you back up after your run, you're more winded than usual.

Some hours later comes a reply.

Junot. French. The answer dashes your vague fantasy of free and unhindered romps through English with a native speaker. You'd dreamed of a shorthand version of those rambling letters your brother Kamran would send each month, trapped in a Peace Corps-ravaged Mali: "Yours in appropriate technology." You'd hoped for the desperate consolations of shared diction. You'll have, at best, a hurried pidgin.

The next day, you telegraph him back: bien. A lie, by implication. The bulk of your French consists of your mother's Pahlevi-corrupted pas vraiss and merzis, all the cosmopolitan affectations of the Shah's courtier class. But a harmless enough lie, to which you attach another: courage. At least any French he responds with will be slowed to a crawl. And you'll have a day to decode it.

Junot's next reply skirts the language issue altogether. Jihad, he tells you. Hezbollah.

You can think of nothing, in fifteen hours, to answer with but oui. Shorter, by a few precious clicks in your shared language, than its English foster brother. You add: I know. You look for some semaphore to compress all that you know, all that you've learned in this private school. Eighteen months. You?

You kick yourself for having said nothing. But on his next turn Junot picks up the English thread as if it signifies. Thirty-six weeks. I know, and as the words unfold in agonizing click-tedium, you wonder why he wastes such urgent time and risks such danger to say them. Then he adds your. Then he adds name.

The word splits open and heaven air-drops manna. This man, this total stranger in the next cell, whose existence you were not even aware of until a few days ago, has heard of you. He recognizes the name you've told him. He has heard it, sometime in the year between your kidnap and his. The world has not lost track. You haven't disappeared. Your mother knows your fate. Your brother. Gwen.

Now time, your old torturer, changes color. There aren't enough hours in the day to digest what the Frenchman tells you and to think up replies. You hurry through your words, stumbling, losing count of your clicks, starting all over. You spin in torment as he types, willing him to hurry, fearing that each breathless pause means discovery.

You never dreamed that words took such numbing redundancy. You invent a code for "et cetera," faster and shorter than your original "do over," which Junot picks right up on. Improvements come piecemeal, improvised. You spend nights inventing whole new codes, drastically more efficient in their transmission. But their rules would take days to convey. And you can't stop saying things long enough to streamline their saying.

Tick by tick, teaspoon by teaspoon, talk returns you to its appalling density. You communicate daily, but never more than a handful of words at one go. Completing a simple dialogue takes a week. Sometimes you go a night without hearing from him, awful interludes in which you toss on your bed like a cheated lover.

Junot says that the English churchman sent to negotiate for the hostages' release has himself been taken, perhaps even killed. The news is at least half a year old, but it hits you with the force of a wire flash. He says the Syrians have occupied West Beirut, putting an end to the city's anarchy.

But not, you reply, a bitter day later, to the war. You ache to cut through the waste of politics and ask him about the good stuff. What's new in music? Who won last year's Series? Any out-rageousness at the Oscars? He can't know, and you don't ask. Nor can you give him the diversion he must crave.

You share all the insights of your protracted stay, the names of all the guards you have garnered, their assorted psychopathologies and soft spots. You learn of your awful luck.

Junot has begged for reading matter but has not yet gotten a single scrap. You tap out short surahs from the Qur'an for him, like singing in the dark after bedtime, delighting in written syntax all over again. All the while you live in danger of detection.

What you could not do for yourself you rise to do for him. Release can't be long in coming, you tell him. All the rational evidence is on your side. The two of you: each other's confidant, each other's clinical physician, each other's clown. You lie for hours at night, giggling at his ridiculous shaggy-dog jokes, the ones that take three days to get to their belated punch lines. The ones that open with the telegraphic formula: Three. Tourists. Chinese. Indian. American.

One day, the line goes dead. It seems at first a minor annoyance. You've suffered interruptions before. Some guard has almost caught him, and he must lie low for a cooling period. Or he is on some protracted punishment, restricted to his chain.

For a while you tap on into the darkness, hoping he can still hear you. But long silence wears away the sense of anything at all on the far side of the barrier. This Frenchman has let you down, has raised your hopes, then hung you out to dry. Your daily dispatches get shorter, more perfunctory. You want to save the good stuff for his return, when you can hear his live reaction.

The day comes when you admit Junot will not be back. You say freedom. You say release, although there are more frugal explanations. This abandonment makes last spring's hopelessness seem like a mercy killing. You hate the man, for reviving desire and all its gruesome reminders. For telling you that you persist in the world's memory.

His words are no better than those pieces of fruit that Ali sadistically tosses, just out of reach.

In your dreams these nights, you lean out through a bright, open window. But the window sash falls like a blade on the back of your neck, as crisp as that old French political expedient. Joy looks out on all that it is not, your book says. But bitterness sees only itself.

Sayid brings you your supper late one evening, some day in what must be late August. The air wears that oppressive stillness, but here it is not so stultifying as the city was, this time last year. Your country estate, the subtle shifts of its noise and breezes, has blessed you in a million ways, all powerless to make any difference. Sayid comes to bring you your usual plate of gristle, and you hear him weeping. It stuns your ear to learn of a grief that isn't yours. In its strange depths, his pool of sadness at once dissolves yours.

What in all the world can this bewildered, accepting soul have to weep about? His suffering twists the air around him. You cannot help yourself; some dead root in you, left over from years ago, twitches in this rain. You want to know what happened. So long as you live, it will hook you, the hint of word. You hear him set down the plate and back out to go. He, too, will leave you without disclosing the source of his bitterness. Then a discovery larger than your life: you can just ask him.

"Sayid." The movement stops, but not the muffled sorrow. "Sayid. What is it? What has happened to you?"

He searches for a way through his loss. "Hussein." Unsure how to go on. "Hussein is dead."

Some family member or close friend. Another victim of this eternal

civil suicide.

"I'm… so sorry. When? When did it happen?"

The question baffles him. "When? At Karbala!" A thousand and a third years ago.

Pity, astonishment, and disgust — the whole grab bag given the human animal — pass through you in quick succession. But the flood of feeling recedes with Sayid, leaving behind only a single, sharp thrill. You know what day it is.

For the first time in months, you can locate yourself in time. Today is Ashura, the anniversary of the ancient sacrifice. The tenth day of Muharram, the month of mourning. Some quick thought and the application of your mother's formula produce the year: 1409.

But when is 10 Muharram? You spend the rest of the month — both months — worrying the problem. Like trying to derive the quadratic formula too many years after high-school algebra. The moon and the sun deny each other's cycles. By the time you conclude that mental conversion is impossible, you've lost count again, in any calendar.

You wake from a deep sleep, a creature gnawing at your face. You scream and spasm, sending some kind of beaked mammal flying across the floor. The guards ignore you, used to your nighttime apparitions.

But this beast is real. It glares at you from the corner where you've whacked it. You make it out: a mouse, feral and sniffing, no longer than your thumb, although a little fatter. Ounce for ounce, it looks at least as needy as a human. But infinitely more harmless.

The scared gray thing gives you a project to absorb another winter. It takes weeks to overcome your bad first impression and win her trust. You surrender the best scraps of each meal, always more than you can afford. In your moments off the chain, you leave stockpiles as far from human contamination as possible. When she comes out to examine the stash, helpless in the tug of its aroma, the human giant is there, lying still, just looking on, passive and given.

Each feeding station that she accepts gives way to another, imperceptibly closer to the giant's base camp. Desensitization takes forever, but it's precisely forever that you have on your hands. You've forgotten what it means to work steadily toward some goal. By the time she'll come within ten feet of you, she already forms your unwitting solace, your joy, your day's significance.

But she remains skittish as the day is long. Something about the disparity in your sizes. Something about being smacked across the room before formal introductions. There comes a day when she'll nibble just outside arm's distance. You're too ashamed to admit the name you've already given her, even to yourself, even at night when she wriggles her nose, inquiring, at your motionless body.

Conflicted for a reason. Conflicted for a reason, as the old televised talk-show public therapies liked to say. Pushing with the same hand that she used to pull you toward her.

Resenting any suggestion that you owed each other anything. But lashed together so tightly that even the vicious pulling away, even the cursing and eternal swearing off amounted to deepest intimacy.

In the days just after capture, your survival could spare no energy for any thought so trivial as love. Six months brought your radical education: happiness and desire were private distractions that allowed states to do their nightmare work unnoticed. A year embittered you to the fact that states had no more wherewithal than the most vicious of quarreling lovers. Eighteen months erased all human pretension past eating and sleeping, staying cool and dry, or calming your bowels until the next bathroom run.

Two years returns you to that first, unaffordable triviality.

More time passes. She comes almost right up to you. She'll take food out of your hand, if you hold it way out, palm open. She no longer turns and runs the second she's finished.

Late fall, the guards bring you a birthday cake. A single-layered, multicultural monstrosity of confectioner's sugar and identity politics, too freakish to assimilate. You don't want them to see you happy. To think that your stupid ecstasy has anything to do with this blundering

kindness.

Joy snubs out when they bring the present. A Minicam, sitting on some bag-headed mercenary's shoulder like a handheld rocket launcher. You are to eat and enjoy this cake — just another well-catered day in the Beirut Hilton — while they videotape you for the pleasure of the home audience.

You eat to keep them from seeing you destroyed. You eat left-handed, a subversive signal to any National Security Agency official inspecting the video for clues. You eat bare-faced, no evidence of ever having had to scramble with a blindfold. You look at this man filming you, stare at him. Even with the lights and blocking camera, even through the makeshift hood, his features will stay with you longer tharr the tape will remember yours.

Muhammad stands off camera, out of vision, saying, "Talk to your family. Say hello to your friends." Throw yourself off a high place. Change stones into bread. You eat slowly, savoring the cake, despite yourself. You make your face a blank, a mask onto which the world can project whatever dream it is struggling to realize.

Who do these clumsy directors think they're fooling? What message can they hope to send? And yet your family will see this. Your friends. Impossible. Communication from beyond the grave. You see them seeing you. You look just happy enough for your mother to imagine that

you're well.

They know your birthday. These martyrs know your birthday. And they can only have learned it from the American media. Someone at home has followed your story, this year or last, and wished you a televised happy birthday that your kidnappers intercept. Your birthday, somewhere within a week of where you sit. You'd forgotten you had one.

"Thank you," you tell the camera, in what comes out a mechanical drone. Who, on the many far ends of this transmission, will receive

these words? "Thank you. I'm alive." You wait, like you wait for the mouse, for your voice to come back. "I am being treated well." Lied to and lying, using and used. The eternal compromise seems, at least for this instant, to favor you by the narrowest sliver. "Although the decor here could use a little work."

You gesture stage right, and the cameraman, by instinct, tracks you with a pan, before he realizes.

"Finish your cake," Muhammad orders.

He's caught you trying to palm a piece no bigger than a finger. "I thought… I thought I might be able to save a little for… later?"

"Let them see you eat the whole thing."

You eat the piece that might have given your only joy a little pleasure.

This pact with your manipulators seals your fate. The State Department will wash its hands of you for aiding and comforting the enemy. But it keeps you alive, for many nights running. Somewhere abroad, out on the globe's trade routes, repeatedly rewound and replayed, your phantom image converses with those who know you, those who hear your words.

You pass through an invented Halloween. A functional Thanksgiving. A genuine simulation of Christmas. You lift a fake glass to a new approximate New Year's.

Your pupils habituate to permanent, low-grade twilight until the crushing vacuum of a single day begins to play like high opera. Even this plotless, characterless, sceneless script reveals its unities. Its beginnings, middles, and inexorable, minimalist ends afford you a panorama, the sweep of a story unlike anything you could have followed when you were free. Surprise in the absence of uncertainty. You will live here for the rest of your life, a Galileo under house arrest, with no telescope to stick through the skylight. You will die here. You'll watch your own deathbed scene, breathless, attuned to the smallest detail, awaiting the only possible outcome.

Attunement teaches you. It is possible to love one person, and only one person, more than you love your own existence, and still not know that one. She made you needy, controlling. You made her willful and perverse. All a life-sized misunderstanding, put to rest in this larger place of enforced listening.

You had no cause to be so brutal, that last call she made you, just before your capture. No cause, the years of preemptive second-guessing, certain that you already heard her objections before she made them. Now that you both must live within perpetual eyeshot of the thing you missed — two humans, too late, making a space for one another— you can see past fear to the place fear never let you reach.

And yet, in the fogged celluloid of this focused dream, the story repeats. The home you both set fire to, again and again. The constant border incursions, the mutual banishment. It's never enough for you. You're never satisfied. You want my fucking bone marrow.

She didn't know you when there was a now. How could she know you in absentia? And the need you felt for her — the love—must become a crippling thing, so filled with self-inflicted misery that even redemption now would ring worse than hollow.

Perhaps, your only reading matter says, perhaps God will place love between you and those that you are hostile toward. For God is powerful. And God is forgiving. And God is compassionate.

The mouse comes out to gnaw on the pages of the book. On those words, for those who can believe without seeing. You let it nibble. Let the creature take from you everything it needs.

As belated thanks for helping them with the video, the keepers return your necklace. Gwen's good-luck charm, the one they confiscated from you on the first day of imprisonment. You sit gripping it, unable to quit sobbing. You press the sharp point of the charm into your cheek, trying to get your thoughts to stop. Guards come and wrestle you, pin you to the ground, and confiscate the charm again.

"Please. I am sorry. Please give it back. I won't hurt myself anymore." A good deal later, after the gouge in your face has more or less healed, a hooded man comes in to snap your picture. Three days on, Ali brings you the print and tells you to sign your name across it.

It's some kind of bush-league trick. An amateur hoax you can't quite puzzle out. They force you to affix your signature to another man's picture, another Crusoe who only vaguely resembles you, gaunt and wasted from sockets to jowls, mizzled gray throughout the hair and beard, a fake-up that will fool no one. Ali harasses you into signing before you can figure out who exactly you're perjuring.

You had no cause to be so brutal, that last call she made you, just before your capture. No cause, the years of preemptive second-guessing, certain that you already heard her objections before she made them. Now that you both must live within perpetual eyeshot of the thing you missed — two humans, too late, making a space for one another— you can see past fear to the place fear never let you reach.

And yet, in the fogged celluloid of this focused dream, the story repeats. The home you both set fire to, again and again. The constant border incursions, the mutual banishment. It's never enough for you. You're never satisfied. You want my fucking bone marrow.

She didn't know you when there was a now. How could she know you in absentia? And the need you felt for her — the love—must become a crippling thing, so filled with self-inflicted misery that even redemption now would ring worse than hollow.

Perhaps, your only reading matter says, perhaps God will place love between you and those that you are hostile toward. For God is powerful. And God is forgiving. And God is compassionate.

The mouse comes out to gnaw on the pages of the book. On those words, for those who can believe without seeing. You let it nibble. Let the creature take from you everything it needs.

As belated thanks for helping them with the video, the keepers return your necklace. Gwen's good-luck charm, the one they confiscated from you on the first day of imprisonment. You sit gripping it, unable to quit sobbing. You press the sharp point of the charm into your cheek, trying to get your thoughts to stop. Guards come and wrestle you, pin you to the ground, and confiscate the charm again.

"Please. I am sorry. Please give it back. I won't hurt myself anymore." A good deal later, after the gouge in your face has more or less healed, a hooded man comes in to snap your picture. Three days on, Ali brings you the print and tells you to sign your name across it.

It's some kind of bush-league trick. An amateur hoax you can't quite puzzle out. They force you to affix your signature to another man's picture, another Crusoe who only vaguely resembles you, gaunt and wasted from sockets to jowls, mizzled gray throughout the hair and beard, a fake-up that will fool no one. Ali harasses you into signing before you can figure out who exactly you're perjuring.

Maybe another month goes by. You almost forget about having taken part in the bizarre ritual. Ali bursts into your cell one day, aflame.

"See who is famous today? See who is in today's newspaper? American film star! Mel Gibson!"

"Gibson is Australian," you say. "Not our fault."

He waves a scrap of newsprint under your blindfold. Eternity's long-sought armistice. Page 6 of the Herald Tribune, and there is the old man's photo, identified as you. Someone has been duped, either you or the world at large. And you don't care anymore, just who.

"Please," you beg. "Let me just… hold it. For sixty seconds." Not to read the article about you. Just for the look, the longitudinal proof of things happening. The feel of it in your hands: your old breakfast table news.

He won't let you hold it, if only because you want to. But before he snatches it away from you forever, you catch a glimpse of the date. You take the number to bed with you, vowing on your life never to lose count again. You shelter the secret figure in your heart, protecting it from all human invention. You perform vast calculations on it, sums and differences, expansions and extractions.

The math's stubborn result rocks you. Simple subtraction slams you up against a figure too mythic for you to believe. You go head-to-head, putting it through the calendar's mill so many times your brain begins to bleed. And still it persists, staring at you in its perfection.

If you were in fact taken on that November day of '86 that has stayed lodged in you, and if the scrap of paper they waved at you was in fact today's, then tonight is precisely your thousandth night. And tomorrow will be your thousandth night, plus one.