This they understood, and Rias offered me a piece of his flatbread. It was about the same length and width as a rolling paper, so after accepting it I rolled it up like a joint, licked the edge, and put it in my mouth, pretending to light it with an invisible match. The men were transfixed by my actions. I took a big imaginary hit and held it in.
“Hashish,” I croaked, as if my lungs were full of smoke, and then I coughed while passing the “doobie” to Rias.
Everyone—especially the Boss—started laughing hysterically as Rias hit the joint. When he passed it back to me I ate it, and he handed me another piece of bread. For the next few hours we talked about cigarettes, beer, and of course, women. I was truly surprised by how open-minded and laid-back the Alawites were.
“Jennifer Lopez,” said Shareef, who spoke a little English.
“Oooh, Jennifer,” I said, drawing a line straight down through the air, ending in a big curve to represent her ass before giving it an imaginary slap.
“Yes!” said Shareef.
All the guys agreed.
“Angelina Jolie,” Shareef said next.
“Oh, Angelina, I love Angie,” I said, puckering my lips.
“Britney Spears!” Shareef cried enthusiastically, pointing at me.
“Fuuuck that crack whore!” I bellowed, waving her off like the bum she was.
The laughter that exploded once Oqba translated this was epic. I was honestly surprised they had a translation for that. By the next time the lights went out, I no longer felt like an outsider.
A little while later after the lights came back on, I sat talking to Oqba, just the two of us. He had one rule for our conversations:
“Don’t ask any personal questions of me,” he said seriously.
And this meant anything.
“So, where are you from?” I asked innocently that first evening.
“I told you—don’t ask me anything personal,” said Oqba, with a cold stare.
“But you just asked me how many women I’ve fucked!”
(I totally lied when I answered that one, too—fuck him, he wouldn’t even tell me where he was from!)
He’d reacted the same way when I asked if he was married or had kids. At first I thought it might have been because his family had been killed, but I’d later find out it wasn’t. He just didn’t want to tell me.
“January seventh, 2013,” I whispered to myself, lying on my back in the dark.
I said the date every day, sometimes five times a day, so I wouldn’t lose track.
Just an ocean of misery as I lay in the blackness, staring at the feeble light shining through the vents on the doors from whatever light source the jihadis resorted to when the power was out. It was darker here than in my other room, and when the electricity was out it was almost impossible to tell whether it was night or day. There was no window in the cell, except in the bathroom, which stunk so bad you didn’t spend any more time in there than you had to. In the background, our soundtrack was the screaming of someone being tortured and a twelve-year-old boy, Abu Jaz, walking around singing the Koran as if nothing were happening.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
Jesus Christ, the only difference here was that it was even closer.
I started pacing again in the darkness. I couldn’t stop thinking about how my mother was going to feel when she heard her only son had been kidnapped by terrorists. As I thought of this I started working up to my first real cry. Just as a tear was sliding from my eye I heard my name ring out in the darkness.
“Matthew,” said Oqba.
“Yeah?”
“Come here, sit down.”
I did, and he started speaking to me in a soft, melodic tone.
“Do you like Michael Bolton?”
“Well, I really only know maybe two of his songs,” I said, caught off guard.
“I used to love to drive my car and listen to Michael Bolton.” He sang a line of some song I had never heard. “Do you know that one?”
“No, I only know, like, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman.’”
“You are thinking of your mother right now?” he asked me.
“Yeah—what if they cut my head off and put it on the internet? She’ll drop dead and it’ll be all because of me.”
I started to tear up again and began berating myself for being such a selfish prick—going off to Syria and getting myself kidnapped—but Oqba cut me off.
“Matthew, you are an American. You are strong. You are my brother.” He grabbed me by the hand. “Now, no more of this; not here.”
I was so embarrassed. I felt like such a pussy all of a sudden.
“Yeah, all right, never again,” I said gratefully. “Thank you.”
That was the last time I came close to crying in front of the men. Still, it can be good to cry, as long as nobody sees it. It keeps you human and that keeps you hungry to survive—more and more with each passing day, in a weird way, because what was the point of going through this hell if you were only going to die at the end?
To pass the time I started playing stories from my past over in my head, watching them like movies, going through every scene, over and over again, word for word. Sometimes I would start laughing at all the dumb shit I had thought up over the years and the crazy guy they’d put me next to would start laughing along with me. Poor Crazy Mohammad, man, they’d really fucked him up. His wrists and ankles were so swollen they looked like they were about to burst. Once in a while I would talk to him, even though I knew he didn’t understand a word of what I said, and he would just giggle. One time I asked him what his favorite color was—he didn’t understand the question—and then I just moved on to Angelina Jolie. That he understood. If there was one thing they all understood it was Angelina. Too bad we couldn’t get a
