I think what bothered me most was that he was such an arrogant prick, thinking that his PhD and the five languages he spoke counted for anything in this environment. Well, they counted, but not as the assets he seemed determined to believe they were. He wasn’t on a college campus; school was out, and he was in a secret Syrian terrorist prison where all of these skills worked against him. Not only did they make him look more like a spy, he couldn’t seem to help showing them off. No one likes a show-off, and every smart eight-year-old I’ve ever met knows how to act around bullies if you want to keep from having the shit kicked out of you. The man didn’t seem to have a shred of common sense or any street smarts at all—and this put me in considerable danger. In the three months he’d been there he hadn’t bothered to learn the name of a single guard, or attempted to build any kind of rapport with them. When I explained that this was why they were so hard on him and suggested he change his tune, he just snapped at me.
“I don’t need your advice,” he said.
It’s a good thing he wasn’t a spy. If the CIA ever employed this guy it would be the end of America as we know it.
To pass the time we started playing 20 Questions. At first it was great, because we both loved history and literature, but once we went through pretty much everyone in those two categories the game went downhill fast. Theo kept giving me either people who were impossible to guess or those I had never heard of, like Ray Kroc.
“Who the fuck is Ray Kroc, man?” I asked, pissed.
“He founded McDonald’s,” Theo replied.
“What? You mean it wasn’t founded by a McDonald?”
“No.”
“Who knows this stuff ?” I said. “Look, you have to choose people everyone knows!”
One time I gave him Betty White and he didn’t know who she was, so we got into a fight about that.
“How can you not know who Betty White is?” I asked.
“I’ve never heard of her,” Theo answered.
“How can you never hear of Betty White? Every American knows who Betty White is! She’s a Golden Girl!”
“What’s a Golden Girl?”
“Oh my God! I gotta get out of this fuckin’ room!”
The next game I picked was feeding each other famous lines from movies.
“Say hello to my little friend!” I said, in a horrible Cuban accent.
A silence ensued.
“I don’t know it,” said Theo.
“Come on, man, how can you not know that? I’ll do it again for you: Say he-llo to my lee-tle friend!”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, man, you’ve never seen Scarface?”
“No.”
“How could you have not seen Scarface? I mean, what did you watch when you were growing up?”
“We didn’t have a TV.”
“Were you poor?”
“No.”
“So what did you do for fun?”
“We read.”
That game lasted less than five minutes.
Another thing I tried was ridiculous “what if” questions.
“Hey, Theo, what if they came in here with a pistol and one bullet and said ‘Kill Matt and we’ll let you go’? Would you do it?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation.
“Really?” I asked, taken aback.
“Yeah, this is war. You have to do what you have to do to survive.”
It took me a few moments to absorb this information—and the fact that he was completely serious.
“Well, I would never do that to you, because I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror again after I went home,” I said, disgusted.
An uncomfortable silence followed.
“Oh, I take it back,” he said, eventually.
I knew I had gotten in over my head in Syria, but I could hold my breath for a really long time. Theo had drowned a while ago. I don’t think he realized that some shit you just couldn’t take back—like telling somebody you would kill him for a ride to the border. This was one of the most revealing conversations we had in our first few days together, because it let me know that I could never trust him, or ever tell him that I was really Jewish.
Sometimes they would leave massive dried-up pools of blood on the floor for us to see on the way to the bathroom, and the traumatized look on Theo’s face resembled that of a kid who just walked in on his dad having sex with another man. Once in the bathroom I would bullshit with Yassine while Theo was taking care of his business, but if Theo finished first, making conversation was up to him. I had really tried to teach him how to work the guards, and some days he seemed to be getting the hang of it. It was good to see Theo speaking to them so he could try to form some kind of a relationship and improve his treatment. I tried to support him, out of patriotism if nothing else, because maintaining American principles and values in this place that despised them was very important to me—and Americans are always supposed to stick together in war.
One day, I came out of the stall to find Yassine and Theo discussing a very sensitive topic—women.
“How many girlfriends do you have in America?” Yassine asked.
“Uh, none now, but I’ve had about nine,” Theo replied.
“Nine!” said Yassine, wide-eyed.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I mumbled, knowing that this was haram.
“Jumu’ah, how many girlfriends do you have in America?” Yassine asked me.
“Zero,” I said. “I’ve only had one in my life and I was with her for over nine years. We were supposed to get married, but it didn’t work out, and I’ve been looking for a
