This answer was only half true, but safer than Theo’s—I basically admit that I’ve had sex, but not with more than one woman; only with the one I thought would become my wife. After this, we headed home to our cell. It was a conversation Yassine would not quickly forget.
Sometimes to help myself keep it together, I would imagine that there was a camera transmitting everything that happened in the room back home to every house in America, kind of like in The Truman Show. It was a great way to shift my perspective, to stay strong and cut down on the unavoidable moments of overwhelming despair. On the other hand, this tactic also created a new problem, namely how to entertain all my viewers, who weren’t even real. After all, the days weren’t exactly eventful. To make sure my ratings stayed high, I figured I had to make the audience laugh on occasion, which was, of course, where my cellmate came in.
I remember, while Theo snored a foot away from me, staring at his piss bottle—a green two liter with the label ripped off that had obviously once held 7Up or Sprite. Then I’d shift my vision over to his water bottle, which was also green without a label.
I cannot tell you how many times I thought about switching them so I could watch him drink his own piss, and maybe end the entire nightmare by laughing myself to death along with everyone watching back home.
The first time I almost lost it and beat the shit out of Theo was about a week into our time together. I was sleeping soundly . . . until a sound woke me up.
Click! Click! Click!
The sound was coming from Theo’s mouth. He was cleaning his teeth with a shell he’d saved from a sunflower seed. I very politely asked him to stop so I could get back to sleep, but he was feeling confrontational that day.
“No, I’m brushing my teeth,” he said, clicking away.
“You have all day to brush your teeth. Can’t you just let me sleep as much of this day away as possible?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s gonna be pretty hard to do that without any teeth in your mouth,” I said.
“Are you threatening me?”
“Absolutely! Stop makin’ that sound or I’m gonna fuck you up!”
“Okay, I’ll stop for twenty minutes.”
Now I was really getting angry. Again I warned him to lay off his fucking teeth. He gave me some smart-ass answer, but he stopped, so I closed my eyes and tried to drift off. About fifteen minutes later he started up again, only louder. I leapt from my bed screaming obscenities and he rose, too. As soon as he talked back I attacked him, ready to rip his head from his body, but he responded by immediately falling to the floor, flat on his face with his hands out, shaking like a scared little kid.
“Go ahead!” he cried. “It’s bad enough that these assholes torture me! Now you’re going to do it, too?”
I’d been standing over him, clenched fist raised and ready to drop with the force of a cinder block, but the fact that his defense mechanism involved falling helplessly to the floor made me feel ashamed of myself.
“Just stop makin’ that noise! I’ll fuckin’ kill you—and they hate you so much they’d probably let me do it!”
He agreed to stop until later and I lay back down under my covers, but I was too agitated to return to sleep.
Back home, Theo still lived in his mother’s house on eighty-five acres of land in Vermont, with a lake and a barn. But he wasn’t exactly a farm boy—it was obvious that he’d never worked a hard day in his life, the result being that whenever Theo had a job to do, he would fuck it up. About once a week one of the guards would dump a few tubs of soapy water in the room and bring us a squeegee and a broom to clean the floor with. I had done this a couple of times in solitary and knew that we didn’t have much time once the door was closed, so I grabbed the broom and got right to work, scrubbing my way from the back of the room to the front. Since the electricity was out, we were doing this task almost blind. About five minutes later, the door opened so we could push the water out. Theo, for some reason, decided to start doing this from the center of the room.
“Theo, what are you doin’?” I said, shaking my head. “You start in the back and then you work your way forward! Why are you starting there? You’re just gonna get it wet again!”
“Okay, okay,” he said, walking to the back of the room.
A minute later the guard came back to the door and started rushing Theo, which didn’t help. When he’d finally squeegeed what he thought was the last of the filthy water out into the hall, the broom and squeegee were taken away and the door was locked. As soon as I took a step, my foot landed in a huge puddle . . . right in the middle of the room.
“What the fuck?” I said in disbelief. “Ahhh! You can’t do anything right!”
“Oh God, you know what? If it’s not them, it’s you,” he said.
“Oh, pardon me, man, for being pissed that you left Lake fuckin’ Superior in the middle of our room!” I screamed at him. “It’s gonna take like two weeks for that to dry! I swear to God, if you were a Bad News Bear you’d be Timmy fuckin’ Lupus!”
I was on the verge of madness, and it wasn’t because of the terrorists. It was because of this guy. I began to accuse Theo of being squeegee negligent as if it were a real crime—and knowing those Sharia courts, it probably was. He was lucky the puddle wasn’t a little deeper, or I might have tried to drown
