“There, you happy?” I said. “They could come in here with a fuckin’ K-9 and still not find that thing.”
Now that this was settled, it was time to talk about the plan—but of course we argued about that, too.
The bottom panel of the door was about the length and width of a milk crate. I made one test hole along the indentation in the top right-hand corner to assess the strength of the wood and how long it would take. In less than five minutes, the screw was through, and had barely been stripped.
“No, I don’t want to do it that way,” said Theo. “I say we perforate the wood next to the doorknob and then punch it out and turn the key.”
The key was always left in the lock, but that part of the door was solid wood several inches thick. I argued that we would need a drill to pull it off, and even if we had one, the guards would notice the holes as soon as they approached the door. Theo’s answer was that we wouldn’t go all the way through until we were ready to leave.
“But we don’t know when we’re gonna leave!” I said. “It’s not like the regime gives us notice before they bomb the place!”
“Well, then we’re not going,” he said bitchily. “It’s always either your plan or nothing.”
“All right, fine!” I yelled. “My mother’s sixty-fifth birthday is in twenty-four days and I am not gonna ruin it by being in here!”
As you can see, my thinking was not exactly rational at this point, but yes, somehow I let him talk me into his stupid plan. Besides, I was certain that Theo would come around to doing things my way once he saw that the screw was never going to make it through the thickest part of the door.
The doorknob was chrome, set in a rectangular plate about ten inches long and five inches wide. After examining it, I figured our best bet was to first dig into the wood directly along the side of the plate, in order to keep our efforts concealed for as long as possible. When I pressed the corner of the bracket into the wood and dragged it downward, it made a slight indentation. When I did it again the indentation was a little deeper. I kept at this for maybe twenty minutes as they walked past the door on the other side—which they did constantly—until I stopped making progress. Now it was time to break out the screw. They rarely closed the door after they entered the room, and the mark I’d made wasn’t noticeable at a glance, so the chances of them finding it were slim as long as no one decided to inspect the door closely.
“Theo,” I said. “Come here, I wanna show you somethin’.”
I showed him what I’d done, explaining that it was very important for us to stick to this one spot until it was ready in case they ever inspected the door. He agreed and went right back to bed.
Now that I had gotten as far as I could with the bracket alone, I started using it as a screwdriver: I stuck the screw in the groove that I’d made and turned it. It didn’t go in easy due to the thickness of the door, and I kept stripping the screw. Eventually my fingers were bleeding so I passed the bracket to Theo and let him take a spin at it while I rested. After a few minutes, I got up to see what he had done. It was a disaster: instead of staying along the edge as we’d discussed, he’d just started digging a new groove horizontally away from the plate.
“What are you, fuckin’ retarded?” I asked, ripping the bracket from his hand. “Are you trying to get us tortured? Stay along the plate! That’s the plan!”
And on I went, but my explanations were useless. It was clear that Theo could have no part in orchestrating his own escape plan—it would have been suicide to rely on him for anything. If I hadn’t stopped him when I did, his new groove would have been as noticeable as the one he’d dug into the middle of the door. So, with my fingers still raw, I returned to work.
Looking back, I really don’t know what I was thinking. It was completely absurd to believe that we would ever be able to pull it off. I mean, I couldn’t even get the screw one centimeter into the wood, it was so solid. The longer I worked at it, the more I stripped the screw, and every time I did, the bracket made a loud click of metal on metal that made us freeze. We knew that if anybody heard what we were doing we were in deep shit—but we were in deep shit anyway so why not just double down, was my frame of mind.
Click!
A moment of silence, and then:
“Stop messing with the door,” Mohammad said from the hallway.
“Shit!” I whispered, rushing over to sit on my bed. After a minute I got up again and paced, holding the bracket and screw, trying to think of the best place to hide them if this happened again, since there obviously wouldn’t be time to stash them in the light.
That was when I heard the key turn. I tossed the screw into the middle of the floor to hide it in plain sight and threw the bracket under my blankets.
I was sitting again by the time Mohammad forced open the door, accompanied
