“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Sancho asked, in English. I said I was.
“Are you CIA?” asked Bubbles through Theo.
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?” Sancho asked again.
It was obvious that they didn’t believe me, and after a few more minutes of this they left the room, visibly frustrated. Between this visit and the last one from Mohammad, it was clear that my identity was now in question in a way it hadn’t been before—and that I had a serious problem.
Later that night, a gunshot rang out just outside our door.
On our fourth night in the room, the door opened and Fenster entered holding a flashlight. He ordered us to pick up our covers and follow him. We kept tripping over the blankets and each other on our way up the stairs, so he gave us permission to uncover our eyes. When we exited the building I stopped in awe at the sight before me.
We were in what felt like an abandoned city. All around us were these huge battered buildings, with broken windows and no signs of life at all: no lights, no voices, no gunshots; only desolation. After taking it all in I turned to Fenster, who was giving me a confident boast of a look that said, Yeah, this is ours. Standing behind him in the distance was a circular concrete tower about sixty feet tall. In the second or two before we started moving again I studied it well. I always kept my eye out for landmarks in case I ever got out of Syria alive; the tower looked like something I could locate on a satellite view.
Once we’d cleared the building, Fenster told us to cover our eyes and keep walking. Theo kept losing his grip and dropping his blankets, which slowed us down and pissed off Fenster. We approached a building and another guard headed toward us holding a flashlight. As we entered, I paid close attention through the bottom of my cap. There were no guards stationed by the wide open doors and the entire first floor seemed to be vacant. We were led to a staircase and for once told to go up instead of down. On the second floor we were marched up the hall; we heard the voices of militants coming from within the rooms we passed. Fenster opened a wooden door and told us to get inside. When we did, he immediately slammed the door and locked it. We were in a tiny, freezing room, engulfed in blackness.
“This is not good,” said Theo.
“No shit!” I replied.
What we saw in the few seconds before the door was shut didn’t make us feel any better. There was a window, but it had been concreted over. There was a light, but it had been ripped out. It was colder than the Room of Broken Glass, colder than anywhere we had been kept so far, and there was dust and dirt all over the floor where we had to sleep. Theo was clearly in distress so I took control of the situation and spread out our blankets to make a bed; we crawled under the remaining ones together to keep from getting sick. The room seemed custom-made for suffering, with no ventilation or illumination at all, except for what filtered through the thin crack beneath the door.
It’s hard to imagine what one could have done to deserve being locked in a dark room. I wondered, was it something I did in the past? Or maybe something I should have done and didn’t? Mostly, though, I just wondered how long they were going to keep us here.
It was in this place, in the endless cold darkness, that I finally let myself cry. I don’t think Theo noticed because he’d started spending pretty much all day and night under the covers, which honestly was one of the things dragging my morale down the most. General Mohammad had taken me from a cell packed with soldiers who had become my friends and placed me with this guy specifically so I’d have someone to talk to—and now all he did was cower under his blankets, lying there as if he were already dead. He rarely spoke, or even moved. Some days I hated him more than ever because if it weren’t for him I’d still be with the POWs or alone, either of which seemed better than watching someone else silently lose his mind and his humanity. I needed a brother, someone to support me as I supported him. Instead I got Theo.
When we did talk, it was mostly about the past. I remember telling him all about my youth, specifically how insecure I was, always trying to display an air of swaggering confidence I didn’t feel. He responded by telling me he’d gotten into a lot of fights in high school, where he’d been a tough guy with a reputation for violence. I didn’t believe it for a second and wasn’t sure why he’d bother to lie—probably because he wanted me to beware of some hidden beast within.
“So what are your books about?” I asked him one day.
His first was about the students he’d taught at a jail in Vermont, kids who’d been convicted of some pretty serious crimes. It was a one-time thing for him, teaching in a jail, but it gave him enough material for a manuscript. He told me he got a quarter-million-dollar advance, but the book wasn’t a success.
His second book was called A Journey into Yemen,
