“Don’t knock on the door!” he said, and as they left, he slammed it behind them.
I stood there, guilty and untouched, as Theo moaned on the floor.
“Oh shit, dude, you okay?”
“No!” Theo yelled. “Don’t knock on the door!”
I told him I wouldn’t, but I knew that this was a lie. If I really had to go or was painfully hungry, I would be back at that door. Maybe that seems hard to understand, but I had drawn a line. In my mind I was a human being, and human beings do not shit in buckets. We cry two tears in them.
Starvation: I had read about it, but the reality was worse than I had imagined—it wasn’t just the hunger, it was being so completely at the mercy of others. We were usually fed once a day, but there was no guarantee we would be. Most days it was a piece of bread for each of us and a small cup of yogurt, or a bit of halawa on a saucer for us to share. We rarely saw food arrive before Asr, the third prayer of the day, which took place in the late afternoon. Sometimes it would come even later, long after Isha in the late evening. When Yassine delivered our meals I could usually get an extra piece of bread out of him for me and Theo to split. I tried to eat as little of the bread as possible to save it for the next day. It was tough waking up hungry, just lying there listening for the call to prayer, and hoping to be fed. At times while on bathroom runs I would beg Yassine to feed us that night.
“Please, don’t starve us,” I said. “Feed us, Yassine. Please, feed us.”
“You will eat well tonight, Inshallah,” he would always answer, but he rarely delivered on that promise.
Once in a while we got a warm meal, which Yassine served to us as if he were doing us a favor—a little plastic bucket with rice and other leftovers dumped in it. Theo and I would pass the bucket back and forth, taking turns pinching up mouthfuls with our bread. I don’t think we were ever full once, not the entire time we were there.
Nights when they hadn’t fed us during the day were the most painful and seemed to last forever. By then any bread we had saved would be long gone. I would lie there with barely enough energy to move, alert to every footstep I heard, hoping it was someone coming to feed us, their pets. Most of the time the footsteps just walked right past our door. I would babble during these times. I don’t remember what I talked about but it drove Theo crazy, and if he said something I didn’t like or agree with, I’d practically bite his head off. It’s horrible, waiting to be fed. It makes you feel like an abused dog, stuffed into a crate and forgotten. Sometimes they never came at all.
We’d been in the darkness for a few days when the emir came to check on us, accompanied by a bunch of the guards. The door was open and the hallway was illuminated—the electricity was on. We were given permission to turn from the wall and face him.
“How are you?” asked the emir.
“We’re hungry,” I said.
He immediately told one of the punks to get us food and he ran off to do as he was told. The emir then started speaking in Arabic, pointing all over the room. He told the guards to cut a hole in the wall above the door for ventilation—the walls were covered with a layer of moisture that made them impossible to lean against—and to give us a light because he didn’t want us to get sick. Both of these things were done the next day, the guards stringing a wire from where the fixture used to be in the ceiling, with a bulb dangling at the end. The emir also instructed Yassine to give us a bath and scissors to cut our beards, which had grown considerably long, mine dark brown with a silver stripe up the chin.
The hole above the door did little to help with the condensation problem, but it was a great source of light. A natural steel-colored glow burst through it, making it possible during the day to see across the cell. As usual, light made everything a little better for me, but Theo continued to stay under the covers as if it were some kind of sanctuary. Unfortunately, the hole also created a new problem, letting in giant mosquitoes and adding to the number of creatures feasting on our blood. It was so cold we were always under the blankets and barely had any exposed skin for them to land on, but at night as we tried to sleep they’d harass us by flying around our heads, that buzzing sound enough to drive anyone mad. Whenever the light went on, the first thing I’d do was search the walls and ceilings for those vampires and kill them where they sat—but, just like the jihadis, there were always more to take their place.
We weren’t the only prisoners in the building—once I thought I heard the voices of some of the POWs I’d been kept with at the hospital coming from the cell across from ours, but I couldn’t be sure. There were new people all the time, mostly guards we had never seen before. It was obvious that we’d been singled out for extra abuse. Some days they would blast loud music right outside our door for hours on end, just to drive us crazy—and it usually worked. It was so loud I pictured giant six-foot-tall wall speakers on wheels.
Outside our doors it was like some kind of postapocalyptic scenario where only the youth had survived and so had inherited the Earth. One night
