“This is insane,” I said. “This is the worst time of our lives and the best time of theirs, right?”
“Yeah,” answered Theo. “It’s Lord of the Flies out there.”
And he was right. It was Lord of the Flies, only instead of being armed with spears and bows, they had AK-47s and RPGs. The more time that went by, the more I hoped they would just kill me already. Between the cold, the dark, the mosquitoes, and Theo, this place was truly hell, and that’s exactly what we came to call it.
One night when the electricity was out, we heard a crowd of militants gathering outside our door. Flashlights shone from beneath it and lit the keyhole. We didn’t recognize any of the voices, and concluded from the tone that they were mostly management. After a few minutes of talk we heard the door to the cell across from ours open, the same door that I suspected held the POWs. Someone was removed before the door was closed again. Within a minute we heard the screaming.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
“This is so much worse than the hospital,” said Theo.
Whatever they were doing to this prisoner, it was being done in the hallway, practically right outside our door. His cries sounded like the screeching of a cat, and they echoed, bouncing from wall to wall like a laser in a room full of mirrors. All the while the guards were interrogating him: Theo heard them ask about the location of a certain general, but couldn’t make out much of anything else.
Once they were done with this prisoner they moved on to another, and then two more after him. They all screamed like hell except for one, who took it and barely made a sound. It was a good twenty minutes before they returned the last prisoner to the cell and locked it without removing another. Then they turned their attention toward us; I saw the blue ray of a flashlight beam straight through our keyhole.
“Oh shit, they’re comin’!” I said, turning on my stomach and facing the wall with the covers pulled over my shoulders.
The key slipped into the lock and turned. Our door opened and we heard several men standing in the entrance, having a short conversation. The first half ended in a word I knew: “moswer,” “photographer”—they were talking about me. The second part also ended in something I recognized: “CIA,” which meant they were talking about Theo.
“C-I-A, yala!” one of them yelled at Theo; he got up and was taken from the room without uttering a word.
The door was locked and I was once again in the position of waiting for my turn to be tortured. I didn’t move, just locked my hands together and started praying out loud as hard as I could, over and over.
“Please God, don’t let them hurt him too bad and protect me! Please God, don’t let them hurt him too bad and protect me!”
I heard them talking to Theo, but all he said back was, “No, wait! Please, please, please!”
Then his words transformed into screams. Within seconds of the first blow Theo capitulated and told them what they wanted to hear.
“Okay, CIA! CIA! CIA!” he cried out.
As soon as he did this the beating stopped. They loved showing off their CIA agent to visitors. I knew my time was coming, so I prayed even harder.
“Please God, protect me and keep me safe! Please God, protect me and keep me safe!”
The door opened and Theo was thrown violently into the room, landing directly on my leg and causing me to let out an involuntary scream. My turn—but our jailors had different ideas; they slammed the door and locked it. I had been spared.
As soon as the door closed Theo leaned his head on my shoulder, panting uncontrollably.
“You okay, man?” I asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, just don’t move!” he answered. “Don’t move!”
“Ohh-kay.”
So I lay still, as he leaned and breathed on me like a dog. After a few minutes it kind of got uncomfortable.
“Are you all right, man? You want me to rub your feet?” I asked seriously.
Theo let out a laugh, not realizing I meant it.
“No, that’s okay,” he said.
“They give you the tire?”
“No, no, they didn’t have one, so they threw a rope over the pipe and strung me up by my feet and hit me like that.”
Even right on the other side of the door I could not picture what that must have been like—strung up like a pig in the dark, with only the blue rays of the flashlights swirling around the hall. It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life, and nothing had even happened to me.
Now that we had a light, we could disrobe and hunt for bedbugs again. Even when it worked, which was rarely, the light was dim due to lack of power, so I picked through my clothes sitting directly under the bulb, at the foot of our bed. I removed the label from the Pepsi bottle I pissed in, folded it in half, and crushed the bugs inside it to keep my blood and the insects contained. Needless to say, after being in the dark for a while I was crawling with them.
“I guess I’ll look too,” said Theo. “It kills time.”
Theo unzipped his jacket.
“Holy shit!” I said in shock.
What I saw was something not even James Cameron could have made up. His entire shirt was covered with bugs, like something straight out of a science fiction movie. Theo froze, wide-eyed, looking down at his colonized shirt.
“Yo, what’s that on your shoulder?” I asked.
He shifted his attention to his shoulder, where sat the biggest bedbug in the history of man.
“It’s just a piece of fuzz,” Theo said.
“Illlll, man, no way! It’s moving! It’s alive!”
Theo peeled off his shirt, and I
