“I told you to look before, but no!” I fumed. “You didn’t have any!”
“I didn’t! These are from these blankets.”
“Yeah, whatever, keep tellin’ yourself that.”
When Theo picked the bugs from his clothes he placed them on the floor next to our bed and crushed them with a fingertip. This I did not like. I found it disgusting and in violation of my personal hygiene standards.
“Don’t do that!” I told him, over and over again.
“Okay, okay,” he’d say, without looking at me. He’d crush the next couple underneath our bottom blanket, like I’d asked him to, but he always returned to killing and leaving them on the open ground.
One day, after I’d watched him kill about twenty bugs this way, he got up, took a piss, and then walked back to our bed, stepping in the blood and the guts of the bugs he’d just killed along the way. It was not the first time I’d seen him do this, but it was the last.
“What the fuck did I tell you about walking in the blood and trackin’ it and the dead bodies onto our bed?” I asked, as he sat back down.
“You know what? Shut up!” said Theo. “I’ll do what I want. I don’t have to listen to you!”
“Oh really?” I asked.
A second passed as we stared each other down, and then I spontaneously punched him in the face.
“Ooooh, you fucking terrorist!” he yelled, rocking back and forth, as enraged as I’d seen him. “You’re just like them! You fucking terrorist!”
This provoked a reaction from me, considering all that I had done for him in the way of procuring extra food, blankets, and baths, so I jumped to my feet, grabbed him around the throat, and pinned him to the wall.
“I’m a terrorist?” I asked. “If I were a terrorist I’d steal your bread. If I were a terrorist I’d steal your blankets. Now don’t fuckin’ crush any more of those bugs where you walk! Do you understand me?”
“Yes! Yes! Just get off me!”
I let him go. I’m not proud of this outburst, but I was bent on keeping my humanity intact, no matter what—on not becoming the animal they were treating me as. I refused to let anyone drag me any lower.
It was around this time that I started trying to talk Theo into another escape attempt.
“We gotta get outta here or they’re gonna kill us,” I said, trying to motivate him, “or else just leave us here to rot.”
“I know.”
“We have to try and escape again. If only I could get a hanger or something to pick that lock.” To my surprise, Theo didn’t argue.
As we discussed our options it became clear that we didn’t really have any, but this didn’t deter me. We were thinking as one, and for just a few moments we had the bond that we should have had all along. Through the dimness of the cell I looked deep into Theo’s eyes and he stared back. We locked hands like brothers and made a pact that no two people should ever have to make.
“Either we escape together, or we die together,” I said.
“Yeah,” Theo agreed, and he squeezed my hand.
As time went by only one viable possibility presented itself. Almost every time the door opened, there was more than one person on the other side of it—one with the food and the other with a gun—but once in a while Yassine would pay us a solo visit for a late-night feeding. My plan was simple: I get up to give Yassine a fist bump and as soon as he raises his hand I grab it and pull him into the room, slapping on a choke hold until he is good and dead. When they moved us to this building I’d seen how quiet the complex was at night; I was confident that if we could just get outside we would make it out alive. Theo, of course, was against it. He said he didn’t want to kill anybody, even Yassine, who beat him practically every day. Since he’d already admitted he’d kill me for freedom, this kind of pissed me off, because it proved that his refusal wasn’t about taking a life; it was about fear of repercussions for the life he took.
“All you gotta do is cover his mouth if I don’t slap the hold on him right away, and shut the door,” I promised.
“No! If we kill one of them they’ll put the word out to every checkpoint and we’ll never make it out of the country alive. Then they’ll really make us suffer.” Like we were doing so great now.
“Come on, man, the FSA controls all the checkpoints to Turkey. These guys aren’t that organized, although I agree they’d probably try.”
“Forget it.”
“Come on, we made a pact! Escape together or die together, right?”
“No, forget it. I changed my mind.”
“What?”
“I’m not committing suicide with you,” Theo snapped in a bitchy tone.
“Well, if we stay here that’s exactly what we’re doing. At least if they kill us during an escape attempt we go out like men instead of dying on our knees.”
I kept talking, but it was useless. He was back under the covers, waiting to be killed or rescued, whichever happened to come first.
I couldn’t stop staring at our keyhole. It was one of those old-fashioned ones, like for a skeleton key, big enough to look through. I knew that if I could just get my hands on a hanger or some other kind of wire I would be able to pick it. So I started thinking about where I might get wire and
