Once inside he was placed on a gurney with a few parasite-infested blankets for a mattress and cuffed to the frame by his ankle and wrist before being wheeled into the filthy boiler room. There he lay for a week with a catheter emptying out into a bucket on the floor. That week had left its mark: he had a scar around his ankle from the handcuffs and this awful infection that had eaten through the entire back of his heel where it had rested against the metal bed frame. It was a sickly yellowish purple; I thought it was gangrene, it was so rotted. Twice a day someone came to feed him, but when he asked for water he was almost always denied—and all the while, the torture and the screaming continued in the boiler room, right there in front of him.
Whatever the reasons for his arrest, it was clear that his offenses had called for the harshest of treatment. Occasionally he’d received a visit from a man named Kawa, who was in charge of investigating him and his case. When I asked him to describe Kawa, Abdelatif said he was “the short one, with glasses.” It was the Little Judge. We finally knew his name.
Within a few hours, Abdelatif and I were friends. He may have been a liar, but at least he had a sense of humor—after almost two months with Theo, this was the most refreshing thing God could have given me besides freedom. Abdelatif did pledge his allegiance to al-Nusra, but he also spoke extremely highly of America and said it was his dream to move back there someday. The fact that he loved rap music, women, and American movies and TV gave us plenty to talk about. In fact, I could not have been more surprised to learn what his favorite sitcom was.
“You like Curb Your Enthusiasm?” I asked, shocked.
“That’s my nigga!” he said—referring to Larry David.
I was surprised they hadn’t shot him for that.
When the guards finally brought him some blankets, we spread his on top of mine to maximize our comfort and slept side by side. As for Theo, his excitement over our new cellmate waned once we started talking about American pop culture—a subject even a Moroccan terrorist knew more about than he did—and he’d retreated back under his own blankets. We invited him to join us several times, but he stayed put the rest of the night while Abdelatif and I stayed up, telling stories about where we came from and the people we knew there, and about life here as well.
“What’s he saying?” I asked, referring to an inmate up the hall, who we could hear banging on his door and yelling.
“He’s hungry,” said the Moroccan. It had to be at least 2 AM, so the request for room service seemed a little much.
“What does he think this is, his mother’s house?” I asked.
About half an hour later, one of the guards finally came to see what all the knocking was about. Their voices carried easily down the quiet hall, and the Moroccan and I just about fell over laughing when he translated the guard’s response:
“What do you think this is, your mother’s house?”
Needless to say, the guy got nothing.
When we heard the Adhan calling everyone to prayer we couldn’t believe it was morning already. By the time we passed out it was broad daylight, and I felt better than I had since being thrown in with Theo. I finally had someone to really talk to. It’s amazing how little a difference in ideology means when two people are tossed into the same boat heading toward the same waterfall—or so I thought, anyway.
Abdelatif was shocked to see how poorly Theo was treated, and in the beginning, he pitied him. Because he was a Sunni and a jihadi, he was pretty sure that he was going to be released soon, so he gave Theo his Nike jumpsuit jacket, figuring that he wouldn’t be needing it for long. I told him not to offer it and Theo not to accept, being that the room was cold and there was no guarantee that Abdelatif was going anywhere—not to mention that, as nasty as it was, Theo already had a jacket—but Abdelatif wasn’t worried about the temperature and said Allah rewards those who give charity to the less fortunate. However, potential rewards from Allah were something Abdelatif was willing to forgo if it gave him a better chance of freedom, as we learned the next morning when the door opened and Fenster asked if we needed to use the bathroom.
“No, I’m good,” I said, closing my eyes to go back to sleep.
“No thanks,” Abdelatif said in Arabic, doing the same.
“I have to go,” said Theo, standing up.
“No, you can wait, dog!” Fenster barked, and slammed the door.
“Damn, Theo!” said Abdelatif. “What did you do to make them hate you so much?”
“Nothing,” Theo insisted.
Still, seeing this made Abdelatif worry that being nice to Theo could jeopardize his release and lead to persecution from the guards, so he asked for his jacket back. Theo took it off and handed it over, but Abdelatif was so disgusted by the foul odor it emitted after only a day in Theo’s possession that he gave it back again. I would have offered to wash and return it, seeing as the man now had no jacket and the room was chilly, but Theo accepted it without a word.
Since returning from the electrical institute, Theo had become increasingly distant and his behavior increasingly disturbing. One morning
