“Theo, come on, what are you doin’, naming them?”
“Leave me alone,” he responded, without taking his eyes from the parasites.
“Jesus Christ!” I exclaimed in disgust, bringing my slipper down on the five or so bugs that he’d corralled and smearing his blood all over the floor.
Displays like this would send my mood plummeting when I’d been up minutes before. Theo was losing it a little more each day and there didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do about it. I’d tried to talk to him, explaining that his behavior was affecting the morale of everyone in the room, hoping that he’d try to get it together for us if not for himself. His response was always confrontational, some version of telling me that he didn’t care, or to shut up and leave him alone. No matter how much I sometimes hated him, I never stopped trying to reach him, though it became harder and harder the more withdrawn and difficult he became.
Two days after Abdelatif joined our happy little family the door opened and Kawa, the jihadi formerly known as the Little Judge, entered in a denim shirt, looking determined and walking tall.
“Jumu’ah, come with me!” he ordered.
I covered my eyes and we walked out into the hallway together. As soon as the door was closed he grabbed the hood of my sweatshirt, pulled it down until I was hunched over, and punched me in the face. The punch was curiously painless and wouldn’t even leave a mark, so weak it was hard to believe it had come from a grown man. He pulled me down the hallway by my hood and led me into the boiler room, sitting me down on the floor in the dark. I listened as others followed us into the room, and I braced myself for the tire or the electricity I had heard them using on other prisoners. Yassine then crouched down to my right and translated for Kawa:
“Say you are a CIA or I will hit you very hard.”
“But I’m not a CIA,” I said.
Yassine conveyed my response to Kawa and I immediately felt a kick to the side of my head at the same time that a thick cable struck the side of my foot. Unlike the punch, this hurt, and I let out a yell through a clenched jaw.
“Say you are a CIA or I will hit you very hard,” Yassine repeated.
“But Yassine, I’m not a CIA.”
After he translated this I felt another kick to the side of my head along with another lash to my foot. Kawa then stormed out of the room as if he was going to get something, something to use to break me and end this game once and for all. I sat there and contemplated my situation. I knew that management’s patience in waiting for my confession had run out, and I had heard enough victims screaming by now to know that if these people wanted you to say something, you were eventually going to say it. It didn’t matter how tough you were; it didn’t matter who you were—and it definitely didn’t matter if it was true. I came to the conclusion that I had lasted longer than any other civilian probably would have and it was time to fold. It wasn’t like I was endangering anyone else with my fake confession, and if I ever wanted to make it home or escape I had to stay as healthy as possible, which meant not inviting torture out of foolish pride.
“All right,” I said to Yassine, with my head down. “I’m a CIA agent.”
As soon as the words left my mouth Yassine ran from the room, ecstatic, to brag about being the one who’d finally gotten me to say the magic words. I heard him telling Kawa the good news, and then he returned to take me back to my cell with no further abuse.
When I got back into the room, Theo and Abdelatif greeted me with identical raised brows and inquisitive looks that said: Well?
“I did it,” I told them. “I confessed.”
This was no surprise to either of them, especially when they heard what had happened after Kawa took me down to the boiler room. Theo smiled and looked ecstatic that I had at last been brought down to his level. About two hours later the door opened again; this time it was Abu Dejana, Kawa’s assistant. He led me across the hall and into the kitchen, where a video camera sat on a tripod. Kawa stood beside it, holding an orange jumpsuit. Next to him was Chubs the Canadian, wearing his usual black mask. In his hand was a small notepad.
“How’s my investigation goin’?” I asked him sarcastically.
Chubs didn’t answer, just translated Kawa’s instructions to put on the jumpsuit as he handed it to me. I pulled it on over my clothes with a deep sense of dread. Making one of these videos was one of the two things that I’d feared the most during my imprisonment, because of what it would do to my mother. The other one was decapitation. Once the jumpsuit was on I turned to Kawa and held out my arms.
“How do I look?” I asked.
“Take off your hat,” Chubs translated.
“Oh, come on, man, don’t make me take off my hat!” I said. “Please. I look terrible.” I pointed to my bald head and the scruffy hair at the sides that I always kept shaved back home.
“He said to take it off,” Chubs countered.
“But I don’t want my mother to see me like this.”
“He doesn’t care. You have to take it off.”
“Well, if I take it off, can I get some yogurt and bread for me and the boys?”
When Chubs translated this, Kawa
