Then he asked Theo for his opinion.
“No, they’ll arrest you,” he said. “Just send an email.”
Abdelatif shot his attention my way and I scrambled to convince him that Theo didn’t know what he was talking about, but the damage was done. Theo had shown he would rather advise an admitted terrorist on how to avoid arrest than agree with anything I said, and he’d created doubt in the mind of the one person who could possibly help us about whether or not he should.
We were never quite sure what caused the food poisoning, but it was either the spoiled yogurt or the contaminated water we were forced to drink. Whenever the water was out at the hospital we’d fill our bottles from a hose that was fed into the bathroom and slung over one of the faucets. The hose water was so brown it looked like watered-down iced tea, and at first I refused to drink it, but seeing that they would let me die of thirst before they invested in bottled water or boiled it made me realize that Gandhi would have been fucked in this place, so I drank up.
It was early in the day when my stomach started to gurgle discontentedly, and before I knew it, I was pounding on the door.
“Bathroom, please! Bathroom! Emergency!” I screamed in Arabic.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred times when you knocked, whoever answered the door would say they’d come back in five minutes and then return in five hours, but on this day I must have been pretty convincing because when the guard opened the door I was taken without delay. As soon as we got to the hallway, I broke away from him and ran blindfolded to the bathroom.
Once inside the stall I tore my pants down and dropped into a squat like I’d just had a chair pulled out from under me, and a split second later I was spraying shit into the toilet like a busted fire hydrant. There was absolutely nothing solid coming out of me, and when I looked into the toilet there was nothing to see; it just ran down the sides like rain. Between bursts I would stand and squat, stand and squat, hoping that my stomach would turn over so I could get the next round out before I was locked in my cell again. But there always seemed to be another round after that, and so when the guard came to take me back I grabbed a bucket before heading down the hallway, just in case.
Reentering the cell I realized I had a serious problem on my hands. My colon was nowhere near through with me, but maybe with enough willpower I could hold it off until our next bathroom trip. After pacing a few laps I decided to lie down and try to sleep as much of the morning away as possible, but as soon as I lay down my stomach kicked back into full swing. I definitely didn’t want to be the first one to shit in a bucket, so I just bitched and whined until I couldn’t take it anymore. Once again I pounded on the door and once again the same guard answered. We called him the Fat Man—he was one of the new guards we’d met upon our return; he’d seemed okay, but on this day he proved that he was much better than that. I must have knocked on the door close to a dozen times before evening and almost every time I did, it opened to reveal the Fat Man on the other side, wearing the goofy grin that came with helping the American with the runs.
By nightfall the sickness had not improved and the medication the guards gave me did little to stop the flow. In fact, I’m pretty sure the pill they gave me for diarrhea was the same one they gave Abdelatif for his broken leg. This made me remember the Holocaust literature I had read again, and how diarrhea had been one of the main causes of death in the camps. I started worrying that I had dysentery, and my pacing and fretting began to get on my cellmate’s nerves.
“Just handle it,” said Abdelatif. “Be a man!”
This was easier said than done—as he would learn for himself later that night.
Theo and I were sound asleep when the Moroccan jumped up, hobbled over to the door, and started pounding.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I gotta shit!” he yelled in a panic. “Grab the bucket!”
“Come on, man, just knock—”
“Grab the fuckin’ bucket!” he screamed, heading right for me.
Realizing there wasn’t a second to spare, I leapt up, grabbed the bucket, and placed it on the floor behind him as he ripped off his pants. A second later Theo was holding him by one hand and I held the other as we lowered him down to the bucket, which was about the size of a pail kids use to build sandcastles at the beach.
“Just be careful, man,” I said. “That shit spills and we’re in trouble.”
The sound effects discharged by Abdelatif’s asshole rivaled any artillery shells we had heard going off outside. We must have held him over that bucket for a good five minutes before he gave us the okay to stand him back up.
“What was that you said to me before about being a man?” I asked.
“Yo, you were right,” he apologized. “That was no joke!”
After taking Theo’s water bottle and heading to the back of the room, Abdelatif—still naked and dripping with shit—asked me to help him clean
