“Hey, Ali, what’s up?” I said enthusiastically.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“It’s Matt! Who do you think it is?”
“We are in danger,” he replied.
That was when I looked around at our new environment and realized it was just another prison.
“Nah, we’ll be all right,” I said confidently.
After a while we all removed our blindfolds and began to embrace one another like men who knew they’d just escaped death. Despite the zip ties I was shaking so many hands I felt like the mayor, and for a few minutes the huge blisters that had formed on my wrists ceased to exist; I was once again among friends. We passed the next few hours speculating on where we were and why we’d been brought here. Some thought this was just a temporary holding place because of the trouble at the checkpoint, whereas others thought it was where we’d been heading the whole time, another routine transfer so as not to keep us in any one place for too long.
I knew that this prison was going to be different from all the rest when I heard the prisoners in the cell across from ours. There were two of them and they were women—one never stopped pounding on the door while the other never stopped crying. The sound of her weeping pierced the heart of pretty much every man in the room until it ended, when the guards came for them later that night. Like all the others that had come and gone and would in the future, we’d never know where they ended up. All we knew for certain was that we never heard them again.
This was our introduction to the House of Mohammad.
We had not seen much of General Mohammad since the electrical institute, and now we learned why. He had been made an emir and given his own militia to command. This villa was one of two that he had either requisitioned from their former owners or simply taken when they fled in the wake of the war.
The cell must have been the apartment’s master bedroom, and at one time a set of large French doors had spanned almost the entire twenty-foot length of the room. Now those French doors were a thing of the past, covered with layer upon layer of concrete, spackled on so jaggedly that we hung our spare clothes from the sharp points that protruded. It made for a dim scene. Both the light switch and the fixture had been ripped out, leaving nothing but thin wires snaking out into the air. The only unobstructed windows were set at about eye level, each with two glass doors that opened in and bars on the outside. It was a gray day, and only a dreary light filtered through.
I caught up with old friends and was introduced to the new arrivals among the POWs, one of the most memorable being Pops, a short little dude of around sixty with salt-and-pepper hair and a raspy voice. Once we got to know each other he called me “Mr. Friday.” Pops was a total nymphomaniac, and sometimes it seemed like he knew just enough English to talk about sex. I’ll never forget what he said to me after we’d introduced ourselves in the fading light of that first afternoon:
“Can you get me a date with Hill-or-ee Cleen-ton?”
For some reason Pops had a real thing for Hillary. One time he crept up behind me and started stroking the top of my head, telling everyone in the room that he bet the skin on my bald head was “as smooth as the skin on Hill-or-ee Cleen-ton’s ass.”
I also met Senator Iayd Sulaiman, a cool cat of forty who’d held a seat in Bashar’s parliament before being kidnapped in Homs. He stood 6′3″, with thick curly hair. The Senator was a trip. Here was a man who was accustomed to receiving daily hour-long massages back home and now he was sleeping on the floor with the rest of us. He spent hours reading the Koran and praying, and later the two of us would have long talks about everything from politics to religion and become close friends in the process. He almost always had one pant leg rolled up over his kneecap, where the bone was covered only by scar tissue. I never asked what had happened because I’d seen enough to know it was the result of being struck repeatedly with a thick cable like the one they’d tortured me with, probably while he was in the tire.
And then there was Fatr, a twenty-five-year-old so fresh faced and innocent looking that he could’ve been the poster boy for the Syrian Boy Scouts, if such a thing existed. He had thick black hair and a long patchy beard that never came in fully. Looking at him you didn’t really think “warrior,” but then he took off his shirt and you saw the scars. That kid took five bullets to the chest and abdomen, and still he almost never stopped smiling.
The sight of a bunch of prison guards has never been more welcome than when the door opened and they entered to remove our restraints. I was in so much pain from the ties digging into my flesh that I thought my hands might fall off. They dumped everyone’s blankets on the floor in a single pile, and we could tell right away that ours were missing. Our blankets had been the same brown wool as the rest, but my quilt was nowhere to be seen, and before I knew it every blanket in the room had been snatched up and either spread on the floor or used as a cover, leaving me with nothing. Even Theo got one, but he didn’t offer to share it with me.
We were now realizing how inadequate the room was for confining so many people. Once lying down, the twenty-three of us were packed
