“Go ahead, Kawa already knows who I am,” I responded every time, calling his bluff. “You tell him lies and he’s just gonna torture you.”
When Oqba called me over, I knew what he was going to say before he opened his mouth. He wanted me to apologize to Abdelatif, to make peace in the room and relieve the tension.
“Do it for me, please? Do it for me?” he asked in his sweet voice.
“No, fuck him! He talked shit about my sister first!” I replied.
“You don’t understand, in this part of the world when you talk about someone’s sister, or mother, or father . . . it’s blood.”
“And you think we just let that shit slide in America?” I asked, incredulous, but out of respect I heard him out and afterward I went over to that psychotic son of a bitch and made peace.
I felt nothing but disgust as his repugnant ass hugged me and said he was sorry. As I returned the hug I rolled my eyes over his shoulder, so every man in the room could see that I was completely full of shit.
After that first day at the villa I don’t remember Theo ever refusing a request from Abdelatif; he was massaging him so many times a day I would have needed two hands to keep track.
“Theo, come! Come give me a massage!” the Moroccan would shout, and it didn’t matter if Theo was asleep or giving an English lesson, he’d go running.
The worst part was the way he gave the massages, dropping to his knees as if before a caliph, placing Abdelatif’s leg upon his shoulder as the Moroccan lay smirking with his arms outstretched on the floor. We were in a room full of soldiers; the symbolism of this was undeniable and noticed by every man in the room. More times than I can count men would look from this spectacle back to me with their arms out in disbelief, as if waiting for an explanation of how an American could so readily kneel before a member of al-Qaeda, his country’s greatest enemy. This didn’t help things between Theo and me, because he wasn’t only humiliating himself by doing this, he was humiliating America, which was definitely the Moroccan’s goal—making us look so pitiful and weak that anyone who survived would grow old telling their grandchildren that this was how Americans acted without their military around to back them up. It made my life twice as difficult because I had to stand twice as tall whenever I was tested by another prisoner, to prove that not all of us bleed pink like Theo.
The Alawites knelt in prayer five times a day, which meant Theo was now kneeling before al-Qaeda more often than they were kneeling before God. I didn’t know who I hated most for this, the Moroccan or Theo.
The one time Theo did refuse a request, it came from me—and it wasn’t for a massage. The guards were feeling particularly vicious that day, and we were being treated worse than the sheep we heard them keeping in the room next door, where the punishment cells were. That morning Crop Top asked who had to take a shit and only those who raised their hands were permitted to go on the bathroom run. Everyone else, those who only had to take a piss, were forced to use the bottle that had been brought just for me because of my urinary tract infection. By nighttime it was completely filled with pungent yellow fluid.
When Crop Top and Abu Ali returned in the evening for our second and final bathroom break of the day, they were still on their sadistic streak, with the sound of Abu Ali’s Taser snapping out and Crop Top blessing everyone with his signature smack to the back of the neck. Knowing that both Abu Ali and Crop Top took particular pleasure in making me suffer, I decided to skip this run since I didn’t have to go anyway. The only problem was the piss bottle and who was going to empty it. I turned to Theo, who was already lined up to go on the run.
“Theo, can you empty the bottle for me?” I asked, as the sounds of blows and Tasers echoed in from the hallway as the men started down. “I don’t wanna go out there tonight.”
“No,” he replied coldly.
“Why not?” I asked. He was going anyway, and he’d emptied the Moroccan’s bottle every day at the hospital. “You want me to go out there and get Tased and stomped?”
“Yes.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you deserve it.”
It took me a second to absorb this. I looked at him, sitting there rocking back and forth, staring at the ground with a blank expression. Then I dealt him a solid slap across the face, which set off a commotion in the room, given the proximity of the guards.
“Jumu’ah!” I heard from all directions as the men pointed toward the open door.
“What’s going on over there?” piped the Moroccan.
“I asked Theo to empty the bottle and he said no because he wants me to go outside and get stomped and Tased!” I said, enraged.
“Theo, empty the fucking bottle!” the Moroccan shouted.
“Fine!”
“Oh, so you’ll empty the bottle for al-Qaeda, but not for me?” I said, disgusted.
The feeling of being betrayed by one of my own left me consumed with anger; at that moment I could happily have beaten Theo within an inch of his life. Sometimes I was jealous of the POWs, who were locked up with others they shared a bond of culture and country with—they had something bigger than themselves that connected them and kept them strong. The fact that Theo
