“Wait a minute, did you just fuckin’ win?” I asked, staring at the board we had just finished setting up not two minutes earlier.
When I looked up, Shareef was wearing an enormous smile, holding up three of his fingers.
“Three!” he said.
“I can’t believe you just beat me in three moves,” I said, pissed.
“My turn, Jumu’ah,” said Ayman, tapping my arm to tell me to step aside.
“No, fuck that! I’m playing again! I’ve been sitting here for two hours waiting for my turn!” As I reset the board, word of my humiliating defeat spread throughout the room—along with a wave of laughter that accompanied it.
Since the Moroccan didn’t know how to play either I decided to practice by kicking his al-Qaeda ass. He’d sit there playing with a disinterested look on his face, acting like he didn’t care when he clearly did. After about a week of doing this and being schooled by Ayman and Shareef during my games with the others, I started doing better and quite naturally rubbed it in their faces like they did with me every opportunity I had.
I had never seen anybody come back from the dead before, so you can imagine my surprise when the door opened and Kawa entered, carrying a black satchel. He glanced blandly around the room as we all stared at him with our jaws on the floor.
“Jumu’ah!” he said when he spotted me, breaking into a big grin under his Puma cap.
“What up, boss?” I said, forcing myself to return the smile.
The Moroccan told him how saddened we’d all been to hear of his death and that we’d dedicated the Fatiha to him after. Kawa seemed about as moved by that as he was by the news that I was a Muslim—the Little Judge was many things, but foolish wasn’t one of them.
A few minutes later he left and I just sat there, with my head throbbing, devastated to learn he was still breathing. We were right back where we had been since day one—nowhere. With Kawa dead I’d thought there was a chance someone reasonable might be put in charge of my fate, but now all my hopes and prayers had been flushed down the toilet. My misery was painted all over my face. When I finally looked up and made eye contact with Theo I couldn’t believe it: he was staring at me with the most evil, sadistic grin I had ever seen, to let me know that he was taking considerable pleasure in my pain. It was like something you would expect from a Dostoevsky villain.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” I asked, jumping to my feet. I charged over, grabbed him by his beard and yanked it as hard as I could, ready to follow it up with a blow.
Naturally I only got one tug before it was broken up, but other than that nobody really seemed to mind. His conduct was becoming so perfidious that I found myself again asking God what I had done to deserve being locked in a room with such a person.
As always, I received no answer.
There were times during our stay at Obeida’s when I came close to losing it. I wasn’t the only one—it was obvious when someone was sinking into that place beyond depression, and usually when this happened the best thing was to leave them be as they stared into oblivion, letting them slog through to the other side on their own. The one who could always sense when I was in that dark place the most was Ayman, and when he did he would plop down in front of me, trying to distract me from whatever thoughts were circling my mind. To cheer me up he used the little English he knew to rag on Theo.
“Dog!” he’d say, jerking his thumb in Theo’s direction, and I always laughed.
Other times he would just start pointing around the room at different objects, teaching me their names in Arabic and quizzing me on them. Then he’d move on to the days of the week and other basics. If anyone else had dropped in to give me language lessons when I was depressed I’d have told them to fuck off, and the rest of the men knew to give me my space when I was in this state, but my connection with Ayman was one of such deep affection that he knew I’d never say that to him. He was my best friend, someone who gave me solace when I found myself considering the possibility that I might die there, because I knew that as long as I ended up in a ditch with him, I’d be ready to face the end with a full heart and a brother beside me.
Since we were all taking full advantage of not being rushed while in the bathroom, Obeida began to have second thoughts about our setup. All week we watched him turning the room where the bathroom and arsenal were into a cell, building it up with cinder blocks. When it was finished he secured a thick iron door in the wall, with a big slot above it. That night we were transferred in to our new home, and at first sight it couldn’t have been a bigger blow to morale.
The room was about the same size as our old one but pitch-black, with no window and no working light fixtures even when the electricity was on. The front of this store, where the gate was drawn down, had been completely sealed off with a wall of cinder blocks, except for at the very top where two blocks were missing and a piece of concrete divided the hole to make it impossible for any of us to fit through. All we
