I started unweaving the vertical wires the day after Abdullah left, two days before we planned to leave. Theo got on his hands and knees, and I stood on his back and got to work. I could have used the bucket but Theo needed a sense of purpose, and this gave it to him. The first wire snapped from being bent back and forth again and again as I wove it downward, and I realized that I’d have to undo the grate with as few bends as possible, visualizing how I would bend and pull each wire before doing so. Luckily, this worked, and the first wire I snapped was also the last I snapped. Unfortunately, this meant it would take a lot longer than I’d expected.
“How you doin’?” Theo kept asking from under me. “Where are you?”
“Shut the fuck up already!” I yelled down.
“All right, get off me! I’m not helping if you’re going to talk to me like that! You have to be nice to me or forget it!”
He was dead serious, too—from the second we’d decided to escape he threatened to keep us both there anytime he didn’t like my attitude or I insulted him, which was about every eight seconds.
By nightfall, the day after Abdullah left us, all the wires were unraveled and ready to go. All we had to do was fold down the screen, help each other out the window, and we were home free.
The day before the escape I’d figured it was worth a shot to ask Abu Ali for a couple of razors—after all, he had given us everything else we had asked for. I’d said I wanted them so that we could shave our faces, and after he’d dropped our food that evening I turned and saw two yellow disposable razors on the prayer rug. There was absolutely no way we could shave our long, thick beards with those blades, but luckily I had no intention of using them to shave my face.
After dinner that night, it was time to put those razors to good use. Since we were in Syria, shaving our faces wasn’t exactly going to help us blend in, but I wanted to change my appearance however I could for when the hounds inevitably came hunting. Because I was always facing the wall, the only part of me our captors knew was the back of my head, so I opted to shave that so I wouldn’t quite match whatever description went out for me. It was a good idea, but I overestimated the power of those razors—before I was halfway finished both blades were so dull I had to press them extra hard against the back of my skull to get them to work. By the end I had dozens of tiny cuts all over my head, but eventually I finished the job and walked out of the bathroom, with my head still dripping wet.
“The horror! The horror!” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
Theo didn’t get it.
After Abu Ali supplied us with paper and a pen the first thing I did was make a deck of cards, so to keep our minds occupied we played Crazy Eights, and for once we seemed to get along without even trying. When we weren’t playing and he was awake, Theo sat against the wall, reading the Koran.
“I just got to the dawn prayer,” he said.
“Read it.”
“Lord of this day of judgment. You alone do we worship and you alone do we ask for help. Lead us along the straight path, the path of those upon whom You have bestowed Your favors, not those who incurred Your wrath, nor of those who went astray!”
I had never heard anything more appropriate. It seemed like fate—and so before my departure I left the Koran on my pillow, opened to the dawn prayer, for Kawa to find.
“Don’t fuck with the Koran,” Theo said, warningly.
“No, I’m fuckin’ with it,” I replied.
This was the perfect touch, almost poetic: a fuck you to al-Nusra from their precious Americans.
It was a long night. Theo insisted on making the rope; we ripped almost all of our extra tee shirts into long thin strips and sat for two hours braiding, Theo then tying the pieces together. After an hour I volunteered to take over but he refused. Around midnight we turned out the lights so it would look like we were sleeping, just in case anyone came down to check on us.
I sat in the darkness and thought about one thing. I didn’t think about my mother, my friends, or my home—I thought of nothing but getting through that window.
As the hours wound on, Theo and I were running back and forth to the toilet, sick with nerves. Upstairs, it was quiet. Finally, we began to hear the sounds of men moving around and knew that breakfast would be coming; soon, we heard Abu Ali heading down the stairs.
When the door opened, Theo and I were staring at
