Only in fucking Syria.
Theo sat on his bed, bleeding and sulking.
“It looks like someone shot you in your fuckin’ forehead,” I said, laughing.
“You hit like a girl. And you’re bleeding, too,” he said.
“No, that’s your blood, dipshit,” I said, wiping my forehead. I started back in again, continuing my verbal assault, nagging him into letting me save his life.
I don’t even remember what I was saying when he finally capitulated.
“All right!” he said, defeated. “I didn’t say I was completely turned off to the idea!”
“Yes! Here you go,” I said, getting up and returning the Koran to him.
“But we have to wait three days,” he added.
“What? Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“But Theo, in three days they could find the window, put someone else in here with us again, or move us—and we’re due!” I said. With the exception of the warehouse they’d always moved us every month or month and a half; we were up for a transfer any day now and he knew it.
None of this made any difference to him. He finally had a situation that put him in control.
“You also have to be nice to me. If you’re not nice to me, forget it.”
This was his other condition for letting me spare him from death. I had to be nice to him too. I agreed to the three days because I saw there was no way around it. However, being nice to him turned out to be much harder.
Over the next three days I did my best to get Theo to wake up and practice, but he refused. He was back to sleeping eighteen to twenty hours a day, and no matter how hard I tried there was nothing I could do to motivate him to get with the program. All day I would plead with him to get up and tie the rope around the window frame to get a feel for exactly what he needed to be able to accomplish physically, but he always responded either confrontationally or by offering some nonsensical reason as to why he didn’t need to prepare.
“Come on, Theo, get up! Practice!” I said.
“I don’t need to. I used to go spelunking.”
“What? What the fuck is spelunking?” I said, losing my mind.
“It’s caving. I know how to contort my body.”
“What are you, out of your mind?” I yelled. “We’re trying to escape from a terrorist prison here! We have a lot more to worry about than getting our arm jammed between a rock and a hard place for a hundred and twenty-seven hours!”
“I never saw that movie,” he said.
“Ahhhh!” I screamed, gripping both sides of my head in frustration.
He also refused to use the olive oil, or listen to me when I tried to explain why he needed to go with both arms out. I don’t know how I didn’t lose it. It wasn’t enough that I had to go first and deal with the possibility of the sniper seeing me. That I had to plan out every single detail. That I had to stay awake and monitor everything happening outside the door and the window while he slept. No—I had to deal with this bullshit, too.
After a while I just gave up and let him sleep. It was no use trying to get through to him. He was done.
Waiting those three days was literally a torture unlike any I had faced at the hands of al-Nusra. As the first day came and went, so did Abu Ali, without ever noticing the window. I stayed as active as possible, played memory with the deck of cards to keep my mind sharp, and continued to pray for my freedom and to be reunited with my family. At night, Theo would usually come out for a little while to read the Koran and play cards, and we got along pretty well for those few hours.
“If they catch us again they’re never going to let us go,” he said, tossing out a card.
“I know, but there’s a good chance they’re never gonna let us go anyway,” I answered.
As we were playing on the second night, a single rifle shot rang out from the rooftop across the street. We looked at each other, knowing damn well that rifle might be there waiting for us the morning after next, but it was just another one of the grim realities we had to live with, so neither one of us said a word.
Finally, it was the night of July twenty-eighth. By this time tomorrow, I will be a free man, I thought, and never stopped thinking it for a single second, letting it play in the background of my head like a heartbeat. As I’m sure you can imagine, it wasn’t easy getting Theo into warrior mode.
“You ready to go home, Theo?” I’d say, “You ready, Theonidas? You ready? Zero Dark Theo! Yeah!” I would jump and pound my fist into my hand.
From what I could tell, my efforts to convince him that he was qualified to walk around with “Bad Motherfucker” branded on his wallet actually worked. At one point in the hours leading up to the escape he wandered up to the window, staring at it.
“It’s almost Zero Dark Thirty,” he said.
We had both gotten so used to the idea of being killed that I don’t think either one of us was afraid of it anymore. All we were afraid of now was time, and how viciously they were certain to torture us if we got caught. During the three days we waited, I’d decided that once I made it through that window, it was either freedom or death for me. I was not going to be taken back to the transportation building alive; I made sure to have more than enough diarrhea pills to do the job if I got cornered, and just in case I had some other capsules we had been
