Lebanon Hostage Ch. 01

They strip away my gag. The tape pulls at my hair and stings my skin as it comes off, but it's a relief to have the cloth out and to be able to relax my jaw and breathe through my mouth. They also peel the tape off my blindfold, frequently reminding me, "No look! No look!" in case the blindfold slips in the process.

Someone asks me, in only lightly accented English, "Who are you?"

"Jeremy Lawrence," I say. I know he's already been told that, but I'm not sure what exactly he wants to know. "Bernard Garlitz is my uncle."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-three." My interrogator sounds like he's not much older. I picture him in my head as a bearded student.

"You are an American citizen?"

"Yes."

"Where is your passport?"

I feel incongruously as if I'm being interviewed by a customs officer. "It's at my uncle's apartment. I didn't think I should carry it on the streets."

"Why are you here?"

I almost say, in confusion and anger: Because you brought me here. But of course he must mean why am I in Lebanon. "I'm just visiting... for a week. I'm visiting my uncle and helping out at a school while I'm here—a school for Muslim children," I think to add, hoping this will make them friendlier toward me. I name the school.

"You are a teacher?" Instantly, I decide that it's simplest to say yes, rather than have to explain what a graduate teaching fellow is. "What do you teach?"

"English." Again, a simpler answer than "freshman composition."

He says something in Arabic to the others. He sounds like he may be amused. "Perhaps you could teach English to these men here," he tells me.

I'm pretty sure he's toying with me, but I decide to respond as if it's a serious suggestion. "Yes, I could do that, if they'd like." If I'm helpful, maybe things will be easier for me.

"We'll see," says the man in a tone of voice that suggests he's not taking my offer seriously at all. "How many times have you been in Lebanon?"

"This is my first visit."

"What a visit," he says in that amused tone again. Suddenly, I hate him. I wish I could kill him.

He asks me more questions—where in the United States do I live, where do I work? I name the university. Do I work for the government? I hesitate because it occurs to me that since I teach at a state school, I am a kind of government employee. He pounces on my hesitation, thinking he's uncovered something, and it takes me several tense minutes to explain, with him constantly interrupting to challenge me with new, escalating suspicions. I have the feeling, a sheerly blind impression, that the prolonged, aggressive exchange is making the men around us tense as well, and their tension unnerves me further. When my interrogator asks, "Are you CIA?" I practically shout my denial. I am literally shaking with terror.

"Are you afraid?" he asks me.

"Yes."

"Have you been telling the truth?"

"Yes!"

"Then why are you afraid?"

"Because I'm afraid you don't believe me." I'm on the very brink of crying.

"Don't be afraid. You will be fine as long as you do what we tell you. No more questions for now. Take off your clothes."

For a second, the fear that I'm going to be tortured—or raped—springs into my mind, but I immediately beat it away. He said no more questions, so no torture... I'm a prisoner, so they're going to give me a uniform... Or maybe, since they suspect I might be with the CIA, they want to search me for whatever they imagine a CIA agent would be hiding...

With still trembling hands, I remove my button-up shirt. I pull my white t-shirt over my head, working carefully around the blindfold with someone's help. I lower and step out of my pants. Someone takes each item of clothing from me as I remove it. When I start to peel off my socks, the interrogator says, "No, leave them." I hope that means he's also going to let me keep my underwear. He does, thankfully. As it is, I already feel extremely vulnerable. I shiver, both from fear and from the chill of standing nearly naked in a concrete basement.

They give me button-up pajamas to put on. My hostage's uniform. As I dress, I am asked if I have any health conditions that require medication. The question is unexpectedly clinical, professional. My pajama top has a breast pocket, which someone tucks something into. "What's that?" I ask, startled. "Your glasses," the English speaker tells me. I'm surprised to get them back. They don't return anything else they took from me.

The English speaker then explains the rules of my captivity. They do not intend to hurt me, as long as I obey the rules. I will be able to go home as soon as certain demands have been met. They do not know how long that will be. I must be patient. I should not ask questions. During this time, my job is to be calm and quiet and not make problems. (He does not tell me what they are demanding for my release, and although I very much want to know, I have just been forbidden to ask.)

The most important rule is that I must always wear my blindfold whenever anyone is around. I can lift it up when I am alone, but I must lower it as soon as I hear someone coming. If I ever see the face of one of my captors, they will have to kill me. Matter-of-factly, he specifies the means: they will shoot me in the head. Do I understand? Yes, I reply, my heart pounding. I understand.

The other rules he gives me are less dire. They are the guidelines by which my life here will be structured. I will be fed twice a day. I must eat everything they give me. I will be escorted to the bathroom once a day. I will have a bottle of water in my cell for drinking and another bottle I can use to pee into. He calls it my pee bottle. I must carry the pee bottle with me whenever I am taken to the bathroom, to empty it and rinse it out. I must not drink the water from the bathroom tap because it is unsafe; they will refill my drinking bottle with potable water every morning. I will shower only when told.

I will find a "tub" in my cell, he tells me. It turns out to be a small plastic tub of the kind used to bathe babies. This tub holds my new possessions: a toothbrush, toothpaste, package of tissues, cigarettes, matches, a plastic bowl and eating utensils, a small plastic bag for garbage. I am to keep my cell neat. I am forbidden to make noise. I am forbidden to try to communicate with people in other cells. I am forbidden to try to look out of my cell.

He does not ask me if I have questions, only if I understand. Yes, I understand.

I am led to a metal door, which opens on heavy, creaky hinges. We descend a few steps, stumblingly on my part. As we descend, a guard lowers my head and keeps holding it down, as if to prevent me from striking something above me. Immediately after coming down the stairs, they turn me to the right. I hear another metal door being opened in front of me. I am brought into my cell. I encounter a thin mattress lying on the floor; they sit me down on it. I am left alone.

When I hear the guards walking away, I pry the blindfold up onto my forehead to see where I am. I reach to my breast pocket, but my first glance at my surroundings reveals that I'm not going to need my glasses in quarters as close as these. I am in a tiny, cubical cell, containing nothing but the mattress, a folded-up blanket, the two promised bottles, and the plastic tub. The ceiling is very low; my head comes just short of touching it when I stand. Floor, walls, and ceiling are covered in white tile, which in turn is coated in dust and grime and mold stains. The mattress is flush against the side wall farthest from the narrow door; the mattress barely fits between the front and back of the cell. There is a gap, a walking space, maybe three feet wide between the mattress and the opposite wall.

Light enters the cell from outside through a foot-high gap at the top of the door, broken up with bars. A little more light filters in through a circle that has been cut into the lower half of the door; inside that circle is a grill-covered fan. There is a weak fluorescent quality to the light. If I peeked out through either the barred gap or the grill of the fan, I could see what is outside the cell. But that is against the rules, and I intend to obey the rules to the letter.

The first metal door that they opened when they brought me down the stairs to my cell has not been closed, so I can still hear the television playing in the other room, not far away to my left. The television competes with another sound: a roar, like an air conditioning unit, coming from somewhere off to my right.

I transfer my glasses from my pocket to the plastic tub for safekeeping. Then I lie on the mattress and curl up into a ball. After a while, I start to cry. My sobs become heavier and louder. It's stress release, my whole body is shaking. My sobs must be carrying into the other room, because someone comes down the stairs and pounds on my cell door, shouting harshly in Arabic. I'm making noise, I'm breaking the rules... For a couple of minutes, I'm able to restrain myself to quiet weeping, but then I lose control and start sobbing loudly again.

I hear the door opening. At the last second, I remember to pull down the blindfold. I sit up, terrified but unable to stop crying. I sense a single man come into the room. He squats down. I steel myself, expecting him to hit me.

Instead, he puts a heavy but gentle hand on my shoulder. "Shhh," he says. As if consoling a child. "Shhh. No good. No good." His voice is deep, his accent thick. Later I will wonder if he might have young children whom he comforts like this at home. His unexpected kindness overwhelms me—an entirely different reason to start crying. But I hold my breath and get myself under control as he keeps shushing me, his hand still resting on my shoulder.

When I've stopped crying, he puts something in my hand: a small drinking glass, very warm to the touch, with a metal handle. "Eat," he tells me. A tentative sip reveals that he's given me tea. I don't want it, but again I'm grateful for the intended kindness. In any case, I don't feel I have a choice. I try to sip the hot drink down as quickly as I can. I feel awkward drinking with the guard watching me, and I don't want him to become displeased by a long wait.

The guard takes the empty glass. Then he pushes me, gently but firmly, down onto the mattress. "Sleep." I have no idea of the time—they took my watch from me in the van—but I figure it can't be more than a couple of hours, at most, since I was kidnapped, which means that it's still the middle of the morning. Maybe "sleep" is the closest he knows to telling me, in English, to lie down. Or maybe he really is suggesting that I sleep, and maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to try. Maybe, it now occurs to me, the tea was drugged.

The guard strokes my head before he leaves. The physical contact was comforting, and in a while I find myself wishing he would come back and touch me again. In later days, when I'm relatively calmer and start reflecting philosophically about my ongoing experience because I have nothing else to do, I will realize that I've just had my first lesson in the perversity of being a captive in solitary confinement: If I want comfort and support from some source outside myself, I can only get it from the same people who are responsible for keeping me miserable.