Lebanon Hostage Ch. 04

"He's depressed," I say, followed by a simpler version: "He's very sad."

The guard ignores me. I hear a smack. "Talk," the guard commands Allan. "I talk you, you talk."

Another smack. Suddenly, there's a struggle going on next to me. The guard says something to his partner, and then both guards must have squeezed into the cell, because I'm being squashed into the corner while they struggle to make Allan do whatever they're trying to do—turn him over on his back?—which apparently he is resisting strenuously though silently. No one speaks during the struggle, but I hear more smacking. "Don't hurt him!" I plead, and in response the guard smacks me, which shuts me up.

The struggle ends. "You make problem me, I make problem you," the guard says. He sounds self-satisfied, triumphant. More smacks, to me as well as to Allan. The guards leave. I find Allan in the fetal position with his arms shielding his head.

When the guards arrive for the evening feeding, I am sitting cross-legged on my mattress with both our bowls set out neatly in front of me, in keeping with my renewed discipline. Allan is still lying down with his face to the wall, which probably gives the impression that he's giving the guards the cold shoulder. The movie-quoting guard who smacked us around earlier tells me to tell my friend that he'd better stop making problems.

My heart races. Allan isn't trying to make problems, I tell the guard. He's very sick.

The guard considers that. Sick how? he asks.

Contrary to my earlier resolution, I tell them. It's an impulse decision, which afterward I recognize as a symptom of how isolated and burdened I've felt for the past few days. Allan is very sad, I explain. He doesn't move all day. He doesn't talk to anyone, not to the guards, not to me. He hasn't been eating.

The not moving or talking doesn't produce a reaction from the guards, but the not eating does. How long has Allan not been eating? the guard wants to know. Four days, I tell him. The guard counts from one to four for confirmation that he's understood. He becomes agitated. He accuses me of lying, they know Allan's been eating. I confess that I've been eating Allan's food so that they wouldn't find out. I clarify: it's not that Allan hasn't eatenanyfood during the past four days, just very little. The guard wants to know how much he's been eating, and I do my best to communicate. No sandwiches, maybe this much of his dinner at most.

The guard comes into the cell. I have the impression he's giving Allan a crude physical exam, checking him for fever and the like. I hear him look inside Allan's trash bag, then inside mine. He lifts up the edges of our mattresses as best he can with us on them, as if he's checking underneath. I don't understand this. The guard asks me if Allan "throw food"—he makes a retching noise to clarify—or if he "shit water." Not that I know of, I say, not here in the cell. (Is that what the guard was looking for in the trash and under the mattresses?)

My negative answer puzzles the guard. No? he echoes. Am I sure? Yes, I'm sure. Am I lying? No, I'm not lying. The guard is definitely worried now—and rather angry at me. He orders me not to eat Allan's food anymore, I need to leave it so they can see.

I'm awakened in what feels like the middle of the night by someone opening our cell. I can hear an unusual amount of movement overhead through the floor. My first instinct is panic: Who have they come to beat now? Why are they atourcell?

Since my blindfold isn't down, I keep my eyes closed and don't move, so that whoever's standing in the doorway won't scream at me not to look at him. Someone bends down to the feet of our mattresses, where I left Allan's still mostly full bowl after dinner. Two men talk quietly in Arabic for a while; I think the movie-quoting guard is doing most of the talking.

I decide that what I'm hearing overhead is the weekly shift change. The outgoing shift is explaining about Allan to the incoming shift. Good—the new shift will know he's sick, not just difficult.

I soon regret their knowing. The next morning, after taking me for my toilet run, the guards of the new shift do not return me to our cell. Instead they move me to the one empty cell remaining in the row across the way, between the Beaten Hostage and the Praying Hostage. They transfer my mattress, my blanket, and my tub; I'm already carrying my bottles because of the toilet run. Since I'm also carrying both of Allan's bottles, I explain to the guards—I'm on the verge of tears as I do it—that they need to return his bottles to him. Allan remains alone in the cell next to the bathroom, in quarantine.

Half my new cell is empty space, a gaping horror. I'm not convinced I can survive a return to solitary confinement, even with what Allan has taught me in the past couple of months.

Allan... He has no one to look after him now. Who will clean his pee bottle for him? Who will make sure his drinking bottle gets refilled?

I lie on my mattress, face-up, fighting back tears of fear and despair. I'm tempted to abandon discipline again, curl up on my side, and let myself fall. I take a little pride in the fact that I don't, as well as in the fact that I don't collapse into a full-on cry. But I'm still extremely low.

Later in the day, a single guard enters Allan's cell. Listening at my fan, I hear the guard repeat Allan's name, trying to get him to respond. Confident that it's Makmoud, I take the risk of knocking on my door.

He opens my grate cover and shushes me. "No good, Jérémie," he says in a very quiet voice. I think he sounds sad. At least, I'd like to think that.

I stand with my face up against the grate so that I can talk to him as quietly as he's doing. Pointing at myself and then across toward Allan's cell, I ask Makmoud if I can please be with Allan: he's sick, it isn't good for him to be alone.

"Allan no good," Makmoud informs me. "Big problem."

I try again. Yes, I know Allan is no good. That's why I would like to be moved back with him. I want to try to help him with his problem.

Makmoud tells me, "Okay." But it isn't inflected like, "Okay, I'll do it." It's more like, "Hold on a second." He goes back upstairs. A couple minutes later, two men come down into the basement. My grate cover opens again, and a different guard, who speaks a little better English, asks me what I want. I repeat my request yet again.

The guard tells me, "Chef come. Chef say what to do your friend."

A leader is coming? That sounds potentially hopeful. "When will the chef come?"

"Soon."

It's a deliberately uninformative answer, he's just deflecting my question. I'm afraid to push, afraid of making the guard angry. But I'm more afraid of what might happen to Allan if I don't push. "Please—can I be with my friend until the chef comes? He needs someone to help him."

"No. No more talk."

Alone again, I fend off misery by conjuring up optimistic scenarios for the chef's visit. Maybe they'll bring a doctor to see Allan. Maybe... they'll decide to release him on humanitarian grounds. I have extremely conflicted feelings about that imagined possibility.

I pray on my knees. Please God, let Allan get better. Let the chef really come soon. Let them do... whatever is the right thing. Show me what I can do to help.

The chef comes the next day, fairly late in the day. I'm quite certain I recognize his voice as that of the young English speaker who interrogated me in my last prison. The one who threatened me with electrocution. My optimism caves in.

The chef opens Allan's cell, prods him with unsympathetic questions. "What's the matter? Why don't you eat? Are you sick? Answer me."

When he can't get a reply from Allan, the chef crosses the room to talk to me through my grate. "Why is your friend acting like this?"

"He's catatonic." I don't know, for sure, that that term applies to Allan's condition. But I've developed a plan. I'm gambling that if I can convince the chef I know what I'm talking about, he'll move Allan and me back together.

"What?"

"Catatonic—he doesn't move or speak. It's because he's so depressed. He's cut himself off from everything, psychologically."

"Why? What happened?"

Despite my anxiety, I experience a flare of anger, which of course I mustn't let the chef see. I have to explain to you why Allan's depressed? Because he's here—what other reason do you need?

I say, "I'm not sure exactly what triggered it. Probably because there's been... an unusual amount of stress lately."

"How long has he been acting this way?" That's the second time in this conversation that the chef has referred to Allan as "acting." The word rankles and therefore jumps out at me.

Six days, I reply.

"For six days, he does not eat?"

"Yes, that's correct." This time, Idon'tclarify that Allan has been eating but only very little. Since not eating is the only aspect of Allan's condition that seems to worry them, I don't want to minimize it in any way.

"Why won't he eat? What does he want?"

I'm bewildered by the question. Our captors have to have seen depression before, in other hostages. Me, for one. Do they actually think we're just being obstinate? "He isn't doing this by choice," I tell the chef. "He's depressed. He's not in his right mind. He... doesn't care about living anymore."

I hadn't thought about Allan's condition in quite those terms until this very moment. The words drive home for me, at a new level, the horror of the situation.

"He is trying to kill himself?" the chef asks. His blasé tone disturbs me. Are suicide attempts commonplace among the hostages?

"No—not deliberately. He doesn'twantto do anything. That's why he's not moving or talking." I'm frustrated, I don't know how else to explain. "He isn't really thinking about what he's doing. He's just very, very sad."

"His behavior is not acceptable." The chef talks as if this is a question of disciplining a recalcitrant child. "If he is not sick, he must stop acting like this. He must eat, and he must cooperate."

"Heissick—he's depressed. He's not physically sick. It's psychological."

The chef isn't budging. "If he does not cooperate, he will be beaten."

A nightmare flashback: the endless thuds, the screaming... I've been tense from the start of this conversation; my frustration has been mounting; now terror and desperation make me snap. My voice comes out as a screech. "How is that supposed to help? If you don't want him to be depressed, then you shouldn't make him live like this. Look at how we are living! We are trying to do this the best we can—but it is very hard!"

I have to stop talking to keep myself from crying, and in the pause I have time to be afraid of the way I'm talking to the chef. I can hear him breathing angrily, inches away. I'm thankful there's a mesh grate and a locked door between us, but of course that could change at any second.

I switch to a humbler, beseeching tone: "I'm sorry. Please don't hurt him. Give him time. Let me be with him—please. I'll get him to eat. I'll try to... cheer him up. But if you leave him locked up by himself, he isn't going to get better."

Despite my best effort, tears are rolling out from under my blindfold. The shame of knowing that the chef can see my tears is the least of my concerns right now; still, I wish it wasn't happening. I stand by the grate, shoulders trembling, ejecting my breath through my nostrils in tiny pulses as I hold myself back from crying any harder than I am.

The chef doesn't say anything. For several nerve-wracking seconds more, he just stands there, breathing fiercely. Then he covers my grate, steps away from my door. I retreat to my mattress, frightened of what's going to happen to Allan if he doesn't come around quickly, and frightened of what could happen to me now that I've angered the chef.

Before he leaves, the chef checks in on the Beaten Hostage, next door to me. The hostage has recovered to a point where he sounds aggrieved rather than suffering. The conversation is sharp on both ends. The hostage protests that he didn't deserve to be beaten, he didn't do what they think he did. The chef cuts him off: He doesn't want to hear that anymore, it doesn't matter. The rest of their interview is curt, with the Beaten Hostage asking something (I can't make out what), and the chef telling him no. I now carry the additional burden of thinking that by putting the chef in a foul mood, I may have prevented the Beaten Hostage from receiving some request that would have improved his conditions.

After the chef and the guards go back upstairs, someone off to my right taps on his cell door—the Mustached Hostage, probably. I don't know if he's trying to communicate with the Beaten Hostage, or me, or Allan, or the room in general. Then the Beaten Hostage taps several times, not on his door, but on the wall between his cell and mine. A message for me, specifically. I assume he means to be supportive. Or maybe the opposite, come to think of it: maybe he's chewing me out, telling me to bite my tongue when I deal with our captors. How the hell am I supposed to know what he means?

Whatever all this tapping means, my silent reaction is: Shut up, you idiot assholes, the last thing Allan and I need is for you to get the guards any more pissed off!

***

Sometime after we've been fed that evening, all three guards come down into the basement unexpectedly. They open Allan's cell. And mine. Oh God. Are they moving us back together? Or taking us out to beat us?

Someone helps me to my feet. "What's happening?" I ask. I don't expect that they'll answer the question, but I'm too scared not to ask anyway.

"Okay, Jérémie," Makmoud says beside me. His voice is cheerful. "No problem."

They take Allan and me up the stairs, then on into the front part of the house. They're transferring us to another location, I think. Possibilities flash through my head. Is this transfer a punishment? Are they moving us someplace better? Could they be taking Allan to see a doctor, with me going along to explain his condition? Might they even be releasing us?

All wrong. We don't leave the building. They sit us on the floor in a fan-cooled room, side by side, on folded-up blankets for cushions. The guards position themselves behind us. Their voices are a little above our heads, so I imagine they're sitting on a couch.

They give us permission to lift our blindfolds, but we are not to look anywhere except straight ahead. I have to hear it from Makmoud before I believe it. They really do want us to lift our blindfolds, "no problem." A guard with better English, the one who told me the chef was coming, reiterates: Nothing bad will happen as long as we look straight ahead. They have something good to show us. It's starting.Yallah.

Blindfold up. I discover that we are sitting in front of a blank wall—blank, that is, except for two things. A securely shuttered window. And, flush against the wall, a few feet in front of us, a TV with a VCR. The TV is the only activated light source in the room that I'm aware of. The VCR has wound through the blank tape at the beginning of the cassette and is now working its way through the corporate logos that precede the movie.

They show usRambo. The sequel, I guess it must be—he starts in prison, goes back to Vietnam. I don't know one of those films from the other, I don't watch action flicks.

This is the guards' idea of a special treat. They're attempting to cheer Allan up, to boost our morale. I'm amazed. I feel a rush of accomplishment. They listened to me. I took a risk, and it paid off. Thank God. Literally: Thank you, God!

Did the chef order this, or is it the guards' own initiative? Makmoud's idea, maybe? It seems more likely that the guards are following orders. That's what I prefer to believe, anyway: the accomplishment is greater if I persuaded the chef. Pride swells inside my chest. I don't think I've felt this good about myself since my kidnapping.That'smy morale boost, forget the wretched movie.

Rambois not a film I would have chosen to watch. I didn't see it while I was free, it was beneath my interest. Too lowbrow, too violent. Now more than ever, in the present circumstances of my life, I am not inclined to find scenes of violence entertaining. Why our guards think that Allan and I would enjoy watching a film about men who have spent years in captivity, I cannot fathom. Maybe because the captives go home at the end? Or have the guards even thought about that?

At any rate, I want them to think I'm appreciative. Behind me, the guards are loving the film. They jabber and laugh like 13-year-olds as Rambo maims and destroys his enemies. At particularly high-tension moments, I hear them shifting around, getting up; Allan and I must be blocking their view of the action.

It's starting to make sense to me how the same men who are trying to lift our spirits by treating us to entertainment could beat another hostage without compunction.

From time to time, I look over at Allan through the corner of my eye. He's not watching the movie, he's looking toward the ground. But at least he has lifted his blindfold, for the first time in days, and he remains seated instead of trying to curl back up on the floor.

Final credits. Blindfolds down. Makmoud comes up behind us, pumped up from the movie. He squeezes the back of my neck with one hand, I imagine he's squeezing Allan's with the other. His grip is hard, but he means to be friendly. "Okay?Rambogood, yes?"

He wants to know that they cheered us up. "Very good. Yes. Thank you very much," I reply, more enthusiastically than I feel. God, I'm glad that's over. My back aches from sitting so long without support. I'm actually looking forward to getting back to my cell, and my mattress, so I can lie down.

Makmoud steps past us to rewind the video. The whirring of the VCR strikes me as incongruous; that sound doesn't belong in my hostage life, it makes me homesick. Makmoud has turned the TV off, and in the quiet I perceive that the other two guards have left the room. I hear a cell door clang, off in the basement.

From where he's standing by the television, Makmoud asks, "Allan—okay?" His tone is more subdued, less enthusiastic, than it was just a minute ago. Please, Allan, say something. But he doesn't.

I feel I'd better pick up the slack, so I thank Makmoud again, in a more deliberate, intimate tone this time. "Thank you for wanting to help, Makmoud." I give a little extra weight tothank youand also tohelp, thinking he might know that word.

Rather than cheerful, Makmoud's reply is merely polite, maybe even distant. "No problem, Jérémie." I have the impression that he's disappointed—possibly disappointedin us.Allan didn't do what he was supposed to do, he didn't do what my words to the chef may have led them to believe he would do: he didn't cheer up and get better. If showing us the movie was Makmoud's idea, then we have caused him to lose face.

The other two guards return to take Allan and me back to the basement. They put us together in the cell next to the bathroom; my mattress and possessions are there again, waiting. Allan immediately turns his face to the wall. I lie on my back, weeping out of relief that we've been reunited. I hold onto Allan's shoulder, not caring whether or not I'm doing it in an appropriately heterosexual way.

During the night, I wake and am startled to realize that Allan is sitting up, smoking. I sit up next to him. I resist the urge to speak or even to look at him. I don't want to crowd him, but I want to be present. In case there's something he wants from me—that's the selfless reason I'm telling myself. But of course, I also want to be with him becauseIwant to be with him. I've missed him so fucking much. What I really want to do is fling my arms around him and bury my face in the dip where his neck meets his shoulder. Please be back for good, Allan. Stay with me.