Captivity (20 page)

The car slows to a crawl, bounces through a rough patch of road, turns right onto smooth pavement, accelerates to highway speed and joins the honking stream of Baghdad traffic. I rub my head against the rug floor of the trunk and push my hat above my eyes. I lift my head and look around. It’s pitch-black except for a pinhole of light near
what I think must be the key lock. I attempt to slide my hat back down over my eyes but I can’t get it to return to the same position. I eventually give up and hope they won’t notice.

The car is in stop-and-go traffic. We must be approaching a checkpoint. I ready myself to pound and scream if I hear an official-sounding voice. I don’t get the chance. We’re accelerating again. How long has it been? Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes? Half an hour? I’ve lost all sense of time. On a far horizon within me, I see a gathering storm of desperation.
Stay calm, you have to stay calm
, a voice within me says. I concentrate on the music.

The car stops again. Cars rush past. Have we stopped on the shoulder of the road? A door on the passenger side opens and closes. There are two voices right outside. What’s happening? I go to full-body alert. My mind starts racing. I force myself to breathe. Is this the time? Should I kick and yell and scream for dear life? What if it’s an accomplice? They’ll ignore me and punish me later. What if it’s an innocent bystander? I’ll put his life, and mine, at risk. What if it’s a police officer? I might provoke a firefight. The decision is wrenching. I remain still.

The door slams and we’re moving again. The storm is closer now, moving in, a furious, air-shattering maelstrom.
No
, the voice says, breathe,
stay calm
. I focus on the radio. The DJ is a woman. Her voice is throaty, tough, slightly nasal. She’s dedicating a song to a group of soldiers who collected teddy bears and toys for a Baghdad orphanage.

The car stops again and a door slams. The air is suddenly close. I can’t breathe. Panic washes over me. My heart feels as if it’s going to explode out of my chest. I use my head to push my hat above my eyes again. My whole body is trembling. The car turns and stops abruptly. The engine goes off. Doors open and close. I’m a wild animal on the brink of rampage. The trunk clicks open. Suddenly there’s light and air. I’m immediately calm.

Two hands reach in, lift, swing me out of the trunk. It’s Great Big Man. My legs find ground and stand. He pushes me down and puts his index finger across his lips—the sign to be quiet. He’s giggling. I take a quick look around. We’re outside a house with white plaster and
big windows, in a yard with a palm tree, bushes, grass. Medicine Man shouts to him from a door at the top of the driveway. We’re suddenly running, hunched low, Great Big Man’s hand on my shoulder. He’s laughing. We enter the house and turn right. He signals me to stand. We pass through a kitchen into a grand hallway. There’s a room directly in front of me with an open door. Is that where I’m being taken? No. He turns me to the left, directs me up a flight of stairs into a spacious central landing and aims me towards the one open door.

I step into the room. There’s a smell that makes me want to pinch my nose—sad, stale, rancid, despairing. Ahead of me, a window barricaded with chairs, boxes, piles of junk, stained bedsheet curtains. There’s someone behind me. I turn around. It’s Norman and Tom, sitting on chairs against the wall. They’re pasty, haggard, cadaverous, their faces grizzled with unshaved beard, eyes dull and lifeless. They see me, I think.

“Tom! Norman! Am I ever glad to see you guys!” I burst out. They sit like grey statues, unable to move or speak. “Are you guys okay?”

“Jim,” Norman manages to say. Opening his mouth seems to be an effort.

“We thought … you had been released,” Tom says, speaking in slow motion. They both look pained.

“No, no such luck,” I say with a laugh. Neither of them smiles. “We didn’t know what happened to you guys. We thought maybe … Well, it’s just really good to see you again. Really really good.”

“We thought you had been released,” Norman says. There’s dismay in his voice.

“Are you guys okay?”

They nod. I wonder if I look like them and just don’t know it. I have no idea how captivity is affecting me.

Junior enters the room. “Doctor! Thomas! Okay?” he says, a big smile on his face.

“Hello,” Norman mumbles. “We haven’t seen you in a while.”

“
Salam alakum
,” Tom says. Junior bristles at his greeting.

“One big happy family all together again,” I say.

Great Big Man unlocks my wrists. I stretch and arch my back. He pulls a chair out of the jumble in front of the window and places it
next to Norman. Tom is locked by the wrist to a chain that’s padlocked around the door’s cantilever handles. Norman is handcuffed to him. Neither of them is wearing shoes. I sit down. Great Big Man handcuffs me to Norman.

“Just like old times,” I say when the captors leave.

“Quite,” Norman says. “Where’s Harmeet?”

“Back at the other house,” I tell them. “The captors took me in the trunk of a car, said they’ll bring him next.” They nod. “How have they been treating you?” I want to know everything.

Pretty much the same as at the first house, they say. The first night, they slept in a room downstairs. Otherwise they’ve been here the whole time, guarded by the big man. So far he’s been treating them well. Unlike Junior, he’s calm and steady. When he gets bored, he goes rummaging around the house and brings them things to identify. Little bottles of shampoo. A whisk. A coffee press. Oven cleaner. There’s another captor too. He’s only stuck his head in the door once, just for a second. He seems shy, almost timid, as if he doesn’t want to be here. They think maybe he cooks the food. They’ve been getting three hamburgers a day. Just like us, I say. Sometimes they put a tomato in it. They got macaroni once, and eggs once. No fair, I say.

I ask if they’ve seen Medicine Man. Once, Norman says. Twice, Tom says. Each time they were videoed.

“It was only once,” Norman insists.

“No, it was twice,” Tom says. “Remember, the first time it was in the room downstairs. They made us wear jumpsuits. And the next day they filmed us again, in the bathroom downstairs, blindfolded, with chains around our wrists, in jumpsuits again. Remember?”

“No, I don’t,” Norman says.

“Oh my God! That must have been terrifying,” I say.

“I don’t remember that, and I don’t care to,” Norman says.

The room falls silent. “Any sign of our shoes?” I ask. No. “What about sleeping?” They sleep right in the room, on the futon heaped against the chairs and the thin cotton mat lying on top of it. “And the bathroom?” It’s across the foyer, Norman explains. It has a Western-style toilet and
bathtub. The toilet has no running water. The big man lets them go as often as they need to. They point to a filmy one-litre plastic water bottle and two stainless steel cups. They can drink as much water as they want.

We can’t believe it, they say again and again. We thought for sure you’d been released. Their faces are dull and vacant. It’s as if they’re in shock or wearing masks.

I turn my attention to the room. The walls are a soft pink, the ceiling baby blue. I wonder if it might have belonged to a little girl. The floor is eleven pebble-speckle tiles wide and sixteen long. Each tile is a square foot. The window is seven feet wide and four feet high. The left half of the window is covered by a swath of heavy-woven olive green fabric, the right by an unwashed floral-print bedsheet swarming with brown stains. The windows are covered with vertical bars.

Long jagged strips of paint hang from the ceiling. The plaster above the window and along the walls is extensively water damaged. To the right of the window, in the blistered paint and crumbling plaster, I see a figure with a powerful torso jumping up with one arm above his head. A man reaching for freedom. I wonder if Tom and Norman have seen it too.

I count ten wooden chairs in the barricade in front of the window, many of them with broken thwarts or missing seats. In the left corner of the room there’s an imperial-looking throne chair with hand-carved arms and legs. Sitting on the chair is a three-foot-long, two-foot-wide aluminum light fixture with a light bulb the size of an ostrich egg. Poking out of cardboard boxes that are piled on top of and jammed underneath the chairs, a strange assortment of odds and ends: a flattened soccer ball, a dark room clock, a Polaroid camera, floor tiles, videocassettes, a red velvet–sided treasure box decorated with a lion’s head. Things that have nowhere else to belong.

“What’s that thing over there?” I point to a brown, boxy piece of furniture at the edge of the barricade.

“It’s a hostess trolley,” Norman says. “If you open up the top, you’ll see where you can put trays of food to keep warm. It’s only useful
if you do a lot of entertaining. Something the previous occupants must have done a lot of, judging by the size of this house.”

“What about that?” I ask, pointing to a cube covered with grey carpet, two-feet high and a foot and a half square.

“We’re not sure,” Tom says. “When we asked the big man, he kept saying
zowagi, zowagi
and imitated a woman putting on lipstick. We think it’s something a woman must sit on at a dressing table.”

I wonder whose house it is, and if they have any idea what it’s being used for now. Tom says hundreds of thousands have left the country—anybody with financial means. The houses they leave behind are taken over by insurgents. Who’s going to know, much less question, whether or not the occupants of a house have a right to be there—especially under the current circumstances, when asking questions can get you killed.

We hear a vehicle pulling up the driveway, voices under the window, a door below us opening and closing, a high-pitched gurgling laugh. “That sounds like Medicine Man,” I say.

Junior enters the room first, followed by Harmeet carrying a massive ball of fiery red blanket, followed in turn by Medicine Man. For a split second Harmeet looks stunned. Then he smiles. “Dudes! Fancy meeting you here.”

“We’ve got to stop meeting this way,” I say. Tom and Norman smile weakly. It’s a restrained reunion.

Harmeet asks Medicine Man what to do with the blanket. Medicine Man points to the floor next to the beanbag. Harmeet drops it on the floor. Yuck. The floor is filthy. I hope that’s not the blanket we’re using tonight.

Junior pulls a chair out of the barricade. “Move,” he says, directing us to shift our chairs to his left. There’s just enough room between the wall and the open door to fit a fourth chair. “Sit down,” he says to Harmeet. He handcuffs Harmeet’s right hand to my left.

“You see? You are all together again. Everyone is fine,” Medicine Man says. “We just have some negotiation with our political arm and you release for the election. We do this to make some announcement
to show we are not the terrorist. One day, two day, and you release, case closed.” He slides one palm over the other in two quick chopping motions. “Okay? You need something?”

Can you get us some toothbrushes? I say. Yes, he will bring a toothbrush.
Four
toothbrushes, I say, one for each of us, in a pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top voice. The idea of having to share one toothbrush horrifies me. He raises his eyes in surprise. You want four toothbrushes? Yes, I say. He smiles indulgently. Something else? he asks.

“We seem to have lost our shoes,” Norman says. Medicine Man turns to Junior. They exchange words. Medicine Man turns back to us. They’re at the other house, he tells us. He will bring them. I fight to disguise my irritation. They’re not there, I say. They disappeared right after Tom and Norman were brought here. Medicine Man and Junior converse then laugh. Okay, he says, I’ll bring you some shoes. “It must be the big man. Maybe he take them to his farm. Something else?”

Tom says he needs medicine for his stomach. Medicine Man asks if there’s a problem with the food. The food is good, Tom says, it’s my stomach that’s bad. He needs an antacid. “What this?” Medicine Man says. Tom offers to write it down for him. Medicine Man searches his pockets—he has no paper. Junior tears a piece of cardboard out of a box in the barricade and hands it to Medicine Man. Medicine Man hands Tom the cardboard and a pen. “Anything else?” We shake our heads. “Okay. I go.”

The kitchen door slams. A car pulls away. I become aware for the first time of the rushing sound of traffic, horns blaring, an occasional shout. The outside world is very close. Only a curtain and a window’s width away. I look at the three men I am locked to, listen to their breathing, their bodies shifting in their chairs.
We’re alive!
“It’s good to see you guys,” I say.

“I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” Tom says. “I wish I could say the same, but I’m not. We really thought you’d been released.”

“How was your trip over?” I ask Harmeet. “What was it like riding in the trunk?”

“The worst part was waiting. The house was so quiet it was creepy. I didn’t know if they were going to come back for me or if I was going
to be left there. I thought about trying to escape, but there wasn’t much I could do locked to the bed, and I didn’t know if there really was a guard outside. They gave me some biscuits and some water, but I didn’t eat them just in case they didn’t come back for me. It seemed to take forever, but it was only a couple hours. I didn’t like it. When Medicine Man and Junior came back, they handcuffed me and made me lie on the floor in the back. I didn’t have to go in the trunk.”

“That’s no fair. Did they blindfold you?”

“No, just the hat over my eyes. I didn’t have my glasses. Medicine Man said if I made any noise or tried to run away, he’d kill me.”

“Did you think about trying to escape?”

“No. There wasn’t much I could do the way my hands were handcuffed.”

Slowly, in tiny, incremental steps, we fashion as best we can a home for ourselves in our paint-peeling room of gloom. One of our first tasks is to make a bed. We fold and tuck the cotton mat against the wall and lay the futon next to it to form an area of mattress wide enough for us to lie side by side. We place two folded-up curtains (giant gun-barrel-grey bolts of dust-reeking fabric) and two “pillows” (filthy brown pancakes I can hardly bring myself to touch) on the floor along the length of the futon to cushion our legs and feet. Later, in January, when we are all-day shivering cold, we will use these pillows to insulate our feet from the floor.