Captivity (40 page)
Authors: James Loney
Junior steps back, shocked, eyes wide. I sit down, shaking with rage, ready to kill. He clenches his jaw, threatens me with his fist, deluges me with words I can’t understand.
Go ahead
, I dare him with my eyes,
even in handcuffs I will tear you to shreds
. He mutters something and storms out of the room.
Nephew finishes locking us up. Norman and Harmeet ask him if they can lay the futon out in the middle of the room so I can sleep. “Yes,” he says, “mooshkilla, mooshkilla.” I collapse onto the mattress and fall asleep before Nephew can finish chaining my ankle.
–
The days are a fathomless void and a consuming agony. Prayer is useless. God is dead. There is only suffering without meaning or end. The nights are the worst. I think it’s a dream, but I’m not always sure—Medicine Man wearing a surgical mask and an operating gown, holding a scalpel and a bone cutter, butchering me into scores of little pieces that he lines up in perfect anatomical sequence and tortures with electric prods. Again and again and again.
When Medicine Man does come, I’m not sure he’s really there at first. He bends down to look at me, his face full of concern. I force myself to sit up. “You have some trouble with my man,” he says. “You must to understand. They are the simple man. They do not know these things. This very difficult, very dangerous, they have some stress. I speak to him.”
I ask if there’s any way I can see a doctor. “This may be something,” he says. “We have a doctor who work for us.” I tell him that I need an antibiotic and more acetaminophen. “I bring for you,” he says. The effort of it is too much. I collapse and fall asleep.
When my rage is spent, there is only despair. I turn to it like a drug. I imagine myself at the edge of an abyss. Everything around me is angry and black, bitter and boiling, except for the abyss, which is warm and sweet. I imagine myself sliding away, falling in, a door opening, the current taking me. Enough of this, no need to hang on anymore, all you have to do is let go. Just say yes and everything will be over. Wonderfully, deliciously, intoxicatingly over.
NO!
a voice says. It is like a finger snapping, like a hand flicking a switch. It’s a force completely independent of me. It speaks only once. Something stiffens, takes hold within me, and I know immediately: I am going to live.
Bubble wrap packets of acetaminophen and an antibiotic appear, and a wondrous certainty blossoms like a spring orchard. God is not dead after all.
MARCH 3
DAY 98
Am feeling better. Enough, actually, to declare myself returned to the land of the living. Started a course of antibiotic yesterday that attacks pneumonia—only six pills!
My fever is definitely broken. I awoke this morning without a trace of it and the roundness seems to have come off the swelling in my neck. I had enough energy this morning to do a tiny bit of mild stretching, and some very gentle walking.
My body will recover—fully, I feel I can safely expect—but there’s a “but.” I think, if I haven’t already, I’m at risk of plunging into depression. I
need
to focus on the now, the day, be thankful that I am feeling better, the window is open, birds are singing. There is a cheerful shaft of sunlight illuminating our room. I have two brothers who have been looking after me.
—notebook
MARCH 4
DAY 99
I suddenly understand the Psalms. I never could before, the repeating couplets that yearn and sigh and rail, the interminable laments, the innocent narrator besieged with enemies and afflictions at every turn. I used to yawn and roll my eyes: please, not again, spare me the high spiritual drama and holy persecution complexes. But now I know. The Psalms were never written for ordinary time, the place most of us live in most of the time, the everyday round of getting up in the morning and falling into bed at night, the hours in between cluttered with the thousands of things we have to do to get through the days and the weeks. No, the Psalms were written for the time of anguish and terror, when life is in peril and mercy is all that matters. They cry out for us when we are
in extremis
, facing the final hour alone and without hope, the time when God dies and there is nothing but suffering.
Alas, I do not have a bible. I decide to try and write my own.
My God, my God
,
where have you gone, where can you be?
I speak but you do not hear me
,
I call but you do not see
.
My heart breaks open with crying
,
weeping and gnashing of teeth are its song
.
My spirit rolls in ash
,
anguish has broken my soul
.
The lions come for me
,
their jaws dripping with juices
.
Hyenas circle in the distance
,
eyes watching with greed
.
“Come quickly to my aid,” I cry
.
“My time is at hand!”
But you, riding the heavens by moonbeam
,
are too starfield far to hear
.
Of me there is nothing left
.
I am no more than gnarled bones
,
lost and scattered to the far corners of the earth
shining in the moon’s forlorn light
.
Though you measure the span of the universe
with the span of your finger
,
but of my distress know nothing
,
there is one last question I must ask, O God
,
one thing I must know
.
What of the days of my childhood
,
when on summer days you held my hand
and wild we ran skipping sidewalk free?
What of our visits in secret forest glades
,
the plunge and play in ocean surf
,
the breathtaking climb of wild mountain heights?
What of waiting in the long of the five o’clock grocery line
,
when in every face and every place you shone
,
glory all around?
Your servant is waiting, O God
,
waiting for the light of your face
.
Send forth your chariot now
and come quickly to my aid
.
Deliver me from this grave
,
release me from this tomb
.
Death’s paw is on my throat
and death’s door is open wide
.
Always I have felt it, even as a young child, some sense of God’s presence in my life. In my breath, my heartbeat, the light and breeze around me, even if only as a whisper of a trace, always, always I have felt,
known
God was there. Except for these terrible days when I needed him most.
It has to be the most difficult of all human tasks: making sense of suffering. It confounds me, I don’t know how, I don’t think I
can
make sense of it. I know only it was pure hell and absolute desolation. But today, the feeling I have always known in the deep of my being has returned. God is alive!
I am filled with strange and wonderful tears. Those days when God had died, they are a gift, a window through which I can see what I never could before: how much I love and need God, and how intolerable life would be without him.
MARCH 5
DAY 100
One hundred days of handcuffs and chains. One hundred days of being reduced to this penury of waiting. A grisly milestone indeed. But I am secretly exhilarated. We’ve done it. We’re here. We’ve somehow got this far. As much as the thought sickens me, if I can do this, I can do another one hundred. And if I can do another hundred, I can get through a year.
I decide to commemorate the day with a letter. I think for a long time before I choose my greeting. I finally decide on “My dear Dan.” This should not give away too much.
Despite Norman’s obstinate assertion that this day is just like any other, one hundred days in captivity does seem like a bit of a milestone, significant at least as a marker of deprivation, and the necessity of enduring deprivation. Why, we ought to celebrate, bake a cake, string up balloons, invite people over … but then of course, directions are a bit of a problem, and our existence is a minor anti-state secret, and besides, there’s nowhere for people to sit. It would be easier, too, perhaps even possible to celebrate, if there were some end in sight, but alas there is none. Not even an indication of a clue of a possible day of release. The horizon before us is blue and clear with waiting. The only comfort is that when you get to read this, it all will finally be over, the never-ending immediacy of it vanquished by the hand of time. The time between now and then reaches before us into mystery.
I put down my pen. I can’t do it. Something’s not right. This is not the letter I want to send to Dan. It’s too clever, too glib. What I want is to pour my heart out, acknowledge the suffering this must be for him, tell him how much I miss him. I cannot write such a letter. Not here.
I change tack abruptly. I have been considering this for some time now. A letter of appeal directly to the bosses—the invisible higher-ups who are giving the orders, pulling the strings. Something that says,
Please, let us go. Respectfully: Norman Kember, Harmeet Singh Sooden, James Loney, in absentia Tom Fox
.
It sickens me, how hierarchy displaces responsibility, how the people who have to face us each day, deal with our smells, bring us
our food, see our underwear and socks hanging about drying, they do not feel responsible for what they are doing. They’re just following orders. Someone else, someone above them, someone who doesn’t even know what we look like, they’re the ones who are responsible, the ones who make the decisions. They sit behind their big desks and swivel in their important chairs, never having to look us in the eye, see our fear, smell our degradation. We are safely abstract, little pawns that can be moved around and disposed of without effect. Every hierarchy is like this. It separates the finger that pushes the button from the bomb, the bomb from the blast, the blast from the carnage. It protects those who are responsible from having to face the consequences of what they decide, and absolves those who implement the decision from feeling responsible for what they do.
I think this is why we have never asked, never said it directly:
Please, could you let us go
. It seems futile, to ask the guards or Medicine Man for the return of our freedom, when it’s not their decision. And it is too much to ask. If they are prepared to risk their lives and defy the orders they are obligated to follow, because they are compelled by our humanity and theirs to do the right thing, then so be it. But I cannot ask these men to die for my freedom. They must decide this for themselves.
I begin:
We have been asked to appeal to the governments of the United States, Great Britain and Canada, as well as leaders of various Arab Gulf states, for help in securing our release. As we understand you are the individuals responsible for making decisions about our release, we would like, on this one hundredth day of our captivity, to make a direct appeal to you for our release.
As you know, we came to Iraq on a mission of peace, to build bridges between the people of Iraq and the people of the West, and to try and share with the ordinary people of our countries the stories of ordinary Iraqis in a time of war and occupation. In this way, we wanted to be a small part of turning the tide of public opinion against the
continuing occupation of Iraq by the United States and Great Britain. We remain firm in our convictions and our commitment to peace.
In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate, Lord of every human being—
I am just about to write it, the crucial words,
let us go!
, when Medicine Man arrives. It’s his fourth visit in seven days. He’s becoming a regular. Today he says the Canadian negotiations are strong and on track. The minister of foreign affairs is in touch with their negotiator and he wants the matter completed. It’s just a matter of transferring the money.
The minister of foreign affairs! My hearts thrills with hope. Is that Pierre Pettigrew? I ask.
No, it is something like Mac-kay, he says.
Mackay? Who’s that, I wonder. There must’ve been a cabinet shuffle.
There’s a British lord working on the case, Medicine Man says, the same one who sent the three questions for Norman. “There is some movement, but the British are cold.”
I summon my courage to finally ask it: How much money are they negotiating for? “Two million,” he answers. “Two million, for each of you.”
It’s mind-boggling! “Two million, for each of you.” We are valuable commodities indeed. This means contact has been established with our governments, they know we’re alive and they’re trying to get us out. What remains is securing the agreement and negotiating the logistics of transferring the money. My best guess is that it will take another month.
It sickens me when I realize that Medicine Man made no mention of Tom. I’m beginning to suspect that he’s been killed.
Harmeet is in the middle of his check-in. “I feel we’re quite safe,” he says. “As Medicine Man says, we just have to wait.”
I take a deep breath. Here is confirmation of what I have long suspected, that Harmeet and Norman are in denial about the reality of our
situation. It repulses me, the creeping passivity of captivity, how it infects and corrupts us, like a soothing intoxication, a tranquilizing palliative. There’s nothing you can do, it whispers, the decision is out of your hands, relax and let the current take you, you just have to wait, it’ll be okay, waiting you can do.
NO!
I want to rail and scream. We have to act, get ready, be vigilant for the opportunity whenever it comes. It’s impossible to describe, the dismay, the disgust, the rage it evokes, sitting here, day after day, holding out my hands for them to handcuff, the polite smiling and servile obedience. The cry rises from every molecule in my body.
This is not living! I want to live!
“We are
not
safe,” I interrupt, breaking the golden rule of check-ins. “Not for one minute. We could be raided, things could suddenly deteriorate in the political situation, there could be civil war. The captors could have a change of command. They could be forced to kill us to protect their ongoing operations. Until we get out of here, anything can happen.”
