JOHNNY GONE DOWN (8 page)

At first, I had been consumed with regret for giving Sam my passport. He belonged here, I thought, not me - it had been his idea to come to this wretched place. I held an irrational grievance
against the hippies, whom Ishmael and I had helped escape from the airport - they should have been here with me, I thought, instead of sharing their story at cocktail parties as they must be doing now. I had raged against the madness of the Khmer Rouge, who had locked us up for no reason at all - we weren’t enemies of the revolution, we didn’t care whether it was good or bad, we didn’t even know anything about it. Most of all, I blamed myself for the wrong choices that had led me here - abandoning India to study at MIT, agreeing to Sam’s Cambodian vacation, and holding on to life when it was so much easier to slip away.

Now, I thought nothing, I felt nothing. If Ishmael had learned to accept, so would I.

Months passed, maybe years. Time meant nothing in that small, dark cell where I lay, tied by my hand to a wall. I slipped in and out of consciousness, my thoughts coherent for only brief periods of time after I drank my bowl of rice gruel. When awake, I would try to imbue my day with some meaning by remembering equations from fluid mechanics or reciting passages from Milton’s poems. I tried to make myself indifferent to the pain, although sometimes when a sudden movement made the manacle press harder against the gash on my wrist or my decaying teeth began to slowly break away from
my gums, I would give in to the impulse of screaming silently until I collapsed. For the most part though, I waited, either for death or for a chance to escape, both options equally appealing - and unattainable.

After an eternity, they came for me. Two men, perhaps the same ones who had taken Ishmael - though I wasn’t conscious enough either then or now to be sure - untied the manacle that had bound me for months. They lifted me to my feet and dragged me out of my cell. I was escorted through the darkness, past a row of small box-like cells similar to mine, and out of a door which I had often heard opening and closing. It brought in flickers of light into my cell in the mornings and shadows in the evenings.

The sharp glare of daylight hit me like a lightning bolt, and I stumbled. They caught me, not unkindly, and I glanced gratefully at their blank faces. I took in a breath of fresh air and felt suddenly, irrationally elated. Down a flight of stairs we went, into a small but well-lit room with crumbling walls.

A thin man sat on a chair in the centre of the room with a desk full of files, papers and journals in front of him. He looked up on seeing me enter, and squinted.

He said something to me in Khmer.

I tried to decipher if it was a greeting, a command or a question but his tone was flat and expressionless.
I bowed my head to indicate my respect. He walked over to me, and I tried not to look down at him -which wasn’t difficult as I seemed to have shrunk to half my size.

He said something again.

‘English?’ I said tentatively.

‘Confession,’ he said in a sharp, high-pitched tone, and rattled off a string of Khmer.

‘What confession?’ I said, confused.

He raised his eyebrows and one of the men stepped in front of me. Before I could react, he hit me in the face - not hard, a mere tap - but I was so weak that I crashed to the floor. I heard bone crushing against bone but felt no pain.

‘Confession,’ he screamed again, followed by another string of Khmer.

I tried to sit up. For the first time in months, I saw my body in daylight. I had been reduced to a skeleton, the skin hanging from my bones like a loose coat on a hanger. Scabs, bruises and cuts covered every inch.

‘What should I confess to?’ I cried out.

He raised his eyebrows again, and the second man kicked me in the ribs. This time I felt a hollow pain spread through my body, magnifying as it went up, and almost exploding in my chest. I took a second to catch my breath. I knew I wouldn’t last much longer if this continued.

I was about to plead with them to stop when
Ishmael’s words flashed through my mind. ‘Just tell them something.’

This was what he had meant.

Like me, he must have been asked to confess and had been beaten to death because he didn’t know what to confess to.

‘I’m a spy,’ I said suddenly. ‘American spy,’ I added.

If I was a foreigner, I was probably expected to have plotted against the Khmer Rouge, I reasoned quite astutely for someone as fucked up as I was. Ishmael had said they hated Americans, so being an American spy was probably the most shocking confession I could make.

I looked tentatively at my interrogator, wondering if I had overstepped my boundaries.

He went back to his chair and the men came towards me.

I cowered in fear, but they picked me up and placed me on the chair opposite him.

‘Confession,’ he said again with a new gleam in his eyes.

‘I work for the CIA,’ I said with renewed confidence. ‘CIA,’ I emphasized.

His eyes widened. With luck, I thought, I could convince him I was the biggest traitor Cambodia had ever seen. And then what? He would probably execute me swiftly, without torture. I cheered silently at the prospect. He probably knew only a few words
of English, so I decided to choose the ones with the maximum impact.

‘Kill Cambodian farmers,’ I said. ‘End communism. Kill them all.’

His face lit up. Perhaps this was the first confession he had heard; the other hapless prisoners must have denied their involvement vehemently, as I too, would have done if I hadn’t been warned by Ishmael.

‘Fuck Pol Pot,’ I said.

His eyes widened.

‘Fuck Pol Pot,’ I repeated, feeling faint from the exertion of speaking after so long. ‘Kill that bastard.’

I had run out of things to say, given my limited knowledge of Cambodian history and the dizziness that had overcome me.

‘Down with the Khmer Rouge. Motherfucking dog fuckers,’ I said with all my remnant energy.

I seemed to have done my job. He barked out an order to his men.

Finally, I thought, escape to a hopefully kinder afterworld.

I prayed for it to be swift. A shot in the back of the head, perhaps, or a sudden twist of the neck.

Instead, they grabbed me by my arms and dragged me outside.

I blinked in the harsh daylight as they took me through an open courtyard and into a jeep with logs of wood piled high in the back.

They gestured for me to get in.

I knew better than to ask, and slowly clambered into the back. My swollen belly hit against the edge of a log, and I sprawled face down on the pile. They tied my wounded left wrist to the partition between the driver’s side and the back of the jeep. The steel scraped against my wound, still raw from the manacle, and I moaned. As the jeep began to move, I forced myself to stay conscious to take in the first view of the place where I had spent the last several months - or years. It looked like a… a school. Yes, it was a school, I realized. The garden was actually a playground with the remnants of a soccer goalpost. The classrooms in the yellow brick building had been converted into holding cells, one of which had been my home, and the man who had just interrogated me sat in what was probably the principal’s office. They had converted a school into a torture chamber for the educated bourgeoisie - did they even see the irony of this wonderfully symbolic gesture? I chuckled, and realized that I was slowly going insane. Ravaged by starvation, a wrist that had been all but sawed off, crippled by pain as the wood struck against my brittle bones, and on my way to certain execution - yet, I was tickled by the unintended irony.

We began crawling through the city of Phnom Penh. Abandoned cafés on the roadside, factories that had closed down, deserted buildings, damaged
vehicles, rubble, tires and skeletons; no living being in sight, not even a dog, except a few vultures that hovered around the decaying bodies strewn along the sides of the road. The jeep continued its bumpy ride through the debris-strewn dirt tracks, and soon the city gave way to the vast, empty countryside. I remembered Ishmael talking about the forced movement of people to the villages. Perhaps I was being taken there, I thought, and felt a little cheerful. I would prefer to die in the open than in that airless cell, wallowing in my own shit. The steady rumble of the jeep lulled me out of consciousness.

I woke with a sharp pain in my side. Daylight had given way to dusk and the jeep had entered a forested area with deep valleys on both sides of the road. The road became less bumpy but the turns became sharper. We swerved dangerously with every turn; again and again, I was thrown about on the wooden logs.

The jeep took a sudden, sharp turn as we entered an even thicker forest. I was thrown to the other end and banged my head against the opaque front partition. Painfully, I tried to adjust my body and realized that the manacle which tied my wrist to the partition had come loose. I didn’t plan what I did next, I didn’t even actively think about it; I just did it.

Scrambling to the edge of the logs, I jumped out
of the speeding jeep as it navigated its next sharp turn. Down I fell, maybe twenty feet, and landed with a deafening splash in a shallow stream. For a second, I just lay face down in the cold water in disbelief. The water rose up my mouth and nose, and sputtering, I raised my head and looked around. I couldn’t see anyone in the stream, or in the forests on either side. I looked up at the road. The jeep didn’t seem to have stopped. If they hadn’t heard me, it would take a while for them to notice my absence. The logs were piled high and they could neither see nor hear me, nor had they shown any inclination to stop during the journey.

I was free.
I am free
, I repeated to myself, still in shock. A sudden thought struck me. There was only one forest indicated in the Cambodian map, which meant that this was the forest that bordered Thailand. After months of darkness, I could see a tantalizing ray of light in the distance - elusive, but suddenly attainable. I could escape, I thought with sudden resolve. But first, I needed to get out of sight. Slowly, I picked myself up and began to wade towards the bank - and fell in the water.

Come on, Nick, you can do this.

I picked myself up again - and fell. Again and again, I tried and kept falling. I began to cry in frustration. Just months ago, I used to run ten miles a day at soccer practice; now, I couldn’t even muster the energy to walk three feet.

Those bastards could come back any moment.

Think, boy, think, I told myself.
Mens et Manus
, Mind and Hand - the MIT slogan. Use your mind if the body doesn’t listen. I summoned all my energy to get up again, and collapsed once more. This wasn’t working. I tried to drag myself out of the stream. Slowly, painfully, stumbling on the sharp-edged stones, I began to crawl my way to the bank, almost willing the Khmer Rouge lackeys to retrace their steps and put me out of my misery. With a last burst of effort, I dragged myself to the edge of the stream. I slipped out of consciousness when I reached the bushes.

I woke after an eternity, delirious and uncomprehending. I had missed the final examination at MIT because of soccer practice, I thought with a sinking sensation. Why were these dark, angry mosquitoes feasting on me in the soccer field? Coach, coach, I shouted, these plants are eating me. I tried to push the branches away, but there were so many of them, just so many of them… I slipped away again.