Authors: James Loney
There’s a sudden hubbub downstairs. Medicine Man is here. We can hear his laughter moving through the house and up the stairway. “Ha ha, chuckle chuckle,” I say.
“ ‘So then I showed them the gun,’ ” Harmeet says. “ ‘Ha ha.’”
When Medicine Man enters, he hands me a DVD. On the cover there’s a picture of a bearded man with soft eyes. “It is some video about
salam
, the Jesus man,” Medicine Man explains. “You will go downstairs to watch it in just five minutes.” He turns to leave. Harmeet asks if there is any news. “No,” Medicine Man says. “Just suddenly you will go. Phone call and go, all together. The British negotiator—and the Canadian—they are both in Baghdad. Like you, I am just waiting.”
What about the video of Norman? Harmeet asks. “We are waiting. They have not answered,” he says. Norman asks if there’s some reason why they’re keeping me and Harmeet if there’s no problem with the Canadian government. “As you know, the American man, Thomas, his government will do nothing. They not care about him. The British are cold. You and you”—he points to Harmeet and me—“you are safe from the beginning. So we have a plan from the beginning to take you
as a group, to make the negotiating together. If we do not have the negotiations, we kill all of you. So we keep you to release together.”
I ask if it would be possible to talk with Tom on the phone.
“Why?” Medicine Man says. “I see him myself, with my own eye. Just today.”
Just a quick call, I counter, so we’ll know he is okay.
“I know that. I see him today.”
“You know that,” I say, unable to contain my rage, “but
I
don’t know that.”
Medicine Man stares at me. “I know that,” he says coldly, his voice slicing like a guillotine. Our eyes lock. My jaw clenches. I want to jump up and wrap my hands around his windpipe.
There’s no way you’re going to win this
, a voice says. I pull myself together, look away, let my shoulders fall.
I hear Norman’s voice cutting in. “You’ve kidnapped me, but it’s more like you’ve kidnapped my wife.” He breaks into tears. “I know that I’m alive, but she doesn’t. She’s the one who’s been kidnapped!”
Medicine Man’s phone rings. He pulls it out of his pocket, looks down, smiles. It’s a text message. “What’s this word, ‘kidnapped’?” he asks, distracted.
“What you’ve done to us!” Norman cries. “You take us from the street, handcuff us, keep us locked up …”
“This means kidnapped?
Makhtoof?”
“Yes. Kid-napped,” Harmeet says.
Medicine Man puts his index finger against the wall. “How do you spell it?” he asks, writing each letter on the wall as Norman says it. “Yes, I see. Kidnapped. I’m sorry, Doctor.”
“You see,” Norman says, almost pleading, “I know that I’m alive, but my wife has no way of knowing.”
Medicine Man’s phone rings again. “Who is sending me another text message?” He looks at his phone and chuckles. “It is my girlfriend.” He puts the phone away. His face turns serious. “But that is why we take the video. She know, Doctor, she know. She give the three questions only you can answer.”
“But has she seen it?” Norman asks.
“The video is gone, Doctor. They have it.” He points to the DVD in my hands. “In five minutes you will go downstairs. I must to go. Good night.”
The guards unlock us and bring us downstairs. We sit on the floor and help ourselves to a small plate of fried potatoes, eating them one at a time with a stale piece of
samoon
. When it’s time for the movie, Nephew and Uncle are excited.
“Issau salam, Issau salam,”
they say. Nephew loads the disc into the player. The room falls silent. I’m tense, fully alert. I have no idea what this narrator is saying or how it might be received by our captors. Uncle points at the screen as Mary is visited by the angel who announces she is going to give birth to a son.
“Haram. La Islam,”
Uncle says. It is forbidden in Islam to show images of God, Jesus, Mohammed or Mary. What’s this? Why are they doing this?
I worry Uncle’s indignation will escalate unpredictably. It doesn’t. He watches closely, muttering periodically as the movie progresses. Nephew looks torturously bored.
The story unfolds. The first disciples are called. Jesus wanders through countryside and village, teaching, giving sight to the blind, healing the sick, exorcising demons. He walks on water, confronts scribe and Pharisee, calls Lazarus out of the tomb, brings life wherever he goes. I imagine his words. “The last shall be first and the first last.” “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you.” “Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me.” My arms shiver electrically. The acting is wooden, Jesus’s eyes are impossibly blue, the special effects are childish—but here it is, the Gospel! The good-news liberation of every human being from every kind of bondage. Somehow it has found us!
Then the inevitable confrontation. Jesus ransacks the outer precinct of the temple. The authorities are enraged. Jesus and the disciples go into hiding, gather around a table for one last supper. This is
my body, Jesus says, do this in memory of me. He is betrayed, arrested, condemned, flogged, crowned with thorns, forced to carry the instrument of his execution in a grisly parade of state power. They strip him naked, nail him to a cross, hoist him into the air.
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
This is crazy, surreal, too much. To be watching the Crucifixion, in an insurgent safe house, in captivity, under the rule of the gun. “We kill all of you,” Medicine Man had said.
Tom! Where are you? How are you enduring all on your own? Or is it much worse? Are you hanging now on a
mujahedeen
cross, shivering and forsaken, called like the suffering servant to a shock absorber of violence, one who carries the wounds of the world in his body? No, please God, not this. Not for Tom. Not for any of us
.
FEBRUARY 22
DAY 89
I’m homesick, depressed. I feel like my spirit is dying and I am sick. Yesterday, last night, and to some extent now, I’m in that weird fever world, where my brain feels tender, swollen, brittle; and everything feels granular, angular, bent, warped out of shape. I feel always on the brink of a chill. I couldn’t bring myself to exercise this morning—the first time since our little morning regime began. My body, my mind just wouldn’t do it.
Last night, Norman said he’d gone back to being in on-hold mode, “which isn’t very useful to you two.” This, I think, is what I need to do as well. Expect nothing. But how
long
can one go on this way, living off the fumes of vague, repeated promises? We have literally been told three, four days since the first week of our captivity. This, more than anything, is what enrages me, being strung along by the nose, jumping like fools through a never-ending succession of empty hoops, trained pets who’ll sit up pretty for a little tidbit of news.
Tomorrow is Medicine Man’s “not more than one week” best guess. I, we, have got to get out of here. The Simonas went six months. The thought sends me sliding into the abyss.
Another
three months! Our lives have been stolen from us. I am in a rage: at myself, CPT, Bush and Blair, this
mujahedeen
group. The
waste
of sitting here, my right hand chained to the door handle, the left handcuffed to Harmeet. I am a seed buried deep in the bowels of the insurgency, a seed of hoping and waiting. God help me. To endure, persist, love. At the very least, deliver me from despair. Give me wings to carry me through these days. Give me the consolation of your presence. Give me a generous spirit so that I may reach out to the suffering of others, the endless host of those whose lives have been stolen by poverty, war, oppression. Give me to know that I am not the only one, that there is a solidarity of suffering in the Body of Christ, that no matter what happens, the cross is not the final word: There is Sunday morning! There is resurrection! There is Release.
Shwaya shwaya
. This too shall pass.
—notebook
Uncle thinks we enjoyed the Jesus video so much, we’re watching it again tonight. As he loads it into the DVD player, Junior asks me what I would do if the United States invaded Canada. He pretends he’s holding a machine gun. Would I not become mujahedeen, “Canada
jaysh?”
he says, pointing at me.
No, I say, I cannot kill anyone, not for any reason. “This
Issa salam,”
I say. I want to explain to him that there are other ways of resisting—there’s the power of non-violence, the power of Gandhi, Dr. King and the Badshah Khan—but where to begin, how to find the words!
“Majnoon, majnoon,”
he says, laughing and making circles with his finger at his temple.
FEBRUARY 23
DAY 90
It is Junior who comes to unlock us in the morning. Harmeet tells him it is his sister’s birthday today. Junior nods sadly. His sister is very sick,
he tells us, the doctors can’t help her. To comfort him, Harmeet says he is sorry, we will pray for her today.
Inshallah
, you will be out for your sister’s next birthday, Junior says to Harmeet. He rubs his left buttock and complains of intense pain. Why? he asks me.
I don’t know. Could it be from driving?
Yes, back and forth to Fallujah every day. Too much driving, he says.
Junior has not been watching Tom at the first house then. Tom, what is happening to you? It’s been eleven days!
When they bring us downstairs, I immediately lie on the floor and close my eyes. I don’t care about the filth of the rug or what the captors might say. I’m desperate to rest my body. I hear Harmeet explaining to Junior that I am sick. “I am sorry,” Junior says to me.
“Bacher duwa, bacher duwa,”
he promises.
Harmeet lends me his sweater for a pillow. Norman gives Harmeet his tweed jacket and Harmeet covers me with it. I surf through the evening on waves of sleep and the babble of television, dimly aware of Junior whispering fervently on his prayer mat.
The captors have left. The door is closed. The darkness is a relief.
Dear God
, I pray,
help me. I can’t stand it here anymore. I want to go home. You order the stars and set the planets on their courses. Please, return us to our lives, our families, our loved ones
.
The image of Junior praying for his sister strikes me like a thunderbolt. We are both praying to the same God! How can this be, when I am in handcuffs and Junior holds the key, when he is the oppressor and I am the one he oppresses? Is it possible that God can hear both our prayers at the same time? Who is this God we are praying to, lord of innumerable worlds and the incomprehensible reach of the universe? My mind whirls at the inexplicability of it and I fall into the sweet oblivion of sleep.
FEBRUARY 24
DAY 91
It was a strange night. Felt as if I didn’t sleep at all. How to describe it? Low fever incoherencies. My head and my body thoroughly inhospitable, both squeezing, trying to expel my consciousness. Sometime after dawn, I woke up sweat-soaked, and I felt normal—the greatest feeling in the world! I have little mental energy for writing. Another day of no exercises, save some slow walk-shuffling and climbing the stairs a few times.
News from Uncle. Clashes between Shia and Sunni. In Baghdad, Najaf, everywhere. Two days ago, he tells us, a Sunni mosque that was being fixed was bombed. No one was killed. A Jewish, American, Iranian conspiracy. Shia are not Muslims.
Yes, Shia are Muslims, I say.
They are
noos
Muslim, Uncle says. Only half Muslim.
I have Shia friends—they are Muslim.
He’s surprised.
Shwakit? Kadim?
Before or now? What do you want for lunch? Potato cooked in oil?
La
oil. Bad for the stomach. Every day oil.
—notebook
FEBRUARY 25
DAY 92
The sound of martial law in Baghdad. No car horns, no arguments in the street, no donkeys clopping, no ping-ping-ping of propane vendors passing by. According to Junior, 141 Shia were killed in yesterday’s clashes. We ask him how many Sunni were killed. None, he says, smirking. It’s the newest nightmare scenario: civil war, armed chaos and complete social breakdown making delicate ransom negotiations impossible and exponentially increasing the risk of holding on to three hostage assets.
Baghdad falls silent and I fall into a netherworld of fever. Everything offends and provokes. Harmeet’s unfailing politeness, his wiggling toes, the crinkle of his copy book as he flips back and forth through its finger-soiled pages. Norman’s incessant gastro-eruptions, all-exactly-the-same-sounding, his fussiness of movement. I’m deathly irritable,
sensitive, volatile, capable of spontaneously combusting with rage. I lose track of time. Nothing coheres or matters. The only thing I know is self-pity or rage.
During a break in the curfew, Medicine Man appears with a video camera. He wants us to make an appeal to the leaders of the Gulf Arab States—Sheik Khalifa, Prince of Benzyde Al Inhayon, and Sheik Hamid, Prince of Qatar.
I am furious. What the hell is this! How many more of these stupid, useless, goddamned videos do we have to do! What about “Big
Haji
in Baghdad”? What about “suddenly I get the phone call and you go”?
Medicine Man points his camera at me. I grit my teeth and sit up like a trick poodle. When the required speeches are done, I tell him I am sick, I need medicine, an antibiotic, something for pneumonia. I write the word down for him. He says he will get it as soon as he can.
The next morning I’m too weak to get out of my chair for morning exercise. Junior points to Harmeet and says, “This good. Harmeet
zane
, Harmeet happy. Norman noos-noos.
Zane/mozane.”
Then, pointing to me, “This no good.
Mozane
. Jim
kool yom hazeen
.” He wants me to be happy like Harmeet.
It’s too much. I am sick to death of grinning for him, pretending, putting up with his orders, his scorn, his contempt. Anger flashes white and explodes. I stand up and get in his face. “Don’t You EVER Tell Me What I Should Feel,” I say, enunciating each word with typewritten precision, voice flashing like a sword. “Not when I’M the one who has to wear these FUCKING handcuffs!”