From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel Page 11

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. You were provoking me. I felt under attack.” She placed her head into my chest, ashamed. “Let’s not do this anymore.”

  “Hey, it’s okay. It didn’t even hurt.” I started to stroke her hair.

  “I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Baby,” I whispered into the back of her neck. I wanted to tell her how I felt about her at that moment. She had just slapped me in the face, her eyes had betrayed me, and for that quick second she wanted to tear me apart, and yet I was seduced by her hot temper. My cheek still stung—I had never been slapped by a woman—and now with her head on my chest, strange, I think I loved her. Only I didn’t confess it. Baby, I had said, and left it at that.

  After our little tiff, we snapped right back into an enjoyable mood. How easily this can be accomplished when love is so young! The consoling and petting and apologies on the edge of her bed quickly evolved into kissing and embracing and then fellatio.

  Later, when we were on our sides facing each other, I again stifled the urge to tell her that I loved her. Like I said before, her naked body demanded honesty. I resisted, however, by looking past her flushed mouth, her open heart, and stared off into a corner of the room. The humidifier was set to a low hum. The engulfing vapor made it seem like we were lying in a cinematic dream. What I felt and what the situation called for was not going to come out of me.

  Michelle asked what I was thinking.

  Chaos theory, I answered.

  1. Imelda Marcos, aka the Steel Butterfly.

  Two Whole Minutes

  Though our weekly shower usually happens on Sundays, it has become common for them to change the schedule on us, sometimes a day early or a day late. It’s barbaric. After forty-eight hours one already begins to stink, so you can only imagine going more than a week without a wash.

  The outdoor stalls have been built in pairs. Therefore each of us gets a bathing partner, though we don’t shower together. You merely wait in line with your partner for the next available set of stalls.

  My bathing partner from yesterday spoke English. He had a thick British accent, very intelligible. “How long have you been here?” he asked. Since the rules prohibit us from talking to each other, I was surprised that my bathing partner’s guard acted as if nothing had been said. I looked to the man guarding me, and he was not about to reprimand my bathing partner either. Both were ignoring us completely while we waited for the showers.

  “I am Riad. I’m a British citizen,” my bathing partner continued. “What’s your name?”

  I looked to my guard once again. Still, nothing.

  “Boy,” I said. “I’ve been here three months.”

  Riad nodded.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Two years.”

  I thought I had misheard. “How long?” I said again.

  “Two years. Well, over that now. My daughter was three when I was sent here. She is now five. She’s already started school.” He noted this as a matter of fact. “But I was in Bagram for one year before this.”

  Three years in captivity! How terrible it is that I can now imagine just how a man can survive such an ordeal. And I have only been here a fraction of that time. When I arrived I thought surely I was done for. Finito. The steel cot, the thin mattress no thicker than a yoga mat, a towel for my head—what kind of conditions were these? At home I had been sleeping on a platform bed from West Elm and a $150 Swedish pillow that adapted to the contours of one’s neck. My first morning in No Man’s Land, when I heard the call to prayer start up at sunrise, I thought I’d been dropped in the pit of hell. But soon enough I found that my surroundings could be tolerated. I was able to endure. I don’t know how. I have been able to survive on the tasteless rations I am fed through the slot in my door. I am able to be still for days on end without going mad. Being still was never something I could do. Yet, once I was confined to my little box, I discovered it could be done. What choice did I have?

  I said to Riad: “Have you had your tribunal?”

  “All right, move,” said my guard. “You two on deck.”

  We were pressed forward to the showers, then separated so that we each could enter our designated stall.

  There is no roof over the stalls. Just open sky, bright, hot. At this hour the late-summer sun is directly overhead. Once we’re inside the gate is locked behind each of us, and then we turn around so that our hands and feet can be unlatched through the lower slot of the stall doors. We undress, quickly, handing our uniforms through the center slot, because at this point one only has two minutes to wash. Two whole minutes are given to do something so basic. The guard hands over the soap and a packet of shampoo. Then a towel. Some of us are permitted little plastic razors to shave, depending on whether or not we’ve been deemed compliant. Another tactic of punishment dressed as kindness. There simply isn’t enough time to shave in a shower, and the blades are too dull and painful anyway.

  Cold water in the showers.

  Even though it is so unbearably hot in No Man’s Land, the water is too cold to get comfortable. Your breath quickens as your body tries to adapt to the temperature, and it feels, for a moment, like you are being suffocated. Anyone who has jumped into a frigid lake knows the sensation. The two minutes of bathing cannot be perfected either, because each shower is different. At times the water will be cut short while you are still working up a lather. “Time’s up!” the guards will say, even though there’s still time remaining. And what can you do? Complain all you want, you’re getting out.

  I begin each shower the same, by quickly soaping my underarms, then my chest, my genitals, my anus, and finally the rest of my body—my back, sides, legs. I don’t bother washing my face, because this can be done in my cell. Same with my feet. Last, I wash my hair with the packet of pink shampoo. It is most common for the water to be cut off at this stage, so I would much rather have shampoo in my hair than soap still on my body. The hair, too, can be finished in one’s cell. I fantasize about the untimed shower, in which you have all the minutes in the world. Oh, to wash behind your ears! To lather between the cracks of your toes! What luxury!

  “Where are you from?” said my bathing partner over the dividing wall.

  I turned around to look at my guard, who was facing the opposite direction, his arms on his hips.

  “Are you American?” my bathing partner asked.

  “I live there,” I said.

  “I’ve been to Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Also San Diego, and Virginia.”

  “When?”

  “Years ago. I was on foreign exchange to the University of Miami. I was in San Diego on spring break. I was in Virginia—”

  “No talking,” said Riad’s guard. But then he added, “Keep it low.”

  “I was in Virginia to see a girl. I forgot the name of the place already. I’ve even forgotten the name of the girl.”

  I began to laugh. Miami, San Diego, Virginia! I couldn’t believe what this man was telling me. He was a prisoner! He looked just like every other prisoner here. Skull cap, black beard, dark skin, dark eyes. While we were waiting in line I half expected him to spit in my face, but here he was, talking to me.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  The water was shut off. That was the end of our shower. I still had suds under my arms and shampoo in my hair. Riad didn’t answer my question, though I realized it was not something that could be answered in the span of two minutes. I toweled off quickly as my guard waited with a clean uniform to hand me through the slot.

  “Ah, I remember now,” said Riad over the wall. “Rachel. The girl from Virginia was named Rachel.”

  Of course I couldn’t put a face to this Rachel from Virginia. When I asked Riad over the divider what she looked like, we were told to be quiet for the last time and whisked off separately back to our cells.

  The mention of my bathing partner’s love interest had me once again reminiscing about Michelle, the trips to see her in Bronxville,
etc. I was embarrassed to discuss my failed relationship so indulgently with Spyro, but at the very mention of Michelle and Sarah Lawrence College my Greek acted intrigued. “Tell me more,” his eyes seemed to say. I shouldn’t have been so surprised. He’s very familiar with the five boroughs and all the outlying districts, correcting me on locations and so forth. I’m almost sure he lives in Manhattan. Maybe, when this is all said and done, I will run into him on the street. In New York one always seems to bump into someone from the past, strolling along the avenue. Even if that person lives on the other side of the world, there they will appear, as if they had been there all along.

  “You spent a lot of time with the girl,” Spyro said.

  “We were together two years.”

  “So it was pretty serious.”

  “It was very complicated. Michelle could be giving in her own way. She loved me. But I was holding back. Soon it became routine. We were together for that long out of comfort. There were others. I saw other women. Of course, this doesn’t leave here.”

  “Go on,” he said. “It’s just you and me. Talking.”

  “You and me and whoever’s behind that glass.”

  “Who? Behind this glass? There’s no one.” He knocked on the two-way mirror. “See?”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Just remember,” I said. “I’m not stupid.”

  “Did I say that? You’re a college graduate. Okay, there’s a camera behind the glass, recording our meetings, but that’s so we have documentation. It’s mainly for your safety.”

  “And the camera’s operator?”

  “Listen, we can sit here and argue all day about whether there’s someone back there or not, but the fact of the matter is, you’ll never really know. Because you’ll never get to see what’s back there. So what’s the difference? You’re in here. And don’t you forget it.”

  “How could I?” I brought my hands up from beneath the table so that he would be reminded of the chains around my wrists.

  “Now, as you were saying.”

  “What was I saying?” I asked.

  “For someone who’s not stupid you’re readily forgetful.”

  “Selective significance, like you said once.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Maybe it was a Russian.”

  “Let’s get back to that weekend with the girl. Michelle. Qureshi drove you to Bronxville to see her. That was on Friday. What happened on Saturday?”

  “Michelle and I went to see a play.”

  “And?”

  Why did Spyro insist on hearing this? He wanted to know who I met. Who I talked to. Even the name of the play we saw. It was called Goodbye, Agamemnon. Written, produced, directed by, and starring Guatemala, one of Michelle’s close friends. The play was an avant-garde piece with full-frontal nudity and dialogue without language. Actors crawled around onstage in diapers, moaning and wailing. They tore off each other’s diapers with their teeth, ripping Velcro from the poly fabric in attacklike formation. As the play went on, everyone became doused with all-purpose flour, their magnificent faces powder white. Guatemala, in character, rose to her feet, center stage, her black bush covered in white flake, and as she splayed her hands in the air the other actors began to crowd around her, pawing up at her body. She was a god reaching into the heavens, an extraterrestrial returning to the mother ship. She was Clytemnestra1 about to kill her babies. In the denouement of voice and breath, with the life taken out of them, the actors collapsed into a pile, a mountain of bodies covered in lye. Guatemala was last among them. She fell onto her back, her armpit hair erect like two ashen flames.

  What could this possibly have to do with my special agent’s investigation?

  The performance is significant to me only because it gave me an idea for my first New York collection. My models would march down the runway in whiteface, à la Comme des Garçons. Only not in a goth fashion, but in a clean, almost empty way. A blank, lifeless face captured so much—death, purity, sorrow. All of this would be apparent in the models’ look, and it would still be faithful to my initial plans for the collection vis‑à‑vis hipster Williamsburg, with its youth and destructive beauty.

  After the performance was the after party held at one of the dorms just a short walk from the theater. We mingled with the cast and crew, got drunk off red wine that came in cardboard boxes. The air was thick and damp with pot smoke. I met many of Michelle’s friends, and we talked about the show—its open-ended meaning, plotless structure, nudity, artistic merit:

  “Remember the pileup at the end? I was at the bottom left. Stage left.”

  “Our right.”

  “I remember.”

  “Next to Jack.”

  “You remember Jack. He was the one with the great cock.”

  “Ah yes! Of course, Jack. How could I forget? Forgive me. I didn’t recognize you. I was too busy staring at his great cock.”

  “He’s kidding. That’s his sense of humor. He’s Filipino. It’s so random.”

  “That he’s Filipino or that he has a strange sense of humor?”

  “That he has a strange sense of humor.”

  “Though both are equally random.”

  An actress, Poppy, continued to talk to me, but I was too drunk and high simply from the air in the room, and soon I wasn’t listening to her at all. I found a bowl of wasabi seaweed crackers on a chair and became involved in the sound my mouth was making as I attempted to devour the entire lot of them. The clarity brought on by the wasabi was immense. The bowl fell out of my hands and the crackers spilled onto the floor. Poppy said I was making a mess. But when I looked down I saw a pattern. Little rice crackers wrapped in dark seaweed against a black hard tile. The scales on the seaweed were natural sequins reflecting the light in the room. I arranged some of the crackers into a figure and took some pictures with my camera phone for my mood board. Poppy asked what I was doing. I ignored her. When Michelle found me I was still on the ground. Poppy told her that I had spilled the crackers.

  “He’s normally not like this.”

  That night I made love with the sour taint of beer on my lips. Michelle’s skin gave off the odor of a girl intoxicated, but it was also warm and wet. Our bodies generated suction. Afterward we smoked in bed. Then we slept for a while. I woke up with her rough bristles tickling up my leg and then over my penis. I let her pin me to the mattress. Lying there, under her, I once again thought of the floured bodies in the play. The dangling cocks and Guatemala’s armpit hair, the powdered faces moaning for dear life, Poppy plowing into Jack, Jack clawing up at Guatemala. I imagined Michelle blowing Jack’s great cock. I pictured Guatemala naked and all white, the folds of her flesh. The images began to overwhelm me, and I lost my erection. Michelle continued her thrusting until she finished and quickly passed out on top of me. I remained awake for the rest of the night ruminating about my career and the prospect that awaited me. Ahmed as the sole investor in my clothing line.

  My arrival into Grand Central Station Monday morning was always my favorite part of the trip. Commuters crisscrossing like mad under an aquamarine cathedral ceiling, their heels clicking across the marble floor, everyone out of time. They are like cattle being herded toward the slaughter. I liked to walk against the flow of traffic, to paddle against the current, and to observe the tense look on people’s faces as they rushed to their offices.

  I had breakfast—a café au lait and a croissant—at a coffee stand on the northwest corner of Bryant Park. I bummed a cigarette off an old Italian gentleman in suspenders and smoked while I finished my coffee. My ass was wet from the morning dew on the chairs. I remember this so clearly. It was November and it was humid, the start of a new week, the week that would have the greatest impact on my career in fashion.

  That morning, back in Bushwick, Ahmed and I went over the details in his living room. Details that seemed fluid and flexible. Perhaps working this way was just easier for me because of my naïveté in business.

  “If our courtship is going to bl
ossom into fruit, and our trust grow into a stern oak, we must give it all of our fluids,” Ahmed said. “By fluids, I mean water. And water is what sustains life, Boy. Life is energy. You see what I’m getting at? I’m in it all the way. Tackling a new business is like farming. Today we will plow the soil. Tomorrow we plant the seed. Come.”

  We took a drive—our second together. It was as if the open road was his meeting room. The Zipcar his conference table. It was all very American to me.

  “I spoke to my accountant, Dick Levine. He’s a Jew, good with numbers. The funds are all in place. The numbers we talked about, seventy-five K. Yes? But you understand I can’t hand you the total amount. And this has nothing to do with trust! No, we’re cuffed together, you and me. Dick will handle the finances, but the money is ready when you need it. When you get back to the apartment Yuksel will give you an envelope containing your first ten thousand. Well, nine thousand five. Dick feels it’s best that I give it to you in these increments, for tax purposes. You understand, of course. And as expenses arise, as I said, the funds will be available to you.”

  He drove us over to Williamsburg so we could check out twenty-two hundred square feet of available space in the toothpick factory. The old brick building boasted giant bay windows—elliptical arches of steel and glass. It was right on the waterfront on Kent Avenue.

  The loft was a dream. It was completely open, with a high cast-iron ceiling and a tremendous view of the East River. The bay windowpanes were cloudy and stained. Some were even cracked and had been taped many times over. A piece of New York history, as I saw it. My own piece. And in the whole time I lived at 113 Kent, I never had them replaced. Not even for the spanking clean view that I would have attained. Besides, at night one could make out the city skyline as if one were viewing it through a stained-glass mural. There was the sprawling Williamsburg Bridge reaching out to the Lower East Side, the towers of light downtown. The arched windows reminded me that in its original form this was once a factory of workers. And that is what I would be. A worker. Sure, I was an artist, but I had a whole first collection needing to be worked on. For all of my high-minded intentions, I knew what I needed. A dose of practicality. A blue collar around my privileged neck.