He proceeded to lambast me. “Are you telling me my job, you son of a bitch?!” he yelled nervously, his face turning red. “Get back to your cage.”
When I returned to my cage, I felt crushed. I lay down with my eyes closed, trying as best I could to digest everything I had seen and heard in the shock and terror cellar. I kept assessing the sheer horror involved in the context of instances of the most extreme iniquity, barbaric violence, and agonizing torture that some people seemed capable of inflicting on helpless prisoners who were their fellow human beings.
I told myself that, if I had not inured myself ever since childhood to a confrontation with emptiness and the vertigo it can bring on, I would by now have certainly succumbed to this dreadful experience. But getting through it once was no guarantee that I would be able to make it through other phases that were bound to follow. Would I be able, I wondered, to keep my health and sanity through the tests that were now awaiting me: eating dirty food, serving withdrawn hermits, staying in the same cage for hours on end, and so on?
The criminals and directors of this collective have one aim, to convert the human beings who are prisoners into mute animals, with clipped toenails, rotten teeth, shattered limbs, and bodily and spiritual power completely smashed. All such a prisoner can do is to give up and submit. He can rant and rave all he wants, provided that it all happens inside his mouth and his internal space. The people interred in this place have by now reached the very limits of their endurance; they can take no more of it. They have come to see death as a cheap alternative and to regard it as preferable to the utter humiliation they are suffering. They use all the limited amounts of energy and initiative that they possess to take turns during this blessed month reciting Qur’anic verses and selected passages from Prophetic eulogies and other prayers. For my part, I did my best to endure everything as well as I could. Once in a while the guards would shut us up, using clubs and rubber hoses to threaten us because of what they called our rants.
I spent almost an entire month or so like this, enduring the treatment they were meting out. I found myself forced, albeit unwillingly, to do certain things, such as going to the toilet in the way I have described and making do for breakfast with the basic minimum, after removing the foul insects that the food distributors consistently told us must have fallen into the vats by chance; if anyone did not like it, they would say, “Then give him some more gravy.” Something else was to let the cockroaches roam all over your body, searching out the lice that were their favorite food. Things like that.
A few hours before the Night of Power, the collapse in my health just happened to coincide with the arrival of two guards. They took me from my cage and, with no warning, transferred me back to my previous cell. I had no time to say farewell to the people I had come to know in the shock and terror cellar; I just managed a brief farewell wave. They in turn promised to utter a prayer on my behalf as soon as this blessed day dawned and the heavens were open for prayers that would merit a response.
2. Spending Time in My Cell
My very own cell, no. 112!
It is very narrow, five and a half square feet in all, with two blankets and a toilet — the hole covered with a brick to stop rats coming out. It is obviously situated low in a basement where the stench is foul and the sun never reaches. To keep hunger at bay, I get two meager meals a day. A guard pushes them through an aperture in the steel door; all I ever see is his hand, never his head.
So here I am, a prisoner, stuck here for months on end (as far as I can remember). I adjust my life as best I can, devising a program in the hope, even if it is illusory, of making things a bit more bearable. So every day, as soon as I wake up, I spend some time — it may be long or short, it depends — staring at the cracks in the wall, their spiral configurations marked by areas of dampness. Sometimes I amuse myself by reading them as designs with suggestive images and various interconnected dimensions. But once I become aware again and chide myself, I spend the rest of the time on an activity that I much prefer to the periods when I’m allowed outside to walk or meet other prisoners. It is a blanket-based activity, and involves lying on my back, scrunching myself up in a heap, and withdrawing into myself. I bend, make myself into a ball, roll over, put my head between my knees, coil myself up, and then turn over on my side. I come up with some other activities too, things that may well challenge the vast lexicon of Arabic itself: I act the tortoise and hedgehog, I coil up into a spiral, I emparcel myself, I turn into a corpse, staying still and holding my breath for as long as I can before becoming corporeal once again. Even so, these various postures do not exclude still others: stretching, sitting cross-legged, craning my neck, and being generally fussy. I may play the hero, punching away at an illusory foe, then laughing at him and letting out a belch. I imitate the roar of wild animals, then run away from them, making all kinds of chirping noises in the hope of attracting birds to the small cans of water and other things that I leave for them on the tiny upper window. I make other gestures and noises as well, whether I’m stretched out on the bed or sitting up, standing still, or walking around.
As another part of my daily routine I repeat segments of the Holy Qur’an, something I am afraid of forgetting while I am in this horrendous prison. I start with the Sura of Yasin and then move on to the Prophets in which Job, the exemplar of endurance and steadfastness, is mentioned. I recite some Prophetic traditions as well, along with literary texts by authors ancient and modern. A significant part of the day is devoted to something that has gradually become the most important thing of alclass="underline" prayer, even though it involves using minimal amounts of water or sand to cleanse myself when needed. Above and beyond all this, there are other irregular activities that the guards impose upon me. The prelude to such activities is always: “This isn’t a charity prison or a rest home for invalids. Tasks and services performed by prisoners are the means to pay for the food, showers, exercise, and housing that they all enjoy while they are here. Such duties include emptying the garbage cans into the principal dump about half a mile outside the main buildings; cleaning the kitchen, dining room, hallways, corridors, and special cells; and other things.”
Every time I was told to leave my cell to work, I would do my best to restrict my conversation with other prisoners to a simple greeting and an ever more polite response to theirs, so much so that my neighbors took to calling me “the dervish” or “the introvert.”
With the arrival of nighttime, darkness falls and the light fades. All movement now falls to its lowest level. Sometimes the evening meal arrives, other times it does not. There is nothing to read, no radio or television, no news about the world outside. Inmates have trouble falling asleep; if they do manage to do so, there is nothing to guarantee that they will not have nightmares or that various flying or spotted insects will not start plaguing them.
As I myself flirt with Morpheus, the god of slumber, and toss and turn on my bed, I find myself listening to my stomach churning and my limbs grinding. As I graduate from one nap to another, I have visions of the wonders of paradise, gorgeous women, wine, banquet tables that stretch into the distance for miles on end. That only happens if my sleep is not disrupted by some prisoner or other screaming and calling out for help. That, of course, wakes up all the prisoners in the block, who then proceed to curse and rage. That is exactly what happened for the nth time the day before yesterday when one of the prisoners started yelling and screaming because he was hanging from the ceiling vent so as to get away from the scorpions and snakes that were crawling around his cell. He claimed that surveillance cameras had been installed in his quarters. As an act of sheer defiance he used to curse, spit, and even masturbate. On another night it was the turn of another prisoner to raise a hue and cry about his nightmares and the evil genies preying on him. The night guards never moved or interfered, almost as though their ears were stuffed with wax or their hearts had been chained shut.