The First Casualty

She was dead.

He had to keep that in mind.

It didn’t matter what they did to him.

She was dead.

And that wasn’t going to change.

He awoke to the wan flush of the florescent light, high-up on the ceiling of his cell. A heavenly host of desiccated flies looked down on him, trapped in the artificial amber of the plastic shade.

He had no idea how long he’d been a prisoner. They’d picked him up early one morning, snatching him naked from bed. The rough embrace of a hemp sack as it was pulled over his head; the probing steel of fingers grasping his arms; the needle kisses of pebbles as they dragged him over the ground– all this he remembered, was scored on his body like etching on a wax tablet.

She was dead. He had to keep reminding himself. He felt instinctively that he could bare anything, endure whatever they did, if he just kept that one unalterable fact in mind: that she was dead. He embraced the thought, pushing it down deep inside of him – a burning ember which he could fan into an inferno if the need arose.
He raised himself up on the foam mattress. The paper overall they’d given him was damp with perspiration. It stuck to his back like a newspaper on a wet city street.

His cell was tiny, three paces by five, with a metal-framed bed bolted to the floor and a bucket for a latrine. There were no windows, and the only light was the fluorescents, burning constantly, melding the hours into a single continuous day. The door was steel, an inch thick, and fixed by large rivets. On the chipped and pitted surface there were two small hatches. The bottom hatch was long and narrow, like an elongated letter box; the other, square shaped and eye-level.

He didn’t mind the bottom hatch. It opened once a day, during what he thought of as morning, and ejected a plastic bowl, filled with oatmeal or thin stew. When he wasn’t asleep he was hungry and he welcomed the sound of the bolt being and the scrape of plastic against the stone floor. The other hatch was different. When it opened it meant they were watching, and that meant they were coming in.

The thought was enough to start him shaking. He got up and unzipped the overalls, squatting over the bucket.

His bowels had turned to water. He’d read the phrase before, in paperbacks he’d bought from the market. But until this moment, until his captivity, he hadn’t fully understood it. He’d thought it an affectation, a stock-phrase writers rolled-out when their imaginations failed them. Maybe so, but still his bowels had turned to water.

What would she say if she could see him now? he wondered. They’d been married for nine-years. The honeymoon was past and they’d survived the mire of domesticity; the cloying quicksand of routine that smothered so many marriages. She’d always thought him a fool, ever since he proposed to her, driving to the desert, to the table waiting on the plateau of a rocky outcrop, and the table-cloth, the napkins and candlesticks, the waiter that’d cost him a week’s wages. She’d called him a fool. But she’d accepted. He’d been a happy fool.

She’d be ashamed, he thought. For a moment he could almost see her. Standing in the cell with him, shaking her head, the dark tumble of her hair moving softly.

“Oh, Naima.”

His voice was foreign to him. Her name both frightening and frightful. He closed his eyes and spoke under his breath: “She’s dead. She’s dead. Dead. Still. She’s dead. Forever. There’s no coming back. They lied.”
They lied.

The clerics had lied.

There was no paradise. No martyrs. No holy-war. No coming back. The dead were dead and the living were punished. Soldiers in the night punishing grieving families. Unable to believe that they had nothing to do with it. That they didn’t even know.

When he first arrived at the prison they’d left him alone. Face-down, hooded, hands tied behind his back. They’d just left him. Standard procedure. Let the prisoner stew, wonder what’s going to happen to him. They were experts and they knew that there was no torture as bad as your imagination could conjure. No monster as terrible as the one you create yourself.
They were wrong. The Colonel who came to interview him was far worse than anything he could conceive.

“The United States does not condone torture,” he’d said. “But we have our methods, Abdul, we have our methods.”

“Nasser,” he’d said. “Not Abdul, Nasser.”
The Colonel had looked at him like he was a peculiar species of bug he’d like to tread on. He produced a handkerchief and scrutinised it before using it to wipe the sweat from his face.

“Speak English, eh? Clever boy. An educated man.”

This was in the early days before Nasser knew not to talk back. Before he knew that he had no rights.

“I went to University,” he said. “In Baghdad. I’m a business man now. There’s been a mistake.”

“There’s been no mistake, Abdul.” The Colonel walked over to him and dug deep in his shirt pocket. He removed a photograph and held it up to Nasser’s face. “I suppose this isn’t your wife. I suppose that’s a mistake too?”

Nasser looked at it. The picture was black and white and grainy. It was taken from high-up, looking down on a crowd of people, but zooming in on one person in particular. Naima. His wife.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s my wife. Where did you get this from? Is she hurt? What’s happened to my wife?”

“I’ll ask the questions, Abdul. Where did she get the explosives from? Who was her handler? Was it you Abdul? Did you pimp her out – send her into town to blow-up innocent soldiers while you lay in your bed?” He grabbed Nasser’s hair and pulled back his head. He peered into his eyes, their faces inches apart. He smelled of breath mints.

The Colonel whispered, “I don’t want you to tell me. That would spoil the fun, Abdul. These are hard times, and we need all the fun we can get.”

That’s when it really started. The sleep deprivation. The withholding of food and water. The heavy rock music blaring into his cell, washing over him like the stinging blast of a tidal wave. Weeks of this. Months maybe. He had no way of knowing.

At first he didn’t care. The knowledge that his wife had died had numbed him. The thought of her walking to a roadblock, strapped with plastic explosive and blowing herself up – it was inconceivable. It was like a particularly tricky abstract thought. Like trying to imagine the size of the universe or what lies beyond the atom. He couldn’t quite grasp it, not intellectually. But his body knew. He would tremble uncontrollably; hot one minute, cold the next. Wracked with nausea, he had no energy, spending most of the time on the bed, staring at the walls.

The Colonel would come, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. They would question him, taking it in turns to shout, cajole him, plead with him, threaten him.

“You must know something.”

“We’re only trying to help you.”

“You don’t expect us to believe that?”

“She was your wife. You must know.”

“Just answer the fucking question, Abdul.”

“We know you were in on it.”

“LYING COCKSUCER!”

But Nasser wasn’t lying. He knew nothing.

They hadn’t been for a while. For the longest time he’d been alone; the bolt sliding back and the morning ration of food his only evidence that the outside world existed.

He began to think clearly again. Reasoning with himself that they had to let him go soon. They must have checked out his story. Visited his business. Spoken with his friends. They had to see he was telling the truth. He was innocent.

He lay back down on the mattress and looked up at the plastic shade. One of the flies was still alive up there. Every so often it would jump and buzz furiously. He knew exactly how it felt.

There was a click from the door and Nasser looked towards it. The top hatch had opened and someone was looking in.

He felt panic grasp him, and he sat up, his legs tucked in front of him in a gesture of protection.

The Colonel entered. He looked tired and sad, as though he were the prisoner.

“Pretty tough guy, eh, Abdul? Sticking with your story to the end.” He looked down at his boots, the shiny leather marred by a fine bloom of desert dust. “The United States does not condone torture,” he said. “But our friends in Egypt, Abdul. That’s a different story.”

As they came for him, Nasser looked deep inside of himself. He tried to remember. She was dead.

THE END