The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  SARAH (December 12, 2009)

  Fuck you, body, I think as I get out of bed. My head is a balloon filled with water, my shoulders are slack and lifeless, and my eyes feel like glass. I slowly pull on my pants, walk three steps to the sink, and drink two cups of water. My stomach makes an ugly sound, so I ring the bell for the second time even though I know it won’t make the guards come any faster.

  The bell is a round, black rubber button on the wall. When I push it, a green light, which the guards can see but often ignore, comes on outside my cell door. I need to use the bathroom, so I begin to pace the length of my i0-by-i4-foot cell, punching the air like a boxer with my eyes fixed on my bare feet and the brown carpet. I let out a cry of frustration, pick up a plastic cup, and hurl it at the wall. I decide to pee in the sink.

  Ever since I found out Shane and Josh were put together, I’ve been full of uncontrollable anger at everything and everyone. And hate—an almost violent hate.

  If Shane and Josh can get through this, so can I. That’s been my motto since we came here. Even during the months we didn’t see each other, I knew they were enduring the same empty hours I was. Now that they are together in one cell, there’s a rupture between us, a distance I don’t know how to bridge.

  When I’m with Shane and Josh in hava khori, I almost feel worse. Every touch reminds me of the absence of touch. Their situation seems heavenly to me—they’re out of solitary! What could be better than sharing a leisurely game of chess, listening to endless stories about each other’s lives, being able to connect without the fear of interference? They are halfway there, halfway to sanity and normalcy, halfway to freedom! I want to feel happy for them, but I don’t know how much longer I can hold it together alone in this cell.

  My time has become less and less structured as I get more depressed. I talk to myself, eat my food with my hands. Like an animal, I spend hours crouched by the slot at the bottom of my door listening for sounds. Sometimes I hear footsteps coming down the hall, race to the door, and realize they were imagined. Or flashing lights will dart across the periphery of my vision—but when I jerk around to see, they’re gone.

  These symptoms scare me. Sometimes when I try to read, I can’t focus and end up reading the same line again and again, finally hurling my book in frustration. I’ve become extremely paranoid about my stuff, afraid the guards will take things when I’m gone. I hide the food and other junk I hoard all over my cell—under the carpet, in my mattress—and check it compulsively.

  How will I know when I’ve left sane thought and behavior behind? When there’s no turning back? I’ve always clung to the certainty that I can emerge from this place unbroken and unchanged, but I’m not sure I believe that any more. Why am I being singled out for this torture? How can they leave me in here to go crazy alone?

  Suddenly I’m on my feet, running to the door. I start banging on it with my fists, kicking it again and again. The guard opens the door and I stare at her, breathless and angry, my hands balled into fists.

  “I want hava khori,” I demand, my voice trembling, my face locked.

  “No, Sarah!” she yells. “No hava khori today!” I hear the door slam. I hear her footsteps running down the hall. I don’t hear anything else. I want to die. I want to disappear. I want to kill.

  I hear a scream. It’s far away, maybe in the courtyard or the next row of cells. There’s something familiar about it.

  The door opens and a guard is in my cell. She looks at me with horror and through her eyes I see myself. The scream I heard wasn’t coming from down the hall. It came from my own throat.

  The guard grabs my shoulders, and begins to shake me. “Sarah, no! Sarah, no!” We fall to the floor, and I can feel her hands on my face. I open my eyes and follow her gaze to the wall. I see streaks of blood against the mottled white. I look down at my hands and begin to wail like a child. My knuckles are scraped from where I’d been beating them against the wall.

  “I can’t!” I yell at her. “I can’t do this.” Her arms encircle me now. “I can’t!”

  SARAH (December 27, 2009)

  The guards in the hall are frantic as they lead us back to our cells from hava khori. I peek under my blindfold as we pass five or six young women lined up facing the wall. It’s evident by their fitted jeans, long black jackets, and platform shoes that they’ve just been brought in from the streets. I sense their fear as I’m led past. One has a bandage wrapped around her head, caked with blood. Another is limping, her bright red hair streaming out of her torn headscarf. Based on the number of new women I’ve seen, I estimate there are now 10 or 12 packed into each cell.

  I’ve had a hunch something like this might be coming. When I woke up this morning, the guard who brought me breakfast was uncharacteristically brisk. Then I heard helicopters circling outside my cell window. After my screaming episode two weeks ago, my interrogators attempted to pacify me by placing a small TV and DVD player in my cell. I’ve watched the one movie they gave me, the 2008 presidential assassination drama Vantage Point, about 18 times now, and I spend hours each day reading the English ticker on the Farsi news channel. This week, thinly veiled threats against “hooliganism“ on the news caught my attention. Then boxes of new prison uniforms and plastic slippers arrived at the end of the corridor. I assumed the “Green Revolution” protests we watched on TV in Damascus last spring were over, but the government-controlled media has been gearing up for something for weeks.

  I decide to ring for the guard and ask for my nightly shower. “Nah,” she says, exasperated, “kaar daaram.” I’m busy. I begin to pantomime, performing like a trained monkey, smelling my armpits and crinkling up my nose.

  “Okay, enough, Sarah, quickly!” I grab my towel, hastily tie my blindfold around my head, and charge down the hall toward the showers.

  I crank the hot-water knob as high as it will go, steaming up the room like a sauna. Is it really a revolution this time? If this government’s overthrown, what will happen to us? Things could get really ugly before the opposition assumes power. We could get hurt, separated, or killed in the interim.

  I suddenly hear the door open in the small room next to the showers. I quietly unlatch the barred window, peering into the small courtyard. A young woman stares back at me.

  Think fast, I tell myself. It’s been several months since one of the guards has made such a slip, leaving me alone in the bathroom with another prisoner nearby. I grab the bars between us, bringing my face as close to hers as I can. “I Sarah. American. Long time here, no freedom,” I whisper in my ridiculous, infantile Farsi. “You please phone mother Sarah. Sarah no spy, Sarah love Iran people, Sarah teacher, Damascus. Please you freedom phone mother Sarah, okay?” The woman looks straight at me. “I know you, Sarah,” she says in awkward but good English. “I am sorry, but I am not free, so I cannot help you.”

  At that moment the door opens and a guard starts yelling at both of us. She hands the prisoner a stack of navy blue clothes and ushers her down the hallway.

  SHANE (Early January 2010)

  Little cakes and candies wrapped in cellophane dash across the cell floor. The disruption freezes me momentarily as I kneel over tiny flash cards, each displaying a name, arrayed in a large network on the carpet. I was in the middle of something important: constructing an elaborate Greek family tree of gods and mortals. I’d been frustrated because I couldn’t remember which marriages connected the House of Atreus to the House of Thebes. How many days must I study this before it finally sticks? It takes me a moment to realize that the sweets were tossed in through the window in the door. Josh and I lunge to the floor and rip open some cakes. We each put a morsel into our mouths, chewing slowly with our eyes closed. It’s spongy, like a Twinkie. The concentrated blast of sugar is like an injection of well-being.

  After we finish, we set to work splitting open some dates, removing the pits, and pressing some dark chocolate and a glob of butter into each of them. We put six of these in a small plastic bag that I put in my pocket.
Later, a guard comes to take us to hava khori. As I pass the neighboring cell, I jam the plastic bag through the little bars. Behind the door, I hear people scramble.

  I know the cakes came from someone in that cell—I am guessing the guy I often hear whispering to another person across the hall in Arabic, a language rarely heard in this prison and one that, unlike Farsi, I understand. Judging by their accents, I assume that our neighbor is a Saudi and the man across the hall is from Iraq or Kuwait. I’ve gathered that the man across the hall has a television, which is why he is always the bearer of tidings. Our neighbor has been asking for updates on the “Brotherhood,” which seems to roughly mean Al Qaeda, some other militant Sunni group, or all of them generally.

  Sometimes, they’ve talked about us.

  “Hey, the other day when I went to the bathroom I looked in the cell of those Americans. It’s like a five-star hotel in there. They have beds and a TV. And every day they go outside twice. Yeah, Iran is good to the Americans.” So badly I’ve wanted to interject, to tell them we didn’t, in fact, have a television and that we weren’t allowed to even make phone calls. But I’ve resisted.

  I’ve refused to talk, despite our neighbor’s pounding on our wall and the coughs out into the hallway to get our attention.

  I’ve refused because Sarah, Josh, and I made an agreement not to talk to anyone. The longer Sarah is alone, the more afraid—and paranoid—she has become that one of us will get caught doing something and that we will be separated again. For her sake, we don’t break the rules.

  But now he is throwing cakes into our cell.

  As the days pass, it becomes harder and harder to resist the urge to communicate. I am convinced it is safe—these two men talk to each other every day, loudly—and I am frustrated with Sarah’s lack of faith in my judgment. Eventually, Josh and I set a date: In two weeks, we will tell Sarah we want to actually talk to him.

  Then one day, at hava khori, Sarah says, “Guys, I really want to talk to my neighbor. I will be really careful. Do you think it would be okay?”

  “Sure,” I say. I am genuinely happy, because I want Sarah to connect with more people. She has been deteriorating. Her excitement at seeing us every day is desperate. She almost always leaves hava khori deflated and disappointed. People need people, and Sarah needs people more than most. It’s as if they found a special little torture just for her, and put it on a screen for us to watch every day.

  “I’d really like to talk to our neighbor too,” I say. “He seems to know a lot about what’s going on.”

  “Okay, just be careful,” she says.

  Our neighbor says his name is Hamid, and when we start talking to him, our hall feels suddenly alive. He tells us that we are in Section 209, one of the political wards of Tehran’s giant Evin Prison. He teaches us the Farsi word for hostage, gurugan, which we use whenever we are frustrated with the guards, because they hate the idea.

  He tries to reassure me: “America can do anything it wants to. You will be out soon. Trust me.” I disagree. “I think the US is just going to leave us here. We aren’t worth much to our government. If we really were spies, we’d be out by now. Iran is going to keep making demands for things like prisoner swaps, and the US will refuse. Iran won’t be able to back down. So how will we get out?”

  The more I get to know Hamid, the more I see how similar his situation is to ours, except that no one, not even his family, knows what is happening to him. He says he was arrested for a visa technicality, that he has never been allowed to call anybody, and that he has never seen a lawyer or his embassy. He just went to court and they gave him a one-year sentence for visa forgery. “But don’t worry,” he tells me. “Illegal entry is only a six-month sentence.” We are coming up on five.

  SARAH (Early January 2010)

  I wake to insistent knocking on my wall. The new prisoner hasn’t stopped trying to get my attention since she came here after the protests. If I knock back, it will only lead to more communication, like whispering into the hallway or passing notes. There’s nothing I can do to help her, I tell myself sternly, trying to focus my attention back on my book.

  “Sarah.” I suddenly hear a soft whisper. The voice is close, almost as if it were in my room. “Sarah.” My head darts to the right and left, looking for the source of the sound. Am I imagining it? “Sarah.” The voice is louder now. “Please.” It seems to be coming from the corner near the door, where my sink is. Above the sink is a vent. I leap off my bare mattress and climb onto the sink. I press my mouth to the vent.

  “Who are you?” I ask the voice. “How do you know my name?”

  “My name is Zahra, almost the same as yours, Sarah. I know you.”

  “You know me?” “Yes, I saw your mother on TV. I am so sorry for you, Sarah. I am a mother too.” “Did you talk to my mother?” I almost yell, then remember to hush my voice. “Did you talk to her?” As soon as the question escapes my mouth, I realize how irrational it is.

  “No, Sarah. But I saw many pictures of you on BBC. You are a small, beautiful girl. I know it must be easy for you to be standing on the sink. For me, it is difficult. They beat me. They kicked me and tortured me. My hips hurt and it is difficult for me to stand.” Her English is almost perfect, strongly accented with a sensuous, scratchy quality.

  I feel tears welling up in my eyes. It’s a miracle, I think. She knows me! We can talk to each other! “Is—” I hesitate, but I have to ask. “Is my mother okay?” “I don’t know, dear Sarah. I am Dutch,” she says, “and Iranian. I live in the Netherlands, but my daughter is here, in Iran. They will not let me talk to my embassy. I don’t know if my embassy understands that I am here. When you see your embassy, please tell them about me, Zahra Bahrami.”

  “They never let me see anyone,” I tell her. “I don’t know what’s happening. I’ve had no court, no trial. They won’t let me see my lawyer.” “Yes, I know. They are liars, Sarah. Don’t believe anything they say to you. I am your friend now, I love you.” I try to imagine her, hurt and alone, being taken out every day for beatings and interrogation and then put back in a cage. “Why did they arrest you?” I ask.

  “I was at the protest,” she says, “Ashura.”

  Suddenly, the door bursts open. Leila’s small, voluptuous silhouette is outlined in the doorway.

  Not Leila, I think, of all people. I’ve managed to stay on her good side, and she’s helped me a lot—even complaining to the warden about how long they’ve kept me in solitary. I can’t afford to lose her.

  But now her kind, motherly face slams shut like a steel door. She says she will tell my interrogators what I’ve done. Zahra is immediately transferred.

  Now, when Leila comes to my cell, there are no more smiles, no conversations in Arabic. She hands me my food with a cold, unfocused stare, then wordlessly leads me out to the courtyard for a few minutes of sun. I’m no longer her ukhtee al-aziza, her sweet sister. I’m a plant that she gets paid to keep alive.

  JOSH (Early January 2010)

  At hava khori I have to hide from Sarah the depth of my relationship with Shane. Sarah has said that she felt left out around Shane and me on the hike, and now the prison has institutionalized that arrangement.

  Shane and I try to avoid talking about funny moments in our cell or even the fact that the interrogators let us have a plastic chair. Sarah asked us not to say “we,” but we don’t always succeed, and she invariably shudders when we slip. I try to remind her that one day it will all be set straight: “When we’re released, you and Shane will be together all the time. I’ll be on my own.”

  Sarah and I work to build our friendship so our triad’s dynamic doesn’t all hinge on Shane. She tells me about her days as a punk and about her relationship with her mother. She suggests friends of hers I should date in San Francisco. I tell her about Jenny, the friend I’ve wanted to marry since we dated in middle school, how I received long letters from her in September, and how I finally feel ready for her.

  We schedule two weekly hav
a khori sessions in which Sarah and Shane can be alone. On Saturday mornings and Wednesday nights, I go to “small hava khori,” a room smaller than my cell but with a glass roof that allows me to see the sky.

  SHANE (January 10, 2010)

  The censors neglected to remove a staple from our letters. I pull it out with my long fingernails and bend the end to make a little hook.

  I stick the hook delicately under the hem of my pink towel and pull the thread out, one stitch at a time. I do the same with my underwear, pulling out two long, white threads.

  I tie the ends of these little threads to the zipper handle on my mattress. Like my sisters and I did as kids, I take three threads and weave them together, tying little knots over and over again. The knots form into a tiny little ring.

  When we were all in solitary, I read books like Pride and Prejudice and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and paced my cell. I would only read a few pages at a time before I would put the book down, pace, and think. What have I been doing all these years? I’d ask myself. Why haven’t I proposed to Sarah yet? Are we going to just roll along together year by year, without ever deciding that it will be forever? I turned over these questions for months. I’ve never really believed in marriage, so part of me wondered whether I was being seduced into it by my isolation and those 19th-century novels.

  But I love her so much. I do want to be with her forever. Though I see her every day now, she is still ripped away over and over again. I want to be Sarah’s sanctuary and I want her to be mine.

  I tie off the thread spirals and leave enough loose string at the ends to make sure I can tie them onto our fingers. It’s date night, which means that Josh is going to stay in the cell while Sarah and I go out alone. I have the two little rings in my hand, white with a strip of red in the middle, like a stone.

  Josh has no idea what I’m about to do. I don’t tell him because I’m afraid I might chicken out. I’m so nervous. What if she says no?