The Room of White Fire

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “Where is Amal? The favorite!”

  Aaban’s breathing was so deep and fast he could only get the words out one or two at a time.

  “To hell. You! To hell!”

  And again, Roshaan through Moe: “Stop, he doesn’t know! He says he doesn’t know!”

  Spencer looked down at Aaban for a long moment, then across the room to Roshaan. He looked at Clay and Vazz, who gave him vague shrugs. Then he set down the bucket and took up a new one. “Bin Laden will be with his favorite wife! Where is Amal?”

  “Las Vegas.”

  “Where is your great Allah now?”

  “He. Damns. You!”

  “When and where is the next attack?”

  “On your naked whore mother.”

  Spencer lifted the fresh bucket, directing the full heavy river into Aaban’s nose again.

  Five minutes. Ten. Spencer poured the water, and Clay steadied Aaban’s head, and the man writhed and vomited, and the boy screamed in high-voiced helplessness, and Moe the ’terp made sure everybody was understanding everybody else.

  34

  We went on like that for about a month, mostly with the water,” said Clay. His voice was softer now, and he seemed deep within himself. Working deliberately, he removed the flash drive from the computer, set it back in the drawer, and brought out another drive. He talked while he plugged it into the USB port. “Three sessions a day sometimes. In between the water, we used stress positions and nudity. You can’t humiliate a proud man worse than stripping him naked and making him squirm with pain in front of his young son. At least, we couldn’t find anything. He gave us nothing actionable. He toyed with us. He told us how to break down and clean an AK. He gave us directions to his home in Sangin. False, no doubt. He described the beauty of his wives. There’s no use watching every minute of that. There’s probably no reason for Nell to see it.”

  I didn’t tell Clay that Nell would never show this video, because the federal government could charge her and KPBS with sedition or even treason. Nell could be the next Snowden. There was still a war on terror. And national security was as big an issue now as it had been then. Maybe bigger. Nothing had changed—or at least, nothing had gotten better.

  “Do you still think she’s going to like this?” asked Clay.

  “She’ll be fascinated, just like I am.”

  “But will she put me and Dr. Spencer on her show?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to recommend it?”

  “I’m still making up my mind.”

  “This is not the story,” said Clay. “Not yet. You are about to see things that no one has seen or confessed to. Maybe then you and Nell will want the world to know.”

  “I’ve got an open mind.”

  Clay gazed at me. I sensed his attention leaving me, the room, maybe the whole country. Back to Romania? How could he not be drawn back there, over and over, like a moth to light? To white fire?

  He turned and studied the bathroom mirror again, then stared out the crack in the front-window curtain. He looked at me with what looked like full focus and attention. In that moment he needed me. I saw in Clay what I’d seen in Tritt—an irresistible need to tell his story and confess his truth. It was stronger than their desires to forget, or to be understood or forgiven or even loved. Only Briggs Spencer seemed immune to the truth, in spite of the name of his book.

  But, as the video rolled across the computer screen, Briggs Spencer began to change. I saw it first in his face, in the darkness around his eyes and the deepened lines around his mouth. His expression grew harder and more set by the day. His nose erupted in red acne. His movements became faster, abrupt at times, and this grim energy seemed to take him over. He cut off almost all of his thick gray hair. You could tell he’d done it himself because it was patchy and uneven. About that time he began shaving carelessly, or maybe using an older blade, because he had razor burns on his neck and nicks on his chin and under his nose. He also stopped wearing clean clothes. As the videos played on, Spencer’s clothing was the same tan T-shirt and camo pants, dirtier by the day. He lost weight. There were times when he would talk to himself, then remember that there might be cameras running, and stop. Or, sometimes, he would turn to the camera and make faces or comments. At one point, while he held a snarling Malinois just inches away from Aaban’s own snarling face, Spencer looked straight in the camera, widened his eyes, and said, “All the better to see you with!”

  Sitting near him in the weakly lit room, I covertly observed Clay, rapt and unblinking. His expression was of anticipation, as if he weren’t quite sure what might happen next. “Clay? What are you thinking right now, as you watch yourself do this?”

  “My first emotion is wonder. That Aaban could withstand all of that and never break. My second emotion is more wonder at how I withstood it. See, at Arcadia, I could hardly remember any of what we did at White Fire. From the first week I arrived at Arcadia, my mind got cloudier and cloudier, and my memories became very dim and uncertain. I’d ask Dr. Whipple and later Dr. Hulet why the pills were making my past fade away. And they told me the meds would not affect memory. But they were wrong. And Morpheus—that’s a nickname for Don—he’d give me all sorts of special pills, plus the regular meds. He told me Dr. Spencer said I might appreciate them. The special meds made me see and hear things that, later, I knew weren’t there. So, now, when I see what I did on video, it’s like seeing these things for the first time. With my meds gone and this video to watch, I’m back there, Mr. Wills. I’m experiencing it again. It’s hard to believe. It’s painful. Even for me, the torturer.”

  Clay looked at me gravely. “I want you to watch this last part. It’s the heart of our story. It’s what I want the world to know. So please watch what happened. A lot of this Vazz and Tice and I shot without Dr. Spencer knowing. He was pretty much out of it by then. Vodka straight from the bottle as he worked. Plus the bliss bullets that Tice gave out. Dr. Spencer didn’t care about anything but Aaban. Me and Vazz set up our Flips and phones and let ’em roll, so it’s not real clear. I’ll fill you in on what’s going on. This is five weeks after Roshaan arrived.”

  At first, the video was just more of the same. A mood of near tedium hovered in the room as Spencer questioned Aaban, who was naked and chained to the ceiling. The same questions as before. Over and over. Bin Laden. Next attack. With every insufficient answer, Spencer slapped his face and Aaban either snapped and tried to bite him or laughed. Clay and Vazz sat across the room, on either side of Roshaan, who was sometimes silent and at other times crying piteously.

  Then suddenly, Roshaan rose and charged toward his chain-hung father. He came from the background, a blur. Chaos. Clay tackled him at Aaban’s straining feet, wrenching the thin boy into a choke hold and locking his legs around Roshaan for total control. The camera panned wildly to Spencer, then back to Roshaan and Clay, clinched tight together on the floor, Roshaan red-faced and bucking. Aaban kicked Clay in the back of his head, hard. Vazz rushed in and cranked Aaban up so high that he could stand only on the balls of his bare feet. The Malinois in the corner snarled and thrashed on its chain. Spencer cussed the dog while it tore at the air. Then he trudged over to Clay and Roshaan, and I thought he was going to kick the boy. Straining for balance, Aaban yelled his son’s name.

  Tice, the cameraman, shot Spencer face-on as he stared down at Roshaan with what looked like wild contempt. Clay held fast and the boy stopped thrashing as his father bellowed at him from above. Spencer stepped past Clay and Roshaan to stand directly in front of Aaban, and the two men roared at each other from inches away, Spencer cursing and Aaban yelling I knew not what, and the Malinois broke loose and leaped toward Aaban, and Vazz caught the dog midair and crashed to the stone floor with the dog’s jaws clamped and ripping his shoulder. Tice abandoned the camera, but it settled with the lens aimed up, recording the mute black smokehouse ceiling and the screa
ms and snarls below.

  Two minutes went by. Just the ceiling and the unholy noise. Judging by the sounds, Tice and Vazz must have thrown the dog out the front door of the smokehouse.

  Then came a gradually ominous silence.

  In front of me, Clay stared at the monitor, transfixed.

  By the time Tice could man the camera again Clay was kneeling over the sprawled and inert Roshaan, holding two fingers to his carotid while Spencer threw handfuls of water into the boy’s face.

  “Clay, what the fuck?” demanded Spencer.

  “No pulse.”

  “Roshaan!” Aaban boomed out from off-screen. “Gap zadam!”

  “It’s there,” said Spencer. “Find it.”

  “No pulse, sir. Vazz, check his eyes.”

  The camera came in close on Roshaan’s face. White and lifeless. Clay held out a dog tag to the boy’s nostrils, looking for warm breath in the cold room. Vazquez, bleeding from his right shoulder, checked the eyes—clear and unfocused, and with the lids left open—unblinking.

  “He’s not breathing,” said Clay.

  “What is this bullshit?” snapped Spencer.

  “Roshaan? Bedaar kardan!”

  “I’m trying chest compressions, sir,” said Clay.

  “Do ’em. Do ’em, I said!”

  Aaban yelled off-screen as the camera wheeled from Clay to Spencer to Clay again. Clay straddled Roshaan with his knees and went to work with the heels of his hands. The boy’s slender body quaked with each compression, but to me it looked like it was Clay’s energy going through him, not his own. Vazz hooked a thumb into Roshaan’s mouth, arched back the boy’s head, and breathed into him between the compressions.

  “How about Doctor What’s-his-name?” asked Spencer.

  “He went back to Washington last week, sir, remember?” said Donald Tice, loud and off-screen, behind the camera.

  “Indeed I do.” Spencer knelt beside Clay, took one of Roshaan’s wrists, and pressed two fingers to the artery. “This kid’s flatlining on me. Harder, Clay! Faster!”

  Clay worked harder and faster, but the seconds seemed to drag more and more slowly as Roshaan’s body shook and his head jerked with every push, and then Vazz descended for another exhale.

  One eternal minute.

  Clay hit the pause command and the screen froze on Roshaan’s white-blue face. No more screaming man. No snarling dog. Just the car traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, Oceanside, California, six thousand six hundred miles away from where an eleven-year-old Afghani boy had died and a nineteen-year-old American boy had helped kill him.

  “I worked on him for almost seven minutes, total,” said Clay. “No response.”

  The monitor came back to frantic life around Roshaan’s peaceful lifelessness. Clay continued the chest compressions. Spencer got up from beside the boy and strode off-screen. Vazz stood, too, and they argued, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Then Clay and Vazquez lifted Roshaan’s upper body from the floor and tugged off his jacket and underclothes.

  —

  I hoped the shock of cold might bring him back,” said Clay. “Or maybe, I’d see that I’d been off on the compression site and I’d find a better place to press. I was desperate. I was willing to try anything. I started compressing again. I did the best, deepest compressions I knew how. Vazz went back to mouth-to-mouth breathing. Nothing. He was gone. Later we laid him on the waterboard and covered him with a blanket. By then everything was a blur.”

  The video froze on Roshaan on his father’s waterboard, and Clay and Vazz spreading the blanket.

  “Later I lifted the blanket and looked at Roshaan. Then at his father. I saw my soul fly away. It looked like a bat. I haven’t felt or seen it since, Mr. Wills.”

  Cars on the highway. A distant siren. If I’d had any doubt about Clay Hickman’s need to tell his story, it was gone. “It looked like an accident to me, Clay. Choke holds like that have killed before. That’s why most cops don’t use them anymore.”

  “What I think happened? Roshaan had a weak heart. Like mine when I was born. He couldn’t have an operation. Or maybe he didn’t even know.”

  He looked at me, then to the mirror taped to the wall, then out through the front-window curtain.

  “Do you have more video, Clay?”

  He glanced at me, then looked down, nodding. “Dr. Spencer ordered us to get rid of the body. He swore us all to silence. Penalty of death or worse, he said. Moe the ’terp disappeared the very next day. I don’t know what Dr. Spencer did to him. Me and Vazz and Don decided to wrap Roshaan up and pack him in this wood-and-leather trunk we found in the basement. It was a heavy old thing. Like from another century. I can’t play that video now. It’s the hardest part to watch. But I’ll play it for Nell and Dr. Spencer. I’m hoping Nell will want to show it up close. In slow motion. Maybe more than once. It was the end of the end, and the beginning of the beginning.”

  35

  And so,” Clay said quietly. “That’s who I am and why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

  I thought about that. I’d just witnessed Clay Hickman’s moral injury. His soul wound. I heard Paige Hulet’s voice: It is caused by something you do. Not by something done to you.

  In this stark new light, Clay wasn’t quite the menace I’d thought he was. Victim? Not quite that, either. How about collateral damage? I felt old anger and fresh shame, like two snakes swallowing each other by their tails. I hadn’t wanted to see what Clay had shown me, even though I had known the larger, more distant truth of it—like most Americans—for the better part of a decade. But Clay had restored my unwilling eyesight. He had called my bluff and drafted me in. Made me a partner. As Spencer had done to him. And others had done to Spencer and Tritt and many like them.

  “You’re me,” I said finally.

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “What I mean is, the story is about you and a lot of other people, too. A whole country full of us who sent you in to do that.”

  Which is why the idea of Spencer pocketing twenty million dollars for his days at White Fire—for doing the hideous shit I’d just watched—brought Rage, Wrath & Fury running. That Spencer would now promote himself to hero in Hard Truth was the worst corruption of all. Truths hidden, lies magnified. For profit. Again.

  “So what do you think? Is Nell going to want it?”

  I knew if I was honest with Clay I might not see him again. But if I stayed in character, I could arrange one more meeting with him. By promising a meeting with Nell, I could deliver him instead to his parents. And they could get him out of Arcadia and away from Spencer. In my hands I felt the weight of Clay Hickman’s precarious fate, and in my heart the sick fear of betraying his attempt at redemption.

  “I think she’ll want to interview you.”

  He turned to me slowly, hazel and blue eyes boring in. “If she doesn’t, I can edit and narrate and post this on the Internet and the world can judge it. I can force Dr. Spencer to observe and comment, on camera. I understand there may be consequences for me. I will face the consequences, but not alone. Dr. Spencer must participate. I am not a terrorist or a traitor.”

  “I see that.”

  “I want my soul back.”

  “You’ve earned it.”

  He stood abruptly and went into the bathroom, looked out the window to the alley behind the room. He took out his phone, punched some numbers, then turned to me. “We don’t have a lot of time now. They have found us. Company men. After White Fire, I can always spot them. They’ve probably bugged the GPS on your phone—feds can do it without a warrant. Patriot Act. They’re twice as fast as cops, and sneakier.”

  Which meant the company had Clay’s phone number, too. It had no GPS to track him by, but they would be able to communicate with him, and maybe find a way to fool and manipulate him, as I had.

  Clay hustled
back to the desk. He swept the first flash drive from the desk drawer and pocketed it. Then yanked the power cord from the wall and slapped the computer closed. Headlights came down the alley toward us.

  “Take the dolls if you want them,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Through the cracked front-room curtain I saw movement in the dark, not the cars steady on the Coast Highway but human shapes coming our direction.

  “I want that show with Nell, Mr. Wills. I gave you my truth and now it’s up to you.”

  I heard a vehicle stop outside the bathroom window and a moment later a familiar voice hissed, “Clay! I’m here! They’re coming!”

  He hoisted himself up into the window opening, wriggled his shoulders through, and fell out, one arm leading the way, the other sheltering the computer against his flank. I heard him hit, grunt, and roll. I pulled myself up in time to see Sequoia Blain heading away in her little silver pickup truck, driving not fast but assertively, just another motorist with things to do.

  The knock at the front door was loud. I pulled my burner, dialed 911, hit speaker, and set it on the desk where the computer had been.

  “Clay? Open up! It’s me, Don Tice!”

  “One moment please.” I knew he wasn’t Tice. I’d talked to him long enough at Arcadia to remember his voice.

  “I don’t have all night, Clay!”

  “Hang on, Morpheus.”

  “Hurry.”

  “Oceanside Police Department. Your name?”

  “David Wills.”

  “Is this an emergency?”

  “My motel room is being broken into. The Harbor Palms on PCH, room fourteen. I believe the men are armed.”

  “Are you inside the room?”

  “Hey, Clay! Let me in. We have to talk.”

  “Yes, I’m in the room.”

  “Can you exit the building?”

  A car screeched to a stop in the alley. I strode into the bathroom, slammed the window closed, and locked it.