Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  “Thank you,” she says, not quite obsequious but making an effort to show rational deference. By her formality she also hopes they may know she has some strength and dignity left in her, even in this position.

  “Also this,” the Kid says, removing a penlight from his shirt pocket and setting it on the floor. It looks like the same instrument Walid used to examine her eyes. “Emir says is a gift to you.”

  They’ve come and gone again, taking back the thermos after she drank the last of the tea, leaving behind a tin pail, delivered without comment, although she knows very well what it’s for without having to be told. No toilet paper. A pitcher of water they tell her is for drinking (Good, good, iodine) and one for cleaning her hands (This wash only, no drink) after they’ve departed and she’s finished squatting over the pail.

  Later she lies in the corner on her wool blankets, the penlight clutched in her fist like a sword hilt. She’s already used it to inspect her cell, finding nothing much. The grated drain. A nonfunctioning fluorescent ballast on the ceiling. She checked it out. Standing on her tiptoes, touching the penlight to an exposed jag of wire protruding from the ballast, weighing the possibility of a shock and deciding it worth the risk of discovering a hot wire, which she could fashion somehow into a weapon or a fire starter, something to change the status quo. But the wire is cold.

  Now, without any good reason to use the penlight, Cassandra has to work hard to suppress the urge to switch it on. She knows she should conserve the battery for essential tasks, but after a while the darkness gets the better of her. It cannot even be called darkness anymore, since she’s begun to see bluish filaments of light coiling and uncoiling like glowing threads in the space above her. Trick of the brain. Early sign of madness, maybe. When she can no longer resist—it’s either turn on the light or continue to pinch her face to remind herself she has form and heft and isn’t merely a pair of eyes connected to a brain in shapeless dark—the penlight throws a ghostly penumbral beam on the far wall, temporarily banishing these thoughts.

  Seconds pass. She clicks it off, feeling guilty and weak as an addict. She forces herself to concentrate on something else, whatever is happening aboveground. By now the army must know they’ve been captured and aren’t simply lost, didn’t flee the ambush and take a wrong turn in some no-name village. The army will move heaven and earth to recover them. This assurance gives her small consolation. Mind boggled at the unluckiness of being the one for whom heaven and earth must be moved.

  Enough time passes for her to work up the courage to try the pipe. Enough time that she can’t say for sure whether Crump’s screams were something that happened today or yesterday. Enough, she begins to doubt she ever heard them.

  She’s in the corner with the drain and the penlight, using the light’s aluminum body to tap on the grate. She hopes the metallic clicking will be transmitted well enough through the pipe to wherever the drain leads, somewhere near Crump. Three quick taps, then three spaced further. Dit dit dit, dah, dah, dah, dit dit dit. She sounds the SOS exactly fourteen times.

  “Crump?” McGinnis’s tentative, hushed voice comes up through the drain, sounding very near, like he could be in the next room.

  “No, me,” she whispers, cupping her mouth to the grate and speaking into the musty-smelling pipe. When she’s done talking, she turns, ear down, to listen.

  “Wigheard? I thought you were dead.”

  “Me too. You heard Crump? Wasn’t sure if I was going crazy there.”

  “No, I heard.”

  “What happened?”

  He’s silent a moment before answering, and she takes that for shame at letting himself and his two soldiers be taken. She assumes by his surrendering. They would surely be dead back in that canal if he’d put up an organized resistance. Maybe he made the right call not to. Or maybe dead would be better.

  “I think Treanor, the LT, and some of their guys got away.”

  “What about the others?”

  “I don’t know. Jesus, we’re in bad here,” comes the huskily whispered answer through the pipe. Curt, almost prideful, the kind of pride that comes from resigning yourself to out-and-out bleakness.

  “Who are these guys?”

  She’s already spent some time on this question and wants his take. One piece of evidence is the Kid, whose name she’ll soon learn is Hafs. He was wearing a fatigue-style shirt but it looked tatty to her, like surplus from two wars ago, no name tape, rank, insignia. And other than those fatigues, neither Pig nor the tall sniffling Arab nor Walid wore anything like a uniform. Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary force, famously disguise themselves in civilian clothes, and she assumes there are secret police and spies and other remnants of the regime still operating in pockets of resistance throughout the country. But her guess is, these men aren’t Iraqi. She thinks they’re the foreign fighters, the mujahideen Haider warned them about.

  “Doubt they’re regulars,” McGinnis says. “One is maybe a doctor—”

  “Walid.”

  “How do you know his name?”

  “I asked.”

  He chuckles, the laughter sounding eerie and more than a little spectral coming through the pipe. She isn’t sure what he finds funny but, even so, can’t help but join in. It’s a strange thing. In a tight spot, with everything riding on the line, laughter is more irresistible than despair. No small number have gone to the gallows sniggering.

  She and McGinnis work out a code to talk. Safer than using voices. She has the penlight and he a piece of loose tile pried from his cell, instruments with which to tap messages to each other through the cast-iron pipe running under the floor. The code is simple: one tap for the letter A, two taps for B, and so on, with a brief silence to indicate a new letter, and a longer silence for a new word. As with any language, idioms and other shortcuts arise organically to solve flaws inherent in the code. By the end of the first day they’ve devised a grid-based tapping system: two rows and thirteen columns of letters, with one or two taps indicating the row, and the second series, the column. That speeds things up some, but tediousness remains a problem. The length of time it takes to relay a message means that many of them don’t need to be wholly articulated for the listener to infer their meaning. So, they come up with a signal to let the other know when this happens. If, for example, McGinnis guesses the word before Cassandra finishes tapping it out, he interrupts, tapping rapidly on his end to signify a movement toward the letter Y, an affirmation, as in, “Yes, got it.” Hearing this, she then skips ahead to the next word unless the entire intended message has become obvious.

  He has light in his cell, not from a penlight but a window. This fact comes out early on. They talk about it for a long time in the context of escape. He tells her his window is small, barred, and at the top corner of his cell, which has a high ceiling. He thinks it’s ten or twelve feet. It feels as though the part of his wall—concrete under tile—that he can reach while standing is, like hers, buried underground. Feels solid when you knock on it. Thick, a weight of earth behind.

  He describes several rows of shelf mounts without shelves attached, the mounts like runners bolted onto the entire length of his back wall. He believes it might be possible to climb them and reach the window. But the window bars look made of iron or steel, something that rusts, and set close together—no way to squeeze through.

  He balks at her suggestion to climb the wall immediately and further assess the bars. The bolts affixing the shelf mounts look sketchy and might shear off under his weight. Not much purchase. Fingertip’s worth.

  The tile in his room is blue. The room itself like it could’ve been some kind of washroom or small kitchen. Grimy shadows on the walls where fixtures were once mounted but no longer are, wires and pipes and hoses cut, all appliances and cabinets stripped out, hauled off. A tall empty room with a window.

  He’s sorry she has no sunlight. She tells him what it’s like without it. Light is life, she says. Crawling out of her skin, waking up and not knowing if someone or some
thing has snuck in the cell with her, the contradictory sense that the cell is both smaller and larger than it actually is, she tries to explain it, but there’s really no way he can know, not unless they lock him in phantasmagoric dark for days. He says he thinks it’s been five since the traffic circle.

  S-E-E-M-S—L-O-N-G-E-R, she says, then badgers him about the window until finally he promises to attempt a climb up to it when he thinks the time is right.

  O-K—S-O-O-N—P-A-T-I-E-N—

  She cuts him off, racing to Y.

  Then there’s Crump. Much of their talk in the days to come centers on him, sharing their concern and speculating over his condition. He has so far refused all communication, verbal or code. McGinnis thinks he’s being held next door, maybe two doors down. But neither he nor Cassandra can say whether Crump’s refusal to communicate stems from an inability to hear, maybe some side effect of his head wound, or more disturbingly, whether he’s well aware but chooses not to respond. Would he somehow save himself by sacrificing them? Is this why he won’t answer? Or is there something he knows and they don’t, which makes any interchange too dangerous or pointless to attempt?

  In any case, the problem is not that he’s silent. His latest outburst was the worst so far. Cassandra woke to him screaming and throwing himself against what sounded like his cell door, making enough of a racket that she could hear him plainly through her own door, the echo rising through the drain a redundancy.

  “Come on and do it!” he shrieked, the kind of unmodulated shrillness that can only come from a human being pushed to a place where the lines between fight and flight approach a vanishing point. “Just get it the fuck over with! Do it, you pussies! Do it! I know you’re gonna do it so just fucking do it!”

  The guards wouldn’t oblige him. Neither would he let up, and she thought he must’ve been hurting himself with the way he was going at the door, the crashing bangs sounding intermittently; must’ve been running at it, putting his shoulder into it like a battering ram. For his own good she hoped he would knock himself out. No such luck. The guards were in the hall, chattering unintelligibly among themselves and also yelling at him through the door, hollering at him to shut up, which only inspired a greater apex of fury.

  There was the unmistakable clacking sound of an automatic rifle being cocked. Spring loaded, slick, a slim-tolerance sound. Done in the hallway, and louder than it had to be, more dramatic, as if the person cocking the rifle thought the sound itself would serve as sufficient intimidation to silence him, which it wasn’t. He kept on. And even though Cassandra was pretty sure he was about to die, she felt little pity for him in that moment. Anger, mostly. Anger at him and fear for herself, because of how his actions would implicate her, because the guards would kill him first and then move on to her and McGinnis. Not necessarily because they wanted to, but because they would have no choice, these Americans turning out to be more trouble than they were worth. Once you murder one prisoner of war, you’d better dispose of the others.

  She braced herself for the rifle shot foretelling her doom. But as inexplicably as he’d started, Crump stopped. He went at the door to the point of muscle failure. Or maybe he did knock himself out. The guards talked for a while longer in the hallway and then went silent, too.

  Afterward she and McGinnis spent hours going back and forth on the pipe about it. McGinnis had been afraid of the same thing she had, certain that if the guards had shot Crump, they would be next. They still couldn’t say for sure whether the periodic yelling from his cell indicated torture or madness or both, whether they were being held hostage for ransom, a prisoner exchange, the extraction of intel, propaganda value, or something else. But, setting aside their captors’ motivations, they agreed that Crump could get them killed if he couldn’t be reasoned with. The only way to mitigate this risk was to make contact, talk him down, at which task they continued to fail, tapping out SOS signals until their wrists throbbed with repetition, and sometimes, in desperation, risking verbal appeals through the pipe, calling his name softly, asking how he was holding up, but he never responded.

  It was mystifying in the first days, but now she has an inkling of the reason Crump won’t speak except to demand his own death, assuming that’s what he means by Just fucking do it already. It’s still crazy, she thinks, it’d never be something she’d ask for, but maybe her instincts are wrong here and Crump’s figured it out: Talking to each other isn’t going to end this. Won’t solve the essential problem and may only compound it by making them more dependent on one another, therefore more vulnerable to threats and torture. Already, she and McGinnis are running out of things to talk about, their conversation grown stale. It’s what McGinnis seems not to understand, the law of diminishing returns; they talk constantly and yet it gives them no power, no control. They talk about Crump. About home, rescue, escape, what the army may be doing to locate them, and the more they talk, the more McGinnis needs to, and the more she doesn’t, because she can get no more information from him. It’s hollow comfort, like spending money. Frustrated, she lapses into terseness, periods of enforced silence, while McGinnis is starting to show signs of a dangerously needy desperation.

  Like now. Like right now with his tile shard working rapidly, recklessly loud, insistent, demanding her attention. She decides to ignore him for enough time to make it obvious. She would like to ignore this entreaty entirely, claim later that she was asleep and didn’t hear it. But that won’t pass. They’ve just been fed and watered, the boyish guard Hafs entering her cell to change out her waste pail, and she knows the same has been done for McGinnis, which means he knows she’s awake. Other than transparently shunning him, there’s no choice but to tap back on the grate. Listening, ready to receive. He proceeds with the message.

  I-F—I—D-O-N-T—M-A-K-E—I-T…

  She can already tell where this is headed. They’ve been over this ground several times and she doesn’t know if she can bear to reassure him again that if she manages to live, and he doesn’t, she will definitely, without fail, tell his wife that he loved her to the bitter end and that his last thoughts were of her and their son, whose name, she’s relearned, is Matthew. She curses him, the father, silently. Need to teach him a lesson. These things don’t need to be said. They’re mawkish promises to make. Foregrounding what is already huge and painful, talk like this can only lead to defeatism, paralysis, despair. Of course she’d do all that for him. Go to see his people, if she had to. Course she would. Stop worrying about them and worry about us. Like they need any more melodrama, the stakes to be higher. Maybe disgust is too absolute a sentiment for what she feels for him, but she finds him repellently pitiful; what he’s doing makes her want to keep her distance from him, as Crump may’ve decided to. Being chained together is almost as bad as being alone.

  Her anger gets the best of her. She interrupts him and taps rapidly on the drain and doesn’t stop for a solid minute, which action in their code is roughly translatable to her bellowing, Yes, I get it, I fucking get it, so shut up about it already!

  He goes silent. She immediately regrets what she’s done and taps out an apology, repeating it over and over because he doesn’t respond.

  S-O-R-R-Y—S-R-R-Y—S-R-Y…

  I give up, she thinks. An hour passes. Or two, or four; she’s lost her clock, McGinnis and his window and the sun. However long it’s been, silence. Sulking. She thinks it’s just like a man to rub it in like that. To pull back when things are at their most intense. To avoid. To punish by withholding.

  Sex is always on their minds. From what she can tell, they’re even more fixated on it than the average adult male of fighting age, a class of person she’s known very well over the past few years. So, for her to believe the guards are oversexed is really saying something.

  She knows they’re thinking about it by their eyes and their horny awkwardness with her and because from time to time she overhears them, those who speak a little English, with McGinnis in his cell.

  You have wife? What car you h
ave? Why in America are the men always fucking other men? How many times you can do it in one night? How many TVs for your house? Where you live? What you think of Iraq? You fuck many women or just wife? What you think about this Wigheard? You fuck her?

  She figured it would come to this. But there’s no good way to steel yourself to accept victimhood. To try is only to codify the souring relationship between yourself and the world, to cement future agony like reliving a trauma that hasn’t even happened yet.

  It’s Annas, the ugly piggish one. She knows his name by now. She’s made an effort to learn all their names and has succeeded so far with three: Walid, Hafs, and Annas. Her thinking is that by using their names as often as possible, she might, by proxy, humanize herself.

  This strategy is fundamentally sound and will work well with some, less well with others, and not at all with a man like Annas. Might even have backfired, in his case. To remind someone like that of his humanity is to remind him of what he hates most. Thus rage. Thus this present moment, a while in coming.

  He slips into her dark cell with eyes wild and rifle held by the pistol grip, the weapon pointed carelessly toward her while he sets the lantern on the floor and with his foot eases the door shut behind him.

  “What’s wrong?” she says. She sits up on her pallet, blankets folded on top of flattened-out cardboard boxes, these new, a gift from Hafs. Until this present intrusion she’d been sleeping intermittently, stuck in a series of not-quite-nightmares in which she failed at one crucial responsibility after another. Snapped from that into this, the mind demands a moment to realize how afraid she should be.

  “You are wrong,” Annas says, venom materializing out of nowhere. “You are very bad woman.” He comes closer, hovering over her. “Move. The other way.”