Blindfold

by Theo Padnos

  Probably I was needing some positive energy in my cell. I made my hero, Gypsy, the star of a high school musical. In my imagination, I saw her singing: “I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful guy!” I hadn’t spoken with a woman in eighteen months. During a transfer from one prison to the next in Aleppo, I had glimpsed two of them at a bus stop, in front of the eye hospital. So I didn’t know much about womankind in our society, but I did know—because I knew their husbands and brothers—that no woman in our vicinity—not one wishing to keep her head—would have stood anywhere near a stage. She certainly would not have sung those lines. That a woman might do this somewhere—and happily and without a twinge of guilt—seemed wondrous to me. But also ordinary and plausible.

  I found that the more I wrote about Gypsy, the more I cared about her. For a person who didn’t exist at all, she had a remarkable talent for getting under my skin.

  Because our prison seemed to exist at some distance from other houses, I supposed that fields and trees were nearby. But I couldn’t see them. Often I felt that the springtime might as well have been happening on the moon. Gypsy, I started to feel, was my springtime.

  The ambient temperature in the afternoons late in May in Deir Ezzor Province, when I began to write this Vermont story, was about 110 degrees. In the afternoons, in that heat, I had to concentrate to keep from panicking. Thus I made my character, Gypsy, go swimming. She swam, um… a lot. I wrote about the deep pools in the rivers, the flotillas of tiny icebergs that poured out of the mountains in the spring, waterfalls, and a certain flat, sun-splashed, totally undiscovered rock above a millpond, high up, in an unvisited part of the forest. When Gypsy jumped from this rock, the shock the water sent through her body was powerful enough that halfway around the world, inside a solitary confinement cell, in the heat along the Iraqi border, it went through my body, too.

  At first, since I was trying to take myself on a vacation to Vermont, I thought the book would be about a perfect place, under ideal conditions, but later, as the plot gathered momentum, it occurred to me that the effect on the human soul of drones floating through the night, suicide bombers drifting in from around the world, preachers broadcasting prophecies from the minarets, entire cities in flight, and no safe way in or out—the effect of year after year of this—was not known. A transformation was underway. What were we becoming? How had this happened? I felt that nobody in our war-ravaged river valley was likely to have the time or the energy to daydream about the pressures our society was exerting on the soul—and that if a person did daydream and did set the dreams down in Arabic, on paper, the story could cost the writer his life. As for the blank space beyond our valley, what could citizens of that other world, so far away, know about the dream underway here? The photographs from here would show normal citizens going about their lives in a time of war. Our dream, I felt, wasn’t the sort of thing one could capture on film.

  Toward the end of spring, in Vermont, in my imaginary world, Gypsy graduated from high school. Her university was to begin in the fall. She didn’t have much to do. She found herself drawn to a classmate named Taylor who had grown up in a sort of a hippie cult, way out in the hills, among the stone walls and the apple trees.

  The pioneer, the recluse, the man of principle who lives from the land, makes his own law, but goes on his knees before God—along the dirt roads on which I grew up, admiration for such people was a feature of the land, like the apple trees. This feeling mistrusts outsiders. It values defiance. Sometimes it collects guns.

  I imagined that the young people in my Vermont town would have been too busy being young people to notice the first few acts of violence, since they had occurred far away, under the cover of anonymity.

  Inside a local cult, resentments were stirring. The cult had always been there but now, for no particular reason—or, rather—for a dozen reasons, many of which were too convoluted for the cultists to express or understand, the cult leaders were on the march. They thought a shock to the system would do the system good. They wanted a fight. They dreamed of an apocalyptic battle. They made their first attacks by stealth, in the dead of night, against targets that had earlier held the community together. This, my ISIS comrades told me, was how they had got things underway in Syria.

  In my story, as trouble brewed, Gypsy was absorbed in a teenage romance. It wasn’t her first relationship, but she had never yet felt that she could love the person with whom she was getting involved.

  The boy in question, Taylor, had a shy, almost courtly way of speaking. He never would have cursed, for instance. He did not drink. Though he had grown up in a religious family, he found most of the stuff in which he was meant to believe more humorous than true. “I don’t understand God in the least,” he told Gypsy when she asked about his feelings concerning the big man upstairs. She agreed that she didn’t understand him, either. “Good,” Taylor said. “Can we move on?” She was willing to move on.

  So in the early summer, I had Taylor mention a clearing on a hillside called Delectable Mountain that he found very, sort of… um, impossible to describe? It was definitely a lot like a dream, sort of. Once she saw it, she would understand. Did she want to take a walk there sometime?

  Delectable Mountain happens to be a real hill in my town in Vermont, though named after an imaginary range in the popular seventeeth-century allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. In my cell, it didn’t feel imaginary to me in the least. I had been free in that place once. Now that that world was lost to me, I saw all the splendors I had squandered. That I had enjoyed that many blessings, that I had tossed them all to the wind, and that my world now consisted of a succession of two-foot-by-six-foot cinder-block prison cells and, now and then, a go-round with the cable—try as I might, I could not make myself understand how this had happened.

  I felt that my character, Gypsy, was the sort of person who liked to explore unusual places. She was curious about unfamiliar people, too. In my story, I had Taylor invite Gypsy to explore a patch of forest, beyond the apple trees and the stone walls, which the cult venerated as a kind of sacred space. To Gypsy, that part of the countryside was far from home. At first, she hesitated. Eventually, she gave in.

  She found her first excursion into Taylor’s forest positively entrancing. She didn’t mind wearing the blindfold Taylor asked her to wear as he drove her along Delectable Mountain Road. She was about to be admitted into a sacred place. It was also a secret place. She meant to show respect. Deep in the forest, when she was allowed to remove her blindfold, the wind happened to wash a scroll of parchment-like birch bark up against her ankles. She plucked the bark from the grass and marveled for a moment at the fluttering of the forest canopy. She was standing on a bluff overlooking a meadow in which hundreds of white birch trees swayed in the wind. Taylor smiled at the scene. He took the parchment paper from Gypsy’s hand. “We think these are letters from God,” I had him saying, as a line in a poem I vaguely recalled said. “In every hour of the twenty-four,” Taylor said, “in every forest in the world, he sends us these letters.”

  Gypsy gaped at the bark for an instant, turned her eyes to the swaying trees, then focused them on Taylor’s eyes.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” Taylor said. “We think it’s a pretty cool spot, I guess.”

  “I guess so,” Gypsy murmured.

  At the time, I wasn’t quite alone with my characters. Every few hours, one of the younger, twentysomething sheikhs, or several of them would pop open the food hatch in the door of my cell. “What are you writing?” they would ask.

  “It’s about some extremist Christians in America,” I would say. “And about a girl I used to know in high school.”

  “Your girlfriend?” they would ask.

  “Sort of,” I would say.

  “Is it true?” they wanted to know.

  I told them it was very true. “Good,” they said. They asked me to read it to them. If there was no girlfrien
d in the bits I read, they lost interest right away.

  I wanted to keep them entertained. So as the summer got hotter in Vermont, as my cell heated up in Deir Ezzor Province, I made things between Gypsy and her boyfriend heat up, too. They went on dates—at first chaste ones in town but later to a lake, in the hills, at night. Up there, after they had taken off their clothes, then gone swimming, one thing led to another. I wrote about how Gypsy came to look forward to these excursions, how she loved taking off her clothes near Taylor, and how she felt when she was lying, without clothes, next to his body. She felt as she had felt in the birch grove: in the presence of something otherworldly—miraculous, even. She couldn’t believe that what was happening was happening. She couldn’t deny it, either. She found this confusion exhilarating.

  Though the sheikhs could see me scribbling well enough, they had no way of knowing where my writing was taking me. I’m not sure I knew, either. Still, I had a rough plan. I meant to recall what love was like, to watch the heart in conflict with the structures of a society, and so, by going to Vermont, to get at the truth of things in our Islamic state. All day long, the men in the cells next to me were telling me true things about life in that state. So did their prayers, their singing, and their conversation with the Jebhat al-Nusra sheikhs. So every time I learned something true and factual, I put it in my story. The truer my story became for me, the more it drew me into my faraway world.

  Looking back on that writing experience now, I recall how keen I was to drive my characters into a dark place. I found myself mesmerized by the instruments—the handcuffs, the galvanized steel cables, the blindfolds—with which the driving was accomplished. I wanted my narration to dwell on the barbs at the end of the cables, and to scrutinize the way these barbs sank through the skin after the shafts had wrapped themselves around the curve of a shoulder or a skull. The harder the tormentors thwacked, the more the cable ends tore at the flesh. I wanted to narrate the whole bloody mess, instant by instant. I didn’t care if I repulsed my readers who were, in any case, a wholly notional construct.

  * * *

  In my story, things would have worked out well enough for Gypsy if it had not been for her love of exploration.

  I knew she was going to die. I knew it was going to be an agonizing death involving heavy-gauge steel cables. I thought for a moment about how exactly they would draw her into their trap. Looking around my cell, my eye fell on my blindfold. I imagined that Taylor’s father, a cult leader, had been spying on Gypsy and her boyfriend, as religious zealots sometimes spy on their teenage children. I imagined that Gypsy’s nakedness had angered and excited him, which was how the sheikhs in my life, it seemed to me, felt about things they could never have. In order to punish her, the father made the son arrange a date with Gypsy. The couple were to meet on the patio in front of the town library, their usual meeting spot, just before dark. In my cell, this patio appeared before me as if it had been projected across the rear wall of my cell. I could see the tiniest details of the scene. The maples that shade this patio rustled in my cell. From somewhere far away, outside the prison—in the desert, perhaps—came the smell of freshly cut grass. In my story, the patio was going to be the last spot on earth in which Gypsy was safe and in control. It was her jumping-off place. Looking back now, I’m sure the details of the scene came to me so vividly because even then, eighteen months after my own disappearance, I still longed to wind back the clock. I half-thought it was possible. Where on earth is a safe space for me? Such was the question my brain wanted to ask. An answer materialized: the library patio in a village at home.

  In the event, I imagined that Taylor’s father had arranged for Taylor to be away—far away, as it happened, in upstate New York, on a tour of a bible college—on the night he arranged to meet Gypsy on the patio. Trusting that he would turn up as he always did, Gypsy appeared on the patio at the appointed time.

  In the event, a friend of Taylor’s—amiable but simple-minded—turned up in Taylor’s place. “He couldn’t come down here tonight,” the friend told Gypsy. “He’s waiting for you in the birch grove. You wanna go?”

  By the time I’d gotten to this point in my story, I knew roughly what the men in the birch grove were going to do to Gypsy. There were going to be head wounds, a period of drifting in and out of consciousness, and blood loss. I was going to kill my favorite character and before I did it, I felt a twinge of regret. Gypsy had woken me up from a period of slumber. It seemed to me that a person had drifted into my cell, that I had scarcely been involved in summoning her, and that now that she had come, I cherished her company. I didn’t want her to leave.

  But this character, I felt, had an important mission in life. She was setting out. In my imagination, her job in life was to discover what I had discovered about the cruelties men commit in the name of God. I wanted her to be led into these discoveries as I had been, that is, by a trusting nature and a will to discover what other humans get up to in the world. Accordingly, I gave the friend who came to pick up Gypsy on the library lawn a ramshackle car whose ignition was operated by a screwdriver plunged into the keyhole. The driver himself had a laid-back, almost sleepy way of talking. “Get in if you want, Gypsy,” he told her. “Up to you, really.”

  As she contemplated these words, a wave of regret swept over Gypsy.

  I saw her playing out dark scenarios to herself in her mind, which was what I had done in the moments before I got into a car I never should have gotten into. I saw her taking a hard look backward toward the safety of the library. How can I get out of this? she wondered. I made her get into the car because her curiosity about Taylor had been aroused, because she wished to discover more about his sacred space, and because everything she had learned about life to date told her that further, deeper mysteries would unravel themselves if she allowed herself to follow her heart.

  In my story, I had the driver ask Gypsy to put on her blindfold once he turned onto Delectable Mountain Road. “Sorry, Gypsy,” he said. “I guess it’s a secret place and everything. Okay?”

  She was okay with the blindfold. I arranged for Taylor’s father—and a committee of cult leaders—to be waiting for Gypsy in the birch grove. The men stood in the darkness, in silence, their faces covered with balaclavas. Each of them held a three-quarter-inch galvanized steel cable in one hand. This was roughly the attitude in which my first group of torturers in the eye hospital basement had met me.

  As the driver guided her over a stone wall, into the birch grove, Gypsy heard the rustling of the forest canopy, as she had heard it during her first visit to this space. Were there human voices in that rustling? She couldn’t tell. “Taylor?” she whispered. She put her hands to her blindfold.

  In that instant, it occurred to her that she had made a mistake. She had allowed herself to be led into the depths of a forest. By whom? She scarcely knew the driver. In the next instant, a cable crashed into the back of her skull. The force of the blow made her drop to her knees. “Oof,” she said. A second blow caused her to topple forward. As she lay in the grass, a warm trickle of liquid oozed through her hair. What is this? she thought to herself. A boot kicked her head. “Oof,” she said. And then her wrists were being locked into handcuffs. “You are our prisoner now,” said a voice.

  “Help me! Help me!” said other, younger voices—giggling apparently. A flurry of whispered remarks followed whose meaning she could not make out, there was more giggling, and then came another sharp blow to the back of her head. “Help me!” said a voice in the instant following this blow. “Oh please! Oh help! Stop!” Somewhere in the distance, there was giggling.

  “Please!” Gypsy murmured.

  “Oh please!” the voice replied.

  In my story, I made this torture carry on for about twenty minutes. Afterward, a fake trial occurred as Gypsy lay bleeding on the ground. In Syria, such trials are always theatrical affairs. There are spectators arrayed in a ring around an empty spot of pavement or patch of field. In the center of the ring, there stands a m
an in a robe. At his feet, an accused person kneels.

  In these dramas, the central conceit is that after many years of ignoring it, humankind has once again resolved to submit itself to the law of God. When there are trials, the spectators tell themselves that they have gathered to watch this terrifying but holy instrument at work. For their part, the men who spill the blood pretend to themselves that through their violence, they are ridding their sacred space of filth. In Syria, such trials are a ghastly kind of reality TV in that it is obvious to all that a drama is being acted out yet there are no actors, nor is there a script. These dramas are often filmed. Over the ensuing days, the dramas spread through the social networks.

  In my fictional trial, Gypsy admitted right away that she had had sex with Taylor. Blood was streaming through her hair. She wasn’t inclined to contradict her interrogator. She confessed to not being married to Taylor. She confessed to having had sex with other men. When these confessions were finished, there was a pause in the questioning.

  “This makes you a whore?” a voice asked—softly, in a tone of fake wonder, as if a minor revelation was at hand.

  “Yes,” Gypsy confessed, “a whore.” A man was holding his boot against the back of her head. Now he ground her face into the earth. The blindfold came loose. A man grasped a clump of her hair, then pulled her face toward his.

  “What?” he said. “You are a whore?”

  She did not reply. A rain of cable blows hit the back of her thighs.

  “Yes, yes! Please!” Gypsy screamed. “A whore! Please! A whore!”

  After her trial, when Gypsy could no longer move or see, she lay in her pool of blood. The cable barbs had sunk themselves into the flesh at the base of her skull. A boot had staved in a section of the frontal bone over an eyelid.