by C. E. Smith
At a place where the water pools, their captors unroll mats and kneel in prayer, silently touching their foreheads to the ground.
Burkett sags against the trunk of a tree. One of the Kalashnikovs lies within easy reach. He could simply pick it up and open fire on his prostrate captors. What are his chances, one against five – or two against five, if Nick could grab a weapon as well?
Nick seems to guess what he’s thinking. He shakes his head, silently warning him away from the gun. Burkett follows his eyes up to the ledge and realizes it would be futile to make a run for it in this narrow pass. For miles they’d be trapped in the open, with no place to hide. Besides, he can already feel the nausea returning. Sick like this, he’d probably make easy prey on any terrain.
After praying, Safiullah orders Burkett and Nick to collect wood for a fire. It is their first chance to speak since this morning.
‘You look horrible,’ Nick says.
‘Probably something I ate.’ His hand trembles as he reaches for a stick.
‘That old man back there could tell we were American,’ Nick says. ‘Maybe there’s a military outpost somewhere near his village – maybe he’ll report what he saw.’
An unlikely prospect, but Burkett remains silent. There’s no point arguing a matter of faith, or belittling Nick’s interaction with the goatherd. A pointless act of courage: he’d admire it more had it been for courtesy alone.
For dinner, their captors pass out retort packets that read ‘US Government Property’. It seems the American military sells not just drones, but also MREs, or Meals, Ready-to-Eat. Burkett doubts his government would do business with terrorists. The MREs have more likely come all this way through some black market transaction or misplaced shipment, or even a convoy attacked and looted.
Nick knows how to use the flameless heater to warm their meals – beef stew, mashed potatoes with gravy. Burkett’s had nothing all day but flat-bread and a handful of nuts, but nausea keeps him from enjoying more of the MRE than the crackers and peanut butter. He doesn’t mind giving the so-called entrée to Nick.
The temperature drops after dark. The five jihadists sleep on mats around the fire. Burkett and Nick again have to share a single blanket, but after a short time Nick removes himself, complaining of the blanket’s smell.
Burkett hovers on the edge of sleep. He’s vaguely aware of Nick building a fire. Some time later – minutes or hours, he doesn’t know – he wakes to the sight of a figure. A woman. He’s standing ankle deep in the stream. He must have walked in his sleep. She’s silhouetted by fire, a black figure like a tin cutout. It’s someone he knows. Véronique could have followed them, but that seems implausible for even the most intrepid reporter. Who is she? He steps gingerly on the smooth stones but his ankle rolls and he collapses in the shallows. When he recovers she’s gone. All he sees is Nick, who plods into the stream and helps him to his feet.
They are walking again. The slender path disappears in a field of stones and forms again at the base of a steep hill. The path takes the form of switchbacks, and Burkett keeps his eyes on the ground to avoid the stares of those ahead of him.
At the top of the hill he sits down on an outcropping of rock, even though it’s clear the group has no intention of stopping.
He’s tired, but that isn’t why he needs a break. He pulls up the frayed, dirt-covered hems of his jeans, and examines the skin underneath.
Since early morning he’s been plagued by insects. At first they seemed to confine themselves to his ankles, but in the last hour they’ve become more aggressive, working their way higher up his legs.
But now that he looks, he can find no trace of them. He sees the red marks where he’s clawed at bug bites, but he can’t discern the bites themselves.
Perhaps these are microscopic insects. Perhaps they burrow under dermal layers to lay their eggs. Could this be the earliest manifestation of Madura foot? He remembers the amputation he performed at the clinic, the indurated gourd at the end of that man’s leg. With the image comes a shot of guilt: the man had to go through surgery with expired benzodiazepines.
He feels the bugs tickling inside his shoes and wonders if the infestation could have something to do with the fact that he’s not wearing his socks. By last night his socks had become so dirty he had to rinse them in the stream. All morning he’s carried them dangling from the waistband of his pants. Now that they’re dry he sits down and puts them back on, though he isn’t sure if they’ll stave off the bugs or trap them inside.
He’s startled by a hand on his elbow – one of the gunmen ordering him to stand and walk. Burkett drops a shoe and nearly falls from his perch on the rock. As the jihadist bends to pick up the shoe, Burkett notes the holstered pistol at his waist. The man seems to be inviting him to make a grab for it, but it’s Nick who supposedly knows how to fight. Burkett at this point, starved and exhausted, swarmed by invisible insects, isn’t sure he could keep his hand steady enough to aim or pull a trigger.
Nick kneels beside him. ‘You all right?’
‘Fine,’ he says.
Without asking permission, Nick takes Burkett’s wrist and feels his pulse. ‘You’re tachycardic.’
‘Just tired and thirsty,’ he says.
‘You feel warm,’ he says. ‘Do you have a fever?’
A creek bed takes them across a valley of stones. There has been no breakfast, no lunch. Each man is given a small bag of peanuts, the type distributed on airplanes. Burkett feels weak and hungry but the first of the peanuts sits nauseously on his tongue till he spits it out. He stuffs the bag into his pocket and keeps walking.
Not till that evening, when they make camp, do the insects begin to explore the territory above his knees.
A word comes to mind: Formication. The tactile hallucination of ants. It is so typical of withdrawal that he should have recognized it from the earliest tingles.
They seem most active when he rests, and now they feast on his thighs, crotch, and torso. All his scratching does little good except perhaps to mask the prickles with self-inflicted pain.
While the others sleep he lies on his back and stares into the night sky. He has his hands in his pockets, his body rigid as he tries to ignore the needling bugs.
He has a vision of his brother on the ground beside him. The bullet holes in his chest bubble with pulmonary air. A bloodstain spreads in the dirt, and as its edge nears Burkett, he sees that it isn’t blood but a swarm of ants.
He stacks his palms against his brother’s sternum and counts a series of compressions. Ribs crack under his weight. With each thrust, more ants erupt from the bullet holes. They appear on Owen’s lips as well, and within moments they are spilling from his mouth and nostrils. Burkett tries to breathe into his brother’s mouth, but the airway is clotted with ants. Ants form heaps at every orifice, mounds that rise and come together to form a black shroud that vaguely conforms to the shape of the body underneath.
The ants form sleeves up Burkett’s arms. When they cover his face, he pauses his chest compressions to swat them away from his eyes and mouth, but the moment he clears a swathe more ants flood into it. He feels them inside his ear canals. He keeps his lips clamped shut, but it doesn’t take long for the ants to find their way through his nasal passages and down to his throat.
When he reaches again for his brother’s chest, it is nowhere to be found in the thick darkness that he realizes will kill him as soon as he tries to breathe. At the last moment he has a view of himself and his brother from above, and all he sees is a pair of black mounds.
11
Burkett wakes in some kind of cell, a straw mat cold against his skin. He aches with thirst. Nick sits against the opposite wall, between them a rectangle of light cast by a small window. Without being asked, Nick passes him a bottle of water.
‘Where are we?’ he asks after emptying the bottle.
‘In the mou
ntains,’ Nick says. ‘Near Allaghar, I think.’
‘Where is Allaghar?’
Nick shrugs. ‘About a hundred and fifty miles from the capital.’
This jars Burkett. He remembers boarding an SUV with a new set of captors, but of the rest of the journey he has no memory.
‘You had a seizure,’ Nick says.
‘When?’
‘Yesterday,’ he says.
They were wearing burqas at the time, so Nick doesn’t know where in his body the seizure began, nor how long it lasted. It only became apparent when he bucked off the seat and jostled the others in the car.
He turns over his hands. He notices a tremor, ever so slight. Could this be an after-effect of his seizure? Or perhaps a sign of more to come? It persists even as he reaches down and pinches the edge of the blanket. In surgery he always prided himself on his steady hands. If the steadiness doesn’t return, he’ll have to find ways to adapt, like that ophthalmologist at Emory who managed brilliant feats of microsurgery despite rattling instruments. If he survives this experience, he doubts he could get away with popping Valium before every operation. ‘To be honest,’ Nick says, ‘I can’t say I expected —’
He holds back the rest of the sentence, what he can’t say. A seizure. The truth is, Burkett wouldn’t have expected it either. It dispels any doubt he might have had about being an addict. The cause is probably the benzos more than the alcohol. He estimates he’s been drunk, on average, four to five days a week for about ten years. For some that might qualify as alcoholism, but he’s known plenty of medical students and physicians, men and women alike, who could match him drink for drink. His real problem – which he recognized before even losing his medical license – was the daily use of Valium, morning and night, usually supplemented by short-acting doses of Xanax. He wonders if the medical board would accept Islamist captivity as an alternative to one of their treatment programs.
No doubt he has diminished in the eyes of Nick, starting with the regrettable episode of crying, from a competent surgeon to a groveling alcoholic. He doesn’t know what Nick thought of him before – nor for that matter does he particularly care – but it seems Nick could only hate him now for wearing this face, for doing such dishonor to Owen by looking exactly like him.
He shivers even though they’ve been given blankets. There is a painful throbbing in his head. He imagines his brain as a pulsing muscle, squeezing fluid in deranged mimicry of his heart. The pressure steadily builds inside his skull. He lifts his hands to his head but seems to lack the strength of counter-pressure.
The headache pursues him into sleep, and in a dream he realizes that ants have entered his skull and begun eating his brain. When he next wakes, Nick is watching him from the other side of the chamber. Burkett winces at the stench of urine. He notices the dampness of his clothes, the stickiness down the leg of his pants.
On the floor is a package of bottled water. Seeing it makes him aware of his thirst. He drains one bottle in gulps, imagining his body absorbing the water like a dry sponge. Only after he’s finished does it occur to him that water might be in short supply, but Nick doesn’t seem to mind. He tosses the empty bottle into the corner at the foot of his mat. He can tell from the pile of trash there that Nick has consumed several MREs since their arrival.
‘How long has it been?’ Burkett asks.
‘We’ve been in this room almost four days.’
‘Have they not let us use the bathroom?’
‘There’s a septic pit,’ he says. ‘It’s easier to wash you here than there.’
Do their captors understand the nature of his sickness? The natives expect food poisoning in a westerner. If they recognized alcohol withdrawal, it would only confirm their general opinion of Americans as decadent and corrupt, and what difference would that make?
They expect us to be addicts, he thinks. He is proof of Christianity’s failure. But why should he, an agnostic at best, be expected to represent Christianity? Perhaps the jihadists would go easier on him if they understood his position. Or would his lack of belief only cause greater offense?
Burkett senses Nick’s stare but refuses to return it. He picks up another water bottle and turns it in his hands, pretending to study the label, though he can’t read it in the dim light. When he finally looks over, Nick is facing the opposite wall, probably asleep.
The door bangs open, toppling an open bottle he’d filled last night with urine. A bearded Arab, well over six feet, stands there smiling, amused perhaps by the spill. He leads them into the courtyard and orders them to sit at the base of a dry fountain, whose centerpiece has been smashed and partly buried in sand, the fragments suggesting a life-size horse and rider.
Burkett must have seen this courtyard when they arrived, but he has no memory of it. The enclosure is formed by a low-slung, horsehoe-shaped building accessible by rows of doors painted in bright colors. Graffiti marks every available space on the otherwise stark white walls – Qu’ranic verses in the same brown paint. Jihadists with machine guns scowl at them from the shaded part of the courtyard. Those who brought them here are nowhere in sight.
A boy of around twelve strides toward them. A man follows, keeping a hand on the boy’s shoulder. The Kalashnikov looks almost comical in the boy’s small hands, at least till he points it at Burkett. The boy seems to brace himself to fire. Burkett extends his arms, palms out, and says, ‘No, wait,’ but the boy doesn’t pull the trigger. He begins shouting, gesturing with the gun. Burkett flinches when it sweeps past him. He glances at Nick, who keeps the boy locked in an impassive stare.
‘Is he going to shoot us?’ Burkett asks.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so?’
The boy presses the gun against Burkett’s cheek, forcing him back against the low wall of the fountain. The tirade goes on, with prompting from the man beside him, who mumbles at every pause. Other jihadists stroll over to observe what is beginning to seem like some rite of passage for the young boy.
Is he to become a man by killing an infidel? Surely Burkett is worth too much in ransom to die at the altar of someone’s coming-of-age experience.
He imagines an orderly delivering the message to his father. Ryan died as well – the same ones who killed Owen. His father stares, perhaps confused, or perhaps too far gone even for that. It is a small mercy that he no longer recognizes those names.
Pain bolts through his head. He hasn’t been shot, only jabbed with the gun, but still his fingers search his brow for a wet hole. A blaring tinnitus drowns out the boy’s voice. He tries to keep eye contact, but his vision blurs from the pain or welling tears, perhaps both.
An image comes to mind: that woman he glimpsed at their campsite. All at once he knows her. Or his mind paints her silhouette with someone he knows – Amanda Grey, the one he stole from his brother. He hasn’t spoken to her in years, but knows she’s in Nashville working as a forensic pathologist. It occurs to him that of all people she alone might mourn his death.
Did she mourn Owen? Does she even know that Owen died?
The boy spits, first on Burkett and then on Nick. The spectators seem particularly impressed by the glob of viscous saliva that oozes down Burkett’s cheek.
12
The next morning the same guard wakes them by again kicking the door. He seems to enjoy startling them, as if he expected to catch them trying to escape. Along with the usual Kalashnikov, he carries a rucksack and a camera case.
Burkett props himself up on his mat. He can barely see through the slit of his left eye. He reaches up to touch it, imagining how he must look with his facial bruising, vomit stains, and trembling hands – a man near death – but the truth is, he feels better than he did yesterday.
Nick interprets the Arabic. The guard, whose name is Nibras, laughs about the shame they suffered at the hands of that boy. He insists on palpating Burk
ett’s swollen eye, chuckling as he mashes the bruise with his thumb. At first Burkett refuses to wince, but the pressure increases till he has to push away the hand. Nibras makes some joke about how they would have wet their pants if they hadn’t already relieved themselves in a bottle.
‘Is he part of the Heroes of Jihad?’ Burkett asks.
‘Probably,’ Nick says.
‘Does he know who killed Owen and Abu?’
‘How would you suggest I go about asking that question?’
Burkett stares at the smiling Nibras. ‘He seems jovial enough,’ he says.
‘Just ask him.’
The guard squats, looking from one to the other as if waiting for an interpretation, but Nick remains silent.
‘At least tell him I’m not a Christian,’ Burkett says. ‘Tell him I’ve always admired the beauty of Islam and would like to learn more about it.’
Nick’s silence carries a hint of condemnation, but Burkett has no qualms about seeking a neutral ground between religions. He tells himself that the truth is more important than solidarity among prisoners. He wishes he could speak the words himself rather than depend on Nick to translate. To distance himself from Christianity is to distance himself from Nick, and perhaps it’s cruel to ask him to interpret, but when the time for violence comes, Burkett has no interest in suffering for beliefs he doesn’t hold.
Nick begins speaking in Arabic. Burkett manages a partial smile when Nibras turns to face him.
‘He also thinks it’s a beautiful religion,’ Nick says. ‘No surprise there.’
From his rucksack Nibras takes a roll of duct tape. Burkett imagines himself gagged and bound by the wrists and ankles. But the only purpose of the tape, it turns out, is to hang a bedsheet from the wall.
They pose for pictures with yesterday’s International Herald Tribune. Nibras is dissatisfied with the lighting, so he extinguishes the bare bulb and repeats the process. He opens the door to augment the natural light from the window.
