The Sleeper (16 page)

There wasn't anything I could say. Griffin only knew part of the story, and what he didn't know—what I'd almost done—was far, far worse than he thought.

“Don't give up,” said Griffin. “I've got a couple of ideas—things I set in motion. Let's hope they work.”

“What?”

The lights went back on.

“This session is over,” said Griffin.

The door to one of the bedrooms on the second floor of the house by the pond was kind of special to me. I'd given it simple inset panels, and at the top I'd jigsawed three little hearts. I thought that if this was a little girl's room, that would be a nice way to be able to check on her without crowding her too much. And I hoped that Miriam would like it when she saw it. But now the door wasn't hung right. When I tried to swing it closed, it stuck against the jamb. I took it off its hinges, put the wedges back in and reset it. But still it wasn't right. All that work. All that work! And still it wasn't right.

The scream from the next cage made the whole house disappear. The floodlights were out, so it must have been between two and four in the morning, but there was still enough glow from the watchtowers to see the Squatter writhing naked on the cement floor of his cage, holding his gut like he was trying to squeeze out the fire inside. Spit was foaming at the corners of his mouth, and diarrhea spread underneath him. I backed away from his cage and sat down, watching, from the other side of mine. The Squatter groaned now, in too much pain to scream, and the body jackknifed on the ground, then unbent, violently folding and unfolding in a terrible convulsion.

“Poison.” The voice of the Sudanese was right next to my ear. “Must be poison.” He shook the wire of the cage. “Murderers!” he shouted. The floodlights went on and a guard platoon charged down the alley in front of the cages. “Murderers!” shouted the Sudanese, and others started to join in the chant. Suddenly the loudspeakers erupted with the call to
fajr,
the morning prayer: “God is Great. Prayer is better than sleep…” drowning the shouts of the prisoners. Four of the guards threw open the door to the Squatter's cage and struggled to pin him down for the chains and shackles, but he writhed like a man possessed, the demon jinn more powerful than him or the men around him. The imam who had come to lead prayers now went inside the Squatter's cage, pacing at the edge of the struggle between the guards and the twisting, buckling man on the ground like a referee at a tag-team wrestling match. “Get out!” one of the guards shouted at him, but the imam kept working his way around the ring, stepping past the spilled slop bucket and the sleeping mat. The Squatter always left the plastic wrappers from the food lying around inside the cage. Now the imam-referee bent down and picked up an empty pack of raisins, slipping the Sun-Maid into the pocket of his BDUs. If I hadn't had my own ringside seat I wouldn't have known what he was doing. “Poison,” I said so the Sudanese could hear. “They poisoned his food.”

“It is true, Qibla,” said the Sudanese. “Poison for talking.”

“Talking?”

“Talking too much, talking too little,” said the Sudanese. “Talking gets you killed.”

There won't be any explanation, I thought. They'll take the Squatter away and he'll just be gone, maybe dead, maybe in a hospital, maybe in a cage on the other side of the camp, maybe in some hole for hard questioning. Nobody here would know. Did the imam poison him to shut him up? I looked at the Kuwaiti, who seemed, for once, to be completely speechless. The chains were on the Squatter now, and the gurney had arrived so he could be strapped down. No, we weren't going to know, and I wasn't going to learn anything more from the Squatter, not now, and not ever.

Soon after the sun came up full, the imam came back. He looked around the floor of the cage. There was nothing left but the spilled buckets, the worn foam pad, the filthy towels piled in a corner, junk-food trash, and the smeared pool of liquid shit. The imam was looking for something in particular. He bent down and picked up one raisin, then another, but he was still looking. Like someone in a silent movie saying “Aha!” he picked up a towel by its corner and shook out of it the Qur'an. Everybody who could see him was watching him as he wiped it off with his hand, held it to his chest, and left.

“Attention,” barked a man's voice on the loudspeaker. “Collect your belongings. Today cells will be changed. Repeat: collect belongings. You will be taken out of your present cells and you will not be returned to them.”

None of us had any belongings, but every fifteen minutes the message repeated until, slowly, some of the detainees rolled up their bedrolls and tied them with the towels. Others embraced their Qur'ans. Most, like me, did nothing. Just before noon, the transfers began, as one by one the prisoners were taken out of the cages, chained, and shuffled onto the buses that had brought us from the airport so many weeks before. They came for me about four in the afternoon. I was one of the last to be taken away. Eight or nine other prisoners and about the same number of guards were already on the bus. None were men I'd ever seen before.

They took us in full restraints to a large hangar near the airstrip that had been divided into crude plywood cubicles. Each of us was put in a separate box. I heard the doors closing on some, doors opening on the others. Some of the detainees shouted and complained. I didn't. I was still working on the heart-door of Miriam's room in my house by the pond.

Later, maybe a few hours later, the plywood entrance to the cubicle I was in swung open and two guards came for me. We shuffled out into the open and I saw it was night. Even with the runway lights around me I could see the sky was full of stars, and realized with a flash of pain how long it had been since I had seen a full nighttime horizon. We shuffled out onto the tarmac, and I looked around to see where the bus was. I was tired. I didn't want to have to shuffle too much farther in these fucking chains. But we stopped beside one of two executive jets parked on the apron.

One of the guards unlocked the chains on my feet and pulled them off. “Up,” he said.

“What the fuck's going on?”

“Up,” was all he said.

I stumbled up the steps into the unlit cabin and saw Griffin alone at the back, looking out the little round window at the guards below. “That's it,” he shouted. The guard stepped back down. The stairs immediately rose up into the side of the fuselage. The lights went on. “Come here and let me take off the cuffs,” said Griffin, holding up the key.

“What the hell's happening?”

“Right now?”

“Right now.”

“You're going home, Kurt.”

“Don't fuck with me.”

“I ain't fucking with you.”

“You said it was going to be just about impossible.”

“Yeah. Unless somebody called the President.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, somebody did.”

“The President of the United States? What the hell are you talking about?”

Griffin was facing me in the narrow cabin of the plane, but if he reacted I couldn't tell. The only light was from the thin, dim thread that ran along the floor and the stroboscopic flash from the wingtips.

“Who called the President?” I asked again.

“Can't say. A friend of yours, I guess.”

“I don't have any friends like that.”

“Yeah, you don't have friends, do you? But it looks like you have an angel.”

“Nobody knew where I was, unless you told them.”

“Let's not go there,” said Griffin. “Let's not worry about how you got out. Let's worry about keeping you out. And having you ready to move if we need you again.”

I remembered the magazine in Kenya with the picture of the old Bush and the Aga Khan. I remembered those long nights with Cathleen, and the way she talked about her boss's friends in high places. “Faridoon,” I said. “Faridoon got me out of the cage.”

“Don't go there. Don't go back over any of this,” said Griffin. “Don't talk about Guantánamo. Because damn it, you never were there.”

“Yeah. Five months of never was. But you called Faridoon.”

“Someday I'll tell you the whole story. But not tonight.” Griffin turned his shadowy head to look out the window.

I slept, woke with a start, slept.

“That's the Mississippi down there,” said Griffin. A couple of lit-up ships moved on its night-black water. We seemed to be following it upstream. “The Big Muddy,” said Griffin.

I knew then that we really were on our way home. “The Big Muddy,” I remember saying, and that was all. I fell into a sleep so deep I didn't wake up again until we were rolling to a stop on the runway apron.

“Kurt.”

“Yeah.”

“You're almost home.”

The lights went on in the cabin and I blinked awake. “What?”

“Almost home. We're at McConnell.”

“Good. Good God. Yeah!”

“And there's some folks here I think you want to see.”

Both of them were standing in front of a big old Suburban—standing out in the headlights looking as bright as a USO show. I waved through the tiny window of the jet and Betsy said something to Miriam, picking her up and pointing. But Miriam looked around, a little lost, not seeing any face she knew.

The jet's stairs went down and Griffin put his hand under my arm like I needed help, which, to my surprise, I did. “I got it, I got it,” I said, hunching over as I made my way out the cabin door. The air smelled like black fields fresh-turned. We must have been at the edge of the base, because it was all farm smells, earth and straw, and nothing ever smelled better to me in my life. And then Betsy ran toward me with Miriam. I took my child in my arms, and Betsy, too, all in one long hug that I wouldn't and couldn't stop, breathing them in, smelling Betsy's neck and hair—the perfume from the bottle with the crystal doves. And I guess I pulled back for a second because of the weird memory from the deck of the carrier. Betsy looked at me, then looked at me again real serious. “Is that you, Kurt, behind that beard?” Miriam was wiping the kisses off her face, and looked a little scared.

“Oh, Baby,” I said. “I can't believe it's me either, and you, and Miriam. Come on, Miriam, give me an Eskimo kiss.” She pulled back. “I can't—can't believe—oh, God, Baby let's go. Let's just get the hell out of here and go home.”

“We have to stay in a motel tonight.”

“If we're together,” I said, “then that's home.”

“We've got so much to talk about,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we do.”

 

We didn't make love that night at the Ramada. Miriam was in the bed on Betsy's side, and restless in her sleep, but that wasn't the only reason why. We didn't fight, but that was closer to what happened in the long silences between us.

“Tell me what it was like for you all this time,” I asked.

“Lonely,” said Betsy. “About as lonely as a person can be. That's how it was.”

“But Griffin took care of you.”

“Was it Griffin? Somebody made sure we had a place to stay and something to eat and a little TV to watch. We were in Arlington, Virginia. But we might as well have been in prison. No friends. No work. No phone calls allowed unsupervised. God Almighty, Kurt. You go away and Miriam and I wind up hundreds of miles from home under some kind of house arrest, and to this day I have no damn idea what the hell you were doing or why.”

“I want to tell you, but if I start, Baby, I won't stop. And I can't do that.”

“Just tell me one thing then,” said Betsy, and right then Miriam let out a long half-cry from deep in a nightmare. “Just tell me one thing,” Betsy whispered again. “Did you save the world?”

“I stopped a few bad guys,” I said.

We were lying side by side and I could feel the warmth from her body, but something like a force field kept us apart. Every so often a car would pull through the parking lot outside and send a beam through a crack in the curtains sweeping like a searchlight across the stucco on the ceiling. The little red standby light on the TV glared like a snake's eye. I tried to think of the house on the hill by the pond. But it wouldn't come together. It was just an idea now, not a place to be.

I thought of Guantánamo. I thought of the padded cell in the hold of the ship. I thought of the desert and the mud and the beehives, and of Nureddin moving through the night, and of Cathleen and her bottle of mother's milk, and Faridoon and the Ismailis and their friends, maybe some of them in the White House. And I wondered how I could have been so many places and done so many things that I couldn't begin to talk about with the woman I loved. I saw Waris in her father's arms and smelled again the smell of death that was around her in the hospital. I saw the video arcade in Granada, and felt the cold water rush over my half broken body on the floor of the bodega. I drove the blade into Abu Seif's bull-neck—

“What is it?” said Betsy.

“Nothing,” I said. “A bad dream I guess.”

The tape in my head kept rewinding, the images skipping by, each worse than the next, until I saw the people on the videotape in Granada, the woman I killed and the half-seen face of Al-Shami, whoever the hell he was. Al-Shami was in Granada. I was pretty sure he was in Somalia, too. Now he was with me in my sleep. He was every fucking place I turned.

Full awake, I lay still and looked at the roughness of the ceiling. “Betsy?”

“What is it, Kurt?” She was no more asleep than I was, and her whisper was uneasy. Miriam shifted in her dream and put her arms over her mother's neck.

“Why did you leave the house, Betsy? Griffin hasn't told me a damn thing.”

“Forget it, Kurt.”

“Please tell me—just—what happened.”

“I wanted to tell you everything, Kurt. Everything. I was so scared. But you weren't there.”

“I'm here now.”

Another car pulled into a parking space not far from the curtains. The light froze above us. I heard the door of the next room opening and closing. Finally the headlights clicked off.

“Please try,” I said, and I tried to get my voice under control. “Please.”

“Somebody came to visit. Said he was a friend of yours.”

“What did he look like?”

“Never saw him before. And he sure as hell didn't look like anybody you would know one way or the other. Not local. Not army. Dressed too well, sort of slick in spite of himself, like a rich man trying not to look too rich.”

“I'm trying to figure—”

“Black hair with a little gray. Wolfy blue eyes. Average height. Maybe forty-five or fifty years old. A little like that actor Alec Baldwin, if you want to know. Pressed slacks and soft brown loafers, an ironed blue shirt and a blazer that fit like it was made for him. That give you an idea? He didn't look like anybody you'd know.”

“He was American?”

“Near as I could tell. East Coast, I guess. Maybe New York.”

“What did Griffin say about him?”

“Griffin showed me a bunch of pictures. A lot of guys with beards—or shaved by the computer, you know. Griffin didn't say much. He just asked a lot. Kept asking what the man said about this Zoo Bear guy.”

“Yeah.”

“The man only said the name once. Said he knew you were looking for him, and he thought he could help.”

“Betsy, you sure there's no way the man was an Arab?”

“His eyes were as blue as yours, Kurt.”

“There're Arabs—”

“You and Griffin sort it out.”

“Did he have a limp?”

“A limp? No. Not as I recall.”

“He scared you. He threatened you?”

“He scared me just 'cause he was at my front door. He was one stranger too many after all those men who dropped by in the middle of the night before you went away—and now you
were
away and here was another one. You know? And we had that break-in. Just kids, I guess. But, Kurt, I really love my home and I really don't want to have so goddamn many strangers knocking at the door. You know? But, no, he didn't threaten at all. Not like that. Not at all. He was real polite. Said he tried to call, but the phone didn't ring—and he was probably right. We should have replaced that goddamn phone years ago.”

“And you remember his face.”

“Hell yes.”

“Did Griffin have somebody do a drawing?”

“Yeah.”

“You have it?”

“No. Kurt?”

“Yeah?”

“I haven't seen the house in so long, I don't even want to think what it looks like.”

“Yeah.”

The silence was a real long one this time. Miriam quit fidgeting on the far side of Betsy and our little girl's breath slowed to the rhythm of sleep. But Betsy's breathing was silent, awake, and so was mine.

“Betsy?”

“Sleep, Kurt.”

“What did he say he wanted?”

“He said he wanted to help you with Zoo Bear. And he said he loaned you something.”

“What?”

“Money, I guess.”

“Did he say money?”

“He said ‘something.' ”

“And you said?”

“I said, ‘What the hell are you talking about?' And he laughed, and he said, ‘I just want to see him before somebody lets the genie out of the bottle.' ”

“And you called Griffin right after that?”

“Nope. He called me almost right away after that. And I didn't know who the hell
he
was either. You know? He calls and says he's working with the government and working with you, and he wants to talk to me—and then this black dude, ‘Mr. Griffin,' comes to the house and says Miriam and I have got to move away for a while. Like we was in the witness protection or something. And of course I said no. Hell no. But he said we didn't have a choice. And he said he could make us come with him, but he didn't want to do it that way. And you know why? Because he was an old friend of yours, too, Kurt. You know, you've just got so goddamned many friends I just can't stand it.”