On the night of the Overwhelming Event, May 30, 2006, I was deliberately hooded so as not to be able to identify faces, streets, landmarks. This should tell you right away that what has been done to me and others in my same situation is illegal. Even hardened criminals—murderers, rapists, drug peddlers, pimps, and thieves alike—get to see the faces of their captors. Those headed for No Man’s Land do not.
Oh sure, I might have caught a glimpse of one or two of the SMERFs who came through my front door, but I can’t possibly identify anyone. They’ve covered their tracks very well! If I wanted to bring charges against those who kidnapped me, against those who transported me here, against those who handled me so violently through the night sky, how could I?
The path to No Man’s Land is kept secret too. Those who need to get here, my lawyer for one, are still trying to navigate their way. Everyone knows where No Man’s Land is. One can easily point it out on a map. But passage into this place is an enigma. I couldn’t even begin to tell you the way to the forbidden island. It was all done in the dark, with a hood over my head. At times they used noise-canceling headphones. Shall I create for you what it was like to be taken in the middle of the night and transported to such a place? Sure, I could go through all the sounds and voices that I heard during transport: the bumpy roads, the rivets in the bridges, the popping of my ears in the tunnels, and then jet engines starting up, and planes taking off. But I would only be speculating. The God’s honest truth is that I don’t remember how I came to be here. When you are taken as I was, and you are masked, all you pay attention to is your own breath. You become very aware that you are still breathing and that you would like to continue breathing. I wasn’t wondering where I was headed. I had already accepted a fate much worse than the one I got—that I would not be breathing for very long.
Transport is your first introduction to solitary confinement, and so you retreat into your mind and try to endure the pain of your senses being suffocated. Imagine being in a coffin for thirty-two hours, buried alive, and at the end of those thirty-two hours (which is just an arbitrary number, for I wasn’t counting) you will be let out, only you don’t know it. What would those thirty-two hours be like? Why, I’ll tell you. Every inch of air taken in is exhaled as if it were the last.
When did it occur to me that I was a prisoner? Perhaps as soon as I was let out of the coffin, when the sack was taken off my head and I could see light and breathe proper air.
I was grateful to the soldier who removed my hood. He gave me life. I cried at his knees as he sat me down in a chair and chained me to an I‑bolt in the floor. He pulled me by the shackles, my wrists and ankles raw from so many hours in chains. Where was I beginning my new life? I looked around and saw that I was in a room. Just a room with four walls. Brightly lit. A table. Chairs. A door. He left the room through the door, while I sat at the table and waited for several hours. I said and did nothing.
The many hours I had spent hooded and transported here and there—this is all part of the fear they want to instill in you. I really believe the Americans tried to simulate death. Transport, as I said, is your first taste of solitary, as it is a great big void of nothing. I must have been driven around, moved from place to place quickly. Drugged and carried, hooded and deafened.
Where did I end up?
Why, not far from where I started that night waiting for Michelle. When the hood came off I was in Newark, New Jersey. Only I found this out much later, when another soldier said so. I was too disoriented to be conscious of place. As far as I knew, I was in Cairo or Kandahar.
The hood was off and I was seated at a table in a room. It was a room used for questioning. For interrogation. All airports have these rooms. I can only imagine that after the great scare of 2001 they became necessary. After several hours of waiting in the
room I met my first interrogator, nonmilitary, wearing a shirt
and slacks. He had a clipboard and wore a neatly trimmed goatee. He appeared to be in his forties, though he could have been younger. He wheeled in a small cart with a polygraph machine and proceeded to attach me to it. Then he sat down across from me and began his inquiry.
Newark was where Ahmed, my alleged accomplice in all this, my “coconspirator,” was arrested for selling fertilizer to an FBI informant, and where he talked about all the bad things that could, would, and should be done on American soil. For me to say from my cell in No Man’s Land that I still can’t believe Ahmed was capable of such things would be unabashed
ignorance. He roped me into his game a scapegoat, and I took the bait.
“Are you Boyet Hernandez?” I was asked.
“Yes,” I said. I was surprised by the sound of my voice. I hadn’t spoken in some time.
“Do you go by any other names? Any aliases?”
The interrogator seemed to have something in his teeth, and so his tongue struggled between his cheeks and gums to free whatever was there.
“I go by Boy. I’m a designer of women’s wear.”
“Just answer the question.”
“I don’t go by any other names. No,” I said.
He did not tell me why I was there and I did not ask, for I didn’t have the nerve. I had assumed it was because of my relationship with Ahmed. I should have shouted for a lawyer, examined the investigator’s identification, proclaimed my innocence, demanded everything and anything a proper prisoner gets, but I was too paralyzed by fear. My, how I wish I had done it differently! I wish I’d had the strength to tell them that what was happening was wrong. I should have demanded that they charge me with a crime or set me free! You know, I didn’t even suggest to them that they had the wrong man. That’s what everyone, I assume, insists as soon as they are captured. Not me. I went willingly. During my first interrogation I did nothing but answer the man’s questions.
Within a matter of minutes the questions took a rather preposterous turn. I was asked why I was planning a trip to Pakistan. When I said I wasn’t, the interrogator accused me of indeed planning a trip to gather materials. Then he read off a list of names. I was to answer whether I knew anybody on the list with a simple yes or no. I was not to explain my relationship with the names; I was just to acknowledge whether I knew them. Here is where I had trouble. My interrogator never properly defined what it meant to “know.” I did not know if he wanted me to acknowledge whether I knew them personally or whether I simply knew of their existence. The interrogator did not ask the question: Do you know so and so? He only read the name, and I was made to respond. The list was even more preposterous than the allegation of the upcoming visit to Pakistan. As we began I experienced a great deal of confusion, especially with his little machine making its squiggly marks along a piece of paper.
Some of the names that were read to me: Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Aman al‑Zawahiri, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Ahmed Qureshi, Habib “Hajji” Naseer, Michael Jordan, Mickey Mouse, Ben Laden, Philip Tang, Michelle Brewbaker, etc. The list was composed of about two hundred names. I was to simply answer yes or no. I was not to elaborate on my answers.
When we were finished with the list he unplugged me from his machine and left the room. That was it. I never saw him again.
Writing out my confession, I have tried to capture the essence of my life. Because everything I write about is in the past, I don’t see myself as living anymore. This is what happens to you when you are arrested. The present is shifted instantly into the past, and what had once seemed unfathomable—torment, misery, profound suffering—is now actual. “An omnipotent actuality,” my special agent would call it, quoting one of his beloved Russians.1
Now that I approach the end of my confession, I find that I am beginning to lose hold of my character. I have become removed from the hero of my own story, you see. To lose hold of your own character must be part of the natural order of things in No Man’s Land.
All the same, I have tried to capture myself, or my character, as sincerely as possible. To re‑create what it was like to live in my skin.
After several minutes alone in the room at Newark Airport, I was once again hooded and shackled by two unidentifiable men whose faces were obscured by the brims of their military caps. No headphones this time, just the black shroud over my head covering my eyes. The two men carried me outside. We were on the tarmac. I felt the wind and heard the noise of propellers as I was carried along. They placed me in the back of a van and sat across from me. I was getting used to the feeling of metal under my feet and around my wrists and ankles. The chains rattled against the floor as the van moved fast and smooth across the tarmac.
One of them said, “Don’t say anything.” He wasn’t addressing me but the other man.
“Don’t,” the other one answered back.
I heard the click of a picture being taken with a cell phone. It was the recording of a click. A simulation. That’s how I knew it was a cell phone and not a real camera.
“I’m taking it off,” one said.
“Don’t.”
“Who will ever know?”
“If they ever find out it’ll be our ass. Mine and yours. Mine because I let you do it.”
“No one will know. We’re already on the runway.”
“Shut up.”
“Like he doesn’t know.”
The man reached over and yanked the shroud off of my head. They were young, white, well built. The one holding the shroud covered his nose and mouth with it and waved a camera phone in front of me. I stared into the panel of his little mobile device, the tiny lens in its corner. It was a Samsung. He was trying to take a picture, but the van was swerving. We were speeding. The other guard covered his face with his hat.
“Welcome to Newark, you terrorist fuck,” the guard with the phone said through his shroud. “This is your last moment of freedom. Say cheese.”
“Don’t look at me,” the other one said. “Look at the camera.” I was looking at neither. I was looking at the guard holding the camera, the one who accused me of being a terrorist fuck. I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about.
He took the picture.
Somehow I knew this would be my last opportunity to speak freely. “Where are we going?” I asked him.
“We? We’re not going anywhere.”
“Where am I going?” I said.
I could tell he was smiling behind the shroud. I could tell by the shapes his eyes made. “Somewhere…,” he sang. “Over the rainbow…”
This made the other guard laugh. The coward still hid behind his cap.
“Where?” I demanded.
The one with the camera looked at his colleague and then turned back to me.
1. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from The Gulag Archipelago.