Time washed past Elias in ways he could no longer fathom. Some of the other fifty or so men held with him said they were at a top secret detention facility in Jordan run by the American CIA. Yet, Elias imagined they could have been anywhere. Not one characteristic of the place indicated where on earth they were located. All he knew for sure was that the cell he was in this time was filthier and more cramped than the last one.
Because of his proficiency with English and his nationality, the Americans accused him of being a Hezbollah agent, or a counteragent, depending on who was talking, while many of the Arabs confined with him believed he was a Mossad agent because he also spoke Hebrew. Despite the fact that no one trusted him, bits of information eventually filtered down to him from other detainees and camp officials.
What he learned was that after the embassy in Beirut was bombed, the US sent in a covert military team to plan retaliatory strikes. Six months later, the Marine barracks were bombed at the Beirut International Airport, and that’s when the Americans began rounding up suspects, or rather, hostages. Fed up with appearing weak and ineffective, the Americans started collaborating with the Israelis to arrest anyone with suspected ties to militant Islamic groups even though many couldn’t even be identified by the military and espionage forces on the ground. Elias had been one of the unidentified—and unidentifiable.
The Israelis, who had held him as a prisoner of war after the 1973 war with Syria and Egypt, later trained him to fight as a proxy in the South Lebanese Army, cobbled together from factions of Lebanese Christian soldiers, to resist the Palestinian Liberation Organization and later Hezbollah.
After the carnage he was forced to witness against unarmed civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, Elias shut down. The slaughter permanently perforated his soul, his grip on what humanity was supposed to be leaked out to soak into the blood-drenched soil. The memories and images festered in him like maggots in a dead animal, eating away at whatever autonomy he had left. And like the death of the maggots that die only after an animal is consumed, those memories, too, would never die until he did. This, he knew for certain. He refused to cooperate after that massacre, and the Israelis began to suspect his sympathies lay with Islamic militants. So because of his English and of his insistence that he had lived in America, they handed him over to the Americans.
After he transitioned from soldier to prisoner, every chamber of Elias’s body was violated. Torture was used to enforce discipline. To seek information he did not have. Food was minimal—or withheld. Drinking water scarce. Sanitation, non-existent. What they had not emptied out of him, he had done to himself. Even forced to violate his own bowels, so they functioned properly.
In his last conversation having anything to do with his future, a fellow detainee told him the Americans could never return him to Syria because of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, enacted the year before. This prevented the US from extraditing any person to another country if there were substantial grounds to believe the person would be subject to torture. What irony, he thought.
Elias had no secrets left. He’d never had any in the first place. So what did it matter where he lived? How he lived? Or how he died.
Inquiries to his captors about his predicament ended, along with the hope of any messages getting through to family. He did as he was told. Shuffled mechanically from one place to another, as ordered. No action out of the ordinary. A living death.
The years he’d spent ruminating over why his father sent him away from home were done. He’d convinced himself he wasn’t wanted in the first place. And even before he left America in the hope of visiting his ailing father one last time, he realized there was nothing left between him and the woman he’d married, Paula, the mother of his daughter. Their running feud about having more children got the best of them. He knew he’d acted improperly several times, hoping to make her pregnant again. But she was his wife, after all. It was her duty to have children, and what she’d done to keep from having a second child could not be forgiven.
He’d even given up on Father Moody. If there was anything he could have done to help him escape this hell on earth, to intervene with the Americans or to get word to his relatives in Syria, he would have done so long ago.
Elias was told by many people, inmates, prison officials, that the Assad likely wiped out most of his family because of their anti-regime activites or sympathies. He could not comprehend the totality of that. His father and mother, his brothers, and sisters? All of them gone? Any relative left, no matter how distant, would be too fearful to make even an innocent inquiry, others said. And he could never be returned to America because the government would be forced to offer a fair and impartial trial. With no concrete evidence against him, the government would lose.
Get used to it, one prisoner said. We are international zombies.
Now, nothing—his family in Aleppo, his wife in Illinois, his friend and confidant, Father Moody, or even his freedom—was of any consequence. Nothing mattered except his daughter. Therein lay his only remaining thoughts of life outside.
He had not seen Halia in twelve years. She would be a woman now, twenty-one years old, graduated from college at the top of her class, surely. Ready to marry, raise a family. What did she look like? Was she happy? Does she treat her mother with respect? He hoped she was able to take the piano lessons they talked of so earnestly in days gone by. Hope for her life to be as happy and fruitful as possible clung to him. But even that hope had become ephemeral, fading in and out.