There’s a soothing melody to the grind of the gravel beneath his back as Elias studies the clouds above him. He shifts and the stones shift, an accompaniment. Or a counterpoint. He moves his legs and listens as rock slides against hard-packed ground. Clouds drift on invisible currents against a backdrop of pale blue, and he thinks of music on the radio. He thinks of Halia. Unlike the other prison cells, here he has the time and freedom to think. Even though it’s inhuman. Unjust. Illegal. Guantanamo is not like the other places.
He raises his arms and locks his fingers behind his head. Bright lights, perched atop thin metal poles, shine down on him even though it’s broad daylight. He follows the coils of barbed wire wrapped along the fence, and wonders why one side has two adjacent layers of coils, while the other has only one. Is the possibility of escape from one side higher than the other? He chuckles at this. He is on American-controlled soil, yet he knows just over there, just beyond the buildings, lies Cuba.
He sometimes wonders how a place like Guantanamo is even possible, even though he’s been in enough prisons to know that logic, such as it is, doesn’t matter in places like this. Still, he tells himself, he must think logically. So, he won’t forget. So that even now, after all these years, his thoughts and memories, as painful as the gravel pressing through his thin orange jumpsuit and into his shoulders and thighs, are as boundless as the sky.
Indefinite detention. This had been his life before they even coined the phrase. Detention without cause, without justification, without representation. He may be on American-controlled soil, but he is not in America.
Decades ago, in the early days of captivity, he could replay an entire piece by Chopin or Beethoven or Brahms in his head. Symphonies and operas were best. He’d had them memorized, and the voices of the instruments, the notes as they rang out and then hung in the air until dissipating away to nothingness, reminded him of what it was like to be free.
Now, from one small fragment of the sky, he can extrapolate an entire symphony of imagination from the four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, the Frere Jacque three notes of Mahler’s First, the majestic triad of the opening of Zarathustra, the wisps of white in the sky, the emerald beams from his daughter’s ten-year-old eyes, the gentle curve of her ear, fragments, motifs of his beloved Cheryl Halia.
Elias extends his arms as if reaching for his daughter. Beyond his hands, beyond the fencing and concertina wire, clouds drift apart and fuse back together. He gazes at the age spots on the back of his hands, testimony to the accumulation of too many years fused together in an indefinite life.
It happens without warning, like most everything else in his life. Without warning and without any understanding of what it means, the detainees are informed they will be departing Guantanamo. Within hours and without explanation, they are herded onto a C-140 military transport plane, and the lush tropical island set in a sea as blue as the sky recedes into the background, though Elias only imagines this. There are no windows where the prisoners sit.
When the plane lands, the prisoners disembark one by one and are shuffled toward the lone bus idling near the plane at what appears to be yet another military installation.
“My lawyer says we are going to a prison in the state of Illinois,” a fellow detainee says.
Elias swallows hard and whispers. “Illinois?”
The man shrugs while Elias, through watery eyes, searches for something that tells him this could possibly be true, but all he sees are military aircraft and a few signs that read, Scott AFB.
Still, Elias can hardly believe it. Overnight, and as if the last forty years were nothing but a bad dream, he is back in America, back where he started his life as a young, naïve immigrant with the American dream waiting for him to reach out and claim as his own.
Stuart Eisenstat didn’t feel well when he got up, and now the asphalt fumes only make him feel worse. He swallows hard and thinks he might retch.
Maybe it’s the canned, artificial motel air he’d slept in that makes him feel like he’s coming down with something. He pinches the bridge of his nose, fighting a sneeze. He’s always been allergic to those bargain motels, never properly cleaned, dust accumulating in cheap air conditioners and heaters that rattle and whir like turbo props at close range. He had tossed and turned and then awoken to this thought: banal discussions in the aggregate boil down to individual lives forever fucked by decisions made by those in high places. And those in low places. That thought rolled around in his mind while he resisted getting out of bed and facing this day. He’s been nauseous since.
As he waits for the detainees, his throat constricts. Every swallow takes forever to travel up and down his windpipe. Chaos contorts in his gut. Stuart’s demeanor of cold confidence belies the turmoil in his mind. All these detainees, and the United States government has no idea what to do with them.
Of course, he should be beaming. His crowning bureaucratic achievement—the Saluki Federal Repatriation, Rehabilitation, and Detention Facility—surrounds him. The place he spent years trying to get built, years playing the bureaucratic shell game on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security.
He shows his government identification and security clearances to the burly guard armed with a pistol at his side, an automatic rifle slung across his chest, a bullet proof vest protecting his core, and a helmet with a visor hiding his identity. He, and the others like him in the security detail, carry enough weapons to suppress a small insurrection. Who knows where his gear ends and his body begins.
For ten years, Stuart had been an enlisted bureaucrat in the domestic army responsible for the safety and protection of 315 million Americans. Enthusiastically, he’d transferred out of the Department of Energy into the newly created DHS. He was determined to make a difference, to be part of the solution after 9/11. Still, the existential question for his department torments him: Are we safer now than we were then? Than we were before?
Until he’d learned of Elias Haddad, he would have confidently answered yes. But, the accounting as to what the federal government had done in detaining these individuals hadn’t yet begun. These detainees were the unintended consequences of a safer homeland. They were an externality. Stuart once loved this word. In his former world at the Department of Energy, it meant the cost or a consequence of a product or a service that is not factored into its price. It seemed to explain so much.
Then.
Human externalities had only recently occurred to him. Banal discussions in the aggregate, he told himself. A consequence. One that has not been properly accounted for. Did the detention of all these men make Americans safe? And, now, in the aftermath, will America be a safe place for them? Can their lives be reconstituted?
Perhaps the accounting begins today.
The misery inflicted on one man, Elias Haddad, as with many others, could never be fully measured. Stuart knew this. The full accounting of the aftermath of 9/11 could only take place person by person. The collective consciousness was too far gone.
The bus pulls up and Stuart watches as guards herd the prisoners down the steps and toward the main door into the complex. One by one, the prisoners navigate the steps hobbled by leg irons. Stuart scans the faces of each man in search for Elias Haddad, but they do not look at him. Instead they hold their shackled arms in front of their faces, blinking in random patterns against the bright Midwestern sun. And then, slowly, each man takes stock of their new prison.
Stuart searches for signs of suffering in their faces—dark complexions, heavy beards, days, weeks, or months unshaven—and for the history behind their arrival here today. Some scowl, hostility etched on their brow. Some look confused. Others just stare ahead, the subtle lines and angles of their faces, the palate of their skin, etched and eroded, like sandstone on canyon walls.
A second guard follows the last prisoner off the bus. He is noticeably older, much older. This, Stuart knows, is Elias Haddad. Oddly, the man is smiling, and Stuart can’t help but crack a sliver of a smile in response, momentarily freeing him from the nausea. Stuart doesn’t know why, but this man’s smile breaks the barriers of his face and seemingly spreads throughout his entire body. Even though he is shackled at the ankles, handcuffed with his hands bound to his waist by a thick leather belt, the man continues to smile, looking around as if he can’t believe his luck. Stuart imagines the smile, like a zip line, carrying Elias Haddad over the barbed wire and beyond the heavily guarded perimeter. Back to freedom.
Beyond the fence sits the remains of John Veranda’s property. Property Stuart arranged for the government to confiscate by eminent domain. It would be good for the town of Saluki, Stuart told his old college friend, and John had eventually agreed. Of course he didn’t have much of a choice. And maybe it would be. A glob of acid refluxes from his gut, but Stuart summons enough gravity to force it back down.
Are we really safer now than we were before?
For Stuart, what had started as a project undertaken to protect his country from dangerous terrorists had become a mission to reunite an old man and his daughter. A mission he undertook with John. A mission to account for the externalities of one man’s life, for the unaccounted for costs of surviving, of fighting wars—political and personal.
The reunion hasn’t happened yet, Stuart reminds himself as the prisoners file past him until only Elias Haddad stands before him. Stuart wants to say something, but what? The acrid upward flow in his throat crimps his thoughts. What do you say to a man who was swept away from his country, his home and family, detained for years against his will and held captive for reasons no longer understood? How do you make amends for indefinite detention?
The bus lurches to a stop. Elias had longed to see the landscape of his adopted homeland roll leisurely by, but the windows had been blacked out. What would he see now? What was waiting for him in this new prison? The last to exit the bus, Elias steps down onto a newly paved parking lot. He blinks into the sun, and when he takes a step, the goo of fresh asphalt is sticky on the soles of his shoes. He crinkles his nose, breathing in. He’d forgotten what it smelled like. With a few shouted instructions, he, along with the others, is herded away from the bus. At first, the land surrounding them is boundless. No walls. No barbed wire. This disorients him. Momentarily, he wobbles, and then a fence comes into view. He steadies himself. The space around him again confining. Comforting.
Ahead, near the entrance to a low-slung building, Elias notices a man in a long overcoat standing with a group of guards. The man’s coat hangs open, his shoulders are slumped, and he’s not wearing a uniform. Clearly not military. Elias presumes the man holds some official capacity. Perhaps he is the warden or maybe another human rights lawyer. But Elias senses there is something different about him. He feels the man watching him—and only him—as if monitoring every step he takes. As Elias reaches him, the man leans forward, and in a barely audible voice says, “Mr. Haddad, my name is Stuart Eisenstat. Welcome back to America.”
The man did not speak to any of the other prisoners, and this confuses Elias. Still, Elias looks up at him. “Is this Illinois?” he hears himself ask.
“Yes. You are in Illinois.”
And then Elias can’t help but smile, and a single phrase escapes his lips, as if nothing can hold it back. “Am home.”