THE BIG DOG LUNGED out of the doorway, snarling, jaws snapping, and Nadim scrambled backward, tripped, and dropped into a bottomless well. He was falling, falling, but then, somehow, he was rising, up toward a bright light …
He cocked a grainy eyelid open, saw slatted light coming down from overhead, and heard a scrabbling sound and a dog’s sharp bark. He spat some sand from his mouth and rolled over; his whole body ached from the damp, cold night. Over his head, the underside of the Coney Island boardwalk stretched off into the distance, its diagonal wooden boards throwing herringbone patterns of brightness across the dim sand below. On the beach side, the sand rose to the level of the boardwalk; on the other side, a chain-link fence obscured by tall weeds created another wall, leaving this strange subterranean alley.
Overhead, a dog was scratching at the wood, as if digging down, trying to get to him. It couldn’t reach him, but it might alert a passing policeman.
Heart thumping, Nadim got to his knees, grabbed the knapsack he had bought at a discount store the other day, and scuttled like a crab past decades of detritus: Styrofoam takeout containers, rotting remnants of beach towels, mounds of plastic water bottles, scraggly deflated condoms. Condoms! The thought of making love down here in this mess boggled his mind.
He edged around a little blue camping tent some homeless person had set up and put some distance between himself and the dog.
After fifty yards of scrambling through this gloomy underworld, he lay back with his head on his knapsack and caught his breath. He listened for the dog, but it had ceased its frantic yapping. Nadim pressed his forearm over his eyes, thinking about another barking dog, the one that had gotten him into this whole terrible mess in the first place.
IT WAS A SMALL German shepherd with sores on its flanks, and it lived its life, such as it was, in a tiny backyard next door to Nadim’s former apartment in Kensington. It was left outside, day and night, through all but the very coldest times of the year. The dog went on frequent barking jags, upsetting neighbors all around, but the owner was a sour old Caucasian man who refused to listen to their complaints.
The dog affected the members of Nadim’s household in different ways. His sanctimonious father-in-law didn’t like it because he said it was haraam, unclean. Nadim resented the animal because he often worked nights and it roused him from his morning sleep. Enny, his dear little Enny, felt sorry for the imprisoned, unloved beast.
Nadim, still an alien in the eyes of the law, did his best to avoid any confrontation with white Americans, but finally his exhaustion and his daughter’s pleas for compassion wore him down. He bought a box of chocolates as a gift, dressed up, and went next door to politely request that the neighbor bring the dog inside. The meeting did not go well.
“I put up with the smells of Injun food comin’ out of your place, don’t I?” snapped the man. “I put up with your goddamn kid laughin’ over there all day, and I don’t complain!”
Indian food. Laughing. Nadim did his best to keep his temper, and finally—gritting his teeth to avoid an outright altercation—he walked away. But he was branded as a troublemaker. He would never call the police, but when other neighbors did, the old man shouted profanities across the fence at him. And then, just a few days after the terrible events of September 11, when the winds still carried a bitter burning smell across the East River to Brooklyn, a minor tragedy occurred in Kensington. The old man went out one morning and found his mistreated pet lying dead in his yard. Perhaps it had died of illness or of an overstressed heart. But nothing, nothing at all, would disabuse the old man of the notion that it had been poisoned by Nadim.
One week later, in the middle of a night off work, he woke to a pounding on his front door. Bleary-eyed, he opened it to find three men who identified themselves as federal agents. Without explanation, they grabbed his arms, pulled them behind his back, and handcuffed him.
Ghizala came to the bedroom door, saw what was happening, and shouted at the men, but one of them blocked her from coming out.
“Abbu?” Enny, in her pink pajamas, stood frightened at the entrance to the living room, where she slept on the couch. “What is happening?”
“It’s okay,” Nadim told her. “Go back to sleep.”
He heard his daughter crying as he was dragged out of his home, still in his nightclothes.
“Why you are taking me?” Nadim said, his command of English failing him in his fear. “I do nothing!”
The men did not respond; they just hustled him out to the curb and shoved him into a waiting van.
“I have made application for green card!” he said. “My wife, American!”
The men wouldn’t answer.
“I have papers!” Nadim cried. “Please! In my house!”
The van roared off into the night.
Nadim sat shaken, arms aching behind his back. His captors, stone-faced, avoided looking at him; after a couple of minutes of listening to his baffled pleas, one of them pulled some duct tape from the glove department, ripped off a section, and slapped it over Nadim’s mouth.
He stared out the windshield at the red taillights glowing on the highway in front of the van. He was a professional driver and he could see where they were headed. Along the Prospect Expressway. Onto the Gowanus Expressway. Toward Sunset Park.
We will straighten this out, he told himself, struggling to calm his panicked heart. Ghizala will bring the immigration papers; these men will have to let me go.
BUT THEN THE HELL began.
Outside a big windowless building on a desolate stretch of Brooklyn’s Second Avenue, a metal garage door slid up and the van screeched down a ramp. Nadim was yanked out into a bright basement parking lot where three new men were waiting. They wore brown pants and khaki shirts with epaulets, and they placed ankle restraints on him and marched him toward a doorway. One of the men stomped on the short chain that separated his ankle cuffs, and Nadim fell to the oily concrete.
“Get up, towelhead!”
Nadim stared up in incomprehension. The man, a big brute with a hard face and a strangely small mouth, grabbed his handcuffs and yanked him to his feet. Then, while the other two looked on, the man grabbed the back of Nadim’s head and mashed his face against a concrete pillar.
“I have done nothing!” Nadim mumbled. “Please! My wife, American citizen!”
The big man grabbed the middle finger of Nadim’s right hand and began to bend it back so far he feared it would snap.
“Please!” Nadim screamed.
“I had a cousin in the towers,” the big man said. “I hope you’re ready to feel some pain.”
“I have done nothing!”
“Come on,” one of the other men said to Nadim’s tormentor. “We gotta get him up to the S.H.U.”
AN ELEVATOR, BARRED GATES, stark hallways, a bare room containing only a doctor’s examining chair and a weight scale.
The big man unlocked Nadim’s cuffs and leg shackles.
“Clothes off!”
Nadim just stared at him.
The man slapped him in the face. “I said clothes off.”
Slowly, not believing what was happening to him, Nadim began to comply.
The big man walked over to the door and shouted down the corridor. “Hey, Laney, come check this out!”
Just as Nadim got fully naked, a plump female guard appeared in the doorway, looked at him, and laughed.
Burning with shame, Nadim covered his groin with his hands.
“No, please,” he said. “I am Muslim.”
The big man imitated him in a high-pitched voice. “‘No! Please!’” He scowled. “I know you’re a Muslim, you fuckin’ terrorist! Hands at your sides. Now.”
UNDER THE CONEY ISLAND boardwalk, Nadim tried to rouse himself to go find a better hiding place, but he was just too tired. His head dropped back against the cool sand, and those dark months, from the end of 2001 into the spring of 2002, played out again inside his mind.
The first three days had passed in a terrible blur.
He had been thrust into a tiny cell that reminded him of the bathroom on the airplane that had brought him here from Pakistan: windowless, bare, smelly, with a sink and toilet of polished steel. He spent his first few minutes inside, still cuffed and shackled, calling out through a slot in the door.
“Please! I drive for car service! No terrorist!”
The door swung open, knocking him backward onto the floor. The big man with the small mouth entered. He stepped on Nadim’s head and kept his foot there. “You need to understand something: you will speak only when spoken to. Or else I am gonna flush your towelhead down that fucking toilet, do you understand me?”
The foot left his head and Nadim looked up: the man’s face was contorted with rage.
“Please!” Nadim cried. “I have done nothing.” It was a misunderstanding. A simple case of mistaken identity. There was no reason for him to be here, swallowed up inside this windowless building, trapped inside this nightmare.
The big man knelt down and stared into Nadim’s face. “We know all about you, Hajji. One of your neighbors turned you in.”
Nadim thought of the dead dog and of its owner’s hate-filled threats of revenge, and suddenly he understood why he was here.
Now he was truly frightened.
THE HOURS PASSED, BUT he didn’t know how many—he hadn’t seen a clock since he emerged from the van. He desperately wanted a cigarette, but he had no way to get one. After a while he needed to evacuate his bowels, but he noticed that there was no toilet paper in his cell, and so he refrained. He turned and lay down on his little metal bed; it was a bunk, but the upper berth was empty, with the mattress folded in half.
He expected that someone would show up at any minute and he would be able to explain about the neighbor and the dog, but no one came. Eventually, he curled up and tried to sleep, but the lights in the cell were so bright that they bored through his closed eyelids. He lay there and thought of his daughter, of her frightened face, and he prayed that his captors would let him call and tell her he was all right.
He would demand that they let him phone a lawyer. This was America, not some foreign dictatorship. He had rights. He had seen this on TV; everyone in America had rights.
But no one came.
Later, as he was finally dozing off, someone rapped on the door of his cell. Nadim jolted upright, but no one entered.
Again, he started to fall asleep; again someone banged on the door.
Hours passed.
Then days.
BRIGHT LIGHT, ALWAYS, AROUND the clock, glaring in his face when he tried to sleep. Sometimes, when he was mercifully able to drift off, he would be awakened by a barrage of recorded sound, booming along the corridor, angry songs with screaming voices and thundering electric guitars. Even without the aural assault, he wouldn’t have been able to find deep sleep, racked as he was by the desire to smoke and tormented by thoughts of his worried daughter. No one would tell him what he was charged with, and he wasn’t allowed to call a lawyer.
He was kept in his little cell twenty-three hours a day; the other hour he was escorted up to a little recreation area on the roof, where he could pace back and forth, alone. But there were other prisoners in the area they called the S.H.U.; sometimes Nadim could hear their voices. Egyptians. Turks. Yemenis. There was a fellow Pakistani from Sahiwal across the corridor; Nadim was not allowed to talk with anyone, but sometimes in the middle of the white nights they managed to exchange a few words. The other prisoner’s name was Mahmood and he ran a little magazine stand on McDonald Avenue. As far as the man could tell, he had been detained because the FBI found it suspicious that he had been sending “too much money” to his brother in Karachi.
A sentry came by and ordered the men to be silent. The guards were angry—and confused, and scared. The sky had cracked open, that bright September morning, and their whole world had been shaken.
The one they called Barshak, though, and some of his colleagues, seemed neither confused nor scared. They appeared, in fact, almost glad about what had happened recently: it gave them a perfect excuse to vent some deep inner rage. Nadim remembered a vicious bully in his neighborhood when he was a child, and how Nadim had become expert at finding hiding places in order to avoid this boy. But now there was nowhere to hide. He was surrounded by people, day in, day out, who wished him harm. He couldn’t flee and he couldn’t fight. (On his second day in here, he had resisted Barshak’s rough handling. The result: another guard had been called in and they had taken turns grabbing one of Nadim’s manacled arms and swinging him into a wall. This treatment achieved its purpose: he had been forced to realize the futility of fighting back.)
And so the pressure built, with no way to release it, like a tornado trapped inside his brain.