Zeitoun’s bunk was over the fuel tanks, and he was asleep one early morning when he was jolted by an explosion below. He didn’t know if it was one of the tanks, or if the ship had struck something. He quickly realized that if the tank had exploded, he would be dead, so they must have hit something, or had something hit them. He was rushing to the bridge to find out when another explosion shook the ship.
They had been struck twice by Iranian torpedoes. Together they created a hole big enough to drive a small motorboat through. But it was clear the Iranians didn’t mean to sink the tanker. If they had wanted to, that would have been quite easy. They wanted only to send a warning, and to cripple the ship.
They managed to make it to Addan, and there they spent a month repairing the hull. While waiting to ship out again, Zeitoun decided that perhaps his father Mahmoud had been right. It was time to settle somewhere, time to build a family, to remain safe and constant, on land. A few months later, he got off the Andromeda in Houston and began searching for Kathy.
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 13
Zeitoun and Nasser did not discuss the possibility that they would not be released from this prison for many months, or even years. But they were both thinking it—that no one knew where they were, which afforded the authorities, whoever it was who wanted them kept here, complete and unchecked power to keep them detained and hidden indefinitely.
Zeitoun could think of no indication so far that any measure could be taken to advance his case. He had not been allowed to make a phone call, and there was no hint that he would ever be allowed to do so. He’d had no contact with anyone from outside. There was the nurse, but she was a full-time employee of the prison. Professing his innocence to her was futile, as professions of innocence were likely all she heard all day. In fact, he knew that his very presence in a maximum-security prison likely proved his guilt in the minds of all who worked at the facility. The guards were used to overseeing men who had been convicted at trial.
Further, the prison was so isolated that there was no oversight whatsoever, no civilians who came to check on conditions. He had not been let out of the cellblock once, and had been let out of the cell only to shower; the shower itself had bars. If they had refused him a phone call for seven days now, why would they change their policy in the future?
He had one hope, which was to impart his name and innocence to every prisoner he might meet, so that in the event that one of them was someday released they might not only remember his name, but also bother to call Kathy or tell someone where he was. But again, who among them would believe he was one of the true innocents in the prison? How many other names and promises had they known and made?
When he was originally arrested, Zeitoun had not been sure his country of origin had anything to do with his capture. After all, two of the four men in their group were white Americans born in New Orleans. But the arrest had taken on an entirely different cast by the time they were brought to Camp Greyhound. And though he was loath to make this leap, was it so improbable that he, like so many others, might be taken to an undisclosed location—to one of the secret prisons abroad? To Guantánamo Bay?
He was not the sort to fear such things. He was not given to conspiracy theories or believing that the U.S. government willfully committed human rights violations. But it seemed every month another story appeared about a native of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, or any one of a number of other Muslim countries who was released after months or years from one of these detention centers. Usually the story was similar: a Muslim man came to be suspected by the U.S. government, and, under the president’s current powers, U.S. agents were allowed to seize the man from anywhere in the world and bring him anywhere in the world, without ever having to charge him with a crime.
How different was Zeitoun’s current situation? He was being held without contact, charges, bail, or trial. Would it not behoove the Department of Homeland Security to add a name to their roster of dangerous individuals? In the minds of some Americans, the very thought of two Syrians paddling through New Orleans together after a hurricane would seem suspicious enough. Even the most amateur propagandist could conjure sinister implications.
Zeitoun did not entertain such thoughts lightly. They went against everything he knew and believed about his adopted country. But then again, he knew the stories. Professors, doctors, and engineers had all been seized and disappeared for months and years in the interest of national security.
Why not a house painter?
WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 14
The pain in Zeitoun’s side was overtaking him. While standing or sitting in certain positions, he could barely breathe. He had to get help.
When he heard the nurse’s cart making its way down the cellblock, he jumped up to meet her at the bars.
“Did you give the doctor my form?” he asked her.
She said she did, and that she would hear back soon.
“You look sick,” Nasser said.
“I know,” Zeitoun said.
“You’ve lost too much weight.”
“The pain. It’s so bad now.”
Zeitoun had a sudden and strange thought, that the pain in his side could be caused not by infection or injury, but by sorrow. Maybe there wasn’t a medical reason for it. Maybe it was just the manifestation of his anger and sadness and helplessness. He did not want any of this to be true. He did not want it to be true that his home and his city were underwater. He did not want it to be true that his wife and children were fifteen hundred miles away and might by now presume him to be dead. He did not want it to be true that he was now and might always be a man in a cage, hidden away, no longer part of the world.
THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 15
Now Zeitoun knew the rhythmic ticking of the nurse’s cart like his own heartbeat. He leapt to the bars again to meet her.
“What did the doctor say?” he asked.
“About what?” she said.
“About my condition,” he said. “You gave him the form.”
“Oh, you know, I don’t think he got it. You better fill it out again,” she said, and handed him another form.
He did not see her again that day or the next.
* * *
Zeitoun began to feel faint when he rose to his feet. He was not eating enough. It seemed that every meal had pork at its center. And even when he could eat what was offered, he was often too agitated or despondent to do so.
After lunch three guards arrived. The gate to the cell opened, and they entered. Zeitoun was handcuffed and his legs were shackled, and he was led out from the cell. He was walked to another building, and was put into another, empty cell. Now he was alone.
He and Nasser had not spoken much, but the contrast in being alone was stark.
Zeitoun tried to remember how much his life insurance policy was worth. He should have bought a larger one. He had not thought hard enough about it. The woman at Allstate had tried to convince him to insure his life for more than a million dollars, given that he had four children, and how much the business relied on him. But he could not envision his death. He was only forty-seven. Too early to contemplate life insurance. But he knew that by now Kathy would have checked the value of the policy. She would have begun to imagine a life without him.
When he pictured his wife having to make such plans, presuming him to be dead, his heart raged. He had wrathful thoughts about the police who had arrested him, the jailors who kept him here, the system that allowed this. He blamed Ronnie, the stranger who had come to the house on Claiborne, whom he didn’t know and couldn’t account for—whose presence might very well have brought suspicion upon all of them. Maybe Ronnie was guilty, maybe he had done something wrong. He cursed Nasser’s bag of cash. What a fool! He should never have been carrying around money like that.
Kathy. Zachary. The girls. The girls might grow up without a father. If Zeitoun was transferred to a secret prison, their lives would be reversed completely: they would go from the well-off children of a successful man to the disgraced
children of a presumptive sleeper-cell mastermind.
And even if he got out tomorrow or next week, their father had now been in prison. The scarring was inevitable—to live in fear of their father’s death, and then to find out he had been taken to prison at gunpoint, made a prisoner, made to live like a rat?
He clutched his side, pushing back at the pain, trying to contain it.
FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 16
The news came down to the prisoners that after lunch they would be allowed to go outside. It had been a week since Zeitoun had seen the sun.
During the hour they were allowed in the yard, Zeitoun tried to jog, but felt light-headed. He walked around the yard, overhearing one bewildered story after another.
He met a man who said he had been moving furniture in his house just after the storm hit. The police spotted him and broke in. When he protested his innocence, they beat him up and left. A few days later, he came to the Greyhound station to complain. They arrested him and sent him to Hunt.
No story was more absurd than the tale of Merlene Maten. One of the prisoners had just seen her story on TV. She had been held next door, at Hunt’s sister prison for women.
Maten was seventy-three years old, a diabetic, and a deaconess at the Resurrection Mission Baptist Church. Before the storm, she and her husband, who was eighty, had checked into a hotel downtown, knowing that there they would be among other residents and guests. They would have access to help if they needed it, and would be safer, given that the hotel was on high ground. They drove to the hotel in their car and paid for the room with their credit card.
They had been at the hotel for three days when Maten went downstairs to get some food from their car. Mayor Nagin had told everyone in the city to have three days’ food on hand, and she had duly packed enough into the car to last. The car was parked in the lot next to the hotel, and Maten had left a cooler inside, full of the foods her husband liked. She retrieved a package of sausages and was walking back to the hotel when she heard yelling and footsteps. It was the police, and they accused her of looting a nearby store.
The nearby Check In Check Out deli had just been looted, and the police were looking for anyone who might have benefited. They found Maten. She was handcuffed and charged with stealing $63.50 worth of groceries. Her bail was set, by a judge calling by phone, at $50,000. The usual bail for such a misdemeanor would be $500.
She was brought to Camp Greyhound, where she slept on the concrete. Then she was brought to the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women, Hunt’s sister prison, for more than two weeks. She was finally freed with the help of the AARP, volunteer lawyers, a private attorney, and an article about her plight published by the Associated Press.
The lawyers finally convinced a judge that a septuagenarian staying at a hotel would not need to loot a store for sausages. They proved that the store did not even sell the sausages she was carrying. Maten had never been in the store. Furthermore, to even enter the damaged store, strewn everywhere with debris and broken glass, would have required an agility that she did not possess.
In the late afternoon Zeitoun heard a group of guards enter the cellblock. He couldn’t see them, but it sounded like at least four or five men. A cell down the hall rattled open. The guards yelled and cursed, and there was some kind of scuffle. Then quiet for a few minutes, and then the cell closed shut again. The process repeated itself half a dozen times.
Then it was his turn. First he saw their faces, five men on the other side of the blue bars. He had seen one of the guards before, but the other four were strangers. They were all wearing black riot gear, dressed like a SWAT team. They had shields, padding, batons, helmets. They waited at the ready for the door to open.
Zeitoun was determined not to struggle. He would not present any appearance of opposition. When the cell door slid open, he stood in the center of the floor, his hands in the air, his eyes level.
But still the men burst in as if he were in the process of committing a murder. Cursing at him, three men used their shields to push him to the wall. As they pressed his face against the cinderblock, they handcuffed his arms and shackled his legs.
They brought him into the hallway. Three guards held him while the other two ransacked the cell. They threw open the bedding, overturned the mattress, scoured the tiny room.
Two of the guards unlocked Zeitoun’s handcuffs and shackles.
“Take off your clothes,” one said.
He hesitated. He had not been given underwear when he arrived at Hunt, so if he took off his jumpsuit he would be naked.
“Now,” the guard said.
Zeitoun unzipped the jumpsuit and pulled it off his shoulders. It dropped to his waist, and he pushed it to the floor. He was surrounded by three men fully dressed in black riot gear. He tried to cover himself.
“Bend over,” the guard said.
Again he hesitated.
“Do it.”
Zeitoun complied.
“Farther,” the guard said. “Grab ankles.”
Zeitoun could not tell who was inspecting him or how. He expected something to enter his rectum at any moment.
“Okay, get up,” the guard said.
They had spared him this one indignity.
Zeitoun stood. The guard used his foot to slide Zeitoun’s jumpsuit back into the cell, and then pushed Zeitoun in, too. While Zeitoun was putting on his clothes, they backed away from him, shields up, and out of the cell.
Zeitoun’s door closed, and the guards assembled themselves at the next cell, ready for the next prisoner.
From the other prisoners Zeitoun learned that these searches were common. The guards were looking for drugs, weapons, any contraband. He should expect such a procedure every week.
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 17
Zeitoun lay in bed much of the day, wrecked by fatigue. He had not slept. He had run the strip-search through his mind most of the night, trying to erase all memory of it, but every time he closed his eyes he saw the men in their riot gear, at the other side of the cell door, waiting to flood in and take him.
For weeks, it seemed, he had been stealing hours of sleep during the day, a few at night. He could not remember the last time he had strung more than three hours of rest together.
Why had he done this to his family? There was something broken in the country, this was certain, but he had begun all this. He had refused to leave the city. He had stayed to guard his property, to watch over his business. But then something else had overtaken him, some sense of destiny. Some sense that God had put him there to do His work, to glorify Him with good deeds.
It seemed ridiculous now. How could he have been guilty of such hubris? He had put himself in harm’s way, and by doing so had put his family in danger. How could he not have known that staying in New Orleans, a city under something like martial law, would endanger him? He knew better. He had been careful for so many years. He had kept his head low. He had been a model citizen. But in the wake of the storm, he’d come to believe he was meant to help the stranded. He believed that that damned canoe had given him the right to serve as shepherd and savior. He had lost perspective.
He had expected too much. He had hoped too much.
The country he had left thirty years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there, then and now, that precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States. Things had worked out. Difficulties had been overcome. He had worked hard and achieved success. The machinery of government functioned. Even if in New Orleans this machinery was sometimes slow, or poorly engineered, generally it functioned.
But now nothing worked. Or rather, every piece of machinery—the police, the military, the prisons—that was meant to protect people like him was devouring anyone who got close. He had long believed that the police acted in the best interests of the citizens they served. That the military was accountable, reasonable, and was kept in
check by concentric circles of regulations, laws, common sense, common decency.
But now those hopes could be put to rest.
This country was not unique. This country was fallible. Mistakes were being made. He was a mistake. In the grand scheme of the country’s blind, grasping fight against threats seen and unseen, there would be mistakes made. Innocents would be suspected. Innocents would be imprisoned.
He thought of bycatch. It was a fishing term. They’d used it when he was a boy, fishing for sardines by the light of the moon they’d made. When they pulled in the net, there were thousands of sardines, of course, but there were other creatures too, life they had not intended to catch and for which they had no use.
Often they would not know until too late. They would bring their catch back to shore, a mound of silver, the sardines dying slowly. Zeitoun, exhausted, would rest against the bow, watching the fish slowly cease their struggles. And once on shore, when the crew unloaded the nets, they would sometimes find something else. One time there was a dolphin. He always remembered this dolphin, a magnificent ivory-white animal shining on the dock like porcelain. The fishermen nudged it with their feet, but it was dead. It had gotten caught in the net and, unable to reach the surface to breathe, it had died underwater. If they had noticed it in time, they could have freed it, but now all they could do was throw it back into the Mediterranean. It would be a meal for the bottom-feeders.
The pain in Zeitoun’s side was growing, rippling outward. He could not stay here another week. He would not survive the heartbreak, the wrongness of it.