Across the invented gulf of space, shells detonate. Fresh explosions rip through the giant hall, each one touching off others. Stone by stone, St. Sophia collapses into a cavernous ruin.
Up from the cracks around you lick tiny tongues of green. A jungle springs up, and in the jungle, a naked, couched Eve, pointing with wonder at the fires all around her.
Then you hear what can only be the buzzing of insects. They mass you, a sudden swarm of flat, paper bees, no bigger than your thumb, the work of a child with a new paint box. They form a fireman's bucket brigade, flying up into the gallery, each carrying between its legs a colored square. One by one, they add their point of color to the damaged portraits: a wasted Christ, a ravaged Baptist, a Madonna who cannot for the life of her figure out why she's been drawn into this hopeless endeavor.
Paper bees patch at the mosaic, stone by stone. They race the spread of the vegetation. They buzz in insect single file, relentless, returning empty to the hive, to your hands, for refilling. With a child's labored realism, they rebuild the length of the damaged stone bodies. They reach the feet, freeing the captives. The images step from their wall down into the jungled nave, rejoin you where you lie, stricken with insight, in the undergrowth.
The inner church goes dark; fluorescents blaze back on. Transcendence collapses again to the width of a walk-in closet. The future's clients—the demo buyers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff—remove their shuttered glasses. They look upon the alien world that drags them back. They wince in the flush of light, squinting to make things out.
Inside this room, the world re-forms itself. Outside, there is no saying. Against the real, perhaps must plead no contest. But from the demonstration room, no one walks out the way he came.
46
The morning that Muhammad comes for you, you already expect him.
Your ears have attuned to subaudible frequencies. You hear a message in his step, from miles down the locked corridor. You hear upheaval in his voice, even before he speaks.
He thinks he wakes you. "We Arabs have a saying. Rise before the sun, because the earth steals the hours before dawn from Paradise."
He makes you pack your ridiculous sack of belongings, as you have packed so many times before. An old game, this terrorism. They have it down. But gone already, you've become immune, free of hope, safe from all belief. You do as he says, obeying with nothing more than the pointless shell of your body.
His voice hides a note of relief, a sympathy for you, so far as anyone can feel sympathy for another. The care cuts into you. It riddles you with chances, each one more terrible than the last.
He takes you off the chain. Panic descends when he leads you, blindfolded, into the hall. Men call out to you in Arabic, touch you on the back, applauding your shoulders. They take you to certain death, or worse. Now, before dawn, in the hours stolen from paradise. The single fact of your existence, the one that ought to be purely private, beyond history, past politics, even your death will be played out on any number of stages, not one of them your own.
This time, they do not tape you, a minor mercy worse than any harshness. They place you loose into the coffin, one last training in asphyxiation before the final run. You pray for a merciful death, as you have prayed before, racked on this transmission as the truck slams against the cratered streets. You pray, knowing your prayers do nothing. This is part of what has broken in your brain: to keep asking, knowing there are no answers but chance.
The truck draws close to the cursed city, passing through several checkpoints. It makes no sense. They could have put a bullet in the base of your brain, back in the countryside, unseen. They could have fed what flesh you still possess to the farmyard dogs.
Faithful to the core of human cruelty, they pull you from death and revive you. You cannot stand without aid. They force you inside, and the return to enclosed space calms you. Some rendezvous transacts itself, some tense handoff. Your captors leave you in the hands of an unknown third party. The earth starts to shake violently. Not the earth, but something closer. As close as the veins in your neck. Your own meat and blood.
A man is speaking softly to you in accented English. "Please remove
your blindfold. You are among friends."
You refuse. You stall for time. "Perhaps in a little bit."
He offers you food, drink, clean clothes, a shower. "You are free," he says.
You laugh: a short, hard monosyllable of phlegm.
"You are on the way home," he says.
You tear off your blindfold in a flash of last rage. The game, the torture must end here. You have no more life for it.
You find yourself sitting in a dingy office, across the metal desk from a slight, gray man in burgundy tie and short-sleeve white shirt. He offers you his hand. You shake it, although your hand is shaking already. The feel of another's skin rasps against yours. His voice shrieks in your ear. You touch his desk, the papers on it, the pen, the photos. You cannot stop touching these slight impossibilities. Your arms and legs quiver beyond controlling. Distress must finish you. You start to break. You replace your blindfold over your eyes.
He says you will go first to Damascus. You recognize the name, from some ancient myth. From there they will fly you to Turkey, transfer you to a military plane bound for Wiesbaden, and a full debriefing. "It will be difficult at first. You must go as slowly as you need."
He tells you that the world has changed since your capture. You hold up your hand to stop him. It quakes as if you are waving. "Maybe later." Perhaps next week. Perhaps never.
You sit in a hotel room in Damascus with all the shades pulled tight. One of your caretakers is there with you, to make sure you don't harm yourself. He asks if you'd like to see a newspaper. The International Herald Tribune. "Last week's," he apologizes.
"That's all right," you tell him. "I'm a little behind." You peek, and a vision of civilization spins away underneath your fingers. The permanent war, the balance of horror, the only reality you've ever known: all have vanished, replaced by the next, more dangerous morass. The world has wired itself up in your absence. You can recognize nothing. Someone's thumb rides the Fast-forward button as you look on from light-years above, a view of the earth from a distant star, the planet's burning fossil already whiffed out even as its glow just reaches you.
You work to control the newsprint sheets. You see yourself staring out from page 3: the forced prison picture, the one that bears no living resemblance to you. Every other fact is wrong. The piece says you are about to be released. It misstates your age. It says your mother is dead. It claims you're married to a hospice worker and have a five-year-old daughter. Just beneath it, a second article describes the thousand archaeologies uncovered in this year's local firefight. An ancient forum brought back above ground, from under the mortared-down Banco di Roma . . .
You fold the paper back up and slip it under your hotel closet door, where it can harm no one.
The first official American comes to greet you. He talks a wall of spectacular gibberish. The country is proud of you. You have done a patriotic service that will not soon be forgotten. Your brother is on his way from Chicago to Germany to meet you.
"And may I just add, personally?" He smiles. "If we never hear the name Gwen Devins again, it will be too soon." He shakes his head in admiration. "The woman is relentless. Without mercy. She has absolutely worn out her welcome in all diplomatic circles."
At the first interrogation, they go easy. But already they ask you: How? How is it you can still be here, after the years of where you've been?
You do not tell them now, though in time you'll have to. They won't be able to make out what you have to say. How you gave in to the final abyss, how you dropped into the darkness beneath your permanent blindfold. How in the moment that you broke and fell, you never hit. How you saw, projected in a flash upon that dropping darkness, a scene lasting no longer than one held breath. A vision that endured a year and longer. One that made no sense. That kept you sane. A glimpse of the transf
er-house of hostage. Of the peace that the world cannot give.
You'll have to say, someday: how the walls of your cell dissolved. How you soft-landed in a measureless room, one so detailed that you must have visited it once. But just as clearly a hallucination, the dementia of four years in solitary. A mosque more mongrel than your own split life, where all your memorized Qur'an and Bible verses ran jumbled together. A temple on the mind's Green Line, its decoration seeping up from awful subterranean streams inside you, too detailed to be wholly yours.
You couldn't say what style or era. It might have been anywhere on earth: a deserted hangar, big enough to house the rest mass of salvation.
Massive bars of light eroded the stones. You shrank to nothing in the size of it. But you did not disappear.
The walls bore the wounds of a protracted battle. Something had been decided here, or deferred for centuries. You stretched your swollen legs and walked, and the exercise kept you going. Strange flickers led you deeper into the light, until you stood dead center, under the stone crown. Then you heard it, above your head: a noise that passed all understanding. You looked up at the sound, and saw the thing that would save you. A hundred feet above, in the awful dome, an angel dropped out of the air. An angel whose face filled not with good news but with all the horror of her coming impact. A creature dropping from out of the sky, its bewilderment outstripping your own. That angel terror lay beyond decoding. It left you no choice but to live long enough to learn what it needed from you.
Someday you will have to tell them. At some future news conference, when your sanity seems more certain. For now, you sit on the plane to Istanbul, blinking and flinching.
You find that you walk with a limp. You find that you cannot tolerate sun, or movement, or noises, or too many people within ten feet of you.
There is a truth only solitude reveals. An insight that action destroys, one scattered by the slightest worldly affair: the fact of our abandonment here, in a far corner of sketched space. This is the truth that enterprise would deny. How many years have you fought to hold at bay this hideous aloneness, only now discovering that it shelters the one fact of any value?
You turn in the entranceway of illusion, gaping down the airplane aisle, and you make it out. For God's sake, call it God. That's what we've called it forever, and it's so cheap, so self-promoting, to invent new vocabulary for every goddamned thing, at this late a date. The place where you've been unfolds inside you. A space in your heart so large it will surely kill you, by never giving you the chance to earn it.
But you have the chance. Here. Now, for nowhere else exists. You pull your fading solitude around you, the last way left to see yourself in this glare. And how you will survive another's company again becomes the only real problem.
For a little while, you are that angel. Ephemeral saintliness hangs on you. It will not last. Already, irritations seep into your fingertips. You feel yourself slipping back to the conditions of living. But for a time, briefer than your captivity, and only because of it, you are burned pure, by everything you look upon.
You step from the plane and see them, as in the world newspaper photo they instantly become: two forms racing to meet you across the tarmac of Istanbul. The woman who has saved you, and some smaller other. Your eyes search for an empty prison to hide in. There will be talk; there will be touching. There is no earthly way that you can bear it. Your love rushes toward you but stops short, sobbing at the thought of real contact, of what happens next. Her small shadow steps forward from her. You look down and see your girl, this Scheherazade, whose name plays everywhere across her face, clutching a picture she has drawn for her foreign father. She clings to you as if she's known you all her short life. Grasps at long last the fable she's grown up on.
"Look," she says, shoving her drawing into your shaking hands. A crayon man, returning to a crayon home. "Look! I made this for you."
Freeing hostages is like putting up a stage set, which you do with the captors, agreeing on each piece as you slowly put it together. Then you leave an exit through which both the captor and the captive can walk with sincerity and dignity.
—Terry Waite, ABC TV, November 3 1986, shortly before his capture
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In telling the story of Taimur Martin, I have drawn on the many memoirs of the Westerners held hostage in Lebanon. I am indebted to these extraordinary accounts.
Richard Powers, PLOWING THE DARK
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