Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

Every morning at eight the guards march us into a room for TV interviews and three hours later march us back to our cells. And every noon the guards march us across the prison yard to another building for radio and newspaper interviews and three hours later again order us into double formation and march us back to our cells. And every afternoon at five and in the evening at nine they march us into the communal lounging room to read political pamphlets and listen to lectures and recorded ancient Chinese music and then march us into the communal TV room to watch televised interviews of us done a day or two or even a week or month before — we’re never quite sure since we’re always clean-shaven and well-groomed and dressed in the same blue uniforms for these interviews and answer the same questions with the same answers to the same interviewer. After two hours of this they march us back to our cells and I usually fall quickly asleep: tired from all the marching, bored to fatigue with the prison routine, a little sick from the unpalatable food we get or else kept awake with hunger pains because I refused to eat this food, another day done — I’m always thankful for that. Because during the seven hours allotted us for sleep our releases might have been arranged and morning could mean our start out of here — though I often wake up tired, probably because in my dreams I usually march too. Tonight I marched across Chinese and European but mostly American landscape, flanked by the nine air force men who are prisoners with me, though accompanied by what seemed like the entire military service including the commander in chief, all of us singing a marching song I don’t ever remember hearing and keeping in step, as we don’t do here, to cadenced numbers as we paraded past flag-waving crowds. “Hup, two, three, four; ein, zwei, drei, vier; uno, duo, trio, fouro…”

But this morning my cell door’s open. Now that door’s never open except for the few seconds it takes the guard to march me in or out of the cell and when my food’s brought and he directs me to stand at the farthest point from the door with my nose and knees touching the wall. And no breakfast has come, no guard to tell me what kind of American pig I am today or why my breakfast hasn’t come or even why my cell door’s open. I stare suspiciously at the door. Then, with my back to the remote control camera that focuses on my cell all day, I relax on the floor mattress, happy with this one break in prison monotony since we were all brought here seven months ago from a prison that didn’t have radio and television studios.

I dream some more about marching. This time it’s across the George Washington Bridge to New York, though I’ve never been on that bridge or even to New York or New Jersey. I march up to the automatic tollbooth, toss a pocketful of change, keys and tissues into the toll basket, and when the sign flashes “Okay, Yankee trash, march ahead,” I march toward the graceful hills of hometown San Francisco turning pink and yellow pastel in the twilight and suddenly becoming the gray and black glass slabs of neighboring Oakland.

I wake around noon, my cell door’s still open. My lunch hasn’t come and I’m hungry, as I shoved aside last night’s meal. And there are no sounds from the cell corridor, no voices or car and truck noises I sometimes hear past the three inchwide slits in my outside wall, a foot above my highest jumping reach. How odd, I think, since every day but today I’ve been awakened by the guard who calls me pig in several Chinese languages, and a few minutes later he’d place my breakfast on my cell floor — plain white rice and hot black tea, the best meal of the day. Later I’d join my fellow prisoners in the corridor and we’d march down many halls and through many electronically controlled doors till we got to a compound the size of a national soldiers cemetery, which we marched across to the TV studio for another round of interviews on our spy flight over China’s territorial air space, something we’ve done every day except Chinese patriotic holidays for half a year. In the studio we’d take our regular places on a double row of benches and then, one by one, would sit in the only chair in the room other than the interviewer’s and be interviewed.

At first we refused to be interviewed, feeling it would embarrass our country and families, look disastrously bad on our service records and, once we were released, land us a stiff term in an American stockade. But Chinese officials showed us American newspapers and videotapes of U.S. news programs that quoted high American officials about how we hadn’t been on an electronic and photographic intelligence gathering operation as the Chinese had charged, but had been forced down by an air-to-air missile over open seas during a routine meteorological run and that America had done everything possible to get us released and now China had to make the next move. For three years Chinese officials told us China could never make that move unless we or a high American official admitted to the spying mission. Since we already saw two American presidents say on TV that America could never admit to a covert flight it didn’t make, we thought that instead of marching our lives away in a foreign prison, we’d encourage China’s next move by telling the truth without revealing any pertinent information about the flight. We felt that once China got all the propaganda value out our confession as it could, it’d release us to our military, whom we’d take our chances with by pleading emotional and physical breakdown during our capture. That was six months ago, and up until yesterday we were still being interviewed and the questions were always the same.

“Were you flying over Chinese soil?” the interviewer asked each of us, and each of us said “Yes, sir, I was.” “Are you repentant you were on a spying mission over China?” “Yes, sir, I am.” “Why do you want your country to disclose the truth about your spying mission?” “I love America and want it to be a truthful country so it can have the respect of the world. And also a personal reason, sir. I want to return to my loved ones in the States”—though on that last score I always said “Because I’m tired and bored with this place and the food’s inedible and I know I’ll never get used to sleeping on an inch-thick mattress on a hard cold floor and also because I want to finally find a loved one.” I have no loved ones or family, except for an aunt who’s been in an asylum since she was twelve and, for all I know, might be dead by now, God be with you, Aunt Rose, crazy since birth I was countless times told. I was sure the Chinese accepted my one digression from the prescribed dialogue because it gave a touch of realness to the interviews. Anyway, they never objected and my line always got a loud laugh and whistles from my buddies, even after they heard it a hundred times.

I go to sleep and dream of marching again, this time across the Pacific. I pass an island, and a beautiful Polynesian woman in a grass skirt and no top waves to me from a cliff and says “Aloha, Jamie, welcome to paradise now and give all those pretty boys a kiss from me.” Those boys turn out to be my fellow prisoners again, all of us marching single file. “Ahoy there,” a captain on an old whaler says, “where you off to, mates?” “China,” we say in unison, and he says “China? Why that’s unoccupied alien soil — a country we don’t even have relations with.” “China, nevertheless,” we say. “We know of a good Cantonese restaurant in Shanghai and a bar in Canton where you can either get shanghaied or buy for a week or weekend a real live China doll to have relations with.”

The door’s still open. It’s dinner time and no dinner’s come. I wish for the nightly rattle on my door of the dinner guard’s truncheon and the only joke he, or for that matter, any other guard ever made to me in English: “Arise, hair horse man, purloin meat and soiled potatoes.” I’d knock a message out to the next cell, but we’re not allowed to. “Do not communicate clandestinely,” the prison commandant told us the day we got here, “or you will lose many privileges.” “What privileges, sir?” Captain House, our commanding officer, said. “Food, sleeping and washing privileges.” That is expressly prohibited by the Kobenhavn Code regarding military prisoners, which states that basic human needs may be suspended during certain urgencies only to the extent that they are similarly suspended for the prisoners’ keepers.” Commandant Ep said China respects that code as much as America respects China’s borders. But since I apparently have no food and washing privileges to lose today and have slept all I need to for the next day, I knock on the wall to the adjoining cell.