Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

"Heh? A! Salaam, salaam! How do you know? Where do you learn salaam, hey?" He giggles, a low, hick chuckle. "We talk my talk now?" He releases a high-speed stream of syllables that sounds like abuse in any lexicon.

"Who are you?" you try, without a hope in hell that he'll tell you anything.

"Who?" Another throaty giggle, but slower. Mountain kid in the big city. Trying to enjoy himself and make it back home without getting fleeced. "Me? I am Ali."

It's your turn to giggle. You run the risk of pistol-whipping, or worse. But you cannot help yourself. "Hold on. Let me guess. Ali… Smith?"

"Hnn?" You brace for the blow. "Ali Smith?" He laughs like a jackal. "Yes, good! I am Ali Smith."

"Who are your people? What is this group that has taken me?"

But Ali just clucks with his tongue: What do you take me for?

Days later, the next time the Angry Parent hustles you to your morning sprint through the latrine, you try your greeting on him.

"Salaam alaykum. Salaam alaykum"

The Angry Parent makes no reply.

Your beard grows in. You play with the two bald spots on each side of your mouth, the spots that have always stopped you from growing a beard in real life. For the first time ever, you have the luxury of growing facial hair without any social consequences. You twist the longest chin strands into twin points, untwist them, repeat. It's good for what feels like hours at a shot.

You peel off a wafer of plaster from behind the radiator large enough to balance over the opening of your urine bottle. You keep the makeshift cap in place at all times. It reduces the room's stench. You find a way of lying along the radiator so that you can do sit-ups and push-ups without the chain chafing. You jump in place, run two-meter laps in a shrunken oval.

Ali hears your morning workout. He bangs on the door to break it up. "Hey? What you doing in there?"

"I need exercise. If I don't exercise, I will grow sick and weak."

"You stupid shit," he explains.

But no one intervenes when you start up again, quieter.

Knowledge of who is holding you arrives by the worst of couriers. The Angry Parent shakes your door late one evening, the signal to submit and cover your eyes. He enters your cell and places something on the floor in front of you. Then he circles around behind your back.

"Take off your cloth, please." His English, though thick, is surprisingly fluid.

You remove your blindfold. The sight on the floor in front of you turns your eyes hot and viscid. A pencil and a sheet of blank paper, your first since captivity.

"You must write a letter." He sounds forceful, but not violent.

"Oh yes. Oh, bless you. Thank God. al-Hamdallah. "

His hand on your head prevents you from turning around in joy.

"No, no," he corrects, patient as a first-grade teacher. "I tell you what you must write."

You must write: To the people of the United States.

I am alive and healthy. I am being kept by the soldiers of Sacred Conflict, a unit fighting for God's Partisans. They are not terrorists. They do this thing as the only way to win justice.

I am being treated and fed well. I will not be hurt in any way, as long as the United States and its leaders act honorably. I will be freed as soon as the demands of Gods Partisans and of Gods higher laws are met. If they are not, then the failure will be upon you. And the failure will be serious.

You spell several words wrong. The Angry Parent doesn't notice. This is your desperate code, the only word you can smuggle out to the outside, the lone assurance that you know the letter is nonsense. Your mother will tell them. The Chicago office, Gwen: anyone who knows you in the slightest. Nothing if not a perfect speller.

"Please sign the letter," the Angry Parent commands. "Now place your cloth back on your eyes." He gathers up the paper and pencil and walks to the door. "Thank you," he says, and closes you back in on nothing.

Worse than nothing. The sound of the clicking lock forces you under, into a despair like the closing of a metal crypt. It's Sacred Conflict. The group that brought down the American embassy like a stack of mah-jongg tiles. The ones who slammed a car bomb into a crowd of Lebanese scrambling to grab American visas. The group whose eager foot soldier, smiling as he ran his truck through an armed checkpoint, blew himself away with 2,000 pounds of TNT, taking 241 Marines along with him to the heaven of martyrs. The one group in this Babel of factions that you prayed it wouldn't be.

Sacred Conflict: their balance sheet is so huge, so mysterious, that you can't be anything higher than an expendable pawn. These men have the consortium of rational nations on the run, reeling from the power of their conviction. The terrorist group of the hour, just now enjoying their moment on the geopolitical stage, their suicidal, scene-stealing walk-on. Your letter gives them one more holy weapon to brandish at a cowering world.

The day after your exercise in dictation, you fall ill. Your body gives in to the infection it's been fighting since capture. A steel chill spreads from your extremities into your chest. You lie huddled on your mattress under the cheap acrylic blanket, shivering in the slip glaze of your own sweat. Sleep is a four-reel hallucination where radical factions take turns inscribing the details of your confession onto your abdomen with the point of an electric needle.

The next day's ten-minute sprint through the latrine does not last you through the morning. By the time the Shiite Cronkite brings you your pointless lunch, a demon — hot, yellow, and liquid — splays its claws against the wall of your intestines.

"Toilet," you croak. "Merhadh."

"I ask Chef"

"No ask Chef. Tell Chef."

He disappears. You wait an eternity—150 seconds or more. Then you must defecate or die. No time even to scream for a can. You run as far from the bed as you can get, tear down your pants, and aim for the mouth of your urine bottle. Amazingly, almost half of the silty stream finds the bottle. You leave the putrefying rest and crawl back into bed, fetid, sticky, lower than an insect, a dung beetle. You fall into a raging fever.

You wake up, someone kicking you in the back, thumping you with an Adidas cross-trainer toe. AH is shouting, "Hey. Hey! Why you shit all fucking over the floor?"

Your blindfold is on. He must have replaced it before commencing to kick you. You roll over and place your face in the path of his blows. He stops. You feel your power over him, power that comes from your total indifference.

"Sacred Conflict," you say. "Holy War."

"Hey," he bleats. "You gotta eat your food." The gotta learned dutifully from some Top 40 song.

Eating is death. Anything you eat now will pass right through the frictionless tube you have become. All you can do is squat it out, hope the virus dies of dehydration before you do.

"No eat," you say. "Hunger strike."

Your refusal enrages him. He shrieks deep in his throat. "Eat!" He kicks you again, in your mercifully emptied gut. He crouches down and inserts the cold tip of his pistol in your nostril. "Eat."

His growl sounds like a bad James Coburn. Even this wasted, you must laugh. He screams again, his rage ever more impotent. "What you want? What the hell you want?" "Medicine. I need medicine."

"Bukrah," he says, shaken. "Tomorrow." Neither word means anything to you.

In your dream, Gwen reaches into your throat, deep in, deeper than you ever suspected a hand could go. She pulls up half-digested forms, eroded Cracker Jack prizes covered in decomposing clay, the hair and slime that accumulates in sink pipe traps. She holds out a handful, and the two of you lean in for a closer look. The crowns of your heads touch, the first kind touch you've suffered in months. You bend over the slime, examining. It crawls with tiny amphibians, pink cave newts no bigger than termites.