American War(90)

He let her go and called the guards back in. “Take her to the Sound Room,” he said.



IN THE MONTHS BETWEEN VISITATIONS, Sarat lived in a cell in Camp Saturday. The cell was square, and standing in its middle with her arms outstretched, Sarat could brush all four walls with her fingers. The walls were of concrete and were painted the color of margarine. A metal cot and a metal toilet bowl occupied opposite ends of the cell, otherwise it was bare. An overhead light shone at all hours of the day and night, erasing the difference between them. Deprived of the cycle of the day (and, in time, the seasons), the mind made do with the only indicator of passing time available to it: the footsteps of the guards outside.

The guards walked up and down the corridors of Camp Saturday at all hours. Every three minutes, the slit in Sarat’s cell door would open, and a pair of eyes would inspect the room, and then the slit would close again. In time the sound of metal slits opening and closing all along the corridor became a kind of metronome, against which Sarat measured the dawn and death of the day. Eventually she came to know the peering eyes by heart, and gave their owners names of her own invention.

Sometimes she heard screams from the nearby cells. Sometimes the women waited on a guard to open the slit in the door and then tried to throw cupped handfuls of shit and piss in their eyes. A few minutes later a small troop of masked guards would rush the agitator’s cell, and the woman would be carried kicking and screaming to the Non-Compliance Area. In a week or two she would return, and no more noises would come from her cell.

The woman in the cell next to Sarat’s was named Elena. She was from Mississippi, and had lost her mind. Softly she spoke to Sarat through the concrete, in a voice that passed so clearly through the wall that for months Sarat believed it to be a fabrication of her own torture-fevered brain.

Elena said she had been born in this place, caged here from birth because the Blues knew her to be a terrorist from the day she entered the world. She said Sugarloaf had once rested on a vast outcropping of land and was free of cages and free of fences. She sang songs about alligators and swamps and talking rodents.

Amidst the shuffling of the guards’ feet and the rambling screams of the women, Sarat listened to her neighbor’s voice the same way she listened to her own breathing—passively, without thought. But at other times it was the only thing she could hear, a reminder she was still alive.

Sometimes Sarat talked back to the voice sliding softly through the walls, and in these times she lied. When Elena asked her where she came from, she said South Carolina, and invented an elaborate lie about her escape from the illness unleashed upon that state. She enjoyed lying to her faceless neighbor, and enjoyed that the neighbor seemed to believe it. During the worst of her Visitations, when after weeks of mistreatment she returned to her cell hallucinating with pain, it provided some small comfort to retreat into a wholly fabricated existence.

Still, she resisted. The Visitations came in waves—sometimes the woman in the neatly pressed suit didn’t come to see her for months at a time, until Sarat allowed herself to believe that perhaps the interrogations had finally come to an end. Sometimes, the woman seemed a permanent resident of the island, and would call on Sarat almost daily. Weeks alone in the rooms of Sound and Light dulled her senses, until the world beyond arm’s reach became a muddled nimbus she could no longer decipher. The positions in which they shackled her slowly wore the cartilage from her knees and warped her back into a curving column of pain. Still, she resisted.



IN HER THIRD YEAR on the island, Sarat participated in a hunger strike. Elena said women from every camp were taking part, refusing to eat or drink anything but water. She said some women had already been doing it for weeks. She said one had even died from it—a suicide of sorts, something the guards called “Going asymmetric.”

She said the women had a list of demands, chief among them freedom. Failing that, they wanted their loved ones flown in to visit; lawyers from the Red to represent them; and the right to something whose name sounded foreign to Sarat’s ears (she assumed it to be a drug or a religious text). The women in the solitary cells demanded time in the communal yard, a chance to see the sun.

Sarat made no demands. She could no more imagine negotiating better treatment from her captors than negotiating the stinger away from a scorpion. Her silence was the one weapon they could not pry from her; to hand it to them in the form of hopeless appeals seemed to her an act of high cowardice, a tacit admission that the brutal kinetics of Sugarloaf obeyed some kind of law. For the same reason she refused to meet the ones they called humanitarian envoys, who swooped in on Sugarloaf every few months with looks of stern disapproval plastered on their faces, for the same reason she spat in the face of the woman with the neatly pressed suit, for the same reason she tore the pages of the one book they allowed her and glued them with smeared shit to the slit of her cell door—for the same reason, Sarat made no demands.

Instead she simply refused to eat. In starvation she took the levers of torture out of her torturers’ hands and placed them in her own. In starvation she found agency, control.

A week into her strike and concussed with hunger, she was taken by the guards to the medical facility.

She was led into a room with high white ceilings. Black sheets covered the windows and muted the sunlight. The room smelled familiar to Sarat—it was the smell of rubbing alcohol. She remembered the last time she saw her sister.