Zeitoun

by Dave Eggers

How hard it was to do both, to be partner to one and protector to the other. What was the balance? He would spend years pondering this conundrum.

‘The crazy person talks, the wise person listens.’”

His frustration with some Americans was like that of a disappointed parent. He was so content in this country, so impressed with and loving of its opportunities, but then why, sometimes, did Americans fall short of their best selves?

“If your hand doesn’t work for it, your heart doesn’t feel sorry for it.”

much would be lost in the context, the waste and excess of the culture at large. He had been brought up to know that what God hates as much as anything is waste. It was, he had been told, one of the three things God most hated: murder, divorce, and waste. It destroyed a society.

it. Her family was not easy to deal with, this was certain, and any visit could take a wrong turn quickly and irreparably. It’s complicated, she would tell people. With eight siblings, it had been turbulent growing up, and when she converted to Islam, the battles and misunderstandings multiplied.

She read the Qur’an and was struck by its power and lyricism. The Christian preachers she’d heard had spent a good amount of time talking about who would and wouldn’t go to hell, how hot it burned and for how long, but the imams she began to meet made no such pronouncements. Will I go to heaven? she asked. “Only God knows this,” the imam would tell her. The various doubts of the imams were comforting, and drew her closer. She would ask them a question, just as she had asked questions of her pastors, and the imams would try to answer, but often they wouldn’t know. “Let’s look at the Qur’an,” they would say. She liked Islam’s sense of personal responsibility, its bent toward social justice. Most of all, though, she liked the sense of dignity and purity embodied by the Muslim women she knew. To Kathy they seemed so wholesome, so honorable. They were chaste, they were disciplined. She wanted that sense of control. She wanted the peace that came with that sense of control.

Aisha was taking it the hardest. She seemed to swing between worry and fatalistic resignation. She was irritable. She couldn’t concentrate. She withdrew and wept alone. That night, after the other kids had fallen asleep, Kathy sat behind Aisha on her bed. She took her daughter’s thick black hair in her hands and kneaded it with one hand, brushing it with the other. It was something she had done with Nademah to calm her before bed, and Yuko’s mom had done the same with Kathy after their baths. It was soothing, meditative for both mother and daughter. In this case Kathy was humming a tune she couldn’t even remember the name of, and Aisha was sitting, tense but accepting. Kathy was confident that this would ease her worry, would end with Aisha dropping back into Kathy’s lap, contented and sleepy. “You hear from him?” Aisha asked. “No, baby, not yet.” “Is he dead?” “No, baby, he’s not dead.” “Did he drown?” “No.” “Did they find his body?” “Honey, stop.” But after a half-dozen strokes of her brush, Kathy took in a quick breath. Aisha’s hair was coming out in clumps. The brush was full of it. Aisha’s eyes welled. Kathy bawled. There is nothing worse than this, Kathy thought. There can be nothing worse than this.

wasn’t it more absurd to give up? Wasn’t it more absurd to fail, to turn back, than to continue?

And then Kathy’s cell phone rang. She picked it up. “Hello?” “Is this Mrs. Zeitoun?” a voice asked. The man seemed nervous. He pronounced Zeitoun wrong. Kathy’s stomach dropped. She managed to say yes. “I saw your husband,” the man said. Kathy sat down. An image of his body floating in the filth— “He’s okay,” the voice said. “He’s in prison. I’m a missionary. I was at Hunt, the prison up in St. Gabriel. He’s there. He gave me your number.” Kathy asked him a dozen questions in one breath. “Sorry, that’s all I know. I can’t tell you anything else.” She asked him how she could get hold of Zeitoun, if he was being well cared for— “Look, I can’t talk to you anymore. I could get in trouble. He’s okay, he’s in there. That’s it, I’ve got to go.” And he hung up.

Soon after Nasser’s interrogation began, his duffel bag created a stir. A female officer was removing stacks of American money from the bag. “This isn’t from here,” she said. Nasser argued with her, but this discovery only got the building more excited. “That ain’t from here,” she said, now more certain. The money was laid out on a nearby table and soon there was a crowd around it. Someone counted it. Ten thousand dollars. This was the first Zeitoun knew of the contents of Nasser’s bag. When Nasser had brought it into the canoe, Zeitoun had assumed it contained clothes, a few valuables. He never would have guessed it contained $10,000 in cash.

Climax

Looking at it, Zeitoun realized that it was not one long cage, but a series of smaller, divided cages. He had seen similar structures before, on the properties of his clients who kept dogs. This cage, like those, was a single-fenced enclosure divided into smaller ones. He counted sixteen. It looked like a giant kennel, and yet it looked even more familiar than that. It looked precisely like the pictures he’d seen of Guantánamo Bay. Like that complex, it was a vast grid of chain-link fencing with few walls, so the prisoners were visible to the guards and each other. Like Guantánamo, it was outdoors, and there appeared to be nowhere to sit or sleep. There were simply cages and the pavement beneath them.

As the prison awoke, Zeitoun examined the chainlink structure closely. It was about 150 feet long. The razor wire was new, the portable toilets new. The fencing was new and of high quality. He knew that none of this had existed before the storm. New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal had never before been used as a prison. He did some rough calculations in his mind. It would have taken maybe six flatbed trucks to get all the fencing to the station. He saw no forklifts or heavy machinery; the cages must have been assembled by hand. It was an impressive feat, to get such a construction project completed so soon after the storm. But when had they done it? Zeitoun had been brought into the station on September 6, seven and a half days after the hurricane passed through the city. Even under the best of circumstances, building a prison like this would have taken four or five days. That meant that within a day of the storm’s eye passing over the region, officials were making plans for the building of a makeshift outdoor prison. Fencing and razor wire would have had to be located or ordered. The toilets and floodlights and all other equipment would have had to be borrowed or requisitioned. It was a vast amount of planning and execution. A regular contractor would have wanted weeks to complete the task, and would have used heavy machinery. Without machines, dozens of men would be needed. To do it as quickly as they had, fifty men would be needed. Maybe more. And who were these men? W...

Ironic and sadistic at the same time. If they had concentrated on saving people maybe so many wouldn’t of died.

The guilt Zeitoun now felt was profound and growing. Kathy had been right. He should not have stayed in the city, and he certainly should not have stayed when she asked him, every day after the storm, to get out. I’m so sorry, Kathy, he thought. He could not imagine the suffering Kathy was enduring now. She had said every day that something bad could happen, something unexpected, and now she had been proven right. She did not know if he was alive or dead, and every indication would point to the latter.

The ban on phone calls was, then, purely punitive, just as the pepper-spraying of the child-man had been born of a combination of opportunity, cruelty, ambivalence, and sport. There was no utility in that, just as there was no utility in barring all prisoners from contacting the outside world.

He knew the conditions had begun to take a very real toll on his psyche. He had been angry until now, but he had been thinking clearly. Now the connections were more tenuous. He had wild thoughts of escape. He pondered whether something very bad might happen to him here. And throughout the night he thought of the child-man, and heard his screams. Under any normal circumstances he would have leapt to the defense of a man victimized as that man had been. But that he had to watch, helpless, knowing how depraved it was—this was punishment for the other prisoners, too. It diminished the humanity of them all.

Zeitoun and the others on the bus were led into one of the long cellblocks. He was brought down a long concrete hallway and then directed into a cell. It was no more than six feet by eight feet, meant for one prisoner. Nasser was inside already. The door closed. The bars were baby blue.

Zeitoun and Nasser barely spoke. There was nothing to say. They both knew their predicament had just taken a far more serious turn. The two Syrian Americans had been isolated. When they had been caged with Todd and Ronnie, it seemed possible that the charges against them—whenever they were actually leveled—might be limited to looting. But now the two Syrians had been separated from the Americans, and there was no predicting where this would go.

All day Zeitoun made it his business to sit by the bars, waving a napkin, pleading with the guards to grant him a call. The guards seemed to relish concocting variations of their denials. “Phone’s broken,” they would say. “Not today.” “Lines are down.” “Maybe tomorrow.” “What’ll you do for me?” “Not my problem. You’re not our prisoner.” This was the first but not the last time Zeitoun would hear this. He had not been processed in a traditional way, and was not assigned to Hunt for the long term. Therefore he was not technically a Hunt prisoner, and so was not bound by the institution’s standard operating procedure. This was what Zeitoun was told many times by the guards:

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.

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.

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.

After lunch, Zeitoun was taken from his cell and again handcuffed and brought to the same building near the front gate of the prison. Inside he was brought to a small cinderblock room, where a table and a handful of chairs had been arranged. Sitting on one side of the table was a man in his late fifties, wearing a suit. On the other side were two men in coats and ties. Three other prisoners were seated in chairs at the back of the room. It was some kind of courtroom. A young man introduced himself to Zeitoun as the public defender. He would be representing Zeitoun that day. Zeitoun began to explain his case, the mistakes that had brought him to prison, and asked for an immediate phone call to his wife. The public defender closed his eyes to indicate that Zeitoun should stop talking. “You’re not here to be judged,” he said. “This is just a hearing to set bail.” “But don’t you want—” “Please,” the young man said, “just don’t say anything. Let me speak for you. Just sit and be quiet if you can. Don’t say a word.” The charges against Zeitoun were read: possession of stolen property valued at $500. The prosecutor suggested setting bail at $150,000. The defender countered that Zeitoun had no prior record, and that the bail should be far lower. He suggested $35,000. The judge set the bail at $75,000. That was the end of Zeitoun’s hearing. The defender extended his hand to Zeitoun, and Zeitoun shook it. He was led out of the room as the defender opened the file for the next prison...

“Wait!” he said. “Oh no …” He jumped out of the car, leaving the door open. The dogs. How long had it been? He ran across the street and down the block, his stomach spinning. The dogs, the dogs. He knocked on the front doors of the two houses where he had fed them. No answer. He looked in the first-floor windows. No one. The owners had not come back. Zeitoun went back to the tree. His plank was still there, and he leaned it against the trunk. He climbed up to his usual perch and then pulled the plank up. He stretched the plank across to the house on the right and walked to the roof. Usually the dogs were barking for him by now, but today he heard nothing. Please, he thought. Please God. He lifted the window and slipped inside. The stench hit him immediately. He knew the dogs were dead before he saw them. He found them together in one of the bedrooms. He left the roof, stepped back to the tree, and arranged the plank to reach the second house. The dogs were just under the windowsill, a tangle of limbs, heads to the heavens, as if they had been waiting, for weeks, for him.

This complex and exceedingly efficient government operation was completed while residents of New Orleans were trapped in attics and begging for rescue from rooftops and highway overpasses. The portable toilets were available and working at Camp Greyhound while there were no working bathrooms at the Convention Center and Superdome a few blocks away. Hundreds of cases of water and MREs were readily available for the guards and prisoners, while those stranded nearby were fighting for food and water.

“Everything happens for a reason,” he tells them. “You do your duty, you do what’s right, and the rest is in God’s hands.”