Lebanon Hostage

What you're about to read:

This is a work of historical fiction—recent history—inspired by actual accounts, so it's rather realistic though definitely fictional. The novella is built around themes I find erotic: captivity, sexual tension, male intimacy. However (disclaimer and spoiler), you won't find any full-blown sex here. This is the story of a queerly romantic, lopsidedly erotic, but unconsummated relationship between a gay man and a straight man held together as hostages.

Chapter 3 -- Enter Allan

(June-July 1986)

I am awakened by someone tugging my blindfold down over my eyes. "Hey," a guard says. "Get up. You go home now."

"What?" I'm still half asleep, struggling to process what's happening.

"You go home."

"What?" Now it's an expression of disbelief. Did I hear that right? "I'm going home?"

"Yes. Get up."

I start to clamber to my feet, but this isn't what the guard wants, he just wants me to sit up on the mattress. Did I misunderstand? "I thought I was going home."

"Yes, soon," he says. "We come get you. Don't sleep."

He leaves, locking the door behind him. I work to dislodge thick, heavy cobwebs from the inside of my head. He said I'm going home. I can't manage to make that thought make sense. I know I ought to be elated, but all I feel is confusion as to why he's left me sitting here. I'm emotionally numb. I've been badly depressed, I'm aware of that, I still feel it weighing me down. I've been... a long ways away, but I'm staggering back as quickly as I can.

I'm going home.

Really?

I wait for what seems a long time. Outside, the ventilator roars, preventing me from hearing what's going on, why the delay. As I wait, I chip through the apathy of my depression. I'm going home—I'm starting to feel it now. Forgotten emotions are stirring awake: relief, excitement, impatience. Snippets of reunion scenes play in my mind's eye: embracing Bernie, my parents, Chris. I see myself back at home, back at college. I'm going to have a life again. I have a future again...

Despite my rising anticipation, I'm drowsy as a result of having my eyes closed behind the blindfold. It is night, isn't it? I think so... Yes, I'm pretty sure my last meal was dinner. Soon I'll be able to orient myself properly in time again. I'll know what time it is. I'll know what date it is.

Two guards enter the cell. Immediately, I'm more alert. Without a word, they help me to my feet. I walk the zigzag path—for the last time, I realize. Thank God. Thank God. I'm finally leaving this place.

In the guards' living area, someone unties my blindfold long enough to tighten and reknot it. It's a confirmation that, yes, they're releasing me: they want to be sure I don't see anything, any sign or clue that would let me retrace my steps back to this place in the company of the police or the army...

As they're tightening the blindfold, I suddenly remember that I've left my glasses back in my cell, in the tub. Since I've never used my glasses here, I completely forgot about them. It doesn't matter, I'll be able to buy new ones soon enough.

They position me in front of the ladder that leads up through the trapdoor. A guard tells me again, "Home," and pats my back. The gesture seems almost affectionate, at least congratulatory. I work my way blindly up the ladder, taking care not to slip in my stocking feet. There are men waiting up top to help me.

They guide me through the side door of a van and have me sit on the floor, close to the rear, with my back resting against the side. "No talk," a guard orders in the usual threatening manner. They shut the door, leaving me alone inside.

No. Not alone. There's someone else here, across from me, but even farther toward the back of the van. I can hear him shifting a tiny bit as he sits, like me, on the uncomfortable metal floor. A guard? I don't think so, a guard would have no need to stay as quiet as this person is trying to be. This is another hostage. Someone else is going home with me. Good, good. I'm happy for him. Happy for both of us.

We wait in silence, my unknown companion and I. Neither of us tries to communicate with the other, we can hear guards moving around outside the van. Don't be stupid, don't do anything that could jeopardize your release at the last minute.

After a few minutes, the van opens again, and someone else is brought in to be seated across from me. A few minutes after that, a fourth person. As the fourth man sits next to me, I hear a jangling that makes me think he's wearing handcuffs. That's odd and disconcerting. Is this prisoner dangerous? Perhaps he's tried to attack the guards. If so, kudos to him for courage...

I'm reasonably sure that there are now three other hostages seated with me. They've negotiated several people's release; that's why I was here so much longer than the couple of weeks I'd expected at the beginning, it makes sense now. I can't begrudge them the extra time it took to get all four of us home. I feel proud of myself for being so mature about the situation. Now that this experience is over, I can start thinking about it in a different way, from a broader perspective.

The guards climb into the van, we're finally going. One guard in back with the hostages, another up front in the passenger's seat, plus the driver. The engine grinds to life, the garage door rattles open. We're pulling out of the station, hell is shrinking into the distance behind us, freedom lies ahead.

The drive is silent, except for occasional quiet words exchanged between the two guards sitting up front. After turning some corners, we start to drive faster and more smoothly, more straight, as if down a highway. Several minutes later, we turn onto another road. This road winds and climbs. We keep winding and climbing for a long time.

This doesn't make sense. I know enough to know that we're not in Beirut anymore. We're driving in mountains. The mountains start just outside of Beirut. I'm uneasy. What's going on?

Maybe they're releasing us in some remote location. That makes sense, it's a question of security. They'll leave us, they'll get safely away, the authorities will be told where to find us.

Or maybe they're taking us somewhere remote so they can hide the bodies.

Stop it. Why the fuck do you do this to yourself? Stop imagining horrific scenarios. Jesus. They said you were going home.

They said it to keep me docile. Compliant. And it worked.

Oh shit. They couldn't get what they wanted for us, they got tired of waiting so long, they're getting rid of us.

You don't know that. You don't know that.

Oh God, please, I don't want to die. Please don't let it be that. Let them really be releasing us, please.

I start to hyperventilate. The guard sitting in the back of the van hisses and reaches over to shove the side of my head. The rough treatment further convinces me that something's wrong, this isn't a release. I keep hyperventilating.

Suddenly, something metallic is being held to my temple. The guard hisses again, long and slow. I take in a deep, shuddering breath and force myself to hold it. Oh God, oh God. The guard keeps holding his gun to my head until he's convinced I'm controlling myself. Around me, the other hostages are holding perfectly still, perfectly silent.

I now need to pee very urgently.

The mountain roads are getting bumpier, we're rocking on the floor of the van, bracing ourselves with our hands, trying to stay balanced. The hostage sitting next to me, the one I think is handcuffed, is having an especially hard time, he keeps colliding sideways into me. How long have we been driving? Half an hour? More?

Dirt crunches under the wheels as we come to a stop. The two guards seated up front get out, walk away. No one gets out of the back of the van, which means that the guard who put his gun to my head is still here waiting with the rest of us.

After a little while, the other guards return. They start removing hostages from the van, one at a time, in the reverse order they brought us in, a few minutes apart. The third guard is no longer in back with us, but between trips I hear a guard standing watch just outside the van's closed door.

I'm trembling, and my heart is racing. In my head, I'm reciting the Hail Mary, over and over, by instinct, it just seems like a suitable thing to do. "Pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death..." I've heard no gunshots, though. That seems like a good sign...

The van opens again. It's my turn for whatever's about to happen. The guards help me step down onto the ground. Two hold me between them by my arms, very tightly. One presses his gun to my back. My reflex is to arch forward and away; the gun follows me.

They march me quickly up a slight incline. I feel dirt and pebbles through the holes in the bottom of my socks. I step up onto a concrete threshold, then I'm walking across a smooth floor. Down a short hall, I think—we have to turn sideways a bit so we can all fit with the guards still holding me on either side. A turn to the left, threading through a doorway. Across a small room, weaving clumsily around furniture.

We stop. One guard descends a wooden stairway that opens up at my feet. He reaches back up to help the other guard position my feet on the steps. I don't understand at first what they're trying to get me to do, which irritates them. The stairs descend sideways in relation to where I'm standing, but they're steep and the steps are thin, more like rungs, so the guards want me to climb down backwards, as if I were descending a slanted ladder. As I feel my way down, the second guard follows.

I touch ground on a rough cement floor. I hear the familiar buzz of a fluorescent light. The familiar clang of a cell door opening.

Relief washes over me. I'm not going to die, it's another basement prison. Thank you, God, a prison...

As soon as I hear the guards climbing back up the stairs, I loosen the blindfold so I can lift it onto my forehead. At first glance, my new cell looks just like my last, but quickly I register differences. The narrow door is in the middle, not off to the side. There's no barred gap at the top of the door; instead there's a mesh grate, covered on the outside by a metal plate. Light can enter this cell only through the fan that is installed, as in my last prison, in the lower part of the door; this means that my new cell is more dimly lit than my old. Enough light filters in, though, to show me that the white tile covering the walls and ceiling of my new cell is spotlessly clean. It looks new.

There's another difference. There are two mattresses, side by side, taking up the entire floor space. Two tubs, one on each mattress. Two water bottles, two pee bottles. Like the tile, the thin mattresses seem new: firm, stiff, unstained.

I cannot make sense of the doubling. The obvious explanation doesn't even cross my mind. I'm not really thinking about it that hard, I'm still absorbing the shock of being alive. My need to pee is less intense than earlier, but it's still there; when I try to go into a bottle, though, nothing comes. It must just be fear.

I hear the last hostage being brought down into the basement. I am caught completely by surprise when the guards open my cell a second time. I hurriedly pull down my blindfold. I'm sitting on one of the mattresses. A newcomer takes a seat on the other mattress. The door closes, two sets of footsteps return upstairs.

It is perturbing to have someone else in the cell with me—like when the young guard came to chat with me in my last prison. I'm locked in with a stranger. It has occurred to me that I don't know for certain that this person is a hostage, as I've been assuming. Maybe a guard has been assigned to sit watch over me in my cell for some reason. It seems unlikely. But better play it safe. At least check...

I tip my head back until I can see, under the bottom of the blindfold, the feet of the person sitting near me. Shit! He isn't wearing pajamas. I see dark socks, trouser cuffs—not a hostage. I lower my head immediately, but of course the guard has already seen me peeking at him. I wait to be hit or screamed at.

"Hey, it's all right," the guard whispers in fluent English. "I'm not one of them."

Because he's whispering, I can't tell for sure, but I think he has a British accent. Picked up at a British language institute, like Rabeeh, the English teacher I helped at Adnan's school. This is a cruel game, a trap: they want to see if I'll obey the rule about not communicating with other hostages. I sit rigid, unresponsive. Please let me pass this test soon, so he'll go away.

The guard slides closer to me. He unties my blindfold. Oh Jesus, he's taking the game to another level. I keep my eyes screwed tightly shut as the blindfold falls away from my face.

"It's all right," he whispers again. "Look at me." A pause. "Please."

The "please" persuades me to rethink my understanding of what's going on here. There's a slightly desperate note in his voice when he says it, which I don't think would occur to a guard to fake even if he could. I decide to take the risk. I open my eyes, glimpse a beard. A Muslim fundamentalist, it

is

a guard! I've instantly clamped my eyes shut again, but it's too late, I'm fucked. Yet nothing happens, and a second later I realize—stupid!—that a hostage would also have a beard. I open my eyes again, blink, focus in the dim light.

A mop of unruly hair spills over the blindfold that he wears across his forehead like a headband. A scruffy beard covers the bottom of his face. In the space between, puffy bags under weary eyes. He looks to be in his thirties. His open-throated dress shirt is streaked with grime.

We stare at each other. He holds out his hand for me to shake. "My name's Allan Porterfield. You're Jeremy Lawrence?"

That last might be a question, might be a statement, I'm not sure. Either way, this stranger who has just proffered me his name somehow already knows mine. I am known, I am a person.

It's all been too much—the hope of going home, the terror of being shot, the relief at being alive, the stress of thinking I was being toyed with, and now, out of nowhere, this...

cellmate

, this companion, who knows my name and wants to do something as normal as shake my hand. I can't carry it all anymore. Instead of shaking his hand, I collapse into tears. I quickly escalate to sobbing, gasping for air.

The man puts his arm around my shoulders. His touch melts a column of tension in my back I hadn't known was there until I feel it sliding away. The easing of the tension frees me up to cry harder. I'm practically keening now.

The man, Allan, is gently but nervously shushing me, trying to get me to quiet down... Too late. Footsteps pound down the wooden stairs. "Shit," Allan whispers and retracts his hand from my shoulder so he can pull his blindfold down. In his other hand, he's still holding my blindfold, which he thrusts at me. "Sorry."

Still crying, I barely have time to get the cloth in front of my eyes before I hear a creaking hinge, up near the top of the cell door; since the door is still closed, the plate covering the mesh grate must open. A guard hisses for quiet. When he sees me frantically retying my blindfold, he screams, "No look!"

"We're very sorry," Allan says in a tense but appeasing voice. He definitely has a British accent. "We just need a minute, please.

Moment, s'il vous plait?

"

The guard keeps hissing, as if he's a snake. Under other circumstances, it would be comical. Allan feels his way blindly to lay a hand on my back. "Come on, pull yourself together," he says softly. Clenching my fists, I rein myself in until, instead of sobbing, I'm panting hard through my nostrils with my mouth squeezed shut. Allan encourages me: "Good, good."

Once my breathing has become more regular, Allan says to the guard: "We're all right now. Thank you.

Merci beaucoup pour votre patience.

"

"No talk," the guard barks.

He waits a few seconds longer to assure himself that we're going to obey. He drops the grate cover back into place. Before he leaves, he turns on a radio that sounds like it's up by the ceiling. He immediately retunes the radio slightly away from the station it's on, so that we hear a combination of hissing static and fluctuating sounds that never come into focus as comprehensible voices or music. The guard cranks the volume up. This again, I think bitterly. He climbs the stairs, shutting the trapdoor behind him. When I lift my blindfold again, I find that along with the static, the guard has also left the light on.

Allan moves his hand from my back to my left shoulder; he puts his other hand around my right arm. He brings his head close to mine so he can talk in a low voice but still be heard over the radio. "All right, mate?"

I want to explain to him why I broke down so hard. He'll discover soon enough how pathetically fragile I am, but this time I did have what I think is a justifiable reason. "I thought they were bringing us here to shoot us," I say.

"No. No." He squeezes my shoulder and arm reassuringly.

I don't want him to ever stop touching me. He makes me feel comforted and safe.

"I'm sorry," I tell him, "I cry a lot." I figure I owe him fair warning.

"I don't blame you." He squeezes my shoulder one more time, claps my arm twice in a manly, sporty way. Then he withdraws.

* * *

In fact, my crying starts to taper off, quickly, as soon as they've put Allan and me together. His presence, his weight on the other side of the cell helps restore my balance. I am able to steady myself against him as I struggle to find my footing. My life as a hostage has taken a dramatic turn for the better.

Allan is English, a television journalist. A bureau chief, to be precise; I have only a vague idea what that means when he first tells me, but as we fill the weeks to come with conversation, I will become well versed in what his job entails. He had been living in Beirut for almost a year when he was kidnapped—April 11, exactly one month after me. Gunmen seized him as he was walking out of his apartment building on his way to work. For weeks, he was held in a basement prison, not the same one I was. Then, one night, they put him in a van, drove him several minutes over to my prison, put me and the other two hostages into the van with him. And now here we are.

"Here" has to be the Shouf Mountains, Allan tells me, somewhere southeast of Beirut. He is surprised we are here. It's virtually certain that the people holding us are Shiite radicals, but the Shouf are controlled by a rival religious group, the Druze. That makes the Shouf a counterintuitive place for Shiites to hide hostages—which could be why they've done it, but they're running the risk that a Druze militia might discover us and free us. Worried that I will sound foolishly desperate, I nevertheless ask Allan how likely he thinks a rescue could be. His reply is delicate: Not very. It could happen, it has happened, a rival militia rescued two hostages in Beirut a couple years back. But we need to accept that the more likely scenario is that we'll go home when our captors decide it's time.

Not only can Allan give me a sense of

where

we are, he claims to know

when

we are. He's been keeping track of the passage of days since his kidnapping—not with a tally on the wall, just in his head; even so, he's confident that his count is accurate. By his reckoning, we were brought here on the night between June 5 and 6. Close to two months after his kidnapping, three months after mine.

Three months. My God. It's summer now.

Allan is able to give me news about the aftermath of my kidnapping up to the day in April when he was kidnapped. He's also able to shed light on the political situation around my kidnapping. Things are more complicated than I could have imagined on my own.