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 novel 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 7 -- Transferred to an apartment

(January-February 1987)

We enter a new year. 1987. I'm still a hostage, still living with Allan in the cold back room of an abandoned office somewhere in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

About a week after New Year's, our captors decide it's time for a change.

* * *

As always, they come for us at night. I surface from a shallow, chilly sleep to realize that there are more than two guards moving and talking out front. I am instantly caught up in a welter of anxiety and hope.

I pull down my blindfold and sit up as they enter our room. They unchain Allan and escort him out to the front room, but no one approaches my mattress to unchain me. Oh God, no, don't take him away from me... "Allan!" I cry out helplessly.

"Shh! Do not be afraid," an unfamiliar voice says. He's clearly Arab, but his English is fluid and clear. "You are going home now."

My heart leaps, even though I know he could be lying. A second later, a sobering thought seizes me. "Is Allan going home?"

"Do not speak," the same voice insists. But he adds, "Your friend also is going home."

As soon as he says it, I recognize the cruel irony at work: the only way I would have felt certain that I can trust this man would be if he had told me Allan

isn't

going home. As things now stand, I don't know that he isn't just mollifying me, to keep me quiet.

It sounds like everyone but me is now in the front room. They've left the door between us open—a good sign. It suggests they are, in fact, planning to take me out too.

The

scrrrch

of packing tape startles me. I flash back to my kidnapping, the miserable trip crammed into the compartment under the van. Not that again. Then I think: No, this bodes well. They didn't tape us up when they transferred us to and from the Shouf prison. So the fact they're taping us now could be a sign that they really are letting us go. They're getting us ready for transport back to the heart of the city. The same journey I underwent when I was kidnapped, but in reverse.

Just before they start applying the tape, I hear Allan say, in a low, tense voice, "If you're not really letting us go, please don't separate us."

"Do not worry," the English speaker tells him, a little sternly. "Soon you will be free."

Allan is silent after that. Once they're finished taping him, some other kind of movement goes on that ends with the sound of something being dragged a little ways across the floor. It can't be Allan's body; the sound is too scratchy, it makes me picture a woven reed mat. I don't understand, which makes me anxious.

They return for me. Standing in the front room, I know there must be at least three guards here, our regular guards plus the English speaker. I have the impression there may be one or two more men shifting around. I have no reason to think that Abed and Fadil are among them; the Brothers Kalashnikov are on shift. Whether I'm going home or to a new holding place, I would have liked to have said goodbye to Abed and Fadil. I would have liked to thank them one more time for treating us as well as they did.

They wrap a few layers of tape around my blindfold. They don't stuff a gag inside my mouth, but they tie a strip of cloth over my mouth and wrap tape tightly around the cloth. Instead of wrapping tape around my body, like my kidnappers did, these guards merely cross my wrists behind my back and tape them together. The tape is so tight, I worry about my circulation. I can clench and unclench my hands normally, at least for the moment—does that mean I'll be fine? I take comfort in the thought that if my hands are behind me, they must not be planning to wedge me under a van again. They'd better not, anyway. God, that would be uncomfortable, lying on top of my hands.

The guards sit me down on the edge of a chair in order to tape my ankles together. Then they thread my feet into a cloth sack. Two guards lift me out of the chair by my armpits as two other guards lift the sack up my legs, past my hips. The men holding my arms lower me down into a half sitting, half squatting position, so the sack can be pulled up over the rest of my body and knotted shut over my head.

I'm panicking. My first instinctive fear is that I'll smother—but I feel burlap on my face and hands, so although the air is hot and close, I know that the fabric is full of tiny holes for air to pass through. But that's the next reason I panic. I'm envisioning seawater rushing through all those tiny holes. Jesus Christ, they're going to dump us, drown us in sacks like unwanted puppies!

The guards can hear my panicked wheezing through my nostrils. Someone prods me through the burlap. "Do not be afraid," the English speaker says again. It's an order, not reassurance; he's losing patience. I bring myself under control. Please, God, let him be telling the truth.

Two guards carry me out of the building by my shoulders and legs as I'm curled up inside the sack. I hear a car trunk pop open. The guards load me inside and shift me around to their liking. I end up pushed in as far as possible toward the front of the car, with my back to the guards. Allan is loaded in close behind my back, a snug fit. The trunk closes over us. Right away, guards get in the car, and we're off.

The gag is squeezing my face because of the tape wrapped around it. I work my jaw, hoping to ease the discomfort. I am surprised to discover that opening my mouth pulls the gag loose in the direction of my chin. My God, I might be able to call for help—if we're not being released. I rapidly open and close my mouth, working the gag down in tiny increments. Behind me, Allan is twisting in his sack, struggling to get free. Is it possible he has an idea for how to escape? Could he know a way to open the trunk from inside?

I've managed to lower the gag to the point where I could speak or shout freely. Should I? I'm in a frantic agony of indecision... I'll ask Allan. If he hasn't slipped his gag, he can at least grunt yes or no.

I crane my neck around as far as I can. I'm afraid that a whisper won't be audible over the noise of the moving car, so I speak in a voice only somewhat lower than usual. My words come out in a mad rush: "Allan I can talk should I call for help?"

Before I've finished, Allan is shushing me; he's slipped his gag, too. "Shh! Quiet!"

In a perfectly distinct voice, an enraged guard barks, "No talk!" He must be in the backseat, it sounds like he's sitting right in front of me. I am taken aback by how clearly his voice carries. I had assumed that the partition between the trunk and the backseat would muffle sound far more than it does. I realize belatedly that the only reason I hadn't heard the guards talking in the car is that they

weren't

talking. They're talking now, though, urgent and agitated. The car's pulling over. Oh shit!

As the engine idles, a guard jumps out, flings open the trunk, and strikes each of us, twice, with a hard object that I take to be the butt of his rifle. The blows he delivers to me fall on my side, above my hip, knocking the wind out of me a little. I grunt but don't cry out. With a final hiss, the guard slams the trunk closed.

We drive on. Allan struggles a little longer. Then I feel his hands groping around my back and ass through the burlap. He locates my hands, still taped behind my back, and squeezes them. Encouragement, I suppose. No, wait, he's tugging on my hands, as if he wants to separate them. He must be prompting me to twist out of the tape, the way he has. Maybe he does have an escape plan.

I'm able to loosen the tape, but not enough to wrench a hand free. I'm such a goddamn weakling. Exertion and frustration make my breath come out in little sobs. Allan presses a hand high on my back, near my shoulder blades, in what I interpret as a calming gesture. I quiet down, rest a bit, then resume struggling again.

We park, we've already arrived. How long were we driving? Ten minutes? My hands still aren't free. I hope to God I haven't fucked up some plan Allan might have had. Allan pats my back quickly, twice, and withdraws his hand. He holds very still. I do likewise.

The trunk opens. They remove Allan. Someone locates my head through the burlap and raps my skull hard with his knuckle. He hisses softly, a warning, before they close the lid again. The trunk dips, and stays dipped, as a guard leans on the rear of the car. It's a familiar routine: Allan's being delivered somewhere, a guard has stayed behind to keep watch over me. A transfer then, I'm thinking. I pass through multiple emotions in rapid succession. Crushed resignation: we're not going home. Gushing relief: my morbid imagination was wrong, we're not being drowned. Cold fear: what if they separate us, put me back in solitary? A glimmer of optimism: maybe they're moving us because this new place will be warmer.

Long, nerve-wracking minutes pass. It didn't take this much time to move us out of the van when they transferred us to the Shouf prison, and it took nowhere near so long to hustle us into the abandoned office. I have no idea whether to interpret the wait as a good sign or a bad.

Get me indoors already, I am freezing out here.

Finally, the trunk opens again. Someone picks up the knotted end of my sack and hoists it over his shoulder, while two sets of hands lift me up from beneath. Inside the sack, I am hunched over with my arms pulled behind my back and my head pressed toward my bent-up knees. The compression of my lungs forces me to take shallow breaths. Thank God the gag has slipped, I can suck in more air through my mouth.

The guard carries me, on his back, up five flights of stairs; I start keeping count after the second flight. Two other guards are always right behind him to help bear my weight. The guard who has me on his back huffs and staggers but never stops to rest. He wants to get this over and done with. So do I.

A door opens. The guards let me fall, dead weight, onto the floor. My elbow is smashed so brutally that for the next hour, until the pain finally eases, I'll be convinced they've broken the bone. I howl, earning me simultaneous hisses from multiple sources, followed by several kicks to the legs. I restrain myself from crying out again. At least my assailant is keeping away from my back and arms. The blows are more than punishment for making noise, I suspect; someone's venting his displeasure at having to haul me up several flights of stairs. Another guard intervenes. I think I recognize the voice as that of the fluid English speaker, although now he's speaking Arabic. The kicker desists.

They drag me out of the sack and sit me upright on the floor with my legs stretched out in front of me. I'm gritting my teeth from the pain in my elbow, but it's a blessed relief not to be hunched over any more. I fill my lungs with fresh, chilled air. As one guard sets to work unwrapping the tape from my blindfold, someone else uses a knife to cut the tape from my ankles and wrists and to saw off the gag, now hanging around my neck.

Unless this is a multistory office building, I must be in a residential apartment, like Paul and Donald before they were transferred to the Shouf prison. If it's an apartment, no wonder the guards were so unhappy that I yelled—in the middle of the night, no less. Now that the stripping away of the tape is complete, everything has become very quiet. Where's Allan?

I am led down a straight path, which I assume to be a hallway. A guard uses a key to unlock a door to my right. I am brought into my new room, seated on my new mattress. Wordlessly, the guards turn, pull, push me around until I'm lying flat on my back. Why couldn't they just tell me to lie down?

A chain closes around my left wrist. Blankets are spread out on top of me. Someone leans close to my face to speak in a menacing whisper. It's not the same English speaker as earlier, this new man has a thicker accent. "Do not talk or move

at all

. You are sleeping now."

The guards leave, locking me in. Alone? I'm hoping no, I'm hoping that's what it means that the guard forbade me to speak.

I use my right hand to lift the blindfold so that the chain on my left hand won't clink. Even with my eyes uncovered, I'm blind; the room is impenetrably dark. Several feet directly to my left, a sliver of light is visible under the door that leads out to the hallway, but it does nothing to illuminate my surroundings.

From across the room, Allan whispers, "I'm here, Jeremy."

"Oh thank you, God." I didn't intend to gasp it out loud, it just slipped out.

* * *

We don't dare talk much, but Allan and I exchange a few more whispered words that night, mostly about my elbow; having heard me yell, Allan wants to know if I'm hurt. I'll see a hideous bruise on my elbow in the morning, but evidently nothing's broken.

The next day, after the guards have given us permission to speak quietly, Allan lectures me for getting us thumped during the drive. I should never call out, he insists. The odds of being heard by anyone who could or would help us are too slim to make the risk worthwhile. All it will accomplish is to make the guards panic. We need to stay calm so that they will, too.

In self-defense, I tell Allan that I had thought they might be planning to drown us—in which case, the risk would have been worthwhile, wouldn't it? We would have had nothing to lose.

"Jeremy, they're not going to kill us. But even if they were, they're terrorists, not gangsters. They wouldn't want to hide the bodies, they'd want to show them off. They'd take pictures to send to the papers. So they'd shoot us, not toss us in the ocean. But they're not going to shoot us, either. I know why you're worried about it—but those were exceptional cases. You don't need to be afraid of that, it's not going to happen to us."

I ask Allan if he had wanted me to free my hands because he had an idea about how to escape. No, he says, he just knew I'd be more comfortable with my hands free. Were the guards mad when they got him upstairs and saw he had freed his hands? A little, he admits. They smacked his hands, as if he were a schoolboy, which stung like hell. But that's all.

Allan tells me that while I was struggling to free my hands, he kept one of his hands cupped over his genitals. "I was afraid you'd hit my balls. After all that fuss about us sharing the bed, they had us spooning pretty damn close."

We have to joke about things like that, to survive.

* * *

We are, indeed, in a residential apartment. A slummy, crumbling, dingy apartment. We are being kept in a small bedroom—ten by twelve feet, Allan estimates. Apart from our mattresses lying on the floor, the room is bare. My mattress is in the corner directly opposite the door; Allan's is in the corner diagonal from me. The mattresses are arranged perpendicularly, so that their feet approach each other. I am chained to a bolt that has been driven into the wall near my head. The guards have allotted me enough slack in my chain that I can stretch my wrist all the way down my side when I'm lying down, and I can stand up straight near the head of the mattress. Allan is chained to a radiator alongside his mattress, on the wall that faces me.

There are two windows in the room, one above the radiator, the other in the wall alongside me. Both are covered by sheets of metal. Allan tries peeping out the window over the radiator through the cracks at the border of the sheet, but the metal is bolted too tightly to the wall to allow him to see anything. My chain doesn't stretch far enough for me to reach my window, which spares me having to work up the courage to try.

Although the sun lights up the very edges of the metal sheets during the day, the room otherwise remains pitch dark until the guards turn on the light bulb that hangs down from wires spilling out of the ceiling. They leave the light on for us all day and turn it off at night when they want us to go to sleep. We have candles in our tubs for use during power outages.

Our new neighborhood is noisier than our last. We hear more sounds of people living in buildings around us—voices, music. We must be close to the airport; planes roar as they take off. Explosions sound periodically at what seems a not-too-great distance, a reminder of Beirut's continuing civil war. The guards are unfazed by the explosions, so I take my cues from them and stifle my sense of alarm. Whatever's happening, it must not threaten us.

Allan is persuaded that we're in Bourj al-Barajneh, a suburb located just north of the airport. The explosions we hear are probably the shelling of a nearby Palestinian refugee camp, he says. For as long as he's been in Beirut, the refugee camps in the suburbs have been under siege, off and on, by militias who oppose the PLO using Lebanon as a base of operations against Israel.

There are other hostages with us in this apartment—three of them, in a bedroom located across the hall from ours. We hear them being unchained and escorted on their toilet runs. Allan and I aren't supposed to know anything about the other hostages' identity. To prevent the hostages' voices from carrying across the hall to us, the guards speak to them from behind closed doors only. The guards do the same to talk to Allan and me, and they insist we keep our voices down.

Despite the guards' precautions, we know that the other hostages are French. I'm responsible for learning that. After a few days of relentless prodding from Allan, plus practice anticipating the guards' movements, I build up enough nerve to eavesdrop during the other hostages' toilet runs by stretching out to the end of my chain, crouched on the floor. As in the abandoned office, Allan and I are both chained by our left wrists; Allan theorizes that this is because the guards assume we'll use our right hands to eat, as Arabs do. Because my left wrist is the wrist closest to the door, I'm able to stretch out on my chain to within a couple feet of the door. I'm scared as hell the first time I do this, but my success at pulling it off is a confidence-booster, as Allan knew it would be.

I have to repeat the trip to the door on multiple mornings before I overhear a conversation that's sustained enough for me to figure out what language is being spoken. I can't distinguish individual words, but I'm certain that the sounds and inflections I'm hearing are French.

Allan takes his usual pleasure in spinning theories about who the other hostages might be. We know that Paul, Donald, and Robert were held in an apartment with four French hostages, one of whom died, so these could be the surviving three. In that case, this might be the very same apartment that Paul, Donald, and Robert shared with the French; Allan and I might even be occupying Paul, Donald, and Robert's old room. Allan is most drawn to that theory. But there were also four French television journalists kidnapped the weekend before I was—perhaps these three are from that group. This is the first I've heard of that kidnapping, even though it occurred the day before I arrived in Lebanon. Bernie never said a word about it. He must not have wanted to make me anxious.

It's also possible, of course, that these men were taken hostage sometime after the two of us, in which case Allan would have no way to identify them.

We never hear anyone moving over our heads, so we surmise that we may be on the top floor of the building. If we have downstairs neighbors, we don't hear them, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's no one there to hear us. Evidently the guards are afraid that neighbors will hear us, judging from how strict they are that we keep our voices down and not let our chains rattle.