David McCloskey (42:31)
General Kamran Isfahani loads his questions with a tone of slavish deference, because though the man resembles a kindly Persian grandfather, he is, in the main, a psychopath. The General is looking hard at Kam. He plucks a sugar cube from the bowl on the table, tucks it between his teeth, and sips his tea. Kam, typically, would not ask such questions, but during the three years spent in his care, hustled constantly between makeshift prisons, he has never once sat across from the General, clothed properly, with a steaming cup of tea at his fingertips, a spoon on the table, and a window at his back. Something flashes through the General's eyes, and it tells Cam that he will deeply regret asking the question again. It has been over a year since the General last beat him or strung him up in what his captors call the chicken kebab, but the memories are fresh. Each morning, Cam can still see the glint of the pipe brought down on his leg, can still remember how the pain bent time into an arc that stretched into eternity, and how that glimpse into the void filled him with a despair so powerful that it surely has no name, at least not in Persian, Swedish, or English, the three languages he speaks. And he's got more than the memories, of course. He's got blurry vision in his left eye and a permanent hitch in his stride. What is the spoon doing here? A spoon. 2,721 consecutive meals have been served without utensils on rubber discs, so Cam can't help but blink suspiciously at the spoon. A mirage. An eyeball scooper? A test. Perhaps the General plans to skin the fingers that pick it up. The General calms his fears with a nod, a genuine one, which Cam knows looks quite different from the version he uses for trickery, for lulling him into thinking there will be no physical harm. Cam puts a lump of sugar into his tea and slowly picks up the spoon. He stirs, savoring the cold metal on his fingertips. He sets it down on the table and waits, listening to the soft metallic wobble as the bowl of the spoon comes to rest. You will write it down again, the General says. He is rubbing the gray bristle on his neck, and Cam follows his eye contact as it settles on the portraits of the two ayatollahs looking down from the wall above. When Cam was a child, the sight of the ayatollahs frightened him. It still does. He looks away. You will write it again and you will leave nothing out. It will be comprehensive and final. Final. Cam considers another question. The General's silent gaze screams, do not. The first drafts, right after his capture three years ago, were utter shit. Like all first drafts, to call them stories would be like calling the raw ingredients spread across your counter a meal. No, they were just a bunch of facts, information wrung from his tortured lips and committed to bloodstained sheets of A4 paper. But Cam knows he's being too hard on himself. As a dentist, his writing had been limited to office memorandums and patient notes. As a spy, his cables adopted similarly clinical tones. Just the facts. Glitzmann, his handler, the man who'd recruited him to work for Mossad, liked to say. Leave the story to someone else. Mossad had preferred he write in English, not Swedish. The General, of course, demands that he write in Persian, and it is in Persian that Kam has found his voice. Now the cell becomes Kam's scriptorium. In his dragging, tedious Persian script, he writes the Quranic inscription In the name of God, honesty will save you. Across the top of the COVID page, Cam knows that the General appreciates this self talk reminder right up front. Beneath it, Cam titles this as the first part of his sworn confession and then signs his name. Someone will fill in the date later because though he does not know the date today, he also knows not to ask. The General's men will fill in the location for their own files. He writes the number one in the top left corner. But which story should he tell? The General said it was to be his masterpiece, perhaps the best of each, he thinks. He would also like to write something the General will let him finish. He would like to reach the end. Across hundreds of drafts. No matter the type of story, Cam has only managed to write one version of the end. It is the part he fears the most. Someday, he has told himself, someday he will write a new beginning to the bleakness of the end. Will he find it here on this last attempt. A prisoner can dream, he thinks. As always, Cam completes a final ritual before he starts this draft. He imagines writing down his last remaining secret in crayon on one of these A4 sheets right in front of him. One secret. Three years in captivity, Cam has held on to only one. Then he pictures a wooden cigar box. He slides the paper with the secret inside. In the early days of his captivity, he locked the real secret, written on imaginary paper in the imaginary cigar box, into an imaginary safe. But the General's men broke into every physical safe in his apartment, and Cam thought he should also improve his mental defenses. He now pictures the cigar box with his secret incinerated on a monstrous pyre, the light and heat so fierce that every dark corner of his brain burns bright as day. This way, Cam's not lying when the General asks him if he's been truthful, if the story is complete. He's written it all down, has he not? The prisoner cannot be held responsible for how management handles the papers. Cam presses the crayon to the paper and begins.
