A Sliver of Light by Shane Bauer

Author:Shane Bauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

60. Shane

I hate it when this happens—when dinner comes and we eat and there is still no word of us going to hava khori. I used to go ballistic and pound on the door when they were late. I’ve gotten a lot more patient. They always come eventually, but it’s really late now. The sun has gone down. We pressed the button a half-hour ago and no one has come. Something is up. Earlier today they brought us downstairs, stood us in front of a bunch of men in suits, and brought us back to our cell with no explanation.

“I think I want to knock,” I say to Josh, whose nose is in his book. He nods.

I knock loudly, but not harshly—with just the edges of my knuckles, three raps at a time. Eventually, a guard comes.

“Chi?” he says.

“Hava khori mikhaam,” I say.

“Neestish,” he says. No hava khori. Josh jumps up and we crowd the door. The guard walks away as we start to argue with him.

This time I use the butt of my fist and pound the door hard. He comes back and tells us that hava khori is out of service. The door is broken and they are fixing it. I feel that thing happening—where they tell a lazy lie and I start to believe it, because if I believe it, I don’t have to be worried. But Josh is better at not playing that game. He insists that we must go.

The guard leaves. We wait five minutes. We pound on the door again. He returns. “Sarah is sick,” he says this time. “She can’t go outside.”

“I want to see her anyway,” I say.

“You can’t. She says she doesn’t want to see you.” He says it as if he were saying, “Fuck you.”

We don’t give up and eventually the warden comes. It’s not going to happen, he says. We are not going to see Sarah. If we want to go outside, the two of us can go to one of the small open-air rooms. But no Sarah. Inside, I’m in tumult and my body wants to keep going, to make a scene. But some part of me somehow knows that something good is happening. It’s Eid.

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