About Henry Fellows

Post 127:

On Killing and Innocence: The Chronicles of Henry Fellows

Episode 31

Chapter 10 Continues...

            …“Never met him, never actually shook hands or whatever, but he was in charge of the operation to capture—I don’t know, Muhammad al—can’t remember. I had the follow. Thirty yards from that radical psycho, and then nothing. Somebody had me. It was amateur. Me, I mean. Should’ve killed myself, bit my tongue off and choked on it the second it happened. Would’ve been the honorable thing.”

            The room feels colder now. The three around me are all hiding, covering up, trying not to imagine what they would’ve done in the same scenario. Denial is a prerequisite for the types I used to run with, the ones I’m running with now. Deny it could ever happen to you. Deny that you’re in danger, deny that you can be killed or captured because you’re just so good. Deny the enemy could ever break you, no matter what, no matter how long.

            “I broke. Gave up his name.” I can feel the judgment, watch countenances falling around me.

            Coughing to stifle his disappointment, my old handler puts his hairy arms up in a manner that commands me to explain.

            So I do. I tell them about the things that were done to me, the constant barrage of physical and psychological torture, the broken English spat my way, the screaming tirades in Arabic flying back and forth across whatever room I was in. As I give an accounting of my time in captivity, more and more comes back. Baseball day. Five hours straight of being nailed in the good part of my thighs with a wooden bat. The psychos loved it, using American things to torture Americans. That day sucked, but it wasn’t atypical or anything. Hands hung from a hook, one turban counting down the seconds, then another delivering the blow. That was the program; a swing every minute for five hours. The torture was in the monotony of it, knowing it was coming every sixty seconds, not knowing it would be five hours. Every now and then they’d lower the apparatus holding me up so that my feet could touch the ground. It wasn’t for relief. The addition of weight to all those frayed nerves and capillaries caused them to singe with a whole new type of pain. Gotta give it to the turbans; they were pretty colorful with their sadism. Some like to label it religious extremism, but I think it all comes down to enjoying your work. Worst part was listening them try to say Louisville Slugger with their rapid-fire Bronze Age accents. Yeah I know. Racist. Torture can make an ass out of you.

            The waterboarding. Days or weeks with no sleep. The box. The flaying. Usual stuff. It wasn’t a special case. Maybe I held out longer than most, maybe not. Are there statistics for that kinda thing? Actually, forget I said that. There is a department that comes up with statistics for that kinda thing. A department comprised entirely of people that have never had so much as a fingernail yanked out.

            When the extraction team came, there wasn’t much left of my body. It had taken Floyd and every resource at his disposal to locate me. As I tell them the rest of the story I remember him looking, seeing what they’d done. It was more disheartening than the torture. Pity in his eyes. I’m pitiful all over again.

            “Afterward, you said you hadn’t given them anything,” he says.

            “I know. I didn’t remember it. Swear to God I didn’t remember.”

            “And now?”

            “Being down there, watching those two kids about to get the same business…”

            “It came back,” Marie says. Her expression is complicated, contorted by a mix of understanding and disgust. She’s seeing me as a talker. Nobody’s proud of a talker.

            “You told them, then? Where they could find Marks?” Billy asks.  

            “Must’ve.”

            “Meaning?”

            “They’d been asking, weeks and weeks, the same damn questions. Who’s running the operation, who’s in charge?”

            “So you told them?”

            I want things to be simple, to shut Billy up, but it’s not simple. “Must’ve,” I repeat. “Don’t remember talking, but I must’ve. They came in, threw a picture of Marks and his and family at my feet and pissed all over it. Thanked me. Fed me for the first time in days. That, I do remember.”

            “How the hell you forget all that?” Billy asks.

            There’s a million rejoinders to Billy’s question, but none are complete, none are whole. It’s an inscrutable situation; all of it. “Don’t know how I forgot. Only that I did. And now I remember.”

            “But you don’t recall talking?” Marie asks. She doesn’t want to admit to my defeat. Marie’s not a complex animal. She needs things simple so she can know what to do next. This simply ain’t.

            “No—it’s just a fog of beatings and smells, hell without end, amen.”