"YOU NEED SOMETHING?"

The guard who looks like a Shiite Cronkite asks so gently, it's almost possible to imagine that today he means it. You can't catch his eye. But perhaps a blindfolded head-swing in his direction will still haunt him with its husk of a human glance.

"Walter," you say. Slower now, with all the gravity of a dying animal: "Walter. What's your real name?"

You hear him shrug. The currents of compressed air coming off his undulating shoulders form in your ears, as clear as words. You put your hands out in front of you, on your wasting thighs, palms up.

"Tell me," you beg. "I know Ali's. Walter. Listen. I can't hurt you."

You hear him, this peasant driven off the desiccated land, here at the front only for that expedited ticket to heaven given to anyone who dies for the cause. You hear him put his head down. Astonishing. Impossible. Yet still, your attenuated ears hear it.

Softly, he confesses. Somewhere in your childhood's forgotten Koran, in the watered-down hadith that you ingested with your mother's milk, you recall a massive prohibition against lying. "Sayid," he says. Soft as his shoulders' shrug. Ashamed.

You hug him across the infinite gap between you. "Sayid what? What is your family name?"

"No, no," he says, on the edge of anger. Too much to ask. "Thank you. Do not worry."

"Sayid. Sayid. I need you to help me. I need some books."

The air around you brightens. He breathes out a wave of relief. Books: That's all. "Sure. I tell Chief. Tomorrow."

"Sayid. Listen to me. If I don't get books, I'll die. Do you understand?"

"Sure. I understand. You will die."

"Sayid. This is real. If I don't get books, I will go crazy."

"Sure. I know. No problem."

If you've learned nothing else in this nine-month gestation, you've learned that No problem, in Sayidian Arabic, means Big problem.

No books appear the next day. Or the day after that. But this game is long; each day longer than you've dared to imagine.

You ride him. "Sayid. Yesterday is gone. Today is gone. Tomorrow is history. Still no books."

He snickers at your idiocy. "I understand. Chief say books coming."

"Tell Chief, Madness coming. I will die, Sayid. I will die, and your men will have nothing to gain from me. All of this will be a total waste. Worse than a waste. America will be very angry."

"Good." He snarls deep in his throat, the first step of spitting. The size of your error becomes clear. "Good. We like America angry. America make us angry."

America, of course, won't be even vaguely put out. America won't even notice. America has done nothing for you for three quarters of a year: nine months that you've ticked off in seven-minute intervals. Your death would be one less distraction nagging at America's busy conscience. It has taken a solitary locked room--without resources, stripped of any touchstone but yourself--to commence your political education.

In the absence of books, you make your own. You resurrect your all-time favorites. The details come in gross, gray, grainy chunks. The drill perfects itself. You lie back against the wall, as far from the radiator as the links of chain allow. Bone-cold all winter, the machinery has come alive, now eager to add its joules to a summer inferno.

You close your eyes and will yourself into another climate. The volume materializes in your hands--the weight, the heft, the binding's resistance. You turn the treasure over and over, resolving the details down to the publisher's insignia on the spine. You inspect the cover illustration, without opening your eyes. You read the blurbs on the back, the synopsis, the ISBN number, all the precious trail marks you once wasted so profligately when they were yours to waste.

The pages of front matter pass one at a time under your sentry fingers. Hours may dissolve, just playing with the stiffness of the paper, before you get to the actual first sentence. Lord Jim, the forty-four-point Garamond Bold announces to the hushed house of one. And again, in thirty-six point, on the next wondrously wasted page. Or Great Expectations. Every menu name becomes a whole banquet where you might dine out eternally for free.

Then the opening sentences, the fresh start of all things possible. Modestly boundless, it enters bowing, halfway down that first right-hand page. You lie back against your paradise wall, your pillow. You make yourself a passive instrument, a séance medium for these voices from beyond the grave. Politics have taught you how to read, how to wait motionless, without hope. To wait for some spirit that is not yours to come fill you.

My name being Philip. No: My father's name being Pirrip. I called myself Pip. Something about a graveyard, five little stones as visible as the door of your cell, the markers of brothers who gave up on making a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle. Every turn, every further constriction in the plot--yours or the author's--makes it easier to keep to the general contour. Where you cannot recall a scene, you invent one.

You know that underclass orphan, making his way in an indifferent world. He was the first present you ever gave her. A fake heritage hardback edition that actually sold for $12.95 in the cutout-classics bin at both of the mall bookstore chains. Gave it to her for her birthday, half a year after you started going out. Back in that year when you were still trying to feed her all your favorites, to hand over all your secret treasures to her, one by one. Love me, love my childhood. Love my books. Maybe you meant an element of remedy in the gift. It shocked you when she told you she'd never read it.

She tore at the wrapping, excited. But she cried when she saw the contents. The price, you thought at first. Gwen knew prices, even of things she never bought. You must have come in a level or two below where she'd expected. Hurt, you bit back. Said that you'd make sure to get something more expensive next time.

But no. That wasn't it, she sobbed. A book was not a personal gift. People gave books to colleagues, to acquaintances, not to their intimate partners. You might have given this to anyone. It didn't say you and me. It didn't say, You are the only person in the world I could have given this to.

You tried to explain. It did say you. It did say me. This was a story that you'd read four times over the course of your life, one that had meant something different each time you'd read it. It did say you and me. It said you wanted her to know the things that you knew. You couldn't have given it to anyone else, you lied. She didn't need to know who else you once tried to give that story to.

Appeased a little, she flipped through, smiling bravely at the opening pages for your benefit. She patted the book. Said, Thank you so much. I'll let you know what I think. Slid it carefully into the appropriate place on her shelves, then came and dragged you off to her bed, where she ravished you, abdomen slapping against abdomen in such fury that you lost yourself in her punishing metronome, feeling in that impact the force of the correction that she needed from you.

Later, you discovered in her refrigerator a fresh pot pipe carved out of a Golden Delicious apple, lined with a little tinfoil. A little private birthday celebration, prior to your arrival, that she'd felt no need to tell you of. Her tears, forgiveness, ecstasy, and fury all artificially enhanced, with you, as usual, the last person to dope things out.

The book stayed on her shelf for the next six years. To all evidence, she never touched it again except when she dusted. Never tried to read another word, straight, high, or otherwise.

The fruit bongs appeared and rotted without fixed season. Front-runner in a suite of little secrets, the extent of which you could only guess. She never much tried to hide them, but neither did she ever bother to announce their appearances. You offered to smoke with her some weekend evening, when the two of you weren't doing anything the next day. Tai-Jan! Gwen said, in her favorite imitation of your mother, who exercised some fascination on her you never wholly understood. My little pragmatic moralist wants to get stoned with me?

It seemed worth not letting her get to you. Worth waiting her out. Worth trying to be the safety net, the model, the pillar of trust that she'd never before received. But there was something forbidden, too, more than a little prurient, in the notion of getting lit with this woman, of tumbling into a web of shared sensation, all gatekeepers down. Getting inside that cloud of private lust you sometimes glimpsed through the frosted-glass window of her skin.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE BOOK?you ask her, your brain pinging down a chain of associations the night you do at last light up together. The melding that you'd hoped for comes off, at best, as a self-conscious swap of concessions.

She stares at you too long for it to mean confusion. It takes you about three lifetimes to realize she's mocking you. Her barricades and burning-oil look: What planet did you say you're from? Favorite trick to knock you back on your heels. Jockeying, even now, while the two of you share this brief vacation from yourselves.

Why do you always have to rank everything? Biggest? Best? Most? Boys: You'll really have to explain the concept to me one of these days.

You feel the flash of anger, the so-familiar one, the anger that you can't voice without confirming her. Don't need you to rank them. Just want to know the name of one that moved you. One that you loved.

You asked me to tell you my favorite. My absolute fave rave. The one that vanquishes all the other comers. No secrets, now. Come on, name names.

Forget it. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Oh. My little Tai-Jan's feelings are hurt. Bad girlfriend. Her right hand administers a slap to her left. Nasty, aggressive girlfriend. Does not work and play well with others.

Yes, it so often crossed your mind to say. Yes. What you just said.

You don't say that. You say something different. This time, as always. Look. It seemed legitimate to try to share in something that delighted you.

Why can't you just let delight come up in its own good time? Why do you have to engineer everything all the time? Control the whole exchange?

And in the next breath, in her hemp-induced fog, she suggests that she straddle you while you sit on the reclining chair in the front window, lights out, her favorite position, a secret vantage from which she can look out on all the cars and pedestrians, none of whom imagine what takes place inside the darkened warren that they pass by.

How desired and desolate she always made you feel--ever, ever--each of those gifts wrapped in the other's inimical predicate. She stands, in your mind, like some Hindu statuette, one set of hands crooked and beckoning, the other set palms out in front of her, in the international body language for stop.

The posture threw you off from the day you met her, in that florist on Highland, August of '78. You, ordering a dozen prosaic roses to throw into a stillborn cause, already lost, even as you tried to fix it with blooms. She, assembling a wild assortment of spring exotics to send to someone she forever afterward refused to identify. The moment she looks up and sees you enter the shop, she smiles such a grin of vast recognition that you have to smile back, bluffing, wondering how you could possibly have forgotten so friendly, so welcoming a face.

You fall to talking almost without thought, hoping her name will come to you after a couple of clues. But the clues all prove that you don't know this woman from Eve. Four traded sentences and you want to. She makes you want to. Open, uncomplicated invitation--like a neighborhood buddy knocking on the door of a Saturday morning with a baseball and two mitts.

How do you like my creation? she coaxes, displaying for you. It wants to be a bouquet when it grows up.

You make the sound of appreciation, out of the depths of your throat's greater helplessness. What about my needs? Should I go with the red, the yellow, or the white?

Depends. Is it a kiss-off or a suck-up?

Good question. You do a fair imitation of total paralysis. I haven't figured that out yet.

Definitely the ivory, then. Ivory is totally ambiguous. You can always claim misunderstanding later.

You can, and do. There follows the obligatory couple of dead heats of answering-machine tag. Would you? Love to. Say when. You, then.

The two of you cook a meal together at her place. Vegetable lasagna, whose 3.5 grams of fat per serving would strike your mother as a disgrace to human dignity. You wash and slice and pulverize, feeling, despite yourself, as if you're preparing the buffet from which you'll sup the rest of your life. She looks on, smiling at your handiwork. The last time she ever lets you near the food prep.

Her running gag: Who said you could go near sharp implements? Does your mother know you're trying to drive a standard transmission? Someone has cruelly and senselessly led you to believe that joke is funny? Uh, friend: about this so-called wardrobe of yours? The feel of something invisible being forever contested in the flow of wit.

You share five or six more outings, for form's sake, moseying up to the inevitable test of desire. Bird-watching, stargazing: each an adventure, but never the same adventure twice. Pleasure in the agonizing postponement, but she more patient than you. Always she meets you under the gun, the taxi meter running, half a dozen plates up in the air, Post-it notes stuck all over her jumpsuit, appointments with strangers written in Bic on her palms that she has to consult before she can tell you when she'll be available next.

But always her eyes say soon. And when you part, with your ubiquitous and meaningless see ya, always she reins you in with a smiled I believe you will.

Her random reinforcement schedule keeps you massively addicted. Her trick is to pick the moment, that precise evening when the concession seems real and all the wait leading up to it no more than a fluke she is keen to repudiate. She chooses the time and place, a sweet surrender of sovereignty for which she is careful to palm the claim stub.

There comes a moment in the night's right ascension when the lead-up tease, the slow, hinted rope tug, disappears into the bin of all childish things. Then she spreads; then she solidifies. And all that night, your bodies exchange sightings, come within touching distance of a place that you will spend the next eight years trying to recover.

At the moment that she fixes her limbs to you, her commitment is unthinking: as utter as that between any two speechless animals. But absent as well, somewhere far away, deep in a formulating image. Who knows whose? Off in a place that is anything but yours.

Your two souths merge. You move your face to hers, sealing the ring. You will tell her that you love her, prematurely, helplessly, something she already knows, something she will snort dismissal at, glandular, clichéd, but the only thing that might help a little against all that life still has in store for the two of you. You lower your length fulcrumed along hers, a shadow curling toward the foot of its wall as the sun wanders over day, your mouth seeking out her ear. But she speaks first.

You can do anything you want to me.

This is what you hear. Or, at the most generous, the most rehabilitated, factoring in all faults of sound and audition, the tricks of the brain when showered in chemical joy for the land it has succeeded in reaching: You can do anything you want with me.

For years, she will not remember. She will deny having said anything of the kind.

She rises from intimacy to wash off the drops of your body. Clean again, she wraps herself in flannel pajamas--yes, even in this heat--before she comes back to bed. She accepts you against the ladle of her back. She permits you to commit, smiles at the stories you spin out into her ear, but does not return or extend them.

She's up before you, doing her sit-ups to progressive-radio rock, when you finally drag your lame ass out of her long-suffering bed. Breakfast? you ask over the throb of the synth bass.

Not for me.

You commandeer a banana and wait for the routine to abate. It doesn't. Finally, you must get on with your life. The crucial skill here seems to be to ask for nothing, to wait with no expectations, to see what might settle on your sill of its own free accord. See you soon? you say, hoping that the hope in your voice feels in no way coercive.

Yes, she says, pausing in mid--step aerobics long enough to kiss you goodbye. I believe you probably will.

NOW YOU HAVE ONLY your own workout, your own daily routine, to blunt the brutal memory working your gut. Your thirty minutes off the chain to tranquilize, to bring your eager grief low. Back on the leash, you match her sit-up for sit-up, exercise serving some awful, unshakable end, the stupid insistence on surviving. You fight against the steady atrophy of your muscles, work to crush the furtive hope that, should you by some accident ever be freed and in the uproar of freedom come by chance across her, you will not look repulsive. You wonder how she likes beards, this wiry pelt that cups, petlike, into your hands. Groundless desire: the last thing we outlive, outlove.

You flip between following out this tale and fleeing from it. Ali's small sadisms--saying you will be released tomorrow; charging into the room at random intervals to catch you without your blindfold; tossing a gorgeous orange just out of your reach--are nothing compared with recollection. You can deal with Ali, ignore his feeble invitations to believe. But against the torture of expectation, you have no defense.

Events seem blessedly bent on distracting you. This season produces some subtle shift in the front. One of the host of autonomous nations--the Druze, the Maronites, the Falangists; the nomadic dreamers, daily harder to keep straight--some law unto itself is making a play to extend its jurisdiction. The tactics play out behind the blank gray screen of corrugated metal stapled across your window's gouged-out eye.

But you don't need to see the hidden developments to map their tactics. For days, rifled artillery pieces lob their lazy cargoes in. You hear the distant puff of firing, count the intervening quarter seconds, and feel the annihilating crush when it slams back to earth. Your brain does the ungodly calculus, the complex trig that locates in space the arc of each explosion. You mark the ebb and flow, the advance and retreat in your shaking abdomen, telling from the sound of impact the difference between a souk taken out, a playground, a parking lot, and the sheared face of an apartment high-rise.

Sayid spells out just who is on the move. Afwaj al Muqawamah al Lubnaniyah. The Lebanese Resistance Battalions, whose name forms the acronym Amal, the Arabic word for hope.

Hope is not the innocent you once mistook it for. It does not circulate. Yours cannot mean what another takes it to be. Even between you and the woman you loved, you failed to hold the thing in common. You went into the relationship generous and likable and easygoing and came out shaken, the person she most feared, a pathological controller and manipulator. You could not speak to her without spinning out whole chapters of dialogue in your head--countering, wheedling, needing to destroy her belief that you were desperately needy.

In another life, on another infinite afternoon, when the shells abate enough to let you disappear again down the immaculate rabbit hole, she tells you. To your standing question, she answers simply, The French Lieutenant's Woman.

She looks up, vulnerable, appraising your reaction, a little frightened, a little shining. Relieved that you know it, glad for the pleasure she has afforded you, she asks back, How about yours? The easy reciprocity that you once thought could underscore all exchanges between people who cared for each other.

And you tell her all about Great Expectations. A simple, trusting swap of hostages. Surrender everything. We cannot hurt each other as much as life will. You tell her the whole sustaining story, from graveyard to cradle. What larks! you tell her. What larks.

Time in its endlessness brings you to a complete recitation. It takes two full afternoons with your eyes pinched closed to come up with the name "Miss Skiffins." But you have all the afternoons in the world. World, time, and focus, and you start to perform super-human feats of synthetic memory. Desperate feats, deranged, like the reflex acts of mothers lifting two-ton beams off their pinned infants.

You've forgotten nothing. Whole scenes surface out of nothing. They pageant before you, responding to memory's every blush. And when they don't, you make them up again. From scratch, as you think the idiom goes. Week after week, and the complete architecture condenses under your aerial view. Why, here's a church. Why, here's Miss Skiffins. Let's have a wedding.

You take it then, this month's contraband reading, the blessed banality of your old existence, all the engaging, pointless complications that she smuggles in to you under the nose of your captors, your lost Miss Skiffins, so unlike her real-life model, the one who lived in terror of being held accountable for ever having given anyone anything. How ludicrous the potboiler seems, how absurd and anemic, against the daylong barrages that make up your day's only dispatches now.

But how banal the bigger text, the pointless serial novel of power, how static and tedious the scenes, how shopworn real life's theme, how lacking in invention and delivery and interest and basic narrative device compared with the smallest mundanity of love, the chance at private denouement. You devise this simple test of lasting literary merit: Which tale promises the best net present pleasure? Which will see you through the end of this hour?

All the Dickens that will ever return returns. Pip and his Estella go hand and hand out of their ruined place, and you are still here. Still here, after the story recedes, in the bombed-out rubble of your thoughts, a pile that you recognize only because it occupies the lot your house once did. Not even a blank, your mind. A nervous jitter. Twitching like some fourteen-year-old's deskbound leg. You go for hours in the dark not even knowing that you are shaking.

Someone brings you food, rubbish so disgusting that not even necessity can drive you past the stench. You bang your chain against the radiator, no longer caring about the consequences. Someone rushes in to silence you. The Angry Parent. He cracks you in the chest, knocking you back on the mattress.

It stuns you. He's always gotten one of the others to dole out the physical abuse. You sit back up, stalling to catch your breath, until your pulse lowers enough for you to speak. "Listen." You wait, curious, to see what you mean to say. "Listen. Tell me your name."

You hear him breathing through his mouth. You've frightened him. But he says nothing.

"Come on. We've known each other for a long time. Coming up on a year, before you know it. You've had me over. I've returned the invitation. We should know each other's names, don't you think?"

Without seeing his face, you could easily take the sound he makes as a titter. Or he could be tensing to release another blow.

"What difference does it make? 'Ali.' 'Sayid.' Who on earth would believe me? You're going to kill me anyway. Who are you afraid I'm going to tell? God?"

You're ready. Ready for the one quick, merciful bullet through the temple. So of course, he denies you. You hear him shuffle a little in embarrassment.

"Muhammed. Call me Muhammed."

"Muhammed," you repeat. "You are a Shiite?"

He coughs up a little fart of contempt in his throat. Not even contempt. Not even worth asking why you bother to ask.

"Muhammed. I once read somewhere that Shiites believe food to be the holy gift of Allah. A mirror of the divine sustenance. Look at this." You grope about for the cold stench, put your hand in it as you hold it up toward him. "This is not sacred. This is not food."

He takes the platter from you. Leaves without a word. Some time later, another meal appears. More than sacred. Edible. You'd say delicious but for fear of gilding the lily. The dish steams, a Lebanese knockoff of something your mother's exercise in capitalism once specialized in. A bademjan, the heart of the almond, the life of the heart.

Ahalim bademjan, with some angelic substance floating around in the stew, electrifying, a taste once deeply familiar to you that you now strain to recognize. But the harder you chase after the ingredient, the more it recedes. You take a bite; the word beats there, on the tip of your tongue. The memory struggles to the surface and dissipates.

You put down your spoon and wait. You try another mouthful. The familiarity fades with exposure. Every repetition reduces the miracle. You must name it in the last morsel or lose it forever. Then, before you get it to your mouth, restored by the bits you have already devoured, it comes to you. Meat. Chunks of sacrificial lamb.

You walk a tightrope between sassing your guards and falling at their feet. When Muhammed next visits, you thread your way dead down the middle.

"Are you the Chief? Are you the one that Ali and Sayid call the Chief?"

His silence settles out, indulgent. He sighs. It can only be a sigh. "Above every Chief, there is always one higher."

"But you can do things. You have some power. You got me that meat."

"Allah is the doer. Allah alone is the getter of things. All power comes from Him and returns to Him."

"Fair enough. Where did you learn to speak such good English?"

"That's not important." Although, his tone admits, it would probably be of some interest to the U. S. State Department.

"Muhammed. You must listen to me. I am afraid I am cracking up. Not just boredom. Boredom is what I feel on the good days. My brain. It's coming apart. I can feel it. Like a damn zoo animal about to go off its nut. I'm this far away from the abyss. I'm going to start screaming soon, and then you're going to have to kill me, and then you'll have nothing. Nothing. You'll be out a year of room and board and the cost of cremation, and nobody's going to trade you anything for me."

He makes some calculation, probably not mathematical. "What is it that you want?"

With your last ounce of strength, you force down the fury exploding in you.

"I need books. I don't care what. Books in English. I'll take anything. I'll take the damn Lubbock, Texas, phone directory. I just. Need. Something to read."

"We will see," he says, after troubled consideration. "We will do a fatwa to see if you can have a book."

This sounds less than good.

Lessons follow in performing a fatwa. It's the old Iowa Fighting Fundy from Spiritus Mundi trick of throwing open the Holy Scripture to a passage, then interpreting the words as if they were a scrap of cosmic fortune cookie. Judgment by roll of the evangelical die.

You listen to them execute their oracular Three Stooges routine. You tilt your head back, stealthily, to catch the contour of your fate from under the lip of your blindfold. Ali flips the Koran open at random. Sayid flops his finger down. Muhammed, the intellectual, reads the selected Ouija utterance and interprets the augury. Decides what the chance passage means.

"I am sorry," he tells you, sounding genuinely chagrined. "We have consulted the book, and it says no."

You move toward them, trembling, to the full length of your chain. Your body starts to spasm with such violence it scares even you.

"Then bloody Christ. Consult it again. I'm not fucking kidding you, man. We need a yes, here. A yes, or there's going to be an incident."

In the chaotic scuffle, someone knocks you down. You slam the back of your head against the radiator in your fall. The Three Fates evacuate. You float facedown in the pool of your concussion.You haven't even the will to remove your blindfold. You lie fetal, curled up in your own placenta.

Survival is no long-er a virtue, given where survival leaves you. On the far side of this nothingness lies more nothing, extending to the ends of space, one continuous void all the way to the vanishing point, where all lines fall into themselves.

But life has still worse whiplash in store. Years later, maybe even the next day, human noise penetrates your dissolution. Sayid, across an unfathomable gulf, tosses something on the floor near you. "We do another fatwa. We ask again. Everything okay. No problem." Getting nothing, he withdraws.

Another presence settles into your cell. The quaking in you starts up again in earnest. It takes you by your shoulders, determined to shake you back into sawdust. You cannot look, for fear of reprisal. You saddle up near the new thing, crane back your neck, inspect it from under the safety of the blindfold. It's everything you fear it to be. Lying on the filthy planks, unswept since you came here, is that inconceivable device: a cunning, made world.

You kneel and pick it up. You freeze down there on the floor, crying. Frightened to so much as touch it, your fingers clap spastically against the covers. You bounce the book in your hands, testing its weight for any sign of counterfeit. The mass of it swells up close to your eyes, into your slit of vision. You hold it up close, trading off depth of field for detail and resolution. The weave of fibers in the paperback binding grows into the densest forest.

Slowly, your sight scans up the book's length, seeking out the title that will sentence or deliver you. Terror is no less than desire with the chrome stripped away. In your atrophied eyes, the letters read like a line of alien hieroglyphs. Bizarre analphabetic randomness. English has no such series.

Then your pulse shoots into your ears. Great. Your word. Your title. You've done it, summoned up this book by the sheer force of weeks-long concentration. By some intricate and unsolvable plan, through the interplay of forces devised by that engineer whose creation can but grossly caricature, you have been looked after. The words you love have made their way back to you for awful safekeeping. Imagination survives its own cruelty. You've been set down in this hell for something more than merely mapping your abandonment.

For a long time, your eyes refuse the title's second word. Instead, you insist on the word that the word should be. But the surety of print survives your stare. You look again, and the title skids off into senselessness. You remove your blindfold and look dead on. Expectations somehow mutates into Escapes.

You drop the book, electrocuted. If no one saw you pick it up, they can't punish you for touching it. It lies there, upside down, innocent. Impossible to take in. As the immediate madness subsides, you tick off the possible explanations. A trap. A mistake. A senseless accident. A joke whose cruelty makes mainstream sadism seem like the Marquis of Queensberry.

It strikes you: Maybe even Muhammed, with his clean syntax and accent, can't read. Maybe your guards' English extends no further than film and TV. They've bought this secondhand ream of scrap paper for nothing down in the stalls of some bombed-out bazaar, left there by the last American with the good sense to get out of this suiciding country while the getting was good. Not one of these men knows what he put into your hands.

At this thought, something breaks in your throat. You can't place it at first, a shape so strange you can only wait in wonder for it to take shape. When at last you recognize the quick, dry convulsions, you can't stop them. Impossible to say how long you laugh, forcing the sniggers down, silent, secret from anyone beyond your walls.

The book they give you has been read many times. And recently, by all indications. You're not the first prisoner to have begged a fatwa, to have forced scripture to deliver. Of course, there are others, other Western bargaining chips, maybe even housed with you in this very building. They are the muffled noises you hear at all hours down this hall, half a dozen feet away, just on the other side of your own plaster. The movements to and from the latrine. The covered altercations. Others that you've read about, taken before your cap-ture, or poor souls even stupider than you, snatched up since your own destruction.

You touch the cover that other escapees must have touched. Your hands turn the trembling pages so recently turned by others. Title page. Other books by the author. Library of Congress information. Acknowledgments. Dedication. After each new leaf, you set the book down and look away. You wait for as many minutes as discipline permits. You try to pace yourself, to hang on, to savor this pained heightening, the point of long deprivation.

You open to the first true page, the holder of possibility, the keeper of all things. It slinks halfway down the right-hand side. Gorgeous human thoughts detonate in space all around you, extending their subordinate clauses, fling-ing their nouns around like burgeoning tracts of starter homes airlifted into arid wastes.

Grant all permits. Fill the available world with frantic marks. Cram the answers to the living exam into every legible cranny. Have each new version tear down the last, each manic utterance give way to further revision. Let people chatter forever. It doesn't even matter what we think we're really after. For there is no solace here, no win, no other end than this stream of urgent invention.

In real life, this book wouldn't hold your attention for five minutes. Now it bears the key to continued existence. You cannot even say what Great Escapes is about. It may not be about anything. Every verb phrase puts on the full freedom of human movement. The slightest clichés, the worst throwaway inanities pitch you into whole preserves of wilderness, whose existence you've forgotten. Even here: Even into the dulled depths of your confinement, the hive extends its growing hum.

You vow to ration this opening chapter, to make it last at least through the end of summer. Great Escapes must be your daily introit and gradual. A single paragraph to serve as a matins service, another two sentences every other hour. The need to make astonishment last far exceeds your immediate urge to swallow it whole. The point is not to finish but to find yourself somewhere, forever starting.

You panic at the rapid slip of pages across the binding from the right width to the left. You scramble for a way to read without making reading's hated forward progress. But the whole book evaporates into fact before you know how you got to the end.

You close the back cover, sickened by what you've done. You seize up, you stand, you pace around on your chain. You close your eyes, guiltily savoring the cheap stories that you've just slammed down. You pick up the book and start again. It still holds some residual pleasure, but never again the launch into pure potential. Ten days from now, this dazed freedom reverberating in you will have extinguished itself, starved out by repetition. Great Escapes is over. You will need another.

But for a moment, for a thin, narrow, clouded, already closing moment: this. When you come to bed that evening, you turn to tell her, You'll never believe what I read today.

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