Nothing Sacred Part 3

Marsh volunteered, "I guess you would say my position was nondenominational, politically, since my organization's mission was just to keep the peace. But I was on a fact-finding operation in Bangladesh with Thibideaux as my military liaison when we were captured."

"With all due respect for your civilian status, Marsh, I think you should let Thibideaux volunteer his own information."

"That's okay, Colonel," Thibideaux said. "Whatever will help this sweet young thing relax. It's like Marsh said. I was field medic with the 616th Infantry Division and was detached to a special forces outfit a.s.signed to help out with the flood situation in Bangladesh just before the Chinese moved in and all h.e.l.lbroke loose. At that time, the Chinese were supposed to be our allies but it didn't slow 'em down much when it came to openin' fire on our unit or beatin' the c.r.a.p out of Marsh and me. "As an afterthought he added, "Henri Thibideaux, Medical Specialist eighth cla.s.s, U.S. Army, but like I said, you can call me Doc."

The last man simply said, "Sergeant Major Du P. Danielson, U.S. Army Special Forces. Your turn, lady."

Well, at least I wouldn't be giving anything away blindly, and this was about as sure as I could be in the dark without being able to inspect patches. From what these men were telling me, most of them were captured before patches were important anyway. "I'm Viveka J. Vanachek from Bellingham, Washington. I've only been in the military six months. I'm a warrant officer. I was just captured a few days ago and was routed here from what appeared to be a base camp for irregular PRC forces by a weird old woman who claimed to be a colonel in the PRC."

Can a person cower defiantly? If so, that's what I was doing while I waited for someone to demand more particulars. But after a long silence, Thibideaux asked, "Only in the service six months, huh? Then you were home six months ago?"

"That's right, "I admitted cautiously.

"Then, can you tell me, do you know, I mean, I know some women still don't keep track of those things but, who won the last World Series?"

For a moment I thought it was a trap, like the codes used in the so-called world wars of the early twentieth century in which the names of ball players and actresses were used as pa.s.swords and military information was transmitted by Navajo Indians whose native language was employed as a cipher.

But then Danielson asked if I knew about the World Basketball Playoffs too and I realized that they very simply missed sports. They waited for the answers with a certain boyish breathlessness that rea.s.sured me more than the information they'd given me. They really had been here-or at least somewhere out of touch-a long long time. I hated to tell them the truth. Neither sport had been played on a professional level since-G.o.d, since the late forties, early fifties-because the players and owners had tied each other up in litigation for so many years that when sports fans spoke of who won in connection with a particular team they meant who had won the latest appeal on the latest lawsuit, or whose lawyer had won the latest settlement. The sports/entertainment field was in such turmoil that by the time I left the university, basketball was played only in school gymnasiums and on playgrounds and what was left of the sport of baseball was about to be exported to Korea where an arms manufacturing firm was offering to buy up all teams concerned, b.a.l.l.s, bats and diamonds. I hated to tell these men that, but I was afraid if I didn't, they'd know I was lying and decide I was a spy after all.

As it was, they didn't believe me when I tried to tell them the truth. Danielson said, "Oh, that kind of rumors were always flying around. Who won the last game?" I took a plunge and named a couple of teams whose trials I'd seen on the holovid at Sammy's. My fellow prisoners didn't seem to know the difference. Maybe they would have if I'd been able to relate details of the fict.i.tious game, but as it was, they used my information to regale each other for a time about games they had once seen played.

As soon as I realized my information was not going to be challenged, I stopped paying attention. I had more serious things to think about. Like, the reason my information wasn't being challenged was because the memories these men had of our continent were from at least a couple of decades ago.As they babbled maniacally on about strikes and baskets they had known and loved, I sank deeper into despair, realizing that these men had been prisoners for almost half my life and that I was likely to be prisoner with them for the rest of it.

INTERROGATION.

The cell was checked with shadows from an overhead grille emitting frosty morning light along with the chill that wakened the cramps in my body to phantoms of what they had been the previous night. I'd dreamed of lions attacking me and woke feeling the wounds and listening to the roars. For two long heartbeats I lay still, not daring to stand and relieve the cramps-or my bladder. The cramps themselves reminded me. A man with blond curls as sweet as any baby's lay flat on his back on the next bunk, snoring, his long square jaw sagging open. On the other side of me, a black man lay on his back, also snoring, though somewhat more mellifluously. The other two were on each side of them, dark forms huddled in the shadows. I carefully rose and filled the last inch of the pot on the all-too-near far side of the cell.

The guards rattled the cell door and my cellmates struggled up from sleep and straggled out. The steps were very difficult for me, and I moved as if I had aged three hundred years. A woman guard grabbed my arm at the head of the steps and hustled me in the opposite direction from that in which the men were being herded.

"Aw, ah. Be careful there, dollin'." Thibideaux's voice belonged to a raw-boned, balding redhead whose breath, like mine, clouded from his mouth like a cartoon balloon.

"Looks like your turn with the Dragon Lady," Marsh grunted, as his guard hissed reproach and shoved his back so that he stumbled down the path behind the others. My guard dragged me a few steps before I caught up with her.

She led me around boulders and ruined walls ribbing the stony ground like mastodon bones. Dawn the color of carrot soup strained through the camouflage canopy.

We stopped in front of a wall of sandbags. There was no building, just the sandbags with a door in the middle, and it took me a moment to realize that earthworks supported the sandbags. By then a sentry had thrown open the door and I was being shoved down a short flight of steps. White light exploded in front of me and I tried to stop and let my eyes adjust. They'd gotten well cooked in the snow on my little mountaineering expedition and protested the violent changes in illumination. The guard nudged me again and I nearly stumbled over an orange extension cord. Following it upward, I saw that it led to a work lamp suspended from a nail. A series of these lamps were strung together with other orange extension cords, the length of the hall. An unseen generator muttered beneath a babble of bored voices and at times the lamps flickered like candles from the uneven flow of power.

Another extension cord grabbed my toe and I lurched sideways, into a shoulder-high pile of rubble, which slid toward me and tried to bury me. The noise from the generator and the absorbent properties of the dirt floor m.u.f.fled the racket.

The place stinks. They need a good ventilation system down here or at least a few of those little squirt bottles of air freshener. I'm a little more used to it now but it smells like very dirty people sweated themselves to death here and rotted until they disintegrated into air particles. It also smells nauseatingly like rancid fat and I kept swallowing hard to keep down the bile. Luckily, I had had no food recently.We wound through a maze of connecting corridors, avoiding several in which collapsed walls or mounds of rubble blocked the way. At two of the spots farther in, work parties composed of both guards and prisoners shoveled debris and sh.o.r.ed up walls. I tried to map the corridors in my mind but for a mapmaker I have a lamentable sense of direction.

But it seems to me we had made about three left turns and one hard right when we reached the main hallway, a broad spot with other corridors branching off from it and doors, many of them open, some boarded shut, on each side of the pa.s.sage. A sentry stood at attention beside the third door on the left and my guard marched me through into a barn of a room. Plain OD wool blankets hung on the walls. I think they covered windows, which would indicate that maybe the room hadn't always been underground. I also caught a glimpse of what looked like the ruined, fancy frames of a pair of French doors peeking out from behind another stack of sandbags. A bare electric bulb hung from another orange extension cord looped across the top of a large, tarp-covered table. At first I thought it was a little girl sitting there, tapping away at the computer on the desk.

Then she looked up and smiled a sort of inverted smile, with the corners of her mouth turned down, and I saw that she was no child after all but one of those deceptively doll-like Asian women whose delicately sweet faces and b.u.t.terfly-like fragility could conceal anything from an Olympic athlete to a chess champion to a despotic would-be witch-queen like Vietnam's historic villainess, Madame Nhu.

Nhu had also been called the Dragon Lady, after a comic strip about a pilot popular in the mid-twentieth century. The original Dragon Lady and Madame Nhu were both said to have had claws like a cat's but this woman's nails were short and serviceable, her hands even a trifle on the blunt and ugly side.

She smiled as if she were a receptionist in some business office and said to my guard, "Corporal Tsering, please bring tea."

The guard shouldered her rifle, did a smart about-face and marched out. The so-called Dragon Lady graciously gestured toward a beige metal folding chair. I slowly and stiffly arranged my collection of aches and pains into a folded position, realizing that this was the time when, had I been in any other condition, I should have tried to escape. The woman was so small I thought I could snap her neck with a well-placed blow but then what? If she was unarmed, which I doubted, I still had no place to go when and if I overcame her, which I didn't feel capable of doing right then anyway.

"A penny for your thoughts, as they say, Ms. Vanachek," the woman said cutely. Her voice lends itself to cute, among other things. It has a deceptively sweet quality, like the silver chime my grandparents used to ring before Sunday meditations.

"I am Commandant Wu." She consulted her screen, tapped another key or two and said, still in English, "Your name is Viveka Jeng Vanachek-Viveka, that's an Indian name, isn't it? I thought you were North American."

"It's a family name, sort of. My grandmother was a hippie-"

She arched an inquiring eyebrow.

"Hippies were like a mid-twentieth-century peace and free-love activist movement," I explained.

"They also sometimes adopted Eastern philosophies and religions. Grandma Viveka was into Zen for a while and she adopted a Sanskrit name. It means 'discrimination.' My mom liked it so she named me the same thing." She continued to look scornful and skeptical. "It's true. Look, my grandfather wasCzechoslovakian and Irish and I never knew him as anything but Ananda, okay?"

Maybe I should have stuck with the name, rank and serial number business but unless their communications here were awfully poor she already had that information from Buzz's report.

She continued to shake her head disbelievingly and ignored me while she stared into the screen.

"Why you were spared to come here is beyond me. You are very fortunate. The crimes of your people are so callous that we've only admitted a very few others for our program."

"What program?" I asked. I know. I know. I should have kept my mouth shut. But calling a prison camp a program seems to me to be the ultimate in euphemistic bulls.h.i.t of the type the NACAF establishment likes so much.

"Rehabilitation," she said. "But of course, as I keep trying to point out to certain people, not all war criminals are educable. Any people who could do what yours have done to this country-"

"I know. That Chinese doctor already chewed me out for that. But I'm not even a litterbug."

I didn't really mean to say that-it was a sort of a little inside joke for myself. It kind of slipped out.

It shouldn't have. The Dragon Lady pounded both of her little fists on the desk, one on either side of the imperiled computer, and screamed at me with a face like a monkey-demon. "There! You see. You're denying responsibility! I knew you weren't worthy of our time. Do you know that before your people started scattering their bombs about, that mountain over there"-she pointed emphatically to the sandbags behind her-"had stood tall and perfect for millions of years and this valley was filled with a beautiful, sacred lake that nourished all who lived here?"

I shook my head.

"Of course you didn't. Yet it was your government who carelessly sanctioned such behavior, who supplied the weapons. Your government of, by, and for the people. "She practically frothed at the mouth with fury, and just to make her point, spat at the floor, missed and hit the desk, which I guess is why the tarp is there. I tried to caution myself that this woman, like the doctor, had the power of life and death over me, and what kind of life and what kind of death at that. But it all seemed so d.a.m.ned melodramatic.

I settled for hanging my head and trying to look contrite.

Making unintentional bad jokes is the height of my bravado. I may not intend to spy on the other prisoners, as they fear, but neither will I give in to any hysterical heroics. This lady does not especially scare me now, but I don't doubt that she can make me afraid of her if she wishes. I don't want to goad her into demonstrating her power. Insecure people in positions of bureaucratic power can be extremely cruel, as I have good reason to know from various encounters with personnel managers and professors.

"Just as I thought," she said. "You have no answer. You are utterly worthless, a waste of food and s.p.a.ce. Nevertheless, you have questions to answer. You will be put in solitary confinement to mull over your crimes until the time, if ever, that I decide you are fit to return to society. In the meantime, I advise you to consider carefully your crimes, and the crimes of your accomplices, and also to try to think of any possible value your miserable life could be to this community."

At that point, the tea arrived but I was not offered any. Instead I was hauled away to my present cell, where I vegetated for an undetermined length of time until the guards brought me this paper with the instructions to write about my criminal career from age eight on.

PART TWO.

THE CELL, TWO SO-CALLED MEALS AND TWO CHAMBER POTS LATER.

I meant to keep a running record with this journal, writing every day, but I wanted to wait until I saw how the guards would react to my homework a.s.signment from the commandant. I finished it and handed it in, and didn't even offer to give back any of the leftover paper. The guards were inscrutable, by which I gathered they either didn't notice the discrepancy in my supplies or they didn't give a d.a.m.n. So far my a.s.signment has not received a grade. An A undoubtedly means Alive and an F is for-let's not think about F. I trust my expose of my criminal exploits will wow them.

So, although I continue to try to save paper, I also have to keep from going nuts. The physical environment is not worthy of attention except to say that it is a small stone room with a stone platform bench on which I recline if not actually sleep. I can stretch out full length on it and that's about all. I can almost reach from one wall to the other. They keep about a six-watt bulb burning in here all the time, strung on one of those d.a.m.ned orange extension cords. The generator mutters constantly.

The cruise director is definitely lying down on the job as the activity schedule is zilch. So far I have had my food-some kind of doughy rolls with stuff mixed in them-delivered to my door. These concoctions do not agree with me. I've thrown them up both times. The water, too, upsets my stomach.

Maybe it's just nerves but I can't keep anything down. My chamber pot runneth over. The guard exchanges a full pot for a meal, a predictably unappetizing preprandial activity. The roof leaks and has a rotten spot about big enough to admit rats. Not big enough to escape through.

The stones do, however, contain hiding places for this diary. When I first arrived I inspected the whole joint, looking for graffiti ("The Count of Monte Cristo Slept Here," perhaps), the sort of convenient ventilation system you always see in old spy movies, or the sewer drain you see in others.

Nothing. When the paper arrived I decided to try to make a cache for it by using a piece of the rock that fell from the ceiling to carve out the mortar from between a couple of stones. That's when I discovered the stones didn't have any mortar between them. They fit together so well that I broke all ten nails prying one from its slot, but finally made a nice little file cabinet out of the s.p.a.ce below a chipped stone that fits under my left shoulder.

So, to whom it may concern, I hope you have a sense of humor. That's the problem with people like the Dragon Lady. Takes herself too seriously. Reminds me of a lot of the grandfolks' old cronies, the ones who didn't join the NACAF senior corps or request overdoses in their extended care facilities.

Some of those other old ex-hippies, radicals, you know. Poor old dears, ranting on and on about the same kinds of things as our fearless leader here, not realizing it's just all too d.a.m.ned late. The oceans have been mostly dead for a long time. The rain forests are starting on third growth. We haven't used gas or oil on the continent in years. But to the end, the old fossils either didn't know or didn't care to admit that all of their best fights were over, either a total loss or solved by the reclamation industry during thefirst part of this century. But those codgers never had the ability to do anything more than b.i.t.c.h in their whole lives, and b.i.t.c.hing was what they continued to do, with bitter, fanatic intensity. I often wondered what one of them would have done if they could have had someone specific to blame in their clutches. All that moral zeal always scared me. I tried to tell one of them once that the environment was cleaned up, at least where the nice people could see it, and had gotten cleaned up as soon as it became extremely profitable to do so. The poor old thing nearly stroked out telling me how my kind of apathetic young whippersnapper was responsible. That's what I mean. No sense of humor.

LATER.

G.o.d, G.o.d, G.o.d, what an idiot I am. Just catching the line above makes me sick to my stomach.

What kind of suicidal fool would make fun of Wu? On paper. Where it could be found. Jesus, she could keep me in this little room forever.

I think she knows about the paper. I mean, I'm sure she knows, but I think she noticed. They didn't bring my meal. I can't be sure, of course, with no watch and no daylight to go by, but the chamber pot is overflowing and I'm so hungry, even though I don't think I could keep anything down. What if they just stop feeding me to punish me? Why did I start this diary business? Where the h.e.l.l do I think I am anyway?

Okay. All right. I know why I started it. I know. I'm in serious danger here of flipping out. It was just the dream, that's all. It scared me. Probably just the atmosphere of the place but maybe it was from some kind of mind control too.

Anyway, I had this dream. Nightmare. I was a Jewish girl (though we all looked Chinese, but that didn't seem strange in the dream) and my little sister and I, somehow, were the children of the commander of this n.a.z.i prison camp. Our father was letting us live very much against his better judgment. He fought with our mother about it all the time.

Sometimes he was right on the point of sending us into the ovens, and she'd hustle us off to a hiding place until he calmed down. I had these very clear memories of him killing my friends (or were they other brothers and sisters? other kids I loved, loved, that my mom loved too but couldn't save and all that were left, all that could be saved so far, were my sister and me). He murdered them in various ways, burning them in the ovens or locking them in the poison gas showers or using them for target practice for the firing squads; different methods. And I had no delusions. I knew it was real. I knew that if he flicked his finger a certain way, that was it. Final. So I had to stay out of his way and what was harder, keep my sister out of his way, because she kept feeling like he ought to love her and didn't understand that nothing she or I or Mom could do would make him any different. Once I remember the little sister saying, "Wouldn't it be great if we had come at the right time so Daddy would think we were his instead of just Mama's?" But that scared me too. Because somehow, with dream sense, our father didn't know that our mother was Jewish (like us), or he would have sent her to the ovens too, and that would have been the end of all of us. Even weirder, he didn't know that he was Jewish. Or if he had ever known he was so vicious that, like Hitler, he blocked out that part of him, but I couldn't think about his problems. I had to think about what I could do to stay out of his way, not attract his attention, or to please him when I did have to be around him. To do something he really wanted. Because if I didn't, and he noticed me in a negative way, there was nothing ahead but a void for both me and my sister.

Good. There, that's better. I guess that's why I risked keeping the paper. Writing helps-getting it on paper where I can look at it helps. So did throwing up again, except now I have to live with the smell.

Thank G.o.d for the hole in the ceiling. I'm breathing okay again now, too, and I can't hear my pulse soloud-for a while it drowned out the generator, sounded like a d.a.m.ned drum.

Dream a.n.a.lysis time. This dream seems to me to be nature's way of telling me to watch my a.s.s. My first reaction was right on. I am an idiot if I trivialize Wu. The men may talk lightly of being beaten into insensibility during those sessions but I'm not some hero. I'm not in good shape. I would die from it, or from the complications, even something simple like a broken arm if they made me keep working and wouldn't let anyone help me. n.o.body would have to torture me. I could die slowly, from complications, with Wu and the others cheering from the sidelines. s.h.i.t. Bad as the dream was, waking up is not a h.e.l.l of a lot better. Except that I'm not a child, but almost as helpless. Like the little girls in the dream, I have to try to please and stay out of their way, find some reason for them to keep me alive, as Wu said. I don't have a mother to protect me. The Colonel and the others talk big, but they seem to be in the same boat I am except that right now they're together and I'm alone. Nope. They don't represent Mama.

Maybe they're the little sister-or, funny thought, maybe I am. Despite all my intellectual understanding of why people might hate me. I find the actual animosity of the people around me almost as baffling as the little sister found her father's hatred.

And why n.a.z.is? There are more recent villains. But then, of course, I read all that n.a.z.i stuff when I was a kid and thought that if I had been alive then I'd have led a movement to whip their a.s.ses or some equally moronic grandiose kid delusion. The fact that all of us looked Chinese in the dream seems more significant. As if it's just the same old evil in new skin. And the fact that we were all Jewish, even the father, I think maybe meant that we are all victims, casualties who have been battered and abused by this whole big war network.

Was I a child in the dream because Wu seems like such a child? Scary thought, but not likely. She's more used to the business end of the whip. Maybe there are other prisoners here whose vibes I was picking up.

But mostly, oh yeah, I have to be very, very careful. I have to not give Wu any excuse to flick her finger, because if she does, I'm history, and such an unremarkable bit that I won't even be missed.

n.o.body will remember who I was or care if I die here. It will be straight oblivion. Unless maybe later, when this phase of the war is over and the co-belligerents buddy up for a while to figure out who to trash next, some tourists might find this, like Anne Frank's diary or the journals of the Civil War prisoners.

G.o.d! What a concept. Listen to yourself, Vanachek. Even here you're trying to figure out how to get noticed, how to be a media star, even posthumously. But it's more than that. I just don't want to be wiped out, to go through all of this in a vacuum with n.o.body knowing or caring, now or later. Maybe at least this way somebody will get a thesis out of me.

ONE MEAL, ONE EMPTY POT AND, ALAS, SEVERAL MAJOR STOMACH.

UPHEAVALS LATER.

I have got to get control of my nerves. The dream was a good warning, but I can't let it scare me into this kind of state. What they feed me isn't so bad, but I can't seem to keep it down. Would they be awful enough to put an emetic in it? Surely not.

Surely in some place this isolated they'd be more conscious of saving food than that, would just starve me instead. It must be my nerves. I'm sick all the time.

LATERHad uninvited, unexpected callers. A pair of guards this time. Must be the fastidious type, got a whiff of the place and couldn't stand it. But anyway, thank G.o.d I was too sick and shook up to write much and had already hidden this again. So they found me flaked out on ye olde stone bunk, looking suitably subdued and vegetative. The woman, a hard-faced, thin-mouthed b.i.t.c.h who reminds me a lot of the head registrar back at UW, handed me a rag to mop up the mess and a cup of water to drink. The man frowned at the crumbs I was too sick to finish as if the sight of them personally offended him.

I took a cautious sip of water once they had gone and started to drag this out again, but then I heard more footsteps returning and got back into dejected prisoner mode, which becomes easier all the time.

The footsteps stopped, the door opened, and Wu stood there, flanked by the guards. "They tell me you are not feeling well," she simpered nastily. "You must take better care of yourself, Viv. You like to be called Viv, is that not true?"

Not that I didn't have more important things to worry about than embarra.s.sment, but my ears burned. The last person I'd told that to was good ol' Buzz. I nodded though, remembering to keep a low profile and try to please.

"Yes, Viv, we are very far from the amenities here. Our resources are limited. You must take care not to get yourself into such a state that in order to take care of you, we would have to allot you more than your fair share. You do nothing productive here. You are a parasite."

"What-" I croaked, because my throat closed over and I tasted the burn of bile rising again, stinging my nostrils. I swallowed and took a deep breath. "What would you like me to do?" I asked her.

"For a beginning, you must correct this confession. I want you to think more deeply about what you have written. You are so arrogant-your words are full of superior att.i.tudes toward others, condescension. You will not be fit to mingle with others until you have mended your thoughts and accepted your responsibility." Then she took a step into the room, her doll's face childishly earnest and her voice lowered as she said, "Listen to me, Viv. I know how you are feeling. Once, like you, I was spoiled and pampered and believed my freedoms were all that mattered, that I was immune to the will of the common good. Unlike you, I did not live in a society that permitted me such selfish notions and I was nearly destroyed. I thought since your people said they believed in freedoms they would aid my cause, but no one came and my friends died all around me and I too would have died until compa.s.sionate people took pity on my ignorance and saved me. Since then I have seen my errors and renounced them.

You must do the same. You must see how badly you have behaved, how inconsiderate you have been, how cruel and how naive. Only then can you begin to improve."

Abruptly, she cut off the sermon and snapped her fingers. The male guard handed her another sheaf of paper, which she handed to me. "Meditate on your errors and try again."

Paper must not be one of the scarcer resources. They seem to be pretty free with it-in order to spring a trap? Maybe they suspect what I'm doing and are setting me up. Morbid thought.

Ah well, what's life without a little risk? I ask with a madcap cavalier air. (Life, I whimper in response.) HOW MANY MEALS LATER? FOUR?.

I'm not exactly acing my a.s.signment. Vomiting every few minutes is horribly distracting, puts a-youshould pardon the expression-cramp in one's literary style. Constant barfing, coupled with the panic that is no doubt causing it, makes me want to fill page after page with columns which read "OmiG.o.d," but I restrain myself. Neither will I waste paper, risk Wu's wrath, or bore posterity by recording my most frequent mental events- the multiplication tables, the lyrics to old songs, and dirty limericks I recite to myself to try to keep calm. This is a great way for the previously uninitiated to develop claustrophobia. I don't know how Wu expects me to improve my confession when she hasn't returned it. How can I remember enough to do it differently this time? Any kind of deep thinking is impossible in here-there isn't room to pace more than two steps and then I keep kicking the d.a.m.ned chamber pot.

I like to eat when I think, too, and there's certainly not enough of that lousy biscuit to use for study snacks, even if I could keep it down. The worst thing is the thirst, though-they don't bring me much water and the vomiting not only makes my mouth foul, it's also very dehydrating. Instead of writing, I, who was never much for math, count as high as I can count, and start over again, counting the seconds to pa.s.s the time until the next water. I keep hoping rain will come through the hole in the ceiling. Or melted snow. Or a giant eagle to carry me away. Get serious, Vanachek. I really do have to start that fiction piece for Wu now. Have to concentrate.

LATER.

To whom it may concern: What I just finished of the second confession is total cow ca-ca and my Chinese grammar stinks but I did squeak out a few groveling phrases. I decided that the only way to please Wu is to try to think like her, really get into the role she wants me to play-method writing, no less. Try to think like the decadent war criminal I am supposed to be. Find the war criminal inside me. That is what she wants me to do and that is why I am now taking a prolonged break. Sitting here alone, in this cell, surrounded by people who either detest or mistrust me, is hard on an impressionable young thing such as myself. I start thinking, who knows, maybe they're right? Maybe some fatal flaw in my makeup is responsible for my being here.

Maybe they've finally found me out. Maybe all of my past transgressions (real and imagined) have finally caught up with me. That's what they want me to think. That's what I have to think to write this d.a.m.ned thing, which is why Wu is being such a tough editor. She wants me to work so hard at writing a believable confession that I work myself up into truly believing it-these people are very good at this kind of mind control. I need to budget my time and intersperse focusing on the confession with thoughts about Great Literature or The Nature of Humankind or What Myth Means to Modern Society or How Can I Keep From Barfing for Ten More Minutes- anything to keep my balance.

They are, you see, controlling not only the information they give me but are attempting to control the information I feed back to myself. It's part of the whole brainwashing process, another patented mind-control trick. And dammit, after all the time and expense I've taken to fill my mind, I am very resistant to the idea that only by letting someone else control it can I hope to save myself.

MEAL 5-MOMOS.

Aha! A small victory. My savory sustenance each day is referred to as a momo. The guard slipped up and told me so. I'm sure he was under orders not to talk to me but I think he was sort of mumbling to himself. Nevertheless, I have been eating and regurgitating momos for some time now. Let's say five momos, at one momo per day. It's about that many, more or less. Anyway, I shall count my time by momos. Today, inspired by the austere presence of the guard, I dutifully wrote about my warmongeringtransgressions from the time I was ten until my fifteenth birthday. Nibbling the momo instead of wolfing it down when it first arrives helps mitigate the vomiting-my stomach has been confining itself to dry heaves instead. So, after I confessed and until I began feeling that I should save these people the cost of feeding me by bashing my head against the wall, I recited limericks to myself. Regrettably, constant vomiting is not good for one's recall, but then I have a lot of time in which to recall. It is also difficult to hold on to the pen. On the other hand, my journal is my only friend so it is equally difficult to let loose of the pen. I just had the most frightening thought. What will happen when my pen runs out of ink? There are no insurance companies or automobile dealerships here to pa.s.s out new ones. Maybe rat blood makes good ink? And a tiny little rat bone for a quill?

LATER.

Too sick to work anymore. The Arabs are right in a.s.suming the stomach is the seat of emotion-I'm beginning to think it's the seat of the soul, and I lose a portion of mine daily. Can't keep this up much longer.