Zeitoun (25 page)

“We can pray,” Zeitoun said to Nasser.

He had caught Nasser’s eye, and he knew what he was thinking. They needed to pray, were urged to do so five times a day, but Nasser was nervous. Would this arouse more suspicion? Would they be mocked or even punished for worshiping?

Zeitoun saw no reason not to do so, even while being held in an outdoor cage. “We must,” he said. If anything, he thought, they needed to pray more often, and with great fervor.

“What about
wuduu?”
Nasser asked.

The Qur’an asked that Muslims wash themselves before their prayers, and there was no means of doing so here. But Zeitoun knew that the Qur’an allowed that if there was no water available, Muslims could use dust to cleanse themselves, even if only ceremoniously. And so they did so. They took gravel from the ground and rubbed it over their hands and arms, their heads and feet, and they knelt and performed
salaat
. Zeitoun knew their prayers were arousing interest from the guards, but he and Nasser did not pause.

As the night went black, the lights came on. Floodlights from above and from the building opposite. The night grew darker and cooler, but the lights stayed on, brighter than day. The men were not given sheets, blankets, or pillows. Soon there was a new guard on duty, sitting on the chair opposite them, and they asked him where they were supposed to sleep. He told them that he didn’t care where they slept, as long as it was on the pavement, where he could see them.

Zeitoun didn’t care about sleep this night. He wanted to stay awake in case a supervisor of some sort, a lawyer, any civilian at all, happened by. The other men tried to rest their heads on the pavement, in the crooks of their arms. No one slept. Even when someone would find themselves in a place where they might be able to rest, the sound of the engine, its vibrations in the ground, took over. There could be no sleep in this place.

Somewhere in the small hours, Zeitoun tried to drape himself over the steel rack, stomach-down. He found a minute or so of rest this way, but it was a position he could not maintain. He tried to lean his back against it, arms crossed. It could not be done.

Other guards occasionally walked by with their German shepherds, but the night was otherwise uneventful. There was only the face of the guard, his M-16 by his side, the floodlights coming from every angle, illuminating the faces of Zeitoun’s fellow prisoners, all drawn, exhausted, half-mad with fatigue and confusion.

When the sky began to pale into dawn, Zeitoun realized he had not slept at all. He had closed his eyes for a few minutes at a time, but had not found sleep. He’d refused to lie on the pavement, but even if he could have brought himself to do so, even if he could quell the panic about his situation, his family, his home, the uninterrupted drone of the engine would have kept him awake.

He watched as the night guard left and was replaced by a new man. The new guard’s expression was the same as his predecessor’s, seeming to take for granted the guilt of the men in the cage.

Zeitoun and Nasser performed their
wuduu
and their
salaat
, and when they were done, they stared at the guard, who was staring at them.

Zeitoun became more alert, even optimistic, as the sky brightened. He assumed that with each day since the hurricane, the city would find its way toward some kind of stability, and that the government would soon send help. With that help, the chaos that had brought him to this cage would be reined in and the misunderstanding manifested here would be mitigated.

Zeitoun convinced himself that the previous day had been an aberration, that today would bring a return to reason and procedure. He would be allowed a phone call, would learn about the charges against him, might even see a public defender or a judge. He would call Kathy and she would hire the best lawyer she could find, and this would be over in hours.

*    *    *

The other men in the cage, all of whom had finally found some rest during the night, woke one by one, and stood to stretch. Breakfast was brought. Again it was MREs, this time including ham slices. Zeitoun and Nasser ate what they could and gave the rest to Todd and Ronnie.

As the prison awoke, Zeitoun examined the chainlink structure closely. It was about 150 feet long. The razor wire was new, the portable toilets new. The fencing was new and of high quality. He knew that none of this had existed before the storm. New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal had never before been used as a prison. He did some rough calculations in his mind.

It would have taken maybe six flatbed trucks to get all the fencing to the station. He saw no forklifts or heavy machinery; the cages must have been assembled by hand. It was an impressive feat, to get such a construction project completed so soon after the storm. But when had they done it?

Zeitoun had been brought into the station on September 6, seven and a half days after the hurricane passed through the city. Even under the best of circumstances, building a prison like this would have taken four or five days. That meant that within a day of the storm’s eye passing over the region, officials were making plans for the building of a makeshift outdoor prison. Fencing and razor wire would have had to be located or ordered. The toilets and floodlights and all other equipment would have had to be borrowed or requisitioned.

It was a vast amount of planning and execution. A regular contractor would have wanted weeks to complete the task, and would have used heavy machinery. Without machines, dozens of men would be
needed. To do it as quickly as they had, fifty men would be needed. Maybe more. And who were these men? Who did this work? Were there contractors and laborers working around the clock on a prison days after the hurricane? It was mind-boggling. It was all the more remarkable given that while the construction was taking place, on September 2, 3, and 4, thousands of residents were being plucked from rooftops, were being discovered alive and dead in attics.

At midday, Zeitoun heard something strange: the sound of buses at the bus station. He looked up to see a school bus arriving at the far end of the lot. From it descended thirty or more prisoners, one woman among them, in orange jumpsuits.

They were the incarcerated from the Jefferson Parish and Kenner jails—those who had been in jail before the storm. Within the hour, the long row of cages began to fill. And again, just like Guantánamo, all prisoners could be seen by anyone, from any angle. Now, with the orange uniforms completing the picture, the similarities were too strong to ignore.

Quickly after each group was locked into a cage, they were warned about touching the fence. Any touching of any fence would result in severe consequences. And so they came to know the strange rules of their incarceration. The pavement would be their bed, the open-door toilet would be their bathroom, and the steel rack would be the seat they could share. But for the first hour, while the new prisoners got acquainted with their new cells, there was much yelling from the guards about where and how to stand and sit, what not to touch.

A man and a woman were housed one cage away from Zeitoun, and
soon a rumor abounded that the man was a sniper, that it had been he who had been shooting at the helicopters that had tried to land on the roof of a hospital.

Lunch was different than previous meals. This time the guards brought ham sandwiches to the cages and then stuffed them through the holes in the wire.

Again Zeitoun and Nasser did not eat.

The presence of dogs was constant. There were at least two always visible, their handlers sure to parade them past the cages in close proximity. Occasionally one would explode into barking at some prisoner. Someone in Zeitoun’s cage mentioned Abu Ghraib, wondering at what point they’d be asked to pose naked, in a vertical pyramid, and which guard would lean into the picture, grinning.

By two o’clock there were about fifty prisoners at the bus station, but Zeitoun’s cage was still the only one with its own dedicated guard.

“You really think they consider us terrorists?” Nasser asked.

Todd rolled his eyes. “Why else would we be alone in this cell while everyone else is crammed together? We’re the big fish here. We’re the big catch.”

Throughout the day, a half-dozen more prisoners came through the station and were brought to the cages. These men were dressed in their civilian clothes; they must have been picked up after the storm, as Zeitoun and his companions had been. The pattern was clear now: the prisoners who were being transferred from other prisons came by bus
and weren’t processed, while those arrested after the storm were processed inside and brought through the back door.

By overhearing the guards and prisoners talking, Zeitoun realized the prison had been given at least two nicknames by the guards and soldiers. A few referred to it as Angola South, but far more were calling it Camp Greyhound.

In the afternoon, one of the guards approached a man in the cage next to Zeitoun’s. He talked to an orange-clad prisoner for a few moments, gave him a cigarette, and then returned to the bus station.

Moments later, the guard reappeared, leading a small television crew. The guard led them straight to the man he’d given a cigarette to. The reporter—Zeitoun could see now the crew was from Spain—conducted an interview with the prisoner, and then, after a few minutes, he approached Zeitoun with the microphone and began to ask a question.

“No!” the guard yelled. “Not that one.”

The crew was ushered back into the station.

“Holy shit,” Todd said. “They bribed that dude.”

As they were leaving, the cameraman swept his lens over the whole outdoor jail, Zeitoun included. There was a bright light attached to the camera, and being viewed that way, in the glare of a floodlight and shown to the world as a criminal in a cage, made Zeitoun furious. It was a lie.

But Zeitoun had a sudden hope, given that the crew was Spanish, that the footage might be broadcast to his brother in Málaga. Ahmad would see it—he saw everything—and he would tell Kathy, and Kathy would know where he was.

At the same time, Zeitoun couldn’t bear the thought of his family in Syria knowing he was being kept like this. No matter what happened,
if and when he was released, he could not let them know that this had happened to him. He did not belong here. He was not this. He was in a cage, being viewed, gaped at, seen as visitors to the zoo see exotic animals—kangaroos and baboons. The shame was greater than any his family had ever known.

In the late afternoon a new prisoner was brought through the bus-station doors. He was white, about fifty, thin and of average height, with dark hair and tanned skin. Zeitoun thought little of him until his own cage was opened and the man was pushed inside. There were now five prisoners in their cage. No one knew why.

The man was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and seemed to have stayed clean during and after the storm. His hands, face, and clothing were all without dirt or stain. His attitude, too, bore no shadow of the suffering of the city at large.

He introduced himself to Zeitoun and the three others, shaking each of their hands like a conventioneer. He said his name was Jerry. He was gregarious, full of energy, and made jokes about his predicament. The four men had spent a sleepless night in an outdoor cage and did not have the energy to make much conversation, but this new prisoner more than filled the silence.

He laughed at his own jokes, and about the bizarre situation they found themselves in. Without prompting, Jerry told the story of how he had come to be arrested. He had stayed behind during the storm, just as he always did during hurricanes. He wanted to protect his house, and after Katrina passed, he realized he needed food, and couldn’t walk to any stores nearby. His car was on high ground and was undamaged, but he was out of gas. So he found a length of tubing in his garage and was in the middle of siphoning gasoline from a neighbor’s car—he planned
to tell his neighbor, who would have understood, he said—when he was discovered by a National Guard flatboat. He was arrested for theft. It was an honest misunderstanding, he said, one that would be straightened out soon enough.

Zeitoun pondered the many puzzling aspects to Jerry’s presence. First, he seemed to be the only prisoner in the complex entertained by the state of affairs—being held at Camp Greyhound. Second, why had he been put in their cage? There were fifteen other cages, many of them empty. There didn’t seem to be any logic to taking a man brought in for gasoline-siphoning and placing him with four men suspected of working together on crimes varying from looting to terrorism.

Jerry asked how the rest of them had come to be in Camp Greyhound. Todd told the story for the four of them. Jerry said something about how badly the four of them had gotten screwed. It was all common small talk, and Zeitoun was tuning out when Jerry changed his tone and line of questioning.

He began to direct his efforts toward Zeitoun and Nasser. He asked questions that didn’t flow from the conversational strands he had begun. He made disparaging remarks about the United States. He joked about George W. Bush, about the administration’s dismal response to the disaster so far. He questioned the competence of the U.S. military, the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy around the world and in the Middle East in particular.

Todd engaged with him, but Zeitoun and Nasser chose to remain quiet. Zeitoun was deeply suspicious, still trying to parse how this man had ended up in their cage, and what his intentions might be.

“Be nice to your mom!”

While Jerry talked, Zeitoun turned to see a prisoner a few cages away
from him. He was white, in his mid-twenties, thin, with long brown hair. He was sitting on the ground, his knees drawn up to his chest, and he was chanting the statement like a mantra, but loudly.

“Be nice to your mom! Treat her kind!”

The other three detainees in the young man’s cage were visibly annoyed by him. He had apparently been repeating these strange directives for some time, and Zeitoun had only begun to hear them.

“Don’t play with matches! Fire is dangerous!” he said, rocking back and forth.