Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
* * *
Zeitoun was pushed toward the front door. The other officers had already gathered Ronnie and Nasser onto an enormous fan boat. It was a military craft, far bigger than any other boat Zeitoun had seen since the storm. There were at least two officers pointing automatic rifles at them.
At that moment, another boat arrived. It was Todd, coming home from his rescue rounds.
“What’s happening here?” he asked.
“Who are you?” one of the officers demanded.
“I live here,” Todd said. “I have proof. It’s inside the house.”
“Get in the boat,” the officer said.
Zeitoun was not panicking. He knew there had been a mandatory evacuation in effect, and he assumed this had something to do with that. He knew it would all get straightened out wherever they were being taken. All he needed was to call Kathy, who would call a lawyer.
But Yuko’s number was in the house, by the phone, on the hall table. If he didn’t get it now, he would have no way to reach Kathy. He hadn’t memorized it.
“Excuse me,” he said to one of the soldiers. “I left a piece of paper on that table. It’s my wife’s phone number. She’s in Arizona. It’s the only way—” He moved toward the house, smiling politely. It was everything, that number. The piece of paper was fifteen feet away.
“No!” the soldier yelled. He grabbed the back of Zeitoun’s shirt, turned him around, and shoved him onto the boat.
The four captives rode standing, surrounded by the six military personnel. Zeitoun tried to figure out who they were, but there were few clues. Two or three of the men were dressed in black, with no visible patches or insignia.
No one spoke. Zeitoun knew not to exacerbate the situation, and assumed that when they were interviewed by a superior, everything would be explained. They would be scolded for staying in the city when there was a mandatory evacuation in effect, and they would be sent north on a bus or helicopter. Kathy would be relieved, he thought, when she heard he was finally on his way out.
They sped down Claiborne and then Napoleon, until the water grew shallow at the intersection of Napoleon and St. Charles.
The boat cut its engine and coasted toward the intersection. There were a dozen men in National Guard uniforms there, and they all took notice. A smattering of other men in bulletproof vests, sunglasses, and black caps all looked up. They were waiting for them.
The moment Zeitoun and the three other men were led off the boat, a dozen soldiers descended upon them. Two men in bulletproof vests leapt on Zeitoun, tackling him to the ground. His face was pushed into the wet grass. He spat out mud. There was a knee in his back, hands on his legs. It felt like there were at least three men keeping him down with all their force, though he had not moved or struggled. His arms were pulled behind his back and he was handcuffed with plastic ties. His legs were tied together. All the while the men were barking orders: “Hold still!” “Stay there, motherfucker.” “Don’t move, asshole.” Out of the corner of his eye he could see the other three men, Nasser, Todd, and Ronnie, all on the ground, face down, with knees on their backs, hands on their necks. Photographers were taking pictures. Soldiers were watching, their fingers ready on the triggers of their guns.
* * *
Struggling to gain their balance with their legs tied, the four men were lifted up. They were shuffled into a large white van. They sat on two benches inside, opposite each other. No one spoke. A young soldier stepped into the driver’s seat. His face seemed open; Zeitoun took a chance.
“What’s happening here?” Zeitoun asked him.
“I don’t know,” the soldier said. “I’m from Indiana.”
They waited for thirty minutes in the van. Zeitoun could see the activity outside—soldiers talking urgently to each other and on radios. This was a busy intersection that he passed every day. He could see Copeland’s restaurant, where he’d often eaten with his family, right there on the corner. Now it was a military post, and he was a captive. He and Todd exchanged looks. Todd was a joker, and he’d had a run-in or two with the law, so even in the back of a military van he seemed amused. He shook his head and rolled his eyes.
Zeitoun thought of the dogs he had been feeding. He caught the attention of one of the soldiers passing by the open back of the van.
“I’ve been feeding dogs,” Zeitoun said. “Can I give you the address, and you can take them out, bring them somewhere?”
“Sure,” the soldier said. “We’ll take care of them.”
“You want the address?” Zeitoun asked.
“No, I know where they are,” the soldier said, and walked away.
The van drove toward downtown.
“We’re going to the Superdome?” Todd wondered aloud.
A few blocks from the stadium, they pulled into the crescent-shaped driveway of the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal, where incoming and outgoing Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses docked. Zeitoun’s earlier assumption—that they were being evacuated by force—seemed to be confirmed. He was relieved, and sat back on the bench. It was wrong that he hadn’t been allowed to retrieve any possessions, and he felt that the treatment by the cops and soldiers had been rough. But the result was going to be simple and fair enough: they were being put on a bus or train and sent out of the city.
Zeitoun had picked up and dropped off friends and relatives at the station a handful of times over the years. Fronted by a lush lawn and palm trees, the Union Passenger Terminal had opened in 1954, an art deco–style building once aspiring to grandness but since overtaken by a certain grey municipal malaise. There was a whimsical candy-colored sculpture on the lawn that looked like a bunch of child’s toys glued together without reason or order. A few blocks beyond, the Superdome loomed.
As they pulled to the side of the building, Zeitoun saw police cars and military vehicles. National Guardsmen patrolled the grounds. The station had become a kind of military base. A few personnel were casual, talking idly against a Humvee, smoking. Others were on guard, as if expecting a siege at any moment.
The van stopped at the station’s side door, and the captives were taken out of the van and led inside. When Zeitoun and the others entered the main room of the station, immediately fifty pairs of eyes, those of soldiers and police officers and military personnel, were upon them. There were no other civilians inside. It was as if the entire operation, this bus station-turned-military base, had been arranged for them.
Zeitoun’s heart was thrumming. They saw no civilians, no hospital or humanitarian-aid workers, as had been common in areas like the Napoleon–St. Charles staging ground. This was different. This was entirely martial, and the mood was tense.
“Are you kidding me?” Todd said. “What the hell is going on?”
The four men were seated in folding chairs near the Greyhound ticket desk. With every passing minute, everyone in the bus station seemed to take more interest in Zeitoun, Nasser, Todd, and Ronnie.
All around there were men in uniform—New Orleans police, National Guard soldiers, prison guards with the words LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS on their uniforms. Zeitoun counted about eighty personnel and at least a dozen assault rifles within a thirty-foot radius. Two officers with dogs kept watch, leashes wrapped tight around their fists.
Todd was lifted from his chair and brought to the Amtrak ticket counter against the wall. As two officers flanked him, a third officer on the other side of the counter began to question him. The other three men remained seated. Zeitoun could not hear the interrogation.
The soldiers and guards nearby were on edge. When Nasser shifted in his seat, there were immediate rebukes.
“Sit still. Go back to your position.”
Nasser at first resisted.
“Stop moving!” they said. “Hands where I can see them.”
Zeitoun examined his surroundings. In essential ways, the station was still the same. There was a Subway franchise, various ticket counters, an information kiosk. But there were no travelers. There wer
Todd was arguing with his interrogators. Zeitoun could hear occasional bursts as the questioning at the Amtrak desk continued. Todd was hotheaded on a normal day, so it didn’t surprise Zeitoun that he was agitated during the processing.
“Are we going to get a phone call?” Todd asked.
“No,” the officer said.
“You have to give us a phone call.”
There was no answer.
Todd raised his voice, rolled his eyes. The soldiers around him stood closer, barking admonitions and threats back at him.
“Why are we here?” he asked a passing soldier.
“You guys are al Qaeda,” the soldier said.
Todd laughed derisively, but Zeitoun was startled. He could not have heard right.
Zeitoun had long feared this day would come. Each of the few times he had been pulled over for a traffic violation, he knew the possibility existed that he would be harassed, misunderstood, suspected of shadowy dealings that might bloom in the imagination of any given police officer. After 9/11, he and Kathy knew that many imaginations had run amok, that the introduction of the idea of “sleeper cells”—groups of would-be terrorists living in the U.S. and waiting, for years or decades, to strike—meant that everyone at their mosque, or the entire mosque itself, might be waiting for instructions from their presumed leaders in the hills of Afghanistan or Pakistan.
He and Kathy worried about the reach of the Department of Homeland Security, its willingness to contact anyone born in or with a connection to the Middle East. So many of their Muslim friends had been interviewed, forced to send in documents and hire lawyers. But until now Zeitoun had been fortunate. He had had no experience with profiling, hadn’t been suspected of anything by anyone with real authority. There were the occasional looks askance, of course, sneers from people upon hearing his accent. Maybe, he thought, this was just one soldier, ignorant or cruel, wanting to stir things up. Zeitoun decided to ignore it.
Still, Zeitoun’s senses were awakened. He scanned the room for more signals. He and the three others were still being watched by dozens of soldiers and cops. He felt like an exotic beast, a hunter’s prize.
Moments later, another passing soldier looked at Zeitoun and muttered “Taliban.”
And as much as he wanted to dismiss both comments, he couldn’t. Now he was sure that there was a grave misunderstanding taking place, and that unraveling it, disproving it, was going to take days. Todd ranted, but Zeitoun knew it would do no good. The question of their innocence or guilt would not be answered in this room, not any time soon.
He sat back and waited.
Before them was an alcove housing a bank of vending machines and video games. Above the machines, wrapping around the interior of the entire station, was a vast mural that occupied, in four long segments, the upper half of the station’s main walls.
In all, the mural was about 120 feet long, and it sought to depict the entire history of Louisiana in particular and the United States generally. Zeitoun looked up at it, and though he had been in the terminal before, he had never really seen this mural. Now that he did, it was a startling thing, a dark catalog of subjugation and struggle. The colors were nightmarish, the lines jagged, the images disturbing. He saw Ku Klux Klan hoods, skeletons, harlequins in garish colors, painted faces. Just above him there was a lion being attacked by a giant eagle made of gold. There were images of blue-clad soldiers marching off to war next to mass graves. There were many depictions of the suppression or elimination of peoples—Native Americans, slaves, immigrants—and always, nearby, was the artist’s idea of the instigators: wealthy aristocrats in powdered wigs, generals in gleaming uniforms, businessmen with bags of money. In one segment, oil derricks stood below a flooded landscape, water engulfing a city.
Nasser was processed next. He was brought to the Amtrak ticket counter, and now Zeitoun saw that they were fingerprinting and photographing each of them.
Soon after Nasser’s interrogation began, his duffel bag created a stir. A female officer was removing stacks of American money from the bag.
“This isn’t from here,” she said.
Nasser argued with her, but this discovery only got the building more excited.
“That ain’t from here,” she said, now more certain.
The money was laid out on a nearby table and soon there was a crowd around it. Someone counted it. Ten thousand dollars.
This was the first Zeitoun knew of the contents of Nasser’s bag. When Nasser had brought it into the canoe, Zeitoun had assumed it contained clothes, a few valuables. He never would have guessed it contained $10,000 in cash.
* * *
Soon there were more discoveries. Todd had been carrying $2,400 of his own. The officers stacked it on the table in its own pile next to Nasser’s. In Todd’s pockets they found MapQuest printouts.
“I deliver lost luggage,” Todd tried to explain.
This didn’t satisfy the officers.
In one of Todd’s pockets they discovered a small memory chip, the kind used for digital cameras. Todd laughed, explaining that on it were only photos he’d taken of the flood damage. But the authorities were seeing something more.
Watching the evidence on the table mount, Zeitoun’s shoulders slackened. Most municipal systems were not functioning. There were no lawyers in the station, no judges. They would not talk their way out of this. The police and soldiers in the room were too worked up, and the evidence was too intriguing. Zeitoun settled in for a long wait.
Todd grew more exasperated. He would calm down for a time, then explode again. Finally one of the soldiers raised his arm, as if to strike him down with the back of his hand. Todd went quiet.
Then it was Zeitoun’s turn for processing. He was brought to the Amtrak counter and fingerprinted. He was pushed against a nearby wall on which height markers had been written by hand, from five to seven feet. Zeitoun had stood in this exact place before while waiting to buy train tickets for friends or employees. Now, while handcuffed and guarded by two soldiers with M-16s, his photograph was being taken.
At the ticket counter, he surrendered his wallet and was frisked for any other possessions. He was asked basic questions: name, address, occupation, country of origin. He was not told of the charges against him.
Eventually he was brought back to the row of chairs and was seated again with Todd and Nasser, while Ronnie was processed.
Moments later, Zeitoun was grabbed roughly under the arm. “Stand up,” a soldier said.
Zeitoun stood and was led by three soldiers into a small room—some kind of utility closet. Inside there were bare walls and a small folding table.
The door closed behind him. He was alone with two soldiers.
“Remove your clothes,” one said.
“Here?” he asked.
The soldier nodded.
Until this point, Zeitoun had not been charged with a crime. He had not been read his rights. He did not know why he was being held. Now he was in a small white room being asked by two soldiers, each of them in full camouflage and holding automatic rifles, to remove his clothes.
“Now!” one of the soldiers barked.
Zeitoun took off his T-shirt and shorts and, after a pause, stepped out of his sandals.
“And the undershorts,” the same soldier said.
Zeitoun paused. If he did this, he would live with it always. The shame would never leave him. But there was no alternative. He could refuse, but if he did, there would be a fight. More soldiers. Some sort of retribution.
“Do it!” the soldier ordered.
Zeitoun removed his underwear.
One of the soldiers circled him, lifting Zeitoun’s arms as he passed. The soldier held a baton, and when he reached Zeitoun’s back, he tapped Zeitoun’s inner thigh.
“Spread your legs,” the soldier said.
Zeitoun did so.
Zeitoun couldn’t understand the meaning of the words.
The soldier repeated the directive, his voice more agitated. “Put your elbows on the table.”
He had no options. Zeitoun knew that the soldiers would get what they wanted. They were likely looking for any contraband, but he also knew that anything was possible. Nothing on this day had conformed to any precedent.
Zeitoun bent over. He heard the sounds of the soldier pulling plastic gloves onto his hands. Zeitoun felt fingers quickly exploring his rectum. The pain was extreme but brief.
“Stand up,” the soldier said, removing the glove with a snap. “Get dressed.”
Zeitoun put on his shorts and shirt. He was led out of the room, where he saw Todd. He was arguing already, threatening lawsuits, the loss of all their jobs. Soon Todd was pushed into the room, the door was closed, and his protestations were muffled behind the steel door.
When Todd’s search was complete, the two of them were led back through the bus station. Zeitoun was certain that he saw a handful of looks of recognition, soldiers and police officers who knew what had happened in the room.
Zeitoun and Todd were brought to the back of the station and toward the doors that led to the buses and trains. Zeitoun’s thoughts were a jumble. Could it be that after all that, they were being evacuated? Perhaps they had been stripped to ensure that they hadn’t stolen anything, and now, deemed clean, they were being sent away on a bus? It was bizarre, but not out of the realm of possibility.
* * *
But when the guards pushed open the doors, Zeitoun took a quick breath. The parking lot, where a dozen buses might normally be parked, had been transformed into a vast outdoor prison.
Chain-link fences, topped by razor wire, had been erected into a long, sixteen-foot-high cage extending about a hundred yards into the lot. Above the cage was a roof, a freestanding shelter like those at gas stations. The barbed wire extended to meet it.
Zeitoun and Todd were brought to the front of the cage, a few feet from the back of the bus station, and a different guard opened the door. They were pushed inside. The cage was closed, then locked with chain and a padlock. Down the way, there were two other prisoners, each alone in their own enclosure.