Inside Outt

magnitude of his fuckup gnawing at his mind and fear settling like some dark obstruction deep in his chest, he approached the guy who looked like the head guard and asked to call the U.S. consulate. The guy didn’t even look at him, he just laughed to himself and tapped his truncheon. Ben told him he was an American citizen, there’d been a mistake, he needed to talk to the consulate, okay? The guy’s laugh drifted away and his gaze shifted to Ben. His eyes were flat and his fingers curled around the hilt of his truncheon. Ben felt a surge of anger and pictured himself snatching the puke’s truncheon off his belt and braining him with it. But he managed to shove the anger back, knowing it was what landed him here in the first place, knowing that as bad as things were, uncorking on a guard would make them infinitely, permanently worse.
    As he lay down that night on the radiant, piss-stained concrete floor of the small cell he shared with a dozen other prisoners, he remembered a moment from his jungle training. They’d dropped him in a part of the Everglades so dense that even at noon the sun was just a dim green glow at the top of the tree canopy. He had three days to reach his objective, alone, and a day in he started wondering, if he didn’t make it out, how would anyone even find him? He remembered the feeling of being lost and alone, monumentally insignificant in an indifferent, alien world. And now he was fighting that feeling again, that creeping, childlike dread at having been abandoned somewhere, orphaned, marooned.
    He crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulders as though trying to prove he was even still there. Nobody knew what had happened to him. Eventually, when he didn’t report in, the military would go looking, but where? He’d been inhaled like a dust mote into the lungs of a dragon. And every breath the dragon took carried him deeper into its body and farther from the light. He was in so deep already, how was he ever going to get out? In his few nightmarish days within the beast, he’d already run into guys who’d been here for years—
years
—without being sentenced, without even a hearing. He imagined that once you passed a certain point in a system like this one, the overseers wouldn’t let you up for air even if by some amazing coincidence they became aware of your case. At that point, after all, your story would be an embarrassment to them. And the worse your treatment, the more sympathetic your circumstances, the more egregious the entire story, the more culpable they would all be. After a certain amount of time without a hearing, being innocent would probably be the worst thing that could happen to someone in a place like this. What were they going to do, admit that for three, five, seven years, they’d caged up a guy who—
oops
—hadn’t even done anything, and never even gave him a hearing? Yeah, fat chance of that. Better to just leave you where you are. You’d been there that long already, and it wasn’t like anyone was asking about you. Let sleeping dogs lie, baby. Wait long enough, and eventually they’d be sleeping for good.
    The next morning, as he dozed on the concrete, he was awakened by a hard poke in his ribs, which were still bruised from some well-placed kicks delivered by Manila’s finest. He shot to his feet, his back to the wall, adrenaline rocketing through him. Three guards regarded him, their truncheons out. He looked from one to the other. Reasonably good odds, maybe, but what was he going to do—cut through these three and then levitate over the wall?
    One of the guards motioned with his truncheon. Ben nodded and started walking.
    They took him to a small room with faded green cinder block walls and a single rattling fan that in its uselessness seemed only to worsen the clinging wet heat. A black man in jeans, sneakers, and a red polo shirt, obviously fit and somewhere in his fifties, was sitting at a peeling linoleum table in the center of the room, his shaved head beaded in perspiration. He shook his head in mild disapproval as Ben entered.
    “Damn, son,” he said in his gravelly Mississippi Delta baritone. “You look like shit warmed over.”
    Despite everything that had happened between them, and despite the humiliation of having his commander find him like this, Ben was so flooded with relief his legs went rubbery. He knew his situation was bad, but until this moment he hadn’t realized just how near he’d been to actual despair, how