What Is All This? (31 page)

Every morning at eight the guards march us into a room for TV interviews and three hours later march us back to our cells. And every noon the guards march us across the prison yard to another building for radio and newspaper interviews and three hours later again order us into double formation and march us back to our cells. And every afternoon at five and in the evening at nine they march us into the communal lounging room to read political pamphlets and listen to lectures and recorded ancient Chinese music and then march us into the communal TV room to watch televised interviews of us done a day or two or even a week or month before—we're never quite sure since we're always clean-shaven and well-groomed and dressed in the same blue uniforms for these interviews and answer the same questions with the same answers to the same interviewer. After two hours of this they march us back to our cells and I usually fall quickly asleep: tired from all the marching, bored to fatigue with the prison routine, a little sick from the unpalatable food we get or else kept awake with hunger pains because I refused to eat this food, another day done—I'm always thankful for that. Because during the seven hours allotted us for sleep our releases might have been arranged and morning could mean our start out of here—though I often wake up tired, probably because in my dreams I usually march too. Tonight I marched across Chinese and European but mostly American landscape, flanked by the nine air force men who are prisoners with me, though accompanied by what seemed like the entire military service including the commander in chief, all of us singing a marching song I don't ever remember hearing and keeping in step, as we don't do here, to cadenced numbers as we paraded past flag-waving crowds. “Hup, two, three, four; ein, zwei, drei, vier; uno, duo, trio, fouro…”

But this morning my cell door's open. Now that door's never open except for the few seconds it takes the guard to march me in or out of the cell and when my food's brought and he directs me to stand at the farthest point from the door with my nose and knees touching the wall. And no breakfast has come, no guard to tell me what kind of American pig I am today or why my breakfast hasn't come or even why my cell door's open. I stare suspiciously at the door. Then, with my back to the remote control camera that focuses on my cell all day, I relax on the floor mattress, happy with this one break in prison monotony since we were all brought here seven months ago from a prison that didn't have radio and television studios.

I dream some more about marching. This time it's across the George Washington Bridge to New York, though I've never been on that bridge or even to New York or New Jersey. I march up to the automatic tollbooth, toss a pocketful of change, keys and tissues into the toll basket, and when the sign flashes “Okay, Yankee trash, march ahead,” I march toward the graceful hills of hometown San Francisco turning pink and yellow pastel in the twilight and suddenly becoming the gray and black glass slabs of neighboring Oakland.

I wake around noon, my cell door's still open. My lunch hasn't come and I'm hungry, as I shoved aside last night's meal. And there are no sounds from the cell corridor, no voices or car and truck noises I sometimes hear past the three inchwide slits in my outside wall, a foot above my highest jumping reach. How odd, I think, since every day but today I've been awakened by the guard who calls me pig in several Chinese languages, and a few minutes later he'd place my breakfast on my cell floor—plain white rice and hot black tea, the best meal of the day. Later I'd join my fellow prisoners in the corridor and we'd march down many halls and through many electronically controlled doors till we got to a compound the size of a national soldiers cemetery, which we marched across to the TV studio for another round of interviews on our spy flight over China's territorial air space, something we've done every day except Chinese patriotic holidays for half a year. In the studio we'd take our regular places on a double row of benches and then, one by one, would sit in the only chair in the room other than the interviewer's and be interviewed.

At first we refused to be interviewed, feeling it would embarrass our country and families, look disastrously bad on our service records and, once we were released, land us a stiff term in an American stockade. But Chinese officials showed us American newspapers and videotapes of U.S. news programs that quoted high American officials about how we hadn't been on an electronic and photographic intelligence gathering operation as the Chinese had charged, but had been forced down by an air-to-air missile over open seas during a routine meteorological run and that America had done everything possible to get us released and now China had to make the next move. For three years Chinese officials told us China could never make that move unless we or a high American official admitted to the spying mission. Since we already saw two American presidents say on TV that America could never admit to a covert flight it didn't make, we thought that instead of marching our lives away in a foreign prison, we'd encourage China's next move by telling the truth without revealing any pertinent information about the flight. We felt that once China got all the propaganda value out our confession as it could, it'd release us to our military, whom we'd take our chances with by pleading emotional and physical breakdown during our capture. That was six months ago, and up until yesterday we were still being interviewed and the questions were always the same.

“Were you flying over Chinese soil?” the interviewer asked each of us, and each of us said “Yes, sir, I was.” “Are you repentant you were on a spying mission over China?” “Yes, sir, I am.” “Why do you want your country to disclose the truth about your spying mission?” “I love America and want it to be a truthful country so it can have the respect of the world. And also a personal reason, sir. I want to return to my loved ones in the States”—though on that last score I always said “Because I'm tired and bored with this place and the food's inedible and I know I'll never get used to sleeping on an inch-thick mattress on a hard cold floor and also because I want to finally find a loved one.” I have no loved ones or family, except for an aunt who's been in an asylum since she was twelve and, for all I know, might be dead by now, God be with you, Aunt Rose, crazy since birth I was countless times told. I was sure the Chinese accepted my one digression from the prescribed dialogue because it gave a touch of realness to the interviews. Anyway, they never objected and my line always got a loud laugh and whistles from my buddies, even after they heard it a hundred times.

I go to sleep and dream of marching again, this time across the Pacific. I pass an island, and a beautiful Polynesian woman in a grass skirt and no top waves to me from a cliff and says “Aloha, Jamie, welcome to paradise now and give all those pretty boys a kiss from me.” Those boys turn out to be my fellow prisoners again, all of us marching single file. “Ahoy there,” a captain on an old whaler says, “where you off to, mates?” “China,” we say in unison, and he says “China? Why that's unoccupied alien soil—a country we don't even have relations with.” “China, nevertheless,” we say. “We know of a good Cantonese restaurant in Shanghai and a bar in Canton where you can either get shanghaied or buy for a week or weekend a real live China doll to have relations with.”

The door's still open. It's dinner time and no dinner's come. I wish for the nightly rattle on my door of the dinner guard's truncheon and the only joke he, or for that matter, any other guard ever made to me in English: “Arise, hair horse man, purloin meat and soiled potatoes.” I'd knock a message out to the next cell, but we're not allowed to. “Do not communicate clandestinely,” the prison commandant told us the day we got here, “or you will lose many privileges.” “What privileges, sir?” Captain House, our commanding officer, said. “Food, sleeping and washing privileges.” That is expressly prohibited by the Kobenhavn Code regarding military prisoners, which states that basic human needs may be suspended during certain urgencies only to the extent that they are similarly suspended for the prisoners' keepers.” Commandant Ep said China respects that code as much as America respects China's borders. But since I apparently have no food and washing privileges to lose today and have slept all I need to for the next day, I knock on the wall to the adjoining cell.

Knock knock
, I knock, but Junior Walker doesn't answer.
Knock knock knock
.
Knock knock knock knock
, one or two knocks every so often louder or more rapid than the last, along with an occasional SOS, but I get no response. A word from the guards that I've lost all my privileges for the next day would be a welcome response, but no guard comes. Maybe I should stick my head out the cell door and see if a guard's around. “Any prisoner so much as sticking a single finger joint through the cell-door window when opened,” Commandant Ep said that first day, “will be afforded the most serious punishments for this act.” “Please specify what punishments,” Captain House said, “so my men can know what to expect, which is clearly stated in article six of the internationally recognized Sashburton-Tang declaration.” “Let your men expect the most serious punishments that life can assuredly ill afford.” Thank you, sir.” And to us: “You heard the commandant, men. No sticking not even a single joint through the door window unless you want to be afforded the most serious of punishments that life can definitely not afford, agreed?” “Agreed,” we all said, slaves to living, our voices one. Thank you, Captain House. Thank you, Commandant Ep.”

I fall asleep and dream of marching again, though now I'm the officer in charge of a company of hotdogs, sizzling steaks, baked potatoes, bottles of French Bordeaux and chilled American Chablis, fresh-cooked deveined shrimps with a cocktail sauce on top and lemon wedges on the side, all marching five abreast till I command the food to halt and one by one to march up my body and into my mouth. The marchers become disorganized and retreat once they reach my waist and disperse when they land back on the ground. I begin eating my fingernails and then my fingers, but my hunger's still not sated. I bellow “Deveined shrimp, bottles of white and red, franks, steaks, spuds, re-form into single lines and march into my mouth, hup, two, twice, no; mut, rut, vier, hup.”

I hup myself out of sleep. It's morning. Door's still open. I pound on the cell wall and yell This is Jamie Namurti, goddamn you, and someone answer me right now.” I scream that I'm starving, “dying of thirst besides,” and for the benefit of the remote control camera I grab my belly and drop to the floor in pain, but no doctor with food or guards with warnings about penalties incurred by prisoners for cutting up in their cells come bustling down the corridor to me. I stand up, raise my middle finger to the camera, and stick my head a few inches past the door.

Nobody's in the corridor, the cell block seems deserted. I shout at the camera the only Chinese words I can think of: “Mao Tse-Tung, Chiang Kai-chek, Tao teh-king, Li Po, I Ching, dim sums”—those meat-and fish-filled delicacies I used to get in San Francisco tea parlors between classes at the Art Institute—“Kiangsi stew, mushi pork with three extra pancakes, sweet and sour bass with steamed bows and all the cold rice beer I can drink,” but nobody comes to order me to quiet down.

“Abe, Pule, Rick, Dom, Junior, Milkmore, Kunstman, Coneymile, Captain House,” but none of my fellow prisoners answer. “Commandant Ep,” I shout. “Soldier Hsi”—the guard who likes to call me pig. “Han, Tz'u, Shih”—the three guards who bring my food. “Chin, Chan, Tun, Yin, Shan, Shu, Wong, Wang, Wing, Went, Wu”—names I yell because they sound Chinese. Then I say to the camera “I'm sorry, but my hunger and thirst have totally overwhelmed my self-protective instincts and common sense. At the count of three I'm going to have to leave this cell to find the kitchen, though all you have to do is say ‘Don't come out,' and I won't. So please don't squeeze any triggers. Do not use guns under any circumstances. So I'm stepping outside my cell now—one, two, three,” and I throw my only bar of soap out the door, but no one shoots at it. The soap bounces a few times before breaking apart like a soda cracker. “Next, I'm coming out—the real Jamie; no inorganic impersonation. Presenting—your attention, please—the one and only in the gorgeous living flesh,” and I step gingerly into the corridor, look around, do a brief frenetic Navajo dance of peace I learned from my father, end it with a leap in the air and my heels clicking just before I hit the ground. Nothing. And all the cell doors are open I see, as I slide down the corridor's linoleum floor. And no grimacing guards in the glassed-in monitor room at the end of the corridor, though all the monitors are on, showing, among other things, our ten empty cells. Maybe my fellow prisoners were shot, but why would the Chinese shoot them and leave me? Or taken out for questioning and I was left behind by mistake, my cell door—last one at the other end of the corridor—left open by mistake; by mistake, the corridor door left open also and the monitor room left empty. But I'll never know unless I try to find out.

The kitchen's on the same floor as the cell block and seems to have been deserted in a hurry: food still in stove pots and tea in cups. I drink lots of water and eat about a quart of cold rice. Then I go downstairs, announcing along the way that an unarmed peace-loving American prisoner by the name of Jamie Namurti is heading this way, admittedly unauthorized to be out of his cell but please don't shoot, as he's an intensely harmless chap who only wants to know why no one's around and why his food wasn't brought to his cell and why his cell door and the cell block door and, it seems, all the doors in this prison were left open.

Nobody's in the building, so I walk across the compound to the radio studio and then the television one, but they're like the rest of this ghost prison. In the television studio, I sit at my regular place on the bench to think what I should do next, rise as if ordered to by Guard Tu and sit in the interviewee's chair, face the lifeless camera and make the kind of confession I always wanted to.