Guantánamo for Lover Boys

On the second night of a two-night storm. On that second night. We did waterboard someone. Who we waterboarded was Aman, our roommate, who was from outside Baltimore, and who had maybe set up a camera on the third floor. The third floor being the girls’ floor. A floor we’d only frequent upon request. Upon an official invitation. “That’s a no-fly zone,” we’d been told by Peter, our RA, who walked with a cane because of a ski accident at Sugarloaf and who no one had seen since he was tossed over the smoking porch at Hail Mandy’s on the night our school played and lost to Texas Tech in the Cotton Bowl. Of course, the girls came up crying in their terry shorts and university sweatshirts. They told us. Told we. We being: Bone, Kenan, and me. That we needed to do something. Handle our freak. Or else we––we being Bone, Kenan, and I––were no better than him. “Complete perverts,” said one. “Horndogs,” said another. “Totally,” affirmed the one who kept a photo of her high school boyfriend taped to corner of her study desk. We nodded, Okay. We nodded, ­Oh yes, we’ll handle Aman and get to the bottom of all this. And then. Because we were hurting a little bit. And shocked. And young and agitable and the oil war was the only thing our parents talked about when we called home. We did the only thing we could think to do. We hung a sign over our door that read: Guantánamo for Lover Boys.

We weren’t really serious. We were trying not to be very serious, okay? But we’d drunk a bottle of Gordon’s, which had made us brave. Still, we kept pouring water on his forehead rather than over his nose and mouth. He was gagging some. Some. “Tell us,” we said. “I’m okay,” he coughed. “I’m okay.” “We know,” we said, adjusting the blanket. “Tell the truth.” The fabric tightened around his nose with every inhale. His hands dangled. Fingers hung. Until. Then. Right then. When in our little college town like most little college towns––with its gyro shack and its golf course that the fraternities made their pledges sprint nude and its paved roads and its gravel roads you could pick up by the handful and throw at the wild turkeys and auklets as they poked their necks through the bramble, and, yes, of course, its softwood powerlines that overstretch and snap on the second night of a two-night storm––the lights went out.

We found the candles one of us had been saving for romance. We lit them. Aman’s body was sweating faster than it wasn’t. But we didn’t stop. Couldn’t. Could not. Even if it was what we all wanted. “I’m okay,” he yelled again, his lips pinching the blanket. It somehow felt like permission. 

“Stop saying that,” we said, refilling the jug in the sink below the black-and-white poster of a bygone pugilist, his fists raised and ready. “I’m––” he said. Kenan stopped holding the jug with us because his father was a minister, and he got small in the corner even though he wrestled on scholarship. Bone and I leaned in. “We know about the camera and about the girls. We know.” And. At this. At this, Aman stopped fighting his restraints. He breathed deeply, full-on. Lightning struck beyond our windows and hit a doghouse at the edge of town. The dog lived, but not well. It doesn’t matter. In the dorm, it got quiet. Everything got quiet. Quieter. Only rain against the roughleaf. The ceiling fan. Our Geneva-broken hearts beating next to the fighting pads. The candlelight ticking. “Tell us.” We lifted the jug back overhead. Aman said nothing. No. Nothing. For forever. For a long time like forever. A foreverish length of time to not talk. Until he did say, “That’s okay.” Then, “I’m okay,” again. And like a thousand more times. Nonstop. Even as we dragged him down the stairs. Across the garden. Towards the museum at the far end campus. The one with that long stretch of always-mowed grass. What’d we call that grass? Where we would lie still and drink beneath the naughty sky? What was it? Tell me. Tell the truth, right now, little man. Scum bag. Friend. Was it The Bullet Lawn?