SHE WAS MOVED by the guards to a different place, a small building she had never seen before. The building was white and unmarked; it stood at the edge of a fenced and barricaded complex that resembled Camp Saturday but was much smaller. The complex lay near the edge of the island; as the guards led her inside, Sarat could hear the distant crashing of waves.
They took her to a windowless room, lit harshly by the halo of an old, prewar incandescent. The bulb hung on a string from a low white ceiling.
Just as in the place where they fed her, a cot stood in the center of the room. The same people were present: soldiers in guard uniforms and soldiers in white coats. But this time the ones in the guard uniforms stood near the cot, and the soldiers in the white uniforms stood in the periphery of the room; when Sarat looked at them they looked away.
Once again she was strapped in place, and although she caught no sight of the usual implements on the bedside table, she closed her eyes and waited to be fed. But instead she felt a sheet of soft cloth laid upon her face, and then she heard the voice of the woman in the neatly pressed suit.
“If you want this to stop, Sara,” the voice whispered, “you’ll cooperate.”
The voice went away. The room turned silent. And then Sarat was drowning.
The water moved, endless. She entered and exited death, her body no longer hers. Spasms of light and heat encased her; the mind seized with fear and panic. She drowned yet death would not come. It was in this way her captors finally broke her.
To end the drownings she admitted to all the crimes with which they charged her—complicity in all manner of insurrectionist violence, things she’d never heard of before. She admitted her role in the killing of three Blue informants in the New Fourth Ward and in a car bombing on the outskirts of Columbus. When asked about insurgents she knew, she said all she knew; when asked about those she didn’t, she made up plausible lies. The woman in the neatly pressed suit presented to her reams of written confessions and she signed every page. There was no lie too big that her fear of drowning couldn’t make it true.
THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED brought relief. Slowly she was allowed the small precious things previously denied her—packets of soap and shampoo; books other than the Bible; black shades to block the overhead lights; spider-venom painkillers to dull the screaming of her knees and her back. For an hour a day she was led into the recreation yard, where she lay on the warm concrete at the foot of the fence and took in the sunlight, content as a house cat. They brought her food and she ate it all, voracious. The food was fatty and bland; soon she began to gain weight, because there was little to do but sit in her cell and eat. But she ate every bite, and they never had to force-feed her again.
Every other Friday, when the guards came to cut her nails and trim her hair, she sat still and let them. And on the Thursdays before they came, when her nails were longest, she dug them deep into the skin of her inner thighs until she felt the warm trickle of blood. The guards who looked in on her every few minutes must have thought she was masturbating; they let her be.
The following summer, the guards rotated, and Bud Baker left for good—but it didn’t matter one way or the other to Sarat when Elena whispered the news through the cell block walls, because the girl whose soul the thick-necked guard had slowly strangled was also gone. The day assimilated the dark, the dark assimilated the day. Years passed.
ONE DAY, long after her last Visitation, two guards came to Sarat’s cell and took her back to the old building in which she had confessed. As she was led down the hallway, she recognized the place, but it felt dilapidated, unused. There was now a fine layer of dust on the chairs and on the table. An old, handwritten sign on one of the walls read, “Clean Up After Yourself.”
Once again they sat her down, but this time the guards did not shackle the prisoner to the bolts in the ground. The soldiers left and soon a woman Sarat had never seen before entered the room. The woman was young and dressed in a formal blouse and skirt.
Sarat was gripped with a cold, crippling fear at the sight of her new visitor. She stared mute and motionless at the woman, and quietly she resolved to herself that if they tried to take her once more to that small white room, she would claw her own throat out before she let them strap her again to the drowning chair.
The woman sat down and set a plain folder on the table.
“Sara T. Chestnut?”
Sarat said nothing.
“Are you Sara Chestnut?” the woman asked again. “That’s your name, yes?”
Sarat nodded. The woman removed from the folder three small stacks of stapled sheets.
“Sara, my name is Gabrielle,” said the woman. “I’m a repatriation specialist with the Peace Office in Columbus. I want you to listen carefully—are you listening?—to what I’m going to tell you, because this is important. All right?”
Sarat nodded. The woman had a singsong voice, a cadence fit for explaining things to children.
“I’m going to ask you to read and sign these three forms,” Gabrielle said. As soon as she said it, Sarat began signing the papers.
“Hold on, hold on, let me tell you what they are,” said the woman. “Now pay attention: the first one is a declaration from the Peace Office. It states that the government of the United States, in capturing and temporarily detaining you as a suspected insurrectionist, was acting in good faith on information from a source the government now believes was not credible. It further states that, upon review, your status has been changed to No Longer Combatant. The second form is an agreement of indemnity, covering all branches and arms of the United States government in perpetuity. The third form is a solemn declaration that you will not engage in any action, nor counsel any action, against any branch or arm of the United States government, nor any of its members or representatives.”
Sarat looked from the woman to the forms and back. “What do you want me to do?” she asked.
The woman leaned across the table. She took Sarat’s hands in her own. The sensation of a stranger’s bare skin on hers felt alien to Sarat. The sensation of proximity without violence felt alien.
“Sara, the war is over,” said Gabrielle. “You’re going home.”
She heard the words, but they failed to register in her mind. Three times the woman repeated herself, until finally Sarat pushed her hands off and retreated from her chair to the corner of the room. There she knelt into a fetal ball and would not look at the woman or listen to anything else she had to say. Soon Gabrielle, exasperated, left the room, and the guards came in and dragged Sarat back to her cell.
A few days later they returned and took her again. But this time it was not to one of the Visitation buildings, but to the airstrip. There she was made to board a small plane alongside a group of fourteen women. The women looked haggard and disoriented in the glare of the early morning sun, and said nothing to one another as they boarded the plane.
Soon they were flying. From her small porthole window, Sarat peered out at the vast expanse of glittering blue surrounding the place that had been her prison. Her eyes badly damaged, she had trouble making out the geography over which the small plane flew. But she knew exactly what it was: the lapping Florida Sea, its bed thick with carpets of sea grass and schools of blind lionfish. It was real even though she could not see it clearly, and would remain real even if every last pair of eyes in the world went blind.
The plane crossed the sea and descended upon the mainland. Sarat was coming home.
Excerpted from:
FOUND CAUSE: DIARY OF A FORMER SOUTHERN RECRUITER