Free Emails from the Edge by Ken Haley Page A

its tether. The tension was palpable as my guardians, taking no chances, forced me to sit on the floor while the formalities that govern police procedures the world over were carried out. Asked my name and address, I gave nothing away.
This was valuable time, and I used it to survey my surroundings. What had been an increasingly insistent headache now made concentration difficult, and as I looked at the three photos above the desk officer’s head—which would usually have been of the Emir of Bahrain and two princes—staring back at me were the faces of Saddam Hussein, Gamel Abdel Nasser and the Ayatollah Khomeini. I have never been able to make sense of this and seldom think about it, but daresay a psychologist would conclude that to focus on the fiercer face of nationalism in the Middle East was an understandable illusion, flowing directly from recent harsh realities. My perceptions were like a door blown open, unhinged but not yet entirely detached.
Of course I didn’t think at the time I am hallucinating . The appearance of dreamlike reality, albeit of the nightmarish kind, only confirmed the idea that this was exactly the sort of sliver of consciousness you might retain if your brain had been blown apart. Cut loose from my mental moorings, I became obsessed with the idea that this was Hell and that, to get out of it, I had to fight back against those from the Dark Side holding me captive. So, acting on the principle that action begets reaction, I lunged at the nearest officer with my fists—clearly the act of a crazy man, since he was armed with a truncheon.
He raised it above his head, and his fellow officers shouted sharply at him, but something told me he wouldn’t bring it down. I growled at him, like a wild dog, trying to provoke him, just so that we could reach the next stage of the ordeal. That came quickly, in the form of officers’ hands gripping my arms, the cold clasp of handcuffs being fitted over my wrists, and a small posse of police herding me into a corridor that ran off at a right angle from the front desk. With an almighty shove in the back, they pushed me onto the concrete floor of a cell and locked me in.
The cell was surprisingly large for just one person, although maybe it had been built to hold several. A strange inhuman caterwauling in the corridor, which broke out intermittently most of the night, had me wondering whether other inmates had been turfed out because a Western prisoner here would be so exceptional that any harm befalling him would incur consequences for the guards. The cell must have been occupied not long before because the only item in it was a urine-soaked mattress. Its walls enclosed ten metres by four, with standard-issue iron bars high up admitting shafts of harsh electric light.
Avoiding the mattress at first, I sat hunched over, back to a side wall, holding my head in my hands. The front of my brain felt as though lasers were boring into it, zapping the cells and melting them down. The mugginess of the night—of course there was no airconditioning—and the absence of any water aggravated everything. Misery and suffering are beyond words: anyway, in my psychotic state, it appeared quite conceivable I was dying but more likely that I had already done so. Visions of my parents calling out to me, unaware that I could see but not communicate with them, made this irrational thought highly believable. A flood of self-pity rolled over me, extracting a few salty tears that blended with the perspiration streaming down my cheeks.
The only measure of time now was the watch: not my discarded wrist ornament but the warder pacing past the cell at what I judged to be quarter-hour intervals. In the deepest part of the night, a scream from one of the other cells further along the dim corridor rent the stillness. A policeman’s lot need not be an unhappy one; a torturer’s work is never done. All at once, I felt that being in solitary meant someone was