THE CUBE, EAST

I LIVE IN the Cube. I write on its glossy gray cinder-block walls however I can—with my nails before, with pencils now that the guards bring me some supplies.   

Light comes through the small glass-block window high on the wall, reached only by the many-legged crawling creatures that also reside here. I am fond of the spiders and ants, which have set up separate dominions and manage to avoid each other in our shared nine-square-meter universe. The light of a world beyond, with a sun and moon and stars, or maybe just fluorescent bulbs—I can’t be sure—streams through the window in a prism that lands on the wall in red, yellow, blue, and purple patterns. The shadows of tree branches, passing animals, armed guards, or perhaps other prisoners sometimes slide across the light.

I once tried to reach the window. I stacked everything I had on top of the bed—a bedside table, the small box where I keep my toiletries, and three books the guards had given me (Arabic translations of Schindler’s List, How to Be Happy, and Always Be Grateful). I stretched as tall as I could on the stack but only reached a cobweb.

When my nails were strong and I weighed more than now, I tried to mark time as prisoners do, one line on the wall for each day in groups of five. But I soon realized the light and dark cycles in the Cube do not match those of the outside world. It was a relief to know, because keeping up with life beyond the Cube had begun to weigh on me. Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation. The Cube is thus devoid of time. It contains, instead, a yawning stretch of something unnamed, without present, future, or past, which I fill with imagined or remembered life.

Occasionally people come to see me. They carry on their bodies and speech the climate of the world where seasons and weather change; where cars and planes and boats and bicycles ferry people from place to place; where groups gather to play, eat, cry, or go to war. Nearly all of my visitors are white. Although I can’t know when it’s day or night, it’s easy to discern the seasons from them. In summer and spring, the sun glows from their skin. They breathe easily and carry the spirit of bloom. In winter they arrive pale and dull, with darkened eyes.

There were more of them before my hair turned gray, mostly businesspeople from the prison industry (there is such a thing) coming to survey the Cube. These smartly dressed voyeurs always left me feeling hollow. Reporters and human rights workers still come, though not as frequently anymore. After Lena and the Western woman came, I stopped receiving visitors for a while.

The guard allowed me to sit on the bed instead of being locked to the wall when the Western woman, who looked in her early thirties, came to interview me. I don’t remember if she was a reporter or a human rights worker. She may have been a novelist. I appreciated that she brought an interpreter with her—a young Palestinian woman from Nazareth. Some visitors didn’t bother, expecting me to speak English. I can, of course, but it’s not easy on my tongue, and I don’t care to be accommodating.

She was interested in my life in Kuwait and wanted to talk about my “sexuality.”