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to see his welts, his bruises, he was worried about his balls. The way they hung it seemed they’d swollen to the size of grapefruits from the twisting and the twisting, from the electric shocks, they throbbed and throbbed, there was a time when Gloria had cradled them in her fingers, in her mouth, squeezing playfully, a daring squeeze, how could they have imagined what could be done to balls? how much more daring things could get? where was she now? his wife safe, safe, safe drinking coffee with her girlfriends, typing letters for her boss, taking off her earrings in the bedroom, taking off her blouse, leaving on her wedding ring, wondering where he was. His mind returned to her over and over, finding her in bed, her body warm, hair redolent, opening arms and legs to him, shhhhh you’re back, don’t worry , he’d shrink to baby-size and be enfolded, crawl between her legs into her body where the baby was growing, shhhhh there’s room for both of you , he stayed inside her, warm, lush, halfway between worlds, all three of them resting in one nest of flesh—until cold water and spit made him return.
    Days passed. Weeks. He couldn’t tell. He learned that there are things worse than the dark. Light in the wrong places, like his ass, the hole of him, filled up with a metal rod that lit with current. The questions kept coming and coming, over and over, he no longer knew what he answered, he no longer knew what they wanted, what his body could survive. He longed for dark, retreated there, a microscopic coil of a man.
    The men said You don’t exist.
    They said it loud and also said it low and there was no day, no night, no slope of time between light and darkness.
    You don’t exist. You’re nothing.
    Little did they know those words could be a refuge. What does not exist can feel no pain. Pain still approached with jaws wide open, but it found nothing to clamp onto. Nothing mattered. He slipped away. Even his name was gone from him, erased from the past, from all the mouths that ever made the shape of it to call him from the street for dinner, to call on him in class, to sing him to sleep, to punctuate a question—did you steal that? are you cold? do you still love me? how many oranges? where do you think you’re going? Where there are no questions there’s no life. Where there is no name there is no calling. Better not to be called, not to feel yourself again, the skin and cold nightwater and the boots, the three other men in the small tube of a cell, whom he smelled nearby though they were strictly forbidden to speak. They too had no names. They only had numbers, called out by guards when they arrived to take them to the interrogation room down the hall.
    The men in that room. They existed. They were hot unyielding they were everywhere. He hated them. He needed them. Sometimes he loved them—he despised himself for it but couldn’t help it, they could grant reprieves, could halt the beating and say Look what I did for you , could fill his mouth with a sweet pastry when he was starved, the same hand brought the pastry and the electric jolts, stroked his forehead dry with a cloth and pushed levers, and he was so debasedthat when the pastry came and the voice said Say thank you, sir , he would not only repeat the words but mean them. I want to live and so I want your love. Men who could grant life and thresh it to oblivion. The guards were myriad, they gave him mate sometimes and sometimes a crust of bread, a bowl of gruel, a small moment to lift the hood off and eat. Sometimes they laughed, the laughter of a bored man or of a boy watching ants drown in the water he’d just poured over them.
    In the end it was light that broke him, light worse than the dark. Light revealing colors that never should be seen. He was tied to the table, as usual, facedown, beaten first, then shocked, poked, twisted, as usual. A hand touched his face, caressed it, two fingers soft along his cheek, then drawing up his hood. His head was