1-02

He holds her a little longer than last time, and she struggles and flails and thrashes violently, cold water splashing loudly. He lets go. She gasps and coughs and makes strangling cries. She doesn't complain. She's learned not to complain.

It took a while, but she's learned it. She's learned all of this is for her own good, and is grateful for a sacrifice that will change his life. hers but his, in a way that isn't good, wasn't good, can never be good, she should be grateful for his gift.

He picks up the trash bag he filled with ice from the ice maker in the bar and pours the last of it in the tub and she looks at him, tears running down her face, grief, the dark edges of it showing.

�We used to hang them from the ceiling over there,� he says, �kick them in the sides of their knees over and over, over there. All of us coming into the small room and kicking the sides of their knees. It's excruciatingly painful and, of course, crippling and, of course, some of them died. That's nothing compared to other things I saw over there.

I didn't work in that prison, you see, but I didn't need to, because there was plenty of that type of behavior to go around. What people don't understand is it wasn't stupid to film any of it, to photograph it. It was inevitable. You have to, if you don't, it's as if it never happened. So people take pictures, they show them to others. It only takes one,

one person to see it. Then the whole world does." She glances at the camera on the marble-top table against the stucco wall. They deserved it anyway, didn't they, he says. They forced us to be something we weren't. So whose fault It was it.