The Shattered Lens Read online

  * * *

  ON MY FOURTH AND LAST DAY at the embassy, the two very kind gendarmes who had picked me up at the Four Seasons came in and said, “We’re having problems getting your papers. You have no documents and the Lebanese government is not happy that you went out of the country and then came back in illegally.”

  It was true. I’d effectively been smuggled into and out of Syria. So the French government had been negotiating for several days.

  The gendarmes said, “We have an embarrassing request. We need five hundred dollars from you.”

  I said, “Why?”

  “Well, we had to pay for the administrative fees that the government of Lebanon requires in order to get some of the documents you need to leave the country. But they weren’t sufficient. They need something else, and that costs five hundred dollars.”

  “Can’t the French government pay for it?” I asked. I mean, it’s five hundred bucks, I thought to myself, which is nothing for the government of one of the richest nations in the world. Who gives a shit?

  The gendarmes cringed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, the government insists they don’t want to pay for it. Bureaucracy.”

  There was something Kafkaesque about the whole situation. I wondered what life as an eternal prisoner of the Pine Residence would be like. I assumed the resistance stemmed from the fact that I also had a US passport; the French felt that the Americans should foot some of the bill—petty Franco-American rivalry. Or maybe they suspected I had my own money and they wanted to see if I’d break it out.

  Of course I still had the four thousand dollars Aboud had given me, which I wanted to keep secret. But if it meant forgoing my freedom, then there was no question. So I told them the truth: I had four grand in my pocket; Aboud had given it to me. The gendarmes took the hundred-dollar bills to check if they were real—none of them were fake—kept five hundred, and gave the rest back.

  I got my documents the next day. At least they booked the flight for me and didn’t make me pay out of my own pocket. I assumed they had a deal with Air France.

  * * *

  THE SAME TWO GENDARMES drove me to the airport. We cut ahead of the queue and they led me through security, flashing their badges to the various authorities.

  At one point we got stopped and they pulled out the official documents. The Lebanese security officer shook his head and said, “You can’t leave the country.” The French gendarmes started negotiating in English with the security. After five or ten minutes they agreed to let me go through their customs.

  We waited together and had some coffee. I wasn’t sure what the problem was exactly. Probably the fact that I had no documents, which needed to be explained. The French embassy in Lebanon wasn’t equipped to make new passports, so I was without one. I got a new passport when I got back to Paris. Or maybe they wanted baksheesh—a bribe. In the end I didn’t care as long as I got out of there.

  When I took my seat in the plane I realized the whole crew knew about my situation. The pilot came to see me and they put me alone in a special coach area. I must have looked like a freshly cleaned homeless man with my white T-shirt and a plastic bag filled with the few belongings I’d decided to keep. (I’d left the big roller suitcase with all the other stuff behind.) The stewardesses were all very friendly and very pretty. It had been a while since I’d felt any even remotely flirtatious vibes from women. It sort of dazed me.

  When we landed in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport the pilot told everyone over the intercom to stay put. “We have a special guest on the plane, who needs to exit first.” I didn’t realize they were talking about me. A stewardess came up to me and said, “Okay, Jonathan, we can go.” So everyone was suddenly scowling at this tired-looking, bearded skinny guy with shitty clothes and a plastic bag, and half-wondering, Is he famous?

  As soon as the plane’s gate opened into the jet bridge I saw my uncle Claude, my father’s younger brother, along with two secret service men who took me off the plane very quickly. I followed them. We went through the bridge and then to an underground passage where the VIPs go: a maze of tunnels and rooms. After about a five-minute walk there was a glass door, and I could see my best friend, Yann, along with three other friends. We all started hugging each other; it was very emotional. Mila Jubin was also there, the woman with whom I’d spoken on the phone briefly from Beirut. She was the one who had handled my case and acted as my father’s liaison with the French foreign ministry.

  Suddenly they had everyone leave the room. An older man came in and introduced himself as a psychologist. He asked if I wanted to talk about anything. I tried to dismiss him as quickly as possible and make him understand that his very presence was aggravating me. So he just handed me his card and said to call if I wanted to talk.

  Then all the others came back in and we left the airport. Finally, I was free—at least to do whatever I wanted and go wherever I pleased.

  * * *

  AS SOON AS I got to Paris the government put out a press release and everything became public. The press corps got wind of it and the next thing I knew I was in a shitstorm, getting calls left and right. My email inbox was greeted with an avalanche of messages. I gave my first interview to Paris Match because the editor, Régis Le Sommier, was a friend of mine and I wanted him to have the scoop. Then came the radio and TV. I was getting my fifteen minutes of fame—and then some.

  Jean-Fabien, one of the friends who had shown up at the airport, owned a houseboat on the Seine, near Pont de Sèvres. He was going away for a while so he gave me the keys and told me to have a party.

  I invited the girl I’d made a date with two days before I got kidnapped, the one I’d stood up.

  “I’m having a party on this boat. Please come. You’ll understand why I wasn’t able to show up.” I didn’t tell her why; I was, in fact, surprised that she hadn’t been made aware of the media frenzy surrounding me.

  She said, “No way. You must be kidding.”

  But she ended up coming anyway. At first she tried to give me the cold shoulder. I was standing behind the bar and she walked up to me very nonchalantly.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked, and handed her a glass of wine.

  “So what the hell happened?”

  “I was kidnapped.”

  Naturally, she thought I was lying.

  “Check the Internet,” I said. “It’s all over the Web.”

  But before she had a chance to raise a doubt, one of my friends walked behind her and said it was true.

  She felt bad—shocked. “I’m sorry, I had no idea.”

  Now I had her complete sympathy, which I could probably have parlayed to seduce her. But all I wanted was to be surrounded by people in a sympathetic but superficial setting that didn’t test the limits of human interaction. I’d been debriefed so many times that I didn’t want to have anyone asking too many questions if it wasn’t strictly necessary.

  * * *

  OF COURSE, ONCE IN PARIS I needed to be officially debriefed some more. I was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d’Orsay, where I saw Jubin again. She was a very pleasant woman—petite, reserved and elegantly dressed.

  The next day she asked me to come to her office once more. The DGSE, France’s external intelligence agency, was there, with about ten people asking me all sorts of questions—mostly the same ones: How did I get out? Who and what money? Who were the rebels? How many were there? What kinds of weapons? Cities? Terrain? Fighting? Shelling? I was spilling it all out now, almost by rote, honing a narrative that helped chip away at the daze I still felt.

  * * *

  I SPENT A WEEK in Paris, then flew back to New York. When I got to JFK Airport my father was there with Ann. My sister Lauren couldn’t make it because she had a work commitment in California, and we agreed it would be better to spend time alone as soon as things calmed down. I’d also asked my ex-girlfriend Tara and her son Kyle to be there. I wanted to be surrounded by people who knew me well. It was almost as if I nee
ded a reality check because I sensed something had shifted.

  Within a week, my friend Aaron, the one who had first gotten news of my abduction and told my father, threw a big party for me at a girlfriend’s house, where he invited all my friends. My father was there, too.

  Eventually my mother came to New York from Mexico and stayed with me for more than a month.

  Everyone kept asking me what had happened. I appeared on CNN and Fox News. Old friends would probe me casually, or if they didn’t want to be too intrusive, then I’d see the look in their eyes . . . So? What was it like? It was a never-ending debriefing—extending into this book even—as if by fixing the narrative of my own abduction I could plug up some gaping black hole that experience had opened in my universe.

  CAUGHT IN THE RIP CURRENT

  MY FATHER FELT A GETAWAY BY THE SEA would help me readjust, so he booked a hotel in Boca Raton, Florida, where he invited me along with Ann and my sister Lauren. He understood that I needed a break from all the questions posed by others. I needed to look inward and work out so many of my own questions now rising to the surface like foam in a simmering pot, or flotsam after a storm. And he knew the sea always gave me solace.

  In some ways my father knows me better than I know myself. (And if my father knows who I am better than I do, then my mother knows who I can be—my potential—better than anyone.)

  * * *

  I SWAM IN THE ATLANTIC. Then, after I exhausted myself, I sat on the white sand and watched the waves from a distance, breaking gently and foaming up at my feet before they retreated. The metaphor hit me suddenly and unequivocally: History is like the ebb and flow of the ocean. The whole of it is so vast that you can only hope to fathom the surface, a little of the depths, a few specifics with respect to the life it breeds. What we understand of history from our limited human perspective can be likened to what we are able to see from the shore, or from some vessel plying its way across the surface. Hurricanes, typhoons and other tempests come and go more or less frequently, revealing themselves to be cyclical, perhaps even corresponding to some vague elaboration of chaos theory. But when you’re in the middle of a storm, floating on a fragile boat, or trying to ride a wave on a surfboard, every lash and curl of water can lead to your undoing.

  I’m certainly not the first to milk this metaphor. In War and Peace Tolstoy described the great men of history as merely riding the crests of historical waves set in motion by myriad forces beyond their control or comprehension. But it’s a metaphor that springs from the core of my being.

  Given my druthers there’s nothing I love more than skirting that edge where the ocean licks the land—swimming and surfing much more than sailing, since you need to have your skin immersed in it.

  It’s the same with history. Studying it from books or even archeological digs is somewhat like sailing: enjoyable and rewarding in and of itself. But plunging into the thick of it is a qualitatively different experience.

  I’ve always felt like my time here on earth is just a blink, and the more you study history (not to mention paleontology or geology) the more the significance of that blink tends to diminish. So when I’m in the whorl of some historic event, I feel much more alive with respect to the oceanic vastness of time itself than when I’m just an observer, studying it several times removed by mediating factors such as books or visual chronicles.

  As far as my own understanding of history is concerned, the twentieth century, with its world wars, was a massive tsunami that crashed down on all our notions of civilization. Nothing of human activity’s superficial mechanics remained the same. Maybe in essence people were still the same—they still fell in love and fucked as they’d done for eons—but the planet was suddenly swarming with mechanical vehicles, the magic of electricity and nocturnal light infiltrated our dreams, and we began to project our words, thoughts and images instantaneously across impossible distances through a previously unimaginable ether.

  I was born into a world still sweeping up the detritus of that massive tidal wave. I’d hear stories of horror and heroism. And I’ve always been eager to swim through the waves, constantly on the lookout for that big one.

  What happened to me in Syria, I thought as I watched the soothing Atlantic froth up on the Florida shore, was quite simple. I got caught in the rip current of history. Major changes have been occurring along one of the world’s geopolitical fault lines. Jihad in the age of the Internet was crashing headlong into the tail end of the black-gold rush. The postcolonial Muslim world was experiencing an epochal upheaval and I rushed in to watch the flare-ups and capture images of them. But I got caught in a rip current and was dragged out toward that scary place where you suddenly know just how little you count.

  Fortunately—whether from experience, instinct, good karma, or sheer dumb luck—I did the right thing. I didn’t try to swim back to shore against the current and risk succumbing to exhaustion. I let the rip take me for a while. Then, when I felt it loosen its grip, I tried to swim parallel to the shore, out of that narrow channel that seemed to defy the oversimplified logic of ebb and flow. It worked. I’m still alive. Somewhat free.

  * * *

  SO NOW I KEEP asking myself: Why me? Why was I the lucky one? I could have been hit by a shell while captive and no one would have known anything about me or how I vanished from existence. No CNN, no Fox, no film rights, no book deal—just an untimely and messy death in some Syrian shithole. Or I could have been sold to a more fanatical group of jihadis and beheaded as propaganda fodder. My fifteen minutes of fame would have come as a poster child for Allah’s wrath manifested in the blade of the faithful.

  There is, of course, the karmic explanation, which I’ve never been fond of—even though it might offer a tidy etiology. As I watched the waves I thought of the several lives I’d saved thanks to my swimming prowess.

  There was that kite surfer in Mexico whom the wind simply lifted into the sky, only to throw him back into the water. He got tangled in the parachute, and even though the edges were designed to float, he nearly suffocated under the fabric. I swam out about a half a mile and helped him back to the beach.

  Then there were the two Indian girls in Puerto Rico who got caught in a current that threatened to fling them into an outcrop of rocks on the shore.

  In Hawaii I helped two other teenage girls who got caught in a rip current that was dragging them out to where huge waves were poised to slam them into the rocks. One of them was holding on to me and I showed the other one how to dive into and under the wave just before it broke and curled into a roiling broth. It took about six or seven waves, but with each one we managed to get a little closer to where they could stand with their heads above water.

  Once, in Panama, on an island by the Colombian border where fishing boats ran drugs, I came close to dying myself. I got caught in a wicked rip that tore the leash off my surfboard. I managed to swim back, with great difficulty, and collapse on the shore. It was already a terrifying experience for someone like me, who was trained to swim long distances competitively. It’s hard for me now to imagine what someone already uncomfortable in the water must go through when that otherwise gorgeous maw of a breaking wave swallows him or her. Probably like getting eaten by a whale. And when you suddenly realize you’re in the beast’s belly reflecting on how to get out—like Jonah or Pinocchio—it means you’re already dead.

  As I treaded water just beyond the line where the waves break, the up and down of the ocean swelling serenely—like the diaphragm of some sleeping beast—burnished the meditative state that always comes over me after a long swim. I knew that evening I’d be having a pleasant, civilized meal with a family who loved me. They were all doing their best to understand how I felt. But I wasn’t sure myself how I felt. As I floated I imagined myself having just been spouted out from inside a whale, where I’d gotten glimpses of mysteries I’d wind up chasing forever.

  If I were inclined to think in terms of karma, I’d attribute the fact that I’m still alive to being in the bl
ack on some cosmic balance sheet. The lives I’d saved over time were like money in the bank—which helped pay my ransom. But I’ve never liked that sort of new-age logic and tend to shun it. I even have trouble attributing my survival to sheer luck. Somehow grace had come my way—which I can never expect to figure out. At best I can hope to carry on treading, more or less ignorant of the mechanism by which some are saved and others fucked.

  OTHER HOSTAGES

  WHATEVER THE METAPHYSICAL REASON behind my freedom, I owed it to those still captive to help in any way I could.

  As soon as I got back to the United States I was debriefed by the FBI. They came to my father’s apartment in Manhattan: two agents, both women. They helped me get some money back to cover all my lost equipment and urged me to help them track down several Americans who were still in captivity.

  Syria was fast becoming the most dangerous place for journalists and aid workers in my lifetime. Reports of abductions appeared on a monthly or even weekly basis. By the time I was released there were dozens of foreign hostages still in rebel hands. Very few major media outlets were reporting directly out of Syria. The majority of reports in newspapers were being filed from Beirut or some Turkish border town.

  In general, war correspondents and photographers don’t elicit much sympathy when something bad happens to them. Certainly not as much as an aid worker. The prevailing attitude is: you choose to go into this situation, you put yourself at risk, and you are the one making a living off of war; danger comes with the territory. I’ve even met extreme pacifists who refuse to help war correspondents in any way because they feel by doing so they would be validating war in general. When I come back at them with the argument that allowing people to see the horror of war tends to make populations more averse to inciting war, it doesn’t seem to take hold. In any case, anyone with an ideological agenda—be it pacifism or nationalism or feminism—needs to draw some rather arbitrary lines in the sand in order to placate their conscience. I was never a pacifist, and I’ve always felt that war is as “valid” as a hurricane or tornado. To eschew such disasters by hiding out in the Yukon, where they’re less likely to happen, is no answer. In fact, the absence of eyes watching probably encourages those inclined to incite violence.