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and he wasn’t Filipino, so why were they wasting their time? They’d dumped him in the Manila city jail, which Ben quickly learned from some of its English-speaking inhabitants had been built for a thousand inmates and currently housed more than five times that number. There were people of all ages, mostly Filipino but a few foreigners, too, convicted murderers serving life sentences alongside ordinary people who couldn’t afford bail and were just waiting for their day in court. It was so hot the concrete walls caused second-degree burns, so crowded the prisoners had to sleep side by side on the ground in shifts, and stank so badly from the accreted decades of concentrated piss and nonstop sweat and endemic diarrhea that you could feel the miasma on your skin like something moving and alive, something trying to worm its way into your pores so it could dissolve you from the inside out.
    There was an open-air pavilion where the prisoners were served food. Twice a day, the same watery, yellowish gray porridge smelling of rotting fish. On his first morning, Ben choked it down, knowing he had to eat to stay strong, then barely made it to the corner of the pavilion before throwing it all up. A bony but tough-looking Thai guy with brown skin as drawn and dried as jerky laughed and said, “No worry! Everyone do first time, sometime second time, third time. Soon-soon, okay, yum-yum.”
    “Yum, huh?” Ben said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
    “Not yum-yum, you die,” the Thai guy said. “So you make yum-yum.”
    No one messed with him—his size and demeanor took care of that—but so what? Dummying up, he began to realize, was just a multiplication of his initial stupidity. Had the cops even filled out any paperwork? He couldn’t remember seeing any. Looking around at the shifting ranks of scrawny, gap-toothed prisoners, all of them filthy and haggard and sweating bare-chested in the heat, he could easily imagine himself being forgotten here.
    On the third day, with the magnitude of his fuckup gnawing at his mind and fear settling like some dark obstruction deep in his chest, he approached the guy who looked like the head guard and asked to call the U.S. consulate. The guy didn’t even look at him, he just laughed to himself and tapped his truncheon. Ben told him he was an American citizen, there’d been a mistake, he needed to talk to the consulate, okay? The guy’s laugh drifted away and his gaze shifted to Ben. His eyes were flat and his fingers curled around the hilt of his truncheon. Ben felt a surge of anger and pictured himself snatching the puke’s truncheon off his belt and braining him with it. But he managed to shove the anger back, knowing it was what landed him here in the first place, knowing that as bad as things were, uncorking on a guard would make them infinitely, permanently worse.
    As he lay down that night on the radiant, piss-stained concrete floor of the small cell he shared with a dozen other prisoners, he remembered a moment from his jungle training. They’d dropped him in a part of the Everglades so dense that even at noon the sun was just a dim green glow at the top of the tree canopy. He had three days to reach his objective, alone, and a day in he started wondering, if he didn’t make it out, how would anyone even find him? He remembered the feeling of being lost and alone, monumentally insignificant in an indifferent, alien world. And now he was fighting that feeling again, that creeping, childlike dread at having been abandoned somewhere, orphaned, marooned.
    He crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulders as though trying to prove he was even still there. Nobody knew what had happened to him. Eventually, when he didn’t report in, the military would go looking, but where? He’d been inhaled like a dust mote into the lungs of a dragon. And every breath the dragon took carried him deeper into its body and farther from the light. He was in so deep already, how was he ever