“Special? I wish.” Janson shook his head. “No. I lost it. Snagged on a thornbush while I was bellying through your trails.”

The interrogator looked annoyed. He moved his chair closer to Janson and leaned forward. He tapped Janson on his left forearm, and then his right. “You can choose,” he said. “Which one?”

“Which one what?” Janson asked dazedly.

“Not to decide,” the rawboned man said somberly, “is to decide.” He glanced up at the man behind Janson and said something in Vietnamese. “We break your right arm,” he told Janson, explaining almost tenderly.

The blow arrived with sledgehammer force: a barrel unscrewed from a machine gun deployed as a weapon itself. His wrist and elbow were supported by the bamboo of his chair; the bone of his forearm extended between those two points. It gave way like a dry branch. The bone had split from the blow: he knew it from a soft crunching noise that he felt rather than heard—and from the horrendous pain that surged up his arm, taking his breath away.

He wriggled his fingers, to see whether they would still obey him; they did. Bone but not nerve had been severed. Yet his arm was largely useless now.

The noise of metal sliding against metal alerted him to what was to happen next: a two-inch-thick bar was inserted through the heavy irons around his ankles. Next, the unseen torturer tied a rope around the bar, looped it over Janson’s shoulders, and pulled his head down between his knees, even while his arms remained bound to the arms of the chair. The torque on his shoulder was a growing agony, vying with the pulsating pain of his broken forearm.

He waited for the next question. But minutes elapsed, and there was only silence. The gloom turned into darkness. Breathing became even more difficult, as his diaphragm strained against his folded body, and his shoulders felt as if they were in a vise that narrowed and narrowed without end. Janson passed out, and regained consciousness, but it was consciousness only of pain. It was light outside—had morning come? Afternoon? Yet he was alone. He was only half-conscious when his bonds were loosened and bamboo gruel was poured into his mouth. His underpants had been cut off him now, and a rusty metal bucket was placed on the ground beneath the stool. Then the loop was tightened again, the loop that bound his shoulders to the ankle irons, that forced his head between his knees, that threatened to tear his arms from his shoulders. He repeated a mantra to himself: Clear like water, cool like ice. As his shoulders burned, he thought about the summer weeks he had spent ice fishing in Alaska as a child. He thought of the emerald beads on the huge flat jungle leaves, the way they dripped away, leaving nothing behind. Later still, two boards were tied to his broken arm with twine, as a sort of makeshift cast.