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Eventually, Rosewater left the room and a guard came in. Through the crease in the blindfold I could see that he wore brown sandals.

“You can go to the bathroom now,” he said.

Brown Sandals led me to a restroom. He closed the door behind me and told me that I could take my blindfold off. There were five stalls in a row. Three of them had signs saying, “Guest Toilet.” The other two had big “No Entry” signs with the warning “Guests will be punished if they use these toilets!” I obediently used a “Guest” toilet.

It took Rosewater quite some time to return to the interrogation room. As much as I wanted to remove my blindfold and look around while I waited, I didn’t dare take the risk. I could see writing on the arm of the desk under the blindfold. It was covered in graffiti. Some of it had been written by former prisoners; some of it was in a child’s hand.

Hassan is a horse. This was next to a blurry image of a smiley face.

God have mercy on me. This was written in Arabic instead of Persian.

Iran’s judiciary, which is in charge of Evin, buys secondhand chairs from the Ministry of Education. At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, Khomeini declared that prisons would be transformed into schools in the Islamic government, that all of the anti-Islamic activists who entered prison would leave as supporters of the regime. The authorities in Evin seemed to take their leader’s advice quite literally.

Eventually, Rosewater came back into the room. His steps were quieter than before. I saw, as he walked closer to my chair, that he was no longer wearing shoes, but black leather slippers with light gray socks. This worried me. I guessed it meant that he was settling in for the long haul. He paced the room, and each time he passed by, I tried to catch a better glimpse of his slippers. In Iran, low-ranking functionaries often wear shabby plastic sandals, and they usually have holes in their socks. I was hoping to find a hole in Rosewater’s socks, indicating that the authorities were not taking my case too seriously, and had assigned it to someone with very little power. But there weren’t any holes in his socks. In fact, his slippers looked as if they had been polished.

I heard someone else enter the room, and hoped that it was his boss, or someone I could try to reason with. The new man spoke to me, asking me questions I’d already been asked, but he was more mild-mannered and patient than Rosewater. Good cop, bad cop, I thought.

“Mr. Bahari, you know that the editors of most American newspapers and magazines are assigned directly by the CIA,” the new man said.

Dumb and dumber, I thought to myself.

At this point, I had to accept that Rosewater was, in fact, in charge. I was playing chess with a gorilla. He could swallow my pieces at any point during the game. But I had to keep on playing.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen—the situation is much more complex than you think. I don’t think the CIA would want to assign editors.” I waited for a response, but none came. “If they were hoping to influence different media organizations, my guess is that they would attempt to do it through an orchestrated public relations campaign.”

Rosewater left the room without reacting. When he came back, he put both hands on the back of my chair. “I don’t trust anything you say, Mr. Bahari,” he whispered into my ear. “From now on, most of our communication will be in writing. I am going to write down questions, and you will write your answers. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

I considered this good news. New instructions meant that someone else—hopefully someone less ignorant than he—was supervising the whole thing.

“Face the wall and remove your blindfold,” he said. He stood me up and moved my chair. “And keep your head down for as long as you are here.” Then, as if sensing my question, he added, “However long that will be is up to you. People who have not cooperated have grown old, very old, here.”

The thought of spending even one night in Evin frightened me. He’s bluffing, I told myself, trying to concentrate on answering his questions. They were very general