Hana, when the planes came screaming overhead, I tried to run to you, to rescue you from the bombs. Had the Italian not alerted me to Reagan’s treachery, we would all have been martyred on that day. But there was no time, and my other children rushed me away; they exhorted me to hide in safety. When all along they would like to have seen me buried in the rubble. Perhaps the blood of their mother has corrupted them. Hana, when I adopted you, you were motherless, fatherless, an orphan. I saw that you had the same fierce Bedouin blood possessed by own mother. You were only five when they attacked me. The imperialists claimed that I’d never seen you until that day I held your little body in my arms, that I didn’t adopt you until you were already dead. But how is such a thing possible? This is the madness they spread. Their madness will engulf us all.

A Bedouin party: Dance, poetry, camel races. We drink tea all night around the fire. I would like to have sacrificed a goat in honor of your birthday. A thousand goats. The way the sun comes up over the desert as the fire flickers and dies and the yellow sand turns, for a few moments, as black as the oil that comes purling up out of it — I would like to have shown you these wondrous things.

When the bombers roared overhead, I heard someone shout, “Get Gadhafi to safety, get the King to the tunnels!” One of my lieutenants, I think, or one of my sons — in the chaos, who can tell these sycophants one from the other? I knew by the too-loud tone of his voice that he said this only so that I would hear it. We were already on our way to the tunnels, and he hoped I would hear and someday repay his loyalty. But I stopped. I turned to one of my bodyguards and asked her, “Where’s Hana?” I turned to my wife. “Where is she? Has she been taken to safety?”

They say you can never love an adopted child as you love your own blood.

My wife had a hand on my shoulder. My bodyguard or my lieutenant or one of my sons held onto my arm, shielding me, holding me back. But I broke away and ran into the open, toward the tents.

I could hear the planes cracking the sky overhead. I could feel the air parting before the bombs as they rushed toward me. You must escape to hell, I thought, you must walk into the fire that melts your bones; you must flee the choking, filthy air of this city. I could hear your cries coming from the tents, but then it seemed your cries were everywhere, that all my children were crying to be freed from this hell on earth. And I was about to rush into the flames, when they pulled me back, dragged me away to the safety of the tunnels. “Father, please,” they said (for they all wish to call me father), “think of the revolution.”

Hana, if you were never my daughter, then why this ache at the sound of your name?

My memory of you grows dark. The fires are coming nearer, and everything is confused. They even say you are alive. They say you have become a doctor. A doctor! I would be so proud, Hana — I would like to have been a doctor myself. Instead, I am a king. The sky is cracking above me. The children are shouting and clamoring for my forgiveness. In these tunnels, which lead to hell, all the heat of the desert gathers and chokes the breath from my lungs. Yet, even here your cries reach me. In a moment, I will regain my strength. This old Bedouin without even a passport will break free again and come to your rescue. Reagan, Schwarzkopf, my traitorous children — none of them will hold me back. I will run into the flames, my bones will char, and I will know what became of you when you were abandoned by these fools that surround me, when you were encircled by the arms of the fire. Yes, my bones will melt as your bones did, and together we will flee this city and escape to hell. A train of camels stands waiting. The sands are turning black. Hana, lead me away from here. Hana, take my hand. Hana, don’t leave me alone.

Hana, before we leave, please, tell me your name.

He was in a shipping container when I found him. In the end, rooting him out wasn’t all that difficult. Of course, I had some advantages. Being able to penetrate brick like it’s nothing but a threshold, or slip unnoticed through checkpoints — through the checkers — are two such. I spent a day searching the remains of Gadhafi’s shattered palaces and the ornate, psychotic warren of bunkers stacked beneath them. I wasn’t alone — rebels had taken up positions, cackling at his vintage pornography and furiously frisbeeing his china across a grand ballroom. The dead were there as well, searching. I knew them for their wounds — the mangled, the tortured, the exploded and beaten. Sniper victims looked like they were still alive, until they turned their heads, just so. “Patience,” one of them kept saying. “He shall soon be found.” And he was.

The shipping container was in Abu Salim, wedged into a dusty alley between low-rise, private buildings. I’d only meant to drift through it as a shortcut to the street beyond, but suddenly there he was, along with his nurse and a few of his functionaries — or maybe they were his sons? The inside of the container was a humble affair, with some cots crammed into the far end, dotted sparsely with small, beautiful pillows. Near the entrance was a little media hub; a digital camera and tripod, aimed at a joint stool set before a screen of green construction paper. A pair of crank lanterns offered the only light, and that was softened by sheets of Egyptian cotton that had been hung from the walls and roof, which gave the interior of the shipping container the feeling of a strange rectangular tent. Gadhafi stood in the middle of this space, talking with a younger man. He wore his favorite, full-on pan-African regalia, clothing typical to exactly zero Libyans. He was reviewing some remarks, while the younger man chewed a pencil, circumspect and almost imperceptibly impatient. From the far end of the container there came the sound of messy weeping. The nurse, a pretty young woman with dark roots in her unkempt straw-light hair, must have realized that her timing was bad. She should have left sooner than this. Gadhafi approached her, put a hand on her shoulder. “Courage, darling,” he said. “The news today is good.”

I launched myself at him and slipped neatly through, touching all the muck inside him. I thudded on the floor and rolled out of the container, into the bedroom of a young boy in the building adjacent. He and his mother were under the bed — they weren’t doing anything but listening to the never-fading sound of gunfire. There were empty cups on the floor, from where they’d had tea. Under the bed. Their eyes were red with crying and boredom and terror. I howled so loud I could have sworn they heard me, and charged back through the wall and into the container. Gadhafi had seated himself upon the stool, practicing his speech. I slashed at him. I bit him through the throat. Gadhafi made a face and rubbed his bulbous old nose like it had a tickle. He coughed and did a little voice exercise. “The sheep sleeps beneath the leaves. The sheep. Sleeps. Beneath. The leaves.” I felt like I might shatter to bits.

“Nothing you can do,” a voice said. I hadn’t noticed him when I came in; a man squatting against the wall, opposite the still-weeping nurse. He was dead as well — all but naked, his withered skin dark as resin. He stank of cooking, and smoke licked about his neck and shoulders. He’d later tell me that he was a soldier who had refused to fire on demonstrators in Benghazi. Gadhafi himself had presided over his execution — his burning. “You think I haven’t already tried?” he said.

I sat beside the man, and together we watched our one-time brother leader deliver a speech humiliatingly awesome in its insanity. The young man — one of Gadhafi’s sons, I was sure of it — recorded the whole thing, and then used the laptop to add in a background of a cheering, ebullient crowd. With a hug and a kiss from his father, the young man slipped out into the darkening evening to deliver the remarks to God-knows-whom. Gadhafi returned to his little stool, and began dictating a correspondence to the Prime Minister of England. It wasn’t clear, at first, who should be taking this down. The people in the container looked at one another with exhausted eyes. Finally the nurse got up from her cot, wiped down her slick face and began transcribing the missive. The correspondence went on all night. Our old leader had a lot to say to the likes of Barack Obama and Silvio Berlusconi and Nelson Mandela and Danny DeVito. He wrote, as well, to “the Traitors” — no one inquired as to what address they should dispatch this note — promising them an eternity of blood.

The next morning, the soldier got up to leave. “I’m getting nothing out of this,” he said. “Besides, I need to look for my sister. Don’t you have people of your own?” When I told him they were dead, he said: “And that matters, why?” He put one leg through the wall of the shipping container. “The old man will die when he dies,” and I got the horrible, sinking feeling that there was a note of forgiveness in his voice.

“I need to see it,” I said. The soldier sighed, and left without another word. The day passed slowly. After lunch, Gadhafi demanded to go on a stroll in his gardens, miles away now, likely a command center for the rebels. His son made ready to take him, but as they reached the exit he remembered that it was hot today, and they ought to change clothes. They returned to the corner with the cots, put on light linen pants, discussed dermatology with the nurse, asked how she ever managed with such fair skin, obtained from her a little story about her hometown, and the whole question of going outside was thus avoided. More ghosts arrived. A man without fingernails or eyes or soles to his feet. A woman who had been cut from ear to ear, but only so deep that it was the infection that finished her. We watched the old man wallow in his blood-soaked vanity. We noted how the expressions of his sons and functionaries were hardening, how even his beautiful nurse was eyeing the rifles leaning against the wall. Eventually, my fellow ghosts departed. The woman even touched Gadhafi, lightly, on the head before she went. It seems he felt it, because he stopped whatever nonsense he was saying and looked behind him. “You shouldn’t stay,” she said to me.

And she was right, of course. I’m not being insincere when I say that I am awed by her humanity. I wish that I could forgive this terrified, dangerous child. But I can’t. So I will remain here, watching this butcher and his offspring stew in their own offal. The rebels will likely find the container, relieve its occupants of this particular hell. But, as I said before, I hope it doesn’t happen. I hope Gadhafi is never found; that the container is bricked closed. And I will wait here, watching this man and his loved ones exact their own punishment. I’ll stand guard by the door until they fucking eat each other.