Eric Fair grew up in the shadows of crumbling Bethlehem Steel plants, nurturing a strong faith and a belief that he was called to serve his country. Consequence is Fair's story, the story of a man who begins with a desire to serve and, through a winding series of choices, becomes an interrogator for a private contractor at Abu Ghraib during one of our nation's darkest moments. In 2004, after several months as an interrogator, Fair's now constant nightmares take new forms: first, there had been the shrinking dreams; now the liquid dreams begin. By the time he leaves Iraq after that first deployment (he will return), Fair will have participated in or witnessed a variety of aggressive interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, diet manipulation, exposure, and isolation. Years later, his health and marriage crumbling, haunted by the role he played in what we now know as "enhanced interrogation," it is Fair's desire to speak out that becomes a key to his survival. Fair chases his own demons from Egypt, where he served as an army translator, to the police force in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to a detention center in Iraq, to seminary at Princeton, and eventually to a heart transplant ward at the University of Pennsylvania. Spare and haunting, Eric Fair's memoir urgently questions the very depths of who he and we as a country have become.
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