B009G3EPMQ EBOK (16 page)

So instead I gave the name “Smulan,” our dog. I’d pulled Smulan out from under a parked car, starving and crusted with dirt. He was now a loving member of our household, and I figured if there was any mention of my “son, Smulan,” instead of my “son, Erik Junior,” or some other name while they were on the phone, Erik was likely to play along. He has a fine ear for nuances of conversation, sharpened by years of ferreting out the truth in testy negotiations. I felt sure he would recognize this as a signal from me and wouldn’t contradict me.

When we rescued Smulan in Hargeisa the year before, he was filthy, hungry, afraid—oddly enough a mirror image of my present condition—and now the thought of Smulan’s gratitude for his new home and for the love he found there made me smile in spite of myself. That smile seemed to do the trick to convince Abdi I was smiling at the memory of my “son.” In an odd way, Smulan brought me some welcome payback for his new home with us in that moment. I could take some degree of hope in having convinced Abdi I really was the mother of a little boy and that it might help me avoid rape. These circumstances offered little enough hope to any captive female, unless special considerations could be invoked. There was just so much drugged-out male energy everywhere. Otherwise the worst seemed inevitable, a matter of time and circumstance.

Abdi loosened up at the story of my “son” and confided his own situation as a father of four. I looked into his face—the bloodshot eyes, the green drool on his chin—and I could not repress a wave of real pity for those four kids. Here was Daddy at work.

We got back into the car, and the caravan started up again, proceeding out into the middle of the desert and more or less following an old camel track. There was no reliable sense of distance.

Just as the bump-along journey threatened to become boring, the first car in the convoy broke down and stalled the whole line. Several men swarmed the smoking car to begin makeshift repairs and scream at one another about the best way to do them.

Abdi shrugged and pulled out the sleeping mat, then went to the rear vehicle and pulled Poul out. It was good to see he was still with us. I was grateful for visible proof that I wasn’t completely alone out there. Rationally, I realized there was nothing Poul could do to help me against these people, but he represented companionship. When he looked at me he saw me, Jessica, not an offensive piece of meat from a rich country who owed each and every one of them a millionaire’s riches in compensation for their hardscrabble lives.

Abdi tossed the sleeping mat on the ground and placed Poul next to me. “Sleep!”

I could have hugged Poul and told him I was grateful they hadn’t separated us. I didn’t. He could have spoken to me about whatever greater fears he was able to discern from key words in their conversation during his solo ride. But the silence was already beginning. One meeting of my hot and swollen eyes with those of my fellow captive was all either one of us got.

For me, it was enough. The sense of aloneness disappeared with it. Aloneness is where despair begins, and we were still pledged to fight against that feeling.

But we both seemed to be in that strange place where you are so tired you can’t make yourself sleep. After about an hour the
squabbling, jabbering men, who didn’t appear competent at much of anything, turned out, after all, to be competent. In my eerie state of unsleep I was physically weak and certainly confused, so I had to wonder how these men managed automobile maintenance under such heavy narcotic influence.

What explained their mechanical success, muscle memory? Maybe the guy who actually fixed the problem had done enough mechanic’s work in his time that he could still pick up the right tools and twist the proper bolts even after chewing
khat
until his eyes popped.

At that moment I saw Jabreel come reeling by, still with us after all. Either his threats to leave were bluffs, or somebody was keeping him around. He looked as tired as I felt, and he was so blitzed on
khat
he couldn’t walk straight. I couldn’t tell whether his presence in this mess would make any genuine difference, but the sight of him was consoling.

Such was the state of things. He could speak with us when he was coherent and he had insisted several times that he realized the prices being quoted for us were madness. Perhaps he could somehow inject a little sanity into this squad of jabbering addicts, if he got some sleep and sobered up a little.

Abdi piled us back into our respective cars and the caravan started up again. After another fairly short drive they all stopped one more time, at a large man-made watering hole that had gone completely dry. The image crystallized our environment. The dry hole was surrounded by towering termite stacks six and seven feet in height. They were intact, although the insects who once benefited from the water there were probably gone. The fact that the stacks were still standing turned out to be the point of our stop here, not the dry watering hole. Jabreel clambered up onto the miniature hill and got a cell phone call through to Mohammed, the man claiming to speak for our NGO and our families, but whose identity we couldn’t confirm.

This was our second proof-of-life call, supposedly made to our NGO’s communicator. No one was telling us anything about that, however. What I knew for certain was I could hear the loud crackle of static and a male voice broken into bits by the shaky connection.

There was nothing to do but play it out for real. Poul and I were each allowed to speak to the man calling himself Mohammed. I didn’t bother quizzing him about his identity. If he was a fake he was probably prepared.
It can’t hurt to send a message,
I thought.
The worst that will happen is it just won’t go through. No harm done.

“This is Jessica.”

“This is Mohammed speaking, and I have authority to speak for the families and the employers. Do you have a message I can pass along to your people?”

“Yes, I have a message. Tell my family I love them. Ask them all to pray for us.”

“Your family, yes.”

“And my husband. Erik. His name is Erik. Tell him I love him.”

“Tell your husband you love him.”

“No, Erik. His name is Erik!”

“I understand. His name is Erik.”

“Tell Erik I love him. And we will see each other again. It’s important to tell him that. We will see each other again.
Tell him that!
”

“Yes, yes. Rest assured I will tell Erik. Now let me talk to Jabreel.”

Erik got the call from Dan Hardy in the late afternoon, informing him the Crisis Management Team communicator had just spoken directly to Jess. They could confirm she was alive, but the captors were making insane demands. Like so many phone calls since his wife was taken, this one ended with another question mark. He hung up relieved over the proof of life, but frustrated by the risk that still surrounded her.

There was nothing else to do but sit down again and write to her. He hadn’t missed a day yet, so he began another of the letters he hoped one day to give her to read.

Jess, I’m back on the tightrope. It’s already becoming familiar, and I’m certain others who love you in their own way feel their own version of this. I balance gratitude and elation you’re still alive with my outrage that we should have to wait here for little sips of news, for whatever they permit you to say. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to pray anymore, and I pray for your safety most of all. I try to project the idea of a bubble of safety around you. From this foxhole, prayer is a logical alternative to the random cruelty that seems to be driving these people.

In the evening of that same day Dan Hardy called again with more details about what Jess said. They were dribbling out information to him in little spurts, each one screened by the Crisis
Management Team. Dan had needed to get official clearance to release this information about her before he could elaborate beyond what he’d told Erik that afternoon. There was official concern over how much Erik was permitted to know, because of the CMT’s concern that he might try to go get her.

Hardy didn’t need to elaborate. Erik felt a wash of gratitude for the sense of release Jessica’s few words gave him. For him, the next best piece of news after hearing of her survival was her assurance of love, after his worst fears and self-recriminations held him responsible for letting her make the trip. Her gift in those words was to reveal that the guilt was coming from within himself, not from her. She revealed the heavy sense of burden to be nothing worse than the question of how much guilt he was going to carry.

He only knew his fears couldn’t be allowed to dominate his thinking or he would be lost. He kept busy by remaining in constant contact with their family on the phone, and locally with a few trusted friends. Secrecy was still basic to the family’s plan. The people holding Jessica obviously had at least one cell phone, therefore they could somehow get online. He was certain they had internet access in the nearby town of Adado.

How sophisticated were they about electronic information? Would they force passwords from her and pull some sort of online identity scam? He had battened down the hatches by shutting down social sites and adjusting banking information, but if they were persistent they would try to find records of any purchase Jessica might have made online and take home addresses, phone numbers, private email addresses, any form of contact. A leak could be anywhere. Electronic “water” will find the weakest point.

He tried to unwind with a few forceful workouts at the gym. They did a lot to keep him from just grinding his teeth and pacing the floor. The physical effects of sustained anxiety had put sharp knots in his muscles, so the ability to throw his emotions into the workout loads helped to more or less slap him together and cast
off a lot of the terrible energy for another few hours. He had also begun starting the mornings with long walks around their neighborhood, just trying to keep his head straight.

In the meantime he went off to oversee his work each day, determined to keep his routine as normal as possible. He thought about arranging to cancel his workload or get a replacement—but of course that would leave him there inside the long silence with nothing to do but think. That, he knew for certain, would not be good.

He could see how someone could be tempted, deeply tempted, to turn to alcohol or pills in a time like this. There is something basic to the survival instinct that wants to avoid deep, persistent pain. All animals avoid it when they can. Sleep doesn’t do it; sleep is no protection from the subconscious mind.

With alcohol as a refuge, a person could start out the day mildly drunk in an attempt to escape dark thoughts, but quickly become completely intoxicated. Short of a blow to the head, the only thing completely effective at shutting off the tormented thinking and worst imagining is the oblivion delivered by drugs or alcohol. If he could have seen any way a drink or pill could help get Jessica back, he would have already been facedown on the floor.

Most professionals can keep up a certain persona regardless of other things going on in their lives. Erik was also able to fall into familiar behavior each day while in important business situations, but living with two such different versions of life was bizarre in the extreme. Everything around him felt fractured and segmented, as if life had been transformed into something by Picasso.

Jessica:

The days began to dissolve into one another, daylight hours dragging by while they held us under the cover of the trees, followed by nights of fitful half-sleep out in the chill of the open desert. Whatever dopey ideas they had about security from overhead surveillance, they never missed a day of hiding us from above, or a night of sending us into the desert to hide under an open sky.

Makes perfect sense, guys,
I think to myself.
Put us out in the open at night because surveillance planes or satellites could never spot us. After all, it’s dark.

I’ve always found stupid people scarier than smart ones. Stupid evil people scare me more than smart evil people because a stupid man will gladly surrender his judgment to someone else. This makes him substantially more dangerous. If I had to choose between being held captive by a smart criminal and a dumb one, I would take the smart guy every time. At least I’d be dealing with someone who’s got the capacity to understand his own situation—and perhaps be open to improving it.

Meanwhile, they continued to keep my medicine away from me, for reasons nobody would explain, and I got recurrent
bladder infections. Maybe they were just acting on an order and didn’t know why. My impression was there was no real justification for this, just the repressed resentment of somebody who would lift himself up by denying me something I needed. I could feel my internal balance already going off center, and within days of being taken I had felt a urinary tract infection and a rough stomach bug setting up shop together.

As for stomach troubles, no doubt a major factor had to be the disgusting fact that we had only two bowls and two spoons, a few cooking pots, and four cups for the
entire
camp to use. Thus any microbe hosted by any one of them was quickly shared with the rest of us.

Result?
Hey everybody, let’s all take turns eating out of the same bowl with our bare hands. How could that be a problem?

You can fight ignorance with education and you can ease poverty with financial opportunity, but as we’ve all heard it said, stupidity isn’t fixable. Boy, was that ever playing out in front of me. A few dollars worth of cooking and eating utensils would have benefited the health of everyone there, but for that you might have to forgo a few mouthfuls of
khat,
and that would be asking too much.

I couldn’t find any compassion in myself for these men, and that was unusual for me. But their conduct wasn’t just the result of poverty; it was sheer idiocy to force a large group of people to eat from what amounted to a common bowl. It would have been astounding not to be sick.