I demanded a radio again from Dhuxul, thinking, I really deserve something from these fuckers now.
The fat boss mumbled something in his bleak voice and limped away on his wooden leg. The men must have noticed my distress. To cheer up their obviously sour hostage they ordered restaurant food, and we all ate spiced and greasy rice with vegetables and goat, as well as sambusi, which came wrapped in newspaper. The sambusi shop happened to send big scraps of some English-printed newspaper, which we used for napkins, and I spent the afternoon piecing together torn broadsheet pages from the Gulf News. For the first time in a year and a half—since my radio had disappeared when we first boarded the Naham 3—I started to collect scraps of insight into the disheartening course of the planet.
The disconnect is strange to think about now. Four months earlier, my grandmother had fallen asleep in her house in Holland after complaining about a stomach flu. She’d placed a glass of water on the bed stand, rolled down the shutters, and closed the door. In the morning, my aunt, who lived in the house, woke up to do an hour’s worth of kitchen work before she suspected a problem. Another aunt in Cologne dreamed on the same morning that Oma had invited her to open a window. “You’ll like it,” Oma had said in the dream. “The fresh air is nice.”
My good-humored grandmother died on her bed in May. I had no way of knowing that, no way of divining that Mom had already flown to Holland to see her buried in a cemetery on the north edge of the village, where my grandfather had rested for years; or that Mom had spent three days in Europe without giving a number to Somalis or hinting to any pirate that she had left Redondo Beach. So the idea that she was waiting around for my imminent release in September—this wild idea that led to a fanciful, but not irrelevant, emotional rupture—must have been dreamed up by Dhuxul.
XIV
Several mornings later, after a bleak dream, I scribbled in my notebook:
Chicken Satay
Crushed peanuts, coconut milk, red chili, soy sauce, shallots, lime
Rice
Bashko served me a breakfast of sullen beans and oversweet tea. Someone had cooked them with well water. I stretched out on my mattress afterward with stomach cramps, and the dream made me want to see my grandmother again. The doubt that I would, and the grief, came in long uncertain waves.
I was trying not to let the guards see any emotion when Dhuxul limped into the room and handed me a battered shortwave radio.
Part 8
Stronger Than Dirt
I
Over a year and a half, I had missed a new pope, a new president of France, and Syria’s deepening civil war. Young terrorists had bombed the Boston Marathon, and Hurricane Sandy had flooded New York and New Jersey. Philip Roth had announced his retirement. Chinua Achebe, Margaret Thatcher, and Gore Vidal had died. All of it had rippled in the distance while I rotted on my mattress. It shouldn’t have mattered, but writers are social animals, whether they like it or not, and now, by holding the radio to my ear and pacing the floor of my room, I could pick up faint programs from the BBC.
My sense of the current date had weakened after the fistfights and confusion over the Naham 3’s calendar pages; it had never recovered. By listening to the World Service, I figured out the real date and compared it with tentative guesses I had scratched in my notebook. I was seventeen days off.
The hour of news in the morning added an interlude of distant conversation to my daily routine. On some days I caught another broadcast, Radio Sultanate of Oman, and I gathered from the existence of this station that Oman had an expatriate scene large enough to demand English-language programming. The music hour featured awful top-forty hits and an odd British host who read the local papers out loud. He gave us tales of cars washed away in wadi floods, twins abandoned in a Muscat park, a fisherman killed by a leaping stingray, and the beneficent public-spending habits of certain Omani princes—all recited in a rakish Midlands accent over the galloping, whistling theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
His name was Fike, apparently. He called himself “Fike on the Mike,” and he interpreted his top-forty mandate with a loose sense of time, digging back twenty or thirty years to play hits from the same week in 1986, or 1979, which didn’t always improve the song list but sometimes reminded me of home.
Blondie, Donna Summer, a band called M (which had one big hit, “Pop Muzik”), and Rod Stewart had dominated the radio in 1979, while various car-pool moms drove me and a pack of other kids to and from elementary school. Their songs playing over my tinny shortwave radio conjured the cracked asphalt, the square ungraceful cars, the fluorescent-lit supermarkets, and the cinemas sticky with spilled Coke that I still associated with 1970s L.A.
A few months before my father killed himself, we went to see Cannonball Run, a screwball comedy about street racers driving across America. The film was retrograde in every way, from its gender politics to its celebrity cast, but Dad loved it. Burt Reynolds was his favorite actor, and the jumpsuited women must have distracted him from his addictions. I loved it, too. Thinking about the movie in Galkayo loosened something, a resistance or a mistrust, maybe a lifelong defensive posture against the innocent, corrupted, awkward, hopeful, stagnant, sun-beaten suburb of my childhood.
I had astronaut wallpaper in my bedroom, and I liked model rockets, those cardboard tubes with plastic fins and parachute-loaded nose cones. We would set up the spindly launchpads in a brush-grown field behind our house in Northridge, and Dad came out to make sure we found a dirt patch sufficiently clear of weeds to avoid starting a brush fire. The rockets went Pssssssssssssssstt like a deflating balloon and shot into the cloud-streaked firmament over L.A. They popped apart near the top of the arc and came floating down, or twisting, depending on the state of their easily tangled chutes. The tangled ones landed hard and bounced in the weedy dirt.
I don’t know what Dad dreamed about back then, and I never asked. While he sank into addiction I was too busy resenting him. I remembered the bitter criticisms and the shouting, but at the same time, of course, he would have tilled his own dreams into my head. He wanted me to study science. I almost did study science. Maybe the instinct I had from age twelve that something besides a heart attack had sabotaged a man I considered all-powerful was what drove me to books. He would have been disappointed—he didn’t even like to read. His late notes to me were misspelled and half-coherent, either from booze or a pain-distracted mind, and for his son to become a writer would have been a catastrophe for his Northridge dreams, for all the love he had tried to express.
Maybe every suicide is an apocalyptic gesture, a last-ditch howl at the moon. Even the disciplined self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc had an element of drama, and sometimes I plotted the best way to go out in glory and gunfire. I had strong urges to do something irreversible. But it occurred to me that Mom didn’t deserve to have two men in her life die by suicide. An adult who committed suicide “did not obviously love you,” by my own definition, and on some afternoons this line of thinking was all that kept me alive. (Even such clear-sounding logic took an effort of will and cognition to arrange in my head. I wasn’t entirely sane.)
Around this time I started to pray. Reading the Bible on the Naham 3 had not returned me to strict religious belief, but prayer did help me articulate my most self-destructive emotions, so it became a way to balance my brain and remind myself of the forces raging overhead. It let me sort out what was, and wasn’t, within my power.
Writing in notebooks had the same effect, and I remembered that the poet Derek Walcott had once compared composition to prayer. “Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic,” he said in an interview. “If one thinks a poem is coming on—in spite of the noise of the typewriter, or the traffic outside the window, or whatever—you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity, so that what’s in front of you becomes more import
ant than what you are.”
This detached but inward-turning concentration became the most important aspect of prayer for me in those prison houses, rather than the belief in a personal God who could hear and intercede. “Renewing my anonymity” maintained my sanity. Epictetus meant nothing else when he wrote about removing your self from suffering. “If you regard yourself as a man and as a part of some whole,” Epictetus told his students, “it is fitting for you now to be sick and now to make a voyage and run risks, and now to be in want, and on occasion to die before your time. Why, then, are you vexed? Would you have someone else be sick of a fever now, someone else go on a voyage, someone else die?”
II
Sometimes I heard uncertain, hovering noises at night, and I woke up to find my guards listening in dead silence to a staticky phone for signals and interference. I was never in favor of cutting-edge surveillance technologies before I became a hostage, but now I fantasized about stealthy, invasive aircraft of any kind, even insect-size drones, those insidious but supposedly still experimental flying robots that could imitate beetles or dragonflies and cling to ceilings to spy on people.* On quiet, nervous nights when some force appeared to be listening, I would cross myself on my mattress and pray in a silence-breaking, conversational voice. The Somalis never interrupted. They respected prayer, though my noisiness made them uneasy. They thought drones could pick up voices. I decided to accept the pirates’ superstition and use this perhaps fanciful technology to my advantage. (Just in case.) During each prayer I included an explanation, in clear German, of my whereabouts and added a description of the house and yard and the specific location of my room. (Just in case.)
My prayers, in other words, had a practical side. The miseries of Somalia hadn’t stripped away a fundamental cussedness about my situation. Good and bad were reversed for hostages, as Rolly had pointed out—“We are like the devil, they are like God”—so a “Fuck you” mental orientation kept alive our sense of right and wrong. It was hard to balance this justified rage with the pirates’ arbitrary behavior, and it made nonviolent resistance tricky to practice. I wanted very much to be violent. So did my guards.
One day during Ramadan, for example, the men had confiscated my TV to watch it on the porch, where it blathered at high volume.
“Hey, can you turn that thing down?” I said in a loud voice.
“Michael! Be quiet!”
I lay in the heat on a thin woven mat in my sun-shot room; Dhuxul had gone to work. The TV was a constant source of tension. I couldn’t see why this supposed gift from the boss should make my life miserable while it eased the tedium for my guards.
“Can you turn it down?” I said again after a while.
“Shut up!”
Someone turned up the volume.
“TURN IT DOWN,” I roared, and Bashko came charging in with his rifle cocked. I felt ornery enough to fight him, just out of my head enough to leap to my feet and do whatever damage I could, so it took a deliberate act of will to keep myself quiet on the floor and watch to see how far Bashko would let his temper carry him. Violence unprovoked by a physical threat was against the rules for these men, and to test their limit I had to “renew my anonymity,” or remove myself from the equation, mentally, so I could locate a fulcrum point between my temper and my self-control.
Near the end of 2013, Nelson Mandela died, and the BBC’s coverage of his funeral lasted several days. The news electrified my guards. He was their hero, an African resistance leader who’d stood up to white supremacy. They sat there with rifles, like jailers, but identified with Mandela, who’d sat in jail. His greatness, of course, consisted in transcending both tribe and race, and the radio coverage led with his remarkable line from an interview after his release from prison in 1990. “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom,” he said on my battered little shortwave, “I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
Rage remained my natural element in Galkayo, so forgiveness was elusive. Mandela had noted in his autobiography that white South African lawyers and judges under apartheid considered him a “kaffir lawyer.” Kaffir is a nasty term in Afrikaans, close to nigger or coon; it derived from the Muslim slave trade. Arab traders used it to refer to non-Muslim African slaves, people it was halal to capture. The word had spread through European colonies in Africa as an epithet for slaves as early as the 1600s. I couldn’t compare my situation to Mandela’s—he’d suffered for the color of his skin over the better part of the twentieth century, without even leaving his country—but while I lived in Somalia, the label for me was galo, kafir, infidel, and in that sense I noticed a parallel.
Forgiveness for Mandela meant putting down a great deal of pride. Even when he was right, he’d learned to relinquish rage. He was a Methodist, but radio reports pointed out that he never trumpeted his beliefs, and by the time he died, no one could say in public where he went to church or how often. So the forgiveness he referred to as his real liberation from prison was nondenominational, human rather than distant, not mystical or in any sense out of reach.
I had time to think about that while I lay on the floor.
III
One day in early November I sat on the mattress at Dhuxul’s house and leaned over some scraps of newspaper, waving away flies in the hot afternoon. Bashko sat in front of his pile of khat. He looked hopped up and bemused. At last he asked a question.
“Michael,” he said. “America—dukhsi?”* Are there flies in America?
I shrugged. “Yes. But not like this.”
“Europe?”
“No same-same.”
He thought for a while and said, “Why? Nuclear?”
“Hah!”
Bashko wanted to know if the United States and Europe had rid their countrysides of insect pests by detonating nuclear bombs. “Interesting idea,” I said, and tried to explain that the real reason was less apocalyptic. Cleaner bathrooms and kitchens, I told him; no goats in the street. “Of course, parts of America still have many dukhsi,” I said. “But conditions are different.”
“Malaria?”
“Small-small. It depends on the health of the animals. And the people.”
Bashko asked me about camels, mules, cows, and goats, which led to questions about the most common meat. We discussed how to say “cow” and “chicken” in Somali—lo and digaag—and I may have drawn a sketch of the edible bird.
“Okay!” said Bashko.
This unusual conversation had consequences in California. Word swept the rumor kitchen that Michael’s favorite food was digaag, that I missed digaag more than anything, and Fuad informed my mother that I had made a special request for chicken, so the pirates would slaughter one for me if she wired a quick five hundred dollars.
“I told him no way,” Mom said.
Dhuxul’s prison house stood in an urban-pastoral part of Galkayo, next to houses as well as open fields, and it was common for us to hear bleating herds of goats, fussing pigeons, donkeys, chickens, and mating cats. After lunch that afternoon I heard a kitten cry and glanced up from my notebook. I’d never heard such a helpless noise inside the compound.
“Bisad?” I asked Bashko. Cat?
“Yes.”
“Mother?”
“Finished,” said Bashko.
I didn’t want to interfere if the mother had just left on a hunt. But I had fish and powdered milk.
We listened to another hour of ragged crying before I asked to see the animal. Bashko disappeared into a garbage-strewn kitchen in one corner of the compound, semidetached from the house. He returned with a frightened young cat the size of my hand, with orange, flea-ridden tiger fur.
The men watched in fascination. I opened a can of tuna and set it on the floor. The kitten caught a whiff, buried his face in the meat, and let out a growl of pleasure so profound it made the pirates laugh. Good sign. A cat with an appetite for solid food was no longer a suckling. I thought he might like some milk.
> There was no bowl or dish, so I asked Hashi to use a kitchen knife to cut the bottom off a plastic water bottle and make a small, rough-edged plastic tray. I mixed some milk and served it to the kitten, who lapped it up, shoving the plastic around the floor.
The cat must have been three or four weeks old. Male or female, I couldn’t tell—everything was too furry—but I named the creature Jack because his fur was orange and the date was close to Halloween. After his can of unexpected tuna fish, Jack settled at one end of my mattress and fell asleep.
A stray cat was vermin to the guards, so Bashko, Hashi, and Farrah found my sentimentalism amusing. Madobe came out of his room and stared at me in disgust.
Once Jack had lost his innocence about seafood, we became good friends. He listened for my chains in the mornings; after my dawn visits to the toilet, he would mew and come running. Dhuxul noticed, but instead of banning the animal, he scolded the men in a dead and droning voice. The kitten could stay for now.
The Desert and the Sea Page 30