The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  “We’re happy to see you, man,” he said with a smile. “There’s some sandwiches at the front, if you want. Once we take off, you can walk up there.”

  Absentmindedly I let my pink blanket drop to the floor. He pointed and smiled through his beard.

  “I’ve been lookin’ at pictures of that thing for a couple of years,” he said.

  I brightened, but it was too early for penetrating questions.

  “It feels good to be in one of these big planes,” I said, “instead of hearing them over the house all the time.”

  Kevin laughed.

  We flew north again, to Djibouti, for some bureaucratic reason. “We have to fly to Djibouti first because . . .” Kevin tried to explain over the roaring noise. “Then we’ll go to Kenya.” I just nodded along. A young blond airman sat next to me. The knees of his khaki suit had thick padding, which reminded me of what Derek had said about sharp rocks.

  “You guys paratroopers?” I said.

  “Yep,” said the young airman.

  They’d landed within twenty minutes of us in Mogadishu; the C-130 must have shadowed Derek’s plane. Someone had prepared for shit to go wrong.

  This plane ride lasted deep into the evening. For paperwork reasons, I crisscrossed East Africa twice—up to Djibouti, down to Nairobi—and hurtling through the darkness like that, free but bewildered, unsure of how the next few days would look, elevated my blood pressure and made my heart slog with excitement and uncertain hope.

  We landed in Nairobi after dark. I stayed with a BKA officer and his family in a quiet, banana-grown suburb. This BKA man—I’ll call him Heinrich—had stocked the fridge with German beer. “Men always want beer when they get out,” he said. Heinrich saw me coming from miles away.

  His compound had a sunlit garden thick with fruit trees and flowers. I lived in a guest room outside, detached from the main house, where I could take a shower and shave, sleep when I wanted, and make real coffee in a little machine. Two turtles roamed the yard and coupled in the sunshine.* I moved through this gorgeous place with the shocked eyes of a zombie, not quite trusting it, hoping it was more than a dream. My blood pressure, which had already impressed two doctors, refused to go down. Even in this lush corner of Kenya I woke up with my heart racing three or four times a night. I made a note in my journal: “I move from one thing to another like a fish. My brain is prone to cramp, and so is my chest. White-hot rage grips me sometimes.” But in this house I began to relax.

  An FBI psychologist who had boarded the plane in Djibouti stayed near me for three days. He was African American and sweet tempered, a bulky former Marine, and he had the rumbling, dry sense of humor of a combat vet. When we went out in public for lunch, at the Westlands mall, my brain wound up like a spring and I started to scrutinize every stranger with a fierce and panicky alertness that I couldn’t seem to control. This adrenaline clarity reminded me of a veteran I had interviewed years ago in California, an ex-soldier who’d tried to explain his mental condition to me. “The first thing I noticed when you walked into my office,” he said, some thirty years after his tours in Vietnam, “is that you were unarmed.”

  I turned to the FBI shrink, whose name was Carl.

  “Am I hypervigilant?” I said.

  “Maybe!” he said with a wide grin.

  After considering this for some time, I said, “Are you here because I might have PTSD?”

  He answered, “We don’t like to put a label on anything.”

  I called my mother and we had an early, excited reunion on the phone. TV trucks had surrounded the house in Redondo Beach. Since she had kept the story quiet, my release took the L.A. media by surprise, and even now, except for a simple statement from her, they had little to report. I was in no mood for interviews. I wouldn’t have known what to say. I felt easily overwhelmed, and my powers of decision making had atrophied. I didn’t trust myself at all. Even the simplest choices posed by the FBI and BKA people were confounding. The puzzles had started before we left Mogadishu: Did I want to lie down? Was I hungry? Did I need a tranquilizer? Did I want to fly home to Berlin, or California? A State Department representative during our layover in Djibouti had waited for me in an office tent, eager to show me a “privacy waiver.” Did I want to sign this form or not? (How the hell did I know?) Did I want to talk to the media, or should the government make a statement on my behalf? For a man who’d lived in the corner of a concrete room for more than two years, who’d lost his knack for interpreting ordinary social cues, who had felt the burden of making the world worse whenever he did make a choice, treading back into regular life was not like taking wing but like walking through a thick substance, like moving through water on the ocean floor.

  Someone from Heinrich’s house ordered a pair of provisional glasses for me from a Nairobi optometrist, based on what I could remember of my own prescription. My numbers were off, but the glasses sharpened the garden and let in a flood of baffling, vivid detail whenever we drove into town. I could see the ocher volcanic soil crumbling along the roadsides, the deep-shadowed banana groves, the beat-up cars in dusty shimmering gridlock when herds of brown oxen crossed Mombasa Road; the brilliant, burning Kenyan sky.

  I preferred not to wear my glasses.

  II

  A reporter from Der Spiegel named Matthias Gebauer met me at the German embassy in Nairobi on the second day, to see how I was. He happened to mention a shootout, as if I had heard about it, a massacre among my pirate bosses that had killed several people.

  I blinked.

  “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “In Galkayo this morning,” he said. “I just read it on Twitter.”

  Der Spiegel had involved itself in my case and helped my family from the first day, although they never had to, legally speaking, and Matthias was considerate and kind. He told me what he knew about the shootout.

  Two days after I left Galkayo, several pirate bosses held a summit meeting at a yellow house belonging to “Abdi Yare,” a house I didn’t recognize, although it had a typical steeply raked blue metal roof and an arched gate squeezed between two businesses, recognizable in photographs as an urban building, with ads painted on the yellow walls. Dhuxul and Abdi Yare* were evidently inside the house when the incident started. A second group of bosses “rolled up heavy” in SUVs, according to people who described the scene to me later. Ali Duulaay and Ahmed Dirie, the rotten-toothed man from my first months as a hostage, stepped out, along with Ahmed Dirie’s brother and a fourth man called Abdi Ganeey.* They had belonged to my kidnap team, and they’d overseen my guard team for most of 2012. But after my leap from the Naham 3, another faction had watched me, led by Dhuxul and Abdi Yare, and these men had received the ransom cash. Duulaay and the others were outsiders now.

  Each faction had a loyal group of guards. Rival pirates aimed their weapons at one another in a complicated standoff, for mutual security. One of them, Farhaan—the pirate who’d let me watch Captain Phillips*—aimed at Duulaay’s head. For reasons I still don’t understand, Farhaan pulled the trigger. So the sadistic boss who had tormented Rolly with a cigarette while he dangled upside down from a tree, who had clouted me more than once for no reason—maybe the cruelest man at a gathering of cruel men—died on the spot. Gunfire unleashed by the others killed Ahmed Dirie, his brother, and Abdi Ganeey. Abdi Yare was injured. Dhuxul, on his wooden leg, pulled him to safety. “Farhaan the petty pirate ran away,” a source in Somalia wrote. “He is on the run for fear of a clan vendetta (hunted by Ali Duulaay clan mates).” Some rumors placed him afterward in South Africa. “He scraped off a few thousand dollars for offering his guard services.”

  Friends of Abdi Yare drove the injured pirate leader to Mohamed Garfanji’s house in El Hur, on the Galmudug coast, to recuperate. But within three days, Abdi Yare—whoever he actually was—died of his wounds.

  Five men who had tormented me for almost three years had vanished like a wisp of steam. I felt staggered, bewildered, relieved. A raid killing Bashko or t
he other guards would have weighed on my conscience, but hearing about this shootout left no trace of grief. The bosses had excused themselves from the world; the scent of cash had roused them to an ecstasy of self-destruction more precise than any American raid.

  III

  I flew home to Berlin with two BKA agents and three people from the FBI, and we stopped first for a layover in the Vegas-like circus of the airport at Abu Dhabi, with its faux-mosque architectural fantasies and its murmuring midnight crowds. The weird stimulus of this airport put me on edge. While we waited near a food court, I wondered how it would be to see Mom again, and I wondered if I would see Oma at all.

  From Abu Dhabi we took a late flight to Berlin, and the attendants served a two-course meal. Between courses, mine asked, “Would you like a change of silverware?” and the question lay so far outside my recent experience that I just sort of wagged my jaw; I had no idea what to say.

  I was in a fugue state, dissociated from my old life and self even while I returned to it. We landed around dawn at Tegel Airport, on a gray, fogbound morning in Berlin, where the German government had set up a small reception with snacks and drinks. My mother was supposed to land around the same time, and we were going to be reunited among various FBI and German government officers; but Mom’s plane was delayed. So after some nosh and paranoid chitchat—I had absolutely no idea who anybody was—a BKA man drove me to my apartment.

  The familiar streets of Berlin were fog- and drizzle-smeared, like a flickering dream from a prison house. I had trouble believing they were real. For three or four days I had used my natural languages again, and the flood of detail they brought to my brain was overwhelming, like the detail through my provisional glasses. Suzy met me at the door with a key, and it seemed incredible that she still existed, incredible that my friends and apartment were still intact. My uncle in Cologne had maintained the expenses. I just opened the door and sat down. A group of friends had emptied my clothes from the drawers and closet, for some reason that Suzy explained but I found hard to understand. But the brownish cobblestones and the Space Age street clock on Helmholtzplatz hadn’t moved, and the neighborhood looked almost unchanged. The thick trees outside my kitchen wavered in the autumn drizzle.

  Suzy had left a postcard, which helped me understand about the clothes: “MIKE! This is your housekeeping team—Suzy, Daryl, Aimee, John, and Desmond. We are in the middle of removing MOTHS from your worldly goods. All the textiles in the flat need to be either drycleaned or washed at 60 degrees + C. Some of your clothes are with us, being laundered. We are so happy you are home and can’t wait to see you and give you your clothes back.”

  My friends had cleaned the place in early 2014 and finished off the chore with an improvised but melancholy celebration—they got drunk and left a bunch of bottles behind. These bottles remained in the kitchen until the BKA called Suzy a few days before my release. The housekeeping team returned, to clear the bottles, but Berlin moths had turned my apartment into a summer breeding ground, as Berlin moths will do. So the housekeeping team took some of my clothes home to throw into their washing machines. Out of startled gratitude and delight, I invited everyone out for drinks—the first coming-home party full of nonstrangers that I navigated in my weird fugue state—and it was wonderful. Suzy, Daryl, Aimee, John, and Desmond each presented me with a massive bag of clean laundry at the bar.

  Seeing my mother again, at a Berlin hotel, was a system shock. Part of me couldn’t grasp that someone I loved and remembered from so long ago could stand there again in real life. She looked older, but spry and flushed with emotion, vulnerable as a girl. I looked wraithlike and hollow eyed. One of the first odd stories she told was about seeing the moon in California. “I used to look up at it at night and wonder if you could see it, too.” I smiled and told her about the handful of times I had noticed it from Abdi Yare’s House. For two years and eight months we had shared no other common reference.

  She had lit candles for me in church; she wore a new crucifix. Like several hostages I’d met, she had leaned back on her childhood religion. For two years and eight months, my mother had been captive, too.

  It was weird to think, in the sterile room of this brand-new Holiday Inn, how close I had wandered to suicide. I didn’t mention it, but I remembered the years we had gone to church in Northridge, the hot suburban streets, and the neighboring apartment complex where Dad had ended his life. Mom had remained so evenhanded on the phone for 977 days because her primary instinct was to protect me—the same reason she had maintained a falsehood about Dad’s heart attack. She hadn’t told a malicious lie. But the line of logic that kept me alive on my worst days in Galkayo—that Mom didn’t deserve to have two men self-destruct—made it fortunate, for both of us, that I had bothered to figure things out.

  Her psychological strength had faltered only near the end, so a professional negotiator had stepped in. Robert, or Bob, was a Californian who worked on missionary-hostage cases in Africa. He’d helped liberate a group of Kenyan medical workers from Ali Duulaay earlier in 2014. So he knew the right personalities, and at the FBI’s instigation, he had volunteered to help. “Abdi Yare came down really quickly at the end with his demand,” Mom said. “We still don’t know why. Until July he was still demanding four million.”

  I told her about the stirrings of labor unrest among my guards, and she nodded. “We didn’t know if it was some disagreement, or if things were maybe not going so well for all the pirates, but when they went down like that in September, we knew there was some kind of urgency.”

  Mom said Denis Lyon had followed my case with energy and intelligence as a healthy man in his midseventies, but a stroke had disrupted his brain in 2012, and he’d spent more than a year at a rehabilitation center. “His speech was totally gone,” Mom said. “He could only utter noises. He would recognize his family and friends, but he couldn’t talk to them.”

  Denis died, after a second stroke, in 2013. Unbelievable. I’d spent countless hours with family and friends in my imagination, and the only surprise more intense than coming home to find everyone alive was coming home to find some of them dead.

  “How is Oma?” I said lightly.

  “Michael, she died last year. She wanted so much to hold on.”

  I started to cry.

  Oma had slipped away while I baked in a hot prison house on a sweaty mattress, while my guards lit cigarettes and fussed over their fucking khat. Part of me knew it, part of me had already grieved, but the news still made me want to rip up the ground and go looking for her. I wasn’t done with my grandmother. There were no words powerful enough. Pirates did the same thing to seafarers from all over the world, of course. Untold stories of hostage families from Senegal to Vietnam, from Argentina to India, involved quiet tragedies like these, and such intimate losses were the real ransom extracted by kidnappers and other traffickers in human flesh.

  IV

  Those early weeks of freedom consisted of drizzle as well as beautiful, crisp days with a fine autumn sunlight. Living in Berlin again was like pulling on an old pair of jeans. It felt familiar, even though certain changes were hard to miss. A grim, gravelly matter-of-factness about the city had retreated; my neighborhood had more lights, and fancier restaurants, and people were obsessed with fantasy-minded TV shows I had never heard of, like Game of Thrones. Along with the posh and flashy changes in Berlin there was an air of dissatisfaction and rebellion, as if the West had never moved through this cycle before, as if it were all new again, and no one could even imagine that the prosperity of the sixties had had something to do with its hipster discontents. Young men wore beards like the one I had just shaved off.

  Berlin is a walking city, and when I tried to run errands on my emaciated legs, my ankles and knees swelled up like balloons. Underexercised ligaments protested like creaky hinges. For a month I felt crippled; I kept to a walking radius of about two city blocks. But the FBI wanted a long series of debriefings to bulk up its file against my kidnappers, so I had to a
nswer questions every day for the first three weeks at the embassy in central Berlin. I couldn’t even walk to the subway. So they arranged a driver, and the man who picked me up every morning was a genial field agent who’d spent time as a paratrooper in Afghanistan. He told me about jumping from C-130s and doing mountain training in the snow. He seemed to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress, because he ran at the mouth, and after a day or two, frankly, I learned to do the same. We jabbered at each other in the car, and it was therapeutic as hell.

  The FBI and the BKA both wanted to hear my version of the story, to fill in gaps in evidence they had gathered, and to prosecute pirates if they could. I was happy to tell it. Discussing the nightmare with people who knew it from a different angle was useful. I learned to talk at length in English again; I learned to express things I had only witnessed or felt. Some days, of course, were exhausting, and after one difficult debriefing, I sat slumped in the FBI car, feeling dazed and numb. “When you’ve told it a hundred times,” my friend at the wheel said, “you’ll get better.”

  I came out of Somalia with a quick temper and a tendency to panic in social situations—my fugue state included a flaming protective mental boundary, a firewall to limit stimulation. The easiest remedy, at first, was exercise. Emotion is a form of energy, as I’d learned in the ocean on the Naham 3, and pouring sorrow and rage into a regimen at the gym was the readiest way to use it up. I felt hair-trigger delicate for at least three months, not beyond the reach of suicide. But body and mind are not separate creatures, and physical recovery helped uncramp my brain.

  Carl’s refusal to label my condition “PTSD” also helped. “We don’t wanna pathologize anything,” he said, and for me it was healthier not to intellectualize my recovery, not to turn the rage and grief into a separate complex to recover from. I focused on growing stronger, not on being “happy.” Mirth was no longer the point. A great change had rolled through me in Somalia that I still found hard to articulate. Parts of me felt shriveled and twisted, and sometimes, when I untwisted them, I fell under a foul depression that was like a stench coming out of a cave. But I knew better than to order my feelings around. In Somalia I had learned to take moments of happiness however they arrived. The Latin term amor fati, or “love of your fate”—phrased by Nietzsche, stolen from Epictetus,* a principle developed over thousands of years of European philosophy—happens to turn up, again and again, in traditions from Buddhism to Islam. Love your fate or get bulldozed by it.