Impossible Odds

escape plan if allowed to communicate. They were probably right about that, but even with the clarity of hindsight I can’t imagine how we would have pulled it off. I think the forced silence was mainly directed at us as another mechanism of control by domination. They knew we hated being isolated, so of course that’s what they did. This kept us sealed off from the outside and from one another as the two victims.
    We remained at our next stopover point for several days, a spot the men called the “Banda place.” It was essentially a large thatched roof mounted on tall poles. We were permitted under the roof’s shelter in the daytime. That was notable because it was the only time we weren’t kept under the scraggly tree branches during daylight hours.
    Here, too, they marched us down near an abandoned goat pen and once again made us sleep out in the open air. I could never see any point to it, but they were adamant. No matter how the day was going otherwise, as soon as darkness fell they wanted us clear of all structures, whether natural or human, and out under the open sky.
    Abdi was the camp sergeant, I guess. He acted as the point man in the rare moments when something needed to get done. Nevertheless, his green teeth revealed a man who loved his khat leaves at least as much as the other enthusiasts. Thus the even-handed logic necessary for competent command was a slippery concept for him. He could chew through an entire kilo of the tender shoots ina single day. Protocol itself was all the more tiresome to a hyperventilated brain.
    As long as Abdi had plenty to chew, he loved to talk. Listening wasn’t Abdi’s strong suit, but under the stimulant effect of a cheek full of khat, he could run his mouth nonstop while keeping his hands busy puffing on cigarettes and sucking down quantities of Coca-Cola.
    Communication, it turned out, wasn’t always desirable. Abdi’s command of English allowed him to make the depths of his lunacy clear. They revealed a cauldron of rage.
    His face was pocked by acne and his voice perpetually hoarse from shouting from within his constant state of tension. His mood swings were like nothing I had ever seen, cycling from chattiness to confrontational anger. He appeared to suffer from a massive bipolar disorder. I quickly came to regret being able to understand him, and instead longed for the pleasantly meaningless babble of an unfamiliar language.
    He enjoyed discussing philosophy for as long as the khat supply held out, and when he got wound up tightly enough he felt compelled to offer words of wisdom. Sometimes he liked to riddle us with philosophical questions and then stare through us while we tried to answer. His eyes were completely empty, focused on some unseen faraway point while the imagination raged under the stimulant effect after chewing so long and so hard. It’s the common link between khat users: eyes empty of warmth but present in a vaguely malicious anger.
    In their laughter there was even a specific sound to the khat high with these men. Khat laughter: a frequent, nearly constant chuckling, done with an inflection to the sound that effectively portrays sneering and mockery. If it’s coming from you, a nasal-sounding cackle will start up when your brain waves hit a certain frequency. You will then maintain that frequency until the khat runs out, or exhaustion claims you and you have to flop over and sleep like the dead—and then get up and do it again.
    The cackling is a constant declaration of cleverness and an expression of the khat -generated sensation of “victory” over anyone else, everyone else, over all of it. An attacker can beat that khat user down with a billy club, and he’ll still go right on cackling over how many opportunities to inflict further damage the attacker missed, thus proving the khat user to be the more clever of the two.
    One moment Abdi would be on the phone screaming orders about the daily delivery of khat leaves for all the men to chew, demanding more cigarettes to help fill his boredom, or haranguing someone on the other end to refill our supplies of canned tuna and biscuits. With the next intake of breath, Abdi could become curiously peaceful. In his calmer state he reverted to his philosopher role, with a series of questions he liked to pose to us. One of his favorites was, “Which are the four directions of the earth?” After the first few fruitless arguments about the correct answer, we learned to respond the same way