Impossible Odds

experience and felt a doozy coming over me then: the tight constriction of the chest that felt like suffocation, the need to break free into clear air. I was painfully aware that in the past these groups have been quite keen on selling off their captives to other groups when negotiations didn’t go well. Ourswere apparently going so badly the men were beating each other up and spending a lot of time arguing about their “Amer-ee-cahn” captive.
    Poul and I had already agreed: Whenever we can, we’ll try to stick with the devil we know, meaning it was better to stay with this group, crazy and dysfunctional as they seemed, than to take a chance on the mental stability of the next group’s leader. We were, at least, alive so far. Poul had not been badly beaten and I hadn’t been raped. It was hard to imagine better treatment from some other group. If we left this one there was no place to go but down.
    They stopped the cars. There was no way of telling why. Someone pulled the doors open, and they ordered Poul and me to get out. With my anxiety mounting I saw them wave Poul back to the last of the four cars.
    They’re separating us! Why?
    I began to cry and beg them not to split us up. Poul pleaded with them to be human while I clung to his arm. Did they understand us? Probably not the words but certainly the intention. It did no good. They ripped me away from him and escorted him out of there. He looked back and called to me to “be strong,” and then they were gone with him.
    The sense of time slows down and there is the actual, physical feeling of my stomach dropping like a bowling ball down an endless well. I’m keeping vomit choked back because it will surely trigger their outrage, giving them an excuse to explode. They all appear to be burning with an urgency so deep that it would be a relief to them to fall into slaughter mode and feed us their choice of knives or bullets.
    So they’ve separated us now. They spent the evening talking about the “Amer-ee-cahn” and glaring at me. My God—Jabreel has disappeared. Poul is off with others, for some reason. I think he’s back there now in the last of the four cars. We don’t know if we’ll see each other again.
    I focus on my breathing and teeter on the edge of a drowning panic.And because I pray, I call out to God in my heart, please make them kill me quickly. Whatever they are going to do, have mercy on me and make them kill me first.
    On top of losing my only companion in this grotesque experience, I instantly felt the loss of his point of view on things. Poul had so many years in the region, his study of the intricate clan structure gave him insights into their status structure, their volatility, their possible reactions to the stress of bargaining in a hostage situation like this one.
    Plus, he was one of us. On the most basic level, he was a companion, no matter what other attributes he had. His overall worldview was vital in helping me retain my own. When there is a genuine “us,” countless tiny references back and forth are instantly understood, confirming dual membership in some meaningful slice of humanity. With Poul gone there was no “us” left. Now it was only them, and they were many, all with the eyes of the heavy khat users that seem dead and angry at the same time. It reduced their behavior to insistent monologues with nobody in particular, cackling and flashing their green teeth, then later crashing and flopping down to sleep in any spot at all.
    People say the threat of immediate death concentrates the mind. I found it worked too well for me. A jerky freeze-frame of bizarre and terrifying moments ran past in a strobe. Each one landed a punch. Sneering faces. Screamed orders. Gun barrels waving.
    Before long the agreement I had made with Poul about not allowing despair to take control of us began to feel starry-eyed to me, foolish. I couldn’t help but look at our situation and think , Oh, I am so screwed. We’re in this way too far.
    To them I was a compliant captive who tried to do nothing to provoke them. But in truth I was more like a human radio beacon. I beamed out to the universe, out to any source in this world, in the next world, to please stop this. Somehow, put a stop to all this.
    I struggled for some evidence of logic or clear reasoning in theirbehavior, for anything that would bolster me in rejecting the prospect of my destruction on these ridiculous terms. But I discovered how hard it is to think coherent