Impossible Odds

me. He began to sleep next to me on my mat. I felt certain he was inching closer each night. He was a shark sizing up its prey. I knew him well enough by then to be certain he would kill me in a fit of rage if I humiliated him in front of the others by screaming at him and fighting him off.
    But Jabreel, the lesser physical threat, was the one I actually feared more. I felt there was no choice but to allow him to takeadvantage of me, up to a point, for the singular purpose of getting us out of there. The art of the dance was in maintaining a line that was not to be crossed.
    Jabreel sort of played along. Once I woke up to find him sitting next to me. His hand was reaching under my blanket and touching my legs. I pulled away, “turning in my sleep,” and he faded off—for the moment.
    So we found ourselves in a twisted and lethal version of a game: the casual avoidance of the sort of unwanted sexual advances that continue long past the point where the abuser might credibly claim a “misunderstanding.” Nobody was misunderstanding anything in my little corner of our makeshift camp.
    His erratic behavior and level of drug use had long since convinced me he was capable of destroying half of this group’s investment of money and labor, namely me, over sex. I could tell something was holding him back from cracking open in a full-out sexual attack, but short of that, he behaved like a Billy goat crossed with a whiney adolescent.
    Whenever Jabreel was in our company and had no opportunity to misbehave, he liked to draw attention by spinning tales of his important NGO work, expounding on the vast difference between himself and “these pirates.” But even in those obvious situations where I was a hands-off commodity, he tended to simper around me in childish intoxication. He was developing “hungry eyes,” staring at me while he stretched a toothless smile across his face and aimed it at me. It was like staring into a gaping wound.
    “Jesses. I come America live with you.”
    “No, Jabreel. I keep telling you, I’m married.”
    “I live with you and Erik . . . you hear me, Jesses? You hear me?”
    “Yes. I hear you, Jabreel. I’m still married. I love my husband.”
    “But I love Jesses. When Colonel talk to me about you, we call you ‘lei,’ you know that? In Somali is ‘golden.’ I marry to you, all these men wish to be me!”
    “Jabreel, think. Think! If you come to America, how will you get your khat ?”
    Blank face. Good. That shut him up while he mulled it over. The silence wouldn’t last, but out there we were taking what we could get.
    •  •  •
    After that quick phone call, we spent the next several days camping at that same nowhere site. We maintained the usual routine of being forced to hide under tree foliage by day and then force-walked out into the open at night, there to sort-of-sleep while I kept one eye open for Jabreel. When he came slithering around, the only control I could exert was to ignore his advances as much as possible, and then when ignoring him didn’t work, resist him with a gut-wrenching show of false humility.
    “No, no.” I was careful to speak in a soothing tone. “I’m married, Jabreel. So are you.”
    When he began to shrug at the mention of his wife, I switched to a religious appeal. “What does your religion tell you, Jabreel?” I hoped to engage him as a man of faith, since he did, after all, pray five times a day.
    Now on the heels of seeing my hopes of having a baby vanish, I was dodging impregnation by a man with a strict prayer schedule—or any of these other men. To me, the cruel irony of a forced pregnancy from this would be too foul to endure.
    It was about at that point when it struck me that I still had one big choice available. I could, if I so chose, die fighting the bastard off. Before I allowed him to torture me into giving in, I could force him to copulate with a corpse. Leave him to pay for his perversity with the outrage of the others, once they realized their hope for ransom was dead. If I dared, I could do that to him.
    It’s never been in my nature to think such thoughts. I tend to avoid confrontation. But in that narrow list of choices left to me, there was nothing left besides how I chose to die. Rather, it was down to whether I chose to die on my own terms, or if I was prepared to allow them to decide my fate according to their whims and the quality of their khat supply.
    I didn’t expect Jabreel’s fear of the other men