Impossible Odds

some nameless desert town. This vehicle had tinted windows, which helped keep us from public view as long as we were moving quickly enough, and as always I kept my hijab on while we were away from the camp, which also helped a little.
    But once the car stopped, anybody who took more than a passing glance could see there were two white people inside. This is rare in that region. The kidnappers pulled to a stop in town, either to actually conduct business or simply to leave us in the street on display, and it didn’t take long for the locals to realize there was a show to be had inside that vehicle: two white people, two Westerners, two kidnap victims being held for ransom—we didn’t need to understand their words to grasp their thinking. Men of all ages and a few females as well surrounded the car and gawked at us. They seemed to regard our misery as some sort of triumph for them.
    The oddest thing about such an experience wasn’t just the menace of it, since we were surrounded by deadly threats all the time; it was the blank eyes of the people staring back at us. I learned what it is to be a freshly captured zoo animal, trapped inside a tiny cage with nothing left to do but watch the creatures staring in at you.I saw no sense of recognition from anyone outside those windows that they were looking at a fellow human being. I merely saw the idle curiosity of unfeeling people scoping out an interesting pair of unusual animals.
    This particular crowd didn’t directly menace us; they probably feared the guns of our captors too much to do anything like that. They were merely indifferent to our situation and to whatever human commonality we shared with them. They didn’t gawk at us necessarily as people they wanted to see dead, they just made it clear our survival was a matter of indifference. It was our only visit to that place and did nothing to make me want to return. The most important lesson that day was to never forget that the silent roadway stretching off into the distance was only an illusion of freedom. In fact it represented nothing more than an opportunity for everything to quickly get much worse.
    •  •  •
    Abdi’s disappearance had little impact on the amount of casual cruelty displayed in that unhappy camp. The duty just seemed to fall to the next guy in line. In this fashion we greeted the New Year. I rose early at sunrise that morning, grumpy over pick-your-reason but glad to have a chance to make bread again that day. My first item of business was to get water heated over the fire and make tea, which could have been the beginning of a passable morning if we actually got a chance to have tea with sugar and dip our campfire sand bread in it.
    We did not. The camp was favored by a visit from Abdilahi, the same young boy I saw on that first stinking day of this ordeal, the one who used to wear one of our mine awareness graduation bracelets, the one rumored to have killed three people already. His erratic personality and vicious flashes of khat -fueled temper made me glad he was usually someplace else. Though our code name forhim was “Crack Baby,” it wasn’t much of a code. If any of the other guys spoke English, they would have recognized exactly who the name Crack Baby referred to.
    There was a genuine “chicken or egg” conundrum in this remnant of a departed child. I wondered how badly scrambled his brain had already been, through trauma, disease, or genetic glitches, when he discovered khat and managed to get in the way of a daily supply. Who could say how many bales of leaves had passed through this kid? I tried to recall, had anybody ever studied the long-terms effects of khat use on a brain so young? But philosophy didn’t matter here for Abdilahi, our Crack Baby, the miniature trouble zombie. Everything appeared to have been burned out of his brain except for a surprising capacity for meanness and provocation. Crack Baby walked through life pecking at trouble the same way a bird pecks at the ground: randomly, relentlessly, and without a moment’s thought.
    This morning, sorry to say, our Crack Baby was right there among us, swaggering and talking at a pointlessly loud volume and glancing around to lock eyes with his next target. Maybe I did something to draw his attention, maybe I just won the backward lottery that day. He and another youngster with the common name of Hassan were the only other people stirring in the camp then, and I’d had plenty of opportunities to see how