Impossible Odds

feeling like a bag of mud. I had lost fifteen or twenty pounds and my bony body couldn’t seem to retain heat anymore. It would have been some consolation to be able to see my mom’s star, but that was no option on this odd night when nothing was visible. So I conjured up images of her instead and projected them out into the solid black sky, using it as the world’s largest movie screen.
    Even though I couldn’t see Mom’s star, I sent her my deepest feelings, my longing for the depth of love I once felt from her. The yearning for it wasn’t diminished after she was taken from us.
    Mom, I just don’t think I can make it through any more of this. Whatever the plan for all this may be, I don’t think it includes my survival. I think this is what dying feels like. I’m so sorry, I know you would want me to stand strong. I know you would want me to believe Erik can find a way to make rescuers come, and I’ve tried to hold up in the face of this ordeal, but I don’t know anymore. I would never agree to leave Erik behind, but I can feel this body dying. Mom, you felt the shadow of death coming over you, and now it’s trying to tear me out of this world. Maybe that’s why the desert seems so dark tonight.
    I’m not asking to be saved from this anymore. If I can’t survive this, please let me know I can somehow reach Erik with my love for him. It’s going to devastate him if I never get home. He’ll face such terrible loneliness, and it will be much worse than what I’ve been feeling, because he’ll have no hope at all of getting our lives back again. I’ve lived on that hope for so long, but it’s melting away now.
    If there’s no hope left for Erik and me as a couple, can you help me cross over? I think I could die without fear if I could sense you there with me.
    Noises stopped me. My concentration up to then had been nearly hypnotic, but these irritating little noises broke it. Thosefaint animal sounds, insect sounds, whatever they were. The damned noises were nearly faint enough to ignore, but they hovered right at the edge of my hearing.
    A tiny cracking of a thin twig, one dry branch of a bush scraping across another, a bouncing pebble. Like feathers tickling away at my ears, they refused to leave me to my thoughts.
    “Aggghhh!” I said it out loud in spite of myself. This was really the end. A bunch of weirdly lethargic captors lay all around me, I couldn’t see a thing under this thick darkness, and I couldn’t even take advantage of the silence to reach out to my mother’s spirit without having my attention tugged by whatever was out there.
    I decided the unusually deep darkness was fitting. Here in the final stages of this long execution by starvation and medical neglect, there really wasn’t anything to see anyway.
    More little noises. What’s out there? Frustration and anger made me bold enough to stand up on the mat and switch on the flashlight. I played the beam all around the camp, looking for the source of the noises. Nothing.
    I wondered again, was I hearing anything new? Or had my mental state simply combined with the darkness to make me start hallucinating?
    I directed the beam around in a full circle one more time: still nothing, only the inert forms of a bunch of desperate men sleeping off their drug stupor, men who only used the drugs to pad the harshness of their lives within their broken society, who were playing this deadly kidnapping game as their best attempt to feed their families. My heart would go out to them, except they were attempting to do this by slowly grinding me to death in a bizarre game of “chicken” with my family and employers, to see how much of my misery it might take to pull maximum money out of them.
    Their main question at this point was nothing more than whether I could survive long enough to make their game pay off. It occurred to me then that the only satisfaction I might see in thisthing could be my dying knowledge that my death itself would screw up their plans and leave them with nothing.
    I snapped off the light and lay back down, but the “consolation” of thinking my death would cost them their gamble was cold comfort. The more rational thought of leaving Poul alone to their torments was enough to keep me from feeling any satisfaction at the thought of my own demise. There had been no offers of millions from the Danish side, as with the American side, and I knew there never would be. So once these desperados accepted the fact that I