A House in the Sky (32 page)

He pronounced the word the way the rest of them did, with a fearsome kind of pride, treadling through all four syllables,
SO-mal-eee-ah.

We drove on toward whatever was going to happen. It felt to me like I was falling through space, tumbling through a vast textureless emptiness, with no holds, no chance of self-arrest. After a few minutes, the human scene outside the car window fell away, the people and shanties and strewn garbage, and then we were in the countryside, on a paved road, planing over a lightless, utterly still piece of earth. After a while, Ahmed turned the wheel and the car veered onto a sandy track. I didn’t know what to tell myself. I couldn’t for one second imagine what was ahead. Would there be a desert exchange with Al-Shabaab—me for a pile of cash? Was it possible they were going to kill me and leave me, as a way of pressuring Nigel’s family to pay more and pay quickly? My mind lit fires and then put them out. Ahmed calmly spun the steering wheel as if he knew precisely where he was headed, dodging bushes that reared up under our headlights, his tires flinging sand. In forty-five minutes of driving, he hadn’t uttered a word.

Without warning, he hit the brakes and threw the car into park. I heard him shut off the engine. A single silent beat passed in the car. I started to cry again. I heard myself talking, filling the space. “What’s happening? Why are we here? What are you doing? Don’t hurt me, please, don’t.”

Nobody in the car turned to look at me. One by one they pushed open their doors and climbed out. I sat in the backseat, crumpled over my knees, feeling like I was going to vomit. Someone’s hands pulled at my arm, tugging me toward the door.

The moon was in the sky, narrow and bluish. The stars made a rich carpet overhead. I noticed it. I don’t know why. The sky was there and
so was I, half in the car and half out. It was Donald who had my arm. “Come,” he said. I hung on to the inside handle of the open car door with both hands. He pulled harder, attempting to drag me. “Come, come on,” he was saying, sounding surly and fed up. My feet slipped through the sand. I let go of the door.

I was upright. We were moving through spindly desert brush toward a clearing with an acacia tree, a gnarled thing lit up by the moon. The men from the car were there already, all but Donald and Abdullah, who were marching me toward the tree. Clearly, they’d discussed their plan, how to go about it. They had lined up, looking solemn and grim, ceremonial. There were no other cars in sight and no people. I let go of the idea I was being sold to Al-Shabaab, even though that had become the more hopeful option. This was it. I was going to die.

Words streamed out of my mouth. I was talking to myself more than to them.
I miss my mom, I miss my dad. I want to see my family again
. All longings became simple. I remember sobbing and trembling and the constant feeling of falling, end over end, through a void. I remember it in ways I wish I didn’t, every step we took toward that clearing. How I clung to Donald when we reached the tree, how he put his hands on my shoulders and turned me—gently, it seemed—so that I was facing away from the line of my captors. How I reached and grabbed on to his shirt as he pushed me down, how I heard the
fffft
of fabric ripping as I went, and how all at once I was on my knees in the dirt with my back to the group. I felt the coarseness of the desert sand through my jeans. I remember how heat radiated from the ground, still trapped from the previous day.

From behind, someone pulled off my head scarf and grabbed a fistful of my hair, snapping my head backward. Something thick and cool pressed against my throat, a knife, long enough that, from the corner of my eye, I could see its rounded tip, the end of the blade. I felt myself gag. Whoever was holding my hair gave my head a fresh yank and angled the knife so that it skimmed the left side of my neck, the soft part, the jugular. I realized the blade was serrated; I felt its teeth holding my skin. I begged them not to do it. I thought of every time Abdullah and Ali had mimicked the motion of beheading with their
hands. I thought of the hacked-up Iraqi man I’d seen. I kept talking. I blurted a thought I’d never had, not once in my life, but which felt like a desperate certainty:
You can’t do this. I haven’t had children. I want to have children.

Was this really me? It was, it was.

There wasn’t a way out. They’d said so many times that they would kill me, and now they were. In my body, some internal fuse box stripped itself right to smoke. My muscles went rigid. I heard myself draw in a breath.

Behind me, the men were talking, saying things in Somali. It was Donald and Skids having some sort of disagreement, with Ahmed weighing in. A sharp word was said. The person holding my hair let go abruptly. I fell forward into the sand.

When I looked back to see what was happening, Donald’s voice caught me. He said sternly, “You turn around.”

They talked for a few more minutes as I sobbed in the dirt, sounding like an animal, like something wounded and incapable of speech. I remember my own sound acutely, the craziness of it. I don’t know how much time passed or what caused me to look back again, but this time I could see that Skids had his phone out and was dialing a number. He was talking into it—to Adam, it would turn out. Donald walked over. He leaned down and looked at me directly for the first time all night. He looked actually scared, afraid for me. “How much money does your family have?” he said.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said, my breath spent from crying. “They’ll get anything you want. Please don’t kill me. They’ll get money for you. They will.”

“They want one million dollars,” Donald said. “You are lucky I am here. I have asked them to give you one more chance. You have seven days, and if there is not that money, then they will kill you.”

A moment later, he handed me the captain’s phone, with my mother’s voice on the other end.

ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE

LAWFUL INTERCEPTION OF TELEPHONE NUMBER

(Indiscernible conversation in the background)

(Call is disconnected)

L
ate, very late, that night, they returned me to my room. I crawled onto the mattress and pulled the blue-flowered sheet over me, too exhausted to draw the mosquito netting. The house had gone quiet. I had no energy to wonder what had happened, whether the whole thing had been staged—a mock moonlit execution meant to lead me precisely to the place I’d gone, blubbering and projecting terror across ten thousand miles.

The next morning, after Hassam had come in to open my window shutters for the day, I went to my sill and waited for Nigel to arrive at his. When he was there, I told him about the previous night, crying about it all over again, leaving out the part about the serrated knife held to my throat—in some way, I suppose, to protect him from knowing that the knife existed, and not ready to dredge up the image again. I said only that they’d threatened to kill me. I let him assume it was with one of their guns. Recounting the story to Nigel didn’t ease anything. He’d heard them taking me away, he said, and wept for a long time. We both understood we’d entered a new and more dangerous territory with our captors. We were moving toward a conclusion. The whole group had rehearsed a death. My death. I tried not to think about it, but there was no shaking it off. I wept uselessly, reflexively, through much of the morning.