Over a year and a half, I had missed a new pope, a new president of France, and Syria’s deepening civil war. Young terrorists had bombed the Boston Marathon, and Hurricane Sandy had flooded New York and New Jersey. Philip Roth had announced his retirement. Chinua Achebe, Margaret Thatcher, and Gore Vidal had died. All of it had rippled in the distance while I rotted on my mattress. It shouldn’t have mattered, but writers are social animals, whether they like it or not, and now, by holding the radio to my ear and pacing the floor of my room, I could pick up faint programs from the BBC.
My sense of the current date had weakened after the fistfights and confusion over the Naham 3’s calendar pages; it had never recovered. By listening to the World Service, I figured out the real date and compared it with tentative guesses I had scratched in my notebook. I was seventeen days off.
The hour of news in the morning added an interlude of distant conversation to my daily routine. On some days I caught another broadcast, Radio Sultanate of Oman, and I gathered from the existence of this station that Oman had an expatriate scene large enough to demand English-language programming. The music hour featured awful top-forty hits and an odd British host who read the local papers out loud. He gave us tales of cars washed away in wadi floods, twins abandoned in a Muscat park, a fisherman killed by a leaping stingray, and the beneficent public-spending habits of certain Omani princes—all recited in a rakish Midlands accent over the galloping, whistling theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
His name was Fike, apparently. He called himself “Fike on the Mike,” and he interpreted his top-forty mandate with a loose sense of time, digging back twenty or thirty years to play hits from the same week in 1986, or 1979, which didn’t always improve the song list but sometimes reminded me of home.
Blondie, Donna Summer, a band called M (which had one big hit, “Pop Muzik”), and Rod Stewart had dominated the radio in 1979, while various car-pool moms drove me and a pack of other kids to and from elementary school. Their songs playing over my tinny shortwave radio conjured the cracked asphalt, the square ungraceful cars, the fluorescent-lit supermarkets, and the cinemas sticky with spilled Coke that I still associated with 1970s L.A.
A few months before my father killed himself, we went to see Cannonball Run, a screwball comedy about street racers driving across America. The film was retrograde in every way, from its gender politics to its celebrity cast, but Dad loved it. Burt Reynolds was his favorite actor, and the jumpsuited women must have distracted him from his addictions. I loved it, too. Thinking about the movie in Galkayo loosened something, a resistance or a mistrust, maybe a lifelong defensive posture against the innocent, corrupted, awkward, hopeful, stagnant, sun-beaten suburb of my childhood.
I had astronaut wallpaper in my bedroom, and I liked model rockets, those cardboard tubes with plastic fins and parachute-loaded nose cones. We would set up the spindly launchpads in a brush-grown field behind our house in Northridge, and Dad came out to make sure we found a dirt patch sufficiently clear of weeds to avoid starting a brush fire. The rockets went Pssssssssssssssstt like a deflating balloon and shot into the cloud-streaked firmament over L.A. They popped apart near the top of the arc and came floating down, or twisting, depending on the state of their easily tangled chutes. The tangled ones landed hard and bounced in the weedy dirt.
I don’t know what Dad dreamed about back then, and I never asked. While he sank into addiction I was too busy resenting him. I remembered the bitter criticisms and the shouting, but at the same time, of course, he would have tilled his own dreams into my head. He wanted me to study science. I almost did study science. Maybe the instinct I had from age twelve that something besides a heart attack had sabotaged a man I considered all-powerful was what drove me to books. He would have been disappointed—he didn’t even like to read. His late notes to me were misspelled and half-coherent, either from booze or a pain-distracted mind, and for his son to become a writer would have been a catastrophe for his Northridge dreams, for all the love he had tried to express.
Maybe every suicide is an apocalyptic gesture, a last-ditch howl at the moon. Even the disciplined self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc had an element of drama, and sometimes I plotted the best way to go out in glory and gunfire. I had strong urges to do something irreversible. But it occurred to me that Mom didn’t deserve to have two men in her life die by suicide. An adult who committed suicide “did not obviously love you,” by my own definition, and on some afternoons this line of thinking was all that kept me alive. (Even such clear-sounding logic took an effort of will and cognition to arrange in my head. I wasn’t entirely sane.)
Around this time I started to pray. Reading the Bible on the Naham 3 had not returned me to strict religious belief, but prayer did help me articulate my most self-destructive emotions, so it became a way to balance my brain and remind myself of the forces raging overhead. It let me sort out what was, and wasn’t, within my power.
Writing in notebooks had the same effect, and I remembered that the poet Derek Walcott had once compared composition to prayer. “Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic,” he said in an interview. “If one thinks a poem is coming on—in spite of the noise of the typewriter, or the traffic outside the window, or whatever—you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity, so that what’s in front of you becomes more important than what you are.”
This detached but inward-turning concentration became the most important aspect of prayer for me in those prison houses, rather than the belief in a personal God who could hear and intercede. “Renewing my anonymity” maintained my sanity. Epictetus meant nothing else when he wrote about removing your self from suffering. “If you regard yourself as a man and as a part of some whole,” Epictetus told his students, “it is fitting for you now to be sick and now to make a voyage and run risks, and now to be in want, and on occasion to die before your time. Why, then, are you vexed? Would you have someone else be sick of a fever now, someone else go on a voyage, someone else die?”
Sometimes I heard uncertain, hovering noises at night, and I woke up to find my guards listening in dead silence to a staticky phone for signals and interference. I was never in favor of cutting-edge surveillance technologies before I became a hostage, but now I fantasized about stealthy, invasive aircraft of any kind, even insect-size drones, those insidious but supposedly still experimental flying robots that could imitate beetles or dragonflies and cling to ceilings to spy on people.* On quiet, nervous nights when some force appeared to be listening, I would cross myself on my mattress and pray in a silence-breaking, conversational voice. The Somalis never interrupted. They respected prayer, though my noisiness made them uneasy. They thought drones could pick up voices. I decided to accept the pirates’ superstition and use this perhaps fanciful technology to my advantage. (Just in case.) During each prayer I included an explanation, in clear German, of my whereabouts and added a description of the house and yard and the specific location of my room. (Just in case.)
My prayers, in other words, had a practical side. The miseries of Somalia hadn’t stripped away a fundamental cussedness about my situation. Good and bad were reversed for hostages, as Rolly had pointed out—“We are like the devil, they are like God”—so a “Fuck you” mental orientation kept alive our sense of right and wrong. It was hard to balance this justified rage with the pirates’ arbitrary behavior, and it made nonviolent resistance tricky to practice. I wanted very much to be violent. So did my guards.
One day during Ramadan, for example, the men had confiscated my TV to watch it on the porch, where it blathered at high volume.
“Hey, can you turn that thing down?” I said in a loud voice.
“Michael! Be quiet!”
I lay in the heat on a thin woven mat in my sun-shot room; Dhuxul had gone to work. The TV was a constant source of tension. I couldn’t see why this supposed gift from the boss should make my life miserable while it eased the tedium for my guards.
“Can you turn it down?” I said again after a while.
“Shut up!”
Someone turned up the volume.
“TURN IT DOWN,” I roared, and Bashko came charging in with his rifle cocked. I felt ornery enough to fight him, just out of my head enough to leap to my feet and do whatever damage I could, so it took a deliberate act of will to keep myself quiet on the floor and watch to see how far Bashko would let his temper carry him. Violence unprovoked by a physical threat was against the rules for these men, and to test their limit I had to “renew my anonymity,” or remove myself from the equation, mentally, so I could locate a fulcrum point between my temper and my self-control.
Near the end of 2013, Nelson Mandela died, and the BBC’s coverage of his funeral lasted several days. The news electrified my guards. He was their hero, an African resistance leader who’d stood up to white supremacy. They sat there with rifles, like jailers, but identified with Mandela, who’d sat in jail. His greatness, of course, consisted in transcending both tribe and race, and the radio coverage led with his remarkable line from an interview after his release from prison in 1990. “As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom,” he said on my battered little shortwave, “I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
Rage remained my natural element in Galkayo, so forgiveness was elusive. Mandela had noted in his autobiography that white South African lawyers and judges under apartheid considered him a “kaffir lawyer.” Kaffir is a nasty term in Afrikaans, close to nigger or coon; it derived from the Muslim slave trade. Arab traders used it to refer to non-Muslim African slaves, people it was halal to capture. The word had spread through European colonies in Africa as an epithet for slaves as early as the 1600s. I couldn’t compare my situation to Mandela’s—he’d suffered for the color of his skin over the better part of the twentieth century, without even leaving his country—but while I lived in Somalia, the label for me was galo, kafir, infidel, and in that sense I noticed a parallel.
Forgiveness for Mandela meant putting down a great deal of pride. Even when he was right, he’d learned to relinquish rage. He was a Methodist, but radio reports pointed out that he never trumpeted his beliefs, and by the time he died, no one could say in public where he went to church or how often. So the forgiveness he referred to as his real liberation from prison was nondenominational, human rather than distant, not mystical or in any sense out of reach.
I had time to think about that while I lay on the floor.
One day in early November I sat on the mattress at Dhuxul’s house and leaned over some scraps of newspaper, waving away flies in the hot afternoon. Bashko sat in front of his pile of khat. He looked hopped up and bemused. At last he asked a question.
“Michael,” he said. “America—dukhsi?”* Are there flies in America?
I shrugged. “Yes. But not like this.”
“Europe?”
“No same-same.”
He thought for a while and said, “Why? Nuclear?”
“Hah!”
Bashko wanted to know if the United States and Europe had rid their countrysides of insect pests by detonating nuclear bombs. “Interesting idea,” I said, and tried to explain that the real reason was less apocalyptic. Cleaner bathrooms and kitchens, I told him; no goats in the street. “Of course, parts of America still have many dukhsi,” I said. “But conditions are different.”
“Malaria?”
“Small-small. It depends on the health of the animals. And the people.”
Bashko asked me about camels, mules, cows, and goats, which led to questions about the most common meat. We discussed how to say “cow” and “chicken” in Somali—lo and digaag—and I may have drawn a sketch of the edible bird.
“Okay!” said Bashko.
This unusual conversation had consequences in California. Word swept the rumor kitchen that Michael’s favorite food was digaag, that I missed digaag more than anything, and Fuad informed my mother that I had made a special request for chicken, so the pirates would slaughter one for me if she wired a quick five hundred dollars.
“I told him no way,” Mom said.
Dhuxul’s prison house stood in an urban-pastoral part of Galkayo, next to houses as well as open fields, and it was common for us to hear bleating herds of goats, fussing pigeons, donkeys, chickens, and mating cats. After lunch that afternoon I heard a kitten cry and glanced up from my notebook. I’d never heard such a helpless noise inside the compound.
“Bisad?” I asked Bashko. Cat?
“Yes.”
“Mother?”
“Finished,” said Bashko.
I didn’t want to interfere if the mother had just left on a hunt. But I had fish and powdered milk.
We listened to another hour of ragged crying before I asked to see the animal. Bashko disappeared into a garbage-strewn kitchen in one corner of the compound, semidetached from the house. He returned with a frightened young cat the size of my hand, with orange, flea-ridden tiger fur.
The men watched in fascination. I opened a can of tuna and set it on the floor. The kitten caught a whiff, buried his face in the meat, and let out a growl of pleasure so profound it made the pirates laugh. Good sign. A cat with an appetite for solid food was no longer a suckling. I thought he might like some milk.
There was no bowl or dish, so I asked Hashi to use a kitchen knife to cut the bottom off a plastic water bottle and make a small, rough-edged plastic tray. I mixed some milk and served it to the kitten, who lapped it up, shoving the plastic around the floor.
The cat must have been three or four weeks old. Male or female, I couldn’t tell—everything was too furry—but I named the creature Jack because his fur was orange and the date was close to Halloween. After his can of unexpected tuna fish, Jack settled at one end of my mattress and fell asleep.
A stray cat was vermin to the guards, so Bashko, Hashi, and Farrah found my sentimentalism amusing. Madobe came out of his room and stared at me in disgust.
Once Jack had lost his innocence about seafood, we became good friends. He listened for my chains in the mornings; after my dawn visits to the toilet, he would mew and come running. Dhuxul noticed, but instead of banning the animal, he scolded the men in a dead and droning voice. The kitten could stay for now.
On the third night, Jack angered Madobe by creeping back and forth across the pirates’ mat. When, inevitably, he crouched on the porch for a shit, Madobe swiped him against a wall. I slept through this commotion, but in the morning I noticed that Jack looked ill, or at least off-balance, and Bashko told me what had happened. He insisted on tying up the cat.
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Restrain him?”
“Haa, yes,” he said. “Nighttime, only.”
I glanced around the room. “Using what?”
There was no answer, so I let Jack roam free. When night fell, I told the Somalis to let him go where he pleased. The next morning, of course, he was gone. Bashko tried to explain that the mother cat had returned, so the guards had set Jack free. But later I heard an alternate story from Hashi. He said Madobe had thrown Jack over the wall.
“Because why?” I said.
“Because—Madobe.”
“Fucking,” I said.
No young animal had much of a chance in Galkayo; I knew that. I had also understood that Jack’s term as a pet would be limited. But caring for a stray had reminded me of the pleasures of ordinary life.
Three days later, we heard a thin wail outside the compound wall. Someone opened the door and the kitten raced into my room.
“Jack!” I said.
He looked frantic, frightened, and thin. He hadn’t found much to eat. It sucks out there. I opened a can of fish, and he feasted like a lion.
I’d missed him keenly. I tried to stifle my emotional reflex the way I tried to stifle my disgust at the flyblown filth in my room, or my urges for revenge, but even while I suppressed these instincts I knew it was a muffled and white-knuckled way to live. The kitten got to me. He was the only creature I had met since my leap from the ship who seemed to like me. Now that he’d returned, I decided to keep him around. I dug in my bag for a pair of underused long pants, which had a belt improvised from a frayed strip of sarong cloth; I tied this soft rope around Jack’s middle, like a harness, and fastened the other end to a door handle. The fabric was long enough to let him sleep on the foot of my mattress, on a flattened part of the mosquito net. Bashko threw a rag behind the door for use as a kitty toilet. This system worked. Jack established a spot and slept there. At night sometimes he attacked my feet through the net, which woke me up, but he kept out of trouble with the guards.
At last I subjected him to a bath. I carried him to the shower room in one hand, with my soap and shampoo in the other, to give him a lather and a rinse. He didn’t appreciate this treatment at all. But in the Somali heat his coat dried quickly, and his color changed from dun and foxlike to something like furry peach.
Jack had a long Abyssinian face, and he could be clumsy as well as ridiculously cheerful. He grew like a weed. But his furry nether regions failed to develop like a boy’s, so I started to think he was female.
“What should your name be?” I asked the kitten. “If you’re a girl and all.”
I decided to call her Julianne, after the actress Julianne Moore (another redhead).
One morning when Yoonis turned up at the house, I made a joke to Bashko—out of Yoonis’s earshot—about the cat returning from the chaos outside to eat free meals at the house. Bashko’s eyes lit up.
“Yoonis, same-same!” he said, and I laughed out loud.
The joke distracted me from an obvious fact. Yoonis, as a translator, showed his face only when the bosses had organized a phone call or a video. Bashko caught me unprepared the next day with an order to pack my things. “Video, video,” he whispered. He promised we would return to Dhuxul’s, so we left Julianne in the room, harnessed, with a supply of milk and an open can of fish. We drove out to the desert bush for another pointless act of pirate theater in front of another arching cluster of thorns. These excursions took hours; they were object lessons in wasted time. But under this particular cluster of thorns, I first heard the name Abdi Yare, which the pirates had used in phone calls to California. It was a shape-shifting name, a label applied to more than one pirate, but the rumor in California was that my guards were tired of holding me—“Abdi Yare” had run short of cash—so he seemed willing to bargain.
We returned to Dhuxul’s and idled in the compound while the men packed our things. Hashi found Julianne in my bedroom and handed her to me in a blanket. “Bisad, okay,” he said, and instead of staying at Dhuxul’s, we drove to the Pirate Villa with the kitten trembling in my lap.
That night I heard swirling sounds in the sky, an erratic and maddening noise like a turboprop landing and taking off. Galkayo’s airport lacked runway lights—it closed for business after dark—so I think all of us had visions of SEALs using the airport for a staging area. The rolling-thunder sound continued for a week and filled me with a strange and hopeful trepidation. It frightened the pirates, and one of them woke up in such a state of nerves he needed pills to calm him down. The next morning he sat against a wall in the entryway, smoking a cigarette with sagging lips, and the others made fun of him. They told me to call his name. “Xiiro,” I said,* and he just looked around, glassy eyed.
By now I just wanted freedom or death. I was ornery enough to suffer until my price fell to something manageable—I refused to yearn for a sudden, splash-out ransom of many millions—but my patience had shriveled, and I would have welcomed violence. I wanted pirates dead. These weren’t my rules. Death, and threats of death, were currency in Somalia; pirates wielded them for profit and fun.
One morning I happened to ask Bashko for news about the Naham 3, and he came up with a surprise.
“Naham 3 finished!” he said. “Albedo, sink!”
“What happened?”
“Finished! All crew, Somalia.”
The cargo vessel we’d been tethered to had sunk, Bashko said, and the bosses had tried to run an emergency skiff to save the hostages and pirates from the foundering ship. But several of the original twenty-three hostages from the Albedo, and about twenty Somalis, had drowned.
“All died,” he said.
“Jesus.” I squinted. “Pirates no swim?”
“No.”
I nodded. “Naham 3 okay?”
“Yes, okay. Not died.”
“All crew, Hobyo?”
Bashko hesitated. “Eh—Hobyo, Harardhere,” he said.
Bashko’s details were off, but overall he’d told the truth. The Albedo sank in the summer of 2013, because parts of the hull had rusted through. The Naham 3 stayed on the water, somehow, for another month, but by late summer the Somalis had abandoned both vessels.
“One Chinese,” Bashko admitted, “is died.”
“What? Who?”
He described Jie, the young Chinese crewman, and said he had died after a hunger strike. Jie was the good-humored, fey-looking kid who had made the joke about “cargo” when I showed him my new soccer jersey. One part of grief is fear, and the proximity of death—news of a fellow hostage, even if he was miles away—left me grim and melancholy.
“He go crazy,” Bashko said.
“I wonder why.”
Julianne was a pain in the ass, like any decent kitten. When she wandered free of her cloth rope during the day, she drove Madobe nuts. She scampered around the Pirate Villa yard to inspect laundry buckets and potted plants, and more than once I glanced out to see Madobe’s tall shape lumber after something unseen, like a ballplayer trying to field a tricky grounder. He would bring in Julianne and dump her in front of my mattress with a fierce, hissing complaint in Somali, shaking his splayed hands in frustration. That thing won’t sit still.
One night, a plane made a deep arc over Galkayo, and I heard the pirates whisper, “AC!” They went quiet and tense, and I fell asleep with Julianne perched on the foot of my mattress. Around midnight, Issa woke me up. “Michael, come on. Go out.” Groggily, I let him unlock the chains. I had to gather my things and roll up the mosquito net. Pirates packed the car while Julianne stood in the middle of the concrete room, looking confused, tethered by the long cloth to a window shutter.
Bashko led me into the courtyard while the pirates emptied the house.
“Bashko,” I said. “Bisad.”
“Bisad, no,” he said. “Bisad free.”
I squatted next to the car, draped in my blanket, looking up at the black, starry sky. For months I’d felt like a man underwater; for months I had drowned the most subtle and human feelings of sympathy and hope because they would have exposed me to emotional destitution. The cat had revived them. Bashko came over to explain that we were moving back to Dhuxul’s, but he would stay behind to clean things up. He would feed the cat. Then he would set her free.
“Okay, Michael?”
I shrugged. It was long expected, but not okay.
We drove to Dhuxul’s in a hurry and I had to sleep somehow in the humid concrete room. Through the doorway and the arabesque arch I could still see a spatter of stars. The pirates had feared a raid. I wondered if surveillance had traced us to this house. Weird feelings asserted themselves. Can they find me, or not? I had no idea what the military wanted, I couldn’t tell why I was still here, and there was no way to measure my own losses in character and ordinary love except by the numbness in my blood. Grief overwhelmed me—not just for Julianne but also for Jie and the Albedo and the stupid waste of lives and time that seemed to trail these pirates like a stink. I’d never seen such a powerful human force of chaos at such close range. Pirates had blinkered, selfish habits—they had a weaker instinct for cooperation than any group of humans I had ever met—and they were too shiftless and khat-addled to clean up their own mess in Galkayo, which resulted in a stupid and self-aggrandizing pirate society, a suicidal culture in which gunshots rang in the street and gunmen were winners, as Fuad had written to my mother, “while educated ones are losers in life.”
I’d read a theory somewhere that pirate behavior tended to increase during lulls between empires, because when tension between great powers existed, bands of pirates or guerrillas had less room to operate. They tended to fall under the ordered influence of one side or the other. In periods of transition—let’s say after the fall of Communism—the center gave way, and more forces acted on their own. The French historian Fernand Braudel had noticed this pattern when he studied the Mediterranean of the 1570s. The Spanish Armada had overwhelmed Ottoman imperial ships at the Battle of Lepanto (where Cervantes had fought), and tensions had slackened. “The end of the conflict between the great states,” he wrote, “brought to the forefront of the sea’s history that secondary form of war, piracy.” The theory held for Somalia because Siad Barre had collapsed after his Cold War sponsorships dried up. But it couldn’t quite account for the century and a half of relative peace on the oceans before the Cold War, the surprising lull in piracy that had started only under pressure from a minor breakaway republic (the United States) in the early 1800s.
I came up with another theory in the hot concrete room. Barbary pirates were a fringe expression of a long-simmering war between Christians and Muslims. They had existed before the Battle of Lepanto, and they had existed afterward. Tensions between empires may have let up after that battle, but the struggle didn’t end for good. Mediterranean piracy was a “secondary form of war” that also flourished during eras of primary war, not unlike our own, when imams find political reasons to fire up their people by emphasizing Verses of the Sword.
“Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero,” says Don Juan in Shaw’s marvelous play Man and Superman. Sure. And ideas about the Koran gave my guards an excuse to hold me captive. But they weren’t unique in the history of human rights abuses. An Argentinian journalist named Jacobo Timerman had counted the number of high-minded and lethal ideas fueling violence in his country while he sat in a government prison during the 1970s.
Rural and urban Trotskyite guerrillas; right-wing Perónist death squads; armed terrorist groups of the large labor unions . . . terrorist groups of Catholic rightists organized by cabals who opposed Pope John XXIII . . . Hundreds of other organizations involved in the eroticism of violence existed, small units that found ideological justification for armed struggle in a poem by Neruda or an essay by Marcuse.*
Ideas were just indicators, like words. They could inspire a person to great heights, or they could stodge the flow of instinct and love. Some ideas worked as excuses for tribal violence. Even fine ideas could drive people nuts, which meant that the foliage of an idea depended on its mental and emotional soil. There was entropy and violence in the world, I thought, and that was interesting. But there was also entropy and violence in the human heart.
One morning Issa leaned against a wall and fiddled with his phone. He always looked pensive, so I sometimes thought he was clever, or at least less gullible than the others. Now he said, “Michael,” and showed me a doctored photo of a smiling African man with a single, centered eye in his forehead. He’d found it on the internet.
“Real?” he said.
“A one-eyed man?” I said, and he gave a bashful laugh. It wasn’t a joke—he really wanted my opinion.
“No, no,” I said, a little startled by the question.
He nodded and went back to browsing through pictures on his phone.
“Issa,” I said after a while, “what will you do if I go free?”
“I will go out,” he said, and waved his hand. “From Somalia.”
“With your money?”
“Yes.”
“When Michael is free, Issa will be free?” I said with a crooked smile.
“Yes.”
“Where will you go?”
“To Italy,” he said. “Boat, from Libya.”
Stories had mounted on the radio about a fresh push of migrants to Europe. Issa stood to earn several thousand dollars from my ransom, and with that kind of money he could live well in Somalia. Did he really dream about a complicated voyage to Italy? The overland route through Ethiopia and Sudan to Libya would be dangerous and long.
“Somalia to Libya—how?” I said.
“No problem.”
Maybe he had good smuggling connections; maybe he was just being coy.
“You’re crazy,” I told him.
This was the end of 2013. Chaos in Libya had opened paths for smugglers to move more people across the Mediterranean, and lethal capsizings had become regular news. I thought of the humanity pouring into the sea as a mass of strangers, a class of people called “migrants” who would be unknowable until you met them, here and there, in Europe. But one of them sat right in front of me. Calling my feelings “mixed” was an understatement. My feelings whistled and pissed like a tropical storm—resentment, fury, pity, alarm. Issa held violent power over my fate, he could kill me if I tried anything funny, and both of us wanted out of Somalia. But his captive would move home to the relative privilege of Berlin—if I got out at all—while my Kalalshnikov-armed jailer harbored the grand dream of moving to Europe on a tottering Mediterranean boat.
Near the end of 2013, negotiations budged again, and Mom had reason to hope the pirates would capitulate. She had to wonder for the first time about the logistics of my release. “We thought they might come to an agreement for $1.5 million,” she said, “and we thought we’d better have a plan in place to get you out of there.” She contacted a retired British officer in Nairobi, Colonel John Steed, who knew how to organize transportation for pirate hostages once a ransom had been paid. Steed ran a charity within the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime called the Hostage Support Program.* “Fair degree of trust required,” he wrote to my mother. “Pirates do sign a faxed agreement, and have only gone back on agreements twice.”
Steed put Mom in touch with a pilot named Derek, a charter flight operator who lived in Nairobi and had long experience with missions in Somalia and other parts of Africa. He named a steep fee, but added, “Take note that I will be totally exposed and on my own.”
While Mom considered this offer, her mysterious intermediary, Sheikh Mohamud, insisted on receiving his own fee of one hundred thousand dollars, effectively raising the ransom. Derek asked questions among his contacts in Galkayo and reported that he could verify the bosses involved in my case, including Ali Duulaay and “Abdi Yare,” but he couldn’t establish a credible identity for Sheikh Mohamud. “He does not fit in,” wrote Derek. “Sheikh Mohamud is also the name of the current president of Somalia.* So that does draw some suspicion.”
To me, “Sheikh Mohamud” also resembles “Mustaf Mohammed Sheikh,” the supposed name of the pirate we interviewed in Hobyo. Maybe the resonance was deliberate. But “Sheikh Mohamud” is also a clichéd and common name in Somalia, almost like “Fred.”
Several days later, Mom received a phone call from this shadowy Sheikh Mohamud, saying he was no longer in Galkayo and did not want to see Abdi Yare or any of the other bosses again.
“They have insulted me,” he said, and disappeared.
I knew nothing about these negotiations. But Bashko and Issa insisted that my family, and my governments, were the causes of our constant location changes. We were still locked up together because of my clan’s intransigence. Around New Year’s the pirates drove me through the streets of Galkayo in broad daylight, blindfolded, to a house protected by extra-high compound walls, with words painted over the doors indicating it had once been an office or a school. We called this new villa Abdi Yare’s House. No one told me the meaning of the move, but a left-behind sheet of paper taped to the powder blue wall in the largest room had cartoonish, classroom-style computer graphics and several lines of Somali, along with a slogan in English:
TO BE A PIRATE IS TO BE IN DANGER!
Someone had a sense of humor. Abdi Yare’s House had previously served as a pirate reeducation center.
Outside the front window I could see a minaret heavy with loudspeakers. By evening, after two calls to prayer, it was obvious that the blaring sacred song would vibrate through our concrete walls, like an AC/DC concert, five times a day. It reminded me of a story credited to Kabir, a fifteenth-century Hindu poet from a Muslim family who once wrote a whimsical dialogue between himself and a fictional mullah. “Why must you shout,” Kabir asks the mullah, “as if Allah is deaf?”
Bashko talked in vague but optimistic terms about my ransom negotiations, as if he expected fabulous wealth to rain down from several glittering cities at once—Los Angeles, Berlin, Washington, D.C. His optimism threw me for a loop. Before my kidnapping, I had believed that professional kidnappers all over the world knew that America, in particular, maintained a strict no-ransom policy. But it was news to Bashko.
One day, after Somali negotiators evidently tried to lower the pirates’ expectations by telling them no money could be expected from Washington, Bashko stalked into my room and said, “Why?” with a look of mocking sarcasm. “America no money?”
I shrugged.
“America, no money for thieves,” I said, and tried to explain the rationale: if governments paid out for every hostage, thieves would keep taking more. “Criminals, everywhere,” I said, and mimed a person nabbing a hostage.
But I was no longer sure I believed it. Ransoms did fund more kidnappings, and a no-ransom policy could slow them down. But not deter them: Americans, like Europeans, were targets no matter what. Greed was too fundamental. Relative wealth was its own incentive. My kidnappers were romantics who thrived on dreams of a life-changing fortune dropping from the sky. To Bashko it seemed the height of American evil that helicopters might arrive before a bundle of cash, because he listened to reports on the radio every morning about billion-dollar bailouts, catastrophic Wall Street losses, interstellar arms deals, and trillions in public debt. When they did the math it seemed incredible that some slice of that action couldn’t be wired to Somalia. The gulf between my privilege and their poverty was so vast that my own vile state—bearded and filthy and chained every night, rotting into my mattress like a castaway—was readable as the price of a poor man’s ambition.
These justifications did not make me mellow. They did not ease my mind. I didn’t want my guards to move to Europe, and I didn’t think they deserved a cent of my cash. I even thought a no-ransom policy worth its salt in Washington should require a consistent military response. Otherwise, criminals like Issa or Bashko, not just in Somalia but throughout the world—young men who heard about the fantastic wealth of the West but spent little time boning up on divergent hostage policies, who hardly knew the difference between Britain and France, and who, in any case, had seen enough government corruption to scoff at principled statements by the State Department—would never learn how dangerous it could be to kidnap a Westerner.
“Michael,” Bashko said, his temper heating up. “Because, adiga. Aniga—no America, no Europe!”
Because of you, he was saying, I can’t go to America. I can’t go to Europe.
“Because of me?” I said. “Why?”
Drones around the Naham 3 had photographed him while he guarded us on the upper deck, he said. He was a recognizable pirate; his face would be in databases, and for the rest of his life he would have to stay out of the most promising nations on earth. Bashko’s international prospects were dimmed, and it was all Michael’s fault.
“I did not kidnap me,” I told him. “I did not make you a pirate.”
“Because—adiga—Somalia!” he shouted in our broken language. Because you came to Somalia! “Fucking!”
“Fucking,” I agreed.
One afternoon I glanced up from my mattress at Abdi Yare’s House and noticed that Bashko had left the room. His rifle lay on a mat. I considered grabbing it. The room was large and empty, with a glare of sunlight streaming in from the concrete yard. I tried to judge from the sound of movements and hushed voices where the guards were. They would have bedded down in two separate rooms.
Bashko came in, noticed the gun, picked it up nimbly by the muzzle, and sat down with a brilliant smile.
“Problem!” he said, meaning the unattended firearm.
I smiled back.
The house was silent that afternoon, because an Orion had flown overhead. Bashko rested his rifle behind him. He locked his elbows around his knees and munched a stem of khat. His eyes were fervid. I had just been wondering how many of the guards I could shoot before they got to me.
“Michael,” he said. “America, coming—adiga finished.”
If the Americans come, you will be killed.
“I know.”
“Why no money?” he asked.
I shrugged.
From my mattress at Abdi Yare’s House I could sometimes see the moon, large and blurry, like a fat silver lantern over the compound wall. The light spilled in through a metal screen. Moon sightings were so rare for me in Somalia they came as a shock: the prison houses kept me locked away from the drama of the natural world. I couldn’t count the number of clear, moonstruck nights I had missed in Somalia, or (even worse) the number I had left to enjoy. Somewhere in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky the lead character wonders the same thing. “Everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really,” he says. “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.”
I wondered if Mom could see same full moon from California. No reason why not. I was lost, but I hadn’t left the planet. I had just quit indulging in hope for the future. I wandered, instead, in the underworld of the past, and on one of these nights I remembered my father, just before he died, picking me up from a guitar lesson wearing his clothes from work, chewing a toothpick, broodily distracted behind a pair of plastic sunglasses. In spite of his mood he was full of enthusiasm for something I had written to commemorate my sixth-grade graduation. Those few sentimental lines had melted him. He wanted a copy. I can’t remember what they said. But this memory in Somalia disrupted the story I had continued to tell myself, all these months and years, about our relationship. I wondered if we would have fought like hell over my career.
Not loving enough was the crucial failure, like not appreciating the moon. I never told Dad how much I wanted him home when I was twelve, because I was twelve, and because I had no idea that I would see him again maybe four, maybe five times more in my life.
His alcoholic sense of waste in Northridge must have been a powerful distraction from the simple thrill of living. My childhood memories were charged with that thrill. The dry tedium of the suburbs hadn’t beaten it down. It occurred to me in Somalia that I lacked my father’s problem. I was learning to thrive in an ugly atmosphere. In spite of foul circumstances I had found a way to live. It’s still hard to describe. Dad’s disillusion sounded like bare-knuckled realism, but it proved to be a stubborn chemical ignorance of a beauty that surrounded us every day. Northridge, after all, could also be beautiful—a once fertile part of Southern California still dotted with sycamores, pines, and liquid amber trees, even cactus and banana trees. It had wildlife: possums and cougars, rattlesnakes and owls. The relative bleakness of Somalia had revived colorful memories of an awkward American boyhood, a chorus of strange people and cracked-asphalt schoolyards, graceless restaurants, dusty baseball diamonds, of polluting cars and stifling schoolrooms that were beautiful, too, and this weird superhuman beauty, like the power of the sun, had not even wavered when Dad shot himself in the chest.
After one of these horrible nights I woke up feeling shaken, frightened, but somehow cleaned out. I remembered that one point of a sublime poem by Saint Francis called “The Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon” was love for the unlovable, an opening of the soul toward beauty as well as the ugly abomination of death.
A pirate tossed the clinking keys. I unlocked my chains and shuffled to the bathroom. I came back and waited for breakfast. Bashko, replacing the night-shift guard, delivered my ration of beans and sat against the wall, wrapped in a sarong. He listened to news on his phone.
A few stray flies showed an early-morning interest in the sugared beans. I waved them off.
“Michael,” said Bashko after a while. “America, no money?”
I didn’t want talk about it.
“Bur’ad, finished!” he went on. Pirates are done for.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Bur’ad, no ships,” he said, cryptically.
I shrugged and finished eating, then retreated under my mosquito net and listened to the radio.
Bashko had placed his finger on an unpleasant fact. One reason I’d languished so long in Somalia was the decline of piracy off the coast. The Naham 3 turned out to be the second-to-last vessel hijacked during the dramatic upswing in Somali piracy, the heyday between 2005 and 2012, and now the bosses invested money elsewhere—in foreign real estate, drug running, weapons smuggling, even human trafficking. Shipowners now sent cargo vessels past Somalia with armed teams on board; navies were helping to keep the peace. Hijackings off Somalia had all but ended in 2013 and ’14, and the gangs clung to what they had. Including me.
On the radio I heard about a U.N. report announcing precisely what I had flown here to investigate—that piracy in Somalia had employed thousands of people in certain regions and towns. Illicit business had attracted capital to industries like boat repair, restaurants, and housing, and I wondered if turning the illicit movement of goods into something legitimate might not be far behind. While I rotted in Galkayo, in fact, work had started on the Hobyo waterfront to build a small port and to grade the dusty bush trails leading from the town. Members of the Galmudug government were even working to renovate Mussolini’s Farmhouse. It was a comical act of whitewashing, and I wouldn’t learn about it for months, but Hobyo elders and investors had started to convert the ruin where Rolly and Marc and I had lived into a quasi-government building known as the Villa Galmudug.
Also on the radio, I started to hear familiar voices. A Somalia expert I knew from the Hamburg trial, Stig Jarle Hansen, talked about al-Shabaab. A BBC reporter from Berlin, a friend named Damien McGuinness, now reported from Latvia. People’s lives had moved on. Hearing Damien’s voice unstuck my habit of resisting hope. It reminded me of busy restaurants in Berlin, of low lights and music, cigarette smoke and half-crumbled East German tenement buildings, especially the bar in one of those buildings where I used to gather friends for casual dinner and drinks. It cracked my practiced indifference to think about that life, and I missed them all with a crushing, lonely desire.
During the first half of 2014, we moved between Abdi Yare’s House and Dhuxul’s house every four or five weeks, depending on aircraft noise, and Dhuxul decided to stash me in the corner of a larger, dimmer room at his house, away from the door, so I no longer had a view of the sky. My guards shut the bottom half of the steel shutters in this room, all day long, so I had to squint when I wanted to read or write. At night they closed the shutters completely.
I thought my colorful clothes could still flag the attention of planes, so I did laundry often. The outdoor bathroom at Dhuxul’s was a semidetached chamber with no windows, and the pirates had to stand in the yard holding Kalashnikovs while I plunged my shorts and soccer jersey into a bucket of water and sudsed them up with Top-O-Mol. Sometimes they wouldn’t let me out because of a plane in the sky. I started to wonder if the presence of armed men in the yard, on its own, was a clue to my location.
Laundry became a comforting ritual. My brain wandered to strange places while my hands did the work. Every African I’d met—Rolly as well as the pirates—referred to Top-O-Mol detergent as “O-Mol,” which struck me as weird, because the company promoted the opposite nickname on each plastic satchel: top! I remembered Ahmed Dirie sitting under a thorn tree one afternoon in the bush, staring at a plastic satchel of the powder and coming up, finally, with “Top!”—which produced a rotten-toothed grin of surprise, as if he’d never studied the package before.
It it dawned on me during a laundry session that they were echoing Omo, a brand of detergent African kids grew up with from Senegal to the Seychelles. That made me think about the pop-cultural power of a simple brand of soap, which reminded me of old Ajax detergent ads in the United States. They predated my childhood, but they’d left such an impression on a generation of American kids that both Tom Waits and Jim Morrison had made fun of the jingle in their songs. The old black-and-white commercials featured a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue of plumbers, diner cooks, and suburban housewives, while a jarring ridiculous chorus in the background sang, “Stronger than dirt! Stronger than dirt!”
I hummed this jingle to myself while I worked.
One day, Bashko denied me permission to wash my clothes. “Tomorrow!” he said, but the next day he also said no. This petty restriction moved me to rage. It eroded my slim but established set of rights. I stood up to mount a protest on my woven-plastic exercise mat. I said, “Washy-wash,” in the same calm and patient tone I used to insist on trips to the bathroom before dawn. The tone must have irritated Madobe, because he stepped over in a quick fury to pull the mat from under my feet. I went straight down. Most of my weight landed hard on my twisted right leg, and there was intense pain from the top of my shin to my ankle, like a crack in wood. I took this rich opportunity to yell and swear. Bashko hollered back, brandishing his rifle. He ordered me to sit on my mattress in silence, and my next trip to the bathroom involved an excruciating limp.
By dinnertime I had declared a hunger strike.
“No chum-chum?” said Bashko when he tried to serve me food.
“No chum-chum,” I said. “Because Madobe.”
He sighed and left the room. These strikes were a ritual now, like the laundry. Bashko and the other guards pretended not to care. But the next day, after I refused a second meal, they asked for my demands.
“I must see a doctor,” I said and pointed at my shin. “X-ray.”
Any clinic in Galkayo with an X-ray machine would have to be run by a real doctor. I doubted the pirates would present me to one. But I saw good reason to hold out for a demand just beyond the bosses’ reach: I wanted to force them to let me go. This cloudy design was a far more serious proposition than protesting a missing bowl of beans, and it had to be approached with care, since the bosses would shut down any protest that posed a direct threat to their ransom. I thought a defiant, showy strike would invite beatings or torture. But I could imagine escalating a small misunderstanding to a justified, disciplined protest.
From stray reports on the BBC I had gathered that a human could last a month without food, given water to drink. Without water I would die in three days. I wondered if the pirates would confiscate my liquids. But the injury to my leg went against every rule, as Dhuxul and Madobe both understood.
I navigated the first day with water, tea, milk, and mango juice. I just rationed supplies. Half a bottle of juice and one cup of milk per day, plus one bottle of water, felt right. I could anticipate the gnawing hunger, and I handled the panic.
On the second day I felt a heavy, hollow depression from the moment I woke up to pee. The panic returned. My brain went groping for a way to rationalize my self-starvation, but all it found was a stubborn refusal to let Madobe off the hook.
By the end of the third day the men had begun to worry. Abdul, the effeminate guard, came in to hand me a greasy package of sambusi.
“No,” I said.
“No problem!” he whispered. Our little secret. He motioned for me to hide them, so I ate one and hid the rest. My body sponged up the nutrition and I felt better for about two hours.
Abdul and Bashko came in the next morning and said, “Michael! Doctor tonight! Chum-chum okay.”
“Mm-hmm.”
It was a ploy, but I noticed my advantage. I had demanded an X-ray. I could take them at their word, eat a snack, and if I still had no X-ray “tonight”—which seemed unlikely—I could resume the protest in the morning.
“Okay,” I said, and let them serve me a bowl of beans.
My leg had improved, and I knew the bone was only bruised, not fractured. But I limped convincingly to the toilet, which kept Madobe’s sarcasm in check. He always watched me with alert, half-mocking eyes for evidence that I was just fine.
That evening, I went to sleep without knowing the state of my own hunger strike. No doctor had arrived. Bashko pretended we were back to normal in the morning and delivered a bowl of beans. With my stomach rumbling, I said, “No doctor, no chum-chum!”
“Fucking!”
The hunger intensified every day. It made me scrappy and mean. During my fierce and starving afternoons I nursed every old, familiar prisoner’s grievance. I resented the guards’ resentment, I loathed their guns, I hated their religion. I thought of them as enemies who lived on such a deep circle of hell that they owed me a profound moral debt from the first sluggish hours of the morning, when they unlocked my chains, opened the clanking shutters, and granted me permission to pee. These grievances weren’t new, but the hunger stripped them raw, and the longer I turned them over in my head the more I had to face my own mistakes, until the emotional balance I nurtured to survive an average day seemed to burst into black smoke and spiral like a crashing plane. On these occasions I could screw myself into the ground with memories of my capture in President Alin’s car and my warm swim in the ocean off the Naham 3—my feelings of guilt, my suffering mother, my helpless relatives and friends—and this easy lurch from righteous anger to self-recrimination made me rotten-minded with rage. Part of me still begged for vengeance. Part of me still wanted suicide. I still pulled at my chain, psychologically, like a junkyard dog.
On day five, I had to review my motivations. I felt weak. I wanted the struggle to end. The pirates hinted that liberty was imminent—“Chum-chum, okay!”—but in my undernourished state I thought their wispy gossip and promises of freedom were more maddening than the raw passage of time. I learned to listen with distant bemusement, the way an old man watches TV.
By day six my body had started to consume itself. I looked, and felt, like a scarecrow. I let Bashko convince me that a doctor would soon pay a visit. He called the runner and ordered sambusi, and I indulged in a greasy feast before bedtime, but I saved one, wrapped in plastic, for the morning.
In the morning I asked Bashko about the doctor.
“No doctor,” he said.
“No chum-chum!” I said.
“Fucking.”
On day seven, I refused breakfast, then lunch. In the afternoon, two bosses arrived. Dhuxul and one elder who went by “Abdi Yare” came in, looking stern, followed by Yoonis and a strange new Somali they introduced as a doctor, a small-featured young man with glasses. He listened while Yoonis translated my complaint. He palped my shin and tried to look knowledgeable. But everyone could tell I wanted to hold out for some concession, just as I could tell this young Somali had no medical degree.
“The leg is not broken,” he said. “You will be fine.”
He handed me a small pot of Tiger Balm ointment to rub into my skin.
“Okay, Michael?” said Yoonis.
I said nothing.
“The doctor says you are fine,” Yoonis insisted, with the bosses staring me down. “You do not need an X-ray.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“You must eat.”
I said nothing.
Sheer frustration after the failed hunger strike brought me to a pair of contradictory, dead-end realizations, neither one liberating or, in fact, very helpful. The same puzzle had ruled my captivity for more than two years, but now I felt it in my gut like the dull point of a pike.
I wanted to die; I did not want to die.
These feelings were compounded by the blanket of desert heat that pressed on Galkayo during an average afternoon. “It is almost impossible to describe the malaise, the very special weariness of spirit,” Hanley wrote in Warriors, “which eats into one after the sixth month in the midst of the tension and the hot silence.” Six months! “I know of fifteen cases of madness in that wilderness.” Hanley wasn’t reassuring to think about, and the worst part about not wanting to die was facing this malaise every day.
But my hunger strike had rattled the pirates. It forced them to wonder what might happen if I died and denied them a ransom. Farrah, the long guard with a gentle manner, who had a sharp chin and large teeth, seemed impressed with my stamina. One afternoon while he sat alone on the mat, watching me in the room, he said, “Two years!” with a broad, lazy smile, as if he were tired of the routine, too. “Adiga.”
“Haa,” I said.
“Two—years,” he repeated.
A bit longer, in fact. By now it was late March 2014. Two years and two months in captivity. Farrah kept smiling, as if it were some kind of achievement.
I liked Farrah. He was a lank and quiet man, unsure of his role as a pirate. Sometimes I caught him deep in brooding pleasure over the music he played on his phone. He played air oud like a teenager—he followed the twanging notes with his long fingers, nodding his head—and he’d boasted innocently about K’naan as a clan brother, a fellow Sa’ad, before the others had shut him up.
In case of a violent rescue, I didn’t want Farrah to die.
In case of a violent rescue, I didn’t want me to die.
One morning I listened to an hour-long program from Rome about the new pope, Francis. My shortwave was fickle in the hour before the World Service—usually it tuned in to Radio Sultanate of Oman, sometimes it preferred Vatican Radio. On this particular morning, I heard Francis compare human sin to the stars, and his simple image had an uncommon persuasion for a hostage lying on the floor of a prison house.
“At night we look at the sky, and we see many stars,” the English reporter translated, and in the background I could hear the pope give his homily in Italian. (“Tante stelle, tante stelle.”) “But when the sun rises in the morning, the light is such that we can’t see the stars. God’s mercy is like that: a great light of love and tenderness.”
This homily was the first stirring and relevant idea I had heard in many months. It reminded me of the Unforgiving Servant, the petty man in the Gospels who walked into the street after pleading for mercy from a king, only to hassle another servant for a much smaller debt. I noticed that if the pirates were in debt to me, morally, then I was in moral debt, too—up to my neck in it. Rotten with obligation. To my mom, above all; to my entire family, to all the institutions working to set me free. It would have been idiotic, hypocritical, to maintain some persecuted notion of myself. I was still alive, for one thing. In spite of my nasty circumstances it struck me as basically good that I hadn’t drowned myself off the ship. Therefore, I shouldn’t kill myself now. All the personalities from Epictetus to Pramoedya, from Thich Quang Duc to Derek Walcott, who had sustained me so far—all these different ideas of liberation from the self—seemed to congeal in the pope’s image of the sun, and a strange feeling of gratitude spread in my blood. I had nothing but a quiet throb of life, which itself was a gift, like the power of thought, and the simple poetry in the pope’s words unfastened something, so I could feel how bitterness and anger were acts of will, like suffering itself, and how a slight step backward, an unhooking of the mind, could let in a flood of mercy and light.
So I called a private truce. I stopped treating the pirates like persecutors. I talked as pleasantly as possible to the men during the daylight hours when we had to sit in a single room among crumpled leaves of khat and kettles of oversweet tea. When they asked for mango juice, I gave them a bottle, without wondering to myself why they didn’t just go to the goddamn store.
“Good—morning,” Hashi would say when he opened my steel shutters in the morning.
“Subax wanaagsan,” I answered in his language, and meant it.
My routine hardly changed—I listened to the radio, I drafted a novel in my notebooks, I raised my voice now and then to let any hypothetical drone discover my location—but I no longer cursed myself, or the pirates, every morning. My hair and beard were wild as a hobo’s, with startling new streaks of gray, but I no longer felt the strain coming from within.
By now I had abandoned hope as a decadent indulgence, a fine flapping of the spirit that ended too easily in desolation. When I thought about my friends in Berlin, my family in Cologne, my grandmother in Holland, or my mom and my friends in California, I thought of them as shades from the past. I assumed Mom had packed up my apartment and stuffed everything into storage. I hadn’t spoken to her in fourteen or fifteen months. I knew there was a chance this dim existence in Somalia would end in gunfire, or with an unexpected hostage sale to al-Shabaab, who wouldn’t mind having an American to destroy in public. I assumed the past was gone; I just moved from one moment to the next.
Epictetus said in more than one of his lectures that real human freedom is moral choice, the skill to choose good over bad and not to be distracted by “impressions.” This turned out to be a lot of work. By “impressions” he meant not just prejudice, reflex, and the first impressions we all form about strangers who might be enemies or friends—the usual bending of the light through a cognitive prism that modern psychologists also teach their clients to see—but the basic wrong impression that good and bad can be discovered out there, among the hordes of uncontrollable other people. “Sectarian strife, dissension, blame and accusation, ranting and raving—they all are mere opinion, the opinion that good and bad lie outside us,” Epictetus said. “Let someone transfer these opinions to the workings of the will, and I personally guarantee his peace of mind, no matter what his outward circumstances are like.”
One afternoon I noticed two guards, Issa and Rashid,* absorbed in a movie on a sleek new phone. Everyone else at Dhuxul’s had gone to sleep. The voices of the actors coming from the phone sounded American, and I wondered which American film could hold these men so rapt. The BBC had been full of Oscar coverage of the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips, which followed the famous naval standoff between pirates and SEAL snipers in 2009.
I listened for a while and thought, Fuck me, that’s Tom Hanks.
“Issa,” I said with a sour grin. “Movie okay?”
“Haa.”
A week or two later, Farhaan, the youthful veteran of Mogadishu, came to squat heavily beside my mattress with the same smartphone.
“Michael, look,” he said, and showed me a scene from Captain Phillips. To my surprise, he handed me the phone. While we watched parts of the movie—early scenes set in Oman and on the cargo ship MV Maersk Alabama—my nerves woke up from their slumber of the past few months and an idea arrived with a faint, stirring hope. What if I just called home? The pirates tried to keep their phones out of my reach because they worried about that possibility. Now I concocted a plan to dial Mom’s number without alerting Farhaan. I’d have to blurt something in German; then I would hang up, pretend I had shouted at the film, and curse and swear and apologize for somehow screwing up the phone. Oh dang where’d the movie go?
Farhaan’s number could then be traced from America, and I could be rescued.
For the first time in months I had a real alternative to my dull and hopeless prison life. My heart thudded. It could work, but the idea ran the considerable risk of leaving an American number behind in the phone’s software, which a pirate might see.
Farhaan retreated to his mat. He chewed khat and talked with Farrah. I found the volume button. To dial a number I wanted a silent keypad. I killed the volume slowly, waiting for my guards to think about other things.
Instead Farhaan blurted, “Michael.”
“Hmm?”
“Problem, telephone?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Volume, volume.”
“Mm—yeah. Hit the wrong button,” I mumbled.
He came over to fix it.
“Thanks.”
He returned to his corner, and I watched a little more. After a while he stood up to leave. Farrah, who spoke less English, remained in the corner with his pile of khat.
Deciding whether to use this tool for my physical freedom was also a moral decision, discerning better from worse. I might die; the guards might die. But those were the terms of our existence here, imposed by my captors. I had not turned into a saint.
I fiddled with the volume again.
Farrah said, “Michael! Problem.”
“What? No problem.”
“Sound, sound,” he said.
“Hmmm.”
The whole house slumbered. Farhaan came back and the guards exchanged words. Farhaan, heavy and patient, came to squat on his haunches and stare.
“No problem,” he said.
“No problem,” I said.
Flies buzzed. Afternoon light poured through the door. Farhaan squatted about a yard away. To distract us both from what was on my mind I pointed at the main Somali character, the pirate who would survive the movie and go on trial in New York.
“This Somali,” I said.
Farhaan nodded. “Abduwali,” he said, referring to the real pirate Abduwali Muse. “He is my friend.”
“Really?”
“Yes, my clan brother. My friend from childhood.”
“Darod?” I said, referring to the clan. Farhaan had said he came from Puntland, where the Darod dominated.
“Yes,” he said.
“Abduwali is in America now,” I said. “In prison.”
“Yes.”
I don’t know why Farhaan showed me Captain Phillips. I think he was just being kind. It seemed like a morbid film for pirates to watch, since we all knew how it ended: three simultaneous bullets from the stern of a warship, three mutilated pirates; blood, horror, and a rescued American. No doubt they felt entangled in the same drama. (Maybe they were watching for tips.) The spectacle of Somalis in a Hollywood film also held a druglike fascination for them, and smartphones, even more than TV, had delivered the distant, narcotic world of pop culture straight to their hands.
After forty-five minutes, long before the climactic sniper fire, Farhaan grew tired of squatting near my mattress in the buzzing heat, watching me watch the film.
“Okay, Michael,” he said, and took his phone away.
One afternoon in May, while I wrote in my notebook, Bashko came in and set a bottle of liquor on the concrete floor with a clink.
“Alcohol?” I said. “Why?”
“From taliyaha,”* he said, which was our word for Dhuxul.
“Why?”
“Good!” Bashko said.
He lifted his thumb and went away.
The bottle, from Ethiopia, had a yellow label showing a juniper bush and a brand name in Amharic, along with the English words dry gin. Dhuxul drank the same stuff. Since I was working, I saved it for sundown, when I would need help falling asleep. The bottle had an electric effect on my guards. Every time a new pirate came in and spotted the rare, clear, potent, forbidden liquor on the floor, he looked unnerved and tempted. A few words exchanged in Somali would explain the mystery—a gift from Dhuxul—but no guard was immune to the luxurious allure of the gin.
First Abdinuur, the machine gunner, came in to beg with a plastic cup.
“Sahib,” he said in a rough and pleading voice. “Aniga, gin, okay.”
I laughed and poured him a little. He’d never used the word sahib with me before.
“Adiga Muslim?” I said. Aren’t you Muslim?
“Haa,” he said, and downed the shot.
Later in the afternoon, Rashid, the Pirate Princeling, tried his luck. “Sahib,” he said. But Rashid had cheated me out of limes and sambusi and other little treats, and I liked him less than Abdinuur. I wagged my finger.
“Muslim, no,” I teased him, though I knew he wasn’t observant.
“Sahib,” he insisted.
“No.”
That evening, I mixed a cup of gin with mango juice to drink before going to sleep. It tasted vile. Abdinuur came in to wrap the chains around my feet and expressed, in a mixture of Somali and pidgin, that I should be happy about the gift from Dhuxul, because a bottle of Ethiopian gin could run twenty dollars.
I felt real surprise. “It shouldn’t cost ten,” I said.
The next day the pirates were no less surprised that my gin still existed. Why hadn’t the booze-starved Christian emptied his bottle? They paraded in, one by one, to stare or beg for more. I traded Rashid one slug for a lime, and in the evening I asked Bashko to cut my lime in half.
I squeezed it into a tin cup of cloying tea from my thermos, and this concoction was tolerable. I made a note:
Somali Gimlet
The pirates pooled their allowance to buy gin of their own, and one day, while Dhuxul was gone, a runner delivered an identical bottle. Abdinuur tilted it up to drink in great bubbling gulps. Four or five others gathered around with plastic cups. Bashko and Farrah both abstained, at least in front of me. But it was interesting to watch the others abandon Islam for an evening.
A few days later, in early June, Hashi woke me up by opening the metal shutters at dawn, as usual, and said:
“Michael? Adiga free.”
“Hmm?”
“Today,” he answered, with the flying-airplane hand gesture I had learned to loathe. “Adiga free.”
“Really?”
“Haa.”
I went to the bathroom, returned, and ate my bowl of beans. Afterward Hashi and Bashko both told me to pack.
“Why?”
“Adiga free!”
“Bashko, what’s going on?”
He squatted near my bed and explained that sometime in the afternoon I would be driven “to Galkayo,” where I would board a plane for Nairobi. I couldn’t just sit here with my towel hanging on the shutter, my skin disinfectants on the windowsill, my bottled-up toothbrush and steel cup all waiting on the floor. I had to be ready to leave.
I didn’t believe him, but over the next hour I watched the pirates pack their own clothes into plastic sacks. My heart started to race. At last I packed my faux-leather bag. I even separated a few snacks and mango drinks into a plastic bag as a carry-on. The idea that my ridiculous satchel, which had to be tied with a dirty rope, would survive transshipment in a luggage hold was delusional. But for the first time in months I allowed myself a few inches of optimism. I imagined a U.N. plane, a skinny turboprop with a dozen seats. I wondered what to say to strangers.
Around noon, Abdurrahman, the urbane translator, came to Dhuxul’s house with his telephone and showed me a text message in English:
Tell Michael we will bring him back to Dunckerstrasse in Berlin.
It also gave the correct house number. Astonishing. A current of hope stirred in me again.
“You must answer this person,” said Abdurrahman.
“Who is it?”
“He has come to help you.” He handed me a notebook. “Please write your answer here. I will send it.”
“I should write to him?”
“Yes.”
But Abdurrahman didn’t want me to type into his phone. He wanted to transcribe the message later and send it from a different location.
“I see.”
For the rest of the afternoon Dhuxul sat with his men on the porch, ruminating over piles of khat. His wooden leg lay next to him on a mat, suited up with a sock and shoe. Dhuxul’s moments of fatherly kindness to his men had a menace that reminded me of Indonesia, about ten years earlier, when I had visited a Koran school in Java. It was a plain but sweltering, banana-shaded dormitory where young Muslim radicals had lived with their teacher. “He is not like other leaders,” one of the boys had said. “He sits and eats his meals with us.” The teacher was a fringe-bearded ally of al-Qaeda named Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, who had masterminded the bloody 2002 bombings in Bali. This implosion of class difference and hierarchy was a technique of pirates throughout history—not just idealistic, not just admirable, but also a simple way for criminal bosses to win the devotion of poor young men.
Late in the afternoon, Dhuxul’s phone rang. The last thing I remember hearing from the commander that day was “Ahhhhh. Maya.” No.
Night fell, and Hashi came in to wrap the chains around my feet. I asked him, full of fragile and almost childish hope:
“Aniga, free?”
“Haa,” he said. “Tonight.”
I woke up at the first muezzin on the same filthy mattress. I thought I heard the thrum of a drone. The guards acted tense and ignored my requests for more drinking water and shampoo. All morning they maintained an uneasy quiet.
In the afternoon, I asked permission to use the toilet while Abdinuur sat in a chair in my doorway. He just stared into the courtyard and ignored me.
“Abdinuur,” I said. “KADI.”
He gave me a filthy look.
“What’s the problem around here?” I said, very loud, which brought Bashko darting into the room with his rifle. He told me to shut up and argued with Abdinuur. For a minute I watched in disbelief. The pirates were like Keystone Kops. At last my bladder asserted itself: “KADI,” I roared, and then all the pirates were arguing.
They let me walk to the toilet, but I had shattered the uneasy quiet. Hours later, in the dead of night, a car arrived to drive us to Abdi Yare’s. The men tossed my things on the floor. They seemed resentful and bitter. When I lowered my mosquito net in the dark, Bashko came in to lock up my chains, and I whispered at him for an explanation.
“Because, adiga,” he said. Because of you.
The translator and runner at Abdi Yare’s House was a slithery, oily man with a long face and close-set eyes. He came in with deliveries of khat and necessities from the market. He looked no older than most of the guards but acted calm and superior. He did seem well informed, so I asked Bashko if this man, Hassan, could offer me news. He minced into the room, with careful disparaging eyes, and seemed to answer every note of defiance in my voice with a qualm of infidel hatred, as if I were too stupid to understand why I had to sit in a room.
I asked about our day of near freedom the previous week. “A man came to give us money for you,” he said. “His name was Joe. Do you know him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He came with seven hundred thousand dollars, but we told him the price was three million. We told him, ‘Go back to your motherland.’”
“How odd.”
“He wore the uniform of your military. You say ‘fatigues’? He came here with three people. They did not have proper visas, and we do not know how they entered the country. We referred them to the minister of the interior. They were under arrest for two days.”
“‘Interior minister’ for Galmudug?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“We have evidence he came from Djibouti. We do not know what he intended. He spoke like an American. We think this man was a commando.”
“What a peculiar story,” I said.
“Do you know him?”
“I don’t know anyone named Joe.”
At least not anyone who would come to Somalia. It did seem possible that a contractor might try to get me out, but I couldn’t fathom why someone like that would startle my kidnappers by wearing fatigues. The only fact I could rely on was my street address on Abdurrahman’s phone. Someone had spelled it correctly. A pirate wouldn’t have been careful about the c in Dunckerstrasse, which suggested that my apartment was intact, which suggested that no one had packed it into storage, which suggested that someone expected me to return, which suggested that my family and friends were more than just shades from the past. The more I wandered down this road in my head the more the wheel of hope and disappointment racked my emotions, lifting me for a while but leaving me, for a while, in even worse condition.
My guards must have moved through the same cycle. I think it gnawed at their morale to think that a ransom had landed in Galkayo, briefly, but flown off again into the clear blue sky.
When Ramadan started later in the summer, we lived in Dhuxul’s house again, and someone liberated the TV, again, from his bedroom, though not for my benefit. The World Cup was on. The men watched it on the porch. I went to sleep every night with the glare of soccer matches flickering through the door. They played after dark in Somalia, beamed across the planet from Brazil, and since I had to be chained and quiet on my bed by sundown, I followed the tournament every morning on the BBC.
World Cup soccer woke up a powerful nostalgia for Berlin. The commotion of a European city during a soccer tournament is unlike anything in America, where people retreat to backyards and living rooms for the Super Bowl or the World Series, leaving the streets deserted. Berliners collect in bars and cafés on summer evenings for the World Cup—men and women, young and old—to drink and chatter and holler at big outdoor screens. People wander the sidewalks with flags. They chant national songs. When I worked late in my apartment I could keep an ear on the score just by listening to the crowd. If opponents scored a goal, a few people cheered. If Germany scored, the sidewalk erupted. Mounting tension toward the end of every match expressed itself in the wavering noise, and you could actually hear the ball approach a goal, or the release of pressure when it changed sides, or the sound of agony when a player missed a shot. To follow a good game, you didn’t even need to watch TV.
Germany advanced to the semifinals in 2014, to play Brazil, and I asked permission to watch. My body still felt the aftereffects of my weeklong hunger strike. Not only had my muscles wasted; my immune system had broken down. Boils had grown on my skin from a staph infection, and I suffered some kind of cyclical fever. These afflictions possibly helped my case. Dhuxul consented, but no one knew what time the game would air. I stayed up for the early time slot and the men let me sit, wearing chains, on a plastic chair in the doorway. But the early game was a rerun, so the men sent me to bed.
In the morning Bashko woke me up with exciting news.
“Michael!” he said. “Germany—seven points!”
I scowled and shook my head. Obvious pirate bullshit. Who scored seven goals in a professional soccer match?
“Seven points!” he insisted. “Brazil, finished!”
“Hmmm.”
The story led the World Service. Germany had knocked out the host nation with seven goals, humiliating Brazil while a billion people watched on TV. The sheer impertinence reminded people on the radio of the 1950 World Cup, also in Brazil, when a player from Uruguay hushed the vast crowd by scoring a goal against Brazil in the final minutes of the deciding match. The Maracanã Stadium—almost two hundred thousand people—fell silent. I heard an interview with the Uruguayan player as an old man on the BBC, and he gave a memorable summary of his own career. “Only three people have silenced the Maracanã,” he said. “Frank Sinatra, the pope, and me.”
By now some friends in Berlin were starting to wonder if I’d learned to sympathize with my pirates, in the strange fashion of hostages who survive by adopting the viewpoint of their bullies. Therapists had named the Stockholm syndrome after the behavior of Swedish captives in a bank robbery in 1973. The hostages defended the thieves’ behavior to the police after a six-day ordeal. It wasn’t like that for me. Most of my comfortable and civilized self had stripped away, but the core of it, my will, had sharpened. I would have escaped in a second if I’d spotted a chance. My mother, in California, knew the World Cup was on, and she encouraged the FBI to suggest a military rescue during the tournament. She thought my guards might be distracted at night. “Soccer is kind of universal,” she said, “so I figured they would be watching, since they didn’t have much else to do.”
She was right. But she didn’t call the shots. Mom had no direct line to the president. “I wrote a couple of letters to the White House, but I never heard back,” she said, and after more than two years this reticence upset her.
I wouldn’t have minded. I was sane enough to welcome another way out, but it was crucial—for my own mental health—to quit straining for vengeance. Stockholm syndrome and forgiveness were not equivalent: I’d learned to forgive, but I hadn’t forgotten the nature of the game.
Germany advanced to the final, and guards let me sit in the plastic chair again, well after dark, in the doorway. I wrapped myself in a blanket and thought our festivities looked like a sinister imitation of a World Cup party in Berlin. Eight or nine Somalis sat cross-legged on the cold patio, where no light shone but the flickering screen. Someone hung tarps across the arabesque arches of the patio to hide the TV glare, and Farhaan passed around a plastic bottle with some bootleg gin. We kept it hidden from Dhuxul, who lounged at the front of the group with his wooden leg against the wall. During the game preview, the TV flashed an up-close shot of the actual trophy, the World Cup itself—thick molded gold and malachite. Dhuxul’s hand reached up to swipe at it. His men laughed. I felt a wave of disgust. The gesture was pure instinct on Dhuxul’s part; a thief wanted anything that glittered.
We moved back and forth between the houses, Dhuxul’s and Abdi Yare’s, throughout that summer. We never returned to the Pirate Villa, and Bashko insisted the reason was “drones,” but I think it had more to do with pirate-gang politics, because we heard furtive, indistinct humming at night no matter where we lived.
In late August I woke up to hear that terrorists had decapitated a freelance journalist in Syria, James Foley, in a gruesome new style of video. For months my radio delivered bizarre news about the Islamic State, which rose like a gas from the Sunni provinces of Iraq and Syria in 2014 to establish a patchwork “caliphate” where callow and criminal men tried to live without conventional law, like the pirates who had strung Rolly from a tree, and who, like their predecessors in al-Qaeda, used Islam as a license for bloodthirstiness.
I’d never heard of Foley. He’d been kidnapped in 2012, during my long news blackout. But his story sounded familiar—a freelance excursion to a dangerous country, some lapses in judgment, a world of shit. The radio report had me paralyzed. I didn’t know yet that the image of a hostage in an orange jumpsuit in the desert, kneeling before a robed Islamic State executioner holding a knife, would become a new gauge of mayhem in the world, an updated emblem of entropy.
News of Foley’s execution agitated my guards. When Bashko brought my beans for breakfast that morning, he said, “Michael! James Foley. Killed!”
“I heard that.”
“Daesh, no good,” he added.
I didn’t know the term, but to Bashko the name Daesh was as common on the radio as “Islamic State” was to me. He explained the derogatory Arabic nickname.
“Ah, okay,” I said. “Fucking,” I added.
I must have looked angry and grim.
“Adiga, no,” he said, meaning it wouldn’t happen to me.
“Hmmm.”
Until now al-Shabaab had expressed only a low-voltage desire to buy an American hostage. I hadn’t been worth the money. Otherwise Garfanji would have sold me in the two or more years since his threats in the wilderness. But when Daesh started to win territory and fame in the Middle East, there was a faction of Shabaab fighters who wanted to shift allegiance to them, from al-Qaeda, and one way to draw their attention was to behead an American. So, among certain members of al-Shabaab, my market value went up, which may have encouraged one pirate faction to consider selling me off.
Foley may have died under similar circumstances—kidnapped by one group, but sold to murderous Islamists. Mom was sheltered from the worst possibilities by the FBI. She learned nothing of these nuances at the time, although she’d exchanged emails with Jim’s mother, Diane, for moral support. Now Jim was dead. “When I first heard the news, I had a bad feeling,” she said later. “Then I heard the name ‘Foley.’” Mom, with a feeling of dread, had to send her condolences.
The news in 2014 seemed to describe a new, wobbling twenty-first-century world order. I heard about the rotting out of nation-states, the spread of transnational groups like the Islamic State and Boko Haram, which had started to dissolve borders in Africa and the Middle East and mock the power of some national militaries as a mirage. Russia had invaded Ukraine, using the U.S. war in Iraq as a justification to ignore a sovereign country’s borders. (“Good!” Bashko had said when he heard about Putin’s annexation of Crimea.) Entropy had picked up speed. A noticeable number of interviews on the BBC featured people from both the left and the right who ridiculed the idea of national sovereignty, as if old ideas naturally had to be dumped in the garbage. But it was hard to see a shimmering vision of justice and peace in the distance to replace these old ideas. Instead the world was rolling back to factionalism, to violent opportunism, to old swamps of chaos and crime.
One brilliant late-summer morning I plotted another hunger strike under my mosquito net while the radio murmured beside my ear. The net indicated my mood. When it was down, during daylight hours, I felt depressed. Bashko sat alone in the room and watched me.
“Sahib,” he said.
I glanced up.
“Mango,” he requested.
I wanted nothing to do with Bashko today. But I sighed and crawled out from the net. I pulled a bottle from the clanking case of juice and tossed it to him. For this favor I expected information.
“News,” I said.
“No news, sahib,” he said.
We had just moved back to Abdi Yare’s House again. I felt weary and disgusted with the old routine.
“This house—why?” I said.
“I don’t know, sahib.” He shook his head.
“Aniga, no free. Why?” I said.
“No news,” he repeated.
I scowled and crawled back under my net. I resumed my position—one arm thrown over my face, listening to the radio—and this time I meant it as a direct personal snub.
After a minute Bashko hissed, “Hey! Michael!” and waved at me to sit up.
He did have news? I opened the mosquito net and sat on the edge of my mattress. Bashko told me a wild story. He said the guards would stop work if the bosses couldn’t cut a deal—they were tired of changing houses, too. For two months they’d received no allowance.
“All group,” he said, meaning all the guards, “stop work.”
I nodded, uncertain of what to say. “A labor strike?”
The BBC had recently mentioned a miners’ strike in South Africa, so I said, for clarity, “South Africa, same-same?”
“Yes!” Bashko answered and laughed.
I nodded again and asked if a hunger strike by the hostage would help.
“Okay, sahib!” He lifted his thumb. “Slow-slow. Two weeks.”
Several days later, Abdinuur—who was the senior guard, although he didn’t act like it—came into my room and announced to Bashko and some other men that he had quit. Bashko celebrated, throwing his hands in the air. Evidently Abdinuur had told “Abdi Yare” on the phone about his intention to strike. Abdi Yare had fired him on the spot. For some reason that was a good sign. The same evening a car arrived in the darkened yard with an ominous rumble, and Abdinuur disappeared. I found it blood chilling. Bashko reassured me that the rest of the group would stay and guard me—by his reckoning we were on the verge of freedom—but I didn’t dare believe him. I saw no reason Abdi Yare couldn’t replace the whole team, one by one, and leave me in the hands of new and more dangerous men.
On the first day of September, Yoonis came to squat beside my mattress. He said there would be a phone call to a man called Robert, “from the U.N.” He gave me a list of simple facts to mention and said, “Do not tell him where you are.”
“I don’t know where I am.”
What was going on, though? I wondered if “Robert” would be the same man who had failed to show up with a U.N. security team at the airport. Or if “Robert” was the real name of “Romeo”—the nickname of the calm-voiced negotiator Garfanji had called in the darkened bush over two years before.
I decided to rehearse a few lines in German to describe my location. I concocted a sentence explaining that I was in a house near a mosque with a (rather loud) minaret, which I could see from my east-facing window. I practiced weaving it into English phrases for “Robert,” so the Somalis wouldn’t notice. My heart raced.
Before lunch, Yoonis ordered me to throw my blanket over my head. Six of us had to walk out and sit in a hot Land Rover in the courtyard, with all the windows sealed. The call would be routed somehow from Mogadishu, and Abdi Yare would listen in. The phone rang. Yoonis spoke in rough Somali and handed it to me. “Michael, my name’s Robert,” said a self-assured, but unfamiliar, American voice.
I answered a security question and gabbed about my health. Since Yoonis had ordered me to be dramatic, I also gave my whereabouts in half-hollered, desperate-sounding German. It seemed to work. I got every bit of information out to Robert, or Bob, who I gathered was not from the U.N., and I told myself that if the whole thing was a trick by the Pentagon—as Yoonis half believed—the Pentagon would have what it needed.
Robert connected me somehow to my mother. She asked in an urgent voice how I was. “We’re trying to get you out!” she said. Hearing her again after nineteen months was a miracle, a memory of a lost life, but I couldn’t let it raise my hopes, because her language hadn’t changed—after all this time she used the same questions and the same vague, encouraging optimism. I spent the rest of the day in a haze of panic and confusion. I couldn’t tell whether negotiations had budged, or how much German my pirates had detected.
For lunch Hashi cooked flat, crepe-like pancakes called anjero instead of pasta. I used the pancakes to sop up a potato-and-onion mixture with my hand. We’d been eating like this for weeks, if not months. The pirates had noticed that I refused plain spaghetti but didn’t mind anjero. Bashko asked if I knew anjero from the United States. (“Yes, from Ethiopian restaurants.”) Their treatment of me, I thought, had improved since my weeklong hunger strike. Maybe I’d convinced them I was crazy enough to commit suicide.
Now Bashko watched me eat, with wary, questioning eyes. He asked if my mother had promised a ransom. She hadn’t mentioned money at all, but I said, “Of course.”
He seemed to relax.
“Bashko,” I said carefully, between bites. “Abdi Yare speak—phone call good?” Did Abdi Yare say it was a good phone call?
Or, more to the point: Are we cool, even though I just ratted our location in German?
“Haa, yes,” he said.
“Okay.”
I tried to relax but couldn’t.
The next morning we heard on the radio that a leader of al-Shabaab, Ahmed Abdi Godane, had been killed by a drone while his convoy paused near a village in southern Somalia. Godane had organized the siege of the Westgate Shopping Mall, in Nairobi, where dozens of shoppers were slaughtered by Shabaab terrorists in late 2013. The gunmen had ordered some of their victims to recite the shahadah before they died (“There is no god but Allah”) so they could distinguish Muslims from kuffar.
Bashko heard about the strike while he sat wrapped in a blanket, beside his rifle. “Michael!”
“Hmm?”
He gleefully whispered the news about Godane’s death, held up his thumb, and smiled. “America, good!” he said.
Later in the week, I woke up to an almost extraterrestrial noise over the courtyard, an electromagnetic hum, intense but unplaceable, and I wasted no time uttering a prayer in conversational German to describe my location to any nearby snooping drone. The guards mumbled to one another in the dark, and Bashko shuffled out to the courtyard. It occurred to me in a half doze that he and I both had inconsistent views about military drones. As long as they helped us, we didn’t mind.
Bashko’s rifle banged like a cannon, and I twitched in bed.
The next morning I asked why he’d fired his weapon. Bashko’s typical answer to such a question would have been “Because, thief!”—meaning a stranger, some lurking Somali—or else flat denial. This time he told me, in a tense excited whisper, that five drones had circled the house for two hours. He’d looked up to see faint lights reflected on a layer of cloud. The lights, he said, were blinking on top of the drones. He had noticed them only because of the weather.
“Five?” I said skeptically, using five fingers.
“Five,” he said, flashing the same gesture.
I wondered if it was a fairy tale. Then I wondered if my German outbursts on the phone had done some good. Then I wondered if we were all about to die in a raid. But Bashko didn’t even wonder why the drones had paid a visit.
“Because, adiga,” he said. Because of you.
“No,” I dissembled, with a smile. “Because, al-Shabaab. We are in Harardhere?” I said. “Al-Shabaab is in Harardhere.”
“Okay, sahib,” he said.
The whole month of September was a weird fog of rumor and fear. In spite of the new stirrings I hoped for nothing, trusted nothing. I heard a rumor from the guards that someone had arrested Mohamed Garfanji in Mogadishu. Then I heard he’d gone free again. I mulled a hunger strike to force the bosses’ hand. But I wondered whether open defiance would worsen my situation. I thought a labor strike by the guards could easily bring a fire sale of the hostage to another pirate group, or even to al-Shabaab, and if that was true then a hunger strike might bring nothing better. The whole process could start over.
The swirl of uncertainty nauseated me, and I put no faith in rumors of freedom.
One morning in late September—the 23rd—Yoonis came to my room with his phone for another conversation with Bob. This time he let us talk for thirty seconds. “Okay, do you have any idea what’s going on?” Bob said, and managed to explain exactly nothing before Yoonis snatched the phone from my hand.
“Proof of life, only!” he said, and I lost my temper.
“What the fuck are you doing? You should have let me finish!”
“Why?” he said. “Tonight, you will go free.”
“If you’re lying, Yoonis, I swear I’ll stop eating tomorrow.”
That was a hot flash of temper. I tried to keep hunger-strike plans to myself. Later I caught Yoonis joking about the conversation to Hashi, and I assumed he was proud of fooling me, of trying to raise my hope when my real fate was to be shifted like a sack of millet to some terrorist’s Land Rover.
Around noon I had to use the bathroom. Before I finished, the main compound gate swung noisily open and a Land Rover rumbled into the yard. My limbs swamped with fear. Cars came at night, as a rule. Hashi stood outside the bathroom with his Kalashnikov and said:
“Michael? Gari.” Michael, your car is here.
“What gari? I’m busy.”
“No problem,” he said.
My other guards buzzed in the hall like excited schoolboys. Abdurrahman the translator, Madobe, and a runner had arrived in the Land Rover with a sealed clear plastic sack of bound hundred-dollar bills.*
“You are going free!” said Yoonis when I came out.
I studied the bills to see if they were fake. Hard to tell. It was a lot of money, but al-Shabaab would have paid in dollars, too (not shillings). It says something about my flinty frame of mind that in spite of the cash, I couldn’t believe I was about to go free. I’d shut down everything in self-defense, and I still had a hair-trigger temper, an animal mistrust of the mysterious changes upending my comfortable prison world.
“You must pack your bags,” Abdurrahman said. “You are going to the airport.”
I dropped a few things into my faux-leather bag, in a desultory way, and tied it all up with a dirty rope. The day felt bright and warm. I had time to make a journal entry. “I’m sick and stuffed-up, with clogged ears and blurred eyes, lungs full of bronchitis and a heart full of rage.” One of the guards had given me a bottle of potent Egyptian cough syrup to calm my bronchitis (or whatever it was) and help me sleep. I’d been sick for weeks. Boils thrived on my skin. By now it just felt normal.
I packed my notebooks away. No one seemed to care about them. A few men wanted to shake my hand. I submitted, but looked away: I did believe I would never see them again, but I thought somebody else would just deliver me to another part of the bush and transfer me to a more dangerous gang.
I climbed into the car with only Yoonis and Abdurrahman, the two translators. No weapons in sight. That was oddly encouraging. But when the car pulled out of the compound, Yoonis changed his story.
“We will not go to the airport now. We will give you to some other Somalis,” he said, which was the wrong thing to say to a hostage in my frame of mind. I nearly bit off his head, thinking You just sold me to another gang. I felt blind with practiced mistrust, fierce as a cat piled into a traveling cage.
The heat and dust of Galkayo seemed pleasant, though. I saw school compounds, semifamiliar houses, and medical clinics. Robed women with children moved along the road. Driving in a car without a tight contingent of armed men felt almost civilized, and it was such a surprise to see everyday life in a Somali town without squinting through a blindfold that I began to notice a different fear, an unexpected panic that all my wound-up defenses might be useless now. I might have to unwind. What if these guys are serious? The streets bustled with people and goats, and trees threw a spangled, fluttering shade. Plastic litter had collected around the bases of the houses and walls, which had painted advertisements and logos, and I wondered, with a stir of nausea, how it would feel to walk these streets like a normal man.
I’d grown used to being a hostage and I didn’t know how to stop.
We drove some distance into the bush, where a white sedan waited beside a gnarled acacia. “Get out. You are free,” said Yoonis, and that was it.
My atrophied arms began to tremble.
A pirate I recognized climbed out of the sedan, leaving the passenger door open, and climbed in with Yoonis and Abdurrahman. They drove off in a hurry. I found myself alone in the quiet waste with a new driver, who looked almost as nervous as I was. Dust blew up off the bush. There was no other gang. This new man spoke American English. He described a wild plan to deliver me to a hotel in North Galkayo, where I would meet my mother.
“Oh, sure,” I said, trembling with fury again, fangs still dripping with sarcasm. “My mother’s in Galkayo.”
“She is in the hotel.”
“I thought we were driving to the airport.”
“We are driving to the hotel first,” said this Somali.
Fuck off, fuck off, I thought.
“Great” is what I said out loud.
While we drove to town he recommended lying far back in the seat and draping my blanket over my head.
“It’s better if people don’t see you in this car.”
“Can you tell me what’s going on?” I said.
“You are okay now. You are free.”
“I want to talk to somebody.”
“I will call Bob,” he said.
He dialed a number while he steered along the dusty road, and on the phone I heard not just Robert, or Bob—the negotiator—but my mother. That confused me. Were they in the same room?
Her voice sounded musical and happy.
“Where are you now?” I said. “Not in a Galkayo hotel room?”
“No, we’re in California,” she said.
“Your driver will take you to a hotel,” Bob said, “and another man will drive you to the airport. Your pilot’s name is Derek.”
The fierce pessimism I had applied all morning to these unusual events opened its grip a little. I just wasn’t sure what to feel instead. Freedom seemed as bizarre as a Thanksgiving feast. I was too racked and shattered to face a pleasure like that. While we steered through Galkayo my driver made small talk, chatting like a guarded American, a melancholy kid who wanted to show some friendliness but preferred not to expose too much of himself. (I could relate.) We pulled up in front of a small but tidy hotel under the withering sun, and we spent just enough time indoors to call Bob and switch drivers. Then I rode with another Somali to the Galkayo airport.
This dry airstrip with a few low buildings was so mythic to me, such a magnet for my fantasies and dreams, that it felt odd to see it in real life. On the square of tarmac where I had shaken Ashwin’s hand before his flight to Mogadishu I now saw a single-engine Cessna. A bantam, leathery pilot wearing mirrored sunglasses stepped out, paused under the wing, and snapped photos of me emerging from the car.
“For your mother,” he said.
“You must be Derek.”
I gave him a real but weary smile. Derek was the first competent man I’d met in two years (since I’d left the Naham 3). He shook my hand and offered me a cheap blue backpack stuffed with clothes. One of my rubber Thai sandals broke as I stepped into the plane—just in time—so I was pleased to find a fresh pair of sandals in the backpack. Also a tube of Dramamine.
Derek rearranged some bags in the cramped space behind our seats while I rooted through my new belongings.
“Flew in with my own fuel,” he chatted, pointing at large plastic tanks in the hollow tail section behind our seats. He’d emptied the tanks into his plane while he waited. “For the return trip.” Galkayo’s airport lacked reserves of the right kind of fuel, he said, so he’d buzzed up from Mogadishu in this little plane like a flying bomb.
The backpack also contained a new shirt, protein bars, toiletries, a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription, and a pair of waterproof safari slacks with a tag from the Djibouti NAVEX. I blinked and remembered the feeling of hot sun pressing down on the air-conditioned shop, and I noticed an unexpected rush of gratitude for the cheap racked clothing and the thousand brands of shampoo.
Derek chatted away in fluent and reassuring English. He sounded Scottish or South African. His plane had an old-fashioned instrument panel—crowded with black meters and dials, no digital screens. He climbed in and slammed his flimsy door. I fastened my seat belt. We put on headsets, ready to go. The tarmac in front of us lay empty, but a Somali guard asked us to wait “just half an hour.”
“What for?” Derek asked him.
“A journalist is coming; he wants to take your picture,” said the Somali.
“No,” I told Derek.
My head felt cramped; my body felt limp and weak. I would feel cramped and weak for months. People have said, “You must have been overjoyed,” but joy wasn’t on the menu that afternoon. Any ransom is a filthy compromise, and I’d lived like a hated castaway for so long it was hard to imagine that anyone wanted me back. I blinked in the hard sun and tried to unstick my brain.
“Galkayo tower, Galkayo tower,” Derek radioed, and gave his call sign. “Request permission to take off,” he said. “Two souls on board.”
No response from the tower. He let the plane roll forward.
“Galkayo tower, Galkayo tower,” Derek repeated, and I felt another tremble in my atrophied muscles. Two souls on board, I thought. He has a point. A living dog was better than a dead lion. I had sometimes wished for the moral clarity of a rescue, but violence would have been a compromise of a different sort; it would have endangered the people who came to get me. It would have killed Bashko and Hashi and Farrah. It might have killed me. The bosses, in any case, would have survived.
“Sometimes they don’t answer,” Derek mumbled.
My daily sense of terror and waste had started to scatter like a fog, and the changes panicked me. Oh God oh God what now. After years of halting speech in one kind of pidgin or another I wasn’t sure where to put the things I felt. Gratitude was too weak a word. Maybe Lazarus led out of the tomb was no less tongue tied. It just felt fine to sit in the warm cabin of a functioning plane. I looked at the cracked and sun-beaten white buildings of the airport—these objects of fantasy for two and a half years—in mute animal wonder.
“Galkayo tower, Galkayo tower,” Derek repeated. “Request permission for takeoff. Two souls on board.”
At last there was noncommittal noise from the radio.
“Yes, okay,” crackled a voice, and Derek lined up his plane for takeoff.