“I want to strangle you and hang you off the balcony.” Marco’s idea of sweet nothings. He’s behind me, in me, twisting my shirt around my throat. I lean forward to do another line and he grabs my hips and thrusts hard. The feeling of him deep and the hit of damn good coke are like I’ve imagined God: an absolute and precise sensation of being alive.
And we are alive, handsome Marco Morales and I, we are most definitely alive.
Three hours before, we were dead, face down in the earth with guns to the back of our skulls and the smell of fear and everything extraneous ceased. It was like being in a tunnel, the most focused I’ve ever been. Three hours before, we’d been in the heart of the North Pole. General Christmas was certainly good for jokes. He kept us laughing, oh ho ho ho. The Nightmare Before Christmas; here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus Lane; he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake; etc, etc. Marco and I, nosey, nosey journalists, were chasing a story about how the Museveni government was supplying his archenemy with arms to perpetuate the war. As long as General Christmas was a threat—stealing children, hacking off their limbs if they were naughty—the US government would continue to supply Museveni with money and weapons to fight him. My sources had told me that the Christmas elves were armed with new American AK-47s. They could only have gotten them from the Museveni government.
And, indeed, they were armed with AK-47s. These AK-47s were pointing at us, as we sprawled on the ground.
Fear is many different sensations. It is being in an elevator that suddenly drops a few feet; it is your jeans getting tighter around your thighs as the muscles swell with the adrenaline you might need to run away; it is absolute clarity and complete occluding panic. You are certain you will survive; you hope their knives are sharp. You are afraid and incredibly brave; you are accepting of death; you will do anything to stay alive.
As I lay there, my sound and vision narrowed in. The excited voices of the Christmas elves muted and I heard the faintest stamping, little marching. It was a trail of ants, moving to the left of me, between Marco and me. He was watching them, too, marching through the dry, red earth.
Suddenly he made a coughing noise. I realized they’d kicked him or hit him, and they were still doing so. I watched the ants and considered the millions of years that had gone into their design, the trick of evolution to produce something so deceptively simple as the ant. A leopard or dolphin you could see the effort. But an ant was a child’s drawing, three little dots and six little legs.
Someone started tugging at my jeans, trying to pull them down over my hips. I had never been raped and I wondered now how you died from rape, as women do. If ten men fucked me one after the other, how was that different from ten lovers in ten weeks, men whose names I couldn’t remember and maybe had never known. How can ten penises kill you?
Some of the ants were carrying bits of litter. Ants clean up, they keep the planet clean. Ants will be part of my cleaning, when my body is done. The ants and the flies and the scarabs. I felt my body, then, like a cloak, my flesh upon my bones, my skin firmly encasing my flesh. Mine, I thought, all that I ever owned.
My jeans were down by my ankles now, exposing my bottom, just this part of me, reducing me to this. But also the men reducing themselves. All we are is machines fucking each other to reproduce. They were scared, too, these boys, these boy-men of General Christmas—these Christmas elves could die any day and they probably would. They were like salmon who ejaculate upon dying.
The first one clambered on me, putting his knees between my legs and spreading them. What if I lived? What if I had his child? My stomach contracted hard, as if I’d been punched, and my legs tried to draw back together, my vaginal muscles clenched. It was all instinct. I breathed out, I breathed in. Did the second one care that he was putting his dick in another man’s cum? And the third and the forth, weren’t they disgusted by all the fluid?
But the improbable happened: they ran away. They just left us, Marco and I, and when we looked up they had vanished back into the bush. They’d taken our bags and our shoes and our sunglasses. There was a little trail of peanuts and raisins. The stash of GORP I kept in my bag must have burst open.
Marco and I sat up. I pulled up my underwear, my jeans. They were immediately itchy, as bits of dust and dried grass had become embedded in the fabric. We avoided eye contact but I could see out of my peripheral vision that Marco had blood on his face. For a few moments—minutes? seconds?—we just listened to the sound of the bush, the cicadas, weaver birds twittering inanely. Then, the sound of a vehicle, coming fast. We stood. Should we run and hide? The old axiom—the enemy of my enemy is my friend, is complete bullshit. The enemy of my enemy is simply the more ruthless motherfucker.
But we didn’t move; a mutual, unspoken decision. Hiding seemed futile and would put us in a vulnerable position. No one wants to be found cowering in the bushes—you can’t help but look furtive, suspicious.
Three military Land Rovers pulled to a stop. Twenty Ugandan government soldiers unpacked themselves and surrounded us. The commander, thin and tall with scholarly wire-rimmed glasses, appraised us, asked a few brief questions. We didn’t mention the attempted rape, we simply said we were journalists. He ordered his men into the bush, leaving four to guard us or protect us—we couldn’t know. Within minutes, there was shouting and shooting. The government soldiers ushered us to cover behind the Land Rovers.
I longed for a cigarette. Not a mere craving, but bone-squeezing need, almost like that moment before orgasm when you think it won’t happen, the sensation begins to recede, and you feel a great angry need for it. Marco was uneasy, too. I saw him dabbing compulsively at the gash on his head. Without his camera, he had no way to interface with the situation.
After ten minutes or so the shooting stopped. There were shouted commands, scuffling, grunts of pain. The commander and his soldiers ushered six of General Christmas’s men—boys—into the clearing. One was clutching his stomach where blood bloomed like tie-dye over his yellow t-shirt. Obediently, they knelt down. Very quickly, very professionally, the commander unholstered his side-arm and executed them. The last—a teenager, maybe 16 or 17?—looked at me in confusion, as if he did not understand what dream he was in and how he might get out.
“Mama,” he said—not imploring me, as a generic mama, but the word drawn out, softly, as a child addresses his mother: “Mama.” PAP! He fell face first into dust.