A House in the Sky (46 page)

I was trussed like an animal. My panic was immediate. I couldn’t last a minute this way. I couldn’t last even a second. I couldn’t form a thought beyond the pain of that position, my back straining from neck to tailbone. The twisted sheet dug into my arms and ankles, cutting off circulation. My lungs felt compressed. I struggled to breathe, gagging as if someone were pouring sand down my throat. “It’s too tight,” I shouted, my voice raspy and alien. “It’s too tight!”

At some point, the boys left the room. Neither had uttered a word the whole time.

*

What did they think about, the whole group of them, sitting outside my door during those first minutes, those first hours? Did they talk? Did they laugh? I’d never know.

I was lost to everyone, drilled down into some underground place, trying to lift imaginary boulders, trying to pull up enough energy to get me through. Pain tore through my shoulders and back, searing the length of my spine. My neck bent toward the floor, my head unable to reach it and take away some of the strain. My thoughts warred:
I can’t bear this. You have to hang on.

At one point, in the dark of night, I heard the door open, some footsteps.

I tried to form words, but they came out a strangled moan. I begged at the darkness, at whoever was there, to untie me.

Something landed roughly on the small of my back, causing my muscles to seize up further. It was a foot. Whoever it was, he was tugging at the sheet, using his bare foot for leverage. I felt a new tension in my shoulders, my thighs lifting higher off the ground. He’d only come in to tighten the knots.

By morning, I’d peed myself, having tried to hold it back as long as I could. I heard voices in the room. I knew they could smell the urine. Maybe they could see a puddle of it seeping from beneath my dress. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but at first they sounded offended. Then somebody was laughing. I felt sure they were making jokes about who would have to clean it up.

More hours passed. I lay awake and fully alert, my body stuck with hot pins. I tracked the calls of the muezzin, intoning in his minor key. Units of time had unfastened themselves from wherever they normally lived and were floating around me, big and small. I’d undergone another adjustment with the bindings: Someone had entered the room and wrapped what seemed to be a scarf around my neck, tying its ends into the sheet that kept my arms and legs in place, so that any time my head started to sag, the tension on the scarf caused me to choke.
They’ve studied this,
I thought.
They’ve consulted some manual on how to make a person suffer.

I’d coached myself through a full year of captivity by breaking time into survivable pieces, telling myself to try to make it to the next day. When a day felt too big, I told myself to make it to the next prayer session or the next hour. Now, lost in the cacophony of my mind, I worked only to get myself to the next breath.

The pain in my body had begun to blend, engulfing me like a swirling, pulsating star. Elbows, back, neck, knees—they’d lost all their distinction. I felt the pain every second. I was never unaware of it.

But something else was happening, too. Some little compartment had hinged open in my mind, like a perch. If I steadied myself enough, I could rest there. I could observe the pain more calmly. I still felt it, but I could feel it without needing to thrash, without feeling like I was drowning in it. When I didn’t thrash, the time floated by a little more easily. Though I’d figured out how to balance on that perch, it was only for a few minutes at a time. The hurt in my body always wrenched me back, setting my brain screaming again.

Every so often a voice cut into my thoughts—the same calming voice that always seemed to offer counsel, telling me I would be okay. This time, though I heard it, I couldn’t believe it. I was wishing my captors would kill me so the pain would leave.

Jamal came in at one point and removed my blindfold and the scarf that had been holding my neck. The light flooded my eyes. I begged him to help me, but he only looked at me coldly.

“I am sorry,” he said finally, his voice sounding flat. It seemed clear that he was not apologizing for himself. He was sorry I’d ended up in this situation, and that was it.

*

They came and went. They fussed with the ropes. They put the blindfold on and then took it off. When I screamed for help, they shoved a sock in my mouth, forcing me to breathe through my nose. I must have lost consciousness, because I woke to find Skids, on his hands and knees before me, peering intently at my face—checking to see if I was alive. Twice on that second day, they rolled me over onto my back, on
top of my tied arms and legs, which caused my blood to flow into all the parts of me that had gone dead. The sensation was excruciating, a blast of stippling circulation, but it gave my limbs moments of relief. Each time, though, when they returned me to the stomach-down position, the pain felt worse than ever.

The calm voice tried to say things, but I argued with it now.

Breathe,
it said.

I can’t.

You’re going to be okay.

I’m not. I’m going to die.

You won’t die. Keep breathing.

I’m dying.

No, you’re not.

It was afternoon again. Or that was my best guess. Mohammed and Abdullah came in and kicked at my ribs as I yowled into the sock. I floundered in the riptide of my own panic, my mind going limp with exhaustion. I knew I would die in that room. The pain was vivid to the point of being electric, electric to the point of being like lightning on water. I couldn’t get away from it.

Then I felt a force whip through me like a strong gust of wind. It was like being seized by something, snatched, pulled upward. The pain was gone. I felt a bizarre, disembodied relief. Nothing at all hurt. I’d become unhitched, like a blown bit of dandelion drifting on a pillar of air. I was an observer, purely an observer, a self without a body. Maybe I’d died. I wasn’t sure. I was high up in one corner, looking down at what was below.

From above, I could see two men and a woman on the ground. The woman was tied up like an animal, and the men were hurting her, landing blows on her body. I knew all of them, but I also didn’t. I recognized myself down there, but I felt no more connected to the woman than to the men in the room. I’d slipped across some threshold I would never understand. The feeling was both deeply peaceful and deeply sad.

What I saw was three people suffering, the tortured and the torturers alike.

*

Late on the third day, about forty-eight hours after it began, they untied me. I don’t know who undid the knots or whether anything was said. I slumped forward onto the floor. The blindfold was pulled off. The gag came out of my mouth. Someone rolled me over. They picked me up by my arms and legs and tossed me heavily onto my mat. The sun had set and the house had gone dark. I could see Mohammed kicking me again and again, but I couldn’t feel it. They were yelling things at me. I squinted at them through bleary eyes. The words seemed to pour from their mouths in slow motion. I could feel myself drenched in sweat. My arms lay like dead things on either side of me.

Jamal loomed overhead. He was holding a bottle. I opened my mouth, and a curve of clear water arced toward it. Jamal poured half the bottle down my throat, the stream causing me to sputter and choke and to lift myself into a sitting position. Jamal was thrusting something new at me—a paper and pen. “Take, take,” he was saying. They wanted me to write something down. My fingers couldn’t grasp the pen. My hands were useless. I could see in the light of the boys’ flashlights that they were a sickening shade of gray.

Abdullah was dictating notes for a phone call. “Today everything is changed. You tell your mum. Everything is changed.” I couldn’t take in what they wanted me to say. I was in too much pain.

I could hear the squawking of a phone on speaker being carried into the room. Skids held it to my face. Mohammed kicked one of my dead legs. The line crackled and spat, but my mother was on the other end.

“Amanda? Hello? Hello? Hello?” she said.

“Mummy.”

“Amanda . . .”

“Mummy,” I said, my head too drained to muster anything else, my need for her keener than it had ever been. “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy . . . Mummy . . . Mummy . . . Mummy . . . please.”

I
n the end, I said most of what they wanted me to say to my mother, though it was an effort just to form words. I said, as they had told me to, “Everything has changed,” and I meant it. I told her I had been tied up and tortured. I told her I couldn’t handle even one more day.

She told me they’d offered Adam half a million dollars, but he wouldn’t take it.

Both of us wept the whole time on the phone. It felt like a farewell.

When the call was over, Skids and the boys filed out of my room, leaving me alone on the mat with a half-empty bottle of water. Just before exiting, Abdullah looked back at me. “Tomorrow we do to you again,” he said. “Every day until your mother pay money, we do to you.”

He left the room. The words fell like concrete blocks. This wasn’t the end of the torture. It was just a reprieve.

They were going to come back and do it all over again.

A blackness edged over me. I understood then what it means to feel hopeless. To despair. To feel no trace of faith in anything. They were going to tie me up again.

I lay rigid on the mat as the blood flowed back into my joints with a rotoring intensity. My mind stayed stuck on one thing: It was going to happen again. They would keep going. They would push and push at this impossible idea that our families had millions of dollars to pay.
They would push for an eternity, because to them, time didn’t matter. Time on earth was just time spent waiting for a chance at paradise.

They had figured out how to destroy me without totally extinguishing me. They’d keep me alive till they got their cash.

I heard a sound rise out of my lungs, a long keening sob, more animal than human.

Was this my life? It was.

I was done.

It would be better to die.

This was the calmest thought I’d had in a long time.

*

My razor, the straightedge my captors had given me months earlier to shave my pubic hair, had gone rusty in the humidity, its blade spittled with orange. But it could cut. I knew that because I still used it. I kept the blade tucked in its paper sheath among my toiletries, the little fortress of bottles I’d lined up next to my mat. With some pressure on the razor, I was sure I could slice open my wrists.

In the dark, I lay waiting for the sensation to come back to my hands. I curled and uncurled my fingers, feeling their function slowly return. I planned how it would go. I figured all I needed to do was jab myself hard and then rip the blade through the vein, right side first and then left. I guessed it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, beginning to end. With some satisfaction, I imagined the boys coming in and finding me half alive, but not being able to save me. It gave me pleasure to think I could watch them lose their fortune as I died.

I decided I’d wait until the early morning to do it.

I had spent hours, many hours, in the last year being hard on myself. I’d chastised myself for the life I’d led, for all the self-indulgent things I’d done. I’d berated myself for having run stupidly into Somalia, for having empty ambitions, for believing I was invincible. I’d been mad at myself for never telling my mother that I forgave her for the ugliness of my childhood. I’d regretted the years I’d spent hating my body, starving it to stay thin. I’d wanted another chance to do all of it better, but now I accepted that it wouldn’t come.

With that acceptance, I felt something different, soothing. A peace, a receding of my regrets, a low tide sliding back to leave a skirt of glittering beach.

Had I lived a life? I had. Had I seen the world? I had. I’d done things. I’d loved people. I’d seen beauty. I’d been fortunate. I was grateful.

By the time the first thin light slipped through the cracks in my shutters, I had thought, person by person, through my family and my friends, through everyone I would miss when I was dead. I felt saddest about Nigel, for leaving him alone there in Somalia. In my mind, I’d asked forgiveness, his and everyone’s, for not trying to live longer. I’d sent love and hoped that somehow it would translate from my place on the mat, up over oceans and continents, to where each of them was. I’d cried a little, but I also felt ready. It was time.

What I wanted was to die quickly. I could hear, beyond my doorway, the sound of the boys sleeping out in the reception area—the occasional unconscious snort or sigh. The muezzin, I knew, was probably lifting himself from bed now, trundling through the dark toward the mosque with its pink neon to make his first call of the morning. Mornings, for me, had always been the most difficult, the drowsy moment when dream sorted itself from fact, when I woke just enough to realize the chains around my ankles. Sometimes I touched them to confirm that they were real.

I reached for the razor, and once it was in my hand, I lay back down, waiting another minute to make the first cut.

This is it,
I thought.

But before I made a move, I felt a curious warm sensation spreading from the top of my head down through my body, like a liquid being poured into me. It relaxed me completely, making me feel as if I were melting into the mat. I didn’t feel any pain. I felt like I was pooling into something larger, connecting to a new source of strength. Images flashed through my mind—beaches, mountaintops, the street I lived on with my mom and dad for the first six years of my life—almost as if I were being taken on a rapid-fire trip. Its clarity was piercing. I longed to see it all again, to be a part of it.

Something moved in the doorway. The early sun at a window in
the reception area had washed a pale square of daylight onto the floor of my otherwise dark room. In the middle of it was a small brown bird, something like a sparrow, hopping back and forth on the dirty floor, cocking its head and pecking at the ground. The bird looked up, seeming to study the room and me in it. A moment later, it lifted off the ground and, in a flurry of feathers, was gone—flying through the door, back into the reception area, out toward the sky.