The Other Joseph (21 page)

And then, three years ago, on that Christmas Day off the coast of Africa, Roy vanished. A war came for my brother like a war came for me.

According to a senior Nigerian naval officer generous enough to correspond, the pirates selected December 25 for reasons both practical and symbolic. First and foremost, Captain Bolewa surmised, their leaders—secretive figures viewed as warlords by some and Robin Hoods by others—likely presumed, not altogether incorrectly, that the pirates would encounter a distracted and somewhat reduced crew as they attempted to seize the Mantis 15, the last known place Roy was seen alive. And although no one ever took official credit for the Mantis 15 assault, Captain Bolewa was confident the pirates were aligned with the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. This militant group claims to oppose the exploitation and oppression of the people of the Niger Delta, and the devastation of the natural environment, by partnerships between the government and oil corporations, and months earlier MEND had initiated Operation Hurricane Barbarossa—an ongoing string of actions intended to bring down the oil industry in the region pursuant to an “oil war” targeting pipelines, facilities, and work sites. In Christmas,
Captain Bolewa speculated, MEND saw an occasion to send a message of defiance to the West.

Which returns me to Roy, Christmas Day, and the Mantis 15. An Australian named Liam Simms remembers tranquil seas and a battered twenty-foot panga with a two-hundred-horse outboard. The speedboat came in fast out of the setting sun, and there were eight pirates in total. Fatigues and bandoliers. Black balaclavas. They carried Kalashnikovs and machetes and, on the shoulder of a pirate in the bow of the now-idling panga, an RPG he kept leveled on the Mantis 15 as another man spoke broken-English, surrender-or-be-fired-upon demands through a bullhorn.

BSX Drilling had employed a tactical security team to provide for the safety of the Mantis 15—as was done for most, if not all, significant drilling rigs in the Gulf of Guinea—and the Mantis 15 team was comprised of four former special forces types of various units and nationalities, led by Simms, an ex-sergeant from Australia's 2nd Commando Regiment. It was Simms who went on the loudspeaker to direct the crew to collect on the far side of the rig while the security team took defensive positions. And it was Simms who presented himself unarmed at the railing, shouting down to the bullhorn man as he tried to calm the masked, faceless pirates in the speedboat fifteen meters below.

The primary, immediate threat was the pirate in the bow with the RPG, as a well-placed warhead would have unleashed hell on the Mantis 15. But to surrender the rig to pirates was only a slightly less frightening prospect. Accordingly, Simms continued to buy time until—and I am speculating here—a corporate office monitoring the situation from thousands of miles away radioed in orders, and a member of the security team shot the RPG pirate in the chest with an M4.

The fighting ended quickly. Two pirates who opened up with Kalashnikovs were also killed, and a fourth was shot as he lifted
the dropped RPG. He fell forward with it into the water, and seeing the RPG lost overboard, the other pirates chucked their weapons. Simms had his men hold their fire, so what would have been a turkey-shoot massacre was avoided. Still, three pirates lay dead in the speedboat and one was in the Gulf, hurt and bleeding, fighting to keep his head above surface, treading water but only barely.

But the pirates had a contingency plan, apparently—because then a man sitting on the gunwale of the panga began popping and tossing floating smoke canisters to provide cover. The orange smoke billowing from the gap between the speedboat and the rig, as well as the fading light of sunset, made it difficult for Simms to describe what happened next. What he does know is that my brother and another crew member, a Nigerian cook, came alongside him at the railing. Simms warned them back, fearful there might be more shooting, but Roy, and the cook, stayed there with him, looking into the darkness and the smoke. Almost zero visibility, yet they could hear the splashings of the pirate in the water. The cook and then Roy grabbed life rings and threw them blindly into the Gulf, but the wounded pirate was screaming now. Simms moved over to the cook, about to push him out of harm's way, when he saw the American with hair “like a Gypsy Joker” biker climb the railing and point down at something.

The pirate in the drink had gone quiet, and Simms recalls Roy glancing back twice before flipping off his hard hat and jumping, disappearing, into the orange of that smoke cloud. “He seemed angry,” Simms told me. “Not afraid, not crackers—cut-snake mad. And then he went over like he was a bloody lifeguard.” Maybe a minute later, Simms heard the speedboat's outboard throttle up and drone away.

The search for Roy Joseph was called off the next day. There were no ransom demands or hostage videos, and Simms was
considerate enough not to mention sharks to me. He said only that he believes my brother drowned trying to save the life of a pirate.

LIKE ROY
, I too have known the ends of the earth. And during the summer of my year one as a prisoner in the desert, already driven desperate by agonizing solitude and boredom, but also seeking to perhaps earn some sympathy from my invisible and enigmatic captor, I persuaded a guard to submit my request to receive instruction in Arabic and Islam. For this I expected to be ignored or even punished, a return to the terrible months that had followed my arrival at that remote, secluded compound, but a week later a man in a blinding white head scarf and thawb appeared in front of my cell. Ahmad. My tutor was much older and spoke crisp, perfect English. And he was kind. Ahmad whispered that it would be prudent if I didn't tell him anything I wouldn't want passed along to “others” beyond those sands, and then we began to talk. A single visit that was never repeated. Not once did I meet the fiend who held the key to my cage, but early on such seemed to be his psychopathic way. To give and then take. To find amusement in relayed accounts of my sufferings.

But I did get that lone visit. Ahmad told me he had been pleased to learn my name, explaining that the Joseph of my Book of Genesis and the Yusuf of his Quran were one and the same. Consequently, he announced, we shall open your lessons there. Over the next hour, the first pleasant hour of the twenty years I would spend in that earthbound limbo, I listened as he shared the story of the prophet Yusuf with me. The story of a dreamer who was thrown into a well by his own brothers, enslaved and then imprisoned for many years before becoming favored by a king and set free, reunited with his family. Yusuf's life was a splendorous life, my tutor contended, and as he said this I knew he was trying to give me what I needed. A way to look at my circumstances and not lose hope.

Neither my brother nor I have been very likely prophets, and no one would call our lives splendorous, but I see us both as that dreaming brother of legend. As that Joseph in a well, waiting for what might come next. That day in the culvert, Roy, you were shaken and afraid, but what you did not know, what I wish you could have known, was that I was also so afraid. And the only thing keeping me stable was having you there with me, riding out that storm. “Be careful, Tommy,” you said to me then, a soaked twelve-year-old speaking not of a storm but of war, and I should have done more than act brave for you. That wouldn't have changed our destinies—destiny is destiny—but there in that culvert, yes, I should have given you more.

After Ahmad I found strength in meditation and in books, in the scattershot prayers of an agnostic, in the eventual, startling gentleness and even friendship of my guards, but above all it was the dream of my homecoming that sustained me during my years of captivity. The dream I might one day hobble down the steps of a plane and see my family on the tarmac. On the final night in my cell I heard the explosions of mortar rounds, then the rat-a-tats of firefights, and in the morning the compound was taken by rebels. With the Arab Spring my dream seemed inevitable. There was the crossing of that golden desert on motorcycles and in cars for a rendezvous with amazed CIA spooks, and three days afterwards, like an offering from a god, nighttime helicopters filled with brother SEALs descended onto a road near a seaside date palm grove to help bring a long-haired and bearded scarecrow home. A C-17 flew me from a secured airfield directly to Germany, and I was a week at Landstuhl before the med/psych experts came clean about my parents, then Roy. As I wept I remember feeling as if the world had finally broken me. I was the last of the Josephs, and having a sense of the loneliness my little brother had been living with felt like more than I could bear.

Then, later . . . America, Walter Reed, and the visit from
Margaret Mokwelu. Poring through Roy's binder introduced me to a new level of pain, frustration, and anger. And there was astonishment but no joy even in knowing Joni and Nancy were out there because, unfortunately, I was famous by then, so this much was clear: they must have heard about my return from the dead, yet they had chosen not to contact me.

But Margaret was persistent. Due to those notes she knew things about me and my family no one else knew, so in certain ways she was my only friend. For several days she would come and we would talk, and she pleaded with me to summon the strength to do what Roy had done and go to Joni. The strength to eventually make the San Francisco phone call Margaret had never been able to make. I failed in that, she said, but that was also not my place. Please take this burden from me. Then she asked me the question Roy once asked himself. What would your brother want from you?

My reassimilation and reintegration was meant to be a long and ongoing process of closely supervised mental and physical healing, but after three months of military bases and medical centers—and a time-served, photo-op promotion conferred by the president—I'd had enough. Following my surgery and rehab at Walter Reed, and another month as an outpatient, I was allowed to walk away, and since then I've been an expeditionary, retired-navy traveler and tourist, moving through this country and this ghost story. I remain astounded by the Internet and the price of gas and the phones in everyone's pockets, but otherwise I still recognize America.

In Louisiana I found Sam. His muzzle was gray, his body stiffening, but when I spoke his name he rose and came to me like a fighter answering the bell. Get yourself an address and send for him, Malcolm said. Have some time with the old rogue—even if it'll make this coon-ass cry to give him up.

And in Nevada, Lionel Purcell. Battle Born Outfitters is in
business again, and he says his outlaw days are over. Almost all of my SEAL platoon had been through Walter Reed to see me at least once, but Lionel just waited patiently until I wrote him, in that knowing and reclusive way of his. Yup, Ahab, your brother was out here. Yup, you might have a kid. When I arrived in Battle Mountain he brought me to the Rubies, and I told him that what happened to me in the Persian Gulf—the agony I've caused for so many, the guilt I'll live with forever—was not anyone's fault but my own. This first Joseph to jump before he should have.

But I also told Lionel that on my swim I had felt something with me in the dark water. Something that had awoken me from my slapped sleep. Something the fishermen who found me on the beach seemed to have a name for. And although I'll never know what he was, exactly, that something was definitely there. Confusing me, watching me. A panicked, disoriented boy, alone and swimming. A boy mistaking the lights of an underway trawler for the lights of a search vessel. A boy realizing his mistake too late for that mistake to be corrected. Too late for him to do anything but push on for the shore.

California. I regret Nancy Hammons probably comes off as the villain of Roy's pages, as a shadowy presence to be avoided and feared, because the actual Nancy is thoughtful and caring. A woman who once kissed me on a beach and told me I was too much of a kid to be the warrior I thought I was then. A mother who would lay down her life for her daughter. She was dumbfounded to hear from me, could never have expected that binder, showing me the way, but she has been a lighthouse in all of this as well. I retraced Roy's pioneer trail, driving from a trailer in Battle Mountain to a hotel in San Francisco to meet her, and we talked in my room for hours. My memories of our night in San Diego seemed to be from another lifetime, but I did remember her. She was the last woman I'd been with, just as I had been her last man.

In San Francisco Nancy told me that, as reports of Thomas Joseph began to flood the news, she and Joni had read of Roy's death in one of the many articles written about me. And they had been as surprised to learn of that as they had been to learn of my resurrection. Even the fact Roy had been in Africa was a revelation to them. Nancy explained that after months and then years passed, Joni finally accepted Roy had decided to turn away from her. No private investigators this time, only trust, a conviction Roy would find her again when he was ready. But Joni knew the truth now, and Nancy said they'd still been discussing how to best approach me when, instead, I had called them. Nancy insisted all blame for their delay lay on her. She had been worried I'd never be able to forgive her for shunning my brother.

So it was for me to tell Nancy to put that aside. I wish she would have told my parents about Joni, that they could have known her and loved her. And yes, Roy had deserved better. But any bitterness I might have been holding on to went away when Nancy drove me to the yellow house on Marvel Court. A star-spangled
WELCOME HOME
balloon was tied to the tucked balcony. The same balcony where Roy first saw Joni.

“No more secrets,” said Nancy. “This can be our beginning.”

And then: Joni. She was standing in the center of a living room with two framed photographs in her hands, pictures Roy had given her. “Hey,” she said, shy and shaking, and I told her that one of the photos was of a day I still remembered. A bright hospital room where brothers are meeting. I am a child, and Roy is the infant cradled in my skinny arms. And, blurry in the background yet certainly there, a mother and father are watching their sons.