Let's Go Swimming on Doomsday Page 2

  Terrorist.

  My toes curl up in my sandals. I stare at the trash in the corner. My bad ear starts to do that ringing thing, like it’s underwater.

  Sam tries again. “Look, the police and the UN don’t want you to stay here; you’re sixteen, underage. That hand needs a doctor. Did you steal the phone or not?”

  I shiver at the word doctor. Sam sounds annoyed, but maybe like she’s telling the truth. Maybe she does want to get me out. “No,” I say. “I didn’t steal it.”

  “Then why did you run from the officer?”

  “Because he chased me.”

  Sam presses her lips together. She watches me for a long time. I find myself staring at her hands. Her skin is so pale that I can see blue veins under it. Finally she stands up, gathering her papers. “I’ll be back,” she says.

  I watch the sun shift angles behind the window bars. This cell isn’t so bad, really.

  I’ve been in worse.

  It’s sort of a relief to leave my fate to Sam. Either she’ll persuade them to let me go, or she won’t. Being a white muzungu from the UN has got to help.

  Sam seems a little better than the muzungus I’ve met at the Glory Christian Life Center. I’ve been there a couple of times because they give out free lunch. Those white girls are just a few years older than me, all big eyed and soft. They think because they’ve been in Sangui City for five minutes that they “get” Africa. That fixing poverty or elephant poaching or whatever is just a matter of rolling up their sleeves and getting to work. They say things like, “Africa calls to me,” as if Africa is a beautiful smiling woman beckoning from a doorway.

  Wallahi, they’re annoying.

  At the Glory Christian Life Center they’re always trying to talk to me about Jesus—that’s the price for food. The first time one of them started in with the whole “Do you know Jesus Christ, the redeemer?” thing, I almost told her to shut the hell up. Doesn’t she know talk like that can get her killed? But then I remembered I wasn’t in Mogadishu anymore. I’ve found myself spacing out like that, ever since that night. Getting confused, seeing things. So I calmed down and just listened politely, waiting until I could slip away and get my plate without seeming too rude.

  Sam returns after maybe half an hour, looking flushed but victorious. A fat, grumpy police officer follows, keys in hand, and unlocks my cuffs. When he bends over me, I see spots of stew he’s spilled down the front of his uniform.

  “All right, let’s go, Abdiweli,” Sam says.

  I rub my wrists. They sting, but unlike my fingers, they’ll be fine.

  “It’s just Abdi,” I say, like just Sam, but she’s already heading out the door.

  This is good, I tell myself as I follow. Getting out of here is a good thing. You don’t want to be in jail. The words slide through my brain, failing to rouse any sort of response, good or bad. All I feel is nervous about being out and exposed again.

  As we’re leaving, the police are bringing another guy into the station who’s bleeding from a pink gash on his scalp, his head bobbing around on a neck as useless as a rubber band. The officers have to pick him up under the armpits and drag him inside. He’s missing a shoe and smells like beer and pee. We keep walking.

  My eyes automatically sweep over the people in the yard, but I don’t notice anyone suspicious. Ladies in bright kangas wait to bring food to locked-up family members. They sit under the palms with the patience of saints. Their kids scuffle in the sand. Men with somber faces and ill-fitting suits line up at an office window for something.

  The white Land Cruiser Sam aims for stands out like an elephant in the parking lot, its antennas bristling importantly.

  She sits up front with the driver, and I get in the back. They talk in muted voices while I look out the window. An officer has just come out and told the waiting women that they can queue up to bring food to the prisoners. They jostle for position in line, and a fight almost breaks out.

  “Is this right? Your address?” Sam asks, twisting around in her seat.

  I look at where she’s pointing on the form. The address I gave to the police was 100 percent fake. The driver, a Kenyan, looks at me and seems to see more than Sam can. “We want to take you home,” he says. “What neighborhood? Eastleigh?”

  “No,” I say quickly. Definitely not Eastleigh, the place in Sangui City most people refer to as “little Mogadishu.” But I can’t tell them to take me to Kenyatta. That part of town is just office buildings and lunch restaurants. Nobody lives there. Well, no one but street kids anyway. So I say the first thing that comes to mind: Mbagani area, Jogo Road.

  That satisfies them, and they both turn around and the driver pushes us out into the press of metal and glass that is Sangui traffic. The sun is setting and I hear the adhan, the call to prayer, start up from somewhere in the leafy-green neighborhood. I lock my door.

  The car windows are cracked only a fraction, tinted so no one can see inside, but still, I keep scanning. Looking for what, I don’t know. That little sign that something is off, the tickling sensation in the back of your brain. That primal instinct that tells you when someone is looking at you, lining up their sights. The same people who taught me to listen to that part of my brain are here somewhere. The Boys are walking these streets, ready to slice me up. Because I’m their little traitor.

  I try desperately to keep my eyes open, but it’s like my body has decided, Enough. You’re safe enough. I will close them for just one second. Just one.

  FOUR

  THEN: AUGUST 17

  ?, SOMALIA

  Like I said, I’ve been in worse cells.

  At some point while I’m lying on the damp concrete floor with my hands and ankles tied, I have a revelation. Here’s what I think: My family and I weren’t actually abducted from our beds in the middle of the night by soldiers. My mother, grandmother, little sisters, and brother are not in a nearby cell, broken or in the process of being broken.

  I think that maybe, in fact, they have been abducted by aliens.

  Wait. I know how that sounds, but just hear me out. Let me explain. It makes a lot of sense, actually. Why haven’t I been allowed to see them? Why won’t these soldiers tell me where I am?

  Because they’re scared, that’s why. They don’t want me to know the truth.

  I’m not talking about a bad abduction. I’m talking about one like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We showed it on repeat about a year ago at Salama Cinema Palace, the backroom DVD hall where I used to work. The movie was old as shit, but awesome. Isn’t it actually possible, totally possible, that right before the soldiers broke into our compound, Hooyo, Ayeyo, Hafsa, and the twins were just beamed up? I saw the light. It was blinding. Knocked me right out, didn’t it?

  I close my eyes, open them, see the same thing: nothing. It’s that dark. I warm to the thought that in the chaos, childlike aliens with gentle little hands saw what was happening and stopped time, came down, and led my family away to their spaceship. They intervened at exactly the right moment and protected Hooyo and the others from the men who have me now. Maybe the aliens didn’t see me, or they thought I was dead. That’s why I got left behind. The soldiers only managed to get me.

  I can picture it all so clearly. My family is sitting up there in space, and they are all fine. Ayeyo is complaining that the aliens talk too softly while she nods off in her comfy white space chair. And maybe instead of a little dog, like in the movie, there’s a cat up there for Hafsa to play with. One that looks like the tabby that ran away during the long rains last year. Faisal and Zahra play with silver alien LEGOs. Maybe even Aabo and Dahir are there. They found Aabo and beamed him straight up from whatever construction site he was working on in Saudi, and Dahir has escaped from the Boys. The little aliens are friendly, and when the time is right, when everything is safe again, they’ll rescue me from this pit and we’ll all go zooming off into space, to a bett
er world.

  I want to tell my captors that I’ve figured it out. I know what they don’t want me to know. But I can’t seem to make my body take on the task of sitting up. I tell it to move and nothing happens. My head and face are sticky and swollen, and my mouth won’t form words. I smell copper and urine, mildew and dirt.

  Thoughts flit through my head in the dark like pale butterflies.

  FIVE

  THEN: AUGUST 17

  MOGADISHU?, SOMALIA

  “Hey, boy, kaalay, get up.”

  Big hands grab me under my arms and haul me up off the floor. By the time my head clears enough to think about struggling, I’ve been dragged into another room and flung into a chair. My body is a symphony of pain: I hurt in too many ways to count or separate. I finally get one eye open, and the world swims at me in the shape of a man’s silhouette. I can’t see his face. The room is dark, and the only light comes from a bulb behind his head.

  I try to figure out where all my limbs are. My hands are tied behind my back. My ankles are shackled together. It finally clicks that I’ve been like this for a long time. Days. I feel a tug at my feet. The soldier who put me in the chair is binding them behind me, attaching them to my wrists, hobbling me. The word helicopter pops into my head. It’s what they call this position: feet tied to hands behind your back. Every once in a while a body will show up on the street, still tied up like this, tortured, dead, dumped for the seagulls to peck at and the people to learn a lesson from.

  Comforting thoughts.

  “What is . . .” The garbled words in my head won’t come out right. “Where am I?”

  The man doesn’t reply. He is smoking, a gray cloud pooling around his face in the stagnant air.

  I shake my head, trying to get my vision to work. Bad idea. Hurts like hell. I can’t make the man’s face out, but the hand with the cigarette is white. Not good. There are no white guys in Mogadishu you want to run into. Especially not in . . . wherever I am. The cell has no windows. No way to tell where I am or how much time has passed. I don’t even know if I’m still in Mogadishu.

  “Who are you?” I manage. “Where’s my family?” I feel something hard in my mouth and spit it into my lap. A piece of tooth.

  The man exhales. “So many questions.” The words are Somali, but his gravelly voice isn’t.

  Was there a white guy with the soldiers who grabbed us? I have no idea. When they burst into our house, I thought the men were thugs who’d come to rob us. It happens all the time in our neighborhood. But it didn’t take long to figure out that these guys weren’t your average pack of khaat-high looters. They had body armor and big guns and moved in an organized pack. They’d been trained. They were taking orders. They shone lights in our eyes so we couldn’t see. And all they said was “Be still! Stop talking!” again and again. The whole thing probably took less than two minutes. The last I remember I was being separated from my mother and grandmother, my sister and the twins, and tossed into a truck. I woke up here. Alone.

  My best guess is that I’ve been here two, maybe three days. This guy is the first person to actually talk to me. The soldiers come to visit, but it’s just to beat me into a bloody mess every couple of hours like they’re on a schedule. Electrical wires whipped against my bare feet until they’re fat and oozing. Fists cracking against my face and ribs. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to be alive. They haven’t questioned me. They haven’t said anything. It’s like I was brought in just for the pleasure of beating the shit out of me.

  The man continues to smoke and watch me. A soldier brings a cup of water and holds it to my lips. It runs down my neck as I try to swallow.

  I think I might be in the Hole.

  People don’t come out of the Hole.

  That’s all I can figure, that I’m in the underground prison that’s been passed from president to occupier to warlord—whoever’s in charge of the capital—over the years. But the thing is, you have to be someone special to make it into the Hole. And not to be all humble about it, but seriously, I’m nobody. Ask anyone. I’ve worked hard at it. Abdiweli Mohamed, total nobody. Kid who does okay in school, keeps his head down, runs from trouble. Family as poor as anyone else’s. My dad’s not a politician; he’s in Saudi working construction like half the dads in my neighborhood. No one in my family is a troublemaker, unless you count my eighty-year-old grandma, my ayeyo, whose potty mouth would make a soldier blush.

  The man pulls a chair out of the shadows and sits in front of me. I can see his face now. He’s definitely white. Shit. The only white guys in Mogadishu are the occasional journalist with a death wish and European and American military. They’re supposedly training the Somali army and the AMISOM troops from Uganda and Kenya. AMISOM—the African Union Mission in Somalia—and the army are everywhere, but the white guys stay out of sight, on bases near the airport. Whispered rumors are always going around about night raids by American Navy SEALs, bombs dropped by drones. If you’re smart, you don’t ask. You don’t want to know. You don’t want to have anything to do with it.

  And you definitely don’t want to be stuck down in the Hole with one of them.

  AMISOM and the army are supposed to be the good guys, and we cheer when they march down the street, and yeah, they’re better than Al Shabaab, but I follow one simple rule, hammered into me by my father before he left to find work in Saudi: Don’t trust guys with guns. Any of them.

  I look around the cell again. Both guards have AK-47s trained on me. I may not have gone looking for trouble, but it doesn’t seem to have mattered, Aabo. It came looking for me.

  “Are you hungry, Abdiweli?”

  Hungry? That’s what he asks, after his friends have spent the last couple of days tenderizing me like a side of meat? The man waits for my answer. I shake my head no. I can see him better now. He has thin glasses and a beard. He isn’t in fatigues, just normal clothes, simple pants and a button-down shirt like a schoolteacher. He’s looking at me, but something about his gaze seems like he’s not really seeing me. Like he’s inspecting the engine of a broken-down car. As if I’m something mechanical that will work if he can just figure out which screw to turn.

  “I need to ask you some questions,” the man says.

  “Who are you?” I ask again.

  “You can call me Mr. Jones.”

  “My family . . .”

  “Your family is fine.”

  “Where are they? I need to see them.” I try to stop it, but my voice cracks. “Please.”

  He cocks his head. “Maybe. My questions first, though. Then we’ll talk about your family.” Mr. Jones has a folder in his hands, which he opens. “I need you to be truthful with me. Can you do that?”

  I look from him to the folder. I know where this is going. “I’m not a terrorist.”

  “No,” he agrees, like he knows everything there is to know about me already. He holds up a photo of a man walking down a street. “Do you recognize him?”

  At first I don’t. It’s the beard, maybe, and something about his eyes. He’s older, obviously. But then I do, like a slap across the face. For a second I don’t move. Then I lick my lips. “No.”

  “Are you sure?” Mr. Jones flips the photo around, as if to be sure he’s shown me the right one. He lets me look again.

  I shake my head. A bead of sweat rolls into my eye, and I blink. A thousand thoughts rocket through my brain, one after another: he’s dead he’s not dead that’s not him it is him where did he get that photo where is he is it really him it can’t be him—

  Mr. Jones looks past me and nods. A signal. It snaps me out of my head. I start to turn, but feel my feet being yanked back, my toes scraped against the concrete, old wounds reopening. “No!” I shout, trying to shake free.

  But the hands hold my ankles tight. I hear the telltale whistle and the electrical wire slices against the soles of my feet like a lick of blue fire.

 
Like all the other times this has happened, I scream.

  “Oh, come now, it’s not that bad,” Mr. Jones says to me.

  I let myself moan, high and soft like a girl. I am so beyond caring about how I look to these soldiers. I watch a string of my drool roll down my bloody shirtfront.

  “Come, look again.”

  I don’t lift my face.

  “It’s your brother, isn’t it?”

  When I still don’t answer, I hear the whistle, and I’m already screaming before it hits.

  “It’s your brother Dahir. Okay, that’s enough.”

  At first I think he’s talking to me, but then I realize he’s telling my torturers to stop. For a second I don’t believe it. I wait, but nothing happens. Choking a breath, I feel a sudden surge of relief. None of them have ever stopped once they start, no matter how I beg or cry or scream. Not until they’re good and ready. This man, he can control them. I feel words bubbling up, and I nearly let them slip. Thank you, I almost say.

  What is wrong with me? Suddenly I feel worse than I’ve felt at any point so far and I gag, but nothing comes up. It’s like my eyeballs have come unhinged from my head and I’m seeing myself from a high, far corner of the room.

  “We’ll take his identity as a given,” Mr. Jones says. “Dahir Mohamed, age nineteen.” He picks up my chin and forces me to look at him. His eyes are calm. Up close, I can see that Jones is older than I had thought at first. His face is wrinkled, blotchy. White hairs sprinkle his beard. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You don’t know.”

  “No.”

  He shakes me by the jaw. Not hard, just enough to make me look at him again. “We do. We know where he is.”

  “Where?” I can’t help asking, even though I know he’s not going to say.