I lie on the carpet, wondering whether I should make another attempt to move. I do not even know who this boy is; he could be in the same sort of trouble I am. I try to find my arms and realize they are behind me, tied with what I assume is the phone cord.
This, too, is a first for me. I have never been restrained like this, though I have seen men tied by the hands, and I have seen these men executed before me. I was eleven years old when I saw seven such men killed in front of me, in front of ten thousand of us boys in Ethiopia. It was meant to be a lesson to us all.
My mouth is taped closed. It is packing tape, I know, because Achor Achor and I had been using it on the food we were storing in the freezer. Powder and Tonya must have wrapped it across my mouth; now the roll is lying next to my shoulder. My voice and movements are restricted by the things I own.
I am not sure what will happen to me here. I have come to know that shootings happen more as a result of struggle than of planning. Because I have given up my struggle, and because there is a ten-year-old boy at my kitchen table, I believe they do not intend to kill me. But I am, I know, lost in this series of events. I do not know where my assailants are, or if they are coming back. Who are you, TV Boy? My assumption is that they have left you to guard me and the television, and that they will soon come to retrieve both. As a boy I was asked more than once to guard the AK-47 of a soldier of the Sudan People's Liberation Army. For much of the war, it was said that a rebel soldier who lost his gun would be executed by the SPLA, and thus when a soldier was busy in some way he often employed the help of a boy, all of us willing. I once guarded a gun while one particular soldier found pleasure with an Anyuak woman. It was the second time I ran my hands over that kind of gun, and I can remember its heat to this day.
But thinking, bringing forth any memory at all, causes such searing pain in the back of my skull that I close my eyes and soon lose consciousness again. I wake up three or four times and am not sure what time it is, how long I've been lying on my floor, bound. There are no longer clocks in the room, and the night is as dark as it was when I first fell. Each time I wake, the boy is still at the kitchen table, having barely moved. His face is no more than eight inches from the screen, and his eyes do not blink.
As I lie here, my brain grows more lucid, and I begin to wonder more about this boy. He has not once turned to look at me. I cannot see the screen but I hear the laughter bursting from it and it's the saddest sound I have heard since arriving in this country. If I am right, and this boy is guarding me, I think I will definitely leave Atlanta. I might very well leave this country altogether; perhaps I'll go to Canada. I know many Sudanese who have settled in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal. They tell me to join them, that there is less crime, more job options. They have guaranteed insurance there, for one thing, and as I lie here it occurs to me that I have none. I was insured for a year, until recently, when I allowed it to lapse. Four months ago, I quit my fabric-sample job to become a full-time student, and insurance seemed an inessential expense. I try to guess at my injuries but at this point I have no idea. The fact that I can think at all leads me to believe that either I have escaped a major head wound, or I am already dead.
The Sudanese who are not heading to Canada are moving to the Great Plains, to Nebraska and Kansas-to states where cattle become meat. Meat processing is high paying, they tell me, and it is relatively inexpensive to live in these parts of the country. Omaha now hosts thousands of Sudanese men, Lost Boys and others, a good percentage of whom are paid to divide and carve the animals, cattle, that in many parts of our native Sudan were only to be slaughtered as sacrifices on the most sacred of occasions: weddings, funerals, births. The Sudanese in America have become butchers; it is the single most popular occupation among the men I know. I am unsure whether this is a giant leap forward from our lives in Kakuma. I suppose it is, and the butchers are building a better life for their children, if they have them. To hear young Sudanese children, born of immigrants, speak like Americans! This is how it is now, in 2006. There are few things stranger to me.
I look up to the couch and think of Tabitha. Not long ago, she sat on that couch with me, her legs over mine. We were entwined so tightly that I was afraid to breathe, lest she move at all. TV Boy, I miss her with a growing heat that surprises me and will likely engulf me. She was here with me not long ago for a weekend where we barely left the apartment; it was decadent and quite contrary to the ways in which we were raised. She had come to the United States, to Seattle, from the refugee camp at Kakuma, too, and here we were, two children who grew up in that camp, so many years later living in America and sitting on this couch in this room, shaking our heads at how we came this far and what lay ahead. She giggled about my thin arms, demonstrating that she could touch her thumb and forefinger around my bicep. But there was nothing she could do or say that could offend me or dissuade me from loving her. She had come to Atlanta to visit me and that said everything that mattered. She was sitting on my couch, in my apartment, wearing a very snug pink T-shirt I had bought for her the day before, at the DeKalb Mall. Shopping is my therapy! it said, in glittering silver lettering that swung upward from left to right, with a splashy star as the bottom of its exclamation mark. Sitting next to her in that shirt was intoxicating and I loved Tabitha in a way that made me feel like an adult, like I had finally become a man. With her I felt I could escape my childhood, its deprivation and calamity.
The boy is now looking in the refrigerator. He will find nothing palatable to him. Achor Achor and I cook in the Sudanese way, and I have yet to find any Americans who are eager for the results. We are not, I admit, skilled chefs. For our first many weeks here, we did not know which foods belonged in the freezer, which in the refrigerator, which in the cabinets and drawers. To be safe, we placed most items, including milk and peanut butter, in the freezer, and this proved problematic.
The boy finds something he likes and returns to his seat. I am somewhat sure that this boy, now sitting with the TV again, Fanta in hand, knows nothing about what I saw in Africa. I wouldn't expect him to, nor do I fault him. I was far older than he is when I realized that there was a world beyond southern Sudan, that oceans existed. But I was not much older than he is when I began to tell my story, what I had seen. In the years since our journey from our villages to Ethiopia, and then across the bloody river to Kenya, it has helped me and it has helped others to tell our story. When we were proving our case to UN officials in Kakuma, or are now trying to convey the urgency of the situation in Sudan, we tell the most dire stories. Since I have been in the U.S., I have told abridged versions of my story to church congregations, to high school classes, to reporters, to my sponsor, Phil Mays. Perhaps a hundred times at this point I have traced the basic outline. Phil, though, wanted all the details, and I have told him the most complete account. His wife heard the broad strokes and could hear no more. It was Phil and I who, every Tuesday night, after a meal with his wife and young twins, would walk up his spiral stairs and down the hall, to the infants' pink playroom, and there I would tell my story in two-hour stretches. When I know someone is listening, and that person wants to know everything I can remember, I can bring them forward. If you have ever kept a diary of your dreams, you know how the mere recording of them each morning can bring them forth in your mind. Backward from the part you remember best, you can recreate the night's adventures and wishes and terrors, conjuring everything from when you lay your head on your pillow.