Photo credit: Margarita Osipian

This is the second installment in a series of 11 audio poems collectively known as “The Benjy Poems,” written and directed by Benjamin Hackman, and produced and engineered by Craig Saltz.

The Benjy Poems was adapted for the audio stage by the author and is based on a collection of poems by the same name. The poems were performed by their author, with additional voice talent provided by: Jessica Popeski, Benjamin Reinhartz, Caitlin Morris-Cornfield, Schön Faria, Sarit Cantor, and Bradley Benninger.

This project was made possible by the generous financial assistance of CUE. Poems in the series were funded by the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

“Benjy’s Education” previously appeared as text in Canadian Literature, as audio in The Collagist and online as a part of a selection of poems that won the Ted Plantos Memorial Award in 2011 from the Ontario Poetry Society.

Photo credit: Margarita Osipian

This is the first installment in a series of 11 audio poems collectively known as “The Benjy Poems,” written and directed by Benjamin Hackman, and produced and engineered by Craig Saltz.

The Benjy Poems was adapted for the audio stage by the author and is based on a collection of poems by the same name. The poems were performed by their author, with additional voice talent provided by: Jessica Popeski, Benjamin Reinhartz, Caitlin Morris-Cornfield, Schön Faria, Sarit Cantor, and Bradley Benninger.

This project was made possible by the generous financial assistance of CUE. Poems in the series were funded by the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

“A Note to the Players” previously appeared in The Collagist #38.

Congratulations to Heather Davis, the winner of the 2012 3Macs carte blanche Prize for her work of nonfiction, Aria, published in Issue 15.

And congratulations to the finalists: Christopher Chew and Ian McGillis.

The juror for this year’s prize was Kevin Chong, the author of four books, most recently the novel Beauty Plus Pity and the memoir My Year of the Racehorse. He is based in Vancouver.

The 3Macs carte blanche Prize is awarded once a year in recognition of an outstanding submission by a Quebec writer, artist, or translator. The prize is sponsored by Mark Gallop, of MacDougall, MacDougall & MacTier Inc.

We’re extremely proud to bring you yet another great issue of poetry, fiction, photography, graphic fiction, creative nonfiction, audio stories, and our carte blanche Q&A, as we come to the end of our eighth year of publishing.

For this issue, we asked our contributors to send us their stories on “conflict”, the wars big and small that changed their lives. Among them are Erika Dreifus’ violent encounter with a stranger, Gregory Koop’s vision of war through the eyes of one family, and Rob Thomas’ disagreement with his son on the definition of kite.

But almost every story contains a conflict, internal or external, that motivates its characters. We invite you to discover these battles as you peruse these pages.

We may have been publishing for eight years, but we are still growing. Next year, we will produce three issues per year (spring, summer, and fall) on our new improved website – coming soon!

Also, stay tuned for the next This Really Happened event, in Montreal, on January 22nd and, for the second time, at the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival in April 2013

Sincerely,


Maria Schamis Turner

Editor, carte blanche

But he doesn’t smile back. Instead, he raises his fist. With a single punch—and a blade between his fingers—he rips open the flesh between your hairline and the corner of your eye. Then, unflustered, he keeps walking north; you stumble south, your hands clutching your forehead.

Fire! you yell, because you remember that safety snippet about bystanders being more willing to assist fire victims. It’s a cold, atypically quiet day; you’ve passed no baby strollers and only a few leashed dogs on your jog. But after a few moments one man—white, about your father’s age—sees you. He doesn’t hesitate. He tries to calm you while calling 911 and looking for someone—presumably, a large, vigorous, and utterly fearless someone—who might catch the attacker.

So much blood. If you’d attended medical school, like so many of your Ivy League friends, you’d know that the head bleeds profusely. You’d understand that this unstoppable liquid staining your blue fleece jacket and soaking your fingers as they pull and press together the edges of your wound isn’t necessarily catastrophic. But for now, you are ignorant. Something from a long-ago first-aid class tells you that you should sit, or maybe even lie down on the chilly ground, to keep the blood from pumping down as well as out from your head.

Still, you begin to crumble, because you can hear that the 911 operator just doesn’t understand this nice man on the phone and can’t figure out exactly where you are, on this walkway between the park and the river, where there isn’t a cross street. Or any street. The ambulance will get there too late, and you will die without seeing your family again, the last image before your eyes your own bloodstained fingers and the pigeons flying above the waterline.

The nice man keeps trying to calm you between his diligent efforts to enlighten the dispatcher. Another stranger joins the pair of you.

“She wants to call her parents,” the first man says. “Can you give her your phone?”

The newcomer, who also appears to be a prosperous white man in his sixties, hesitates. “So much blood,” he says. “I don’t want all that blood on my phone.”

You almost laugh. You envision your father responding similarly. He can be squeamish; he doesn’t regret that you and your sister were born in a time and a hospital that barred him from the delivery room.

The first man, who had placed his jacket around your shoulders while waiting for the 911 dispatcher to get with the program, seems annoyed. A compromise is reached: the second man will call your parents himself. They’re back in the city from their holiday, unpacking groceries in their apartment. An hour ago, before you began your jog along the river, your father had stopped by to drop off a bagful for you. He knows that you’re nearly 40, that you’ve lived on your own for almost two decades, that your steady paycheck renders you entirely capable of purchasing groceries. But he’s the son of Holocaust refugees; he simply must bring you groceries. Just in case.

You manage to recite your parents’ phone number. When you hear your mother’s cheerful Hello—and somehow, you can hear it clearly even down there on the ground—you nearly weep.

More people gather. The asphalt is cold beneath you, and that extra jacket isn’t sufficient. You’re shaking, as the man with the phone will soon tell a New York Times reporter.

The paramedics materialize. They promise that they will take care of you. You will be fine.

Almost simultaneously, your father arrives. “Mom will meet us at the hospital,” he says. His voice is steady. He squeezes your hand. He tells the paramedics, when they ask, which hospital you prefer. He responds that yes, you would like to have a plastic surgeon available.

You can’t believe how well he is handling this. You’re proud of him.

They’ve wrapped your head in something. Gauze? Bandages? Your eyes are closed and covered. You are moved onto a stretcher and carried to wherever they managed to park the ambulance. It is your first time in an ambulance.

So much lies ahead. Three dozen stitches on your forehead. Nerves so jangled that you will be unable to sleep. Interview requests that you will decline (technically, your mother will decline them, because she won’t leave your side for days, and she intercepts all incoming phone calls). The news people will cover the story anyway, and you will be shocked to see your own image, culled from the Internet, flashing across your television screen.

And then, heartbreakingly, there will be the visit to the precinct to view a lineup. You won’t be able to identify the attacker, but oh, the shame and rage and other devastation you will read on the faces of the men assembled on the other side of the glass, emotions that you will also see etched into the old mug shots that the sketch artist will ask you to review down at One Police Plaza not too many days later. At those moments, you will again want to weep, guilt pressing behind your eyes and in your heart, because you are facing this trauma (and everyone assures you that it is, indeed, a trauma) with privileges and resources that none of these men will ever possess.

But all of that rests in your future. In this moment, on the stretcher in the ambulance, you hear the door shut. Your father continues to hold your hand, tightly. The sirens wail.

This one here is the one story I kept avoiding. But then last Christmas, when my aunts came and sat in our rose wallpapered living room and my mother was hairless and glassy-eyed from chemo-brain, they told all these stories again. They told them with laughter, or with seriousness, but without anger, as if they were someone else’s stories. They told the story about the man who used to be a friend of my grandfather’s, a farmer who owned a small fruit and vegetable farm outside of town. At the beginning of the summer, after my grandfather died, the man started bringing generous bunches of carrots or radishes or kale to my grandma each week. She would invite him in for a tea, and sometimes he said yes, and she apologized about the mess and tried to throw out the Bazooka bubble gum wrappers and spilled cereal before he finished wiping his boots clean on the cocoa mat. Sometimes he said no, and Grandma was relieved, and my Aunt Glennice was delighted that she could cook fresh vegetables for supper and wouldn’t have to run to the convenience store for canned pasta because Grandma had forgotten to get groceries before the store closed. (My uncle says that Aunt Jeannette now needs to have at least two heads of lettuce going bad in the fridge at all times, just so she knows they’re there.)

When September came and the kids left their jobs in the tobacco fields and the tar from the leaves was slowly wearing away from their cuticles and they had finished painting the decrepit porch and shutters with their earnings, then the farmer came by to gently lift the brass mailbox lid without wiping his boots and left a bill charging Grandma for all of the summer’s produce. “And she paid for every last one of those vegetables, though it took her months,” Aunt Glennice said in our lamp-lit living room.

The story I’m about to tell is the one I’ve been avoiding. This one is about the family in the big house down the street. We’ll call them the Mansfields. There were three girls who were a bit older than my aunts and mother. My mom says that she and her siblings grew up knowing they were poor but not knowing how poor they were. She and her sisters would lug out plastic tubs from the basement and fill them with soap and water and sponge bathe the poorer, dirtier kids in the neighbourhood. I picture them all out in the front yard with the green garden hose and the mutt, Scamp, looping between the kids and barking while several stations are set up. My aunts and mother stand in their swimsuits, eyes squinting beneath bowl-cut bangs while the others, dressed in grey undershirts and torn shorts, step into their Ivory baptisms and shed their grime like Pig Pen stepping out of his cloud of filth.

The Mansfields would have seen this, and they also would have known that my grandma’s kids played down the ravine in Catfish Creek, where catfish can’t survive. The kids made rafts of sticks and thin logs and pop bottles while playing Huck and Finn. The Mansfield house was something else, and who knows how much of something else because most all of the houses looked like something else compared to the one in which plastic and cardboard were duct taped around the cracked bedroom windows and where the kids wore their winter coats to bed.

Mrs. Mansfield arrived at the front door one day and holding in her fists the necks of several green plastic garbage bags full of clothes that didn’t fit her three daughters anymore. “I was wondering if these would fit your girls,” she said to Grandma, who was still dressed in her yellow housecoat with pink petals. Mom, Aunt Jeannette, and Aunt Glennice came around the corner slowly and Mrs. Mansfield smiled and held out the bags for them and they took them shyly to their room and tried things on. “And we were so excited,” said Aunt Glennice. “We never got new things.”

This isn’t really quite true. My mom, the youngest girl, never got anything new. But there were a few things Aunt Glennice was given when her father was still alive—a pink cashmere sweater and a plaid coat. She also bought a pair of jeans, I know, because she was only allowed jeans with the zipper on the side. Zippers in the front were for sluts.

But the Mansfields’ clothes were “gently used” and trendy, and the girls threw shirts over their heads and pulled on still-dark denim. Many of them actually fit properly, weren’t too tight or short or tearing at the hem. When they came out of the bedroom, Mrs. Mansfield was still there. She smiled and asked, “Did you find anything you like?” and the girls nodded and said thank you. Then she turned to my grandmother.

“And how would you like to pay for these?” Mrs. Mansfield asked kindly.

The girls looked down and tried to keep their faces from turning white and prayed their mother would have the humility to refuse. “Well,” said Grandma slowly, “I don’t have enough cash to pay you up front.”

“That’s fine! I completely understand,” said Mrs. Mansfield. “Why don’t we do it in increments.”

“And she paid for every last piece,” Aunt Glennice told us. The clothes began to feel like hair shirts. They ended up in a pile at the back of the closet until the girls outgrew them.

A couple of years ago Mom was in the chemo ward, where the nurses said that she “just lit up the place” with her presence. Friends or her sisters drove her there and flipped through copies of Canadian Living while she slept. The nurses loved Mom’s wigs and we all knew the blond one might be a little too young for her, but they told her she might as well take the opportunity to find out if blonds actually do have more fun.

Mom was there one day with plastic chords plugged into her arm, and in the far corner of the room she saw Mrs. Mansfield all alone. Maybe Mrs. Mansfield is a happy person. Maybe she usually has a daughter or grandchild or neighbour and this happened to be a day when they all happened to be busy. But Mom thought Mrs. Mansfield looked worn and sad. And she couldn’t talk to her because she was sleeping in the dark corner. And she didn’t talk to her because it might bring the woman more pain than pleasure to see someone she had wronged in the past, even if she were lonely and dying now.

He and his crew would drive from Soweto up to Johannesburg’s northern suburbs 20 miles away, where the rich lived behind walls topped with broken glass and concertina wire. They’d stake out their target. Sometimes they were after a luxury car. Sometimes it was the contents of somebody’s safe.

Home invasions could be messy, but there was a lot of money to be made. They’d strike just as the sky began to lighten, as the servants were turning off alarms and getting the paper. “We’d find the main bedroom and ask them, ‘Where’s our money?’”

He said he always urged nonviolence, at least at first. If the householder resisted, he’d appeal to the guy’s sense of reason, to his desire to see another day. But if he still wouldn’t budge, “It’s bad, it’s bad, when you are not talking. Then I will go outside and let the others deal with you. But when you open the safe it’s cool.”

Now 32, he says he’s retired. He told me he never killed anybody. I want to believe him.

~ ~ ~

I met the thug in 2009, through his cousin Khaya, a 28-year-old door-to-door salesman who peddled Chinese-made insoles and caller-ID machines. Like just about everyone else in Soweto, Khaya had to hustle for a living—the unemployment rate was around 40 percent. While South Africa has come a long way since the end of white rule in 1994, half the country still lives below the poverty line, and the shantytowns are growing with a biotic intensity. Khaya had plenty of competition from other guys selling the same stuff, and it was hard. “That’s business,” he said with a shrug.

His cousin, the thug, was a very different sort of hustler. Due to the nature of his work, I won’t name him. Instead I’ll call him Bongani, a common Zulu name that means “give thanks.” Bongani lives with a few members of his extended family in a modest red brick house in a quiet Soweto neighbourhood. He was cleaning his room when we arrived, R&B blasting from a boom box. He is short and muscular, a fireplug in a Manchester United jersey, with an old scar running from his left temple to below his eye.

He paged through a photo album. In one photo, taken in the early 1990s, he wears a shirt and tie and holds a gigantic, Paleolithic cell phone, a gadget no regular Soweto kid could have afforded back then. Another image is of his first crew. Three guys, all with high-top fade haircuts like old-school New York rappers, sprawl across a car hood, glowering at the camera. “This person there, he has already passed away,” he said pointing to one kid.

Bongani got into the game in the late 1980s, during the last years of apartheid. He was in his early teens, and some older guys in the neighbourhood recruited him into their crew. Soon he had that giant cell phone and he was missing a lot of school.

Not that anyone cared, because Soweto was in open revolt. The white government had declared a state of emergency. Armored cars patrolled the streets, shooting down protestors. Anti-apartheid activists were trying to make Soweto “ungovernable,” and they were succeeding. People quit paying the rent on their government houses. Kids quit school. “Liberation before education,” as the sloganeers put it.

He joined the crew out of economic necessity, he told me. Neither of his parents had jobs. He was the eldest child; if no one else could provide, he would. He bought nice clothes for himself, but most of the money went to support the small universe of relatives who had come to depend on him. It was an underworld version of the southern African concept of ubuntu, which means, “We exist for each other.”

He’s proud of this self-sufficiency. “When you must ask of neighbors,” he explained, “they are always whispering at the back of you.”

Most nights the crew headed north to the suburbs. Nigerian middlemen brought them orders from car buyers all across southern Africa—Mozambique, Tanzania, Zimbabwe. Maybe somebody wanted a C-class Benz, maybe a 4×4. Often, the Nigerians already had a car picked out. All Bongani had to do was take it: “We’d wait for the owner. We just ask for the keys, nothing else. If he is fighting, then we grab him and tie him with wires or ropes and put him in the house.”

They’d drive their treasure out to the empty spaces of eastern Johannesburg, half-industrial suburbs near the airport where there was plenty of privacy. The Nigerians would be there with the money.

There were four guys in Bongani’s crew, and they stole six or seven cars a week. It was lucrative: he made a few hundred dollars a week when business was good. The thieves couldn’t have done it, of course, without cooperation from the police—both black cops in the townships and white cops elsewhere. “You must have cops who know you,” he said. “You must pay the cops.”

Breaking off his story, he moved to his stoep. He swept his arms out, taking in the whole of Soweto beyond his courtyard. “I could tell you that maybe 30 cars have been stolen this morning.”

~ ~ ~

If you’re feeling cynical, you might say Bongani was just ahead of his time. Or maybe that he didn’t set his sights high enough. After apartheid ended, Johannesburg was on track to become the murder capital of the world. The papers were full of Wild West-style shootouts and cinematic hijackings. Men dressed as cops robbed buses full of tourists while gangs drove trucks through storefronts, loading their precious cargo out into idling vans like well-armed movers.

South Africa’s new government went on a renaming binge, banishing a slew of Afrikaans names from the nation’s official lexicon. Boer generals were swapped out for liberation heroes, white names for black. Jan Smuts airport became Oliver Tambo, Pretoria became Tshwane. Transvaal province, home to Johannesburg and Soweto, was now called Gauteng.

License plates were changed to read “G.P.,” for Gauteng Province. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles rapper Coolio, who hit big with “Gangsta’s Paradise” then faded from view, was all over the airwaves in South Africa. The “G.P.” on those license plates came to stand for “Gangster’s Paradise.” Men on the street sold T-shirts bearing the slogan along with a picture of the license plate.

One of the country’s biggest current celebrities is an ex-con named Kenny Kunene, a mix of Robin Hood, Al Capone, and Donald Trump. Since getting out of prison in 2003, Kunene, a former car thief and ivory trader, has transformed himself into a mining and nightclub magnate. He gives inspirational talks at schools (‘When we were criminals we couldn’t enjoy our cars; we couldn’t drive them in the daylight,” he reportedly said), but he also brags about eating sushi from the midriffs of models. No one’s quite sure how he made so much money so quickly or if that money is legit. Kunene says he wants to be a role model for South Africa’s poor youth, and he probably is. At last count, his Facebook page had almost 30,000 “likes.”

~ ~ ~

We got in my car, and Bongani pointed out the local landmarks. The mechanic’s shop where stolen cars were dismembered. The liquor store where his gangster friends hung out. The storefront where they made moonshine. A heavyset man wearing a ratty Christmas sweater emerged from the building and shuffled down the sidewalk. “I went to school with that man,” said Bongani. They’re the same age, but the man in the sweater looked 15 years older. “The drinkers don’t live long because of the chemicals,” he said. “If you drink cheap alcohol you’ll have a cheap life.”

At a backyard restaurant, its grills set up in an old shipping container, we bought bunny chow: a half-loaf of white bread stuffed with a hamburger patty, baloney, cheese, mayo, barbecue sauce, and fries.

We walked to a bridge overlooking a squatter camp named Chicken Farm, a settlement of hammered-together tin and plastic. Bongani grew up near here. The Klipspruit River runs through the camp; people do their washing in the water. It’s filthy, and when the rains come, the camp floods. The garbage floats in doorways.

The traffic roared past our backs. Honking minibus taxis, the chatter of school kids, the occasional screech of a drag racer peeling out: the ambient sounds of the township.

From our vantage point we could see Kliptown, where in the 1950s activists wrote the Freedom Charter, a precursor to modern South Africa’s famously progressive constitution. Kliptown is also the site of Soweto’s first luxury hotel, the kind of place where the ruling African National Congress holds meetings and banquets. “Instead of building homes for these people,” Bongani spat, “government builds a five-star hotel.”

Billboards on the roadside bragged about the millions of homes the ANC had built for poor South Africans since 1994. Millions more, though, were still waiting for their own matchbook houses. Of course, there’s no way even a perfect government could have met the pent-up expectations of its constituents, to speedily right the wrongs of a system built to serve the needs of a minority. But Johannesburg was completely encircled by places like Chicken Farm.

~ ~ ~

As Bongani tells it, life was hardest during apartheid’s final years. After Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990, everybody knew that change was coming. The white regime, however, made a last-ditch attempt to show the world that blacks weren’t fit to run the country by fomenting violence in the townships between traditional Zulu workers and the ANC’s political cadres. These were the Township Wars, which engulfed Soweto and other urban townships in the early 1990s. Aided by the white security forces, members of the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party fought their enemies from the ANC in the streets with clubs, knives, and guns. “Sellouts” were necklaced—set upon by a mob, immobilized by an auto tire, then set alight. In the ANC’s view, common criminals were little better than collaborators, so Bongani was a target, too.

He tried to explain his side of the story. Seen through the right lens, his crimes were just as political as, say, attacking a police truck. “These things, with thugs stealing cars, it was part and parcel of the struggle. We were blacks fighting for survival.”

He looked at the floor as he talked. “Our elders didn’t understand.”

~ ~ ~

Wondering how those elders felt about today’s South Africa, I paid a visit one day to Motsumi Makhene, the principal of Central Johannesburg College, a technical school that occupies an old whites-only, English-style school on a rocky rise above the city’s downtown grid. Makhene is a member of the “Class of ’76,” as it’s called, the generation of activists who came of age after the 1976 Soweto Uprising, which began the sustained revolt that ultimately brought down apartheid. For his generation, which braved police beatings and economic hardship in the name of freedom, the struggle was a unifying force. Younger South Africans, he noted, don’t have that bond. He rubbed his salt-and-pepper beard as he talked, contemplating the present and the future. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Liberation was followed by a headlong rush for profit. The new economy may be good at minting black millionaires, he said, but it’s left ordinary South Africans to fend for themselves. “We are modeling the art of the scavenger,” he told me, “with a message that says you must get rich immediately. It infects everything.”

~ ~ ~

As dusk came on, we dropped Bongani at his house. Nowadays, he rises at 4 a.m. to ride a minibus to the northern suburbs, where he works as a landscaper. “It’s not a bad job. But you know how much I earn there?” he asked with a snort. “2,970 rand for the month”—about a quarter of what he used to make in a week. For a bit of extra cash, he consults with younger car thieves. He shows them how to change the plates on a car or obscure its identification number, or he tells them which cops or judges can be bought.

He finally got out of the game after doing a few years in prison, along with two years in jail waiting for a trial (South Africa’s courts are terribly backlogged). It wasn’t legal troubles, however, that made him reconsider his line of work. One night, he said, an ancestor came to him in a dream and told him that he would die a violent death. The dream unsettled him. “I left because I saw that I could be dead anytime.”

~ ~ ~

The day after Bongani and I visited Chicken Farm, my friend Khaya and I drove to Avalon cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of Sowetans are buried. The cemetery is out on the edge of the township and stretches for miles across the veld. Avalon is expected to reach its capacity soon. Even now, they’re burying two coffins per gravesite.

During the struggle, funerals here often became rallies, ending with riot police lobbing teargas into the massing crowds. Today, tourists sometimes come to see the grave of Hector Pieterson, the 12-year-old whose killing during the Soweto Uprising drew the world’s gaze. Many of the headstones bear the seal of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing; one has a hammer and sickle etched into it. Many plots, though, are just piles of dirt with a number and a date. They’re new and unfinished, or the families didn’t have the money to do more.

Soweto is a chaotic place, but Avalon is quiet. It was late afternoon and fever-hot under gauzy clouds. We walk among the plots, guided by a young security guard with a fat, round face. Fifty yards away, two men in blue coveralls sang as they dug a grave. The breeze carried the sound over to us.

I thought of something Bongani said. He was explaining why he didn’t like to use violence, even though some of his partners did. “Some people had more anger than me,” he said. “Me, I was so patient, humbled by doing bad things.”

He fixed me with his eyes. “I know that God will punish me.” I drove out of Soweto. The wind came ripping off the slag mountains separating Soweto from Johannesburg. These hills, flat-topped heaps of castoff dirt and rock, are the byproduct of the gold mines that made Johannesburg the richest city on the continent. In the waning light, even these mine dumps looked like bars of gold.

I’m a few weeks into my new job as a Project Officer with a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The compound where I live and work is surrounded by eight-foot cement walls topped with curling rows of barbed wire. We have squat toilets, outdoor shower stalls, and no running water. Electricity is provided by a generator, which the night guard turns off around midnight. When the generator stops, so do the ceiling fans, making it hard to breathe, much less sleep.

I’ve found some comfort in my bedtime routine. In the mornings, I fill up a large water bottle, fold my sheets and pillowcase into a Ziploc bag, and put it all in the freezer. At night, I move my bed outside to the back of the compound, on the other side of the rakuba, the thatched roof shelter, where the women sleep. I shower, change into my loose cotton pants and baggy t-shirt, remove my icy package from the freezer, make my bed and immediately throw myself onto the frozen sheets, which stay blissfully cold for about three and a half minutes. I lie there, rolling the frozen water bottle over my body. Becky, in her striped pajama pants and college T-shirt, falls asleep spread eagle, on her back. Sahar, curled up on her side, murmurs into her phone. I don’t understand enough Arabic to know what she’s saying, but from her soft tone I guess that she’s talking to her fiancée or maybe mother or sister.

I’m getting used to the sounds of the village at night. I can sleep through the braying and moaning of our neighbours’ donkeys and cows, the sun rising over me in the morning. But I wake up with a start to the sounds of gunfire that occasionally break the heavy night air.

The first night I heard shots, I lay awake with my sheet pulled over my head trying to talk myself out of panicking as my housemates snored around me. The next morning, drinking tea under the rakuba, I asked my boss Abdullah about the noise. “You will hear gunshots here a lot,” he explained, legs crossed, glass of sugary tea in his hand. “Sometimes, it is people protecting their homes, shooting to scare away thieves, or people celebrating at a wedding. Sometimes,” he shrugged, “the men here just get drunk and start shooting their guns into the air.”

I’ve been told that if the kidnappers do show up, it will probably play out like this: they will come to the front gate, brandishing guns and shouting demands. Our elderly, unarmed guard will have no choice but to let them in. But the scenario I imagine is this: the kidnappers, AK-47s slung over their shoulders, stealthily scaling the cement wall, peering down at our sleeping bodies as they deftly cut the barbed wire with their machetes, landing with a thud on their feet, inches away from us.

I may have to confront this fear tomorrow. Sahar, Becky, and I have been attending a three-day safety training course for new NGO staff. My friend George, a security officer who runs the training, told me that the very tall and muscular Senegalese soldiers are going to simulate a surprise attack on us. Becky is excited. I am secretly terrified—not only of being kidnapped, but also, of being fake-kidnapped. If I cry, scream, become paralyzed with fear, everyone will know what I already do. I’m not cut out for this.

At the training base the next morning I confide to George that while I’m OK with an ambush-carjacking, I don’t want the nice Senegalese guys taking me away as the token kidnapping victim. “Does this mean we have to cancel the simulated gang rape?” his Russian co-worker bellows, laughing. I glare at him, but George shoots me a look I instantly understand. You have your jokes to deal with all this. Let us have ours.

Outside, we are divided into white Land Rovers and drive in a slow convoy around the base. The Senegalese soldiers jump out from their hiding places and attack us from all sides. They point unloaded AK-47s at us through the car windows. We are pulled out of the cars, blindfolded, and told to lie face down on the ground. I hear George giving them directions in French. I spit out some sand in my mouth as they go through our pockets, take our phones, bags, and shoes. I feel the men standing over me and my heart beats faster. I inhale and exhale slowly, remind myself that this is all pretend. Please, please no, I silently beg. This is mildly funny now, but if you pick me up and take me away I might lose it. “Non, non!” George whispers, “Pas elle! Prenez l’Americaine!” I feel the men move away from me, then hear the cars drive off. George yells at us to get up and take off our blindfolds. “Look around you! Are all your colleagues still here?” We look around at each other—shoeless, sand stuck to our sweaty faces—and laugh, breaking the tense silence. Becky is gone. We go back to the training centre to debrief and she is sitting in the classroom, laughing and drinking sodas with her kidnappers.

Back in my room that night, I lie in bed thinking about the day’s training. A few tips are ingrained for life. I know that the most nervous person in a kidnapping situation is actually the guy pointing a loaded gun, and that if I don’t stay calm, neither will he. I know that if I’m riding in the passenger seat and my car is ambushed, I keep my right hand up where they can see it and use my left to unbuckle my belt. I learned that there is an emergency button on the walkie-talkie I should always carry that sends an alert to the security base. I know that I’m vulnerable because I’m a small (read: easy to move), white woman. I also learned that if I am kidnapped, I will probably be gone a long time.

I think about what it would be like to be gone—for a day, a week, a month, three months. Where would they take me? What would I want with me? I pick a few things from my room and place them on the floor beside my bed. Baggy, cotton-linen blend cargo pants, breathable for long days in the desert sun, comfortable for nights sleeping curled up on hard floors. In one pocket I’ve stuffed Cipro, hand sanitizer, and baby wipes to help offset bacterial infections. Inside another pocket is a bra, and on top of the pants is a headscarf; like the bra, I feel less sexually vulnerable with it. It could also serve as shade, blanket, pillow, and washcloth.

I don’t want to sleep outside tonight. I feel too exposed, too vulnerable. I want to stay in my room, with the windows closed and the door dead-bolted. If the kidnappers do come, I might have a few minutes while they’re trying to break down my door to alert the security base with my walkie-talkie, make a call, pull on my stocked cargo pants.

Abdullah is in the hallway, rifling through the pantry where we keep emergency supplies, but more commonly used for sneaking late night snacks. He’s changed out of his work clothes and into a long white jalabiya. He stops at my open door, looks around as he picks out a date from the container in his hand. “You have not moved your bed outside yet?”

“No. I’m going to sleep inside tonight.”

“You think you can sleep inside? In this heat?”

“I’m gonna try. If I can fall asleep before the fans go out and not wake up in the middle of the night, I should be OK.”

“Oh my God,” he shakes his head from side to side. “Oh, that is too much. OK, suit yourself,” and he walks away, laughing.

A few hours later, I’m still awake when the generator cuts out, staring up at the ceiling fan as it slows to a lazy whirl, then stops altogether. The air in the room pushes down on me. I fling open the window, mentally willing a strong breeze, but there’s only about two feet of space in between my window and the eight-foot cement wall. There is no breeze and it now feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. In the dark I fumble around for my flashlight, gripping it between my teeth as I grapple with my bed frame and mattress, trying not to wake anyone. Becky and Sahar have left my spot for me, and I quietly place my bed in the space between them.

I put my phone and walkie-talkie on the ground, within arm’s reach. I’ve left everything else in my room. My little pile, while reassuring, is as ridiculous and futile as my momentarily frozen sheets. If the kidnappers ever really did come over the wall, I wonder if I’d even remember to push the emergency button on my walkie-talkie. Who, amongst the three of us, would stay calm in the face of a loaded gun? Sahar might plead with them in Arabic. Becky and I would probably scream. Would Abdullah and the other men come running from the men’s house next door? Would our neighbours, the ones with guns, shoot at them? Or would we quietly be removed, no one noticing until morning tea, when the men would come outside, and see our three beds still there, empty and unmade.

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New York City is a black and white town. It’s gritty and grainy too. There are bits and pieces of people’s lives and interactions scattered throughout the city’s streets and boroughs. Sometimes, all we see are the bits and pieces. Sometimes, things are too close for us to see whole. We are packed in tight. We duck and weave and shuffle from place to place. We pay no heed to the man in the Elvis costume, or to the woman with the screwed up face. These people are fragments, revealing themselves for a moment, before disappearing back into the mix of Manhattan. They are simultaneously both out of context, and the context themselves.

My photographs are singles, but they also form a whole. But this whole still feels incomplete, as it should, because nothing is complete. These images are pages torn from the streets, and from the very asphalt itself. I stole these photographs from you. You in the suit, with your pocket hanky. Or you, with your big circus earrings. These were your moments, and I took them. I just thought I’d let you know.

All the photographs are from the series “The New York Photographs”. They were taken in NYC throughout 2012, using the Ricoh GR Digital IV.