The River

One day, you'll wake up for the last time. One day, you'll kiss your loved ones goodbye and mean it. The power of life, the essence of it all, is that nothing is guaranteed. If beauty were a constant it would lose its depth. The line between good and bad, right and wrong, is very thin. It's a line that must be crossed, and can never be avoided. My name is Wilson, and this is the day I crossed that line.

***

I moved back from Kampala once I finished my studies, and spent a few months at home in Kenya. Job opportunities aren't easy to come by so you take what you can. I spent ten years as an accountant in the Middle East. My time there was pleasant, if not thrilling, the dry heat my only vivid memory. But the company I was working for disbanded, and it was back to Kenya.

Between my son and my mother, the pressure to find work was overwhelming, and I soon accepted an opportunity to work in Thailand. "I'll be there as long as I need to, until the money is comfortable enough to come back." I told Mum, as she shuffled Jeremiah in her arms. He was turning four in two weeks, and I probably wouldn't see him again until he was five. "And you, Little Man! Don't be growing up too quick, eh!" His nose pinched with giggles and I wriggled under his armpits to tickle him. Mum set him down on the floor and he wrapped his arms around my leg.

"Love you, Dad!" he grinned, baby teeth missing from his smile.

"You better save some of that money for me." Mum wrapped her arms around my shoulders. She was older now, and had shrunk with age, head resting on my chest before she looked up to me, stern. "And for goodness sake, Boy, be safe."

The flight was smooth, daydreams of the work I was getting myself into broken up by bouts of sleep. Since the company hired me, I had been tested for English competency and people skills, but nothing more. The contract was set for two years, but with an option to extend based on performance. I didn't want to stay longer than that, as I hoped to see Jeremiah grow up, but money now would make me money later.

I was picked up from the airport by two Chinese men, one of whom was the driver. "Welcome, everybody, nice to, uhhh, meet you." His English was splintered but he was charming, trustworthy. "The drive will be long, but hey, comfortable right? And I will be driving you. Me and Ji."

"Good afternoon, everybody." Ji was short and stocky, and spoke with gravitas. 15 people or so filled the shuttle bus, all having arrived from various African airports. My seat was next to Will, a man around my age. His hair was greying along the ridges of his hairline but his smile was youthful and bright, full of optimism.

"Nice to meet you, Wilson." His hand met mine with a firm grip. "I'm from Nigeria, where are you from?" he asked.

"Kenya. Do you know what we're doing here?"

He chuckled, as confused as I was. "No idea, but, hey, we're being paid!"

"Ha! Whatever it is, it's worth the money!" We settled into the journey. The roads were smooth and the temperature cooled as we plunged deeper into the night. Time passed without worry, until the driver pulled us to one side. The roads were densely lined with thin trees, creating a plush velvet backdrop. Sunken mist turned the air thick, and the driver dragged open the side door.

He rested his arms on the roof of the van. "Apologies, but we've come to an uhh, a small problem. The road here is closed, I think for the, what's the word?" He turned to Ji, who had joined him on the roadside.

"Construction."

The driver's head tilted, confused, before agreeing with Ji's suggestion. "Construction, yes, construction. We're going to make a change to the schedule and stay one night in a hotel nearby. Is this okay?" The group harmoniously accepted, and we made our way to the hotel. One night turned into two, but we were back on the road soon after.

That day's journey wasn't quite as peaceful. The kind driver and Ji had disappeared, replaced by a much more deliberate and purposeful man. He didn't inform us of his name, but said that we'd soon be crossing the border into Myanmar. I sat next to Will again, and we discussed our children back home. "I've got two daughters, twins, actually." He didn't look at me, instead staring longingly out the window, deep in thought. "They're starting school soon, in two or three weeks."

"Oh, so is my boy! He's just turned four, he's already massive!" We chuckled together, and it was good to know, in all the uncertainty, that I had found a friend.

A few minutes later, the rumbling engine ground to a halt, at a commotion outside the tinted windows. The side door rattled open again and I heard a different voice. The language wasn't English, nor did it sound Chinese. Filing out one by one, the group got out of the van and armed soldiers sorted us into a line along the dusty gravel path. A wire mesh gate blocked us from a river, maybe two hundred meters wide. A sign, written in Thai with a small English translation along the bottom, read: Myanmar Border.

The line between life and death is thick. The moment to pass over, however, is flashing, fleeting and fierce. Guns in our backs, rows of soldiers circling us, we tiptoed along the tightrope, the rhythm of my heartbeat louder than our footsteps. "Why are you here?" A woman, rows of badges imprinted along her shoulder, asked me.

"We're here to work." I told her, my voice shivering. The driver had disappeared and the shrill-voiced man was leading the others into a small building to our right, so I followed.

We had been there an hour or so, the windows were lined with a blue film to disrupt the sunlight, and the waves of trees blocked the horizon. I couldn't see Will, and Jeremiah felt further away than ever.

Soon a shuttle bus, with a different driver, took us to another set of soldiers. They led us through the gates of a complex, and into the bottom floor of an office block. Next to me, Mary, another of the group, spoke softly, the kind of voice reserved for a primary school teacher. "I thought we were here to work," She said, and there was not much reassurance I could give her.

"I'm sure we'll find out soon, at least we're in an office now." The lift took us up to the top floor, where pockets of light illuminated drifting smoke along the tiled ceiling. There were a hundred people in the room already, none of them fully clothed. We were dragged to sit on the floor in the far left corner. Men with batons patrolled the perimeters. We were each assigned a computer, an account and a couple of phones. "Will, hey, Will." I ushered him over, and he set up in the seat next to me. "So, what are we doing? We just ring these numbers?"

"We're scammers, Wilson."

***

We woke at 7am each morning, to make the walk over to the office in forty-five minutes. Will had skipped the previous day's meals due to sickness. "Did you hear about the man who tried to leave this place?" I asked him. We hadn't seen our phones or passports since we got here, and any contact with the outside has been monitored. "He made it out, he escaped. When he got to the river, he paid a man, one of the officials from Myanmar, 5000 dollars to help him cross." I slipped through the office doors, committing to another day in purgatory. "They took the money, turned him around and handed him back to the company. Nobody has heard him speak since. They say they took his voice."

Will's hand gripped my bicep and stopped me in my stride. "Listen, brother," he said with a weight I hadn't heard from him before, "We'll get out of this together. You hear me?"

"I hear you." I pressed the lift button to the top floor, where the work was, Mary rushed in beside us.

"HEY!" One of the guards swept across the room towards Mary. His baton raised, Mary already curled into a ball, he wrapped it across her spine. She shrieked in pain, body unravelling. Another guard joined the onslaught. They lifted her arms, scraping her across the crumbling carpet and into a smaller side room. Her legs kicked, dragging herself against the tide but she was overpowered, thrown inside and the door locked behind her. Will stood from his creaking chair, burning white knuckles crunching into his palms. "Wilson, we need to leave. Soon."

***

In the queue for the phone, Will in front of me, Mary, held up by two men, in front of him, her knees swollen and bruised, calves scattered with the grazing cuts of a beating. The plan was set, I punched the number into the landline attached to the wall, it rang only once. "Hello, hello, how are things?" I asked, looking to Will for confirmation. He flicked his thumb up. The guard cycled between us, honing in on any suspicious conversation.

"Good afternoon, sir, can I help you today?" said the female voice on the other end of the phone line.

"Yes, please. If you wouldn't mind."

She had a polite yet formal tone. "What can I do for you, sir?"

My tongue swelled in my mouth. "A little hungry, but nothing too bad. We start early tomorrow though, and I'd hate to be late."

She seemed to understand my hesitance. "Is somebody listening to you?"

"Yep. Mhm." Will hung up his phone and slipped back into the office.

"We're tracking your location. Are you in immediate danger?"

"Probably not, maybe soon. Hopefully I'll see you as soon as I can. And the rest of us. We start at 8am tomorrow, so I should be ready to leave for 7:30."

"Thank you, sir, you're very brave. We'll try our very best." I slid the phone back on the wall and rushed to find Will.

"I've spoken to the UN, they'll be in contact with the embassy to orchestrate the move," he said. "Apparently they have no jurisdiction in Myanmar, but they said they'll try." His arms and eyes were equally as heavy. "Did you manage?"

"I did, I spoke to the Kenyan embassy in Thailand. It was hard to explain with them watching but I think they understood." We pushed through the door to the sleeping hut, where around 50 sets of bunk beds lined head to toe in rows. "I've told them we'll be ready at 7:30, so I think we should tell some others. Safety in numbers."

***

In the morning we decided the best way out was to admit what we had done, and hope that power in numbers would bail us out of any danger. Of the hundred of us working, on our floor, we had sixty or seventy people ready to be rescued. Wilson and I led the charge, with Xhi, the English-Chinese translator alongside us. If the negotiations were to be successful, we needed to be brave. We had all been beaten one way or another, and today would be no different, but that was the price of freedom.

Xhi joined us.

"Are you ready, guys?"

We nodded, "Ready."

There was a group of men at the gates. They were not Chinese, but they didn't look like UN officials. Xhi greeted them for us, and explained "They've been sent from the embassy, the Kenyans have no, uhhhh" he paused, considering his words, "place here. Not Myanmar. They've come from the river."

"Are they here to take us?" asked Wilson, hand leaning on the steel black gate of the complex. Xhi translated again, and the wait was interminable. "They have a list, names. They can't take us all. They've got names they're here to save."

I joined the conversation. "What?" My voice cracked, air trapped in the deepest pocket of my lungs. "What do you mean?"

"The embassy can only take so many."

"And the rest?"

"The rest are left behind." Xhi looked past me, as a herd of armed men trailed the path towards us. "Quick, take them, go, go!" The names were reeled off, and bodies crammed through the gaps in the gate.

"Oi! Oi! Hey!" The batons swung, as the guards reached the crowd. Shrieks and growls grumbled through to us, and slowly the list reached its end. Wilson slid through the gate, not looking back. There were only ten of us left on the wrong side of the gate. The escape, a blinking fleeting moment, a crossing of the line, missed. Our chance of sanity ripped away from us. Mary's hand rested on my shoulder, her knuckles bruised blue. "We will never leave this place."

I walked towards one of the guards. He raised his gun to my nose, staring along the barrel. "Inside, or we shoot."

I turned to Mary, tears spilling on her cheeks. My neck craned back around, eye to eye with the rifle's silencer. "Shoot me. We're already dead."

"Inside!" He repeated, louder this time. "Inside!"

"Kill me." He flicked his eyes across to the rest of the guards, none of them knowing quite how to respond. Xhi stepped up next to me, another brave soul balancing on the line. The line we must never cross. He didn't speak, but the guards charged him. They wrapped the baton around his shins, flipping him onto his belly on the dusty path. They fastened handcuffs around his wrists as he writhed in pain.

"Out!" An army official burst through the gate. The remaining group spilled through. Armed Thai soldiers piled in the complex, forming a river between us and the guards. I grabbed Mary by the wrist, dragging her towards the waiting van, an army commander lifted Xhi onto the seat next to me. The engine coughed, the gates swung shut behind us, a line closed.

***

The line between peace and war is out of our control, yet our price to pay. The last day we say goodbye to our loved ones is not our choice; the line between life and death is one we're dragged across, ready or not. I'm back in Kenya now, and rebuilding is taking some time for me. Me and the little one are playing in the woods, and my heartbeat slows with every breath. Jobs and money have their ups and downs, but time moves only forwards. You can face your fears and beat them, but you'll never win the battle with time. Jeremiah's just climbed out of the river, but he'll never know how deep it can run.