She felt a profound sadness that she was going to die.
As she fell, she realized that blood was trickling from her eye and mouth. One of the soldiers had fired a grenade at her. Suddenly her eye and her chest hurt with a pain so acute she could scarcely breathe. “Journalist! American journalist!” she shouted as she rose with her hands up. She lay there for about half an hour, alone and petrified, before making her fateful decision. Marie dropped to the ground as the bullets whined past, but her escorts fled into the jungle, back the way they had come. The Tamils guiding her from the rebel-held part of Sri Lanka into government territory ran into an army patrol as they crossed the front line. In real life, it was hard to figure out exactly what was happening, although later, she understood that it had been quite simple.
Stand up? Crawl away? Lie still? Stand up? Crawl away? Lie still? The choices repeat and repeat, a drumbeat of fear pounding louder and louder, as she lies paralyzed. She cannot roll back time, nor can she push it forward. The decision will determine whether she lives or dies, but nothing will undo what is about to happen. She can try to crawl away, knowing they will shoot at anything they see moving. These are her choices: She can stand up and shout, hoping they will see that she is white and female, obviously a foreigner. In the dream, she is lying on the ground, seeing the flares, hearing the machine-gun fire and the soldiers’ voices exactly as she heard them that pitch-black night in Sri Lanka before the moon rose over the fields. As she drifted into sleep, her subconscious reran what had happened, the fear and indecision never resolving, like a horror film stuck on a loop, repeating into infinity. She had lived with bad dreams for many years, but nothing prepared Marie for the recurrent nightmare that plagued her after she was shot.
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