Six Months in Sudan (33 page)

He doesn’t understand my meaning.

“You know. We sorted out the recubra. And the gazebo. Remember? When it was raining.”

“All right,” he says, hesitantly. “I’ll let you know.”

“I mean … we don’t have to … just …” He looks towards Julie and Angela. “Forget it.”

He stands, goes to join them. I drain my second pilsner, pick up the red lighter. Tap. Tap. Tap.

I AM LOOKING FOR
my clothes in the clothes cupboard in the corner of the gazebo. It is well after dinner. The generator kicks noisily in the corner. Ah. There they are, an unfolded bunch of them.

I close the wooden door and tie it shut from storms. I place my clothes on our dinner table and start to fold.

David is gone. He left yesterday. He drove for two hours to a flooded landstrip and waited as the plane buzzed it once, twice, then banked away. Desperate, he and the driver followed in the Land Cruiser and watched it land on a drier piece of earth a few kilometers away. They tried to reach it, but a river blocked their path. They drove back and forth, but could find no place for the truck to cross. Finally, the driver stopped, David hiked up his trousers, grabbed his bag from the back, and forded the river. He arrived just in time. The driver put the car in reverse to begin the drive back to Abyei, but he was hopelessly stuck. It took him hours to get out.

Where everyone else is, I don’t know. Sleeping, listening to music,
sending email. Oh, there’s Marco, walking back from the log tukul. He is going on his R&R soon. To Jordan.

He stepped into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water, and is now walking towards the gazebo. He takes a chair at the end of my folding table. Smiles.

“So.”

I smile back.

“So.”

“The great doctor goes home soon.”

“Insh’allah.”

He lights a cigarette, and exhales slowly.

“Soon, Abyei will be very small to you.”

“Really?”

“Like … poof. All these problems become not yours.”

“I would be surprised if it was that easy,” I say.

He shrugs.

“I am going to be worried about you guys until the next doctor gets here. I can’t stop thinking about that.”

“Even that will disappear. Poof.”

I shake my head and sit down.

“You glad to be going on your R&R? To another Muslim country in the desert?”

He nods. “Very much.”

“Aren’t you going to be worried about us?”

He laughs, thinks for a second. “No.” He laughs again.

“Could I have a cigarette?”

“Of course.” He offers me the package.

It is rare for Marco and me to be sitting like this, just the two of us, talking. We both like each other, but we are both quiet, busy watching. I prefer writing to talking; he prefers listening. I am always moving, full of plans. He told me, during my end-of-mission evaluation, that after he arrived, he watched me for a couple of days and thought, “It seems Abyei has two coordinators.”

I remember those days. I learned from them.

“Did you read the book I gave to you?” he asks.

“Um. Some of it. It was good. I have to give it back to you before you leave.”

“Just put it down in my tukul.”

“Hey, let’s sit outside?”

“Yes.”

I pull two chairs off the gazebo floor and put them in the sand. Above us, a sky dusted with stars.

“So,” I say.

“So.”

“This is your first mission as field co, right?”

“First. Yes.”

“You were a log before?”

“Yes. Three missions or so.”

“Where again?”

“Sudan, Angola, Congo.”

“So why field co?”

He shrugs. “I wanted a new … mmm … challenge? To make a project work, but not only by fixing machines. It’s a bigger work. Much work with people, trying to understand them, their problems, how to help them do their job.”

“Are you going to do it again?”

He pauses, shuffles his chair in the sand. “I don’t know. I think about this. The part I like best is the medical activities, the hospitals, the mobiles. I don’t like much sitting in security meetings, or meeting with military commanders. Maybe it would be good with HIV.”

“I think you’re good at it. You made things calm, at least with me. It was good to have you say, ‘We just do what we are doing. We make no changes unless we have to.’ It was important for me and Tim to have someone tell us that.”

He laughs. “It is because I am slow. I need time to think, see the situation. Maybe it changes. I take long decisions.”

“I think that’s good. At least it worked for me.”

“Well, then, we are lucky.”

The generator winds down. I glance at my watch. Ten.

“What did you do before MSF?”

“I was in school for nuclear engineer. But I stop.”

“Why?”

“The first few years were good, I like very much. Just learning about the atom. But in the last two years, it was about practical, and I knew that I would be then working in a power plant or something like. I enjoy very much the theory, but I think I wouldn’t enjoy much the job.”

“I always want to know more about that second, that one instant from when nothing went to everything,” I say.

“For me too. That’s why I study.”

“I think I told you. When I was in Africa last, I came here as a writer. I traveled around from country to country, writing about HIV. A blog. I learned a lot.”

“You told me,” he says.

“Well, I traveled through Zambia with a photographer. She was great. We worked well together, and we talked about doing it again. She said she wanted to travel around the world and take photos of different cultures dancing. I said I wanted to go looking for magic.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if ‘magic’ is the right word. I mean … like … the unexplainable.”

“Okay.”

“Just to see if it exists. I used to think it did, but I’m not so sure any more. You know?”

Marco shrugs and butts his cigarette out. I tip back on my chair. We sit there for a while, quiet. Above us the Milky Way is bright, a smear of a thousand suns.

From nothing, everything.

10/07: interspace.

the best way to get a hedgehog out of your room is to poke him with something blunt, like a shoe or a book. then, when he curls into a ball, you just roll him gently from behind your trunk and out the door.

a vine that i have been watching for a few days has now crept into my tukul, and decided, for some reason, to turn left and follow the wall. quietly, nature would reclaim this tukul if i let it. only bats and bugs and vines and clicking crickets. it is one of the things that gives me some solace. if we humans don’t figure it out, if we use everything until there is nothing more to use, and slowly or suddenly join the fossil record, it’s ok. there are other things besides us.

friday the 13th. that is when i fly. three days. were these the ones i have been waiting for all this time? they seem ordinary.

i spent an hour last night looking at flights, responding to emails. at dusk, i folded my computer into my backpack, and started home. i quickly encountered some acquaintances from another ngo out for a walk. i tried to talk, but could not. the words that came were jumbled and strange. i had spent an hour in an unfamiliar interspace, pulled from this place to place to place to place at a hundred kilobytes per second, and it had left me dizzy and uncertain. it didn’t fit well with the cows, and the water pumps, and the women balancing buckets. after a short, stilted conversation, i returned slowly home. by the time i arrived, i found the ground beneath my feet.

and it is still there. here. abyei’s brown ground. all dust when i came in february, cracked and shifting with the wind. now, as i look out at a black and heavy sky, soon to be thick mud. it has changed. completely.

this is the point where i begin to wonder what i have changed. this is when you start the questioning, only now, just as the days push up against one another. you don’t have today and tomorrow any more; you have lost them. in their place, TODAY and TOMORROW, too swollen to change, and you live them like a race.

so i was in the tb office today thinking about what i will leave behind. as i was balancing in the interspace, the one between here and there, then and now, one of the young tb patients walked in. she is about eight years old, and has been on treatment for two months. after the first meeting, i have not seen her parents. she comes every week on her own and always wears the same torn, overlarge black dress. she peeks around the corner, then bashfully slides into the room barefoot, and steps onto the scale. she answers my questions shyly, only with nods. when i finally place the foil packages in her hand, she skips out of the room. i adore her. so brave.

when i saw her this time, for the last time, i had this overwhelming urge to give her everything. i didn’t even know what everything was, i just wanted to give it.

and i knew then that i was thinking about things the wrong way. when the plane takes off and the abyei ground falls from beneath my feet for good, the best things i will have left behind are not the ones that can be summarized on my end-of-mission report. they are the bright, beautiful parts of the day that can only be lived here. there are many. i will miss them.

“D
R. JAMES, HOSPITAL. CHANNEL 6.”

“Hospital, go ahead.”

I am on call, for the last time.

“The woman with burn is having heavy breathing, over.”

“I’m coming. Over and out.”

I reach to the chair beside me, feel for my headlamp, click it on, look at my watch, 00:12. I tangle through the mosquito net, take my scrubs from the rope, put them on, pick up the pharmacy keys, my stethoscope, walk to the driver, “Mustashfa,” he rises from his chair sleepily blinking, gate opens rumblerumble, Land Cruiser starts gruffly, we roll past the military compound, I slam the door shut, walk through the front gates of the hospital, the nurse is there with a flashlight, no generator at night any more, too much power, gas too expensive, only candles and flashlights, mosquito nets hang like spiderwebs, spooky.

“This way,” she says, shining the flashlight in front of my feet, not in front of hers.

We round the corner (the hospital is like the back of my hand), and enter the dark room.

As soon as I cross the threshold, I can hear her breathing. My instant thought, my first, before I even register her family gathered around a single candle, five of them looking at me carefully, is, she’s dead.

I don’t need to know any more, don’t need to examine her. But I do. Maybe she can feel the bell of my stethoscope on her chest (her breathing … noisy … like marbles shaking in the hose of a vacuum cleaner …), or my fingers on her wrist (her pulse is fast … thready …), or my hand on her stomach (soft … no peritonitis …).

“Do you want oxygen monitor?” the nurse asks.

“No.” Just her chart.

The nurse has it in her hands. I look back over this woman’s hospital story, her fevers, her medicines. Oh. Here’s where she came in, from days away, her perineum burned with boiling water. And here’s
the hemorrhage, her bed full of blood, took her to the operating room. Okay. Right. She arrested. Here’s where, as I was getting my blood screened to donate, the young soldier in dark glasses who didn’t know her came to the hospital and said, “I heard someone needs blood,” and I saw Haj, his uncle, our oldest nurse, in Abyei for decades, beaming proudly, and the boy gave and saved her and she started to get better, and our talks of transfer grew less frequent and the antibiotics started to work and we were happy, Mohamed and I.

All that in scribbled notes, dots of vital signs, cross-hatched marks of delivered doses. There were no more medicines to try, nothing that could change the story at this point, no one who would read it after this.

I stand up, let her hand go. It lands limply by her side. I face the family.

“Malesh. She’s very sick. I don’t think she will live until morning.”

Sepsis. I think she has sepsis. There are bacteria in her blood, dividing from one into two. The antibiotics killed millions on millions, but one became resistant and now there are simply too many.

“It’s her breathing. It is too bad.”

She has inhaled her own vomit, her own dinner, a glass of water. That, or she has acute respiratory distress syndrome. The bacteria make a waste, a toxic waste, and it causes capillaries to become weak, to leak. Her lungs are full of water, water mixed with proteins and salts. It will drown her.

“I’m sorry.”

For her. For you. For me. Because as soon as I step off the plane, you all will collapse and I’m sorry I feel so much relief at that thought.

I leave her gasping in the room.

I walk to the nursing desk, and scribble an order on her chart.

“Furosemide,” I say. Useless. “And oxygen.” Useless.

“There’s nothing more I can do.”

Don’t call me about her again.

I walk through the hospital gate. The driver is waiting, napping. I rap on the window and he starts the truck. We roll down the driveway, past the dark military compound, and home.

I walk into my tukul and look at my watch. 00:22.

WHAT TIME IS IT?
Nine.