They left seven more packets with the family, instructing them to make one drink per day for the boy, and then they returned to the campsite for the night.
The mother-in-law who had attended the appointment assured Batsa that she would mix the powder for the boy every day, and after this week, the boy would eat several servings of milk and yogurt every day, and there would be no disagreement.
Maxence smiled at her and bent to touch the mother-in-law’s feet, and she said a blessing over him. With his family and a strong matriarch around him, that child was going to be okay.
Because Maxence had lived in Africa and Latin America for so long, the crucial importance of families and communities had become apparent to him. Europe and the United States seemed to have lost that cohesion and strong sense of belonging in the hustle to advance technologically. Social media seemed to be a woefully inadequate substitute.
Out in the countryside beyond the small town, the wind had picked up and bit through even Maxence’s leather motorcycle pants and jacket that he wore. They’d been gaining in elevation with the last few villages that they had visited, and the air had grown increasingly frigid. The sun didn’t seem to warm the black leather on his back and legs at all as they rode.
Earlier, when they’d ridden the motorcycles into town around noon, Dree had the shivers, but she’d seemed to warm up as soon as they’d gotten inside and started the clinic. The ski suit she wore had been sufficient to keep her warm for a while, but Maxence was becoming worried about her as the daily temperatures dropped.
At their campsite, Father Booker and the two engineers were tending to the fire and the food as they drove up. Alfonso had already made a main dish for dinner, and Batsa had arranged for delivery of bread, rice, and some side dishes, overpaying the lady handsomely.
The guys had built the night’s campfire larger than previous ones because the freezing wind had turned biting.
Dree’s teeth were chattering when she got off the motorcycle, and she stuck her gloved hands under her armpits as she surveyed the night’s campsite.
Maxence ushered her over to one of the best spots around the campfire, not downwind where the smoke would choke her, but just off to the side where she would get the most radiant heat without the smoke coming right at her.
After a few minutes, her posture relaxed, and she took her hands out from under her armpits when Alfonso passed her a plate of warm food.
Around the campfire, Maxence ate and tried not to think about Dree’s curvy body as he prepared to sleep beside her and keep his hands off of her for yet another night.
Dree received her plate from Alfonso and piped up, “You would not believe the day we had, guys. Father Maxence solved a medical mystery.”
Maxence chuckled.
Isaak grinned at him. “Oh? Considering Maxence’s proclivities in school, did he recognize the symptoms of a rare venereal disease known only in Turkish prisons and Brazilian brothels?”
Maxence stared down at his plate and refused to rise to the bait.
Dree said to Isaak, “No, silly, and I would really hope that something like that hadn’t made its way to remote villages in Nepal. Nope, we had a kid with advanced scurvy. I’ve never seen a case, and I think you haven’t either, right, Max?”
Max shook his head. “No, I’d never seen it. I’ve done most of my fieldwork in eastern Africa or Latin and South America, where fresh food is available the vast majority of the year, if not all year-round. I’d never seen scurvy before. It’s hideous.”
Dree nodded. “It’s a terrible disease. When England was trying to explore and exploit the Polynesian and Indian Ocean islands, those ships would lose half their crews or more to scurvy. It’s deadly.”
Alfonso asked, frowning, “But, how do you know it was a vitamin C deficiency?”
Dree turned to him. “Once we figured out that’s what it was, it was obvious. The symptoms matched. The kid wasn’t drinking milk, and raw milk is a minor source of vitamin C. It must be pretty important here during the winter, though. All the other kids were getting at least some vitamin C from milk and maybe some from preserved foods like these hot pickled chutneys that the lady delivered, so they didn’t get scurvy. This particular kid, though, wasn’t drinking the milk. I didn’t even think about milk being a source of vitamin C because, you know, it’s not orange juice. He didn’t have symptoms of calcium or protein deficiencies, so I think it’s the vitamin C.”
“But you didn’t assay for it,” Alfonso said. “You don’t have a definitive diagnosis until you take blood and assay for ascorbic acid levels.”
Dree laughed, and Maxence saw where this was going. She said, “We can’t draw blood and send it off to the lab for a vitamin C concentration assay.”
“No,” Alfonso said. “But you can’t treat a deficiency unless you are certain that the nutritional deficiency is the cause of the disorder. Otherwise, you may miss the true cause.”
She said, “We don’t have a gas chromatograph and trained technicians at our beck and call in this hill village. If it’s not scurvy, then it’s something that I don’t know how to diagnose. I told his parents that if he doesn’t get better to take him to the nearest city, but I don’t think they can.”
Alfonso was scowling. “These hill villages need medical laboratories, too, in addition to the NICU micro-clinics. How are we supposed to treat premature babies without access to modern medical techniques?”
Maxence smiled, sensing an opening. “That’s an excellent question, Alfonso. If we build these NICU micro-clinics all over the mountains of Nepal, how will the staff perform routine procedures on these premature babies?”
Alfonso glared at his plate. “We’ll just have to build medical laboratories, too.”
Maxence kept his voice quiet. “Trucks don’t come up here during the winter. How will we get supplies to them?”
“We’ll mail them.”
“There’s no mail up here, Alfie. The store doesn’t even get supplies for months. The clinics will need oxygen canisters and pharmaceuticals.”
“We can get it to them,” Alfonso growled.
“And where will we find medical technicians to work in these medical laboratories? Or pediatricians with neonatal specialties to work in the micro-clinics and send the tests to the medical laboratories staffed with technicians?”
Alfonso glared at Maxence with more anger than Max had seen from him since they were on the playground at boarding school. “Then what do you suggest we do? Are we just supposed to let these premature babies keep dying just because we can’t do everything?”
Maxence wasn’t a lawyer, but he’d been trained in rhetoric by the Jesuits when he got his doctorate in theology. He knew the answer to his question before he asked it. “Has a study been performed that shows highly technological micro-clinics will reduce premature infant mortality in far-rural areas anywhere?”
Alfonso sputtered, “Surely, there has to be. If a premature baby is born near a NICU and placed in an incubator, the baby has a better chance of survival. Incubators save premature babies.”
“If a premature baby has access to an incubator and trained medical personnel in a hospital setting, yes, their chances of survival increase. But that’s an entirely different situation than we are confronted with here.” Maxence flung his arm sideways, indicating the vast, dark expanse of the Himalayan mountain range at night. “There are no doctors here. Dree is the first trained medical professional some of these people have seen in decades or their whole lives. Who is going to staff these NICU micro-clinics?”
Alfonso said, “We haven’t reached that part of the project yet.”
Maxence said, “I wasn’t aware that the project had a budget for ongoing, long-term medical professionals to staff these micro-clinics. How many physicians or surgeons do you think are going to move to these remote stations and stand ready for the one infant who is born prematurely in this area per year?”
Alfonso said, “Once the micro-clinics are built, we
can raise money to staff them. In the meantime, at least they will exist.”
Maxence caught Dree’s gaze. She was watching their exchange with wide eyes and eating without pause. If she’d been sitting in a movie theater, she would have been shoveling popcorn into her mouth.
Father Booker and Batsa were casually chewing their food. Booker shrugged when he saw that Maxence had looked over at him.
They had known that staffing and resupplying would be problems.
Isaak was staring down at his plate and frowning, using his fork to stab a rehydrated carrot. This argument may have been a revelation for him.
Later that night, Maxence waited while Dree went back to her tent for her nightly sponge bath and self-care. Luckily for all of them, she’d turned the flashlight away from herself while she was washing up, thus avoiding putting Maxence and the other men in a moral dilemma that they had passed last time, but barely.
There had been no more discussion about the establishment of the NICU micro-clinics. Indeed, everybody seemed to be stringently avoiding the conversation. Instead, they discussed the probable schedule for the rest of the trip.
Batsa pulled out a map and shone his flashlight on it as they traced the meandering path that they would take through the Himalayas.
He mentioned, “If we need to buy more supplies, there are alternate roads from these mountain communities that would be a straight shot down into the larger town where the airport was, Chandannath. We could stay at that inn again that had the delightful hot showers.”
Alfonso added, “Chandannath has a medical college that trains doctors, nurses, and technicians. Since they have one of the larger medical schools in Nepal right here, why aren’t there more doctors and technicians out in these hill villages?”
Batsa raised his head from the map and stared at Alfonso. “Because maybe they prefer running water and better medical support services in Chandannath and the other larger towns.”
Maxence kept his mouth closed and stole a glance back at Dree’s tent, which was dark except for a tiny pinprick of light in one corner. “Looks like it’s safe. I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
After his quick crawl into the pup tent and undressing as silently as possible, he slipped into his mummy bag and zipped it up to his face.
The tent was significantly colder than it had been on previous days, and even the few minutes of being underdressed in the icy air had chilled him.
Luckily, Maxence was mostly muscle, and he warmed up within a minute or two of zipping up the bag.
The frosty air snapped at his exposed cheekbones and nose.
Dree asked, “You okay?”
“Yeah, I warmed up as soon as I zipped up my sleeping bag.”
“Yeah, it’s getting colder as we climb in altitude. I had to break out one of the hand-warmer packs that Father Moses packed for me in Paris to warm up tonight. But I meant about arguing with Alfonso about the micro-clinics.”
“Oh, that. Alfonso and I have known each other for years. We went to school together. That wasn’t an argument. That was just a discussion about what’s best. We both want what is best for the people who live up here. We just have differing opinions about what to do about it. He’s not going to throw a rock at my motorcycle or anything.”
Dree laughed. “I don’t know, man. He looked pretty pissed when everybody wasn’t going along with exactly what he said.”
“Alfonso wouldn’t try to murder me over this. Now, stuff that happened in high school, that’s where a motive for murder might come from.”
She giggled prettily, and Maxence had a hard time not falling into the rabbit hole of his memory of her sunny smile, her flashing eyes, and her jiggling tits. She said, “It always surprises me when the motive for murder isn’t something that happened in high school.”
“Indeed, and boarding school is ten times worse than day school, I assure you.”
“Did any murders happen at your boarding school?”
Maxence chuckled, his stomach bouncing under his fingers. “None that we know of. Anybody who went there was probably smart enough to hide the body or had security henchmen to bury it for them.”
“Okay, fine. Did any murders ever happen in Monagasquay?”
Ah, she wanted a Monagasquay story.
Maxence considered what to tell her. Lots of murders had happened in the history of his small country, and he was quite sure his cousin had murdered a man. He wasn’t entirely sure about the whole story, however.
Instead of telling Dree a highly conjectured version of what might have happened with Alexandre, Maxence said, “There’s a rumor that floats around Monagasquay that one of the princes was kidnapped when he was a small child.”
In the dark, her sweet little voice rose in excitement. “Oh, a kidnapping story. That sounds good. I’m in the mood for a thriller. Wait, was the little prince rescued? Or is it like the little princes in the tower in England, where they never found their bodies? Because I can’t handle it if he doesn’t make it.”
A shiver ran through Maxence. “He survived.”
“Okay, then tell me the story,” she said.
Maxence breathed in a deep breath, feeling the cold air all the way down into the base of his lungs.
The problem was the dark. He couldn’t see, and he couldn’t ground himself with his sight.
Instead, he concentrated on the warmth of the sleeping bag around his arms and legs. A scent like a peach and citrus-flavored alcoholic drink on a cypress dock over the Mediterranean Sea puffed out of his sleeping bag as his body warmed the remnants of his cologne.
Curls of his hair traced lines on his forehead and near his ears as he breathed.
His riding gear piled at the base of his sleeping bag emitted a leathery whiff into the air.
As Dree breathed, her breath whirred in the dark, and the nylon of her sleeping bag creaked.
His abdominals were lumps under the soft cotton of his shirt where he rested his fingertips. His mouth still tasted like mint from his toothpaste.
The ground was hard under his back and heels.
The very apex of the tent was a faint, yellow-gray smear of a line against the blackness surrounding him.
Maxence stared at the yellow-gray smear. His ears filled with the tiny whoosh of Dree’s breath and the rustle of her bedroll.
Breathe.
He could breathe.
If he could breathe, he could speak.
Maxence said, “Once upon a time, there was a little prince of Monagasquay. He wasn’t a very handsome little prince and he was second in line to the throne after his older brother, so nobody cared about him very much. He was just the spare in case something happened to the older prince, and he expected to have a very quiet life, which was just fine with him. As his older brother was not particularly kind to him about his extraneous status, the young prince made himself scarce as often as possible, which was probably why no one noticed for a week when he went missing.”
“Wait,” Dree said. “How old was the kid?”
“Nine years old,” he said.
“And how long ago was this?”
“Years and years ago. Lifetimes,” Maxence sighed.
“And nobody just went, ‘Hey, where’s the other kid?’”
“Evidently not.”
“Who kidnapped him? Does Monagasquay have a rival, an ancestral enemy, like England and France were always fighting with each other back in historical times?”
Maxence chuckled. “Monagasquay is too small to have any real enemies. If we had an enemy, they would simply squash us. Back in medieval times, the nobles who ruled the Italian cities squabbled with each other with their tiny little armies. Whenever France got pissed off at us, they just overran us and stole all the art and jewelry from the fortress-turned-castle.”
“That doesn’t seem fair. That sounds like a big ol’ bully picking on a little kid.”
“It was a long time ago, a much longer time ago than the kidnapping.”
“Oh, th
at’s right, the kidnapping. Let’s get back to the kidnapping.”
Maxence said, “Monagasquay is right on the Mediterranean Sea, and we are a seagoing people. Boating and sailing are very important in our culture. One day, the little prince was out sailing his small sailboat when a larger motorboat pulled up alongside, snatched the little prince off his boat, and spirited him away to a tanker ship anchored farther off the coast.”
“Does the little prince have a name?” she asked.
Maybe Max should call the kid Augustine.
Too obvious.
Maxence said, “His name has been lost in history.”
She argued, “And yet, with motorboats and tanker ships, it doesn’t sound like this happened a long time ago.”
“I’m not that good of a writer. I’m just making stuff up as I go along. If there are historical anachronisms, I’ll try to do better next time.”
“Fine, fine. Tell me about the little prince whose name has been lost in ancient history who was kidnapped by guys on a motorboat.”
The boat which had sped up alongside him and then carried him away had been long and narrow, and the sparkling red hull had splashed through the wavelets as he’d fought.
Max said, “The tanker ship had been moored off the coast for weeks, as they had been looking for their chance to kidnap the prince.”
“What did the kidnappers want? Money? Publicity? For Monagasquay to have some other political prisoners released from some other country?”
“It appeared to be money at first, but they didn’t seem to know how much they wanted or where they wanted it deposited. This was all during a time of great upheaval in the history of Monagasquay, when an old sovereign prince was dying and an election was imminent in the Council of Nobles, which is also known as the Crown Council of Monagasquay.”
“But you said that a prince election was happening right now.”
“It happens every time a new sovereign prince needs to be crowned.”
“That seems to happen a lot in Monagasquay.”
“Or maybe I’m just a terrible writer, and you should find someone else to tell you stories to help you fall asleep at night.”
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