He needed to clear his head. None of this made sense. Maybe I’ll take a walk. He got halfway through the kitchen before he turned back. And then he started to pace. Kitchen to the computer in the dining room. Dining room back to the kitchen.
It was past midday and hot outside. The air-conditioners were buzzing away. He walked into the living room. The red rental car was across the parking lot. The air was shimmering above the asphalt.
The computer pinged.
There was an e-mail.
Chapter Nine
Julia Richmond. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. July 18, 2003
THEN THERE WAS LIGHT UNDER THE DOOR AGAIN. DISTANT VOICES. THE RATTLE OF AN engine. Car doors thudding closed. Another plane overhead.
Julia’s mouth was dry. She stood and paced. And counted. And lost the count after about 250-something steps. The numbers always disappeared after 50, jumbling together. She needed to pay more attention, to keep her focus.
She needed to eat. Were they going to bring something to eat? To bring something to drink? If it was morning she had last eaten a day ago, at the health center. A cup of muddy coffee and some trail mix.
They might remember. You need to drink to live. She pounded on the door. No one came.
Julia imagined Carl, sitting at a computer in his compound, looking for news of her. Calling people. Trying to get help.
That was silly. Carl was dead. Sister Martha was dead. The kid with malaria was dead. She rattled the door and tried to jam the handle down again, but it didn’t break.
No one came.
She pounded on the door again.
No one came.
“Feed me! I need water!” Julia yelled. “Daniweil! Jonathan! Water!” Julia yelled again. “Daniweil! Jonathan! Fuck you all!”
No one came.
They owed her water. She deserved water. No one should be treated like this. Then she sat down next to the bucket of her urine and wrapped her arms around her knees. There might not be water.
Every day of her life there had been people around. Good people and bad people. Mostly pretty average people who never quite lived up to Julia’s expectations. Those people had lives that were pretty average. Lots of compromises. People who lived together and didn’t love one another. People who were crappy to their kids. People who had inappropriate expectations of one another. Maybe they didn’t pay attention. Maybe they had crappy values. Maybe they just wanted stuff—houses and cars and prestige, to be popular, whatever that was. To make money. People who spent their days in meetings where nothing was accomplished. People who sucked up to their bosses and tried to intimidate their co-workers. Some guy wanted a corner office, and that was his whole life. Some secretary wanted to fuck a manager, because she thought people would think she was brazen and free, and then she talked herself into believing the manager would leave his wife and kids for her, and she’d get the house with the swimming pool. Sometimes a guy who was a manager would leave his wife and kids, because he liked fucking his secretary and wanted to be able to fuck her whenever he felt like it, even at lunch. None of that mattered. It was all okay. It was all better than dying in a linen closet in the middle of Liberia—a place no one knew existed. The people at home were all people, and even if they were stupid and crass, they were around enough to keep one another from dying of thirst, from starving, from getting raped or slashed open by drug crazed man-boys who were hopped up by stupid African warlords, themselves made insane by impossible dreams of lust, power, money, and sex.
“Water! I need water!” Julia yelled. “Daniweil! Jonathan! Water!” Julia yelled. She yelled again and again. The light under the door was grey and strong, not red and weak. It was daytime. They could hear her, damn them.
If I’m going to die here, I’m going to die on my feet, not on my knees, Julia thought. I’m going to be dead a long time. I’m going to die fighting to live.
She rattled the door again and she kept rattling it, rattling, and then yelling. She took breaks to walk. Three paces up. One to the side. Three paces back. One to the side.
It wasn’t working. Julia felt alone and she felt abandoned and she felt impotent. Now it is coming out, she told herself. How I don’t really have what it takes. How I’m not really as smart as they always said. How I’m not really able. If I were smarter, if I had better skills, I could break out of this trap. But I’m not that smart, not really. All I’m good at is standing on line and taking tests.
What would Carl do if he were here? she wondered. He would talk his way out. He’d engage Jonathan, rather than confront him. Maybe.
And then sadness about Carl overwhelmed her. So close. Now lost.
Got to put yourself aside if you are going to think clearly, she told herself. That’s what they teach you in doctor school. Put the self aside. What did Bill Levin call it? Unself-interested advocacy?
That shit got me locked up, Julia suddenly thought. All that unself-interested crap. That was what brought me to Africa, and that is what led me here. That crap is going to kill me. I’m locked up in Africa, a zillion miles from home. They just killed a guy I loved. And people I loved. I’ll never have a life for myself this way. I’m going to get out of this place, even if I have to tear down this door with my teeth and fingernails.
Julia rattled the door so hard she thought the handle might break, and she pounded on it with her fists.
“Water! Water! Water!” she yelled.
Finally, there were footsteps and a voice to shush her, and a key scraped in the lock.
A flashlight exploded into Julia’s eyes. The room flooded with light. Another bucket thrust into her chest.
The door slammed shut again. Julia let the bucket slip between her elbows and guided it by pressing it between her inner arms and her chest, and then pelvis and legs, and squatted to bring the bucket to the floor. Then she felt the inside of the bucket. There was a large plastic bottle and a pot that had a soft warm lump that felt like a foam pillow or a breast and four cool lumpy cylinders that each had broken fibrous covers—likely four ears of roast corn.
Julia’s hands were tied, so she lifted the bottle with her hands, and then trapped it at waist level between her body and the shelving. She used the bottom of both sides of her hands to twist off the bottle cap, which fell onto the floor in the darkness. She was able to reach her tied hands around the bottle, and then she drank.
The water was stale, metallic, and brackish, and tasted like it had been standing outside in a rusty pot. It was warm. But it wet Julia’s lips.
The bottle dropped as Julia lowered it. It bock-bocked two or three times. She felt the water splash onto her feet before she found it with her hands, stood it up, and then lifted it into the new bucket, wedging it against the side with the corn and soft lumpy material.
She pulled off a moist piece of the lumpy material and put it in her mouth. It was spongy and smooth and tasteless—fufu—a soft starchy ball of cassava that filled you and soothed you as you ate it, and when you ate enough lulled you to sleep. She picked up one of the ears of corn, pulled the husk back, and bit into it. It was soft and mealy, tasteless and thick, and had she not been hungry, she would have spit it out. But she swallowed the corn and put the ear back into the bucket for later. Nothing to look forward to. Enough to keep functioning. Until whatever came next.
Chance favors the prepared mind, Julia thought. I’m ready.
Chapter Ten
William Levin. Providence, Rhode Island. July 18, 2003
IT WAS 10:00 A.M. LEVIN SHOWERED, CHANGED, AND DROVE HOME. YOU CAN TASTE the sweetness of sleep before you lose yourself in it. The paper was on the porch. No mail yet. Levin sat at the kitchen table and opened the paper. A few minutes of the Times was a glorious way to decompress.
Some Liberia news on page five. Levin remembered reading that things in Liberia were heating up. An indictment. Presidents moving back and forth. Rebel armies on borders. Shelling. Boy soldiers again. It was hard to keep track of what country was falling apart when, which Afr
ican president was in power, and who was about to be overthrown or had just been overthrown, and who had declared themselves president for life. Africa was a little like Rhode Island, full of political drama of uncertain consequence. Hard to keep track of all the good old boys, and who was doing what to whom or taking what from whom at each moment.
Now there was a map with a curved arrow that had a broad base to show the movement of troops and control, an arrow that came up from the lower right corner of the map of Liberia and stopped about a third of the way across. A third of the way across, at a town called Buchanan. Stopped at Buchanan. That was where Julia was. Not cool. Uncomfortable. Not cool at all.
You read the New York Times. You skim the headlines. You file away the facts. You rarely ever associate those facts with the lives and fortunes of people you know and love.
Levin sent an e-mail.
It often took a week for Julia to respond to Levin’s e-mails. If he didn’t write, he’d hear from Julia once every month or two. If he wrote, she’d respond. She was busy. He didn’t have very much to say.
His student. His only real student. The rest became orthopedists in California, plastic surgeons in New Jersey, or neurologists in New York. But Julia was different. They met when Julia was a medical student. She asked questions when Levin gave his yearly lecture—a pert young woman with green eyes and black hair who took herself way too seriously. She followed up the lecture with a series of e-mails, wanting to know more about various aspects of what Levin presented. No one had ever done that before. Leave it alone, Levin thought to himself. None of this material is going to be on the test. Then she showed up in the ED for an elective month and hung around most nights after her shift was done. What could Levin tell her about electives in the developing world, in Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, and Kenya? Which was a better experience? Could she get scholarship support to travel?
And then she stayed for residency.
In the ED, Levin became Julia’s mentor. He steered her through internship (it gets better. I promise.) He got her gigs at WHO and CDC to keep her sane, a month at a time, and together they hooked her up a three-month stay in Kenya.
Julia wanted to work in the developing world. Most of the time, her head was in the clouds, stuck on romantic notions about the role of medicine in international relations and how better health could create peace and make a more just society and all that.
But Julia got tougher, as a resident. Levin had seen her fix and focus in the middle of the night when a gunshot victim was bleeding out. He had seen her put her hands on a tense belly, know what she was dealing with, tube the guy and open the belly down in the department, not waiting for the surgeon or the OR, because there just was no time to wait.
They became friends as her mind and her skills developed. Julia finished residency and joined the ED staff. Then she began traveling to the developing world to do things Levin himself only dreamed of. He kept her car in his spare garage when she was away, and she had her mail come to his house.
She sent pictures. Beautiful pictures of kids posed in front of rural clinics, of pregnant women standing on the porch of a health center, of a new latrine that everyone in a community was digging. He made a screen saver out of those pictures so everyone in his office could see them, one picture of smiling little kids after the next, whether he was in the office or not.
Julia was the real thing. Julia was repairing the world, saving lives, using her brain and the cunning in her hands and fingers, listening to people, speaking clearly so she would be heard despite not having the language of the place, understanding complex problems, making difficult diagnoses without fancy tests and tools, and improvising. Three billion people living on a dollar a day. Levin had a warm house and a TV to watch. The world was going to hell in a handbasket. Julia was out there fixing it. Levin was sitting on his duff, an imposter.
He wouldn’t get a reply for a week or two if he e-mailed. That wasn’t good enough. He tried Julia’s cell. It was six or seven at night over there. She should still be awake.
Different ring tone. Quick repetitive buzzing. Very loud. No answer.
Levin looked online, at the BBC, and at the State Department website, and at al-Jezeera, where you could sometimes get unfiltered news. What he read was worrying. There was fighting in Buchanan. They had sent in the U.S. Marines and pulled Americans and EU nationals out. There was a travel warning. U.S. citizens cautioned. Unstable military situation. Don’t travel there. If you are there, don’t go out. Avoid crowds.
He called the State Department and got connected to the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Africa Desk. They couldn’t provide any information. Privacy laws. They could record data for the file. There was already a report in the file. All American citizens had been evacuated. The mission was complete.
Those words made him sick to his stomach. If Julia had been evacuated, she would have come back to Providence or called or e-mailed. Levin checked his e-mail again. There was nothing.
He called Julia’s mother in Mill Valley, who was just back from playing tennis, chipper but completely clueless. She didn’t even know there was a war on in Liberia, or even that Liberia was a country in Africa. She hadn’t heard from Julia in a few weeks. Nothing out of the ordinary.
The Liberian embassy in Washington didn’t answer their phone.
Levin got Jack Reed’s office on the phone and badgered a nice young legislative assistant into making a call. Senator Reed’s office put him in contact with someone at the State Department, who said exactly what the last person said—privacy laws again. All she could do was take down Julia’s name and last known address. Open a case file.
Levin hadn’t thought much about Julia in months. But he couldn’t stop thinking about her now. Levin could hear her voice—impetuous, smart, and unrealistic, the voice of someone who was barely thirty, who has this stupid, blind hope, this belief in doing the right thing because it was right, this commitment to unself-interested advocacy, to unconditional love, the light that had almost gone out in himself. Repair the world. Right. As the world spun out of control, as the rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. How much good had those beliefs done him? Or the world or anybody else?
Who was Julia to him? Probably just a faint hope, a distant fantasy, a last gasp; not a student, not a lover, but somehow more than a friend. A voice. There was a line from somewhere that described it. He pieced the line together, word leading slowly to word. “Neither … father … nor … lover.” It was Theodore Roethke, a poet from the northwest he’d read in college. “Neither father nor lover.” That phrase described it perfectly, described who he was to Julia and who Julia was to him.
The poem was called Elegy for Jane, and as soon as the line came back, his brain stopped short. “Neither father nor lover.” It was an elegy for a young woman who had been killed, thrown from a horse.
The thought of Julia dying, of Julia’s body lying crumpled on the ground, her head snapped backward and her face that ghastly blue-white was too much for Levin to bear. But there it was. They had evacuated all American citizens, and Levin hadn’t heard from Julia. She could have been caught up in this mess, and she could be dead. There was already a report in her file.
I’m a coward, Levin thought. I’m sitting here in America, going to work every day, just plugging up the holes people shoot in each other, treating headaches with Percocet, and ordering MRIs. We pay agribusiness to grow corn, and then sell the corn syrup to food processors, who sell it on TV; and we get diabetes and heart disease from eating all that crap, and then big pharma and the hospitals and the device manufacturers sell us more stuff to fix it all, and the insurance companies line up to pay for it so that a bunch of rich guys can line their pockets while we fatten ourselves like turkeys, ready to be cooked and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. I am wasting my life, Levin thought, pissing away my days and nights to repair the damage done by a for-profit culture that is out of control. This is “finger in the dike” stuff. I’m one more cog in the machine that is d
estroying the communities that make us human. My life isn’t about repairing the world or about bringing the lost light back into the universe. It isn’t about kindness or goodness or justice or even about love. My life is complicity, not action.
There was a ping from Levin’s computer, which was on a desk in the next room. He needed sleep.
One more e-mail. Just one. Probably junk.
Chapter Eleven
Julia Richmond. Grand Bassa County, Liberia. July 18, 2003
THE LIGHT UNDER THE DOOR DIMMED, BECAME FAINT RED, AND THEN WENT OUT BEFORE IT came back.
Julia worked at slipping her hands out of the cloth tie that held them together. She reached back with her fingers, stretching them to the point of dislocation, but she could not even put the third finger of either hand, which reached furthest when she flexed her fingers as far as they would go, onto the knot. The cloth tightened against her wrists when she moved her hands, which made them tingle and then go numb.
She stood and paced when she was awake. She rubbed the cloth on the edge of the shelving, hoping to fray it or wear it away. The light wasn’t good enough to see if it worked, when there was any light at all.
Or she sat, and she dreamed.
Her hips began to ache from the hard floor. She could picture the anatomy—the femoral head as it entered the acetabulum of the hip joint, the greater trochanter rotated out and up as she flexed the hip and the knee. That meant she was sitting on bone, the ridges and grooves of the acetabulum pressed into the muscular gluteus and its ligamentous attachment to the bone, where there was no fatty cushion. She tried to change positions when she was sitting or laying back. Sometimes she sat with her knees drawn up to her chest. Sometimes she lay on her back on the floor with her hands under her head. Sometimes she lay on her side, her clasped hands as a pillow, her knees drawn up.
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