by Neil Clarke
“Shit shit shit shit,” she swore. It was a deep cut, and blood ran freely down her forefinger. I rushed her to the tap, stuck it under the cold, then went for the medical bag. I returned with gauze, plasters, and a heal-the-world attitude.
“It’s okay,” she said, holding the finger up. “It’s better.”
The cut had vanished. No blood, no scab. All that remained was a slightly raised red weal. As I watched, even that faded.
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Ten said. “But it’s better.”
I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want there to be anything more difficult or complex in Ten’s life. I wanted what she had from her past to be enough, to be all. I knew this was something alien; no one healed like that. I thought that if I let it go, it would never trouble us again. I had not calculated on the bomb.
Some fucking Nazis or other had been blast-bombing gay bars. London, Edinburgh, Dublin so far, always a Friday afternoon, work over, weekend starting. Manchester was on the alert. So were the bombers. Tuesday, lunch time, half a kilo of Semtex with nails and razor blades packed around it went off under a table outside a Canal Street bar. No one died, but a woman at the next table lost both legs from the knees down and there were over fifty casualties. Ten had been going in for the afternoon shift. She was twenty meters away when the bomb went off. I got the call from the hospital same time as the news broke on the radio.
“Get the fuck over there,” Willy the boss ordered. I didn’t need ordering. Manchester Royal Infirmary casualty was bedlam. I saw the doctors going around in a slow rush and the people looking up at everyone who came in, very very afraid and the police taking statements and the trolleys in the aisles and I thought: It must have been something like this in Nairobi, at the end. The receptionist showed me to a room where I was to wait for a doctor. I met her in the corridor, a small, harassed-looking Chinese girl.
“Ah, Mr. Giddens. You’re with Ms. Bi, that’s right?”
“That’s right, how is she?”
“Well, she was brought in with multiple lacerations, upper body, left side of face, left upper arm and shoulder . . .”
“Oh Jesus God. And now?”
“See for yourself.”
Ten walked down the corridor. If she had not been wearing a hospital robe, I would have sworn she was unchanged from how I had left her that morning.
“Shone.”
The weals were already fading from her face and hands. A terrible prescience came over me, so strong and cold I almost threw up.
“We want to keep her in for further tests, Mr. Giddens,” the doctor said. “As you can imagine, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”
“Shone, I’m fine, I want to go home.”
“Just to be sure, Mr. Giddens.”
When I brought Ten back a bag of stuff, the receptionist directed me to Intensive Care. I ran the six flights of stairs to ICU, burning with dread. Ten was in a sealed room full of white equipment. When she saw me, she ran from her bed to the window, pressed her hands against it.
“Shone!” Her words came through a speaker grille. “They won’t let me out!”
Another doctor led to me a side room. There were two policemen there, and a man in a suit.
“What the hell is this?”
“Mr. Giddens. Ms. Bi, she is a Kenyan refugee?”
“You fucking know that.”
“Easy, Mr. Giddens. We’ve been running some tests on Ms. Bi, and we’ve discovered the presence in her bloodstream of fullerene nanoprocessors.”
“Nanowhat?”
“What are commonly know as Chaga spores.”
Ten, Dust Girl, firing and firing and firing at the glider, the gun blossoming in her hand, the shanty town melting behind her as her clothes fell apart, her arm sticking through the shield wall as she shouted, I’m chipped, I’m chipped! The soldiers shaving her head, hosing her down. Those things she had carried inside her. All those runs for the Americans.
“Oh my God.”
There was a window in the little room. Through it I saw Ten sitting on a plastic chair by the bed, hands on her thighs, head bowed.
“Mr. Giddens.” The man in the suit flashed a little plastic wallet. “Robert McGlennon, Home Office Immigration. Your, ah . . .” He nodded at the window.
“Partner.”
“Partner. Mr. Giddens, I have to tell you, we cannot be certain that Ms. Bi’s continued presence is not a public health risk. Her refugee status is dependent on a number of conditions, one of which is that . . .”
“You’re fucking deporting her . . .”
The two policemen stirred. I realized then that they were not there for Ten. There were there for me.
“It’s a public health issue, Mr. Giddens. She should never have been allowed in in the first place. We have no idea of the possible environmental impact. You, of all people, should be aware what these things can do. Have done. Are still doing. I have to think of public safety.”
“Public safety, fuck!”
“Mr. Giddens . . .”
I went to the window. I beat my fists on the wired glass.
“Ten! Ten! They’re trying to deport you! They want to send you back!”
The policemen prised me away from the window. On the far side, Ten yelled silently.
“Look, I don’t like having to do this,” the man in the suit said.
“When?”
“Mr. Giddens.”
“When? Tell me, how long has she got?”
“Usually there’d be a detention period, with limited rights of appeal. But as this is a public health issue . . .”
“You’re going to do it right now.”
“The order is effective immediately, Mr. Giddens. I’m sorry. These officers will go with you back to your home. If you could gather up the rest of her things . . .”
“At least let me say goodbye, Jesus, you owe me that!”
“I can’t allow that, Mr. Giddens. There’s a contamination risk.”
“Contamination? I’ve only been fucking her for the past six months.”
As the cops marched me out, the doctor came up for a word.
“Mr. Giddens, these nanoprocessors in her bloodstream . . .”
“That are fucking getting her thrown out of the country.”
“The fullerenes . . .”
“She heals quick. I saw it.”
“They do much more than that, Mr. Giddens. She’ll probably never get sick again. And there’s some evidence that they prevent telomere depletion in cell division.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, she ages very much more slowly than we do. Her life expectancy may be, I don’t know, two, three hundred years.”
I stared. The policemen stared.
“There’s more. We observed unfamiliar structures in her brain; the best I can describe them is, the nanoprocessors seem to be reengineering dead neurons into a complementary neural network.”
“A spare brain?”
“An auxiliary brain.”
“What would you do with that?”
“What wouldn’t you do with that, Mr. Giddens.” He wiped his hand across his mouth. “This bit is pure speculation, but . . .”
“But.”
“But in some way, she’s in control of it all. I think—this is just a theory—that through this auxiliary brain she’s able to interact with the nanoprocessors. She might be able to make them do what she wants. Program them.”
“Thank you for telling me that,” I said bitterly. “That makes it all so much easier.”
I took the policemen back to my house. I told them to make themselves tea. I took Ten’s neatly arranged books and CDs off my shelves and her neatly folded clothes out of my drawers and her toilet things out of my bathroom and put
them back in the two bags in which she had brought them. I gave the bags to the policemen; they took them away in their car. I never got to say goodbye. I never learned what flight she was on, where she flew from, when she left this country. A face behind glass. That was my last memory. The thing I feared—insane, out of nowhere—had taken her away.
After Ten went, I was sick for a long time. There was no sunshine, no rain, no wind. No days or time, just a constant, high-pitched, quiet whine in my head. People at work played out a slightly amplified normality for my benefit. Alone, they would ask, very gently, How do you feel?
“How do I feel?” I told them. “Like I’ve been shot with a single, high-velocity round, and I’m dead, and I don’t know it.”
I asked for someone else to take over the I-Nation account. Wynton called me but I could not speak with him. He sent around a bottle of that good Jamaican import liqueur, and a note, “Come and see us, any time.” Willy arranged me a career break and a therapist.
His name was Greg, he was a client-centered therapist, which meant I could talk for as long as I liked about whatever I liked and he had to listen. I talked very little, those first few sessions. Partly I felt stupid, partly I didn’t want to talk, even to a stranger. But it worked, little by little, without my knowing. I think I only began to be aware of that the day I realized that Ten was gone, but not dead. Her last photo of Africa was still on the fridge and I looked at it and saw something new: down there, in there, somewhere, was Ten. The realization was vast and subtle at the same time. I think of it like a man who finds himself in darkness. He imagines he’s in a room, no doors, no windows, and that he’ll never find the way out. But then he hears noises, feels a touch on his face, smells a subtle smell, and he realizes that he is not in a room at all—he is outside: the touch on his face is the wind, the noises are night birds, the smell is from night-blooming flowers, and above him, somewhere, are stars.
Greg said nothing when I told him this—they never do, these client-centered boys, but after that session I went to the net and started the hunt for Tendeléo Bi. The Freedom of Information Act got me into the Immigration Service’s databases. Ten had been flown out on a secure military transport to Mombasa. UNHCR in Mombasa had assigned her to Likoni Twelve, a new camp to the south of the city. She was transferred out on November Twelfth. It took two days’ searching to pick up a Tendeléo Bi logged into a place called Samburu North three months later. Medical records said she was suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, but responding to sugar and salt treatment. She was alive.
On the first Monday of winter, I went back to work. I had lost a whole season. On the first Friday, Willy gave me print-out from an on-line recruitment agency.
“I think you need a change of scene,” he said. “These people are looking for a stock accountant.”
These people were Medecins Sans Frontiers. Where they needed a stock accountant was their East African theater.
Eight months after the night the two policemen took away Ten’s things, I stepped off the plane in Mombasa. I think hell must be like Mombasa in its final days as capital of the Republic of Kenya, infrastructure unravelling, economy disintegrating, the harbor a solid mass of boat people and a million more in the camps in Likoni and Shimba Hills, Islam and Christianity fighting a new Crusade for control of this chaos and the Chaga advancing from the west and now the south, after the new impact at Tanga. And in the middle of it all, Sean Giddens, accounting for stock. It was good, hard, solid work in MSF Sector Headquarters, buying drugs where, when, and how we could; haggling down truck drivers and Sibirsk jet-jockeys; negotiating service contracts as spare parts for the Landcruisers gradually ran out, every day juggling budgets always too small against needs too big. I loved it more than any work I’ve ever done. I was so busy I sometimes forgot why I was there. Then I would go in the safe bus back to the compound and see the smoke going up from the other side of the harbor, hear the gunfire echo off the old Arab houses, and the memory of her behind that green wired glass would gut me.
My boss was a big bastard Frenchman, Jean-Paul Gastineau. He had survived wars and disasters on every continent except Antarctica. He liked Cuban cigars and wine from the valley where he was born and opera, and made sure he had them, never mind distance or expense. He took absolutely no shit. I liked him immensely. I was a fucking thin-blooded number-pushing black rosbif, but he enjoyed my creative accounting. He was wasted in Mombasa. He was a true frontline medic. He was itching for action.
One lunchtime, as he was opening his red wine, I asked him how easy it would to find someone in the camps. He looked at me shrewdly, then asked, “Who is she?”
He poured two glasses, his invitation to me. I told him my history and her history over the bottle. It was very good.
“So, how do I find her?”
“You’ll never get anything through channels,” Jean-Paul said. “Easiest thing to do is go there yourself. You have leave due.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do. About three weeks of it. Ah. Yes.” He poked about in his desk drawers. He threw me a black plastic object like a large cell-phone.
“What is it?”
“US ID chips have a GPS transponder. They like to know where their people are. Take it. If she is chipped, this will find her.”
“Thanks.”
He shrugged.
“I come from a nation of romantics. Also, you’re the only one in this fucking place appreciates a good Beaune.”
I flew up north on a Sibirsk charter. Through the window I could see the edge of the Chaga. It was too huge to be a feature of the landscape, or even a geographical entity. It was like a dark sea. It looked like what it was . . . another world, that had pushed up against our own. Like it, some ideas are too huge to fit into our everyday worlds. They push up through it, they take it over, and they change it beyond recognition. If what the doctor at Manchester Royal Infirmary had said about the things in Ten’s blood were true, then this was not just a new world. This was a new humanity. This was every rule about how we make our livings, how we deal with each other, how we lead our lives, all overturned.
The camps, also, are too big to take in. There is too much there for the world we’ve made for ourselves. They change everything you believe. Mombasa was no preparation. It was like the end of the world up there on the front line.
“So, you’re looking for someone,” Heino Rautavana said. He had worked with Jean-Paul through the fall of Nairobi; I could trust him, Jay-Pee said, but I think he thought I was a fool, or, all at best, a romantic. “No shortage of people here.”
Jean-Paul had warned the records wouldn’t be accurate. But you hope. I went to Samburu North, where my search in England had last recorded Ten. No trace of her. The UNHCR warden, a grim little American woman, took me up and down the rows of tents. I looked at the faces and my tracker sat silent on my hip. I saw those faces that night in the ceiling, and for many nights after.
“You expect to hit the prize first time?” Heino said as we bounced along the dirt track in an MSF Landcruiser to Don Dul.
I had better luck in Don Dul, if you can call it that. Ten had definitely been here two months ago. But she had left eight days later. I saw the log in, the log out, but there was no record of where she had gone.
“No shortage of camps either,” Heino said. He was a dour bastard. He couldn’t take me any further but he squared me an authorization to travel on Red Cross/ Crescent convoys, who did a five hundred mile run through the camps along the northern terminum. In two weeks I saw more misery than I ever thought humanity could take. I saw the faces and the hands and the bundles of scavenged things and I thought, why hold them here? What are they saving them from? Is it so bad in the Chaga? What is so terrible about people living long lives, being immune from sickness, growing extra layers in their brains? What is so frightening about people being able to go into that alien place, and take control of
it, and make it into what they want?
I couldn’t see the Chaga, it lay just below the southern horizon, but I was constantly aware of its presence, like they say people who have plates in their skulls always feel a slight pressure. Sometimes, when the faces let me sleep, I would be woken instead by a strange smell, not strong, but distinct; musky and fruity and sweaty, sexy, warm. It was the smell of the Chaga, down there, blowing up from the south.
Tent to truck to camp to tent. My three weeks were running out and I had to arrange a lift back along the front line to Samburu and the flight to Mombasa. With three days left, I arrived in Eldoret, UNECTA’s Lake Victoria regional center. It gave an impression of bustle, the shops and hotels and cafés were busy, but the white faces and American accents and dress sense said Eldoret was a company town. The Rift Valley Hotel looked like heaven after eighteen days on the front line. I spent an hour in the pool trying to beam myself into the sky. A sudden rain-storm drove everyone from the water but me. I floated there, luxuriating in the raindrops splashing around me. At sunset I went down to the camps. They lay to the south of the town, like a line of cannon-fodder against the Chaga. I checked the records, a matter of form. No Tendeléo Bi. I went in anyway. And it was another camp, and after a time, anyone can become insulated to suffering. You have to. You have to book into the big hotel and swim in the pool and eat a good dinner when you get back; in the camps you have to look at the faces just as faces and refuse to make any connection with the stories behind them. The hardest people I know work in the compassion business. So I went up and down the faces and somewhere halfway down some row I remembered this toy Jean-Paul had given me. I took it out. The display was flashing green. There was a single word: lock.
I almost dropped it.
I thought my heart had stopped. I felt shot between the eyes. I forgot to breathe. The world reeled sideways. My fucking stupid fingers couldn’t get a precise reading. I ran down the row of tents, watching the figures. The digits told me how many meters I was to north and east. Wrong way. I doubled back, ducked right at the next opening and headed east. Both sets of figures were decreasing. I overshot, the cast reading went up. Back again. This row. This row. I peered through the twilight. At the far end was a group of people talking outside a tent lit by a yellow petrol lamp. I started to run, one eye on the tracker. I stumbled over guy-ropes, kicked cans, hurdled children, apologized to old women. The numbers clicked down, thirty five, thirty, twenty five meters . . . I could see this one figure in the group, back to me, dressed in purple combat gear. East zero, North twenty, eighteen . . . Short, female, Twelve, ten. Wore its hair in great soft spikes. Eight, six. I couldn’t make it past four. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I was shaking.