But we dare to trust them, to love them. What does that make us women? I thought about that a lot, and finally I decided not to love him anymore.
So I left to stay with my sister up north in Mzuzu. He did not chase me, did not try to find me. For that, I was grateful—I imagined perhaps he understood how I felt, understood his own betrayal and understood that I needed to be away from him, even if at first I did nothing differently than I’d done at home with him: lying on the floor, crying, staring, refusing to eat, shouting at anyone around.
My sister tried first to live with me in that state, to understand. Then she struggled desperately to cheer me up, to get me to come to a treatment center, to see a doctor. She said she knew someone who knew someone, that I could get medicines, I could live a long time. But I just snarled at her husband, growled at the men in town. I saw a woman at the food shop who I was certain was a whore, and I slapped her in the face. And then, back to lying on the floor, crying my eyes out, breaking things—always my own things, things I’d brought from home.
Finally, one day, my sister—a secretary at local government office—came home from work speaking of a big new project, vague like every big new project in Malawi is at first, and of the many people who would be needed to work desks. She had put my name in, she said, with strong recommendation. She assured me I would have work, and this, somehow, woke me up. I began to pull myself together a little.
Just enough.
A few weeks was all it took. It was phenomenal, how quickly the first camp was set up: all they did was put in the fences and ship in tents donated by some NGO or other that probably had no idea what they would really be used for. Now they call this place a “death camp,” and we have guards and another, taller fence ten miles out in all directions to keep them away, to stop the protesters and the human rights activists and the mercenaries and the international reporters from breaking in, photographing them, letting them all out into the world… but back then, those NGOs were eager to donate the tents.
Finally, they said, someone is doing something concrete about the AIDS crisis.
On the first day, the tents weren’t even set up: that was left for the people who would live in the camp to do. A few water lines and communal latrines were dug, and that was it: the Viphya HIV quarantine center was set up for business, with me placed at one of the front desks, a broad smile on my face, in a fine, colorful dress and matching hair wrap my sister bought for me. I was ready to do my job.
Me, at the front desk, secretly infected, smiling at the men and women, one by one, passing me on their way to oblivion. Somehow I was convinced that as long as I sat at this desk, I would never end up inside the camp itself. That I would see her, eventually, and know her—the one who had infected my husband, and through him, infected me.
Nobody was actually calling it a “death camp” then. But the people they brought in knew already, on some level, that they were supposed to never leave this place. They pretended, even those first people, to hope things would come out fine for them. They acted as if they’d held on to the belief that the camps were set up with medicine, that UN observers and MSF volunteers would be let in. That treatment programs like those in some other countries—some not so very far away—would let them live their lives. They pretended as hard as they could.
But if you watched them carefully, there was a brokenness that overcame them as they stuck a finger into the machine, as they got the result and were led through the gate into the camp.
Maybe it was all the guards around with guns in their hands.
“So many guns,” my husband said to me a few months later, when he was led up to my desk.
“Christopher,” I said. My husband did not look ill, though he had changed in the months since I’d last seen him. He had gone gray at the temples, and his eyes had a defeated look. He wore a silver cross around his neck, his shirt unbuttoned, probably because of the heat on the buses since the windows were nailed shut to prevent runaways.
“Joyce,” he said, and held out his hand. And suddenly I was not a government official at the front gate of an HIV camp. Suddenly I was a woman on the verge of widowhood. I had imagined him being brought here, imagined his being brought to my desk even, and I had always imagined myself staring through him, showing no sign I recognized him, letting him go into the camp. I had imagined myself quitting on that day and never coming back here again.
And yet, in the moment, the thought possessed me that I could get the candy tin from my bag, that I could get the slip out. That maybe the guards would not make him take the test again on another machine. That somehow I could keep him out of there, save his life. Not to go home with him, not necessarily, but… to help him somehow.
I got as far as pulling out the candy tin and opening it. Then I realized—they would test him again. They would make him go to Anthony’s machine and test once more, and then it would say what it had said on the last machine and all the machines before. No blood test needed. Nobody reached my desk without already knowing what would kill him.
“Kaposi’s sarcoma?” I asked, looking up from the tin and into his eyes. His familiar, unrecognizable eyes.
“Tuberculosis and candidiasis of the lungs,” he said. Almost nobody died from the tuberculosis, and it made me wonder—will conditions in the camp worsen? Will the roads in be blocked? Or… will he die from a broken heart? A man who had no reason to live would die sooner, might get ill and fall apart in just a few years.
“Oh, love,” I said, and I reached across my desk to hold his hand. Then I saw the most awful thing in my life, worse than anything else I had seen at my desk: my own husband refusing to weep, refusing to move, just looking at me and waiting for me to tell him what to do. Unable to do anything at all. About to be bundled off to die. With no idea why he was here, why he would never see me again, why the machinery of our government had decided he would be chewed up in this way instead of the usual way. With nobody to blame for giving him the thing swimming in his blood that would kill him.
He stood there looking at me, with his mouth a little open.
I sat there, as still as death and staring back at him, unable to speak at all. Eventually, Anthony saw what was happening and called the guards to bring my husband to his desk. Kuseka came to my side and led me away from the desk.
He could have said something, could have said a million things. Could have told them, right then, that I was infected too. Could have taken me into the camp to be with him again. I’m sure he could see it in my eyes, that surging longing to be beside him again, which shocked me as I realized I was feeling it.
But he said nothing at all. He just looked at me one moment longer, and then with his jaw clenched, he turned away and let them lead him to Anthony’s desk and stuck his finger into the machine there, stood waiting for the slip to pop out. Anthony took it, read it silently, and then nodded to the guard who held my husband’s arm.
Then the guard led him away, out of the world. There was another woman standing in front of my desk, but I stayed where I was. I could feel myself about to vomit as I watched him being led away, not glancing back to see me.
That was when, to my surprise, I began to miss him, in a way I hadn’t felt since I’d left him.
I sit beyond the perimeter surrounding the fence sometimes, looking for him through a pair of binoculars I bought in a secondhand shop in Mzuzu.
I see a lot of things. I see people arguing, and I see groups of women crying. I see people using hand gestures to communicate because they don’t have a language in common. Ivoriens, Ethiopians, Algerians, Tutsis, Sudanese, Zulu: all jumbled together like pieces of a puzzle-map. The violence is constant but mostly low-level, and even when it is extreme, it is never fatal—after all, nobody in the camp dies of a stab wound or injury, only from some complication related to AIDS.
Doctors have begun talking about a “culture of rape” that exists in parts of the camp and how it is the reason that so many uninfected people finally do contract HIV. The
government argues that they would have been infected anyway—that the machines are never wrong. I wonder how people keep on living in there, how they resist the urge to hang themselves, to cut their own throats. Is it the hope of a rescue? The hope of a cure? Are they imagining that maybe, in a few years, the camps will be shut down and they will no longer live in a zoo? Or is it just that the tents are so crowded nobody has enough privacy to kill herself?
I see women giving birth to babies that may or may not already be infected, and may or may not die in the camp. People still celebrate, even with the tears I’m sure are in their eyes, even with their hands scarred from hanging on to the barbed wire of the fence and looking out at the guards with the guns pointed at them. They sing and chitchat until the baby is taken away to be tested. Whether the baby is returned or disappears, their mothers wail all night long.
I watch the buses pull up to the gate compound, sometimes ten or fifteen of them in a caravan, with a military truck in front and another behind. The wheels on the bus turn and turn in my mind. It is me, looking in the face of the machine that will kill me, and in a way I feel lucky. Nobody in the camp even knows what HIV looks like—cannot draw a picture of it. They have masks for it now, masks for characters that I never saw when I was a little girl in my home village. The masks are huge heads that sit on top of wasted bodies, with sunken eyes and cheeks and a deathly look; one mask shows a grotesque red face covered in scabs and pustules, and three horns sprout from its crown. This character’s name is Edzi, which is how people from the villages in the bush in our part of Malawi pronounce “AIDS.”
The people in the camp put on the masks and dance out the dramas that I have never seen before—dancing stories that never existed when I was a little girl in my village, or stories I don’t recognize, at least. Even people from other parts of the continent are putting on the masks and dancing now. They are making a culture of their own, these prisoners. Sometimes the monstrously masked dancers tumble to the ground, lying still for nearly an hour as the music goes on without them, as if to enact the death that is waiting for them all. Other times, they rise again soon after and stomp down little fences made of paper and cloth—the dream of resurrection and escape.
Sometimes they dance for an hour and a strange effigy is brought out, a thing made of scrap plywood and leaves and scrap metal they’ve found somewhere. A few men parade it out to the edge of the camp, where we can see it, and then everyone puts a finger into it, one by one. The thing is an effigy of the machines—the machines like the one on my desk—that tell us how we will die. And then they set the effigy on fire and burn it and leap onto it crazily, smashing it while others sing and sing and sing.
The fence dances, those seem almost ridiculous to me. Some fences will never come down once they’re up. And the machine-effigy dances, those scare me. They’re angry, those dances, no matter how futile. But the resurrection dances, if that’s what they are… those I understand completely. I take comfort in them as I wait for Christopher to wander into view. He wasn’t sick enough to be dead already—that’s impossible, I tell myself as I sit staring through my binoculars.
Day after day, when I finish work, I come out here and watch. Sometimes a guard stumbles across me and begins to threaten me, until I show him my employment card, and he realizes I work here. Then he tells me to put the binoculars away and get back to work, and I tell him I am working and that he should leave me alone if he knows what’s good for him. I wear my glasses at this time, and it makes me look like I am studying something. It works.
I keep wondering what I will do when I finally see Christopher. Run to the fence, try to climb it and get to him? Run away? Burst into tears and give up finally? Try to smuggle a letter to him? Quit my job and consider myself a widow?
I wonder about the men who made the machines: Why did they choose the question of how we are to die? Why not how we will live? Isn’t that what people used to ask the stars? Will I be happy? Will I be rich? Will my wife be beautiful? Will my husband be kind? How many children will I have? It’s stupid to ask those questions to the sky, of course—stars can’t tell us anything in the way of useful answers—but at least the questions themselves are useful. The only question the machines answered for me was one I didn’t need an answer to, one that does me little good now, with my eyes straining to distinguish whether that gaunt man standing by an open fire is Christopher, fallen ill, or someone else who happens to be about his height and build.
No, the machines tell us nothing about how we would live, how we could live. About such a question, all the machines tell us is, “You never asked about that.”
I find myself lowering the binoculars from my eyes and looking up to the sky to search for some story that could make sense of this for me—some dead hunter or ancient god above, still upside down and glittering in the darkness, surrounded by an ocean of stars all around. For a moment, I feel like this is all inevitable—like the camp is nothing more than the upside-down picture of the world made by the machines, just as old President Banda’s rule had been an upside-down version of how the British ran this place, just as democracy since that has been upside down too. For a moment, a wide, dark fatalism wafts through me like smoke, filling me to the brim with a hopeless despair.
But then the smoke clears, and I have the binoculars in my hands again now and find myself searching the people in the distance, behind the fence. Hope might be only a habit, but it persists anyway. The crowd is performing another dance, near the fire now. One of the masks is new, with an enormous guard hat crowning its wooden head.
Nearer the fence, guards are shouting now, provoked and yelling as the guard masks multiply, and the dancers, turning their backs on the guards, hoist the masks up and toss them over their own shoulders toward the fire.
Gunshots ring out—but we already know the inmates won’t die from gunshot wounds—and suddenly a siren begins to blare. A fire breaks out among a stand of tents, and people run, screaming, toward the fence. The flash of cameras is visible in the distance, and off to my left, in the darkness, three pairs of headlights flick on, suddenly tumbling over the bumpy ground toward the fence.
They’re going to break people out. It’s really happening, I realize as the buses slam through the fencing, with guards shooting round after round behind them. The guns are loud, but they don’t frighten me. For the first time, nothing frightens me, and I don’t feel imprisoned by anything. When the machines told us how we will die, they also told us how we will not die. The fear that would have held me in place is now so tiny, so overpowered by hope and regret and by longing that I thought I couldn’t feel anymore.
As I rise to my feet, I catch the faint whiff of tear gas. It somehow makes me laugh for the first time in months, and then I am running as hard as I can toward the massive hole in the fence that the buses have made, and into the firelit camp—calling out to Christopher, and not caring whether it’s the last thing I will ever do in this world.
* * *
Story by Gord Sellar
Illustraion by Nick Abadzis
CANCER
This certifies that
HELEN FRANCES LAWRENCE,
sex FEMALE,
was born to
JOHN DENISON LAWRENCE and
VIRGINIA MATILDA LAWRENCE
on SATURDAY at SIX TEN PM,
this EIGHTEENTH day of AUGUST 1990
at the MONTFORT HOSPITAL in OTTAWA, ONTARIO,
and will die of CANCER
JOHN AND VIRGINIA WERE OVERJOYED: ten fingers, ten toes, and while it wasn’t the best death, cancer didn’t happen to the young very often. Two days later, on August 20, 1990, baby Helen was home.
The other kids in grade four called Helen “Helen Helen Cancer Spellin’,” which never made much sense. She’d yell that at them.
“That doesn’t even make much sense!” she’d say.
“Maybe you should give up on rhymes!” she’d say.
“You guys, cancer isn’t even that hard to spell,”
she’d say.
One day in grade four, during second recess, she met Tina. Three boys had surrounded her, chanting “Tina Tina Belly Screenah.” A group of onlookers was growing, and Helen joined them.
“That doesn’t even make much sense!” yelled Tina.
“I know, right?” shouted Helen.
Not everyone got tested at birth, and Tina hadn’t. Not getting tested had been her parents’ choice, but in university it had become her choice. She and Helen were hanging out in Helen’s dorm room, alone, lying side by side on her bed. It was the only comfortable place in the room.
“Has the CANCER prediction changed the way you live your life, Helen?” Tina asked.
“Has being a lesbian changed the way you live your life, Tina?” Helen asked.
“Has being a superbitch changed the way you live your life, Helen?”
They kissed for a bit.
“I was joking about the superbitch part,” said Tina.
Helen and Tina were at the mall near their house because it was Tina’s thirtieth birthday and she’d decided she wanted to know. It was stupid not to, she’d decided. Helen had agreed to pay the two hundred and fifty dollars as a birthday present. Tina pulled the credit card out of the machine, passing it back to Helen with one hand as she stuck her finger in the machine with the other. A sample was taken, her blood was analyzed, and a printout was produced. “AIRPLANE,” it said.
“Nice!” said Tina, excited. She showed her prediction to Helen. “Mine’s better! AIRPLANE’s way better than CANCER.”
“You’ll probably just get hit on the head by an airplane,” said Helen, “and it’s not going to be nearly as cool as you think it is.”
“A toy airplane?” said Tina.
“Nope,” said Helen.
Tina laughed and noticed the display on the machine still read “INSERT FINGER.” “Hey,” she said, “it’s still gonna do a reading. Quick, put your finger in!” She grabbed Helen’s finger and pulled it toward the machine. Helen shrugged. “You want a piece of paper with ‘CANCER’ on it, it’s yours.” She put her finger in, and a few seconds later the machine spit out a piece of paper. Tina grabbed it.
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