The Medicine Burns

by Adam Klein

  He kept his eyes averted as he played; he wanted the music to ask for coins. He wanted to slip behind his sorrowful invocation, invisible. He wanted the music and not his eyes to make the listener sympathetic.

  The woman he played for stopped and watched him, then handed him a five rupee note. When she had walked off, he continued playing for me, and even as he looked at me, his eyes were following the music.

  We sat down in a restaurant boasting pizza. “The prices are too high here,” he said.

  “I’ll buy,” I said. I was already out of breath.

  When the food arrived, I couldn’t eat. I was sweating heavily. Suddenly, my circumstances terrified me. I would barely be able to afford another week here before the money ran out, and there was perhaps less time than that before my health would fail me entirely.

  I sat there squeezing my head in my hands, trying to stop the anxious thoughts. But I couldn’t stop them. I could not accept the arrangements I had made for myself. I had cornered myself: I had to die or beg for charity. But I couldn’t beg.

  The boy asked me, “Are you going to be sick?”

  “Yes,” I told him, and I put my hands over my eyes so that he wouldn’t see me crying.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  “I’m tired. My resistance is down.”

  “We will go back now,” he said, standing.

  He took up his instrument and walked a few paces behind me, playing. It seemed as though I was walking through my own funeral procession, with people turning their heads as we walked. The desert whistling behind the awninged shops made the whole town seem like a painted curtain. He followed me halfway around the lake before I turned to him and asked his name.

  “Sanjay,” he said.

  Someone called out from a chai shop and I turned around. It was the German I’d met in Jaipur. I walked back to see him. He was sitting in a large wicker chair, smiling.

  “It’s good to see you here. The last time I saw you, you were telling me how much you needed a rest. It’s restful here, though I can’t say you look any better for it.”

  “It’s worse,” I said, joining him at the table.

  Sanjay sat down, too, but looked uncomfortable and kept his attention on the street. Eventually, another musician boy, a little older than him, approached. They spoke to each other, often glancing back at the German and myself, until I asked Sanjay to go on without me.

  He looked sadly at me, but didn’t question the suggestion. He gathered his instrument and bow, and asked if I would see him later. I assured him I would, and he and his friend walked off.

  “Have you seen a doctor yet?” the German asked.

  “No, I don’t have the money for it.”

  “There’s a public hospital in Jodhpur, just across the street from the train station.”

  “I don’t need a hospital. The boy is taking care of me.”

  “He’s lovely,” the German said, winking, “how long have you had him?”

  “A few days. He helped me through a fever.”

  “What kind of medicine is he treating you with? Are you in pain?”

  “No medicine, just cold rags and simple food.”

  “If you’re in pain I can help you,” he said. “I have an opium connection here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I had a problem with heroin before, and I don’t have any money.”

  “That’s OK,” he said. “You’ll feel rich.”

  He offered to bring it by the Lotus Lodge later that evening.

  “I’ll have to leave India,” he confided. “My permit ran out years ago. I read tarot cards to make a living. Tourists sometimes pay me in American money. I tell them my story and most of them are horrified by the idea of being trapped in India, and they sympathize with me. But I’ve loved India. It changes you. In Hamburg, my goal was to work in a bank, or to sell good German cars. In India, I’d be content to have a group of young boys who would follow me out into the desert like a holy man.” He laughed and looked over his shoulder as though he expected the desert to present him with a mirage, a preview of his enlightenment. “They’ll catch up with me soon,” he said, growing more serious. “Otherwise, I’m afraid if I do stay in India, I’ll be tempted to walk out into the desert, even if I can’t find anybody foolish enough to follow me. It sounds crazy, but it’s a fantasy of mine.”

  It was late afternoon when I left the chai house. Sanjay was waiting on the street. He hesitated, though, until I called him over. Then he quickly took my arm and asked me if I would write my name on the face of his instrument.

  “Write it under that tree,” he said, pointing.

  It was a beautiful spot he had chosen. We sat in the shade and he handed the instrument over to me. I took out my pen and scratched my name over the bleached, leather face. My markings were tentative. He watched over my shoulder and I could hear the anticipation in his breathing. I felt at first I was defacing the beautiful instrument which had four taut strings running along the wooden neck and over the gourdlike body, but he squeezed my arm to encourage me further. I thought it strange that he might remember me, sitting there and writing under that tree, by some markings he could not read.

  We stretched out under the tree. He laid on his back with the instrument on his chest, plucking the strings with his long fingernails. He inclined his head so that it almost touched my chest. His eyes were closed and he was smiling.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked him.

  “My mother let me play for her like this. When my father died, she wanted to die, too. There was no rain and we lost everything. Then she got very sick and she stopped eating. Every meal I would force her to eat. She stopped being able to see, and then she said that she was already dead and she told me to go to Pushkar and not to come back. But I went back anyway,” he laughed, nodding his head, “and I would play for her because it reminded her of my father. Then before she died she asked me to play the song I was just playing for you, and she started to sing, only quietly, but like she did when there was food to cook, and friends still in the village.”

  I was trembling at his closeness. I wanted to lie beside him for the rest of the day, but there was only a short time to enjoy him. His friend approached and stood over us, laughing, then took his bow and began jabbing at Sanjay with it. He stood up and they began arguing.

  Finally, Sanjay said the other boy wanted to play for me. He stood silently by the tree. I couldn’t understand his expression, whether he felt ashamed of his friend, of me, or of himself. But his friend started to play and tapped his foot as he did. And it was the same melody I’d heard Sanjay play, but with none of the sadness, with a strange mockery instead. And when he finished playing, he reached his hand out to me.

  “You don’t play as well as him,” I said, looking over at Sanjay’s quiet face. Then I stood up to go.

  Sanjay walked beside me, apologizing. I told him it didn’t matter, that I was tired and wanted to nap.

  “I’m going to help you get better,” he said.

  I grasped his arm with a strength that surprised me. “You’re not going to make me well,” I said. “I’m dying and you’re not going to make me well.”

  He pulled his arm from my hand and ran off.

  By the time I arrived back, I had cramps so severe I couldn’t stand straight. I went into the shower room, took off my clothes and let the water run. I stretched out on the floor beneath it. I felt something warm on my leg and it was clotted blood running from my rectum. I wanted to scream but put my hand in my mouth and bit it. I watched the blood disperse in the water and didn’t move until the water tank had emptied, and I was shivering. The blood seemed to have stopped but the pains were sharp. I sat on the shower floor, my teeth chattering, praying for the German to come with the opium—indirectly, it was the first time I’d prayed for medicine.

  It was Sanjay who found me, though, and put my arm around his neck, holding me up and carrying me along to the room. He looked astonished over my
condition, as though nothing had led up to it, as though he’d never seen me sick before.

  “You should go to the hospital,” he said. His eyes were sadder than usual. I imagined him thinking, Because you won’t let me make you well.

  At that moment I wanted to tell him to try, that I would try also, but it was too unfair to do that to him again. His mother had waited too long before she sang with him. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t remember that tune.

  “My medicine is coming,” I said. “My friend will be here soon.”

  He woke me when the German finally came.

  “Thomas,” I said, already delirious with fever, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “This is Heinz,” he said, taking my hand. “I don’t know if I should give you this.”

  “Give it to me,” I said. “It’s like morphine, right? That’s what they give soldiers when they can’t help them.”

  He nervously paced the room and asked Sanjay to bring us chai. “I’ll mix it in your tea. Drink it fast, it’s bitter.”

  Sanjay brought the tea and hesitantly left the room when I the German asked him to.

  The opium affected me powerfully, but not in the way we’d hoped. It stunned me. I threw up. I was nauseous with the slightest movement and sat still at the edge of the cot.

  “Hospital,” was all I said, gasping for breath.

  The German paced nervously. I was throwing up in a bucket by the side of the cot, and the smell was pungent, already like a hospital. I think he smelled death on me and that propelled him to action. It wouldn’t be easy getting me to Jodhpur, and I knew he was worried that I wouldn’t make it. How would he ever explain himself to the authorities, traveling with a long-expired visa and a dead American?

  Under the influence of the opium, I didn’t make much sense. I remember Sanjay coming into the room, taking out the bucket, and touching my face with his hands. I twisted the ring from my finger, then, and put it in his hand. He was crying when the German finished packing my bag and led me away.

  6.

  I saw an omen in the streets of Jodhpur. In front of a store I saw a white horse staggering on a mound of trash. It was tied to a post with a tethered rope around its neck. Its front leg looked broken, but it was made to stand by the short length of rope, and seemed to have been in this condition for some time. Something like gangrene had set in, and the horse’s flesh was putrid.

  I was wheeled into the emergency ward of Mahatma Gandhi Public Hospital. They pressed me to lie down on a rusty stretcher with rubber wheels. The wheels squealed and turned off in odd directions so that the short, nervous intern who was guiding me through the hospital corridors had to run along the sides of it to save us from hitting a wall or one of the many spectators.

  I was wheeled into a room where a woman and her daughter were standing. The little girl was weeping, her face pressed into the hot pink fabric of her mother’s sari. Behind a green curtain, a man was screaming and crying.

  They cleaned me up, brought me into the ward, and put me on an IV for dehydration and malnutrition. The German saw me settled in, a crowd of interns gathered by my bedside, prodding me.

  “I apologize,” he said. “I can’t stay with you. The hospital will drive me crazy.”

  “So will the desert,” I told him.

  “Get well,” he said, “and come back to Pushkar.”

  In the bed near mine, an old man from a village not far from Jodhpur was connected to tubes. The men of the village had been sleeping on mats around his bed since he’d arrived. Old world loyalty. They’d marveled at the beeping and pumping machines that kept the old man breathing, but an American was even more interesting. They spoke no English but gathered around my bed, smiling and bowing and excitedly talking amongst themselves.

  The villagers are trying their turbans on my head, one by one. The fever sweeps over me. I no longer make any sense to them.

  “Thomas, let me play,” I say, and the villagers find a place for me at the card table. An intern pushes them aside impatiently. The IV has caused a rash. It feels like worms under my skin.

  One of the sisters is crying at the bedside. Sanjay squeezes out a cloth and puts it on my forehead. I know his song, now, and I hear my voice intoning it. The villagers stand at the foot of the bed. They look like a hundred grandfathers. They’re patient with me. I keep looking back. I keep stumbling at the start of the desert.

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