the mortis

by Miller, Jonathan R.

  “You say that because of skin? Because of the brown on your outside?” The orderly smiles, looking more sad than happy. “Color is not a matter here. You have the mark or you don’t have it. We listen what the blood say, that’s all.”

  On either side of the main office is a wing of portables that serve as patient rooms. Until the doctor returns, Lee has her own quarters there. The door locks from the outside and there are hand-welded, wrought-iron security bars installed on each of the two windows, but otherwise it’s almost like a standard room in a university. Single bed, a trash can, a dresser, and a desk—that’s all, and it’s more than enough, more than she’s experienced in several months.

  She is given a liter of water and a roasted breadfruit. The orderly allows her to keep her carryall, minus the cleaver. She digs into the side pocket for the prescription bottles, the bottles she sent her husband to look for days ago, even though she had them in her possession the entire time. She uncaps one and shakes out a single pill and takes it.

  She lies down on the bed, shoes still on. She stares up at the ceiling, holding onto her left arm with her right hand.

  The morning her husband left to the Makoa to find the drugs, Lee didn’t move for a long time after the last branch went down over the culvert opening. She waited where she was. Her breathing was quiet, and she stayed prone and listened for maybe an hour, motionless, wondering if Park would backtrack, come to check on her. Or maybe he would come asking her for further direction, or maybe he would simply give up on the project and return, empty-handed and guilt-faced. It was possible that he’d never even left the area at all and he was crouched somewhere in the dense foliage outside the shelter, watching the opening for movements, mouthing the underside of his wrist, sucking loudly in his new, habitual way.

  The truth is that Park could have gotten lost entirely within the brief time he’d been gone—that quickly. It was possible that he was wandering the tangled thick of the sielve, wrapped in one of his lucid, waking dreams. This was another recent habit, his dreaming—a growing propensity for losing time, losing space, losing ground—and there had been other new habits also, none of them good ones. All of those habits put together had become too much for Lee, and the sight of him chasing an imaginary child into the waves that day had made it clear to her that it was time to run.

  After Park had been gone for what felt like an hour, Lee began to pack. She took everything she could reasonably carry on her shoulders or in the carryall—the rest she scattered into the underbrush, a good ways out. Everything dear to him that he hadn’t taken along, all of it. It didn’t feel like a choice at the time; it felt like setting the scene. She needed this thing to look like a pure ransack job brought on by a group of survivors, strangers. Nothing personal to it. If her husband ever came back from the Makoa and saw his side of the shelter untouched—assuming there was anything left of him inside that animate shell of a body—it might be clear to him what she’d really done, and she couldn’t bear the thought of him knowing that she’d decided to leave.

  Cãlo had always seemed like the only choice to her, the only civilization remaining on the islet, and a number of times over the past few weeks she’d tried to convince Park of the obvious advantages. The food and water alone, but also the security, the medicine, the sanity, the airport for Christ’s sake. She’d even tried to suggest gently that there might be something that could be done for him in Cãlo, something to help him. To stop the obvious progression. But he wouldn’t hear any of that. I’m not sick, Lee, he would say. Goddammit, look at me. I’m not one of them.

  Her best chance of surviving was to go alone—it became obvious to her. She was strong, physically and mentally. She could outlive La Sielve and anything dangerous she found running up and down the murram. And most importantly, she could make it through any checkpoint that the locals put up, any gateway—she could be vetted and verified. She could pass, bottom line. She didn’t look like one of the infected, or at least not a vast majority of them, and the uncomfortable truth was that even if her husband had been able to hide his symptoms, he just didn’t quite have the right skin to make it by.

  chapter twelve

  Over the next two days, as Lee waits for the dokotera, she works on her strength. She rests her body properly and consumes all she can lay hands on. Her captors bring food once in the morning and once in the evening—rice and red-speckled beans in one paper bowl, and a green vegetable puree in another. A plastic spoon too flimsy for anything but eating. She is allowed to use a basin of hot water and a bar of soap. A toothbrush. She is escorted to the outdoor latrine. She sleeps for hours on the mattress even when the sun is up. They wash her clothes and deliver them to her warm and folded.

  Lee spends some time at one of the barred windows, looking out, and without meaning to, she learns what the chainlink is used for. It’s a holding area. She can see a handful of the sick inside—eight of them, men and women, pale-skinned—milling around slowly, each of them dressed in some variation on the standard tourist uniform.

  Lee can see a water bucket and ladle. A large tray of plain rice, fly-covered, seemingly untouched. There is a canvas sun shelter with a row of woven mats spread across the ground underneath, presumably for sleeping, but none of these lost souls seem to have any interest in rest. They just shuttle from one extremity of the cage to another, and it’s clear that they’re not trying to test their limits or to find a way through. They don’t seem discontented at all with this, the arrangement. Perhaps every time they turn around and start to walk on the well-worn paths, they believe instead that they’re covering new ground, moving forward to better things; perhaps in their minds, they’re rounding a corner instead of heading back.

  On the morning of the third day, there is a soft knock, and it’s the orderly—the kind-faced one with the form and the pen and the observation session disguised as a simple interview. He is carrying the warm-water basin and he tells Lee that the doctor has arrived back to the office. Dr. Clotilde. He tells her that she can have time to wash first, and he passes her the plastic tub carefully before leaving the room.

  Lee sits on the mattress. She spends a few moments with her fingers in one of her braids trying to tease it out and possibly start over, but the braid won’t loosen. She needs to do something about her appearance right now; she can’t afford to come across as anything but healthy, put-together. She gives up on the hair and just ties it back. She sets the basin on the desk and rinses her face and then she strips down, sponging both armpits, her throat, her groin. She wrings out the washcloth.

  She air-dries and re-dresses, staring out the window at the holding pen as she thinks about what to say—the messaging, the narrative—and how to best articulate it. She catches sight of her arms and quickly rolls down the sleeves of the flannel shirt. She curses herself; these are the things she can’t afford to forget about. As she buttons the sleeves at the wrists, she catches sight of the raised welts. If anything, they seem to have worsened.

  Soon the orderly comes to the door. She opens it and sees that he isn’t wearing his whites anymore; since he was last here, he’s changed into jeans and a button-down work shirt. The latex gloves are off and so is the wedding band. He steps out of the entryway to make space for her.

  The orderly brings Lee to the center portable and walks her through the office to the open exam room. Well-lit. Sterile white walls. An instrument tray and a metal table and a padded stool. A glass-front cabinet with shelves of medical supplies. Gauze and surgical tape and metered vials half-filled with clear liquids.

  There is an older Mirasai woman sitting at a writing desk at the far end, paging through a paper sheaf; she doesn’t look up at them. Her violet headwrap and the kente-patterned Mirasai dress, yellow and red. Her lush black skin. The woman could be anywhere between fifty and seventy; it’s difficult to know.

  Lee stares at her for what feels like a long time. Over the past months on the islet, the only women she’s seen have been young and in constant flight, te
rrified—small and gaunt and clinging to anything that seems even remotely tenable. She’s only seen glimpses of them, and finding herself in this woman’s presence—in the company of her stillness, the conveyance of an unspoken strength, the implicit safety—she can feel the tears start to come and so she clears her throat and blinks a few times. The orderly escorts her to the center of the room and leaves her there without an introduction or announcement, not even a word. He closes the door on his way out.

  The woman doesn’t make Lee wait long; she straightens the sheaf of papers and sets them aside, and when she looks up and smiles, it seems genuine.

  “Clotilde,” the woman says. She stands and comes around the desk. The smile is gone but the expression is still open.

  “Aleah. Lee is fine.”

  The woman takes off her glasses and puts them on the desk. “Aleah,” she says. “Okay, my girl.”

  Lee stands for a few moments, unsteady, and her mouth is trembling. Everything she planned to show, to demonstrate, is forgotten. It’s as though her physical responses have become involuntary, and she rushes forward a few paces and falls into the woman’s arms and she is caught, held up, and she begins to sob uncontrollably.

  When Lee’s breathing returns to normal, the woman eases her limp form into a chair. Lee pulls up her shirt collar to swipe at her eyes, her nose. The woman leaves the room, returning a few moments later with a wet plastic water bottle.

  “We have gotten back some good things,” the woman says, and she gestures to the overhead lights, “but plumbing isn’t one. Not yet.” She hands Lee the bottle and nods down at it. “Torluna well water for you. The real thing.”

  Lee takes the bottle from the woman, but she sets it unopened on the chair between her knees. “Thank you,” she says. As much as she wants to drink, she can’t allow herself to accept more from this woman than she already has by letting herself be held.

  “Okay. Let’s have a look.”

  The woman takes hold of Lee’s face with both hands. Her strong fingers probe behind the jawline.

  Lee submits to it, closing her eyes. “I’m not sick,” she says. “There’s nothing to find.”

  “Mm hm.” The woman’s fingers are digging in. She stops and looks down at Lee’s body. “Put up the sleeves,” the woman says. “Come.”

  Lee doesn’t move.

  “Come.” The woman claps once lightly. “If your health is good, what is your worry?”

  Lee gives in to the full battery of the woman’s tests—some familiar, some foreign. The woman looks into each of her eyes, back and forth, with a penlight. She is told to walk barefoot from one end of the room to the other, and the woman watches her legs and nods and scrawls something on a notepad. The dimensions of her skull are measured with metal calipers: front to back, laterally, and then chin to crown. The wounds on her forearms are swiped with the leaf of a pungent herb, and then for a long time the woman studies the leaf, the side of it that made skin contact. Lee is told to blow air into a hard plastic mouthpiece attached to a plastic hose for as long as she can sustain it. Instead of using a stethoscope, the woman listens to her heartbeat by lowering an ear and pressing it between her breasts against the sternum.

  After about an hour of running tests, the woman puts down the notepad and the pen and goes to stand in the entryway between the two rooms. She speaks briefly in Mirasai to someone on the outside and then she comes back in and goes to the desk. She sits and looks up at Lee.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman says.

  “What for?”

  “It is never easy to say or to hear. But I tell you: you carry it.”

  Lee stares for a long time, too long. “Carry it.”

  “Yes,” the woman says.

  “Carry what?”

  The woman shrugs. “Call it what you call it. The malaise of polis. The walking, waking loss. The mortis,” she says. “You have it.”

  “How the hell could you know that.”

  “I know because I am born.” The woman’s voice is firm. “I come from sight.”

  The woman continues to blather on, but as she speaks, Lee kneels down and takes up one of her tennis shoes. She starts to pull it on. “Okay,” she says when the woman pauses. “Just say what you saw in me. Describe it so I understand.” She puts on the other shoe and she knots the laces as quickly as she can manage.

  “Part of your affliction is that you cannot take in hard words,” says the woman. “Not from those unlike you. Sick is tuned only to sick.”

  Lee is ready to shoot back—to say something, anything, that will keep the woman rambling—but before she can speak, she is seized from behind by a pair of powerful arms and lifted clear off of the tile.

  Lee is carried, cursing—pinioned and screaming and thrashing—outside of the portable to the chainlink cage, and it’s the orderly that does it, the one who took off his wedding band. Of all people, he is the one who delivers her. He pins her against the galvanized steel with his body weight while he unlocks the padlock, and when the gate is open, he forces her through and closes it. He secures the shackle.

  As Lee is pushed inside, she stumbles over the body of a broken figure huddled in the dirt of the pen floor and she falls hard, but she picks herself up right away. She charges the fence and hurls herself against it, her fingers hooked through the diamond mesh. She shakes the steel tubing, the terminal posts, the coil wire.

  chapter thirteen

  It becomes clear that no one is coming—not to release her, not even to trade words through the chainlink—and by nightfall she accepts the reality of the cage. She delves into the wet rice tray with both hands and devours as much as she can keep down without gagging. She drinks from the water bucket until she can’t stomach any more. She piles all of the woven mats in one corner under the sun shelter and she fashions a makeshift mattress and sits down, her back against the fence, but she doesn’t come anywhere close to sleep. Her cohorts go on dragging their broken bodies back and forth in front of her.

  In the morning, the two orderlies are dressed in work clothes instead of their whites, and they herd the captives—Lee included—up the ramp of a cattlebox stock trailer goosenecked to the undercarriage of a pickup truck. Blood and piss and feces across the wall, on the plank floor. Before the gate is latched behind her, Lee begs to be allowed to ride in the truck cab but they refuse. The bed of the truck then, she says. Put me in the back. Please.

  The orderly with the kind face pauses. He scratches his throat near the collarbone and stares off in the direction of the road. After a moment he says, “If you are tied, okay.”

  “That’s fine. Tie me. Please, yes.”

  They travel along the murram, headed back toward the hotel, away from Cãlo. Slow going. Twenty-five, maybe thirty miles per hour. A brown twine is knotted around her wrists and ankles. She sits with her back against the side bed-panel next to a wheel well, close to the front cab, and her body is lurching from side to side, her head lolling, as the tires bounce over the furrows and ruts of the hardpack. Behind her in the trailer, the sick are falling and rising to their feet and falling again.

  The direction the men are taking—northward, toward the hotel, instead of to the township—is hard for her to interpret. There are a number of permutations to consider, but she eventually decides that the most likely interpretation is that the men are planning to take them as far from the Cãlo border as possible and let them go, similar to what might be done with a dangerous animal discovered too close to home. A merciful catch-and-release. But it could also be true that the men plan to bring them somewhere secluded in order to take their worthless lives from them. Doing their small part to cleanse the islet of a foreign sickness, which in some ways would be its own form of mercy.

  Lee raises her bound hands and raps sharply with her knuckle on the tinted rear window glass. She waits for a minute and nothing happens, so she knocks again, harder this time.

  The glass slides open and she sees the hand of her orderly on the latch, and the ring is
back on. She sees his face in the opening; the other man is the driver.

  “What is it,” he says.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asks. “Please.”

  The man shakes his head. “I just go. This is not my notion.”

  “I’m not asking whose notion,” she says. “Tell me where. Please.”

  The man pauses.

  “Hotel,” he says. “A man is there. One of the buildings. He is not familiar to me. He is like you.” The orderly gestures to her and then to the trailer.

  “I’m not one of them,” Lee says. She is pressing her face up to the opening, as close to him as she can get.

  “You are not one of us. That’s all I mean,” says the orderly.

  Before he can say anything else, the driver cuts in. He says something in Mirasai, harsh and guttural, and the orderly responds to him equally harshly. They argue, and when he returns to the opening, the orderly says, “He tell me to stop words to you.”

  “Don’t,” she says. “I need to know.” She has her bound hands raised high, fingers entwined, but the man goes silent.

  Lee can feel the truck slowing, and when she looks ahead she can see that they’re approaching the checkpoint, the vehicle barricade with the soldalanos lounging. She quickly asks the orderly again, begging, and after a short time he continues.

  “We trade with him, this galashao at the hotel. The outsider. Or we try to.” The orderly pauses and looks down, and when he raises his eyes to the opening again, he is staring far past her face. “The outsider take our men and he keep them there. Woman too. Both. He take the girl of the doctor, Clotilde, who is my mother also.” The orderly looks at her. “How do you say it right, the girl of the mother?” he asks.