by Lucie Wilk
“This place,” Henry says. “Malawi.” He pauses.
“Strange, isn’t it? Old and new.”
“It makes me want to do something for these people. Make a change.”
Ellison looks over at Henry, takes in his earnest posture, his determination, staring into the fire like that. “I’d be careful about change,” says Ellison slowly. “Change is hard anywhere, but this place in particular. Don’t be too hasty.”
Henry is silent.
“You’ve only been here, what … a couple of months?”
“Two and a half.”
“You’ve only just arrived.”
“Yes.”
“You’re just settling in. Takes a while to get used to the place.” Ellison pauses. “It’s a good place, this. Good people.” Ellison looks over at Henry again, reads the stare. “One thing I’ve learned, is there’s no point pushing against something that won’t budge.”
Ellison breathes noisily beside Henry and then gets up to stir the pot again; its contents are now bubbling and the broth is thick. “Looks like supper’s ready.”
They eat quickly and then lie down on cots piled with blankets. Henry falls asleep smelling of sweat and smoke, the taste of stew in his mouth, the sound of wind moving outside the single pane of glass beside his cot.
When he wakes, it is from a dream of wind, thick and black, that has pushed and pulled at the hut, moved it around the mountain. Wind moaning, laughing, crying. Dark tendrils of wind coming up behind him, curling around him, whispering something he cannot understand, nudging him forward.
He sits up in his cot and peers out the dirty window. The sun has broken the horizon and it feels hot, even in the protected shade of the hut. He puts on his shoes and steps out onto the deck. It is warm out here, too, but then a breeze picks up and he is suddenly cold, wishing he had thrown on his sweater. He steps down off the deck and onto the ground. There are no trees, just the ochre grass reminiscent of the plains hundreds of metres below. This is the highest peak in south central Africa, and he feels it, feels closer to the wide, enigmatic sky with the wispy clouds that streak across it but don’t move, as though the sky were a painting, and he is now close enough to see the brush strokes.
To his left is a small hill with a narrow path bisecting it: the path they descended at the end of the day yesterday. To his right is the steep rise of the Sapitwa peak, the highest peak on the mountain. This is the epicentre of the legends, the realm of evil spirits, the basis of all bad magic and witchcraft in Malawi, the place he was warned not to go. When Iris learned of his plans to accompany Ellison to the Mlela clinic, and then to Mulanje Mountain itself, she frowned darkly, her face turning in. “Only fools climb the mountain,” she’d said, and he’d felt like replying, then it shouldn’t surprise you that I will be going, but held his tongue. “Don’t go to Sapitwa,” she’d muttered before turning away completely.
He looks at Sapitwa peak: impressive—a granite wall jutting skyward—but not threatening. He sees no shadow gathering there, no cloud of winged monkeys flying wildly around the peak. No fiery pits breathing, spitting, or cursing.
Henry gazes at it, drawn by something thrilling, a pull in his gut. He feels compelled to climb it, scale the rock face with his bare hands, pull himself up its flanks, dig his fingers into the fissures in its thick hide, stand atop the very tallest reaches of it, feel the power that he knows he’d feel there, accept the consequences of such boldness because it would be worth it.
A figure approaches from across the plain, initially indistinct and wavering in the heat, almost the same colour as the grass. Before long he can see that it is Ellison walking toward him along one of the paths that criss-cross the subalpine plain. He stops a few feet in front of Henry and nods.
“Morning.”
“Gorgeous one, isn’t it.”
Ellison gestures to Sapitwa. “Feels good to be up there. Like you’re king of the world.” As though he had been privy to Henry’s thoughts of a few moments before. “Too bad we won’t be able to climb it on this trip. I have to be back in Blantyre tonight.”
“Do you need special equipment to get up? Harnesses and holds and all that?”
“Nah. Some do, but it’s manageable with nothing but your hands and feet.” Ellison lifts his wide palms up, displays the intersecting crevices and the calluses, twin topographical maps.
“I’d like to do it sometime.” Henry squints and looks at the peak again. A few scanty clouds move behind Sapitwa now, but the appearance is of the peak crossing the sky, as though it is already moving on, as though it won’t always be there for them.
“We’ll do another trip. I love this place.” Ellison moves toward the hut and Henry follows reluctantly, knowing that they will be going in to pack, and to begin their descent down the mountain and their journey back to Blantyre.
Chapter 5
Dr. Bryce, that man with the impossible hair, is staring at her. Here she is, sitting with a chart, doing the work she is here to do, and he is hovering, staring his pale stare, breathing his quiet breath and sweating. She can smell him from here and he smells anxious, like he always does. No different than when he first arrived two months ago.
Iris lifts her eyes and sure enough his eyes are fixed on her. Not nicely. Impatient. As though she has already done something wrong.
She looks down. She will not receive what he is about to dole out. He doles it out anyway. He says something about the bedding. Wondering who cleans it.
She looks at the desk with its chips and scratches and scribbles. She shrugs. “If we remove it, the housekeepers will clean it. But if we remove it, then the patients have nothing to lie on. And nothing to cover them.” Finally, she lifts her eyes to him. She can see him swell and then tighten with the effort of keeping it in.
“So there’s not enough.”
“Yes. Not enough. We clean them between patients.”
“And what about bathing the patients? Not enough soap and water?”
Iris stares at a thick black ring of coffee or tea on the desk that has been there as long as she has. She rubs at it, feels its smoothness, then nudges it with a fingernail. It doesn’t give.
“Bathe the patients? We do.” She thinks about earlier this morning, when she’d run a cloth along Juma’s arms, how he’d looked out the window, not at her, never at her. All of them look away.
When Iris looks up again, Dr. Bryce is putting on his lab coat, fiddling with the buttons, pulling his stethoscope out of one of the deep pockets and hanging it around his neck. Of all the doctors who have passed through these wards, Dr. Bryce is the only one who keeps wearing the lab coat, day after day. To keep the patients at a distance? To remind them of his stature? She tries to remember the original purpose of a doctor’s white coat. A symbol of cleanliness, a sterile barrier to protect the patient from killing bacteria. She takes in Dr. Bryce’s rumpled coat, brown at the cuffs where his wrists stick out. Spots and smears of body fluids on the front. Her fingers drift up to her nurse’s hat that she pins on every morning. It is white and crisp with bleach and starch. Dr. Bryce marches out of the office, back stiff and straight, chin jutting forward. Did the man visit Sapitwa after all? It seems he has brought the darkness back with him. It trails after him: a dirty wake of bad luck.
She closes the chart, leaves it on the desk and follows him into the ward, keeping back a safe distance.
He goes to Juma first, even though his is not the first bed on his rounds. He picks up Juma’s chart hanging at the foot of the bed. He frowns and flips pages, eyeing the graphs that show the fevers, the dips in blood pressure, the surges in heart rate. Now he looks over the beds, cranes his head around.
He is looking for her. Why does he always look for her? There are at least two other nurses circulating on the ward. She can see one of them over in the corner, by the man with TB of the spine. Dr. Bryce finds her, motions her o
ver.
“The blood test results? They were drawn before I left for Mlela.”
“Positive.” She is referring to the HIV test, and he knows it. It is the only one that matters to him. Dr. Bryce dips his head for a long moment, then finally turns his gaze out the window. Juma watches him and waits for the doctor to speak. Like a disciple gazing up to his teacher. Juma does not care about the test results, meaningless numbers and symbols. All that matters to Juma is that he is here, under the care of this doctor. This tall, white doctor with reddish-gold hair, who, now that he is in Africa has grown a reddish-gold beard. This doctor who bends his beard down over his patients when he uses his stethoscope so Juma can study the strange, wiry hairs. This doctor who must bring luck the colour of gold, luck from the shining places overseas where miracles happen every day. Where people do not suffer. Juma does not know this doctor has been to Mulanje Mountain. Iris would never tell him.
Dr. Bryce now smiles at Juma. How can he smile? But there it is, his mouth stretched side to side, cheeks pulled into tight bunches beneath his beard. He puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He says something to him. He moves a hand to his belly and pushes in and Juma lets him even though it is painful; Iris can see the boy tighten with the pain, one of his hands gripping the mattress. He listens to Juma’s lungs and Juma rolls over so he can place the stethoscope on his back. Then he takes the chart, scribbles something on it, hangs it back up, and moves on.
Iris goes over to Juma’s bed. “Moni. Muli bwanji?”
“Ndiri bwino,” he says, and watches her scan his chart.
The doctor has called for more IV saline, although they are in short supply, and Juma has been filling his basin with urine regularly enough, by her estimation. She sighs and goes to fetch it.
*
Henry’s heart pushes against his chest in a way that makes him feel nauseous and light-headed. He sits down on his bed beside the small, square table that holds the telephone in his apartment. It is an old rotary phone, the plastic yellowed where so many fingers have wrapped around the receiver, and over the mouthpiece where so many mouths have hovered. The holes in the mouthpiece are large, and he can see the shine of metal through them. He listens to the ring tone, loud and foreign-sounding. This is the first phone call he has made since arriving in Africa. The phone smells like tobacco, years and years of it.
He hears the phone on the other end pick up in a clatter, clumsy on the other side. “Hello?” The voice is sluggish with sleep, confused. He realizes, now too late, that he has miscalculated. It is 5 am, not 9 am, on Saturday morning in Toronto.
“Sarah?” He says this as a question, although he knows it is her. He is still familiar with her thick sleep voice. It is the voice that comes from her body when it is warm and soft, her limbs loose and relaxed under the covers.
“Henry?” She is sounding more clear now, more in focus. “What time is it? Are you okay? Are you still over there?”
Over there. This place is more than a world away. It is miraculous, this phone conversation, that they can still speak to each other. That they still have a language, a history in common.
“I’m here,” he says. “In Malawi. Blantyre.” He can hear her sitting up in bed.
“God. Malawi. What part of Africa is that again? What’s it like? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.”
She says nothing to this, and there is a pause, as if both of them are understanding how far away they each are. How strange it is that they are talking.
He clears his throat and asks: “How about you? Are you okay?”
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Same old, same old. You know how it is.” He hears her shift in bed, the click of a lamp being turned on. Her night table, he imagines, is cluttered with paperwork, and some of it has tumbled over the edge onto the thickly carpeted floor. He looks down at his bare feet, toes gripping cold concrete. “God, it’s early. What time is it there? Is something wrong?”
Henry doesn’t know how to answer. He says, “No, not really. The work is hard. More frustrating than hard. I feel like I can’t do much to help here.” He hears Sarah’s quiet breaths, he can hear her listening. He knows what she is thinking.
“I’m sure that’s not true. You’re doing what you can, right?”
He pauses. “That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” Henry is taken by the solitude in this word, in the tone of it. For a moment he still longs for her. And in this brief connection across the line, he finds the courage to proceed.
“There’s a patient here with HIV,” he begins.
“Isn’t the HIV rate something like ten percent?”
“Fourteen percent. Maybe twenty in the city. In any case, there’s this one young man. Juma.” When he says the name, he feels like he has ripped open his shirt and bared his chest, like there is no turning back. One world has been shared with another, and he is suddenly not sure if he is doing the right thing. Revealing Juma to her.
“Juma,” she repeats. It sounds strange from her mouth.
“He’s so young. A really good kid. I’d been hoping it was just malaria but the kid’s got full-blown AIDS. And there are no antiretrovirals here. None at all. Despite the fourteen percent prevalence.”
“Because of the fourteen percent prevalence.”
“Yes. Well.”
“By the way, I’d suggest giving that habit up,” she says.
“Giving what up?”
“Hoping it’s not HIV. With a prevalence rate like that. You’ll be done in no time if you keep thinking that way.”
Henry does not reply and Sarah fills the silence quickly. “So where do I come in here, Henry? This has nothing to do with us.”
He wishes, just for a second, that it did. “Your company makes a few of the antiretrovirals.”
Henry hears her sharp intake of air. “Oh, my God. Are you serious? You want me to supply Africa with antiretrovirals?” Now the receiver scratches her out-breath across the line. “Henry. I’m a rep. My job is to sell the stuff. And I don’t even represent the antiretrovirals. What do you expect me to do?”
“Just a few.”
“Just a few? Henry, the prevalence is fourteen percent. That’s like … hundreds of thousands of people over there. Millions on the continent. Even if I could get some for you, where would it stop?”
Henry is quiet on the other end. Still clutching the yellowed phone, the plastic slipping under his sweaty fingers, heart still pounding. He looks at his empty room, at the firm and narrow mattress he sits on. The single bedside table. Mosquito netting knotted in a bundle above him.
“I thought you’d understand. I thought you especially would understand.”
“Understand?”
“The chance to save a kid.” He wonders if the pressure he feels rising in his chest is rising in hers. If those words are almost too much for her, too. There is a long, empty moment.
“It’s just not realistic.”
And these words, her words, shut him down, the pressure clamped off at his throat.
“Henry,” Sarah says more gently, “you know I’m not the one being unreasonable here, right?” When he says nothing, she continues. “Is it … are you still missing her?” She can’t say her name. He is relieved that she can’t say her name.
“This has nothing to do with that.”
“Maybe not directly, but—”
“Nothing to do with her, Sarah.”
Her sigh scratches through the line. Stupidly and for no other reason than comfort, he wants to feel her body release that sigh. He wants to feel her ribs fall in as the air comes out. He wants to feel her skin on his fingertips. He wants to tell her yes, he is still missing Emma.
“So you won’t help,” he says instead. After a moment he adds, “This call is going to be pretty pricey. I’d better get going.”
“Take care of yourself,
okay?”
“Yep. You too.”
“Bye Henry.”
“Bye.”
Henry places the receiver back on its cradle and stares at the phone, hates its dilapidated state, the ugly plastic, the bulkiness. Barely functional.
*
She still figures prominently in his dreams. In his dreams Sarah’s mouth is always there, twisted into a smile or a moist pout, punctuating her small daily thrills and disappointments. Also her lipstick and her deodorant, her clutch purses and her long, smooth hands that grasp them. Her elaborate, lacy lingerie and her body that fills it. Her belly when it was flat and her belly when it was round and tight like a drum. Everything sweet and succulent, red and spicy. Almost everything he is missing here exists in abundance in his dreams.
He had heard that dreams were chemically altered by the antimalarial tablet, Larium; it rendered them surreal, or perhaps just more real. So many ex-pats complained about their dreams here, their Larium Dreams—bright, neon-coloured, cartoonish versions of life. But what if it isn’t the Larium? What if it is simply the contrast of the abundant neon past with this pale, austere present? Nothing works more powerfully than deficiency to bring his old life into garish relief. Henry has stopped taking the tablets, but his dreams remain alive, vivid beyond reckoning, and Sarah remains inside them, flicking her glossy red nails and wavy brown hair. Even Sarah’s perfume is overpowering in the dreams.
But that quiet part of himself that watches it all from some far-off place knows more about how real she is, already suspects that all this sensory detail is an elaborate cover-up for something absent. Something that was never there in the first place. And he wakes up each morning reminded of why they never could have made it work, and why he is here in this dust-covered place of muted dirt and concrete, and she is there in that sped-up, bustling, loud, luxurious and confusing place that used to be his home.