by Lucie Wilk
She moves her fingers to his other hand, the one that is not swollen. She slides her fingers over his wrist, just below the thumb, to the radial pulse. Her own pounding pulse floods her fingers and for a while that is all she can feel: the rapid pounding of her own pulse pushing out her fingertips, pushing into Bryce’s heartbeat, filling the void. But after a few moments she feels it: Bryce’s pulse. It flutters under her fingers like the feeble, panicked wing-beat of a moth trapped under her hand. She draws her hand back because she doesn’t wish to trap it; she never intended to trap him. This was never her intention.
She stares at the gold hair on his arm. And gold flecks along the lengths of his legs. He is naked. She can see the shade of his umbilicus and a thin strip of golden hair leading down to a triangle of darkness that is covered by his leg. She cannot tell if this hair, too, glints red-gold in the light but she imagines it must.
Iris runs her fingertips across the hair on his arm. It is smooth and soft. The skin beneath the hair is hot. She does it again. She hears something. Soft sounds. Something whispered. She looks at Bryce’s mouth that remains partially opened and she sees his tongue touch up against his teeth, twice. In time with the sounds. Ai. Iss. Ai. Riss.
Iris.
She keeps stroking his arm.
“Yes,” she whispers. “Yes.”
He looks at her. Bryce shines out at her from behind those swollen lids.
“God.” Says Iris. “Mother of God.”
He closes his eyes.
The sun is violently bright in her eyes when she leaves the hut. It saps her energy. It is all too much. The responsibility of Bryce’s well-being. A man like Bryce. A man like that. Relying on her. She sees Ade over in his garden, rummaging through the herbs. Why can’t she relinquish responsibility to him? Or her grandfather? They, and their predecessors, have maintained the health of this community for generations upon generations.
Iris wills this oppressive weight over to Ade. She imagines it lifting off her, floating over to him, settling on his shoulders. Those broad, capable shoulders. And, for a moment, she feels better. But then she recalls the argument between Ade and her grandfather. The discussion about his illness. His broken bones. His fire. His nausea and vomiting. But there was no mention of malaria. Of course not. They know of it. Everyone knows of it, but this is not the way illness is approached here. Back in the khumbi, it occurred to Iris that Bryce had malaria. She saw the mosquito bites all over him. She smelled evidence of the vomiting, the diarrhea. In addition to his multiple fractures, he contracted malaria on the mountain. She is sure of it. As sure as she can be here, in this village, without a laboratory to check a blood smear, without a microscope to view the organisms.
She watches Ade pluck leaves from the garden. She sees the bundle he clutches in his hand. Perhaps this is what he is gathering: natural antimalarials. But perhaps not. She thinks of her sister, Grace. Her final memories are of her lying in a heap in the corner of the hut, waves of black death sweeping over her, sweeping over all of them as it took her. Just like Bryce. It will take him, too. They could not save Grace. Ade and her grandfather and the other village sing’anga. They could not save Grace. And when Iris thinks of it, when she allows herself to think of it, she knows that her sister died of malaria. She has thought over and over again as she learned about malaria in a textbook, and then as she treated it in the hospital, that her sister could have been saved. If she had the knowledge then that she has now.
Knowledge. She watches Ade move from plant to plant, his eyes mostly closed as he runs his fingers over the leaves, plucking this piece and that. Does Ade have knowledge? Does her grandfather? No. They do not. Knowledge is something written and applied time after time, over and
over again. Knowledge is something firm and immovable, like a stone. Knowledge is something discovered. Knowledge is something shared. No, Ade and her grandfather do not have this. What they have is belief. A belief so strong and so deep, a belief that plunges into the darkest reaches of consciousness, a belief that plumbs this consciousness, and comes out with a knowing. But this knowing is so specific to an instance, so dependent on the spirit and the circumstance of the moment, that it cannot be shared. It cannot be written. It would be useless in any other context. All that can be taught is the belief itself, not the knowing. This is what Alile is trying to learn. This is what Iris has been cut off from. She will never have this belief. This belief is gone.
And this is why all she feels as she watches Ade gather his medicine is doubt. And this is why, as she sits on the step of his khumbi and watches him, and thinks about Dr. Bryce inside his khumbi, all she can do is cover her face with her hands and close her eyes.
*
He is on the back of a beast, rides it like a bull. It bucks and heaves and snorts and whips him round. To breathe is to hurt. With each gulp of air, coals glow red deep inside.
Mother of God.
Mary Mother of God. A soft smell, candles or incense, polished wood of the back of a pew. The non-pious gleam of it, made shiny by the touch of so many sinners’ hands.
Sweat makes his hand slip. He waits to fall, he wants to fall, to feel impact, to pack it in, to give in, to give up, but somehow he still stands, twisted and dizzy and nauseous. Blinking against the glare from the hateful curve of the pew.
Her casket is open. Leaning in from the wall behind it Mary looks down on him with smooth stone eyes, her hands clasped beneath the immovable folds of her marble robes.
He paws at his own eyes—fixed, staring pupils dug out wide to catch what little light there is, capturing mostly a shapeless grey space.
There is a night sky above him, and constellations cluster in the dark. With each blink they move: gather then spread, spiral in then disperse. He tries to follow just one, to see where one star goes but it is like trying to follow one drop of water in a river. Sometimes the stars coalesce so densely, cluster so brightly that they are eyes, then a face. The face is recognizable only in how it looks at him—he knows he has gazed down the same way on others. Then the clot of stars begins to bleed and he forgets about the face. He blinks and squints and looks for the darkness that the stars traverse, an absence so complete it must contain something. He searches for what hides in between those pins of light.
Chapter 22
The road opens up before her. It is an unremarkable road, unstained. Merely dusty from the dry, reddish soil. Iris stands in the middle of it and looks down along the length of it. It is a pale red ribbon that unfolds in yellow grasslands. These are the colours of her home: red earth, yellow grass. She memorizes this so it can sustain her while she is gone. She has made the decision to leave the village, to return to Blantyre. Just for a little while. But even this brief departure, just the idea of these few days away, is enough to make her crumple to the ground with weakness and fear. It is as though she is leaving a sphere of protection, although she knows this cannot be true. What, after all, would be protecting her? She is unattached, free to float from one existence to another. There is nothing tying her here or there. She can go wherever she chooses. So she has chosen to go to Blantyre. She will go back to Blantyre to save Dr. Bryce. This is her task, for now.
When a truck comes round the bend, it stops to her wave with a jarring screech of unpadded brakes. She negotiates a price with the driver and he waits for her to climb into the back where two families sit and watch her, bored.
Iris looks out the back of the truck as wind fills her ears, whips tears from her eyes so that she can barely see the savannah. All she can make out is a blurry transition from ground to sky. She can’t see the mountain at all.
*
What lies in between, what he seeks, is becoming harder to find because there are distractions all around him. The needle-like slivers of starlight are lengthening. Now they stretch into flat fans of light that sweep over him in vague and changing patterns. And there are more faces, movement, voices.<
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He needs silence and darkness—the perfect conditions to listen, and watch. And search. But what he is seeking slips between the stars, the light, the noise. It hides among the clamouring movements, the throbbing sounds and the flickering objects that pretend to fill the space. Something familiar slowly fills itself outward until it consumes his every thought, defines his very presence.
He has lost it. What? What has he lost? For a moment it still exists as a flimsy flutter of an idea in the armour of his mind, and then even that is forgotten.
*
Once in a while, a touch. A cool cloth or fingers on his skin. It is a miracle, being touched. His skin knows things that his eyes and ears could never know. Touch brings a joy he could never otherwise imagine. Better even, than a voice. They say it is smell that is the most powerful sense. That smell ignites the brainstem, the most primitive part of oneself. That smell awakens deep, old, long-forgotten memories. No. It is touch. It is touch that brings him back to those ancient places, back to safety, back to where he can be gently held. It is touch that saves him, over and over again.
And there is a woman’s voice. Somewhere nearby. He turns his head, slowly, with much effort, to the side where he can hear the voice and she moves into sight. Alile. She hovers over him, wearing a grave expression.
Something firm and deliberate—her fingers—press on his leg. As she works, the pain swells and moves closer to him like a returning tide, each wave larger and closer than the last. She disappears from sight for a minute or an hour. He absorbs wave after wave of pain. She returns with a bowl, places it between his lips and tips the liquid in. It slides down his throat and soon he follows it down and into the deepest parts of himself. He closes his eyes and feels her touch again, now gentle, as gentle as a breath on his skin.
*
When Iris steps off the bus, she walks a few feet and then stands in the midst of the crowd of travellers, knowing she is in the way but unable to go farther. She has a purpose; she knows why she is here and what she must do, and yet the next step seems so unclear.
It is dark. The journey, a hundred kilometres or so, has taken almost two full days. She can’t go to the hospital, now that it is night, although it is possible that Dr. Ellison may be there, attending an emergency surgery. It is possible that if she wandered the dark halls for long enough, she would find him, or someone else. Or the hospital could be quiet. Nights are often quiet, tended only by a few nurses and the night watchman. And, she admits, the nurses rarely call in the doctors, even if it is warranted, even if one of their patients is in trouble.
This terrible truth overwhelms her now. She has felt love, recently. No one in particular. Just a feeling of it inside of her when she moved within the village community. A warmth within her, a knowing that she and they will be fine because she is with them, and they are with her. And now she feels the isolation of her hospital work like a distant ship on a cold ocean. Maybe it was the sheer quantity of death and suffering, all gathered together under one roof. Maybe that was what made them give up. But that was not it. It was something else.
When does a wilful, happy child become the hopeless adult? It happened to Iris when her father was killed. And maybe this is when it happens to them all: fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers lost before they have a chance to grow into the people they were meant to be.
Iris moves over to a curb and sits down. She spreads her hands out wide in front of her and remembers the x-ray. She remembers this rare glimpse of herself as she is without flesh, without muscle or skin or vessels or a beating heart. As she will be when she returns to the earth, when her flesh inevitably melts away. She runs her fingers over the skin of her forearm and thinks of what her grandfather would say. He dislikes inward ruminations almost as much as speaking or writing. The path a mind will take: increasingly narrow as it goes until it is closed off on all sides, until there is no escape from it.
She looks up at the night sky. Here in the city, with the sulphur-yellow of street lights shining down on her, she can barely see it. It exists as a shapeless darkness beyond the brightness of the lights. It lacks the depth and meaning and orientation that it provides in the village. She wishes she could listen to her ancestors. But they were silent to her even in the village, even when she was kneeling on their very bones.
She stands up and begins to walk down to the road. She walks without thinking, in no particular direction. She holds on to a belief that she will know what to do when she gets there.
*
Most of the time when he sinks down into a dream he is running. Running down a hospital corridor or a trail in the forest or the hallway of the house he once shared with Sarah and Emma. But this was not how it happened. The loss was slow and vague and he barely moved through all of it. He sat in a chair by her bedside for hours, days at a time, seeing only the white of the sheets and the translucent pallor of her skin, the thin web of vein within it. It was only his mind that was racing, running through all the knowledge, stacks and stacks of it in disorganized bundles and he sifting through it, trying to find the one thing, the one missing piece of information that could have saved her.
Everyone said there was nothing to know. Or everything there was to know was used up or useless. All there was to know was that whatever they tried only made it worse. All there was to know was that she was suffering, gulps and gasps of air, eyes squeezed shut against the pain.
And then all there was to know was that he was no longer a father.
“Emma.”
When he told Kumwembe that he was not a fighter he was lying. He has been fighting all along, fighting everything in his path, clearing the way in front of him with long, strong sweeps of a machete, beating down all the pirates of the world, all the things that don’t behave cooperatively and predictably, that don’t respond as they should. He has been trying to beat the rogue cells out of them, beat the life into them and that is not how to be a doctor. That is not how to live. That should not be why she died, or how she might have been saved.
“Emma.” There must be a wild look to his eyes because Alile’s gaze is extra calm. He needs her to understand.
“Emma.” He says again. But how can he explain this to her? He closes his eyes and sees her face and knows that is all he will ever see.
*
The room brightens then dims, which means someone has entered. Over by the doorway is the small and slender frame of a girl, her right side a thin glow of outdoor light. The lit side of a moon. She orbits him in a slow ellipse then comes to a stop beside him. The girl—he knows her, what is her name—stands with her arms crossed and studies him; her gaze lingers on his naked skin. When she crouches down and reaches over him, the smell of her is smoky and damp like an extinguished cook fire. She stands abruptly then darts to the other side of the hut and when Alile enters, the girl slips behind her toward the door. In her hand is something pale, and she clutches it tight, and this is the last thing he sees of her before she is gone into the outside. Into the light.
*
Alile bows her head over him. The scant light is enough for him to see her face and her features. Although it is dim, he can see how light her eyes are when she turns them toward his face. They are remarkable eyes. They are the gold-flecked oval eyes of a feline, and possessing the flickering thoughts of a thousand generations. She is looking at him, directly at his face, absorbing his expressions and processing them. He knows his expressions are completely transparent now; he knows that the wonder, the curiosity and the faith all flow steadily under his skin, moving through his muscles in wave after uncontrollable wave.
Alile lays her hand flat across his thigh and leaves it there for a moment, stares at her fingers on his leg. She takes a deep breath in through widened nostrils and then, with a long exhale, removes her hand. She backs away from him and stands up. He turns his head to watch her as she moves away from him, as she turns her back to him, as she moves the bot
tles and gourds hanging from the ceiling, sorting through them and they clink and clang together in a strange music. Henry closes his eyes and listens to this, the music of the bottles and gourds moving against each other. When he opens his eyes, she is gone.
*
When Iris passes a familiar row of wild bougainvillaea bushes that cascade silently over a long brick wall, when she smells the blossoms and looks down the street she is on, she realizes she has led herself home. Her home, and her mother sleeping in it, are just a few blocks away. She continues walking. Without thinking, she has come home, but it makes sense. Where else would she go?
She walks the final two blocks until she reaches her street corner. She turns down an alley, into a row of single-storey concrete buildings, and finds her own familiar doorway. She looks at it for a long time. She doesn’t have the key. The key held no significance in the village. When she had removed her nurses uniform, the key had been in her pocket. She’d dropped it on the floor of her aunt’s hut. She’d kicked it into the corner where it probably still lies, covered in dust and as useless as a stone.
Iris knocks quietly on the door. She listens. When she hears shuffling movement inside, she wipes her hand over her face, as though she can wipe away all that has passed over these last few days, all the questions and answers and more questions.
Her mother must somehow know it is her because, without even calling out and asking who it is, she slides the lock and opens the door. She doesn’t even open the door a crack; she opens it wide and smiles almost as wide when she sees Iris standing there. Iris can see all the gaps, the holes where teeth are missing in her mother’s mouth. And this broken, imperfect smile brings a feeling of love to Iris that she didn’t know she was missing. Iris gives her mother a long, tight hug. She breathes in her mother’s smell. She kisses her on the cheek. The skin on her face seems even more papery dry and thin than before she left Blantyre and Iris’s relief is replaced by guilt. She puts her arm around her mother’s shoulders, feels her sharp bones move under her hand, and the two of them walk into the house. Iris pulls the door closed behind them. She turns the lock.