The room is blurring.
I should make some dinner.
I’M IN A HOUSE on a northern lake. I drove up this afternoon. Today is the first day of the book. On the table beside me is everything I have brought for my weeks up here. Dried food, vegetables, coffee. A bottle of wine. A box of books. My printed blog. Snowshoes.
This morning, I packed my things into my pickup, scraped my windshield, then sat in the cab, blowing on my red hands, thinking about what Jeff had said the night before. I told him that I was nervous about this, about going through it all again.
“I mean, I’ve been writing a bit but … here and there, you know? And when I want to think about something else, I leave it. Now I’ve got to be alone with it.”
“But that’s what you said you wanted, right?”
“Yeah. It just feels big. Like I’m finally going to sit down with the elephant in the room and be, like … ‘Hey.’”
“That’s good, though, James.”
“I guess. I came back, and from the minute I did, I just filled all my time up. I’m sure everyone does the same. Things that are tough, you just put behind you. But now that I have to slow down and look around, and back, I realize that things aren’t the same.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Remember the other day? When we all went for brunch? Scott, Cooper, Ian, Simon, me, and you? I was sitting there just listening to all you guys talk shit and laugh, and I was like, wait a minute … what’s this clear, sweet feeling … it feels like … joy. I hadn’t really felt that for a long time.”
“Dude. Half your book should be about coming home.”
So that’s what I was thinking about. The truck was warming up. I turned on the radio and put my coffee cup in its holder. I straightened up, and felt something else. A deep, quiet well. It came up from the bottom of me. The cracks in my windshield started to blur.
What?
I shook my head. Where was that from? I turned the music up. No tears in Sudan, none since. Why now? What, was I feeling sorry for myself all of a sudden? There was no reason. I shifted the truck into gear.
I drove past Toronto’s fading sprawl and watched the spaces between buildings grow. Soon I was far from the city, the hills round shadows. I drove the last kilometers with a map on my steering wheel, making lefts and rights on an unbroken white palette.
It was freezing in the house. I found some firewood and stacked thin sticks on top of crushed pieces of paper, and struck a match. Soon, the fire was flapping fast, sparking. I sat down on the couch and twisted open a beer. My computer screen sat blank beside me, its cursor blinking. I looked away.
Books. A whole shelf of them. Perfect.
I took one down. Romeo Dallaire’s book, Shake Hands with the Devil. I thumbed through it. I hadn’t read the whole thing. I started, then stopped. Couldn’t. Maybe while I’m up here. What was I feeling so sorry about earlier? This man … he saw crowds of people die. His ghostwriter. She killed herself. I think that’s right. Who told me that?
I turned the book and looked at its cover. There he was, squinting under a blue beret, his face flat. I tried to imagine what it was like for him in the hot sun, sweat trickling down the back of his neck, one hand on his pistol, looking at a world beyond both his control and his imagination.
Jeff’s right. It’s good to be alone with this, these big feelings. The lady. The one with the umbilical cord hanging out and no IV no IV no IV. Her arm was stretched like a balloon, like a thin shiny balloon.
I put the book back on the shelf, sat down at my computer, and started to write.
Oh man. Mohamed. Did I say that to him? Really? That was me?
I leaned back in my chair.
And her husband. I pushed through the curtain and he looked at me with wide, sad eyes. The baby, his new son, crying on the bed beside us. He asked me for help. Me. Could I help him take his wife to be buried?
No. I said no, I am here on behalf of humanity, and though we have the means, most of the world feels you’re too black, or too far away, or there are too many invisible borders or something, and all we have is one Land Cruiser, and we can’t be a hearse and an ambulance, and I’m tired and sick and sad and her arm was like a shiny balloon and no.
When I saw him two weeks later, he smiled me a sad smile. He was sitting at the entrance to the hospital, black chunky handset in front of him. He was our guard. Our hospital guard. I didn’t recognize him that night, with his new baby crying beside him. It was too dark, or I couldn’t look him square in the face. I didn’t know. I would have driven him myself.
Would you have? Are you sure you didn’t recognize him?
The room starts to blur.
I close my computer and walk to the kitchen, take some onions and garlic from the box on the floor, chop them, then fry them on the stove. I add some peppers, some tomatoes, and leave them to cook. The house is filled with their warm smell. I put on water to boil, pour myself a glass of wine, and walk back to the living room. I shuffle through the stack of CDs next to the small stereo. Beethoven piano sonatas. Perfect. I put it on, turn towards the window.
It faces the frozen lake but it’s dark and I can only see shadows. I touch the back of my hand to the clear plastic stretched across the frame. It is cold, slick with moisture. Through it, I can see the room behind and my dim reflection.
My flat face. And I’m sitting in the TB room, cutting foil pill packages.
Two. Four. Six.
I hear wailing. A chorus of it. From just around the corner.
Eight. Ten.
Angela’s face appears in my peripheral vision, pressed up against the mesh window.
Fourteen.
I put the pills in a plastic bag.
“You know where that’s from, don’t you?” Her forehead is dimpled into hexagons by the wire.
I nod. I don’t look up.
I know, I know. Go away.
She waits a full beat, two, then pulls away.
And I’m back here, onions in the air. The reflected room starts to blur. This time, I know what I’m sorry for. I’m sorry I didn’t nod and say:
I know. I know. Come here.
I AM LYING IN BED thinking about circles. A strange winter storm has blown through and a nearby town is flooded with rain. When I went to make coffee this morning, there was no power. I stoked a fire, boiled the water there, then spent the morning writing on the remaining bars of my battery until my screen blinked black.
I left Tim in the market. We were just about to have tea, and talk about love. I was glad to see him again.
The book is a heavy, weighing thing. Up so close, it feels as big as a blue whale. I have to stand up every so often, and walk around the table thinking about how I can make it real. I want only its truth. I want to make up nothing.
I think about what I should include, and what I should leave out. Right now I am trying to see how I can bring back the little boy who had cut the tip of his finger off. I sewed it back on as best I could and he and his father came back to see me every few days for a month. After the stitches were taken out, something I did after a week, the visits were unnecessary. Still, when they asked me if they should come back, I said yes. Every three or four days, in a crowd of feverish waiting patients, I would see the boy with his wrapped finger, its gauze now black with dirt, and I would catch his father’s eye. He would smile at me and I would stop whatever I was doing and wave them towards the emergency room where I would unwrap the long strip of cotton and replace it with a new one. The father would ask me, for the tenth time, how best to care for the healing wound, and I would sit down beside him and explain.
I don’t know how to return to him, can’t properly enunciate why this small act was among the most memorable of my encounters. The only thing I can come up with is that it held a reliable bit of kindness.
I leave him out. It’s a circle. A friend of mine talked to me, after I was back, about what I had written when I was away.
“You wrote in c
ircles. Everything looped. You need to make a straight line.”
But, I said, my life was a circle there. Like here. Straight lines don’t fit.
Now I’m lying in the loft of the house on the frozen lake and thinking about that. I set down the book I’m reading. It’s about “time.”
Maybe it’s all circles. Start to finish, back at the start. Customs officer in Sudan, customs officer in Toronto. Our lives, from dust to dust.
I turn over on my side and blow the candle out. Things go black. I listen to the wet snow slide from the tin roof.
Thump.
From the beginning, to the end, then back. Big bang, big crunch. Away from that first instant, then towards it again.
I start to dream.
Or not.
I wake up. The smell of candle hangs in the air.
Or not. Maybe life is a lightning flash, where things are close enough together to allow planets to turn around suns, but it won’t last. From that one thing that was everything, the universe is on a trajectory where the space between things, even specks of dust, will be so infinite that we might as well just call it nothing. From everything, nothing.
I kick my feet loose from the covers of the bed. I can feel a chill settling into the house.
Time, and the world, and life, and circles, and space, and me here, in the cold dark. So what if this tiny town gets torn apart, and with it Sudan, and with it another part of our wide world. So what.
Another lump of snow thumps loosely outside.
I can hear my heart in my ears. Past the foot of the bed I see only blackness.
Thump.
I lie for a long while. I start to think about guns. I stop. I think about things getting smaller and smaller, dividing, subdividing, cubes collapsing into themselves, and sleep starts to softly pull from the edges.
I AM STANDING in front of an audience of medical and nursing students at McGill University. Seventy or so of them are sitting in the lecture theater, and in the front row are several of my friends. I haven’t had a chance to talk to them about what I saw in Abyei yet. It took me three months to mention it to the people closest to me, and when I did, I didn’t know what to say. Neither did they. We talked about other things.
The people in the audience are looking away, starting to talk about other things. I am having problems with the computer. A slide has stuck. A few helpful observers are standing in front of me, pushing keys.
The topic I was asked to speak on is “Thinking outside the box,” about how the practice of medicine changes in lower-resource settings, particularly that, in the absence of diagnostic and therapeutic tools, one must rely more on his clinical skills.
My intent is to dispel the notion. I want to show them that with an absence of resources, one is only more likely to get it wrong.
The slide that is stuck is the video I took as my plane touched down in Sudan for the first time. People are beginning to fidget. I wince.
I had showed them the top of the building we were sitting in, as viewed from Google Earth. I panned away, and we could see our street. Then Montreal’s mountain. Then the whole city, the estuary of the St. Lawrence, the country, North America. We were so high it was dizzying. As we flew farther, I cut to a picture of the world stretched flat on a map. It was cut into pieces with yellow borders, boxes of countries. Then I showed a picture of the earth at night, taken from space, our lights scattered throughout the blackness like bright bits of mold.
“It’s easier to understand without all the boxes. We can see better who we are. Where our resources lie.”
We hovered over Africa’s darkness for a second, then we fell, hurtling towards Sudan. A hazy shadow of a river approached, and beside it, white letters spelled “Abyei.” As the satellite photos blurred, I announced:
“Welcome home.”
Click.
Nothing.
Shit.
“Um. Well. You’re supposed to be seeing the ground approach, like you were arriving on a plane. I … uh … took it when I was there about six months ago … and … uh … let’s see …”
People are still in front of me, fiddling with the program. One by one, they shrug and go back to their seats.
I try to pick up where I left off, showing them the flat frozen pictures of Abyei’s brown ground. I ask them to think about the thousand words that the half-built homes, the absence of electrical wires, cellphone towers, and latrines tell them.
“And this is your hospital.”
Click.
Nothing.
Shit.
It was the tour I took of the hospital, the one I posted on my blog, the one that garnered so much criticism from Alex in Geneva, who said it was staged, or shot from the hip, when it was neither.
It doesn’t work anyway.
I want it to. I need the students to buy it. I want to bring them to that place. I want them to understand that even if we don’t share space with these people, we share a time.
I have other videos I want to show them, ones I haven’t shown anyone, ones that I haven’t been able to look at before today.
They are of two children. One is starving and about to die. She fixes the camera lens once with her wide dull eyes, then turns away. The other is of a three-year-old boy who is breathing too fast, about fifty times per minute. With each breath, his skin sucks in and his ribs look like a Chinese lantern.
I want to ask them, “What is wrong with these pictures? Mmm-hmm. Yup. Accessory muscle use. What else? Sure. The little girl appears listless.”
But then I want to ask them, “Have you ever seen a child so sick? Ever? Really? Where?”
You shared the exact same time as these ones.
I want to bring them there, to erase the distance until it is invisible and only the moment remains. If I can get them close, as near as I can without taking them there, in the hushed and conspiratorial silence that follows their arrival, I have one last question.
So what?
So what.
Tell me. What does it matter that fifteen minutes after this, the mother wrapped the body that once held her daughter and walked slowly down the hospital road, across the football field, and disappeared with her bundle into the market?
She did.
So what to you, so what to us as humans. It’s possible that because you were too far to feel its ripples, it doesn’t matter at all. But if I can make it seem closer, maybe you can sense that it does. Decide for yourselves what we are. Decide for me.
I never get to ask. I connect at times, and at others the eyes in the audience seem far away. I wish I had had more time to practice, I wish I had written this down. I wish I could take them, them and everyone I know, and show them that it’s not what I thought, that the swiveling telescope, the mirror images upside down, the sparking wires, that disappearing bright spot, it’s not about trying to reconcile two different worlds, it’s about understanding that there’s only one.
POSTSCRIPT
16/05:
Hi lastly, Abyei became ashes!!! yes, since Wed until now. the fighting continue between the SAF and the militia in one side, and the SPLA in the other side, the JIU are divided into SAF and the SPLA..
in Wednesday, since 12:30 pm up to 2:00 pm, then from 2:20 pm untill the dark, we are evacuated from compound 1 in arround 7:00pm, via UN Tanker, yes, only through the tankers, they came up to CMPD1 then all inside, then to UNMIS, but the shooting never stoped..
we slept over the night in UNMIS, then Thursday morning we evacuated from there by their helecopters to Kadugli, then this afternoon to Khartoum and Juba …
all the staff are physical intact, but emossionally unstable..
nothing left from Abyei, except the mosque, which is concrete …
we could not take all our lagages, about half of the staff just evacuated with the clothes that they were wearing it..
most of our computers in the office are looted, then CMPD1 and 2 are completely burnt …
out of 26000 inhabitant of Abyei, left le
ss than 10 person in civilian clothes, the rest either in the bouche/forest, or wearing uniforms fighting with machine guns …
I will give more updates later on.
Alfred
ABYEI IS ON FIRE. War finally found that place. The people in the town have fled in the rain. I’ve heard since that one of our local nurses was killed.
A few civilians were left in town, trapped by the fighting. Unable to find food, they broke into the hospital pharmacy and ate the BP-5. I wish I hadn’t eaten even one.
The town is on fire, and its people, some of my patients … Aweil. Where is she? In the rain. No.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. We were supposed to save that place, all of us, me, you, everyone we know. We were at least going to try.
The thing you don’t know is how happy she was. Once she started to smile, that day I was in Ethiopia, she rarely stopped. Now I wonder if she is tied to Rebecca’s thin back, marching through the mud, or if instead of her, it’s another of Rebecca’s children and Aweil is sitting in the middle of a puddle, crying, people pushing past.
I look hungrily on the computer for news, to see familiar faces, to try to identify the cinders of our compound, or in the background, the hospital.
I can’t.
I can’t write about this any more. My thoughts are with the people huddled under tarps in the rain, with Sylvester in the hospital again, overwhelmed by war and the dead bodies and the dwindling supplies. It’s time to stop writing about the world and return to it.
Good luck to you.
The beginning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK OWES A DEBT to many people. First, I would like to thank the dozens who commented on my blog; you not only offered me support when I needed it most but convinced my publishers that Abyei’s story was one worth telling.
I would like to offer the highest arc of my gratitude to Avril Benoît and Ken Tong, both with Canada’s MSF office. Their encouragement and support were unflagging, their advice golden. They are sincere champions of both humanitarianism and telling the story.
Six Months in Sudan Page 28