I got the message. I was spoiling both her time in East Africa and my own, doing the very thing I thought I’d learned not to do: looking at everything through the lens of expectation. Holding tight. I resolved, from that moment onward, to savor my moments there.
One thing in East Africa I could find no fault with was the landscape. As a native of Kansas, I’ve always been a sucker for wide open spaces. The vast planes of Tanzania, spotted with herds of elephants, zebra, and antelope, gave me a feeling of expansiveness that made me short of breath. Nothing glowed like those skies. The sunsets were spectacular, feasts of orange and gold, lilac and rose, amethyst and violet and deep, deep blue. The clouds piled upon each other in sharply defined layers like an otherworldly mountain range, the spaces between them glimmering lakes.
For a person who grew up seeing wild animals primarily on television or in zoos, the sight of large groups of them running free was a revelation. I had to keep reminding myself they were real. In the Ngorongoro Crater, we rode in our jeep in the center of a wildebeest migration. I stood with my upper body poking through the vehicle’s sunroof, while all around me a roiling sea of animals galloped, their thick bodies and enormous heads supported by thin legs, their glossy manes rippling in the sun as their pounding hooves flattened the grass. The furious drumming of their hooves exhilarated me.
“I’m a wildebeest! I’m a wildebeest!” I shouted, and my voice was lost in the madness, subsumed into the unrelenting symphony of hooves.
After our safari, we returned to Arusha, our jumping-off point, to plan the next leg of our trip. That night Debbie came down with malaria. We remained stranded for more than a week in that strange little town filled with desperate safari hawkers, while she lay on her bunk, throwing the covers on and off, going through the feverish dance I’d witnessed so many times. I cared for her as best I could, administering the appropriate doses of medication, bringing food and water, applying damp towels to her forehead, chasing the aggressive safari salesman from our door. Throughout all this, I marveled at my own continued health. By the time Debbie was safely on the plane and I’d set out alone for places unknown, I was convinced that my body was invincible, a fortress of immunity.
A week later I lay on a lumpy mattress in a barren hotel room in the town of Tanga, Tanzania, lazily watching a fan turn above my head. The air was stupefyingly hot and still. As I stared at the fan’s hypnotic spiral, an extraordinary languor seeped into my limbs. My arms and legs felt weighted down, as though an army of Lilliputians had anchored them to the bed with tiny ropes. As my mind began to drift toward sleep, a small voice in the back of my head made the following delicate suggestion: Before you conk out, why don’t you put up your mosquito net?
My eyes scanned the room vaguely.
I don’t see any mosquitoes, I told the voice. Probably the fan’s keeping them away. And besides—at this point my face undoubtedly wore a faint smirk—mosquitoes don’t like me.
Three days later, in the coastal village of Pangani, I awoke in the morning with the sensation of a thousand tiny needles pricking my flesh. I’d spent the past two nights camping on the roof of the Pangadeco Hotel with Clemens, an East German medical student with bright green eyes and astonishing black lashes, whom I’d met in Tanga. The Pangadeco was a “find”—a completely empty hotel less than a hundred yards from the beach— and the previous days had passed in a blissful haze of sun and sand. At night Clemens and I had walked for miles into the lukewarm shallows of the ocean, moonlight floating lightly on the water like lace on black velvet. Back on the beach, we’d watched tiny crabs skitter sideways across the sand and drop into their holes, so light on their ballerina claws they left no tracks. The only blot on this idyllic time (besides my nagging anxiety about Michael), was the fact that it was the sacred month of Ramadan, the Moslem holiday in which no one eats between sunrise and sundown. This meant there was no food to be found during the day except coconuts and underripe miniature bananas about three inches long.
But on this third morning, when I sat up, my head seemed to soar above my body at a great height, as though resting atop an impossibly tall, spindly neck. I stumbled down the stairs to the toilet, awkwardly balancing my unwieldy head, and noticed, with the morbid fascination that accompanies such observations while traveling in the developing world, that my feces had turned a bright, almost neon yellow. The beast had entered me at last.
I carted myself to the local hospital for a malaria test, only to find that Ramadan was coming to an end, and the hospital was closed for the festivities. Back at the Pangadeco, the owner telephoned a German doctor who lived in a nearby village. Over a crackly connection, the doctor told me I should assume it was malaria and begin treating it right away, rather than waiting to get a test. If it were malaria tropica, the most virulent strain, and I didn’t treat it, I could conceivably die from it, she explained, whereas taking unnecessary medication might screw with my system a bit, but it wouldn’t kill me. Armed with this advice, I broke out my supply of mefloquine.
Mefloquine was the strongest antimalarial drug available. Peace Corps members took it weekly as a prophylaxis, but the doctor in southern France, where I’d bought my medications, advised me to bring along only a small amount, to use as a cure if necessary. He’d given me a combination of more moderate drugs to take as prevention.
“This mefloquine is too toxic for your body. You should not take it weekly if you will be in Africa for more than two months. This is not just the personal opinion of Dr. Marc Sillard,” he’d told me sternly, pointing at his chest, “But the strong recommendation of the World Medical Association. I give it to you as a cure only in case of emergency. If you are near a hospital and can be tested, they may give you something else.”
Peace Corps volunteers I met in West Africa reported all sorts of effects from their weekly mefloquine dosage, from depression and mood swings to startlingly vivid dreams and hallucinations. Their weekly dosage was one tablet. The curative dose was three tablets in a single day.
By the time I took my mefloquine, the fevers were in full swing. My body behaved like a furnace gone haywire, my temperature modulating up and up like the ending of a Barry Manilow song until it broke in a dramatic display of sweat and shivers, only to begin the process all over again. I kept a bucket of brown water next to my sleeping bag, wetting a grungy washcloth and placing it masochistically against the hottest spot I could find—stomach, underarm, inner thigh—as every hair on my body stood bolt upright on its follicle in protest. Although I was ravenously hungry, when I finally got access to food, I was unable to keep it down. Even with something as innocuous as rice, I would eat one spoonful and my throat would close on the second bite. Still, my mind remained detached, even slightly intrigued.
“Malaria’s not so bad,” I said to myself.
My first mefloquine-altered night was spent in a surreal state, somewhere between acute wakefulness and grotesquely etched, brilliantly colored dreams. I watched helplessly as everyone I’d ever met paraded through my head, their edges blurred and the colors slightly off, as though captured on home video with a handheld camera. All my loves and betrayals, from early childhood onward, came forward in random order to take their shaky bows: my seventh-grade best friend who deserted me when I was kicked out of the in-crowd for gaining weight and “dressing like a Martian”; the mentally disabled boy at my elementary school whom I championed and then betrayed by throwing a single pea in his direction during a cafeteria food fight; the man who whispered “dirty Jew” in my ear on a cross-country bus; the acting coach whom I worshiped with fervent, unparalleled lust; my adoring father and chronically nervous mother; Michael, Michael, Michael, Michael . . . all of them praising and accusing me, grabbing hold of my hands and legs and hair, breaking my heart again as if for the first time. I shouted their names, sat up again and again, cried and begged forgiveness.
And then, suddenly, I opened my eyes. I had to write a letter to Michael. I shot out of my sleeping bag, slipped under my mo
squito net, and skidded across the cold cement to my backpack, where I fumbled madly for my notebook and pen. Suddenly there was no time at all—no time to form the words, no time to get the stamp, no time for the letter to cross the ocean and sit in his mailbox. In this moment I understood everything, and he had to understand right now, too. I loved him; I needed him; I cherished him. He was my life.
By the time morning came I had no patience left for either letter-mailing or malaria. I had to get back to Dar es Salaam, where I could find a reliable phone. I would call Michael and tell him how I felt. Then I’d put myself on the first plane home. My journey was over; the endless searching, doubting, questing for self. I knew what mattered. Thank God I’d figured it out in time.
I started to get up to pack my backpack and was stunned to discover that I could not stand and cross the paved roof to reach it. I stood up and sat down again three times in rapid succession, my legs folding beneath me like a marionette. The dizziness in my head was so severe that palm trees, ocean, clothesline zoomed by me as if on a high-speed carousel.
“What are you doing?” Clemens called from across the rooftop. “You’ve been screaming all night long,” he added with visible irritation.
“I’ve got to get to Dar es Salaam,” I said.
“Are you crazy? You’ve got malaria. You’re not going anywhere.”
“But I have to,” I told him, my voice rising. “I need a reliable phone line. I have to call.”
“Call in a few days,” he said. “Look at you. Who do you think you are? Stay in bed for Christ’s sake.”
“I have to call,” I said. “What’s the big deal? How much work is it to sit on a bus?”
I started to stand up again, and again I found myself sitting. My head ached like the worst kind of hangover. The colors of the world were too bright. Still I kept trying, over and over, with the perseverance of an athlete training for a race. Never in my life had there been a challenge I’d set my mind to and been unable to achieve, from winning the county spelling bee to writing and touring original plays to traveling alone through Africa. I wasn’t going to be defeated by six feet of cement rooftop.
But I couldn’t do it. I rose and fell and rose and fell like a crazy jack-in-the-box before I dove headfirst into the hot morass of my sleeping bag and began to cry like a child throwing a tantrum; heaving, moaning, wailing, shaken by violent sobs which gradually gave way to a bottomless river of fluid grief. The sudden knowledge of my arrogance pressed down on me like a boulder. I could not stand and walk across the cement. Michael was gone and might never come back to me. Things were fragile. Things could be broken. Things could be lost.
I spent two days prostrate on that rooftop, hobbling down the stairs in the evening to ingest a few grains of rice. Clemens waited in a state of growing agitation for me to recover.
“Go back to Dar es Salaam,” I told him on the third morning. “Continue your trip.”
“And if you die here?” he said angrily. “I would be responsible.”
“If I died here,” I said wearily, “you’d never know about it.”
The next afternoon, I stumbled to the bus station. Clemens carried both my pack and his own. My fevers were gone, but I was still dizzy and weak.
The seven-hour bus ride along the tropical coast of Tanzania to Dar es Salaam was among the longest of my life. Every bump in the road traveled up my spine like dynamite and arrived with a jolt at the base of my skull, creating the sensation that my head was splitting apart. A couple of young men in the seat behind me found my groans amusing, and at each bump they would chime in with me, the three of us moaning in raucous harmony.
When we arrived in Dar es Salaam I dumped my luggage at a cheap hotel I’d stayed in before. Clemens helped me flag a taxi and told the driver to convey me to the hospital.
“Have a test,” he said. “Find out what is wrong.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’ll be okay now,” he said. He strode away without a goodbye.
Dar es Salaam was a modern city, but friendlier and slower paced than Nairobi. Boats of all sizes, from dinghies to passenger ships, crowded the noisy port. As we drove by the sprawling Kariakoo Market, I saw streetside fires and food vendors that reminded me of Accra. Seeing them tugged at my heart as though someone had wrapped a thread around it—a bittersweet ache.
At the crowded hospital, a nurse drew my blood and sent it upstairs to a lab. She told me to wait—the doctor would call me when he had the results. I sat for three and a half hours in a dingy waiting room while patients filed in and out of the doctor’s office. The close air smelled of vomit and ammonia. A yellow plastic basin sat on the floor, with patches of wet on either side of it. Sandals and shoes picked up the moisture, leaving hieroglyphics of circles, stars, and dashes on the cement floor.
When the results of my test arrived, they showed malaria in my bloodstream.
“I took mefloquine!” I cried.
The doctor shrugged. He was a middle-aged man with thick glasses, stern and focused.
“Different strains respond to different things. Try this.” He handed me a prescription for a new round of drugs.
“But mefloquine’s supposed to knock out everything!”
He shrugged again and glanced toward the door where dozens of other patients huddled on wooden benches, waiting.
Back at the hotel, I took one of the new pills. My room was bare and functional, like every other room I’d stayed in in Africa.
A bed in the middle of the floor, a mosquito net hanging above it from a wooden ring, a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, an overhead fan. The shared toilet and showers were down the hall. I turned on the fan and it creaked slowly to life, clattering loudly as it gathered speed, stirring the stagnant air. I lay on my bed, allowing the breeze to cool my limbs. Now that the telephone office was just a few short blocks away, I was suddenly reluctant to call Michael. I told myself that I’d wait until tomorrow, when I felt better. I wanted to have all my wits about me when I called.
An hour later I was shivering again, my body tingling with fever. What was this? A relapse? A side effect of the new drug? As I piled on blankets, I grabbed the pill bottle. Scanning the instruction sheet that was tucked inside, I found the words “can cause severe side effects and in rare cases death, when taken in conjunction with . . .” A long list of medications followed. One of them was mefloquine. I sprang out of bed, a strange buzzing in my head. I looked at the paper again. There it was in tiny, barely legible print. Mefloquine.
I stepped into my flip-flops and ran down the steps of the hotel with my rubber soles flapping.
“There is a doctor just next door,” the woman at the desk told me, after I’d blurted out my story. “You can go and speak with him.”
In the building next door, I scanned a list of offices until I found the words “Mr. Paul Chiteji, Private Medical Doctor, room 305.” I ran up a slippery, poorly lit staircase to the third floor. The building was eerily empty—most of the offices seemed to be closed.
“Please be in,” I muttered under my breath.
Next to number 304 I found a small, empty reception room with no one behind the desk.
“Hello!” I called desperately.
A slender, smooth-faced young man emerged from an inner room. He wore a green sports shirt and dark blue pants.
“Is the doctor in?” I asked breathlessly.
“I am Doctor Chiteji,” he said.
“You?” I was startled. He looked about seventeen.
“Certainly,” he said, smiling. “How can I help you?”
I poured out my story.
“Let me look at this.” He reached for the bottle of pills. He examined it for some time. “You should discontinue to take these,” he said at last.
“What about the malaria?” I said. “And what about the dose I already took?”
“Your mefloquine has surely vanquished the malaria,” he said. “Most likely the test has misdiagnosed. You must return to th
e hospital for another test. This drug has not harmed you. Look! You are alive. Only, if you are concerned about the effects, it is best that you discontinue the drug.” He laughed, then, and took my hand with surprising tenderness. “Sistah,” he said, “don’t worry. Be happy.”
Dar es Salaam was hot. Really hot. Walking even a short distance in the sun, I felt like a cookie left overlong in the oven. All internal suppleness was baked out of me, leaving my insides a dry, charred husk. My mouth was parched and cottony. No amount of water helped, because all moisture migrated instantly to the surface of my body. Places I didn’t know could sweat leaked liquid—elbows, eyebrows, feet. For an hour that afternoon the power was out, paralyzing the ceiling fan in my room. I took a shower to cool down, got out, toweled off, and a moment later I was wet again, just as though I hadn’t dried myself at all.
When the day cooled to evening, the power came back on, and I could move again. I took myself to dinner at a fancy hotel, where I sat at a table, still trembling a little.
“What is the trouble, please?” asked my waiter, looking at me with concern. He was neatly dressed in dark pants and a yellow button-down, a bright white towel over one arm.
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“Pardon?”
Looking into his kind face, I again poured out my story.
“Please, you will speak with the manager. She will surely help you.”
Docile as a goat, I followed him. The manager was a plump Danish woman with red cheeks and blonde hair cut in an efficient bob.
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