Coercive men see only slaves and rivals in the world.
If the meek refuse war to defend themselves against coercion, then they deserve to be slaves.
Peace-lovers can only have what they love by being better at what they hate than those who love war.
There is no road to peace that does not pass through war.
Cecily had made the rule that the American caregivers could only move through the city of Calabar two by two. To do otherwise was to invite attack by the opportunistic brigands who still lurked on the fringes of the city.
But the presence of the caregivers had brought a calm to the city, born of hope, for word soon spread that the Americans had medicines that would help.
Cecily warned everyone never to promise a cure. "The most you can ever say is, 'This might help improve the chance of survival.' Anything else, and you will create bitterness and anger wherever death comes despite our help." Everyone agreed, but still the rumors spread that the Americans had brought a cure.
Rumors also spread that the Americans had a cure because they had created the disease and infected Africa with it because the Americans hated black people and always would. There was nothing Cecily could do about this, and she warned the others that arguing would accomplish nothing. "If you are met in a household by angry accusations, walk away and go on to the next house."
But there were those who could not keep their tongues still. "If we created the disease, and if we have a cure, why are so many of our soldiers sick with the nictovirus?"
For the disease was actually worse inside the American base on the university grounds than it was out in the city. The monkey sickness, as it was called in Nigeria, was still fairly new to Calabar; Lagos and the western part of the country had been ravaged already, but the majority of the households in Calabar did not yet have the disease. The American soldiers, though, had been so confident that their barriers against infection from outside the base would work that they were careless about their safeguards inside it, and so once their wall was breached by the disease, it spread quickly and there was no soldier who was not at one stage of the disease or another.
Fortunately, the number of soldiers was not large—Cole's command was special ops, and so they worked in small units. There were only about three hundred soldiers in Calabar, and since one caregiver could provide for the basic needs of ten patients, only sixty of them remained on the university grounds to care for the soldiers in two twelve-hour shifts.
The rest of them went out into the city, at first the neighborhoods near the university—Akim Qua, Big Qua, Uwanse, Atimbo, Satellite Town—but then ranging farther and farther into Calabar. They brought with them bags of medicine—ibuprofen, stool softeners, and antidiarrhea medicine. The instructions were simple: Take the stool softeners as soon as the sneezing turns into coughing; then, when the fever starts, switch to the antidiarrhea medication and begin taking ibuprofen.
Using an ancient offset printer at the university, one of the soldiers who was not yet desperately ill had printed out instruction sheets in English, but that only went so far—the poor and uneducated could not read it in English, and there were many, especially among the elderly, who could not have read it in any language. So the caregivers had become adept, by necessity, in acting out a pantomime.
Within a few days, however, students and faculty members began showing up, offering their services as interpreters. They were all fairly fluent in English, though few of them had much experience with medical terminology; all of them spoke Efik, the dominant local language. Cecily had never heard of Efik, and a Nigerian interpreter explained why. "Efik is a language of the delta, where all the oil is. Therefore everybody treats our language and our people as if we did not exist. Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, English—they are all languages of strangers who rule over us in order to take our oil and give us nothing."
"They gave you the nictovirus," said Cecily.
The woman grinned at her.
"Teach me how to greet people in Efik," said Cecily, "so we can get into their houses."
Soon Cecily had all the Americans practicing the phrases. "Ndi owo ku ufok?" Is anybody home? And then: "Mme ono usobo edi-oh!" Medical workers are here!
Soon the university people—who were quickly christened "the varsity team"—were masked and gloved and taking full part among the caregivers out in the city.
Naturally, many sick people came to the university, but interpreters just outside the campus entrances explained to them that if they had any family to help, they should stay home and administer the medicine and plenty of water. If they truly had no one to help take care of them, then they were taken in to the university teaching hospital, whose staff had come back to duty now that there was actually something useful for them to do. The danger was that they would be overloaded, but most people understood how enormous the epidemic would be, and believed readily that the hospital offered no advantages over their own homes.
So Cecily spent her days out in the city, like any of the other caregivers. She refused to be turned into an administrator. She left the clerical and sorting tasks to those who seemed reluctant to deal with the sick and poor—and she refused to let anyone criticize them as slackers, at least in her presence. "We came here to do what we can. Everyone's a volunteer, and every job needs to be done." And if that didn't silence the complaints, she'd quote: "And the eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help; nor again the head to the feet: I have no need of you." Let them argue with Saint Paul if they wanted to find fault.
At night, she would return to the university and look for Mark and Chinma. She had expected that Mark would go out into the city with her, but that changed on that first night when she realized that Cole was sick and the whole base had been exposed. "You'll stay here and take care of the soldiers," she told Mark. At first he protested that he had come to help Nigerians, but she replied that he had come to help the sick, and the American soldiers would need him as much as the Nigerians. He spoke their language, he even knew some of them personally. They would be happier with him helping take care of them.
She did not say, though she knew he understood: It's safer here, surrounded by America's finest soldiers. Nobody will try to hurt you because they happen to hate Americans.
Soon she learned that there was no particular anti-Americanism among the people. Even those who believed that the disease was part of an American plot tended to blame the government—some of the very same people would announce their intention to get a visa and move to America someday. It was as if they held the wicked rumors in one part of their minds, and the image of America as a place of freedom and safety and prosperity in another. As she wrote in an email to Aunt Margaret: "The rumor mind and the television mind, and never the twain shall meet."
What she could not get the local people to stop doing was calling her "Obufa Mma Slessor." She would introduce herself but they would nod and instead of trying to say "Cecily Malich," they would say "Obufa Slessor" or "Mma Slessor."
"What does this mean, this 'Slessor'?" Cecily asked her interpreter of the day.
In reply, the young man—a medical student when the university was running—took her to a large statue near the entrance of the university. It was of a European woman hugging a pair of African twins. "Mary Slessor," the interpreter explained. "A hundred years ago she came here and made everybody stop killing twins."
"Killing twins?" The concept baffled her.
"They believed it was a bad witch mother who had two babies at once," said the interpreter. "Or a curse on the family. They killed the babies and the mother. Very bad thing, and Mary Slessor made them stop. So: This statue is her with the twins she saved."
"Why do they call me that?"
"Be happy for it, Mrs. Malich," said the interpreter. "They see you as a white woman coming to save them, so they call you 'Obufa Mma Slessor,' the New Mrs. Slessor. Because of that name, everyone treats you and your people with respect and you are safe in the city."
That was reason en
ough to let them keep using the name—though she made it a point to introduce herself as Mma Malich once she actually got in the door.
As for Chinma, Cecily quickly learned he was little help as an interpreter. He spoke only a little English, but he spoke Efik not at all—he had lived in a part of Nigeria where Yoruba was the dominant language, Hausa and Ibo were often spoken, and no one ever used Efik. So Chinma was more useful—and safer—working side by side with Mark in the soldiers' quarters. It would help Chinma improve his English, and since he was immune to the disease, he didn't need to wear the mask, though Cecily still insisted on gloves when handling the patients, because there were other diseases that could be spread by the constant exposure to fecal matter.
For when it came to actual care of patients, rather than passing out meds and instructional leaflets, there was no escaping the feces. As they moved through the city, everyone knew that it was the door where no one answered their knock that they were most urgently needed. Families tended to catch the disease in quick succession, since infected people would come home and live normally for several highly contagious days before the first symptoms appeared.
So it happened often—more and more, as time passed—that when they went into the house where no one answered their knock at the door, or hand-claps outside it, or their calls in English and in their memorized Erik phrases, that inside they would find the entire family desperately ill. The healthiest would be groaning in the agony of acute constipation and painful coughing and sneezing; the weakest would have little energy left to groan, for they were covered in the filth of their own dysentery and coping with high fever, dehydration, and agonizing headache.
Into these houses Cecily and her companion—a different person every day—would go, and instead of just handing out meds, they would first take water to everyone and help them drink. Then would come the medications, usually capsules and tablets, but liquids for the children and those too weak to swallow a pill.
And then, finally, would come the cleanup. Bottled water was too precious to use for this, so they would have to use whatever water was available in the house or could be borrowed from still-healthy neighbors. Every caregiver had quickly gotten used to the stench and no longer recoiled from touching what had to be touched and washing what had to be washed. It was impossible to make everything hospital-clean, but they left every house in better condition than they found it in.
They marked with orange tape the lintels of the houses where no one was able to get out of bed. The food crews would then know which houses to visit on their daily rounds. For the first few days, gas-masked American soldiers went with the food crews, but as the soldiers took sick, they were replaced by Nigerian students, armed only with sticks; but they, along with Cecily's reputation as the New Mrs. Slessor, were enough to deter brigands and pilferers.
As word of what the caregivers were doing spread through the city, order began to return. People with white breathing masks went back to their jobs; farmers from the hinterland began to bring food into the city again, so they could return with medications and knowledge of methods of treatment. Extended families formed a widespread network throughout the region—most people in the city still had many relatives in the hinterland, and that network began to keep the city alive.
All of this was gratifying—it was clear that the coming of the American caregivers was making a great difference. The city would not starve; people were far less likely to be robbed, raped, or murdered as they lay sick or tried to flee the city.
What Cecily was watching most closely, though, was the mortality rate. She could not measure any control group—they were not going to leave some portion of the city within their reach untended—but she could try to gather statistics on the recovery rate among those who were treated.
The best indicator would be the soldiers—they were all known by name, they were gathered in one place, and they could not move in and out of the countryside without anyone missing them. The reports from Lagos and other areas of early infection were of death rates as high as fifty percent in some areas, and never lower than thirty percent. If the soldiers died at the same rate, then all their effort was making no difference at all.
So part of Mark's work, Cecily decided, was to gather the stats as they came in—the number of soldiers who were sick, the number reaching each stage of the disease, and then, eventually, the number who died or who were still alive when the fever broke.
"I'm supposed to care about numbers?" he asked impatiently.
"Yes," she said. "This plague will probably reach the United States someday. We need to know if our treatment regime works, and if it does, how much difference it makes."
After his twelve-hour shift every day, Mark went to Sergeant Wills's workstation and emailed the day's stats to the health authorities in Atlanta. It was tedious at first; it didn't get hard until men started dying. They weren't numbers to Mark, or even mere names in a list. Especially because the first to die was one of his father's jeesh—Cole's jeesh.
Mark had cared for Cat Black personally; Cole's team were all in one room, except for General Coleman himself, who stayed in the headquarters office and continued to hear reports, communicate with the Pentagon and the ships offshore, and give occasional orders from his bed, as long as he was in condition to do so.
Cat was a bad patient from the start, grousing about everything, but as Mark told Cecily, "He's mostly just embarrassed, I think, because he hates having somebody else give him a bedpan and a urine jar, and wipe him up afterward."
"Maybe it's harder because of who you are," said Cecily. "I didn't really think of that."
"I asked him already," said Mark. "If he'd rather have a stranger do this, or Reuben Malich's son."
"What did he say?"
"That he'd rather be wiped up by several imams and ayatollahs of his acquaintance, because he thought they deserved to be up to their elbows in his … stuff."
"In other words, he was okay with having you continue."
"I don't think he cares very much anymore," said Mark. "The fever started today, and I switched him over from glycerin suppositories to loperamide and ibuprofen."
Cat was not the first patient to need the switch, or even the first of the soldiers—but he was the first of Reuben's jeesh to start down that precipitous slope. Within three days the jeesh were all fevered, trying to deal with dysentery, and still wracked with pain from coughing and the headache.
Cat became delirious, and sometimes flung himself around brutally, as if he were hallucinating some enemy, or maybe just a bothersome insect. More than once he hit Mark, not deliberately, but hard enough to knock him down. Cecily had to hear about this from Cole himself, when she reported to him; one of the still-walking soldiers had reported it.
"I think if the fever hadn't weakened Cat so much," said Cole, "he might have seriously injured Mark. Even as it is, I suspect Mark is hiding some bad bruises."
But as long as Mark didn't tell Cecily about it himself, she pretended not to know. She figured that Mark was determined to bear whatever pain it took to care for his father's friends. The fact that he didn't mention it did not surprise her, but it did please her. He was not a complainer.
As Cat sank further into his fever, he began to be harder to dose with his medications. He spat out pills, or let them lie in his slack mouth without swallowing. That was something Mark had to talk about, because Cat's dysentery was worse than anyone else's, and yet he was least likely to get his meds. And as for dehydration, he wasn't drinking enough, and even though the university hospital had the equipment for intravenous feeding, the Pentagon absolutely forbade using any of their equipment, for fear of injecting their soldiers with HIV from insufficiently sanitized needles.
As soon as Mark told her about the problem, Cecily went with him to see Cat, and was shocked at how weak and emaciated he looked. But then, all the men in the ward looked devastated by the disease. The others, though, were conscious enough to greet her, and Benny and Arty were still not
in the fever stage, so they could make a few wan jokes and then call her aside and whisper about how well Mark was doing, even though he had another roomful of patients to take care of along with them.
"He's a good man," they both told her. There seemed to be no sense of irony or condescension in their use of the word man for a thirteen-year-old; they said it as they might have said it of any soldier.
Cat did not recognize her, though, and as she watched Mark struggle to get water into him, Cecily realized for the first time that Cat was probably going to die of this. She had already seen enough Nigerians die—she had come upon patients who were already as bad as this on her first day working in the city—that she knew the signs of those who could not stay above the hydration line. As Cat got weaker, it would only get harder to put water into his system; as he got less and less of his medication, the diarrhea and fever would only get worse, dehydrating him faster.
But he was also a strong man, and so he did not die as quickly as most patients who fell below the line and couldn't rise above it. So it wasn't until the next night that Mark told her, "Cat's bleeding."
She knew what it meant and what it looked like, but she let Mark tell her what he had seen, because he needed to say it to somebody. "It was seeping out of his eyes like tears," he said, and shuddered.
"And his nose. And rectally—it was the only thing coming out, and it looked like pure blood to me, bright red."
Cecily held Mark's hand.
After a while, Mark got up. "I'm going back to him," he said.
"You have to get your sleep," said Cecily. "There are living patients who need you tomorrow."
Mark shook his head. "He's not going to die alone."
"He's got the rest of the jeesh in the room with him."
But Mark shook his head. By "alone" he meant "without somebody holding his hand," though he couldn't say so. And none of the others was in any shape to do it.
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