by C. E. Smith
This is the stuff of sexual farce, but Nick finds no cause for laughter when Burkett shares the story the next morning in the kitchen. The problem is either Nick’s sense of humor or Burkett’s storytelling – or perhaps something of both.
‘Anyway,’ Burkett says, ‘I guess the guy had recorded all kinds of footage of women inside their homes. There’s supposedly a black market for it.’
‘So what happened next?’ Nick wants to know.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did the girl’s father take a shot at the drone?’ he asks as he pours coffee into a foam cup. ‘There are people serving time for just that, you know.’
Burkett strains to remember. How did the father react to the voyeuristic drone? Perhaps Burkett missed that part of the story, which he heard by eavesdropping on a drunk journalist in the bistro of his hotel. Burkett was sitting a few tables away but could hear every word – at least he thought he could. Perhaps the journalist attenuated his voice when he realized Burkett was listening. It was only a week ago, but Burkett’s memory of it is vague – probably because he was drunk at the time too.
‘What about the daughter?’ Nick asks. ‘How old was she?’
‘A teenager – how should I know?’
‘Beyond a certain age, she would have been viewed as a disgrace to her family. Something like that could ruin her prospects for marriage.’
‘If that’s the case why would she brag about it?’
‘Maybe she was sent to another town to live with some relative,’ he says, as if Burkett needed consolation. ‘On the other hand, she could have been beaten or even killed.’
Nick’s disapproving gaze seems to implicate Burkett in whatever injustice befell the girl. And even as Burkett shrugs off a twinge of guilt, he finds reason to accept some small portion of blame. Is he not perpetuating that family’s shame by spreading the rumor? He sips his coffee and looks away. The conversation is beginning to feel like a recapitulation of some old disagreement between him and his brother.
The site of Owen’s death is a twenty-minute drive from the clinic. After seeing his brother’s body, he has no need to protect himself. His eyes have already been seared by the autopsy wounds and bullet holes. No other vision can hurt him. And yet as the car stops a voice in his mind tells him,
You don’t need this. You’ve seen enough.
It is late afternoon. The other car eases to the verge behind them. The pair of armed bodyguards – employees of the strongman Walari – remain inside with their engine running.
‘He was visiting a patient’s house?’ Burkett asks.
‘He’d done an appendectomy on the girl a week earlier,’ Nick says. ‘He was worried about a wound infection.’
Burkett is almost relieved to see nothing at the roadside but sand and gravel. But what did he expect – a chalk outline with overlapping bloodstains?
‘Do you think he was betrayed by someone in that family?’
Nick shakes his head. ‘The police say it was random.’
‘He was on his way back to the clinic when it happened?’
‘That’s right – he’d already seen the patient.’
Burkett remembers the absurd ‘press release’: We arrested a Christian missionary with translated Bibles.
‘How does a person get ‘arrested’ by jihadists? Did they drive up behind him and force him to pull over? How could they do that? Were they disguised as police?’
Nick shakes his head. ‘There were so many insider attacks we had to work out an agreement with the local police. They would never under any circumstances try to stop us on the road.’
Burkett has heard about the controversial program of recruiting separatist militants into the national police force. At some point it must have seemed like a good idea – bolstering security while at the same time depleting the ranks of jihadists – but the only proven outcome has been a rise in the number of suicide bombers dressed as police.
‘Owen would be more likely to stop if somebody needed his help,’ Nick says. ‘Maybe they pretended to have a flat tire, or engine trouble.’
‘Trap, disguise, or whatever, they must have known he was coming,’ Burkett says. ‘My guess is the Heroes’ – he can’t speak the word without a sneer – ‘were watching the clinic. They followed him out and set him up on his way back.’
‘That seems unlikely to me,’ Nick says. ‘We’d have known if we were under surveillance.’
Burkett glances back at Walari’s thugs and wonders how reliable they’d be in a standoff. The escort wouldn’t even be here if Burkett hadn’t insisted. Nick seems oblivious to the risks. Does he truly believe that God will protect him, even after God failed to protect Owen?
‘You came out here that day and saw the body?’ Burkett asks, and Nick nods. ‘Where exactly was he lying?’
The patch of sand lies partly shaded by a boulder, without even a hint of discoloration. It seems as though the earth drank his blood and then forgot him entirely. How long has it been, fifteen days? What disturbs Burkett most about the place is its ordinariness, how easily one could pass it without knowing. Perhaps every bit of land in the world has its own forgotten history of violence, and it isn’t possible to take even a single step without dishonoring the site of some person’s death.
He lies on the ground. Nick watches as if this were perfectly normal and to be expected.
‘Which way was he looking?’ he asks.
‘Your right,’ Nick says.
It is the direction of the mountains. Grit abrades his scalp as he turns his head. The last thing registered by his brother’s eyes could have been one of those distant peaks, or perhaps something closer, some bit of gravel or clump of weeds.
What happens in the brain at the moment of death? Is there an unprecedented surge of neurotransmitters and electrical impulses? Adrenalin to heighten acuity, endorphins to numb the pain. He has the notion that his brother experienced a dilation of time, the world in slow motion, such that his final second stretched into an entire year. The smoke from the gun barrels stood perfectly still. A year-long respite from time, an interval of pure contemplation: it is an afterlife as believable as any.
That night he calls his father at the home. The home: as if the place of senility and bedpans represented some ultimate gathering of family.
‘Elysian Fields,’ answers a woman in a monotone.
After introducing himself – there is the usual international delay of one or two seconds – he is connected to his father’s room, where a nurse says, ‘I’m placing the phone to Dr Burkett’s ear.’
‘Dad? It’s me, Ryan. I’m with Owen – at the clinic where he works.’
His father grunts.
‘What was that? How are you feeling? Are you seeing your friends in the dining room?’
Burkett talks about the clinic and the patients. He doubts his father understands any of it, but still he feels the need to say something of substance. These unilateral conversations drain him. Add to that the stress of lying – or rather avoiding the truth, speaking of Owen in the present tense. Dementia doesn’t necessarily imply psychic fragility, but in his father he’s begun to see a kind of child-like innocence. It is a quality Burkett has a strange impulse to protect, even if there is no clear evidence that his father ever did anything of the kind for him or his brother.
After their mother died, they were left in the sole care of their father, which meant a series of relatives, nannies, and housekeepers. What little attention they received from the man himself, the almighty surgeon, it always seemed to Burkett that he favored Owen. This was confirmed when they graduated from medical school. Both Emory and Hopkins allowed parents who were also physicians to award their children’s diplomas. The parent needed only to provide credentials to qualify for a temporary professorship. A straightforward matter, the same at both schools – but their fath
er couldn’t manage it twice in the same week: he took the stage for Owen’s graduation but not Ryan’s. Later Owen would cite the apparent bias as an early sign of Alzheimer’s – one of the many lapses they’d recall when the diagnosis prompted them to come up with a narrative of cognitive decline. But Burkett had a slightly different explanation: the disease worked on one’s personality from the outside in, attacking the shallowest parts first. His affection for Owen must have occupied the deepest place. Burkett he might neglect and even forget, but as long he loves Owen, then something essential remains.
‘Dad,’ he says. ‘Can you talk to me? Do you want to put the nurse back on?’
Perhaps he should pretend to be his brother. Perhaps that would draw out some hint of the former self. But that former self, no matter how weakened, would probably recognize the imposture.
Why this impulse to lie? Why does he want to protect this man like a child? The man who said to his own ten-year-old sons: Your mother killed herself. She did it by breathing the exhaust from her car. Always the scientist, he took the opportunity to teach them about carbon monoxide and hemoglobin in the blood. The darkening of blood without oxygen. Burkett remembers it as one of their longest conversations. For a time he was convinced that his mother had died because of a change in the color of her blood, and in a manner of speaking that was accurate.
‘Sorry I can’t put Owen on the line.’
Faint static comes through his phone. It could be the sound of electrical activity in a feeble brain, the remnant of a brain. When did he cease being our father? He was still our father at graduation. He was our father when he lost the ability to perform those simple tasks put forth by the neurologist: spelling ‘world’ backward, drawing a clock face.
‘Dad,’ he says. ‘There’s something I need to tell you. The reason I’m here is that Owen was killed. He was shot to death by religious fanatics.’
‘Ah,’ his father says.
An expression of pain or surprise, or perhaps nothing more than a verbal tic, a random flexion of the vocal cords during respiration.
‘Did you hear me?’ Burkett asks. ‘Do you understand?’
6
Burkett’s first surgical case is a man in his late thirties whose left foot is swollen to the size of a melon. He walks with a crutch, his massive foot wrapped in a grimy bandage.
‘He was your brother’s patient,’ Abu says.
‘Does he know I’m not my brother?’ He has to ask now that several patients have made the mistake.
‘Yes,’ Abu says. ‘He knows what happened and offers his sympathy.’
Burkett looks at the man’s bloodshot eyes, the skin prematurely wrinkled, and opens the manila folder that serves as a patient record. He recognizes his brother’s barely legible handwriting. A single line, dated two weeks ago: OR 5/4 for L BKA. Below-the-knee amputation, scheduled for two days after Owen’s murder.
The patient unclasps a clothes pin so that Burkett, wearing rubber gloves, can remove the encrusted swaddle. He holds his breath – for the cloud of skin flakes more than the foul odor. He stands and changes gloves, if only as a pretext to let the scurf settle to the floor. He tries in vain to feel a pulse through the shell of warts and scabs. The nub-like toes twitch in response to his prodding, but there is no evidence of pain or active inflammation. No doubt the underlying bones are involved, perhaps destroyed.
This is mycetoma pedis – or Madura foot. Burkett has never seen a case, but it couldn’t be anything else.
‘How long has it been like this?’ he asks.
The man listens to Abu’s interpretation and then thinks for a moment before speaking.
‘Too long,’ Abu interprets. ‘The foot has enlarged over so many years that he hardly remembers a time when it was normal.’
‘Did it start with an injury?’ Burkett asks. ‘Did he hurt his foot while working outside?’
‘He doesn’t recall an injury,’ Abu says over the man’s voice, ‘but many years ago, before the – it got bigger?’
‘The swelling.’
‘Before the swelling, there were painful sores with blood and pus.’
While the patient waits, Burkett attempts an online search, but the internet service is too slow for anything more than email. In the clinic’s small library, he manages to find an entry for Madura foot in a book called Tropical Medicine for Nurses. It occurs to him that his brother likely read the same entry in the same book.
Back in the examining room, Burkett makes a chopping motion with his hand. ‘We’ll have to cut it off.’
The patient was told the very same thing by an identical surgeon three weeks ago, but still he places a hand to his chest and dips his head in gratitude and relief. Burkett can see the emotion in the man’s face – his yearning to be rid of the foot.
‘Tell him we’re sorry for the delay in surgery. We appreciate his patience.’ Burkett understands how a man will build up hope, even if three weeks seem short for a problem lasting decades.
It is an operation better suited to an orthopedic surgeon. Burkett was a medical student the last time he scrubbed in for an amputation. There was no shortage of diabetic toes at Emory, but those cases fell under the purview of orthopedic surgery. He reminds himself that Owen wasn’t trained in orthopedics either.
‘He just wants it gone,’ Abu says, while the patient wraps his foot back up.
‘Tell him to come in on Tuesday,’ Burkett says. ‘We’ll do it then.’
The patient rises and shakes Abu’s hand, then Burkett’s, all the while bowing and mumbling his thanks with tears in his eyes.
‘See you Tuesday,’ Burkett says.
When Nick travels to the capital for supplies, Burkett walks with Abu and Beth to a crowded market in the center of town. Beth wears a headscarf but even still she draws malevolent stares. A gruff bodyguard, who follows in a tieless suit, is presumably returning some of that malevolence. The children begging for money (Abu and Beth have brought coins for this very purpose) instinctively know not to bother with the bodyguard.
A black flag hangs from one of the stalls, signifying that vendor’s refusal to sell to westerners, or perhaps just Americans, although in Burkett’s judgment few Americans would even know what to do with the variety of bark and roots on display. According to Beth, this discriminatory vendor – an old man in a turban and mirror sunglasses – went blind decades ago when a member of a rival family threw acid on his face. It was one of many reprisals in a feud that lasted until the majority of both families had been killed.
As it happens, the old man became something of a milestone in Nick’s endeavor to learn Arabic. When he felt he’d reached a certain level of fluency, he tried to pass for native by purchasing a vial of ylang ylang oil at the forbidden booth. Afterward Nick was so pleased by the old man’s friendliness that Beth almost refrained from telling him when she uncorked the vial to the stench of urine.
Burkett waits while Beth haggles with a teenager over the price of apples. A younger boy in the adjacent stall swats a dog when it veers too close to a bucket of crabs. A large tuna hangs from a hook, slabs of its flesh cut away, its fins removed. The boy, when he sees Burkett watching, smiles and gestures toward the fish.
‘No thanks,’ Burkett says.
Nearby a young man in a white tunic seems to be staring at him, perhaps mistaking him for Owen, but as Burkett passes, the man’s eyes remain fixed on some distant point. Burkett experiences a twitch of recognition, but surely he would remember if he’d seen this man as a patient in the clinic.
He risks another glance: the man is walking now, his arms rigid and upper body stiff, like a wooden effigy attached to mechanical legs. There is a sheen of sweat on his face. All at once Burkett understands: it is the look of intoxication – probably opiates. Perhaps he should ask him where a foreigner might buy scheduled pharmaceuticals in this town. But when he looks again t
he man has disappeared among the stalls.
With her bag of fresh apples, Beth conducts him to the edge of a crowd bidding on livestock. They watch as an American in military fatigues outbids a Khandari tribesman for a horse. This is Mark Rich, Beth explains, an air force captain embedded at the local base. After the final round of bids, they find Captain Rich at the stables waiting for his new horse.
‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ Rich says as they shake hands. ‘We were trying to start a wrestling school.’
‘You were a wrestler?’
‘Four years at the Academy,’ he says.
The captain’s interpreter, a white-haired Arab in camouflage fatigues, stares at the bodyguard, whose gray suit and bulging sidearm mark him as one of Walari’s men. The aide’s fleeting scowl is a reminder of the tense equilibrium between the national army and provincial warlords, former enemies who have found common cause against the Islamic separatists.
‘What weight did you wrestle?’ Burkett asks.
‘One-fifty-eight.’
‘Same,’ Burkett says.
‘Wow,’ says the captain, more polite than amazed: it’s not as much of a coincidence as it might seem. Of the ten weight classes, those around one-fifty tend to be the most highly populated. The two men stare at each other. For former wrestlers in the same weight class, it’s only natural to wonder who was better then and who is better now. Burkett can’t remember a single All-American from the Air Force Academy.
‘How about helping me get this school off the ground?’ the captain asks. ‘It gives the boys a sense of purpose. There’s a long tradition of wrestling in Khandaros, especially among the natives.’
‘No thanks,’ Burkett says. ‘I’m done with all that.’