Thirst (18 page)

The child’s cry had no reprise. Leslie stared past him. After an indefinite period in which the rest of us were soothed by the untextured noise of the storm, she said, mostly to herself, “I wish I were a doctor. My parents wanted me to go to medical school.”

“Medical school?” I asked mildly. “Do you think many children of my nation have been saved by American medical schools?”

She shrugged. “A few. Anyway, I would save this one.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. “But this child doesn’t need a doctor—a whole doctor, that is—any more than he needs piano lessons. He may even need piano lessons more. Sure, a medical doctor trained in the West, after about a hundred grand in personal tuition fees and government subsidies, has many skills, including one or two that would help this kid, but ninety-nine percent of the stuff is irrelevant. Most of it is irrelevant to anything but making money. Mumbo jumbo so that every MD in a BMW sounds like a scientist. They come here with their CAT scanners, their centrifuges, their pills they get as samples from the pharmaceutical multinationals, and their self-righteous do-gooding, and they turn health
into a commodity. My people can’t afford to think of health as something to be purchased, or even as a tangible gift. What this kid needs is fresh milk, decent food, and a few shots. Two of these items were in abundance in my country long before anyone in your medical schools had ever heard of us, back before we were told progress had to be imported. The average life span of my people has actually dropped in the last sixty years. But what’s the point of living longer anyway? What’s the point of saving this kid if this is the brute existence in store for him?”

“Well,” Leslie said. “I still wish I could break this fever.”

“I wish I could teach the kid to play the piano.”

Leslie turned away and sprinkled some bathwater into the child’s face. “C’mon, fella,” she mumbled.

The boy blinked. I wasn’t quite sure I had seen it until he did it again. The flicker of a smile lit Sana’s face for a moment. My wife managed to find the words to ask her to reheat some water. The woman, who perhaps thought the above harangue was the baptismal invocation, did as she was told without hesitation.

“You see, I think it’s working.”

“It’s not going to be enough,” I said. “The fever’s only a symptom. The kid has an infection. He really needs something like penicillin. And it’s probably even too late for that.”

“Dammit, we haven’t been thinking. Isn’t there a case of first aid stuff in the jeep?”

“There’s gauze in it and some antivenom, and that’s all,” I responded sullenly. I had, in fact, made an attempt
to properly stock it the day before, as we were preparing for our return, but the infirmary was low on supplies. The chief physician had not been content merely to give this message to an orderly, but had made the walk over to our quarters to tell it to me himself. He was apologetic but earnest in his plea that I use my influence in the capital to get his requisitions fulfilled. He had probably oversold to the black market and been caught short.

“In your shaving kit,” Leslie said and snapped her fingers, a gesture that usually amused me. “There’s some Bufferin in your shaving kit. I’m almost sure of it.”

“It won’t help him,” I said, shaking my head. “This boy needs a lot more than a Bufferin.”

Krik pulled himself up from the floor and hobbled out of the room’s shadows. His jaws were locked shut. He clenched his fists.

“Buff’rin,” he said, revealing that the son of a bitch knew yet another foreign word. “You have Buff’rin?”

“It’s in the jeep and it won’t help your son anyway. Sending him to Sempril might have helped, but the Bufferin is useless.”

“It might bring the fever down,” Leslie said in English.

“Get it,” the peasant demanded.

“It wouldn’t hurt to go back for it.”

“In that storm? No way.”

“Your honor, you must,” the man said. For a moment I thought he was going to lunge at me. I rested a hand on my holster.

“I beg you,” Sana said to Leslie, who nodded in sympathy, affirming a naive belief in the solidarity of gender, rather than class or nation.

Then Leslie declared, “I’ll get it.”

“No, you won’t. You’d never make it. You were out there, you know what it’s like, and now it’s night and the storm’s even worse. You’d never find your way there and back. None of us would.”

It was a stalemate, and we were all silent for a moment. Then Sana went to the back of the room and withdrew something from one of the cartons. I knew what it was. She did not look at me as she returned, her hands clutched to her chest, her steps measured, to the time kept by some inaudible nuptial march: my bride.

I backed away, horrified. The child’s soul, taken by baptism, was not enough?

In her hands were two soiled notes, ten dollars apiece.

“Here, she said. “It’s all we have.”

I raised my hands, opened them flat, and shook them at her, and further retreated so that my back was against the wall. Still she advanced, trembling, intent on touching me with the filthy money. My mouth was open but I could not at first speak, as if with all my polyglot skills I had forgotten the rudiments of manufacturing human speech. Then, in English, I yelled, “No, you don’t understand!”

“Save my child,” she begged, waving the hard currency about as if she wanted to beat me with it.

“No,” I cried again, but I grabbed my army raincoat, threw it on my shoulders, shoved my feet into my boots, and, without even lacing them or saying anything more, I flung open the door and ran out into the storm.

This is what happens: the tropical summer sun heats the land and the ocean unequally, the sea absorbing a far greater quantity of solar radiation. The land gives up the heat it cannot absorb to the atmosphere above it, which then expands and rises, creating a draft of dense ocean air. This parcel of air carries the ocean’s evaporated moisture and the latent heat absorbed from the sun. As it moves inland, the ocean air rises and the water vapor condenses into raindrops. The precipitation releases the latent heat, further buoying the column and further intensifying the draft. A monsoon is thus a huge machine that transforms solar energy into potential energy and then, with dramatic effect, converts the potential energy into the kinetic energy of wind and rain. For this explanation I am indebted to Peter J. Webster, writing in the August 1981 issue of
Scientific American
(which is dedicated to forging an entire nation of them!).

Or, conversely: one summer, when the earth and man were young and not yet in their current forms, when the number of things that were possible was greater than the number of things that were not, Pen the hunter left his beautiful wife, Tal, in order to hunt the jungle for the most succulent deer and young boar. His quiver stocked with a thousand arrows so sharp he could not see their points, he marched deep into the jungle, unafraid and arrogant, deeper than any man should go. But soon he was ignoring the fine game virtually underfoot, for he had heard the song of the Wild Princess, promising him everything he had ever wanted
or had thought he wanted. He followed it to the near bank of the one river and found her there, combing her tresses, and he was enchanted. She took him to her bed, which was made entirely of the light reflected off the river on the day of the summer solstice, while Menasha, the tiger-king, watched from his celestial lair. Pen’s ecstatic moans, transported into the winds by the wings of a thousand sparrows, reached the ears of Tal, who burst from her home weeping and begged the jungle to return her faithless husband. As she stood unprotected in the clearing in front of her house, Menasha appeared, took the woman between her jaws, and in one leap carried her to his empire of the heavens, where he placed her as a treasured prize in his vault, whose walls are a thousand bricks high and a thousand bricks deep. Despite Menasha’s charm and, quite frankly, his virility, Tal still wishes to be with her husband and each summer cries for him, and on behalf of the suffering of all the world’s women. Her tears flow so heavily they seep through the masonry, and her wails stir both the sky and the earth. For the above account I make grateful acknowledgement to Lester R. Fernald, author of
Myths and Legends of the Eastern Peoples,
Vol. II (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1937).

Less than thirty running paces from the peasants’ hovel, I had tripped over my sodden army coat. As I staggered to my feet, the entire sky heavy on my back, my clothes remained rooted to the earth. I stood there for a while, my body rocked one way and then another in the torrent, and I wondered if I would really make it to the jeep or if I would hear Leslie if she called into the
night for me to return. Without thinking, I shrugged off the coat, allowing it to be claimed by the bubbling soil, which was as pungent as blood.

The loss of weight was invigorating. I peeled off my boots and my muddy socks. I unbuckled my holster and casually dropped it, an act for which I could have been court-martialed. Undressing as quickly as any lover, I shucked off my uniform trousers, my shirt, and my Jockey briefs, and with each garment thrown into the mud, I felt myself stronger, and even buoyant. I held the keys to the jeep in my right hand. I was completely naked, but unilluminated, so that I could not see my body. For a moment, before I again engaged the storm, I felt as if I had no body at all.

I slogged my way down the road. My body was cut by wind-whipped bushes and branches, but the storm numbed the pain, and the blood ran freely and unobtrusively into the graves of my ancestors. I repeated to myself, in three languages, the injunction to keep moving. I could not see, but my feet communicated with the edge of the road, and I trusted my heading.

The jungle was as dark as the bottom of the ocean, but no darker. Indefinite forms swam around me: man-eating animals, zombies, and the spirits of the dead or even worse; or common things, I told myself, like what scared you in a strange bedroom in the middle of the night.

Down the road, the jeep was only another of the jungle’s black ghosts. From the moment I first thought I saw it, a while passed before I actually reached it, as if it were slowly rolling away or as if the deluge were
diluting the space between us. The mud here was thick and each time I pulled a foot out of it there was a noise like a vaginal gasp on the upstroke. I almost fell when I reached the vehicle, but then I steadied myself and clinked the keys against it—metal against metal, the sound of civilization—discovering that it was indeed real.

Inside the jeep I opened my suitcase, which was part of the Samsonite luggage set that was our wedding gift from Leslie’s grandparents. Like a thief, I frantically dug through my things: a dress uniform, polo shirts, a pair of jeans, tennis sneakers, and a two-week-old copy of the Asian
Wall Street Journal.
At the bottom of my suitcase I found my shaving kit, and inside it, next to the aerosol can of mentholated shaving cream, I found the Bufferin. The lather is the greater miracle: it heats itself after being dispensed from the can.

I tried to start the engine. It made no sound that could be heard above the storm. None of its dashboard indicators stirred. If it turned over I would have made it to the capital by dawn. The engine, however, was quite dead.

 

My feet slipped as I left the jeep. The tiny plastic container flew from my hands into the mud.

I found it, but only after several panicked minutes on my hands and knees, sifting the soil. The bottle was caked with dirt, yet its contents were clean. I could see through the mud the ball of brilliant white cotton that—in defiance of the instructions printed on the side of the container in six languages, none of them mine—I had left in the bottle as a token of the pills’ purity and potency.

My return was directly against the direction of the storm. It no longer struck me as wind and rain, but as a single brutal force. I attempted to walk sideways to cut my exposure, but each time I opened my body to the storm, it found its advantage and whipped me around savagely. Only a hundred meters or so from the peasants’ home, I slipped, fell hard, and slammed my head against a rock. My ankle turned. For about three seconds, the earth was dry and lit. “Mama,” I cried.

I lay in the mud, trying to spin myself away from the pain. Perhaps it was not as bad as I now recall; after all, it was only a bump on the head and a twisted ankle. Nevertheless, I had been defeated, and defeated not only in the efforts of that night. Naked and helpless in the land of my birth, I had made no progress at all. I was a prisoner of the jungle, and whatever spirits held dominion over it.

“Notre Père qui es aux Cieux,”
I began, praying to the power of the Jesuits who had run the school I had attended outside Geneva. I remembered crisp linen and a lay teacher’s aftershave. But I knew that if there was a God in heaven, even he would be unable to see through the storm, so I also prayed to Menasha, who might be right there in the bushes, behind a tree, swaying from a branch above me or perhaps in a low-lying fold in the clouds.

Menasha is neither good nor bad; he is, however, capricious and powerful. It pays to court him and, if necessary, to exhort, provoke, intimidate, charm, bribe, and beg him. Wear him down and soften him up. Appeal to his good side. Appeal to his bad side. Flatter, demand,
play on his sympathies. Don’t hope for what you want, and then maybe you’ll get it, but not if this thought has already occurred to you. Unexpect the expected.

After a while I tried to stand, but under the force of the storm, it was much easier to walk in a crouch or even crawl. And so I crawled, the Bufferin in my left hand, the keys to the jeep cutting into the palm of my right. I kept my head down and slowly made my way.

According to native belief (Fernald,
ibid.),
man had once walked on all fours and had lived a happy life that way in harmony with the other inhabitants of the jungle. On his knees, he could see the world much clearer than he does now. He was glad to feed on the grapes that fell from the vines in the Wild Princess’s arbor. The grapes still on the vines were for the princess only, but the jungle animals were welcome to whatever lay on the ground. So much fell that no animal was ever hungry, or even knew what hunger was, but man grew bored with this easy life and was irritated that he should be treated in the same way as the other animals. He wanted the grapes on the vine—if only because the other animals could not have them. When no one was looking, he nibbled at the vines near the ground and, after getting away with that, he reached for the grapes a little above his head. In truth, these grapes tasted no better than the ones that had fallen, and some were sour because they had not been allowed to ripen, but man was thrilled to do what was forbidden. He mistakenly believed that the grapes directly off the vine had given him special powers of perception and immunity to retribution. These beliefs made him reckless, and one day, in
full view of the world, he reached the top of the arbor and attempted to pull down a thousand bunches of a thousand grapes each, more than he could possibly eat. As he stretched, the Wild Princess furiously struck him with a sapling, paralyzing his body in that position, so from that day on he would be forced to stand on two feet, never sure of his balance. Then with the sapling she tickled his unprotected stomach, so from that day on he would always be hungry.