by M. D. Massey
One of the soldiers knocked on the wall next to the door. “Hello! Anyone home?”
An old woman pulled the curtain aside. Peeking into the waning daylight, she squinted.
The soldier wasted no time. “Hello, ma’am. We’re looking for the mother of Akachi Anikulapo-Kuti.”
The woman reacted as though seeing a ghost. She tried to close the curtain on the soldier, but she had no door to protect herself, just a flimsy wisp of illusion. From inside, we could hear her shouting, “No! No! No!”
The soldier lobbed a grenade of hope her way. “Akachi isn’t dead, if that’s what you’re concerned about. He’s doing well, actually.”
The curtain opened. A withered old man stepped outside. His face was as wrinkled as prunes, his hair white and wiry, his eyes clouded with cataracts. Looking up at the soldier, he said, “My wife—Akachi’s grandmother—can’t deal with this anymore. Akachi’s mother—our daughter—has Ebola. She developed symptoms a few days ago: fever and muscle pain. Her husband and his brother have taken her to the church. Ebola is a curse, a punishment for our sins. We intend to pray until God hears us.”
The soldier asked the old man for directions to the church.
Agitated, Akachi’s grandfather waved his hand toward the center of the slum, pointing toward the open high-rise that climbed like a jumble of children’s blocks into the air above the shacks.
We hurried to the church. We knew we should be in protective gear. Everyone grabbed paper masks and latex gloves from their pockets and put them on. That’s all we had with us.
We passed the kids splashing around in puddles. We waved to them, but ignored their requests for more candy.
Two doors down from the high-rise, we found a makeshift church. We could only tell it was a church by the wooden Cross nailed into the front wall of it, sticking up above the roof. There was no door. Inside, there was a small altar, a few pews, tables filled with burning candles. My God, such a fire hazard to the entire slum. A procession of people circled round and round the rows of pews, chanting. A priest held a limp woman in his arms, praying over her and pouring water onto her forehead. Water dripped from her Ebola-fevered forehead onto his bare hands and arms.
We had seen enough. It was Dante’s Inferno, The Divine Comedy. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” This slum was cursed. Not by God or by Satan, but by poverty and ignorance and the most damned of luck to be living near bats and monkeys infected with the horror of hemorrhagic disease.
As we walked back to the armored vehicle, the sun dropped slowly from the sky, lighting the horizon with fiery clouds of red and orange and gold, as though God had tossed His plaything upon a funeral pyre. The ball was clearly in our court.
Back at camp, Dr. Steele called it a night. She said she’d speak with the World Health Organization and the CDC about conditions inside the slum, but there was nothing more for us to do tonight. We were the day shift and she’d see us tomorrow. She warned us to use the Disinfecting Station before doing anything else.
The next morning, we found out the slum we had visited was now quarantined by the local government. Residents would no longer be allowed to leave. Liberia’s armed forces had been ordered to shoot on sight anyone attempting to leave the quarantined area.
I needed a moment. We had been told the news at breakfast. I went back to my residence hall, sat down on my bed and wept. Akachi’s family had been condemned. Even if the little boy survived the disease ravaging his body, he would have no one to return home to. The slum world he knew had been given a death sentence in order to save the rest of the world.
Later in the day as I cared for Akachi, I felt a sadness welling up in me unlike any I had ever known. I and the other medical staff were trying to make him better, with the odds of his survival unlikely. But if he did make it, then what? Where would he be sent? Would he end up with anyone who would love him and offer him the remnants of a childhood or would he be sent as a servant or slave to work an adult job, as so many poor kids around the world were forced to do?
When Dr. Steele walked over to Akachi’s bedside, he woke up and cried again about wanting his Mama. This time, he wailed about the monsters in yellow duck suits. The minds of children are marvelous. We had become large humanoid ducks to him, some kind of nightmarish cartoon characters. I told him that behind our suits, we were just doctors and nurses. “Akachi, you know how sick you feel? We’re just keeping the germs from reaching us, so that we can make you better.”
Akachi wailed even louder. I did not seem to have a way with kids, and I regretted that.
Determined to help Akachi feel less afraid of me, I came back onto my next shift with a dozen stickers of kids’ cartoon animals stuck onto my protective suit with temporary glue approved by Dr. Steele. That actually made Akachi laugh! But then he became so exhausted by the excitement, he collapsed onto his pillow and fell into a deep sleep.
I sat by Akachi’s bedside, holding his tiny hand in my large turquoise glove. I could see his small bones outlined against his thin, taut skin.
As I sat there, the machines attached to the little boy began to beep and chirp. All the bells and whistles signifying rapid decline went off. Akachi’s breathing became shallow and rapid. Blood leaked from his nose.
I hopped up to make room for Dr. Steele to maneuver next to the bedside.
Akachi’s heart monitor flatlined. I saw the straight line and heard the shrill announcement that his heart had stopped beating.
Dr. Steele asked me to get something-or-other. I forget what, an extra blanket or something. As I walked away to get it, I heard her pronounce: “Time of Death…”
Then she turned around and told me I was dismissed for the day.
Covered in sweat and dizzy, I followed her suggestion. I left the treatment center and went directly to the Disinfecting Station.
Two hours later, I couldn’t take it. I returned to the section of the treatment center where Akachi’s bed had been. I’m not sure what drove me there. I guess I wanted to see the empty bed for myself or find out if another patient had been assigned to it, to help my psyche let this innocent child go. I blamed myself. What if I hadn’t made him laugh? What if he had needed the extra energy to fight off the virus? I know that was silly, but I had leapt into the bargaining stage of grief. Maybe if I made enough bargains inside my mind, God would bring Akachi back. I don’t know. It wasn’t rational.
When I walked back to Akachi’s curtained area, I almost screamed behind my face shield. He was still there, lying flat on his stomach on the mattress, which seemed odd. Normally, an Ebola patient would be removed from a hospital bed and cremated as soon after death as possible. I mean, at least in this camp and every reputable medical facility designed specifically to deal with serious, contagious diseases such as Ebola.
In the slum that Akachi came from, bodies of dead Ebola victims were often left wherever they had succumbed to the disease, or were dragged into the street and deposited there out of a realistic fear that the family would be quarantined by the government if they found out they had been exposed to Ebola or in the mistaken belief that moving bodies out of homes into the street somehow helped prevent transmission of the disease. In reality, Ebola-infected bodies are most contagious immediately after death and placing them in a public area is disastrous.
Post-apocalyptic science-fiction-sounding events were happening in Liberia on a regular basis. At one point, the government took matters into their own hands and buried the bodies. However, they made the graves too shallow. Dogs dug up the bodies and were seen eating them. Now, dogs don’t develop Ebola symptoms, so no one even knows if they’re carrying the disease; but they can pass it on to humans by licking or biting us. That sounds like the stuff of nightmares, horror, and science fiction; but in much of Liberia, it’s reality.
In our camp and in all the other modern medical facilities where Ebola patients are treated, however, the deceased are immediately removed from the beds where they passed away. They are quickly crema
ted or sprayed down with disinfectant and buried. So it was an anomaly that Akachi was still in his hospital bed hours after he had died.
I swallowed my scream down into my heart and studied the little boy. His bowels had let loose, with their telltale sign: the tarry black-jelly stool of Ebola. Blood had saturated the middle of Akachi’s pillow, surrounding his head like a macabre halo, most likely having leaked from several orifices in his head, including his eyes, as Ebola robbed him of his blood-clotting ability. The sickening sour stench of vomit and blood hung in the air inside the building.
Struggling to hold back tears until I was safely outside and freed from my face shield, I was suddenly distracted by a commotion a few partitions down from Akachi’s. Dr. Steele was telling a male nurse that Akachi wasn’t dead. She reprimanded the flustered nurse for recording a Date and Time of Death for him.
The nurse replied, politely but firmly, “Akachi was clearly dead. He flatlined. We didn’t resuscitate him.”
Dr. Steele replied, “We didn’t need to resuscitate him. He came around on his own.”
Confused, I touched Akachi’s back gently with my turquoise-gloved hand. There was no movement of breath there. He had definitely stopped breathing. And he had been disconnected from his intravenous drips. Blood leaked onto his bed from the holes where the needles had punctured his skin.
Akachi was indeed clearly dead.
The nurse persisted, “But you called Time of Death. I only recorded the Date and Time of Death that were called.”
Dr. Steele replied, “You have a lot to learn, Nurse.” She said the word Nurse as though spitting fecal matter from her mouth. Then she added, “You’re suspended from work for one week. Report back to me then, not a moment earlier.”
The nurse blurted out, “But…” Dr. Steele ignored him and turned away. Looking down at the floor, she headed toward Akachi’s area. I stealthily moved into a partition right next to his. There, a pregnant woman lay sound asleep on her back, her package of human baby rising and falling beneath her hospital gown as she breathed in the sour air.
I heard the footsteps of another worker following Dr. Steele into Akachi’s room. Looking through the thick plastic curtain, I discovered that it was a male CDC worker. Shortly after that, two more CDC workers entered.
I moved myself closer to the plastic sheet dividing the expectant woman’s room from Akachi’s. I listened as hard as I could. Some words were muffled due to my having to listen through protective headgear and the health workers talking through their face shields, but some of their conversation came through loud and clear. The word vaccine certainly did.
Dr. Steele asked the first worker, “So, you have the vaccine?”
The answer: “Yes.”
Dr. Steele: “How many doses?”
CDC worker: “Fifty doses right now. More are on their way.”
Dr. Steele: “OK. Give the first dose to this boy. How many doses will he need to complete your experimental trial?”
CDC worker: “Three. That should do it.”
Dr. Steele: “OK. Give him the first dose here. Then let’s move him on over to the research facility.”
My shift ended. Due back that night, I knew what I had to do. I planned to dig out Akachi’s medical files and scan them. I also planned to figure out which research facility he was being moved to.
Akachi was clearly dead.
I tried to make sense of what I had overheard. In a desperate attempt to save patients and beat Ebola before it became a worldwide pandemic, researchers had been developing serums, including serum developed from the blood of Ebola patients. Serum from a patient had recently saved the life of a missionary health aide, and that story had gone viral all over world news. But what I had overheard still didn’t make any sense. Serum is developed from patients who had survived Ebola, the theory being that their blood is rich in antibodies that had successfully fought the disease. The blood of a person killed by Ebola, however, would be more laden with disease than antibodies.
And Akachi was clearly dead.
I left Building 5. I disinfected myself in our sister building, Disinfecting Station 5.
I planned to rest and meditate before my evening shift. I went back to my residence building, lay down on my bed and fell fast asleep. I dreamt about Akachi in the exact same position I had found him a short time earlier: the tiny body robbed of its sweet soul, silenced forever from begging for the comfort of his Mama’s arms, his insides liquefied and leaking onto his bed. In my dream, he rose from the dead, morphing slowly into a giant yellow duck. Lumbering like Godzilla, he wandered into the slum where he lived, crushing houses and children playing in puddles as he went. Finally, he reached the church where he found his mother floating in the air. She levitated slightly above the priest’s fingertips as he reached desperately for her in the processional march among the fire-hazard candles. Suddenly, Akachi shrank down into his child form, a disastrous version of his former self: sheets of skin peeling from his bleeding body.
I woke up, screaming bloody murder and covered in sweat. Thank God, no one was around. No one barged into our residence building to save me.
I looked over at the alarm clock and gasped. I had only ten minutes to get to work on time. Shit! Shit! Shit!
I knew it wouldn’t be safe for me to start work with a muddled, groggy head. Rushing through getting into protective gear also wasn’t a great option. I decided to take a safe amount of time and to suffer the consequences with Dr. Steele.
Finally, at 9:30 PM, I was dressed in my duck suit and heading on over to Building 5. As I reached a large tree in front of our Safety Station, the front door to Building 5 opened. Four medical personnel in yellow protective suits clutching the handles of a stretcher with their turquoise gloves exited through the door. I wondered who they were moving. The body under a white sheet didn’t appear to be dead, as the head wasn’t covered. Had someone actually recovered from Ebola? Dead bodies were usually carried out the back door.
The door remained open. Dr. Steele came out of the building. She waved to someone up the road in the opposite direction from the camp’s front entrance.
I ducked behind the wide trunk of the tree next to me. As I watched, a team of three doctors from the CDC and two doctors from the World Health Organization approached the stretcher. I recognized all of them from ongoing training sessions all medical staff were required to attend. They asked Dr. Steele a number of questions, including: “Has the patient received the first dose of vaccine?” To which Dr. Steele replied, “Yes. That’s been done.”
My blood pounded so loudly in my ears, I had difficulty hearing. It was as though the protective headgear had suddenly stuffed the noise of my pumping blood closer against my eardrums, muffling the outside world. My heart knocked against my chest.
The first dose. Exactly what Akachi had been given.
The group stood silently in front of Building 5, as though waiting for something. One of the CDC workers spoke into a cell phone. Moments later, three sets of headlights appeared off in the distance, farther up the road but in the same direction from where the CDC and WHO doctors had arrived.
From out of the darkness, the vehicles emerged into the lighted area around Building 5. One turned out to be a camp ambulance. The other: an armored military vehicle. The third: a camp van. Medical personnel exited the ambulance. Soldiers carrying automatic weapons exited the armored vehicle. Both groups surrounded the staff carrying the stretcher. The driver of the van just waited.
For a brief moment between the time the stretcher was loaded into the ambulance and the ambulance doors were closed, I saw the patient sit up on the stretcher, rub his eyes and begin to cry. He looked up at an ambulance worker masked in protective gear and pleaded, “Mama! Where is my Mama?”
Dr. Steele turned to the team of CDC and WHO workers and commented, “Well, at least he’ll be seeing his Mama soon!”
A couple of workers laughed. One of them offered a thumbs-up sign.
Akachi. And h
is mother? Where were they taking him?
I couldn’t follow. I didn’t have a car. I couldn’t hop onto a bicycle or run or even walk at a fast pace in my yellow suit.
I became even more determined to study Akachi’s medical files.
After the medical group left, including Dr. Steele, I counted to 180 seconds. Three-minute interval. Then I entered Building 5 as though simply late for work. I apologized profusely to the intern on duty, babbling about how I had accidentally fallen asleep without setting my alarm, how exhausted I had been, etc., etc. Then I asked for instructions on my duties that night.
I was told to change a few intravenous drips. That’s it.
After my shift ended and I had gotten disinfected, I sneaked into the records room attached to Building 5. It had its own entrance, as it was easier for staff to look through records without those damn protective gloves on. At the end of each day, all records were scanned inside the treatment room of Building 5 and uploaded into computers in the separate records room.
I sat down in front of one of the computers. I ran a search for all records on Akachi Anikulapo-Kuti. I found lots of information. His family background, the slum where he came from, his condition, his treatment, his progress. I also found a sheet signed by Dr. Steele giving instructions for Akachi to be moved to a facility called The Vaccine Laboratory.
I thought about that for a moment. I had never heard of The Vaccine Laboratory. Surely, if it was on the grounds of our camp, I would have heard of it? And yet the ambulance and all its accompanying vehicles had headed not in the direction of the camp’s massively fortified gates, but deeper into the camp’s grounds.
I typed in a search for: The Vaccine Laboratory. Nothing popped up. I tried: The Vaccine Laboratory Liberia. Nothing. I tried: The Vaccine Laboratory Africa. I tried: The Vaccine Laboratory CDC WHO. I started typing: The Vaccine La…
At that moment, I experienced a piercingly sharp pain in my neck. It radiated upward, slamming my head with crushing migraine. As my vision blurred, I tried to analyze the pain. The prick felt as thin as a needle, but as traumatic as having a silver stake hammered into my neck.
