Ezembe

by Jeffrey L. Morris

  There had been one, and only one, liaison with James’ father.

  On that day, Karen’s ward had maintained a quiet buzz of activity through the early morning hours. The nurses glided silently on the thick rubber soles of their white shoes. Only the occasional muffled clack of an instrument dropping into a kidney pan cut through the constant wheezing and sneezing. An infection was running through her ward, some kind of nasty virus, and taking samples from patients for tests, checking their vitals, and so on had worn her right out.

  “We should be testing the clods coming in here, bringing this stuff off the streets,” Karen said to the assisting nurse. The nurse looked even worse than Karen felt, though her duty was just a standard twelve-hour shift. The nurse had picked up the bug as well.

  Some of the patients were in bad shape. One old dear was streaming with flu. Karen smiled as she patted the woman’s shoulder. “There, there, dear, you’ll be fine.” This localized epidemic had sprung up so quickly and so many had caught it, there was little point in isolating any of them. In any case, there wasn’t room anywhere else. So her ward had become a de facto isolation area.

  Karen shuffled down the hallway, the wheezing rattling in her aching head, and slung herself into the swivel chair at the doctors’ station. Tick, tick, she filled out the rounds log, and leaned back to relax and slough off some of the accumulating fatigue. There was no faster way to pick up a bug than leaving a door open through exhaustion. An exploratory sniff shifted a bit of goop in her left sinus. She grimaced—she was probably there already.

  The night dragged, and the cups of coffee and periodic rounds were the only relief on offer. Karen’s body screamed for rest. Whenever she sat, her head drooped. Once she nearly fell out of her chair as her head tipped her center of gravity back too far. She stood, flustered, and pounded the well-worn route to the coffee machine.

  Then came a diversion—Alan “Rich” Richardson. Rich was also serving his time as an intern, though he was well ahead of Karen. He too had been a late starter in med school, but his path to the door of that institution had been very different from hers. While she had immersed herself in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Rich had qualified as a paramedic, then as a nurse. At the age of twenty-four, his gift for medicine and thirst for adventure had gotten him shanghaied as an aide for Médecins Sans Frontières.

  Rich had just finished his own shift, and was passing Karen’s ward on his way to clock out. She called to him, “Hey! Buy you a cup of coffee?” The machine squirted her own order obscenely into a paper cup.

  “Sure! Thanks. Standard Frankie.” Meaning white, two sugars, the way most staff took their coffee whether they liked it or not. Karen hit the button, and the insipid liquid hissed into the cup.

  Rich raised his drink high. “Santé! Your health,” he said.

  They chatted—the usual intern gripes and groans: insane scheduling, staff shortages, what bastards some of the residents could be, and so on. Karen stole glances at the strong face. Her eye gleamed involuntarily. She thought she caught him flirting back once or twice, but she wasn’t going to kid herself. Rich was the biggest heartthrob in the hospital, and most of the nurses were angling for him. He steered well clear of any such entanglements, though.

  Karen listened to him as attentively as her flu-ey state allowed. The conversation had wandered, and Rich was comparing his current duties to the hell he had experienced in Africa with the volunteers. And he was easy to listen to. Eight years earlier, in 1971, when MSF began operations, Rich had been involved in one of the organization’s very first forays into war-ravaged Biafra. His astonishing stories made Karen’s little gripes seem tiny and trifling.

  “We saw diseases there we had no names for—Livingstone got it right when he referred to Africa as ‘the open sore of the world’. And the violence, it was beyond belief, not that we have managed much better in the West, but it’s so raw in Africa.” This was a world Karen had only seen on TV.

  Rich told her about the Ju-Ju men, West African witches. “They resented us treading on their turf, and they’d try to discredit us, or worse. A few of our people died from poisoning after the Ju-Ju docs put a ‘curse’ on them. One way to protect your patch, I guess.” He shrugged.

  Rich’s stories weren’t self-serving. He wasn’t bragging, or using them as some sort of badge of honor. These were stories that needed to be heard, and he told them well. The wars, the poverty, the misery—it was more intimate, it cut closer to the bone than seeing it on the six o’clock news.

  Fascinated though she was, Karen’s interest faded about then. She gazed at that beautiful face, and what a marvelous face it was: strong, rugged, and more than that, noble. And Rich smelled absolutely divine. She mentally slapped her own wrist for being sucked into such a schoolgirl longing.

  However, while Rich’s face was certainly handsome, it was beginning to appear just a little grotesque. His head grew larger in proportion to his body, as did his hands. Behind the swelling head, the hallway stretched and folded like a hall of mirrors. The fluorescent tubes shimmered, and the world began to rotate on some invisible axis. Smiling and fully conscious, Karen fell face first onto the counter. She lay there for less than a second, then sprang back up, as if the counter were made of rubber. Hands up, palms out, she blathered, “I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m just tired is all.”

  Rich’s appendages returned to normal dimensions. “Chills?”

  “Well, yeah, I...”

  “Here, let me take your temperature.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “No way. You’ve got this damned thing that’s running around your ward, don’t you?”

  “Nah! Just tired. Well, maybe, but I’m fine. Really. Listen, I am sooo sorry about that.” Karen rambled and blathered some more, which only served to increase her embarrassment.

  “You are going to go home and go to bed, no argument,” Rich told her firmly. “You’re not fit for anything here.”

  “Should—can’t.” Karen sighed. “I’m only a little over halfway through my shift and I can still walk, so...” She trailed off with a shrug. They both knew the only excuse for an intern vacating a shift was his or her own death, and even that was considered weak.

  Rich offered, “Look, I’m done and I’ve got nowhere to go. I can mind the store for you while you catch forty winks, okay?”

  He was right. Karen thanked him, and gratefully slunk to her waiting cot in a nearby storeroom. Sweeping her hand across the light switch as she flopped, she hit the mattress and was asleep instantly.

  Karen dreamed. A jungle of multi-colored fingers reached out from a fleshy landscape. They made rude slurping noises. Parades of fluorescent tubes, knotted together in starry bundles, danced through her skull. It was an unsettling phantasm. Ironically, a few years earlier, she’d ingested all manner of substances in order to invoke images very like these.

  After sleeping for what seemed like weeks, Karen was woken by a gentle knocking at the door. It opened, and Rich squeezed his face through the crack and whispered, “Are you alive in there?” She stirred, and he opened the door wider. Pulsating fluorescent light splintered past him onto the small cot where she lay. Karen squinted. The light behind him outlined his shape. His shoulders were broad and his waist narrow, as if he were mathematically constructed to push all the correct female buttons. He was, at that moment, perfect—like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. Any coyness present in her evaporated. She propped herself up on her elbow, her hair stuck to her face, her eyes bleary. Karen was an attractive girl, but a fever and an hour of quasi-sleep do not leave many looking their best. She could not have cared less.

  “Feeling any better now?” Rich asked lightly.

  “Mmmmm. Much, thanks.” Karen stretched and lay back, her arms over her head. Rich moved towards her, cautiously. A spark had formed between them, and grew into a brilliant arc as he sat down next to her. He leaned in and touched her shoulders, then kissed her, wordlessly. Karen’s muscles went slack. A few items of clot
hing were hastily discarded, and others pushed out of the way as they confidently caressed. This was no backseat fumble, no dirty little grope in a closet. It was purposeful, and every move made was done as if it had been practiced a thousand times.

  Karen pushed Rich to the cot and straddled him. Surrounded by the columns of empty pill bottles and bedpans, she began to grind. Her gaze locked with his, and she did not, would not, release it. To an outsider it would have looked ridiculous, but in spite of lumberjack shirts, lab coats, and medical equipment in place of lingerie and candlelight, there was solid, unapologetic biology at work, and it was the most beautiful thing Karen had ever experienced.

  The stacks of plastic pill vials took on the appearance of a great translucent pipe organ, and Karen thought she could hear the strains of a Bach fugue, which then morphed into In-a-gadda-da-vida honey, don’cha know that I luau-uhv yoohoo? She grunted with the beat as the lyrics rattled through her head. She leaned down and kissed Rich, her stride unbroken. It was ridiculous, and she didn’t care. Neither of them cared. There was an energy coursing from within Rich that filled her, and she let it flow back into him. Words punched at the inside of her chest, mad words, and she roared and swore things she didn’t even know she had within her. The act became more purposeful than pleasurable as it progressed, and she felt as if she were floating above him as the end drew near.

  Karen’s eyes opened wide as if she’d been wounded. A lifetime ran through her, a universe. She fell on Rich’s chest and began to cry. Her tears ran down his neck. The droplets connected and became a stream. When the sobs subsided, she pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked into his eyes. There was something more than the two of them in that room.

  The pair lay entwined for as long as they dared, and finally she spoke, apologizing for the waterworks, but he waved it off, and simply stroked her hair. There was no need to say anything.

  After a time, a little guilty feeling sneaked up on her. Back in the world, the hospital waited. They tidied themselves, sorting the bits of clothing as they found them.

  As Rich tucked in his shirt, Karen noticed a long, jagged scar on his belly.

  “That is a hell of an appendectomy scar you have there.”

  “Oh, that, uh, no. Not an operation. Um, not a big deal, really.” Rich was reluctant, but amended, “Well, it was at the time, but I survived anyhow.”

  “Well, go on, tell me!”

  “When I was in Biafra, my unit was stopped on the road to Enugu by a band of soldiers or robbers—we never found out which. They’d blocked the road with a string of old truck tires on the far side of a bridge, and trapped all of us in our vehicles. They grabbed everything we had, and then, when they were done, shot or stabbed everyone in our party as well as anyone else who happened to be there.”

  “God, that’s awful! You were lucky to survive!”

  “It was pretty grim. Pretty standard practice in that area, unfortunately.”

  Karen grimaced. It was hard for her to believe there were things like that in the world.

  “I was run clean through with a machete.” Rich pulled up his shirt in the back and showed the exit wound. “I’d almost completely bled out when they found me. A local nurse saved me and patched me up.” Raising his eyebrows, he added, “Happens a lot over there.”

  “What a nasty-sounding place! Good thing you got all that out of your system.”

  “Oh, I’ll be going back when I’m finished here.”

  “But why? Are you insane?”

  “Somebody has to do it. Africa, well.” Rich shook his head and snorted, then smiled. “It’s a hotbed of disease and suffering. An open sore.”

  “But there’s plenty of that everywhere. All around us. Why not start in your own back yard?”

  Rich stood and slipped on his shoes. “It’s a tiny world, Karen. Everywhere is our back yard.” He grinned broadly. “Besides, I’m kinda hooked on the place now.”

  ~* * *~

  After that single encounter, the pair carried on a politely flirtatious relationship, but never slept together again—not even a kiss. There was something final in that one night, but no ill feeling between them, no disappointment. The thing that had brought them together had run its course in those few moments.

  Rich finished his internship four months later. The day he left, the two of them had breakfast together in the staff canteen, and then said their awkward good-byes. Surprisingly for a doctor, but perhaps not so surprisingly for a man, he failed to notice that Karen’s midriff was not as slender as it had once been.

  Seven

  Of all the tools James had developed in his struggle with this thing, he’d found painting the most effective. It made the bad things go away, almost magically. And his product wasn’t bad at all.

  So he called his agent.

  “Hey, man, how are you?” Gabby said. “Heard you did a cha-cha with a bus stop last week.”

  “Yeah, was pretty nasty. But I’m, eh, fine now.”

  “Glad to hear it, sunshine! Watch out for yourself, huh? I know your stuff would skyrocket if you broke your neck, but I’d really miss you.”

  “Hilarious. And if you want a job as my mother, you’ve got stiff competition from the original. So what’s up?”

  “Just been waiting for you to call, babes.”

  “Well, I’m calling.”

  “Heh-eh. Well, I got a show on the twenty-second—multiple artists. I could do with a few of yours if you got anything interesting. If you want, that is.”

  “Sure I want, but sheesh, I’m not going to get much done in ten days. I could rummage through the pile and see if I can find a few I wouldn’t be ashamed of.” James clamped the phone between his ear and shoulder, and idly flipped through a few pieces stacked against the wall.

  “Perfect. You do that, and I’ll see how many spaces the gallery can give us. You can leave a few in reserve, too.”

  “Great. I’ll have a look and call you in a couple of days. I can courier them up to you.”

  “Well, I have to be in Philly next week. We could go for a bite, and I could pick them up afterwards.”

  James shoved the paintings back against the wall. “Thanks, but I need to rest awhile, you know? Doctor’s orders.”

  “Hey, man, I am not talking about a game of squash here! Dinner at someplace snazzy is all. Maybe some nice jazz joint afterwards?”

  “Well, I can make some dinner for you here, and we can go through the paintings together. I’ll make Italian and put some jazz on. How’s that?”

  “Cool for cats, man. I’ll see you Thursday.”

  “Perfect. See ya, Gabs.”

  James knew he couldn’t get away with this forever. If he didn’t get a grip, he might never step outside again. He needed to rebuild his tolerance. He needed to gain control.

  The apartment was relatively peaceful now. Almost everything Maria and her helper had missed had been wiped clean, so nothing was roaring at him. There were a few corners and one or two spots below the floorboards where he could smell things, but it was tolerable. He went to one of those spots: a gap in the floorboards in the hallway. Up till now he’d been hurrying past, but he got down on his hands and knees and sniffed. The stale, sour odor of death filled his nose, and then his brain. The accompanying noise was a tangled cacophony. That feeling, the one he’d had in the hospital, told him to relax, and when he did, the noise settled down a little. He breathed in deeply. It was a dead rodent, probably in the final stages of decomposition. Most anyone could probably smell it if they were close enough. He pinched his nose tight, and stilled his muscles. Other, subtler information began to filter through. A sense of rhythm in that chemical undercurrent began, like a heartbeat, but more complex. Patterns, a series that altered very slightly with each passing cycle, like music. As with the globes he had observed in his dreams, there was something very familiar about it all.

  James spent almost an hour experimenting with his rotting mouse and the kaleidoscope of signals it radiated. He had
no idea what they were. Perhaps they were some sort of chemical or electrical reaction between the bacteria and its host? James, never a stellar biology student, didn’t have a clue.

  These myriad signals bounced off the rim of his skull, producing patterns, as if the different scents were separate musical instruments playing in concert. There was structure, and also rules—he was certain of it, and now James realized this in a very experiential way. Until this point, all this peculiarity of his had ever done was steer him clear of microscopic beasties, but now he was looking straight into another world. He poked a flashlight at the seam in the floor, but still couldn’t determine the source, and not having a hammer with which to pry up the boards, he went in search of other quarry.

  The plastic garbage bags simply held too much information. They’d only end up giving him a headache. There was nothing growing old in the fridge for him to play with, but he could feel a bit of a buzz from underneath it. On hands and knees, his face pressed on the floor, he definitely noticed something radiating from the small gap. An old, straightened coat hanger served to root through the dust bunnies, and it emerged with a few gooey brown bits on its end. The deep clean James had paid for had only gone so far, and he resolved to pull the fridge out and give the area a really good scrub-down later, but for the moment, he was absorbed by the rubbery glob on the end of the wire.

  To continue the musical analogy, one could say the residents of the glob produced a simple tune, as opposed to the big-band effect James had experienced with the mouse. A simple folk song, this one—strong and rhythmic, like a steam engine. Again, there was that feeling of familiarity he couldn’t put his finger on, and this was the most persistently annoying feature of this entire situation. Somehow, he knew he should know what this was all about, but had no idea why.