by C. E. Smith
‘Two years ago,’ she says, ‘there were literally hundreds of groups claiming responsibility for attacks in the capital. Now it is just the Heroes.’
‘How did that happen?’
‘You could say the jihadists had to pool their resources to fight their assorted enemies – warlords, the national army, you name it. Secularists, unionists, foreigners.’
‘Why did the Heroes rise to the top?’
‘Their leader, Mullah Bashir.’
‘Didn’t someone kill that guy?’
She nods. ‘Six months ago, probably a drone attack. It was a political victory for President Djohar, a strike against terrorism, but Bashir was loved by many, so his death served to inspire even greater hatred, especially against the west.’
‘Isn’t it amazing how drones always inspire hatred for Americans, even when those very drones are owned and operated by someone else?’
‘Americans are hated not just for selling drones to the regime, but also for sending missionaries to convert Muslims, for exporting pornography and fast food. For being the great Satan.’
He stares at the ashes in the chair beside him. ‘The group that funded my brother’s clinic, International Medical Outreach, claims he wasn’t here as a missionary but as a health worker.’
‘To say otherwise would endanger those working at his clinic. It is illegal here to preach Christianity. What your brother was doing was akin to espionage. A foreigner doing illegal work under a pretext. Medicine was his cover, so to speak.’
‘What a waste,’ he says.
She shrugs. ‘Do you disapprove of your brother’s proselytism?’
‘You can’t expect to come to a place like this and impose your beliefs on others. It’s certainly not worth dying for.’
‘By law, if a Muslim converts to Christianity, he forfeits all of his property. Missionaries should consider this when they come here with their religion.’
‘I thought there was a new constitution,’ he says. ‘I thought it was approved by western monitors.’
‘Have you read the new constitution?’ She pauses, but he doesn’t think she’s waiting for a reply. ‘The law against apostasy was one of many concessions to conservatives in parliament.’
‘What about the tribal religion?’ he asks. ‘Do the Islamists hate it as much as Christianity?’
‘Samakism,’ she says. ‘There are not many actual practitioners, not enough to have any real influence.’
‘What exactly do they believe?’
‘There was a powerful being,’ she says, ‘a Jinn, who created this island, El-Khandar, by dropping a great jewel into the sea. To protect the islanders, the Jinn sent a demigod, a one-eyed shark named Samakersh. You occasionally see his symbol on doors and buildings.’
She uncaps a pen and on her napkin sketches an eye, a simple oval with a dot near the center, and beneath the eye a jagged line like the edge of a saw. An eye floating over mountains? Not mountains, he realizes, but teeth – the teeth of a shark.
Though she hasn’t yet finished her wine, he gestures for the waiter to bring another round. She has a kind of dark-eyed beauty, but what he finds most alluring is her voice – not just her raspy eloquence or French accent, but the odd formality of her language, her reluctance to use contractions.
‘How do you feel about Djohar’s use of drones?’ she asks.
If Burkett were honest he’d place his opinion on drones somewhere between apathy and disapproval. But what does he really know about it? He imagines soldiers with joysticks, a disturbing overlap of gaming and killing.
‘He has no choice,’ Burkett says. ‘He lacks the manpower to keep his country from falling apart.’
‘There has been an outcry over civilian casualties, particularly from America, where private companies are selling him the drones in the first place. But you are right, what choice does he have? How else can he deal with the unofficial mini-state in the south, people paying tax to a separate Islamic regime?’
‘Unofficial?’ he asks. ‘If I’m not mistaken, the caliphate of South Khandaros has already been recognized by Hamas and the Taliban.’
‘With endorsements like that who can argue?’
‘A far cry from the United Nations,’ he says with an easy laugh.
After a period of silence he says, ‘I think I’m too drunk to talk politics.’
‘And I,’ she says, ‘am perhaps not drunk enough.’
When the bistro closes, they walk through the lobby toward the elevator. He isn’t sure what will happen, how he should go about suggesting she come up to his room. But when the elevator doors close she turns to him and they kiss. He presses her against the wall and runs his hands up and down the sides of her body. They hardly disengage when the elevator arrives at his floor. She clings to him as they approach his room. Though still in public, technically, they seem to have dispensed with whatever decorum they might have observed downstairs.
Now they’re in bed. She lies beneath him and her lips move against his ear, muttering in French what could be either obscenities or endearments, possibly both. When drunk he has a tendency to feel abstracted, distant from himself, which adds to the strangeness of this foreign woman and this foreign place. He feels like he’s in a kind of free fall, the darkness beneath him opening wider and wider as he braces for impact. Afterward he rolls off her and waits for her to speak, but she says nothing, and in only a matter of minutes he hears the nasal rasps of her drunken sleep.
Just past four a. m. he wakes in a panic. He left his brother’s ashes in the bistro. At his table or Véronique’s, he can’t remember which. He races down to the empty lobby, and bangs his fist against the door of the bistro until a uniformed bellhop walks up behind him. The bellhop doesn’t have a key to the bistro. Only after Burkett hands him a twenty-dollar bill does the man call security. It takes half an hour for the guard to arrive and open the door. To his relief, the ashes wait undisturbed in the same chair where he left them.
The clock reads five a. m. when he returns to his room. He goes to the bathroom and undresses and drinks a glass of bourbon in the shower. Afterward he stands in the carpeted room with a towel around his waist. The rising sun casts a bar of light across his bed and the bare legs of the woman lying there.
While she sleeps, he unpacks his computer and checks his email. Two days’ worth of unread messages, at least fifty, wait in his inbox. There is a message from the Georgia Medical Board with his license number in the subject line. He holds his breath, feels his heart accelerate. It’s been less than a week since the hearing. Could the board have already decided his case?
He skims through the letter, pausing on the phrase ‘temporary suspension of your medical license’. After his third drunk-driving charge, the state of Georgia has deemed him unfit for surgical practice. If he undergoes treatment for substance abuse, the status of his license will be reconsidered in six months. The board has been kind enough to provide links to two treatment facilities.
His initial response, after shutting his laptop, is to go to the bathroom for a Xanax and a shot of siddique. He stares at his reflection as if waiting for it to give him some word of encouragement or condemnation. He climbs back into bed and drapes one arm across his eyes, but there is little hope of sleep. With the sun coming up he would need a higher dose to escape consciousness.
So he is now an unlicensed physician. He wonders if this is a decision he can appeal. Should he contact a lawyer? Baptist Hospital has hired him as general surgeon, to begin practice a week from today. His future partners gave him a generous signing bonus, which he now might be obligated to pay back. Perhaps even more generous was their offer to postpone his start date when his brother died.
Will they revoke the job offer? The status of his license should be a private matter. If no one asked, he could theoretically begin operating next week as scheduled. Perhaps he could
find a local treatment program in the evenings. On the other hand, he would face criminal prosecution if it ever came to light that he was operating without a license.
Substance abuse. The words would have shocked his teetotal brother. Burkett, for his part, had always enjoyed the occasional binge, even when they were college wrestlers, but he wasn’t getting drunk on a regular basis till late in his first year of medical school at Emory. By fourth year, he and his classmates were out in the bars every night. During his internship and residency, it wasn’t uncommon for him to show up for rounds still drunk and reeking of smoke.
Owen, whose social life revolved around Bible studies and fellowship meetings, finished at the top of his class at Johns Hopkins and became a chief resident in surgery at Harvard. What a surprise it must have been to his attendings when he turned down a fellowship in pediatric surgery and entered the mission field.
Véronique rises and hurries to the bathroom, surprisingly modest of her nudity. With the shower running she reappears in a terry cloth robe to gather last night’s clothes. He gets up and makes two cups of drip coffee using bottled water from the non-alcoholic minibar. He pulls back the curtains for a view not of the ocean (his room faces in the wrong direction) but of moldering rooftops interspersed with minarets and columns of greasy smoke where people are burning their trash.
Light glints from a metallic disk hovering among the chimneys and antennae as if suspended by a string. Too small for a helicopter and too still for a plane – it could only be a drone. He notes the blur of propellers, a camera like some kind of proboscis. By reflex he shuts the blinds even though the camera points elsewhere.
She emerges fully clothed and turns on the overhead light, and he’s gripped by a sudden awareness of his pasty skin, the hirsute paunch over the waistband of his boxer briefs. It is unclear whether he refrained from dressing out of laziness or a hope of further sex, perhaps some combination. That picture of him and his brother sits on the bedside table, and his younger, stronger self seems to glare in disapproval at what he’s become.
Véronique picks up his wadded pants and flings them across the bed. While he dresses she sits with the bowl of complimentary walnuts left in his room last night.
‘So how long have you been married?’ she asks, no doubt taking his sullen mood for guilt.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m just hung over.’
How many times has he used that excuse in the morning? How many times has she heard it? It would be more truthful, perhaps, to tell her he’s grieving for his brother, but on this subject he remains silent.
She has a flight home in two days. He’d like to see her again, but she has appointments all day and a party tonight at the French embassy. She programs her number into his phone, but doesn’t invite him to the party. Why should she? Perhaps she’ll fit him into her schedule, a tryst between appointments.
‘So when are we getting together?’ he asks when she opens the door.
She glances back at him, a quick smile as she leaves, and asks, ‘How about the next time we’re both in El-Khandar?’
He stares at the door with a lingering smile, half expecting her to return – or hoping she will. Of course she was joking about their next meeting. She’d have no reason to expect him to visit Khandaros, or El-Khandar, ever again. And no doubt the idea would have seemed absurd to him yesterday, even an hour ago, when he still had a medical license and a career waiting for him back in the States. But what’s waiting for him now? His father, his only living family, no longer recognizes him. He still owes fifty thousand dollars for medical school, twenty thousand in back taxes. His debts wouldn’t have been a problem on his salary in private practice, but now he wonders how he’ll make the payments.
He can’t bear to think about money. Debts, investments, salaries, and taxes: such words have little more than a tenuous connection to reality. His inability to grasp financial concepts might be a consequence of growing up in relative wealth. The economics of health care are such that his father, at his prime as a surgeon, earned far more than Burkett ever will.
A message from Nick Lorie appears in his inbox.
We’d love to have you on board. I spoke with IMO about making it worth your while to join us.
International Medical Outreach paid off Owen’s debt from medical school. If they would do the same for Burkett, if they would help with his student loans and back taxes, he could stay and continue his brother’s work. Here he could practice the kind of medicine he envisioned as an undergraduate: helping those in need without worrying about reimbursement rates and lawsuits. And if he found it unsuitable, he could simply leave. He’d be free to come and go at will.
Of course, he can’t ignore the political situation: a tense equilibrium of warlords, jihadists, and government forces. A military comprised of American drones and soldiers ill-equipped to fight the ever more likely civil war against the Islamists in the south. The Republic of Khandaros, ‘the Rock’, has cracked down the middle: ‘A knife broken at the hilt,’ as the saying goes. If the situation takes a turn for the worse, Nick and Beth have their plan of evacuation, the promised helicopter.
For Burkett the threat of violence is nothing new, not after almost seven years at Grady Hospital in Atlanta. During his time there, two physicians on separate occasions were assaulted in the very same parking deck, one killed and the other permanently disabled. He’s sure he could find statistics to prove Grady at least as dangerous as his brother’s clinic.
As he responds to Nick’s email he thinks of another reason to stay, one he’s surprised not to have considered sooner: he wants to see where his brother died. Not that seeing the place would change anything, or even make him feel better – but what if he uncovered some bit of evidence missed by the police? Something perhaps only a brother would notice. After all, he knew the victim better than anyone else. If the roles were reversed, if Burkett were the one who had died, he has no doubt Owen would insist on visiting the scene of the crime.
4
Three days later Burkett and Nick leave the capital at first light, traveling south on a coastal road. Burkett’s passport is stowed in a hidden compartment with a stack of Bibles. When the car takes a hard turn, he feels a slide and a knock under his seat as if the Bibles were crying out to be found. Even if IMO have agreed to the monthly payments on his debt – confirmed in writing just last night – the contraband under his seat makes him question the bargain. After what happened to his brother, why would he consent to ride with translated Bibles? What sort of madness is this?
He and Nick have taken the precaution of wearing turbans and covering their faces with scarves. There is no weapon in the vehicle – Burkett asked – but Nick has military experience, and their driver, Abu, is a hulking presence, well over six feet.
He remembers the official announcement put out by the so-called Heroes. We arrested a Christian missionary with translated Bibles, so we killed him. He’d be interested in knowing the original language of the statement, whether it was composed in English, or later translated by the media. He can’t help but admire the perversity of arrest, the way it casts the murder as an act of law enforcement.
Adding to the risk, yet unknown to Nick, are the ten bottles of siddique he bought from the concierge yesterday, bringing the total in his suitcase to thirteen. With the benzos, he could probably maintain an optimal condition of low-grade drunkenness for about twenty days. If he decides to extend his stay in Mejidi-al-Alam, he doubts he’ll have a problem replenishing his supply. On the other hand, since sobriety must come to him eventually, it might as well happen here.
They pass a crumbling set of buildings, the burnt-out shell of what looks to have been a grand seaside hotel.
‘The Aljannah,’ Nick says. ‘Raided by militants. Hundreds of guests were taken hostage and ultimately killed.’
It is evidence of the event’s magnitude that Burkett remembers it at all. He
was in his residency at the time, so completely immersed in work that outside news had to be particularly grim or sensational to penetrate the walls of his narrow existence. One of the televised moments he recalls with disturbing clarity: a masked gunman and kneeling hostage, a single shot to the back of the head. That image haunted him when he learned of his brother’s decision to move here. And rightfully so, for now when he closes his eyes it is his brother who kneels and waits for the bullet.
Nick asks the driver to slow down. ‘Check it out,’ he says, pointing. ‘The national army’s sorry excuse for special forces crashed a helicopter in the hotel pool.’
Sure enough, the charred tail of a helicopter juts from the rubble like an obscene gesture aimed at a ship in the distance, what looks like an aircraft carrier.
‘Quadri, the Behemoth, wanted to make Khandaros a tourist destination,’ Nick says. ‘He legalized alcohol and gambling in the coastal provinces, so it wasn’t long before the resort became a symbol of decadence and moral corruption. Some say it was the photographs of Quadri’s poolside antics that led to his ousting.’
‘I can’t imagine that guy in a bathing suit.’
Nick smiles. ‘He wasn’t known as “the Behemoth” for his svelte physique.’
They skirt a small bay, where fishermen toss nets from boats. A brightly colored village sits in a depression formed by rocky hills.
‘My home,’ says their driver in heavily accented English. ‘The village where I grew up. Those fishermen could be cousins.’
‘Was your father a fisherman?’ Burkett asks him.
‘All the men of my family have been fishermen,’ Abu says, with a sweep of the hand that implies endless generations. ‘It was a great surprise to everyone when I chose to go to university in the capital.’
‘What did you study?’ asks Burkett.
‘Economics,’ he says. ‘But not for long, unfortunately.’
‘This was in the final years of the king,’ Nick says, ‘when the secret police were cracking down on radical student groups.’
