Somebody's Heart Is Burning (36 page)

The doctor shrugged. He was a middle-aged man with thick glasses, stern and focused.

“Different strains respond to different things. Try this.” He handed me a prescription for a new round of drugs.

“But mefloquine’s supposed to knock out everything!”

He shrugged again and glanced toward the door where dozens of other patients huddled on wooden benches, waiting.

Back at the hotel, I took one of the new pills. My room was bare and functional, like every other room I’d stayed in in Africa.

A bed in the middle of the floor, a mosquito net hanging above it from a wooden ring, a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling, an overhead fan. The shared toilet and showers were down the hall. I turned on the fan and it creaked slowly to life, clattering loudly as it gathered speed, stirring the stagnant air. I lay on my bed, allowing the breeze to cool my limbs. Now that the telephone office was just a few short blocks away, I was suddenly reluctant to call Michael. I told myself that I’d wait until tomorrow, when I felt better. I wanted to have all my wits about me when I called.

An hour later I was shivering again, my body tingling with fever. What was this? A relapse? A side effect of the new drug? As I piled on blankets, I grabbed the pill bottle. Scanning the instruction sheet that was tucked inside, I found the words “can cause severe side effects and in rare cases death, when taken in conjunction with . . .” A long list of medications followed. One of them was mefloquine. I sprang out of bed, a strange buzzing in my head. I looked at the paper again. There it was in tiny, barely legible print. Mefloquine.

I stepped into my flip-flops and ran down the steps of the hotel with my rubber soles flapping.

“There is a doctor just next door,” the woman at the desk told me, after I’d blurted out my story. “You can go and speak with him.”

In the building next door, I scanned a list of offices until I found the words “Mr. Paul Chiteji, Private Medical Doctor, room 305.” I ran up a slippery, poorly lit staircase to the third floor. The building was eerily empty—most of the offices seemed to be closed.

“Please be in,”
I muttered under my breath.

Next to number 304 I found a small, empty reception room with no one behind the desk.

“Hello!” I called desperately.

A slender, smooth-faced young man emerged from an inner room. He wore a green sports shirt and dark blue pants.

“Is the doctor in?” I asked breathlessly.

“I am Doctor Chiteji,” he said.

“You?” I was startled. He looked about seventeen.

“Certainly,” he said, smiling. “How can I help you?”

I poured out my story.

“Let me look at this.” He reached for the bottle of pills. He examined it for some time. “You should discontinue to take these,” he said at last.

“What about the malaria?” I said. “And what about the dose I already took?”

“Your mefloquine has surely vanquished the malaria,” he said. “Most likely the test has misdiagnosed. You must return to the hospital for another test. This drug has not harmed you. Look! You are alive. Only, if you are concerned about the effects, it is best that you discontinue the drug.” He laughed, then, and took my hand with surprising tenderness. “Sistah,” he said, “don’t worry. Be happy.”

Dar es Salaam was hot. Really hot. Walking even a short distance in the sun, I felt like a cookie left overlong in the oven. All internal suppleness was baked out of me, leaving my insides a dry, charred husk. My mouth was parched and cottony. No amount of water helped, because all moisture migrated instantly to the surface of my body. Places I didn’t know could sweat leaked liquid—elbows, eyebrows, feet. For an hour that afternoon the power was out, paralyzing the ceiling fan in my room. I took a shower to cool down, got out, toweled off, and a moment later I was wet again, just as though I hadn’t dried myself at all.

When the day cooled to evening, the power came back on, and I could move again. I took myself to dinner at a fancy hotel, where I sat at a table, still trembling a little.

“What is the trouble, please?” asked my waiter, looking at me with concern. He was neatly dressed in dark pants and a yellow button-down, a bright white towel over one arm.

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“Pardon?”

Looking into his kind face, I again poured out my story.

“Please, you will speak with the manager. She will surely help you.”

Docile as a goat, I followed him. The manager was a plump Danish woman with red cheeks and blonde hair cut in an efficient bob.

“Oh yes,” she said sympathetically, upon hearing my story. To my embarrassment, I had started to cry again while I was telling it. She patted my arm awkwardly. “All right.”

She called the American Embassy doctor at his home number. His voice had the particular music of South India. He spoke to me at some length, asking lots of questions.

“The young doctor was quite right,” he said at last. “It is most probable that the malaria was already gone. It showed up on the test simply because some of the dead cells remained in your bloodstream. The symptoms you are experiencing now are side effects of mefloquine. It produces different responses in different individuals. For some the effects—dizziness, vivid dreams, et cetera—can last up to two weeks. You must rest now. Tomorrow, come to my office and we will perform another test.”

Just as he had suspected, the test showed no malaria. Crisis averted, I had no more excuse for avoiding the telephone office.

A bored-looking woman slapped a scrap of paper onto the wooden counter in front of her and instructed me to write down the number. She then showed me into a wooden booth with a paneless window and a phone with no dials. Beside the phone a low wooden seat came out of the wall. Through the window, I watched her attempting the connection. When she got through, she would signal me to pick up the phone.

Sweating in my wooden cubicle, my heart knocked ferociously against my chest. What would I say to him? What
could
I say?

The operator nodded at me. “You may pick up now,” she said.

I lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I shouted. “Hello?”

“Hello,” said Michael groggily. “What time is it?”

“Sweetheart, listen,” I said. I spoke in a rush, fearing the connection might break. “I want to come back to you. I know I said I wasn’t sure, I wanted to leave things open, but I’m sure now. I got sick, and I realized a lot of things. About what’s important. I want us to be together. Will you wait for me, sweetheart?”

A long silence followed my proclamation.

“Hello?” I said after thirty seconds or more had passed.

“When?” he said in a flat voice.

“What?”

“When will you be home?”

“A month. Two at the absolute most. I’m almost out of money, anyway.” I giggled nervously. “I would head straight home, but my brother’s coming to see me next week, and he’ll be here for two weeks. We’ll probably do Zanzibar, maybe another safari in the Serengeti. Then I just want to visit the island of Lamu; everyone says it’s amazing. And I heard about an orphanage near the border of Ethiopia where I could volunteer maybe for just a week or two. And then home. That’s it. But most importantly, I’m ready to make a commitment now. No more leave it open, wait and see. Two months, tops, I’ll be in your arms.”

Again there was a long silence.

“Hello?” I said.

“It’s too late.”

“Please don’t say that, sweetheart.” Tears sprang to my eyes. “I know I’ve put you through hell, but . . . I didn’t realize. Everything’s new now. Didn’t you say I was the finest creation of the universe?” I babbled. “That you’d never love anyone the way you love me?”

“If you’re serious,” he said suddenly, “come home tomorrow. Not next week. Not next month. Tomorrow. And we’ll talk about it. I’ll see how I feel.”

“Yes, I mean, that makes total sense. But, you know, my brother’s coming next week. Why don’t we compromise. One month. I’ll skip the orphanage. Just two weeks with him, then a super-brief look at Lamu—”

“Tanya! You don’t get it, do you? There’s no room for haggling here. This isn’t a marketplace. I’m compromised out. Let someone else compromise this time. Let your brother travel alone! Yes, I love you, Jesus Christ, of course I do, but there’s someone fifteen minutes away who loves me, who wants me, who thinks I’m just as exciting as the island of Lama—”

“Lamu.”

“What?” Silence. “And anyway. If I take you back now, who’s to say you won’t leave again next month—”

“I won’t.”

“Or next year? You’re a traveler, and I can live with that—I love who you are—if I knew that you’d come back to me, if I knew that you’d at least be faithful to me.”

“I will! I told you, I had an epiphany. I’m sure now.”

“You’re sure now, but how sure will you be once you have me safely back in your camp? Once you’ve proven to yourself that you can get me back anytime you want?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?”

We sat in silence this time for more than a minute while the line crackled with static. My eyes and nose were streaming. I tried to breathe quietly. Through the window of my wooden booth I saw the operator looking at me with curiosity.

“Tanya,” he said at last. “I love you. Get on a plane tomorrow or the next day, and we’ll talk. Okay?”

Yes,
I thought,
yes.
Why couldn’t I say yes?

“Okay?” he said again, his voice cracking.

Back in my empty room, I lay on the bed staring up at the still spokes of the ceiling fan. The power was out again. My body created a damp impression of itself on the sheet. I was playing a little game where I’d turn my head sideways, then turn it quickly back toward the ceiling. Each time I did this, the spokes of the fan appeared to turn for a moment and then grind to a halt.

I’ve got to go back,
I thought. But he hadn’t promised anything. He’d said we’d talk. What if I flew home, disappointing my brother, who was traveling all this way to see me, only to find that Michael had chosen this other woman? And Lamu— everyone said it was idyllic: a peaceful, sunny dream. No cars, only donkey carts. People who returned from there looked rested, happy. Perhaps there was something to be discovered there, some important bit of wisdom that couldn’t be gleaned anywhere else.
Stop it,
I berated myself.
There’s always another
place.
My brother’s visit, though—why was Michael so stubborn? He’d waited this long; what was three more weeks?