The Devil Is a Black Dog

I
’m sick. My temple throbs. I can feel my entire nervous system, down to every last nerve ending. My head is wrung out. It hurts. My mouth is like dry clay, as if I haven’t had water for days. Just a few minutes ago I was gazing listlessly at the rocky desert as it flew past. Now, if I turn my head, the landscape comes with me. It slips, like the sound in an old video recording. I don’t know where I caught this sickness. Perhaps when we crossed Lake Nasser. We had to hurry on the Egyptian side and scrambled to get tickets for the ferry. I remember how thirsty I was in the market, and that I drank from a communal clay pot. Yes, perhaps it was the water, the green water of the lake.

It is also possible that I became infected in Abuja. I was staying in a damp room in a boarding house called the Hotel Mechko. I didn’t think twice that there was no mosquito netting on the windows or bed. Hundreds of bugs must have sucked my blood that night while the rainy season bellowed outside.

Or perhaps it found me in the air of Kinshasa, Mombasa, or Aden. Or came from the roaches that crawled across me at night
in hotel rooms, or from holding hands or a lover’s embrace; for everything is infectious in the tropics. If you live here, you know you can’t avoid disease. Even with an iron constitution, the continent will get a taste of you sooner or later. Of course there is preventative medicine, but the side effects are so strong that it is not out of irresponsibility that you decline them. Who would want to bear the continual retching and nausea in 110-degree heat, when the bottom of your mouth is dry as paper and your lungs are burning with such hot, steamy air that you think you are breathing fire?

No, living in the tropics isn’t about overcoming disease but trying to survive it. You should be ready, because it is unavoidable. And vaccinations are useless. I remember how proudly I asserted to a doctor while walking between beds of the slumbering TB patients in the leper and tuberculosis hospital in Zaria, Nigeria, that I was inoculated and thus didn’t need a face mask.

“There are no vaccinations for this,” responded the doctor. He explained that TB patients are put to sleep in the last stages of their disease so they don’t suffocate while awake.

Most African diseases come with fever. When it begins, time pauses. The hand on the wristwatch doesn’t move, the wind doesn’t blow sand. There is nothing to a person, just a body. One that is about to betray you.

The woman I’m traveling with, Zeinab’s her name, comes from the Fur tribe. I pay five dollars a day for her love. We have a special ritual for the payment. In the morning, after we make love, she gets her backpack, takes out her leather wallet, stands in front of me, and says, “A new day is beginning, so pay.” I pay. Her teeth flash in the morning light as she smiles. We’ve been together for two months. I think she’s in love with me, and I probably haven’t needed to give her any money for a while now, but I do anyway, so she can’t use that against me when it ends.

“You’ll take me home with you, right? So I can see the snow.”

“I’ll take you.”

“You were joking, right? When you said you have no soul.”

“I was joking.”

“Because if you don’t have a soul, how can you go to heaven or hell?”

“What makes you think I want to go anywhere?”

“Because you are always traveling.”

“And?”

“There is nothing wrong with travel, that’s not why I said it. I love traveling with you. Traveling, making love, drinking beer, and eating opium for nice dreams.”

When Zeinab sees I am in trouble, she tells the driver. His name is Abdul Sabur, and he drives barefoot. I had contracted him in Khartoum to take me to Sawakin, because I wanted to see the face of evil. Zeinab told me it’s a haunted place, where the devil sits on your chest at night.

Along with that, there was also a civil war, and the tribes were on the move; this is what I am supposed to write about. We’re traveling in a thirty-year-old black Ford Cortina. My woman turns toward me and says something, but I can’t make sense of her words, which come to me in gurgling sounds. She presses a plastic bottle of water into my hand. I lift it to my mouth and drink. The water should be warm, but it feels cold to me, and makes my esophagus ache. I see Zeinab’s expression of worry, tears forming in her eyes as she begins to recite the Koran. In Africa, when there is trouble, everybody turns devout. For example, once during a police raid on a Cairo brothel, I saw a Saudi man, who wasn’t in the least bit religious, swear on the Koran that he was only there by accident.

Abdul Sabur turns toward me. He looks terrified. I don’t understand why, until I see my face in the rearview mirror. My eyes are blood red and my pupils have all but disappeared. Abdul pulls off the main road and heads in the direction of a village. Mud huts appear against a horizon of beaten red earth and goats. The inhabitants stand at the huts’ entrances and stare at us as we come to a stop in the village commons.

“It’ll be alright,” says Zeinab. I respond in Hungarian. When a fever is up around 107 degrees you forget all languages but your own.

Abdul Sabur opens the door and I try to get out. All my muscles stiffen and tense, and I can’t bend my leg. Tears of pain flow from the effort, and in the end I fall flat on my face. I taste salt in my mouth; perhaps it’s blood. Men from the town rush toward us; they lift me up and carry me into one of the huts. Inside it’s dim, and smells of smoke and feces. They lay me by the fire.

“Halfan,” I say. “I have Malaria, bring Halfan.” A black man with tattoos on his face says that the nearest pharmacy is in a city ninety miles away.

Abdul Sabur departs immediately, but on this road he won’t get back until dawn, which means a twelve-hour wait. Zeinab collapses in tears. She knows that in twelve hours death could come knocking a thousand times. More, if the person is a foreigner.

Crying suits her. The straps of her blouse fall down and I can see her shoulders. It reminds me of how, on our first days together—when she only wanted to make love—she would sleep only on her back. She paid careful attention, on the soiled bed, under the fan, to be sure I wouldn’t see her body, having wrapped herself in a blanket. Then, once after I followed her into the shower, I figured out what she was hiding: the bloody scars given to her by her father; the same man who had molested her and finally went blind from the Nile water and 80-proof moonshine made with embalming fluid.

The village women bring clay pots of water into the hut. Zeinab takes the scarf from her neck, dampens it, and wipes my brow. I plead with her to stop, because it hurts. I feel like I am floating a yard above the ground. From an opening cut in the ceiling I can see the violet-blue, cloudless sky. My eyes get used to the blue. A Hungarian song plays in my mind, and I may even be singing loudly along. The old woman sitting next to me chews betel, her spit forming red pools on the ground. She holds my head up for ten minutes or so as she feeds me on goat milk. I take it without protest; I don’t even have the strength to gag. After that, I don’t know how much time passes. Finally the door opens and Zeinab steps in, accompanied by a man in a long beard, wearing a jellabiya, holding a Koran in his hand.

In Sudan every village has at least one sheikh and one
faki.
While the sheikh relies on the Koran and white magic to heal, the faki’s power comes from the dirty little deals he strikes with the devil. In Khartoum, for example, for twenty dollars I bought an amulet that, when stitched into my clothing, was supposed to protect me from bullets. There was one for sickness as well. I should have bought that one.

“But he isn’t a Muslim,” says the sheikh, turning toward my woman. In response she takes a five-dollar bill from her wallet, puts it in his hand, and says, “Just try.”

He kneels over me. With the Koran stuck under my arm, the sheikh begins to recite an incantation against demonic possession. It doesn’t help. If the devil is inside of me, he has lived there for a long time. He’s dug himself in, and won’t be roused by any common village exorcist.

I turn on my side and can see my father standing there. He is in his brown jacket, a collar shirt, and is looking down at me with a strict, professorial expression.

“The increasing body temperature bolsters the immune system in the many segments of the spine while also stemming the
spread of pathogenic bacteria,” he says and nods, to which I say, “That’s for sure, Dad.”

“This is what you wanted, right? Do you at least know what you are looking for here?” he asks.

“I’m a correspondent. It’s my job to go to places like this.”

I smile, because I know this is not the whole truth, but I won’t tell that to my father, especially if he happens to be the product of a fever-induced dream.

He disappears, but I can’t stop smiling. The sheikh completes his recitation from the Koran; and again Zeinab collapses in tears. In Darfur, where she comes from, if a patient begins to smile, it means he or she is about to die. Around there peaceful deaths are few, but held in great esteem.

But that is not why I am smiling. I am smiling because I don’t regret anything, really. I never wanted to live a sensible life. I didn’t want to be a model citizen; I desired neither a family nor children, and when I found myself in possession of both, the enterprise wound up a dismal failure. I have answers only when the circumstances are clear, like life and death; that’s when I feel best, when the questions are easy, uncomplicated by the reflexes of a dying civilization.

I lift my head, so I can establish that I have indeed lost my sight. Everything looks white, blinding white, as though I am staring into the sun. The world goes quiet as my life begins to flash before my eyes. I am not afraid. I didn’t want a sensible death either.