CARL WOKE THEM BEFORE DAWN. THERE WERE TOO MANY PEOPLE ON THE STREET TO DRIVE fast even then.
People cooked in the road, sat in the road, and slept on the street. Women with boxes and bundles. Men bent double with big fake-leather suitcases held together by belted circles of silver duct tape on their backs. Shanties made of scavenged metal roofing and blue and silver tarps, built right on the broken tarmac.
Terrance nosed through the crowd, which parted before them and closed in after them, as if people were water.
They barely made one mile an hour. Walking would have been faster, only you couldn’t get through the throng any better on foot. Carl stared out the window, tense and angry.
The throng got thicker outside JFK Hospital. Gaunt men in camouflage stood at the wrought iron fence in front of the hospital. Blue jeeps and pickups were parked inside the gates. The soldiers pointed their guns at the people in the street. People walked in front of the guns but kept their distance, ready to run for cover the moment one of the soldiers lost his nerve and started firing.
They drove up a hill that overlooked the ocean. Then they drove through Congo Town, where most of the buildings along the road were wrecked—a wall gone here, the windows shot out there, another building falling in on itself where a tank or half-track had pushed through it. Somebody had themselves a good little battle in here, Terrance thought. One wild time. Really messed it up. Someone cut all the telephone and electric wires off the telephone poles that ran along the street. The short wire ends looped around each pole, running every which way. Telephone poles with bad hair, but there was no wire from pole to pole. Nothing was connected any more. Everything was ruined. Life was fried. Frazzled. Gone.
Nothing moved. Nothing worked. Hope was a memory. A dream. A hallucination. A mirage.
The evening rains and dusk came. The sky became yellow, orange, purple, and red.
A crowd gathered at a soccer stadium in front of two tents flying white and red flags. One more army, Terrance thought, and turned south to get away, expecting another check-point.
But Carl pointed to the tents.
“Médecins Sans Frontières; Doctors without Borders,” Carl said. “We’ll stop here. Three goddamn miles today. Maybe four.”
Men and woman dressed in white coats and blue jeans moved through the throng, some dispensing water in tiny paper cups, others with clipboards and stethoscopes. They checked with each person on the line and sent people off to different queues.
“My crew,” Levin said. “I’ll go to parley.”
Terrance and Carl opened their doors when Levin did and stood to stretch, leaning against the RAV as Levin walked into one of the tents.
They were surrounded by Liberian people, lost inside their clothes, covered with red dust. An old man who looked something like his ma’s second man, only older and shrunken, and who couldn’t look up. Young women, some carrying babies, others standing alone, but all who looked away the second he caught their eye, the second he saw the fear and disappointment, afraid and ashamed of the lives they had and had lost, afraid of Terrance who was washed and fed, afraid for themselves and of themselves, as if they knew their bodies had betrayed them by giving birth to boys and men like Terrance, afraid of the hotness that brought men and women together. Old women, just waiting, without any hope or expectation, waiting for God in his mercy to make known his plan. Children hiding behind their mother’s lapas, confused about where they were. Terrance checked each person, looking for the eyes of someone he knew and who knew him among the shells of people who stood on line.
These were the people Terrance had raided when he was strong-strong, invisible, and flying above the earth. Here, standing on the same ground, waiting with Liberian people, Terrance discovered the war at last. He wasn’t raiding or taking what he wanted. He couldn’t fly above the earth, invisible and invincible. He also wasn’t just driving through a shapeless mass, dodging a throng of the abject and the walking dead. Now Terrance saw the war and felt the war and suddenly discovered how the war he made had reduced Liberian people to ghosts, to shells, to victims, to the weak and helpless and a people without a home or a purpose in their own country. Suddenly Terrance saw himself as a Liberian for the first time, as one more victim, even though, for Terrance, to be a victim—to be wounded or dead—was to be less than nothing, subhuman, a woman who licked your boots begging, a severed head, its mouth tasting the red dirt.
They are my people, Terrance thought.
The men and women in white coats and jeans walking among the others were different from the people they walked among. They were now the only people who appeared to be alive, who walked and talked and acted like they belonged.
Levin found Logistics.
The Médecins Sans Frontières people had been in country since May, they said—and they were up to their eyeballs. Yes, they had heard that Merlin and the County Hospital in Buchanan had been overrun. Nothing they could do about Buchanan now. They had teams in Bong, Grand Cape, Mount, Bomi, Gbarpolu, Grand Bassa, Margibi, and Grand Gedeh Counties, and those teams needed all the help they could get. The supply chain wasn’t working. MSF was trying to negotiate air drops of supplies with UNMIL, but have you ever tried to talk to anyone at the UN? Try getting a coherent answer in anything under six months. They knew about the burned-out vehicle of the Norwegian and the two Liberians who disappeared in Toe County in the spring. They had heard that Julia had disappeared north of Buchanan, her car found burned out, and that two men with her had been found dead. There was a website that listed missing and dead health workers around the world. They hadn’t heard anything else. They didn’t have a reliable internet connection yet. The three men could park the RAV next to the tents, and there were cots they could use for one night and breakfast in the morning, just tea or coffee and a hard roll wrapped in plastic.
Levin asked about who was here doing kids and emergency assessments and where they were here from. It took him two minutes to ferret out a connection. Seconds to find somebody who knew somebody else. Two degrees of separation. Global health, emergency response, and stabilization. Maybe one degree. University of Indiana folk at Eldoret. The group in Burma. Partners in Haiti. The torture assessment project run by PHR out of NYU.
They could use Levin’s help in the Pedi tent overnight. I know he isn’t properly credentialed. He’s here and he speaks kids. We know people in common. Someone had read a paper. Pedigree works. The hell with credentialing. Let’s put you to work.
The football pitch was purple and covered with bodies and tarps. It had once been green and flat with white chalk lines marking the boundaries of the playing field. Now the air above the pitch was gray from charcoal smoke and the stink of too many bodies in not enough space.
Terrance and Carl got dinner in the volunteers’ mess.
Levin reappeared at about midnight when the generators shut down and the camp quieted. He paced while Carl and Terrance slept on bedrolls next to the RAV. He was snoring at sunrise, when he awoke with a start. Then he fell back to sleep. They let him sleep and snore until the sun rose over the tree line.