“Are those two giraffes . . .” Melanie’s voice trailed off.
“It’s a wonder the first time you see it,” Michael said. “Now you understand men.”
They traveled south through the plains in a yellow Land Cruiser, open top, the size of a small bus. It was an angular thing, exposed metal bars, a safari vehicle but without any of the fancy signs or branding of a commercial company. Government issue. To the left, under an acacia tree, two giraffes held the bizarre pose. One had mounted the other.
“Men? They’re not mating,” Melanie said.
“Nope. Guess again.”
She shrugged.
“The one on top just beat the other in a fight. His reward is this expression of dominance.”
“Prison rules,” Melanie said. “You see that, Peño?”
He sat in a seat across the aisle, reading from a file. He glanced at Melanie. “I think you should go back to the hotel.”
She looked away.
“Dr. Martin. Tsetse,” Michael said. Lyle didn’t even notice the fly on his wide-brim beige hat gunning ultimately for his cheek. Michael stood and swatted the air, sending the fly on its way.
“Lost when he’s working,” Melanie said. But she was making excuses—for him, and for herself. They’d had a brief layover in the Arusha Hotel after that exquisite landing near Kilimanjaro. Lyle had sat on the bed, eyes half closed. By that point, Melanie had given up trying to coddle him into conversation. But at one point she came out of the bathroom determined to confront him, bring her nuclear weapon and clear the air. Couldn’t do it. She’d been having trouble sleeping and felt like she might be getting a cold.
The landscape was changing quickly. The dusty steppe took on high grass. Denser trees appeared. In the distance, it looked practically lush.
“We’re not that far from the Selous Reserve. It’s where we’ve set up the perimeter,” Michael said to Lyle. Now Lyle looked up. A man in green fatigues stood beside a yellow police barrier. It looked like he was completely in the middle of nowhere, an oasis amid the brown grass and a felled evergreen. Hardly. Everyone in the truck knew that he was the last stop before death. The truck pulled beside him and slowed. Michael waved.
“Jambo. This is the doctor,” he said. It was a formality. The man in fatigues was too young to have any say-so about anything. His mere presence intended as deterrence. Who would come out here anyway? “Have some more coffee,” Michael said to the soldier as they passed.
Ahead, a small rock formation that would qualify in these parts as a landmark. Melanie watched a lizard scatter at the base of the rocks.
“It’s going to sneak up on you on the other side,” Michael said. He was saying: Brace yourself.
Lyle looked at the late-afternoon sky, pinky blue, yellows bent through the prism of wispy clouds. He scanned the rocks. Muddy water pooled at the bottom right. Maybe someone had washed there. Or people had used it for a restroom. One of the problems he often saw was that sick people did what they had to do where they had to do it—like pissing and shitting—and disease fed on it.
They rounded the corner. A small village emerged, thatched huts bisected by a footworn orange-colored dust road, more like a path. They saw the man in the middle of it. He was on all fours, crawling their direction, trying to, breathing like a dog hit by a car. An aid worker or nurse in a white suit tried to help him by the arm.
“He’s the one I need to see,” Lyle said.
The stake in the far right corner of the medical tent had loosened. Other than that, the setup was reasonable, nothing profound, as might be expected. Six victims in beds, four along one wall, two along another, getting saline drip. Two empty beds betrayed the fate of their most recent inhabitants; sweat and bowel stains, the bodies’ last expressions. It irked Lyle that there still was insufficient manpower here six days after the first patient showed up.
Michael, an edge in his voice, said something in Swahili. A nurse who looked like a beekeeper in all his garb quickly cleaned up one of the empty beds by tossing the sheets and pillow into a plastic bag. A few minutes later, the moaning man Lyle had seen outside became the makeshift hospital’s latest inhabitant.
By then, Lyle had already scrubbed in a bowl of soapy water and gloved and put on a respirator. Melanie remained in the truck. She was a nurse by training, but the risks here outweighed any help she might offer, especially before Lyle got a grasp. Besides, he’d practically begged her to stay put. In the tent, he leaned down and felt the faint pulse of a woman of truly indeterminate age; he figured her between thirty-five and sixty. Disease and sun mottled her skin, bleached her night-dark pallor near pale, obscured the truths her face might tell.
“How many days?” he asked the nurse.
“Four hours.”
Lyle blanched.
A straw rested by her lips. She lacked the strength to suck or move it. A red-and-yellow scarf tied around her forehead hung damp with sweat it couldn’t absorb. The Iraqw people, Lyle had read in his file, typically lived farther north. This was among their southernmost tributaries. He could see from the slightly narrowed shape of the woman’s eyes the Asiatic genetics shared eons ago. Spittle on her chin suggested she’d been coughing. He picked up the chart by her bed and could make out the numbers even if he couldn’t read the words. Last her temperature was taken, it had been 103.8. Another number stood out: 51. Must be her age. He patted her arm and she briefly opened her eyes and he smiled.
He stood from his bench and turned to the man from the road. He kept trying to stand up. With each tiny effort, he violently coughed. You didn’t need an x-ray. Lyle could practically see the fluid in the guy’s lungs. The nurse struggled with him for a second to put on a mask and the man finally succumbed, lacking the strength to fight.
The nurse said something and Michael interpreted. “The son of the local chieftain.”
His smooth round head shone with perspiration. He leered at Lyle and set loose with coughing. Lyle understood. This man wasn’t accustomed to being defeated. Lyle lowered his eyes and gestured to the side of the bed. May I sit? He took the nonanswer as an okay. He sat. He took the man’s long arm and felt for a pulse at the wrist. Ordinarily, ill-advised, not a good place to test. But Lyle didn’t want to reach for the man’s neck. He got what he needed: 185.
“Saline, please,” Lyle said to no one. He would bet that this man’s pulse didn’t get that high facing a mother lion. With Michael’s help, he asked questions and learned the man had been sick for a day. And didn’t want help. Lyle said he understood; he wanted to help the older folks, he said, and the children. He listened and watched and thought. Not Ebola. Maybe Lassa fever.
“You have many mice?”
“This is Africa,” Michael said.
“Sir, how many dead—like you?” Lyle asked.
“Like him?” Michael asked.
“Young?”
Four. Out of a village of only sixty.
Lyle pushed the sheet up and saw the swelling in the man’s legs. The man tried to withdraw but he coughed. Then he shouted, tried to, his words swallowed by coughing.
“What’s he say?”
“The pure breeds did it.”
“What does that mean?”
An exchange followed between Michael and the nurse. Michael explained to Lyle that a new theory had emerged among the locals that had to do, of course, with religion. The Iraqw borrowed each from Islam and Christianity. In recent months, Muslim proselytizers had visited and called them heathens, promised plague. Lyle pressed the interpreter. What had the men looked like? What had they said—exactly? These visitors called the Iraqw an abomination—chukizo, in Swahili. Hell’s plague would befall them, inshallah, God willing.
Lyle saw Melanie standing in the doorway. “Go back to the truck,” he said. She had tears in her eyes.
“Go back to the truck,” he insisted.
“Don’t tell me what to do.” But she turned and left.
Outside, Lyle asked Michael if he had Internet. Yes. On Michael’s big-screen phone, Lyle pulled up an article in Nature. The article was a controversial publication, to say the least. A rare piece of truth that almost didn’t see the light of day; too dangerous. Before delving in, he walked the empty streets of the village. A dozen thatched huts, wood booths, empty, that must’ve served as some kind of market. He asked to see the well and observed it to be clean. He asked Michael about these Muslim proselytizers. Michael said it was the first he’d heard of it. When had they last come? Michael didn’t know. Why?
Lyle, leaning against a hut, was too lost in the article to answer.
“Show me the man’s hut, please.”
There was not much to see. That was the point, Lyle said, without elaborating. A broom in the corner told Lyle much of what he needed to know. The only sign of disarray owed to a glass shattered on the ground near the bed. Where the man must’ve spilled it reaching in his febrile state.
“What are you thinking, Dr. Martin?”
No response.
“You’re frightening me.”
“Looks like Coxsackie B.” True but he didn’t really believe it.
They returned to the makeshift hospital hut.
“When was the last time they were here?” Lyle asked the chieftain’s son. “The pure breeds?”
“What are you asking?” Michael said.
“Ask him, please.”
He doesn’t remember.
“A few weeks?”
“Yes.”
“What did they wear?”
Lyle listened to the translation of Swahili to the Cushitic tongue and back, then to English.
“Suits, like he said.”
“Dark skin?”
“Not this dark.”
“Did they leave you anything? A way to get in touch.”
No.
Just the warning.
“Peño, what are you doing?”
“Taking a nap.”
“In the truck.”
“Good a place as any.”
She stared at him.
“I’ve never in my life seen you act like this,” she said.
He half smiled at her, distant. “Lyle,” she said, “say something.”
He was sitting in the last row of the safari truck. He stared at her. He shook his head, and she could tell he’d traveled to some distant place in his head. He reached behind his head and pulled out a white shirt he’d used as a pillow. He lifted it into the air, like a flag, and he waved it. Surrender.
A day later, their airplane landed from JFK. Michael had gotten off in New York hardly able to hide his frustration. Lyle had given him nothing, bubkes, well, other than his personal symptoms of emotional withdrawal. Just turned into a fucking log. Except when he shrugged and asked for a beer. Before he’d gone totally dark, he’d also told Michael, cryptically, that the villagers didn’t need a doctor but a better police force.
“I’m realizing I don’t speak Dr. Martin,” Michael said to Melanie, trying to be as diplomatic as possible.
She didn’t share Michael’s sense of decorum. “I don’t speak asshole, either,” she said, right in front of Lyle as a taxi driver spitting chew out the window spirited them past looming Kilimanjaro in swirling winds to the airport. “If you want my interpretation, I think Lyle thinks this wasn’t caused organically.”
“Meaning what?”
“He thinks it’s a man-made virulence. Someone poisoned these people.”
It was exactly what Lyle thought. This was chemical warfare. Someone had come in here and given this tribe an intensified flu, maybe something even using CRISPR, genetically hacked viruses meant to do an end around immune systems and traditional treatments. It would explain the attack of young, strong members of the tribe, the threat by outside forces, the visitation of this virus absent any clear catalyst or patient zero and in a fairly clean community, well kept. It would explain, most of all, Lyle’s gut feeling. Maybe even some government had supported this experimentation. It would be revelatory, of course, also solvable. He scribbled down several courses of action, one of which would almost surely confine this and put it to rest.
“It’s absurd,” Michael said before he left Melanie and Lyle in their Air France seats to take his own. “He sounds like one of those nuts in Brazil with Zika.” Conspiracy theorists in Latin America had spread rumors nearly as virulent as the virus itself that the Zika-carrying mosquitoes had been planted by angry British colonialists or one-worlders. “The dean was right,” Michael concluded. He didn’t finish the thought but it was clear enough: he should’ve sought someone else’s counsel. Lyle hadn’t really tried; he’d mailed it. Lyle was just a good storyteller more interested in applause than answers, or maybe something more insidious than that—a malicious fraud. How had he gotten such a reputation? On the flight, Melanie willed herself to go to sleep. She talked again to Lyle when the landing gear came down to touch down in San Francisco.
“Counseling, Lyle. You’re in or I’m out.”
He studied her face. The water retained in her rosy cheeks.
“You’re pregnant, Melanie.”
“Shut up, Lyle.”
He looked down so he couldn’t watch the wave of revelation spread over her face. He’d suspected for a week or more. He suspected she didn’t know. How could he know before her? How did he ever understand these things? It started with a sensation, like an itch, and it made its way from his body to his brain to his consciousness.
“No, Lyle, it’s not . . .” She stopped and her blue eyes turned steely. “I’m pregnant? I’m pregnant!” Her utter disbelief transformed quickly into wonder. Lyle so often was right about things like this. Could he see it before she knew? “Why did you let me go?” she demanded. No words to capture her betrayal.
“Maybe the better question is why you went.”
The tears leaked from her crimson-tinged eyes and one dripped off her chin. She had no strength to wipe them away.
“What’s happened to you, Lyle?”