~
*an excerpt from the novel Bring Me Water
Song on the Corner
The first break in Gregg’s defense is poetic as sentimental lines wing into his head, Tagore or Kipling. It is a tensile fracture, percussed by fragments of his dead brother’s voice and the patter of his own beating heart. When the craving for a cigarette surfaces, Gregg calls in sick and leaves town. In Rwanda, the probability of solitude is low to none, but every year on the anniversary of his brother’s memorial, Gregg hopes for better odds.
Flocks of motos and crowded taxi-vans painted with blessings of the Holy Mother slow Gregg’s drive from Kigali, but there is only one good road to Lake Kivu, part of the single system that connects all of Rwanda’s cities and essential borders. Gregg drives with a learned patience for the mix of vehicles and people on foot. In the shoulder, men push bicycle carts loaded with bags of white potatoes or crates of live chickens. Women cloaked in bundles of sugar cane walk in ponderous, leafy rows, sandaled feet out the bottom.
At Kibuye, the turn-off soon degrades to a rocky incline that drops the Land Rover to its hubs. If not for the arrow-shaped signs pointing up the ruined hill toward the promise of the Cormorant Lodge, Gregg would think he was lost. In a flash of bird-orange, his brother’s voice comes again. Ship me somewheres east of Suez….
Gregg curses the road and his brother’s moldering literature that ghosts him on this day. “Where the best is like the worst,’” he says. “You asshole.”
He pops a pair of Chiclets. He should have stopped at the petrol station to buy cigarettes. The physical obsession inside his body feels like a betrayal of his medical knowledge, but he’s resolved to fend it off this time. To give in now is to regret it later. He counts the days in his head. Calculates how long he can white-knuckle it. Ten more days? Five?
The date of the memorial is an approximation. The mortuary in California that received his brother’s indigent body post-mortem could only give an estimate date. By the time Gregg’s family was located in Idaho, his brother’s remains had been cremated and interred as a John Doe for months. Over the years that followed, Gregg has gone from marking the day on which he received notice to what he figures is the date of death. A good guess, as if it makes a difference.
The rocky road crests a ridge above the forest canopy of eucalyptus onto a soft lip of red dirt and a clearing of sweetgrass marked Parking. Tulip trees bloom in the understory, and to the west, by the light of the sun falling into an endless horizon, Lake Kivu glints like beaten metal.
* *
Gregg sleeps without dreaming under the mosquito nets of the huge bed framed in thick, yellow logs. In the morning, he makes coffee with bottled water. Double shifts and too many drinking games with Dean and Fabian have wrecked his stomach. He takes his first cup outside on the balcony. Chases it with a pair of antacid tablets.
The riffled surface of the lake below absorbs the morning. The horizon is marred by a swale of fog. Or bats. A few years back, Gregg hired a local fisherman to take him to Munini Island—Napoleon’s Hat in the tourist brochures—no bigger than a city block. They docked at the low end of the island and Gregg had thought the plan was to hike up to the center peak. A small herd of cattle chewing cud under a low hang of scrub seemed misplaced so far from the mainland, which had dropped away beyond the slope of the horizon, water in every direction.
The fisherman went ahead, and Gregg was alone on the trail when a commotion broke out, a grand stadium cheer, clapping and whooping. Gregg stopped, disoriented by the ruckus, when the fisherman came at him in an all-out sprint from over the ridge, hollering. To the boat! The boat, he cried. I wake them.
From a rock cleft choked with eucalyptus, hundreds of bats rose in a furious swirl of guano, nesting filth, and frantic wings that snapped like wet sheets on a windy clothesline.
It was all Gregg could do not to cower on the ground. Arms over his head, he hobbled through the whirl, unharmed until an errant wingtip sliced his cheek. For three weeks afterward, he treated himself with a full course of injections to prevent rabies. There was no preventative at the time for the Ebola that was ravaging Liberia and parts of West Africa.
Gregg pours a second coffee and admires the niggling persistence of his craving for that cigarette. Dormant for nearly a full year, it has returned with a desire beyond hunger. He recalculates his odds against it.
At the bottom of the hill, leggy palms frame a volleyball court of white sand. Two women stroll out to the floating dock. Their voices are broken chimes. Both are white and blonde. They strip to their swimsuits. One is tall and thick-waisted. The other is small, her suit a few strategic patches of fabric and string. She cups her hands to her chest as the tall woman re-ties the top.
By his oath as a doctor, he should warn the women not to go in the water. Clinical reports from this area have been tracking a recent rise in schistosomiasis, the parasitic disease transmitted by aquatic snails in the lake. Signs posted in the washrooms warn guests not to drink the tap water. Nothing against swimming.
The small woman dives and surfaces several meters out. Her voice keens off the rounded hills. Something Germanic. She ducks her head to flush her hair back. The second woman’s dive is less graceful. They tread water for a moment before racing toward the center of the lake in a burst of froth and feet.
Gregg raises his cup to them. “Good luck,” he says.
After the women have gone, Gregg takes his issue of New Medicine down to one of the netted umbrellas. A murmur of voices trails him to the beach, a reminder of the proximity of the Rwandan people, seen or unseen, in a country where it’s impossible to hide. Gregg hikes to the farthest point along the beach, and the voices distort to an echo. He needs time and space for his body to recover. He needs a distraction. Needs relief from the memories that haunt him.
Gardens of cultivated fuchsia orchids and tropical anomalies line the terraces of the steep hillside. He imagines a new profession and the trappings of the discriminate photographer: telescoping lenses, manual apertures, and an expensive shoulder bag. National Geographic magazine would feature his macro shots of ant lions, coffee-lace bugs, and giant silkmoth caterpillars. He would teach community education courses at the high school in Idaho Falls.
Farm kids and aspiring housewives would pay good money to take his class, and he’d impress them with slides of spider orchids, purple succulents, and red-hot poker plants. No one would know he was a doctor.
* *
The second night, he dreams of Bryce, but the details are elusive—shifting, ethereal petals of light. In the morning, he eats almonds and dried fruit from his pack, and he’s on his third coffee before the women emerge with their towels. He stands too fast and upends his chair.
“You, down there. Hello! You shouldn’t swim in the water. It isn’t safe.”
The women turn their heads birdlike into the sun. They motion for him to join them.
With both hands, Gregg cuts a horizontal slash across his body. “No swimming,” he says. “Do. Not. Swim.”
They wave. Okay. Bye bye.
They dive into the lake. Their voices chirp off the hills. Gregg envisions hordes of parasitic larvae emerging from their snail hosts as the women windmill through the water, white arms and feet thrashing. It’s an invasive attack, reverse micturition, which breaches their healthy bladders. There are several foreign humanitarian groups in the area, and he calculates access to care. Staunches the spilled coffee from his shirt.
* *
For his brother, access to care disappeared as subsidized medical facilities closed across the country without supportive Federal funds from the Reagan Era’s stringent programs. For his parents, the medical costs maxed the insurance caps, and the money ran out. They tried to keep Bryce at home, but it wasn’t enough to know the textbook symptoms of his psychosis. On good days, Bryce could discuss literature and recite whole chapters of Dante’s Inferno and the Indian epics of Pampa and Tulsidas. On bad days, he wouldn’t respond to his own name, and he’d bite anyone who came too close.
Gregg was finishing his residency in Albuquerque when his parents lost the family farm, bankrupted by medical bills. As a last resort, Bryce was made a ward of the State of Idaho and placed in a residential group home. It was only a matter of months before he ran away. He was caught, hospitalized, and returned to the group home. He made three more attempts before he escaped for good. Volunteers searched the area for weeks, even sent alerts to Utah and Wyoming, but he’d vanished like his own prescient ghost. Until he turned up dead.
Bryce’s remains were returned via Air Cargo, along with a sealed bag of personal items: Converse high-tops, unworn; Swiss folding knife carved with Gregg’s initials; guitar pick; a Farmer’s Pocket Almanac. The post-mortem report confirmed skull trauma and a broken eye socket. Toxicology: negative. Blood alcohol: indeterminate. The blunt trauma either killed him immediately or, unconscious, he’d bled out over time; he’d been dumped in a culvert that had to flood before his body was found.
Gregg arranged final internment at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Idaho Falls, next to the plots reserved for their parents. He stayed in town long enough to help his dad install a new water heater in the rented duplex before returning to Colorado, where he’d joined a practice at the Children’s Hospital.
Six weeks later, he flew home to bury his mother, and again at the end of the summer to move his dad into a nursing home. He thought that was the worst of it, but the worst came at Christmas when his dad didn’t recognize him. Called him Roy and spent the entire visit complaining about the lack of apple juice in the cafeteria.
The next spring, Gregg signed on with the Global Health Program and left for Rwanda. At the time, he wondered if he could make it abroad for an entire year. After five years in Kigali, he wondered if he’d ever go home.
* *
The night-fishing boats set their nets under an arch of yellow lanterns. Gregg makes his way up the lighted trail to the main lodge. He’s famished, appetite stirred by an earlier hike around the shoreline. A tall Rwandan woman is hanging a wreath of eucalyptus over the doorway to the lounge. She welcomes Gregg and accompanies him to the bar to take his order— dirty martini, no olive.
The great room is long and narrow with sliding windows open floor-to-sky to frame the waning moon that hangs in a dense spread of stars. The wait staff hustles food and dish-clatter out to a white family with five children and an au pair. Gregg resists his hunger with another martini. He’s enjoying the conversation with the woman behind the bar. He appreciates the absence of pretense, something he’s always hated about the dating scene back home.
The white family gathers itself for one last selfie. Bucket list, they cry as the waiter snaps their picture. They are gone in a jumble of noise and a crying baby, and the staff resets the tables. Candles are relit with a collective sigh.
Gregg is ordering dinner when the women from the lake appear at the entrance. They wave. Gregg lifts his hand in what he hopes is discrete and uninviting, but the women veer toward him.
The tall woman introduces herself as Alice. “We saw you in the morning.”
The other woman, Perahta, is smaller than Gregg guessed. Her handshake is a wisp of bird-bone.
The waiter indicates Gregg’s table. “You are welcome, Dr. Marcus. Your friends will take dinner with you?”
Gregg hesitates, obligated by the attention. “Of course, you’ll join me,” he says.
His steak arrives, and he slices each bite of the lean entree into narrow slivers, a trick he’s learned from Fabian. The women eat from the open buffet, breaded fish, fried plantains, fresh mangos, and a cabbage salad. Perahta picks at her plate, and Alice chides her for being finicky. They are on holiday from Brussels. Gregg’s Dutch is poor and his French is limited, but he thinks he understands Perahta to work for an airline, perhaps as a stewardess or ticket agent. She found this place on the internet. Alice owns a flower shop, as near as he can tell. He supposes they are lovers, which is safer in Rwanda than in other surrounding countries where same-sex preference is outlawed.
“How long are you here?” He pats the tabletop.
Alice holds up her thumb and two fingers. She points over the lake. “Uganda. Berggorilla. Here, three days. Kigali, two days. Tanzania.” She ticks off a list on her fingers. “Ngorongoro. Lion. Zebra. Maasai. Neushoorn.”
Perahta interrupts. “Rhino,” she says.
Alice stops her count. Cups the small woman’s chin, as if Perahta is a precious child. “Yes. Neushoorn is rhino. We will see him. Then go home.”
It’s a standard tourist loop. North to see the Mountain Gorillas. South to Lake Kivu. The flight from Kigali to Tanzania is a more recent gateway to the fully catered safaris in Ngorogoro and the Serengeti since a pair of back-to-back mass shootings in Nairobi marked Kenya with an international travel alert. He wonders if the listing of safari animals and the Maasai together is a limitation of Alice’s language barrier or a conflation of the African people with its fauna, but he doesn’t know how to ask. He considers how to explain the aquatic snails in the lake. Or whether the Dutch translation for the disease is as interesting as the one for rhinoceros.
* *
Back in his lodge, Gregg captures a coin-sized spider with a coffee cup and a piece of paper and drops if off the deck. “Nothing personal,” he says. “Your odds are better down there.”
The women have invited him to join their boat tour in the morning. Have you seen the bats? On the life of his father, he does not know why he accepted.
He showers in the open stall, towel-dries his hair, and takes his solar lamp into the netted bed to read himself past Gerard Manley Hopkins pitches of grief, lines that have hounded him since leaving the main lodge. He’s swiped Fabian’s latest crime drama for its intriguing blacked- out cover: Kill: [redacted]. The solar lamp inflates like a swim toy and balances on a stack of pillows. The mosquito nets glow blue in the soft light, shifting with the paddle of the ceiling fan and the slap of waves outside. Wind swells the palms. The lodge stilts whisper under the floor, and the bed rocks as if riding on a great sea.
* *
In the foothills of the Tetons, a small resort snugged into the red basalt of Kelly Canyon operated a single rope tow up the slopes for years until the lifts were built. Orange-metal towers were cabled together and hung with open benches to sweep skiers up the hill and fling them away at the top. In the summer, a malfunction in the new power station started a fire that burned all the trees on the south face of the canyon. The trees grew back over time, taller each year, spiked crowns black against the snow base in the lights added for night skiing.
One night on wet spring snow over a layer of ice, Gregg lost control and flew headlong into the ungroomed rough thick with treetops. He twisted his small body in a last-ditch effort to turn out of the heavy snow, and at his knee, a bone popped like cracked ice.
Gregg cried. He was only nine, so there was no shame in it. Bryce wrapped his parka around him before going for help. The big coat smelled of cigarettes, Old Spice, and a lingering body musk. I’ll be right back, Bryce said. He used his own shirtsleeve to wipe Gregg’s nose.
* *
Gregg hunts for his water bottle in the dark to shake off the dream. The pain in his knee nags at him when the weather turns cold, although in Rwanda at 1,500 meters so close to the equator, it doesn’t seem to bother him as much. That night in Kelly Canyon had been cold. Their mother chewed them out good for sluffing school—not enough to keep Bryce from skipping again the next day. He hitchhiked back to the resort for his truck and all their gear.
Where did you go, brother? The one who taught him to ski the black diamonds. The one who quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins from the tractor. Or sang Marty Robbins to the bum lambs. Gregg misses that brother. Not the one in a psychotic break, clawing at his own face. Not the one barricaded in the barn with a hunting rifle. Or returned to Gregg as ash in a sealed plastic bag.
* *
The women are waiting at the dock. Their guide is a young Congolese fisherman who calls himself Frank. He fits each of them with an orange life jacket. Perahta shifts in a child’s jacket, her face pale. Frank seats them under the canopy.
The boat roars toward the empty horizon. The round hills slip by, terraced steppes, resort buildings, necklaces of palms around the base. Two fishermen in open canoes are pulling in nets of ngdugu, small fish like fat silver dollars. Alice points her camera at them, but Frank waves her off. She will have to pay the fishermen for their photo. Alice doesn’t understand. Frank rubs his thumb and forefinger together in the sign understood across languages and the blast of wind. She lowers her camera.
A jut of sentinel rock is the last barrier to open water. Low breakers smack the bow. The lake is flat to an horizon, as if nothing is beyond. Cloud shadows slip along the water’s surface. Gregg knows the tectonic rift under the lake leaks methane into an underwater pocket down in the deep, setting it up for a catastrophic limnic eruption every thousand years or so—an event that hasn’t recurred for about a thousand years. An oil rig project has been working to drain off the bubble of gas as a preventive solution. Gregg calculates their odds and determines the risk from the bats more immediate.
Alice waves to Gregg. The wind and engine noise require them to yell over the meter of distance. He crosses the deck with the motion of the boat.
Perahta is folded into herself, legs drawn to her chest.
Gregg takes her pulse. “Do you have pain?”
Her nod is stiff, eyes wide, pupils dilated.
“In the night. She did not sleep.” Alice rubs the woman’s back. “She thinks it is her monthly time.”
The boat jolts over a wave. Gregg calls forward, and the engine falters. Frank looks worried. “I am paid for the tour?”
“Yes, of course,” Gregg says. “Help me with the girl.”
They make a bed of seat cushions in the center of the deck. Alice extends Perahta’s legs, and Gregg palpates her abdomen. Methodically, he releases the pressure from left to right. She makes a sharp cry, a bird shot out of the sky. Alice winces.
Gregg gauges the distance over the stern. “We need to get her to a hospital.” “She is sick from the boat?” Frank says.
“Of all the possibilities, not this time. Come, come.” He braces Perahta’s bed of cushions against the bench seat. “Get us back. Quick as you can.”
The engine ramps up, and the small boat’s wake is a tall rainbow of glitter.
Gregg calls ahead to Dean, the acting Chief of Staff, to schedule a surgical team. On a good day of driving, it’s three hours to the University Teaching Hospital.
“I hope it’s a good day, Idaho,” Dean says.
Perahta is a curled shell tucked into the layers of hotel blankets in the back of the Land Rover. The Maître d’hôtel waves away Gregg’s attempt to pay for the bedding and orders a boy to bring towels and a plastic bucket at Gregg’s request. They position it on the floor for when Perahta begins to vomit, an anticipated symptom of the infected appendix. The staff hovers in the entryway. Gregg raises a hand out the window. The woman from the bar calls after him in Kinyarwanda. Be well.
* *
And don’t look at the sun. Bryce repeated the rules. It’s like 300 billion-billion mega- watts. Gregg was twelve. They’d cut class to watch the partial eclipse, and Bryce “borrowed” a welding shield from his shop class at the high school. They held the dark glass to the sky and took turns peering at the sun. The round, black shadow of the moon slid in from one side to scoop out the light, and the sun became a gold bowl that tipped up one side and rolled down the other.
No cheating. It’ll fry your retinas in an instant, Bryce said.
The danger made Gregg’s blood rush in his ears. It felt naughty or holy to stand on the edge of the canal behind the junior high school and feel the weight of the planet up through the soles of his feet.
You’ve never seen anything, until you’ve seen the sun through the rings of Saturn, he quoted his favorite Saturday Afternoon Creature Feature.
Bryce laughed but not in a mean way. Whoa there, Melting Man. You’d sooner fall down a ladder and wake up dead than melt like a toasted cheese sandwich.
Gregg was no longer scared, and he never thought his brother wouldn’t always be there for him.
* *
Alice fidgets. She speaks terse Dutch to Perahta, who answers with a sigh. Up one hill, the Land Rover is trapped behind a convoy of taxi-vans swung wide around a line of genocide prisoners marching along the shoulder of the road. They are marked by their pink tunics and guarded by military police with Russian machine guns.
“I ask about churches for the children.” Alice switches to French. “In each village, there is a small church. These belong to children? There.”
“Une petite église?” Gregg follows her gesture. “Ah. Those are memorials. For the genocide. Most townships have one. Inside there are lists of the names of the dead. Some are museums with photographs. Or personal items. Of course, the large museums are in Kigali. And Murambi.”
“Propaganda museums. We are advised not to visit.”
Gregg hesitates, his answer complicated by people he knows. Survivors.
“It explains the poor service we receive in this country,” Alice says.
Gregg considers the resort manager. The blankets around Perahta. The refund of their lodge reservation. “Huh,” he says.
Alice twists in her seat. “It is lucky for us we found American doctors.”
Gregg wonders if she means American or white. He is debating a response when Perahta makes a small sound in the back seat and throws up.
* *
One early summer day, Gregg came home from moving a set of irrigation lines to find everyone inside the house standing around the television. The news on all three stations reported a volcanic eruption in Washington state. He recognized the place, a snow-capped mountain near Portland, Oregon. He remembered seeing it out the window of the plane when he and Bryce had gone to Yakima to buy lambs. It would be days before the news confirmed fatalities and damage, but the initial footage was mesmerizing—a roiling cloud of ash rising up from Mount St. Helens. Every channel replayed the towering black plume.
That evening, Bryce and Gregg climbed onto the roof of the horse shed to watch the evening sky. More than 700 miles away, the eruption turned the regular sunset pinks to an ominous red.
It’s one of the plagues in the Bible, Gregg said. The end of the world.
Bryce sucked at a splinter in his finger. Naw. he said. You wait. What ends us will be something mundane.
Gregg didn’t know the word, but a pricking urgency to prevent such an event began to build in his chest. He leant Bryce his best pocketknife to pull the splinter, the knife that would be returned to him after his brother had been dead nearly an entire planting season. That night on the horse shed, they lay back on the roof and told dirty jokes. Sang cowboy songs. Come and sit by my side if you love me… The sky deepened to a cascade of purples and blues.
By morning, the farm was an alien landscape under a thick layer of ash.
* *
At the Teaching Hospital, the surgical staff preps Perahta, and she is whisked away to the operating theater. It’s after 9:00 pm, but five of Dean’s medical students have come to observe the American surgeon, Dr. Fabian Lawrence, complete the procedure.
Dean catches Gregg in the hallway. “Of course, you come back with two lovelies. Good for you,” he says. “Walk with me.”
Gregg can’t give a single word in his defense as Dean launches into his patient case.
They cross a paved lot toward the cafeteria. The row of low buildings shaded by fig trees reminds Gregg of the barracks in Texas where he completed basic. Not something he dwells on, those unremarkable years in service—in as a Captain, out as a Major—but it does account for his age difference between his colleagues, and perhaps his freedom from student loans.
Inside the cafeteria, the staff section is empty, while two families crowd the visitor side. Dean orders a full tea service. Gregg sighs. The tea means this is one of Dean’s case consults, famed for his exclusion of a response from the consulting doctor.
The patient in questions has a chronic headache with no diagnosis. That’s always the catch. The national health system covers medical treatment for every citizen—including the recent influx of Congolese immigrants—but limits diagnostic testing, so diagnosis often occurs by deduction or after the fact. Or, as Gregg likes to think of it, a best guess. Without confirmation, treatment is selected by the probability of its widest success: if every fever is treated with a malaria protocol, at its conclusion, the majority of illnesses that are not malaria have also been resolved, one way or another. Statistically, to leave a fever untreated is to risk far more deadly outcomes.
“If we were home,” Dean says, “I’d do a CT with contrast. But this patient can’t afford it.”
“So, it’s another craps shoot,” Gregg says.
Dean doesn’t miss a beat. “Assume it’s a tumor and treat with radiation? Open him up? Assume infection and treat with antibiotics? At the risk of developing resistance? Plus, we’re out of time. As of this morning, the patient has sudden-onset blindness.”
Alice appears in the doorway. She eyes the crowded visitor space, but before she has to choose, Dean waves her to their table.
She thanks him with a strained smile.
“My pleasure,” Dean says. He whistles at a startled server, who leaves her post to bring another teacup set. Dean convinces Alice to order a sandwich.
Gregg looks away so as not to stare as Dean imposes his will in a one-two combination of pressure, charm, and the particular entitlement of assuming an essential sameness of all women. Although Dean has definitely missed the mark with Alice and Perahta. Or perhaps he knows more than he lets on and takes it as a challenge. Gregg gives him the benefit of the doubt. Either way, it aligns with the guarded recommendations that came with Dean’s application to Gregg when he was Chief of Staff—some distant department head washing their hands of him, making Dean someone else’s problem. It also explains the defeat that clings like a whiff of old bones to Dean’s wife since she arrived over the holidays. Did she think the distance would change him?
Dean is pitching his consult to Alice.
“And if you don’t treat this man?” Alice asks. “This person who cannot afford a test?”
“Oh, darling,” Dean says. “We’re not monsters. We treat everyone.”
“I am grateful for the research on anyone who cannot afford a test. Treat them all. Where would my Perahta be without first doctor to operate on such pain?”
Dean peers at her, parsing her words. Gregg wonders which part he’s stuck on—the experimental care of the poor? Or the possessive pronoun?
“How much is the CT?” Gregg says.
“$30,000. Rwandan.”
Gregg fishes through his wallet. Drops two U.S. twenty-dollar bills on the table. “That should cover it.”
“A noble gesture, Idaho.” He uses the nickname like a slur. “But you can’t just buy them healing.”
Gregg meets Dean’s gaze. He’s not one of Dean’s women, although technically, Dean is his new boss since Gregg stepped down in the department.
With a brisk sigh, Dean pockets the money.
“Send me the CT results,” Gregg say. “As your consulting. My bet is on an infection.” He motions to Alice. “Let’s go check on your girl.”
Alice sends her chair clattering to the floor. The lively banter from the families in the next section falters. Someone starts to clap as if Alice has performed a trick for them. She hesitates. Turns the chair upright. She bows to the families. Laughs. “I am paljas. Fool.”
“Me, too,” Gregg says.
Dean’s wife, Andrea, is outside the surgical theater chatting with Fabian. The procedure is over, but Fabian is still in his gown. He takes Alice to one side. She shakes his hand. Fabian seems perplexed by her enthusiasm, so Gregg steps in.
Alice swings around, surprising him with a full-body hug. She whispers into his ear. “I was frightened. She is my only one.”
He slips her embrace by introducing Andrea, who invites Alice to stay the night at their home. It’s after midnight, too late for other options except to camp out in the hallways like some of the other patients’ families. She tells Alice she can make accommodations at a nearby hotel in the morning.
“You’re welcome,” Andrea says. “Get some sleep. I’ll bring you back bright and early in the morning.”
Alice begins to cry.
* *
In the cramped library marked Doctor’s Lounge, the men hunch around a low coffee table. It’s after 3:00 am. The bottle of Russian vodka is down to a quarter. The day nurse, off- duty, pours himself another shot. Gregg sips at his tepid soda water. He’s on first shift in a few hours.
It’s movie trivia. Genre: classics. The answer is Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
“Stop. Darkly,” Fabian says.
“Go. Light.”
Fabian touches his nose. “Waffles.”
“Breakfast.”
“Chicken.”
“That’s your guess?” Fabian sits back in the low futon couch and shakes his head. “Unbelievable.” He turns to Gregg with a look that asks for support. Solidarity. Anything.
“I’m out,” Gregg says and, too late, knows it’s the wrong response.
“Call it,” Dean says.
The day nurse stands. Sways. “Next week. My genre. I pick horror.” Leaning into his stagger, he tilts down the hallway. A door slams. A thread of live music undercut by outside voices filters in through the open window.
Fabian rests his cheek on the table. “Who picks horror? No one.”
Dean squints at the game card. “Hepburn.” He hands the card to Gregg. “Any visits from the ghosts this year?”
Fabian takes the card from Gregg and shuffles the game deck. “C’mon, man. This place is nothing but ghosts.”
“Ghost,” Gregg says. “Singular.”
Fabian begins to sing the Righteous Brothers …and time can do so much. Are you still mine?
“That’s right,” Dean says. “Give it some love. You need this ghost, Idaho. Besides, you deserve a good haunting. It’s your fault there’s a lesbian at my house.”
“Oh, yeah? What scares you more? Ghosts? Or lesbians?”
“Andi wants to keep them.”
“How very colonialist,” Fabian says.
Gregg gives his empty glass a mournful spin. “Be careful. Alice doesn’t seem to like black people. People of color.”
“Well, that’s a problem.” Fabian sits up.
“Calm down,” Dean says. “You’re in the majority here. No need to be all prickly.”
“Says you, umuzungu,” Fabian says.
Gregg searches through greasy take-out plates for the screw-top to the bottle of vodka. “I don’t care what people say. I think you’re both a couple of knuckleheads.”
Fabian flips through the new call schedule. “That’s unfair, Idaho.” His kind tone is genuine. “You knew this dog and chicken show before us knuckleheads got here.”
“Pony show,” Dean says. “Dog and pony.”
“Chicken and rice,” Fabian says. “Makes no difference. We’re still pissing into the wind.”
Gregg flinches at the callout. It’s too crass. It clashes with the fragment that hovers at the edge of an earlier waking, a blurred rhythm, like a poem but not exactly.
Fabian calls back down the hall. “I’m on at eleven. Save me some coffee.”
“You wish,” Gregg says. He folds down the futon couch, spreads a clean cotton blanket, and stretches out on its narrow expanse.
Dean produces the bottle cap and claims the vodka. “Bingo,” he says. “Rounds at six. Sharp.” On his way out, he turns off the lights. “Sleep well, Idaho.”
* *
Bryce stands on a street corner in Kigali. The cloudless sky is clear and real, although Gregg in the dream knows it’s a dream. The roll of terraced hills laced with voices fills him with a resounding joy. In the road, motos buzz by. Bryce carries his shoes, and the long tail of a ski hat falls over his face. He is not afraid. He is singing—or it’s Gregg. Their voices are the same.
~
Sherri H. Hoffman
Sherri H. Hoffman is a working writer, graphic designer and sports fanatic. She holds an MFA from Pacific University and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and teaches creative writing workshops for the love of the craft. Some of her own work is published in The Saturday Evening Post, Cimarron Review, Delmarva Review, december, and others. She loves birds, her family, October rain in the Pacific Northwest, and a good cup of coffee.