White Dog Fell from the Sky

55



A day later, lying in bed next to a whitewashed wall, he couldn’t remember the details of when he’d come here. He recalled Alice’s blue dress blowing in the wind at the border, but nothing after that. The wall near his bed had a crack that ran from the top of the window to the ceiling. Halfway up the crack, a mosquito was squashed, desiccated, stuck to the wall. His mind went back to the first day he’d worked for her. He’d dug a square garden. Almost angrily, she’d asked him why he’d made it square. She’d intimidated him. Now he saw who she really was.

X-rays revealed a shattered left kneecap, broken nose, seven broken ribs, and the remnants of a concussion. He needed no one to tell him he had typhoid or that his thumbs were broken. His hunch about TB was confirmed. The wonder was that he’d survived, but he felt no joy at the prospect of life continuing. His heart was filled with emptiness.

Unable to sit in a bath, he was taken into a shower by the only male nurse on the staff. The nurse, Wes, built low and squat, was from the United States. “God, man, you stink,” were his first words. He wheeled Isaac down the hall in a wheelchair, stopped near the shower, and said, “I’ve got to get in there with you.”

“You don’t want to do that,” said Isaac.

“You’ll fall down and hit your head, and then I’ll be in trouble.” He undressed him, and Isaac could see him trying not to gag. He turned on the shower and helped Isaac step in, gripping his shoulder. He took off his own shoes and followed him into the stall.

“You didn’t take off your clothes,” said Isaac.

“I need something between you and me. You’ve got scabies. Move over. When was the last time you bathed?”

“Before I was deported. Early May. What is it now?”

“Christ, man. August. Over three months.”

“It feels longer.” Isaac thought of a time when he’d been stripped, struck with a rubber hose, nearly drowned, and left all night on a concrete floor. “I don’t count that as bathing, though.”

“What don’t you count?”

He realized he’d been talking to himself. “No matter.” The water fell hard onto his shaved head, onto his back and the bandage covering a wound on his shoulder, stinging as it fell. He could smell his own rank odor rising. The water running off him was gray, the color of long-dead meat. Wes shampooed his naked head, and Isaac made his mind go numb as the soap entered the welts.

“Where have you come from?”

“A prison in Jo’burg.”

Wes said nothing, just ran his hand over Isaac’s neck, his one shoulder without the wound, his arms, his back, his chest, his privates, while he held him upright with the other hand. He moved the soap over his thighs, over the knee without the brace, down his calves, his feet. When he’d finished, he started at the top again.

“Again?”

“You’re still filthy.”

Halfway through, Isaac told him he had to go to the toilet.

“Can’t it wait?”

“Sorry. No.”

They dripped across the floor. His body revolted him. It felt as though he’d never be rid of the beastliness inside him. His mind disgusted him more. All the places he’d gone for comfort within himself were spoiled and rotten.

As he wobbled back to the shower, Wes asked, “What the hell did they feed you?”

“Soup. Porridge.” He laughed and then wondered what the laughter was for. Floating maggots. It wasn’t all that funny.

Wes gripped his shoulder tighter. “I’ve got you,” he said. “Go ahead. Step in.” He finished washing him, toweled him off, and gave him a clean hospital gown. Isaac’s legs barely carried him back to bed, where Wes dressed his wounds. “Want anything else?” he heard through layers of oblivion. He slept seventeen hours, through dinner and breakfast and a visit from Alice, who sat beside him for half an hour, watching him sleep, and then left quietly.

They transferred him to a TB ward with seven other men, all of them old. The man in the bed beside him looked like someone he’d once known. The man slept all day, and when he woke, he coughed into a towel spotted with blood.

At night, Isaac could just see stars out a window. In a book Hendrik Pretorius had once given him, he’d read that our bodies are made of dust and matter from stars. Where had he gone, the part of him that was no longer here? The numbness inside, he thought, was something like what happens to a rat after a dog catches it. At first, the animal screams in pain. Then something causes its body to go numb, and as it goes from life to death, it feels little pain. The rat-numbness started the day they broke his nose and dislocated his shoulder. After the hot pain came nothing, a sense of watching himself from a distance. They dragged him back to his cell, and he lay there. When he came to, he realized a guard was watching him through the slit. He crawled into a corner. The eye disappeared.

He’d kept passing out from the pain in the shoulder. He tried to clear his head enough to remember the directions for how to relocate an anterior dislocation: Keep the upper arm perpendicular to the ground, elbow bent at a ninety-degree angle. Rotate the arm inward toward the chest. Make a fist with the hand on the injured side and slowly rotate the arm and shoulder outward. He pushed outward with the good arm as tears rolled down his cheeks. After several tries he heard a pop, and leaned into the wall.

When he came to again, he thought of his mother, how she’d once taken him to an open-air tent where a pastor was speaking. The man said, “Be grateful. There is not one moment in life when it is not possible to be grateful.” He was not grateful. He wished to die. He’d watched open heart surgery, had been astonished at how much abuse a human body can bear and still go on living. The only thing he felt through the curtain of pain was fear that his body would hang on.

And now, was he grateful? He was swept with numbness.

On the second day in the hospital, the old man next to him muttered under his breath, “Nosa tshingwana yotlhe.” Water the whole garden. “Dilo tse di swabile.” These things are dried up.

It came to him then. “Monna mogolo,” he said. “I know you.”

The man turned his head and squinted at him. “I don’t know you.”

“You gave me seeds. Hot pepper seeds. I met you in the garden. I dug a big hole like yours. I hit the water main.”

The old man’s face crinkled into a smile. “Ke gakologelwa,” he whispered. I remember. And then he laughed, setting off a chain of coughing. Isaac reached for the towel between their two beds, and handed it to him. The man gathered his breath and closed his eyes. His face looked as though he’d seen two hundred dry seasons. He breathed hard for a few minutes, then turned to Isaac. “Why are you here?”

“I was in prison in South Africa.”

“You lived.”

I am dead, Isaac thought. As empty as that sack they put over my head. He felt the old man looking at him.

“Are you sleeping at night?” Isaac asked him.

“Dikgopo tsa me.” My ribs.

“Do you have night sweats?”

“Ee, rra.” He caught his breath. “But no matter. Soon it will be finished.”

“You have somebody visiting you?”

“Nnyaa, rra. There is no one left.”

She brought soup with her, and a book she thought he might like, Peter Matthiessen’s The Tree Where Man Was Born. The Sister met her at the door. “You are not allowed in the TB ward,” she said.

“Can Mr. Muthethe come out?”

“You must wait two weeks after treatment begins.”

“If I wear a face mask?”

“No exceptions.”

“I see.” She shifted to her other foot. “But I’ve already visited him.”

“On the TB ward?”

She realized she shouldn’t have spoken. “The room where he was in isolation.”

“You should not have been allowed.”

“So the answer is no?”

“The answer is no. I will see that these things are taken to him.”

A young nurse in training brought him a parcel containing a tin of beef and tomato soup. And a large book. He was not hungry for anything but the book. He propped it on his belly and turned to the first page. There was a picture of a baobab tree, its trunk dark against golden grass standing as though nothing could ever move it. And on the second and third pages, a large blue mountain with two tops. The left side and the right side were like two brothers, rising equally, and the tops so high they turned to cloud. On the next page was a cheetah sitting on its haunches, looking to one side. Its coat was golden white, covered with dark spots. Running from its eye to its mouth was a dark line, like a trail of tears. He turned to the next page, and then he returned to the cheetah’s face. He studied its neck fur sticking up as though a breeze ruffled it, the long tufts in its ears.

On the page following, he found an old Dinka song from the South Sudan.

In the time when Dendid created all things,

He created the sun,

And the sun is born, and dies, and comes again.

He created the moon,

And the moon is born, and dies, and comes again;

He created the stars,

And the stars are born, and die, and come again;

He created man,

And man is born, and dies, and does not come again.

They had put his thumbs in casts, and they stuck up as he held the book. He read the words again. He heard the old gardener straining next to him, his breath creaking in and out, his eyes closed, as though his lungs were saying, and does not come again, and does not come again. He would be fighting for air until his heart stopped beating, and then he would be finished with this world.

Wes came to his bedside and told Isaac that he must walk. He got him up and grasped him firmly by the elbow. Isaac shuffled like an old man. When they reached the door, the sun was so bright, he needed to close his eyes until they were nothing more than slits. The pain in his knee made his mind go numb. They walked out onto the grounds, where the dirt had been swept clean with stick brooms. He thought of the people inside: the old man laboring for breath, women laboring for babies. Wes told him he must come out every day. His mind said, Why? Why bother? A shadow passed overhead, and Isaac looked into the sky. Thousands of quelea birds were migrating, in huge flocks. They landed here and there with their red bills, red feet, dun-colored bodies, black masks, and flew on, black against the sky, surging and turning like paper chains.