Rosie nodded. She was surprised to see that the mechanic was both female and the apparent welcoming committee. K turned and headed off at what appeared to be a saunter, but Rosie and Claude found themselves practically running to keep up. At each turn, their entourage grew, everyone eager to welcome them with pressed hands and a bow and to trot alongside, everyone happy to let the mechanic lead. Claude was whisked away, and Rosie reached for him as if the wreckage they clung to had suddenly split in stormy seas, but he was already too far off, waves of people between them. Rosie felt at once swept along and struggling to keep up. A chorus of voices in a variety of languages informed her what was where and offered helpful hints that were probably important. A shoe tree of fingers pointed in all directions at once.
There was a building that was clearly obstetrics. At least you could tell obstetrics by looking. There was a workshop from which disembodied limbs hung—legs and feet mostly in various states of doneness, some still being assembled, a band saw, a drill press. There were patients sitting in chairs or wheelchairs whose legs ended before their pants did, so she could see where they belonged too. There was an open-air portico—really just a swept dirt floor under a roof of flattened cardboard boxes tied to the underside of a tarp—littered with plastic lawn chairs, sleeping bags, and blankets in piles where whole families seemed contentedly camped out. Whether they were awaiting treatment or news about someone else receiving treatment or something else altogether, Rosie could see only that they were not bleeding or moaning in pain or about to give birth. There were half-formed, halfhearted lines everywhere. There was an eye chart taped to a cement wall at the end of a rock-strewn dirt path. There were stray dogs wandering lazily in and out of all the buildings, including the one labeled Surgical Department, a building with holes for doors and windows but with no doors or windows filling them. There was a large patch of dirt with lounge-style lawn chairs and then the regular sitting-up kind behind them, and though patients were reclining, openmouthed, on the former, and though there was a medic, lab-coated and rubber-gloved, on the latter, Rosie could not quite believe this was a dentist’s office, but she was wrong.
The buildings were cinder block with barred windows or patched plaster with grated cutouts like lace. Corrugated metal roofs covered in debris gapped several inches over the tops of the walls. Curling linoleum floors, their patterns worn nearly away, spilled onto dirt or cement spaces out front. Empty, open drains lined all the walkways, auguring a rainy season that must turn all the dirt floors to sopping, sticky, insect-harboring mud. All of it un-air-conditioned, unsterile, unsealed, and undifferentiable. But the entrances, the doorways, the open spaces where doorways should have been, were all heaped with flip-flops and plastic clogs and sandals, a broom made of straw always propped nearby, and so, though the walls and ceilings were grimy with decades of dirt, the floors were miraculously, significantly, clean.
Her seeming entourage led Rosie to the largest building and ushered her in. It was unlike anything she’d seen before in her life—it was beyond imagining—but she recognized it immediately as home. The rush of the few doctors and nurses at hand, the focus of the medic doing eye-of-the-storm triage amid the rest of the room’s hurricane, the tang of blood and panic, the antiseptic smell augmenting rather than assuaging all the other ones, equivocal spills best avoided, patients unable to ask, afraid to know: an emergency room.
There were no gurneys, no beds, no curtains, no monitors, no machines. Patients lay on plain wooden platforms covered in scraps of sheets or old, felt-lined tablecloths falling into tatters. Patients lay spooning other patients in a tangle of IVs. They shivered against the walls, trailing blood or vomit or bandages into the corners. They sat on the floor between the wooden platform beds so the staff darted around them like swallows. It was impossible to tell who was waiting for treatment and who was waiting for a loved one, whose mangled and missing limbs were emergent and whose had been that way for decades, whose drawn and pallid faces, damp brows, hollow, shining eyes bespoke fever and whose fear and whose had merely frozen that way after too many years in that sorry state. There was a small folding snack table just inside the door with a foot-tall stack of papers weighted down by a rock: single-sheet intake forms.
It was not yet seven a.m.
Having deposited her where she was clearly meant to be, Rosie’s entourage faded away, back to whatever posts they had temporarily abandoned in order to welcome her. Who had taken Claude, and where? There was no one even to ask.
“Ready?” A teenager at the folding table nodded encouragingly toward the pile.
Rosie wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. A jungle orientation of some sort? An HR tutorial on tax and benefit forms? A lecture from Legal on sexual harassment? Somehow, she’d expected calm assurances regarding her child and what he would do while she worked. Somehow, she’d imagined something between truck repair and meeting patients. But there was nothing.
The paper on the top of the stack directed her to bed 8. There, Rosie was surprised, having identified obstetrics some buildings ago, to find a patient in labor, healthy labor from the look of it. When she investigated further, she was even more surprised at what she found between the patient’s spread knees.
“You’re the mechanic,” she could not quite stop herself from saying.
K grinned. “Also midwife.”