Helping Hands

Malmoud, the village leader, grabbed Betsy by the hand, the loose skin on his thin arm purple beneath the white glare of the sun.   His head was covered in thick shocks of white hair, his obsidian eyes sunk deep within their sockets.

He’d been hovering around her ever since she’d climbed down from Brian’s mud-caked Jeep, tilting his head back and forth as he eyed her blonde ponytail, her neatly-pressed safari pants.

He jerked Betsy’s arm as he pulled her through the small, nameless village outside Wau in West Bahr al Ghazal.

These villages were popping up everywhere in South Sudan, everywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa for that matter, as quickly and haphazardly as dust settling after a storm.

The landscape of South Sudan is bleak — the land of biblical cataclysm, of annual droughts giving way to annual floods.   The sky is always full of birds of prey — buzzards, eagles, kites.

Malmoud kept turning around, kept saying something in his language — Thuongjang, the Dinka language, the language of the Nile — but it was incomprehensible to Betsy’s ears, too rich in vowels, too formless, too breathy.   Brian would know what he’s saying, she thought.   Brian speaks six languages.

It’s nearly impossible for an American to visit South Sudan without a chaperone.   Betsy found Brian online.   At 27 he was already working on his doctorate in anthropology.   He had a ruddy face and bright eyes.   He worked for the International Rescue Committee.   She e-mailed him and he responded.   She only paid him $450.

Malmoud’s face looked like an eggplant, his teeth flashing yellow in his wide mouth, his tongue a vibrant pink, his gray eyes radiating anger.   He wore nothing except a pair of faded camouflage cut-offs.

They passed by small huts made of grass, “thuckles” they called them.   They passed by houses of rusted green and yellow sheet metal.   They passed by huts made of dried mud, sagging tin roofs stretched overhead, huts made of rotting, brown wood, chicken-wire fences strung up alongside the dirt path that wound through the center of the village.

There was no electricity, no running water, no telephones.   Brian told Betsy that some of these people had satellite phones but so far she hadn’t seen any.

The sky was a blue dome over their heads, cloudless, stretching endlessly, as large as the world itself.

She was struck by the silence of this place, the emptiness.   A bi-plane buzzed in the sky, somewhere in the distance.   Betsy stopped, made a visor with her hand, looked into the sun.

Malmoud pulled at her once more, muttered something in his strange language, nodded his head toward the canvas IRC tent.   He let go of her hand and Betsy felt his perspiration cooling in her palm.   He side-stepped behind her, put a hand on the small of her back, and using the tips of his needle-thin fingers, gave her a light push.

Betsy looked down.   The dirt in front of the tent had been kicked up, trampled, as if a hundred people had passed through the tent’s entrance that morning.

“You, go,” he said, his tongue struggling over the sharp angles of English consonants.   “Look inside.”

The entrance of the tent was a dark slit that ran up between two hanging flaps of canvas, red crosses painted on either side.   Betsy looked around for Brian, for any of the International Rescue Committee workers, and saw nothing but purple faces, peeking out from behind huts, from within the thuckles.

The bi-plane’s high-pitched buzzing was growing louder.   It was approaching the village.

“Go,” Malmoud said.   “Now.”

Betsy felt the old man’s eyes boring into her, hotter than the sun.   She’d only been here — in this nameless village — for five minutes.   She’d only left Kenya that morning.

She swallowed her spit, took a step forward, and grabbed hold of one of the canvas flaps.   She pulled it back and looked inside.

* * *

“There was a pile of arms,” Betsy said.   “Maybe twelve of them, stacked up like chicken bones on a plate, pools of black blood all over the place.”

“In the back of the tent, all huddled together, there were six dead children — no older than eight or nine.   They’d bled to death.   Their lips had turned gray, puckered up against their face.   All of their eyes were still open.   All of their skin was gray.   The stench — my God — the stench was unbelievable.   They were the only kids in the entire village.   After that’¦ that was it.   There were no children left.”

She was home now, back in Michigan.   She’d arrived early that morning, took a cab home, immediately climbed the stairs, and took a long nap.   Paul, her fiance, had woken her after sundown, roused her gently by stroking the side of her face with the backs of his fingers.   He was nearly done cooking her dinner, he’d said.   He was sorry for waking her, he’d said.

He hadn’t said anything about her early return, hadn’t asked her any questions.   He knows I’ll tell him when I’m ready, Betsy thought, sliding out of bed.

She was setting the table for dinner.   It was covered in an elegant, white cloth.   The lights had been dimmed.   The windows were open.   The humid summer air smelled like trees.   Grasshoppers chirped in the yard.   Trees rustled in the wind.

The sight of wood floors, polished and clean, of floral-print wallpaper, track lighting: these things comforted Betsy in a way she would have never thought possible.   Never before.

Paul was in the kitchen, the next room over, washing the dishes.   They’d been engaged for nearly a year.   Betsy’s trip to Africa was something they had both agreed she needed to do, needed to get out of the way before they settled down, started their family.

As Betsy told her story, he occasionally responded, his voice muffled beneath the sound of running water.   He sounded uncomfortable, like he didn’t know quite what to say.

“They’d been hacked off at the shoulder,” she said, shutting the cabinet door, holding a plate beneath each arm, a glass in each hand — her hard-earned waitressing skills at work.   “With a machete.   It was still there, next to the pile of arms.   Its blade was nicked, covered in dried blood.”

Three days had passed since Malmoud led her to the IRC tent.   She’d taken the first available flight home, a full month earlier than she’d planned.   She lost the will to help, had never been able to go birding in Botswana like she’d wanted.   All the way home and all she’d been able think about were the birds in Botswana.   They were supposed to be the most beautiful in the world.

All she remembered were the buzzards and the kites in Sudan.

“These people actually cut off the arms of their children.   All because they didn’t know what an inoculation was — what vaccines were.   We found out later, we learned that they thought we’d been injecting them with poison — that’s what the village leader said, that’s what Malmoud said.   You should have seen the look on his face.   Those villagers, they nearly killed those IRC people.   And — and I don’t know why, for some reason they thought I was there to help, they thought — they thought I could bring their children back to life.

“The five months I was there, I never saw anything like that — not in Rwanda, not in Kenya.”

Betsy set the glasses on the table, then the plates.   She picked up a box of matches and lit the candles.   A gust of summer wind blew in through the open windows.   The flames flickered and jumped.

“I know I was told, ‘Don’t expect to make things better.’ That’s what Brian said when I first got there — to Sudan.   ‘Don’t think that just because you come from privilege that you can change things.’ But I never thought it was going to be like that.   Christ, I don’t know how we’re supposed to wipe out polio if’ — if’ –“ Betsy’s voice faltered in her throat.   Her eyes were hot and itchy.

She saw Paul standing in the doorway, drying his hands on a dishrag.   The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his elbows.   He filled the doorway, stood in a wide stance. He was a handsome man with a large jaw and dark eyes.   Something about the way he was standing there reminded Betsy of how much she loved him.

“Jesus,” he said, coming toward her.   “Why didn’t you tell me?” He grabbed hold of the back of her neck with one hand, wrapped his other arm around her lower back.   He pulled her close.   “I had no idea,” he said.   “I had no idea you were living with this.”

Betsy angled her chin upward, smelled the wine on Paul’s breath as he came in close and spoke softly in her ear.   His skin smelled of soap.   He said everything she expected.   It’s okay.   There’s nothing to worry about.   You did all you could.   You’re a good person.   Those people need the guiding light.

They never got around to eating that night.   Instead they sat on the couch in the living room, finished two bottles of red wine.   They talked until two in the morning.   By the time they went to sleep, Betsy’s eyes were puffy, swollen and red.   As they climbed the stairs, she felt nauseous.   Only the wine, she thought.   Paul held her around the waist, supporting her.   Her legs were rubbery and she had to hold onto the handrail.   In the morning I’ll feel better.

* * *

That night insects filled her dreams.   Every kind of insect imaginable.   Gnats.   Mosquitoes.   Dragonflies.   Praying Mantises.   They were the size of cars.   They swooped down on her, emerged from black skies, flapped their leathery wings.

They had eyes like silver domes.   She saw herself reflected in their vision.   She saw hundreds of versions of herself, small, distorted.   Her face bent into new angles.

She covered her face with her arms, screamed, “No no no no no!” as she ran.   She was running in the desert, she knew it was the Sahara.   Her feet were bare, the sand lunar-gray, cold as ice, the sky an endless black void.   The insects droned above her, beyond her vision.   She felt their menace in her blood.

In the distance she saw the IRC tent bathed in moonlight, recognized the red crosses on the entrance flaps.   And then she was there, pulling back the flaps.   There was silence now.   The insects were gone.   She took a step inside the tent.

She felt herself sinking in blood.   It closed around her knees.   It sucked her down.   It was at her waist, smelling like copper.   She held her arms in the air and tried to scream.   She couldn’t make a noise.   It licked at her armpits.   She struggled, and for a second she thought she might break free.   She slid down even farther and the blood filled her mouth with its warmth, its metallic stink.   She tried to scream again and felt it pouring down her throat, into her lungs.

* * *

Time passed.   Two, three days.   Betsy got the flu.   Every morning she was waking up, darting to the bathroom, throwing up stomach acid as yellow as bile.   The bathroom would spin.   Her forehead would sweat.

She would think of all the shots the government made her get before she could go to Africa: Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Meningitis, Rabies, Typhoid, Tetanus-Diptheria, Measles, Polio.

She stayed in bed all day.   Her eyes twitched with dreams.

When he came home from work, Paul served her plain foods on a tray.   He served her chicken broth and unbuttered toast.   He served her Jello cut up into little cubes.   She wouldn’t touch any of it.   Finally he started giving her bowls of ice, told her — begged her — to suck on them.   He gave her water, glass after glass after glass after glass of water.

She had nothing but time, nothing to do but think.   She thought of what had happened in Wau.   She thought of what had happened after she’d seen the arms.

The bi-plane’s buzzing turned into a roar as it approached the village, swooping over the huts in a wide arc before touching down in the dry, surrounding fields.

Betsy emerged from the darkness of the tent and fell to her knees, then to her hands.   The dirt was dry and hot against her palms.   Her stomach pulled inward and she dry-heaved, hard enough to break the blood vessels around her eyes.   A thin cry escaped her mouth.   Malmoud stood over her, yelling.   He stomped back and forth, bringing his knees up high, slamming his feet into the dirt.

Brian’s voice resounded down the footpath, a hundred yards away.   He was arguing with somebody.

She fainted.

By the time she woke up in the back of Brian’s Jeep, they were about to cross the border back into Kenya.

The sun was relentless.   The land around them flat, brown.

They approached the border, nothing more than a small shack, a barricade built of yellow 2x4s.   A dozen men — young boys, really — in baggy camouflage uniforms stopped them.   They appeared unsure of what to do.   They rifled aimlessly through their bags.   They argued with Brian.

There was a small metal sign on a post with a message written in Kishwahili, English and Arabic.   The sign warned of taking photographs, a criminal offense.

The guards had AK-47s.   They held them at their hips, posed with them.   They had a meanness in their eyes.   She had never seen anything like it.   They reminded her of abused dogs.

“American!” Brian shouted.   And then he reverted back to words that Betsy could not understand.

The boys let them go soon after that.   It wasn’t until the Jeep bounced along the dusty road into Lokichokio that Brian began talking.   He spoke quickly, loudly.

“Don’t worry,” he said.   His knuckles were white, wrapped around the wheel.   “The IRC workers got out of there as soon as they realized what was happening, as soon as they figured out that the kids had been rounded up.”

“Malmoud — that old man — he was the one.   He was the one who did it.   Did you go in the tent?   Did you see what was in there?   Christ, I never should have let you go with him. Somebody — I don’t know who, must’ve been one of the IRC workers — somebody put out a dispatch, I don’t even know who to.   That plane that landed, it was two human rights defenders, Americans.   None of us knew what to do. We were yelling, we were all scared, panicked.   That’s when I got to the tent and saw you on the ground.   I picked you up, ran you back to the Jeep.   Christ, I never even knew I was that strong.”

It wasn’t until she was on a plane, flying out of Nairobi, that Betsy cried.

Then one morning Betsy woke up, stepped down from bed, and her legs gave out beneath her.   Her bones pulled her straight to the hardwood floor.   First her elbow smacked, then her hip thudded.   A wavering cry escaped her throat and for a second she couldn’t figure out what it was.   When she realized it had been her cry, a cold rush of fear coursed through her entire body.   Her fingertips tingled.

She soldier-crawled her way to the bathroom, sat against the tub, looked at her feet.   Her vision was blurry.   It took a few seconds before things came into focus.

Sunlight poured in through the small window next to the toilet, formed slanted columns, illuminated bits of dust that twirled and danced in the air.

The skin of her toes had turned black.   It looked like her skin had shrunk over the bones in her foot.   Her toenails were a wan pink.   The cuticles had turned orange, like they’d been stained with iodine.   The bridge of her foot was beet red, covered in open sores that glistened white in the sunlight.

Betsy’s heart pounded as she inspected her feet.   She thought of words like gangrene, necrotic, fetid.

She looked at her hands.   Her palms were covered in sores.   The skin on her fingers was so black it was shiny, almost blue.   How had I not noticed that?   How could I have not noticed that my hands turned black?

She was too tired to do anything.   She was too tired to soldier-crawl back into the bedroom, to lift herself up to the phone, too tired to dial the numbers, to explain who she was, where she was, what was wrong.

Betsy felt fuzzy warmth swirl behind her eyes.   She was tired.   She shut her eyes and fell asleep.   Paul will find me, she thought.   Paul will find me and Paul will help.

* * *

She was in a white bed.   The bed’s frame was metal and painted white.   The white sheets were tucked tightly over her body, but her body was not there.   Her arms were tucked beneath the sheets but her arms were not there.   Her legs and feet did not push against the sheet.   She was flat, completely flat.

She was back in the Sahara, surrounded by the lunar sands.   The sky was black above her.   There were no stars.   There was moonlight on everything but there was no moon.

At the foot of the bed was a giant mosquito.   It was perched on the ornate footboard, all six of its massive, pipe-cleaner legs holding the footboard like a buzzard holds the branch of a tree.   Its legs bent out at its sides at severe angles.   Its body expanded and contracted as it took in and released air.

The mosquito tilted its head as it looked at Betsy.   Its sucker hung straight down, like a vacuum cleaner attachment.   Its antennae sprouted from its small head, curled inward on themselves into the shape of a heart.

It had eyes the size of dinner plates, silver dome eyes. She saw herself reflected in the mosquito’s eyes.

“If you had one wish,” the mosquito said, in a voice that sounded like insects crawling, “what would it be?”

“I would like to help everyone.”

“And how would you do that?”

Betsy thought for a moment.   She responded, “I would like more hands.   I have always seen my two hands as helping hands.   If I had more hands I would be able to help everyone in the world.   Two hands are not enough to help everyone.   I could reach out to everyone in the world.   I wish that I had more hands.”

As she spoke, she thought of the pile of arms she’d seen in the IRC tent.   She thought of how small they had been.  She wished she had picked them up, brought them somewhere.   She wished she had done something other than leave them there.   She thought of Malmoud, his obsidian eyes, the way they radiated anger, the way he touched her ponytail.

“I wish I had been able to bring those children back to life — the way those villagers thought I could.   I wish I had picked up those arms and put them back where they belonged, reattached them to their sockets.   I wish that I had been able to breathe life into those children’s lungs, to give them back the life that was robbed from them.”

The mosquito laughed a buzzing laugh.   Its whole body convulsed with laughter.   Its heart glowed red inside its body.

The mosquito’s face turned into Paul’s face.   He looked upset.   Betsy recognized his voice.

“I’m here with you,” he said.

* * *

“I’m here with you at the hospital,” he said.   “You’re going to wake up soon and I’m going to be here for you.”

Paul sat on a plastic chair next to Betsy’s bed.   She had a private room.   The sky outside the window opposite was overcast.   He watched Betsy’s eyes twitch and he thought she must be dreaming.

He did not know how long comas were supposed to last and he did not know whether or not it would be best for her if she stayed wherever she was.

Paul leaned forwards with his elbows on his knees, cupped his hands in front of his mouth, and began to cry.

She’ll need a quadruple amputation, they’d said.   Symmetric peripheral gangrene.   Caused by a malarial infection.

Paul did not know the answers to the doctor’s questions about where Betsy had been or what she had done or what she had taken. He only knew what she told him.   She had been to Kenya, to Rwanda, to Sudan.   She volunteered with the International Rescue Committee.   She had been administering Polio vaccinations.   It was her dream to help stop Polio.

Paul leaned back in his chair and stared out the window.   He did not want to think of Betsy spending the rest of her life confined, without arms, without legs.

Paul thought that the gray sky was the same sky over Africa.   He wondered if these clouds were made of waters that had once been in Africa.   It occurred to him that if so, the journey these waters had made was a long thankless one.