Fever

I thanked him and told him I’d get to the bottom of this one way or the other. I left thinking that someone was trying to lead me in a false direction, either Christophe or the priest. I didn’t want it to be Christophe who was lying to me, but this priest hadn’t been at all what I had expected. He didn’t even watch me walk away. Men who were interested in “my type” always watched me walk away.

When I returned to the clinic, Christophe, Ken Kelso, and Moussa were digging a grave for Assane. He was Muslim and thus needed to be buried before sundown.

“There you are,” Gretta Schmidt said as she came out of the clinic’s entrance when I’d driven up in the yellow Toyota. “I wondered if you men were going to leave me completely alone to handle all of the patients today.” She looked frazzled.

“I see that Christophe is over in the clinic’s cemetery digging a grave, but I don’t see Dr. al-Saadi over there,” I answered. “Isn’t he working in the clinic?”

“No, I haven’t seen him at the clinic at all. I’ve had to carry it all myself so far today.”

When we checked, no one had seen Dr. al-Saadi for hours. That evening he still hadn’t returned. I walked a bit of a distance from the camp and called the Doctors Across Borders office in New York. I told them they needed to send three fresh doctors out to Kongoba. I assured them that the fever issue would be resolved, but I told them I couldn’t say what the issue was and it was going to be resolved yet. After I rang off with them, I called Naples.

The next morning, at my request, Christophe walked with me down toward the river. He made love to me in an animal wallow next to a pond in a stand of elephant grass. The grass was a good five foot high, and where we lay, him on top of me, with me thrusting my buttocks up and leveraging off my feet, meeting him thrust for thrust as we desperately fucked, was where the grass had been matted down by animals watering at the pond and resting here. Our fucking was passionate and frenzied in keeping with me knowing it was our last time. I think he suspected that as well.