by Paul Anton Taylor

Wayne had awakened in a smoky miasma to the drone of voices and a rhythmic rattling, tapping. He was not surprised, as if he were revisiting a dream, a welcoming inevitability. He’d been calm, not overcome by the strangeness of his surroundings, yet clammy skinned and weak. A heavy breathing had accompanied exhalations and inhalations close to his cheek. Glazed, acknowledging the dim light, his eyes had focused on the dark visage hovering in his periphery. Lined and creased above a short gray beard, the dark eyes of the old man had seemed to look right through him as if he were not there.

The face that had floated above his belonged to an elder in the group of refugees who had fled the fighting further north. Women out foraging had found Wayne and brought him to their camp site. Yet the man’s expressions, the look about him, had been intimately familiar. It had not dawned on him immediately, occupied as he had been in piecing together the tatters of memory of the previous span of days, but when it did, he’d felt a genuine astonishment of cosmic interconnection. The face belonged to that of a childhood friend, someone he had met as a youngster in old Rick’s candy store adjacent to the Bruce Battery Works. He’d remembered the name as if it had always been on the tip of his tongue. Michael. He was the son of Mr. Rick’s cousin’s granddaughter and about the same age as Wayne had been back when superhero comic books were a preadolescent preoccupation.

That memory nagged him even after everything had been resolved. How the face of the old African healer had been that of his friend, a friend with whom he’d felt instant rapport, but a friendship that had lasted no more than one summer vacation yet had felt like it was the best he could remember. Most of his friends were chosen by Trish, his mother, and there were few, if any, of African ancestry. When Wayne had returned to the Battery Works during the Fall holiday break, Michael had moved to another state, never to be seen or heard from again. Mr. Rick had answered his inquiries with something about people making bad choices, born to lose.

He’d made a bad choice. Leaving Dr. Fledermann behind in a desperate attempt to find help. Once the sun had set, he’d helped Alfred into the cooling protection of the stranded Land Rover. He had hoped that they would be reported missing once they failed to return from the expedition. Brebeuf or Yousoff returning with help had been the slim prospect he’d held on to. Fledermann improved a little once the heat of the day subsided. Stretched out in the rear of the vehicle, the old man had groaned and murmured and complained. Intent on the growing dark and the steep drop in temperature, Wayne only half listened to the random spouting, the insistence that their predicament was not the way it was supposed to happen. But eventually, if only to break the monotony, he’d advanced the question, what wasn’t supposed to happen?

Fledermann had lapsed into silence after that, offering no answer. His breathing unperturbed although shallow, Wayne had assumed that the old man had fallen asleep. So he’d been startled by Alfred’s clear assertion, “I refused to agree to that!” He’d repeated it again and then with a moan, “I am such a fool! I’ve been betrayed!” And again the mantra that what had happened wasn’t supposed to happen. That it was not something he’d agreed to. Yet bit by bit Wayne had pieced together that perhaps the mission had had a dual purpose. Not only the search for diatomite but another more sinister objective, something that had to do with the future of Bruce Enterprise.

He’d slept fitfully that night and the following day had not been an improvement on the previous one. He’d kept his eyes fixed to the horizon in the direction from which they’d come, willing the rescuers to materialize, but to no avail. And the day had heated up quickly, the abandoned vehicle no longer a shelter, he had carried a semiconscious Fledermann to the shade of the anemic acacia. By then he’d felt the full impact of their dire predicament. The water would not last and the old man would not survive much longer. And another realization had crept into his consideration. He had to save himself and if in doing so he could save the old man, then it was the choice he had to make.

Not long after his vision of Michael, perhaps that evening, he’d had another visitor, a young French Moroccan woman. Her name was Mina, an itinerant nurse with the local UN refugee effort who spoke little English. Thanks to that one year in a Swiss boarding school, Wayne knew enough French to communicate with her. She had just arrived on her regular rounds and had been taken to him. Before that the elder and a few of the women in the camp had ministered to him, offering a little food and water, shelter in a primitive lean-to of twigs. She was the one who had related to him how he had been found, semi-conscious with nothing but an empty canteen and an aluminum field case. She hadn’t known anything about Dr. Fledermann, nor had anyone from the camp. Mina had only sporadic contact with the UN Mission in Timbuktu with the antiquated radio in her Peugeot cargo van that served as a clinic. She had tried to contact the base camp but couldn’t be certain her transmission had been picked up. In the meantime, she had to continue with her duties attending to the refugees. She had pronounced that he was out of danger, but that he needed to rest. She had also told him that he owed his life to the old man he thought of as Michael.

Wayne had pieced together what he could remember, setting off in the direction of the road that had brought them here. He’d made a bad choice, but anxiety had turned into panic and he had to act. He was no match for the searing heat, yet he’d known he couldn’t stop. He hadn’t been able to make anything sensible in those ripples of memory only the intensity of the brazen wash of light. The sensation of being carried had stayed with him. As did the blur of voices and the chanting between the chasms of catalepsy.

In his reorientation, his model had been nothing he could compare with. The smells, the smoke, the oppressive heat wrinkled air, and the languid dark bodies conserving energy in anticipation of a cooler part of the day. Gaunt black faces came to peer at him and murmur a few words or grunts of acknowledgement. He had managed to lift himself on his elbows, shakily, taking in the stirring in the camp as Mina set up her clinic around which people were beginning to gather, some so sick they had to be carried. He had awakened in a different world, one so different that it defied comprehension. What he’d witnessed was not poverty, but a suspension of time, a place that had always been there but always kept out of sight, denied. That was what had changed. His privileged view had been put into stark perspective and so many of his assumptions became untenable and he could not unsee the suffering and misery.

The helicopter had arrived the next day with all the roaring intensity of an angry god. It was a military ship and on board were a Bruce Enterprise representative and a UN doctor. He’d been flown to the main hospital in Bamako and given a physical. He had then learned that Dr Alfred Fledermann had been found a day earlier when Brebeuf returned with help, and that he was in critical condition in the isolation ward. He’d been advised to recuperate for a few days himself before flying back to the States and he hadn’t refused. There’d been too many things crowding his mind and he’d felt he needed the time to process his confusion before returning to the other world, a world that masked cruelty in the guise of prosperity and whose humanity was a sham. Besides he’d wanted to get a chance to talk with the old doctor, get him to elaborate on what he’d been babbling about, what was it that had gone wrong and what did it have to do with him and the future of the Bruce business empire? He’d never got the chance. The BATS lab director had been flown to a more advanced care facility in Italy, the Bamako hospital overcrowded and understaffed as it was. It had been on the tarmac at the airport boarding the company jet that he’d been informed that Fledermann’s plane never reached its destination. He’d thought he’d left it all behind, but it stayed with him: a mystery to resolve, injustice to be righted, and revenge to be exacted.

Next Time: Act 3, Scene 1