no longer able to drive a car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what he might have some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.
The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he had to get to Nairobi. They put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.
A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plan flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day—Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.
The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights hat drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern Rift Valley. The passengers looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born. They saw specks of huts clustered inside circles of thornbush, with cattle trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the Friendship passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy Rift clouds, and began to bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.
The seats are narrow and jammed together on these commuter airplanes, and you notice everything that is happening inside the cabin. The cabin is tightly closed, and the air recirculates. If there are any smells in the air, you perceive them. You would not have been able to ignore the man who was getting sick. He hunches over in his seat. There is something wrong with him, but you can’t tell exactly what is happening.
He is holding an airsickness bag over his mouth. He coughs a deep cough and regurgitates something into the bag. The bag swells up. Perhaps he glances around, and then you see that his lips are smeared with something slippery and red, mixed with black specks, as if he has been chewing coffee grounds. His eyes are the color of rubies, and his face is an expressionless mass of bruises. The red spots, which a few days before had started out as starlike speckles, expanded and merged into huge, spontaneous purple shadows; his whole head is turning black- and-blue. The muscles of his face droop. The connective tissue in his face is dissolving, and his face appears to hang from underlying bone, as if the face is detaching itself from the skull. He opens his mouth and gasps into the bag, and the vomiting goes on endlessly. It will not stop, and he keeps bringing up liquid, long after his stomach should have been empty. The airsickness bag fills up to the brim with a substance known as vomit negro, or the black vomit. The black vomit is not really black; it is a speckled liquid of two colors, black and red, a stew of tarry granules mixed with fresh red arterial blood. It is hemorrhage, and it smells like a slaughterhouse. The black vomit is loaded with virus. It is highly infective, lethally hot, a liquid that smell of the vomit negro fills the passenger cabin. The airsickness bag is brimming with black vomit, so Monet closes the bag and rolls up the top. The bag bulging and softening, threatening to leak, and he hands it to a flight attendant. When a hot virus multiplies in a host, it can saturate the body with virus particles, from the brain to the skin. The military experts then say that the virus has undergone “extreme amplification”. This is not something like the common cold. By the time an extreme amplification peaks out, an eyedropper of the victim’s blood may contain a hundred million particles of virus. During this process, the body is partly transformed into virus particles. In other words, the host is possessed by a life form that is attempting to convert the host into itself. The transformation is not entirely successful, however, and the end result is a great deal of liquefying flesh mixed with virus, a kind of biological accident. Extreme amplification has occurred in Monet, and the sign of it is the black vomit.
He appears to be holding himself rigid, as if any movement would rupture something inside him. His blood is clotting up—his bloodstream is throwing clots, and the clots are lodging everywhere. His liver, kidneys, lungs, hands, feet, and head are becoming jammed with blood clots. In effect, he is having a stroke through the whole body. Clots are accumulating in his intestinal muscles, cutting off the blood supply to his intestines. The intestinal muscles are beginning to die, and the intestines are starting to go slack. He doesn’t seem to be fully aware of pain any longer because the blood clots lodged in his brain are cutting off blood flow. His personality is being wiped away by brain damage. This is called depersonalization, in which the liveliness and details of character seem to vanish. He is becoming an automaton. Tiny spots in his brain are liquefying. The higher functions of consciousness are winking out first, leaving the deeper parts of the brain stem (the primitive rat brain, the lizard brain) still alive and functioning. It could be said that the who of Charles Mont has already died while the what of Charles Monet continues to live.
The vomiting attack appears to have broken some blood vessels in his nose—he gets a nosebleed. The blood comes from both nostrils, a shining, cloudless, arterial liquid that drips over his teeth and chin. This blood keeps running, because the clotting factors have been used up. A flight attendant gives him some paper towels, which he uses to stop up his nose, but the blood still won’t coagulate, and the towels soak through.
When a man is ill in an airline seat next to you, you may not want to embarrass him by calling attention to the problem. You say to yourself that this man will be all right. Maybe he doesn’t travel well in airplanes. He is airsick, the poor man, and people do get nosebleeds in airplanes, the air is so dry and thin… and you ask him, weakly, if there is anything you can do to help. He does not answer, or he mumbles words you can’t understand, so you try to ignore it, but the flight seems to go on forever. Perhaps the flight attendants offer to help him. But victims of this type of hot virus have changes in behavior that can render them incapable of responding to an offer of help. They become hostile, and don’t want to be touched. They don’t want to speak. They answer questions with grunts or monosyllables. They can’t seem to find words. They can tell you their name, but they can’t tell you the day of the week or explain what has happened to them.
The Friendship drones through the clouds, following the length of the Rift Valley, and Monet slumps back in the seat, and now he seems to be dozing… Perhaps some of the passengers wonder if he is dead. No, no, he is not dead. He is moving. His red eyes are open and moving around a little bit.
It is late afternoon, and the sun is falling down into the hills to the west of the Rift Valley, throwing blades of light in all directions, as if the sun is cracking up on the equator. The Friendship makes a gentle turn and crosses the eastern scarp of the Rift. The land rises higher and changes in color from brown to green. The Ngong Hills appear under the right wing, and the plane, now descending, passes over parkland dotted with zebra and giraffes. A minute later, it lands at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Monet stirs himself. He is still able to walk. He stands up, dripping. He stumbles down the gangway onto the tarmac. His shirt is a red mess. He carries no luggage. His only luggage is internal, and it is a load of amplified virus. Monet has ben transformed into a human virus bomb. He walks slowly into the airport terminal and through the building and out to a curving road where taxis are always parked. The taxi drivers surround him—“Taxi?” “Taxi?”
“Nairobi… Hospital,” he mumbles.
One of them helps him into a car. Nairobi taxi drivers like to chat with their fares, and this one probably asks if he is sick. The answer should be obvious. Monet’s stomach feels a little better now. It is heavy, dull, and bloated, as if he has eaten a meal, rather than empty and torn and on fire.
The taxi pulls onto the Uhuru Highway and heads into Nairobi. It goes through grassland studded with honey-acacia trees, and it goes past factories, and then it comes to a rotary and enters the bustling street life of Nairobi. Crowds are milling on the shoulders of the road, women walking on beaten dirt pathways, men loitering, children riding bicycles, a man repairing shoes by the side of the road, a tractor pulling a wagonload of charcoal. The taxi turns left onto the Ngong Road and goes past a city park and up a hill, past lines of tall blue-gum trees, and it turns up a narrow road and goes past a guard gate and enters the grounds of Nairobi Hospital. It parks at a taxi stand beside a flower kiosk. A sign by a glass door says CASUALTY DEPT. Monet hands the driver some money and gets out of the tax and opens the glass door and goes over to the reception window and indicates that he is very ill. He has difficulty speaking.
The man is bleeding, and they will admit him in just a moment. He must wait until a doctor can be called, but the doctor will see him immediately, not to worry. He sits down in the waiting room.
It is a small room lined with padded benches. The clear, strong ancient light of East Africa pours through a
