Bobby Adair: Ebola K

“Up to you. You want to go out and find out what’s going on first?”

Austin heard Rashid set the teakettle on the counter. Then he didn’t hear anything. He looked back into the kitchen. Rashid’s head was down. He wasn’t moving. Austin asked, “Are you worried?”

“Najid called me yesterday. He says all he sees on the news are stories about Ebola. I told him not to worry. Ebola is in West Africa. We’re in East Africa. But he kept telling me about all the hundreds of people who are dying and about how this is the worst outbreak ever.”

Austin raised his hands in frustration. “You convinced me that the odds of us getting Ebola are so astronomically small that I shouldn’t worry about it.”

“That’s the same thing I told Najid.”

“But?”

“He worries. He told me to get on a plane and come home. He said he had a ticket waiting for me in Entebbe.”

“When’s the flight?”

“It was this morning. He said if I didn’t get on that plane, he’d come here and grab me by the ear, put me on a plane, and take me home. His worries are infecting me, I think.”

“Look, Rashid, I don’t know much about Ebola. Somebody has to bleed on you or something. And I read it has a long incubation time.”

“How do you know this?” Rashid asked.

“I did a little bit of research before I came over,” said Austin. “I came across an underreported story about a small outbreak in Sierra Leone and that piqued my curiosity. Mostly what I wanted to know was what I could catch while I was here, and how I could avoid it.”

“What are you telling me?”

Austin said, “We left the village last week. Six days ago. There was no Ebola here when we left. If by some really bad luck somebody caught it from a monkey or whatever, it would be, like, one person. That’s it. There is no such thing as a whole village full of patient zeroes. So if somebody got it, their caregiver might get it, too. And so on, and so on. It could take a month or two before enough people get it for anybody but the local doctor to even notice.”

Rashid didn’t say anything.

Austin sat back down on the couch. “Take a deep breath. Make the tea. We’ll drink some. Then we’ll go. For all we know, Benoit and Margaux will come back while the water is coming to a boil and we can ask them what’s going on. If not, we’ll go over to the hospital and ask Dr. Littlefield. He’ll know.”

At first, Salim hated Pakistan. Every single thing about it was unlike America. Of course, he expected that. But after living nineteen of his twenty years in a Denver suburb, and only one year in Hyderabad, the romantic idea of Pakistani life—the basis for his expectations—was nothing like the reality.

From the moment he landed in Lahore and walked off the plane, it started. The air was pungent with the smell of curry, diesel fumes, a whole range of plant smells, and even a bit of rotting garbage. All the smells of a city that one gets used to and doesn’t even notice, until suddenly replaced by a whole different set of smells, becoming a constantly noticeable reminder of alien-ness.

But that was just the first thing.

The people spoke English with an accent that Salim had a hard time following. Of course, his parents spoke with a similar accent. However, they used good grammar in calm, slow, educated speech—not the rushed slang of people on the street.

Salim’s accent was distinctly American, and that earned him suspicious glances from everyone he spoke to. His sense of alienation made the suspicion feel like hate. Back on that day, as he waited three hours for his tardy contact to come forward and collect him, he sulked near a ticket counter, trying to figure out how to turn his meager cash into a ticket back to Denver.

In fact, he’d been looking at his watch as he sat there, and had picked the top of the upcoming hour as the time when he’d stop waiting and call his father to beg him for money to buy that ticket. But ten minutes before the hand reached twelve on the clock face, a man walked up to him. “Salim?” he asked.

From there, Salim and his bag were hurried out of the airport, rushed into a taxi, and dropped off on a crowded street. He was hustled through block after block of pushing and shoving people, and finally trundled off in a rickety white van. Five others, silent young men with worried faces, shared the rear seats of the van with Salim. A driver and the man in charge sat in front.

They spent the better part of two days heading north in the van, slowly navigating roads which were mostly rutted paths, wide enough for the van but not much more. It was hot. It was dusty. It was a miserable trip. When one of the frightened young men tried to strike up a conversation to pass the time, he was scolded so fiercely that no one in the van attempted to speak for the rest of the trip.

On his second night in Pakistan, Salim and the other young men spent the night in a house that looked like the ones he’d seen on TV whenever soldiers were raiding villages in Afghanistan or drones were blowing them up in Pakistan. Pale stone walls with barren courtyards, the houses were all the sandy color of the surrounding dirt. And everywhere there were dirty, third-world people.

The six shared a room for the night: four on bunks, two on the floor. One of the brave among them whispered a question, and after that a quiet conversation grew. One of Salim’s fellow travelers was from Canada, one from Florida. Two were from the UK, and another hailed from Germany. All were children of Muslim immigrants and had spent most—if not all—of their lives in their respective countries.

The next day, Salim was put in the back of a dilapidated Japanese pickup with Jalal, a nineteen-year-old from London with a comically thick working-class English accent. They rode in the truck most of that day, along dirt roads that wound their way past mountain villages and a few towns. They whispered about where they might be—Pakistan or maybe Afghanistan. Though it could have been Tajikistan or China, for all they knew.

Late that day, with the temperatures dipping near freezing, they arrived at their new home and training center, a complex of buildings that looked to have grown up out of the dirt. Indoor plumbing was a luxury left hundreds, if not thousands of miles behind. Comfortable, bug-free mattresses were replaced with cots made of blankets over sticks lashed together. The kitchen was an outdoor cook’s fire. It was camping, only instead of a tent Salim slept between stone walls under a leaky roof.

Two months in, Salim had gotten used to the thin air, the cold nights, the simple meals, and Spartan life. They trained six days a week, usually four at a time under their two instructors on marksmanship, ambush, shooting from a moving vehicle, physical conditioning, and a host of other skills that any good jihadist might need.

With six trainees in the camp, two would take the rotating duty of drone watch while the other four trained. Keeping out of sight when drones were overhead kept them out of the crosshairs when America’s politicians needed to boost their popularity with news feeds of exploding Muslims.

Salim scanned the sky. “I hate watching for drones.”

“It’s an easy day.” Jalal handed the binoculars to Salim, “It’s your turn.”

Salim lifted them to his eyes and looked at several high, wispy clouds off to the west, thinking that maybe he saw a bright spot up there. “Has anyone ever seen a drone?”

“Dhakwan saw one last week,” said Jalal. “You knew that. I was there when he told you.”

“He saw something,” said Salim, finding himself asking why every single thing said by anybody needed to be taken on faith.