Dave Eggers - What Is The What

This night, I felt that Achor Achor was probably correct. I said nothing, though. I stared at the red walls of our shelter, the fire dimming until we lay in the dark, our breath growing colder.

It is time to leave this hospital. They have made a fool of me. Julian abandoned his promise. He is gone. In the waiting room, Achor Achor and Lino are gone. I approach the new nurse, she with the cloud of yellow hair, at the admitting station.

'I am leaving now,' I say.

'But you haven't been treated,' she says. She is genuinely surprised that I would consider leaving after only fourteen hours.

'I have been here too long,' I say.

She begins to say something but then holds her tongue. This news seems new to her. I tell her I'd like to call back later about the results of the MRI.

'Yes,' she says. 'Sure…' and on a business card, she writes down a telephone number I can call. Since I was attacked in my home, I have been given two business cards. I have not, I don't think, asked for extraordinary care, or heroics from the police. When everyone wakes up, Phil and Deb and my Sudanese friends, there will be outrage and phone calls and threats to these doctors.

But for now it is time I left this place. I have no car and no money to pay for a taxi. It is too early to call anyone for a ride, so I decide to walk home. It is 3:44 a.m., and I need to be at work at five-thirty, so I prompt the automatic doors, leave the emergency room and the parking lot, and begin walking to my apartment. I will shower and change and then go to work. At work they have some rudimentary medical supplies and I will dress my wounds as best I can.

I set out down Piedmont Road. The streets are abandoned. Atlanta is not a city for pedestrians, let alone at this hour. The cars pass through the liquid night and illuminate the road much as they did in those last days of our walk, before Kakuma. Then, as now, I walked while pondering whether I wanted to continue to live.

I was blind, nearly so, when we finally walked to Kakuma. During that walk, I harbored none of the illusions I had when we traveled to Ethiopia.

This was at the end of the hardest of years. It was a year of nomadic life. After the Gilo River, there had been Pochalla, then Golkur, then Narus. There had been bandits, and more bombings, more boys lost, and finally, one morning, I woke unable to see. Even trying to open my eyes caused immeasurable pain.

One of my friends reached out to touch my eyes.-They don't look good, he said. There were no mirrors in Narus, so I had to take his word that my eyes appeared diseased. By the afternoon, his diagnosis proved correct. I felt as if sand and acid had been poured under each of my eyelids. We were at Narus temporarily; it was about a hundred miles north of Kenya, but the climate was similar, the air carrying red dust.

I waited for my eyes to heal but they only worsened. I was not the only boy to contract what they called nyintok , sickness of the eye, but while theirs improved in two or three days, after five days my eyes were so swollen I could not open them. The elders suggested various remedies, and much water was poured upon my eyelids, but the pain persisted, and I became despondent. To be blind in southern Sudan during a war would be very difficult. I prayed for God to decide whether or not he would take my eyesight; I wanted only for the pain to end.

One night, as we all lay under our lean-tos-there were no proper shelters in Narus-we heard the roar of cars and trucks and I knew we would soon be on the move again. The government army was on its way and Narus might soon be overtaken. We boys were to walk to Lokichoggio, in Kenya, under the watch of the UNHCR. I did not want to stand, or walk, or even move, but I was dragged from my lean-to and made to join the line.

I shuffled with bandages over both eyes, held there with what amounted to a blindfold. I found my way by holding the shirttails of whoever walked in front of me. Even though I knew we would soon cross the border into a country without war, this time I had no dreams of bowls of oranges. I knew that the world was the same everywhere, that there were only inconsequential variations between the suffering in one place and another.

When we left Ethiopia, so many died along the way. There were thousands of us together, but there were so many injured, so much blood along the path. This is when I saw more dead than at any other time. Women, children. Babies the size of the Quiet Baby who would not survive. There seemed to be no point. I look back on that year and see only disconnected and miscolored images, as in a fitful dream. I know that we were at Pochalla, then nearby, at Golkur, three hours away. It rained there with a constant grey fury for three months. At Golkur there were again SPLA soldiers and NGOs and food and, eventually, school. There we heard of the rebel split, when a Nuer commander named Riek Machar decided to leave and create his own rebel movement, the SPLA-Nasir, a group that would for some time cause the SPLA as much trouble as Khartoum. This resulting war within the war had Garang's Dinka rebels fighting Machar's Nuer rebels. So many tens of thousands were lost this way, and the infighting, the brutality involved, allowed the world to turn an indifferent eye to the decimation of Sudan: the civil war became, to the world at large, too confusing to decipher, a mess of tribal conflicts with no clear heroes and villains.

We were at Golkur most of that year, and one day, as the conflict devolved and the country fell further into chaos, Manute Bol, the basketball star from America, came to us, flying on a single-engine plane, to greet the boys staying at the camp. We had heard of him only in legend, and there he was, stepping out of the airplane barely big enough to contain him. We had been told he had become an American and were thus surprised when he emerged and was not white. Not long after, we were attacked by militias hired by the government, and were told we would be bombed very soon, and so one day the elders told us it was time to leave Golkur for good, and so we did. We left again and we walked to Narus. Some weeks later, at the urging of the UN, we walked to Kenya. In Kenya, we were told we would be safe, finally safe, for they said this country was a democracy, a neutral and civilized country, and the international community was creating a haven for us there.

But we had to move quickly. We had to get out of Sudan, for the Sudanese army knew our location. During the day we could see the gunships, and when they came overhead, we scattered under trees and prayed into the dust. We walked primarily at night, for two weeks or more, and because we thought we were close to Kenya, and the situation was desperate and the land inhospitable, we walked with more haste and less mercy than ever before. As we got closer to the border, the weather worsened. We were walking into the wind for days, and many among us were sure that the strength and constancy of the wind was meant to repel us, urging us to turn back.

I knew from the smell of the air that this was a dusty place. I took off my shirt and wrapped it around my head, to guard my face from the dust and wind. The infection in my eyes, which had plagued me for days now, allowed me only to make out broad dark shapes split by my lashes.

There were trucks every so often along that walk, carrying the worst-off travelers, sometimes bringing food and water to us. Even with my eyes swollen shut, I was not a candidate for the trucks, for my legs worked and my feet were intact. But I so wanted to be carried. The thought of being carried! I looked at the trucks and thought about how good it would be to be inside, elevated, being carried forth.

When the trucks drove off, each time, boys would try to climb onto the back, and each time, the truck would stop and the driver would throw them off, back onto the gravel.-Wait! a voice ahead wailed.-Wait! Stop!