She looks so peaceful lying here. Her hair is spread on the pillow, her lips are half-open and she looks positively angelic, just missing the wings and the gauzy gown of the angels on postcards that Barb still sends me every Christmas. It's raining - the chilly Chicago rain, so unlike the warm rain of Kisangani, is rattling against the window, and I am so damn confused. Am I having a very early midlife crisis or am I just going insane? No answer comes forth from my brain and I just stand there stupidly, not quite sure what to do with myself. I wouldn't even have come here, but the thought of spending a night in Carter Manor held even less appeal than staying at Abby's. I really have no idea why I don't want to be here – I'm no longer mad at Abby, and I do realize that I acted like an asshole with a capital A after Gamma died, but something is gnawing on my mind, not letting me rest, and I really have no idea what it is.
The air smells like her apple shampoo, and I feel like I should have missed the cleanness of her apartment, but I long for the dirty, sweaty T-shirt on the bottom of my suitcase, a T-shirt that is slightly big for me. It's Luka's – he lent it to me one day because someone threw up on mine and I forgot to give it back to him. It has countless bloodstains – some from that night at the clinic, some from long before, some of Luka's when he cut his finger when making a sandwich. I suddenly realize that I feel out of place in Abby's clean bed with its freshly washed sheets – I keep imagining that this is all a dream and I will wake up in Kisangani in the middle of the night, and listen to Gillian weeping quietly into the pillow or Luka tossing and turning on his bunk as the mosquito net flaps in the rare nighttime breeze.
But I am not asleep, and I am across the world from Kisangani, and all I can do is take my pants off and climb under the sheets. The sheets on "my" side are coldly clean and I shiver, thinking seriously of sleeping in the Jeep. At that thought, Abby scoots over to the other side of the bed taking the comforter with her but I don't mind. I just lay here, staring at the ceiling, listening to Abby's breathing. She snores slightly as she sleeps and I remember that it's allergy season for her, something I should have realized earlier but forgot. That shows just how much in touch I am with her. Great…
I rushed off to the Congo thinking that if I went away my problems would go away. But they didn't, and they followed me back here along with the problems I picked up on my trip. Although I still like Abby, I feel that there is a proverbial invisible wall between us. Perhaps we need time away from each other, and perhaps, and that is the choice I dread, we have to part. When our relationship started, everything seemed easy, but then Abby's problems began to pile up, and I started to question myself at times, to ask myself whether I really would always be able to deal with her problems, and blindly reassuring myself that I could. I was so sure that I'd be with her for better or for worse, but now I'm not really sure, actually not sure at all.
There's another thing I am not really sure of. I have no idea who I am now – Carter the rich boy, Carter the doctor and Carter the altruist have all mixed themselves up into one hell of a mess, and I have no idea where to go and what to do. God, I wish so much that Gamma would be alive. Gamma always could kick my ass when I needed it, give me a kick in the right direction, and make it look like I did it myself. But Gamma's dead, and I'm very, very lost. I'd really like to get back on the plane, fly to Kinshasa, take a Jeep to Matenda and have a good, long talk with Luka, ask him how he deals with it, but I got to stay here in this obscenely clean bed and think about how shitlessly scared I was when I was about to be shot in the head.
Sure, I've had guns pointed at me before. We have had our share of gangbangers and crazed druggies in the ER, but there we can always call security or the cops. In the Congo, there was no one to call. I thought I would die. I was ready to beg that man in any language that I knew to spare my life and let me live. I was only thirty-three, not ready to die, not having done anything to be killed for. Then the man took the gun away and I released the breath I didn't know I held and took a look at Luka. He was just like me, kneeling on the ground with his hands behind his head, but the fear for his life I expected to see on his face wasn't there. He looked like it was an everyday occurrence to him, like he got a gun held to his head every day of his life, and it scared me more than the gun that was touching my temple only seconds before.
It was a shock to the system – to understand that people can live their lives like that, that they can be so numb, that they can become so used to death, and pain and war. That day I started to respect Luka – to do what he does, to go to a place not much different from the one he lost himself in, and continue living despite the burden he carries around. On this trip I found out that Luka isn't the bad guy my jealousy was painting him to be and got to know the Luka none of us here in Chicago knows. In the ER he has often been nothing then an annoying presence, a white coat and a tired voice reciting orders at shift change, dark eyes on a pale face stealing glances at me and Abby and quickly looking away when I looked back, a ghost. The Luka of Congo was a definite presence, and I felt as if I met a different man, a man totally different from the quiet ghost of a man I knew from Chicago, a real man of flesh and blood, who actually was a quite interesting man to know.
I recall the remark I made to him a year ago, when we were stuck in that damned sexual harassment seminar, when I made a stupid jab at the Balkans, and Luka defended his country. I said something stupid, something about that a chance of getting blown up discouraged me from adding a country to my travel itinerary. Now I've just returned from a country where one has a high chance of being blown up, and where I barely escaped getting blown up myself. Another thing that I understood on my trip is that even war zones were once beautiful, and it is doubly painful to the people who live there to see the destruction when they still have memories of beautiful views and clean houses and all they see are ruins and fires.
I'm really mad at Luka right now, but I'm very thankful too – he has made me see the life outside the clean American ER and the Carter Manor, the life almost everyone else sees. I feel shell-shocked, unable to process all the death and destruction I've seen in just two weeks, unable to register why it is so quiet here and why the air is not hot and moist. The old, pre-Congo, me creeps out from his hiding place and chides – you idiot, you should have not gone to the hellhole, you should have been already engaged to Abby and you'd be sleeping with her right now instead of staring at the ceiling and wishing you were with your worst rival. You didn't have to go to Congo – it's not like someone made you go there. The new me counters and says that I needed to go there, needed to get out of my overtly comfortable Chicago life, needed to see that people have much worse problems then mine and that I am actually quite well off. This argument wakes up the young me, who sides with that new voice – remember having no salary after your decision to switch residencies, remember your silly idealism, John, it whispers, and I remember the John who Paul Sobriki killed that night along with Lucy.
I have not thought about the pre-Sobriki me for a long time now. I barely think of Lucy nowadays, although only three years ago she used to occupy my every thought and dream for months. I have overcome my depression and downfall and tried to forget it, but along with it, I managed to forget my youthful idealism and dreams, to suppress the memory of the skinny geeky kid who used to puke every time he worried, the Carter almost everyone in the ER got to know. This starts me thinking about other things, especially friends. I have not had a real friend for a while. Whatever friendships I have had in my life fell apart. With women, they always turned into relationships, and with men they were either interrupted or ended in jealousy. Since Dennis, I haven't really trusted myself to try to form friendships, because I still sometimes dream of the dreaded beeping of the pager coming from the bloody body that used to be the friend I ignored.
My friendship with Abby did not last long until I wanted more of her time. I now realize that I contributed a little bit to her break-up with Luka – sometimes it seemed even to me that she was spending more time with me then with him during the summer of 2001. I should think about this more when I am less tired. When Luka gets back, I should try to continue to develop the friendship that appears to have started between us over alcohol-spiked soft drinks in the dark. Anyway, I should go to sleep. I've been up for almost 50 hours and if truth be told, I am dreadfully tired. At this thought, my brain catches up with my body and my eyelids begin to close. I smell the apple shampoo again and try to remember if I ever seen anyone eat apples in Congo. They must have apples, everyone eats them… I'll send Luka a box of apples for Chance, the little bird… I move closer to the side of the bed, close my eyes and finally fall asleep.