There is a certain weary comfort to a Monday morning here; despite the horrors in the prefabs and the faintly gamma-positive sleet pocking the poly roof of my office, I take some solace from the generic, familiar schlep of the starting week.
I had been up for three hours already, a nagging occipitalis ache dragging me neck first from an uneasy sleep on my surplus noncom cot. In contrast to my usual fractious, broken dreams, my office looked the same as always – a small pokey appendix epoxied to the back of the main ward. One small desk, one half destroyed chair – the seat as hard as permafrost, one semi-opaque sheet of plastic masquerading as a window, one extremely modern laptop – my sole luxury – it’s probably the single most expensive item in a hundred kilometre radius. There’s over a thousand carbon and partially silicon based entities within effective sniper fire range that would cheerfully kill me for it, but so far I think I’ve kept it a secret. A beautiful distillation of thirty years of west coast technofetishism, the computer fortunately doesn’t look anything like a computer does here in the technological doldrums of the Middle East - they still coo over a Macbook in these parts.
I have no fixed schedule here, but many demands on my time. My charges have the sweet plaintive demands of the truly helpless, raggedy stick and bone shapes only faintly tenting the rough blankets that are the only bedclothes available in the chilly main ward. As usual I make a morning tour of the ward, a depressing euphemism for a shuffling survey of the two small bays that are the full extent of the hospital. Zalmai is awake - I’ve never seem him asleep - his sightless head tracking every small sound I make as I negotiate the defunct medical clutter he insists on heaping on and around his bed, a pitiful hedge against further pain.
We found Zalmai about a month ago; he had crawled over twenty kilometres from the Maheepar Pass to the suburbs of Jalalabad. I was led to where he lay by one of the filthy interchangeable urchins who hang around the compound and who know we will pay a few afgani for information on the latest unfortunates to stagger out of the western mountains. Zalmai had heard me coming, the chill winter morning air telegraphed my approach clearly to his undamaged ears. Mewling pathetically he had scrabbled backwards, bloodied palm prints darkening the cracked, dried mud of the grubby no man’s land of the road verge. He looked up at me – his excised, bloodless, empty eye sockets somehow a much worse horror than the terrible battle gore I had seen and treated – they had taken his eyes.
I had been up for three hours already, a nagging occipitalis ache dragging me neck first from an uneasy sleep on my surplus noncom cot. In contrast to my usual fractious, broken dreams, my office looked the same as always – a small pokey appendix epoxied to the back of the main ward. One small desk, one half destroyed chair – the seat as hard as permafrost, one semi-opaque sheet of plastic masquerading as a window, one extremely modern laptop – my sole luxury – it’s probably the single most expensive item in a hundred kilometre radius. There’s over a thousand carbon and partially silicon based entities within effective sniper fire range that would cheerfully kill me for it, but so far I think I’ve kept it a secret. A beautiful distillation of thirty years of west coast technofetishism, the computer fortunately doesn’t look anything like a computer does here in the technological doldrums of the Middle East - they still coo over a Macbook in these parts.
I have no fixed schedule here, but many demands on my time. My charges have the sweet plaintive demands of the truly helpless, raggedy stick and bone shapes only faintly tenting the rough blankets that are the only bedclothes available in the chilly main ward. As usual I make a morning tour of the ward, a depressing euphemism for a shuffling survey of the two small bays that are the full extent of the hospital. Zalmai is awake - I’ve never seem him asleep - his sightless head tracking every small sound I make as I negotiate the defunct medical clutter he insists on heaping on and around his bed, a pitiful hedge against further pain.
We found Zalmai about a month ago; he had crawled over twenty kilometres from the Maheepar Pass to the suburbs of Jalalabad. I was led to where he lay by one of the filthy interchangeable urchins who hang around the compound and who know we will pay a few afgani for information on the latest unfortunates to stagger out of the western mountains. Zalmai had heard me coming, the chill winter morning air telegraphed my approach clearly to his undamaged ears. Mewling pathetically he had scrabbled backwards, bloodied palm prints darkening the cracked, dried mud of the grubby no man’s land of the road verge. He looked up at me – his excised, bloodless, empty eye sockets somehow a much worse horror than the terrible battle gore I had seen and treated – they had taken his eyes.
