![]() And what could I do for her besides wring my hands? She had Livia, she had her nurse, she had the muchacha who cooked and cleaned. It made her sad to see me so uncomfortable. ![]() What an asshole, right? What a shallow motherfucker.īut I was nineteen-and what is nineteen, if not for shallow? In any case my mother didn’t want me around, either. If I stayed an hour with her it was a lot. The vieja could barely get up to piss, looked like a stick version of herself. My tía Livia had it all under control and if you want the truth I didn’t feel comfortable hanging around the house with Mom all sick. I was supposed to be helping out, but really I didn’t do na for her. Medicine was cheaper, too, with the flying territory in Haina, its Chinese factories pumping out pharma like it was romo, growing organ sheets by the mile, and, for somebody as sick as my mother, with only rental income to live off, being there was what made sense. Say what you want, but family on the Island was still more reliable for heavy shit, like, say, dying, than family in the North. Mysty saw it and looked away and eventually I did, too.īetter that way. A shaky glypt of a pair of naked trembling Haitian brothers sharing a single stained cot, knotted together by horrible mold, their heads slurred into one. I remember the first time I saw it on the Whorl. The blast seemed to have a boner for fusion, respected no kind of boundaries. As for the infected, all the medicos could do was try to keep them nourished and hydrated-and, more important, prevent them from growing together. Once the initial bulla died down, only a couple of underfunded teams stayed on. And since it was just poor Haitian types getting fucked up-no real margin in that. A huge rah-rah, but when the experts determined that it wasn’t communicable in the standard ways, and that normal immune systems appeared to be at no kind of risk, the renminbi and the attention and the savvy went elsewhere. There seemed to be no logic to it-spouses in constant contact didn’t catch the Negrura, but some unconnected fool on the other side of the camp did. In the early months, there was a big make do, because it was so strange and because no one could identify the route of transmission-that got the bigheads more worked up than the disease itself. The medicos formed a ninety-nation consortium, flooded one another with papers and hypotheses, ran every test they could afford, but not even the military enhancers could crack it. Black rotting rugose masses fruiting out of bodies. Coral reefs might have been adios on the ocean floor, but they were alive and well on the arms and backs and heads of the infected. Strangest thing, though: once infected, few viktims died outright they just seemed to linger on and on. Most of the infected were immobile within a few months, the worst comatose by six. It almost always started epidermically and then worked its way up and in. You literally had to be falling to pieces for it to grab you. This one didn’t cause too much panic because it seemed to hit only the sickest of the sick, viktims who had nine kinds of ill already in them. All sorts of bizarre outbreaks already in play: diseases no one had names for, zoonotics by the pound. in our region alone, the planet cooking like a chimi and down to its last five trees-something berserk was bound to happen. Shit, a hundred straight days over 105 degrees F. A black mold-fungus-blast that came on like a splotch and then gradually started taking you over, tunnelling right through you-though as it turned out it wasn’t a mold-fungus-blast at all. Didn’t rip through the pobla like the dengues or the poxes. ![]() Within a month, a couple of thousand more infections were reported. The index case was only four years old, and by the time his uncle brought him in his arm looked like an enormous black pustule, so huge it had turned the boy into an appendage of the arm. The infection showed up on a small boy in the relocation camps outside Port-au-Prince, in the hottest March in recorded history. In the beginning the doctor types couldn’t wrap their brains around it, either. Motherfuckers used to say culo would be the end of us. What can I tell you? My head just wasn’t into any mysterious disease-not with my mom sick and all. I was one of the idiots who didn’t heed any of the initial reports, who got caught way out there. Fools make up all sorts of vainglorious self-serving plep- but me, I tell the truth. These days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end. Someone would point to a spot on your arm and say, Diablo, haitiano, que te pasó? You couldn’t display a blemish or catch some sun on the street without the jokes starting. Everybody in our sector accusing everybody else of having it. A disease that could make a Haitian blacker? It was the joke of the year.
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