Brother's Keeper

  Nick keeps his head bowed, his eyes closed. He seems to have passed out. The stub on his left hand twitches, and blood smears the white plastic beneath it.

  With a look from Tarik, the men once again clutch his torso and legs, but Nick seems to put up less fight this time. A hand, the right one now, is pried open, the clippers placed over the little finger. Nick shouts in agony. The chair breaks at the junction of the seat and one of the arms. Nick collapses with an awkward splaying of limbs, his wrists still bound to fragments of the chair.

  ‘I can see you want this to end,’ Tarik says. ‘All you have to do is read the statement.’

  Nick answers with silence. Tarik converses with the others in Arabic. He collects the finger and adds it to the plastic bag.

  ‘These will be sent to International Medical Outreach,’ he says, ‘to encourage payment.’

  With a flip-knife, Sajiv cuts Nick’s restraints and kicks away the remains of the chair. Nick offers little resistance as his wrists are bound at his back.

  Tarik turns to Burkett. ‘Are you ready, Dr Burkett?’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘Did you not realize?’ His eyes flash a kind of mock sympathy. ‘Every­thing that happens to Mr Lorie will happen to you also – unless of course he reads the statement.’

  Burkett jerks against his restraints. He clenches his fists and tries to stand, but all at once strong hands are gripping him by the shoulders and feet.

  ‘No, please,’ he says, as Tarik fits the blades around the little finger of his left hand. ‘Please, I’ll read whatever you want.’

  He can see Nick where he kneels on the floor with his hands bound and head bowed.

  ‘You have the power to stop this,’ Burkett says, but Nick doesn’t acknowledge him. Two fingers amputated, and he has retreated into his prayers – shut out the world. He’ll let them take all of his fingers, and Bur­kett’s as well.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Burkett shouts to Nick. ‘All you have to do —’

  Pain: the so-called best friend no one wants. For years he’s studied it, made a career of fighting it. What is a physician’s purpose if not to keep it in check? And yet he’s never imagined pain like this.

  He realizes he is screaming. He always thought he had a clear under­standing of the nervous system, how it responded to injury. With only a finite number of sensory fibers, surely there must be a limit to physical pain, a point of divergence beyond which it remains the same no matter how severe the injury?

  He understands nothing, knows nothing but pain. It no longer matters to him whether or not this man fired the gun that killed his brother. He’ll do anything he asks if it can bring an end to the pain.

  Beyond the sound of his own weeping, he hears the voice of Nick.

  ‘I’ll read your damn statement,’ he says.

  22

  Burkett wakes to find another man in his bed – unfamiliar limbs nestled beside him. The stranger clings to him. Is this a dream? Perhaps it is another prisoner – a missionary or some government contractor. Could it be that Nick has crawled into bed with him? No, he can hear Nick’s agon­ized breathing from the other side of the room.

  If not for the pain in his hand, or this searing headache, he’d shove the intruder out of his bed. The pain seems to be interfering with his ability to think. Is it also keeping him from locating the intruder’s exact position? Someone is sharing his bed, no question, but where? When he reaches his uninjured hand across his body, the only skin he encounters is his own.

  He falls in and out of consciousness, and each time he wakes the stranger remains. What he needs is something to help him stay asleep. In titrating the Ativan, Tarik didn’t account for the added discomfort of sharing a bed – which would certainly be grounds for a higher dose. He lifts his hand to the crack in the wall, even though he knows it is empty, the pills gone. He finds only stone and mortar.

  His fingers are wet when he withdraws them from the crevice. His whole body, in fact, is soaked to the skin. The moisture seems to be coming from tears, for a giant eyeball has replaced the ceiling. Repeatedly he is grazed by the long lashes as they sweep across the floor. He finds it disgusting and irritating. The only way to find peace is to destroy the eye, so he stands up and jabs and claws at the cornea, causing the eyelids to clamp down. With his fingernails he rips through the fibrous scleral layers, causing a gush of ocular fluid. The water level rises to his chest, his neck, and finally covers his face. He holds his breath, feeling calm despite the knowledge of drowning. He floats against the increasingly flimsy surface of the eyeball.

  An idea comes to him. He finds the small rent, the source of the flood, and pries it wider, tearing the edges till the opening is large enough for his body. He swims upward and breaks the surface and finds himself in the cavernous interior of the eyeball. The viscosity of the fluid, almost like syrup, makes it easy to float on his back. He could almost sleep like this.

  But he is no longer asleep. In the faint light, he can tell that Nick too is awake. Nick lies on his back with his elbows bent and his wounded hands before him as if waiting to catch something from above. Now he too has an IV line and a urinary catheter.

  ‘Probably better not to elevate your hands,’ Burkett says, though he isn’t sure it matters. ‘For healing, keep them on a level with your heart.’

  Nick’s hands fall against his abdomen.

  ‘How do they feel?’ he asks, but Nick remains silent.

  Sajiv lumbers down the stairs carrying a plastic cooler identical to one that Burkett, in another life, used for transporting beer at picnics and football games. He speaks in Arabic, but there is no reply. He wears blue latex gloves to remove the tape and gauze from Nick’s hands. Sajiv dabs iodinated ointment to the stubs and applies fresh bandages, while Nick groans at each touch. Sajiv puts on a fresh pair of gloves before peeling away Burkett’s bandage. Burkett sits up for a look at the stump, the skin bright red, the edges still flared, and the cap specked with fibers of gauze and glistening with blood and ointment.

  Bloodstained bandages lie in a heap at the base of the single IV pole. Sajiv hangs new bags of cefuroxime and lactated ringers. Ativan for Burkett. He injects medications into Burkett’s IV line – probably Lasix and nimodipine, but Burkett doesn’t ask. They are given oral medicines as well. He recognizes the green, oval tablets as Percocet. Sajiv runs their plump bags of urine outside and brings them back empty.

  Burkett waits for the narcotic to take hold. Only by keeping his hand perfectly still can he tolerate the pain. The headache and nausea, either of which would be incapacitating, seem trivial compared to his hand.

  He imagines their fingers shrink-wrapped and boxed, traveling across continents and oceans to the IMO offices. What horror for the poor assistant who opens the package. Two parts Nick and one part Burkett, perhaps a reflection of their relative worth in ransom. If nothing else, he suspects their amputated digits will invigorate someone’s efforts to come up with the money. Perhaps their fingers represent the cost of their freedom. Better their fingers than their lives.

  Of course he’d still be whole if Nick had read that asinine statement sooner. All he had to do was utter a series of words that no one would possibly mistake for his own. There was no requirement of sincerity, only a monotone recitation – no risk of actual apostasy. What did Nick’s resis­tance accomplish beyond the additional amputations?

  Burkett wonders how many fingers Nick could have withstood losing. Did the pacifist expect Navy Seals to rescue them at the final moment? Did he expect angels to knock down the walls and carry them to safety?

  Nick’s silence suggests guilt, the mental flagellation of a Christian forced to recant. Perhaps he sees the wounds to his hands as punishment earned. But the silence also carries an element of anger – anger directed not just at Tarik and the others but also, it seems, at Burkett. As if Burkett hadn’t also suffered. As if bolts of
pain even now weren’t radiating from his hand into the bones of his spine and skull. As if he could be blamed for Nick’s apostasy. Or pseudo-apostasy – for how can there even be such a thing as apostasy under torture?

  It is perhaps five minutes after Sajiv’s departure that Burkett becomes aware of commotion above, shouts from the courtyard. He imagines a brawl among the jihadists and even smiles at the thought of their coming to blows over some fine point of theology. But quickly he realizes that what he’s hearing are the sounds of men in panic. Men shouting in fear, gathering their valuables.

  He sits up and looks at Nick, whose eyes bulge with the same sudden awareness of danger.

  A pulse of heat, a deafening thunderclap, and the earth itself jolts with life. For a moment he seems to float in a void, neither falling nor rising. Then he slams against the stone wall.

  He finds himself curled on his side, lying on the bare earthen floor, pain screaming from his hand.

  Dust coats his tongue and abrades his throat. It seems to fill his lungs, as if he were breathing not oxygen but some compound of dirt and dark­ness. He breaks into a fit of coughing but can’t hear himself over the shrill tinnitus.

  There is a tug in his groin as he rises to his knees. The Foley catheter, still anchored in his bladder. He follows the catheter to where it connects to the receptacle. He gathers the wherewithal not just to break the con­nection but to pinch shut the clip that blocks the flow of urine.

  He is gasping for air. With his good hand, he gropes blindly toward Nick’s side of the chamber, where a small window sits high in the wall. He can sense the window by the taste of cleaner air and a faint glow from outside, presumably fire. The window is a light that fails to illuminate the darkness around it.

  His foot bumps against the unconscious form of Nick. Burkett finds his pulse, feels the rise and fall of his chest. The breaths are short and shallow. He runs his hands over Nick’s limbs. All that remains of the IV line is a bit of tape on his arm. The urinary catheter has been ripped out of him, the balloon still inflated.

  He feels moisture on Nick’s face, in his hair. Warm blood oozes from a gash in the scalp – a deep laceration, maybe three inches in length. It’s not the blood that worries him: scalp wounds tend to be particularly bloody. It is the possibility of a skull fracture or brain injury. He walks his fingers through the tangle of hair, over the normal bumps and ridges, but he finds no abrupt depression, no yielding fragment. What was the mechanism of injury? Was his body thrown against the wall? More likely, he was struck by some falling piece of rubble.

  He holds pressure on the wound till the bleeding abates. Then he palpates Nick’s ribs and pelvic bones. He runs his hands again down his shoulders and arms, the bandages at the ends. There is no sign of additional trauma. Of course, Nick could have suffered any number of injuries. Spinal fracture, pneumothorax, aortic tear, splenic laceration – the possibilities are endless.

  He stands up to reach the better air from the small window. Nick probably needs it as well but he fears lifting him without knowing the condition of his spine.

  All at once Nick lurches awake, rolling to his elbows and knees before Burkett can restrain him.

  ‘Be still,’ Burkett says, his own voice muffled and distant. He is shouting but can’t tell if Nick even hears. He feels a splash against his bare feet and legs, and after a moment recognizes the stench of vomit. Nick trembles as Burkett helps him to his feet.

  The dust and smoke have begun to clear – or so it seems from his easier breathing, his greater sense of the firelight in the window.

  He needs to get rid of his Foley catheter. He resists an urge to yank it out: he’d do himself serious injury by dragging the inflated balloon through his penis. Nick’s catheter, which came out in the explosion, has almost certainly caused urethral injury, tears that could block with the flow of urine or later form constricting scars. To decompress the balloon Burkett will need scissors or some kind of knife. Until then, since he’s nude under his tunic, all he can do is let it dangle between his legs. Fortunately it isn’t long enough to step on.

  He runs his hands over his own face, through his hair, finding no evi­dence of bleeding. He begins making his way toward the stairwell. He shuffles his bare feet, careful amid the debris. When he falls, striking concrete edges, his body roars with pain even though he manages to keep his injured hand clutched to his chest.

  On he crawls with a hesitant probing of hands, dragging his catheter like a flaccid tail. He moves in the direction of the stairwell, where he remembers it, but he is blind this far from the window. A layer of rubble now separates him from the floor, and the craggy edges stab his knees and palms, hurting no matter how carefully he lowers his weight.

  A beam of light combs over the piled stone filling the stairwell. Nick seems to have discovered an intact flashlight. The beam turns sideways when he begins crawling toward Burkett. Their chamber seems smaller by at least a third: a pocket of air somehow preserved in the collapse.

  More likely than not their captors are dead. Tarik, Akbar, Sajiv, and the others. What was the explosion if not a drone attack? Akbar’s greatest fear made real, perhaps a consequence of Tarik’s visit – Tarik or one of the others, the odds of a drone attack no doubt rising in proportion to the number of jihadists gathered in a single place.

  The flashlight catches a swatch of fabric – a threadbare shirt caught in the rubble from upstairs. Burkett reaches and tears off a strip to cover his nose and mouth, another to secure the urinary catheter to his thigh.

  With each fit of coughing his headache surges as if the violent clench­ing in his chest were forcing geysers of blood into his brain. Awkwardly with their damaged hands they pry loose splintered wood and slabs of mortar, shifting the lighter pieces from the stairwell into the chamber. Nick crawls out first, dragging himself through a passage barely wide enough for his wasted body. Jagged stone scrapes Burkett’s skin and tears the gossamer fabric of his tunic.

  In the morning sunlight Burkett is struck by the emaciated figure before him, Nick’s hair a dark plaster of blood and soot, the wound in his scalp gaping and moist. What looks at first like a gel stiffened wedge of hair is in fact an upturned flap of skin. Burkett takes the flashlight and beneath the flap finds a congealed mat of gore embedded with gravelly debris and ropes of hair. The wound needs cleaning and dressing, but for now he resists plucking out that largest tangle of hair lest it cause further bleeding.

  Burkett looks down at himself, bare-legged and barefoot. Like Nick, his skin and clothes have collected a uniform layer of fine dust – either in the explosion or the work of upward digging. Standing in what was once the courtyard, they look like shabby clay figures molded from the surrounding wreckage. Burkett rotates his frayed bandage with its coat of dirt. Their hands, Nick’s scalp: how long before the onset of infection?

  They find the probable site of impact, a charred pit. Of the wall, little but shards remain, the highest just a few feet. Chunks of mortar and stone lie strewn across the clearing. A large oak tree stands blackened on the side facing the crater, with most of its leaves blown off and replaced by shreds of fabric.

  Thirst drives them down to the creek, where they kneel in the bul­rushes. Burkett with his good hand cups water into his mouth. Nick lies flat, drinking directly from the stream and soaking his outstretched hands. Burkett slips off his tunic and lies naked in the shallow water.

  ‘We need clothes and shoes,’ Nick says. ‘We have a long walk ahead of us.’

  Nick stands and tries to urinate but only blood trickles into the water. Burkett pretends not to notice. Nick has enough medical training to appreciate the dire seriousness of a urinary obstruction. This will require surgical intervention, and soon: the obstruction could kill him faster than any wound infection.

  ‘There was a car,’ Burkett says as he puts the tunic back on.

  As they make their way back up the hill, Ak
bar’s knee brace glints in the underbrush – the sun on its metal hinge and its sleeve still tight on the severed limb.

  A Toyota SUV lies on its side. It bothers Burkett that there is only a single car. One vehicle with room for five including the driver. He remembers the men at the compound, Tarik and the other jihadists: a total of eight at least – six without Akbar and Sajiv. Would Tarik and the other five share a single vehicle? No, Burkett thinks: there must have been another car.

  The guard with the scimitar is clamped dead in the driver’s side door. Nick climbs through the back window, leaving traces of blood where he grips the bumper for balance. He tears open a box of bottled water and tosses one to Burkett but allows himself only a sip. To refrain is to delay the accumulation of urine, the inevitable renal failure. He steps around an AK-47 that leans against the roof. He treads over broken glass, holding the sideways headrests for balance. He leans between the front seats and pats the front of the man’s pants and hooks a set of keys from one of the pockets. He removes the man’s shoes but can see they’re too small before even trying them on. Nor do they fit Burkett, whose feet and ankles bear new lacerations from climbing out of the rubble.

  In the footwell Nick finds a shoulder satchel with a laptop inside. The laptop still works despite cracks in the screen, but of course it’s password protected.

  ‘Will you hand me that sword?’ Burkett asks.

  The scimitar is sunk so deep in the man’s thigh that Nick has to use both of his bandaged hands to pull it free of the bone. Burkett tries to clean the blade by wiping it against the dead man’s shirt, but the blood clings like paint. He finds a bare patch of ground and sits down. With the sword he cuts the side branch of the catheter and then carefully slides it from his penis.

  The one who wore the mask lies on his back as if sleeping, but coils of intestine protrude from a bloodless wound in his abdomen. Burkett feels the neck for a pulse. He thumbs open one of the man’s eyes. The pupil is dilated, the cornea not yet clouded. They take his shoes, a closer fit for Nick. Glued to the fabric in one of his pockets they find the melted remains of a cell phone. Another body lies bent against the base of a tree trunk, as if thrown against it by the explosion. Burkett takes the man’s sandals and salwar pants.