Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 6

Soft.

That’s what the Irish called it when the weather was like this, more mist than rain. Mike Burke stood by the window next to his desk, idly watching the street below. Every so often, a gust of rain rattled the glass, and his focus would shift to the pane itself, where beads of water spattered and ran.

His office was a large room with high ceilings in a rose-brick building at the edge of Temple Bar, a famous maze of narrow streets and alleyways near the River Liffey. From where he sat, Burke could see the roof of Merchants’ Arch, the covered byway in which a fictional character named Leopold Bloom had once stopped to buy a book – a pornographic novel, as it happened – for his wife, Molly.

As cold and wet as it was, Burke wanted to go running. There was a gym bag under the desk with everything he needed – except the chance to use it. He had an appointment with a client, a man named d’Anconia, and d’Anconia was late. The man had telephoned that very morning to ask about forming a company. On the quick, as it were.

Fair play, Burke thought. That’s what we do. But his mind wasn’t on it. He was thinking about Kate’s father, aka “the Old Man,” whose name was engraved on the brass plaque beside the heavy oak doors that gave entrance to the office:

THOMAS AHERNE & ASSOCIATES

Bit of a lie, that. Other than Burke, there were no associates. Nor had there been for months. Not since… well, not since Kate died.

Even now, the words took his breath away. Stuttering senselessly in the back of his mind, they suggested a sentence that had no end, an idea so impossible it could only be stillborn. When Kate died…

Where do you go with a thought like that – a fact like that? Her death was an avalanche. One minute, he was standing in her light, dreaming of the years ahead of them… then the earth fell away from his feet. Blindsided, he was buried alive in his grief. Eventually, the cold found its way to his heart, and slowly took hold. Grief drained to numbness and then he felt nothing at all.

The old man was even worse off. One day he was there, holding forth behind his desk, and then he wasn’t. For years, everyone had said, “The firm is his life. You take the firm away, and Tommy’s a goner.” Not true, as it turned out. The firm was the old man’s way of life, a hobby, and a fascination, but Kate… Kate had been life itself.

He’d raised her from a sprog (his word). Taught her to build sand castles, ride horses, read the Greats, and be wary of boys. Tommy had watched in delight as she took on more and more of her mother’s beauty, the ginger hair and emerald eyes, her skin like an empty sheet of paper – had swelled with pride when she breezed through Cambridge with a first, and came to Dublin for her residency. Then she did the unimaginable, turning her back on the genteel comforts of a surgeon’s life in Ireland to cast her lot with a doctors’ charity that packed her off to a godforsaken clinic on the malarial edge of a never-ending war.

Enter, Mike Burke.

Not right away, of course, but soon enough and quite dramatically. Two years after Kate arrived in Liberia, Burke fell out of the air a few miles from her clinic. And lay there, smoking.

A rebel army recon unit, led by the self-anointed “Colonel Homicide,” found him. They may, in fact, have shot him down. He lay in a ditch at the edge of the forest, one leg broken and half an ear torn off. His chest and shoulders were flayed with burns. The burns were infested with bees, and he was flickering in and out of consciousness.

According to the dreadlocked colonel, Burke looked as if he’d been there for days. “I seen his ride, and the ride’s junk, burned out, it’s cold! And this white boy, he’s layin’ in the muck like a bad sign, like a signal from Jesus, swimming in bees. Hieronymus, he wants to take the man’s main machine. You know – just reach in and pull it out, like we do sometimes. That way, we sendin’ a message. Like a Hallmark card. Only this man, his passport says ‘America’! Land of the free! So now, we all humanitarian. Show the positive side of the struggle.” Hoping for a reward, the dreadlocked colonel and his men dragged Burke over to the pickup they were driving (a 4 ® 4 technical with a.50-caliber machine gun mounted in the back), and tossed him onto a pile of ammunition belts. Then they drove him to the Irish lady doctor’s clinic in Porkpa.

A moldering shantytown of huts on the flanks of a dirt road, Porkpa was proud of its infirmary. With a dozen beds, a tiny lab, and its own ambulance, the clinic – a concrete box with a rusting tin roof, its walls painted ocher, pink, and teal – was the only “infrastructure” for miles around. In her first year at the clinic, most of Kate’s time had been taken up with pediatric care and midwifery, health education and vaccination. When the war heated up, the clinic’s priorities changed. By the time Burke’s helicopter crashed, killing the pilot, the clinic was a round-the-clock trauma unit, with gunshot and machete wounds at the top of its To Do list.

With his broken leg and second- and third-degree burns over ten percent of his body, Burke remained at the clinic for seven weeks. There wasn’t any reason to keep him that long, but neither was there anywhere for him to go. Four days after Burke’s ill-fated helicopter ride, the capital underwent a paroxysm of violence. Even if you could get there, nothing worked. Its ports were closed, embassies shuttered. Redemption Hospital was in ruins, pounded by mortars and looted by gunmen. Burke was better off in Porkpa.

Though “better off” wasn’t what you’d call ideal. The clinic was a makeshift operation at best, and infections were a constant threat. Medical supplies were scarce, and the staff – never large – wandered off as the war drew nearer. A month after Burke’s arrival, Kate found herself with a single nurse’s aide, nine patients who couldn’t be moved, and a security guard who could not have been more than twelve years old. There was nothing for Burke to do but get well or die.

When he was able to move around, he did what he could to make himself useful, sitting up nights in the doorway with a shotgun in his lap. Before long, he was changing bandages and helping out in the kitchen. His biggest coup was the generator. Everyone said it was dead – “Black smoke is death-smoke!” – but Burke didn’t buy it. He’d grown up on a farm, and on a farm you fixed things. The generator at the clinic was a John Deere. It was bigger than the one his father had in Nellysford, but it worked the same way and had the same problems. After tinkering with it for an hour, Burke saw that the intake port was plugged. Ten minutes later, it was purring like a cat.

In his spare time – and he had nothing but spare time – he made a chess set out of shotgun shells, plumbing supplies, and empty medicine bottles. It was ugly, but it worked. Kate was too tired in the evenings to take the game seriously, but since it was the only game in town – literally – they played nearly every night.

And as they played, they talked. He learned about her childhood in Ireland, her boyfriends at Oxford, and her love of medicine. As for Africa? “Where else can I deliver babies one day, and the next, treat guinea worm, gunshot wounds, and AIDS – not to mention the likes of you!”

He admired her clarity. His own situation was more ambiguous, and even embarrassing. Though only thirty, he’d spent most of his adult life traveling around the world, “taking pictures in all the wrong places.” That was the only way to get published if you weren’t known: You went where others wouldn’t go. To cities like Grozny and Algiers, Monrovia and Port-au-Prince. The kinds of places where the best hotel in town was the one with the most sandbags.

He was working with the F-Stop Cooperative in New York, and most of the time he loved it. The life. The people. The pictures. Flying in and out of places. Just being there. You get off a plane in a city like Algiers, and everything snaps into focus. Just like that – right there, right then! Be here now. It was a great way to get “centered,” because if you didn’t, you wound up in an orange jumpsuit with a knife at your throat.

So it’s like being one of those divers, she teased.

What divers?

The ones in Acapulco who jump off the cliffs.

He shook his head. I’m not a cowboy, he told her. It’s not just the bang-bang.

Ri-iighhht.

No, really! He’d worked as a reporter, and writing just wasn’t the same. Whatever you wrote, it was never quite right. There was always someone you hadn’t interviewed, or something you didn’t quite grasp. Photography wasn’t like that. A picture was a fact in a way that words on a page could never be.

Burke told Kate how he’d gotten started on a weekly newspaper in Virginia. The paper wasn’t unionized, so he’d worn a lot of hats: writing articles and editorials, taking pictures and doing page layouts. There was a police scanner in a corner of the office, buzzing and crackling, diodes gleaming. Word of a fire, a shooting, a crash, and he was out the door with his cameras.

How exciting, she yawned. A crash.

Well, yeah, it was! A lot of the time, Burke told her, he rode shotgun with the newspaper’s main photographer, an older guy named Sal, who said things like, “Never go anywhere unless you’re strapped.” He meant with a camera.

So you’re always ready to take a picture.

Well, yeah, Burke said, but it’s not just that. The real point is that having a camera with you – even a small camera – changes you.

Changes you?

He nodded. Makes you braver, he said.

How?

If you have a camera, you want to get the picture. So you stand your ground. Most people won’t do that. They see people running, screaming, they head the other way – it’s instinct – but a good photographer stays where he is. He waits for the image.

And if “the image” is a tidal wave?

Burke laughed. It helps to be a good swimmer. But he’d always had second thoughts about photography. Though he’d won a boxful of awards, and covered everything from a gypsy wedding in Siberia to the dragon-boat races in Macao, most of his work revolved around mayhem. An earthquake in Turkey, a mass grave in Kosovo, a beheading in Chop Square. After a while, you got used to havoc. It began to seem almost normal.

And that couldn’t be good for your soul, Burke thought. It was one thing to be an accidental witness, someone who just happened upon a scene, and quite another to stick a camera in a dying man’s face – as he had done on more than one occasion. There was something shameful about taking a picture like that. It made you complicit in the mayhem.

Sounds like bad karma, Kate told him.

Burke smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “something like that.”

Chess wasn’t their only diversion. There was an alfresco theater, of sorts, in the ruins and weeds of what used to be the post office. Each Friday night, a dozen metal chairs were unfolded and deployed before a badly damaged wall of whitewashed cinder blocks. An antique 8mm film projector sputtered to life, casting its spell along a beam of light, flickering with the vectors of moths and flying beetles. In the second month of Burke’s sojourn in Porkpa, he and Kate paid half a euro each to see Richard Burton in The Robe, John Wayne in Hatari!, and Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Where the films came from was a mystery.

What was not a mystery was the attraction that he and Kate began to feel for each other. Maybe it was inevitable. They were young. It was Africa. After the Michael Rennie movie, they made out like a couple of kids, sitting on a couch at the clinic. It only lasted a minute or two, then Kate pushed him away and, with a sly smile, suggested they go to bed.

But not with each other. She needed time to think, she said, then kissed him on the cheek, and left the room, slyly humming. It took him a while to recognize the song. “Just One of Those Things.”

Which was funny, but inaccurate. Whatever it was between them – love, lust, or loneliness – it wasn’t “one of those things.” It was a different “thing” entirely. He was going to tell her that when the unthinkable happened.

They were “rescued.”

Or he was. Kate was upriver delivering a baby when a UN convoy rolled into Porkpa, escorting a truck with a red crescent on its side. Pulling up to the clinic in an armored personnel carrier, a Nigerian captain jumped to the ground, and promptly announced that everyone was being evacuated.

“Everyone?” Burke eyed the little truck.

“Yes,” the captain insisted. “All the white people. Everyone!”

Burke thanked him for his trouble, but declined the invitation, only to be told that it wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. An argument ensued. Burke stood his ground. He wasn’t going anywhere. Not without the doctor.

He woke up half an hour later on the floor of the truck, his wrists bound with FlexiCuffs. Driven to the airstrip at Belle Yella, he was put aboard a UN helicopter with other evacuees, and flown to an American naval ship that was standing off the coast. Two days later, he was in Washington.

His apartment was a one-bedroom co-op on Connecticut Avenue, a couple of blocks north of the zoo. There was nothing special about it except that, in the morning, he could hear the gibbons singing above the traffic. It was never a place in which he’d spent a lot of time, but it was an address, at least, and it was where he kept his books and clothes.

He tried to get in touch with Kate, but there wasn’t any way. The shortwave was down, and her e-mail came back as undeliverable. There didn’t seem to be an Irish embassy in Monrovia. She might as well have been on the moon.

What did she think had happened to him? Did anyone tell her? Did she think he’d caught the first ride out, leaving without a word? That’s the way it must have seemed…

There was a number for Doctors Without Borders in New York, and he called it. They referred him to the Paris headquarters of Médecins Sans Frontières. In his best high school French, he asked about the clinic in Porkpa.

C’est fermé.

Et la directeur?

His accent must have been execrable, because the person at the other end of the line sounded pained: It is okay to speak English, please?

Absolutely! You were saying: The clinic’s closed.

Yes, it is closed.

And I was asking about the director. Dr. Aherne.

She is no longer with us.

Burke froze. What?

Yes! I am afraid it is no longer possible to work in Liberia. It is too dangerous.

Oh… he began to breathe again. Do you have a phone number for her?

Yes, but I am afraid it is confidential. Perhaps, if you like, we could forward a letter?

He wrote the letter that same afternoon, and tore it up that evening. In the morning, he sat down with it for a second time. But there was so much to say, so much to explain. Not about his disappearance. That was the easy part. The hard part was talking about them. The two of them.

What about them? When he thought about Africa, and all the things that happened there, the memories were like hallucinations. The helicopter yawing as its rotors came apart. The ground rushing toward him. The little blanket of bees on his chest. Kate.

In the end, the letter was as much to himself as it was to her. It went on for pages and days as he came to grips, not only with his feelings for Kate but with the uncertainties of his own identity. Who was he? Who did he want to be? What was important? What was not? The more he thought about it, the more he realized that the answers rested with Kate.

By then, he’d cold-called all the hospitals in Dublin. Did they have a Dr. Aherne working for them? Indeed, they did. They had Ahernes and Ahearns. Orthopedics, pediatrics, and family medicine. Mary, Rory, and Declan. Which one did he have in mind?

It was at Meath Street Hospital that he found her. The hospital’s new directory listed Katherine Aherne as a physician in the Casualty Ward. But she wasn’t to start for a week or two, and when she did, the receptionist said, she’d probably work nights and weekends. “That’s how we break them in,” she confided.

In a way, he was relieved not to be able to reach her. There was too much to say, and what if she hung up on him? At least, with the letter, he could say what he felt. And he would, just as soon as he got it right.

In the meantime, he had plastic surgery at Sibley Hospital. There wasn’t anything to be done about the splashes of scar tissue on his chest and shoulders, but the doctors were able to make his ear, or what was left of it, “cosmetically acceptable.”

It was a strange time. He began to work out at the Y, lifting weights and playing basketball in the mornings. Most afternoons, he read the paper over coffee at a sidewalk table outside Foster Brothers, or wandered through the city’s museums. There was a poker game on Thursday nights at James McLeod’s place, but that was all the “socializing” that he did.

By now, word had gotten out that he was back, and editors were calling. F-Stop had a commercial assignment for the Patagonia catalog: a three-day trek through Chile’s Torres del Paine. Was he interested? He thought it over for about an hour. Then he caught a plane.

That night, he lay awake in a window seat, gazing into the darkness of the Atlantic, miles below. In the morning, he changed planes at Heathrow, and flew on to Dublin in the afternoon. Reeling with jet lag, he took a room at an expensive hotel on Grafton Street, and dropped into bed. When he awoke five hours later, he went to Meath Street Hospital and took a seat in the waiting room on the Casualty Ward.

The next night, he did the same. And the next. And the next. Eventually, one of the nurses took pity on him, and let drop the information that Dr. Aherne lived in Dalkey. “Like Bono,” she said.

It was easy to find her after that, but it took a weekend to sort things out, and another week to court her. Two weeks after that, they were married.

The old man gave her away. He liked Americans in general and Burke in particular, not least of all because Burke was content to stay in Dublin for as long as Kate wanted to be there. Soon, Burke was working at “the Firm,” helping the old man with incorporations. Within a year, Kate was running the Casualty Ward at the hospital, and life was grand. They began to talk about a baby.

Then the sepsis.