A Vision of Fire

Well, he thought, when in doubt, eliminate pain, even if a source of pain isn’t evident. He loaded a syringe with codeine and slipped the needle into the young woman’s bicep. She showed no reaction to the pinch.

He stood back for a moment and, out of habit, looked at his kit to make sure no one was edging near it to steal something they could use… or sell. He realized that most of the children gathered in the square were watching a couple who were both aiming horizontal smartphones at the girl, shooting video. Half of Haiti now owned ordinary handsets but smartphones were still prohibitively expensive. Aaron did not have time to be disgusted by the couple. He suddenly noticed that he could hear motors and horns from the road again, and a cheerful music station from a hand-crank radio nearby. The young woman had stopped screaming.

“C’est la fils avec vous?” Aaron asked the couple, remembering that the little girl had referred to the young woman as having a phone.

“Mais non, non,” the man said with an American accent, reinforcing the denial with a wave of his hand.

The woman put away her phone, tugged at his arm. They held trinkets from peddlers, had probably been walking through the market and sought to capture the drama of a native in distress. Aaron wondered what had been lifted from their pockets while they indulged themselves. He didn’t feel sorry for them. They could have offered something, a donation for medicine.

He turned his attention back to the young woman. She was still staring at the sky, but now her physical behavior had changed. He could not say it was a more comforting sight. With her head tilted back and her mouth dropped open, she appeared to be holding her breath. Her arms were waving back and forth slowly with her hands curled in clawlike shapes. She seemed to want to move her legs as well but her feet were rooted to the filthy slop on the ground.

What now? Aaron thought anxiously. He pawed through his kit again—bandages, dressings, ibuprofen, nothing that was going to help.

The crowd of whispering women parted. Some moved aside willingly, others grudgingly. Aaron watched a few of them make the sign of the cross, and some sucked their teeth, a severe insult in Haiti. Others nodded respectfully toward an approaching figure. Aaron suddenly smelled a cigar, somehow able to penetrate through the stink of the garbage.

“Mambo,” some of the onlookers said, explaining and introducing the woman who stepped out of the crowd. The Vodou priestess looked dismissively at the American doctor.

About fifty years old, she was not wearing a hand-me-down American T-shirt but a threadbare, short-sleeved ivory blouse; a skirt that had once been a pale pink; and a thin white kerchief tied around her hair. Her elbows and hips were sharp with undernourishment, and her strong cheekbones would have been envied in another world. Her eyes, tough and fierce, regarded the young girl.

Be respectful, Aaron thought as he stepped aside to admit the woman.

“That girl is drowning,” the mambo said in clear English.

Aaron was speechless. After a moment he said, “I don’t understand.”

“You better hurry,” the mambo said. “She got ice-cold salt water in her chest.”

The woman raised a cigar to her lips and stared at him.

Aaron wrenched his eyes away and looked at the girl. He glanced from her arms to her neck to her open mouth, and, yes, if this girl had been in water, those hands might have been trying to claw to the surface. His mind shoved the thought away hard but… He looked at her face and, by god, her lips were turning blue. Her ears too. She was trembling all over and her arms were slowing down.

This girl has hypothermia. In Haiti.

Aaron waved at several women to move cabbages and stalks of sugarcane off a sheet that was spread beneath them on the ground. He turned to his kit and pulled out two packages and ripped them both open. As soon as the sheet was clear he put his hands under the girl’s armpits and dragged her to it as gently as possible. Supporting her body, he laid her down. He pulled a crackling silver Mylar emergency blanket from the larger ripped package and spread it over the girl to keep her warm under the scorching-hot sun. Then he checked for anything in her throat that might be obstructing her breathing—there was nothing. With one desperate glance at the mambo smoking her cigar, he interlocked his hands and leaned on the young woman’s chest to perform CPR. He ignored his brain, which demanded to know what the hell he was doing.