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Chapter Three
Seven Swords
Reversed
Arguments
Uncertain counsel or advice
India
Unidentified Village
...Now what was the question?
-Frou Frou, Psychobabble
The rain slows cleanup efforts now. The death last week was 310. Not that any country cares, even their own. He watches the monsoon pound here in Mumbai, already calculating the bacteria fostering in the humid makeshift hospital inside. Despite the pounding rain the temperature remains a solid 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and consequently many of the makeshift doctors along with himself have discarded their shirts, excusing most of the women, of course, but modesty couldn't hold out much longer.
It's not just bacteria he's worried about. Even though the rains are looked upon as miracles for their scarcity, Wufei sees already the looming cripple in food distribution. Already he senses Bombay won't be able to send in anything for days: from his standpoint he can make out what once was the road (the rice paddies, the pineapple fields)…now a new stream clogged with mud and grass.
Someone new who arrived from European ministry just days before this…this whore of a monsoon, comes to join him and sighs. His name is Roy.
"Donald put on the alert for the villagers to stay in their homes," he says offhand, his accent ringing of Czech.
Wufei slowly shakes his head, a sarcastic, pitying smirk broadening there. "They won't stay. They don't understand."
Roy's eyes were wide, his lips move, and Wufei catches a flash of someone he once knew, a prince…but he pushes it away. "…o you mean?"
Wufei pushes off the column with the cheap paint, his arms folded and his eyes narrowed at a point on the ground. "These people are close the brink of starvation, constantly. The U.N.'s World Food Program collapsed on H.E. 2025 with the corruption conspiracies, and conspiracy is all they've come to expect from outsiders since then." Even before that, too. There was a tip of disgust on his tongue but he forced it down. Emergency rations were stacked in the back and ready, but that supply had been dwindling for some time during the drought—nowhere near enough to feed the thousands of people mindlessly flocking to grab whatever they could.
Look at their leader. He was ordered to appear in court for allegedly running over a pedestrian while intoxicated for fleeing the scene. But Mr. Niamey will get little more than a slap on the wrist, Wufei knows, because after all the rich defend their own when the tongues are wagging, or they'll all lose their cars and jewelry and become ordinary.
He steps off the porch and into the rain. It if weren't for the waterproof bug spray he'd applied ten minutes ago, a hoard of biting, disease carrying insects would have been on him in seconds. "To us, the solution to their problem is obvious, that they must adapt to survive in this new age or they'll die," He lifts his head up to the dark sky; the eye hadn't finished its Passover yet and the winds hadn't come back. "To us, it is only common sense to join together and operate in an organized fashion…to pity everyone because we're all on the same level. Don't expect pity, Roy, they'll come at us as a mindless mob if we try to tell them what to do even if it's killing them."
"Where are you going?" He makes no move to follow him and it's only mild curiosity that keeps him here.
"Somewhere to pray."
Fact: The total number of all available products in existence remains beyond all capable understanding, and the memory to name all the materials used in an individual product is impossible.
Fact: All "civilized" human life is sustained at multiple points in their life by machine, microchip, and microbiology, surrounded by surpluses of energy, fuel, finery, and food.
Storage. Archives. Information banks. Hard disk, floppy disk, backup tape, hard copy—everything worth anything somehow duplicated in one form or another and stored.
To anyone this is mind boggling but to Wufei it's only the same basic theory that had created the bamboo scrolls in Shanghai which he had studied under. Not difficult to understand.
And in spite of the entire dazzle in the infomercials, gasoline, and colonies there still exists the "Old World."
Follow the stream into the marshes, into the mountains, into the desert, into the jungle.
"The East" was what they called it, they themselves now reign as the "Superior West." It is all they have, they are not so new anymore: space was the true limitless frontier.
The East, or the Third World, or the Underdeveloped Countries, or the Backwards Countries, or the Primitive Area—it covers continents still where timeless white garments walk their camels through the sandstorm, happy as ever to live among the sun-bright desolation.
In the rice paddies, here in the fields, in the marshes of Iraq, in the villages the world over, men and women stooped to gather their crop as they have since the dawn of their time.
Huge urban outposts rise amid the millions, yet the vast majority of tribes, farmers, weavers, vendors, mothers, monks, beggars, and children remain beyond the reach of Western invention, abundance, medicine, and sanitation.
Fact: Sanitation is key.
Wufei already knew that Roy was the type of person who would try to explain that sanitation was the necessary chemical purification of human waste and industrial waste, the purification of drinking water and water for bathing—the nullification of filth in all forms and the maintenance of an environment in which one could be born, give birth, grow up, and die—in maximum security against human or industrial or chemical contamination of any kind.
Nothing matters as much as sanitation, Wufei could hear him saying, Plagues have vanished from the earth due to sanitation.
In the West sanitation was considered a guaranteed given; in the "East" sanitation was viewed with suspicion, or people were simply too numerous to be made to conform to the inevitable habits required by it.
And so, diseases run wild through the jungles; in the marshes; in the deep pockets of vast cities or in the wilderness where the peasants, workers, the fellaheen, still lived as they always had.
Like here.
The night is impossibly loud, a constant din of insects, frogs, and, more distant, monkeys or birds. Something howls from a mile, maybe ten miles away. Wufei finds this no better than the sudden festival the villagers threw for the gods for fertility.
The powers of oblivious denial.
He didn't even try to sleep, but he was woken by a sudden harsh burst that left him wide awake ten minutes ago, and now he's watching the shadows of the night world creep around his walls.
The cot is sopping wet from the heavy, humid air. The monsoon changed course and the winds were fierce but not deadly. This meaning "the trees were uprooted, yes, but in this godforsaken country there's plenty of trees and none of them hit –my- house so the storm wasn't that bad"…
The villagers believed the gods had answered their ritual chants and bead offerings. They wanted to celebrate.
Celebration meant food.
The stockpile vault was empty.
Hunger. There was plenty, and there was hunger. But Wufei isn't just thinking of the people's foolishness here. He thinks globally about food thrown away in the streets of New York while the television program was showing the starving.
It's a matter of distribution.
Light slants in through the window—a headlight—that strikes through the canopy of leaves and illuminating the pale transparency of a spider's web migrating across the room's corners. He gets up as the tires reach his ears, the splash of a vehicle worn and barely able to contain itself having reached its destination.
His body is sticky with sweat and the air's perfume, the pads of his feet sticking slightly to the floor as he makes his exit.
"Hozzat?" Roy's voice is startled but drowsy as the vehicle outside whines in its braking. "What?"
"The WFA is here."
"Oh." He said up, putting on his glasses and looking at his stop watch. "Jesus, it's—"
"I know." Typical, that there was as much organization amid all this change was the modern mystery—that so much could happen and so much could stay the same. How much it could both delight and confuse the eyes: The holy men of India walk naked beside the roaring Jeep Wrangler in the teeming streets of Calcutta.
"Oh." Someone else sat up and blinked blearily. "Do you need—"
"No." Wufei coated his bare torso and legs with another layer of insect repellent before putting on his shirt, then thought better of it since it was useless. He waved to the others. "I have it."
"Oh." Roy laid back down. "Okehh…g'night…" And then his body stilled.
Trying to keep the spider in view—good, it's not a bad one, okay it can live—the Chinese man considers the car outside as he walks. Perhaps something would come out of this. Perhaps not. Perhaps it only delays the inevitable and he's wasting his time here. Perhaps not.
One thing is for certain. Wufei feels none of the urgency he had felt in China, the driving impatience that obviated sleep and food, proving what Dr. O had suspected: the he was capable of hard, compassionate work. He had carved himself a rare niche in a sporadic profession that was 90 percent unprepared youths ripping and roaring and ready to change the world.
Well, Wufei is not a youth anymore—he hasn't been for some time—and already familiar with the depressive existence that awaits him; most of all, Wufei wasn't suffering under any delusion that his role here was influencing the planet, or even the country.
Within a stone throw of air-conditioned office buildings linger pockets of jungle where men know nothing of Shiva, Jesus, or of iron, copper, gold, or bronze. They hunt with wooden spears and poison in the arrow tips from reptiles, only now and then stupefied by the sigh of mechanical bulldozers mowing down the land which was their world.
'They hold out on each other,' he thinks as he walks outside. 'The West has its power, but the East has its oil.'
Quatre.
/'You're a solitary dragon, Wufei, you know that? A solitary…dragon…/
They had all scattered into the four winds, possibly mere hours after the Gundams were destroyed—which was for the best. Hanging around would have only rooted them too deeply in the past in a world ready to move forward and forget; they, rotting their identities more than before, yes, it was for the best.
Dr. O thrived on pushing him forward. /'As quickly as possible, you must establish credibility. The real work begins when I stop watching you as a hawk. Remember, you lived in a small, jealous kingdom with few paltry treasures. The rest of the world is no different. You must rise above the squabbling and the envy. You must always remember that the work continues after the battle is over. And you alone must continue it.'/
And he thinks he has. He's done what he had said he would. He had done it for May Ling, for himself, for Treize, for the earth and colonies, for the challenge itself at first, and finally, for the idea itself.
It's the next day and Wufei finds his current life a selfish therapy, to use two hundred and fifty children daily being brought in complaining of ear aches, belly hurts, cuts, colds, and fevers…just so he won't have to think about May Ling.
Schools here are plagued by insects, leaky roofs and defective equipment, and a lack of method to identify needed repairs. Wufei administers Cetaphil, a moisturizing lotion, to a skin-cracked arm suffering what suspiciously looks like…well, it's treatable only with money that this place doesn't have right now. He debates, a moment, maybe two, before taking the hand of the tiny girl he's treating.
She's not yet twelve. She has wide, dark eyes and skin and hair like they all do, wearing clothes where if the cloth slips he could count her ribs. Her hands are tiny, and so are her fingernails, but they will dry and crack soon. In the healthy hand he places the tiny, 29mL plastic bottle—the kind that's barely larger than your palm—and tells her in his clumsy version of her language what to do with it. Her mouth is slightly open, her eyes unblinking, and she gives a slight dip of her chin when he's done that makes her short, beaded braids clink.
'It's pointless,' the old him sneers. The part that was deluded by false ideals, the side who almost killed his comrades. 'Your actions away from your integrity code are foolish! This is pointless, this is dishonoring…'
Foolish. Pointless. Dishonoring. All of it is true, even by his present standards.
But when it's all said and done, he watches the little girl—bony and graceless—run up to her father who glares at him suspiciously. She hops on his back and they leave. Back to the sodden fields the tribe farms but from which nothing ever grows. Back to the mosquito-ridden huts, the waters by them contaminated with dirty bodies and human waste; the flat land with not enough vaccines to go around, not nearly enough if she got worse. They go back there, those HIV carriers. They go back there; they always go back.
Because it is home.
And I try to bring more-
it's more than I can handle.
But I bring it to the table,
bring what I am able.
The world is on fire...
...it's closing on in...
-Sarah McLachlan, World on Fire
