The activated charcoal in the aircon had long since been active and the prefab smelled like camping trips and the drying wetsuit tang of childhood seaside visits. I pegged back the membrane door as far as it could go and we all shuffled in. Zalmai brought up the rear, taxiing reluctantly into the musty space. Currently our complement is only seven, a recent c.difficile outbreak resulted in two deaths—only one surprise, a goat farmer who wandered into the hospital compound unaided, only missing a lung and his left hand. He died fours days later after the difficile infection swept opportunistically through the wards, a spectacular gastrointestinal revolt that left the whole ward retching and grieving in equal measure.
Some other stubborn remnants of this year’s intake: Max, a shaggy, denimed member of the ubiquitous tribe of nomadic westerners that form a grubby, globally spanning gulf stream of trust fund disillusionment and disestablishmentarianism. Six months ago Max found himself muling out of Kabul with an amphetamine-packed colon and a nearly valueless solid roll of hyper-inflated Afgani currency. The Rough Guide is woefully short on hitching advice for the Kabul-Jalalabad road and Max’s abortive attempt to flag down an ancient Peugeot estate resulted in a third-hand colostomy bag and a free ride to our hospital car park.
Ashur the Syrian, my star pupil, a dead man walking. Ashur was a DOA at Jalalabad Central hospital, a bloody bundle of rags that had been cursorily admitted by an exhausted night staff and then rolled on a broken trolley into an unused corridor in the ER. Doubling as a trauma surgeon during the first few weeks of my secondment, I found this gory heap as I took five and sucked down my millionth smoke of the night. Ashur was what we called a full donor: multiple organ theft and over fifty percent of limb reduction. Incredibly he was conscious when I found him, his one remaining hand pawing blindly at the fetid hot air of the ER.
I was new in country back then, and gear-rich and drug-fat from my new WorkSpace coffers. The hospital wing they had assigned me for the organ theft project was full of box-fresh, state-of-the-art kit designed exactly for the life extension of this type of victim. Ashur was at the thin end of a survival spectrum probability, but back then I was full of enthusiasm, energy and naïve hope.
He made it through the night; his cored torso emptied of offal and filled with a million euros worth of modular life support. That long night was a vague memory of grey market Marlboro consumption, blinking LEDs of the medical gear, and the gurgle/rattle of a jerry-rigged trachea/air filtration unit connection. Ashur is a continuing miracle, wholly dependent on aging med gear, scrounged feedstock and smuggled hormone replacement analogues; yet he has an easy, beatific smile and always some time for Zalmai.
Ashur reminds me of a turn of the century cyborg wet dream gone wrong. Like a crippled borg lacking the transcendent scope of Stelarc’s vacuum-bound nude explorers, Ashur is his own street, making his own uses of the tech we can scrape together for him.
Gula always brings up the rear. She invariably insists on carrying the Job from the ambulance to the prefab, an essential piece of kit for the group sessions. Nearly two metres tall, Gula’s single huge right arm easily flips the modular Job pod off the roof rack and onto its undercarriage of sprung wheels. Gula has not spoken since she came to live with us in the prefabs; she has no overt medical needs and I can only assume she was also a victim of the mountain gangs; the clean stump of her left humerus betrays the trauma of involuntary surgery, not the impartial mangled legacy of a farm accident. Gula’s huge, beautiful green eyes miss nothing, and she acts as our minder during the vulnerable hours we spend in Job immersion during the counselling sessions.