Chapter 4 - X-Ray sex

The sickness continues and the time rolls. Will something arbitrary save me or should I look inside? Again, tired of my sickness, it's like an inner self suggests that this isn't really happening. How did I come to find myself in a hospital, sick, in Ghana, wondering what I'm doing? It's not so long since I extended my visa and here I am trying to keep alive when I could have been elsewhere.

I wasn't sure whether I was dreaming or not but I spent a long period of time ill and the only interruption I can intersperse of days sick, listening to the moaning of the big man was an era in bed dribbling losing my mind. Hospital boredom started to kill me in my confines. I had a locker at the end of my bed that I noticed would become full of water during the day. The wood of its door was transparent and revealed all manner of sordid activity. I saw queues of people waiting in turn to give a dreadlocked guy oral sex as the cabinet itself slowly filled up and the couple became encased in water. They were oblivious to me and I didn't care to watch them, but stuck on a drip all day, things like that at the end of your bed tend to entertain. I was watching all of this very matter of factly, not questioning how I could see through a wood door with x-ray malaria vision, not wondering how these people could breathe under water or why they were there in my ward. My body was too sick to care what was going on in front of my eyes. If I roused at all from my numb slumber it was just to throw up or to try and get to the toilet in time.

The big man and I never spoke. I was too encased in my weird mosquito world to make any attempt. I barely noticed him, though his moaning made my stay in hospital more unpleasant perhaps it helped bolster my recovery. People came to see me and I could hardly hear what they were saying, couldn't communicate much anyway, but I was grateful because in some way it must have helped me keep a mooring to reality. When you spend hours watching a cabinet fill up with water you tend to become a bit foggy in the mind. Like watching TV generally makes your mind that way, this was the same except in this scenario it's a locker made of wood. I remember Jess coming to visit and trying to explain to her what I'd seen. She looked seriously scared and I thought she didn't believe me. I asked her if the hospital was doubling up as a travellers hostel or some sort of brothel, or whether they had a washing service. She just looked concerned. When the nurse arrived with my wax enema and another needle for tests Jess made her excuses and left. Later, I began to wonder. I hadn't seen any action in the locker for a while. I looked through the mosquito screen and saw a line of people with towels…ahh, they must be waiting their turn. Later still I had to check up on things as there'd been no in-ward entertainment still. I checked through the mesh and saw only nurses and patients. I hoisted my aching bones out of bed and round the corner to look behind the wall with the cabinet in front of it. There was nothing there to show an orgy invite session was usually in place. I scratched my head and returned to bed and passed out.

I woke with the fever really kicking in. The big man was moaning something chronic in the dark beside me sleeping. I couldn't bear it, any of it. In a spare moment of lucidity on waking I cursed the pain and cried a whimpering prayer and tried to pierce my mind with some reflection. Had my friends been there? Had I really walked the streets carrying my quinine bag searching for an Internet café? How could it all be? Where was I and what was happening to me? I knew who I was, I remembered things that had happened to me, and people from my life but where was I now? What was happening? How long had this been going on? I was just lying there draped in a thin sheet with twisted up thick blankets kicked away. When I burned I groaned and pushed away the sheet, when I froze I drag the blanket to me. My hand was wet; blood was over it because one of the drip needles had been pulled out. I forced it back in painfully. I cursed that parasite, doubted that little wax cone could kill something so powerful. Wondered if it was all my mind crumbling apart. I needed something to bring me back to myself, something. There was just a battered Wordsworth classic copy of Frankenstein I'd never owned. I wanted my watch, some connection to earth, to life. But hadn't I had my watch when I came in?

I heard something shimmer around me. I felt something grim and fearful over my shoulder in the darkness. I felt frozen with a childlike terror of the darkness and the unknown but I had to know, had to find out what that unknown something was. Though stiff with fear I squirmed and turned to the wall and above me in the bed was something...

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