Fiction: The Snows of Kilimanjaro

The beeping, whirring, and wheezing of a hospital were so loud they could drive a person crazy. If she wasn’t going crazy already. Too weak to move, she never left her bed. They had run out of rooms, so she was in the hallway instead, hooked up and waiting to get better. She saw this as a good sign. If she was in more dire straights, they would have put her in a room already. She wondered if she still had her job. There was no way they would fire her while she was sick, right? Surely they’d let someone else go first.

The covid symptoms weren’t the worst part. It was the sheer boredom of lying down all day without any distraction. There was too much brain fog to read, the brightness of a screen hurt too much, and so did the physical exertion of sitting up or holding something up. So she laid there, eyes wide open, thinking about nothing in particular, imagining she was anywhere else but here. If she had been anywhere else but here, maybe she wouldn’t have been sick.

She could almost imagine that she was back in Mexico. Mexico City was also unceasingly loud, at all hours of the day. It was hard to breathe in Mexico too with the pollution, the altitude, and her asthma, though not as bad as right now. She spent two, almost three winters in Mexico, eating tacos and sitting in parks. She would always remember Mexico as a sepia-tinted dream. There was food at all hours of the day, markets filled with various knick-knacks, and the dancing, oh the dancing. Towards the end, her Asian features, developing tan, and improving Spanish meant she passed for mestizo, until the conversation turned to more complex stories. She tried putting them down on paper, but she would quickly grow bored and start another. Fortunately, there was no shortage of men or stories in Mexico.

Once upon a time, she had wanted to write about all her travels when she was teaching English abroad. She had never wanted to come home, staying in one place no more than a few years, packing up her bags whenever she had tired of a city. That was when she was younger.
She coughed and shuddered. Coughs now hurt not only her throat, but also her lungs, head, and muscles. She felt like she was dying every time she coughed.

She should have probably never started smoking knowing that she had asthma. And she didn’t really smoke, only while drinking or stressing. However, it was part of the job while living in Paris. Growing up in Canada, smoking always felt like a dirty habit. But in Paris, everyone smoked. And they made it look so damn good too. She lived in Paris the shortest of all her sojourns abroad, only for half a year during college. But it was nostalgic, defining even. She learned about fashion, about art, about music. That’s when she decided she wanted to write, after reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald. That’s when she decided she didn’t want to live in Canada anymore. She wanted to live in Paris, to wander the streets, to eat subsidized baked goods, cheese, and wine.

But after getting bored of Mexico, she went to Shanghai. Back to Shanghai, in a way, since she was born there, but it was a very different Shanghai than the one she knew when she left. It looked like Toronto thirty years in the future, and she found plenty of other English teachers to smoke with and drink with and buy drugs at underground clubs with. It was strange to see the videos from friends in Shanghai. Many had chosen to leave, but the ones who stayed took photos of the empty streets she used to frequent. Streets that used to be teeming with people and life, empty like a post-apocalyptic nightmare. But, she reflected, as Copenhagen locked down, that would be what it looked like too.

She felt a light touch on her arm and looked up. It was the clipboard of a nurse, taking down her readings.

“How’s it looking doc?”

“You’re doing well. Fever went down a little bit, and everything else is fairly steady. We don’t need to put you on a respirator yet.”

She coughed.

“I still feel like death.”

“I’ll bring you some juice later to help you get your strength back up.”

There was no time to write in Shanghai. Just beats and booze. It was in Shanghai that she met Hans. He was Danish, but spoke English quite well. He found a home with the German expats because there weren’t enough Danish ones, and she hung out with the Germans because they liked the same dirty techno clubs that she did. Hans was on a two-year stint in Shanghai at a Danish shipping company. She remembered the one day they went out to one of the villages next to Shanghai. It was a hazy afternoon preceded by a lazy morning. It was a bad day to go out, the humidity oppressive. They were on a bridge above opaque green water, surrounded by vendors of cheap souvenirs and outstretched selfie sticks. It was there that Hans asked her if she wanted to go back to Copenhagen with him when his term ended.

She had only allowed herself to get close to Hans because they both knew that there was an expiry date for their relationship. But what the hell, she had enough of Shanghai, and Copenhagen was that much closer to Paris. She told herself that it would be a good opportunity to start writing in earnest. It was much cleaner than the grunge of the cities she had lived in before but it had no good food. Well, it had some very good restaurants that Hans would sometimes take her to, but nothing unpretentious: Chinese food was a luxury, French wines were robbery, and tacos were extortion. Yet she was happy. There were worse places to live than quiet Copenhagen. They bought a dog together, a little long-haired wiener dog that would almost scuttle as it moved its little legs along the grey streets.

And they had excellent healthcare. At least she didn’t have to think about costs as she lay here, linked up to several machines whose incessant beeping kept her awake. She was too young to be suffering like this, gasping for air on this hospital bed. It was a bit ironic that after spending her youth smoking in some of the most polluted cities in the world, she was slowly suffocating in Denmark. She laughed and it hurt but she continued to laugh. She never did make it back to Paris after all.