The Sweeper is sweeping all of them away … .

  Neetu rouses herself. Brow heavy, mouth dry, her eyes dart around and her feet and hip absorb the sensation of a soft mattress. She feels and smells clean. Jasmine soap. She is clad in a T-shirt, cotton boxers of some kind, a bathrobe—under a clean sheet. Yet cheap artwork poisons a dingy stucco wall; a geriatric air conditioner rumbles on the widow sill, pouring dry, stale warm air into the room. This air carries the piquancy of the Blue Nile, the White Nile, of taxi and bus fumes, of animals. She’s in Khartoum.

  She hears a woman’s voice—English, with a slightly Latinized lilt. Neetu realizes this is the voice of the same woman who haunts a waking dream, and in it the woman brandishes a hypodermic and utters the word “thorazine.” Neetu’s eyes focus. Yes, it’s her. Tall in strappy white heels and a knee-high white skirt, tight to the rump and hips. Her hair raven-black: bobbed, well coiffed. Her gold blouse is unbuttoned shamefully to expose the latticed rim of what has to be a push-up bra. Other Western women wisely cover themselves out of respect for Islam, or they wear khaki or denim and are shod with hiking boots or trainers. The woman’s skin is pale but for a slight blush on the cheeks, and that scares Neetu because most Caucasians visiting Sudan attain a ruddy tan from a sun that had punted all pretense of mercy months ago. Exotic is the word many folks-Americans, at least—would use. That’s how white people described Neetu. And yes, those eyes. Blue as blue as the cloth of a turban, and a face she’s also seen in dreams.

  The pale woman tugs a stethoscope from across her shoulder and lifts Neetu’s arm to check her pulse. Neetu sees a white-tipped French manicure doubtless procured across the Blue Nile in Al Urogan. And that blouse must’ve been 80 euros in the European Union compound over there with its Hermès and Starbucks and other bedeviling Western fixtures. No sign of blight or the worst drought in a century in Al Urogan. Wealthy Sudanese women can shed their burkas for Valentino capris, and the Veuve-Clicquot, Cuban cigars and lobster are airlifted in daily on those same Antonovs that kill hundreds in Darfur each month, just as they did in the South Sudan a decade ago.

  The woman trumpets through her cherry lips, “Dr. Gupta-Brown … good to see you awake, hon. Please join us when you feel up to it.”

  Neetu’s through the bedroom door and scans the room. The air conditioner in what looked to be a hotel suite’s sitting room served just as feebly as the one in the bedroom. The place is sweltering. There’s that exotic woman again, but this time she’s at the sliding door to a balcony, peering out.

  “Dr. Mifares?” Neetu calls. That’s her name—Portuguese or something, but she’s an American. World Heath Organization, she’d told Neetu. A “special advisor” to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees for Southern and Western Sudan.

  Tying her robe, Neetu staggers to the glass and immediately spies a dossier on the rusted cowl covering the air-conditioning unit. Her name’s printed on the tab. But Mifares pulls her attention away from that, down to the street below the balcony. Rajf Street, Neetu reckons. One of Khartoum’s seedier neighborhoods and so this must be the al-Omdurman Hotel, which explains the equally seedy decor.

  A crowd of perhaps thousands fills the block below in the relentless heat. Milling, ugly and restive—yet the throng is strangely quiet, and with no signs or the burning effigies or raised brown fists Westerners usually associate with the stereotype Muslim mob.

  “General strikes in the city,” Mifares explains, “and famine in countryside.”

  Neetu’s clutching at her own shoulders “Dr. Mifares, I’m very, very confused—”

  “No, please call me Chra … short for Chrasiella. Listen, hon, I’ll just get to the point. You’d been comatose for over a week.”

  “Oh my God … coma? H-head trauma?” Now Neetu’s groping for nonexistent head wounds on her pate. As she pivots, disoriented, she realizes there are others gathered in the suite.

  One is a short, doughy Sudanese in an olive drab uniform festooned with ribbons. A beret is folded into his shoulder epaulet. He says his name is Colonel Omar El-Fuud, Sudanese Army, and his voice is close to that of a hungry alley dog growling over a pigeon carcass. He strides over to Mifares and scoops up the dossier.

  Neetu falls into a sofa, and there finds herself crumpled across from a slight, bespectacled white man. His skin looks drawn over bone—like that of the livestock dying in the dust-choked hinterland not ten miles from downtown Khartoum. He’s sweating under his white collar and black hassock.

  To the room Neetu asks, “Why aren’t I in a hospital? Full C-T scan … skull series, neuro work-up … d-did I seize? H-have you rung the Doctors for Peace HQ in London?”

  Easing to Neetu’s side and patting her trembling hand, Mifares says, “I’ve checked you out.” Eschewing any diagnostic details Mifares then gestures to the man wearing the priestly hassock. “This is Monsignor Gerd Kolsch, Papal Nuncio for Eastern and Central Africa.”

  Father Kolsch rises, twitches a smile on his gaunt face and offers a boney hand. “On behalf of His Holiness in Rome I would—”

  “Why the fuck are you people here?” Neetu snaps. She curls into a fetal ball on the musty sofa.

  Colonel El-Fuud opens the dossier and begins to recite from the biography. He lacks a heavy accent and speaks with such arrogance and disdain that, yes, Neetu now thinks he’s Sudanese Army Intelligence. They get the plum assignments abroad—leaving their wives covered from head to henna’d toes so they can attend American or Commonwealth schools and romp in places like Amsterdam and Bangkok. “Neetu Gupta-Brown, M.D.,” he begins with a derisive lip curl. “You are divorced, correct? Yet you keep your name hyphenated. Why?”

  Plump cinnamon cheeks quickly dampen with tears as Neetu repeats, this time timidly and with her voice breaking, “Why the fuck are you people here?”

  But the Colonel drones on. “Born Mumbai, India, 1976. Parents emigrate to Toronto, Canada, 1977. Own a restaurant there. Not the stereotype of physicians or engineers, I see. And then you marry a black man at McGill University. Ernest Brown. You two attend medical school at Howard University in America.” He’s grinning now. “So you like being with the blacks, eh? That is why you are in Darfur? I wonder what Mum and Dad have to say about that?”

  Enough venom saturates the air to jolt Neetu into hollering, “Fuck you, murderer!”

  “Ahhh,” El-Fuud sneers, “now we come to it … .”

  Abruptly Mifares intercedes. Perhaps El-Fuud defers to this woman because she’s backed by the UN? Or maybe he humors her as he thinks she’s ripe for conquest? Whatever the case he backs off and Mifares takes her turn as the priest looks on, still twitching that uneasy smile.

  “Howard, in D.C., right?” Mifares purrs. “I was right up the Parkway in Baltimore. Johns Hopkins—med school and a then a doctorate in Public Health.”

  Kolsch chimes in and Neetu doesn’t like his German accent. “What can you tell us of the militia attack on the camp at Al Jur Sureaf?”

  Neetu shrugs her shoulders, and that makes the priest and Mifares cross nervous glances. “I haven’t ever been to Al Jur Sureaf,” Neetu mumbles. “Not safe there … .”

  Mifares jumps a penciled eyebrow and says, “Hon, you called Omar, here, ‘murderer,’ yet you’ve never seen him before?”

  “No … no … but … but everybody knows the Army is out there helping the Janjaweed under the pretense that it’s fighting the SPLA … and that the SPLA’s broken the peace accord … .”

  “Shut that cow’s mouth!” El-Fuud demands.

  “I-I have to deal with disease, malnutrition … and then you come along and I have to do battlefield surgery too?”

  Unmoved the Colonel snarls, “So you have been to Al Jur Sureaf?”

  “N-no … I don’t … look, who the fuck are you?”

  “How did he bring them down?” the Colonel shouts. Mifares cuts him a frosty glare but El-Fuud’s vitriol sharpens. “Describe it now! Two attack ’copters! An Antonov flying at over 3,000 feet! And the bodies … tell me, bitch!”

  There are rapid raps on the door and calls in Arabic. El-Fuud’s men have heard their commander’s shouts. Mifares stands. Her voice is a low hiss that widens the priest’s eyes behind his glasses yet narrows Neetu’s own brown orbs to slits.

  “Omar, I could have gotten us a cool, clean deluxe suite at the Khalifa Hilton, but no, I thought I’d be nice and include you in this interview. Even let you pick this dump. Don’t make me regret that decision. Now go tell your henchmen to chill out and fetch us some ice and sodas. And if you yell at her again … before I’m finished—you’ll suffer … .”

  The Colonel sheepishly orders cold drinks for everyone; Mifares fluffs her black mane as if he wasn’t there.

  “Neetu,” she says, “you were found about three hundred miles southeast of here, on the frontier between Darfur and the Kurdofan district. Delirious, mumbling in Masalit and Fur. Do you know Masalit and Fur from your patients?”

  Neetu’s sobbing now. She nods but she’s wishing she were home. Home is a studio apartment in Hamilton, across a turgid river from gunmetal blue Detroit. Home is empty, silent, sterile without Ernie or her parents, but at least it’s familiar.

  Father Kolsch follows with, “Do you know what thuba Ajep Bol N’zugane means?”

  Neetu shakes her head.

  “That is an obscure Dinka dialect from Juba district in the Southern Sudan, not Darfur. It means ‘the Sweeper who feels no pain.’ Does this jar your memory?”

  Images, sounds, odors should be flooding Neetu’s brain, but there isn’t a single footprint of a nightmare other than the memory that she had one. She was snug in her bunk in Nyala and had a bad dream. When she awoke, she was in Khartoum, there with Dr. Chra Mifares.

  Replacing his glasses Kolsch presses her: “You and a soldier who’s gone AWOL from the African Union peacekeeping contingent saw a … person … kill many men. Sergeant Thomas Okinga, 4th Airborne Battalion, Army of Ghana—he is a friend of yours?” Kolsch hunches in his chair. “Meiner kinder, this Okinga was spotted yesterday evening near the White Nile ferry landing. Perhaps they are hiring tickets to Atibara?”

  “Ferry? They? Wh-who’s with Thomas? Y-You must slow down, I don’t—”

  “He shepherds a group of people. Masalit and Fur. An adult woman in a wheelchair among them, and how a woman in a wheelchair has eluded the police is, well, puzzling—especially as they also travel with small boy and a pregnant teenage girl. Somehow this little band obtained Western-looking clothing, cash and the wheelchair. The man Okinga was still in his Ghanaian Army fatigues, and perhaps that is how he procured the supplies and secreted these people from Darfur. You might be able to help us find this group, as well as confirm the identity of ‘The Sweeper.’”

  Kolsch dabs his thin lips with a handkerchief rather than offering it to Neetu. “Are you Hindu, Dr. Gupta-Brown?”

  Coldly Neetu snaps, “Raised Anglican—now atheist, Monsignor. Why?”

  “Curiosity, Doctor … please forgive me.” The priest’s face sours. “This renegade Sergeant Okinka kidnapped this family, you know. This family may be the relatives of a boy who departed the hospital at El Geneima some years ago. What we do know is that his father was Fur, his mother was Dinka.”

  “I told you … I can’t help you. Now may I use the telephone to ring—”

  “Please, Doctor,” Kolsch begs. “Just a few more minutes. The boy was born somewhere between Juba and the border with Uganda. We believe his mother may have been killed during the fighting in the south over ten years ago. He likely roamed north to find his father … alone or in these gangs of hungry, orphaned black children we hear of. ‘Lost boys,’ they’re called. Ghastly. With God’s grace he found his way to El Geneima, where we support the camp’s hospital under a program endowed by His Holiness John Paul II in response to the wars in the South Sudan and then Darfur. He was to be adopted by the Church. His Holiness Pope Benedict has continued this program and our representatives sought to have the boy flown to Rome.”

  El-Fuud grumbles under his breath, but another slicing look from Mifares stills his lips. Then Mifares’s face abruptly softens. She purrs to Neetu, “I examined this boy at the El Geneima hospital. He is very special. His name is Adam, and hon, we think he’s the one called ‘The Sweeper who feels no pain.’ You saw him.”

  Neetu’s now mixing tears with incredulous, weary chuckles, and this brings more scowls from Colonel El-Fuud.

  “Look,” Neetu guffaws, “I didn’t see any ‘Adam who sweeps.’ And I’ve been to the El Geneima hospital. Doctors for Peace staffs it. Dr. Mifares, with all due respect—I don’t recall hearing about you there.”

  Mifares folds her arms and smiles. “That’s because it was close to ten years ago, hon. See, a nun working as a nurse noted strange wounds on Adam. They reported this to Rome and the Church asked me to do a medical consult. As a courtesy, I did so.”

  “Wounds?”

  “On his wrists and ankles,” Mifares clarifies. “We thought it was hemorrhagia from skin lesions—you’ve seen the conditions presented by these children. You may also have heard of ‘stigmata.’ Mystical yes, but the Church has to investigate these things. The boy was Dinka, yet he’d been dressed in girl’s clothing by Masalit women, as I had heard it was customary to dress boys like that to protect them from guerillas who seek to recruit them, or from the Islamic militia.”

  “Girls suffer worse,” Neetu says. “And I can’t help you.” Now Neetu’s not liking this tall, striking woman with ink-black hair who smells better than anything she’s smelled since she’s come to Sudan. “Please, may I now ring the Canadian Embassy?”

  “How ’bout your parents?” Mifares asks.

  “Forget them.” Neetu’s recalling her mother’s shrill disapproval and her father’s silent disgust. Turn down a fellowship at Cornell Med to do what—inoculate filthy human flotsam? To her parents, Neetu leaving for Africa was worse than marrying Ernie Brown.

  Mifares seems to glom on to her thoughts. “I’m sure they haven’t forgotten you, nor has your husband. And of course we could take you to a proper hospital, but not here in Khartoum. General strike outside, remember? And a foreigner—especially you—well, you saw that mob out there … .”

  “Especially me?” But as addled as she is, Neetu’s peering right into Mifares’s eyes. Bluest blue. Bottomless. Irresistible. She’s calming herself and allows Mifares to scoot as close as a lover.

  A mellifluous whisper causes Neetu to bob her head as if consumed by a waking dream. Neetu’s mind tumbles back to 1997, and it sees Dr. Chrasiella Mifares arrive in El Geneima with the only mobile MRI between Cairo and Cape Town. Indeed, one of the few in the world ten years ago—subsidized by Father Kolsch and a Doctors for Peace benefactor.

  “You’ve heard of Barrett Epstein back in the States, right, hon?”

  Though dazed Neetu recognizes the name. Epstein has more money than God. Real estate development and construction. Babylon Management LLC, out of Washington, D.C. Talking heads on TV say he bought himself respectability by endowing non-governmental organizations like Doctors for Peace; the last thread twisting through Neetu’s mind is of a story read on a blog months before she arrived in Sudan. Barrett Epstein’s brother Herb was under indictment for money laundering. The FBI had ironclad proof Herb was banking a Russian Mafia human trafficking ring operating out of Haifa, Israel. Subpoenas for the records of Babylon Management LLC were supposedly on the judge’s desk awaiting signature when “new evidence” came to light from high ranking Israeli officials and a few WHO chiefs. Witnesses disappeared or recanted. The White House clandestinely ordered the Justice Department to drop the indictment and trash the subpoenas—at least that’s what the blog expounded.

  Neetu’s mind’s eye soon clouds and she cannot ask herself why Barrett Epstein was interested in a Dinka orphan with bleeding wrist and ankle wounds that refuse to heal. Stigmata. Nothing but a superstition. Yet no worse than anything Neetu had heard in the refugee camps of Darfur or in the South Sudan, when all disparate people had for succor and healing was superstition. Was it any different than the yarns spun by old tongues back in India? Tales of the trinity of God—the three Lords Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu. Of Vishnu’s servant, Kalki. An archangel they said, who bears the avatars to earth. The last avatar, Siddhartha—also called the Buddha—was long dead, and now mankind’s endured the Kali Yuga. The time of cruelty, selfishness, ignorance, bloodletting, murder. The time of Kali. The evil one. Child of chaos. Child of the morning star, who fears only Lord Vishnu’s servant Kalki, and the avatars who will bring the world to light … .

  Neetu’s uncurling from her fetal ball as Mifares details hard medical observations, not superstition. The boy named Adam manifested the most amazing anatomical anomalies ever recorded. So shocking that Mifares refused to share her notes, even with old colleagues at Hopkins.

  “Our mobile MRI exploded after Adam’s pictures uploaded,” Mifares reveals. “Its magnets reversed polarity. That’s the consensus of fifteen technicians who pulled the thing apart twice. Impossible? It didn’t stop there. An EKG short-circuited. And an EEG registered deep frontal cortex activity only seen in extreme REM sleep before it, too, smoked and died … . Both were hooked to the boy, Adam, as he lay on his cot. Expressionless. Mute.”

  Mifares rises and retrieves a glowing laptop from the bedroom, then places it on the coffee table separating Neetu and scarecrow-like Kolsch. At the same time the sodas arrive. Orange pop, with Chinese characters on the labels. Mifares opens a bottle for Neetu and hands her a caplet along with it. Valium. The blue eyes suck Neetu in once more, and, obediently, she swallows the caplet with a gulp of tart soda.