Face up, butt down, on a green cot in the military hospital. Muslim nurses; to my eyes, blurry, and my swimming mind, they look like Catholic nuns. But gentle. They murmur soft commands in Indonesian. Louise hovers in the background, translating on occasion. Someone asks her if she is my mother. I laugh, jerk, cough, cough, cough. Louise is 28. “Those fuckers,” she breathes, but she, too, is laughing. I wonder, in between fits of coughing, how I came to be struggling to breathe on a curtained-off cot with an ancient armpit thermometer tucked in my T-shirt and a young Australian near-stranger acting the part of my mother, right down to the part where she cooks me spiced salad, green beans, and cheesy mashed potatoes, and, on another night, pumpkin spaetzle, and refuses to let me move a muscle to help. How, also, did I come to be playing Hitler Has Bad Gas with six teenagers from all over the Indonesian archipelago, and how did that particular game come to depict Angelina Jolie as a purple marker stick figure with 3 arms? How did I come to live trapped in a tiny hot saggy-mattressed room with someone who seems to hate me, and, more importantly, how did I come to stop really caring?

Diyah, my team-teacher, tells me that she drank a noxious glassful of mixed plants and herbs that her sister concocted every morning during her senior year of high school to cure her nearsightedness. She thinks it is puzzling and quite hilarious that I, and every other Western teacher in the room, is immediately upon her: "How do you make it? How do you make it?"

Some of the plants, most of them, only grow in Java. She doesn't remember. Her eyesight is perfect now. She watches, fascinated, as I put in my contact lenses. I watch, fascinated, as she entirely fails to grasp the sheer awesomeness and power of what she has said.

Anyway, "You must stop Doxycycline," the blue-wrapped nurse tells me as she scribbles out a prescription for enough antibiotics to fell a hippo. "If you take, you feel like this every day." So no more malaria preventatives. But I can swallow. And I can breathe. And I am (mostly, at least) alive.