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Sil is lying back on the bed watching the dim glow of an untouched cigarette buring in the ashtray next to him and wondering when he began to smell of sour milk. Another trickle of sweat runs down the side of his neck and pools with the rest on his chest. The thin white mosquito netting wafts slightly from the ineffectual ceiling fan whose white blades glint with the moonlight streaming in from the window. The netting does a far better job of keeping out the breeze than the mosquitos which Sil has long since ceased to swat.
Malaria is not that bad, or at least doesn't seem that bad once you've had Dengue Fever. Or so Scratch said this morning when he brought juice and another round of Malarone, which Sil is convinced is far more debilitating than the actual Malaria. In some ways Scratch is right. Sil's never experienced Dengue ("You'll love it, same sweats plus internal hemoraguing, bleeding gums, bleeding nose, bleeding asshole… god, I thought I was gonna die." Scratch sat down in the chair next to the bed and stared right through Sil for some time before retreating back outside into the morning heat), but so far Malaria isn't much worse that the really bad bout of Measles he had as a child.
But the smell of his body is beginning to worry him. Sour milk at times. Then something more like onion with occasional accents of moldy Stilton. Sil took some comfort in the knowledge that he was beginning to produce the olfactory bouquet of nineteenth century France, but at night, when the shivers and fever had draind the humor out of him he knew on some level that he smelled like death. Perhaps not death. The approach of death. Like the curious smell of a cow Sil had once seen, bloated, dying in the streets of Jaisalmer, its intestines a tangle of the plastic bags and Dixie cups Indians were forever throwing to the side of the road where half starved animals scarfed them down. Or it could be that he's finally begun to absorb the smell of the jungle lurking all around their half-constructed base camp of moldy canvas tents and clap board shacks that hardly slowed the decent of the relentless afternoon rains.
The Indians Scratch had hired to help in their endeavor had taken to avoiding Sil, going so far as to move around the primiter of the camp so as to avoid passing by him in the mornings when he sat on the ground in the shade leaning against the shack, but always unsure if he were sweating from fever or just the endless heat. One day he spent several hours dropping an unlit cigarette from his knee and became half convinced that he could tell it fell slower here than he remembered, as if the humidity might somehow have a palpable effect on the powers of gravity.
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