Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  In grade school, you know that you are smart but never pretty. There are always more obvious contenders: Taniesha, pussy-eyed with long, Cherokee-blood good hair; Kiesha, who let DeVante peek at her panty-drawers behind the slides. Rom-com dream girls never look like you. Then there is a PBS series starring you or at least your distant relations. Beautiful Zulu queens: courtly, coveted.

  Your parents let you break night for “educational viewing” as you are their Gifted and Talented child—a blue-ribboner in Olympics of the Mind. You fall asleep on the couch dreaming. The next school day, boys froth with talk of Zulu girls and their Hottentot teats (bared by the SABC, for historical accuracy). Yo, you see that redbone with the bee stings? You see that mami with the milk jugs swangin’ like um-dada-um-da. Titties. Tetas. African tatas. Heads swivel. Eyes zoom in on your frame. It’s shocking being seen all at once, by so many. You flush. Crossed arms cover what has yet to develop. For years, while Taniesha gets hickeys at the back of the bus, while Kiesha gets a baby bump, you get As and Bs but no kiss after prom. For you are African, and by this culture’s definitions, unsightly.

  An Admissions counselor at your dream college speaks of wondrous opportunities. She leans in to share a moment with you, future Ivy Leaguer. “Your kind does so well here,” she murmurs, adding confidentially, “not like those others.” Her smile is knowing. So you smile back. Are you smiling in agreement? In gratitude? Because those who once hurt you are now made small? You’re undecided. But it’s not like the moment will stand isolated. Its twin comes as an African American financial aid officer frowns down at your application, tells you “you people” are why her son can’t go to college. She stamps an angry approval on your paperwork. So you smile. Are you smiling in agreement? In gratitude? Her colleague pulls you aside, tells you, “Chile, she just mad her son got caught up in these streets.” You smile. But sometimes, in the sullen dark of your dorm room, you remember and only then and just then and finally then your throat constricts, your face too tight for smiles, vise-like.

  College tests you. There are Swahili 101 electives, classmates in Bantu knots, and kumbaya African Student Union meetings, monthly. Yes! Yet certain lessons are trying. A media studies class schools you on symbolic annihilation—the omission, the mis- or underrepresentation of whole peoples in book leaves, in film reels. And you remember your skin is the color of redaction. You remember confusion as old elementary school “friends” poke you online. Who are they? Their names are never next to yours in class photos, in yearbooks. Were you friends? Where is the evidence, the proof of life? Hives punch through your skin like pissy ellipses. Scratch them raw till a patient school therapist explains that this is how a body purges upset. No matter how long suppressed.

  Try and try to forget. Your memory had always been fuzzy, tending toward breaks in the transmission, bald spots of time you had jokingly dubbed “selective amnesia.” But still moments remain. You, itty-bitty—all nappy plaits and teddy bear eyes. A soft one you were. Keen on gold stars. Undone by scolding. When you made mistakes—as children are wont to do—there were inconsolable fits of despair. Your worried mother gifted you a children’s book on self-esteem whose pages held a mirror. She bid you look. Singsonging of all the ways in which you were wonderful. You are smart. You are beautiful. You are worthy. You are kind. Your agile young mind struggled to absorb those images, so at odds with those of books and television, of schoolmates and teachers alike. The mirrored book grasped tight in your trusting hands. Look again, child. Mama told you. Look. But you were gum-drop young: tender-headed and tenderhearted. You turned from your likeness.

  It Just Kills You Inside

  (Based on True Events)

  Boogeymen are real in Africa, folks. Both the real ones and the sticky crude imaginings that ooze up from the darkest of hearts. They are gold-epauletted military despots who disappear your loved ones in that bump of the night. Or Big Pharma execs donating untried and untrue drugs to guinea pig villagers for tax write-offs. And then there are the workaday nightmares that complicate waking life, come courtesy of the tribalist, the spiritualist, the herbalist. This is why the first reports were dismissed as so much hinterland superstition, bush whispers in the dusk. This was Africa after all—the land of juju, obeah, and kamuti. A place where death rides in from the desert on horseback.

  With all these familiar horrors, who in the hell was going to believe in zombies?

  No one, for a very long while, when yours truly was on the job. You see, tropical governments hire outfits like mine for their cover-ups. I am what some might call a “fixer.” My specialty: crisis management and communications—coming in after that burst oil pipeline wrecked the endangered ecosystem of some tree hugger’s wet dreams or after your company’s homicidal aspirin spree-killed dozens, tamper-proof seals about as secure as a buck-toothed virgin on prom night. I’m the man who got that sensitive CEO in front of the cameras, contrite and doling out “heartfelt” assurances about maximizing safety measures and thorough reexaminations of system protocols. Even better, I trained him to cry on cue—one muscular, robust tear, of course, all manly like.

  There was a lot at stake back then: a good name, millions in foreign currency, political capital worth its weight in bullion. What was a few hundred thou between my kleptocrat buddies and me for a tidy little media campaign that whitewashed the first zombie death tolls? I’d said yes before I even believed them. So used to the garden variety brushfires of their regimes—political purges, coups d’état, ethnic cleansings—that I all too easily dismissed the Z word as complete crapola.

  Were they really trying to bullshit a bullshitter? Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. Insulted, I hiked up my retainer. Resolved to get to the what’s what of things when I got to ground zero in Cameroon.

  • • •

  Twenty-odd years ago, in the badlands and bedlam days, French scientists had been flown into Cameroon on the hush for research support. Their government always did take a special, mostly mercenary, shine to their former colonies. The country was one of several puppet regimes they propped up in the region. I was flown in to whittle down their science jargon into reassuring sound-bite-sized pieces and forestall any community hissy fits with PR pabulum.

  There had been a lab-coated Frenchman, a Dr. Georges Orliac, a head honcho at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Paris offices. He was flanked by a retinue of bespectacled suits and coats, quickly introduced, quickly forgotten, all looking at me expectantly. But first they gave me some papers to sign, “eyes only, confidential” type stuff. Standard for most of my clientele but somehow there seemed to be more emphasis on this ink, more jittery eyeballing of this particular John Hancock.

  “You know about Lake Nyos, Monsieur Connor?” Orliac was fidgeting with his glasses.

  “’Course,” I said. “Summer of ’86. Nearly two thousand dead. Natural disaster, bucolic lake goes acidic, belches up a cloud of CO2 gas that asphyxiates villagers for miles ’round. Takes out their livestock, too.”

  “Oui, oui. And about the Israelis?”

  Yeah, I had heard, rumors of secret Yehuda bomb sites, conspiracy theories that confounded even me, King of Misinformation. A lake goes kaboom and suddenly it’s an international plot; talk of government payoffs allowing nuclear tests in subterranean lairs was bolstered by the Israeli prime minister’s immediate in-country presence, swooping in with a fully equipped hospital plane just days after the disaster.

  “I know some,” I replied. In my business, information sharing was a game of hide-and-seek or keep-away.

  “The rumors are true,” he said. “The Israeli military was testing a neutron bomb; that is what detonated the gas.”

  I was quiet a spell, studying on it. I’d heard my own rumors. More likely, the French had done this themselves, broken a beaker or two of something heinous, and now were on to the slapdash ass-covering phase of the project. Either way, I was on the job. Orliac thrust a stack of photos at me—exhibit As and Bs and suc
h.

  “What you are looking at are the villages of Sobum, Chah, Koshing, and Nyos,” he said. “Fertile lands, barren now. We have been studying and treating the survivors of the disaster … getting the usual complaints: heartburn, lesions, and neurological problems like monoplegia, forgive me, muscle paralysis to one part of the body. You follow?”

  I nodded. “This is all well and good, Doc, but why am I here? Nyos was in ’86, five years ago, ancient history.”

  “You are here because there were other survivors besides the living.” He searched my face for some reassurance that he should proceed. “The dead, those who succumbed to the initial gas cloud—some buried, then some, some we kept, set aside for study—they rose.”

  They rose? They resurrected? Yeah, right. Was he really trying to bullshit a bullshitter?

  I was in his face then. Giving him a shake. Mussing up his crisp lapels. “That’s the craziest thing I ever laid ears on, Doc.”

  He was rattled, then he rallied. His fervent gaze settling on me with all the might and will and smiting force of a true believer. Doubting Thomas that I was, I couldn’t quite put my faith in the good doctor’s pronouncements. I was a practical man who needed hard facts and real-world answers—not hokum, not hoodoo. I wanted out of that peculiar revival tent, was walking out of the room when the doctor said, “Look.” That was all he said.

  Four minutes later, I did. Got blue in the face.

  “Christ-al-mighty,” I whispered, then loudly, “what the hell have you boys gone and done?”

  • • •

  “Une autre tasse de café, monsieur?”

  I wake slow. See the dishy Camair stewardess, hovering. More than two decades after the first outbreak, here I was on a rusty tugboat of a plane headed back to Cameroon, the first hot zone. The plane shimmies. She rolls, then rights herself: “Café? Thé? Chocolat?”

  “Oui, un serré,” I answer. Struck by a powerful need for strong brew and a cigarette and maybe a shave.

  We hit a patch of turbulence that tosses me about like Sunday wash. I’m getting too old for this shit. My churning gut nothing to do with the gore-filled pictures on my lap. Pain from the old bite flares up alongside my right palm, insistently, forgetting that there’s no hand there to speak of. Shuffled photos drop to the cabin floor and I catch maybe one, maybe two; still a piss-poor southpaw all these years later.

  “Ah, je suis desolée,” says the stewardess. She is pushing one of those spit-shined meal carts, its wheels steamrolling the more adventuresome photos that have bushwhacked into the aisle from a thicket of armrests and collapsible trays.

  She stoops to pick up wayward snapshots, underfoot and under wheel, then gasps, exclaims, “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, mon Dieu—”

  “Ils sont faux, pour le cinéma,” I lie, thrust the glossies into a waiting folio, but it’s too late. I know that look. She goes all still then shivery on me, her eyes the glass of high-rise windows reflecting nothing but thunderclouds and open sky. She hustles off, creaky-wheeled, my coffee forgotten.

  A smoke it is then.

  The cramped airplane bathroom is little better than a pit toilet. I guzzle my chemo pills with tepid water from a soggy Dixie cup and the plane shakes and I get baptized—gray-blond five o’clock shadow glittering with water drops, my reflection gleaming dimly in the milky cataract of a mirror. Mine is a good face with some sleep hung on it: a face four wives have loved, five if I count my ex Mambe twice. As a kid, my daughter, Chelsea, had loved to crawl on my lap at night to kiss this face. My old man spat in it once, breath marinated in sour mash, bitter because I went AWOL from the family business of soldiering—chose law school over the leatherneck ways of the Corps. Chose conduct unbecoming, in his mind. Of a mind myself to bend the rules instead of hop to them.

  I look at the obligatory No Smoking in Lavatory sign below the mirror and the detector I disabled just above.

  I take a long drag.

  I huff. I puff.

  Smells like menthol and shit in here. Someone didn’t flush.

  I flush. Better.

  Back in my seat, I pick up coffee-grounded country reports—half their stats fabricated by me. Christ. I’d done my job too well. Only two decades removed from the first Z outbreak and now African zombies, initially a cause célèbre, were the celebrity cause du jour. Championed by aging rockers and silver fox actors with Cheshire grins. There were star-studded telethons held to raise funds for their rehabilitation into society. Every Hollywood A-lister wanted to accessorize with an African zombie baby of their very own. Those “undead” tots were trainable! Early vaccination worked!

  But the photos in my folio tell a different story. No glamour shots there, just what remained of a formerly photogenic film siren, recognizable only by the longitude and latitude tattoos on her mangled shoulder blade. Her latest adopted child—one Anasta Mbengwi, age four, zombie—had made a happy meal of her. Her bottle-blond nemesis’s fan base on “Team J” would be ecstatic, if I ever let them find out about this.

  • • •

  Back to Orliac and the big reveal. I was looking through a glass pane thick as Einstein’s eyeglasses. On its flip side, Test Subject 13, nicknamed Lazarus.

  Lazarus looked nothing like the late-night TV creations: shambolic shufflers, gray-fleshed and caterwauling like amateur sopranos. His skin was part nacreous, part necrotic—covered in sores I later learned came from radiation exposure. Sure, he was walking and talking like you and me and other beasts of our kind. But he was undead. Sure, he was only a bit slower, pausing every now and then to tune to some frequency beyond our ken. He was still undead. Sure, he was nothing like the creature that would sink canines and incisors into my flesh six months later. Yet he was still undead, undeader, undeadest.

  Too big for my britches, my father would say, just young, dumb, and full of cum. I was twenty-nine years old and dumbstruck, gawping like some slack-jawed yokel. Maybe I was greener than I cared to admit. Maybe the fear for my wife and kid at home, in the dark, had me shook. Maybe it was normal to feel unsteady in a world gone all Tilt-A-Whirl off its axis. Or maybe it was the eerie lab full of doctors unabashedly pawing at nature and her tender parts. All these things come to mind but at the time I told myself that it was the job, just the job. Lazarus being the worst type of PR nightmare—the headlining kind: African Super Virus Kills, Regenerates Dozens!

  Africa was on the brink, poised to become Typhoid Mary for the pandemic of the century. It seemed inevitable, this Dark Continent long plagued by germophobes nattering that her darkness was somehow catching. The first colonial conscripts who braved her shores had been petrified. Clutched their pith helmets in death grips along with trusty pamphlets on overcoming her dangers: bloodthirsty natives (Exterminate all the Brutes!), dusky nubiles threatening moral turpitude, and for those yet to fall to that particular brand of bodily corruption, there were untold diseases. Always disease. Malaria. Yellow fever. Cholera. AIDS had an entire continent scapegoated, accused of bedding down with primates. (Fast-forward a few decades and it’s all: Howdy, Ebola. Welcome to the hoedown. The Canadians are mixing up a special drug cocktail just for you. But let’s just keep that on international ice, tucked in some fridge till us good white folks start dying, for a sip.) That’s what I was up against.

  Orliac was making noises at me then, gestures too. His yapping coalesced into things called “findings.” It seemed, besides the considerable trick of undying, Lazarus there wasn’t getting any older. They were still running preliminary tests but five weeks of observation and the man hadn’t aged a lick. That I could spin: African Super Virus the Secret of Eternal Life! But no. I was to keep things hush-hush and under wraps while they conducted further research. My job: quash media tales of undead relatives making any surprise Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? appearances. Easy enough in those halcyon days, before the internet and citizen journalists, blogs and vlogs, Tumblr and Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat, and so on and so on. The city folk—readers of the Camero
on Tribune, Jeune Afrique, and Le Monde—were civilized. Mean understanding of things left to their backwoods relatives with ridiculous notions of uncles and aunties and wives and daughters and mothers and fathers freshly returned to them from death’s uncanny valley, tags and receipts intact.

  Lazarus lulled us into complacency, that one. Orliac’s team had accounted for twelve hundred of the affected, treated and studied in secret. We thought we had it all under control. Nixed the bloodshed. The violence.

  It wasn’t till six months later, when a gendarme pulled one named Naaman out of a dusty Kondengui prison cell for show-and-tell, that I began to truly understand the weight and heft of what I was up against. Because that thing—so docile, nearly bovine in its cud-chewing tranquility—snarled once, lunged forth, and bit me.

  That long-ago night, after that thing took teeth to the meat of my hand, I hadn’t really felt anything for a moment, just the shock of finding myself rent from reality, thrust into the starring role of some direct-to-video, B-movie reel. Then the gendarme took a machete in hand—those banana republic cops always seemed to have one at the ready—and cut mine clean off. Then, fuck me, it hit hard: a world of primal hurt and doomsday visions and mortal wounds came screaming down like a pack of howler monkeys, shaking the root of me till all my limbs but the one now gone were quaking. Another man might have doubled over in pain. This man heard his old man: Quit your bellyaching, dogface! So I braced myself against the shock—gnashing up the soft lick of my lip, spitting blood, steadied on a smelling salt whiff of my own briny sweat. I remember picking up my sorry hand then, cradling the suckling babe of it to my chest, before a rush of others gushed in, grabbed hold of me, and then I was away. Last thing I saw of that cell was the gendarme, in a corner, hacking that creature to bits with a brute efficiency that spoke of long practice, the deadly precision of thwacks and thwacks and thwacks on end.