Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  • • •

  An hour after my plane finally slouches into Douala, I’m at the orphanage founded by our recently deceased starlet after her stint as UN ambassador on mission to the Z refugee camp where she plucked her daughter. I’m being thoroughly briefed by child psychologists, preeminent Z scientists—Orliac disciples—who assure me that the thing that my photos are declaring is not possible. The children do not attack. They are not even zombies, just legally classified as such for government and international aid to the descendants of the original Nyos victims.

  Finally, I am taken by a Swiss nun to meet Anasta, poster child for Z adoption.

  “She’s still a bit shaken, understandably,” says the nun. “Sweet child. Mercifully, she can’t remember a thing.”

  “And the father?”

  “Here by tomorrow. En route from a film set somewhere. Prague, I think.”

  “Do you think she did it, Sister?”

  “I pray not. But mine is not to judge God’s ways nor his creatures,” she says, unclasping the steeple of her hands to wave at a door. “Here we are.”

  I nod and show my ID and clearance docs to the gendarme stationed just outside. He’s a lumbering hulk of a man, more matter than mind, with an AK-47 slung casually across the barrel of his bandoliered chest. He eyes my glossy laminate credentials with more than a little bit of suspicion, looking over at the sister—Agnes, was it? Or Mary Margaret?—for assurances that all is on the up and up. She nods, nearly imperceptibly. The fingers on my gun hand twitch, itching for the trigger of the hog’s leg shooter I’d surrendered at the security desk up front. Right about now, with two hours of sleep in the last twenty-four hours, I’m doing my level best to keep from wringing this peabrain’s neck and marching through this goddamn door.

  Finally, he hands back my lanyard and waves me into a dayroom too sunny for such ghoulish business. Inside, Anasta is playing with her dolly. When she looks up at me, I see she is lovely in the strange way these children of Nyos can be: frosted plum skin, silver halos around her irises, as if she is being influenced by better angels.

  “Hello, Anasta, I’m Connor. May I sit?”

  She smiles shyly. And just like that, I’m back to my best “teatime with Chelsea” behavior as I settle into a sunflower-patterned chair, too small by far.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” I ask.

  “Yes. New Mommy is dead. I’m not,” she says. “I never was.”

  She’s one of those tweeners, born of a mother who had been exposed to the gas but died much, much later. She looks at me. Unblinking. The psychologists say it’s hard to get a read on these kids. Something about the eyes, the affect.

  “You’re not real,” she says, placing her dolly’s hand over my prosthetic one. Brown plastic palming beige.

  “Sometimes, I can be,” I say.

  “You smell too.” She crinkles her nose, then sniffs for good measure. “But it’s nice. Like Old Mommy—like honey and dirt. New Mommy and I visited her in the ground last week. She sleeps there now.”

  Grave beds are comfy that way.

  I had prepaid for a full funeral package when I learned about my cancer a year ago. Inoperable. No joy. A five-year prognosis tops. Plenty of time to plot my escape from this illness and her harpy’s grip. Pretty sure somewhere, despite the research restrictions, Orliac and his cronies are in some subterranean lab, cooking up my salvation. So there’s that.

  • • •

  Dead man walking. Didn’t know it all those years ago, but Lazarus had kin in the country, kissing cousins among the Bakweri tribe of north Cameroon. They were called the vekongi—victims snared by nyongo witchcraft, doomed to a half life: withered existence by day and entranced enslavement on the farmlands of their “masters” by night. Their distraught families had recourses of course: they could consult a witch doctor who practiced “good medsin” or an attorney who practiced criminal law. The first might involve a retainer—say a jug of palm wine, two or three goats, and a minor cash outlay; the second required a much larger sum of CFA francs, beyond the means of many of those simple village folk, but if you could afford it, justice in the courts could be yours under section 251 of the Cameroonian Penal Code for the prosecution of witchcraft practitioners. Another remedy? Mob justice—villagers stoned suspected witches and sorcerers.

  Learned all this from Mambe. She was Bakweri. She was also the mother of my only child, Chelsea. When Chelse’ was little, she loved bedtime stories. Anything with wicked witches and goblins and ornery ogres collecting tolls to cross rickety wooden bridges. Fancied all things monstrous. Scarier the better. Put her right to sleep.

  “Once upon a time,” I’d start, “there was a handsome vampire—”

  “Vampires are for wussies, Dad.”

  “Got it. There was a handsome prince who had three wives—”

  “Kongi wives?”

  Kongi was her shorthand for the vekongi—for imaginary revenant relatives.

  “Wait for it,” I said, then continued. “One by one his three wives mysteriously died, yet the prince’s lands grew fertile and his kingdom flourished. Strange fruits hung low from his trees. Crops as tall as buildings sprang up from his fields. The villagers rejoiced and filled their bellies till their guts clenched with fullness. No living soul worked his farm but by cock’s crow his fields were ploughed through and through.”

  “Kongi farmers?”

  “Wait for it …”

  We went through this a thousand and one nights. My noggin chockful of a hundred ways to scare my little girl shitless, but she always, always laughed it off. Worked herself up into a drowsy stupor. I came to think of those story times as my daughter’s dress rehearsal for facing life’s terrors head-on. She learned to embrace the monsters under her bed, to cuddle them close as a teddy.

  Her mother hated the whole thing of course, but was I really going to listen to a woman who named our daughter after a British football team? Could have been worse, I guess. Could have been Manchester. Said as much to Mambe once. Then ducked immediately. She had a good throwing arm, that one—a grinding stone (missed me), books (took an unabridged dictionary in the hip), a cell phone (head-on), slicing a scar on my left temple shaped like a reaper’s sickle. An omen of things to come? Damn, I don’t know. I’d lived on the continent too long, gone native, started to see signs and portents in dust tracks, in moonbeams.

  • • •

  “Hungry,” I hear Anasta say, her voice cotton candy and light, even as I flash to an image of her tiny pearly whites marbled red with blood. Flash to Naaman’s teeth clamping down on my own mitt. I suppress a shudder.

  “Did you get hungry, sweetheart? Is that what happened?”

  “Hungry?” she says, offering me a tea-plated sugar cookie.

  I accept Anasta’s hospitality and eat the cookie.

  Acceptance.

  Kübler-Ross should give me a medal. After my diagnosis, I’d made it through her five stages of grief—denial (a river in Africa, Chelse’ would have joked, as much a fan of knock-knock and other cheesy jokes as her mother), anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—in one month flat. ’Course I fought it. Let them cut and gut and irradiate me. Let some guru give me shark fin enemas to tack a few more years on this grizzled life of mine. Somehow, I mustered. I cared. Who knew impending death would be so life affirming? Coughing up blood tends to make a man sort certain things out.

  Anasta is eating her cookie in contained little bites. Tears are falling down her cheeks but not a sound escapes past that sugary morsel.

  “Hey, kiddo. What’s a matter?”

  She shakes her head. Comes over to me then. Scampers up onto my lap for a hug, small face upturned, looking me dead in the eye. A moment, maybe two, later, says, “My mommies are together now.”

  And there is something in the steadiness of her gaze, in the curve of her jaw that reminds me of my daughter, of how she could look her fears straight in the eye and not be diminished.

  And before I kn
ow it, I’m hugging her back.

  Acceptance.

  I’ve had my papers in order: the bulk of things to Chelsea, waiting on her; something for each of the wives, despite the fact I still haven’t told any of them, even the ones still speaking to me. If I could have put it in a press release, or 27-9-3’ed it, I’d have been golden. Delivering other people’s bad news, that was what I was good at. This past year, I’ve been working pro bono for a couple of Morts-Vivants education programs. Named an endowed scholarship to one after my daughter. Hope she’ll run it one day even after I’m long gone. I like to think she would be the kind of woman who would embrace these creatures, see them as plenty more than monsters. I like to think she would be proud that I do the same.

  • • •

  Saved me way back then, Mambe did. Hallucinating her for days. Conjure woman that she was. I was in isolation for a week after that thing bit me. His name was Naaman, or at least that was what the scientists called the remains they tested, Test Subject 1202. Even if his family could have been reached or notified, hardly anything remained of his immortal soul or his mortal body to identify him as anyone or anything meant to be loved or reckoned with.

  Orliac and his team had commandeered a floor on the west wing of the Cameroonian president’s private clinic to treat the influx of ministers and other government muckety-mucks who demanded some kind of vaccine. Unthinkable that they should somehow suffer with the masses. Pussies. Till this day I still suspect Z-Destruct was a syringe full of sugar water and vitamin C, but they were falling all over themselves for a shot in the ass.

  So there I was. Bedbound but high-flying on a morphine wire. Caspers, more foul than friendly, floated in: poking, prodding. She: all that tethered me in that twilight limbo twixt the quick and the dead. Mambe. Mambe. Mambe, in the beginning, in the Eden before—the doubts, the recriminations, the second divorce. Mambe, an itsy-bitsy thing, in the teeny-weeniest of polka dot bikinis, lying alongside me on a Kribi beach, full of vim and vigor and secrets well kept. Head flung back to the selfsame sun that was boring through the sizzling skin dead center of my eyes, striking at the rich, bubbling oil of my desires. I want. Her to want me. To want.

  “My poor mukara,” she had cooed. Mukara. Gai-jin. Gwai-lo. Gringo. Oyibo. Outsider. White man. Barely into my twenties but I’d already heard them all; a drill sergeant’s son who’d spent half my life under foreign suns on every base known to man. A different burning crept under my skin. Damn this woman and her sawing, parting up all that God and country and reveille-hour drills from age ten on had wrought. She would undo me. Best turn tail, I thought, but she was having none of that. Straddled me lickety-split. My hot cheeks cupped in the slick of her sun balmy hands.

  “My poor, poor mukara,” she said, eyes flashing with laughter.

  I pulled her closer. Eyes closed. Her forehead to mine. Her inhale my exhale.

  “Why are you crying?” she whispered. Fingers pressed to my skin, to my manic pulse.

  Was I? Guess so. Thought the drip was sweat. Wasn’t ready to talk about it though. I was raw, fresh from the Sudan in the bad ol’ days, years in a Khartoum embassy Marine detachment, then more on a private security detail. I was good and tired. To the marrow tired. That day with her too perfect for talk of boy soldiers with guns taller than their bodies entire; pissing their pants as death took them; crying for long gone mothers in Dinka, in Nuer. Wasn’t ready to talk so I kissed her to reach oblivion. And when I finally pulled away, she pulled me back. As hot and full of need as I ever could want.

  “You look like crap,” a voice said. Jolting me awake in the hospital bed. I jerked upright. Could’ve keeled over, been floor paint, but I was anchored by tubes tapping my veins. Was I still hallucinating?

  Mambe was right there. Bedside. And seeing her sobered me right up. Owed her my life in more ways than one. Her father was a high-ranking minister—one of only a handful of men in the country who could A-okay VIP care for a chump like me.

  “Scratch that. You look like the crap that shit poops out,” she said.

  “Always a pleasure to see you.” I made a mock courtly gesture with the one hand left to me. Then pressed its nails into the last scar she’d given me, trying to scratch an itch just under my skull. It always acted up when she was around.

  She laughed. Reached out for my missing right hand reflexively, shuddered, then reached out again to pull my bandaged stump into the cradle of her palms.

  “It’s good to see you too, Con,” she said. She called me Con—short for my last name, Connor. Long on innuendo.

  “Yes, Maim.” Short for Mambe. Long on innuendo.

  “Ouch,” she said, holding up my stump. “For once, I had nothing to do with your stitches.” She laughed, then asked quietly, “You okay? What happened? They won’t tell me anything.”

  I shrugged. I had been foggy on the particulars myself, so doped up the first few days that Orliac’s antiseptic explanations poured into ears full of cotton wool.

  “Too much Dawn of the Dead hysteria,” I said finally.

  Turns out my hand was missing because some numbnut prison guard watched too much late-night television, called himself trying to “staunch the contagion,” keep it from stir-frying my brain pan. Orliac had since discerned that the condition didn’t work that way.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s not airborne, blood-borne. You either got it at Nyos or you didn’t.” I said this bit with a lot more conviction than I actually felt. Who was I really trying to convince? Her? Or me?

  “For fuck’s sake! Don’t handle me, Con. Is that the truth or are you ‘on message’? You’ve known about these mon … these things, for six months. You never said a word. You have a child, you have m …”

  She looked at me piercingly. Her nails dug into my stump. I winced.

  What could I say or do to make it right? Apologize? Grovel? Quote some official statement chockful of my own ten-dollar-worded BS on homeland security reporting stratagems? No. She deserved better. Thought about my daughter then. Her trusting beddy-bye hugs for a father who swore he’d keep her safe from night terrors and whatever else life had in store. I answered her as honestly as I could manage. “It’s what they tell me, darlin’. But if you get a chance, I think you and Chelse’ should take a vacation somewhere nice. Hospitable.”

  “Thank you, Connor.” She looked me dead in the eye for a heartbeat, then peered off into some distance I knew I would never reach again.

  She left me then. My better half.

  Last I ever saw of her. Never saw Chelse’ again either—she’d be about 29/30 now. Looked for years after I stepped out of that hospital bed and into the fray. After I got back to playing my role as a cog in the world’s vast meaning-making machine. My own meaning lost.

  • • •

  A voice is chirping, “Daddy! Daddy!”

  Chelsea? I shake my head, exorcise my ghosts quick-like, hoary-headed bastard that I am.

  “Daddy! My daddy’s here!” It’s Anasta, up and bouncing cheerily toward a violently pulsing door I’d had the good sense to lock behind me. Someone’s pounding away. The fuck?

  I’m up out of my seat bounding toward her, a teeny chair armrest strung around my left ankle. I punt it toward a corner and just as I reach the door—swooping up Anasta, dolly and all—it splinters open. Here’s Sister Agnes/Mary Margaret, or some such, panting and pink-faced, the muscleman in camos in tow.

  “They know,” she says on a gasp, hand at her throat. “They know about the child.”

  And just then I hear the distinct rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire at the compound’s gates. Peering through the dayroom’s blinds, I see smoke from afar. One, maybe two, klicks south of the main building. The orphanage, ironically situated on the sprawling grounds of a defunct game reserve, had land to spare. That distance would buy us time.

  Camo boy is at the door, hanging off its hinges now, radioing someone—anyone!—for assistance. I’d seen what passed for security around these parts so I wasn’t
holding my breath. The Born-Agains militia, zombie poachers—out here in the sticks we’re pretty much sitting ducks for any yahoo with a grudge and a gun. More shots fired. Closer now. Ear-shattering. What are these guys packing? What are they even shooting at? Wasted bullets riddling the clouds. Confetti ammo in the air.

  Time to pop smoke!

  “Sister, we need to haul ass out of here,” I say. Plotting a route to my gun.

  Anasta is trying to wiggle free from my arms, saying, “Movie, movie. Daddy’s movie. Pow, pow, pow.” She shoots off tiny finger pistols.

  My mind shoots to the actor’s last action flick, Resurrection Hill—a critical flop that was box office gold. Anasta must have been on set.

  “Just like Daddy’s movie, sweetheart,” I tell her. “You’re gonna do everything me and the reverend mother say so the bad guys don’t get us, right?”

  She nods yes, then stills in my arms. Goes quiet as the grave.

  I hand her over to the nun and we head out. Footfalls echoing in the empty hallways. Most personnel still at the older facility in the capital: the one protesters camp outside of, spewing spray-painted hate along its walls. This was supposed to be a sanctuary—isolated, safe. The best-laid plans. The security desk up front is empty, a swivel chair overturned on the floor. My holster there, my gun gone. The soldier and I exchange a look. Without a word he passes me a peacemaker, the Walther PPK from his ankle holster. The sister opens up a reception desk drawer, drops in her rosary, and pulls out a bowie knife big as my forearm. Well I’ll be damned, Mother Superior.

  She catches my look.

  “Brazzaville.” All she says before leading us away, down, down, down another passage. Me bringing up the rear. Watching our six as we run from the thump of gun blasts grown louder and nearer. We stop short at a steel door, more fortified than the other, this one with codes, with touchscreen panels, all manner of high-tech gizmos and sci-fi doohickeys alien to this land.