by Neil Clarke
My mother pretended it was Gichichi but I could see it was not. In Gichichi, the men did not stand by the fence wire and stare so nakedly. In Gichichi the helicopter gunships did not wheel overhead like vultures. In Gichichi the brightly painted matatus that roared up and down did not have heavy machine guns bolted to the roof and boys in sports fashion in the back looking at everything as if they owned it. They were a new thing in Nairobi, these gun-gangs; the Tacticals. Men, usually young, organized into gangs, with vehicles and guns, dressed in anything they could make a uniform. Some were as young as twelve. They gave themselves names like the Black Simbas and the Black Rhinos and the Ebonettes and the United Christian Front and the Black Taliban. They liked the word black. They thought it sounded threatening. These Tacticals had as many philosophies and beliefs as names, but they all owned territory, patrolled their streets, and told their people they were the law. They enforced their law with kneecappings and burning car tires, they defended their streets with AK47s. We all knew that when the Chaga came, they would fight like hyenas over the corpse of Nairobi. The Soca Boys was our local army. They wore sports fashion and knee-length manager’s coats and had football team logos painted in the sides of their picknis, as the armed matatus were called. On their banners they had a black-and-white patterned ball on a green field. Despite their name, it was not a football. It was a buckyball, a carbon fullerene molecule, the half-living, half-machine building-brick of the Chaga. Their leader, a rat-faced boy in a Manchester United coat and shades that kept sliding down his nose, did not like Christians, so on Sundays he would send his picknis up and down Jogoo Road, roaring their engines and shooting into the air, but because they could.
The Church Army had its own plans for the coming time of changes. A few nights later, as I went to the choo, I overheard Pastor Elezeke and my father talking in the Pastor’s study. I put my torch out and listened at the louvres.
“We need people like you, Jonathan,” Elezeke was saying. “It is a work of God, I think. We have a chance to build a true Christian society.”
“You cannot be certain.”
“There are Tacticals . . .”
“They are filth. They are vultures.”
“Hear me out, Jonathan. Some of them go into the Chaga. They bring things out—for all their quarantine, there are things the Americans want very much from the Chaga. It is different from what we are told is in there. Very very different. Plants that are like machines, that generate electricity, clean water, fabric, shelter, medicines. Knowledge. There are devices, the size of this thumb, that transmit information directly into the brain. And more; there are people living in there, not like primitives, not, forgive me, like refugees. It shapes itself to them, they have learned to make it work for them. There are whole towns—towns, I tell you—down there under Kilimanjaro. A great society is rising.”
“It shapes itself to them,” my father said. “And it shapes them to itself.”
There was a pause.
“Yes. That is true. Different ways of being human.”
“I cannot help you with this, my brother.”
“Will you tell me why?”
“I will,” my father said, so softly I had to press close to the window to hear. “Because I am afraid, Stephen. The Chaga has taken everything from me, but that is still not enough for it. It will only be satisfied when it has taken me, and changed me, and made me alien to myself.”
“Your faith, Jonathan. What about your faith?”
“It took that first of all.”
“Ah,” Pastor Elezeke sighed. Then, after a time, “You understand you are always welcome here?”
“Yes, I do. Thank you, but I cannot help you.”
That same night I went to the white chapel—my first and last time—to force issues with God. It was a very beautiful building, with a curving inner wall that made you walk halfway around the inside before you could enter. I suppose you could say it was spiritual, but the cross above the table angered me. It was straight and true and did not care for anyone or anything. I sat glaring at it some time before I found the courage to say, “You say you are the answer.”
I am the answer, said the cross.
“My father is destroyed by fear. Fear of the Chaga, fear of the future, fear of death, fear of living. What is your answer?”
I am the answer.
“We are refugees, we live on wazungus’ charity, my mother hoes corn, my sister roasts it at the roadside; tell me your answer.”
I am the answer.
“An alien life has taken everything we ever owned. Even now, it wants more, and nothing can stop it. Tell me, what is your answer?”
I am the answer.
“You tell me you are the answer to every human need and question, but what does that mean? What is the answer to your answer?”
I am the answer, the silent, hanging cross said.
“That is no answer!” I screamed at the cross. “You do not even understand the questions, how can you be the answer? What power do you have? None. You can do nothing! They need me, not you. I am going to do what you can’t.”
I did not run from the chapel. You do not run from gods you no longer believe in. I walked, and took no notice of the people who stared at me.
The next morning, I went into Nairobi to get a job. To save money I went on foot. There were men everywhere, walking with friends, sitting by the roadside selling sheet metal charcoal burners or battery lamps, or making things from scrap metal and old tires, squatting together outside their huts with their hands draped over their knees. There must have been women, but they kept themselves hidden. I did not like the way the men worked me over with their eyes. They had shanty-town eyes, that see only what they can use in a thing. I must have appeared too poor to rob and too hungry to sexually harass, but I did not feel safe until the downtown towers rose around me and the vehicles on the streets were diesel-stained green and yellow buses and quick white UN cars.
I went first to the back door of one of the big tourist hotels.
“I can peel and clean and serve people,” I said to an undercook in dirty whites. “I work hard and I am honest. My father is a pastor.”
“You and ten million others,” the cook said. “Get out of here.”
Then I went to the CNN building. It was a big, bold idea. I slipped in behind a motorbike courier and went up to a good-looking Luo on the desk.
“I’m looking for work,” I said. “Any work, I can do anything. I can make chai, I can photocopy, I can do basic accounts. I speak good English and a little French. I’m a fast learner.”
“No work here today,” the Luo on the desk said. “Or any other day. Learn that, fast.”
I went to the Asian shops along Moi Avenue.
“Work?” the shopkeepers said. “We can’t even sell enough to keep ourselves, let alone some up-country refugee.”
I went to the wholesalers on Kimathi Street and the City Market and the stall traders and I got the same answer from each of them: no economy, no market, no work. I tried the street hawkers, selling liquidated stock from tarpaulins on the pavement, but their bad mouths and lewdness sickened me. I walked the five kilometers along Uhuru Highway to the UN East Africa Headquarters on Chiromo Road. The soldier on the gate would not even look at me. Cars and hummers he could see. His own people, he could not. After an hour I went away.
I took a wrong turn on the way back and ended up in a district I did not know, of dirty-looking two-story buildings that once held shops, now burned out or shuttered with heavy steel. Cables dipped across the street, loop upon loop upon loop, sagging and heavy. I could hear voices but see no one around. The voices came from an alley behind a row of shops. An entire district was crammed into this alley. Not even in St. John’s camp have I seen so many people in one place. The alley was solid with bodies, jammed together, moving like one thing, like a rain cloud. The noise was incr
edible. At the end of the alley I glimpsed a big black foreign car, very shiny, and a man standing on the roof. He was surrounded by reaching hands, as if they were worshipping him.
“What’s going on?” I shouted to whoever would hear. The crowd surged. I stood firm.
“Hiring,” a shaved-headed boy as thin as famine shouted back. He saw I was puzzled. “Watekni. Day jobs in data processing. The UN treats us like shit in our own country, but we’re good enough to do their tax returns.”
“Good money?”
“Money.” The crowd surged again, and made me part of it. A new car arrived behind me. The crowd turned like a flock of birds on the wing and pushed me toward the open doors. Big men with dark glasses got out and made a space around the watekni broker. He was a small Luhya in a long white jellaba and the uniform shades. He had a mean mouth. He fanned a fistful of paper slips. My hand went out by instinct and I found a slip in it. A single word was printed on it: Nimepata.
“Password of the day,” my thin friend said. “Gets you into the system.”
“Over there, over there,” one of the big men said, pointing to an old bus at the end of the alley. I ran to the bus. I could feel a hundred people on my heels. There was another big man at the bus door.
“What’re your languages?” the big man demanded.
“English and a bit of French,” I told him.
“You waste my fucking time, kid,” the man shouted. He tore the password slip from my hand, pushed me so hard, with two hands, I fell. I saw feet, crushing feet, and I rolled underneath the bus and out the other side. I did not stop running until I was out of the district of the watekni and into streets with people on them. I did not see if the famine-boy got a slip. I hope he did.
Singers wanted, said the sign by the flight of street stairs to an upper floor. So, my skills had no value in the information technology market. There were other markets. I climbed the stairs. They led to a room so dark I could not at first make out its dimensions. It smelled of beer, cigarettes, and poppers. I sensed a number of men.
“Your sign says you want singers,” I called into the dark.
“Come in then.” The man’s voice was low and dark, smoky, like an old hut. I ventured in. As my eyes grew used to the dark, I saw tables, chairs upturned on them, a bar, a raised stage area. I saw a number of dark figures at a table, and the glow of cigarettes.
“Let’s have you.”
“Where?”
“There.”
I got up on the stage. A light stabbed out and blinded me.
“Take your top off.”
I hesitated, then unbuttoned my blouse. I slipped it off, stood with my arms loosely folded over my breasts. I could not see the men, but I felt the shanty-eyes.
“You stand like a Christian child,” smoky voice said. “Let’s see the goods.”
I unfolded my arms. I stood in the silver light for what seemed like hours.
“Don’t you want to hear me sing?”
“Girl, you could sing like an angel, but if you don’t have the architecture . . .”
I picked up my blouse and rebuttoned it. It was much more shaming putting it on than taking it off. I climbed down off the stage. The men began to talk and laugh. As I reached the door, the dark voice called me.
“Can you do a message?”
“What do you want?”
“Run this down the street for me right quick.”
I saw fingers hold up a small glass vial. It glittered in the light from the open door.
“Down the street.”
“To the American Embassy.”
“I can find that.”
“That’s good. You give it to a man.”
“What man?”
“You tell the guard on the gate. He’ll know.”
“How will he know me?”
“Say you’re from Brother Dust.”
“And how much will Brother Dust pay me?”
The men laughed.
“Enough.”
“In my hand?”
“Only way to do business.”
“We have a deal.”
“Good girl. Hey.”
“What?”
“Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“Do you want to tell me?”
“They’re fullerenes. They’re from the Chaga. Do you understand that? They are alien spores. The Americans want them. They can use them to build things, from nothing up. Do you understand any of this?”
“A little.”
“So be it. One last thing.”
“What?”
“You don’t carry it in your hand. You don’t carry it anywhere on you. You get my meaning?”
“I think I do.”
“There are changing rooms for the girls back of the stage. You can use one of them.”
“Okay. Can I ask a question?”
“You can ask anything you like.”
“These . . . fullerenes. These Chaga things . . . What if they—go off, inside?”
“You trust the stories that they never touch human flesh. Here. You may need this.” An object flipped through the air toward me. I caught it . . . a tube of KY jelly. “A little lubrication.”
I had one more question before I went backstage area.
“Can I ask, why me?”
“For a Christian child, you’ve a decent amount of dark,” the voice said. “So, you’ve a name?”
“Tendeléo.”
Ten minutes later I was walking across town, past all the UN checkpoints and security points, with a vial of Chaga fullerenes slid into my vagina. I walked up to the gate of the American Embassy. There were two guards with white helmets and white gaiters. I picked the big black one with the very good teeth.
“I’m from Brother Dust,” I said.
“One moment please,” the marine said. He made a call on his PDU. One minute later the gates swung open and a small white man with sticking-up hair came out.
“Come with me,” he said, and took me to the guard unit toilets, where I extracted the consignment. In exchange he gave me a playing card with a portrait of a President of the United States on the back. The President was Nixon.
“You ever go back without one of these, you die,” he told me. I gave the Nixon card to the man who called himself Brother Dust. He gave me a roll of shillings and told me to come back on Tuesday.
I gave two thirds of the roll to my mother.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, holding the notes in her hands like blessings.
“I have a job,” I said, challenging her to ask. She never did ask. She bought clothes for Little Egg and fruit from the market. On the Tuesday, I went back to the upstairs club that smelled of beer and smoke and come and took another load inside me to the spikey-haired man at the Embassy.
So I became a runner. I became a link in a chain that ran from legendary cities under the clouds of Kilimanjaro across terminum, past the UN Interdiction Force, to an upstairs club in Nairobi, into my body, to the US Embassy. No, I do not have that right. I was a link in a chain that started eight hundred years ago, as light flies, in a gas cloud called Rho Ophiuchi, that ran from US Embassy to US Government, and on to a man whose face was on the back on one of my safe-conduct cards and from him into a future no one could guess.
“It scares them, that’s why they want it,” Brother Dust told me. “Americans are always drawn to things that terrify them. They think these fullerenes will give the edge to their industries, make the economy indestructible. Truth is, they’ll destroy their industries, wreck their economy. With these, anyone can make anything they want. Their free market can’t stand up to that.”
I did not stay a runner long. Brother Dust liked my refusal to be impressed by what the world said should impress me. I became his personal assistant. I made appointments
, kept records. I accompanied him when he called on brother Sheriffs. The Chaga was coming closer, the Tacticals were on the streets; old enemies were needed as allies now.
One such day, Brother Dust gave me a present wrapped in a piece of silk. I unwrapped it; inside was a gun. My first reaction was fear; that a sixteen-year-old girl should have the gift of life or death in her hand. Would I, could I, ever use it on living flesh? Then a sense of power crept through me. For the first time in my life, I had authority.
“Don’t love it too much,” Brother Dust warned. “Guns don’t make you safe. Nowhere in this world is safe, not for you, not for anyone.”
It felt like a sin, like a burn on my body as I carried it next to my skin back to Jogoo Road. It was impossible to keep it in our rooms, but Simeon in the metal shop had been stashing my roll for some time now and he was happy to hide the gun behind the loose block. He wanted to handle it. I would not let him, though I think he did when I was not around. Every morning I took it out, some cash for lunch and bribes, and went to work.
With a gun and money in my pocket, Brother Dust’s warning seemed old and full of fear. I was young and fast and clever. I could make the world as safe or as dangerous as I liked. Two days after my seventeenth birthday, the truth of what he said arrived at my door.
It was late, it was dark, and I was coming off the matatu outside Church Army. It was a sign of how far things had gone with my mother and father that they no longer asked where I was until so late, or how the money kept coming. At once I could tell something was wrong; a sense you develop when you work on the street. People were milling around in the compound, needing to do something, not knowing what they could do. Elsewhere, women’s voices were shouting. I found Simeon.
“What’s happening, where is my mother?”
“The shambas. They have broken through into the shambas.”
I pushed my way through the silly, mobbing Christians. The season was late, the corn over my head, the cane dark and whispering. I strayed off the shamba paths in moments. The moon ghosted behind clouds, the air-glow of the city surrounded me but cast no light. The voices steered me until I saw lights gleaming through the stalks: torches and yellow naphtha flares. The voices were loud now, close. There were now men, loud men. Loud men have always frightened me. Not caring for the crop, I charged through the maize, felling rich, ripe heads.