This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death

by Неизвестный

The wedding was modern, but at our feast we ate nshima cakes made from the freshest, finest ground maize, and so many relishes it would have scandalized the queen of England. So many relishes: groundnut and rapeseed and chibwabwa, and mlamba fished fresh from Lake Nyasa, and beef relish made from a calf bought for the occasion by Christopher’s brother, and we had a wonderful banana beer my mother brewed for us. And we sang, and we danced, and I loved Christopher with all my heart.

  A month later, he got a position with a small office of the local government—his brother’s friend had a few strings to pull, it seemed—and soon we were living the life of a young married couple, all smiles and sweetness and longing when he was away at work for the day. Such long workdays. I made nshima cakes every afternoon, experimented with relishes, and hummed happy songs to myself as I did the washing.

  Sometimes, when I sit by the fence, staring into the tent village inside the camp and waiting, I think of the night we sat staring into the sky, at the stars. It was on a trip up north in ’94, to visit some of my relatives living in Mzuzu—very near where I work now. I remember sitting by his side and looking up into the glittering sky.

  “My father used to have me sit on his lap when I was a little boy, and he would tell me stories about the stars. The constellations, you know?”

  “I don’t know any of those stories,” I said. “Why did he tell them to you? Was he some kind of witch doctor?”

  “Ha, no, my father was an accountant’s assistant, at least before independence. Before he went to prison.” Christopher paused for a moment and then swiveled his head while still staring up, as if searching the sky. “He just loved stories about the stars. He used to tell me we could find all the answers to the riddles in life in the sky. Ah, do you see him? Orion? There he is,” he said, pointing at the sky. “You can see his belt, there, running in a line like that?”

  I did see it, and I nodded. “But it doesn’t look like a man.”

  “The Greeks were farther north… above the equator. He’s an upside-down man to us.”

  “Ah,” I said, seeing what might be the shape of a man a little more clearly then. “And who is he?”

  “Greek story, about a big man, you know.”

  I was never really a village girl: I lived in the bush only for a short time, as a child, before my family moved to the city. Traditional masks and the village dances—I recognize them a little but don’t know their names and don’t always grasp their meanings. I never learned the Chewa names for the constellations, let alone the English ones. And yet, somehow, the story sounded familiar to me. I couldn’t help but imagine that Orion had cheated the gods somehow, perhaps by sleeping with a god’s wife while he was busy doing something else. So I asked, “What did he do?”

  Christopher laughed and said, “Well, he was a wonderful hunter, but arrogant. He threatened to kill all the animals in the world to show how great a hunter he was. Like a poacher, you see? So the gods killed him because they couldn’t let him do that. But they felt sad, to kill a great hunter, so they put him in the sky.”

  “What kind of hunter would kill every animal in the world? How stupid!” I said.

  Christopher laughed and said, “You know… that’s what I said when my father told me the story too.”

  I laughed; he didn’t mention his father often, though I knew they had disagreed about his studies, about what Christopher ought to do with his life. “Poachers aren’t great hunters at all.”

  “True, but… they do seem able to kill everything they see.”

  “Poachers aren’t the only ones like that,” I said, shaking my head and glancing at our little shortwave radio, on the ground beside us. It had been Rwanda this, Rwanda that, and refugees headed to Malawi by the truckload; no music, just bad news all the way along the road, until Christopher had shut it off and started to tell me stories about his family.

  He laughed, a little sadly. “Those bloody butchers are bad… but find me a president who hasn’t done the same thing somehow or other.”

  And when I thought about it, I couldn’t, so I just looked up into the stars and wondered whether, when Banda died someday, we might not start calling that constellation by his name, until it was time to get back in the car and continue on our way.

  “Another bloody day of this, ungh?” Anthony says, and purses his lips. He doesn’t look at me, but I’m the only person in the break room besides him, so he must be talking to me.

  “Yes, another day,” I say, and nod slightly.

  Anthony does not like working at the admissions testing desk. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he hates himself for continuing with this job. You can tell by the way he fills up his coffee cup. By the way he looks at the people who come up to his desk. By the sound of his voice.

  He looks up at me. “Do you… realize what we’re doing?”

  I don’t have anything to say to that.

  He doesn’t wait long before he realizes I’m simply not going to answer his question. I am taking the easiest way out: don’t talk.

  So he does. “We’re killing them,” he says softly. “How can you pretend we’re doing anything else?”

  I have no idea why he thinks I’m pretending that, but I say, “Bus accident. That’s how I’m going to die. So is every bus driver out there killing me? People have to get where they’re going. How are you going to…?”

  He slumps forward a bit, looks into his coffee, a little forlorn. “Murder, I think. ‘Stab Wound in the Belly’ were the exact words on the slip.”

  “And do you stay home all the time? Have a metal detector at your door?”

  “That’s different,” he says. “How many of these people will catch the damned virus here, inside the camp? How many of them wouldn’t catch it if we let them out? How many of them catch it solely because we’re putting them in this prison?”

  “None,” I say, wishing I could believe it.

  “None,” he echoes, his eyes sliding back down to the coffee cup. “I don’t know about that, sister. I don’t know at all about that.” And I realize then: he doesn’t know why he is here. He isn’t like me. I begin to wonder why he is here, after all.

  Anthony is so tough at the desks, such a hard man to face, but forget the stab wound: it’s this job that is killing him. And I, smiling so gently and speaking so kindly at my desk, watch them go by with nothing at all in my heart.

  Nothing but a question muttered in the shadows of my heart: Are you the one?

  But Anthony is right. I have no idea what would happen if, suddenly, all the buses in the world stopped running one day. If we crushed all the buses tomorrow in a million scrap metal yards, how could my result not come up differently on one of the machines?

  I don’t know. I wonder sometimes, at night, whether millions of people’s results changed the day the president decreed the founding of the camps. A silent, invisible flicker in the shape of tomorrow’s history; a flickering nobody would notice, like a flame in a closed room, as the fate of the country—of many countries—shifted. The scientists say the results don’t change, that someone whose slip says “Explosion in Outer Space” will still die from an explosion in outer space, even if he never gets into a space shuttle, even if he tries to live underground and never comes out from his bunker. Maybe the flaming wreckage of an exploded satellite slams into the air vent of his bunker and he chokes to death on the smoke, or maybe some other miracle happens. It doesn’t make sense, though since when has the world ever made sense? But there are constant stories of people trying to test the hypothesis, doing crazy things. They never die of anything but what the slip says. So what difference does it make what we choose to do in this life? What is the point of deciding anything?

  But the place where I live and work now—it looks nothing like it used to. That is the result of decisions, isn’t it?

  This whole area was once an eco-tourist hotspot, everything green and pure and gorgeous for the tourists. Green tourism was one of the few industries in Malawi that was really growing, b
ack before the centers opened up, the vast tent villages sprouting out across the plains like an off-white fungal bloom at the foot of the Viphya Mountains. But times change, and new industries appear.

  Malawi was one of the poorest nations on earth not so long ago, but now things are improving for us. For most of us. We haven’t solved the biggest problems in the neighborhood—the petty dictators, the stupid wars, the adolescent boys with guns and something to prove. And we still have the same kind of president we’ve always had: a man who thinks of himself as our daddy, thinks he can tell us what to think and feel, and believes that he must slap us when we disobey him. But someday, someday soon, people will not think of us Africans as soon as the word “AIDS” comes up. People will think of how the continent was forward thinking. A quarantine so effective, it prevents people from being able to spread the disease even before they’ve been infected.

  That’s what they tell us, warning us not to try to make sense of it. There’s no way to explain how, yes, this man standing here has not yet contracted HIV, but he will catch it, and it will kill him. I mean, almost nobody dies of brain toxoplasmosis or Kaposi’s sarcoma or candidiasis without having AIDS; and nobody dies of AIDS without having HIV. And everyone in the camp will die from one of those diseases, the toxoplasmosis, the sarcoma, the candidiasis, or the tuberculosis or pneumonia. That much we know for certain: I know. I’ve seen the slips, thousands of them.

  And the machines are always right, they say.

  Goodness knows, I spent nights sitting, wondering—but if they don’t have the disease already, then of course they will eventually catch it once they’re sent to a camp. But they are only sent into the camp because they are destined to catch it—whether inside or outside.

  If only we don’t send them in now, maybe they won’t catch it, my mind sometimes insists. It insists harder when the person with the positive result is a child, just a youngster who isn’t even infected. But as sure as the sun comes up tomorrow, that kid will catch it, will die from it. The machines are never wrong.

  Still, Anthony is right. I myself am proof of that.

  A puzzling thing: I am HIV-positive.

  And yet, “Bus Accident” is what the paper says. I still have it—I’ve carried it in my bag, folded into an empty candy tin for safekeeping, ever since the first day I got it. That is the insane part: for a while, they stopped doing blood tests and relied only on the machine results. Yes, the doctors are now required to report infections, but if you keep quiet and avoid them—or find a doctor who won’t report you, who can get you medicines quietly—then nobody notices you.

  So camps like this one will be around forever. After all, I could be passing the virus on every day, if I wanted to.

  I don’t, of course. I’ve been celibate since the day my husband came home with his eyes wide, shocked, and his mouth tight, and sat at the table and stared at me for an hour before he said anything to me. When I saw that, I knew something had gone wrong and was certain it was at work. Finally, I thought. He would tell me now what was wrong: what was making him sleep in the other room, why he was so despondent lately.

  He was a civil servant and had immense responsibilities, and a man like that has stress sometimes. Stress that made him tired, drove him to need to be alone at times and to stop touching his wife the way a man touches a woman. Men are like rivers—sometimes running high, and then suddenly running low. The changes in men are harder to track than rivers’, because they don’t even follow the seasons. They follow some other, hidden rhythm. Often not even the men themselves can explain why it happens when it does.

  My husband, he is an educated man and a Catholic. I never expected him to tell me what he did, sitting there at the kitchen table one rainy evening after work. Telling me about his visit to the doctor, about the test. About the result, how the doctor said he had HIV. The way he did the doctor’s voice, like he was trying to figure out if he’d misheard him. Edzi, that’s how the name of the disease sounded when he said it. He was crying. He said I’d better go and get tested.

  And the first thing I thought was, No, I don’t.

  “My death paper,” I said to him softly. “The paper said ‘Bus Accident.’ I can’t have…”

  My husband’s eyes widened. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what it was I was seeing in his face. It might have been fear, or perhaps anger that he could have this sickness in him, but it might have passed me over like the Israelite children in Moses’s Egypt. For twenty years he had lived with me by his side. For me to be apart from him, even in sickness, might have baffled him. The thought terrified me too, almost as much as the prospect of my own infection.

  But then he was smiling, even as he cried harder and he held my hands gently in his own. “I prayed… I prayed so many times that you would be safe, would be fine. That my sins would not poison you.” A teardrop fell on my hands, and I wondered, Is the disease in that teardrop? Could I catch it from that?

  Three days. For three days, I walked around in a kind of daze, knowing my husband was ill, believing that somehow I had come through uninfected, wondering how this could happen. The next morning, I went to the women’s center, but I got the result two days later. The nurse from the women’s center called me at home with the results, three days after he told me.

  “Positive,” she said, which I thought was good news at first. I don’t know why I thought that—I suppose because I was so desperate for a miracle. “Do you understand, this means you have been infected?” Then I remembered: a positive result is bad; a negative result is good.

  I don’t remember what the nurse said after that. I only remember sitting down, fumbling in my bag for the candy tin, and pulling out the slip of paper.

  Unfolding it.

  “Bus Accident.”

  The hardest are the families: the man with his wife, and a baby in a sling hanging from her shoulders. Families, they say, are the building blocks of a nation.

  Has anyone ever had to sort bricks like this? Bricks that all look fine, all look healthy; bricks that weep and beg for a test on another machine?

  The men sometimes get angry and shout. That doesn’t bother me anymore—the security men come up with guns, and the men get quiet or get shot. Never fatally, just wounded. I look at their wives, and it breaks my heart. Your husband brought you here, I think. It’s true. Your husband gave this to you, didn’t he?

  It’s harder with those wives: the women who show a recent blood test, who insist that they are not infected. They are the ones who trouble me.

  And then there are the women who come alone, with no husband or children.

  “I’m not sick,” they say. They all say that, standing there alone in front of me.

  And I look into their eyes and wonder, Are you the one who gave it to him? Is it from you that he got the virus that is swimming in my blood today? I am sick, and you say you are not… and yet you will go in there, while I stay out here.

  “Yes, madam, I understand,” I say, my voice as steady as it can be. “But if you look at the result from the machine…”

  “The machine is not a doctor! How can I know that the machine won’t give me HIV itself?” The women are desperate because they know it isn’t something they can control. When you can control something, you never feel desperate.

  “No, madam,” I say, my eyes serious now, as I wonder, Are you the one? Are you? “The machines never infect anyone. It’s impossible. They designed it carefully so it wouldn’t…”

  “Then test me on another machine,” they beg, pointing at Anthony’s desk on the one side or to Kuseka’s on the other.

  “It will be the same result. Please,” I say. “I’ve seen it a thousand times.”

  “Then please… just see it once more.” The women make fists and scream and bawl and struggle. They are supposed to do it. And I am supposed to send them to Anthony’s desk. When they do this at Anthony’s desk, he shakes his head and gestures to the guards.

  But Kuseka and I, we usually allow them to be t
ested once more. I think Kuseka does it out of kindness, but I do it… I do it to see the result. To see the look on the woman’s face.

  A guard escorts the woman over to the machine, and that is the moment when you discover what kind of mother she is. The loving mother knows there might only be one test allowed and puts her child’s hand into the slot. The selfish mother, she puts her own hand in, clutching the baby to herself.

  There is a woman at my desk now who doesn’t need to put the baby’s hand into the slot. Her child’s result was never any of the diseases that kill someone with advanced AIDS. Her child’s slip reads, “Diacetyl-Induced Lung Cancer,” whatever that means. But when she puts her own hand into the slot and winces at the pinprick, she looks at me. I can see it on her face, that this is not just the third or fourth time she has done this. She knows already what the result will be. She is just hoping the machine somehow will give her another result through some kind of malfunction.

  She is hoping for a miracle.

  And I can see it on her face, that she knows one isn’t forthcoming. Her husband knows too—he has watched her do this many times, and the guards have let his arms loose as they lead him over to her. She looks at me, and for a moment I expect her to be thankful. I let her go over to Kuseka’s machine and try again. But she isn’t thankful at all: as I watch the guards lead her husband and her—child still in the sling, crying now—I catch her eye, and I see a pure and cold resentment in her eyes.

  The sort of resentment that will only slowly ferment into resignation. I recognize that look—I’ve seen it a hundred times a day in the eyes of men and women who come to my desk to be tested.

  And I recognize the look from the mirror too, when I get home from work every day—where I have watched it begin the transmutation to hopeless acceptance.

  But she glimpses something almost as cold in my eyes too, I am sure.

  After I found out, I left my husband.

  Not right away. I was angry and hurt, and I think I stayed around for a while to punish him. I would lie on the floor and cry, and then eat something for lunch, and then cry some more until I couldn’t. Then I would stay there on the floor till he got home.