He still slept with other women, she was sure of it. But what could she say? She had forgiven him in advance, hadn’t she? She had found his little fuck-book in Harare, that cold list of names, and she had run off to Livingstone, and she had bounced right back to him anyway. They had never spoken about that book but it had revealed to her just how broad his tastes were, just how expansive the circle of his desire. When she had agreed to marry him, she had never thought that one day, she might be left standing outside of it.
Her ache for him spread through her each night, as if issuing from an unbearable throbbing in her upper left wisdom tooth. She eventually resorted to touching herself while he slept beside her. She would hitch one leg like a flamingo and fumble with her fingers, pondering what would happen if he caught her busy-handed, if he woke up and asked: ‘What on earth are you doing, Thunder?’ Would he believe her if she said she was scratching an itch? Would he roll on top of her with a cheeky grin? No. Whenever she turned to him and opened her eyes, she’d find him dozing through her solitary ministrations. It was a small death every time.
She began taking herself to the guest room to take herself in private. She would lock the door and lie on the bed. Eyes closed, breath catching, she would thrum and clench, automatic tears slipping down her temples, a rancid taste in her mouth. These excursions always put her to sleep and sometimes she didn’t make it back to the master bedroom until morning. She would come in and find Lee awake, sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes. ‘Good morning,’ he would say with a soft smile. He never asked where she had been, which felt like both a relief and an insult.
One evening, as she kissed her son goodnight, she saw Joseph wince and turn his head from her mouth. Only then did it dawn on her that her toothache might smell as rotten as it tasted. Was that why Lee was avoiding her? She started taking antibiotics, hoping to quell the infection. A month later, Mrs Thandiwe Banda found herself once again caught with her pants down, sitting on the toilet – her own this time – and wondering what she had done to deserve this. She scrutinised the canvas between her legs, trying to read the baffling stain, sniffing tentatively at it. It smelled like a bakery and it felt like one too – dry and hot as fire. Hellfire? Was this her punishment for her nightly visits to the guest room? Thandi was not a regular churchgoer, but she was well acquainted with flaws and their consequences.
Thandi said nothing to her doctor husband and she barely registered the pharmacist’s matter-of-fact diagnosis – thrush – and how normal a condition it was, especially on antibiotics. She suffered in silence as she inserted the cool lozenges into her hot hole. She suffered as the prescribed medication destroyed the pearly legions of yeast inside her. She suffered a trip to the dentist, who peremptorily pulled the tooth. And she suffered when it was over, and she found herself back in bed, lying beside a beautiful man who still had no apparent interest in touching her.
Once Thandi gave up on pleasuring herself, she had more time to stare at Lee and think. To notice how his smell changed on certain days of the week, to parse its individual notes (bergamot, smoke, lye, gin). To try to deduce where he took their son after he picked him up from school. Yes, Thandiwe Banda became quite the scientist. She curled on her side and observed her husband, her palms, like his, clasped in prayer and wedged between her knees.
* * *
Microorganisms are highly deceptive creatures. A virus, for example, seems weak by definition: it is classified as an obligate and its primary state is one of need. But a virus does not just hide inside its host like an animal seeking shelter in a cave, nor does it just hitch a ride in a cell and drop off elsewhere. A virus sneaks in and takes over. Some viruses, like Ebola, are effective because that takeover is so rapid and gruesome; but most of them, like the common cold, are powerful because they are relatively mild but ubiquitous. Lee chose to study The Virus because it is one of the most devious of obligates.
Its ultimate cunning is its choice of host, what’s called its tropism. The Virus targets the immune system, infiltrating the white blood cells that usually direct operations to defend the body from invaders in the first place. It then uses those immune cells to reproduce itself, co-opting their mechanisms for genetic replication. The same is true, in a sense, of The Virus’s main mode of transmission: sex. It takes advantage of the two engines of life – the desire to reproduce and the will to persevere. Sneakiest of all, The Virus vanishes into the cells it has usurped, making it invisible to the system that would seek to destroy it. It is the great pretender, a spy in disguise, an inner subverter. This makes it all the more difficult to cure, much less prevent.
‘By the year 2000, fifteen per cent of the Zambian population was infected with The Virus – mostly women, mostly adults. And that was six years ago,’ Lee said, shaking his head. The NGO workers and social scientists in the audience bowed over their scribbling pens. He could almost hear them thinking: Why won’t these bloody muntus just stop fucking already?
Lee was delivering a talk at the Alliance Française of Lusaka, which was hosting a conference about addressing the needs of those infected by The Virus, as well as the orphans they left behind. The Virus had wrought an epidemic. Prevention campaigns had helped. Billboards all over the country proclaimed the virtues of safe sex and, more dubiously, abstinence. That looped red ribbon icon was now scattered over pamphlets and walls like a plague of red eyes. And unlike other political leaders in the region, Kenneth Kaunda had acknowledged The Virus as early as 1987, after his son Masuzyo died of it. There had been substantive advances in treatment since then: access to antiretroviral drugs, with the vehicular-sounding abbreviation ARVs, in the early 1990s; the approval of the first generics a few years ago.
But still, it was as if – and Lee said this now, turning away from the charts and graphs on his projected PowerPoint to gesture at the ceiling like a poet: ‘It is as if a giant animal has crunched its teeth through millions of people. It has devoured an entire generation of this country. All the parents are gone.’ He looked out at the audience of bobbing heads. ‘We are a nation of orphans.’
This was mostly rhetoric. Lee needed to convey the magnitude of the epidemic to policymakers if he was to acquire the resources he needed for his experiments. But in truth, Lee was too pragmatic to weep for dying Zambians, and he was far more interested in the biology and epidemiology than the sociology of the disease. He turned to his next slide, an old one.
‘This is the structure of The Virus.’
He only showed this one to non-scientists these days. The diagram was basic and oddly floral – a circle surrounded by spokes, the glycoproteins The Virus uses to attach itself to an immune cell. Lee looked at it admiringly.
‘A vaccine usually works by giving the body a tiny dose of an inactive virus,’ he explained.
This is like an invasion by a zombie militia – small-scale and half-dead, but unusual enough for the body to notice it, destroy it, and learn all about it in the process. When the real army comes, the immune cells are primed to attack. But The Virus thwarts this approach by targeting the immune system itself, by in effect infiltrating both the schools and the military bases of the body.
‘To develop a different kind of vaccine, we have been looking instead into some promising studies about a group of sex workers in Nairobi,’ Lee said. ‘These women are obviously highly exposed to The Virus, and they test positive for it. But for some reason, it has not blossomed into the full-blown disease in this small population.’
A few bowed heads in the audience sprang up like maize kernels bursting into popcorn.
‘As we’ve known since the 1990s,’ Lee went on, ‘human immune cells have receptors that The Virus uses to enter and infect them – CD4, CCR5, CXCR4. The hypothesis is that these prostitutes have mutations in the genes for one or more of these receptors. In short, these women may have a natural immunity to The Virus.’
Audience members whispered as he proceeded to the
next slide. This research was not new – the Americans had discovered a Virus-immune patient with this mutation in 1994 – but social researchers seemed to know little of the scientific data being gathered in Africa. Yes, the studies were scant and suffered from a breathtaking lack of resources. But being here, in the midst of the crisis, ought to make you hungry for medical breakthroughs wherever they could be found. Lee was always a little surprised by the surprise he encountered at these conferences.
After his presentation was over, an older man, white hair stubbling his chin, approached him.
‘Hex-cuse me, sah. But that was remakabo! Extra-extra-ordinary!’ the man exclaimed, pumping Lee’s hand energetically. ‘Blirriant!’
‘Thanks,’ Lee murmured. There weren’t many locals at this conference. The bashikulu’s suit was old-fashioned and scuffed, his hems as withered as his thin purple lips. He was wearing a stethoscope for some reason, and dusty white nursing shoes.
‘Am Dr Patrick Musadabwe. We must link up, Dr Banda! You are velly implessive.’
Lee sighed internally, anticipating a request for money. He glanced around the room at the clusters of chatting bazungu, seeking an exit from the conversation.
‘…must inform you that I have a velly-good population for testing this Nairobi thing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘These women in Kenya.’ Musadabwe leaned in with an eyebrow raised. ‘You are aweya that we have these same women in Lusaka as well?’
‘Yes, I’m aware.’ Lee scratched his head and tried not to laugh or inhale – Musadabwe’s breath was staggeringly foul.
‘You must come to my clinic, just down the road in Kalingalinga. We can do velly-good resatch together.’
‘Ah sorry, Ba Uncle.’ Lee put on his politest Zambian manners. ‘I have my own clinic.’
‘But do you have the correcti peshents? Because if we transplantate these kinds of mutation thingies, pahaps through the stem cell transplantation—’
‘You know about stem cell transplants?’ asked Lee, peering curiously at this ragtag doctor.
‘Of course!’ Musadabwe exclaimed, issuing another cannonade of halitosis. He put his hand on Lee’s arm. ‘Come, my friend, come to my clinic. It has eveelithing you need.’
* * *
Musadabwe’s clinic, a squat blue and white building in the middle of the compound, did not have everything that Lee needed, not by a mile. It was empty inside but for an old wooden desk, its concrete floors speckled from the fresh paint job on the walls. Reaching up now and again to pat Lee on the shoulder, Musadabwe gave a tour of the rooms – ‘andi this one will be for examinationing our peshents…’ If the patients were not poisoned by fumes from the paint, Lee thought, or from the good doctor’s mouth. If he even was a doctor. Despite the string of titles after his name on the outside wall of the clinic, Lee wasn’t quite convinced by Mr Malaprop over here.
Musadabwe seemed to know his stuff, though. They sat on the wooden desk and drank from a bottle of Scotch – the only bottle, the only chemical, in the place – lecturing each other on bone-marrow transplants and receptor mutations, on inherited conditions and antiretroviral resistance, on autoimmunity and genetic abnormality, on using what was available to make something new.
‘Together, Dr Banda,’ Musadabwe exhorted, ‘we can vanquish this monster!’
As the sun sent its dying light into the hollow clinic, Lee thought it through. He had been having trouble recruiting subjects for his vaccination research at his private medical practice across from the International School. The Virus was still taboo and his wealthy patients sometimes seemed more desperate to keep their status under wraps than to stay alive. They paid him generously not just to administer imported ARVs, but to remain discreet about it too. Even the promise of anonymity hadn’t convinced them to try experimental therapy.
Besides, if Lee wanted to replicate the Nairobi study, he needed to find a different kind of Virus patient – sexually active, asymptomatic, and willing to undertake great risk for money. This clinic was in a perfect location – a compound frequented by prostitutes and their clients. And Musadabwe, doctor or no, was the first person Lee had met who both felt the urgency of the problem and had the ambition to pursue a solution into the shadiest corners of Zambian society.
‘Fine,’ Lee said finally, swaying a little as he shook Musadabwe’s outstretched hand.
‘Yes, it is extremree fine!’ Musadabwe grinned greenly at him. ‘Velly-good.’
* * *
At first, Musadabwe’s One Hundred Years Clinic was simply a hole in Lee’s pocket. Lee funded the entire operation – building the sterile examination rooms, importing equipment and ARVs – and keenly felt its redundancy: did he not already have a private clinic? It was like he had just built its poorer, shabbier cousin in the compound, and worse, for patients who could not pay. If anything, these patients opened the hole in his pocket wider with their bleating pleas. They wanted fees for schooling, food for sustenance, medicines for opportunistic infections and for everything else besides – colds, coughs, rashes. And still, the holy grail of study subjects eluded him.
Things moved faster when Lee discovered Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd by chance a year later. Plying Sylvia with dinners and stories, Lee took samples from her and all of her ‘salon girls’ and followed their leads to other casual sex workers in the community. He began a side project of his own, an experiment of sorts, based on a hunch. Musadabwe ran some tests and after a year of sorting the data and sending samples to their collaborators in Kenya and South Africa, they confirmed the results.
Some of these women, just like the ones in Nairobi, indeed had a natural gene mutation for an immune cell receptor. The Germans had effectively cured an HIV patient by giving him a stem cell transplant from a donor with a mutation like this – they were calling him The Berlin Patient. And in October of 2009, Lee and Musadabwe received a new report from the lab in Jo’berg: one very special woman had a second receptor as well. Zambia had a Lusaka Patient. It was indisputable: they had revolutionised the hunt for the Virus vaccine.
* * *
To celebrate the results, Lee and Musadabwe and Sylvia went to a shebeen next door to the Kalingalinga clinic and drank for hours. By the time Lee got home that night, he was falling-down, head-over-heels cut. He stumbled through three doors – out of a taxi, through the front door, into the master bedroom – kicked off his shoes, and collapsed next to his wife. Thandi was still awake, lying in the fetal position, hands between her knees. Her white nightie and chitambala looked silver in the gloom.
‘And where have you been?’ she asked.
This was new. He thought they had a silent agreement. He paid; she stayed. He didn’t ask about Livingstone or her guest room visits; she didn’t query his nightly whereabouts.
‘Ah – work, you know,’ he said, closing one eye to stop her from bouncing in his vision.
‘Work.’
‘A forum at, uh, UNZA. The Swizzerlandians, I mean the Swiss…’ He began to drop off.
‘You smell like whisky.’
‘Good nose.’ He licked his chops sleepily.
‘Work,’ she said again.
Lee opened his eyes. Thandi’s eyes glinted malachite. He looked away from them and saw her hip under the nightie, curving up like the moon on a horizon.
‘Come here,’ he growled and put his hand on it. He expected her to resist but instead, her breath caught and she bit her upper lip. She was lovely in the faint light coming from the clock radio, her skin purplish at the creases of the elbow and armpit and neck. Before he could stop himself, he had rolled onto his back and pulled her on top of him.
They lay pressed to each other for the first time in years. He felt himself grow hard against her pelvis. She had put on weight but she was still his Thunder – still quick and strong. He nudged his head towards hers and kissed her big, slipp
ery lips. Her legs slowly parted and bent to kneel on either side of his hips, like a hesitant jockey. He cupped her breast – a mother’s breast, lowswung but buoyant – and she moaned and hitched her nightie up, then her panties to the side. She worked him inside her and began to rock her hips. Lee’s eyes slid shut. He forgot himself completely, forgot his resolve to keep her safe from his secret store of deviousness.
* * *
As soon as it was over, they fought. Lee was panting from his orgasm. Thandi was collapsed on him, vibrating, still pent up. Then he twitched. It was the slightest buck of the body, just enough to signal I’m done. Thandi scudded off him, sat up and exploded. She had not known that her mouth harboured such a reserve of vile clichés. She called him a faggot, a dambe, a drunkard with a useless dick. She threatened to leave him, to move to London to live with her sister.
‘And I’m taking your fucking son with me!’
Lee sat up and raised his hand. He stopped himself – even drunk, there were too many checkpoints between Lee’s mind and his body for him to lose total control.
‘What, you’re going to hit me now?’ she spat.
He lowered his hand and lay back, chest heaving, a tendon in his jaw writhing like a maggot.
‘At least you’d be touching me for once!’ Thandi shouted. ‘Fuck you, Lionel Banda!’
She got up and stomped off to the bathroom down the corridor. She peed and wiped, semen sopping the toilet paper, and turned her panties inside out before putting them back on. Her hands were shaking with rage. Instead of returning to the master bedroom, she went to the guest room, locked the door, and lay on the pristine bedspread. She grabbed a pillow and put it between her legs and humped it furiously, trying to put out the fire he had sparked in her. But after a while, her hips stilled and she pulled the pillow up to her face and wept into it instead.
The Old Drift Page 43