The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Joseph approached the schoolboy secretary and asked for Dr Musadabwe. Without looking up from his phone, the boy stood and left the room. He returned promptly, Musadabwe rushing in behind him, dressed in his dingy lab coat, his tattered stethoscope swinging.

  ‘Joseph!’ Musadabwe reached his hand out.

  ‘Doctor.’ Joseph shook it, ducking a wave of halitosis.

  ‘Come!’ Musadabwe paused and turned to the woman. ‘Am coming just-now, love.’ He grabbed Joseph’s shoulder. ‘It is velly-good to see you, young man. Come and see the lab.’

  Joseph followed him down the corridor to the back door. They exited into a dirt yard strung with a clothes line bedecked in white – lab coats, towels, sheets. The laundry’s sparkle belied the stench back here, which was chokingly putrid. It grew as they passed a set of crates.

  ‘Testing animos,’ Musadabwe explained as they stepped inside a small concrete building at the bottom of the yard. ‘And this one is the lab.’

  It was nothing like the labs at UNZA, which were shabby and chipped but functional. This was more like something you’d see in a post-apocalyptic movie, all bent tools and drifting debris. There was a black workbench in the centre, dusty pipettes and test tubes scattered over it. An incubator sat unplugged in a corner, its door ajar.

  Musadabwe turned on the light – a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling – and motioned for Joseph to sit. Joseph perched on the one high stool, suppressing the urge to tidy up. Musadabwe ceremoniously pulled his stethoscope off his neck and placed it on the workbench – it looked like a snake with two heads set to attack each other. Then he leaned against the workbench, crossed his arms and ankles, and plunged right in.

  ‘Andi so? Your father. He was a blirriant man, your father. He was telling me we can even have science in Zambia. It is a technico world, hm? These Americans – they are too greedy! And the Chinese now? Mm-mm. But they can help us. They can supply matelios and whatwhat, from this Sino-American Consosham. But even us Zambians, with our limited rezosses, we can come together! Andi use? Our heads!’

  Joseph nodded.

  ‘Now. This is the current state of the situation. The Virus has destroyed our country. Compretely and totally! Whole generations have been wiped down! Those plagues in the Bible? Those locusts, those boyos bursting on the skin – they were just prophecies of this disease!’

  Joseph nodded again, a bit warily. He wasn’t a huge fan of the evangelical craze in Lusaka.

  ‘To make a kew-ah – how can we? The Virus compolomises the immunie system. So you cannot even do a normal vaxin. So maybe the solution? Don’t kill The Virus compretely. Maybe just find some? Equa-biriam.’

  Musadabwe uncrossed his arms and levelled his hands like a see-saw.

  Equilibrium. Joseph nodded. Commensalis. Okay. Learn to share the table with The Virus.

  ‘But The Virus, it is velly movious, changing-changing all of the time. You cannot swove this problem just like that,’ Musadabwe snapped his fingers. ‘No! It is a moving target! So we must also keep moving. Like Muhammad Ali, floating like a bee! Knock it off from the pass!’ He punched his fist into his palm, then grabbed a scrap of paper on the workbench and plucked a Bic from his coat pocket. ‘This?’ He drew a circle. ‘It is a human immunity cell. They are calling it? Tee. Cell.’ He labelled it. ‘And these ones,’ he gave it a halo of sprouting mushrooms, ‘are the receptacles.’

  Joseph nodded. Receptors. He knew what these were from googling the abbreviations in his father’s notes. Receptors and co-receptors sat on the outside of human T-cells. The Virus used them like portals to break into the immune system and take over. If one receptor didn’t work, The Virus shifted to the next, like a general trying every gate of a walled castle. Musadabwe explained all this in his broken English, which oddly didn’t seem to impede the clarity of his science.

  ‘Andi so? There was some resatch in Kenya. It’s now twenty years ago! It was showing that these women, you know, the women of the night,’ Musadabwe blinked over the euphemism, ‘they are highly exposed to The Virus. But they did not catch the full disease! The Virus, it was in the cells but at velly low logs, the same low levels that we need for…?’ He lifted his nose and waited like a teacher.

  ‘Equilibrium?’ Joseph answered tentatively.

  ‘A-haa!’ Musadabwe see-sawed his hands, slower this time, more dramatically. ‘So these female populations had some natchuro immunities that made The Virus sustainabo. It was because they had a mutation on the respectacle that was preventing The Virus from attaching—’

  ‘Oh.’ Joseph sat up. ‘The mutation blocks The Virus from getting in the T-cells!’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’ Musadabwe grinned. ‘Their mutation was on this respectable,’ he scribbled letters next to a mushroom on the diagram. ‘See. See. Arra. Two Dashi. Sickisty-fo. Eye.’

  CCR2-641. Joseph recognised the abbreviation from his father’s messages and emails.

  ‘But your father found a woman with a mutation on a ligand of another receptor as well.’ He scrawled out another abbreviation: CXCR4∆6. ‘We are calling her the Lusaka Peshent. Andi so? If we duplicate both of her mutations in the general populations—’

  ‘We can prevent The Virus from infecting our immune cells,’ said Joseph. ‘But’ – he nibbled the side of his thumb – ‘how do you duplicate mutations?’ He was out of his depth now.

  ‘A-haa! So, there is a technology now! Crispa!’ Musadabwe wrote it out: CRISPR-Cas9. ‘It targets the genes. You can make mutations at the DNA level. Crispa is simpo and affordabo.’

  So why had this not been done before?

  ‘Crispa is velly new. And you can make some mistakes. How do you mutate the genes without damaging other things, this-side-that-side? It is not easy. It is some kind of mm, genetical engineering? Because if we go along this path, we are not mutating The Virus. We are mutating our bodies.’

  Joseph remembered the last memo on his father’s phone, the words just audible through the wind on the golf course: ‘…the question then is whether to modify the genome of the host or…’

  Musadabwe had now embarked on a begging rant. There was a Chinese study being run by a Dr Ling and Ling had said he would back Musadabwe, but new equipment was needed – did Joseph have access to his father’s research funds? To buy a cell sorter? A new incubator? The mice could be ordered online—

  Joseph’s head was swarming. He needed to think. He needed to read Dad’s notes and listen to Dad’s memos and process them. He needed to zap each buzzing thought, pinch it between his fingers, pin its jerking body to a velvet plate, frame it behind glass and hang it on a wall with the others. Only then could he step back and see the big picture. He stood up and cut off Musadabwe’s spiel by murmuring some vague promises.

  ‘Fine.’ The doctor clapped his hands once, resignedly. ‘That is velly-fine.’

  He led Joseph back through the fluttering white yard with its animal reek and into the dark corridor of the clinic. They shook hands at the front door. Joseph stepped out into the bleeding sunset and the teethgrinding drone of woodsaws at the woodyard next door. When he glanced back at the clinic, the doctor was gone, but Joseph caught a movement behind the window. It was the dark-skinned woman from the waiting room, staring straight at him.

  He averted his gaze and turned around. There goes one of Dad’s women, he thought, or rather one of his women of the night. Had they been his lovers or his patients or both? There had been a circle of sickness around Dr Lionel Banda – Salina and Mum and Farai and Sylvia. They all had The Virus. Joseph realised now that to be spared that intimacy was also to be deprived of it.

  2016

  ‘They called him The Black.’

  ‘The Black?’

  ‘The Black.’

  ‘Hm. The Black? Shuwa?’

  ‘Ya,’ Joseph insisted. ‘The Moor.’

  ‘More what? More colour?’

&
nbsp; ‘Moor. It’s an old word for a black man. They spelled it M-O-H-R in German. I read about it online.’

  ‘But he was black? Shuwa? Did you not tell us he was a Jew?’ Jacob looked annoyed.

  ‘Mwebantu, Ba Marx started all of the revolutionary movements!’ God exhorted. ‘Marching on the road of history, justice on his side. The black and the brown and the yellow: all of us must rise up!’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So – he was a muntu?’ Jacob asked again.

  ‘No, he was German. He was what they call swarthy. It was just his friends and family teasing: “The Moor is going underground. The silly old Moor.” They called Engels The General.’

  ‘What kind of friends talk like that?’

  Joseph pulled up a picture on his phone. ‘Just look at his face. It’s definitely brownish. The hair is kinky. Thin lips, yes. But that is what they called a Negroid nose.’

  Jacob peered at the phone. ‘Ah you, that is just a tan.’

  ‘Mwebantu, this is a tired debate!’ said God. ‘Shut your mouths.’

  Jacob laughed and clapped God on the shoulder. ‘Yes, bwana.’

  * * *

  Joseph left the woodyard and walked through Musadabwe’s clinic to the lab in the back. The door was open and he stood at the entrance for a second. The floor of the lab had been scrubbed raw this morning. But the dust would soon return. It had already begun its inevitable drift from the yard. He thought of the old man and the young man next door at RIP Beds & Coffins, smiling at the lazy, hazy arguments they had cultivated over the past few months. Joseph had become a regular, stopping by on his way to and from the lab, smoking a joint or two, drinking a beer or two, chatting about the Marxist ideas he was learning from Gran’s cassette tape.

  Joseph washed out the beakers from this morning. He sterilised. A chicken from the crates outside made a popping sound. He sucked his teeth and went to see what was up. Musadabwe’s newest schoolboy secretary was standing outside the door. The boy held the latest results out to Joseph with both hands, the insides of his elbows splayed taut. His uniform was green and stiff.

  ‘How do you expect me to know you’re there if you don’t say anything?’

  The boy shrugged, a smile flickering upward then subsiding into indifference. Joseph took the results and told the boy to change into patapatas before coming into the lab. Joseph spread the results over the workbench. He could just make out the numbers in the tables, flush against the borders, serifs overlapping. The boy was shuffling uneasily by the sink, awaiting instruction.

  ‘Big results today, eh?’ Joseph said wryly.

  The boy stood with his hands clasped in front of him. His shaved head shone under the bare bulb, making him seem smaller.

  ‘Don’t you want to learn anything?’

  The boy shrugged one shoulder.

  ‘Lesson one. A virus eats its house from the inside. That’s the only way it can survive.’

  * * *

  I told you about the first trials a couple of emails ago, but I guess I didn’t tell you about the second ones? In the second ones, the nodules burst from the inside. You can imagine the pressure we’re under from Ling. Musadabwe keeps trying one way, then another. The specimens are all botched. There’s no pain, I don’t think, but there are mutations in the skin, and the bones start to curl up. I can hear them outside sweeping the ground – the sound of tumour-blasted feet.

  Yeah, God’s just a nickname, haha – the old man doesn’t even believe in God. He lectures us about class politics so often that Jacob calls him bwana just to piss him off. God the atheist, bwana the Marxist. Jacob works for him, technically, but he lacks a feel for carpentry. It’s hard to admit but working with his hands may be all that a poor person of our generation can manage. Jacob stares at me sometimes. I think he wants to ask me about his mother. I guess I want to ask him about her, too. The Lusaka Patient.

  Naila. At night I dream of you, of your hands.

  * * *

  Joseph lifted a mouse out of a wooden box, one hand holding the tail, the other gripping the neck. The animal bucked between these pincers, its body pulsing with panic. Joseph slipped it into a Mason jar, which was stuffed with tissue soaked in anaesthetic, drops clustering on the inner glass like dew. The mouse collapsed with a soft squeak.

  ‘Come on out, now.’

  He tilted the jar to tip it out again. He pinched its skin, then slid the syringe in. He eased the plunger down. After a moment, the mouse flinched once, twice.

  ‘Wakey, wakey.’

  It got up on its little rubbery feet. He cradled it gently in his hand and let it back into its box. He wiped the workbench under the hood, his stoned mind drifting in the slow circles his hand was making over it. He prepared the gel plate with buffer and agarose and ethidium bromide, slid it into the UV transilluminator, and took the old gel plate inside the clinic. The examination room was dark but for a blueish spotlight from Musadabwe’s Digit-All Bead.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘The latest gel.’ Joseph put it on the table.

  Musadabwe pointed his glowing middle finger at it. As usual, he started complaining, the words in his mouth moaning like trapped animals as he hemmed and hawed. Joseph waited for it to stop. The light from Musadabwe’s Bead lit upon an irregularity in the gel.

  ‘Why is this still here? Did you not redo it?’

  ‘I’ll try a new mouse.’

  ‘We do not have lab mice to spare,’ Musadabwe grunted. ‘They are velly expensive!’ He held his finger closer to the plate and scanned his Bead light over it again.

  * * *

  In the first test, the cells were too full – too drugged, I think. In the second, they lysed. What will the third test do? I’m losing my mind, Naila. These tests are supposed to move forwards, not backwards. I know I didn’t finish my second term at UNZA, but I didn’t really need to, I had learned more than enough to improve Dad’s protocols. That’s why Musadabwe hired me, right? At least that is what I thought. Now I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think he appreciates my work. But sometimes I think he just wants my money – which is Gran’s money, really.

  * * *

  ‘The copper mines are nearly empty,’ said Joseph.

  ‘The British cleaned them out!’ said God, picking at a back tooth with a matchstick.

  The yard was scaly with wood shavings, some so tightly curled, their shadows made garland chains. Jacob kicked through them as he came in, carrying his latest toy. He squatted to open the cardboard box and they heard the creaking sound of styrofoam. Sunlight flashed over a black surface as Jacob inched the machine out. It clicked as he tugged it one way then the other, pivoting it back and forth. At last, it sat upright in the dust. Jacob pressed a button on a remote. The drone shuddered to life but stayed crouched on the ground. Joseph turned back to his conversation with the old man.

  ‘The British colonialists were just highstrung. Too brittle, too cold.’

  ‘There were hordes of them!’ God laughed, marijuana smoke spilling down his body, rolling around his neck, massing from his mouth. ‘This country caved when the bazungu came in.’

  Joseph frowned, scratching his head with dull shame. He wasn’t white or British but Gran was, and he sometimes felt an oblique guilt by association. The drone was squealing and buzzing now, rising slowly from the ground. Dust nipped at their skin. Jacob hunched out of the machine’s way as it zoomed over his shoulder and hovered above the yard, propellers at full speed. Methodically, he brought it down, then went over and picked it up from the wood shavings.

  ‘Our country is full of broken promise,’ said God. ‘But the promise never shatters completely – there’s never the total disaster, the catastrophe we need to start the revolution!’

  ‘That’s sick, old man,’ Joseph chuckled.

  ‘Cooperating with the West after Independence only made us weaker. Why did we
bother?’

  ‘Uh, I think it was for the money?’

  ‘No, they have just been waiting for our resources to dwindle. Vultures! We started this nation with potential. “A society of the people!” Kaunda said. But somehow we narrowed until it was just for the top three per cent. The capitalists replaced the colonialists. And now these foreigners take our minerals away and even shoot our miners. Every day their greed bites into our land. Soon there will be nothing left. We must wake up! We must stop dreaming! We are still on the ground. It is still night in this country. We are still on our knees. Time to rise up!’

  God’s face was wrinkled and his dreads were matted, but he was still quick and strong. His hands were busy now, rolling two new joints of mbanji.

  ‘This is how we put revolution in the body!’ he laughed.

  Joseph watched God with dreamy patience, waiting for him to light up.

  * * *

  Have you heard of Jonas Salk? He was the American scientist who discovered the polio vaccine. He proved that we could use inactivated polio cells the same way we use inactivated tetanus and diphtheria cells to make a vaccine. Late in his life, in the 1980s, he even did some preliminary studies on a vaccine for The Virus. I was googling around and it turns out he conducted experiments on himself, and his wife and son were the test subjects for the first polio vaccine trial. ‘I will be personally responsible,’ he said. Good thing it worked! When they asked him who owned the patent on the polio vaccine, he said: ‘Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’