The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  She shook the tin cups dry. Was it Lee? That man and his bloody promises. A house, a cure. His love. Even the smallest promise – that he would come to her before he died – he had even broken that one. She had learned of his death from the funeral announcement in the Post. The Anglican cathedral. No way would she have shown her face there or at the crematorium. Had his skin burned like bark? Like paper? Where can I go? Where can I go? Where can I go?

  As Sylvia walked back to her mother’s door, an image came to her. Aubergine skin, impwa eyes – Loveness, but from before Lee and his many varieties of drug, before the Hi-Fly, before their late nights at the shebeens and hotels. It was Loveness’s young face, from when the two of them were just girls, sitting face to face, knee to knee, pulling together, bathed in that soft light from the plastic-bottle roof.

  She had lost touch with Loveness years ago, somewhere between a Virus conference in Berlin and a Virus workshop in Holland. What had brought that memory to mind? Sylvia tried the door to No. 74 and found it locked. She sucked her teeth and banged her fist on it. Greed, maybe. That was what connected those two. Lee and Loveness both had no limits. They were the kind of people who eye your plate even while they’re eating from their own.

  * * *

  ‘Smaller,’ the General said. He and Jacob were circling the swimming pool together, their composite shadow undulating on the water. The General had been talking to some government contractors and it seemed that they were more interested in surveillance drones than delivery drones now.

  ‘Smaller will not be easy, bwana.’

  ‘You have already given us miracles! My left-tenant, ehn?’ the General laughed, his fillings a plague of metal in his mouth. ‘I have provided. And you will provide, ehn?’

  He put his arm around Jacob’s shoulder and turned them to face the New Kasama house. It was crawling with its usual infestation of guards. The ground floor had a white facade now, though rainy-season mould was already reaching green fingers up it. The entrance had been fitted with sliding glass doors that reflected the garden and the pool and Jacob and the General standing side by side. The pillars still poked up into the sky, and hovering between them, where the second storey ought to have been, were Jacob’s first prototypes: three bird-sized drones that he had stripped to the bone and coated with solar tape so that they could travel long distances without refuelling. They dipped and bobbed, flashing in the sun like monstrous dragonflies.

  The glass doors beneath them slid open and Pepa emerged, wearing a navy-blue bikini and a green and pink chitenge knotted at her hip. Her gold hair was plaited in a zigzag mukule. A diamond necklace around her neck flashed in the sun. Jacob waved but she ignored him, like he was just another of the General’s men. Perhaps he was.

  By the time the General had sent the SUV to bring Jacob to the New Kasama house to show what progress he had made on the drone project, Solo and Pepa had been living there for two months. Solo’s eyes looked as if they had been swallowed up – too much labour, too many beatings? No, Jacob realised. Drugs. One time, Jacob had managed to get Pepa alone but as soon as he was done apologising and conveying his worries about Solo, she’d replied with just two words: ‘Too late.’ But it wasn’t too late. He had to believe that. He would prove it to her.

  Now she walked to the deep end of the pool, untied and tossed her sarong, and jumped in feet first. Up, down, up – her sleek, riven head broke the surface. She wiped her hand down her face and began a gangly crawl through the water.

  ‘Okay, bwana. I have some ideas,’ Jacob said, turning away from her.

  ‘Good,’ the General murmured, still watching Pepa swim. ‘I already feel richer.’

  * * *

  When Sylvia had returned to No. 74 Kalingalinga, she had brought with her a particular smell – faintly reminiscent of Godfrey or of Matha’s fingers after she’d been gardening. It irked Matha. First, Sylvia had left her. Then she had dumped her son here. Now she had displaced him. Why had she come back? To show off her fancy robe and beery breath? Or her scarred skin and thin body? Wasn’t flaunting your death a sin?

  Over the last few years, Matha had developed some new opinions, or rather some new words for opinions that she had long held, about what was and wasn’t a sin. Teaching her grandson how to read with Mrs Zulu’s Bible had reintroduced her to its lessons. She had been surprised by how familiar some of the passages were. At first she thought this was just because of how people in Lusaka spoke these days – God bless this, bless you that, as if everyone were sneezing all the time. But then Matha remembered that Ba Nkoloso had taught her to read using the Bible. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. Put thou thine tears into my bottle. The words echoed back to her from her childhood. For the love of money is the root of all evil.

  Returning to those mouldy old pages, she saw for the first time how angry God was, how He smote and browbeat his way through the Old Testament, and raged His way through the New: cursing fig trees and whipping money changers, daring people to consort with lepers and poor people, posing such a threat to government, they’d had to hang Him as a warning. It made sense to her that as a girl, her image of God Himself had been Ba Nkoloso – round black cheeks, storm clouds of dreaded hair, fearsome flashing eyes. Her image of heaven had been the clouds that he had asked to step out onto during his first flight.

  Did he live in the clouds now? Was he looking down upon her from up there? She could hear his booming voice. Back straight! Eyes up! A luta continua! You squandered your whole life on that dead man Godfrey! What has become of my Star Afronaut? What has become of the Matha I knew? And what has become of her daughter?

  * * *

  When Lee Banda’s son started pitching up at the One Hundred Years Clinic next door to RIP Beds & Coffins, Jacob was puzzled. UNZA students did not intersect with compound residents unless they were reaching through car windows to trade kwacha for packets of fruit or Christmas ornaments. They might look each other in the eye, comfortably touch hands and even exchange thanks. But to broach the class barrier beyond this consumers’ pact was rare.

  Was Joseph slumming, enjoying the low life on the low down? Like father, like son. One of Jacob’s few satisfactions in life was that Dr Lionel Banda was finally dead. He wasn’t about to resurrect him by resenting this skinny, yellow boy, his ugliness spiced now with pimples.

  But then Joseph started showing up at the woodyard itself. Ba Godfrey had managed to build RIP Beds & Coffins into a small enterprise, collecting scraps from the woodyards in Kalingalinga and knocking them into items of furniture that he sold on the side of the road. Returning from a meeting with the General in New Kasama one day, Jacob found Joseph sharing a joint with the old man under the mopane.

  ‘Bwana,’ said Jacob to his grandfather.

  ‘Mwana,’ said Ba Godfrey. ‘This one is Joseph. He works at the clinic.’

  Joseph coughed and woozily tilted his head up. ‘Have we met?’

  Jacob ignored him and reached down to pluck the joint from his fingers, then sucked on it so fiercely it singed his lips. He handed it back, holding the smoke in his lungs and sipping out a question to his grandfather – ‘Has. The. General’s. Driver. Come?’

  ‘Not today,’ Ba Godfrey said. ‘But stay, comrade. We are discussing politics!’

  Jacob sauntered off with a backhanded wave. He was not in the mood for his grandfather’s chatter about the good old days of Marxist revolution in Zambia.

  Evidently Joseph was, however, because he started coming by every other day on his way to and from the hovel at the back of the clinic, where he and Musadabwe were doing god-knows-what with chickens and prostitutes. Joseph didn’t seem very serious about it. He mostly hung about RIP, smoking weed, calling Ba Godfrey ‘God’, and peppering Jacob with questions about his drone project.

  It was not going well. Jacob had been experimenting with different drone models, trying to figure out the best ones to shrink
down to miniature size. He purchased them online with the Standard Chartered bank card the General had given him, picking up the shipping boxes from the DHS off Makishi Road. But after nearly a year of work, RIP Beds & Coffins looked like a robot graveyard. Compound kids snuck in at night to strip the corpses, stealing metal and plastics to model little vehicles, just like the ones Jacob had once made in the Auto Department. Those old toys and these new ones – they were not so different. Except that Jacob not only had to make his look good enough to sell to bazungu, he had to make them fly, too.

  He was running out of ideas. The websites on small drones were all geared towards research in universities or the military. With his limited reading skills, he could just about follow the findings – automated flight, hovering capacity – but he could not replicate them. He ordered more parts but they were stiff and heavy. His drones ceased to lift altogether, skittering in vain on the overturned oil drum in the woodyard. It was his too-heavy chopper all over again.

  * * *

  Sylvia had stopped eating. It had been a gradual process. She started with medicine. Dr Musadabwe had hunted her down to No. 74. Just to see how she was doing, he’d said. Matha was at the market, so Sylvia let him in, suppressing her distaste for his skew afro and his stained lab coat and his threadbare stethoscope peeling like a snake’s skin.

  She had always hated the look in Dr Musadabwe’s eyes when he examined her. It was not strictly clinical. It wanted something from her. Not sex or money. Data. She shrank from him. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. She refused the ARVs he offered, suspecting he would switch the pills with the ones he and Lee had conjured in that shack at the back of their clinic or the ones they had given her to ease the side effects.

  Once she gave up medicine, it wasn’t so hard to give up food. The resurgence of pain helped. It gripped her here and there over the course of the day, like an animal leisurely clenching its jaws around her body parts, its teeth puncturing her skin centimetre by centimetre, skewering her organs at the rate of a shadow’s creep.

  In this state of suspended agony, food was a distant notion, a wait, what did I forget? on the edge of the mind. Sometimes Sylvia would smell food or glimpse it – she might see a boy pass by the window with an ice lolly painting his lips blue – and wonder: do I want? But after a moment, she would snuggle right back into the clutter of her aching bones knowing the answer. Nakana. I don’t want.

  * * *

  Jacob was taking a nap under the mopane one day when Joseph strolled up with a cocky grin and tossed a sheaf of paper at his feet. It landed with a smack and sent up a waft of dust. Before Jacob could speak, Joseph squatted down and made his case.

  ‘I know, you’ve got this. But listen, this article is about the exact thing you’re trying to make, and’ – he held up a finger – ‘it’s only available online through UNZA.’

  ‘Futsek, man,’ said Jacob. He tipped his head back against the tree and closed his eyes. He heard Joseph walk away. A few minutes later, a voice woke him up.

  ‘Foolish muntu. Where is your solidarity?’

  He opened his eyes. Ba Godfrey was standing over him, licking the edge of a new joint.

  ‘With that ka coloured? Ach, bashikulu, please.’

  ‘You’re going to chop off his head for having a drop of white blood? He’s trying to help.’

  Ba Godfrey walked off without offering Jacob a hit from the joint, which was the old man’s version of a slight. Jacob picked up the article that Joseph had printed out for him. It had grown warm in the sun and black ants were crawling all over it, as if its letters had come to life. Jacob shook them off and slowly paged through it, trying to understand the complex words. He could barely make sense of the title: Challenges Facing Future Micro-Air-Vehicle Development. He squeezed his left fist and his new Digit-All Bead needled deliciously in his grip.

  Jacob had been beaded a couple of weeks earlier, wearing his cleanest clothes and dabbing cologne behind his ears and marching into the shop at Arcades as if he weren’t currently sleeping at a woodyard in Kalingalinga. Reckoning it was part of his technological research, he had used drone funds to pay for a full package: a Bead in his middle fingertip, a wrist speaker, and a permanent tattoo of conductive ink on the back of his hand. It had been worth it just to see the look on Joseph’s face when he showed him – at least until Joseph had trumped him by explaining its mechanics to Ba Godfrey. Jacob grimaced. The guy was smart.

  Jacob took the article and strode over to Ba Godfrey and Joseph, who were languidly chatting over the joint. He sat on a rock nearby and waited for a pause in their conversation.

  ‘We’re transforming the genes in the immune cells,’ Joseph was saying. ‘And that can cause a kind of butterfly effect. So the immune system might be attacking the skin cells, their melanin production. Skin conditions are often caused by autoimmune reactions and—’

  ‘Auto-what?’ Jacob interrupted.

  ‘Autoimmune.’

  Jacob rifled through the article in his hands. ‘Is that the same as—’ He held it out and pointed at a word on a page towards the end. Joseph leaned forward to read.

  ‘Autophagous? No, that means – hey!’ He looked up. ‘You read it?’

  ‘I can read,’ Jacob said indignantly. ‘A bit. But what does it mean? Auto like a car?’

  ‘No, like automatic – on its own. Autophagous is something that eats itself.’

  ‘Cannibalising,’ said Ba Godfrey with a wise nod.

  ‘Eh,’ Joseph bounced his head side to side. ‘More like self-cannibalising.’

  ‘It is talking about eating why?’ Jacob persisted. ‘Is this article not about drones?’

  ‘It’s—’ Joseph scanned the paragraph. ‘The microdrone can use its own body for fuel.’

  ‘But if it eats itself…’ Jacob shook his head. ‘Will it not be gone?’

  ‘I guess.’ Joseph frowned. ‘Maybe it’s using up just one part of its body. Or’ – he grinned – ‘maybe the drones eat each other.’

  ‘Eh-heh!’ Ba Godfrey released a plume of smoke. ‘Cannibalising!’

  He reached the joint back to the boys. But Joseph was translating in earnest now, Jacob sitting beside him, pointing at the words he didn’t know.

  * * *

  Sometimes Sylvia would open her eyes to a blur stomping around, giving off a salty spray of words. What was her mother going on about? Oh, the smell. Sylvia had been using an old pot as a bedpan, too weak to make it to the latrines. How far she had fallen from her grand adventure as Lionel Banda’s scientific breakthrough.

  When the salon had burned down, he had taken her away with him, flown her all over the world. He had wined her in Paris, dined her in Shanghai, turning the Virus conference circuit into a bizarre medical honeymoon, a celebration of the Lusaka Patient. It was a thrilling title – her very genes were one of a kind – but an anonymous one. She had been probed and prodded, fed an endless assortment of pills, her insides like a jar of Smarties.

  After his wife had divorced him for passing The Virus to her and their new child, Sylvia had thought things might change. In the end, Lee had left her to rot in that house in Northmead, while he went off and married some Ethiopian diplomat, just for the money, he’d said, just to sponsor his precious vaccine research. If that was the case, Sylvia had asked, then why was his new wife so pretty? No matter. Now he was dead. Now she was dying.

  Why had Loveness not come? Sylvia could almost see her friend smacking her lips: When did you give up, Syls? When did you become so sad? Sylvia closed her eyes. I’m not sad, she thought as pain lackadaisically crunched into her back. I’m angry.

  * * *

  Armed with new knowledge, Jacob focused on addressing the main challenges that Joseph’s microdrone article described – flight dynamics, energy conservation and navigation. He bought flexible solar strips for the wings, splurged on lithium batteries, experimented with laser sensors.
He felt like he was nearing his goal but months of false starts had bled the Standard Chartered account dry. Truth be told, the Digit-All Bead he had bought for himself had been a stolen mbasela too far. He tried his grandfather first.

  ‘After littering this sacred ground of manual labour with your electronical rubbish, you come and ask for money?’ Ba Godfrey returned to shaving his plank of wood.

  Jacob pleaded. All he needed was K5,000 – he was sure this lightweight lithium battery the Russians had just put on the market would work – but Ba Godfrey interrupted him, pointing at the skeletons of drones around them, berating him for his wasted effort.

  Just then, Joseph walked across the yard towards them.

  ‘I’ll lend you the money,’ he said smugly.

  Hope rose in Jacob’s chest like a kite but pride tangled its string and held it.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not take money from a Banda.’

  Jacob walked off, making his way to No. 74. Gogo did not have much kwacha stored in her filing cabinet, and he didn’t go by her home often these days. But he was out of options. He found his mother sitting alone at the table, swaying slightly. She looked up and greeted him with a vague smile. He sat down across from her and nudged the plate of cold lunch towards her.