‘Nakana,’ she said and tried to stand, then collapsed back into her chair.
‘You need to see a doctor.’
‘Had enough of doctors, thank you,’ she tittered, then broke into a cough.
‘A real doctor,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Not that charlatan.’
‘Who? Lee?’ she smiled. ‘Shame. No, but he tried.’
‘This medicine he gave you – it did not even work. He was testing you. Like an animal.’
‘Maybe it could have worked. I stopped using it.’
‘That family,’ he fumed. ‘They take everything away from us.’
‘Not everything.’
‘Your house,’ he raised his fingers one by one as he listed, ‘your body, your job—’
‘My job?’ A laugh rippled through her and she winced.
‘Did he give you any money from his Virus vaccine? Did you get any proceeds?’
‘No,’ she shrugged and scratched a dark patch on her cheek.
He shook his head. ‘You were just another lab rat.’
‘No,’ she frowned. ‘I was the only one with both mutations. I was The Lusaka—’
The door opened. It was Gogo, dripping tears, carrying bags of vegetables.
Jacob stayed for supper. It was the first meal these three Mwambas had ever shared together. It was very quiet. His mother barely touched the food. Gogo furiously snatched hers into her mouth. But they somehow coordinated their movements – his mother reaching wordlessly and Gogo handing her what she wanted; Jacob pouring more water in Gogo’s cup the moment it was empty; his mother adding just the right touch of salt to Jacob’s meat. The air between them was tender when darkness fell. Gogo insisted that he stay the night.
Jacob had just achieved a restless sleep on the floor when a spasm in his hand woke him up. He switched his Bead to torch mode, cupping his hand to shield its brightness. It took him a while to see it because was it was nearly inside the light coming from his middle finger – a red bump next to his Bead. A mosquito bite. It must have interfered with the circuit. He clicked his Bead on and off, trying to still the zinging feeling, but it lingered, pulsing from the centre of his palm. He lay back down and closed his eyes and there it was. The key.
The Challenges Facing Future Micro-Air-Vehicle Development had to be considered all together. Jacob ran through them in his head. Flight: drone propellers were too stiff to account for the strange ways that air flows at such a small scale. Power: the balance of weight and energy had to be just right – the energy source for a microdrone could not be too heavy. Navigation: weight was also a problem here – the camera or lasers that would allow the microdrone to ‘see’ couldn’t be too bulky. Could there be one solution for all of these problems?
The article had called this multifunctionality, but he hadn’t understood what that meant until now. He had thought of it like a Bead, which you pressed in different ways for various functions – one tap for on and off, two to make it a torch, and so on. But this was more like the splayed network of nerves in his hand or the meal the three Mwambas had shared tonight, separate yet connected, synchronised.
He clicked his Bead on, crooked his left middle finger, and opened the Diagram app. With his right index finger, he drew over his palm, making a sketch on the virtual sheet. When he was finished, its lines were shaking because his hand was. It was the blueprint of a wing. Now he just needed money to make a new prototype.
* * *
They made the exchange in the ‘lab’ behind the clinic. Jacob had thought he would resent it but it felt good to watch Lionel Banda’s son hand over a thick wad of kwacha, cool and smooth as skin. Jacob counted out the bills twice. He barely paid attention to the contract or to Joseph’s contorted words about the difference between experimenting on animals and people. Jacob felt that everything was coming to him now, everything that was owed.
He took a taxi to the New Kasama house a few days later. He hadn’t been there in months, dodging the General. But now that he had good news to report, the General was out of town. Like teenagers without a chaperone, the guards were clustered around an mbaula, getting wasted and watching YouTube on their Beads, rifles in a casual heap like a woodpile. Solo sat alone in a corner, his eyes locked on something a centimetre away from his face, or a centimetre inside it.
Jacob found Pepa outside by the pool. She was wearing an emerald bikini and a big straw hat, and was rubbing sunscreen into her pale freckled belly. He had heard the rumour from the General’s driver but he only believed it when he saw her stomach protruding like a watermelon. It was almost familiar – malnutrition had distended it back when she was a compound kid – but now it had a seam running down it, as if she might unzip any second. He pulled up a stool and sat beside her, watching her hand making mesmeric circles over her skin.
‘Christian is somewhere there,’ she said, pointing at the house. ‘General is gone. Big business in Dar.’ She raised an eyebrow and for a second, she was Pepa again, his cheeky friend.
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘I will wait here with my own big business.’
‘And what is that?’ she smirked.
‘I have done it,’ he announced. ‘I have the microdrone. It will be the smallest one ever.’
‘Oh-oh?’ she said and reached under her lounger for her drink. ‘Took you long enough.’
Jacob scraped his stool close enough to smell the coconut of her sunscreen. He clicked his Bead on and stretched his left palm out to show her. It was hard to see in the sunlight, so he cupped his right hand over it and drew it to her face, as if they were kids and he was showing her a grasshopper. She peered inside the little cave at the picture of the wing glowing there.
‘I call it Moskeetoze.’ He spelled it out carefully.
‘Why not just Moskee-to?’
Jacob had stolen the idea from nature. Insect wings are flexible but they have a built-in web of nerves, veins and arteries – this makes them stiff enough to flap. The nerves transmit signals for the wing to stroke and bend, which reduces drag. The veins and arteries carry blood – energy. The wing also has tiny hairs that help the insect navigate through touch. To make his microdrone, he would replace blood with fuel, nerves with circuits, and the tiny hairs with antennae that would brush the planes of the world and send Wi-Fi signals to the cloud – and to other microdrones. Together, Moskeetoze would move in concert, and if they ran low on energy, one could be sacrificed for fuel. It would be a swarm that ate itself once in a while to stay afloat.
‘I’m impressed, Engineer,’ said Pepa.
‘Ya,’ he grinned. ‘It’s fly, right?’
They breathed, eyes locked. He looked away first and saw the copper hairs curling out from the sides of her green bikini bottom. He clicked his Bead off and put his hands in his lap to conceal his erection. She smiled and picked up her drink, which was spitting softly.
‘Malawi shandy?’ she murmured. She reached it towards him. They both knew she was daring him to remove his hands from his lap. He took the glass from her hand and the hat from her head and put both on the ground. Then he grasped her face – her ear strangely cold under his palm – and kissed her. She kissed back readily, darting her sugary tongue into his mouth. She smiled against his lips to break away.
‘And in my condition,’ she chided and squirmed in her seat. There was a pause as they both remembered the General. ‘You are going to make us so rich, Engineer.’ She smiled sadly as she put her big straw hat back on.
* * *
It turned out there was no need to build a prototype. The General brought the men in suits to the New Kasama house – three Chinese, one Zambian, one American – and sat them around a table with Jacob. Jacob explained the wing design as slowly and clearly as he could. The five men whispered to each other, nodding tersely. A short while later, the General slid a piece of paper in front of him – the second contract Jacob had received this wee
k. Jacob scrawled his name on it and the General handed him an envelope of cash. It was enough to live on for years.
They celebrated outside by the pool, which looked greensilver under the security lights. Jacob, Solo and Pepa smoked cigarettes and swilled Malawi shandies and danced to rumba, Pepa cackling as she held her big belly with her hands and circled her hips beneath it. She and Jacob exchanged vibrating glances all night and eventually snuck behind a bush to tangle fingers and lips, sending a surge into the throbbing knot at the centre of his body.
Hours later, when he got back to Kalingalinga and stumbled over to RIP to give Ba Godfrey the news, he saw Joseph walking out of the clinic, a bulky sack over his shoulder. Jacob was about to step forward and offer to pay the loan back when Joseph tripped and fell, the sack flying off him. Jacob was still thrumming with tipsiness, with the brush of Pepa’s lips, the grip of the General’s handshake. His muscles felt taut and alive. This strength seemed somehow correlated to Joseph’s weakness. So rather than offering Joseph a hand up, Jacob found himself jumping him instead, wrestling with him until they were locked in a sweaty grip.
Jacob let go first and stood, smacking the dust off his thighs. Joseph was still on the ground, chuckling feebly. Jacob looked away. Across the woodyard, Ba Godfrey was sitting at the base of the mopane, watching them, a queer look on his face. Jacob walked over to his grandfather, navigating around a new chicken coop and a queen-sized bed. A freshly made coffin was standing on its end beside its maker.
‘Shani, bwana,’ Jacob said with a sloppy grin. ‘And who is that one for?’
* * *
No. 74 was electric with weeping. It seemed every woman in the compound had gathered there, their arms in the air, fingers trilling to what sounded like a sermon. Jacob pushed his way through the throng, urged forward by something less than love and more than curiosity. He had a desperate wish to see the body and believe. But when he managed to get through, a woman was blocking his view. She stood stock-still, holding a Bible open under the glare of the bare bulb, reading out from it in a hoarse shout. The words she spoke were unfamiliar and she threshed them out quickly, as if they tasted bad:
…locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold and their faces were as the faces of men and they had hair as the hair of women and their teeth were as the teeth of lions and they had breastplates as it were breastplates of iron and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle and they had tails like unto scorpions and there were stings in their tails…
The woman reading was short and round and dark. Her chitambala was halfway off, her grey afro in disarray, and her chitenge drooped low on her hips. Her eyes and mouth stretched wide as she poured forth her torrent of words. But what was most shocking – and the reason Jacob didn’t recognise his gogo at first – was that her face was completely dry. And that was how he knew, that was why he believed. Sylvia Mwamba was dead and Matha Mwamba had stopped crying. Just like that.
Can mosquitoes and humans live peacefully together, can we forge an uneasy truce? Hover around each other enough and symbiosis sets in. Over moons, you’ll grow immune, and our flus will move through you – a mild fever and maybe a snooze. This balance can even come to your rescue, defend you against rank intruders. As Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe once said, the lowliest creature, the tiny udzudzu, is what kept the imperialists at bay!
Thus when the whites first swooned to the tropics, they saw that the blacks never fell: the raging calenture that gripped the bazungu passed over the huts of the bantu. This place was The White Man’s Grave. But it wasn’t bad lands that caused their downfall – it happened on the seas as well. They say La Amistad’s crew caught a fever, while the black mutineers were spared it. Was it African skin or sweat? It was neither. It was us, and a matter of time.
Reckon the wars, how a battleground festers: the British armies in the American South, the Japanese in the Pacific. Even the fall of the Roman Empire was due in part to our diseases. In every case, the nature of grace is that one side is simply more used to us. Call it invasion or world exploration: either way, it upsets this balance.
Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to befalls on either side of this blade. The social contract or individual free will; the walls of a commune must keep us close or capital must run rampant. That’s how you froze your long Cold War, with this endless, mindless divide.
Our essence is somewhere between or besides. We flee but our flight is unruly and tangled, a haphazard hover, a swarm. We loiter a lot but we move over time, we do best when we choose to meander. Come and go, nor fast nor slow, but at a peripatetical pace. Be open to float over land and sea, beneath the communal sky, a throng, a flock, a sly murmuration – is this perhaps the solution?
Jacob’s design might achieve this in time: a latticework drifting in tandem. But in the hands of those who are power disposed, what becomes of this socialish network?
Naila
2019
Lake Malawi at sunset. The sun was melting into the water, a simmering pot of gold. Twelve-year-old Naila sat in the sand, wearing her mother’s old swimming costume. It was brown with little orange rectangles and fastened with safety pins to fit her slim hips and flat chest. Mother sat beside her, legs stretched out, green veins like tangled seaweed in her pale skin. Mother crossed her ankles and laced her toes, fitting one set into the interstices of the other, her best and only trick.
Gabriella and Contessa and Lilliana got up from their half-built sandcastle and ran towards the lake, hand in hand. At the shore, they dawdled and shrieked as the waves slurped up their toes and spat them out again. The wind dimpled the water. The girls splashed in and now Naila was with them. They floated on the rocking lake, their faces up to the glowing sky. They sank together, crossed legs for anchors. Tea party. Pinkies jutting, hands arcing, they sipped from invisible cups. Bubbles rose, stringing their lips to the air, necklaces losing their pearls.
Naila was alone underwater. A pin on her swimming costume popped open, hammocked down, nestled among the rocks. It glinted astral down here, but it would be dull metal once she pulled it out of the water. She reached for it, but it was too far away and then she couldn’t move, her foot was caught. A pressure on top of her head, a hand, pushing her down, holding her under—
* * *
Naila gasped awake. Mother. She shivered. The air in the plane was so cold and brittle, it just might crack with the right kind of tapping. Tapping. Someone was tapping on the lavatory door a few rows behind her. With a small whine like an inhalation, the door buckled open. The familiar smell of sugary soap and alien fart. Then the smell of shit, wide and deep.
‘Yikes, right?’ said the man next to Naila with an incredulous smile.
Oh no. She had already weathered a nine-hour flight and a four-hour layover. This second leg of the journey would be only six hours, but she was exhausted. The man in the middle seat hadn’t been too bad so far, as far as flight companions go. Minimal fumbling, elbows politely retracted inside the armrests, a scent dominated by toothpaste, and blessedly quiet – until now.
She entered the conversation reluctantly. He was of Indian descent too, but they both spoke English, hesitant to broach language differences, which immediately convey class ones. She told him her name, about Zambia and its weather – ‘still so mild, even with The Change?’ he asked – and that she had just graduated from uni. He told her his name, which passed right through her head, and that he was an accountant for Cadbury Chocolate UK – he handed her a shiny purple business card. He was on his way to meet his bride for the first time.
‘The first time?’ A twenty-first-century arranged marriage. This should be interesting.
‘Yeah.’ He leaned in t
o speak confidentially. He had lowered his standards a little because he really wanted a good woman. Naila’s eyebrow lifted. His fiancée currently worked for a phone bank in Chennai. Once they married, she could work as an administrative assistant for his father’s garage in Birmingham. She’ll adjust really well. Everyone in England had been shocked by his choice, especially his mates. His previous girlfriends had been flashier. More stylish.
‘I’ll show you.’ He pulled out an Android – their Digit-All Beads had to remain off for the duration of the flight. ‘So this is when we arranged things.’ He swept a photo off the screen. ‘And this is now. Not bad, right? More modern. She’s cut her hair and now she dresses, you know…’
He glanced at Naila to ascertain whether she did, in fact, know how modern Indian girls dressed these days, but her own fashion sense was currently hidden under a heap of aeroplane blankets. She felt seen, nonetheless, with her short, metallic haircut. She subtly fingered a pimple on her chin, which was surely a creamy button by now. She looked back at the Cadbury man’s phone, at his future wife. The woman’s expression looked more forgiving than camera-happy: Okay, just one more.
The meal began and the Cadbury man put his phone away. The carts trundled down the aisles, model-hot airline attendants explaining the options even though the passengers had already received a printed card menu in English and Arabic. Their row had already been served when Naila remembered that she had to take her birth-control pill. She reached awkwardly under her loaded tray table for her rucksack and pulled out the packet with its telltale calendar. The Cadbury man didn’t seem to notice – he was busy ploughing into his chicken masala.
She took her pill with the water from the cupcake container, feeling a Pavlovian twinge of nausea. Morning sickness. How odd that the pill prevents pregnancy through trickery, making your body believe it’s already pregnant. Like how vaccines use inactive cells to jumpstart the immune system. Or how she used to give Daddiji the TV remote with the batteries missing – only when it sat useless in his hand would he give in to his drowse, leaving Naila and her sisters free rein over the channels. Silly Daddy. Naila patted her womb. Silly body. She glanced at the Cadbury man, but he was eating his chocolate and raspberry fool, his eyes on his screen – the flashes over his face implied an action film. Why did she care what he thought of her? Was it just because he was attractive?
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