Blue Light

On Saturday night, when the rest of our clan leave their homes to hunt down the yellow and red lights of a young city on a weekend night, the four of us, Kaijenga, Awana, Rom and myself turned down another direction. Wa had said that he knew where we should find another light. A pale blue light. And we followed him. There are people like that: when you put people like us next to people like that, we slip from ranks adjacent to them into files behind them.  We spilled out of a taxi on the edge of the fine blacktop and let the van curve back towards the towers of the city, and we dove after him into the narrow, crooked, cracked mudroads into the slums. Ragged walls and rusty tin and rotting planks, deeper and deeper into the slums.

It was darker here at this hour than it would be uptown, and the flashes that were caught in the slimy puddles beneath our sneakers were fugitive; they darted away from our eyes as we approached. We padded through with our puffy sneakers firmer than the ground and Kai laughed. Tuli mu ghetto! he proclaimed.

I felt no mirth. I felt the smokiness of the darkness and smelt something wild that was loose and free that should not be. I treaded hard but felt I should not because I felt that we must be walking over graves, if not of men, then of things men had held dear before they laid them down here and turned away from them.

We turned out of the black alleys and found ourselves in a street, patches of tarmac. Painted walls blazing white and yellow, blasted by crisscrossing beams of lamplight from two shopfronts on either side of the street. I asked Wa if this was where we were going.

He said no. This light was dull green if it was not this cruel white. The walls broke into cracks and pockmarks and urine stains darkened their bases. A child ran out of one doorway and vanished into a shard of shadow on the other side of the street. He was so small. He was followed by another child.

Who is this who lets a child be awake at this time, sneered Rom.

Rom was tall and his shoulders were always hunched. His head stuck out of his collar like a spaceship finding escape velocity. We did not sneer back at the vanity of this statement, the idea that Rom could make such a statement only because he had no children of his own and therefore could so freely scoff at others for making mistakes he did not have the capacity to make himself.

Wa walked to the shop the child had emerged from to get some cigarettes. I asked the burly woman within for a juicebox of Splash. She looked at us with nothing in her eyes until she saw Kai and Rom and then she resented us. I should tell you that Kai and Rom wore glasses. Maybe I was just seeing things– the slums were bearing on me in a way– but I always fear this about poor people, that they are angry at me for not being as poor, that they hate the things I have because they hate the things they don’t have and that is the only way they can feel about me.

Glasses are expensive. If she was short sighted, she would never see us the way we see her.

Kai sniggered at my juicebox.  He had wanted me to buy liqour. Wa said we would find plenty once we found the right light. We walked on.

Until we landed at the end of the street and there was a low hovel. We crouched through the doorway and into the light from a single bulb burning morosely from a low ceiling. We walked through the small room and out again from the other side into a tiny courtyard that was hemmed on all four sides with wooden benches. We sat down, and were followed by a tiny woman in a leso and a headscarf. She laid four glasses in front of us and laid two coca cola bottles of clear liquid next to them.

The silver angel. I had heard of her. The silver angel who said Dance With Me.

Wa, grinning, spilt a drop onto the wood on the bench next to him and then lit a matchstick. He dropped it onto the bench and a blue flame sprung upwards. He grinned again, this time right at us.

A Guy Gets A Call From His Best Friend’s Girlfriend. She Asks Him To Do Her A Favour

It was a weak morning, it was the reason I hate waking up before eight. The sun climbing with weary effort up the black hills of Mengo, nudging into a grey sky streaked with long, thin clouds. It made me think of lines of vomit in a puddle outside a bar after a storm. I hate waking up before eight. I don’t want to see this crap.

The Caldina hummed sedately, switching to a calm purr on corners as we rolled down empty roads into the curves and valleys of Nateete. We had given up on small talk, Desire and I. I had tried, but my early
morning sullenness was too heavy to lift off with just a couple of flippant remarks and that perkiness of hers that I had come to expect was completely absent.
There had been a trace of it when I arrived at The Agency (forgive me; I didn’t bother to get its name) hugging my shoulders and frowning.
The cab driver who brought me, totally insensitive to my irritable state, had turned on that station I hate, and I had been buffeted by Country music all the way from Nateete. She was already seated in the passenger seat of her car. She leaned
out and waved me over.
“Christopher, baambi, I’m so glad you could do this for me…” she had began to say.
“Chris,” I interrupted curtly. Then, realizing that that might have sounded rude, added, “I mean, no problem. I don’t have much else to do.”
What followed were large gaps of silence that sounded even wider because of the sharp smallness of the peaks of words that separated them.

“It’s a cold morning.”
“Yeah. I think the rains are coming.”
“Yeah.”

“You should have brought a sweater.”
“I know.”

“Really chilly.”

Desire didn’t like silence, and I did think of lifting myself up out of my funk to get into some sort of conversation, but then it was six thirty in the morning. Fuck that.
“Where are we going?” I asked, fingering the keys, tapping the levers and gears and pedals, getting a feel of the car. And I could feel her shrink when she said, “You know the place in Nateete called Ewomusawo?” after she said that, I could sense her retreat into herself. As if those words just turned the lights off.

I don’t like driving. I never quite got the instincts to kick in, so I had to be alert all the time. I drove on edge, always sure that I will be focusing on the wrong thing, and neglecting the other thing and that is when some kid will run into the road in front of me and make us both a statistical inevitability. I drove with both hands clinging to the wheel as if I was hanging off it, my eyes darting all over the road, the hair on the back of my neck pricking through my shirt collar. At the end of any trip I would be exhausted.
I don’t talk when I’m driving, and I don’t think of anything else apart from the task at hand. I cannot escape the awareness that I am pushing tons of potential death. I focus keenly.
I knew where Ewo’musawo was. Desire emerged from the humming silence to say, “Turn in here,” as soon as the junction appeared.

I swung the car into a brief spell of tarmac that gave way to a deeply rutted and gulleyed stretch of dirt road. Easier to relax on these, because you have to move slower. This one was worse than most, though, and the car had to virtually assume its quadruped nature and creep, step, climb and clamber over trenches and ditches and humps to move
ahead. Eventually we wound round a corner, past the only really flat surface since we got off the road—a few metres square of mud pounded down to make the football pitch of a primary school—and round a concrete wall to a row of silent doors adjacent to windows painted green. Musawo means doctor. This row of rooms was three small clinics, a tiny lab, and a dispensary. That is why they called the place that. A lot of times I have been to places like this, where huge wide areas take their name from one small specific corner, and never ever got to the actual source of the name.

There was a time a while ago, when I used to come to Nateete frequently. I was curious about marijuana, and there was a guy around here who could hook us up. It was just about a month of weekends, then I decided that the high wasn’t worth the tricks my memory played, and I stopped my trips to the suburb. But I remembered the name of this part of Nateete. Ewo’musawo. This was the first time I was actually seeing the doctors’.

I parked. Desire sighed heavily and looked at the buildings. The dirty walls, the rusty tin roofs, the dirt pathway with dust settled and still in the weak light looked extremely sad. She sighed again. And that is when I finally woke up from the morning languor, and snapped out of my driving tension and realized that I had driven her to a clinic hidden in Nateete at a quarter past six in the morning. She was going to have an abortion.

She didn’t even look at me. Her gaze fixed on the long corridor between the clinics and their wall, in contrast to the rest of the compound, it was shining and clean, freshly mopped. She said, “It will be like an hour,” she said.
I didn’t know what to reply.

“Okay,” I said. She inhaled deeply as if sucking in strength to move, and shoved herself out of the car. As she walked down the corridor I saw her reflected beneath herself in the shiny cement floor.

The sky was open and the sun was now bright but I felt as if a storm
had just fallen right on top of my head. Had she tricked me or had she trusted me? Had she been manipulating me or had she really, truly just turned to me for help? I could almost see streams of blood flow down that corridor. I got out
of the car and walked quickly out of the compound. In panic. I didn’t want to be seen there.

I walked through Nateete’s ugly paths, its ragged scattered bush and its clusters of weed and wild grass, its guttered pathways, the still rivers of deep green crud flowing beneath slum houses, stinking in the rising heat. I saw pregnant goats and dirty naked babies with bald heads scuttling from one hovel to another, young women with old eyes bent over basins and saucepans looking up from their work at me with my Nike sneakers and sunglasses. I stepped over the goat shit and squinched my nose when the smell of frying cassava mixed with the smell from the rivers of sewage. And I saw that the world was so much larger than my own life.

When I returned to the clinic, I found Desire already in the car. She was lying in the back seat, her feet folded together up to her stomach. Her eyes shut. I climbed into the drivers seat. I didn’t want to wake her. She wasn’t asleep. She got up as soon as she heard me at the door and by the time I was in the seat, she was sitting upright.

I looked into the rear view mirror and saw her rubbing her head. Silence would have been more natural now, but I had to ask.
“Does he know?”
She continued to rub her temples. Not as if there was pain, just in the way you do when you need to do something to the thoughts in your mind. “I can’t tell him.”
Now I also grasped my head. She got out of the back of the car and held her belly lightly as she opened the passenger seat. She got in and I could see her eyes were swimming.
“I would have preferred not to be involved in this, Desire,” I said. “You could have hired a cab to bring you…”
“You’re his friend. That is why I asked you,” she said.
“You think that because you couldn’t have him here you could have me and that will make it alright?”
She flared up suddenly. “Look, it’s my body. It’s not his and it certainly isn’t yours, okay?”
“You think that means this won’t hurt him? And now you’ve put me in the middle of it—Desire, I’m going to have to tell him…”
“Don’t!” she snapped. The tears were streaming now. She leant back to catch her breath and gather herself together. “Don’t tell him. Nze I’ll tell him myself. Just take me back. please?”
She curled up tighter and tighter in her seat as we drove, and I know I almost killed five people on the journey back. At the agency I parked, turned off the engine and was set to fly out of the car—I was angry and bewildered and for some reason frightened, but she grabbed my shirt. “Christopher.”
“What.”
“Thanks.”

Drops of Jupiter by Train and Ernest Bazanye

The wind is mean. A mean, dark wind spilling and spiraling over wet ground. It falls against my forearms and neck and temples and brow. I snug my collar closer around me and wince to draw my thoughts away from the fresh memory of my last hit and thoughts of next hit. I’m dreaming in spite of myself … I try to draw my thoughts away but they keep slipping back and I keep looking up to the corner for to see if I shall catch the arrival of the shadow in a trenchcoat with the vials of lies hidden in any of a dozen pockets.

It is the sudden sound of rubber on wet concrete that makes me turn away from the cracked yellow of the dim streetlight. Squelch on ancient pave, squelch over crack, silent as it leaps daintily over a puddle and lands with a smaller sound on the other end, squelch and squelch and it finally arrives. That leap was a small effort for a woman who we know knew could fly. I look up to see the return of my cosmic traveler, who merely grins.

And for all the things she has that she could say she chooses just hi.

She hugs her shoulders closer to herself and she shakes the stardust out of her hair and just says hi.

Of all the things I could say I just say four words. “So, how was it?”

She stops against this wild black wind as a painting does and then nudges my shoulder with her hip and I scoot over because she also doesn’t want to go indoors and she sits down next to me and doesn’t answer my question.

It feels like it always has to be next to her on this perch. I ask again. “How was it? Tell me.”

Did the wind sweep you off your feet? Did you sail across the sun? Did you make it to the milky way and find the lights all faded?

She sighs and a small smile seep slow sad stories. The matron with the lazy eye and the starched white uniform, the grass that never grew, the fruit trees that never bloomed, Neptune with his phantom rings, the moons, all eleven of them, of Jupiter, the asteroid that plummeted straight into the belly of Phobos. There was an orderly with the stutter who suffered so badly and the light of Alpha Centauri was so cold.

Again I turn to the streetlight and my skin itches for that nanosecond of pain. It wants to break, it wants to break to yield to a needle, to suck in the pale juice that destroyed us both.

Mountains crumbled over us every night before they came and took her away.

I look to the streetlight for the arrival of the traitor who looked just like saviors do when he rode up in his trenchoat.

She talks about how white the walls were and how everyone spoke in low voices. The flat plastic beds and the neverending asphalt of the Milky Way.

Tell me, I ask, “Did you miss me?”

Remember the mad rushes of our veins collapsing and the sweet folding in of our spirits before they were unfurled and how the next day our tastebuds were burnt and we could not tell that the soy latte we were sipping was the best one ever and how I took bullets for you before you were bundled into the spaceship and shot into another world called away from me.

Orion blazes and Sirius flashes a signal in the wrong language.

I know that when we hugged her and said we wished her the best, I didn’t. I didn’t want to be left alone, not here. I didn’t want her to come back clean because then it wouldn’t be coming back.

There is another sound. The wind brings it to me. Under the streetlight, boots and the faint clatter of glass against glass. The trenchcoat is here. Before I will close my eyes and surrender and get up and walk over to him and hand him a ball of crumpled notes I ask again that she tells me.

“Did you miss me?”

She sighs again.

“I will,” she says.

Thunder Road.

By Bruce Springsteen and Ernest Bazanye

I nudged the Camry off the road and purred slowly up the clay. I stopped before the gate and turned down the radio and waited. For a while, the chirruping and the whooshing and the faraway cracks and shrieks of a suburban kampalan evening resolved themselves into a distant hum, and the only sound was the bare whisper of Roy Orbinson in the cassette player, singing for the lonely; this is stillness, which sometimes is as good as silence. and it was as he strummed that I heard her screen door slam.

Mary stood on the veranda, suddenly, abruptly present, altering the keel of the whole universe. When she saw me waiting in the car, she did a little dance, striking a little pose to show of the dress.

The moment of frivolity passed and she must have been struck by the thought that we should be hurrying, because she stopped fooling around on the porch and started to skip up to the car. I had never seen Mary skip before. She was a strong woman, tough as she had to be, and she usually moved with the resolute firmness of a hammer. But then she usually wore trousers. The dress was a moment of fancy, perhaps, a what-the-hell-let’s-see, a wink and a nod, a little prank to play on our daily lives, but as I watched the light fabric play around her knees, I couldn’t help but understand exactly what the dress said, and the joke was not funny. It was solemn and staid and it was on us.

The dresses of this fashion; we had first seen a dress like it in a magazine in a shop in Naalya. A smiling blonde extraterrestrial woman from Utopia was wearing it as she swooned into the arms of a perfect Aryan with broad shoulders and a grin made of pure light. We used the page to wrap our chips and chicken.

Now, as the folds swayed around her knees, the scars on her knees (and the long one on her inner left thigh) flashed like sparks and she had to reach down to stem the cloth’s reckless motion.

A new garment, a new gait, the beginning of a new journey. But the same old scars still came with us, the accumulation of all the bitter shit life had done to her, she could not leave behind.

Mary was no Utopian blonde, and I was certainly no broad-shouldered Aryan. I wish I was, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t fly her off to the stars in a shiny spaceship. All I had was this Camry and the promise to take her as far as it would let me go.

She swung the door open with too much energy, slid in and slammed it again the way I kept telling her not to and beamed as if there was never ever going to be anything to worry about ever again. I just got scared. “We’re a bit late,” I said. “We can make it if we hurry,” she said.

I turned the key. The Camry flexed, then chugged and growled. I shifted the gears and we were curling back down the murram hill looking for the road.

I wanted to tell her that this was going to work, that we would hit the city limits and fly down Thunder Road and ride all night and by daybreak we would be where things worked out and everything started out alright and stayed that way and promises were made of steel and nothing could break them, and I know she wanted to hear me say that. But those were words I couldn’t speak. I had already said too many things to her that I should never have said.

Evening breezes threw up dusty clouds; all the boys who had loved her and lost her, their wasted desires turned to ghosts that turned to dust to watch us and bid a forlorn farewell. We said nothing. Roy Orbinson strummed on. Mary’s hand straightened her dress and lay on my shoulder for a moment. Her eyes looked out of the windows at the town whizzing past us. Until we got to the city limits. The sign welcoming those coming here, and the sign saying “come again” to those leaving. I stopped in the middle of the road and sighed. The sun was weak , but I could still see the road stretching before us like a killer in the night.

“I know it’s late,” said Mary, sensing what gripped my heart, “but we can make it.”

I gunned the engine again and we pulled out of the town.

The song Thunder Road is here. Live in Barcelona, solo on the piano.

Pelegrines

There is a young woman at the corner of the street. She shifts her standing posture in a way that shows that she is impatient. Her hair is slicked back and shiny, pulled into a little tail. On her head it seems like every strand has been oiled to perfection. She has four earrings, two in each ear, and a pair of expensive sunglasses pushed up on her head in spite of the night— the watching man can see them glinting in the streetlights and in the occasional lamplight of the cars that roll past to and for.

She shifts posture again. He wonders how at the contrast she makes with the ground she stands on; she is so clean, so smooth, so polished clean. The ground is made of dirt.

Her skirt is tight around the hips and the man knows that to touch it would electrify him to the bone. He smiles slowly to himself.

Pelegrines does not do a roaring business. In a city that loves to drink, places like Pelegrines do not roar. The market prefers other place, places where they can drink for love.

At Pelegrines, you douse your sorrows, moisten them, and cloak them around you like a cold damp rug, and its familiarity imprisons you within its folds.

Two thin grey strings of cigarette smoke slowly wind their way toward the naked red light bulb. They fade as they rise.

The tip of the cigarette glows—a rapid angry glow, with an audible sucking and a crumpling of paper behind it. Fat cheeks with stubble collapse. Quickly, then relax.  Gusts of smoke spill out of the nostrils. The fleshy mouth talks and more smoke escapes among the words. The speaker is fat. His shoulders are broad and hunched. His fat hands have hairy fingers and move in sharp, startled, jerking motions as he speaks. He is loud and speaks with force, as if what he says is urgent and important. There is a woman with him. She receives his onslaught of words with no reaction. Her legs are crossed and her knees catch the light from the red bulb. She watches the speaker with eyes that are the eyes of an older woman. Her hair is braided, her wrist encircled in a bangle and those eyes look like traitors, betraying a disguise; she does not look as young as she is. She weathers the speaker’s urgent words without flinch.

Next to her, a spare dark man, balding about the temples, sits leaning towards the speaker. He wears a black blazer and black trousers. His chin and the lapels of his blazer throw angular shadows onto his chest so it is hard to see what colour his shirt is. It is probably white or beige. It is, he is, indistinct, obscured by an insufficiency of light and succumbs to shadows falling on him from everywhere. He nods and emits monosyllables of affirmation every time the urgent speaker pauses.

The speech is in a language the watching man does not know.

“Eh, Papa, I saw you looking at the young gel who was outside,” a voice draws the watcher’s attention from the table with the two men and the women. It is from a man who has sat next to him.

“Papa, I saw you appreciating. He he!” the man next to him has a bottle, which he sets down next to the watcher’s.

The watcher grins to acknowledge his friend, and to admit that he did, in fact, appreciate.

“Eh, Papa. These young gels. The things they wear: smallo dresses. Tight ones, I tell you!” the man next to the watcher says. He smiles. His smile is broad and his teeth glisten wet in the red light. His eyes glisten too. They are watery.

The watcher renews his grin. “Surely.”

The smiler shifts to a more square position on the stool. He looks out of the door to the place on the corner of the street where the girl had been standing. He shakes his head slowly. “My friend, my friend. I tell you.”

“Surely.” says the watcher. His bottle rises to his mouth again and he sucks.

“They are succulent!” the smiler says, his hands raised as if to hold onto two levitating buttocks. “Juicy and succulent. And I am sure she is also tight and can scream nicely! Ha ha ha!” As he laughs bits of spittle flash out of his mouth.

The watcher laughs along. “Where can we get such, my friend?”

“Papa, for us we cannot get such gels. They are for men with money. Serious men. For us, only old women.”

Together they lapsed into a silence to acknowledge the sadness of this. But it was perfunctory, lacking real regret.

“Me I once had this young gel. She was going to the university…” the smiler begins to say.

“You are deceiving,” comes the reply. But there is no challenge in it. It is said as the delivery of a cue. The smiler picks it up.

“No, you wait. Let me tell you.”  And he shifts in his seat in preparation to launch into the tale.

The smiler is one of those men who are made to tell stories. With his comically round body, his mad shock of hair, he looks like a clown who doesn’t even need make up. He has a strong west-Ugandan accent and a loud gravelly voice, which knows how to trail off, rise and fall and suddenly rise again, at all the right points. His eyes are wild and round, and they dart and startle, then blink, then stare. His mouth can contort into a thousand shapes. He was built to tell stories.

“She was a young gel, from university. She had the buttocks which were round my friend, like two … the Baganda call it ncujju… what is it?”

“Pumpkin,” answered Papa.

“Like two sweet ripe pumokinds, very good. And my friend, she liked the smallo dresses. Always wearing the tight smallo dresses. With the pumokinds in the back and in the front, two breasts like the hills of Kigezi, with the nipplos flashing at you, at me, at everybody!” he spreads his arms wide, to show that it was indeed everybody. Papa chuckles.

“It was when I was still driver at the Ministry of Transport when it was still there.” The Ministry of Transport had since been assimilated into the Ministry of Works and Industry.

“Me, Serapio, I was the driver of the Permanent Secretary!” he says the last two words with emphasis and draws his torso up and forward, the round man’s equivalent of puffing his chest out. “You see me and you think I am a smallo man like these smallo men?  Me, I used to sit with the permanent secretary and we would discuss issues. You should know who I am.

“Now, the permanent secretary knew me very well because, not only did I do office work with him, I also sometimes helped him in personal errands. Like driving his wife and, even, his gel-o-friends. And sometimes…”  a wicked glint in his moist eye, “…I drove his daughter. The one with the ncujju, the pumokinds.

“One day I was going to collect her at Makerere University. The highest centre of learning in Uganda.  I was taking her to her father’s office so that they could travel to the village to make plans for the marital introduction ceremony of her fianch. The one she was saying she was going to marry. I reached the place at Makerere and I found she was not there. I say, wait and I ask her friends. They told me to go and look behind that wall.” Serapio cranes his arm in a complicated twisting gesture to show that the wall was behind a corner. “Then I go behind the wall and I find Susanna. But only Susanna?”

“Who else was there?”

“My friend, can I tell you what I saw?  My old eyes, they failed to close, even though I was seeing thing which was shameful! This young gel and a young boy, and they are ssssucking each other on the mouth. With saliva and noise like nssshoooo! Nssshoooo! And in the open public. They are ssssucking.  It is called kiching mouth. Nsshooo! Nssshhhoooo!”

“Eh? My friend, in public?”

“Okay,” Serapio concedes, “not in the full public. They had tried to hide behind the wall. But where there is no roof, and there is no door for a person to knock and say ‘Can I come in’ before you enter, then it is in the open public.

“I was ashamed my friend. I went back in the car and waited for her. When she finishes kiching, she will come. I sat there my friend, and I sat there thinking.  Now, this gel, educated, and beautiful, and the father is so rich. Moreover and she is going to the marital introduction ceremony of the fianch just next month. And now she has another boy-o-friend. Kiching his mouth in public. These people. You have everything and you throw it all away. I know my friend the permanent secretary if he knew he would be shocked. His pressure would attack and I would have to drive him to hosiptal.”

“But were you planning to tell him?”

“You wait and I tell you. When the gel entered the car she started greeting me, calling me muzeeyi. When every day she was used to ignoring me and behaving as if I am a mere servant only because I am a driver. She came and sat in the front chair. ‘Oh, muzeeyi, how is work?’ she us saying.

“Me I told her stop pretending. That ‘Young gel, you father will be shocked. Pressure will get him and I will have to drive him to the hosiptal.’  ‘But you don’t tell him.’  ‘No. He is my friend. I have to tell him. No.’ “

Serapio’s arms are becoming even more animated now, bouncing around his body to accent his words.

“My friend, the gel was young in her years, but she was old in the appearance. I saw her sitting in the chair with the smallo dress climbing the thighs. And the breasts, they were like the hills of Kigezi!”

Serapio’s round eyes roll maniacally. “I tell you, I am trying to drive but my eyes they are just walking off the road going to her body as if they are having legs!

“The gel is young, but she is old in knowing the things of womanhood. When she saw that I was refusing, she saw that my trousers, my lion was standing. My friend, didn’t she say: ‘Okay, if I allow you to taste, will you promise not to tell?’ He he!”

Serapio looks more shocked than his audience does at this moment, as if this point in the story has just knocked the wind out of him.

“My friend I was -eh! Even me I was going to get pressure that day. I failed to say anything. Only the lion answered. I drove quickly to my shack kazigo and she entered the bed and said, oh my goodness, she said…. ‘Do quickly then. There is no time.’ My friend, Serapio facked the permanent secretary’s daughter! I am not a smallo man like these smallo men. You should fear me! Ha ha ha!”

Serapio claps his hands and laughs. His guffaw, hectic and demanding, swells through the air to join Papa’s laugh, and the laughter of the others who always eavesdropped when Serapio began his stories. The urgent man and the old woman and the shadow-engulfed man also laugh and comment to themselves in that language of theirs.

Serapio wipes the spit from his mouth and the tears from his eyes. “I pierced the ncujju!” he laughs. “When you see me now, why do you think I am a smallo man? I pierced the ncujju of the permanent secretary’s daughter. I am not a smallo man like these smallo men!”

Papa laughs and laughs. He knows Serapio was lying through his large wet teeth, but the lie has been sweet. This was Pelegrines. Beer and lies conspire to defeat the weight of truth.

“I am not a smallo man,” Serapio echoes, and the night, with these words, finds a path along which to stretch towards home. A point at which to start the familiar journey, past the familiar landmarks, towards the inevitable conclusion to which all these nights lead. They will speak and the sounds will be as vapid and insubstantial as the cigarette smoke of the urgent man. They will cloud up the air and the night between them, only to fade as they rise. The men will take drink after drink until, sated, they will decide to part ways, each to head for a different spot in the night to meander through the late, cold night, to what he called home. Until the next time night fell, when they will return to Pelegrines.

That Shop Isn’t There Any More

From The Invisible Man

In my neighhourhood, in the mornings as I head for work, I walk past a dark and dingy shop. It is one of the riddles that came with Museveni’s little economic boom that shops will cluster like this. Each one is identical to the next, none giving you any reason to enter it and not another. But this one shop seems to have missed Museveni. It looks just like all these hollow caves used to look back in the days..

This shop is still cavernous and dark. There is nothing inside. To the left and to the right the shops are crowded with sacks of sugar, flour, rice and other grains, powders and substances no yuppie would be able to identify. Milling around the sacks, falling off shelves, are toothpaste, bread, detergent, headache tablets, bad-tasting squash concentrate, insecticide, light bulbs and margarine. Dangling from strings stretched across the rafters of unceilinged roofs are socks and handkerchiefs and bathing loofahs and safety pins and hair extensions and in the midst of all this cornucopia, struggling to find her way from product to customer, there is a small, pregnant girl with a western Ugandan accent who speaks no English in the right hand shop, and a boisterous, dark boy who should be in school in the left hand shop.

In between them is the cave. With nothing to sell in it. Nothing in it, not even light.

Every morning as I pass by I see the woman who… owns? Just works in? Lives in? the shop. She wears a threadbare, careless busuuti which serves not to adorn or to beautify the wearer. It is just there because going naked would be too much surrender.

She has surrendered. Her skin is the obvious grey-brown that occurs to skin when it was bleached years ago but the bleaching stopped, and the skin was allowed to fall into whatever hue it found most easy to settle into.

Her skin is threadbare and careless and serves not to adorn, or to beautify. She just wears it because she has nothing else to do with it.

Every morning I see the threadbare woman bent over a charcoal stove. I want you to see her too, before I tell you what she does at that stove:

She is flabby and amorphous, shapeless in the way a polythene bag full of shit is shapeless.

It is four o’clock now. I am sitting at my computer naked. Calling people bags of shit.

She is a polythene bag full of some semi-solid and unimportant matter, draped in an old, ugly busuuti and having a head on top. The head is covered with a headscarf, I think. I told you- these things never stay long enough to register, so I cannot recall accurately what it is she has on her head. Maybe it is a hairnet- and beneath the hem you can see what is a rarity in Uganda these days: unsalonned, untreated hair on an adult woman. Little tufts of it stand out from the part beyond the hem of her headgear, malnourished and scanty, like savanna grass.Her flat, broad, grey-brown face has eyes ringed in dark patches. This happens often with skin-bleachers. Is it that the skin under the eyes resists the decoloratives, or that it is extra-sensitive round there and when you apply bleach there the skin gets burnt? Is it these patches that make me see that her eyes hold a deep, deep, ancient sadness? Is such a thing really there, or is my mind just playing tricks on me now, trying to construct a detailed figure out of an image I have only ever glanced at in passing? No, it is there. I never noticed it when I looked at her, but I saw it. And when I remember now, I can see it. Eyes that are deep, old, bottomless wells falling into a soul as cavernous as her shop.

From Run: We made this

I remember when this was a virtual ghost town, empty, dry and deserted. Right after the war. It was fourteen years ago, but it was so bad I can recall like it was yesterday. The shops were empty and their windows were cracked if not smashed and broken. The glass was that translucent grey-blue glass subsides to after a long enough period of neglect. Paint that once advertised the shop’s wares was faded and scratched, so much so that you could no longer tell whether it said “dentist” or “ten percent off”. There was nothing in the windows anyway. Just sagging wood shelves, curving under the weight of their own emptiness.And there were potholes all over the main road. Roads all over the city were more hole than flat surface. Drivers had learnt to swerve and steer round to avoid the jutting islands of tarmac. The tarmac had become a nuisance. Electricity poles stood in line like rows of decrepit crosses, beyond useless, as if the bodies that had been crucified on them had long rotted away. The poles were standing sentinels of deadness. No electricity, no life coursed through them. I remember when there were no traffic jams because all the cars were lined up at a petrol station for their meagre ration. I remember when nights in the city were dark because there were no neon signs commanding us to buy things, when there was nothing to buy and even if there was, there was no one to buy it. We were all broke.I remember when nights in the city were silent because no one in their right mind wanted to be outside their homes after sundown, when the nights in the city were silent except for the occasional gunshot.I never thought we would ever become this.

I walk pavements up to the zebra crossing and wait for rude and pompous drivers in luxury saloon cars to pass so that I can walk again, across the firm and permanent tarmac of Kampala Road. All around me there are people talking to each other in loud, boisterous voices, arguing, joking, haranguing, talking on cellular phones about how expensive life is these days, because it doesn’t occur to them to think how much better it is than the days when life was cheap. Baseball caps, sunglasses, brightly-coloured neckties flash all around me. Across the road I see Greenland Towers, where there is a long reflective glass window. There used to be a slowing down of human traffic at that pavement when they had just renovated the building, because people always paused to stare at themselves in the mirror. But Kampala, we got used to it. Now we take it for granted that we look fantastic and stroll past Greenland without breaking our stride.People. Buzzing like manic hornets, ignoring the hawkers who push pocket radios and hair styling tools and fake leather wallets and bootleg CDs into our faces. Buzzing and swarming from one enterprise to the next, making money or spending money, we don’t stop. And all this is presided over by large, opulent billboards beaming down the computer enhanced ecstasy of smiling models who have achieved nirvana by banking at this bank or using this courier company.

The ghost town is resurrected, alive now. And the life swirls around me like a chilling wind, invigorating.Sometimes, just for the hell of it, I walk at night down Jinja Road, from the Diamond Trust building, sometimes, all the way to Supreme Furnishings, where the windows display living rooms like those on TV— evidence that somewhere, on some of Kampala’s hills, there are people who have homes like Ally McBeal’s. I walk under the hundred neon lights, among the pretty people coming from pizza at Nandos heading for Cineplex Cinema holding hands. I try to imagine that I am invisible, just watching and not being seen, and I let the gratefulness overwhelm me, allow myself to be surprised that out of mounds of smouldering earth, we made this: pizza, and multi-storeyed glass-walled towers, and modern cinemas, and phone booths and cocktail bars and satellite TV and GQ magazine vending stalls.

And I try to stifle the sense that this is a fragile beauty, that it cannot last. That one day something will happen, something will happen to bring it all crumbling down and we will be back to 1986, and that when it does I will shake my head and say, “Shit. It was just a matter of time. It couldn’t last.”

Chapter IX: Not to create or recreate

Some men are destined for greatness, this we all know. Other men, we are equally aware, aspire towards greatness and miss their goal. This is one of too-many definitions of tragedy.

But then there are others, those whose place on the ladder of success is just beneath that of those who failed greatness. They are those who failed to be satisfied with being average, those who wanted more. A lot of the time the dissatisfaction sits in them like a cowering stowaway hiding in the shadows with a bad smell, evident but indistinct, and they cannot tell what exactly it is they want about more, just that what they have isn’t enough. In some ways this is worse than tragic. It is pathetic.

Sebastian the welder had a good childhood: hearty breakfasts, stern parenting and plastic footballs for Christmas. He even had a period, between the last year of primary school and the middle of the second year of secondary, when he was an above average student. Then he found other pursuits all of a sudden — drink, girls, rap music, nightclubs, and became an average student again. He felt it was an acceptable compromise, a fair trade. He saw the options thus: work now and have fun later (in the Future, which teachers spoke about with a capital F) or have fun now and work later. Work now and have more fun later, when you are rich. Or work later and have more fun now, when you are young. He was smart enough to know that he would probably grow to regret it, but he was also smart enough to know that there were no guarantees that hard work would bring him success. Besides, youth versus wealth? He figured out, quite precociously, that it was a no-brainer.

“The modern age,” he said to me one day last week, “is the age of paradoxes. The very term is a paradox. Age. The word implies a wide stretch of time. (He stretched his arms apart) Modern. A very specific present. (He held up a pinch in his fingers, as if to show a pinch of time.) Paradoxes.”

His shoulders were drooping. They would be hunched and tense in a few moments, once he walked into the office, punched in, climbed into the elevator, up, out, and walked down the hall. As he progressed down the hall, his lazy footdragging slouch would be replaced by a more hectic frog-march. The change would be both quick and imperceptible. He would end up at his desk. When he had pulled his chair to his desk, put his files on his desk, popped the cap off his pen, the shoulders would jerk upwards, and stay there up there for the rest of the day.

“In the modern world we bury men at eighty, ninety, even beyond that, but the average life expectancy, in the modern world, has dropped. It is roughly twenty seven. That is about two years after a man gets a job. At twenty seven the job has finally got the man and the man begins to die. And he dies until he is eighty, ninety, even beyond that. Then we bury him.”

In the middle of a street in the middle of the city a man with a bald spot in the middle of his head had been crying out to the passersby, who always ignored him: “Don’t you see? You have to believe. That’s all. You just have to believe. You have to believe that we can be pure and vital and… and we can be beautiful. Only if we believe. That’s all it takes, why can’t we understand that? That’s how beauty becomes truth— when someone believes it. Please, please believe that you can be that you can be worth the breath you breathe. Please, all you need to do is believe!” the man begged us, but we walked on and never heard him. Walked past, drove past him in our cars and headed for our offices, our elevators, our punch in cards, our desks, our deaths.

“You see, when you get here, you stop seeing your life in those terms— you don’t see it as a life anymore. Your perspective narrows. You see it in weeks. Let’s break it down: you spend the whole day processing these files, then you go home, tired, exhausted. You need to sleep, so you do. Until the next morning when you take the revitalization gained from the night to go back for another day of processing files. You work so that you can work. Five days go by, the weekend comes, you rest, get the energy for the next five days. You spend week after week doing nothing but processing files. When you are not tired, you are processing files. When you are not processing files, you are too tired to do anything else. So you end up doing nothing but processing files. For weeks that turn into years. Is processing files living?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“That’s what I mean. You start processing files, you stop living. You start to die.”

I followed him into and out of the elevator and down the hallway. He waved at two people in their cubicles, one a pretty woman with a coffee cup in her hand, the other a chubby man with plump cheeks that made him look smiley. I did not like that smile. It was not the smile of a person who was happy, it was not the smile of a person who was amused. It was the smile of a person who just smiled because it was the natural state of his face at rest— his default countenance— he would smile until something entered his mind and caused him to register a real reaction to the world around him. Until then, as long as there was nothing to frown at, or scowl at, or scream at, he would smile. Even though there was nothing to smile at. The smile was meaningless.

“My friends,” he said, footdragging along. ”The term has a different meaning now than it used to have before I came here. In school, on the playgrounds, friends were different from what those two are.” He looked at me. “I share no secrets with them. I don’t know whether I can trust them because it wouldn’t be proper to try and find out. We just share a conversation. The same conversation, basically, every time we meet. We voice the approved opinions about the topics on the list. This boat is not rocked. That is why I feel so… becalmed.”

There must be a life outside this office, I ventured, wife, family, that sort of thing.

“Yes. But they all have jobs, too. It’s not the same. I hate the fact that Christmas is not the same as it used to be when I was a child.”

This was when I had to ask. I had been restraining myself, because it seemed impolite, but now I realised we were too far gone over the bounds, politeness was now plainly dishonest. I asked him if that was the reason for the bomb. That he wanted to get Christmas back.

“I don’t know what will happen after the bomb. I don’t think it will bring Christmas or childhood back. I am not doing this to create, or to recreate anything. It is a bomb. Its job is to destroy.”

He walked into the office and mumbled at the shy secretary at the filing cabinet. She smiled back at both him and I. I nodded slightly at her.

He placed his briefcase on the desk and removed some papers. “This is what you’re looking for, Beatrice,” he said. He handed her a pale blue folder.

She took it, smiling bashfully. She mumbled something that could have been thank you but was so whispered I couldn’t make out the exact words.

“I took it home to finish it there,” he said.

You took work home last night when you were going to blow up your office this morning? I asked.

“Strange, isn’t it? Force of habit. Now you see why I have to do this? I have to break the habit.” He chuckled. He thought he had cracked a joke. “I will work on a few more projects now. Until my lunch break. That is when I will leave. I will not come back. There will be nothing to come back to.”

I mentioned it a few days later to Meeks, when he was putting a coin in the beggars can. This day the beggar was begging for money, he was not begging us to believe in the purity of beauty or anything like that, and I remembered the file processor. “This man the other day. He took a bomb to his office and blew it up.”

“Yeah. I read about it in the papers,” Meeks replied.

“the funny thing is, the whole thing was premeditated. He knew that morning, when he walked in, that he was going to blow up the place at lunchtime. But he still sat down and did a morning’s worth of work. I would have thought he would go in, put the bomb down, and leave. Or if he had to wait until lunchtime, at least not work, do something else…”

Meeks chuckled very much like the file processor had done. “It was an act of insanity. You can’t expect it to have been carried out rationally.”

There was another bomb explosion in another office later that week. As in the first, no one was hurt, but the damage was such that the company had to shut down for a substantial period of time, and the employees had to leave. They would have nothing to do until the repairs were finished. A week later another explosion took place. The ex-file processor was on a crusade. It was saddening. He did it to break free. To not have a job. But now that he was no longer a file processor, he was an arsonist, a bomb-placer. I don’t know if that qualified as life now.

Some men are destined for greatness, this we all know. Other men, we are equally aware, aspire towards greatness and miss their goal. This is one of too-many definitions of tragedy.

But then there are others, those whose place on the ladder of success is just beneath that of those who failed greatness. They are those who failed to be satisfied with being average, those who wanted more. A lot of the time the dissatisfaction sits in them like a cowering stowaway hiding in the shadows with a bad smell, evident but indistinct, and they cannot tell what exactly it is they want about more, just that what they have isn’t enough. In some ways this is worse than tragic. It is pathetic.

Sebastian the welder had a good childhood: hearty breakfasts, stern parenting and plastic footballs for Christmas. He even had a period, between the last year of primary school and the middle of the second year of secondary, when he was an above average student. Then he found other pursuits all of a sudden — drink, girls, rap music, nightclubs, and became an average student again. He felt it was an acceptable compromise, a fair trade. He saw the options thus: work now and have fun later (in the Future, which teachers spoke about with a capital F) or have fun now and work later. Work now and have more fun later, when you are rich. Or work later and have more fun now, when you are young. He was smart enough to know that he would probably grow to regret it, but he was also smart enough to know that there were no guarantees that hard work would bring him success. Besides, youth versus wealth? He figured out, quite precociously, that it was a no-brainer.

“The modern age,” he said to me one day last week, “is the age of paradoxes. The very term is a paradox. Age. The word implies a wide stretch of time. (He stretched his arms apart) Modern. A very specific present. (He held up a pinch in his fingers, as if to show a pinch of time.) Paradoxes.”

His shoulders were drooping. They would be hunched and tense in a few moments, once he walked into the office, punched in, climbed into the elevator, up, out, and walked down the hall. As he progressed down the hall, his lazy footdragging slouch would be replaced by a more hectic frog-march. The change would be both quick and imperceptible. He would end up at his desk. When he had pulled his chair to his desk, put his files on his desk, popped the cap off his pen, the shoulders would jerk upwards, and stay there up there for the rest of the day.

“In the modern world we bury men at eighty, ninety, even beyond that, but the average life expectancy, in the modern world, has dropped. It is roughly twenty seven. That is about two years after a man gets a job. At twenty seven the job has finally got the man and the man begins to die. And he dies until he is eighty, ninety, even beyond that. Then we bury him.”

In the middle of a street in the middle of the city a man with a bald spot in the middle of his head had been crying out to the passersby, who always ignored him: “Don’t you see? You have to believe. That’s all. You just have to believe. You have to believe that we can be pure and vital and… and we can be beautiful. Only if we believe. That’s all it takes, why can’t we understand that? That’s how beauty becomes truth— when someone believes it. Please, please believe that you can be that you can be worth the breath you breathe. Please, all you need to do is believe!” the man begged us, but we walked on and never heard him. Walked past, drove past him in our cars and headed for our offices, our elevators, our punch in cards, our desks, our deaths.

“You see, when you get here, you stop seeing your life in those terms— you don’t see it as a life anymore. Your perspective narrows. You see it in weeks. Let’s break it down: you spend the whole day processing these files, then you go home, tired, exhausted. You need to sleep, so you do. Until the next morning when you take the revitalization gained from the night to go back for another day of processing files. You work so that you can work. Five days go by, the weekend comes, you rest, get the energy for the next five days. You spend week after week doing nothing but processing files. When you are not tired, you are processing files. When you are not processing files, you are too tired to do anything else. So you end up doing nothing but processing files. For weeks that turn into years. Is processing files living?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“That’s what I mean. You start processing files, you stop living. You start to die.”

I followed him into and out of the elevator and down the hallway. He waved at two people in their cubicles, one a pretty woman with a coffee cup in her hand, the other a chubby man with plump cheeks that made him look smiley. I did not like that smile. It was not the smile of a person who was happy, it was not the smile of a person who was amused. It was the smile of a person who just smiled because it was the natural state of his face at rest— his default countenance— he would smile until something entered his mind and caused him to register a real reaction to the world around him. Until then, as long as there was nothing to frown at, or scowl at, or scream at, he would smile. Even though there was nothing to smile at. The smile was meaningless.

“My friends,” he said, footdragging along. ”The term has a different meaning now than it used to have before I came here. In school, on the playgrounds, friends were different from what those two are.” He looked at me. “I share no secrets with them. I don’t know whether I can trust them because it wouldn’t be proper to try and find out. We just share a conversation. The same conversation, basically, every time we meet. We voice the approved opinions about the topics on the list. This boat is not rocked. That is why I feel so… becalmed.”

There must be a life outside this office, I ventured, wife, family, that sort of thing.

“Yes. But they all have jobs, too. It’s not the same. I hate the fact that Christmas is not the same as it used to be when I was a child.”

This was when I had to ask. I had been restraining myself, because it seemed impolite, but now I realised we were too far gone over the bounds, politeness was now plainly dishonest. I asked him if that was the reason for the bomb. That he wanted to get Christmas back.

“I don’t know what will happen after the bomb. I don’t think it will bring Christmas or childhood back. I am not doing this to create, or to recreate anything. It is a bomb. Its job is to destroy.”

He walked into the office and mumbled at the shy secretary at the filing cabinet. She smiled back at both him and I. I nodded slightly at her.

He placed his briefcase on the desk and removed some papers. “This is what you’re looking for, Beatrice,” he said. He handed her a pale blue folder.

She took it, smiling bashfully. She mumbled something that could have been thank you but was so whispered I couldn’t make out the exact words.

“I took it home to finish it there,” he said.

You took work home last night when you were going to blow up your office this morning? I asked.

“Strange, isn’t it? Force of habit. Now you see why I have to do this? I have to break the habit.” He chuckled. He thought he had cracked a joke. “I will work on a few more projects now. Until my lunch break. That is when I will leave. I will not come back. There will be nothing to come back to.”

I mentioned it a few days later to Meeks, when he was putting a coin in the beggars can. This day the beggar was begging for money, he was not begging us to believe in the purity of beauty or anything like that, and I remembered the file processor. “This man the other day. He took a bomb to his office and blew it up.”

“Yeah. I read about it in the papers,” Meeks replied.

“The funny thing is, the whole thing was premeditated. He knew that morning, when he walked in, that he was going to blow up the place at lunchtime. But he still sat down and did a morning’s worth of work. I would have thought he would go in, put the bomb down, and leave. Or if he had to wait until lunchtime, at least not work, do something else…”

Meeks chuckled very much like the file processor had done. “It was an act of insanity. You can’t expect it to have been carried out rationally.”

There was another bomb explosion in another office later that week. As in the first, no one was hurt, but the damage was such that the company had to shut down for a substantial period of time, and the employees had to leave. They would have nothing to do until the repairs were finished. A week later another explosion took place. The ex-file processor was on a crusade. It was saddening. He did it to break free. To not have a job. But now that he was no longer a file processor, he was an arsonist, a bomb-placer. I don’t know if that qualified as life now.

Why are you looking at me like that.

Whenever he looks at her he is instantly bewildered. He has only a split second within which to take in all that her eyes hold, the deep brown  music, the pleading and the mockery and the threat and the promise that mingle and conflict and then come together to declare unanimously that we are her eyes. He cannot stare at her. He must not.

But in that moment he could swear that it is his entire destiny to dive and be immersed and vanish forever, be buried in there.

Then a small twitch skips down her face, her cheek, right below the scar shaped like it was from a scratch from a fingernail, and that twitch, in that moment of movement the world revolves for the last time and finally comes to rest.

And she smiles, and her lips are the answer to every question, the answer is forget about it, and she giggles like the meaning of life. Then she says, why are you looking at me like that? And he cannot answer beyond, I don’t know.

You are just so… and he cannot go further. Because she is beyond what can be said. He galvanises his pride, he drags his ego from where it had run to hide and pushes it to the front of his mouth so he can say something cool and uncorny. He says, you make whitney Houston finally make sense.

She simultaneously made him weak, and made him strong. He swore, everytime he said, hi Jessica, that he will move history for her.

“The bitch said I can’t have the afternoon off. And yet the only reason is because she was busy in the salon the day she was supposed to be drawing up the duty roster,”

“Gimme her number. Tell me where she lives. Does she have a cat? I will kidnap the cat and send her one paw in the mail. And tell her if she doesn’t let you off the next package will be the cat’s head.”

She laughs. Kidnapping. Mutilation. Fear and misery. It doesn’t matter. Anything.

“She isn’t the sort of person who would keep a cat. The cat would probably run away from her by itself before you even get there to kidnap it.”

“Okay, then. When the cat runs away, we will catch it and start cutting bits off and mailing them. She wont know the difference.”

She smiles a wan smile. She leans her head sideways and sighs. “I wish I could make it. Really. But I have to work.”

Her braids fall away from her ear and again he is torn between the dance of those braids and the way the light slips over her earlobe when he has only a split second to be immersed.

“well, I’ll give you a call, okay?”

“Yeah. Call me.”

And then he turns and walks out. He has been crushed to dust. He has been turned into a mountain. He cannot imagine how that boss would refuse to give her an afternoon off. He cannot imagine anyone ever refusing to give her whatever she wants. He cannot imagine himself ever doing anything to make her unhappy, to hurt her. But he knows that one day he will. We always do.

Whenever he looks at her he is instantly bewildered. He has only a split second within which to take in all that her eyes hold, the deep brown  music, the pleading and the mockery and the threat and the promise that mingle and conflict and then come together to declare unanimously that we are her eyes. He cannot stare at her. He must not.

But in that moment he could swear that it is his entire destiny to dive and be immersed and vanish forever, be buried in there.

Then a small twitch skips down her face, her cheek, right below the scar shaped like it was from a scratch from a fingernail, and that twitch, in that moment of movement the world revolves for the last time and finally comes to rest.

And she smiles, and her lips are the answer to every question, the answer is forget about it, and she giggles like the meaning of life. Then she says, why are you looking at me like that? And he cannot answer beyond, I don’t know.

You are just so… and he cannot go further. Because she is beyond what can be said. He galvanises his pride, he drags his ego from where it had run to hide and pushes it to the front of his mouth so he can say something cool and uncorny. He says, you make whitney Houston finally make sense.

She simultaneously made him weak, and made him strong. He swore, everytime he said, hi Jessica, that he will move history for her.

“The bitch said I can’t have the afternoon off. And yet the only reason is because she was busy in the salon the day she was supposed to be drawing up the duty roster,”

“Gimme her number. Tell me where she lives. Does she have a cat? I will kidnap the cat and send her one paw in the mail. And tell her if she doesn’t let you off the next package will be the cat’s head.”

She laughs. Kidnapping. Mutilation. Fear and misery. It doesn’t matter. Anything.

“She isn’t the sort of person who would keep a cat. The cat would probably run away from her by itself before you even get there to kidnap it.”

“Okay, then. When the cat runs away, we will catch it and start cutting bits off and mailing them. She wont know the difference.”

She smiles a wan smile. She leans her head sideways and sighs. “I wish I could make it. Really. But I have to work.”

Her braids fall away from her ear and again he is torn between the dance of those braids and the way the light slips over her earlobe when he has only a split second to be immersed.

“Well, I’ll give you a call, okay?”

“Yeah. Call me.”

And then he turns and walks out. He has been crushed to dust. He has been turned into a mountain. He cannot imagine how that boss would refuse to give her an afternoon off. He cannot imagine anyone ever refusing to give her whatever she wants. He cannot imagine himself ever doing anything to make her unhappy, to hurt her. But he knows that one day he will. We always do.

(I don’t even remember when I wrote this. Years and years ago.)

Chapter VII (Bwaise at Half-Past Midnight)

 “I got drunk when I was twenty and stayed drunk until I was thirty-five, which is when I realised that I had become poor and it was too late.”

The man curled his fingers tighter around the base of a glass. The bottle seemed to glow and cast a dirty bronze light over his face. His eyes were exhausted and his skin was dry as a brick. His fingers wound even tighter and he said, “Too late to even think of not drinking. There is nothing in sobriety for an old man to see.”

“You are not an old man,” I said. “You are forty.”

“I’m drunk and poor. I have no youth.”

Meeks and I held our hands outward, looking for something to lean against, groping for support. The narrow spaces between walls, the treacherous uneven ground, the stench from rivulets of dirty water beneath us confused our senses. It was impossible to get through the slum in this late night. But the old man ahead of us was floating serenely forward. His face was turned upwards.

“He is navigating. By the stars. Like a sailor,” Meeks suddenly realised and said.

Voracious shadows consumed the slum. Intermittently a single bright light, like a shriek, would shoot through the night to blast against one rotting wall, ricochet off one dying weed, then diffuse into muddy despair and gradually die. Walls crumbled, children dreamt futile dreams, wives surrendered and even more men got drunk underneath the rust roofs. Hordes were lost in the darkness, but the old man sailed onward with flawless certitude.

“You mean he knows where he is going just by looking at the sky?”

And I looked up at the sky. The sky is plain and simple. Empty and silent forever. It spread above us in infinite blue and was, suddenly, the answer. What is there beyond the failure, the despair? After the ruins of the life he has wasted? “There is nothing,” the old man said.

And I looked up. And nothing was the most perfect, most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

The old man began to take his coat off. He dropped it and I saw that it landed under his feet. He pried his shoes off, one at a time, using his toes against the heel, and they landed with a hollow clopping sound, which is what made me realise, through the darkness, that he was rising. As he floated higher the shirt and the belt slipped off and parachuted to the ground.

Meeks and I watched in silence until he was just a black circle blocking out the corner of the constellation of Orion. And then we blinked and we could no longer see him. “Giving up,” said Meeks. “It’s not so bad, is it?”