Chapter V (The end)

 But, Musoka told me, I didn’t have that option anymore.
      
       He told me about the nomad witnesses. The Nevermen. He said after the blood from the northern war woke him up he had to understand how such a thing could happen. He wanted to understand the modern man. And that is why he found me.
       “That is why you are making me a witness?”
       And he said he is not the one who makes witnesses.
       “You want me to tell you what modern man is like so that you can understand him and use the knowledge to destroy Kony?”
       And he said he didn’t have the power to destroy anyone.
       I have since learnt that the immortals among us, especially the race known as the Nevermen, seek to understand others because they cannot understand themselves.
       Musoka was right. Once I finally became nothing, I discovered the ability to become anything. I could become anyone and walk into peoples’ lives at will. And instantly, by nothing more than making the decision, become a part of them: a part of their lives, a part of their houses, a part of them. I could be seven years old, miles away from the lipless men in the north, miles away, now in a lushly furnished white house in Kampala, playing video games on a weekend with Joe Junior, when the door rings.
       He goes to open it and looks up at a shy young woman greeting him politely. She is deferential, but still, in her measured words, I see two minds: fear and anger, and I hear in her voice a low humming. She is pregnant. She asks Joe Junior if daddy is home.
       “Daddy is not home,” says Junior. Daddy is off playing rugby again, because he doesn’t care what Alice-Mummy thinks.
       “I am his secretary, Elizabeth. Please tell him when he comes that I dropped by to remind him of my hospital bills.”
       “Okay,” says junior, impatient to return to the video game.
       But I let him go alone. Before the door shuts, I slip out of the house and find myself sitting in Elizabeth’s womb, with her translucent child— hers and Joe’s— curled up within hot walls, sucking food and water and oxygen through the membranes of the uterus. And growing. And tasting, in what it sucked, a sense of something being amiss. And knowing in the way the unborn know, that it is doomed.
       I look at her. Joe’s Death row daughter. Adulterers should not have sex without birth control, I say. She looks at me with an unreadable expression. An embryo’s face does not form expressions, but I can see that contempt given to those who have said something useless.
       What do you want from me? Pity?
       I want you to shut up, she says.
       She knows she will die soon. Die before she lives. I see her point. I turn silent.
       Then she asks. What is it like, life?
       Depends, I reply.
       What would my life have been like?
       Depends on Joe, I reply. He is a rich man. He would send money to have you looked after well. You would have fed well, gone to a good school. Spoken English. Elizabeth is not a bad woman. She would have looked after you well.
       I would feel no pain?
       You would. One day you would ask why you don’t live in your father’s house, and Elizabeth would shrink and shirk and tell you to shut up and finish your dinner. And then you would feel a way that you cannot understand until you feel it.
       They made me, she says.
       I know.
       Why would they not want to keep me?
       It’s complicated. There is a way things are that does not allow bastards to intrude into rich men’s families.
       What is complicated?
       Life.
       From where she is, though, the concept of complicated has no room to maneuver and take form. She stays curled in a position given to her by default, through no choice of her own, and everything she needs just happens— food, water, oxygen.
       I now understand her question. And I try to answer it better: Life has a sky that is blue and stretches all over it, and sometimes you can look at it and wonder why anything else ever bothers to do anything else but just look at the sky. It is such an enormously grand event.  And there is fire. Red, orange, vigorous, mesmerizing, and you have to fight the urge to leap into it and dance in it. And there is saxophones like the great Nsubuga Ntawi’s, which tricks your mind into thinking that beauty is a real thing, and that we can hold it and grab it and own it, and you forget that everything you have ever known before that proves that you never own beauty, that beauty doesn’t care about you, that it will destroy you if it wishes. Elizabeth had beauty. And it was like fire, and Joe leapt into it and was burnt, and now, you must be destroyed.
       I thought he loved her.
       There is no such thing as love. In life, there is no such thing as love. There is only sky, fire and music. These are real. Love is an illusion. Don’t ever believe in it.
       Don’t worry. I won’t, she says sadly.
       And then I am there when the wicked juices begin to flow through the veins that used to bring food, water and oxygen. Now they bring poison. And she cannot stop herself from drinking it deeply. And she begins to shrivel. She turns dark. She turns black. She whispers the most she can do for a scream.
       In a few weeks the last of her will be flushed down a final toilet. The end.