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?”