I remember Mr. Bukenya’s classroom in primary school being long and dark. The walls and floor were made of bare, dark grey concrete which turned just a bit darker up in front, halfway up the wall, between the two corners, where a rectangle of black paint had been spread. That was the blackboard, covered with Mr. Bukenya’s handwriting. Geography notes.

For fifteen minutes, he had been in front of the class scribbling across the board. This was primary school education in Kampala those days.

The teacher came in a short while after the bell rang and found us silent as lambs turned to stone. The grey room had been a riot of squeals and screams four seconds before. Then someone spotted the teacher striding up the stairs, one hand on the banister, the other on the cane, and his name rippled in a staccato whisper through the classroom: “Bukenya-Bukenya-Bukenya.” With each repetition, the whisper would subdue more of the field of squealing voices, until, by the fourth sharp whisper of his name, the room would be silent, and we would be sitting at our desks, our shirt-tails hastily tucked back into our shorts, our knees clenched together, elbows on the desk, silent.

He walked in wearing his practiced stern look: chin angled slightly upwards, eyebrows stretched to a frown. He disapproved of us, found our very existence despicable. Or at least this was what his face said to us every time he entered the class swinging his cane in one hand.

“Good morning, class,” he would say. He had a voice that boomed across the room. He was a thin man, worn into his late thirties, wearing a sad, faded blue shirt and trousers which had the bum stitched. He would be pathetic if I saw him now— I never keep trousers long enough for the seat to require patches— but back then, sitting knees together, elbows on wood, it came as no surprise that this weedy cartoon could produce such a large sound as Bukenya’s voice.

When the teacher came in and greeted, the rules were, we stood up and greeted back.

A shuffling of shoes on the dusty concrete floor followed as we rose to our feet like badly trained soldiers coming to attention. “Goood moooorning, Mr. Bukenya,” we recited. Moses surreptitiously, hastily, pinched Daudi. Daudi looked down and noticed an edge of white cloth hanging out of his shorts. He quickly shoved the out-turned pocket back in, and clasped his hands together behind his back. And prayed that the teacher had not seen it.

Bukenya glowered for a second at us, sucking in the fear, savouring the taste of it as it passed over his teeth. Then finally, “You may sit down.” This is how every lesson started for seven years. With fear.

Bukenya was now holding the cane in both hands— one end in each hand. The cane was horizontal in front of him. We always knew where the cane was. He held it this way for a moment as he scanned the class. Then his gaze settled on Batso. “You,” he said, pointing the stick at him.

Batso shot to his feet and swallowed, his hands flexed tightly straight at his side.

Bukenya said, “Go and get my book from 6.B. Hurry up!”

And so Batso ran out of the class and down the stairs to fetch the geography textbook Bukenya would not carry from his last lesson, not as long as there was some kid upstairs to play his porter.

While Batso scuttled down stairs and up corridors, while he was timidly knocking on the door of 6.B and straining every fibre to prevent himself from offending whoever it was teaching down there at the time, Bukenya stood in front of the class and continued to project terror at us. It was an art, I’m sure, based on an inner talent but honed with much dedication to a fine skill, the act of just standing that way. Bukenya stood, not moving, dead centre of the blackboard. His hands were together in front of him now, the cane dangling loosely from the right hand, over which the left was folded. The cane swung in a small, intense arc, the only part of the figure that moved. Bukenya stood before the class, feet apart, shoulders back, chin raised.

Before him we sat motionless and silent, hardly daring to think. But though he stood motionless, and we sat not moving a muscle, nothing in the room was still. He was a rotating machine gun spraying the room with iron bullets and we were being peppered, our small bodies convulsing with the multitude of tiny shocks.

Then breathless Batso came back. He had run the whole way.  If he had met Mr. Semango in the corridors, he might have got a slap for running, but if Bukenya felt he had dawdled, he stood to suffer much more.

Batso stood at the door, trying not to pant too hard.

Bukenya turned to him. “Why are you standing there? You want me to come there and beg you for my book?”

“No sir,” Batso stuttered— he ran in, sticking the book out in front of him. He was looking down to avoid Bukenya’s gaze. Bukenya took a moment to enjoy the sight of the boy with the down-turned head, proffering the book before him, before he took it, finally, and said, “Sit down.”

Now education began. Bukenya turned to the blackboard, opened the textbook, and started to copy what was in the book onto the board.

And we, who always had our notebooks open by the time he came into class, began to copy the notes from the board.

Bukenya would write on one half of the blackboard, then the other half. Once the second half was filled, he would, without skipping a beat, grab the duster that cleaned the chalk off the blackboard and clean the first half, then continue to write. If your pen run out of ink (we used fountain pens only. Ballpoint was not allowed) or if it just stopped working (It was usually one of those cheap things made in China. Cheap means inexpensive, but also means liable to croak at any minute) then you had to pretend to write on and hope he didn’t notice that you were writing air. Believe me, you didn’t want to explain to Bukenya that you started his lesson without a working pen full of ink.

This was to go on for one hour and was to be our geography lesson for the day. At the end of the term we would be told to revise our notes (Cram. Memorise key dates, terms, and figures) and fill them into the dashes on the question papers during the exams.

The cane was leaning against the wall now, patiently waiting. It knew its thirst for blood would never go unquenched.

That was when Mr. Semango appeared at the door. Semango, a man with a permanent sneer, hardly forty but who already had liberal sprinklings of grey hair, waved Bukenya over.

They spoke for a few seconds outside the door, then they both turned and walked away.

As soon as they were down the stairs, the childness exploded. You can’t keep that shit locked in. “Batso! Go and get my book!” mimicked Moses.

Batso got up immediately, grabbed a book and ran to Moses. He dropped to one knee, eyes down, and stuck the book out. “Here is your fucking book sir, you rat-fucking bitch!”

And the room stopped being dark and grey and silent. The red of our uniforms flashed up and down the place as we ran around, climbing over desks, running in the aisles, and the screeches would have torn off the tin roof.

I untucked my shirt, flicked up my collar, loosened my top button and then swaggered over to Terry. I was sitting one leg on her desk, one leg hanging off it, thinking I was the smoothest Casanova ever, when the enormous noise inside, which we thought would not succumb to anything but the staccato whispering of a teacher’s name, was pierced. By a shrill and ugly screaming.

Not thinking, we rushed to the large windows to look out. We needed large windows so that we could have enough light when there was no electricity. It was murder when it rained, though, because there was no glass in them.

We clustered at the windows to see a woman in a leso and a headscarf shrieking as she was shoved out of the staff room by Bukenya.

“Ndeka! Ndeka!” she was screaming. “Kati nze omusajja nawasa waaki? Asula mu mabaala! Buli kilo asula mu mabaala. Eka tetumulaba na ko. Kati nawasa waaki?!”

The more Bukenya tried to quiet her down, the louder and sharper she screamed. As he fought to bundle her into the arms of the security guard at the gate he looked up.

And saw the crowd of our faces looking down at him.

You can’t blame his wife. She was a desperate woman at her wit’s end. She just wanted an answer, she didn’t mean to embarrass Bukenya like this, by letting his students hear her yelling about the nights he spent away from home, having passed out in a bar.

The instincts they spent all those years beating into me rise and make me consider, even if it is just momentarily, that it was probably our fault, for standing there staring, just giving the man an excuse, just giving him a reason.

After the security guard had taken her away, Bukenya marched up the stairs, stomped into the class and he whipped us all like a mad thing. Any excuse was enough. An “i” undotted, a “t” uncrossed, one sock hanging lower than the other— anything. He picked up the cane, walked through the class and swung everywhere. “Is this how they spell highlands, eh? Is this how they spell highlands? Get down!”

“You, why is your belt crooked, eh?”

“You! You call this handwriting? It looks like a chicken ran across the page!”

You! How could you look at my shame? How could you look at my shame? How dare you have a future while my life is in ruins, how dare you! You will pay!

And again the roof strained from the pressure of squealing voices rising.

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.

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.)

 “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?”

When burglars robbed me, they took everything. They cleaned me out. I rose out of the haze of chloroform and staggered into the empty space between the windows, stared at a forced door and stood agape at the bare walls. An empty house. 

That was the first time I really felt how non-existent I was. Without my disguises, without the props and pillars that buoyed up the illusion that I had a personality I felt as if something was about to collapse. I felt there should be a crumbling, a cracking, and a discordant descent to the ground. 

And I stood there staring and gaping and not breathing, and waited for the crash.

No crash. Nothing hit the ground. 

I could have gone to the police. I could have alerted the neighbours. I could have informed the local government officials, filed a report, done what normal people do. But I didn’t have it in me to move. No impetus.  I sat in the middle of the bare floor, cross-legged and silent. I said “what the fuck” a couple of times, but there were long long spaces of time between the utterances so I was virtually silent.

I virtually had been. Now I was not. It surprises me when I think of it now, that this didn’t feel that bad after all.

Dawn was an unenthusiastic grey behind the clouds. Night had dissolved at the approach of morning. The sky was the colour of old khaki.
Across the road a girl stepped in rapid but careful steps over the cracks in the pavement, ducking in and out of dew-covered cars as if she was trying to take cover among them. She couldn’t have been over sixteen, and she walked anxiously, her concern alternating between the urgent need to keep pulling the hemline of her skirt downwards, and the need to fold her arms over the sheer blouse she wore.
Skiv and I slowed down to puzzle over this spectacle- and muse over why it was so arresting. We knew hookers had to go somewhere in the morning, we knew not all of them were jaded, thirty-five and stoned, but it was the first time we had seen a teen prostitute in daylight, staggering in what could have been anything from tight shoes to shame. Hookers had never looked sad before.
“They carry an extra pair of trousers or a longer skirt in their handbags, then they change into it in the mornings,” Steve said.
“You think someone stole her bag?” I asked.
“No, I think she just hasn’t learnt how to organise herself.”
Shrug. It was an adequate way of dealing with the tragedy that confronted us: blame it for its own inexperience. The problem is that it she is not tragic enough. In a few years when she is settled in the ways of the business, she will never cross our eyes in the morning like this. And we will only see her when we are drunk, at night, red and blue and green neon lights dripping from her lips, and we will want her.

A cave’s echo faded behind me. He was saying, “You have eighty five years. See you in eighty five years.” When I asked, “Are you sure I’m not making a big mistake?” he replied, “Everyone is always making a big mistake. You have eighty five years to realise that.” And that was the last time I heard him, and the last I remember his voice. From the moment I was placed in the womb, to begin a nine-month-long slumber, I would be forgetting, bit by bit: him, me, them, everything, so that when I was finally born, I would know and remember nothing.

Nine months is a concept you don’t really grasp when you are in a womb. Gestation is worse than unconsciousness; it is a state of non-consciousness. You see no light, and there is no moon spinning above your head, so you don’t know that time is passing. Until the arrival of glimmers of another sort of awareness than you have ever felt before- the thing that you will come to call physical -and then you are thrust out of the darkness and the warmth and the blood. Bewildered and stunned, I lay in strange hands, not moving. I didn’t understand. I didn’t actually feel the pain until I saw them cut the chord that linked me to her. That is when I felt, for the first time ever, alone.

I saw her. In blood and anguish. I saw her. I swear I remember it.

I was one of two dozen born in that hospital that night. My arrival was inauspicious in every way but this: that I saw it all happen. There were impulses, little surges of annoyance or small bits of confusion sparking here and there in the landscape of my mind that only resolved themselves into thoughts when I was asleep again. Then I understood.

“I want to go back. I don’t like it here,” I said. But he didn’t reply.

Something had gone wrong. I wasn’t supposed to remember him. I wasn’t supposed to remember any of it.

Lingering memories of being unborn made my childhood difficult for a time. My infancy was frustrating because my body and my voice could not articulate what my soul wanted to say, many times what it wanted to scream. I would be embarrassed in the end at having to cry, having make such a fuss over a thing as simple as a blanket that I wanted to be wrapped a bit closer.

And I never really got to love her. My mother was so separate, so blatantly another thing, that I could not resolve myself to love her. I hypothesized that it was dependence, or the feeling that one is a part of her that makes men, children, infants love their mothers. And I hated my dependence and I could never forget the feeling that I was definitely not a part of her. I just landed in a part of her. And something went wrong. How was I to know she was not to blame? I think, in some ways, I hated her.

After years passed, I eventually got used to things. One of the blessings of mortal life is that there is nothing you cannot settle into. By the time I could talk I knew that I had to keep my secret closed and tell no one. So when I ran with the other children under the sunlight, chasing after footballs, climbing trees, hunting wild pigeons with catapults then roasting them on little three-stone fires and fighting over the charred meat and running again when some grown-up found us and yelled at us for playing with fire, I knew, though the others did not, that our bodies were just the vehicles, our actions just the route. What the point really was was to drink the sun. Because souls love the sun. In both nature and supernature, this is true.

I was diagnosed, by the school guidance counsellor, with Seasonal Affective Disorder. She was an excitable and eager woman, two years out of university, who had spent one year looking for a job. She had been on the point of despair when this one came along. It saved her faith, and she felt she owed it to this redeemer to give it her all. She was determined to get the psychology of every student in the school categorized. What she really did was try to get a category of neurosis for every student who came her way.
The first of my many referrals to her came when the teachers noticed that I sometimes seemed distracted and impatient. Some said I was daydreaming, others preferred to think that I was just lapsing, suddenly, into a state of stupidity in which I would just stop thinking. They did what teachers in those days did: they caned me for it. But I had learnt to separate myself from the things going on in my body. The sirens and the clamour in the nerves could not alarm me because I knew they were not really mine. They were the body’s. So I sometimes seemed distracted during the caning.
Then they sent me to the guidance counsellor, who said I had ADD, then that I was dyslexic. Then she gave up on the major dysfunctions and the last she gave me was the Seasonal Affective Disorder. Because, though it happens to everyone to some extent, it was profound with me. When clouds covered the sky, everything in the world darkened and lost colour and I was inconsolable- nothing could make me smile.

In my youth I discovered love, and lust, and that this body could actually be fun. Because when lush hair and small hands combined with dimples and a low voice, things in me stirred and the excitement spurred me to toil on even though I knew I was spending energy on a doomed endeavour. In the times when she was looking the other way and I was alone again, I would ruminate on the lack of a word for this. Relationships? Affairs? Whatever they were, didn’t she know they always failed? No one stays in love forever; love dies. Once you start it you are on the way to the end.
But while you’re in it, while she is looking up at you, or calling you bitter names, or combing her hair in the mirror, or asking where you have been when you were not at her side, or biting your ear, at those times you forget that you are hurtling towards a precipice. Maybe that is why I was so addicted to romance. It involved forgetting.

They hated me when it ended. They resented my lack of regret, the fact that I was not surprised when I found that they did not love me anymore.
Later on, they would resent me for my refusal to get married, but I did not want to have children. Many emotions are physical. Fear is not. Fear is from the very core of your soul and is the truest thing you ever feel.

But when I got into middle age, I began to get restless. I got impatient. Tired of waiting, I began to do stupid, desperate things.
When I was fifty, I had my first suicide attempt. I wanted to slit my wrists, but then, that would leave a lot of grief behind. The family. Mother, father, their only child a suicide?
I tried the more discreet suicides first. The overdose of sleeping pills. I was taken to the hospital and told I was lucky to have been found in time. The next time I doubled the number of pills and when I left the hospital mother sternly warned me to throw away the pills and learn to use liquor like normal people.
So the next time I got drunk and leapt into the road in front of a night bus. It was one of those buses that cross the country from border to border. When they are out of the city, the road is deserted and the driver feels he can comfortably step on it and switch half his mind off. It is easy to kill a man then.

The hospital kept on calling it a miracle. That the bus driver had seen me, that he had missed me so narrowly, that I escaped alive.
Twenty passengers died when the bus swerved off the road and overturned. And all I had was mud on my face and envy. And a broken hand that made sure I never tried again. I didn’t want to jump off a building only for another miracle to mean I have to spend thirty-five years bedridden.

But my restlessness was not purged. So I married someone. She was thirty-eight at the time. A career woman. I think she was lonely and knew she was kind and she thought I was lonely too so she kindly agreed to marry me.

I don’t want to know whether my years with her made her loneliness worse. I could find out but I don’t want to know. She wanted someone to be close to and I was always miles away. I tried to make her happy, but where it mattered most I was useless. How do you explain the irritation of dampness to a fish? I never did understand what loneliness was like.

I was walking slowly down a road in the busy shopping centre of the town I had retired to when I finally died. They drive carelessly on that road, and there is no pavement. For an old man at night, that means a dizzying and confusing blur of headlights. I was dazzled for a moment by the glare of lights that seemed to be coming from all angles at once. Blaring horns befuddled me further. I found myself helplessly staggering into the road. It wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the last. I heard the screech and a woman scream right after I felt the car ram into my back and it was moments after, looking at myself on the ground, twisted in half, that I realised what had happened. I hadn’t expected it this soon. I had turned eighty-five only a month before.

This time there was no gestation. Just a sound like bells blowing- that is the only way it can be described- as the world below fell away. And a feeling of lightness. This was unlike the unborn. I don’t know how I can describe it to you, but it was the opposite in almost every way. The unborn we were one: The unborn. Here the dead were individuals, each with a name.
I found one and began to talk. He was friendly and we were soon comfortable together. I was about to feel something I hadn’t felt in eighty-five years, about to feel like I was at home. Then I asked him what his life was like before he died.
He asked what I meant.
What you did on earth, in life.
He did not understand the words, he said.
Life, I repeated. Mankind, earth.
Again, he said he did not understand. No one I have asked understands. They do not remember it.

Tonight we are going to keep the paying guests awake with song and drums and celebration of all our dreams. Tonight, tonight, the highway’s bright. We’ll go racing in the streets.
Over the lawns minute orbs of spilt beer clinging onto blades of grass with a shine like jewels. Three hundred hungry fans sit on plastic lawn chairs, falling away from a raised stage.
The stage is lit a blazing yellow. The large and extravagantly coloured logos of brewers and a mobile phone service company stand behind and to either side. In between is a bare square of wood. That is what we beam our hungry eyes at, waiting for the singers to leap up and set our fantasies to rhyme and to a clapping raga beat.

To my right, the entertainment and social affairs editor of the biggest newspaper in town. “Is it true, what you write?” I ask him. “When you say, ‘the most happening party, the hottest spot in town, the biggest star’ is it true? Do these people, places and things become what you say they are before or after you say it? Are they ever what you say they are or are you lying?”
He smiles a knowing smile, a trickster who cannot resist the urge to lay out the prize he has so cunningly stolen. “What difference does it make?” he asks.

They are here, the singers. She is lithe and agile, much smaller in person than she appears on TV and in the posters. Less beautiful, but only marginally so.

The singer smiles as if she loves us all and waves the microphone at the crowd. She is wearing a clinging lycra sheath with a long slit pointing with determination at her crotch. But keep quiet about that. Say she looked sexy and leave it at that. The generalisations, not the specifics, that is the landscape we inhabit now. It doesn’t work if we think too much.

Then he comes on. Dressed in all black, dreadlocks wild and buoyant. His shirt is open to show the heavy chain with the large medallion swinging left to right.
The crowd exhales a wind of applause to him. She slithers over to him and wraps her arm around him. We cheer again. Then it is time for the wind to turn. He shakes her off and, his hold on the microphone changing from a carrying grip to a commanding choke, begins to chant out the first words of their song.

And the drums begin to pound.

His voice is like the footballs bouncing on tarmac that we used to hear in our childhoods. It is like thunder contained and controlled so that we can listen in awe but not in fright. His song is like the power we want to have and its rhythm is like the rhythm we want to follow when we sleep with the women we want to ravish. His words are like the recklessness and the freedom and the destruction with abandon that we want to mete out at the world. He sings about the girl and swears that he will be true.

She comes in with her verse, wailing and squealing, her voice flinging its clothes off. She swears she will believe him and whatever he tells her, if he says he will be true.

And the crowd throws its hundreds of arms into the air and its hundreds of eyes and mouths are wet, tears and spittle and sweat spray into the air, droplets arch and then fall downwards to land with unheard tiny splashes into glasses of beer and gin. The men who came with their women and the women who came with their men move closer to each other. The men who came to find women and the women who came to be found by those men move closer to each other.

The singers’ voices blend and mingle and the couple approach one another. She sways her hips while one hand is raised above her head. He licks his lips and thrusts his waist into hers. They burst into the final chorus while entangled in one another. I will be true I will be true I will be true to only you.
When someone asks you what music is, will you ever be able to tell them? Or will you just give up the futile attempt to define it and just say, “Listen. You hear that? That is music.”

 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.

I met Kintu three years ago in a nightclub. I had almost completely vanished. My gradual disappearance from myself was almost complete and there was barely anything left of me. Just shreds and debris. I went to a club to get drunk. I did not expect to meet the original man. The first one.
      
         There must be moments when Club Capri is empty. I have never seen them, but logic dictates that they must exist. Because no one lives here.
         In those moments the wandering eye of a janitor slipping over a shock of black and white slides on unperturbed because the giant monochrome of the machine’s entrails is so familiar.
         But at nights like this, when Capri is most alive, the black of shadows falls on the black paint of the walls and obscures their darkness with a more threatening, more potent darkness, and the white of the tabletops and the checkered floor disappears under the urgent flashing rainbows of disco lights. A thousand colours, from the clothes of a thousand dancers, dominate the sweeping eye. And if you are dancing right, you do not notice that these are the only colour Capri has. Colour that is borrowed. Capri has no soul.

        
       Some buildings do, they have an emotional essence, and that is more apparent when they are empty; that is when you feel it the most. The sternness of an office, the cruelty of a factory, the malice of a courtroom, the love of a home. And the feeling touches those who enter it, and so when it is full of people, the people are tinted by the colour of the room. But Capri is soulless. It needs to borrow from the hectic, drunk, fast-talking people in it, as they jump and fall in jerking motions, smiling as if they are happy.
      
       The music was thick and strong and it was beating into my back as I sat at the bar gazing into a bottle of Pilsner.
       “Asio. Ngolinga sema. Ngolinga sema tewawalina. Ngo osema.” To my left a dark-skinned man with a hard jaw and large frowning eyes was staring at me. “Injibuusanwe. Asio, ngo sema,” he said.
       He wore a navy blue blazer over a dark shirt that was open at the neck to show off a heavy gold necklace. He had a marine cut. The fashions were those of your average Capri playboy, but the skin beneath them was too dark, the eyes were too sharp, the jaw too set for him to really be something that frivolous.
       “Do I know you?” I asked, resenting the intrusion.
       He sneered. “Nyawaiko,” he said, then was done with me. He turned his attention to the bartender and raised two fingers. It rarely happens at Capri, but the bartender responded immediately, and carried two Nile Specials to him. “Cheers,” he said to the bartender and walked off.
      
       “Who was that?” the woman next to me asked.
       “Don’t know. Crazy guy. Couldn’t understand a word he said,” I answered, then I returned to our interrupted non-conversation.
      
       Which was interrupted again only minutes later, when she said, with surprise, “Look.”
         I looked.
         At the foot of the stool stood a little girl. First I noticed that her face was all eyes and hair— she had big girl eyes and two enormous puffs meticulously combed and tied up above her ears. Then I noticed that she was wearing a cheap and shapeless dress— it looked like a nightdress.
         Then, only after this, did I notice that there was a little girl, can’t have been a day above six years old, in a nightclub at two in the morning.
         “Asio, musaja ima ngo,” she said. She tugged at my jeans to pull me to follow her.
         She led me to a table at the rim of the club, at the edge where you only had Capri on one side of you. On the other, beyond the wall, was an empty street. The man with the jaw was waiting smiling. “Aaah,” he said in a congratulatory tone. “Naona amekuja. Umekuja. Keti. Keti.” He gestured at the seat opposite him at the table. It was empty. The second beer he had ordered was standing at the other chair waiting. He was holding the first. “Kaa hapo. Hebu mimi na wewe tunene.”
         I sat myself down and, before I could ask who he was, he launched again into that language:  “Nialabako kino kifo kimamsula. Kimamsula dadala.”
         I waved my hands around my ears. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying!” I shouted.
         “Kelele ni mingi. Ngoja.” Then, with the simple act of looking around at the club, a glance passing over the speakers and the lights, he made them withdraw. They crept away, as if obeying polite but firm instructions to leave us to ourselves. The table was now quiet, and there was only one light on it. I don’t know where it came from. It was not one of the Capri lights. It was white.
         “Ngwani?” I asked. The word rolled off my tongue with ease.
         And now that I had finally discovered that I could speak his language, he switched to English. “My name is Kintu.”
         “Kintu who?”
         “Just Kintu. Where I am from, that name is enough.” From the gold chain hung a medallion. In the fresh white light I could see that, embedded in the medallion, was what looked like a tooth.
         “It is the tooth of a cow,” he said. “It is several hundred years old.”
         “An heirloom? Passed down from your fathers?” I don’t know why I was asking. Maybe because he wanted me to.
         “I have no fathers. I am the original father.”
       There are two versions of the story of Kintu. The one they tell children in early primary school, the version the teachers were told by their grandparents before fireplaces at dusk, is that Kintu was the first man. He came down from heaven at the beginning of time with the first cow and a large gourd. He milked the cow to release the rivers of the world, then he tipped his gourd over and spilt out the seeds that grew into all the plants in the world, then he smashed the gourd on a rock and the rock became Nambi, the first woman.
       The other version, the one you learn in university or, if you are curious, in secondary school, says that Kintu was a hun with imperial ambitions. He emerged from the area that is now Eastern Congo (or from the Sudan. Scholars disagree) in the seventeenth century and began conquering and subduing the simple scattered societies around the Lake Victoria until he had a kingdom to call his own beneath his feet.
       When Kintu came to me in the club, he would not tell me which version was true. He did not answer many of my questions. He only told me that he was immortal, and that in a short while, I would become immortal too. When I told him I didn’t want to be, he said I had no choice.

       He said he had just come from the war in the north and needed to understand. He wanted a witness. He spoke of  evil that billowed off the ground by day, and fell from the black sky at night,  evil that blew in the wind. The newspapers and the reports and the NGOs and the UN would call it a twenty-year-old insurgency that the government has failed to suppress, and use words like Human Rights Abuse and Atrocities. But only Kintu knew as well as the victims how pale and how weak that was. This is what happened: For years bands of monsters in the skins of men had been stomping into the villages, into the lives of those who did not deserve such a fate— they were only people, they did not deserve this— and loot through the huts, then burn them down. Their thefts had deepened the villagers’ poverty, and now their fire made that depth absolute. Everything was gone. But not everything. They would turn to the villagers. Some they would kill, some they would rape. They would take their lives, or take their lives.
       Everything was gone. But not everything. This sort of evil does not subside, this sort of evil grows as it feeds. They would then turn to other villagers with their machetes swinging in dull whirrs of dark iron and if they could not slice the lips, ears, noses cleanly off or if they did not chop the hands, buttocks, legs cleanly off, if the flesh clung to the body by a string of bleeding, desperate faith, their hands would grab in, nails digging in for a stronger grip, and pull, to tear it off. And then they would laugh and let the man, thus mutilated, live. Because they felt it was funny.
       And then they went away. But not alone. They turned their guns on the children and told them to march. Small bodies, naked and wet in a child’s sweat wrung out by the fear and the running and the heat from the burning huts and the splashes of blood that fell from all around them, the small bodies walked around, ahead and behind the monster, and none of the children dared to cry. Don’t cry for your mother, don’t cry for your sister next to you. Don’t even think of what they are going to do to her for the rest of her life. Because if you cry they will put a gun in her hands and tell her that if she doesn’t shoot you, they will start tonight.
       And hope, if you still can hope, that she doesn’t cry. Because then they will put the gun in your hands.
       The monster, through the billows of smoke, dust and noise and the yellow-green haze rising up from other worlds disrupted, retreated, dragging the silent children with it. And the survivors who did not even think of themselves as survivors, looked through eyes blurred with tears and blood, and watched them leave. Everything was gone. Everything.
      
       When Kintu told me this, how he had stood in the midst of the fray, and how many eyes he had seen it through, I tried to do what Kampalans had done for twenty years. You put up barriers to the inner parts of your mind. You erect them quickly and you make them high. “Children Abducted”, “Village Razed To The Ground”, “Men Mutilated by LRA”, “Kony Rebels Strike Again”… you cannot let that knowledge penetrate again. Let it stay on the surface, where you can know it for now, then forget it when the music starts to play on the radio. The new Mariah Carey song. Because if it gets inside, you will feel helpless and useless, because you cannot stop them; and you will feel dirty and cheap like a thief, because they don’t deserve to suffer and you don’t deserve to be secure; and you will feel angry that this happened and spoilt your peace, and you will feel angry for feeling that, and then you will want to forget, and you will say in the silence of your heart that the next time you will not let this knowledge in. I will not let it in.
      
       But, Kintu told me, I didn’t have that option anymore.