Dust (2 page)

Random humans in this slippery city of ephemeral doings crave his death.
Ua!
Something flutters and falls within Odidi like a startled, broken songbird.
What have I ever done to them?
He just wants to go home.

Justina!

Oasis.

He will cross spiderweb black roads to touch her.

Odidi runs.

He turns down Jogoo Road and glances upward, childhood habit born when Galgalu, the family herdsman, had told him that God was Akuj—Eternity Revealed as Sky. Up there now, orange dusk light’s bateleur eagles. Like marabou storks, they are prophet birds. Water in his eyes. Odidi blinks away Nairobi’s late-day drizzle. And the earth shivers behind him. A pitiful bellow, a goat protesting the injustice of a butcher’s knife. Death stinks of cold emptiness. Omosh: the last of his men. Odidi gulps down vomit. Tastes salt. Tears in his mouth, sticky, wet of hands, as if he has dipped them into blood. Was this the destination of all their wars?

Shadow and regret.

Stumbling.

He must move.

But the city, his city, has all of a sudden changed its shape and turned against him. Roads slither into hard walls; blocks of shadow scurry away to expose his next step to ravenous, carnivorous urban trolls. Faster, Odidi runs.

A whisper from his remote past like a brushstroke on his bare back:
You can’t live in the songs of people who don’t know your name
.… Odidi grabs at his throat, suffocating in a burst-of-fire clarity.
What have I done?
Odidi runs.

Glimpse of his fleeting shadow’s reflection on darkened glass panes. What had he done? Odidi runs. Louder:
You can’t live in the songs of people who don’t know your name
. He understands now that he must protect his family. Odidi runs. He
must
reach a stranger; stop him from boarding a flight from Heathrow to Nairobi. First, he
must
find the labyrinthine alleyways, his escape routes. Pounding steps behind him, sundown’s cool breeze on his arm and face. A moan within his throat—
let me go home
. Odidi runs. Damp-fisted hands propel him forward, and the city’s twilight rain saturates his skin at the same time that he hears a phone melody from within his coat pocket. Cesária Évora’s “Um Pincelada.” His sister’s calling tune.

Grim grin. Only Arabel Ajany Oganda would phone at a time like this. If he were to answer, he predicts her first words would be “Odi … what’s wrong?” He would have to say, “Nothing, I’m taking care of it,” as she expected him to, and he always did. And he was. Odidi runs. “Um Pincelada” plays. If he could, he would say,
Hello, silly
. After more than ten years of nothing, today he could tell her:
I’m going home
. She would laugh, and he with her. The music stops.
Hello, silly
.

They were chance offspring of northern-Kenya drylands. Growing up, Odidi and Ajany had been hemmed in by arid land geographies and essences. Freed from history, and the interference of Nairobi’s government, they had marveled at Anam Ka’alakol, the desert lake that swallowed three rivers—the Omo, Turkwel, and Kerio. They learned the memories of another river—the Ewaso Nyiro—four moody winds, the secret things of parents’ fears, throbbing shades of pasts, met assorted transient souls, and painted their existence on a massive canvas of
glowing, rocky, heated earth upon which anything could and did happen. They mapped their earth with portions of wind, fire, sky, water, and nothingness, with light, piecing tales from stones, counting footsteps etched into rocks, peering into crevices to spy on the house of red rain. They lived in the absence of elders afflicted with persistent memories: no one to tell the children how
it
had been, what
it
meant, how
it
must be seen, or even what
it
was. Because of this, they re-created myths of beginnings. “The first Oganda was spoken into existence by flame,” Odidi once told Ajany. She believed him. His sister trusted everything he said. Glimmer of a smile.

“Hawa!”

He had forgotten where he was.

Odidi runs.

He jumps over mud-stained, crumpled election posters entangled in rotting foliage that show the bright face and pure-white teeth of one of the presidential candidates.
Teeth do not rot in the grave
. Where had he read that? To his left, a plastic-choked alleyway. He ducks into it. Song in his heart, a psalm of glee. This is
his
territory.

Justina!

A glance finds her among a seething mass. He knows most of them—gang associates. Justina is draped in her yellow muumuu with its ridiculous giant pink carnations. He adores that dress on her. He adores her. Her eyes are unusually large, luminous, and hollow. Her howl fragments his heart—Who has wounded her?
Whom must he kill?
—and then flames flare from his heart’s soul and engulf him, and after he screams out, he can no longer see Justina.

Odidi limps.

He grips his shattered right shoulder. Protrusion of bone. Blood trail. Trickle from his mouth. It is said that in the throes of battle dying men cry out for their mothers.
Akai-ma
, Odidi groans. She wards off ghouls and bad night entities, wrestles God, casts ancient devils into hell before their time, and kicks aside sea waves so her son will pass unhindered.
Akai-ma
. Throb in the back of Odidi’s left leg. Searing that eats the base of his spine. Damp from his chest. And even though his leg is heavier than a tree trunk, he tries to carry it home. He grapples with a thought that keeps sliding away. He seizes it.
Justina!

The finish line. He will make it because he is Shifta the Winger, rugby finisher, and scorer. His forwards and backs have thrown him the
ball. Although they have fallen out of play, they depend on him to end the game. He is the quickest, the trickiest, the best Shifta the Winger, dancing through adversaries. Before Jonah Lomu made it right to have large wingers, there was Shifta the Kenyan Winger, who carried the game into the face of opponents, and who scored try after try after try while crowds chanted
Shifta! Thump, thump! Winger! Thump! Thump!
And later, when he heard the Kenyan national anthem, felt it resound in his spirit, he had wept tears that traveled past his lips and reached the earth.

Shifta! Thump!

Winger! Thump!

Odidi hobbles to the center of a pathway, his twisted leg dragging. Warm liquid runs down, stains his trousers, leaving a visible patch. Piss. Out of his control.
Akai-ma!
She fixes everything. Retrieves those who belong to her. Dim shadows, like bateleur eagles surveying grassy plains, circle in. They herd him into a trap.

A succinct
ratata
.

Odidi’s good knee gives out.

He crumbles.

Exhales on a gurgle.

It is said.

That when a person begins to die, all his life races past him in spaceless time and timeless space, and he can feel again, only much faster, and with sunlike light, all he has felt before. On the tarmac, Odidi Oganda’s knuckles scrape hot stone. His left leg faces the opposite direction. A single spurt of sound becomes a blaze that cuts through Odidi’s middle, and his entire existence spirals down a hole that becomes smaller and smaller. His body jerks backward and then forward. He sighs, exhausted now, fingers folding into themselves.

Music.

A replay of Cesária Évora.

Ajany
.

His sister.

Words congeal, become blocks of thought. Heart-speak.
Poor ’Jany
. He must warn her.
Poor ’Jany
. Music. Akai-ma will be mad. Flicker of laughter. She
was
mad.
Akai-ma
. Galgalu will be waiting for him. He had said he would watch the sky for signs of Odidi’s homecoming. Later, they would travel with the cows to the Chalbi Desert salts and debate life, its loves and crevices.

Music.

Cesária Évora.

Ajany.

His sister.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, when he was only four years old, Odidi, carrying Ajany, had screamed at his mother:
This is my baby!
She was, for he had wandered a long, long way to bring her back home, having, with Galgalu the herdsman, retrieved her from the fixed gaze of five waiting vultures.

Odidi savors the ringing.

It tastes of ordinary things.

Like presence.

He listens.

And listens.

The music stops.

No
, he thinks,
No, ’Jany, continue
.

The drone of a million flies now buzzing in his ear. What’ll he tell his sister? He’ll say, “The land woke up at dusk and said to itself, ‘Today I’ll be Arabel Ajany. And the lake looked at the land that was Ajany and said, ‘Today I’ll be Odidi Ebewesit.’ That is why we roam. Because sometimes we are places, not people.” She would believe him. She always did. He would say …

Anonymous murmurs.

Someone moves close to him, kicks at a numbing portion of his body.

“Ameaga?”
Is he dead?

“Bado.”
Not yet.

They arrange objects around Odidi that
ping
when they fall. He squints through an overwhelming dark-red veil at the moving misshapen shapes.

Simpler needs:
Help me
.

Foot on his numb body.

Smaller longings:
Touch me
.

Minuscule hope:
Stay with me
.

Murmurs.

Stay
. Odidi hiccups.

Ache becomes pining, every straggling breath now consecrated to presence, a single word bursting through—Baba! The sound dissolves
resistance. Baba! Misery pouring out of Odidi’s mouth is the color of rotting blood. It stains his coat and T-shirt. Red tears. Streaks make his face a grotesque duo-toned mask.

Odd memory.

Old music.

Fela Kuti.

Moses Odidi Oganda was eighteen years old, a first-year University of Nairobi engineering student, when, in a room full of books and silences in his coral-hued desert home, Wuoth Ogik, he had dived into a story of machines and found, tucked into inner pages, an alien painted vision. He had ripped it from a page that age had glued it into, his breathing all of a sudden disgruntled, pained, and potholed. Before he could further contemplate what the image meant, he heard the hard tread on stone of his father’s footsteps. He had returned the piece to its mute page and walked out with the book.

Later, at university, he found Fela Kuti’s songs—their compacted rage:
Aye, aye, aye
 …
I no go agree make my brother hungry, make I no talk …

He had also appointed himself Thomas Sankara’s heir and wore nonprescription lenses shaped like those Patrice Lumumba had once worn.

Three semesters later, Odidi traveled home to Wuoth Ogik. In their third evening as a family, Odidi Oganda brought in the AK-47 that Nyipir, his father, had given him five years ago. He took it apart, then threw the pieces at Nyipir’s feet, chanting:
Aye, aye, aye … I no go agree make my brother hungry, make I no talk
 …

Stillness.

Then Nyipir had stooped over the pieces.

Stillness.

Afterward, in the interlude of strokes from a hippo-leather whip that tore at Odidi’s body, Nyipir implored, “The only … war you fight … is for what belongs to you. You can’t live the songs of people who don’t know your name.”

Odidi had tried to shield his body, waiting to execute a rugby side-tackle, forgetting Baba was a seasoned military man. They wrestled across the floor.
Crack
. The breaking of Odidi’s left arm, his rugby ellipse-carrying arm. In Odidi’s stifled sorrow, the dying of grand rugby hopes
that he realized right then he had nourished. He remembers Ajany waving her arms above her head, struggling to scream: “Stop!” Stuttering
Sttttttttt
over and over. Akai-ma cursed in Ngaturkana, summoning God and Catholic saints to witness the madness. She also offered to strip and show them her bare behind. A curse. But Galgalu struck the ground between father and son with a long, thick, herdsman’s stick.
Thup!

Then there was silence.

Much, much later.

A father’s whispered entreaty to a fleeing son:
Stay. Stay, please
.

The son left.

Never bothered with an answer or even a backward look.

Now, years later, from a bitumen-smelling potholed backstreet, Odidi’s heart bleeds out his answer:
Coming home. Wait for me
.

Scent of return.

Burnt acacia-resin incense. Desert essences—dung, salt, milk, smoke, herbs, and ghee, the yearning for rain. Akai-ma said good smells melted bad spirits.
We’ll meet our cows at sunset
, Odidi promises.
Home
is the cream of hot milk of their animals, gulped down when Galgalu the herdsman was not looking, chewed-grass, slime-layered goat tongues on skin as they licked the stolen salt he and Ajany fed them with. Small Odidi watches Baba shave, his angular face lost in soft white lather, experiences again the wonder of Baba’s smooth-faced re-emergence. Baba winks. He is stretched out on his large, peeling tan leather armchair, head leaning back, a whiff of Old Spice, filled with big laughter. Just when Odidi would have thrown himself into Nyipir’s arms, a chill shadow crashes into him, stabbing into his body.

Now.

It stretches over him.

Odidi croaks,
You!

It stares back, empty-socketed, and as noiseless as when they had first met.
What do you want?
Hollow hunger. Perpetual thirst.
Here I am
. The thing smiles. Odidi understands.
If you touch her …
Odidi shivers.
Leave her alone
. Cold tears. If it did not burn to do so, his teeth would chatter.
Please
. The shape watches Odidi’s seeping shadow flow into a twisted, dark-red cave, its den.
Not her fault
, Odidi pleads.
I’m here
.