Dust (39 page)

In the late day’s sky, morning’s wandering birds fly in array back to mountain nests.

Ajany walks into the guesthouse’s reception area, limbs weighed down. Everything of life is out of focus, and she has lost her feeling for time.

Just then, a taxi driver skids in. Isaiah leaps out. He is returning from the Rift Valley, where he has experienced arcane space, color, and Great Rift Valley silences. He has also seen flamingos on Lake Nakuru.

“Hello,” says Isaiah in resolute cheerfulness.

Ajany, lethargic, offers a nod, avoids his eyes.

He knows. “You’re leaving.”

Another nod.

She drags herself to her room.

Isaiah reaches her door in time to hear the lock turn. He waits outside, then shakes his head and walks toward his room with the caution of one traversing sliding rocks that abut a crag. Flesh and woman; delirious remembrances of intimate shadowed selves. All of a sudden, they had become afraid of each other. They were not lovers who needed words to wound; absence sufficed. Wordless, they had both fled, before dawn, to opposite portions of the land.

In the evening, on impulse, Isaiah orders Thai takeaway for two, avoiding Calisto, who is stalking him. He did not ask for his twice-a-day hot pineapple-vanilla-ice-cream crêpes.

“Arabel?”

Ajany has stuffed some clothes into an open case. She is busy removing Odidi’s office photograph from its frame when she hears Isaiah’s knock. His voice. She hesitates. A clock’s minute hand settles into nine-fifty-two before she turns to unlock the door.

Isaiah lifts the greasy brown paper bags.

“Last Supper?” He lifts a bottle of Australian red wine. “Thai chicken, jasmine rice,” he adds.

Ajany forces a smile.

What endures?

Absence.

They eat.

They start their meal in silence.

Listening to outside sounds; cars, voices, birds, drip-drip of a leaking tap; whispery wind on plants.
Tick-tock
. A woman and a man suffused by vague, steamed jasmine rice scents chewing on Nairobi-cooked Thai chicken.

Then Isaiah speaks, much too loudly: “I saw flamingos today as pink as Wot Ogyek.”

“Wuoth Ogik,” mutters Ajany.

Isaiah grins as he pours red wine into a coffee mug.

Fruity.

Ajany looks and looks.

The room spins.

The wine is the color of Odidi’s morgue blood.

A crevasse splits open—a summons, a memory.

Appetite dissolved, Ajany falls in.

Exhausted by mysteries, of confusing answers, fuzzy thoughts, bad dreams, drowning in unknown sensations, the accumulation of silences, Ajany rises up like a creature on fire and flies out of the room. She runs past Jos, onto the lawn and through the gate.

Isaiah follows her, the wine bottle in his hand.

He shouts, “Just a minute. Wait!”

He thrusts the half-full bottle at Jos.

Light-streaked darkness.

Ajany runs blind.

Down Ngong Road, she runs and runs. She runs, and then she stops, looks left and right, crosses the road to her right, and comes to an abrupt stop outside the mortuary gate. Stands still, as if she is waiting for something majestic to appear.

The green glow of the morgue lights stains her face.

Her fingers cling to the gate wire.

Rustlings.

Vigil for a riddle.

The Old Dead gather to watch.

Rustlings.

The last time she was here, there had been radio prattle. White and pink chalked numbers on a blackboard. Green walls, creak of a faulty
fan that cooled nothing and whirled in time to the ticktock of a hidden clock.

They had found Odidi’s body.

Baba had groaned, then shut up and become stone.

She had bled from her nose, and from her life.

Something died.

Arguing over a body.

Then a ritual:
preparing the deceased
in a grossly understaffed morgue. She went to buy Odidi a new suit, and shoes from the mall.

Nyipir Oganda was wiping Odidi’s chest when she returned, the attendant watching him, clasping a hand to his jaw.

Her father’s deformed hands were gentle. He wiped Odidi’s face with a cream-colored cloth. He hummed a lullaby:

Nyandolo

Nindo otere

Nindo man e wang’ baba

Obi mana ka

Nindo man e wang’ mama

Baba finished and gestured for the clothes.

They dressed up Odidi together. Black socks on Odidi’s feet, laces on tan leather shoes, tied up just as he had taught her.

Ali Dida Hada’s radio crackling, “Stand down. Calling all units.” And shouting, “Oganda, leave for Kalacha now. Security forces have taken over the election center.”

Dr. Mda puffed out his cheeks.
“Aieee! Ngod,”
he shrieked. “Are we
sntupid
?”

Now.

Fading voices.

Fading traffic sounds.

Delicate night-rain falls. The corroding wire of the padlocked gate cuts into Ajany’s fingers. Shadows within the grevillea upon which, not too long ago, a metallic-mauve bird sang.

Memory’s voice—sounds like a groan.

A choice.

She could climb over and never have to return to this side again.

Stillness.

And mutterings from in-between people: the Newly Dead.

Rustlings.

The earth is soft where Ajany stands.

Fetid scent.

Echoes.

Why does Obarogo need eyes at night?

Come
.

Tug of subtle tendrils.

Come
.

Whistling; breathed prelude of a shared desert song. She listens and feels Odidi as a flame without light. But when her heart should have stopped—swallowed by painful joy, she hears,
Choose
, and she is poised before a red cave’s entrance. She is standing by a roadside, seeing herself inside Odidi’s eyes.

Swirling fog.

Waits three seconds too long.

That, too, is a decision.

Sundering.

Cold smokelike wisps unravel, returning her to a center within other inner worlds. Mist stairs evaporate into unreachable portions of darkness. Her knees give way. Surrendering.

A lone firefly hovers.

On impulse, Ajany crawls over to scratch at a goo-encrusted plaque at the gate.
Hic locus est ubi mors
 … The rest of the words are indecipherable. “This is the place where death rejoices to teach the living,” the full plaque once declared.

Tremulous touch on Ajany’s face, tender, moist, warm on skin. A hard arm around her body: she is propped up by its weight. Isaiah’s head heavy against hers. Wetness slides down her neck. “You’re c-crying,” she says.

They take the long route back, through the city center, traversing edges of peril. She wants to stay lost. He has nowhere else to go. They walk until Ajany’s toes cramp. They skirt fringes, where noise is muted and people scarce, and find themselves crossing a half-gated piazza, at the center of which looms a silhouetted cross. Hazy light outlines a side building. They approach its orange-hued stillness and discover other
quiet souls, some seated, some kneeling, three with their heads buried in their arms. A monstrance glimmers on a rude table adorned with yesterday’s flowers. A red light flickers on the wall adjacent to the table. It is a place to sit out the night with no risk of anyone’s asking for payment or an explanation. They sink into a bench next to a small bookshelf and sit close together, like two lost children, holding hands and hoping to be found.

Later, for the first time in the years of his meanderings, Nairobi’s flower man will be stopped in the middle of the street just before dawn. A stuttering woman wants lilies, rosemary sprigs, and baby’s breath for all the money she has, which is two hundred and fifty shillings. Such a fresh experience; he offers her the flowers for two hundred.

Isaiah and Ajany will return to their guesthouse in the indistinctness of that time of day. In her room, they will grip each other, engulfed in mongrel plant aromas. But first, he will strip off his clothes, and then hers, crushing spaces of distance, the limits of skin. Crumbling in her bed, she will arrange his limbs around her body in order to become cocooned. Entangled, secured, and warm, they both sleep at once.

Midafternoon, Jos phones the room. “Madam, an Officer Hada’s here for you.”

Ali Dida Hada’s eyes narrow when he sees the small, puffy-eyed woman, and the haggard, darkly tanned man next to her. He remembers the time of his first encounter with Ajany; she looked just as half-worldly then as she did now, with Odidi standing in front of her like a defense shield.

The fear and questions are huge in her eyes.

Resignation, too.

“Eh …”
he starts, “Wuoth Ogik livestock were stolen.… 
Pole
 … Galgalu, he was hurt.” Quickly, “He’s safe, don’t worry.”

She whispers, “Baba?”

“Asking for you. I’m leaving. Police plane. Wilson Airport, fourteen hundred hours. If you want to come.” He glances at Isaiah.

Outside, two crows caw—a bird quarrel in full throttle. Ali Dida Hada watches Ajany.

“She’s not there,” Ajany tells Ali Dida Hada. “She left us all long ago.”

Ali Dida Hada removes his cap, scratches, returns it to his head. “Tomorrow. Fourteen hundred hours.”

Isaiah steps forward. “Is there an extra place? I’m going back anyway. I’d be grateful for a ride back.”

Ali Dida Hada turns to Isaiah with a tiny frown, offers him an imperceptible nod, and exits.

Somewhere in the northern frontier, a Trader marches with a new and loaded AK-47 in a frenzy fed by assorted phantoms’ murmurs for vengeance. Today the man will be an exorcist in a steaming Kenyan desert.

Ajany, Isaiah, and Ali Dida Hada leave Nairobi the next day. They leave in an unmarked white car under cover of a blue-gray cloud with the smell of lilies and roses and rosemary sprigs. Isaiah carries Hugh Bolton’s clay face. They take off from the police air wing in an eight-seater laden with supplies: six retreaded tires, newspapers, and a sack of mangoes and oranges. The other passenger is a government assistant minister. He speaks about Kenya’s future, now that Article IV has been accepted—it is rosy. They speak of the state of the world—it is precarious. They say the rains are late for the second year running; they confirm that weather patterns have changed. They will land in a drizzle of locusts.

32

A BALD ELDERLY MAN WITH WHITE EARRINGS, WRAPPED IN A
dark blanket, his feet in tire sandals, smoking a black pipe, walks by. Distant cowbells. A slow-sailing cloud covers a premature moon, which casts a shimmery eye over an earth amphitheater of stone and shrubs. Locusts form a small, low-hanging, moving cloud. The acacias are big-headed dryads. In the horizon is a tourmaline-shaped rock hill with etched panels. In the foreground, Aaron Chache, in creased uniform, gesturing like a marshal, guides a plane to a halt.

When it does stop, Ali Dida Hada, Ajany, and Isaiah climb down and walk into the scrawny police post.