Books, Short Stories and Satire

I spent the night clothed and conscious, hyper vigilant and ready for today. Yet now that it is morning and time to act, I find myself drowning in lethargy. I lie on my bed watching shadows on the ceiling and listen as the world wakes. I must have heard these sounds thousands of times before, but today they feel like they’re new. There’s the morning chorus of birds, the babble of children chattering on their way to school, the barking of next door’s dog, a creature driven to a frenzy in its desperation to attack any living thing that walks past its abode. My neighbour told me he bought it for protection, but there’s a tinge of mania in its bark, and I think the dog is the most dangerous thing in his life. When silence falls, I prick my ears for the sounds of Mama stirring. I am listening for echoes of the past; a fragment of memory forged in a time when she could call out to me. I won’t hear her from my room, and the thought that she might need me now, even if only to shift for comfort, makes me rub the grit from my eyes and rise.

 

I walk barefoot along the corridor, appreciating the rough terra-cotta tiles and a light breath of wind that passes between louvre windows whose panes are so dusty they’d be opaque if they were clear glass. The house is musty and old, dark and cool, a colonial relic where long-stemmed fans turn like spinning, arthritic spiders and the tapestries and carvings look like they were pillaged from angry natives long, long ago. It is a sad house, but it would be beautiful if it weren’t so grimy.

 

The sweetening wind on my bare chest and face won’t last. In a few hours, the sun will broil the air and breathing it in will feel like sucking on the end of an exhaust pipe. The warm, fetid air filled with nasty particulates is why I don’t bother to wipe the windows; they wouldn’t stay clean for a day. I stop by the bathroom to wash my face and wonder why I bother. Even the soap is dirty! As I brush my teeth, I amuse myself with the thought that, given the current levels of pollution and the global predilection for twinning cities, this one should be twinned with Mordor.

 

Outside Mama’s bedroom, I don the medivac suit I bought at great expense, and peel back the sticky tape seal from around the door. She’s awake when I go in; her red-rimmed eyes tell me that she too hardly slept a wink. In my case, it is a beggared conscience that denies me sleep, in hers it is pain and a fear of death. She can’t speak, but she doesn’t have to. I have spent years calibrating the haunted expressions of the dying. She’ll be dead soon, and we both know it. If anything, I am more certain of this fact than she is, since I am the one who is killing her.

 

I sit on the edge of the bed and take her hand, so fragile with its paper-thin skin. She reminds me of the skeleton of a lizard I once found. When I tried to lift it, to put it in my Shoebox of Special Things, it crumbled to dust. Mama is fragile like that. Every time I pick her up, I fear she will crumble into dust in my hands. I smile at her, but she can’t see me smile, and even if she could, she can’t smile back. She can’t eat. She can’t speak. She can’t move, not really, not more than her eyes and the odd, faint twitch that I have persuaded myself is involuntary.

 

The bed is dry, and I think about placing her on a commode, but the fading sheen that was on her face yesterday has gone. In its place is grey leather. I am struck by the thought that her death marks the beginning of the end of all things, and I wonder why I should be so surprised when I not only knew this day would come, I engendered it. I run a gloved hand tenderly along her jawline, lean over and touch the visor of my suit to her forehead. There’s a hint of recognition in her eyes, not of me - she can’t see my face behind the tinted plastic - but of the finality of the gesture. She closes her eyes, and as I back away, I know they won’t open again.

 

I reseal the room and remove the suit, and it is time for work. I prepare myself mentally for my last day at The Institute for Tropical Medicine, where I am a bit part actor on a small stage. I play the part of a respected academic and seeker of truths, a moral man with a mission to improve the lot of his people. I am not a moral man, and I have sought and found the truth. In so doing, I became a man who lost all hope for his people. I have come to despise what remains of humanity after my mother dies. She was the only person I ever loved who loved me back, and now she is gone, and there is no love, there is nothing left to like or care about. People have started to notice my contempt for them and their lives, but I pass the tests of social interactions like an irritating ghost; seen but not scary. I should terrify them, but they are too self-absorbed to see that.

 

I change into work clothes and take the short walk to the office. Normally, I avoid the route through the shantytown where rag-tag groups of children with skinny appendages and swollen stomachs call me rude names behind my back. I nod at their mothers and grandmothers, some of whom I have known most of my life. Even the ones who acknowledge me stare right through me, which is what happens when human eyes wish to unsee what they have seen. Even the prostitutes are sullen and disinterested. Where are your menfolk? I wonder, and the answer comes easily. They left home hours before I had to rise and went off in a vain search for work. The only men left in this place are old, ailing, or still drunk from the night before.

 

I used to hate this journey, but today it’s tolerable. I’m going to strike a blow for you, I think, and I imagine that instead of disliking me for my relative affluence, the people who watch my passing do so in awe of the man who became the Champion of the Oppressed. I want to scream out loud; I am going to reset the world! I don’t, though. They’d only sneer and think I’d gone predictably mad. My people steer clear of madmen. Madmen are victims of witchcraft, sickened by bad juju, which makes their madness, in all probability, untreatable and contagious.

 

Once through the shantytown, I pass by dozens of rusted hulks of cars and buses. They were built to run on fossil fuels and so became fossils themselves once the fuel failed to fire the economy. I don’t normally come this way, so at the crossroads I have to stop and think. I don’t want to think, so I do a childish thing and cross onto Adamu Street by walking through the shell of the mobile library that is mounted on blocks and hasn’t moved or seen a book in a decade. Once it was yellow on the outside, with red stripes down the side. Now it is brown inside and out, its interior flecked with green algae and stinking of piss. I was a studious soul in my time, and I’d come to this little oasis of knowledge often on my way home from school. Clambering through it is like passing through a time warp. I imagine the seats filled with the living dead, though my imagination cannot stretch to visualising faces. I nod to the faceless librarians; there were always two of them, and they nod back, acknowledging our shared past. We were only ever truly alive in bygone days, the ghosts and I.

 

When I reach the other side, I turn right, twisting my head to see if I can still read the graffiti on the side of the bus. It is illegible now, but I know it used to say Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. My head fills with scorn. It is a saying as trite and as untrue as the rubbish Mama used to read in her evangelical Christian pamphlets, packed with nonsense slogans like: Great leaders learn to lead by first learning to follow. Lies! Time has proven again and again that our so-called great leaders are psychopathic wolves who don’t give a damn for the sheep that follow them.

 

I pause at the next junction to look up and down the empty highway. I think of times past when petrol and diesel-powered vehicles were so ubiquitous that we had bumper-to-bumper traffic. Too bad we only sold the stuff the vehicles burned and never learned to make the vehicles themselves. When the Americans and the Europeans and the Chinese and the Indians no longer needed fossil fuel for their shiny, new, nuclear engines, we were stuffed. Poor us. Our economies crashed and burned as the countries that used to depend on our raw materials suddenly didn’t need us. When space mining and ocean farming became reality, they quickly threw up walls to stop billions of the needy from migrating to the land of plenty.

 

Senior government officials and the millionaires and billionaires have nuclear vehicles, of course. They also have massive diesel generators that run twenty-four seven. I could have a nuclear car too if I applied, and mortgaged my soul, and took the risk of being killed for it in a robbery. But I have nowhere I want to go and no ego to appease, so like the rest of the population, I walk or cycle. Today, I’m glad of the walk. I’m in no hurry to meet my doom. I want to see all the poverty and hopelessness of my people, my poor, failed people. I want the injustice of their sorry lives to be etched into my soul. I need to picture their pain as a fetid, pus-filled boil just begging to be lanced, so that when the moment comes to choose, and life seems to offer much, I’ll remember that I already chose to side with those who never had, and never will have, choices.

 

In the office, my colleague, Kola Benson, is hard at work. He gives me a look of disdain and casts a sideways glance at the clock. I almost laugh at his transparency. Kola is trying to isolate the unusual protein molecule in a strain of Ebola that wiped out half of the people on the continent of Africa. I nod in his direction, and he grunts in mine. We long ago stopped feigning civility or cooperating. I isolated the protein molecule over a year ago, but I’m not going to tell him that. I’m not going to tell him because he’s a jealous fool who wants to go to the big conference in San Francisco in my place. I’m not going to tell him that the molecule is man-made. I’m not going to tell him that I intended to reveal my findings to a gathering of scientists, and I can prove that the strain of Ebola which killed billions was a weaponised version designed to target African DNA. The speed with which it was dealt with when it migrated to the more advanced nations was proof that they always had a cure, but letting their citizens of African descent die would have betrayed their actions. That is what I was going to say. Now I shall smile and talk about clostrenderitis liviticus, a made-up bacterium I shall pretend to have discovered, and how understanding it will help to combat the scourge of diarrhoea in nations with an inadequate water supply. I shall stand on a stage, flat out lie, and soak up the applause of people who couldn’t care less about nations with inadequate water supplies.

 

I sit at my table and look around the office. The place is a hole. The whole building is a crumbling wreck. A man with my responsibility should be working in a pristine laboratory with state-of-the-art gas chromatography, a laser microtome, a mass spectrometer, an electron microscope, isolation chambers, biohazard zones and suits, you name it. What have I got instead? Electricity for ten per cent of the working day, and none at night. I think of Mama, bow my head, and secretly wipe away the tears. She’s sure to be dead by now. I unlock my desk drawer and take out a syringe and a bottle that contains a sample of a new Ebola strain, my strain, which I cross-cultivated with the old after stripping out the gene-targeting protein. It took ages, but it will prove to have been worth every second of my time.

 

I remember my joy at discovering that the vaccine we bankrupted the country to buy from Western pharmaceuticals did not affect the sample in my drawer. Mama was my final test. Bowel cancer got to her first and would have killed her slowly and painfully in time, but it was my hybrid Ebola strain that ended her life. It took three weeks for the symptoms to show, and from then on, forty-eight hours until death. Three weeks to develop the symptoms of a lethal virus transmitted in blood, breath, sweat and saliva, and only forty-eight hours to kill - those are the core ingredients of an extinction-level global pandemic. I wonder if anyone will be alive afterwards to name it after me.

 

I put the syringe and a needle in my bag. There’s only one way to deliver my agent, and that’s to slip a needle under my skin and introduce the virus into my bloodstream. Kola Benson doesn’t know it, but I have more than a ticket to San Francisco. I have tickets that take me to Texas, then New York, a whistle-stop tour of Europe, from there to Dubai, on to Russia, then China, a stopover in Japan, before coming home via Australia. It’ll be one hell of a journey. I’ll get to see so much to be thankful for, but then blessed are the meek, eh?

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