Dust (3 page)

Odidi and his sister Ajany’s December school holiday. Odidi, plotter of adventures, had decreed they should visit the forbidden, damask-stone cave to find the source of a stream they could hear but not see.

“No!” Ajany had stammered. “There’s bad in there.”

“How do you know?” Odidi scoffed.

“Akai-ma says …”

“We’ll find water at the base.” He had interrupted her. His words had separated and bounced back.
Wa … Bassssssss … Ter … Wa … Sssssss
 …

So Ajany had placed her hand in his and followed him to the cave entrance that opened into a hollowed-out higgledy-piggledy grotto haunted by “God’s dazzling darkness” and seeping water. Damp pockets, points of light, and thick shadows that clung. Odidi had squashed his shoulders through trough-like passageways. Ajany followed. Tiny for her age, she could have strolled through. In two places they walked upright. Mostly they slithered on the hard, cold ground, dark skin tones blending in, inching forward on knees and hands. Abrupt left turn into a twisted chamber, into a triangle of light on jutting walls, which revealed yellow-and-red-shaded signs of bleeding spoors and giant footprints heading upward.
There
. The imprint of the world’s first record of laughter—open-mouthed toothiness carved into ancient rock. Pictograms. Space shimmering in between icons. They had whirled before the cave wall. “Mhhhhh,” Odidi had said, understanding where secrets are born. The too-muchness of experiencing, why silence is the language of last resort. They had laughed and laughed, peals of joy bouncing in the chamber. Ajany had skipped up and down before stumbling backward and falling on her bottom.

Crack!
Ajany picked up what had been broken.

Odidi looked at what she carried and saw a white human finger bone, pointing at him. Ajany flung it away from herself. It had struck Odidi on his forehead. And when he had turned his face away, he had spotted the rest of the skeleton. The skull stained, grinning, and missing some teeth. Its sunken sockets stared at him then, as they did now.

“Where has its face gone?” Ajany had wailed, hand facing upward, her feet jumping, crashing down on the thing’s left hand. Odidi had stretched forward and picked Ajany up.

She gripped his neck, hiccupping. “It’s Obarogo! Odidi, Obarogo!”

And even as his life now leaks out, from the tarmac, Odidi chortles,
He-he!
Bubbles in his gullet.
Obarogo!
His sister consumed every story he fed her. Obarogo, the blind bogeyman born out of Odidi’s desire to hear his sister scream. Obarogo, who took life from the wool of darkness. Obarogo, who needed eyes in order to see in the dark and who sought out little girls whose eyes were open when they should have been asleep. Obarogo, of course, avoided boys.

They had raced away from the red cave, he half lifting, half shoving his sister ahead of him. Days after, Ajany, sucking on her two fingers, had dogged Odidi’s steps as they pastured livestock. She had yanked at his shorts. “ ’Didi, I dream of … of … Obaro … Oba …”

“Stop it!” Odidi had hissed, and whistled at the herding dogs. When he had looked back, he saw Ajany stabbing the earth with a twig. He shouted, “Soon we go back to school!”

Ajany had looked up at him with large, afraid-of-school eyes. The twig had fallen from her hands.

“We’ll go Far Away,” Odidi had whispered. Just as he had promised, “We’re going to
real
Kenya,” when he had learned of Baba’s decision to send them down-country to a boarding school south of the Ewaso Nyiro River.

Odidi and Ajany’s first vision of the school had been as a space demarcated from the rest of the universe by a massive black gate and an overgrown, almost dark-violet kai-apple fence that covered a thick wall. It was a misshapen world of gray stone edifices, a piteous tribute to an obscure English public school.

The headmistress, Mrs. Karai, M.Ed. Calabash-shaped. Stumpy. Stern. Ice. Yellow-brown, thin legs, faux-pearl necklace, and hornrimmed spectacles. After her New Year new-student assembly speech, on the morning of their second day, she summoned Odidi and Ajany to her office.

“Stand.”

They stood.

“No fighting, no stealing, no politics. Do you know how to use a toilet?”

No answer.

“I take that to mean ‘no.’ Matron will show you. I warn you. I smell trouble—you’ll see. You’ll know who I am, you hear?”

Touch and instinct were missing from Mrs. Karai’s words. Was reason also a sense? Odidi had gathered every fury that possessed him, had
heard his sister grinding her teeth, knew she was unconscious of what she was doing. If he exploded, she might crash. So he had swallowed down rage and touched Ajany’s shoulder.

“Dismissed,” Mrs. Karai snarled.

They had left the office hand in hand. They had dodged each other’s eyes. Later, they focused on study. Ajany learned to paint, covered shame with vivid colors. Books revealed destinations. Huskies in Alaska, pumpkins that become footmen, genteel princes, knights of round tables, and agreeable kings who oversaw holy order. Atlases were a favorite; anything could be imagined to happen between the lines and curves of a journey.

Odidi became a grade-three piano student within a year.

“Come.
Li
sten.
Li
sten. Ajany!”

Music and painting bandaged soul-holes.

They forgot teachers whose lip-curling mouths asked, “
Ati
, from where? Is it on the map?” Drowned out classmates: “You people cook dust to eat.” Music and painting canceled memories of annual February humiliations when news stories of northern land famines arrived with portraits of emaciated, breast-baring, adorned citizens, and skeletons of livestock. They suffered a flurry of “School Walks” and “Give Your Change, Save a Life” and “Help the Poor Starving People of Northern Kenya” picnics. Ajany, being a useful facsimile for the occasion—reed-thin, small, dark, bushy-haired, with large slanted eyes—was thrust to the school stage to slump over one end of a massive cardboard of a bank check for newsletter photo shoots. Odidi would sit in the audience with eyes shut, dreaming about end of term, when the blessed migration from this Kenya to theirs, via Nairobi, occurred. Nairobi was the oasis where he and Ajany boarded a dilapidated green holiday bus shaped like a triangular loaf and shuttled along ramshackle roads to the trading center. Sometimes they walked; most of the time they got a ride close to Wuoth Ogik, where they purged school from their hearts.

After the red cave, life at school for Odidi and Ajany changed. Odidi acquired bulk, merged it with fury, and, after joining the rugby team, transformed the school’s game. In the second season, when the opponents’ defense tried to take the ball from him, he broke three sets of teeth and converted twelve tries. Their school, former perennial failures, became School Rugby Cup contenders. In the created songs of worship for their new hero
—Shifta! The Winger
!—Odidi found belonging, and Ajany, reflecting Odidi’s glory, was at last left in peace.

Years later, Odidi would command Ajany, “Choose.” She did. She left Kenya. He had stayed. To live out a belonging to which he had become accustomed.

Lying on the tarmac, Odidi connects meaning to sounds he hears: a tire squeal, a slammed door, cut-off words, ricochet shouts of once-alive friends. They are where they are because of a green Toyota Prado of which they had tried to relieve its current owner. Wasn’t stealing. It had been Odidi’s car. He’d bought it, cash. It had been swiped from him. He was just taking it back. He and the car’s current driver had once been friends. Schoolmates, business partners, drinking and whoring buddies who had chosen the green car for Odidi to celebrate a life-changing deal gone through. The friend had opted for a brown Jaguar. A few years later, contracts shattered, he was driving Odidi’s car. This job was supposed to be easy: stealing from a thief.

When Odidi had told Justina that he was going to take his green car back and give it to her, Justina had begged, “Odi-Ebe, please—why not buy another one?”

He had snapped, “This one’s mine.”

Justina had placed both her hands over her bulging stomach. “I’m scared.”

He had laughed at her, seized her, and lifted her up. She had looked down at him. He had watched her until she managed a smile, the way she always did. “A
kawaida
job like this?” he had whispered as he lowered her. “It’s Odidi.” And finally she had giggled. This last job was supposed to have been easy.

After this he would marry Justina.

Restart destiny.

He would also find the courage to climb into an airplane. It was time to visit his sister in Brazil. There was so much to say and do. This job should have been so easy. Except, after Odidi and his team had struck, and he had been about to drive off in the car, a police execution squad was waiting for them.

Voices.

More cars.

Whirring of a camera.

Bright light.

Murmurs.

Then.

Five, four, three, two, one, action!
A voice, gravelly, pompous, and familiar: “Our
mbrave mboys
returned fire for fire. Two of our men are wounded. The gang leader
mocked
us. Threw abuse. Our
mbrave mboys
gave chase. The climinals
fred
on foot. We persisted. We
forrowed
for two
kirometers
.…”

Odidi listens.

“The
climinals
moved with the
plecision
of
rocusts
. They
swarmed
their targets. They have been
stearing
, conning, and
dismantring
vehicles. Have executed bank
rombberies, mundered poricemen
, and escaped with ninety
mirrion shirrings
.”

Shit!

Odidi understood.

A setup.

The Officer Commanding Police Division, whom they paid every month to look away, and who on three occasions had hired out his gun to the gang, had just sacrificed them.

Sorrow is a universe.

Guilt.

Shame at being fooled. It contains fear because there is no one who will hear what he needs to say.

Such is loneliness.

Tears.

Electric chill-pain.

Odidi shivers.

Blood.

What’s happening to me?

Then.

Someone is breathing over him.

Warmth. A voice: “I’ve looked for you, boy.”

Odidi opens his mouth.
Baba?
No sound.

The voice: “I’m here.”

Odidi tries to shift toward the presence.

Wants to say,
Didn’t rob any bank
.

Attempts a grin.
Knew you’d find me
.

But it is simpler to allow life its rolling sensations.

Above Odidi, the night. Blurred intimacy of twinkling white stars; watching Kormamaddo, the bull camel of the waters.

What’s happening to me?

A voice says, “Close your eyes, boy. Go to sleep.”

Odidi coughs three times.

Red bubbles spatter.

The voice says, “I’m here.”

Odidi breathes in.

Doesn’t breathe out.

Becomes still.

The six-foot-tall, professorial, gray-haired, bespectacled man, a high-level plainclothes policeman wearing a nondescript, now bloodied black suit and black shoes, will wait nine minutes to retrieve the pistol strapped to Odidi’s chest and a bullet-pierced cell phone. With a tiny, delicate movement, he will pocket these. A squashed scarlet Sportsman cigarette packet with two cigarettes rustles in his shirt pocket. He reaches for one, reconsiders. He can endure, and has endured, the cocktail of stench: blood, shit, gun smoke, and rotten water from a nearby open drain. Eyes empty, he hunkers down. Hand to cheek, he thinks of Nyipir Oganda, the boy’s father, while his stained fingers dislodge his bifocals, which then rest crooked on his large nose. He stares into nothing.

1

HERE. SHE COULD PAINT THIS
;
HOLD THE BRUSH AS A STABBING
knife. There. Coloring in landscapes of loss. She could draw this for him, this longing to hear his particular voice, listening for echoes of bloodied footsteps, borrowing dead eyes to help her find him again. Here. Jagged precipices of wounding, and over cliffs, an immense waterfall of yearning, falling and falling into nothingness.

Her father, Aggrey Nyipir Oganda, is a slender, dark stone statue in front of her. Only his eyes roam spaces, taking everything in, the emptiness, too. Eyes reddened and popping out, shadowy tear streaks on an ebony face. His old policeman posture is intact. Straight, stiff, steady, he is old-world dapper in a slightly shabby 1970s coat and 1950s brown leather fedora. Tinged with the gray of age, clandestine wrinkles congregate at the corners of his eyes. As with so many men of Kenya from his time, his manner is genteel English colonial stranded in time’s paradoxes.

A twist deforms Ajany’s full lips.
Here
. The evidence. They are descendants of a lineage of Living Dead. Breathing in, she shifts her body to stare at a beige coffin, habitat of the new and unquiet dead on a day when distorted election results will set a bucolic country afire. The
outside world is drenched with human noises of accusations and counteraccusations, election rigging, and the miracle of mathematical votes that multiply and divide themselves. But within their world, in a self-contained, haunted compound with its lone, misshapen grevillea tree, upon which a purple-blue bird tweets, and where death prowls at half past three, Ajany bends forward to listen to and for her brother, Odidi, whose story-words had created vessels that always carried her into safe border.

Hours ago: Inside a morgue with its forgotten dead, the unprepared dead, and the happy dead, a chill had turned all their hands a pale yellow, same shade as Moses Odidi Oganda’s long, thick fingers. They had rummaged among the discarded dead in order to find and retrieve their own.

Post-autopsy, after a smoke-stained attendant had stitched him together again, father and sister had dressed Odidi up: olive khaki suit, black socks, and tan leather shoes, purchases from a half-closed, guarded, nearby mall whose managers balanced the fear of waiting for hell’s inevitable descent with the thirst to milk the last flow of money from panicking citizens. By three-thirty, documents signed, all protocol adjusted and therefore observed, Moses Ebewesit Odidi Oganda was officially dead.