And she suffered when it was over, and she found herself back in bed, lying beside a beautiful man who still had no apparent interest in touching her.
Once Thandi gave up on pleasuring herself, she had more time to stare at Lee and think. To notice how his smell changed on certain days of the week, to parse its individual notes (bergamot, smoke, lye, gin). To try to deduce where he took their son after he picked him up from school. Yes, Thandiwe Banda became quite the scientist. She curled on her side and observed her husband, her palms, like his, clasped in prayer and wedged between her knees.
* * *
Microorganisms are highly deceptive creatures. A virus, for example, seems weak by definition: it is classified as an obligate and its primary state is one of need. But a virus does not just hide inside its host like an animal seeking shelter in a cave, nor does it just hitch a ride in a cell and drop off elsewhere. A virus sneaks in and takes over. Some viruses, like Ebola, are effective because that takeover is so rapid and gruesome; but most of them, like the common cold, are powerful because they are relatively mild but ubiquitous. Lee chose to study The Virus because it is one of the most devious of obligates.
Its ultimate cunning is its choice of host, what’s called its tropism. The Virus targets the immune system, infiltrating the white blood cells that usually direct operations to defend the body from invaders in the first place. It then uses those immune cells to reproduce itself, co-opting their mechanisms for genetic replication. The same is true, in a sense, of The Virus’s main mode of transmission: sex. It takes advantage of the two engines of life – the desire to reproduce and the will to persevere. Sneakiest of all, The Virus vanishes into the cells it has usurped, making it invisible to the system that would seek to destroy it. It is the great pretender, a spy in disguise, an inner subverter. This makes it all the more difficult to cure, much less prevent.
‘By the year 2000, fifteen per cent of the Zambian population was infected with The Virus – mostly women, mostly adults. And that was six years ago,’ Lee said, shaking his head. The NGO workers and social scientists in the audience bowed over their scribbling pens. He could almost hear them thinking: Why won’t these bloody muntus just stop fucking already?
Lee was delivering a talk at the Alliance Française of Lusaka, which was hosting a conference about addressing the needs of those infected by The Virus, as well as the orphans they left behind. The Virus had wrought an epidemic. Prevention campaigns had helped. Billboards all over the country proclaimed the virtues of safe sex and, more dubiously, abstinence. That looped red ribbon icon was now scattered over pamphlets and walls like a plague of red eyes. And unlike other political leaders in the region, Kenneth Kaunda had acknowledged The Virus as early as 1987, after his son Masuzyo died of it. There had been substantive advances in treatment since then: access to antiretroviral drugs, with the vehicular-sounding abbreviation ARVs, in the early 1990s; the approval of the first generics a few years ago.
But still, it was as if – and Lee said this now, turning away from the charts and graphs on his projected PowerPoint to gesture at the ceiling like a poet: ‘It is as if a giant animal has crunched its teeth through millions of people. It has devoured an entire generation of this country. All the parents are gone.’ He looked out at the audience of bobbing heads. ‘We are a nation of orphans.’
This was mostly rhetoric. Lee needed to convey the magnitude of the epidemic to policymakers if he was to acquire the resources he needed for his experiments. But in truth, Lee was too pragmatic to weep for dying Zambians, and he was far more interested in the biology and epidemiology than the sociology of the disease. He turned to his next slide, an old one.
‘This is the structure of The Virus.’
He only showed this one to non-scientists these days. The diagram was basic and oddly floral – a circle surrounded by spokes, the glycoproteins The Virus uses to attach itself to an immune cell. Lee looked at it admiringly.
‘A vaccine usually works by giving the body a tiny dose of an inactive virus,’ he explained.