Joseph came rushing in. As if choreographed, the two calamities on either side of the salon crashed at its smoky centre.
Thandi watched Sylvia transfer the injured girl, bleeding and shaking, into Lee’s strong, capable arms. Thandi saw that Sylvia and Lee did not greet each other – they did not need the hello, the entrance into a conversation, because it was always ongoing. She sensed the ease of their bodies, their muscles moving in tandem, their skin brushing. Overcome, Thandi looked down. She saw the white hair at her feet and the softly sparking cord of the fan. She saw the shapes and how they fit together. With a grunt, she kicked the serpent with its fiery head into that fortuitous kindling.
‘Thunder.’ Lee turned to her.
She stepped forward to help, her body blocking his view of what she had done. As she wiped the girl’s bleeding cheek and fashioned a sling from a rag; as she and the others followed Lee out into the compound, carrying the girl to his pickup truck, Kalingalinga bystanders attaching themselves to the host in their wake; as she and her husband navigated this emergency as deftly as they had the one 30,000 feet up when they first met fifteen years ago, Thandi felt at peace. She had been brave. She had done exactly what she needed to do.
Lee the brave, the bold, the bright. Brinksman of love and of science. His ultimate aim is laudable, true: to free mankind of The Virus. But to do it that way, to play chromosomes, is to tinker with Nature’s design. Foolish Pandora! Wilful Prometheus! Shirk primal laws at your peril! This is one topic to give us our due: we know far more virology than you do. Malaria, dengue, fevers yellow and black, West Nile, and the newcomer, Zika. Illness we know, in our blood and our spit. Parasites, viruses, wormy nematodes: you name it, we surely deliver.
Mala aria’s the worst, she uses us both – that rank double agent – to make and remake her own kind. Hippocrates knew her, and Shakespeare, too, though he didn’t know whence she came. Hear Caliban’s curse: All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall and make him by inch-meal a disease! But bad air’s the wrong name – she doesn’t waft from the swamp, she’s carried by all of the swamp-dwellers.
Our proboscis, a needle that punctures the skin, is the devious, dark double carriageway. When we snack on your blood, we exchange a few fluids, and the parasite cells catch a ride. They go down to your liver, and stay there a spell, and grow exponential in number. Sometimes they rise to the top of the head and breach the wall of your mind. Either way, your warm body allows them to hibernate and this is when fever besets you.
Oh Her Highness, Queen Mal, she’s an imperious imp and she’s taken a fancy to travel. We’re her gnatty waggoneers, trundling along, driving a swift team of atomies. Once in your veins, they gallop right through you, blistering your sweet lips with plague. But you humans have made it far worse, you know, by travelling so much yourselves.
Though a fidgety itch we occasionally give, this itch to run is your own. As exploration expanded and freedom went faddish, you took the pathogens with you. You carried us, too, as tiny stowaways in aeroplanes, in tyres, in soil. We got loaded on boats, shipped across seas, with a baggage of bad blood beneath us. Wherever we landed, we spread our thin wings, then we spread our Queen Mal’s malcontents.
In this same global way, Lee’s scientific play will scatter the hazard haphazardly. Though he did not tamper with bad air as such, bad blood is much harder to banish…
III
The Children
Joseph
2014
Dad was coming home to die, or at least that’s what he had told them over the phone. He arrived on a Thursday. They were late to pick him up so they found him already outside the airport. He was waiting under the covered walkway to the car park, with its blue canopy and its white tent walls plastered with ads for Airtel and Standard Chartered and Digit-All. American suitcases, bedecked with buckles and pockets, sat on either side of him like guard dogs. Chinese passengers – their presence in Lusaka had swelled in the early 2000s – swarmed around him.
He wasn’t yet forty but he could have been sixty. He had The Virus, as did