from Ling. Musadabwe keeps trying one way, then another. The specimens are all botched. There’s no pain, I don’t think, but there are mutations in the skin, and the bones start to curl up. I can hear them outside sweeping the ground – the sound of tumour-blasted feet.
Yeah, God’s just a nickname, haha – the old man doesn’t even believe in God. He lectures us about class politics so often that Jacob calls him bwana just to piss him off. God the atheist, bwana the Marxist. Jacob works for him, technically, but he lacks a feel for carpentry. It’s hard to admit but working with his hands may be all that a poor person of our generation can manage. Jacob stares at me sometimes. I think he wants to ask me about his mother. I guess I want to ask him about her, too. The Lusaka Patient.
Naila. At night I dream of you, of your hands.
* * *
Joseph lifted a mouse out of a wooden box, one hand holding the tail, the other gripping the neck. The animal bucked between these pincers, its body pulsing with panic. Joseph slipped it into a Mason jar, which was stuffed with tissue soaked in anaesthetic, drops clustering on the inner glass like dew. The mouse collapsed with a soft squeak.
‘Come on out, now.’
He tilted the jar to tip it out again. He pinched its skin, then slid the syringe in. He eased the plunger down. After a moment, the mouse flinched once, twice.
‘Wakey, wakey.’
It got up on its little rubbery feet. He cradled it gently in his hand and let it back into its box. He wiped the workbench under the hood, his stoned mind drifting in the slow circles his hand was making over it. He prepared the gel plate with buffer and agarose and ethidium bromide, slid it into the UV transilluminator, and took the old gel plate inside the clinic. The examination room was dark but for a blueish spotlight from Musadabwe’s Digit-All Bead.
‘What is this?’
‘The latest gel.’ Joseph put it on the table.
Musadabwe pointed his glowing middle finger at it. As usual, he started complaining, the words in his mouth moaning like trapped animals as he hemmed and hawed. Joseph waited for it to stop. The light from Musadabwe’s Bead lit upon an irregularity in the gel.
‘Why is this still here? Did you not redo it?’
‘I’ll try a new mouse.’
‘We do not have lab mice to spare,’ Musadabwe grunted. ‘They are velly expensive!’ He held his finger closer to the plate and scanned his Bead light over it again.
* * *
In the first test, the cells were too full – too drugged, I think. In the second, they lysed. What will the third test do? I’m losing my mind, Naila. These tests are supposed to move forwards, not backwards. I know I didn’t finish my second term at UNZA, but I didn’t really need to, I had learned more than enough to improve Dad’s protocols. That’s why Musadabwe hired me, right? At least that is what I thought. Now I’m not so sure. Sometimes I think he appreciates my work. But sometimes I think he just wants my money – which is Gran’s money, really.
* * *
‘The copper mines are nearly empty,’ said Joseph.
‘The British cleaned them out!’ said God, picking at a back tooth with a matchstick.
The yard was scaly with wood shavings, some so tightly curled, their shadows made garland chains. Jacob kicked through them as he came in, carrying his latest toy. He squatted to open the cardboard box and they heard the creaking sound of styrofoam. Sunlight flashed over a black surface as Jacob inched the machine out. It clicked as he tugged it one way then the other, pivoting it back and forth. At last, it sat upright in the dust. Jacob pressed a button on a remote. The drone shuddered to life but stayed crouched on the ground. Joseph turned back to his conversation with the old man.
‘The British colonialists were just highstrung. Too brittle, too cold.’
‘There were hordes of them!’ God laughed, marijuana smoke spilling down his body, rolling around his neck, massing from his mouth. ‘This country caved when the bazungu came in.’
Joseph frowned, scratching his head with dull shame. He wasn’t white or British but Gran was, and he sometimes felt an oblique guilt by association. The drone was squealing and buzzing now, rising slowly from the ground. Dust nipped at their skin. Jacob hunched out of the machine’s way