unkillable beast, it wanders the earth, doomed to vicarious evil. When a zombie attacks you, bites into your flesh, does it know what it’s doing? Not really.
This is true for us as well. We carry ill but we don’t really mean to. Fevered blood, hot blood, spicy blood, sour. Boiling inside the veins of the ailing, the minute we sip it, we know it. But by then it’s too late: the agent’s inside us and somewhat beyond our control. Viruses and parasites are small canny monsters: they take over our wishes completely. Possessed, blooddrugged, we are the third man, we broker between flesh and disease. Bad faith, bloodlust and anthropophily: such is the way of the mozombie.
Your beastly old tales know it all too well: we are Nature’s great superfluity. ‘What is this creature for?’ you still cry, raising your fist to the heavens. We pollinate little and feed very few, and no predator needs us to live. The name of our species, Anopheles gambiae? It literally means ‘no profit’. A deity slept on the day we sprang forth. We’re an asterisk to Nature, a flaw, a digression, a footnote if ever there was one. We are not just an accident, but issue it too. Extermination trials go wonky. Toxorhynchites, they thought, would devour us, but they released the wrong species and we did not just survive, we thrived!
Joseph himself has learned this the hard way: his vaccine, founded upon a mutation, has foundered on capital’s reef. But all sorts of things can slip through the cracks, especially genetically tweaked ones. Evolution forged the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake…
Jacob
2009
Jacob lost his mother when her hair salon burned to the ground. After the Indian girl fell from the jacaranda tree, everyone trooped out into Kalingalinga with Uncle Lee as he carried her through the compound to his pickup. They drove off to the hospital, the girl and Ba Sibilla in the front next to Uncle Lee while his coloured son and wife – rollers still in her hair – squatted in the bed of the truck. Those who worked and lived at Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd returned in high spirits – they had saved a life! – only to find it being ravaged by ragged, roaring flames.
Ash swarmed around, black and grey and white like television snow. It smelled like a thousand supper fires, a thousand hairdryers. The neighbours were already trying to put it out, shouting commands, flapping blankets, tossing buckets of water. The salon girls scampered here and there, crying out. Jacob stood there helplessly and stared – not at the fire but at his mother, who stood equally fixed before it. Only when Aunty Loveness hugged her from behind did Mummy move, barely – her face trembled like a brushed string.
Only later, when the police told her that the fire had started at the electrical outlet, did she burst to furious life and turn on Jacob.
‘You!’ she spat at him. ‘Always messing about with these wires and gadgets and A-B-C-D! Why can’t you just be playing outside like a normal child?’
But playing outside like a normal child was exactly how the mwenye girl got hurt in the first place, Jacob thought. And it was only because she fell from the tree that they had all abandoned the Hi-Fly.
That night, he and his mother and Aunty Loveness slept outside, warming their bones against the flame-heated earth around the black husk of the salon. The next morning, they stuffed what was left of their possessions into plastic bags – Jacob was distraught to realise his aeroplane belt had charred – and began their exodus from Kalingalinga. He imagined that they would be zamfooting for hours to find housing, but after a short walk across the compound, his mother paused in front of the gate of a small breezeblock cottage and took his hand, gesturing for Aunty Loveness to wait.
‘Odi?’ Mummy called out as they ducked through a curtain at the entrance. It was dark and dank inside, and Jacob heard a faint blurbling sound like a storm drain, though it was not yet rainy season. An older woman, short and dark and round, got up from her squat in front of what looked like a crate of soft drinks. She was wearing a pink jersey and a faded chitenge wrapper with a pattern of binoculars with eyes on the lenses. She stepped towards them and he saw that she was ill – her own eyes