by Duncan Mwangi
Let me tell you about the boy who came into my room last month. I’d just come home from work; I didn’t have enough for the bus so I’d walked for what had been two hours. I was in the shower washing out the weight of Nairobi on my joints. As I tried stroking my member to get hard, soap got into both my eyes like spat venom and the water suddenly stopped flowing. I reached for both the faucet and the shower head but all I grabbed was air. A sudden wind was blowing at the soapsuds on my back; I could feel them pop. Then I heard footsteps. I decided to take a chance and open my eyes. The lather made me wince.
There he was, in a black flowy abaya. Everything about him, even in stillness, was flowy. Still, I could tell he was not a boy—don’t ask me how. I was not trying to clock him or anything. He motioned for me to follow him. His fingernails were long and painted a singed-plastic black but I swear to God I knew him somewhere and in that somewhere, wherever it was, he was not a boy.
For a moment, I wanted to scream but I didn’t. I live in a cramped neighborhood with my unit facing twenty to thirty windows thereabout, and screaming while naked was bound to not work out well. Anyway, I knew this not-boy. I just had to remember from where.
I didn’t get a chance to follow him because out of nowhere a blast of cold water was hitting me and once it rinsed out my face, he was gone. As soon I was decently clothed, oiled and ready for bed, I checked around my bedsit but there was no trace of the strange boy.
At night, I dreamt about my mother atop a grassy hill and I was at the bottom. There was the wind; not that I could hear or feel it but because I could see the tall grass stir like stew ingredients in a pot. Or maybe it was the moon doing it the same way it likes pulling at the hems of an ocean like a perturbed child. My mother saw me and waved me to climb up to meet her, but every step I took was a spreading knife on a buttered slice of bread. I could only make three–no—five steps before I ended up back down. It reminded me of high school when I tried to up my grades in Mrs. Kiai’s Chemistry class on a whim (she was a total MILF). I’d be sore with lack of sleep for weeks for a measly B after which I’d slack off and glide back down to my permanent C’s. They were insectile efforts: she barely even noticed.
Eventually, my mother got tired of waiting. She slowly crouched to her knees then lay down on her back. Then akaanza kugaragara. On and on and on, down and down and down, until she was nothing but a hypnotic spiral. As soon as I blinked, my eyes met the brown stain from my ceiling.
It was a bit after seven the next morning. Switchboard was already awake in the next building playing really loud rhumba, which my feet kept getting tangled in as I peeled, diced, washed and roasted five plantains for my breakfast. On my morning shower, I waited for the boy to make an appearance, but all I got was a rising water level that had licked its way up to my ankles by the time I noticed. There was a clog in the drain. The cap was full of wet bits of my hair and some slime. I used an old toothbrush to clean the pores and set it back down. My hands would’ve probably shuddered the whole day if I hadn’t done that weekend Nairobi Water and Sewerage stint in Njiru back in Uni. On those nights I remember being so afraid of getting stink on my bed linens so I slept on the floor with my hands far above my head. While asleep, I’d tuck them under my chin again, and the ghostly smell of human discharge would mischievously stick two fingers up my nostrils and force me awake. The pay was ass but it kept me alive for my classes so I stayed.
With my appointment with you at ten and a mover’s job at one forty-five, the course of my day was pretty much set. I locked up my house and stood on the balcony for a moment. Outside, like a dull fat cloud swallowing a couple of small bright ones, Saturday was coming together. Children in shorts, sandals, sleep lines and saliva stains were running down staircases with clutched fists and back up with bread, hot mandazi, eggs and milk sachets. The sun was vainly checking itself out on every window. Once every five minutes a boda would zoom past, breaking the sound coming from Switchboard’s building.
As I made my way downstairs, a Chihuahua tried to take a nip of my red leather coat on one of the staircases. As soon as its owner had her back turned, I flipped her dog the middle finger. We were now lifelong enemies. If the thing was smart, like a cat, it would probably find a way into my house, take a good long dump on the floor and spread it on my furniture with its paws like it was making a smelly Picasso. That’s what cats do when they hate a person. Kind of like they did my mother.
You were late, which was unlike you. Lagat let me into your office because all the charging points at the reception were full. I had to sit on your black couch and wait. The curtains were drawn and the only sound in the room was the comforting hum of the fluorescent bulb.
I’ve never seen you look sexier than you did when you barged in that morning in a plain white tee, an ocean blue pair of ankle trousers and your braids hanging down like breathing roots on an old tree. You had that fresh-out-of-bed look and traces of your husband were still all over you. It made me go hard, thinking about you and him having done it barely minutes before you got there. Let’s just say that I naturally love being a follower, in all things.
We were deep in the mundane stuff, those meds I was supposed to be taking but couldn’t afford, when I proposed the thing, asked you to peg me like you previously wanted. Remember? I will never forget your face. Every part of it wanted to close up like a fist. Then you found air again and began to laugh. I laughed too, then asked you again.
“We’re doing this,” you said out loud as if for you the fringes of reality were combusting like a photograph on fire.
“We’re doing this,” I promised.
I helped you stack your patient files on the couch and we dragged it across the carpet and right next to the door. It made no sound at all, thank goodness.
I did that striptease routine you liked until all that was left on me was an outline of chest hair and a blue pair of ankle socks. When I got on top of your desk and spread my legs, your laughter was hysterical. “Unakaa kuku porno inazunguka kwa window tao.” Thanks to me, you said, Sonford chicken was on your mind at eleven in the morning and you couldn’t go through with it. Chickened out, you quipped, feeling like you just got a Harvard degree handed to you. After one measly blowjob, I let you dress me and I slumped to the floor and sat sulking on the carpet while you moved the couch and the files back.
I saw the boy again, still in his abaya. He was crouched right next to me on your carpet, staring me down. I broke eye contact, but he didn’t seem to notice, so I waved a hand over his face, but that didn’t register too. As soon as you opened the door for me to leave, it was like he melted into the carpet leaving no stains behind. Not like we did.
I was late to the move at two. The boys patted my back and handed me a couch and shared a spliff between lifts. We’d never met before in our lives. While we were in transit to Machakos, feeling smothered by the truck’s body heat, naming our lost dreams and lost wage jobs, the lifetimes we had spent apart from each other were shed. We learned that to become kin is to share less of blood and more of misery. Once the move was done and we were paid, we decided Nairobi could wait. It was always going to be there anyway. Nairobi is kind of an oxalis; as long as someone pisses on that corner it’ll stay evergreen.
One of the boys had a baggie with him and suggested that we find a secluded spot. The Machakos park grass looked inviting with the sparse lights creating elaborate shadows on it. We could hear the water in the lake swishing and the trees rustling their leaves, like children with rattles who couldn’t use their words. Probably trying to warn someone, anyone, that five men were jumping the fence. The leather coat under me grew moist as I sat on the grass, but I stayed put, as unfazed as the rest of the crew was.
We passed the blunt around and blew smoke at the moon. From the corner of my eye, I saw the moon blow something back. The piece of paper did a dutty wine in the air before making up its mind on the lake. Then it plunged downward, a flapping meteor.
Standing by the edge of the water, ready to receive it, was the boy who was in my room last month. He came up to me, took my hand and led me to the lake. The water was bathtub-silent now. I watch him fold the paper into a plane and toss it back up. It was forcefully snatched from its slow parachuting by a sudden breeze and whipped against a tree bark. It held onto the tree for dear life momentarily, then was pushed off by the wind again, which clearly was throwing a shit fit.
“Do you know how to make one?” the boy asked me. “Every good boy should know how to make a paper plane.”
A memory that was previously hard to recall shoved itself forward and was now within reach. The last week of December 1999 found my mother and I lying on a lot of sacks with maize spread out to dry, about two football fields of it. My mother was knitting another grey beanie hat for school. I was seven at the time, and would lose these woolen head socks—these mboshoris—nearly as fast as I lost skin cells. The old millennium was fast shelling the last of its seconds from its cob. Most of the neighborhood was out of their houses. The Christians were huddled in their iron sheet churches, deep in prayer, with them the fear of mice on a ship caught in a bad storm. The rest of the world was stacking colorful soda crates and black Tusker lager crates on their verandas. Chicken and goat thighs were browning and wrinkling above hot coals every day outside the tenement house.
I pushed out the Mathematics Kasuku exercise book I was sitting on, opened it, plucked a page and handed it to my mother. “I don’t know how to make a paper plane”
She stopped knitting and took the page into her hands. “Every good boy should know how to make a paper plane.”
***
Yes, Soni, the boy was my mother. In the beginning, I said that I could tell that the boy was no boy. While I believed my eyes and the boy they saw, I believed my ears too. I believed the mother they heard. Even before he told me about the cats and the couch, every detail of that story being just like she would have remembered it, I believed him.
He also told me things about my father, who is now living in Nakuru’s leafy suburbia under my sister’s thumb. “We signed the divorce papers thirteen years ago, but we never knew what to do with them so we kept them in his sock drawer. I always meant to take them to the registry every morning when I would leave for work, but he always waited to leave after me.”
“For more than ten years, you could not wake up before him once?”
“Some mornings, I did not want to leave him for a cold bed. On all the others, I did not have enough money to think about leaving.”
A stretch of clouds now covered the moon, giving us privacy. “You are a fertile man,” the boy said out of nowhere.
I told the boy that no boy wants to hear his mother talk about his sperm. “I can be reborn to you as a son, or I can become the wind.”
I’ve never had mixed feelings about having children. The stretch of my life so far is a pit with a deep bottom. No children can grow in it.
As if I had said it out loud, the boy affirmed my train of thought. “Don’t worry. I’ve seen where you live, and I want to relinquish the chance.”
I’m usually high-strung, but I laughed. The boy laughed too. The moon threw back the cover of clouds on its face, revealing that it was also laughing.
***
After promising to join the chorus and chaos of the wind instead of burdening my strange little life, I thought the boy was gone for good.
My mother died many times when I was a child. My father said she was probably listening in on the dead as they gossiped. The part about gossip was true: my mother would have bought chinks in people’s walls if there was such a purchase category in real estate. I wonder what he would think of her current quest to become the wind, to pick up everyone’s private chatter at will. My sister, who had just delivered her first child, told her to quit her charcoal burning business because of the deaths and bring everyone to live in Nakuru. For a firstborn who is a product of hands-off parenting, all Beryl ever does is act like an extra set of hands. Outside of this trait, I must admit that I don’t know much about her. We’re not close.
The dispensary doctor called this sudden death in the night sleep apnea, gave her medication, and made her promise to hire someone else to help. Without Beryl to squeeze free labor out of and unable to stomach the possibility of being grifted by having a stranger as her employee, my mother shut everything down. By the time I was eleven, she had blown through her pension.
When I called home last year a week before she died, she was filing documents for a government relief.
A week after my pact with the boy to leave, I got a free vasectomy in the clinic right below your office. I see the sign many times before whenever the elevator door opens on my way up, the one with the heavyweight dark-skinned man whose clothes fit like bandages. I’ve always wondered if he’s just an agency model or some random guy who was sitting at the reception waiting for his own snip snip appointment, and why he would come in dressed like he was not about to receive a wound. It also beats logic to market an attractive-looking man as unwilling to propagate his genes. Just saying. It’s not a selling point I would fall for.
Anyways, I’d manscaped between my legs. I followed the steps my bunkmate used to shave with; lathering with soap and gently running a razor around the area. His pubic hair used to grow back really fast. Pathogen fast. Him shaving it so openly made for a couple of awkward Sunday afternoons, but I got over it and paid close enough attention to pick up the skill.
I was also in some loose tennis shorts in case things turned out painful. My doctor, a certain Dr. Wangdu, was pretty confident it would be dull pain at best but I’ve learned that my body is often a bitch about things normal people find to be a breeze.
After she was done, Dr. Wangdu handed me some ice in a plastic paper bag and some eclairs. “For your trouble,” she said.
“I have no sweet tooth, or children to give the sweets to,” I said, my words coated in mirth and an aftertaste of irritability from the pain I was feeling.
Right there, clear as day, stretching out a hand to me was the boy. Despite the sudden appearance, he no longer felt to me like an apparition of any kind, really, but just a companion who’d stepped out of the room to catch a breath and a smoke. I did my best not to acknowledge him. Without skipping a beat, I said goodbye to Wangdu and let the boy follow me to the reception to book a follow-up consultation.
When we got to the elevator, I handed him the sweets. “Forget something?”
He shrugged as he opened one, bit into it and pocketed the rest. “I knew that you would probably throw these away. I could not let that happen.” I asked him if he was, in any way, bothered by my vasectomy.
“A little bit, but I get over things now.” Just as well that he added now, for my mother was never the one to talk like that.
“You could have got over me throwing out those eclairs too.” “On that, I chose to intervene.”
Then the boy and I were shit-talking my sister, finding fault in how she liked to feel needed, so needed that on the day the cats came and filled the living room with their poo she cleaned everything up by herself. I did not hear the elevator ding nor the doors slide open.
I did not see you curiously take a peek inside, and wonder who I was talking to.
Duncan Mwangi is a Nairobi-based fiction writer, poet, and graduate of the Nairobi Fiction Writing Class NF2W4 2020 run by 2018 Caine Prize Winner Makena Onjerika. His works have been previously been featured on Afreada and The Shore Poetry.