Akai-ma turns again to rock Odidi, humming.
Nyipir lumbers toward her.
Ajany kneels, watching them.
Nyipir approaches; Akai lifts up her hands. She screeches, “Don’t. Touch. Me. You. Don’t. Touch …” She points at Nyipir. “Don’t.”
Nyipir stands still in the middle of an eternal landscape that seems to foreshadow the end of life.
Akai: coded prayers, unrepeatable curses.
Galgalu pleads with her. “Mama, mamama …” Akai looks through him.
Galgalu says, “Ma, give me the boy. I’ll put him to sleep.”
Akai places her head against Odidi’s.
Connecting.
Galgalu kneels next to her, his face close to hers, her rifle floating in and out between them. Sticky wet of sorrow tears merging.
“Odidi?” Akai-ma purrs, easing her son, she imagines, into wakefulness.
It is more than an hour before Akai-ma lets Galgalu return Odidi’s body to the coffin. She adjusts Odidi’s shirt, strokes his sewn-shut eyes. “I can’t see,” she whispers to Galgalu when he seals the coffin’s lid.
Galgalu places the lantern on top, a miniature beacon, then wipes its surface with his shawl and helps Akai up.
Ajany and Nyipir creep closer to her.
“M-mama,” Ajany calls.
Akai-ma straightens up and blinks. “You?”
A cold stone inside Ajany’s stomach flutters.
“Arabel Ajany,” Akai-ma says. “Arabel Ajany.” Her voice falters.
Ajany takes four steps toward Akai-ma, a history of longing in the movement. Akai’s arms reach out. Ajany steps in, inhales Akai-ma’s rancid, sad warmth. Incense, hope, and softness. Almost touching, almost disappearing into her mother. But then Akai shoves Ajany away. She drops her arms; her eyes dart left, up, and right. She groans, “Where’s your brother?”
Ajany goes rigid.
Nyipir intervenes. “See, Akai, see, Ajany’s home.”
Akai-ma sucks air. “Why?” Childlike sound: “Where’s Odidi?”
Ajany not thinking. Then thinking, And me? Thinking, Where am I? But before the ground dissolves under her, she throws herself at her mother, grabbing her back. And me? The feeling pushes at her mouth. She clings to Akai’s neck, an unyielding hold. Mucus and saliva, blood and bitterness from a palate cut.
Akai recoils, tears herself away. Her eyes are thin slits, her nostrils flare, and when Ajany looks again, her mother is a still, steady point with a finger on a trigger and a smile on her face. Click-clack. Selector set to burst. Clear gaze. Gun pointed to heart, a glint from the barrel like light on a pathologist’s scalpel. Certainty. Akai will pull the trigger if Ajany moves in her direction again.
Ajany drops to the ground.
She lies down flat.
Hands scrabble at the earth.
Mind focused and roaming around the barrel of a gun. She senses its position. Tenderness because her mother is at the other end. She hears Nyipir’s soft chant. Akai, Akai, Akai, Akai. Feels the soft departing of day.
She could paint this. Could even paint the nothing, its sliver of warmth on her skin. Ajany sniffs the earth, dust flecks on her face. She twists her neck to glance at the purpling sky. Not trusting thought. Finding nothing to trust. In that moment, she stops waiting to be born. She is willing to re-enter her half-death, aches for fire that may return her to silence. She rests her head upon her arms and waits.
Shift of pressure, rush of air. Running feet, a question, and the distant slam of doors. Car engine revs, wheel squeal. Nyipir shouting—Akaaai! Akaaai!
Akai Lokorijom is leaving.
Ajany waits for her body to come together again, all those parts she had stopped feeling — hands, feet, face. She raises her head to see the lurching, stopping, starting, and stalling green car. She tells herself that she can also leave. She can also go away. And then she is in pursuit of a ramshackle family Land Rover. Behind her, Galgalu also runs. The car jolts ahead of them. Low-lying thornbush scrapes Ajany’s feet, stinging. Galgalu overtakes Ajany. Ajany reaches for and drags him back, hanging to his right arm, fighting not to be left behind again, not thinking, she bites into his arm. Galgalu snatches his hand away; he snarls and tumbles. She falls over him. Ajany reaches for Galgalu’s hand. She rubs off her saliva and tooth marks. On the coffin, the lantern’s flame flickers.
Galgalu pats Ajany’s back. “Ch’uquliisa,” he croons. “Ch’uquliisa.” Grasping for clarity. “Ch’uquliisa,” Galgalu says, reading Ajany’s soundless hiccups. He knows her voices. He had urged Ajany into life from Akai’s womb, had sucked mucus out of tiny nostrils, and had understood her stupefied silence when she saw the world she had come to. Later, he had scooped her from beneath a tree where patient vultures watched over her. On that day he had told four-year-old Odidi, while he arranged Ajany in his arms, “This is your baby.”
Raro Galgalu is an intermediary between fate and desire, a cartographer of unutterable realms. He has lost faith in tangible things. Now he scrutinizes the skies. The portents are cruel. A pale-orange veil shrouds the world. He recites “La illaha illa ’lla Hu. La illaha illa ’lla Hu.”
Galgalu seeks the mind of his dead father. His father had been ayyaantuu—an astrologer, in Hargagbo. After a gruesome drought that he predicted would be the worst — it was — had passed, and a locust invasion he foretold would destroy all pasture had done so, rumors of sorcery slithered across the landscape and followed the family. Mad, the older Galgalu predicted his own death. His son Raro tried to pray him back to life in a season of almost white skies, while his mother sought refuge in herbs and hope. But one moonless night on the day after a total solar eclipse, Galgalu heard his father cough — a rattling sound. Then Raro saw his father’s shadow lift itself from the body on the mat, felt it brush against him as it glided out into the darkness.
“Ch’uquliisa,” Galgalu sings to Ajany. “Ch’uquliisa.”
His arms around her.
One wild afternoon, by decree of elders, Raro Galgalu was chosen as scapegoat for all clan guilt. He had been bringing home a kid that had sprained its leg. Its mother bleated behind him while men surged around him and inflicted the ritual curse. He tore at his heart, to pull out the malediction. The scars were curved lines across Galgalu’s chest. The kid tumbled from his arms, and his goats cried as he was driven away with sticks, stones, dust, and dung. Driven by billows of unwantedness, he marked his progress by cairns in the daytime and falling stars at night. He wandered, a solitary, bowlegged creature intending to walk itself to death.
Until, that soft dusk of December 12, 1963, when, down in the city, a doleful officer unwrapped the last Union Jack that would ever soar over Kenya, Galgalu stumbled in front of a coral-hued edifice. Wuoth Ogik. A brown-and-black-patched cattle dog that had a lot of hyena in its ancestry had appeared and wagged its tail at him. Galgalu stroked its head. It licked his hand. He would learn that its name was Kulal, after the cherished mountain. By the time he saw the tall, dark, long-limbed spirit flowing toward him, its arms swinging in wide swoops, he was ready to die. Ekhaara. A roaming spirit. It carried a headrest and club — things men carried — and a gourd of sour milk, herbs, and grasses. Its feet were dusty in akala tire sandals. It had hitched its sarong up on its thighs. Its eyes took in everything. Raro Galgalu had closed his eyes.