A man dies, and it is easy to say when the dying ends. The breath goes out and does not come in again.
The heart stills. The blood cools and congeals. The last thought fades from the brain. It is not so easy to say when a dying begins. Is it, for example, when the body goes into the terminal decline? When the first cell turns black and cancerous? When we pass our DNA to a new human generation, and become genetically redundant? When we are born? A civil servant once told me that when they make out your birth certificate, they also prepare your death certificate.
It was the same for the big death of Nairobi. The world saw the end of the end from spy satellites and camera-blimps. When the end for a city begins is less clear. Some say it was when the United Nations pulled out and left Nairobi open. Others, when the power plants at Embakasi went down and the fuel and telephone lines to the coast were cut. Some trace it to the first Hatching Tower appearing over the avenues of Westlands; some to the pictures on the television news of the hexagon pattern of Chaga-moss slowly obliterating a “Welcome to Nairobi” road sign. For me it was when I slept with Brother Dust in the back room of the upstairs club.
I told him I was a virgin.
“I always pegged you for a Christian child,” he said, and though my virginity excited him, he did not try and take it from me forcefully or disrespectfully. I was fumbling and dry and did not know what to do and pretended to enjoy it more than I did. The truth was that I did not see what all the fuss was about.
Why did I do it? It was the seal that I had become a fine young criminal, and tied my life to my city.
Though he was kind and gentle, we did not sleep together again.
They were bad times, those last months in Nairobi. Some times, I think, are so bad that we can only deal them with by remembering what is good, or bright. I will try and look at the end days straight and honestly. I was now eighteen, it was over a year since I left Jogoo Road and I had not seen my parents or Little Egg since. I was proud and angry and afraid. But a day had not passed that I had not thought about them and the duty I owed them. The Chaga was advancing on two fronts, marching up from the south and sweeping down from the north through the once-wealthy suburbs of Westlands and Garden Grove. The Kenyan Army was up there, firing mortars into the cliff of vegetation called the Great Wall, taking out the Hatching Towers with artillery. As futile as shelling the sea. In the south the United Nations was holding the international airport open at every cost. Between them, the Tacticals tore at each other like street dogs. Alliances formed and were broken in the same day. Neighbor turned on neighbor, brother killed brother. The boulevards of downtown Nairobi were littered with bullet casings and burned out picknis. There was not one pane of glass whole on all of Moi Avenue, nor one shop that was not looted. Between them were twelve million civilians, and the posses.
We too made and dissolved our alliances. We had an arrangement with Mombi, who had just bloodily ended an agreement with Haran, one of the big sheriffs, to make a secret deal with the Black Simbas, who intended to be a power in the new order after the Chaga. The silly, vain Soca Boys had been swept away in one night by the Simbas East Starehe Division. Custom matatus and football managers’ coats were no match for Russian APCs and light-scatter combat-suits. Brother Dust’s associations were precarious: the posses had wealth and influence but no power. Despite our AK47s and street cool uniforms-in the last days, everyone had a uniform-even the Soca Boys could have taken us out. We were criminals, not warriors.
Limuru, Tigani, Kiambu, in the north. Athi River, Matathia, Embakasi to the south. The Chaga advanced a house here, a school there, half a church, a quarter of a street. Fifty meters every day. Never slower, never faster. When the Supreme Commander East African Protection Force announced terminum at Ngara, I made my move. In my Dust Girl uniform of street-length, zebra-stripe PVC coat over short-shorts, I took a taxi to the Embassy of the United States of America. The driver detoured through Riverside.
“Glider come down on Limuru Road,” the driver explained. The gliders scared me, hanging like great plastic bats from the hatching towers, waiting to drop, spread their wings and sail across the city sowing Chaga spores. To me they were dark death on wings. I have too many Old Testament images still in me.
The army took out many on the towers, the helicopters the ones in the air, but some always made it down. Nairobi was being eaten away from within.
Riverside had been rich once. I saw a tank upended in a swimming pool, a tennis court strewn with swollen bodies in purple combats. Chaga camouflage. Beyond the trees I saw fans of lilac land-coral.
I told the driver to wait outside the Embassy. The grounds were jammed with trucks. Chains of soldiers and staff were loading them with crates and machinery. The black marine knew me by now.
“You’re going?” I asked.
“Certainly are, ma’am,” the marine said. I handed him my gun. He nodded me through. People pushed through the corridors under piles of paper and boxes marked Property of the United States Government.
Everywhere I heard shredders. I found the right office. The spikey-haired man, whose name was Knutson, was piling cardboard boxes on his desk.
“We’re not open for business.”
“I’m not here to trade,” I said. I told him what I was here for. He looked at me as if I had said that the world was made of wool, or the Chaga had reversed direction. So I cleared a space on his desk and laid out the photographs I had brought.
“Please tell me, because I don’t understand this attraction,” I said. “Is it that, when they are that young, you cannot tell the boys from the girls? Or is it the tightness?”
“Fuck you. You’ll never get these public.”
“They already are. If the Diplomatic Corps Personnel Section does not receive a password every week, the file will download.”
If there had been a weapon to hand, I think Knutson would have killed me where I stood.
“I shouldn’t have expected any more from a woman who sells her cunt to aliens.”
“We are all prostitutes, Mr. Knutson. So?”
“Wait there. To get out you need to be chipped.” In the few moments he was out of the room I studied the face of the President on the wall. I was familiar with Presidential features; is it something in the nature of the office, I wondered, that gives them all the same look? Knutson returned with a metal and plastic device like a large hypodermic. “Name, address, Social Security Number.” I gave them to him. He tapped tiny keys on the side of the device, then he seized my wrist, pressed the nozzle against forearm.
There was click, I felt a sharp pain but I did not cry out.
“Congratulations, you’re an employee of US Military Intelligence. I hope that fucking hurt.”
“Yes it did.” Blood oozed down my wrist. “I need three more. These are the names.”
Beside the grainy snaps of Knutson on the bed with the naked children, I laid out my family. Knutson thrust the chip gun at me.
“Here. Take it. Take the fucking thing. They’ll never miss it, not in all this. It’s easy to use, just dial it in there. And those.”
I scooped up the photographs and slid them with the chip gun into my inside pocket. The freedom chip throbbed under my skin as I walked through the corridors full of people and paper into the light.
Back at the club I paid the driver in gold. It and cocaine were the only universally acceptable street currencies. I had been converting my roll to Kruger rands for some months now. The rate was not good.