THE CURE

The pungent fumes of cheap cigarettes had chased me away from the back of the bar – where I liked to sit – to the counter. I found a spot that was being bathed by the evening breeze hissing through a broken pane and pulled a stool. It’s fine, I thought, no need to fuss over a smokers’ bliss. At least the bartender, whom I had come to call ‘The Alchemist’ due to the dexterity with which he flung his bottles about as he prepared his concoctions, was now just a whistle away. And just like that, I had found my new favorite spot.

Like many scattered about the room, I just wanted to get drunk and go home. I sipped my cold cider straight from the bottle. As usual, it was a dull Friday eve and I wanted to keep it that way. Lost in idle thoughts, I caressed the cold bottle, feeling the condensate wet the palm of my hand. Every so often, I brought the bottle to my lips and tipped it upside down, letting the golden perfection flood down my throat. Indeed, liquor possesses the remarkable quality of soothing a fragmentary and scattered mind, and nothing does it better than the drink you love the most.

Scarcely had I brought it down and whistled for another one when a young woman of calamitous beauty planted herself barely an arm’s reach away, balancing delicately on her stool. Without wasting time, she was nursing a tall glass of something more potent than mine. What innocence, I wondered – so recently touched by its mother’s lips – would drag itself into a place such as this? Her dress was dull and decent, lacking the excesses that are the totem of a twilight girl. She seemed like a campus lass, freshman or sophomore, who had abandoned a boring evening lecture and had foolishly come here all alone. She gave her little head a sway, swinging her auburn locks away from her sweet face, gave me the eye and took a sip of her drink. “Ah!” she smirked, giving the bartender a smile. He returned it, of course, but with the veiled reluctance of wise man.

She kept her eyes forward, scanning the cheap bottles on display with a pretentious seriousness. It seemed she was afraid to meet the immodest eyes that the men behind her, brought from loud banter to whispers by her presence, were casting upon her. It was a local bar for local men: not many women wandered here without a disgruntled husband or boyfriend nearby, unless they were dangerous: either looking for trouble or running from it. This one, I thought, was bait: amekuja na mchele [she has come with drugs to spike someone’s drink]. Her Shalini perfume – most likely a River-road knock off – had now expelled the thick musk of sin and cigarettes from the air, living behind a pure feminine scent.

“Kuna [Is there] Wi-Fi?” she chirped, extracting an IPhone from her purse with the flamboyance of a naive city girl, holding it up for a moment as if to ensure that it had been seen. She shouldn’t have done that. At least not here. That Iphone will pay for someone’s drink tonight, or for his darker pleasures.

“Eeeh, iko, [Yup]” bellowed ‘the alchemist’, mixing up another drink. “Password ndio hiyo kwa ukuta [is there on the wall].” She turned her head, following the direction of his nod, and let her eyes linger on me for a moment before scanning the wall for the password. It was simple, ‘Tusker254’, yet she kept her gaze on the wall for almost a minute. For a moment, I thought that maybe her thoughts had arrested her, or that maybe she couldn’t read the ugly script with which the password was writ, but after watching the rapid movement of her eyes across the room, I realized that I was wrong: she was watching someone, as slyly as she could without being detected.

At this point, the birds of prey were inching closer, watching, nodding and winking at each other, making bets with themselves and hoping to beat the other at the first move. I knew these guys: there’s no way this girl was walking out of here without either a man in tow, men in tow, or without a fight. I picked up my bottle, drained the last mouthful with absolute relish, and beckoned for another. With a dexterity imbued by experience, the alchemist – now at the far end of the counter – opened a cold one and gave the bottle a firm push, making it skid upright all the way from his end, past the vixen, straight into my open palm. Good man. I nodded and gave the bottle a passionate kiss. Tonight, without a doubt, was going to be fun.

“Hey,” she began.
“Hey. Hi!” I offered my hand, but she held out a fist instead. Insulted, I gave her the most ‘bro’ fist bump in the book, complete with the chest salute, and returned to my beer.
“Hey!” she barked again, tapping my hand almost painfully. While wondering why she wouldn’t just leave me alone, I raised a brow at her to keep talking.
“Kuna msee ananifuata [Someone’s following me]” she announced, with a broad smile on her face.
“Ummm okay. So?”
“He’s here. He’s watching us,” she mumbled, then let out a little laugh.
I gave her a long look. It was not long before I noticed that something was amiss. There was terror lurking beneath the surface of that smile. Concealed by her collar but not well enough, was the fading dark-blue impress of large fingers on her neck. A powerful man must have had a vice grip around her throat not long ago. Pushing my beer away, I leaned in and whispered the obvious, “Are you okay?” But all I got was a louder laugh as if I had just used the corniest line on my list.

“Don’t act like I’m telling you something serious. He can’t hear us from here, but he’s looking at you. Just act kawaida [normal] and he’ll go away.”
Hardly had I wished that I had remained at the back of the bar when my thoughts were suddenly severed by a deafening, “Lily!”

Having seen this scene too many times, I clasped my bottle firmly and turned towards the voice. On seeing the purpose for which I intended to use my bottle, the alchemist shook his head at me and gave me a look of displeasure.
“Huyu amelewa,[This one’s drunk]” came his quiet protest. “Ikikuwa ngori nitaita ma-blue [If it gets ugly I’ll call the cops].” Lily trembled under his shadow like a feverish child, daring not to look back. This must be him, I thought. Boyfriend or ex, maybe husband. They must have been fighting, and he’s itching for a second round.

“Lilian! Twende! [Let’s go!]” yelled the brute again, grabbing her shoulder. She clicked, shrugged his arm off and remained still, never looking at him. The rowdy bar had now gone silent, and what was a packed counter was now quickly getting deserted. Seconds later, the girl was on her toes, wailing, hoisted by the collar and being dragged to the door.

Typically, I would have done nothing. I really wanted to do nothing, to let them drag each other out as the bar rose up in cheer. It would have been free entertainment, befitting an idle place like this. I would have enjoyed my beer as planned and staggered back home to my unremarkable but peaceful existence. But just as she was being dragged past the door, she kicked the brute in the nuts and bolted back in, straight towards me, knocking over my bottle as she jumped into my arms.
“Help me,” she sobbed, “He’s going to kill me,” and melted helplessly onto her knees. The alchemist, completely unbothered, grabbed my bottle before it rolled over the counter and crashed onto the floor. In a jiffy, another one had been opened and placed exactly where the previous one had been.

The brute wasted no time. He toughed out the blow and was soon towering behind her again. When the first slap missed her head and grazed my knee, the crowd went up in roar. I released an audible “Fuck!” and stood up. The brute clenched his fist and took aim, but the punch did not land. Mine did; he didn’t need a second one. Men are a vain and vengeful lot, quick to act but slow in thought. I looked at the brute on the floor, his groaning drowned by the laughter that rose around us. Today was not going to be the day that a drunk man won a fight against a sober one. I tossed a few notes at the alchemist, drained my bottle, took the girl by the arm and led her out.
“He’ll…he’ll…he’ll follow us!” she stammered, purse in hand. Her eyes were fixed upon the brute, glaring and cursing at us.
“Don’t worry, when they tell him who I am, hawezi jaribu [he won’t dare],” I revealed. She remained unassured.

We thus set upon a ramble through the town, trying to get as far away from the bar as possible, but every so often she glanced about to see whether the brute was stalking us. Once or twice, she would spot a large, dark shape gliding in the shadows not far behind and cling fearfully to my arm, only to realize after a while that it was just another lonely personage of the night.

After a few moments, her fear turned to cheer, and a sweet warmth came upon us. We seemed like a fair and happy couple, walking hand in hand down the streets we knew so well. She spoke to me as if to a long-lost friend and laughed as joyously as a lover would. Every wink she cast my way was returned, and no laugh of hers was not accompanied by mine. We were like young pilgrims of the night, wandering about in search of a proper site for our pleasures.

Squeezing my hand, she finally posed the question I hoped she never would, “Who are you, anyway?” A smile cut across my face as I considered my response. To know oneself is a difficult thing. We often know what we are, but it requires deliberate introspection to discover who we are. Often, people pose questions whose answers they really do not want. When a stranger or an acquaintance extends a polite ‘How are you?’, rarely do they want to know the truth. You would be misguided were you to burden their ears with a narrative on how you really are, the maladies that besiege your body, the depression that rots your mind or the corruption that threatens your employment. Not a word more than a simpler ‘I am fine’ should suffice: though untrue, this is much better, and is without a doubt an act of kindness.

To dispel the quiet that had followed her question, she pressed on. “Come on, stranger, tell me,” tugging on my arm playfully. “What’s your name?”
“My name’s Bond, James Bond,” I announced, folding my fingers into a pistol and firing into the air. Unamused, she pinched me painfully and asked again.
“Lily, you can call me whatever you like,” I offered.
“Okay then, James Bond, tell me about yourself. What nice and handsome man drinks alone on a Friday night?” The compliment was a fine lure, but I was disinclined to take it. To truly speak of myself is to speak of sorrow. It is to reveal a grief so deep that it can swallow whoever approaches it. It is to bring to light one festering wound after another that even time itself may fail to heal. Not today, not ever. And definitely not to this sweet little stranger. I didn’t want to know anything about her, and she surely shouldn’t want to know anything about me.

We did not need to strain our eyes as we walked, for the twilight had now morphed into a bright night, illumined by an overzealous moon which hoovered high. We walked all the way to the outskirts of town and followed the beach, listening to the murmurs of the sea. Like a thinker commanded into an extemporaneous display of her skill, she skirted about from one topic to another, shifting seamlessly from abstruse philosophies to her most cherished memories. I felt a warm admiration for her wit and gave my cleverest observations in recompense. I never wondered why a graduate of law, a valedictorian no less, was doing with an abusive middle-aged man, but she told me anyway. I couldn’t care less, but I listened. What else was I to do, now that I had been forcefully parted from my drink?

When we had come upon a lovely spot, she raised her arms skyward and spun around like a ballerina, letting the wind rustle her dress about. Her lips seemed to move as if in silent song; her eyes shimmering like pebbles in the moonlight. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, the unbridled freedom of a happy soul. I stared at her as she spun, motionless. Perhaps the darkness may have cast a spell into my eyes. Almost falling, she steadied herself, tossed her purse aside, ran towards the water, and in full dress, plunged right in.

I studied her, how she laughed when the salty water got into her nose, how her garments clang onto her body as she rose out of the water, how she wrung her locks dry and let them fall back onto her breasts, how she marched towards me with majesty, her eyes locked onto mine, and how she grabbed me by the shirt and lead me into the sea.

I wondered what lurked within the heart of this girl that made her feel so connected to a man whose real name she never knew. I wondered what affections she had established between us, without any choice on my part, that she would incite me to jump into the water with her, in the dead of the night, only moments after I had extracted her from the lethal arms of another man.
It was as I held her in my arms, the waves crashing into us, that I posed my first question of the night.
“What is your greatest fear, Lily?”
“My greatest fear, hmm…” she begun, pulling closer, “is to lose my mind. To lose control.”
“To go crazy?”
“Yes. To wake up one morning and find myself in a hospital room with nothing but white sheets and a bed bolted to the floor. To find myself all alone, secluded and restrained, unable to move, and be told that I am clinically insane.”
There was something dreadful about the pronouncement that made the water suddenly feel cold and unwelcoming, and soon we both departed from it.

“I have a brother…he’s…” she continued, stammering.
“Sometimes…sometimes he sees things…other times he says he can feel something crawling under his skin. When you look, you see nothing, but he says they are there. Hundreds of little ants, crawling under his skin. He scratches and scratches until he bleeds…” The moonlight struggled through the foliage above us and the night was filled with dread.
“Where is he?”
“He’s at Mathare.”
“How long has he been interred there?”
“7 years,” she announced. “I don’t know if he’s ever coming out.”

As if to deepen the woe that had come over the night, the clouds conspired to snuff out the moon and plunged us in intermittent darkness. I glanced behind me one last time, cursing the kilometers that lay between my beer and me. The world seemed asleep, and no light crept through the windows of the homes that were scattered about. As she pointed to her house, which she assured me the brute would never find, I relinquished her hand and announced, “Lilly, I must go now.” It was enough that her troubles had crept into my eve, and it would be unsound to let them worm into my life. With a quiet voice, ladened with despair, she asked me to stay, if only for a short while. “Please,” said she, and prompted by a foolishness of heart, I wrapped my arms around her and pressed a kiss upon her brow, resolving to share a just a little of my peace with this stranger as if she was a dear friend.

Twas a dull house she had, lacking the exquisite articles that one would find in a young woman’s possession. A basket of apples was the only item on her little glass table, and there was little to look upon but furniture and a corner where clothes were strewn. As she washed away the salt and sand with a quick bath, I thrust back the curtain and cast the window ajar to let the cool breeze steal into her chambers. As I stood at the corner in silence, careful not to wet anything else with the water still dripping to my feet, I saw a small white box of pills under the table. However, before I could reach for them, she burst back into the room, a bottle of cheap wine in hand, and made me sit by her side.

For an hour, gulps and sighs were the conversations we shared, drinking straight from the bottle. Suddenly, she let out a muffled scream, holding her temple with one hand as if weathering a terrible agony.
“It’s just a migraine, it’ll go away”, she alleged, grabbing the bottle from my clasp, but I knew that migraines don’t just go away.
“Are you supposed to be drinking?” I wondered. She ran her little hands though her locks, sighed, and took another swig. I leaned in close, not close enough to ignite her repulsion, but just close enough to feel the heat radiating from her skin and wrapped an arm around her. Deep down, we all desire to be understood, so I held her until the pain went away.

“What are those?” I finally asked, pointing at the box of pills, and her face fell from a heavenly serenity to a quiet sadness. Her cheeks sagged, her shoulders drooped, and eyes dropped, burdened by the thoughts of her terrible afflictions.
Grabbing them from the floor, she began,

“The doctors said that I am also sick. They gave me these.” I snatched the box from her little clasp and turned it over. ‘Elavil’ it read. A powerful antidepressant, and quite good for migraines too. The diagnosis, she said, filled her heart with black terror. Twas like hearing the metallic asylum doors slamming shut in her face, announcing that there was no escape. And once a while, she said, a calm, soft voice offers a terrifyingly rational cure: just kill yourself once and for all, end it all.
“Are you taking them?”
“No…I can’t. I don’t want to.”
“Yes, you can, and you need to stop hogging the drink!”
Handing the bottle over with a smile, she tossed the meds away and sunk into my arms. A brief but heavy silence fell upon us, but it was soon broken by another confession.
“You know, I don’t really like people.”
“Hah, same here, but you seem like one of those Kenyans who walk around calling themselves introverts?”
“Umm yeah, so?” she protested.
“Well, you people don’t really know what that word means. You club every month, have 3,000 Facebook friends, 50,000 followers, you post your selfies everywhere, and you still think you are introverts.”
“Well, I am. And I’m very fine alone.”
“Like hell you are,” I mumbled and took another swig.
“What?” She flung up her hands and glared. She had heard me. “What have you said?”

But her anger was short-lived, melted away by a touch of my hand. Sometimes we may want to be left alone, but we really don’t want to be all alone all the time. In her lowest moments, it is the fear of dying alone rather than that of losing her mind that stands tall and speaks most harshly to her soul. It reminds her of the deepest secrets of her affairs and of the sins she has committed against lovers long gone. It fills her heart with alarm, and a dull jealousy glows within her eyes as she resents every couple, young and old, that rejoices in each other’s arms. Even when she stands in the currents of a large crowd in the city, the darkness of loneliness is so great that it snuffs out the light of every other soul, such that it feels as though she is standing in the cold desert of a lifeless planet. Humanity elbows past, brushing against
her skin and filling her lungs with their scents, yet they feel merely like a strong wind rushing past that will be soon forgotten. Her side is often vacant, save for the shadow that rushes along with her, and in life, although there is hardly a doubt that she will reach where she seeks to go, it is just as certain that she will get there alone.

When by some nostalgic affection she wanders into a church, she said, she plants herself only on the least populous pew that is closest to the door. Although her natural charms are sufficient to disturb the most devout man of God – and indeed no piousness can survive the onslaught of the feminine form in its prime of youth – she never joins her giggling peers in their mischief at the front pew any more. When the sermon ends, as the faithful disperse off towards their homes, and the faithless towards their illicit rendezvous that befit a Sunday eve, she chooses to stay behind, head bowed in feigned prayer to remain undisturbed. When the house of God finally clears, she walks back home all alone. She thrived in solitude, and each moment she spent among humans was to her but a great misfortune, a calamity from which she must free herself.

I too thought of myself as a sullen saunterer, dragged from my mother’s womb into a world that seems much better off without me. If it were not for the mild joys that my indulgences bring – the sweetness of song and dance, the beauty of literature, the euphoric bliss of learning and the charming wit of chess – this life would have been much easier to terminate. But no such things await us in death, so I’d rather linger about a little more.

The vast majority of us are seldom truly alone. Though our homes are empty, and our beds are cold, we are buffered by the simulacrum of company that technology brings. The longer we stare at our screens, sharing our thoughts with a legion of people we do not know, the further away we are drawn from the human sited right beside us. Yet, they too are being sucked into the same digital abyss. Inevitably, we grow too fond of our artificial world where we can create whatever reality we want about ourselves. A life of extravagance broadcasted to the world when one lives in poverty is the mask worn by a lonely soul, begging for attention. A symptom of this is that we fiercely guard our loneliness as if the whole world was conspiring to breach it. We tell our friends that we are too busy to join them on a Saturday eve, yet we lay idle in our beds.

The screen quarantines us from the real world, starving us of real company and affection. Its pernicious effect is most apparent in those who suffer the great curses of our post-modern age: a vile aversion to books and an incurable recalcitrance to learning. These ones are irredeemable. They are condemned to wander about in their mental prisons, lost but forever unaware. Learning is not merely the accumulation of knowledge. It is an embodied awareness of a mind that is enlivened by mystery and wonder, that delights in the beauty all around and outstretches its arms to the world. It is a cure, indeed, but one that many refuse to consider.

“What do you fear, Bond?” she poked, dragging my joke too long.
“I don’t know,” I lied. Her fears truly resembled mine. Every so often, my solitude persists so long that it molts into loneliness. It is almost natural for the world to caricature the lonesome as unusual, bizarre; to believe that they, being shunned by their peers, must therefore be ‘deservedly’ shunned by us. Yet, the truth is that it is often the lonesome one that first withdraws from the world before they are shunned by it. After a while – healed or not – they are condemned to return to it.
“Maybe I fear death, but not much.”
“Not much?” she wondered.
“Well, if it comes in my sleep, what’s there to fear? A peaceful death is much better than a violent one.”
“But dying is…terrible!”
“There are fates much worse than death, Lily.” And with that, our bottle had been drained. With nothing else to keep us company throughout the night, a lecherous thought encroached into our unsuspecting minds. Soon, her tongue had found mine, and in each other’s arms, we found bliss.

There was something odd about it though, about how she gave herself to me, unguarded and uninhibited. She cast away her clothes faster than I could free myself from mine and draped herself around me. What I merely desired, she yearned for. She sucked the salt of the sea from neck and did not let the sand that still clung onto me disturb her. Like a starving woman who happened upon a pool in the heart of the desert, she plunged right in and drank to her fill the waters in which she swam. Trembling in pleasure, heaving and hissing to every touch, every bite, and every thrust, she let my fingers wander wherever they will, and my body to do whatever it must. And I did, until there was nothing left.

“Next time, maybe I won’t let you touch me,” she whispered. With amusement, I turned to look at her. Her sweet face was turned away from me but her warm thighs were still draped over mine. I let my mind cling onto the words for a moment…maybe, she said? But each moment I grew more puzzled, and an almost inaudible “why?” escaped from my lips. Something had distracted her enough to miss the question, but it was not really an answer in words that my question truly required. Sometimes, thoughts and feelings are best conveyed in their purest form, by the language of the body. A slight recoil at a tender touch, a forced smile, a quickened breath and the quiver of a bitten lip often convey what words may refuse to tell. I ran a gentle hand through her locks and held a thick one between my fingers, playing with it like a little boy with his favorite toy, watching her face with the keenness of a man of science. If a thought or emotion flashed in her eyes or sped across her face, even in a fraction of a second, I knew I would catch it. But I am no master of women, who like men say what they don’t mean and mean what they don’t say. I may think that I saw something, but it may just be a ghost, a figment of my imagination. However, nothing came from her beautiful face but cold indifference. We sat in silence, letting the hours decay into the past like immortals with eternity to spare. I reached for her hand, held it in mine for a moment, then ran a finger along the brown skin that her little shorts could not conceal, and whispered a little louder, “Why?” “I don’t know, maybe I just won’t.” She parted her lips into a difficult smile, but it did not linger long. Her thoughts were far from here, and she wasn’t going to tell me where they were.

“You are lucky, you know., that you know who I am,” she cooed, wiggling deeper into my clasp. Yes, I was, and yes, I did. She was the strangest creature I had ever seen. The are some people who are bound to remain alien to us decades after our first meeting, but there are others for whom a single day would suffice.

This girl devours a man whole: body, mind and spirit, leaving you with nothing left to give someone else. Her wit cuts deep and lays you bare, every word delivered with the intent to kill, if not to unmask and deeply wound. Her thoughts are like flashes of lightning in the night: unpredictable, brilliant, beautiful and dangerous. One must approach them with caution, lest they petrify your own mind in disbelief. With each conversation, she holds the mirror up for you to see yourself, and though tis a little disconcerting, it is indeed a breath of fresh air when all one gets from others is charades, facades and deceit. My illness, she once said, was ‘eloquence in sciolism’: that I speak most beautifully about the things I know the least about. The cure, she announced gleefully, was simple: the company of good books and educated women. I agreed and asked her to supply me with both.

I pressed my face into her hair and inhaled the raw scent of the sea that still clung onto them, pulling her little frame into my arms. She barely moved. It was as if she was now oblivious to my presence, lost in whatever images that flashed across her mind. I wrapped my arms around her waist, pressing my lips onto her temple, and sighed. “What have I done now?” I wondered, but even though I might have done nothing at all, I knew it was just a matter of time before I had to apologize for it.

To my amusement, she said that she might just develop the habit of summoning me in the night just to sit by her side, to listen to me while letting my insidious passions burn out in the cold glare of her indifference. Hers was a pursuit of solitude in my company, as strange as it may seem. It was as if the voice in her head, the one with which we converse when we are alone, had quietened, and my purpose was to serve as hers until it had been awakened. The whole experience is a little less than torture, enough to drive any man mad, but tolerable, for when the needs of her mind are sated, she wouldn’t let me suffer long. The real way to know a woman, they say, is the biblical way, but then, how much can you really know about her when tis not upon you that she unburdens herself?

The distant hum of traffic across Kenya’s longest bridge had quietened, and not a single sound of the night invaded into the room. As the twilight came, her breathing and mine were all that fought to dispel the silence, and it was not long before that silence had lulled her to sleep. As I eased slowly out of her clasp, I wondered whether it was wise to return here. I looked at her frail form, lying on the couch, and recalled the troubles that pursued me. I was not supposed to be here, but maybe, she said? Maybe…. Let’s wait and see.