A Toss of the Dice

No one has ever called me Charlie or Chuck or Chas. I have always been known as Charles, that’s all. It’s not that I care either way, it’s just that none of my exceedingly few friends or acquaintances can bring themselves to call me by any other name.

“That’s okay. You’ve convinced me – whoever the fuck is listening – I may be slow but now I think I’ve got the message. You want me dead. You want me to forget all that this wretched life has dumped on me. That I can do...” I muttered to myself.

What’s the big deal? What do any of us know about death? Nothing – absolutely nothing. I don’t feel either way about dying – it is entirely indifferent to me and, so, I think no more about it than about brushing my teeth or combing my hair.

That would make this my last will and testament.

All I can see is the desolation of this litany of ennui, day-after-day, this droning lamentation of failure – and the attendant helplessness. If you ask why I’ve come to this decision I’ll spell it out for you:

It’s because things are what they seem!

What is finally left is your own ragged, bug-eyed, beat-up face in the mirror, aging like a browning pear lying in a rotten crate. And as you ponder those senseless, eternal questions, keep in mind that the universe is indifferent.

I guess in lieu of a real testament, I’ll leave you this story. If, after reading it, you’ve thought of a way to save me it’ll only help to further prove my point, since I’ll already be dead.

The supreme paradox.

Some seem to remember a period in their past that might be called the best time of their lives. I own no such memories. My entire history, since the events narrated herein, has been no more than a blur. Some earlier episodes can be vaguely called to mind, but these were neither good nor bad. They were just images seemingly left to float loosely through time.

It has been said that the definition of insanity is to repeat the exact same action again and again, each time expecting a different result. If that is so, I’m a lifelong member of the madman’s choir.

So be it.

I’ve met many strange people in my protracted lifetime. Some bark like dogs. Some grunt like pigs. Some purr like cats. Some speak from the highest tower, others from the lowest dungeon. I speak from the gutter…

The Ritual

Now, to the point: I was financially encouraged to work in East Africa for a British contractor on a road construction job. I was hired as a language assistant; I could translate to and from Kiswahili and English.

The project was a road starting from no place and leading nowhere. How it ever got financed has always puzzled me. Be that as it may, I found myself right in the middle of Tanzania and this road was forging ahead through an endless thicket of insects and sand. Savannah interspersed with jungle. Dry red soil rising to heaven every time a car passed by; sweltering afternoon heat followed by chilly nights. This was the routine, day in and day out; this was reality.

One day, driving along a dusty, dirt road, (the only kind there was), I saw a young girl – she couldn’t have been more than twenty years old – hitchhiking.

The road was deserted; the average traffic was one car every four hours. I stopped to pick her up, knowing beforehand what I wanted. Perhaps she also knew; her despondent look pierced any feigned attempt at subterfuge. Her features were typical: neither pretty nor ugly, just a girl with a round face and a listless, blind stare into the empty, forsaken space that surrounded her.

I motioned for her to get into the front seat. I said nothing and she responded with a subdued silence; we had nothing to say and conversation would have been futile, a simple waste of time. We had nothing but time, yet still we saw no reason to waste it.

I drove for a while and then purposefully steered the car into a grove, abruptly stopping and turning off the engine of the white mini station wagon, now thoroughly coated in red earth.

She hardly looked at me. I motioned for her to get into the back seat; she nodded quietly and I believe I gleaned a trivial smile flash across her glowing face.

If the kind reader would like to know what happened next, I recommend you shut your eyes and think about two people who both knew that it mattered absolutely not what they did in that car, or even that they were in the car. There was no place for desire or love or tenderness… just passion for flesh. Why should it matter with whom? If solitude, whose voice is ever as clear as day, were one’s only friend, then why not, with eyes firmly shut, devour?

… I slid up my pants, and she adjusted her tattered kanga. Neither of our faces yielded any significant expression; it was as if nothing had happened. In fact, I must, to this very day, strain my memory to be sure that any of the things I am about to tell ever really took place.

She resumed her seat in the front. We drove away in the same unabashed silence that had marked the initial phase of the encounter. My knees were shaking, making the act of driving slightly more pleasurable. She pointed to the scattered mud houses; I pulled over on the grassy embankment. Opening the door she stepped out as lightly as a butterfly alighting on a delicate flower.

She walked toward the village with a sensuous sway. I revved the engine and drove away watching the red dust rise from the rear view mirror.

Some hours later, back at the main camp, I still had work to do. Sitting in the rancid-smelling, squalid little wooden office, I looked over the coffee-stained papers spread across the scratched, wobbly desk. There was a memo from the Engineer informing of how the road was to pass through an ancient tribal burial ground. No markings, no headstones, just a very old cemetery, dating back to the eighteenth century.

The memo requested my presence in the project manager’s office.

“We have to convince them to allow us to dig up the graves and bury them someplace else,” said the stately, albeit friendly, pock-marked chief engineer.

“I can’t see why we don’t just go around it?” I replied with certain aplomb.

Felix retorted dryly: “We tried to calculate how much of a detour we would have to make. As it turns out, we would need about a kilometer and a half of lateral terrain and we just don’t have it…” He rubbed his lips with his thumb.

“What do we tell to them?”

“Just say that we can’t avoid the cemetery and we’d be happy to move the remains to any other site of their own choosing.”

“Alright – I’ll see what can be done.”

After a week of what seemed utterly futile negotiations with the village chieftain (such is the way of negotiations with villagers, you never really know where you stand) we finally struck a deal. They gave us a new place to lay the mortal remains and, after showering the chief with such coveted gifts as jeans, tee-shirts and moonshine, we were allowed move ahead with the expropriation.

All that was left to do was to call a cleric from each of the religions represented in the gravesite and have them consecrate the bones: a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, a spiritualist.

Since I had already witnessed, in one fashion or another, the first two, I decided to attend the latter ceremony out of mere curiosity. Two other friends had asked to observe the ritual as well: MacDonald, the chief surveyor, and Moraes, the accountant. So one cool, mid-July night we three set out for the village.

We had already been told that there was going to be a sacrifice – they needed blood from a bull. The village supplied the unfortunate beast and we threw in an askari, a ragged, underfed member of the people’s militia who helped guard our camp; they were the only people permitted to carry weapons.

The whole thing got off to a bad start.

When the mendicant-looking, half-consumed askari aimed at the big bull’s skull from only five or six feet away, he missed, wounding the bovine in the front leg. The frightened, limping creature ran with an agility that one would never expect from such a bulky, injured beast, and hid in the nearby brush. The shaman – a slight old man with stubby white whiskers protruding from his aged, wrinkled face – ran after the animal, trailed by an entourage punctuated by the askari. When they finally caught up with the dying bull the ragtag soldier put him down with a point-blank discharge to the head.

Now he needed to be transported back to the clearing where the ritual was to be held. We were asked to provide a tractor, which caused yet another delay of some ninety minutes or more.

Finally underway, the ceremony began with the bull’s blood mixed together with that of a chicken and that of a goat. This pottage, all stirred in a wooden bowl and seasoned with foliage gathered from the surrounding bush, supplied the crucial unction of the ritual.

The quartet of sextons on either side of the old man formed a curious bunch. One fellow, who could not have been less than eighty years old, and a woman who must have been pushing a hundred, both lepers, with varying parts of their anatomy missing – mainly fingers – presented a spectacle of ranting that only intensified the repugnance of their gnarled limbs. Another man, considerably younger, leaned against a baobab trunk, thoroughly disheveled, while ragamuffin shreds of what once had been very cheap clothes fluttered in the cool breeze while clinging scantily to his already sagging bones. Yet another, younger woman, with a brightly colored green and yellow turban wrapped around her head, did not stop talking, not even for a fraction of a second. Regrettably, none of us were close enough to understand what she was saying, but the few words that made some sense sounded something like damu and safi and maisha, that is: blood and pure and life.

Without warning the elderly diviner hoisted a twig-like branch from the floor and dipped it repeatedly in the wooden basin. The young woman suddenly quieted her chatter. The sea of gaslights that bejeweled the absolute darkness around the old cemetery twinkled and sputtered in tiny jerking movements. The hoarse, deep voice of the shaman pierced the black silence with a shrill invocation of the Goddess of Death:

Óia Matamba ê, tata eme/ Óia Matamba ê, tata eme/ Sinha vanju/damuringanga/ Ê tata eme/ Oiá, óia Matamba/ Ê tata eme/ E dambure, senza quenda é maiongue,/ Banburussenda, senza quenda é maiongue/ O sinha vanju, o sinha vanju ê/ O sinha vanju, o sinha vanju ê/ Ae Banburussenda, o sinha vanju ê.

“Kikapuni mna mayai”, chanted the crowd, “in the basket has eggs” with an enthusiasm very unlike their habitually lethargic character. The lights seemed tremulous as the roar of the chant overwhelmed the senses and left the three of us with a sensation of impending disaster.

After invoking Matamba several more times the crowd abruptly silenced.

The shaman deftly picked up the front legs of a stray dog that, I suppose, just happened to be wandering the grounds and started to dance with it around the fire enclosed in a circle of stones. The dog appeared to know each step as the old man led the way.

We three could but look on in stupefied awe at the primitively powerful display of faith. The shaman continued to prance about with the dog while shaking the blood-soaked branch over the verdant terrain. The hound began to wail and the village leader joined in, howling like a coyote with a wounded leg, almost limping yet never missing a beat in the disbursement of the blood.

Some thirty or forty minutes had passed since the beginning of the ceremony when a dead silence enveloped the crowd. The sage and his sextons stood statue-like around the fire.

I looked at MacDonald and Moraes, but I must confess my overall inability to produce anything even vaguely similar to a human sound. Their eyes seemed to be popping from their sockets and I suspect mine looked no different.

When I awoke I was staring at MacDonald’s big, oval, smiling face.

“What happened?” I muttered.

“Dunno Charles, seems like you passed out or something,” he replied, still grinning like an overgrown, mischievous kid.

“Or something…” I shook my head, trying to clear it.

“How long have I been out?”

“’Bout twenty minutes or so. You just collapsed.”

The cemetery was empty; just the three of us staring at each other in disbelief. They helped me to my feet and practically dragged me back to the car. I sat in the front and Moraes drove with Mac in the back seat.

He was driving so fast, I was forced to ask him, “How do you see in this darkness?”

“I just keep my eyes on the line – look ahead and see the line,” he stated matter-of-factly.

The night sky was opaque; I was petrified. The car seemed to hurtle through the night like some phantom sled slithering along a trail of ice. The trees swayed in slow motion, distorted and out of sync with the velocity of the automobile.

The little white station wagon stopped in front of my blue and white prefabricated, wooden house with a vine climbing up the rope tress tied to the porch. I tumbled out of the car and wobbled toward the front door. Mac hollered out that he’d bring back the car in the morning.

The next day we traded notes – Mac and Moraes informed me of what I had missed:

“Not much, Charles,” said Moraes, twisting his Rudolph Valentino type moustache like they did in the old, silent movies.

“The old guy continued to stare at the ground and repeated that same chant a couple o’ more times. Then everybody started to shout and scream somethin’… what was that Mac?” Mac smiled.

“Mkono mmoja hauchinji ng’ombe, which loosely translated means ‘One hand cannot slaughter a cow.’ It’s an old African saying and the implication is pretty obvious.”

I scratched my head, as if the obvious significance to which Mac alluded was escaping me.

MacDonald

The giant yellow bulldozer trundled backward and then thrust forward, shuddering and wheezing black smoke until the air was infected. The huge front blade hit the ground, filling the shovel and rising like a victorious pugilist’s fist brandished at the muggy, gray sky. I stared at the reddish-brown dirt, dripping like powdery blood through the shark-like teeth. My eyes discerned pieces of bone and what must have been remains of flesh mixed in the dirt – an eerie sight. A skull here, a femur there, a few ribs scattered in the heaps of soil. The dozer then twisted like a scourged animal and lumbered to the ditch that had been dug some 400 yards from the burial site. The villagers just looked on, muted by the roar of the engine and by sheer disbelief.

Mac, Moraes, and I followed with our eyes the robotic, menacing gyrations of the giant yellow contraption. The stench of diesel and rotting flesh reminded us that words would have been superfluous. How many trips would it take to fill the ditch? I tried, in vain, to predict the answer to that question.

A warm breeze whistled through the bush not unlike some alien form of speech. I wanted to decipher its code. I wanted very much to understand its mystery and its charm. As we headed back to the main camp, my thoughts hung suspended in such musings. I was sure that we had witnessed an event capable of changing our lives. I didn’t know just how much.

I hadn’t seen Mac for two or three weeks, when one very hot, sticky day I got a call on the radio. It was Masasi, my field-lieutenant, asking me to go to the village where we had excavated the burial ground. He didn’t say why, but from the tone of his voice I knew not to hesitate. I got into my car and drove as fast as the bumpy dirt road would allow. When I got to the clearing, which lay precisely in the center of the village, I saw from a distance the white Volkswagen beetle, immobile, with the driver’s door ajar. I could make out the silhouette of a black giant sitting behind the wheel.

As I approached the car I could distinguish my friend, Mac, with a smile that seemed to be frozen on his face. Masasi ran toward me, a look of despair clouding his features, and began to babble in Kiswahili.

“It’s Mac… he’s frozen solid… we can’t get him to budge… he won’t say a word…”

“What happened? Was it an accident?”

Masasi made an effort to compose himself: “He was driving through this spot, right here where the graveyard used to be, and he just froze up. The car shut off by itself and we can’t move him.”

“Mac, look at me, man…” I could not discern the least hint of movement – his visage actually resembled the ebony statues that were so commonly sold along the roadsides.

“It’s useless!” Masasi bleated.

I carried on this way for about twenty minutes. He did not so much as blink. The more time passed, the greater my apprehension grew. I shook him, slapped him, and shouted at him; nothing altered his hypnotic, trance-like state.

Finally I gave up, I turned to Masasi: “Listen, we’ve got to get him to a hospital. Now…”

Masasi, not waiting for me to finish my sentence, turned to the workers who had rallied around the car and commanded them to help lift him into the jeep: “Tunahitaji daktari kwa haraka!”

These sullen fellows were not accustomed to doing anything quickly, but sensing the urgency of the moment, I suspect they were driven by some heretofore unknown force of solidarity, and rushed to get the company vehicle parked some yards away. Following great physical exertion, we managed to get Mac from the front seat of the VW to the back of the jeep, still in the same motionless state. Masasi took the wheel and, with the speed of insanity, we headed to the hospital at Kilosa, forty some odd miles from the village.

The wine-red African dusk was settling over the rolling grassy plains. We pulled into the rock-strewn patio and cut off the engine. Masasi ran into the hospital and, almost instantaneously, emerged with two young nurses in starched white uniforms. All I could think was ‘What are they going to do?’ A few moments later two large, surly men followed, and the four of us pulled the unmoving gentle giant from the back seat. I saw my friend being carted away with the help of a twisted wheelchair.

After slamming the car door, I trailed into the lobby of the white stucco building that would never have been recognized as a hospital anywhere else in the world. Mac had already been taken to the x-ray room, where they would take black and white pictures of his skull and find nothing. They would scan and probe his body for two full weeks, only to discover that they had no explanation for his ailment; explanation, indeed!

When he was first struck down by this malady Mac weighed over two hundred pounds; he died skin and bones, one hundred and nineteen pounds of wrinkled black flesh and crumbling white skeleton. He never emerged from that coma-like state, and one very hot, clammy day he just stopped breathing. Just as bafflingly as he had taken ill, he had died. We were never notified of any funeral; I don’t even know if he had family. He simply vanished from our view.

Moraes

Roughly two months after Mac’s premature end, Moraes was slated to return home, which in his case meant Lisbon. Moraes, the methodical, disciplined, logical, bean-counter had finished his contract. He had never brought his wife and her little daughter to the job. All the while, he worked and they remained safe and sound back in their cozy home in Portugal. He had only gone to Europe twice during his two year stint, and both times he returned to work gloomier and more circumspect than before. Neither of us had commented the death of our friend; a few words were exchanged right after we learned about it, and then, all we could do was nod our heads.

He stopped by the house the afternoon before his flight. His customary gloomy demeanor was more accentuated than usual. We spoke briefly about his homecoming and all the things he missed. It was odd; at the time I didn’t take notice, but he never mentioned his wife or her daughter. He spoke about the food he wanted to taste again, the smell of the streets in his hometown, the sooty windows in his living-room and the furniture that had seen better days.

“Hey,” he said, coming as close to a smile as I had ever seen, “don’t you let anything happen to you. When you come to Lisbon we’ll get together.”

“Yeah, you can count on it.” I boasted a confidence that I surely did not have.

The sun shone at oblique angles on the concrete floor of the office that was, and always had been, spattered with that infamous red dust. Juma, my assistant, tapped lightly on the glass pane that was the top half of the door. I could see him carrying a dirty white envelope with international postage affixed to the top right-hand corner.

“Barua, ndugu,” he said rather flatly, fanning himself with the letter. Juma called me ndugu which technically meant close friend but, at the time, the country’s afro-socialist government had adopted it as a synonym for comrade.

From time to time I received letters from friends and family. I expected to see my father’s fluid scribble on the face of the envelope, but I was wrong. The handwriting was new to me, piquing my curiosity. As I stared at the Portuguese stamp my heart dropped. I felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach.

As Juma turned to leave, I took the ivory letter-opener from the mug on my desk and inserted the dingy blade in the soiled, white paper; the weight alone told me that there was more to this letter than I first imagined.

Dear Charles,

You don’t know me; I’m the cousin of Antonio Moraes, whom I believe was your friend, more so because he asked me to write you concerning what has happened here. Please excuse my English; I will try to be as clear as possible.

As you know, Antonio returned not ten days ago from Tanzania. We all went to pick him up at the airport, Celeste, his wife, Sandra, her daughter, and myself. All were glad to see him and he appeared to be as content as he ever was, which as you must know, was not saying much.

After a long, quiet dinner I left them seated around the dinner table, in utter silence, and went home.

At 3:00 am I received a phone call from the police. Something had happened at the casa de Moraes and could I please come to assist in their investigation.

They wouldn’t tell me anything right off, but my imagination ran wild….

When I arrived I must confess my thoroughly unsuspecting spirit was shocked beyond any possible description. The dinner table was still set, dirty dishes and all, and at the head of the table was my dear friend Antonio with blood all over his curly head which dripped in a languid stretching motion on the flowery white ceramic butter dish. At the opposite side Celeste sat slumped in her chair, her long black hair knotted with shining, crimson blood. And little Sandra, oh, little Sandra had a ragged, powdery black hole in her tiny chest, as her head hung crookedly over the back of the chair. It was unmistakably the most gruesome sight I have ever witnessed.

My belly felt as if it had been struck with a sledge hammer. The room began to spin and I could see a small cloud forming through the window that framed the well-lit room.

The coroner’s report is not yet official but the word from the precinct is that it will be deemed a homicide-suicide. The evidence is overwhelming, they tell me.

Apparently, some twenty minutes or so after I had left, Antonio took down a hunting rifle that was slung on the living-room wall and shot Sandra, Celeste and himself, in that order.

The police found a note pinned to his shirt, over his heart, which, in a frantic scrawl, read ‘tell Charles it found me.’ They, of course, wanted to know about you and why you would know anything about this horrific tragedy. I told them that you had been colleagues and then explained about Antonio’s recent return from Africa. They would like to talk to you, but, given the limitations of the Lisbon police, I do not believe they will cross the ocean to seek you out. However, I’m sure that, should you ever find yourself in Lisbon or environs, you would be a welcome guest at the central precinct for a cup of demitasse and some amicable prattle about my poor departed cousin.

Well, there is not much more that I know, and, from the note, I suspect you may know more about the cause of this misfortune than I do. If so, I would much like to hear from you, and learn of anything at all that could possibly shed light on these events.

Having fulfilled my duty, I remain,

Sincerely,

Amador de Veiga-Filho

Aside from the letter, there were several clippings from local newspapers, all neatly folded inside the envelope. I sat inert and voiceless, and yet, in my soul, I felt I had no right to be. I should have known that something like this would happen. He had left a note, he had wanted to tell me something; alas, he needed a friend. But why me? I was never a good friend to anyone. I never took anyone else seriously enough to actually care. I never loved anyone. I looked at the soiled envelope and the creamy white writing paper over which the words seemed to hover.

In a rapid and logical succession of thought I arrived promptly at the conclusion that, of the three alien witnesses to the strange ritual, I was now the only one left alive.

I walked outside where the balmy air and barren wasteland that surrounded me only enhanced the sense of abandon that I was, by and large, almost always subject to. I could find no solace under the African sun. My entire body coiled under the weight of the earth; my movements were sluggish, my mind lethargic. Everything I dared look at was intolerably out of focus. I could not envisage myself anywhere, doing anything in particular. My spirit had departed, or so it seemed.

Charles

Several days later I awoke unusually early from what must have been a very deep sleep. I don’t remember having dreamed, and the general feeling of bulkiness seemed far greater than before. A stir of pyrexia dwelled inside of me, and the sweat that soaked the sheets was more than I could recall. I tried to stand but found that my knees were shaking too much, my legs could no longer endure the weight of my body, diminutive though it was. A haze of somnolence assaulted my senses, and I lay back down on the bed as though I had been pinned by some formidable force. I was sick, nauseous and shivering as if the temperature in the room had suddenly fallen below zero.

I heard a vacant mumbling as I began to shake the sleep from my ears. I could detect Felix’s baritone, punctuated speech above the other voices, which were more difficult to identify. When the fog lifted I distinguished three people – two men and one woman – standing around the bed: Felix, George, the head of planning, and Marion, the director of the local ex-pat elementary school.

Squinting through my dismal disease, her round, firm figure reminded me of how much I had wanted her stretched across my bed. All the things I had wanted to do with her…

The small window, dingy for lack of care, framed an orange sky, a sunset that swam on the horizon like a wily snake seeking out its prey.

My head was swimming – dizzy and fever-ridden. Marion was asking if I was alright; I didn’t know how to answer. I thought about saying that I felt fine, but the apparent inconsistency bothered me. I have never been able to contradict the obvious – perhaps because I knew that any good lie must be consistent in order to fit the observable facts – I was forced to confirm my unambiguous frailty and my yearning to dive into sheer darkness, to lay forgotten in a world of silent chaos, fruit of my madness, a darkness in which no one would remember my name.

Of a moment my entire spirit was dowsed with a sense of limitless freedom, I could go wherever I pleased. The former barriers, whatever they may have been, would have vanished in the blink of an eye. This might have been caused by the infirmity, or by the stifling air, or by hunger; I have heard that extreme hunger causes the release of endorphins which, in turn, produces a very pleasant buzz.

I always knew myself to be a man without country. To what make-believe line or rattlebrained, puppet politician can one, in clear conscience, pledge allegiance? To what unseen power can one knowingly bend when a world of untapped knowledge awaits the curious and inquiring soul that stands upright on the edge and allows all things, even the deadliest poison, to permeate his blood?

I rolled over – tossing my body like a log on a fire – and I lay a long, lusty kiss on the full, moist lips of night. She was my lover. The walls danced before my watery eyes in stark contrast with my parched mouth; heart pounding and sweaty crimson palms that seemed to swell and shrink in alkaloid syncopation. Still pitching and heaving on sweat-soaked sheets I screamed…

Doubtless, delirium had set in. Thoughts appeared to ooze from my sweltering brain, without order or meaning. I could feel a tingling creeping through my limbs, the extremities as brittle as frozen twigs. I saw their faces staring down at me as though I were floating above the mattress.

The voices grew louder but still made no sense. I was prostrate and semi-conscious, every hour or so urinating a brown liquid. I could detect the despondency in the faces hovering at my bedside. Still, I was convinced that I was immortal – this affliction would not, nay, could not kill me.

I was subjugated by a jaundice that, besides the obvious physical suffering, seemed to filter through my very essence. I was losing weight at an alarming pace – the nausea and diarrhea had melted some 15 pounds from my normal body size, which was already rather lean.

They called in a doctor from Dar es Salaam. He was a young, educated Tanzanian who had earned his degree in the U.K. After examining me from head to toe he concluded that I had contracted some rare form of viral hepatitis. I later learned that the popular name was Blackwater Fever. It is always the simple explanation for everything. I was to be moved to a ‘good’ hospital (for whites) in the capital and undergo some tests.

Still ablaze in fever – the last time it had been checked it was somewhere in the vicinity of 105 degrees and rising, and with no drugs known to man capable of bringing it down – I was bundled into a Kombi and, under a torrential rain, set off on a 4 hour odyssey that included twice getting stuck in the mud and, on both occasions, in my thoroughly debilitated condition, I found myself forced to scrounge around in the bush to find branches and leaves to serve as traction so that we could continue our journey. All I could think of was a big ice cream cone, the kind that one only found in the capital. It must have been a reaction to the uncontrollable fever, the body’s attempt to dowse the wrath-laden fire in my brain.

The dreary silence inside the flimsy microbus was broken, only sporadically, by the dry, hacking cough that came from the driver’s seat. Joshua, the chauffeur, originally a Wahehe tribesman and a very likeable sort, was a staunch smoker and an equally enthusiastic drinker. Legend has it he once drove from Arusha, home of Kilimanjaro, to Dar es Salaam, a 14 hour ordeal on slippery, meandering roads, with the container originally meant for windshield wiper fluid brimming with pombe, a local brew distilled from ever abundant corn husk. Apparently, he had rigged a long plastic tube coming from under the hood, through the dashboard and straight into his gullet.

I must have fallen into a deep sleep because, when I awoke, the room was meticulously antiseptic, doors had no knobs, and all the voices were no more than whispers. The bed was bleach-white; the sheets exuded a crisp clean smell of detergent. A tall doctor, whose dark black skin contrasted sharply with the white shirt and pants he sported, spoke slowly, as though I were unable to understand his English – which was perfect, by the way. He prescribed virtually the same remedy as had been previously directed by the first doctor. I needed rest and a saline drip to re-hydrate my body. I would undergo a stout regimen of sweets, bland liquids and non-greasy foods along with some antipyretic drugs. In two weeks his diagnosis was proven correct to the letter.

Indeed, of the three, I was the solitary survivor. Or was I?

There it is! I’ve finally told the story.

And from it the sole conclusion is that there must be some reason I was spared; perhaps only to be able to tell this tale. I cannot think of anything I’ve done since that justifies my hollow existence. I do know that it signaled the end of comfort, the end of soothing and healing of wounds. Beauty could no longer inhabit such a world and I needed another toss of the dice.