The room was now cozy, lighter, cool because it was night. The neighbors told each other good night from one cubicle to the next. (Her sister was out whoring and chewing khat, never riding the zebras of sleep.) The music was low; bulbs glowed beautifully above the dirty white walls. Her delicious musk-mound floated him away from himself just as khat took him out of Kenya, past Moronie's low tree-balls bunched together under the broad cloud-cauldron of volcanoes; past the dark lady with the golden nosering and golden earrings (her head and shoulders wrapped in a cloth of blue and white stripes, blue and black sunbursts); past Moronie's bulk of hairy greenness, past the spittle between the hot black teeth of bays; and all the way to Madagascar's rivers the color of tomato soup, braiding broadly down between clouds and tree-destroyed places. She rolled on top of him, and he whirled westward to Somalia, where khat was qat and the sellers sat on a carven wooden chest beneath a green plastic awning. Ladies sat on the curb with double handfuls of qat, swishing flies away with the green stalks. A Somali in a station wagon pulled into the special parking lot, waving a plastic bag of qat, and began to chew and spit. He said: I don't need to eat anymore! My food is qat! —
He recited the roster of qat: gangete (the best kind), gese, lare, harere from Ethiopia. . Everyone was chewing qat. His head began to pull the rest of his body a little into the air; he discoursed with the others on all subjects of this world, his analysis complete and certain; she pulled him on top of her and was kissing his lips until she'd sucked him back into Kenya where qat was only khat and there were not four kinds; her sister lay drowsing half-naked against him all day making chewing sounds, dreaming of khat. It was night again, and his love was in his arms.
She explained to him that President Moi was a devil-worshipper because on the twenty-shilling note was a picture of him with a snake around his neck. — To be a devil-worshipper you must kill someone in your own family, the one you love the most, she whispered. You must do it in front of the other devil-worshippers. If you get rich from devil-worship and then leave that church, your riches will leave you. — President Moi's bodyguard had seen the snake and thought that it was hurting the President, so he killed it. President Moi got very angry and had him murdered.
She said that Moi had killed so many people. She knew that he was a devil-worshipper because her rent had doubled in one year to eight hundred shillings a month.*
She was sleepy now. She yawned and scratched her cunt. After he went away he found that she was still with him, because in the hair below his belly tiny black scabs appeared, itching more every day, and finally when he caught one between his fingers he saw that it was not a scab at all, that it had writhing legs. Then he knew why she had really shaved her pussy; and he remembered how she used to scratch between her legs without saying anything. She was in his arms.
* In 1993, this was about U.S. $40.
Now it was dark, and crowds stood in the streets. Someone had tied a bundle of leaves to the sign for Taveta Road. The night was cobalt violet with pale gray swirls of cloud. A woman smiled and said: jambo,* and he knew that he would never be lonely again. The buildings pulsed with shouts. The whores stood in the darkness, their sun a single strip of orange windows above.
Past the alley where men stood pissing against a dark wall, his love's sister disappeared, sinking without sight or sound. The police had caught her.
They waited an hour to be sure. Sitting at one of the restaurant's scuffed and mismatched tables, they ordered the cheapest dish, which was mutton stew and passionfruit juice. Heavy chain grated squeaking on the echoing floor. Parade music momentarily drowned the bus horns outside as a guard came in between the tables, swinging his truncheon.
I give him one hundred shillings, his love said. He find out for me.
She went over to the man and they spoke for awhile. When she came back, her face was almost the same. Only someone who knew her very well could have told that she was almost in tears.
He say, you a cripple and you fuck me up the anus. Sometimes I want to cry, I tell you. I tell him, maybe he know that because you fuck
