James Lilliefors - Viral

Charles Mallory studied the sightlines between the café and the windows of the adjacent buildings, attentive to anything unusual, recounting the tenuous threads that had led him here, coming together and, it seemed, now unraveling. Remembering details, phrases. “The ill wind that will come through.… Witness to something that hasn’t happened yet … the October project.”

He had checked in at the hotel fifty-three minutes earlier, using the name on his passport and identification card—Frederick Collins—not the one on his driver’s license.

12:51 .

Clearly, the meeting had been compromised. For whatever reason, Paul Bahdru was not going to show. The “why” would have to be determined later. Now, he had to find safe passage out.

He zipped up his bag and took a last look at the people walking along the wet, smoky pavement, seeing around the edges of things now. This was Charles Mallory’s first visit to Kampala in many years. He had been pleased, after arriving from Nairobi on a Kenya Airways flight that morning, to find the city on its feet again, with functioning utilities, clean water, crowded restaurants. Although in many ways—some obvious, others not—it was still a city rebounding from the civil war that followed the 1979 overthrow of Idi Amin. As with many African countries, Uganda was a patchwork of tribes and customs, its boundaries drawn by nineteenth-century British colonists who had come here to mine the region’s wealth. It was a sad tale that he had seen replicated in different ways in a number of Africa’s fifty-three countries, many of which had become breeding grounds for corruption and dictatorship.

Charles Mallory heard a sound: a sudden rain exploded on the tin awning above the window. He froze. Moments later, another sound. He took a deliberate breath and reached for the telephone.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Collins.” He listened to the other man breathing. “Hello, sir. A package has arrived for you at the front desk. Just delivered,” the man said, speaking with a lilting Ugandan accent.

Mallory felt his pulse quicken slightly. A package . Who could know he was here?

“Sir?”

“Yes. I’ll be right down.”

He went out, down the creaky wooden steps and along the flagstone path to the office. It was raining heavily now, thudding on the tin roofs and apartment awnings; scents of wet brick and dirt and tree bark mixed with car exhaust and the smells of meat roasting in the sidewalk stalls. Merchants huddled under plastic wraps and trash bags. It was just an hour past midday but dark like evening.

The clerk in the office was the same one who had checked him in. A thin-faced man with small, curious eyes and a slight twist to his upper lip, which gave the impression that he was smiling when he wasn’t. The man reached under the counter and set a bark-cloth package on top of the desk. A small, florist-sized envelope was taped to it, with his name, “Frederick Collins.”

“Who brought this?”

The clerk watched him steadily, his brow furrowing. “I don’t know.”

Mallory turned. Through the wet, greasy side window he saw the café down the street, where he and Paul were to have met. Above it, laundry blowing on a line, battered now by the rain.

“What did he look like?”

The clerk lifted his shoulders, as if he didn’t understand. Charles Mallory fished fifty thousand Ugandan shillings from his pocket.

“Not a man,” he said. “A woman. Car stopped outside. A woman delivered it and walked out.” He looked to the window and, for a moment, may have grinned.

“A prostitute?”

The desk clerk gazed back at him, as if a question hadn’t been asked.

Mallory took the package and walked quickly across the terrace, ducked against the rain, and took the stairs two and three at a time back to the room. He closed the door and twisted the deadbolt. 1:04. Okay . He looked back at the street, at the windows of the other buildings, searching for a set of eyes that might be watching him, a curtain pulled back. Nothing. Then he sat on the bed and sliced open the envelope, careful not to leave fingerprints. The envelope contained a single business card with a name on it in block letters: Paul Bahdru. “With Regrets” was scrawled in smeared black ink below it.

Using a dry washrag, Charles Mallory placed the card and tape back in the envelope and tucked it inside a plastic wrapper in his bag. He sat on the edge of the bed under the chuk-chuk-chuk of the fan and began to pick apart the tightly wound bark cloth. It was rectangular, narrower than manuscript pages or a photo book. He stopped for a moment to listen to the rain, to make sure it was only that—rain, beating the tin roof. Down below, tires skidded. Horns sounded.

What had gone wrong? Had someone followed? Or perhaps Paul Bahdru was watching now, from another window, wanting to make sure no one saw them together. Questions to be answered later.

Suddenly, Mallory jerked upright.

He clawed faster at the edges of the bark cloth, pulling the Styrofoam stuffing from the box.

“ No ! God dammit!”

The contents of the package stared back at him. It was Paul Bahdru—his head. The open eyes looked right at him through a thin, soiled plastic—the corners of his mouth upturned slightly, as if smiling at some final ambiguity.

TWENTY-SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-THREE miles away, in the Republic of Sundiata, Dr. Sandra Oku gazed numbly through her dusty windshield at the late afternoon light in the baobab trees, the fields of bell peppers and potatoes and cassava, and the devastation that had come to her village overnight.

Dr. Oku was the only health-care worker in the tiny village of Kaarta, in the Kuseyo Valley. Designated a “district medical officer,” she provided antiretroviral drugs to the farmers and villagers when they became available and tried to help anyone else who walked through her door—mothers and children, mostly, suffering from chronic diarrhea or skin infections or malnutrition. Many she couldn’t help and sent to the hospital in Tihka.

She was a long-limbed, graceful woman, with large, perceptive eyes and thick hair she braided and clasped back every morning. Until that day, she had been living her life in Kaarta with a dream—the sort of dream that most of the villagers could not afford. After the rainy season, she had planned to travel nearly a thousand miles to visit a man she had not seen in months—seven months next week, to be precise. A man she had met in medical school and with whom she expected eventually to share her life. But there was no room in her thoughts anymore for dreams; real life had suddenly closed in.

Dr. Oku’s most important work wasn’t distributing medicines; it was teaching preventive methods so the villagers wouldn’t need them. Some afternoons, she closed the clinic and drove her old pick-up into town to counsel the laborers and subsistence farm workers, and to distribute condoms to the nomadic women who worked the roadhouse along the lorry route. The women turned their backs when they saw her approaching, because they did not want to be educated, or even noticed. They wanted something else, something she couldn’t give them. Nearly 20 percent of the villagers were HIV-positive, Sandra Oku estimated, and many of them gathered at the truck stop whenever the faith healers showed up to hawk their healing potions. Over the past year, conditions had worsened in Kaarta. Water was scarce, and some residents had taken to fetching it from streams contaminated with untreated excrement. Since the revolution last year—when the Sundiata military chief had taken over the government of Maurice Kasuva—the central government’s health ministry had made it more difficult for the rural pharmacies and health clinics to get medicines.