"Stella!"
There is no mistake it is me he means. I turn. It is a dark man at the corner of the ward, bed No. 29. He is sixty at least, take or add ten – of all the surprises of the Aids ward, age is the greatest. I walk back, my gift bag in one hand and the list of bed occupants in the other.

He is the one who coughs a lot. As I walk back, I recall that he has had two shares of my cookies because the guy next bed was wheeled out this morning. Dead. Maybe he has liked my cookies. Or maybe, seeing the duty nurse is elsewhere engaged, wants to solicit some help from me; something light like, ‘Turn me over, please.

So I am surprised when he says that he knows me. ‘Yes?’ I ask, not amazed; just curious. If he has been transferred here from either of the two hospitals I had visited the last vacation, he might very well remember.

“I am Dan Makosa,’ he announces proffering, for a hand shake, an emaciated reminder of what must once have been a very strong arm.

I nod and hold his feather-light hand in mine. I weigh the name in my mind. Dan Makosa. That much the duty nurse’s guiding list says he is. There is something else, though, in the way he had said it; like someone who expects instant recognition.

‘Don’t you remember me?’ he asks and I reflect.

A few seconds later I give up and conclude I can’t. I shake my head.

He coughs once and licks his lips. ‘At the university?’ Ah, I tell myself. He could have been…let me see, one of the elderly junior staff at the university. Most likely, he had been a janitor. It was easy to be known to them, particularly the ones in our hostels because we were asking favours from them all the time. Still the name does not click.

‘Ah, you worked there. I see.’

‘No,’ he says, flatly again, and coughs several times. ‘B.A. Econ. The Millennium class. Remember now?’

This world is a small place indeed. I have travelled 500 kilometres from my area of operation, the city. I have left its wide clean streets and clammy filthy paths; the sky scrappers in the C.B.D. and the low shacks in the slums; the universities and the madness everyone indiscriminately suffers from. I have left the foolishness to job-seekers, and small-timing to muggers. I have risen above all that. I have outrun the police and survived savage mobs. I have travelled to a far place where no one has possibly ever seen me. Only, in my attempt to get a place where I can sojourn in anonymity, I find an old man who tells me where I went to school; exactly what courses I took, even the year I graduated!

I am disturbed. Perhaps more correctly, disturbed and, yes, quite delighted at the whole idea. But I am embarrassed too that I cannot place this old chum in my memory. Grappling with all these confused feelings, I manage to open my mouth, ‘You are right, that’s when I graduated…’

‘Me too,’ the old man adds immediately. This withers a lazy friendly smile sprouting in my mind. Is this a joke? He has said it flatly, his voice muffled, almost lost in the dry coughs but I am sure I have heard right. It surely isn’t a joke. The way he is looking at me, it cannot be a joke. He watches my eyes closely, urging me to try some more, yet determined not to assist my efforts any further. I pause to listen to my memory, poor as always.

The memory of my childhood is dominated by mornings when I could sit on a high rock behind our homestead and watch the fog fall apart to reveal the familiar snowy peak on Mt. Kenya. Now, Makosa doesn’t belong to that piece of memory and the only reason I have invoked it is because there is a specific way I feel sometimes if an elusive answer is lurking in the subconscious. I don’t claim to have control over it whatsoever but I have over the years learnt to assist it, with surprising results quite a few times. .

With the encouragement of the twinkle in Makosa’s eyes, I am looking him straight in the face. His is the nondescript withered face of an average AIDS victim so I blank it out, introducing a mental fog. My mind is unsettled and creeping with uncertainty and I can only hope Makosa does not notice. There were many seasons when I sat on the rock and waited for hours and the fog would not lift off the peak. Aware only too well that I could easily fail, I dare to watch it and pray that it will fade out slowly and a snowy peak will spring forth. I look closer and, voila!

The Makosa I knew starts to unfold before my eyes. Unbelievable! It must be a right season for my experiment. His eyes sparkle, the mouth spreading out in an easy smile under a broad Bantu nose. The boy simply glows and is so charming that ‘charming’ suddenly seems inadequate. He is exactly the way I saw him the first time thanks to my memory, which is now clearer than crispy stream water and flowing even faster. My memory informs me that I fell madly in lust with him on that first meeting. I fully agree with it. Honestly, I am wondering how I ever recovered from the fall and ‘am rather satisfied to remember that I tamed the campus Top-gun for quite a few weeks. What do people call achievement? I am feeling rather light-headed owing to the success of my ‘fog’ experiment and more so the result it has brought me.

Then, right in my face and without warning, explodes a deafening fit of coughing that violently shakes me out of my reverie with the force of a sledge hammer. I am aware of this tragedy in front of me and though I don’t remember when I shut my eyes, I am now afraid to open them. Things are in a way they shouldn’t be. In my mouth lingers the taste of past bliss, but in my mind is a faded picture of the real hell that looms about. I have no interest however in discovering how this catastrophe looks like; call it determination to hibernate from the reality if only for a little longer.

Have you seen worse punishment? I mean, which well-meaning spirit would let me savour the joys of the past so fully only to drop the reality in my face with such rudeness. This particular question nags me at this point and I wonder what I have done so wrong to warrant such a harsh rebuke. It is Makosa’s renewed coughing that forces me to open my eyes and look.

‘Shwaah!’ Like the slash of a rhino hide whip on naked buttocks, a cold swish travels a painful journey the length of my guts and I find myself groping for support and leaning on the empty bed number 28. My jaw drops. A minute becomes minute; too small.

The chiming of the wall clock above the duty nurse’s desk glumly announces that it is already two in the afternoon. Visiting time is up. I don’t care. I am not thinking. I am blank. I am in limbo. Since I cannot repaint this sadistic scene, I begin to accept it, I allow myself to agree that some times one can only do so much. It is certainly a bad day. I am incessantly praying that tomorrow arrives sooner. In my waiting, I study Makosa, telling myself I have never seen him before. The cheek bones on which the skin is now horridly strung refuse to be unfamiliar. The eyes too, though sunken deeply into the skull have the shadow of a sparkle. I watch him through a coughing fit, watch his lungs explode within the constraints of his ribcage and his lips tremor. It is as if the lung tissue has turned into card board and if he were to spit out, it would inevitably be saw dust. Each cough sounds like it could very well be the last. I sit myself quietly on the bed next and look closer. Of course, he is Makosa. Dan Makosa. And I shared his bed, those six years ago.

God, I could also be a goner! This second realisation shakes me in proportions incomparable to any other. Thinking about it like that! I quickly look down at my own person and scrutinise my skin for a sign, any sign I may have been overlooking. I find none. I am dazed. Even the night I lost the roof of my shack to thieves in the slum, the unforgiving mid-night rain that had abruptly cut my sleep had not shaken me half this badly. This is one very bad dream on an extremely bad day.

I look about us. The ward is cold. Dull cream walls climb around us restrictively. We are crudely plucked out of the joy of our past and thrust into the ugly, inhuman truth of the present; we are the same cast in a different scene. The forsaken sick lie in the ward around me. The very smell of delayed death fills every inch of space in this place. I am choking in the truth that it has only been six years yet my age mate, here, looks older than my own father. This stings my eyes and pricks the skin on my hands where I grab the metal of the bed stead. I look at Makosa and know it could so easily be me. He looks into my eyes and I into his. I see wetness. He is going to cry and I am frightened.

I fear for Makosa of six years ago who had an education, a handsome face and a million hopes. I know he has come to the end of his tether. I fear because I also know he might lie at the mortuary for weeks unclaimed and not even make it to the obituaries. I fear that his grave might go unmarked in the public cemetery. One can fall so low. I fear it could happen to me.
I feel his tears physically burning my eyes

What can I do? This man has travelled through hope and is now certainly beyond it. I know it. He has travelled his different ways and arrived here. I look at the rot before me, compare it with the Dan Makosa of six years ago and…what can I say, except that I am sorry? What can a one say? He is going to cry. I start to say that I am sorry....

Tears roll down in fat warm balls. They sting all the way down and bounce off my knee…oh, God, help him! Then, suddenly, I feel his finger tremble against my cheek and I am surprised because I can’t see it. All I see is water; I feel its heat and sting. He rubs it off and I truly am shocked to see his face before mine. I am shocked because I am crying and he is not. He coughs and I sniff.

Then he smiles and it tears me inside. Seeing how so much I am falling apart, he draws a hankie from some place under the blanket and suspending it on the end of an awfully unsteady finger, manages to offer it to me. As soon as I pick the hankie, the arm flops back onto the bed as if it has no connection to the man beside it. He pants, the abdomen heaving worryingly and I am angry at myself for costing him so much. Later when I am calmer and his eyes have stopped popping feverishly and I am feeling so, so small, he tells me it is okay. And I do not understand. How does a man in Makosa’s shape say that he is okay? I am awed by his strength, so much of it that he is not a bit scared of death that hangs only a brief inch away? Calmly, he steadies his eyes and opens his mouth. It stays that way and I wait for his words without noticing that he will never again propel a word beyond those lips; that he has said all there is to say.

I wait.

I find myself looking at the exasperated and impatient face of the duty nurse and I do not resist when she leads me out.

* * * end * * *

Copyrights: George Waiganjo and Afrikanews.org