Eigengrau

I remember the taste of sugarcane juice dripping down my chin when it happened.

Baba stood at the gate, dusty and exhausted, his heavy arms weighed down by plastic bags filled with goodies from the coast of Mombasa. Ma’ Kamaa, his second wife after the barrenness of the first, my mother, ran to him, months of being alone and ridiculed finally over. He shook his head, stopped and reprimanded her, for the first time of two, before pulling down a red-brown handkerchief from his face and saying he was sick.

No one knew what to do. Even his title as Chief Messenger to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland held no water when it came to diagnosis and treatment with the disease from the North. Right before he died, he swore at Ma’ Kamaa for taking too much care of him when she should not have. He died, two months before The War was over. Grief-stricken for eighteen years, Mama followed him soon after I joined the rest of my mates working in a growing Nairobi.

The years were good to me. The women, even better. I grew in trade. I learned. They from the North had come to make life better, so they said. Buildings grew. Alliances were made. Loyalties shifted. I was young and carefree. I faltered and fell into hard times. I licked the rough hide of the law a few times before being bailed out by a traveling economics professor I met two years before my current state of affairs.

Michael Michael was his name. MM, he preferred, after I lambasted him for the awkwardness of it all. Even I, with my strange-to-him heritage had a name that made more sense. Nairobi was going through strange times in 1950. For one, it had just become a city. The visitors from the North came in large buses from boats at the coast. Money flowed through the night, and the friendly company was always thick and warm.

With the promise of a quick and easy job, MM asked me to wait for him behind a few of the crates in the back the settler bar. I had a few smokes. Took one out and inhaled the sweet hay. The evening sky was embarrassingly beautiful. There I was, a thirty-three year old with no woman, no serious work, scarred from years behind prison, and waiting behind one of the most exclusive clubs in Nairobi for a white man. I was a dead man walking. If the men from the bush heard of what I was doing, they would have offed me instantly. MM came back, three beers in his hand, his steps unsteady. He said he would only have one.

“There will be reward,” he said. I shook my head, asked if it involved freedom or money. He chuckled and swung his beer down until it wetted his old beard. I was reminded then of the sugarcane juice. Of old death.

In the next two years he made a man out of me. I walked with MM, learned the man’s tongue a little better. I even got myself a few white women to be with on most nights. MM laughed it off, saying the hate I got from my people was normal. He said ‘a man strides in abundance when his feet ignore the red coals below’. I met his friends, noblemen, who saw in me a spark, they said. I wrote. I drank. I observed. Two years slip by quick enough if you’re not paying attention.

It was a Sunday. The papers were smeared with propaganda about the men in the bushes seeking revenge against the settlers. Against men like MM. He told me it would soon pass. Wheezing, he took out a yellow photograph from his breast pocket. His eyes watered. He put it back and sniffled and drank once more. “Come,” he said. “We have work to do.”

There was a building. White. Massive. Inside were white men in white coats, hunched over clipboards and machines and dials. A bed was in the middle of one of the rooms. It looked cold. MM asked me to take my shirt off. I did. After a pause, he ordered me naked. I hesitated. He pat my back, told me that this was where the job was all leading to. That he came to the prison cells looking for someone strong, someone who could take it. He whispered that he considered me a friend, family even. He then ripped my pants off and told me to lie on the bed. He left without saying goodbye.

Minutes later, there are men around me, asking me to take a deep breath. Labored, I tell them, beg them to stop. They do not stop. They murmur and hum in Latin, the last language my betrayer had taught me. The needles hurt no more. It is cold. I cry out for MM. The smell of acrid alcohol is still strong in this strange room. I see Ma’ Kamaa. I see Baba. I do not see the women, or those I had to kill for my life. I see nothing, not nothing. Eigengrau.

“You can open your eyes.”

A woman. Soft, like the pillows at the lodging. Like Mama’s porridge at dusk. I see nothing. I feel cold. Something warm prods my neck. A hand. Warm breath tickles my skin. I open my eyes to soft flooding light all around me. I taste metal and oranges. I smell nothing.

There are three people surrounding me. One is a woman, too skinny for the age in her eyes. The other men are in different clothes, bulkier, mean-looking. Security, maybe. They made no mistake, I suppose. MM must have called them in after I snapped a neck or two after he left. I remember nothing. I know I did something. The woman, seated, taps her lips.

“You must be confused. I can imagine.”

For a woman of our skin color, she speaks the tongue really well. She is dressed in white, like the men who held me down. A nurse, perhaps? I ask where I am. My voice, it’s gone.

“Don’t force it. You will speak soon enough. Perhaps I can give you an orientation on what happened while we wait.”

Perhaps. I observe. The light feels different. The air, heavier. I try moving, bobbing at least. Everything feels stale. Raw.

“You were tasked with a job in the year 1952, the only one to ever exist. Today, that job ends. I need you to listen carefully now.” She sighs and crosses her leg over the other. Muscles engorge. Blood flows. I am still a man. “You were chosen. Your genetics at the time made more sense for it to be you, the first human being to be cryogenically frozen through time. The Freemasons at the time were a little unorthodox with their methods. But times change. It has been 67 years since you slept, Johnson Kamaa. Welcome to the summer of 2019. The government budget’s just been read, and life is, well, come along and I will show you.”

That was six months ago.

Today, they let me leave. I have in my coat some money, a pencil and notebook, and a card with a number on it. They tell me they will always be watching, and that if I run into any trouble they will be first to respond. I just nod as the doors open.

It is afternoon. Raining. I walk on, untethered and wet. I let the rain mask my tears, as the world soaks itself into me. Nyerere Road, the street marker says. One thing that never changes through time is the lie of the church. And so my walk through the thinning rain leads me to the parking space of the All Saints Cathedral that was consecrated right before I slept. I greet the guard, who waves a metallic beeping thing along my person, and allows me through. I find my way through the high doors and high ceilings, observe the few praying souls, and then leave. I know where I will come back to in the morning.

The moving pictures I have been watching for six months describe Nairobi as a city beyond what I knew it to be. They are right. And wrong.

Nothing has changed. Men in love still hold hands in secret. Mothers hold their babies tight to their bosoms before crossing the road. Men of the white man’s faith preach on street corners a little more confidently. Women of the old faith and in short skirts take their spaces when darkness falls. The rates are a little high, but manageable. Alcohol has gotten better. So has the food. There are less people like MM now, and more of my people. I can walk into any bar, any restaurant, and stay as long as I like and eat what I like. People are still people, even with the raciest fashion or technological trends. They swear. They fuck. They cheat. They steal. They kill. They love.

December is here, and I have not made a friend. Not yet, anyway. I’m not ready to let anyone in. I’ve seen how they treat men like me who speak of grandeur. Mathari Mental Hospital is their home. It never will be for me.

Of course I still think it all a dream. The number on the card in my pocket proves otherwise. They check up on me once in a while. Sometimes the nice doctor who woke me up wakes up next to me. We talk. I tell her about MM and my childhood, and she asks me to try to heal. I laugh at that, and kiss her, and tell her to get on her knees. She still keeps secrets about why they did it, why I was a lamb for them. I understand. I don’t understand.

I take a short walk from the lodging, body still sore from last night, all the way to the edges of downtown. There, Mama Joy welcomes me heartily. In her fat hand is a long tumbler, filled with my most passionate 21st Century drink: spiced sugarcane juice. Through the radio, a woman talks about something happening in China, something similar to the olden days. Mama Joy scoffs and says it’s propaganda from all the loans the President has been taking from there. A new customer, thick in the neck and smelling like rags, coughs and says it’s nothing more than news being news. A child runs by me, their reed propeller waving in the wind, them chortling. Shuttles heading to Kisumu, Kericho, Maralal honk in the background. Hawkers yell and sell. Laughter abounds at a man begging for the glued kids not to take his money. Sugarcane churns in the press.

I sip, and breathe. And smile. It too, shall pass.