The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  * * *

  ‘What are you doing with that thing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jacob replied without looking up.

  God was sawing through a plank of wood. Now he pushed his goggles up. They held his dreadlocks back like a girl’s headband.

  ‘It better not be nothing!’ he said. ‘The General is waiting.’

  The new drone model was propped on its back on an overturned oil drum, a brick underneath it to raise its head and protect its propellers. Its square belly was open. Joseph glanced around the yard at the remnants of Jacob’s experiments. It looked like the aftermath of a battle scene in a Terminator movie.

  ‘But why?’ he tried again. ‘Is that, like, a real drone? How much did it cost?’

  Jacob glared at him and returned to his tinkering. After a beat, he spoke. ‘I’m rebuilding it.’

  ‘Why?’

  Jacob narrowed his eyes and flicked his chin up. ‘And you – why do you do those things in your ka lab?’

  ‘Science.’

  ‘So?’ Jacob jerked his head at the drone. ‘Same-same.’

  * * *

  Joseph turned on the gas for the Bunsen burner. Four samples of canarypox – one had disappeared last week, he suspected Dr Ling had snatched it – were huddled in the wooden rack. The Petri dish was sitting on the workbench. He lit the burner. From a recessed part of his mind, he watched himself hold the inoculation loop in the tiny roar of the methane flame until the metal glowed a fierce orange. He cooled the loop in the agar with a hiss. The agar looked clean, the colour of Vaseline. He dipped the sterile loop into the open test tube, then scribbled it over the agar. He was making another culture to examine on the electrophoresis tray. He leaned against the workbench, watching himself dip and transfer.

  * * *

  Salk wasn’t the only one. Scientists love to experiment on themselves. The immunologist David Pritchard slipped hookworms under his skin. The cardiologist Werner Forssmann put a catheter in his heart. The chemist Albert Hofmann took the first ever hit of LSD on his bicycle ride home from the lab. I can see the appeal of testing yourself. It’s all about the control. You control the whole experiment. You prove your commitment to your hypothesis. You observe symptoms internally and externally. You skirt the ethical morass of testing human subjects, if not the legal one. But I’m sure there’s a loophole, the same way no one ever goes to trial for attempting suicide because you’d have to bring charges against yourself. It’s all about ‘the control’ in another sense, too. If you give yourself a disease from a known source, you have a control condition – two patients with the exact same strain. One you test, the other you don’t.

  * * *

  The yard vibrated with the smell of fresh wood and friction.

  ‘Maybe the Chinese will be the dawn of a new economy,’ said Joseph. ‘They’ll light the way.’

  ‘With kwacha and ngwee?’ God snorted. ‘And what about our freedoms? We are already falling back under the sway of totalitarian thinking with the Chinese.’

  ‘Yes, bashikulu,’ said Jacob. ‘If we want light, we must have fire! Burn out the disease.’

  ‘What disease?’ asked Joseph.

  Jacob swept his hand through the air and began to walk away.

  ‘Do not run from the argument, mwana,’ God spat.

  Jacob glanced at the glob of spit on the dirt. ‘The foreigners are the disease. They are still in power.’

  ‘That’s superstitious nonsense,’ Joseph clucked. ‘You believe we’re still under colonialism?’

  ‘Me, I don’t like the foreigners who come here. They just plunder our resources.’

  ‘Most of the world doesn’t even know who we are,’ said Joseph. ‘We’re still very young, you know. This nation barely has a history or a working economy. We benefit from foreign aid.’

  ‘Zambia is only young because of the foreigners.’ God lifted his joint with delicate fingers. He sipped the burning leaves and winced with pleasure. ‘They carved us up. They drew borders straight through the villages. Pulling tribes together from this side, that side. Joining us into Federation, splitting us again. It took some time to make one Zambia one nation.’

  ‘Well, the Chinese aren’t doing that,’ Joseph shrugged. ‘They first came here in solidarity. And now they have come to invest. They’re building railroads and farms and airports. That can only help.’

  ‘Ah? No. We cannot afford that kind of help,’ said God.

  * * *

  I’ve been listening to my dad’s Memos, going backwards in time. The Notes are more useful, of course – he lays out the exact procedures to test the mutations. Musadabwe and I have essentially been replicating what he was doing, but faster now that we have access to CRISPR. It’s changed the whole scientific landscape. My dad knew it would. You can hear it in his voice in the last Memos – the news really started to circulate about CRISPR in 2013. The term for what it does is DNA editing and it really is almost as easy as typing and deleting the words in this email. It’s cheap now, too, but of course there’s a patent war already.

  Dad’s Memos are more philosophical than scientific. He asks himself questions and answers them, like he’s ventriloquising both Socrates and the sycophantic neophytes. He gives himself diagnoses. I’m looking for the moment he figured it out. I think he was testing the vaccine on himself. Like Salk. Did he test it on my mother too? On Jacob’s mother?

  * * *

  Joseph printed out the Wikipedia entry on ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’. It was eighteen pages long. He slid the printout onto the oil drum, next to Jacob’s drone.

  ‘You know I have Wi-Fi too?’ Jacob said through gritted teeth. ‘Like everybody else in Lusaka?’

  ‘Ya, no. I just—’

  Jacob pressed his middle finger to his thumb. A skewer of light shot out from the tip of the finger.

  ‘You got beaded?’

  Jacob crooked the fingers of his left hand at the top knuckle, casting a square of light onto the palm. He tapped this ‘screen’ with his right index finger. The Google home page appeared. ‘See?’ He extended his hand palm up. ‘Even us poor people, we have Googo now.’

  ‘Technology is no longer the preserve of the rich, eh?’ said God. He came over from his sanding bench and peered down at Jacob’s hand. ‘How does this thing work?’

  ‘Human skin is an electric interface,’ said Joseph. He had seen a demo at the Arcades Digit-All shop. ‘They embed a torch and a speaker in the finger, and a mic at the wrist – but you can also use a wristband. There’s a circuit in the median nerve,’ he pointed to the centre of Jacob’s palm. ‘The rest is conductive ink.’ Jacob turned his hand over to show off the tattoos radiating across its back.

  God shook his head. ‘I like electronical guitar but I will never put electricity in my hand. The hand is man’s saving grace. This part,’ he pointed at his own median nerve, ‘we call it—’

  ‘The eye of the hand,’ said Joseph.

  ‘No!’ said God. ‘It is called the labourer’s nerve. The hand is what we use to grasp tools to plough the earth! And weapons to fight the power! And instruments to play freedom songs!’

  Jacob rolled his eyes, clicked off his Bead, and pointed at the Wikipedia printouts Joseph had brought. ‘Anyway. I already read about drones online,’ he said. ‘It will not help my project.’

  ‘Ba Marx wrote that the machine, it is a virtuoso,’ God was musing. ‘It has a soul! The mechanical laws are acting through the machine and these act upon the mind of the worker…’

  ‘What is your project exactly?’ Joseph asked Jacob.

  ‘A nanorobot.’ Jacob crossed his arms. He was shorter than Joseph, but stronger.

  ‘Whoah. The robots that they send through veins and arteries?’

  ‘Ah, no. Not that small.’

  ‘You mean a microbot?’

  ‘Yes. That one. They are making th
em in USA already. The size of a fly. Or a bee.’

  Joseph cast his eyes at the drone on the oil drum – the size of a pigeon. ‘Okay.’

  * * *

  I found Jacob’s name in my dad’s files. I’ve been going through the photos – they go back the furthest because every time Dad plugged his iPhone into his laptop, it downloaded his whole photo library. There’s a 2012 album, from when he moved out – he took photos of his old documents to back them up. It’s barely legible but I think it was a test. It says ‘sample’ and Jacob M. The result is negative. I guess he lucked out. Should I tell him? How do I even bring it up? ‘Remember when our parents used to fuck?’

  I mostly go over there to smoke with God and hear stories about freedom-fighting days, to talk about Marx – another self-tester, in a way. He wasn’t really black but he certainly lived the poverty he was theorising. And yeah, I guess I’m a little curious about Jacob’s ‘drone project’. It does seem shady, as you say. But it also seems so unlikely, so kachigamba. Does he really think he can pull it off?

  * * *

  Joseph stood above the woman of the night. He watched her for a moment then rapped his knuckles against the wall to wake her. Her eyelids shimmied up, her irises like solid black buttons. Her head fell forward and she began coughing. When the fit had settled, she blinked.

  ‘Injections,’ he said, placing a hand under her arm to help her up. Her skin felt damp.

  As Joseph guided her to the ‘Examinationing Room’, she slurred at him. ‘I know you,’ she said. Her head drooped so far her chin almost touched her chest. Joseph sighed and kicked the door open. Musadabwe watched warily while he assisted her up onto the exam table.

  ‘Drunk again, love?’ Musadabwe smiled grimly.

  Joseph handed a tray of medical equipment to the doctor and placed a bucket beside the woman, just in case. She was falling to pieces, her skin scorched black, her eyes slitted like buttonholes now. When Joseph moved towards the door, Musadabwe called out.

  ‘Help me,’ he said.

  * * *

  I didn’t think we would get this far. We’re nearly ready for human inoculation. The patients are hungry for it: whining and pleading with their big eyes. Ling wants us to gather more data first. It turns out he organised competing teams of scientists on either side of the Indian Ocean – he’s essentially pitting us against each other, to force a breakthrough. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I know what you’ll say, Naila – neocolonial neoliberalism, Ling just pushed our research back etc.

  He held the Chinese results over Musadabwe the last time we met. Can you imagine it, all of us sitting across from each other in that hovel of a lab? Ling blinking slowly. Musadabwe singing his give-us-more-money song – Dad must have taught him that. They ignored me completely. Humiliating. I know the Virus vaccine is not technically my project but I’ve worked on it for months. I had to insist on even attending these meetings. I threatened to resign. Don’t laugh. I know you can’t resign from a job you never had. I know I got this far only because of my money. But I want to see it through. I’ll rustle more out of Gran if I have to.

  * * *

  The sunlight had gone from dull orange to white heat, the day burning itself up. Joseph squatted on the stoop of the clinic, rinsing tools in a bucket. Students in pale blue uniforms strolled along Alick Nkhata. Joseph watched them with fond pity as he dried a beaker and the centrifuge tubes. He hadn’t gone to his UNZA classes in ages, not since Naila had transferred out. The One Hundred Years Clinic and RIP Beds & Coffins were schools of a different sort.

  Just as he finished drying, he heard loud voices next door. Joseph walked over to the woodyard, slipping through the gap between a dresser and a coffin. Jacob was leaning against a tree, jeans low on his hips. Joseph’s eyes narrowed – Jacob hadn’t come by in a couple of weeks. He was talking to God, who was facing away, a block plane in his hand.

  ‘Isa kuno, iwe,’ God called. ‘Come closer if you want to ask for things! You need what?’

  Jacob strode over to him and God’s hand fell onto his shoulder. He gestured for Jacob to assist and they levered a plank onto the trestle. As God began shaving bits of wood off it, their words grew inaudible. In the bright midday light, the wood flakes looked like scraps of gold.

  God stopped to point at the metal lumps around the yard. ‘And what are these?’

  ‘False starts,’ said Jacob.

  ‘You buy these machines and just break them,’ God chided, picking up a discarded drone.

  ‘I’m almost there, bashikulu,’ Jacob protested.

  ‘Almost!’ God laughed and tossed the machine to the ground again. ‘No, I’m not throwing kwacha away so you can build some more almost-robots.’

  ‘I’ll lend you the money.’ Joseph stepped forward.

  Jacob gaped, a laugh catching in his throat. ‘I will not owe money to a stranger—’

  ‘Ah, you!’ God shoved Jacob towards Joseph. ‘You need the money? So take it.’

  * * *

  I never thought about that possibility. You think? Jacob is darker than both my dad and his mum, so I always assumed – although Sylvia’s skin is artificially light after all. AMBI-valent, so to speak. And the genetics of skin colour do play out in unpredictable ways.

  Naila. I miss you. There’s a crack in my screen because Musadabwe’s secretary boy dropped my phone, but I got your WhatsApp. Your new haircut is lovely. Why did you decide to dye it silver? I’ve never seen that before – it looks like a helmet. My Joan of Arc. You’ll call me a fool for giving any of Gran’s money away, especially to Jacob, and for drones at that. But he’s aiming high, right? Striving for innovation! I sound like a muzungu. Maybe you’re right – maybe it’s just guilt like he really is my brother. Is the selfie you sent from the rally you told me about, after the protests? You look so hopeful. So strong.

  * * *

  ‘Eye for an eye. Or is it tit-for-tat?’

  Joseph reached out his hand.

  ‘Are we bazungu that we must shake on it?’

  Joseph blinked and lowered his hand. He leaned down, opened his satchel, and took out a paper bag with the money in it. ‘Okay, here it is. Five thousand sharp,’ he said.

  He sat on the high stool, watching Jacob take the block of kwacha notes and count them out, slipping them onto the workbench. Joseph looked over the loan contract – he had printed it out this morning without proofreading it. Jacob counted the money again in that leisurely way of his.

  ‘So,’ Jacob said finally, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  Joseph was at the sink, idly rinsing out test tubes.

  ‘What are you doing in here with this Virus thing?’

  Joseph looked at him. ‘I’ve told you. Musadabwe and I are trying to cure it. We’re scientists.’

  ‘Scientists? Nts.’

  Joseph folded his damp arms across his chest. ‘What word would you prefer? Doctors?’

  ‘What do you know about doctors?’ Jacob sucked his teeth again.

  ‘Yes, of course. Africans know nothing about medicine,’ Joseph said sardonically.

  Jacob pointed his finger in Joseph’s face. ‘I know your medicine is killing my mother.’

  Rage beat across the air between them. Standing across from each other in this dark room had kindled something.

  ‘Jacob. The Virus is killing your mother, not the medicine.’

  ‘Your father is the one who brought her to this clinic.’

  ‘He did not take her away from you.’ Joseph released the words one at a time.

  ‘You people are using her!’ Jacob shouted. ‘For experiments!’

  ‘No! I don’t know exactly how my father did his experiments, but we’ve only used animal subjects.’ Joseph strode across the room and opened the door to the yard between the lab and the clinic, where they kept the crates of mice and chickens. His words cut through the s
mell of shit and bleach and dust, through the whimpers and squeaks of the animals.

  ‘We take their T-cells out, genetically modify them with CRISPR, and put them back in.’ The jargon tasted metallic in his mouth. ‘They don’t die, but I can see it in their skin, off-target symptoms from disabling the cells, black spots and patches from the mutagenesis. This is just what happens when we test it on animals. How could we use it on people?’

  Jacob had turned away. Joseph stepped back into the lab. He grabbed a pen, signed the loan contract, and pushed it towards Jacob. Jacob’s head was down, his hands on the money in his lap. He looked up.

  ‘We shouldn’t talk about your father.’

  ‘He’s gone anyway.’

  ‘It happened a long time ago.’

  ‘And your—?’

  Jacob snatched the contract closer and signed, too. He stood, gingerly hitching his jeans up.

  Over the two years since the funeral, Joseph had come to hate his father: a feeling which had clarity and could accommodate the admiration he’d once felt for him. Dr Lionel Banda had still left him this legacy, though: a trail of coded messages leading to a cure. Joseph had started with the truth – he and Musadabwe had tested only animals so far. But the rest was a lie. Joseph knew human trials would have to come eventually. He felt sorry for the Lusaka Patient and the other women like her. But to say sorry to her son would be tantamount to a confession, and Joseph would not face that until the study was done.

  * * *

  Musadabwe is shutting the lab down. He told me to stop the experiments. I guess he reached an impasse with Ling – ‘that Chinese trickster has robbed us!’ – and the results from our lab are just going to be absorbed in the experiments at Huazhong. Our tiny data set will be lost in the midst of the discovery! Musadabwe has licked his wounds already. He says that he’ll shift his focus back to treating Virus patients. That he can’t stem the uneven tide of research, but he won’t let these ‘women of the night’ succumb like dogs. He’ll keep the clinic open as long as he can.