TAO CHRONICLES

Episode Three (Finale): The Press That Never Was

The door rattled the third time and this time it gave.

It did not break. It simply, quietly, opened. The way a door opens when somebody on the other side has had a key the whole time.

Tony spun around.

There was nobody there.

Just the empty stairwell of the building. The same staircase he had walked up, smelling of dust and ambition and someone, somewhere, frying something. No politician’s men. No goons. No drama. Just an open door and a soft draught and the distant sound, from somewhere down on the street, of a hawker insisting that every person within earshot needed a belt.

Tony turned back to Wanjiku.

Wanjiku was not there.

The counter was still there. The glass cases were still there. The dirty 2019 calendar was still on the wall. But the steel door behind it was closed. Flush. Seamless. As if a door had never been there in the first place.

Eugene was gone.

The three guys on the stools were gone.

The fan on the wall had stopped turning.

“Wanjiku?”

His voice came out wrong. Thin. Like a voice recorded on a cheap phone.

“Eugene?”

Nothing.

He walked behind the counter. He lifted the calendar. The wall behind it was just wall. Smooth, painted, a small water stain in the bottom left corner shaped vaguely like the map of Uganda. He pressed it. He pressed it again. He pressed it with both hands like a man trying to push a matatu out of mud.

It was wall.

He turned around. The novel Wanjiku had been reading was still on the counter. He picked it up. Half of a Yellow Sun. He opened it.

Every page was blank.

Every. Single. Page.

Tony, twenty three years old, Second Class Lower in Sociology, fifteen ngweezys lighter, stood alone in a phone shop on the third floor of a building on River Road, holding a novel with no words in it, and felt something inside his head make a sound he had never heard before.

A sound like a small bone, very far away, agreeing to break.

The phone in his pocket buzzed.

He took it out with hands that were not entirely his.

It was not the Samsung S22 he had bought.

It was his old phone. The Tecno Spark. The one he had carried into the building.

The screen said: MAMA. Twelve missed calls.

He answered.

“Antony? Antony, where are you? Antony please. Where are you?”

His mother’s voice was not the voice from that morning. The shoulder grip voice. The wooden spoon voice. This voice was something else. This voice was a voice he had only heard once before, on a Tuesday morning two years ago, when she had hung up from a phone call and slid down the wall of the kitchen and stayed there for forty minutes without making a sound.

“Mum, niko River Road. Niko sawa. Nimenunua phone. Wacha nikuje na hiyo S22 ama...”

“Antony.”

“Mum?”

“Antony hakuna S22.”

He looked at his hand. The S22 was there. Black. Heavy. New. The IMEI sticker still on the back.

“Mum, niko nayo sahi.”

“Antony, listen to me. Listen. You are not in River Road. You are not in town. The doctor has been calling me all morning. Antony, you walked out of the ward at six. You were not supposed to leave. Antony, please, just tell me where you are, just describe what you can see, and stay there, do not move, I am coming.”

Tony looked around the shop.

The shop was not a shop anymore.

The glass cases were a green wall. The counter was a small metal bed. The dirty 2019 calendar was a piece of paper taped above the bed with somebody’s name written on it in marker.

The name was his.

Mwangi, Antony. DOB 14/03/02. Ward 4B.

The novel in his hand was not a novel. It was a hospital blanket folded into a square.

The fluorescent light above him buzzed exactly the way Wanjiku’s basement corridor had buzzed.

The door of the room opened.

A man in a white coat came in. Calm. Not surprised. The face of a man who had walked into this room every Tuesday for a long time.

“Antony,” he said. “Tumekutafuta tangu asubuhi. Kaa chini, brathe.”

His voice was kind in the way a surgeon’s voice is kind.

Tony stayed standing.

“Daktari, niambie. Niambie kitu moja tu. River Road. Luthuli. Iko?”

“Iko, Antony.”

“Eugene. Wanjiku wako?”

The doctor sat on the small metal bed. He folded his hands in his lap. He took a long breath the way a man takes a breath before saying a thing he has said before, to this same patient, in this same room, on a different Tuesday.

“Antony. We have talked about this. Wewe uko na bipolar. Severe. When you are in episode, you go to River Road. Always. The same building. The same staircase. Watu wa hiyo area wamekuzoea. Eugene anakuanga ni watchman wa duka chini. He brings you back. He has brought you back six times. Wanjiku ni nurse wetu hapa. Yeye anakuanga na wewe juu wewe humsikia. Father yako, Antony, alipotea miaka mbili. Hatujui ako wapi. Hiyo ni ukweli. Hiyo part ni kweli. Lakini hizo zingine, Antony, ni akilo yako. Sio dunia.”

Tony looked at the S22 in his hand.

It was not an S22.

It was a folded piece of paper. A photograph. Creased at the corners.

His father. Light blue shirt. Squinting against the sun. Holding a brown paper bag.

He turned it over. On the back, in his own handwriting, in blue biro, it said:

Baba alirudi. Tarehe 14. Saa nne usiku. Kitchen. Aliniambia print. Print yote. Hii sio ugonjwa. Hii ni kazi.

Tony stared at the writing.

He did not remember writing it.

The doctor was watching his face. Watching very, very carefully. The kind of watching that is not watching. The kind of watching that is waiting.

Outside the small barred window, somewhere across the compound, a printing press started.

A very, very large printing press.

The doctor did not flinch. The doctor did not turn his head. The doctor did not hear it.

Tony looked at the doctor.

The doctor smiled.

The doctor’s hands were rough at the knuckles. Old scars. Faint smudges of something dark under the nails that no amount of soap had ever fully removed.

“Kaa chini, Antony,” the doctor said. “Tuko na mengi ya kuongea.”

END OF TAO CHRONICLES.