Hari Kunzru

I’ve given them all nicknames. The Minister, the woman from the Foundation, the sleek new rep from the pharmaceutical company. Stupid nicknames that come of their own accord, spawned out of the marshy recesses of my brain, the indefinable area I associate with swelling and bad dreams.

The minister has always been Futureshock, ever since our first long meeting several years ago. Walking into the room with his entourage he did all he could to appear imposing, institutional, but mainly he looked astonished, his bug eyes and slightly slack mouth giving him the expression of a cartoon character who’s just spotted a truck bearing down on him. Unfortunate, I thought at first. Forty minutes into the session, as it became clear his understanding of the disease was (let’s put it diplomatically) broad-brush, I realised his goggle-face was the expression of an existential state. Shock and awe. The man was looking into tomorrow and knew he couldn’t do a thing about it: all the shit he was supposed to be dealing with was going to break over him like a tsunami over a package tourist.      

Is it me, that nicknaming part of my consciousness? Or a sequela, a residue of my last bout of fever? That, if you didn’t notice, is a deep question. Do my thoughts belong to me, doc, or the parasites in my blood? Last year was the third time I’ve been sick and by far the worst. To coin a phrase, I haven’t been myself since. I try to stay on track, but things tend to slide. So, me or my shot-away neurology? Show of hands please.

The minister runs a finger inside the collar of his neatly-tailored safari suit and explains that the big problem is the people don’t exist. The people don’t exist because their villages don’t exist, because the land on which their villages stand is still officially forest, and forest, by definition, can only contain officially-recognised forest villages, which these aren’t. The government wants more forest, not less. It has ecological targets to meet. So the people aren’t going to exist any time soon and if they don’t exist, they can’t be helped, because what government has an obligation to the non-existent?

Enola Gay, the Foundation representative, nods at this, as if it isn’t completely insane. Enola has that moneyed East Coast trick of suppressing her sweat glands, so that even though the aircon in this conference room isn’t working and the temperature is in the high thirties, she looks clean and bright and new in her Egyptian cottons and little pearl earrings. Maybe she’s coated in something. Is there a kind of sealant spray you can buy?

When I got sick last time I went blind. It’s supposed to be poetic, the dying of the light. To me it was just scary. The blindness was preceded by a strange dissociative strobing, as if I was way back behind myself, then in myself again for a while, then back, then in, on and on, each phase lasting -  I don’t know. I had no sense of time. I’d been thinking about conducting a séance, or dreaming I was actually doing so, though in my dream there was none of that old-fashioned spiritualist paraphernalia, no flickering candles or ouija boards. It was a kind of diving down. I somehow dived down and found myself in the land of the dead. When I came up again I was blind.

We have an uninvited guest on the biscuit plate. Fat little anopheles, squatting on the rim like a tiny spy, the enemy’s eyes and ears at our bi-monthly council of war. Because the rest of us, all of us round this formica-topped plywood table, are on the same side. That’s important to keep in your head at those moments when you feel like taking the invisible rail-gun out of your invisible sports bag full of weaponry and blasting the hell out of the whole lot of them while screaming in cathartic wordless anguish.

Being blind, it was as if part of death had come back with me. As if death was a smoked-glass lens through which (henceforth, evermore) I would be forced to view the world. And my sight didn’t just come back. As in: the next morning I woke up and I felt better and I could see again. It was a battle. It was metaphysical. I had to fight the forces of blindness and vanquish them.

The biscuits have been laid out in a fan array, those sickly sweet biscuits that are the only brand you can get here and taste like all the bad snack foods of the world concentrated into individual crumbly yellow-white rectangles. I’ve eaten two so far. I watch as the mosquito makes a brief flight and settles right in the middle of the formal arrangement. Lord of all I survey. Soon the world shall know my name. It shows pride in your work, that array. A tea-boy on the way up.

Her hair looks like someone ironed it. Enola with the jellyfish eyes, are you actually human? We had a personal conversation once, on her last visit. I was drunk (no surprise there) and confessional, and started talking about all the things I shouldn’t, about meaning and purpose and absurdity and how I worry about falling off the edge of the world because of the weeks that go by when I don’t talk to anyone about anything that isn’t work, and mostly I don’t talk to anyone at all. She adopted a wooden expression of concern she’d obviously learnt on a course and uttered a series of clichés so devastating in their banality, their utter lack of acknowledgement of my particular human existence, that I started to laugh and kept on laughing until she got up and said she had to be getting back to her suite because she had email to write. She actually used the phrase “getting back to my suite.” Oh yes, that vital high-status reception room. How I howled. I admit I’d hoped she was going to sleep with me, but that was in the early part of the evening, before I realised her idea of sex probably involved beaming something to you from her PDA.

Who is there to tell, anyway? Who could do anything?

The minister has got onto the subject of drugs, the cheap ones which don’t work any more and the expensive ones which do. Poor Futureshock. You only get so much money to play with and coming in under budget earns you your choice of: a) one-on-one tea with the president b) a new limo or c) a statue (three quarter bust or even full length) in a rural development area. So who says the cheap drugs don’t work? Officially they still do, because Futureshock hasn’t approved a study, and until he approves that study and it shows to his satisfaction that the cheap drugs don’t work, the official position will remain that they do, that all the millions of doses of under-budget but useless medicine he sends out to the rural areas are actually curing people.

You know, Enola, I’ve changed my mind. I think sex with you might be good, in a rubber-dolly kind of a way. You’re what? Thirty-five? Mayflower stock. Good cheekbones, expensive prep schools, MBA, health-club membership. You’re in personal control of twenty million dollars of media-baron guilt money. You’d go one way or the other. You might snap, let it all out, want to do a lot of nasty stuff you’d have to run away from on the treadmill the next morning. Or you might just go AWOL: lie back, assume the textbook positions. Spreadsheets, spread between the sheets. Enola enters strategic alliance then puts the incline on max.

Q. What does the Land of the Dead look like?

A. It’s dark but not black. It’s a differentiated field of grey and the dead are part of that grey, waves inflecting its flow. The dead are vibrations, undulations. When you pass through them, for a brief moment they inhabit you.

I ground my teeth. I fought the blindness, forcing it outwards, tunnelling through it, all the time experiencing a warping of self, a pulse and stretch that threw me out to the horizon of things, then sucked me back inside the cramped knot of my jaw until my consciousness achieved infinite density, became a pinpoint of high white pain. It came to me that this cosmic proprioceptive rhythm had a purpose and if only I surrendered to it I could do unprecedented things, flow through all the parasites in all the mosquitoes and suck them back into my head, draw them into myself until I’d cleansed every far-flung marsh and puddle of the world. I would heal everyone. Me. I could already feel p. falciparum building up in drifts in the deep recesses of my brain, clogging my arteries with infected red cells. My swollen head expanded, vast with fever.  

Back in meeting-space we’re onto IP law, courtesy of Face-off. The thing about Face-off is he’s doing us a favour by even being here and we shouldn’t upset him. He’s currently inhabiting the body of a lightly-bronzed German in his early fifties, a conspicuously well-dressed cycling or skiing type who was introduced to me as Kirch or Koch or Kirchner, something like that. The name of the host body is unimportant, because we all know it’s Face-off and he always needs to be smiled at and coaxed and propitiated like a primitive idol, even by Enola Gay if she wants more bang for her Foundation buck. This Koch, with his penny loafers and emphatic consonants, is gently threatening Futureshock concerning a local company who are making a generic version of one of his products. Not for malaria. God forbid! Malaria isn’t what you’d call a revenue-rich ailment. This factory is making an exact copy of his fancy heart disease medicine and selling it for about a tenth of the branded price. Unlike low-disposable-income developing-world villagers, Westerners have lifestyle preferences and one of their key lifestyle preferences is to be alive instead of dead. They pay good money for it, unless of course they don’t have to. Koch/Face-off is legally required to maximise shareholder value. Legally required, you understand. That means aggressively protecting the company’s intellectual property: it would be negligent to do anything else. Koch performs his routine well, delivers the well-worn lines with considerable aplomb. We’re asked to imagine the personal consequences for him if he gave way to his highly-developed sentiments, the lawsuits, the damages he would face if he allowed his natural thirst for justice and keen empathy for the suffering of others to colour his professional judgement. A slippery slope. A morality tale: Losing the summer house; tearfully kissing little Gudrun or Ulrike goodbye. The cops making a point of keeping the cuffs on for the cameras on the courthouse steps.   

If Futureshock opens his mouth any wider, he’ll start to dribble. What should we do if baby turns blue?

I remember drinking once with a guy called Prosper, a saturnine Ivoirean lab-tech from one of our projects in the south. We were in their team house, which wasn’t bad as team houses go. Intermittent electricity supply, functioning shower. For four days we’d been unable to go out to the clinic because of a rebel attack on the main road out of town. I was beginning to go a little crazy. I’d already had a meaningless row with the team leader because I lit a cigarette in the communal area. I was a visitor, I was under her authority. That’s how it works, but they lose perspective out there, get that Alamo mentality and start to believe the metaphorical hordes will pour over the wall if there’s the slightest infraction of discipline. I mean, it’s not like I needed a lecture on public health. I suppose I shouldn’t have said what I said, but fuck it. It was only a cigarette. So there was a huis clos atmosphere over dinner and everyone went to bed early, except Prosper, who sat in a chair on the verandah listening to trebly hymns on his personal stereo. I was bored and angry and I’d already mined the others for conversation. My days of forced inactivity were making me feel like a Beirut hostage: I might as well have been chained to a radiator.

My secret weapon was the bottle of locally-distilled rum I’d brought from the capital. It tasted like industrial cleaner, gave you the shits along with your hangover and had the sole virtue of flensing the insides in such a way as to lend the drinker a temporary (and spurious) sense of being scoured, emptied of whatever physical or psychic filth had driven you to open it in the first place. I offered Prosper a glass, waving it in his field of vision until he took off the headphones. To my surprise he accepted.

We drank and talked, or rather we drank and Prosper grudgingly answered my questions about his family, his home, when he first volunteered. His responses weren’t particularly illuminating. Did he like being a lab technician? Very much. Would he volunteer for another tour? Of course. Why of course? Because he was needed. Once or twice (out of politeness, as far as I could tell) he asked similar questions of me. But he drank, which was the main thing. He drank and listened as I babbled about whatever came into my head, constructing both sides of the conversation I so badly craved. After a while the rum began to work and I no longer cared whether he was interested. I told him about growing up in Leeds, going to medical school in the early eighties. How I pierced my ear, bleached my hair white. Not many post-punk medical students, Prosper. Did he know about punk and new wave? He nodded without conviction and held out his glass. I refilled it, went on. Darkness was cool. Black clothes. I spent all my money on records, used the names of the bands as a kind of shorthand for a mental state, a sort of epic depression. The point wasn’t to get happy, merely to raise up your unhappiness, make it bearable.

I was wittering on, trying to describe this ridiculous subculture to a man who’d grown up in a place defined by the mission school, the army checkpoint and the fields. Had Prosper ever bought a record? Tapes, he said. Cassette tapes. His eyes were glassy. I told him how there was even a band. An all-girl German band, very underground. Prosper shook his head. Malaria. Why would anyone want to have such a name?

Enola is making an actuarial point to the minister, something about per-dollar mortality reduction. Well, well. I heard a rumour they were in partnership. Looks like it’s true. Enola is saying that for each dollar spent she wants to save as many lives or fractions of lives (her expression) as she can. Face-off is charitably offering a discount on his antimalarial drugs, and if the deal works out she’ll effectively save twice as many people. No brainer, right?

An arrangement. Complex, private, opaque and yet no doubt rigorously contractual. The Foundation lends its good name, and  -

The problem is, says Enola. Here it comes. If the Foundation is to attract a private partner in its efforts to save the lives of the Minister’s citizens, it’s important such a partner feels comfortable about the stability of the local regulatory environment.

What was their song? The Malaria song?

Kaltes klares wasser

Uber meine Körper

I was trying to remember the song for Prosper. Cold clear water. But I couldn’t make the phrase come into my mind. I don’t know why I began to cry. Because my body was fucked; because I had no more resources to call on. Prosper put an arm round my shoulders. What you need, he said, is Jesus in your life.

I’m so tired. A four-hour journey over lunar dirt roads, a plane and three more hours of hydrocarbon-laced gridlock to get here. Across the table Futureshock looks grim. He’s not really listening, still stuck on the fact that even with a discount, Face-off’s new drugs are still more expensive than the old ones. If he budges at all, he’ll fail to meet his target. He won’t get the three piece suite or the rotisserie set and the opposition will accuse him of not caring about the health of the poor, which he doesn’t particularly, though that’s not the point.

They’re gradually revealing the shape of the proposition. Want a free malaria program? Shut down the generics factory. I’d say the chances of Futureshock buying it are slim. The factory’s probably owned by his cousin, whereas the people out in the south are refugees, only visible at all in an administrative sense because irritating foreigners keep harping on about them. The minister has better things to do with his time – discrediting the opposition in the press, renumbering his offshore accounts. Far better to shelve this. Better for me too. My head is spinning. The prophet Ezekiel’s vision: wheels within wheels. Was that some kind of desert fever? Could it have been treated? I no longer have my ethical bearings. I don’t feel well. Just let me go home to bed; I don’t know left from right any more, let alone right from wrong. That must be a song lyric. But what song?

A fever like I had doesn’t pass by without leaving marks. I was incredibly gaunt, wore dark glasses indoors. I’d turned into The Man Who Fell To Earth. There were months of headaches, holding onto the banisters as I climbed the stairs. It was the longest time I’d been back in England in twelve years. Children had mobile phones. The radio was dominated by a ruthless repetitive thumping. When I looked into the mirror I saw an old man with sagging pouches under his eyes and a yellow cast to his skin. As soon as I got stronger I flew back out here. I’m based in the capital. A co-ordinating role: I’m not up to spending months at a time in the field. And my old face has never returned. The parasites scored deep lines across my forehead, turned down the corners of my mouth.

So Enola, I don’t blame you for not wanting to go to bed with me. What am I offering? I’m a borderline alcoholic whose shattered body lets him down in inventive and humiliating ways and whose main emotional reference points are early-eighties records. My one meaningful attachment was a two year student affair with a woman whose only noticeable effect on my life was to accelerate my flight. For twenty years I’ve worked in far-flung corners of the earth where my total inability to commit to another human being can be disguised as a generalised passion for humanity. The poor bastards huddle in line and I love them, from a distance.

The mosquito has vanished from the biscuit plate. In a moment, someone round the table will reach up a hand, slap an exposed arm, the nape of their neck. Who will it be? I’m supposed to speak next, to outline our position, make a case. What will come out of my mouth? I could have done with a day to sleep before this meeting. Or a month. I think I could actually manage it, if I had a catheter. And perhaps some kind of drip. A month of unconsciousness. Cold water over my arms, my face. What will I say? Love me Enola. Evolution is ahead of us anyway. There’s no time. The room has gone silent. They’re waiting for me to speak.

[This story appears in Ox-Tales, an anthology published to raise money for Oxfam. Buy it, or just listen to me talk about it with Giles Foden and Mariella Frostrup on Radio 4]