By the following day everyone knew a miracle had occurred in the mwadhini’s house. Word spread, like a drifting cloud of coral eggs, spawning, frenzied; it left the island and lived for a while in the daily gossip of coastal Kenyans. The Daily Nation ran a backpage story, and KBC ran a minute-long radio spot featuring sound bites from Dr. Kabiru: “I did not know one hundred percent, that it would work, no. But, having extensively researched, I was confident…”
Within days the shell collector’s kibanda became a kind of pilgrim’s destination. At almost any hour, he heard the buzz of motorized dhows, or the oar-knocking of rowboats, as visitors came over the reef into the lagoon. Everyone, it seemed, had a sickness that required remedy. Lepers came, and children with ear infections, and it was not unusual for the shell collector to blunder into someone as he made his way from the kitchen to the bathroom. His conches were carted off, and his neat mound of scrubbed limpets. His entire collection of Flinder’s vase shells disappeared.
Tumaini, thirteen years old and long settled into her routine with her master, did not fare well. Never aggressive, now she became terrified of nearly everything: termites, fire ants, stone crabs. She barked her voice out at the moon’s rising. She spent nearly all her hours under the shell collector’s cot, wincing at the smells of strangers’ sicknesses, and didn’t perk up even when she heard her food dish come down upon the kitchen tile.
There were worse problems. People were following the shell collector out into the lagoon, stumbling onto the rocks or the low benches of living coral. A choleric woman brushed up against fire coral and fainted from the pain. Others, thinking she had swooned in rapture, threw themselves on the coral and came away badly welted, weeping. Even at night, when he tried stealing down the path with Tumaini, pilgrims rose from the sand and followed him—unseen feet splashing nearby, unseen hands sifting quietly through his collecting bucket.
It was only a matter of time, the shell collector knew, before something terrible would happen. He had nightmares about finding a corpse bobbing in the wavebreak, bloated with venom. Sometimes it seemed to him that the whole sea had become a tub of poison harboring throngs of villains. Sand eels, stinging corals, sea snakes, crabs, men-of-war, barracuda, mantas, sharks, urchins—who knew what septic tooth would next find skin?
He stopped shelling and found other things to do. He was supposed to send shells back to the university—he had permits to send a boxful every two weeks—but he filled the boxes with old specimens, ceriths or cephalopods he had lying in cupboards or wrapped in newspaper.
And there were always visitors. He made them pots of chai, tried politely to explain that he had no cone shells, that they would be seriously injured or killed, if they were bitten. A BBC reporter came, and a wonderful-smelling woman from the International Tribune; he begged them to write about the dangers of cones. But they were more interested in miracles than snails; they asked if he had tried pressing cone shells to his eyes and sounded disappointed to hear he had not.
After some months without miracles the number of visits fell off, and Tumaini slunk out from under the cot, but people continued to taxi in, curious tourists or choleric elders without the shillings for a doctor. Still the shell collector did not shell for fear he would be followed. Then, in the mail that came in by boat twice a month, a letter from Josh arrived.
Josh was the shell collector’s son, a camp coordinator in Kalamazoo. Like his mother (who had kept the shell collector’s freezer stocked with frozen meals for thirty years, despite being divorced from him for twenty-six), Josh was a goody-goody. At age ten he grew zucchini on his mother’s back lawn, then distributed them, squash by squash, to soup kitchens in St. Petersburg. He picked up litter wherever he walked, brought his own bags to the supermarket, and airmailed a letter to Lamu every month, letters that filled half a page of exclamation-laden Braille without employing a single substantial sentence: Hi Pop! Things are just fabulous in Michigan! I bet it’s sunny in Kenya! Have a wonderful Labor Day! Love you tons!
This month’s letter, however, was different.
“Dear Pop!” it read,
…I’ve joined the Peace Corps! I’ll be working in Uganda for three years! And guess what else? I’m coming to stay with you first! I’ve read about the miracles you’ve been working—it’s news even here. You got blurbed in The Humanitarian! I’m so proud! See you soon!
Six mornings later Josh splashed in on a water taxi. Immediately he wanted to know why more wasn’t being done for the sick people clumped in the shade behind the kibanda. “Sweet Jesus!” he exclaimed, slathering suntan lotion over his arms. “These people are suffering! These poor orphans!” He crouched over three Kikuyu boys. “Their faces are covered with tiny flies!”
How strange it was to have his son under his roof, to hear him unzip his huge duffel bags, to come across his Schick razor on the sink. Hearing him chide (“You feed your dog prawns?”), chug papaya juice, scrub pans, wipe down counters—who was this person in his home? Where had he come from?
The shell collector had always suspected that he did not know his son one whit. Josh had been raised by his mother; as a boy he preferred the baseball diamond to the beach, cooking to conchology. And now he was thirty. He seemed so energetic, so good…so stupid. He was like a golden retriever, fetching things, sloppy-tongued, panting, falling over himself to please. He used two days of fresh water giving the Kikuyu boys showers. He spent seventy shillings on a sisal basket that should have cost him seven. He insisted on sending visitors off with care packages, plantains or House of Mangi tea biscuits, wrapped in paper and tied off with yarn.
“You’re doing fine, Pop,” he announced, one evening at the table. He had been there a week. Every night he invited strangers, diseased people, to the dinner table. Tonight it was a paraplegic girl and her mother. Josh spooned chunks of curried potato onto their plates. “You can afford it.” The shell collector said nothing. What could he say? Josh shared his blood; this thirty-year-old dogooder had somehow grown out of him, out of the spirals of his own DNA.
Because he could only take so much of Josh, and because he could not shell for fear of being followed, he began to slip away with Tumaini to walk the shady groves, the sandy plains, the hot, leafless thickets of the island. It was strange moving away from the shore rather than toward it, climbing thin trails, moving inside the ceaseless cicada hum. His shirt was torn by thorns, his skin chewed by insects; his cane struck unidentifiable objects: Was that a fencepost? A tree? Soon these walks became shorter: he would hear rustles in the thickets, snakes or wild dogs, perhaps—who knew what awful things bustled in the thickets of that island?—and he’d wave his cane in the air and Tumaini would yelp and they would hurry home.
One day he came across a cone shell in his path, toiling through dust half a kilometer from the sea. Conus textile, a common enough danger on the reef, but to find it so far from water was impossible. How would a cone get all the way up here? And why? He picked the shell from the path and pitched it into the high grass. On subsequent walks he began coming across cones more frequently: his outstretched hand would come across the trunk of an acacia and on it would be a wandering cone; he’d pick up a hermit crab wandering in the mango grove and find a freeloading cone on its back. Sometimes a stone worked itself into his sandal and he jumped and backpedaled, terrified, thinking it would sting him. He mistook a pine cone for Conus gloriamaris, a tree snail for Conus spectrum. He began to doubt his previous identifications: maybe the cone he had found in the path was not a cone at all, but a miter shell, or a rounded stone. Maybe it was an empty shell dropped by a villager. Maybe there was no strangely blooming population of cone shells; maybe he had imagined it all. It was terrible not to know.
Everything was changing: the reef, his home, poor frightened Tumaini. Outside the entire island had become sinister, viperous, paralyzing. Inside his son was giving away everything—the rice, the toilet paper, the Vitamin B capsules. Perhaps it would be safest to just sit, hands folded, in a chair, and move as little as possible.
Josh had been there three weeks before he brought it up.
“Before