ZONING
Outside on Tom Mboya Street, Kandle realised that he was truly in the Zone. The Zone was the calm, breathless place in which he found himself after drinking for a minimum of three days straight. He had slept for less than fifteen hours in strategic naps, had eaten just enough to avoid going crazy, and had drunk enough water to make a cow go belly-up. The two-hour baths of Hell’s Gate hot-spring heat had also helped.
Kandle had discovered the Zone when he was seventeen. He had swapped vices by taking up alcohol after the pleasures of casual sex had waned. In a city-village rumour-circuit full of outlandish tales of ministers’ sons who drove Benzes with trunks full of cash; of a character called Jimmy X who was unbeaten in about 500 bar fights going back to the late 80s; in a place where sixty-year-old tycoons bedded teenagers and kept their panties as souvenirs; in a town where the daughter of one of Kenya’s richest businessmen held parties that were so exclusive that Janet Jackson had flown in for her birthday – Kandle, self-styled master of the art of seventy-two-hour drinking, had achieved a footnote.
In many of the younger watering holes in Nairobi’s CBD, he was now an icon. Respected in Buru Buru, in Westlands, in Kile, in Loresho and Ridgeways, one of the last men standing in alcohol-related accidents and suicides. He had different names in different postal codes. In Zanze he was the Small-Package Millionaire. His crew was credited with bringing back life to the City Centre. In Buru he was simply Kan. In the Hurlingham area he was known as The Candle. In a few years, the generation of his kid brother Giant Rat would usurp his legendary status, but now it was his time.
The threat of rain had turned Tom Mboya Street into a bedlam of blaring car horns, screaming hawkers, screeching matatus and shouting policemen. People argued over parking spaces and haggled over underwear. Thunder rumbled and drowned it all. A wet wind blew, announcing a surreptitious seven-minute drenching, but everybody ran as if a heavy downpour threatened. Even that was enough to create a five-hour traffic jam into the night. The calm and the wise walked into the bars, knowing it would take hours to get home anyway.
Zanze patrons walked into Kenya Cinema Plaza and a group of girls jeered at Kandle because he was going in the opposite direction, out into the weather. Few could tell he had been drinking since noon. Kandle was not only a master at achieving the Zone, he was excellent at hiding it. The copious amount of alcohol in his blood had turned his light-brown skin brighter, yellow and numb and characterless like a three-month-old baby’s. The half-bottle of Insto eye drops he had used in the bathroom had started to take effect. He had learned over time that the sun was an absolute no-no when it came to achieving a smooth transition to the Zone. Thankfully, there was very little sunshine left outside, and he felt great.
‘Step into the p.m. Live the art of seventy-two hours. I’m easy like Sunday morning,’ he muttered towards the friendly insults. A philosopher of the Kenyan calendar, Kandle associated all months of the year with different colours and hues in his head. August he saw as bright yellow, a time when the year had turned a corner; responsibilities would be left behind or pushed to the next January, a white month. March was purple-blue. December was red. The yellow haze of August would be better if he were to be fired from his job at Eagle Bank that evening.
Kandle had tried to convert many of his friends to the pleasures of the Zone, with disastrous results. Kevo, his best friend, had once made a deep cut into his palm on the dawn of a green Easter morning in Naivasha after they had been drinking for almost a week. He had been trying to impress the crew and nearly bled to death. They had had to cut their holiday short and drive to Nairobi when his hand had swollen up with an infection days later. Kandle’s cousin Alan had died two years ago trying to do the fifty-kilometre Thika-to-Nairobi highway in fifteen minutes. Susan, once the late Alan’s girlfriend, then Kandle’s, and now having something with Kevo, stopped trying to get into the Zone when she realised she couldn’t resist stripping in public after the seventy-two-hour treatment. After almost being raped at a house party she had gone into a suicidal depression for weeks and emerged with razor cuts all over her body and twenty kilograms off her once-attractive frame.
Every month she did her Big Cry for Alan, then invariably slept with Kandle till he tired of her and she moved on to Kevo. The Zone was clearly not for those who lacked restraint.
Stripping in public, cutting one’s palm, thinking you were Knight Rider – these were, to Kandle, examples of letting the Bad Zone overwhelm you. One had to keep the alcohol levels intact to stay in the Good Zone, where one was allowed all the wishful thinking in one’s miserable life. The Bad Zone was the place of all fears, worries, hatreds and anxieties.
Starting off towards Harambee Avenue, Kandle wobbled suddenly, halting the crazy laughter in his chest. Looking around, he felt the standard paranoia of the Zone start to come on. Walking in downtown Nairobi at rush hour was an art even when sober. Drunk, it was like playing rugby in a moving bus on a murram country road. Kandle forced himself back into the Good Zone by going back to Lenana School in his mind. Best of all, he went back to rugby-memory land, to the Mother of All Rugby Fields, Stirlings, the field where he had played with an abandoned joy. He had been the fastest player on the pitch, a hundred metres in twelve seconds easy, ducking and weaving, avoiding the clueless masses, the thumbless hoi polloi, and going for the girl watching from the sidelines. In his mind’s eye the girl was always the same: the Limara advert girl. Slender. Dark because he was light, slightly taller than him. The field was next to the school’s dairy farm, so there were dung-beetle helicopters in the air to avoid and mines of cow-dung to evade.
He could almost smell the Limara girl and glory a few steps away when a Friesian cow appeared in the try box. It chewed cud with its eye firmly on him, unblinking, and as Kandle tried to get back into the Good Zone he saw the whole world reflected in that large eye. The girl faded away. Kandle put the ball down, walked over to the cow, patted her, and with his touch noticed that she was not Friesian but a white cow with some black spots, rather than the other way around. The black spot that came over her back was a map of Kenya. She was a goddamn Zebu. All this time she never stopped chewing. With the ball in the try box he took his five points.
Coming back to, he realised he was at the end of Tom Mboya Street. A fat woman came at him from the corner of Harambee Avenue, and just when she imagined that their shoulders would crash into each other Kandle twitched and the woman found empty space. Kandle grimaced as she smiled at him fleetingly, at his suit. At the corner, his heightened sense of smell (from the alcohol) detected a small, disgusting whiff of sweat, of day-old used tea bags. He stopped, carefully inched up against the wall, calculated where the nearest supermarket was, cupped his palm in front of his mouth, and breathed lightly. He was grateful to smell the toothpaste he had swallowed in the Zanze toilets. The whiff of sweat was not his. That was when Kevo came up to him.
‘Fucking African,’ Kandle said. ‘What time