What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 22



January 2, 2008, Kibera—Ita

“CHEGE!” ITA’S SCREAM trips over Kioni as he tumbles into the street. “Chege, no!”

Ita is running Chege’s path, replacing Chege’s tracks with his own. Under the eyes of the stunned policemen, he stutters to a stop.

Chege’s body lies facedown, his T-shirt riddled with too many holes to count. Ita’s nostrils burn with the sulfur smell of gunfire, blended with the sweet, rusted smell of blood. The gun smoke drifts to join that of the rioters’ fires, still blanketing the sky above.

Ita can do nothing. No doctor in the world would try. He drops to the ground, rocks and shrapnel piercing his knees, his blood mixing with Chege’s in the dirt, his tears following soon after.

Ita doesn’t know the physiology of how a mind snaps. But he can feel it. He can feel his mind stretch to the limits of sanity, then snap like a rubber band. The sobs that gush onto Chege’s body, they don’t belong to Ita, they are not his to control. As he turns Chege over, he hears no sound, no groaning, no escaping breath—Chege has left this body behind. Ita peels the dreadlocks from his friend’s face, but he doesn’t move his hand away quickly enough to escape the blood that spills from Chege’s mouth onto his fingers. Ita doesn’t flinch—he lets his hand glisten in the night, moves it to cup the side of Chege’s face, something he could have never done in life.

So calm. Chege’s scarred face is slack, unrecognizable, peace smoothed across it as Ita has never seen, not even when they were boys, not even when Chege slept. Ita remembers in vivid succession the thousands of nights he took his turn at watch, over Chege frowning in his sleep.

“Sleep,” Ita whispers.

In their world without mirrors, Ita knows Chege’s face better than his own. Every scar, he knows the story. They are linked. He will never escape Chege. Something Ita has always known, and which is no less true now. In life or death, their fate was woven together long ago.

In the last few moments the world gives Ita to say goodbye, he sees their relationship clearly for the first time. Grief provides the clarity like water flattening into a reflective surface.

While Ita’s face has stayed clear and smooth, Chege’s is covered in scars. He took every one for himself. For every piece of knowledge Ita prides himself on, Chege traded a piece of his soul. For every indignity Ita was spared, Chege swallowed it whole.

Ita didn’t ask for it, but he took it. Sometime, a long time ago, Chege made him believe that he was better, special. Chege decided to sacrifice, to give up the things he thought Ita could do better—school, legitimate business, charity. Love. The sacrifices created Chege’s identity. What did he see in himself? Ita wonders. What demons found him in the night? What did the little monsters whisper in his ear?

Holding Chege’s head in his hands, Ita knows that whatever his friend became, Ita played his part. His role, even if it was given to him freely. Every day that he accepted Chege’s vision of what he could be, Ita let him be his painting and himself be Dorian Gray.

Chege was a murderer, a thief, a rapist. All the things that Ita could have become, but didn’t.

“Ita.” Kioni’s voice echoes in the night.

He looks up. She peeks through a crack in the door, a crack too small for scared awoken children to see through. Her eyes look to her left. Ita follows them and finds the soldiers whirring into motion like puppets whose strings have been cut.

His moment to say goodbye is over.

The soldiers stand, converge all at once. Ita can sense the agitation in the scramble of their boots. They came for a manhunt, got tricked into this mess. Still, Ita knows the danger he’s in if plays their fleeting sympathy wrong.

“Take him,” he says. That is what they want, to be rid of the evidence. They want Ita to acquit them for their zeal, for their complicity in the sacrifice. He gives them what they want.

With his head lowered, he stands, hands out, palms down, away from his pockets. He backs away, keeping his eyes averted.

When he reaches the door to the orphanage, Ita slips inside and shuts the door. He doesn’t look back.

Instead, he finds the children assembled, a line up of baby owls. Walter waddles to the front. When he sees the blood on Ita’s hands and clothes, his lip trembles and his mouth opens to cry. Ita yearns to pick him up, but Chege’s blood is still wet between his fingers.

Kioni scoops up Walter instead, fends off his wailing by bouncing him on her hip.

“Go,” Ita says to the boys. He feels the sting when their eyes flinch, wounded. “It’s okay. You’re okay. But please, go.” He sighs when they hold the line, stunned. “Michael.”

Michael doesn’t budge until Ita looks straight into his eyes. Then, with a clench of his jaw, the boy resumes his role. He herds the children back to their bedroom.

Ita slinks past Kioni into his room. He strips off his shirt, pours water over his hands, wipes them on a rag. Then he sits hunched on his bed, not knowing what to do next.

The med student in him knows he’s in shock by his numb hands, his rapid heartbeat, his shallow breath. His blood pressure is sinking alongside his heart. But he is helpless to do anything about it. For the first time, Ita glimpses the minds of the ghost men who wander the alleys of Kibera, shells of fathers and husbands whose whispered grievances are like trash in the wind. Their wives and children, their youth and hope—all having slipped through their fingers.

Ita thinks he understands. He sees how loss can flood a mind, leave room for nothing else to matter.

When Kioni opens his door, he can’t be bothered to look at her. His eyes are ripe with tears that cannot fall, tears he doesn’t care to wipe away.

“Ita—” she says, but stops. Maybe she sees how words have lost their meaning, their purpose flittered away like everything else. But she’s moving anyway, sweeping into the room like a storm cloud, misting down onto the mattress next to him. He is glad she doesn’t touch him.

After a long drift of silence, out of the corner of his eye, he sees her open her arms. At first, he does nothing and Kioni leaves them be, a stone angel in a cemetery.

But then Ita feels something inside stirring, pushing him, nudging at what’s left of his soul, until he lets himself fall into her lap.

Images of Chege saturate the air around them. Not just of tonight, of shots ringing out, of blood pooling in the dirt. No, not just that. Images of nights piled up through the years, from long, long ago—they dance around them in the room, cresting and falling on their twin strangled breaths, their crippled heartbeats.

Ita feels the roughness of Kioni’s dress, feels the warmth and softness beneath, and he gets caught, careening from one memory into the next.

When Ita touches his cheek, the wetness of his tears slips between his fingers like blood. He feels sick inside, the acid rising up in his throat. He lifts himself away, away from her warm skin and the terrible visions it brings.

Her hand finds its way to his cheek, a mirror gesture of how he cradled Chege’s face. She looks at him, mourning, as he did over Chege’s body.

They cry together for their friend. No matter what he was, he was theirs. Their only family. And they cry for themselves, for the parts of them that died in the dirt with Chege.

* * *

Light is seeping into the room when Ita looks over and finds Jomo standing in the doorway, watching them. Their eyes meet and hold.

“Come in,” Ita says, his voice thick. “It’s okay. Come here.”

Jomo doesn’t budge.

When Kioni raises her head, the three of them get stuck in a slice of time, like a fuzzy photograph. Ita imagines himself trapped inside a camera, and he wonders if he is destined to lose his mind in the coming hours and days.

Then Ita sees it—Jomo’s big toe inching forward in the dirt. He approaches like a frightened cub, eyes averted. His little fist is closed tight over something.

Ita and Kioni watch, entranced. Jomo reaches the edge of the mattress, drops the thing onto the blanket, then jumps back and runs out of the room. Ita gets up to go after him, until a sparkle pulls his eye to the bed.

The necklace.

His mother’s necklace. The necklace he clasped around Leda’s ivory throat on Christmas. Ita snatches it up, closes it in his hand and hangs his head, eyes squeezed shut.

He sees Leda, tossing back her dark hair to expose the pale skin of her neck that seemed so naked to Ita, indecent almost, both in sensuality and vulnerability. He sees the light glinting off the necklace, the promise that would bring her back to him.

Ita opens his hand, stares at the gold chain with the bird forever imprisoned upon it.

How did Jomo get it? Did she leave it behind before she left? Ita can almost feel his heart ripping through his chest. The light catches the end of the chain dangling from his palm—it’s broken. Snapped. Ita fingers the edge, his mind reeling, so much so that he barely notices that Kioni has seen what he holds. Her hand flies to her throat.

“I gave it to Leda,” he says.

Kioni’s face falls, her pupils swelling to spill their ink. “You gave it to her? To a stranger?” She scrambles off the bed. “After everything. After all those years. You gave it to a mzungu?”

Ita doesn’t have a chance to respond before Kioni flees the room, vanishing into the night. He doesn’t have the chance to tell her, Leda wasn’t just anyone. She was a chance at light, beauty, at peace. She was a chance for redemption. Redemption for what I did to you.