At low tide, accompanied by an entourage of the mwadhini’s brothers, the shell collector waded with Tumaini out onto the reef and began to upturn rocks and probe into the sand beneath to try to extract a cone. Each time his fingers flurried into loose sand, or into a crab-guarded socket in the coral, a volt of fear would speed down his arm and jangle his fingers. Conus tessulatus, Conus obscurus, Conus geographus, who knew what he would find. The waiting proboscis, the poisoned barbs of an expectant switchblade. You spend your life avoiding these things; you end up seeking them out.
He whispered to Tumaini, “We need a small one, the smallest we can,” and she seemed to understand, wading with her ribs against his knee, or paddling when it became too deep, but these men leaned in all around him, splashing in their wet kanzus, watching with their dark, redolent attention.
By noon he had one, a tiny tessellated cone he hoped couldn’t paralyze a housecat, and he dropped it in a mug with some seawater.
They ferried him to Lamu, to the mwadhini’s home, a surfside jumba with marble floors. They led him to the back, up a vermicular staircase, past a tinkling fountain, to the girl’s room. He found her hand, her wrist still lashed to the bedpost, and held it. It was small and damp and he could feel the thin fan of her bones through her skin. He poured the mug out into her palm and folded her fingers, one by one, around the snail. It seemed to pulse there, in the delicate vaulting of her hand, like the small dark heart at the center of a songbird. He was able to imagine, in acute detail, the snail’s translucent proboscis as it slipped free of the siphonal canal, the quills of its teeth probing her skin, the venom spilling into her.
“What,” he asked into the silence, “is her name?”
Further amazement: the girl, whose name was Seema, recovered. Completely. For ten hours she was cold, catatonic. The shell collector spent the night standing in a window, listening to Lamu: donkeys clopping up the street, nightbirds squelching from somewhere in the acacia to his right, hammer strokes on metal, far off and the surf, washing into the pylons of the docks. He heard the morning prayer sung in the mosques. He began to wonder if he’d been forgotten, if hours ago the girl had passed gently into death and no one had thought to tell him. Perhaps a mob was silently gathering to drag him off and stone him and wouldn’t he have deserved every stone?
But then the cooks began whistling and clucking, and the mwadhini, who had squatted by his daughter nightlong, palms up in supplication, hurried past. “Chapatis,” he gushed. “She wants chapatis.” The mwadhini brought her them himself, cold chapatis slavered with mango jam.
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
