Demon Box

How like the Tanzania of recent years, he thought; everybody gets in on the race but the runner. Such inefficiency. Such bureaucracy. Poor topheavy Tanzania, swaying and teetering. Even the most avid supporters of President Nyerere’s socialistic progress were beginning to admit that the nation’s economic strife was caused by more than increased oil prices or the recent droughts and floods. Oil prices had increased for all nations; droughts and floods had always been. And if sweeping socialist reform had increased life expectancy by 20 percent in a decade, it had probably increased the social woes by 30 percent! More thefts and less to steal. More schedules set and less of them met.

This decline of care for time was what most troubled Magapius. His countrymen once were proud of their timing. If a bird was to be netted, the netman would be tossing the net as the bird flew by. It was an appointment to be kept, a pact between netman and bird. A courtesy. What was the joy in a longer life when that tribal respect for time was becoming as rare as the old stylized dream dances?

As much as the race itself, Magapius was looking forward to visiting the People’s Republic of revolutionary China. If the dream were to live, reaffirmation must be found there, in that mightiest stronghold of the experiment. Everybody knew there was no juice in Russia any more, no Kunda as the Bantu put it. No baraka, as the Arabs said. And the boatloads hysterical to escape Cuba and Haiti for the capitalistic coasts of Florida did not speak well of Castro’s collective. But China… ah, China… surviving Mao’s madness as well as Brezhnev’s belligerence. Great China. If China could not accomplish it, perhaps it could not be accomplished.

He heard a motor and stood to wave at the approaching headlights. It was not the bus. It was a loaded sisal truck that had encountered the bus miles back, stuck crossways in the middle of the tiny road, front wheels in one ditch, back wheels in the other. The bus had been turning around to return to pick up last week’s mail that the driver had again forgotten.

One of the sisal truck’s three drivers boosted Magapius’s luggage to the top of the load of fiber and invited him to join them for the ride on to the city. He couldn’t join them in the cab, however. There was no room. In the nation’s battle against rampant unemployment, there were now three drivers required in every vehicle of transport, whether they could drive or not.

Magapius thanked them and climbed the heap of fibers. How particularly Tanzanian—three men in a clean cab in filthy work aprons; one on top in the blowing white fluff in the only suit the family owned, black…

In the cramped kitchen of his uncle’s house, Yang was studying mathematics. He had less than a week before the trip to Beijing, and his instructors at school had decided he could best prepare for his absence by staying home and studying on his own. From the adjoining room came the whir of the motorcycle motor as his uncle drilled away at the day’s collection of cavities. It was a clever setup. Raised on its kickstand, the rear wheel turned freely against a simple wooden spool that in turn drove the gears that powered the drill cables. The drill speed could be adjusted by the bike’s throttle, and the whir of the little two-cycle engine helped blanket the occasional groans his patients made in spite of the bristle of anesthetic needles in their necks and arms.

Yang was seated near the window. If the sun had been out it would have fallen across his high-boned face and bare shoulders, but it was overcast. It had been overcast for weeks. Since before the floods.

His sister came in from the backyard carrying a pan of green leaves and dumped them in a large kettle of cold water, singing as she did. Yang recalled the stanza. It was from a skit his sister’s class had performed for National Day a year ago. The girls had learned the song from a play that was mailed out to all the primaries, a short musical dramatization emphasizing the value of early warning and treatment of stomach cancer, China’s number-one killer. His sister had stopped attending school after that year, speaking of plans to join the People’s Liberation Army. Now she washed cabbage leaves and stacked them beside her aunt’s wok—delicately, as though arranging expensive silks—while she sang:

Esophageal cancer must be thoroughly conquered.
The pernicious influence of the Gang of Four must be wiped out.
Prevention first, prevention always, prevention first!
Thus we prevent and treat cancer of the revolution.