A spiral of golden flame burned linoleum. The flames flickered as they lashed at darkness, then shrank with an inverse quiver, extinguishing from the center of the spiral outwards, until there was nothing but a coiled pool of liquid. The liquid defied gravity ascending back up into a canister of gasoline as a faceless figure moved strangely in reverse. The ghoulish apparition worked his circular way around the darkness of a kitchen.
Ndusen's eyelids burst open.
Rattled, he turned to find himself safely in bed next to Kondwani. She was already awake, finely tuned to his nighttime movements.
He spoke to her in muted Chichewa. "There is something about that fire. I cannot stop thinking of it."
"And what is it that you think of?" Kondwani asked.
Ndusen sat up in bed. The nightmare was an ebbing tide. A wave of spiral patterns on Mioko's kitchen floor. Smoke hissing from immense heat.
"Instead of filling my time with fixing this building to make it livable, Mr. Axlerod has me checking every mailbox in the entrance-hall to swipe late payment notices from landlord-tenant court. I did not come to this country to thieve mail."
"But what choice do you have, Ndusen?"
Ndusen looked off into the living room at Stella and his sleeping children. There had to be a choice. He had made the choice to leave his mother, his brothers. Ndusen had come to America craving more, bigger, better. All he had ended up with was modern, faster, and a complete lack of control. All the same unfulfilled cravings. When he looked at his pompous employer he saw a man driven by his own greed. A man with seemingly no scruples whatsoever. Or if Mr. Axlerod did possess any kind of a conscience, he had somehow developed rather an intricate system for justifying the contemptible choices he made on other people's behalf. Ndusen had been out to Mr. Axlerod's Long Island mansion. He had seen the lavishness first hand. The garish entrance hallway framed below a wrap-around banister of fine wood. Giant chrome cookware built into an outdoor bar, nestling a jacuzzi. The neighboring manicured golf course. A trophy wife, and their trophy children. What would he himself do in order to possess such material treasures?
Ndusen knew full well as he pulled on his trousers that for a man like him, these luxuries simply would never be on offer.
Standing on his footstool, Ndusen replaced the hallway overhead on the sixth floor with a long-life bulb. He could not help but notice the sounds of fiery copulation permeating the hall.
A sheepish shut-in emerged from his apartment.
"Good morning, Mr. Ivan." Ndusen said.
Ivan Hershberg wore his standard uniform: a bike helmet and reflective cycling vest so filthy Ndusen wondered if even the brightest of vehicle headlight would catch any glare. Ivan clipped his helmet and closed his door. The copulation sounds were beginning to surge.
Ndusen couldn't help it. He had to know. "Is he always this..."
Ivan raised an overgrown eyebrow. "Disruptive?”
“Yes.” Ndusen smiled.
“With Dorian, all depends who's in there with him."
"I see."
"Don’t worry about him. Let me give you and your boss some free advice." Ivan moved in a little too close, with a soft conspiratorial tone. "You wanna upscale this place, suck up some more trust fund babies to this shitbox tenement, you oughta drag that guy Hacking--one flight down--to the nuthouse. Guy's a menace. You ain't gonna convince Desiree the Debutante to move in below a guy who's apartment smells like an abattoir."
"My interest is not to rid this building of any tenant." Ndusen said, "I simply do the job of repairing it."
Ivan strapped his vest shut. "Sure it is," he said as he continued down the hall.
Ndusen knew that inch-by-inch the divide had blurred to the point where many of the tenants mistook him, the super, for a cog in the wheel of the system at large. He was just as much a neighbor to them as a minion of their landlord, but every day he felt the increasing withdrawal of trust--never again to be restored.
Ndusen heaved industrial garbage bags out the back courtyard. He would have to have some kind of a talk with Mr. Axlerod about his aggressive tactics. If anyone could give this landlord some idea of the impact his eviction attempts were having, it was Ndusen. Yet each sentence he tried to formulate made him sound ever more a landless man trying in vein to steer a world governed by landlords.
Ndusen's nostrils were filled with the entirety of his powerlessness as he tossed the first trash bag high into the pile. Not even the buzzing flies cared for a garbage man's thoughts. He swung with the second bag but for some reason he hesitated before releasing.
He looked at the forsaken courtyard. How long had it served as a way station for rubbish? Had this long neglected space ever served any other purpose?
Finding himself inexplicably hauling wood and debris through the ground floor hallway, Ndusen tried to block out the weight of powerlessness that bore down on him.
Up the street, he shoved pile upon pile of rubble into the dumpsters. Time suspended into a stream of heavy lifting. Of aching arms, of filthy shoes and broken skin. The sun moved from east to west, and still the lowly laborer wrapped his fingers around discarded items, once new and clean and expensive. With each rusted piece of metallic debris, each broken appliance, discarded stroller, or dissolving refrigerator box, Ndusen summited the mountain of trash. The smell of his sweat brought him back to Mangochi, tilling the soil of his father's plot before the season's maize planting. Back when he found pleasure in work. Before the generous societies of the West brought his people hybrid seeds. The first year's maze yield had been beyond all expectation. The tribal chiefs had thrown celebrations, the Guli-wan-kulu had danced in their rags and frightful masks. Entire villages erupted with festivities.
Till the donations stopped.
That was when his parents and all of their neighbors found out that the fancy gifted maze embryos were designed to prevent unauthorized seed saving by anyone who farmed them. Their birthright of collecting and replanting saved seeds harvest upon harvest had been stripped. Ten thousand years was taken in one day; the self-serving gift of a million tiny sterile wonders. His family knew nothing of patent technologies, of genetic modification. All they knew was they no longer controlled the growth of their primary food source. He wondered if his parents would ever have planted something named 'Terminator Seeds,' into their land, their family heritage, if their benevolent patrons had printed the product's true name on the woven plastic sacks.
And then there was the bold and powerful America itself, where hardly one citizen in ten thousand knew how to grow a single potato. He had heard so on the morning shows Stella watched in her struggle to command the English language. And on this great island city, nobody even touched a vegetable before it was out of the ground. His children would be no different. He had thought that he was taking his family to a place free of war, disease, genocide. Yet among the many things they had lost in the exchange was soil. Growing life from dirt. He knew he would never pass on the ripening nourishment of his father's red earth at the base of the lake in Mangochi. His first memories where of that dirt passing through his infant fingers. If he could just reclaim for his children something of the essence.
As the hours passed Ndusen began to reach the fowled concrete at the base of the giant hill of rubbish. He could feel the soft tissue between the lumbar disks beginning to cry out, but he pressed on. The last of the festering rats scurried for new hunting grounds on the other side of the fence.
No one had asked him to do this. To excavate these decades of rubbish. But in this task, he did have a choice.
Finally, Ndusen pushed open the back doors for the last time. He surveyed his new domain.
The concrete courtyard lay empty.
CHAPTER 02
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 04
CHAPTER 05
CHAPTER 06
CHAPTER 07
CHAPTER 08
CHAPTER 09
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
UPDATE: LOOKING FORWARD - CHAPTER 13
BEHIND THE KEYBOARD
When I was 20 years old I leased a $10k camera package and traveled to Malawi to make a documentary on HIV/AIDS on spec. It was a risky choice and I wasn’t sure how I was going to pull it off. Luckily a few months into that I was introduced to Harvard fellow, Charles Mann, who hired me to work on a documentary he was producing in my spare time. Through that work, interviewing wealthy nation donors and Malawian farmers, I learned very early on about hybrid seeds and the strange con that was being perpetrated by massive agri corps on some of the world’s poorest farmers.
It felt good to help tell that story. And now, so many years later, those experiences still influence my work and worldview.
Here are some images I pulled of my PD-150 camera all those many years back.
It’s kind of crazy looking at these, just how much the technology of video quality has changed, but that massive overarching corporate greed persists. As we all know here, perhaps technology will aid in dealing with the greed issue.
Yours In The Chain,
Doug Karr
SPECIAL THANKS to my wife @zenmommas for years of support during the writing process, @ericvancewalton for his trailblazing, inspired collaboration and incredible guidance, @andrarchy for his mind blowing insight and friendship, @bakerchristopher for being an inspiration as a human artist and bro, @complexring for his brilliance and enthusiasm, Masie Cochran, Taylor Rankin and @elenamoore for their skillful help in editing the manuscript, and to @opheliafu for the fantastic illustrations she created exclusively for the novel's launch on Steemit and to Elena Megalos for her wonderful character illustrations. I’d also like to thank Eddie Boyce, Jamie Proctor, Katie Mustard, Alan Cumming, Danai Gurira, Stephan Nowecki, Ron Simons, Dave Scott, Alden Karr, Missy Chimovitz, my dad Andy Karr and late mother Wendy, and everyone else who helped lead me to this moment.
I am a Brooklyn based writer, film & commercial director, and crypto-enthusiast, my projects include @HardFork-series an upcoming narrative crypto-noir and my novel Dwelling will soon be premiering exclusively on Steemit, and you can check out more of my work at dougkarr.com, piefacepictures.com, and www.imdb.com/name/nm1512347
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