Passenger

I never thought I could be nostalgic for immigration at Julius Nyerere Airport. Those endless, untidy snakes of exhausted humanity.  The scratched glass booths and the scufffed officers who walked in and out of them. Their faces unreadable, their movements unknowable, the queues they abruptly left behind abandoned to confusion. I had stood there for almost an hour, face to face with an empty desk, my dusky pink suitcase merrily spinning around the distant carousel, taunting me with imaginings of freedom.

Of course, the roads of Dar es Salaam are always testing. Never quite horrific enough to make me long for the sweaty line I had just escaped from me, but close enough to make me weigh the two experiences carefully. It should be clear at this point that I am not a good traveller. I know some of my colleagues actually enjoy the roulette wheel of Dar traffic. Will you sit, stationary as the grave, for hours on end, as streams of mopeds whisker past you to roll the dice at the next intersection. “Are there many fatalities?” I once leaned forward to ask my driver. I remember him taking a moment to spread a wide grin before replying. “Oh yes, many.”

I preferred feeling the crawl of continental drift to the alternative though. When the roads were quiet. This was the part my colleagues loved, seeing their taxi driver push their Corolla to the limits of its aged manufacturing, wheels bouncing through streets of dirt road and tarmac, road markings reduced to nonsense by cornering so sharp it could cut to the bone. I just kept my eyes shut, telling myself they must drive like this all the time, trying not to remember the time I asked about fatalities. Sometimes someone would notice my scrunched-up face and ask the driver to take it easy, but tonight I would have to fend for myself. For the first time, I was alone in this city.

The man who I would be at the mercy of was called Michael. He told me had been waiting for me to arrive for eight hours. It wasn’t the first time I had heard something like that after my flight had been delayed and I never knew whether to doubt it. To be honest, I wasn’t sure which made me less comfortable, that Michael knew how to guilt me for a bigger tip, or that the meagre fee my company paid him for driving me across the city was worth nine hours of his time. It was late enough for the roads to be quiet so I chose the back seat even though Michael offered me the front. I had read somewhere it was more likely to protect me in the event of a crash. There wasn’t anything else I could do other than hope Michael was a man of good character and gentle of foot. It only took three turns to reduce my hopes to half of that equation.

Dust from the dirt highway kicked up in streams past my window as the night was subjected to all the grunt Michael’s car could muster. My seat jolted when we hit tarmac, but this only allowed Michael to build up more speed and leave my stomach further behind. The plastic of the seatbelt clip pinched my skin as I dug my fingers around it. I hoped Michael would catch sight of my pained expression in his mirror and ease off the gas, but his attention was split entirely between the road ahead and his luminescent phone screen, and not in a ratio that made me feel any more comfortable.

“M-Michael,” I muttered weakly.

The neon signs of a nightclub flashed by.

“M-Michael, could you, would you mind-”

Another jolt as the tyres glanced against a raised curb.

“Please could we slow it down a bit?”

A high-pitched horn blared as Michael roared up behind a hapless tuktuk, followed by a ringing crack as our wing mirror was forced closed by the scaffolding of the tuktuk’s cover.

“Michael, slow down!”

I hadn’t meant to yell, but it finally got me a view of Michael’s eyes in the rear-view as he nonchalantly lowered his window to push the mirror back out.

“… please.” I added. “It’s just a bit fast for me.”

Michael shrugged and flicked his eyes back to the road as the world around me began to revert to a more acceptable pace. I thought I heard him mutter the word “sorry”, but it might just as easily have been a curse in Swahili.

“Could you also not use your phone while you’re driving.”

Michael didn’t look back at me or say anything this time, but he did deftly flick the lock button on his phone and refrained from revisiting it.

“Thank you,” I said as we drove past a hospital, and for the first time felt confident my journey would not end up there.

Michael may have been grumpy with, but I began to relax a little after that, even enjoying the views of the city through my window. I found the “abode of peace” rarely lived up to its name, but there was something undeniably special about the place. Even now, in the dead of night, I could feel the energy of it, a city teeming with life. It was easy to only see hardship through western eyes, but there was hope, and hustle here.

On my last visit my work had crossed my path with a girl called Gloria. Gloria woke up at four in the morning to get the bus to school, and that same bus would not bring her back home until almost midnight. She would do it again the next day, and would carry out even longer journeys on the weekends to secure her family food and water. It made me feel ashamed for ever complaining about my morning commute, but what struck me the most about Gloria was how she never once complained about her lot in life, on the contrary, she was simply thrilled she got to go to school at all.

Still, I could never quite see this part of the world as Gloria did. I had been spoiled by the West and could not escape my fear of the city’s realities, realities that became more apparent as the car slipped further from the city’s centre and into the more suburban business district. Row upon row of houses and offices were set back from the road behind high, thick walls and iron gates. I was reminded that my existence here was a curated one, lived from behind those walls, never venturing out without a destination or protection. The closest I got to reality was on the taxi rides to and from the airport. My colleagues would have mocked me, told me that the city was no less safe than London or New York. They might have been right, but I found it impossible to ignore how everyone I met here had such a different attitude towards life and death, and I felt a wave of depression that I could not be at all confident that Gloria was still making those long journeys to school. That one of the city’s realities had not already come for her.

It was a cheerless thought, but one soon snatched away from me when the car’s tyres suddenly screamed into the night. Michael was forcing the engine up to its maximum, and the quiet street we were on was turning into a blur.

“What’s going on?”

The car screeched into the next corner, the tail steering out wide before Michael plunged us into another street.

“Michael?”

I continued to try and get his attention, not bothering with any of my former hesitance, but it did no good. Michael’s hands were gripping the wheel as though clamped by iron, his foot seemingly welded to the floor. He did not look at me, did not speak to me. He began continually muttering in urgent Swahili, his eyes frequently darting to the rear and side mirrors.

I turned my neck to look behind the car as Michael once again threw the car into a sharp bend. My neck jarred painfully as my body was forced back into the seat, but I couldn’t see any other car behind us. Whatever Michael was doing appeared to be his own choice.

I kept crying out but it was as thought I was calling to him from another dimension. A horrible echoing bang came as we clipped the edge of a metal dumpster, forcing us to careen across the road directly towards a towering wall. Michael’s hands yanked on the wheel to straighten us, but we still lost his wing mirror with a startling crunch. A low hanging tree branch splintered the windshield as we reconnected with the road. Michael didn’t flinch and just kept the engine roaring.

I knew I had to act. Even me, in all my timidity, had fight or flight instincts. There was a pang of hesitance as I unbuckled my seatbelt, abandoning my only source of safety. Against the momentum of the car, I struggled forward and placed a hand on Michael’s upper arm.

“Michael, you need to stop.”

It was as much an effort to be gentle as it was to be firm, but the words sounded as I needed them to, calm and in control.

“Michael,” I repeated. “I need you to stop.”

The car hit a bump, two wheels briefly leaving the ground. I bit my tongue as we landed.

“Stop,” I said, my voice rising now. I could see the speedometer and it was pushing close to seventy. Ominous clunking sounded from somewhere beneath the car and I had a vision of a wheel bursting free and rolling down the road ahead of us. My grip on Michael’s arm tightened. “Stop… please… just stop… stop… stop!”

It was the wrong moment. He was speeding into another sudden corner. There was only a small chance we would have made it at the speed we were travelling, but the pressure I had exerted on his arm sealed it. The end came quite quickly after that. A corrugated iron gate came into view one second, then we hit it in the next. I just had time to throw myself into the recesses of the back seat before the impact threw me forward. I was sure I saw something in the fractions of seconds I spent travelling through the air, something out of place and extraordinary. A dark silhouette against the sky, a man perhaps, but flying… wings outstretched… an angel. Then I hit the back of the front seat and everything went dark.

I could only have been out for a matter of seconds. No-one was on the scene, no sirens blaring, the only ringing within my head. It was strangely quiet, just the hiss of a broken engine, the car finally at rest. I looked towards the driver’s seat. The steering column had merged with his chest. I looked for not longer than I had to. Dead on impact.

My shaking hand found the door handle and remarkably it wasn’t damaged. I stumbled away from the gruesome scene and out into the night, noticing my own blood running down my arm and a limp in my left leg. My vision was circled in an enticing blackness and my body begged me to let it shut me down, but had I noticed a tall man standing further down the street as I succumbed to my knees. I struggled not to give in. I was in no position to defend myself, but in my head I needed to make sure this man wanted to help before I could let the darkness take me. Surely he would help, surely he would call an ambulance. I stared absently at my blood dripping onto the road, then felt something hard and thin force my chin up.

Was my brain so addled from the adrenaline, or had the man travelled a hundred metres in a mere instant. And why had his finger hooked beneath my chin to force me to look up at him, it hardly seemed like the most caring of gestures. My head swam and my vision darkened. The man’s face was thin and pale. Bald, no, completely hairless, no eyebrows, nothing. I felt like I was going to be sick, but I clung on. There was something else missing from this man, something that should be there but wasn’t. I began to taste blood, then I placed it. His eyes, dull and grey, were completely devoid of all sympathy. I knew at once that he was the wrong person.

“It’s a shame,” the man said, his voice bland and without accent. “The driver was always expendable, but I had rather hoped to drink the passenger.”

My hearing was faraway and impaired, surely I had heard him wrong… but, wait, had he just said Michael had been expendable? Had he made us crash? Why did my head have to hurt so much?

“You have my apologies, and sympathies,” he continued. “I should have paid closer attention to you. I never would have swooped down had I known you were fair skinned. Do not get me wrong, you taste just fine of course, but your kind tend to attract more unwanted attention, more questions, and I normally pride myself on my discretion. I should really have let the driver go when I saw me… but it has been a while, and I quite enjoy a chase.”

I slumped to my side, slipping off the end of the man’s bony finger. This could not be happening, it could not be real. The man’s slow, deliberate words trailed around my head like a song played out of order. It was nonsense. I needed to get up, I needed to leave, but my body wouldn’t let me.

“Alas, it was all for nought, and there is nothing further to do towards that end. I do so apologise, again, but really the best option I have is to make you another of this city’s road accident statistics and find my meal elsewhere.”

The dread that my body’s cocktail of chemicals had been supressing suddenly landed inside me. It filled me from the soles of my feet to the very ends of my blood-matted hair. I looked up again at the man. It was all I could do. I watched his white face begin to flake and give way to something dark and scaly, his grey eyes glowing into an intense and ugly yellow, his irises contracting to vertical slits, black fangs descending past what used to be his lips. Vast, leathery wings spread out behind him, blocking the rest of the street from my limited view, and a great, clawed hand drew itself back into a fist, ready to strike.

My brain fully gave up in that moment, no longer even trying to make sense of the sight it was being presented with. And all I could think of as the creature’s fist hurtled towards my skull was what I would give to be back stood in line at immigration.