"What happened to you?" Moses exclaimed as Jiddy came into the house quite late one Friday night after his usual trip to the markets. Jiddy was covered with blood, and Moses jumped up from his desk to assist; but Jiddy smiled broadly on hearing Moses' question.
"I'm okay," he said. "I'm okay. We had another celebration. It was my turn."
"Your turn to do what?" asked Moses. "You're covered in blood!"
"Don't worry, Stump. It's not mine," Jiddy reassured him, as though that was all the explanation that the younger man would need.
"But whose is it?" Moses asked.
"You remember Dinah?" he asked. "The girl you introduced me to at the bullfight a couple years ago, when we were still working as bodabodas?"
Moses remembered the girl. She had suffered some kind of brain damage, but was quite beautiful nonetheless; and she had a gentle, sweet personality.
"We sacrificed her tonight," Jiddy said. "I was the executioner."
"You what?" Moses put his hands to his face and sat back down in horror.
"Where have you been, Stump?" Jiddy asked. "We've been doing it for months… in the theater… every Friday night. Dinah had something wrong with her anyway. She didn't even know it was going to be her."
"No, no!" Moses shook his head with his hands over his ears. He did not want to hear any more. "What is happening to us?" he asked, knowing that he would not get a satisfactory answer from his older friend.
"You wanna be careful talking like that," Jiddy said. "We do it for Dangchao. You should see the films they show of people doing it for him in Jerusalem. It kind of cleans out all of the evil in you if you just pour it all into the sacrifice. Everybody feels better afterwards."
Moses still wasn't listening.
"Jiddy, something is very very wrong about this. The whole village is going crazy."
Jiddy suddenly turned deadly serious. "Stump, you gotta watch that," he said.
"I mean it. People are dying for saying less than that. I'm your friend and I won't tell, but others would, straight as a spear."
The full impact of what Jiddy had said was sinking in. Moses had been so busy making money that he had not paid much attention to what had been happening over the past year. It was just one more illustration of his ability to focus. He had shut out talk of strange meetings at the superchurch, since he never attended anyway, and he had only been to a couple of the adult shows, preferring to patronise the other theater on those few occasions when he had time for entertainment. He had never been there on a Friday night, simply because he knew that it was more crowded then.
Jiddy could see that his friend had been shocked, and he tried to comfort him.
"It's happening everywhere, Stump," he said. "Think of it like war. We don't have wars now, so we can afford a few people... just for fun."
Moses shook his head again and stood up to walk outside. Fun Jiddy had called it! He had to get away from Jiddy's disgusting justification for such a perverted form of entertainment in a society which had lost all sense of reason and morality.
Out in the open air, Moses looked up at the stars and remembered that night so long ago now, when he and Rosy had looked at the stars. She had been only 12 years old then, and now she would be 18, if she was still alive.
"Do you believe in God?" she had asked. And from that she had moved to asking him if he ever talked to God... or if God had ever talked to him.
He looked up at the stars and clenched his one fist. Was it rage? Not really.
How could he be angry with a God whom he had never known? But he was struggling with inner turmoil. When he lost his arm, he never blamed anyone, and so why should he blame anyone for what was happening now? But still , something was not right in the village, and maybe in the whole world. Something inside of him cried out for an explanation. Was Dangchao really evil, like Amy and Josephat had said? If Dangchao was behind what was happening in the village, how could he be anything else but evil? And the bigger question was, what could he, a struggling small -time businessman living in the Kenyan interior, do about it?
Moses had always concentrated on just looking out for himself, and not bothering with other people's problems. But now he could not bring himself to think about Dinah without feeling revulsion... for Jiddy... for the people in the village... and maybe even for Dangchao.
Economically, things had continued to go well, both for Moses and for the rest of the world. He was close to being able to add another vehicle to his fleet, maybe something bigger this time, that could make a run to and from Nairobi. But he could see that he was being drawn into the very sins that he had condemned the U.S. for six years earlier. People wanted luxury coaches, and the one Moses had his eye on used incredible amounts of fuel. But it had the power and the added features that would pay for itself with satisfied customers.
Perhaps that was what Dangchao was doing too. Maybe he was just trying to keep his "customers" satisfied. People are so crazy, Moses thought to himself, still gazing at the stars. He was honest enough to include himself in his observations.
We all want more, even when we don't need it. Unless we have more than everyone else, we're not happy,he thought. For Jiddy the overdose had been pleasure. He had reached a point where he now only found pleasure in seeing someone else suffer. And it appeared that Moses' room mate had a lot of company... both in Shinyalu, and in the greater world outside of their village.
But poor Dinah! And how many others had they treated in the same way?