The Last Empty Cup
Africa
Lubanzi woke to the sound of his grandmother singing in the courtyard below, her voice rising through the open window like smoke from a cook fire, curling and familiar. The song was old, older than the century, something about a woman who loved a fisherman. She only sang it when she thought no one was listening.
He checked his wrist display: 5:47 AM in Kampala. In Stockholm, a woman named Ingrid would be surfacing from sleep in approximately eight minutes, and Lubanzi needed to be ready to catch her.
The haptic gloves hung on their charging rack, soft as old leather from three years of other people’s mornings. He pulled them on, flexed his fingers. The neural interface calibrated with a tingle that started in his palms and spread upward like cold water filling a vessel.
“Connecting to Solbacken Care Residence. Client: Ingrid Lindqvist.”
The feed resolved, and suddenly Lubanzi was six thousand kilometers away, seeing through cameras mounted in a humanoid frame. Swedish light, thin as broth, seeped through lace curtains. He turned the robot’s head. Ingrid stirred beneath her blankets, ninety-three years old, her white hair fanned across the pillow.
“God morgon, Ingrid,” he said, and the translation systems rendered his voice into Swedish before it left the robot’s speakers. He crossed the room carefully, each step in his Kampala bedroom echoed by mechanical legs in that distant place.
“There you are.” Ingrid’s smile was slow, dragged up from whatever dream still clung to her. “I was worried you’d forgotten me.”
“Never,” Lubanzi said. He had learned, in his first months of this work, that the clients did not want efficiency. They wanted the illusion of being remembered. “How did you sleep?”
“I dreamed of Erik. We were dancing at our wedding.” She laughed, a dry sound like paper tearing. “Sixty-eight years ago. I stepped on his feet the whole time. He never complained, not once.”
“He sounds patient.”
“Patient.” She considered the word as Lubanzi guided the robot’s arms beneath her shoulders. Through the haptic feedback, he felt her weight, the birdlike fragility of her bones, the tremor in her grip. “No. He was stubborn. Too stubborn to admit I was a terrible dancer. That’s not the same thing.”
Lubanzi lifted her gently and thought about the difference.
By noon, he had completed three more shifts: a woman in Osaka who collected antique radios and liked to explain their mechanisms while he prepared her meals; a man in Toronto, post-surgery, who called him “kid” and complained about everything but always said “you’re alright” before disconnecting; a couple in Munich who finished each other’s sentences after fifty-one years of marriage and still bickered about how to load the dishwasher. Each client left a residue, like sediment settling after water passes. Lubanzi carried pieces of them through his day.
He ate groundnuts in the courtyard while his grandmother worked at her loom. Her fingers moved through the threads with a certainty that seemed almost violent, the shuttle flying and catching, flying and catching. The cloth emerging was deep indigo, the color of the sky just after the sun drops below the horizon.
“The Wanjiku girl came by,” she said, not looking up. “Asking about you.”
“What did she want?”
“What do girls ever want when they ask about boys?” His grandmother’s mouth twitched. “She mentioned the council meeting tomorrow. Land rights for the new arrivals.”
“The returnees from Europe?”
“From what’s left of it.” The shuttle flew, caught. “The elders want the usufruct agreements settled before they put down roots. You should go. You should see how these things are done.”
The returnees had been arriving for decades now, the children and grandchildren of those who had once fled to places that had seemed permanent. Lubanzi had grown up watching them disembark at the transit station, their faces carrying an expression he had come to recognize: the particular bewilderment of people discovering that home is not where they left it. The kinship networks absorbed them, found them work and housing and a place in the web of obligation that held Kampala together. But absorption was not the same as belonging. That took longer. That took generations.
“I’ll go,” he said.
His grandmother nodded once, sharply, and returned to her weaving.
In the late afternoon, he walked. The streets of Kampala had shed their colonial geometry over the decades, growing organic and branching like river deltas, following paths worn by feet rather than plans drawn by foreign hands. Vertical farms rose between the old buildings, their glass faces reflecting the sun in sheets of gold. Delivery drones hummed overhead, moving in patterns that seemed random but weren’t, each one a node in a system too complex for any single mind to hold.
He passed the community center where a circle of elders sat in the shade, their faces lit by the soft glow of dispute mediation displays. Two traders from the market stood before them, arms crossed, neither willing to look at the other. The elders listened, conferred, listened again. No police. No courts. Just the slow work of consensus, patient as water wearing stone.
Evening came. His grandmother asked him to go to the market for palm oil and cassava flour.
“Take the long way,” she said. “The sunset will be good tonight.”
He did. The sky above Kampala was turning the color of ripe mango, streaked with the thin lines of atmospheric processors doing their invisible work. The call to prayer rose from the mosque on the corner, overlapping with the sound of a choir rehearsing in the church across the street, the two melodies weaving together into something that was neither and both. At the old shrine between them, someone had left fresh offerings: fruit and flowers and a small carved figure that might have been a saint or a spirit or simply a beloved ancestor. The faiths had learned to share the air here. There was room enough.
He was thinking about this, about rooms and what fills them, when he saw the old man.
He sat against the wall of a shuttered building, his clothes hanging loose as if they had been made for someone larger. A plastic cup rested before him, empty, its mouth open to the sky like a question no one had answered. Lubanzi stopped. The man’s eyes were fixed on something in the middle distance, something that wasn’t there.
Lubanzi had seen poverty. He had seen it in historical feeds, in the archives that documented the terrible decades at mid-century when climate collapse and extractive debt had cracked the continent open like an egg. He had heard his grandmother’s stories of the hunger years, told in the flat voice she reserved for things too large to hold any other way. But he had never seen it here, now, sitting against a wall with an empty cup.
He crouched down. The old man smelled of dust and something sour, something that might have been illness or simply time.
“Mzee.” The honorific came automatically. “When did you last eat?”
The man’s gaze drifted toward Lubanzi, slow as a ship changing course. His lips moved. No sound came out at first. Then: “Eat?”
“Food. When did you last have food?”
The old man’s forehead creased, as if the question required translation from a language he had once known but forgotten. He lifted one hand, let it fall. “There was bread. Someone gave me bread.” A pause. “Was that today?”
Lubanzi stood and held out his hand. The old man looked at it for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Then his fingers closed around Lubanzi’s, dry and light as corn husks, and Lubanzi pulled him gently to his feet.
They walked to the market together. The old man’s gait was unsteady, each step a negotiation with gravity, but he did not let go of Lubanzi’s arm. The vendors watched them pass. A woman selling groundnuts caught Lubanzi’s eye and nodded once, a small acknowledgment of something understood.
Lubanzi bought the palm oil. The cassava flour. A portion of grilled plantains, still hot, wrapped in banana leaf. Beans. Rice. Enough to fill a bag, enough to matter. The kinship network would register the expenditure, would note it in the vast ledger of giving and receiving that underwrote everything here. No one would object. This was what the systems were for. This was what the long century of building had purchased.
He walked the old man to the community center and found an elder who could help, a woman with gray braids and steady hands who asked no unnecessary questions. Then he went home.
His grandmother was still at her loom when he arrived. The indigo cloth had grown by several inches, deep and even, the color of trust.
“You’re late,” she said.
“I met someone on the way.”
Her hands paused on the shuttle. She looked up at him, and in her eyes he saw something that had been there his whole life, waiting for him to grow into it. Recognition. The passing of a weight from one pair of shoulders to another.
“Good,” she said.
The shuttle flew. The cloth grew. Outside, the last light bled from the sky, and Kampala hummed with ten million lives, each one a thread in a pattern too vast to see but strong enough to hold.