the premonition

2015

In Malawi it’s called nyengo ya mvula — the season of rain — but right now it’s more like nyengo ya industrial carwash. The rain smashing down on my corrugated tin roof is so loud it’s basically a great, muffled silence. The perfect environment for getting stoned and working on LSAT logic problems, wouldn’t you say?

I’m 29, and I have this idea that I could be a lawyer. Like Grandpa Dick. He died when he was just about to start making money at it, and ever since then, lawyerin’ has been this “to be continued” storyline in our family. My sister’s getting her Ph.D., and it seems tidy to have a lawyer and a professor in the family.

“After I finished the Peace Corps, I went to law school,” I say aloud, just to hear how it sounds. It sounds great. I could do good and help people. Like Gandhi. Everybody loves Gandhi!

And then, suddenly, my insides freeze and contract.

34, I think.

And I’m overwhelmed by the certainty that I’m going to die.

In 1914, Carl Jung dreamed about a flood destroying Europe and turning to blood. “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so,” an inner voice told him. “You cannot doubt it.” He figured it was something to do with his personal life and kept his head on a swivel… and then World War I broke out. In 1909, Mark Twain famously predicted his own death: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. ... The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” And then there’s Donald Campbell, the only person in the world to hold world speed records on land and water. The night before a water speed record attempt, he was unwinding with a game of solitaire when he drew an ace and queen of spades. A superstitious chap, he recognized that these were the same cards that Mary Queen of Scots had drawn before she was executed. “I know that one of my family is going to get the chop,” Campbell told the guys he was playing with. “I pray to God it is not me.” The next day his boat Bluebird flipped going nearly 300 miles an hour. Needless to say, he didn’t survive.

Death in the abstract is a first-world luxury. In Malawi, it lives right there alongside you. The average life expectancy is 65. The estimated HIV rate is 8.9% — which means the actual rate is probably more like 18%. The infant mortality rate is 32.8 for every 1,000 live births; in America, it’s 5.1.

The first time I got a good look at death was in Malawi, hitchhiking in the back of a pickup truck. We were speeding along the M1, and I was sitting rigid as a soldier, acutely aware that if anything went wrong, I would die. “I have no control over this situation,” I realized. “So… I guess I accept death.” And in this moment, with the rain pounding down on my roof, I know it will be in five years.

You’re not dying, you’re just stoned, my brain suggests. I stare into space and probe the thought. But the certainty remains frozen in the bottom of my gut.

What if this is a warning? Like, I gotta start eating better and exercising every day? But that thought rings hollow too. It’s like I’ve glanced over and caught sight of a tiger stalking me. What am I supposed to do, hold still and pretend it’s not there? I start crying. And then get angry. I leap up and pace around my one-room house, silently raging. It’s not fair! I want more time!

The tiger yawns, baring fangs as long as my fingers.

It goes on like this until the rain begins to subside. Slumped against a wall, I begin to make out the individual droplets, like popcorn that’s ready to come out of the microwave. I sigh and open the door and take a seat in the doorway.

When the rain clears, it reveals air that’s alive with laughter, the merry cacophony of music drifting up from the market, and birds wheeling crazily through the air snapping up bugs. Life jostles life like passengers on a crowded minibus. I sit and regard the world around me buzzing with life and the world within me calm as a puddle.

You know what, sure. I’m gonna die when I’m 34.

Grandpa Dick died young, and so did both of his sons. Genetics being what they are, it’s not out of the question that I’ll die young too. What if my premonition was a warning? In Malawi, magic is real. If I had been born here, would I have questioned this premonition? I understand Western biology about as well as I understand African magic, so who am I to say if it’s one or the other? All I know is what I feel, and it feels true. Five years until I die. Or like, get married, my brain adds. Like the end of me as an individual.

I let that thought sit and decide it’s fine. The important question here isn’t what exactly is gonna happen in five years; it’s how I plan to spend my time until that point. So I throw out the logic problems and do the most logical thing I can think of: I make a bucket list. And at the top of that list is: Ride a bike on every continent.