A delulu, you ask? A delusion? Yes, I have encountered such things. A Pandora’s Box of pestilential evils, a saprogenic corner of a city, a caries of the soul. All of it a pseudology, a legerdemain, a skullduggery of a higher order. I have been honeyfuggled and hornswoggled, humbugged and gulled.

The world, you see, is a constant effort to deceive, a ceaseless jiggery-pokery of words and deeds. Was I delouloued further? Was the delusion solved, the solulu found? The problem, you see, is that the solution to a delusion is often another delusion. The ignis fatuus, the deceptive light, is a hard thing to follow. But sometimes, in the midst of all the deceit, one finds a glimmer of something else. A flicker of menschlichkeit, a hint of decency. Not much, but enough. Enough to keep going, even when you know you’ve been cozened and mulcted, when you know the entire world is a grand, elaborate imposture.

In the end, it was a Monday. An afternoon walk, a coffee of questionable provenance—and then, a peculiar alignment. What began as a promise of unworrying relaxation was hijacked by a delulu, a private delusion that demanded a solulu. A solution was, of course, a new problem. This particular delusion, born of an unusual brew, decided to align itself with a weekly writing commitment. Suddenly, the tranquil evening was gone, replaced by a mind-boggling entanglement of words and thoughts. I was here, in the midst of it all. The new corridor development, the face-lifted thoroughfare, the concomitant greenery. Amidst the hustle and bustle, a seemingly normal passage. But the backhoes were busy digging. Digging out the misaligned road parts, those water-retaining bits and bobs that never sat quite right. And so I declared it, for all to hear: Roads are, after all, alignments. A truth, discovered amidst a delusion, a solution, and the ceaseless digging of the earth.

Then, it came to my mind. When the corridor development was in its offing. It was the last day before the Ethiopian New Year. I had a last chance, I thought, to pass by the road, to catch its finishing essence. The pedestrian border, as it always does, had been pushed into the road. The pedestrian lane itself seemed to have traversed the main road’s first lane. It was tiring just to think of listing what was on sale. I arrived at Derartu’s square. A hustle. A bullfight. A swollen-to-burst minibus, a bouncer-turned-casher’s assistant, a man of my age, and a boy with a face like a split sky. The boy grabbed the man’s shirt collar, insisting he hadn’t been paid. My involvement was needed.

On the return journey toward the city center, I reminisced about what happened there a few days earlier. At that place, where it was already seven o’clock, we fought for a spot on a minibus. A colossal assistant ushered us in. The fare was a triple-fold increase. Most of us were silent. A young girl complained, loudly. Insults. The repeated use of the word “metoleb.” Our journey was aborted. As I started walking, a single side light was not working. I had to follow a boy and a girl, invading their privacy to come out of the dark. It took me only a while to notice the road was now being used for agitated oxen. I had to revert.

As I approached the chicken market, swollen with Isuzu trucks loaded with live finishers, a heavy rain arrived. A joke, I suppose. I entered the nearest alleyway, which led to a ramshackle kiosk, a local arake distribution point. Amidst the rain, a boy relieving his kidney to the nearby flood, was busy slaughtering chickens. A perfect, terrible, clumsy alignment of a world that makes no sense, and a world that makes all the sense.

I fell sick, as one does. A week or so later, after a struggle, I returned. The scene was surprising. People were selling and buying, their facial muscles flipping out. The rubble. What was left from the shakes. The area was being cleared, but not yet. A limbo. A terrible, beautiful moment of transition. A world clinging to its old habits, even as it was being swept away. A scene, in short, that made a certain kind of sense.

Wandering. A fine art, I suppose. I started it, a slip of a thing, hoping for a mindless meander. Empty-headed. A worthy goal. Yet, as I left the alley, I was immediately thrown into the great, clumsy alignment of the world. The liquor shops, the milk shops, the raw meat, the bars—all of them in a great, teeming, bustling mess. And then, the chat quarter.

Slowly, surely, a glaring quarter of flexing muscles and a certain kind of intensity. A syzygy of peculiar events. The girl with her VW EV, already consuming before she’d even left the block. The young boy, his “yebole bajaj” parked catawampus in the middle of the narrow street, grabbing his day’s portion. I marveled, a bit, at the chat, so trimmed and enticing, its price escalating due to some distant war.

I passed the first brothel. A mixed feeling, to be sure. The building material shops held sway, a temporary modus vivendi of commerce, and the girls were not to be seen. My mind, of course, went back. A farrago of history. Negadras Haileghiorgis, his struggle, the designated areas, the blazing Tsadike Sefer. The Fascist Italians moving the market, the girls of Asegedetch Alamerew, the rage of the slipper shoe, the countless girls roaming around Negadras’s house before the redevelopment projects swallowed it all. All of it, a great, sprawling holus-bolus of history and commerce, all connected, all at once. And here I was, walking through it, a solitary figure in a world of endless, clumsy, wonderful alignments.

My mind, a fractured thing, was split between two stark realities. On one side, the places seemed tidy and secure, a safe haven for the girls. Yet on the other, this semblance of safety was rattled by its very location—just a stone’s throw from a posh high school. And then, the final, jarring image: the girls on sale, flaunting their offers through the windows.

Another stroll, another set of clumsy, unavoidable alignments. A bullfight on two zebra crossings. A nightmare, I suppose, but these days, my dreams are nothing but nightmares. And then, the raw meat eateries. The bustling kind. My last venture into such things was a bit out of time. Three decades past. Around Abuware. A gate, closed to all but the determined. Tire siga, nothing more. No kilo talk. 50 birr. Lunch. A portion from the ribs, enough for a group. The tej was unique. A young girl, later a woman of legend, made her name there. A true rags-to-riches tale, steeped in the honeyed ferment.

This place, these eateries, reminded me of an old man. A tailor’s shop, near where I grew up. He was over 90. He asked for good food. Was recommended “The Foods Hall.” He struggled to order, but was satisfied with the serving. Until it was time to pay: a fight, a stick, a close call. The owner, laughing from the heart, paid the bill. 10 birr, perhaps. A scandal.

The old man lived alone in a big house. His younger sister left it to him. He promptly disconnected the electric power. He let a young man and a girl stay there, on one condition: no electricity. They lived there, mimicked a candle, and ended up in his will.

And this, this is what threatens me. This specific area, these places. The feeling of being out of time. A past that clashes with a present. A single meal, a single bill, and the whole world is thrown into chaos. A simple misalignment. A simple truth. The world moves on, clumsily, leaving some of us behind, still fighting with our sticks, still mimicking the candlelight.

My mind, a sieve of memories, held onto a few: a friend from freshman year, a vow to go east, then west, and a joint effort. But vows, like words, are fragile things. He broke his in our sophomore year, and our friendship, a fragile thing itself, almost broke with it.

There were other vows. To Dostoyevsky, to Cervantes. To speak their tongues. I started with Dostoyevsky’s. The Russian permanent exhibition in Addis. My neighborhood friends, a flimsy bunch, dropped out immediately. It was just me, our humble instructor Anna Shakmatova, and Fedlu Hussain. A boy from Abinet. A boy whose hands were too big for his notebooks. It was because of him that we lasted two solid years.

He was a grown-up, I think. Born that way. He saw the world, saw its wrongs, and got angry. A fight here, a fight there. He wanted to bring back Addis Ketema’s YMCA, a book store now, to what it once was. While Abinet, his neighborhood, became a “Chicago there,” a no-go zone. He was a paradox, a nationally acknowledged basketball player and a boy with a righteous anger. A man, a boy, a friend. A beautiful, tragic, clumsy alignment of a life, a life that was both here and there, a life that was both then and now.

During my sophomore year, a conflict of grand proportions erupted within our department. A party, led by our chairman, a man in his twenties was a PhD—a rarity in those hallowed halls—and championed by a young, Indian-origin wonder, a woman whose conversation you would gladly spend your life listening to, argued against the evils of handouts. The other side, a less glamorous but equally entrenched party, argued for their pros.

The books we had, on subjects we were meant to master, were, without exaggeration, as old as I was. From the sixties. Yet, unlike my friends, I was drawn to the group that condoned the handouts. My friends, on the other hand, reveled in them. Exams were a kind of detective jigsaw, a secret few had the privilege of seeing. Life was, in its own way, incredible. I remember one of us had an exam for an economics course, seven pieces definite to reappear. For him, it was a mere academic stretch before sleep, and a certain piece of tomorrow while ours was uncertain.

But for me, it was a different story. To align myself with the essence of a subject, to hate the handouts, and to be faced with a pile of recommended books on course outlines, was a kind of being lost to the jungles. A solitary wanderer in a tangled mess of conflicting ideologies. A man, a student, a fool, trying to make sense of a world that refused to.

And so I found myself circling the Kennedy library at AAU, a creature of habit. It was there, amidst the stale air and the faint scent of old paper, that I first laid eyes on fresh periodicals—a mere eight or nine month’s old, but fresh to me. It must have been then that I read the interview, Norman Mailer complaining to Time or Newsweek, a prophet of doom for his generation. The diminishing habit of reading, he said. His generation, an endangered species. A perfectly reasonable complaint, I suppose, for a man who made his living from words. And here I was, a student in Addis, reading his words, a small, quiet act of defiance against a world that was slowly, surely, forgetting how to read. A man out of time, speaking to a boy out of time, in a library full of books out of time.

In my stay in college, we were subjected to a course titled “Comparative Political System.” This was in the midst of socialism’s brief, clamorous heyday in Ethiopia, mind you. Not only the prospect of attending, but the very name of the course was music to our ears. A dubious sort of optimism, as it turned out. Our instructor, a man fresh from Western Europe with a PhD—a surprise in itself—showed up on the first day with an additional surprise. He, now a well-esteemed public figure, was accompanied by a guest professor, also from the West. Two instructors, representing the two main ideological camps, would, we assumed, zealously expound upon their respective differences. It was, for a moment, a sanguine prospect.

It all started well. Then, after a few episodes, it began to take the regrettable shape of a debate. And then, without so much as a whisper of explanation, the visiting professor stopped coming. The circumstances were such that it was understood: no amount of insistence, no manner of hope, would continue the arrangement. Each man esteemed his own camp and disesteemed the other, neither daring to touch upon his respective camp’s challenges, neither having the courage to appraise the other’s strengths, if any. The disillusionment was pervasive, and entirely predictable.

Nonetheless, the time we had floating on the waves of their debate was something. The guest professor, at times quite emotional, would disesteem the socialist camp by underlining that “the true socialist countries are the Scandinavian ones.” A new insight, I suppose, if one was looking for one. But the show was stopped. The one-sided version of “comparative” politics continued, leaving our optimism in tatters. A lesson learned, then. The world is a thing of halves, and the second half, more often than not, fails to show.

We had a teacher, a sophomore-year teacher, with a classroom ambience as rare as a quiet thought. Neither liked nor disliked. In retrospect, his cool and easy presence was a kind of truce, a modus vivendi from the others, the ones who were not like him. We, in our own clumsy way, were not like him either.

One of his quotes, one of the few to survive the long, clumsy fall from school into memory, still prevails. He compared the natural sciences to the social. The natural’s scope, he said, was limited. He concluded that it was difficult to come out with an original idea in that field. The social sciences, on the other hand, had an ease about them. A fertile ground for originality. A strange comfort, I suppose, for those of us who were lost in the jungle, searching for an original thought among the tangle of old, yellowed books. A simple truth, spoken by a man who seemed to have found his own.

Then I saw him. My friend. From college. He went to political science. A good student. Now at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was swimming in joy. He’d just returned from overseas, reliving the course notes from Anyang N’Yongo, Lupita’s father, in Rome. Then, to Belgrade, for the plenum of the non-aligned countries meeting. I was happy for him, of course, though disoriented by the stark comparison to my own situation.

And then, the question. A question that came just as I arrived home. Is a non-aligned world even possible? A question that clashed, head-on, with the law of power geometry, the very law that makes the world spin. A question without an answer. Just a feeling. A feeling of being out of alignment with the world, with my friend, with the very idea of a non-aligned world. A feeling that, in its own way, was a kind of homecoming.

A non-merit blind environment. A sleazy ambience. An unbridled casual employment place. A place where fear was a currency. A tale of girl fixers, of girls procured for a “higher up,” that ended up confusing a girl’s menstrual cycle. And then, the tales, similar ones, rampant. A world of fear, of sleaze, of confusion. A world where the natural order of things, a girl’s own body, could be so easily, so brutally, thrown into disarray. A world where all was askew, where nothing was in alignment. A world, in short, that made a certain kind of sense.

The man at the helm, a minister, had created an atmosphere that made Google’s Inspector General seem shallow. A genius, one had to assume, of a peculiar kind. Rumor, that tireless runner, insisted major decisions were not born of meetings, for the man hated meetings, but from sauna bath sessions with some notorious women. We, of course, had no idea what a sauna bath was. Another rumor, another tired runner, told of a deed spilled from one of the founding fathers of the Dergue. The man, once was at the helm of one of the constituting institutions of where I was, it was said, would revolve his revolver while walking the office aisles. He was notorious for pulling it, every now and then, a sudden, jarring punctuation mark in the quiet hum of bureaucracy. A man of strange habits, a man of power, a man who, in his own way, was a perfect, terrible alignment of the absurd and the terrifying.

A new institution. A new man at the helm. He did not know the meaning of “employee.” From school to boss, a fast-lane acceleration, greased by relentless dry jokes and diffused delusions. A predecessor, I hear, used to project his tongue out after one left his office. A place of waste and nepotism.

Then, another. A blustering insolent. A nonstop pain in the butt. A leadership genius. Notorious for his iffy twists, his venoms, his alveolar flapping stinger tongue, his torrents of lies. A man, an American, a cat-fit tizzy of an arrogant swagger, who turned the human landscape into his own fifth wheel.

Fubared beyond all recognition. A collective, diverse memory, and all thoughts about self and others, reduced to the same language, yet so difficult to talk. A circular, organizational higgledy-piggledy structure. A sharp sword suspended by a single thin thread, hanging over everyone. Uneasy days. No one waits their turn. He makes his point, trashing everything, a 24-carat insult for all.

No positive ideas. No new ideas. Meetings became a showcase for his ruffian negative digs, a dramatcule of claques and chatouilleurs, rieurs and bisseurs, a wolfish hectorian pack. If someone dared to speak their mind, a new culture would prevail. A deciphering, as if from the supreme leader’s uniquely shaped head whittle. A despotic attrition. Things get off color, ending in a nonstop show of heebie-jeebies slavery era management pornography.

Nothing is anything other than its culture. A family, a community, a company, a country. The air, filled with a star bedroom war of gals, doxies, and tootsies. Detail battle plans. Whose star is rising? Whose is falling? A corruption of thousands of minds, confusing offices with daylight imposters, with breastaurants, turning the company compound into a daily ground tabloid.

A catechization nightmare of work, reward, love, support, success, failure, manhood, and womanhood. A dominating doxy hue, from dusky to ivory, setting a muggy encompass of a dyno fuddy-duddy, garnished with dotards and flower people.

Near the year 2000, the Bank of England brought a portion of its gold reserve to the market. An unprecedented price fall. The reserve’s value was cut in half. The same, it holds true, for a doxie to the market, as it is for womanhood. As it is for men on the market.

The courts of law, an amazing spectacle, never get to the heart of the matter. I was in the field, you see, and had a problem. The listless damage from lost revenues. A plague. After a few failures, I devised a method. Claims could only ensue from what was declared to inland revenue. A solulu, a solution for the delusion. From there to forever, the issue was resolved. My own digest of the listless flood of proclamations, a legendary thing in its day, was a similar kind of solulu. A way out of the maze of delusions. What if, I thought, we all followed suit? A list of the delusions, a list of the solutions. A simple, elegant way to make sense of a world that so deliberately avoids it.

Then, the phantom of Getachew Bolodia materialized in my mind. A man, by all accounts, destined for hard labor in Canada, his second degree awaiting. His college education here, a mere frothy confection of sucrose and maltose, utterly looking devoid of any substantial engagement with the Watson-Crick model of DNA’s double helix structure, proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. They built upon the work of several scientists, including Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction data was crucial to their model. A lamentable omission, especially for a supposed Cambridge contemporary. One presumes it could have been, should have been, a bit more profound.

A man I met in a bar, after a few beers, of course, himself a PhD, told me that Getachew had some inspiration among these breakthrough-making people, as he heard it from a visit and a meeting held to honor him by one of them. Getachew once claimed his academic journey began with a single, crucial act of articulation: convincing the overall show priest of the Kes Timhirt Bet that he would, come the morrow, procure the requisite five cents for admission. A feat his childhood friend, less gifted in the art of persuasion, could not manage. He was not, it seems, the arrogant figure he was sometimes painted. He even, in his particular British accent—the envy of many, a small triumph in a world of defeats—upheld the sheer, unadulterated opportunity that five cents had afforded him. Sad but true, nothing written by Getachew is out there on the net, save for the jokes allegedly associated with him. However, Getachew left one of the most colorful and academically biochemistried interviews Ethiopian radio ever had.

And so, it all comes down to this. A Monday, a peculiar coffee, a “delulu” that demanded a “solulu.” A simple walk became a tangled alignment of words and thoughts, a syzygy of backhoes and misaligned roads. For roads, we declared, are alignments. A truth, discovered amidst the absurd.

Therefore, we must be vigilant. A career, like a road, must have its alignments. For a lack of alignment bears water that shortens its life. We must seek the solulus, not the delulus. We must, in a world that is a grand, elaborate imposture, find our own small, quiet truths. And in the end, that is all there is.

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye