When the web of breath had settled into his body, finished and untangled from the air moving outside all things, I covered the sharp glint of his now shallow eyes with the wet napkin with which I had mopped feverish sweat from his skin, lowered the lamp light until he receded from me into the embrace of the incomplete dusk & bobbed there, anchored with just my memory of his last words, a dry rasp really: I hate you.
Hate, it followed me from Gusau to Warri, to DSC. She had sat quietly beside me until we alighted in front of a house I had not seen in a long time. It had driven me from DSC, wandering different small towns, changing and changing before so many full length mirrors that when I finally arrived at Zamfara, I could barely recollect the person I was to be in this new place. It was in Gusau, at Sabon Kasua, smoking before a yellow moon of one harmattan season, while a muezzin sang from inside himself towards the dream of Mecca, I thought of him for the first time in nineteen years. The existential weariness that had been eating me for years was done. I was stone or as still, as taut and isolated as a human can be without dying.
The prayers came to an end and I threw the butt of my cigarette out through the bars that lined the courtyard of my lodgings. I watched as the orange flicker fell down the single storey building into the open drain that ran, parched and thirsty along the road. I could see the fog move slowly from the distant desert, heavy and solemn like a pilgrimage of ghost priests. It was many limbed as it clambered through all openings, even into me, already an open door without key. Near my bed, a poem by Rilke spoke to my body. I was a cage and my eyes roamed the borders of my skin searching for relief but there was none. I did not know if this hunger was why I had left DSC all those years ago. I thought of him, the last time I had seen him.
He was standing near Isioma, his hand on her shoulder, her head almost touching his chin as he whispered into her. Their bodies seemed to move as if they did not belong to the scene. I could see the torturous dance of two people who have revealed the shape of their need to each other and now it was calling to them from inside, canine flashing, ready to rip them into ache. They were lovers, I realised in that instant; my twin brother and my betrothed. The world grew a dark patina that day. Nothing remained inside me for long. Everything that was said, every hand that touched me fell away as if I was a wall stained with wet moss. It was our betrothal. It was the day I was to be introduced to her family, officially beginning marriage rites. I sat on that chair and the world stared at me with curious eyes. I think that day, the change began: the remaking, the many mirrors I will find myself in beginning to take their first arched shape.
The next day, without a word to anyone, I left DSC. Twenty years, I have dragged myself out of that scene, rewriting each sound and shape until both of them have become ghosts, shadows so frail their hem barely meet each other.
In my self imposed exile, I stopped at Aghalokpe, working as a conductor for a bus plying the Eku- Sapele route. I rented a single room in an old chief’s compound and there, at night, I listened to the expressway screech and groan. I was there for six months. One morning, after a heavy downpour, I was discovered by an old secondary classmate in a bus and over a couple of shots of rum and some kolanuts, he told me that my brother married Isioma after I disappeared and that she is even pregnant. That evening, still reeling with the high ringing bells inside my blood, I boarded a bus, a passenger. I left for Benin, carrying only my collected poems of Rilke with me and the little money I had saved.
That was nineteen years ago. From Benin, I went to Bayelsa where I worked for a waterfront bar as a bouncer. From that loud, merry place, I went to Bonny Island. I was in Bonny for four years, before the war began. I joined some small time smugglers, pulling canoes of rum into the island at night. It was a dangerous job but it fed me with the excitement I needed to waken myself from bed every morning. In those times, I became rich as one who had no anchor can be. I gave gifts, made friends, made enemies, had lovers and forgot every one of them the moment I was caught by soldiers with a canoe filled with gallons of contraband liquor. While people died over crude oil, I languished in a military prison somewhere in Calabar.
It was a woman that saved me. I came out of prison, half dead. I was completely broken, transformed. From that shattered mirror, I tried to build myself. I began by begging at motor parks. And there, she found me. She was a widow, she said as she gave me her phone number. Call me anytime, she said. I threw the piece of paper as soon as she was out of sight. I survived. On drugs and cheap street food, I survived. One night, beaten almost to death by my supplier for being unable to pay for my high, I heard my name. From troubled eyes, I peeped and there she was, her wings wide and glowing white, curved over her. She carried me to her home. She took care of me. She gave me life.
For years, I lived with her. She never asked me anything about where I was coming from. I never asked her anything about who she used to be. We lived, two desperately sad souls, tangled as if by a fisher’s cast, yet breathing our separate lives away. One day we slept and morning came, and she was gone. It was simple really. It was the simplest thing that ever happened to me. In her passing I discovered that she had been gravely ill. I thought I was hard enough. I thought pain had secreted all its secrets into my veins. I was wrong.
I was wrong. I could not leave my bed for centuries, for aeons. The world revolved around me. I open the door and look at him one last time. He looked so fragile. Dusk had completely swallowed him. I closed the door behind me and turned to see the many eyes of their children staring at me. There was wonder in their eyes. There was anger. There was hunger too. For when something is gone, you will take anything left to replace it. Near a small window, a girl of about twenty years sat looking outside. She held Isioma’s hands in her palms and both of them seemed to me like an island in the vast sea of restless faces.
He is gone, I said.
The room seemed to sigh and ease its weight, then Isioma turned to look at me and in her eyes, all the years collapsed and a pain so old it had forgotten its name rose from some long undisturbed rubble inside me and spoke;
Why? It said.
She seemed to understand because she nodded her head. Instead of giving this bitter thing an answer, she turned to look at the girl who was yet to look at me. She touched the girl’s hair. Her hands were still gentle and tender. She caressed the girl’s head while the girl swayed, humming to herself. She was weeping. She was singing her goodbyes to her father.
This, is why, Isioma finally answered. Then a rage, stronger than a thousand suns rose in her eyes. She jumped to her feet.
This child was why, you useless thing! It was because of this child, your brother stepped in and married me. It was because of you, he left a perfectly good opportunity in the United Kingdom. While you wandered the world doing whatever you liked, the child you put in me grew up knowing your brother as her father! You pitiful spittle! This is why!! She yelled at my face, pointing at the girl by the window.
I staggered back. I staggered into myself, meeting all the mirrors, all the faces, all the lives that I have lived back to the beginning. I looked at the girl and everything i knew became a question.
You were sleeping with him, I said, my voice almost inaudible, it seemed as if someone else spoke.
Me? Are you mad? Nkiru, can you hear this waste of a father’s loins! I slept with who? Your brother? Do you know how devastated both of us were when we could not find you? Do you know what you did here? How your father died, unable to go to church which you know he loved to do? How your mother fell sick and died calling your name? You! God will not forgive you! she yelled.
You slept with him, I whispered again, shaking my head, unsure of memory, unsure of what was real and false in the world.
If not that my father asked for you, I would not have come to find you at Gusau. If not for Malik, my boyfriend serving at Zamfara who saw you, we would not have even known where to look, the girl said.
I turned to look at her. She was still looking out through the window.
I know only that you got my mother pregnant and ran away. You are not my father. You have seen your brother and he has given you his last words. I have done my duty. You can leave, she added.
He slept with her! I yelled.
But nobody cared. The two women turned away from me. Strong hands held my arms gently and pushed me outside. Dust rose from the soil and kissed the descending dew. The world was red and ready. I lit a stick of cigarette and staggered, once more into anonymity.
