Terra Incognita, page 17
Vi and I had gotten into some mock argument about why we had never dated in high school—I was sure that my sexuality had been a well-kept secret; she assured me it hadn’t. When the bar closed, she had returned home and CJ and I had ended up on a rooftop somewhere—must have been a building on the grounds of the rest home. Whose idea had that been? Mine? His? It didn’t really matter. Above us, a bright constellation had shimmered like a universe of possibility.
“So why the newsies?” I had asked him. “Weren’t you supposed to be up there among the stars? You should have at least joined the Nigerian Space Agency.”
CJ had shrugged, a bemused smile on his face.
“There are enough Nigerians in space,” he had said. His stutter was gone—just like when he would speak about astronomy. “Besides, why be up there when you can stay down here and change things?”
“I don’t know about that. This country has more problems than one man can fix.”
“That’s true, but if we all work to the best of our abilities, we can make a difference.”
“You sound like your dad when you say that.”
CJ’s expression had grown sad. “My father tried to teach me a lot of things. I just wished I had been a better student. You know, I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me until I moved to that metropolis of ours and started hearing people’s stories. So many times all they needed was someone to listen to them or to step in at one critical moment—”
“Someone to save them, you mean?” I had said. I too lived in the city and, making my way through the movie industry, I’d heard my own tales of woe. Stories of thwarted ambition, greed and self-destruction, usually. “Look, our people are always looking for someone to swoop in and rescue them from the problems of their own making. We need to start saving ourselves, if you ask me.”
“So, what would you do if you saw someone in need and you knew you had the power to help?” He had turned his gaze to me. There had been a look in his eyes then, something I could not immediately place. For a moment he had appeared unutterably alien. “Would you stand by and watch them suffer?”
“It’s not that simple, CJ.”
“Yes, it is.” He had turned back to gaze at the stars. “We all have unique abilities that could change the world; sometimes people just need to be reminded of their own power.”
We’d lapsed into a thoughtful silence, each occupied with our own musings. It occurred to me then that CJ and I had never spent much time alone together, without Vi to anchor us. It felt as if I was getting to know him all over again.
“Come, what is a walz?” CJ had turned back to me. “Vi said I would have to do a walz tomorrow.”
“It’s a waltz,” I had said, laughing. “You mean to tell me you still haven’t learned to dance like a Euro? You sure say you be oyinbo true-true?”
CJ had blushed deeply and ducked his head.
I had risen and offered him a hand.
“Oya, let me teach you some moves. I don’t want you to disgrace yourself tomorrow.”
He waved my hand away and stood facing me. CJ was nearly a head taller than me, but something of his old awkwardness had returned, stirring long-forgotten memories. I had snaked one of his arms around my waist, while I draped my arm across his shoulders, my other hand in his. The feel of him had been almost familiar. Strong and solid, yet gentle, holding me with the lightest of touches.
We had danced for a little, I remember that much. I had pulled in closer, breathing in his smell—a mix of beer, aftershave and something indefinable. Then, nuzzling his impossibly smooth cheek, I had kissed him. Softly at first, tasting the skin in the hollow between his jaw and neck, moving to his mouth. His lips were almost girlishly soft. He did not resist—at least I don’t remember that he did.
Try as I might, I could not remember exactly what happened after that. Images and impressions slid through my mind, slippery as a bar of soap. There had been a sensation of air against my face and body, as if I was falling or flying, and then…nothing. I couldn’t even remember how I got into bed.
Wait.
I was naked when I woke.
I never slept naked.
I stood, ignoring the surge of pain in my head, filled with desperate hope. I tugged frantically at the covers on the bed, flinging pillows aside until I found it. Yes. That smell—a sharp sting I could not identify. He had been here. What must his body have felt like? What might he have whispered or screamed? God, how could I have gotten so drunk? I was usually much better at holding my liquor.
I folded the bed sheet carefully and sealed it in the vacuum bag in which I normally kept my underwear. I shaved, dressed and packed, since I would be leaving right after the reception.
In the lobby, I searched the pimply, teenaged desk clerk for signs of disapproval. I used to get them all the time from the landlord of my apartment building in Lagos whenever I had a “friend” stay overnight.
“Good morning, sir,” he greeted me with an eager smile. Perhaps he hadn’t been the one on duty the night before. “Your guest left something for you this morning.”
“My guest?” I asked cautiously.
“Yes, the oyinbo man who stayed with you yesterday night. He left this with me.” The boy handed me an old-fashioned e-reader. It was CJ’s diary. He had carried it everywhere with him throughout secondary school.
“Thank you.” I took the tablet.
“Oga, I like your shades,” he said. “They make you look just like that actor, Max Power.”
“Really? Everyone tells me that.”
I looked at him closely. He was a skinny country boy with slightly buck teeth, awestruck by the big city guy in front of him. He reminded me a lot of myself at that age. On a whim, I fished out my extra sunglasses and threw them to him. He caught them deftly and beamed at me.
Just then, the driverless limo pulled up. I was Vi’s “maid” of honour, and it was time to attend to the bride.
The ceremony was a modest affair on the lawn of the old Yang farm. Despite Vi’s suspension, her employer had provided a lovely stage with a canopy garlanded in blue-and-white roses. Clearly, they still wanted her back.
Vi wore a cream, medieval-style gown that flattered her ample curves. Bucking tradition, she had left her hair loose, with only a simple coronet of white roses circling her head. I wore a pale blue suit that matched the other bridesmaids’ gowns, while the groom and his men wore cream suits with back shirts and white ties.
As the judge spoke, I looked about, pleased with the arrangements. The guests were seated below the dais and I spotted CJ immediately.
He looked distant, as if he were listening for something only he could hear. His black hair was brushed back, an attempt to control his unruly curls, but one lock had escaped to fall over his forehead. He must have felt my stare, because his eyes focused and he turned to me. Grinning widely, he gave me a cheesy thumbs-up. Typical CJ.
When it was time for the couple’s first dance, CJ came up to where I was sitting at the high table.
“W-wanna dance?” he asked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. Times may have changed, but I was still a gay man, and this was still Nigeria.
CJ laughed. “Oh come on.” He urged me to my feet. CJ was surprisingly strong, yet I sensed this had required hardly any effort on his part. “Wouldn’t want our practice to go to waste, would you?”
“Aren’t you scared people will think you’re gay too?” I asked as we started to dance.
He shrugged. “Human sexuality is such a wide continuum. Can you imagine what it might be like for a non-human?”
I gave him a quizzical look. For a moment I thought I caught a glimpse of secret knowledge in his expression, as if another person entirely were hidden beneath the man I knew. Then he grinned.
I left soon after that. My part was finished and I had no desire to mingle further with the denizens of my home town.
Once on the plane, I booted up CJ’s e-reader. The entries stretched back decades. Many were cryptic poems of loss and alienation, but most were stories, fantastic tales of men and women who could fly or run at speeds faster than sound or lift tractors with one hand. They were good too. The mystery of CJ’s career had finally been explained. The most recent entry, though, had been added just last year. It was a movie script.
I patched my agent on my com feed.
“Max, where have you been?” She sounded hysterical, but then Maggie Yuen always came across that way. “You were supposed to be on set in Hong Kong two days ago.”
“Relax. I had to see some old friends. Besides, that movie is so behind schedule, two days won’t kill anyone.”
“Well, the studio is probably going to try and knock down our fees now,” she said sourly. “I hope it was worth it.”
I thought about it for a moment before answering. “I have my memories. Mags, you know how you’ve been disturbing me about opening my own studio?”
“Of course, you’re a hot commodity. Why should you let these studio boys be dragging you up and down?”
“Well, I think I’m going to do it.” I turned down the volume just in time or I would have been deafened by her cries of delight.
“Okay! You need a script for your first vehicle.” She’d already called up a list of writers and was highlighting names. “Let me get hold of Chuks…”
“No need. I’ve already found one.” I peered at the e-reader. “What do you think of this title: The Super Man?”
Chinelo Onwualu is a writer, editor, journalist and dog person living in Abuja, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. Her writing has appeared in Ideomancer, the Kalahari Review, Saraba, Sentinel Nigeria, Jungle Jim, and the anthologies AfroSF: African Science Fiction by African Writers and Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond.
THERE IS SOMETHING THAT OGBU-OJAH DIDN’T TELL US
Jekwu Ozoemene
Sometimes I wish my grandmother had had the time to tell us Ojahdili the great wrestler’s tragic story from the point of view of Ogbu-Ojah, his legendary flautist. For this praise singer it was who, once he wet his pursed lips and hunched his shoulders in a crouch (as flautists were wont to do), would unleash an intoxicating melody that buoyed his master’s spirit, waking in massive convulsive ripples the most tired, injured or atrophied muscle and sinews. It was said that even birds paused in mid-flight upon hearing this tune, several dropping right out of the sky to their utter astonishment. It was also said that it tended to rain birds (not cats and dogs), whenever Ogbu-Ojah let loose his:
Ojahdili!
Ngolo di golo di gongongo!
So it was little wonder that Ojahdili soon ran out of men who could defeat him in a wrestling bout, and stumbled upon the idea of travelling to the spirit world. For was it not common knowledge that no man had been known to defeat the spirits? Was this even Ojahdili’s idea in the first place? I must have been too awestruck or frightened at the prospect of wrestling with a spirit to broach this important question to Grandma.
So we were told that it was Ogbu-Ojah’s magic sweet melody that, despite the reservations and admonishment of Ojahdili’s parents and friends, ferried his master through mmiri na asaa, agu na asaa, forded seven great rivers, across seven dangerous forests, to Iton-Kom. That mythical land, situated smack between the land of living and the land of the dead, was where the dead freely interacted with the living, and animals were known to mingle and talk with both man and spirits.
It was still this same Ogbu-Ojah’s sweet melody that saw Ojahdili through the first victory with the one-headed spirit, and through to his legendary defeat of the spirit world’s wrestling champion, the much-dreaded ten-headed spirit.
With the benefit of hindsight, I would have loved to ask my grandmother why Ogbu-Ojah and Ojahdili did not stop after the legendary defeat of the ten-headed wrestling champion of the spirit world. Didn’t they notice the conspiratorial look between the spirit lords? Didn’t they hear the lull, and feel the chill when the spirits demanded one last fight? Were they not puzzled when the new challenger produced by the spirit lords was a puny-looking, emaciated spirit that stumbled into the wrestling arena with a drunken gait?
Though Ojahdili must have been inebriated by his recent victories, for some reason I have always believed that Ogbu-Ojah knew that this was it, that this was that moment when a man would be finally and irredeemably broken. So why didn’t he stop his master? Why did he have to unleash his melody once again? For he must have known that even this would be of no use.
He had barely gotten to the second stanza when, in a blur, his master was whizzed through the air, and landed spread-eagled on his back in a deafening thud. When the dust settled, Ogbu-Ojah’s eyes were tortured with the strangest of sights—the uncanny image of the puny-looking spirit straddling his master’s muscular chest, pinning both his massive arms with what looked like thin air. In the ultimate humiliation, he had stuffed the once-great Ojahdili’s mouth with clods of dirt, dry leaves and what appeared to be maggot-filled faeces…
I remember the expression on my grandmother’s face when I asked who the puny-looking spirit was, mouth agape and in awe, the whispered question barely escaping my lips. The look she gave me was as if to say, was it not evident? It was his chi, she responded with a sigh, his personal god. For no man, however great or strong, can defeat his personal god… no man.
Somehow I was left with an inkling, this feeling that Ogbu-Ojah knew, as soon as he set eyes on the puny spirit, that it was Ojahdili’s personal god. So why didn’t he stop him? Why did he have to play the flute that one last time? Had he become tired of Ojahdili’s belligerence, his quest to conquer? I doubt this, because without his rousing melody, Ojahdili would never go into battle—never. Or was this pure and simple envy, anya ufu? Did he want to see Ojahdili fail, his master humiliated. Did he? Hmmnnn… there was something that Ogbu-Ojah wasn’t telling us.
Things only became clearer when grandmother told us the story about Udene the vulture and his affair.
I never really understood how a vulture could have an affair with a human being. How? That is, assuming that ili enyi meant having such an affair.
Growing up in the village, there were so many euphemisms to mask what adults got up to behind closed doors. One of the things I noted quite early in life was that these dysphemism helped to differentiate between what sex meant to adults and to children. So, while for the older ones, sex or an affair was referred to as ili enyi, as different from ime enyi (enjoying friendship as opposed to being friends), for us children it was represented by just one sufficiently ominous dark phrase, ife alulu ani, implying a bad, dark, terrible and dirty activity. Thus if during the monthly egwu onwa moonlight games a boy was caught wriggling on top of a girl, it would earn the erring child a visit from the neighbourhood disciplinarian, Nne Godi.
Godwin’s septuagenarian mother had racked up quite a reputation for herself due to her legendary leg-lock or ipa. Long before Americans invented water boarding, Nne Godi would imprison an erring child between her legs and smear hot chilli pepper on or into their privates, depending on the sex. Suffice to say that Nne Godi’s visitations were enough to deter all but the lion-hearted neighbourhood child from exploring ife alulu ani.
So how could I, under these Guantanamo Bay-like, life-threatening circumstances seek clarification for the meaning of ili enyi from any of the adults without incurring the wrath of Nne Godi? How? Unless I asked the slightly older children during the next ’egwu onwa session. Unfortunately, the next session coincided with my preparations for the annual Federal Government College Common Entrance examination into the country’s unity schools.
So, that moonlight-bathed night, when a horde of neighbourhood children came calling at my heavily fortified home’s, padlocked and chained wrought iron gate, it was my stern-voiced father who bellowed, “Rapu nu ya. O na agu akwukwu.” Leave him alone. He is studying.
Of course that didn’t deter the bellicose children from composing a spur-of-the-moment derisive song for me:
Jekwu puta egwu onwa!
Kpom kpom!
Okuku aka anabara ina alaru ula!
Kpom kpom!
“Jekwu come out and play! How come you have gone to bed long before the chickens have come home to roost?”
All I could do was to bury my head in shame (and my Larcombs mathematics textbook) as I struggled to figure out the square root of five and six. I couldn’t recall which one was more devastating, the shame of the mockery from my friends or the fear of not having a clue to the required square root.
Grandma came to my rescue the very next day, as providence forced my father off to Lagos for an emergency business meeting—a trip that at the minimum, would typically last one week. However a concession had to be made in order not to incur his wrath. I studied up until the time for the egwu onwa games, but rather than release me to go play with the neighbourhood children (and possibly earn me an opportunity to sneak into Nne Onyewe’s cocoyam farm and get up to no good under the canopy of swaying broad luxuriant cocoyam leafs), she brought out and spread her ute raffia mat on the cemented courtyard and invited us all to come join her for another session of akuko iro.
For those who don’t know, Grandma was a repository of, what appeared to me at the time to be, thousands of folklores, oral tradition akuko iros that had been handed down from generation to generation. It was acknowledged that if she ever invited you to listen to an iro, you had better put your butt down on that raffia mat and listen attentively, for you were most likely never again going to have the opportunity to hear that story from a storyteller as gifted as her.
It was said that Ogbu-Ojah slunk back home from Iton-kom, that mythical land situated smack between the land of living and the land of the dead. It was known that Ogbu-Ojah’s magical sweet melody had ferried the town’s champion wrestler Ojahdili to the land of the spirits, to challenge the spirit champions to a wrestling match. It was also known that Ogbu-Ojah’s sweet melody had seen Ojahdili through the first victory with the one-headed spirit and through to his ultimate demise at the hand of his personal god, his chi. Defeat in the land of spirits meant death in the land of the living, so it was only Ogbu-Ojah who was allowed home through the portal that separated the land of the living and that of the dead.
