The Death of Vivek Oji

by Akwaeke Emezi

  My mother stared at me when I walked into our house. “You’re home,” she said, frowning. I hadn’t been back in a while. Usually she would shout at me for being away so long, but this time she just looked up at me, her shoulders rounded and tired. She was sitting in the parlor with a tray of beans in her lap, picking out the stones, and she looked like maybe she had been crying.

  I put down my bag. “Yes,” I said. “I’m home.”

  Four

  Vivek

  I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them.

  So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?

  Five

  After Vivek died, Osita went to Port Harcourt and drank until the days were sabotaged in his memory. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and when he got there, no one cared about where or what he had come from. He was tall and immaculately dark-skinned, muscled and handsome and generous with drinks, so the oil workers he fell in with were more than happy to spend time with him. There were hotel rooms and some women, and a memory of dirty glasses stacked high and teetering before they crashed into a sink and broke, then the warped sound of people laughing. Osita watched the glass bounce. He felt carpet against his back and tasted a vileness in his mouth, as if someone had vomited into it. A girl straddled his hips and lowered her face to his, but it blurred to nothing.

  Then he was floating on an inflation tube in someone’s pool, his hands and feet trailing in the water. A bald woman was treading water next to him. “You’re crying,” she said. It was only then that Osita noticed the tears slipping into his ears. It was evening and the light was leaving. “It’s raining,” he told her, slurring his words.

  She laughed. “It’s not raining.”

  “It’s raining inside me,” he said, and a wave of darkness took over. When he woke up, he was lying on a pool chair on his stomach, his head turned to the side. There was a small pile of sand on the cement next to him, thrown over his drying vomit. No one else was by the pool. Osita sat up and found a bottle of schnapps that someone had left on the floor. It was still a quarter full.

  He drank some more.

  He was gone for a few weeks, and they only found him because his aunt came to Port Harcourt looking. One of the Nigerwives there connected Kavita with a taxi driver who knew everyone in town.

  “He’s tall,” she told him. “Very black. Gorimakpa. And one of his front teeth is broken.”

  After two days, the taxi driver took her to one of the hotels. The receptionist quickly allowed her upstairs because she was Indian and angry and demanding things in a raised voice. When they unlocked a door near the end of the corridor, Kavita walked in to find Osita lying on the bed, snoring loudly, his breath gurgling in his chest. She flinched at the smell of the room and shoved his shoulder. Osita jumped up, grunting in alarm and rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days; stubble spread from the curve of his skull to his face.

  “Aunty Kavita? What are you doing here?”

  “Put on your clothes,” she said. “I’m taking you home.”

  He stood up, obeying automatically, even as his head swam. “Give me five minutes,” he said, stumbling to the bathroom in his boxers as Kavita watched him. It was impossible for Kavita to see Osita without seeing her son, Vivek—the two of them as boys, sitting together at the dining table, running through her house with their wrestling toys, fighting on the parlor carpet. When she started looking for the small charm Vivek used to wear around his neck and couldn’t find it, Osita had been the first person who came to mind.

  The charm had been missing since before the burial, but Kavita hadn’t wanted to look for it properly then. If she found it too soon, she would’ve had to bury him with it; even Chika had noticed it was missing. If she found it afterward, she could keep it for herself. She went through Vivek’s room looking for it after the burial, but it wasn’t there. She called Maja and Rhatha and Ruby and told them to ask the children if any of them had seen it. All of them said no. The only person remaining was Osita, but since Kavita wasn’t talking to Mary, she made Chika call Ekene and ask for him.

  “We haven’t seen him,” Ekene said. “We’re even a bit worried. He said he was going to Port Harcourt for work but we haven’t heard from him since. It’s not like him to behave like this. Mary says he was drinking heavily before he left. I don’t know what’s going to happen to that boy.”

  Chika had said it was ridiculous to go chasing after Osita. “He’s twenty-three, he’s not a child anymore,” he said. “Leave that man alone.” Kavita ignored him and went to Port Harcourt anyway. She had to find that charm.

  Now, standing in her nephew’s hotel room, she felt a little jealous. If she could have run away and fallen apart like this, doing God-knows-what with God-knows-who, she would have done so in a heartbeat. But she had a husband, and useless as he was, he was something she didn’t want to leave, not now.

  Kavita heard the water start running from the showerhead, then the louder hiss of her nephew urinating against the inside curve of the toilet bowl. She looked around the room, at the clothes and underwear scattered on the floor, at the empty bottles and condom wrappers, grimacing when she saw a used condom lying next to the bed. Mary would have a fit if she saw this, she thought. Sometimes Kavita missed her sister-in-law, but whenever that pain showed up in her chest, she reminded herself that the Mary of today was not the same Mary she’d known all those years ago. You lost that sister a long time ago; she’s gone, just like Ahunna. The only difference is that her body is still walking around.

  The sounds of water from the bathroom turned off, and a few minutes later Osita came out dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Kavita watched him collect his scattered things and stuff them into the suitcase. His embarrassment was palpable as he picked up the condom wrappers and the used condom, tossing them in the wastepaper basket, but his aunt didn’t say anything and so, gratefully, neither did he.

  “I’m ready,” he said, zippering the suitcase and levering it upright. Kavita nodded and Osita looked around the room one more time as they left.

  * * *

  —

  As they drove out of Port Harcourt, Osita rested his head on the window and fell in and out of sleep, slivers of memory glimmering in his head. The fact of the hotel room was strange—he couldn’t remember checking into it in the first place. He’d been relieved to see the condom wrappers, but he only had vague memories of using them. Things had gotten even stranger when his aunt appeared, barely seeming real, but he had followed her as if she was salvation, and now they were going home.

  Osita pressed his forehead against the glass of the window as a blurry memory tried to push forward. There had been a man. He rubbed his eyes and tried to place the image. Yes, there had definitely been a man, in that same hotel room. Short and stocky, with hairy muscles. Lebanese. Osita vaguely remembered the man undressing him, then removing his own shirt to expose a firm potbelly. His unfamiliar voice calling Osita beautiful, so black and so beautiful. Osita had been silent, his head swimming, his limbs clumsy. Slivers of memory: The man’s sweat matting the hair on their chests as he ground against Osita, a fog of raised voices. Osita’s cheek pressed into the mattress, a hand forcing the back of his neck down, the man’s hips pushing, seeking. The sound of heavy grunting, a stab of pain, a flare of rage.

  In the car, Osita jerked back from the window and looked at his right hand. It was swollen. As he stared at it, dull pain filtering up his arm, he remembered rising up from the bed with a roar, his left hand wrapping around the Lebanese man’s throat, then watching the sneering power drain out of his eyes, replaced by a sickly fear. The man had thought Osita was too d
runk to resist, but Osita was much taller than him, much bigger, and powered by senseless grief that was ready to evolve into rage. He’d held the man by the throat and punched his face with his free hand in a flurry of short sharp blows that split the man’s eyebrow and washed blood down his cheek. The darkness came back, and the next memory was of the man stumbling out of the door holding his clothes against his chest, swearing loudly.

  Osita had collapsed onto the bed and Kavita had woken him up. It was, now that he thought about it, a very good thing that she’d come to get him when she did. He had a feeling the Lebanese man would have returned—people don’t react well to their power being beaten out of them. He cradled his hand, wondering why he hadn’t noticed it while showering. Then, the pain had been diffuse—everything, inside him and out, had hurt—but now it was concentrated and loud. Kavita reached out and gently examined the injured hand, ignoring his wincing. She rummaged in her bag and handed him some Panadol and a bottle of water. “Take,” she said. Osita swallowed the tablets obediently. The chasm in his chest was riddled with pain, as his mind compared memories of Vivek’s touch with that of the stranger in the hotel room. There had been a party, he recalled now, and all the people had bled away until only the man was left, his greedy hands “helping” Osita to bed. The whole time in Port Harcourt, Osita had fucked only women—it had been like that since Vivek died. It felt safer, as if he wasn’t giving any important parts of himself away: not his soul or heart, just his body, which didn’t matter anyway. The stranger’s assault felt especially violent because of that, and Osita was glad he’d beaten him up.

  Fucking foreigner, thinking he could take whatever he wanted. No man had touched him since Vivek died, and the way Osita felt now, perhaps no man ever would again.

  He rested his head on Kavita’s shoulder. She patted his cheek. “Try and sleep,” she said, “there’s go-slow.” Osita closed his eyes, and they made the rest of the drive back to Ngwa in silence.

  * * *

  —

  The charm Kavita was looking for had been a gift she’d received from Dr. Khatri when Vivek was still a baby. It was made of silver, in the image of Ganesh, and it hung from a thin silver chain. “Give it to your son,” he’d said. “Never let him take it off.” Kavita could still remember the warmth of her uncle’s hands as he pressed it into hers, the octagon of the pendant cutting slightly into her palm. “Promise me, beti.”

  Even though Kavita had converted to Catholicism, even though the charm was an idol, she had agreed. She kept it for several years, afraid that Vivek would swallow the pendant as a toddler and choke. On the day she finally gave it to him, when he was six, Vivek looked at her with his serious dark eyes and insisted on putting it on himself. His hands moved like a ritual as he lifted the chain over his head and let it drop. From that day on, Ganesh rested just below the hollow of Vivek’s collarbone, but it was missing when his body turned up by their front door. After the burial, Chika decided that it must have been stolen, of course it had been stolen—it was silver, real silver, after all, not that plated nonsense. But Kavita didn’t want to hear it. It couldn’t have been stolen, couldn’t have been lost. He must have removed it and put it somewhere.

  “He never took it off, woman.” Chika hadn’t bothered to rise from the bed as he said it, his eyes following her as she rummaged through her dressing table. “Why would it be there? You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Shut up!” she shouted. “You don’t know. You don’t know what happened. You don’t know where he put it! If you don’t want to help me, then leave me alone.” Chika shook his head and turned over, backing her, leaving her to her madness. Futility had pressed him flat.

  Kavita didn’t have time to talk to her husband. His friends had been calling the house to see how he was doing; even Eloise called a few times to check on him. All Kavita could think about was finding that necklace. She kept hoping Osita would know where it was.

  “You can stay as long as you like,” she said when they reached the house. “Help me search his room for the pendant. You know which one I’m talking about? The silver one?”

  Osita nodded. “The one with the elephant-head god on it.”

  “Yes, exactly. If he took it off, he would have put it somewhere safe. I’ve looked, but I know how you boys are. There must be somewhere special, somewhere I haven’t looked yet.” Her face was lit with a desperate hope.

  It made Osita uncomfortable. He knew as well as Chika did that Vivek never took the pendant off, but he could tell it would be pointless to say that to Kavita. When they stepped into Vivek’s room, Osita paused at the doorway, his skin skittering. It was strange to be there, in that new emptiness. He looked at the wine-colored velvet curtains that blocked out the sun, and remembered the afternoons they’d spent there—building elaborate wars on the bedspread as children, listening to music, talking about their crushes. And then, years later, after Vivek came back from university, those sparse afternoons when they weren’t at Juju’s house or in the boys’ quarters, when they drew the velvet curtains closed and lay in the dark, whispering. Now the air in the room tasted dusty and alone.

  Kavita looked back at Osita and he stepped in, scratching his head. “Erm, maybe here?” he said, walking over to the bookcase. “He used to hide things inside his books.”

  “Just any of them?” Kavita stood by his shoulder, peering at the shelves.

  “No.” Osita pulled down one book: Vivek’s copy of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah. “Usually just this one,” he said, opening it. A dry pressed flower fell out as he flipped through its pages, and Kavita caught it carefully. She turned it over in her hands as Osita slid some letters out of the book and into his pocket without her noticing. “It’s not here,” he said. Kavita looked up, disappointed, and set the flower on the shelf.

  “Are you sure?” Osita handed her the book. She looked through it slowly, then shook it, as if the pendant would burst out from the pages. “Isn’t there somewhere else he could have kept it?”

  Osita pretended to think, looking around the room again. The performance was depressing him, especially because he knew it would end badly for her. He walked over to the mattress and lifted it to check underneath.

  “I already looked there,” Kavita said. “Only some condoms.”

  Osita was glad she couldn’t see his face. He went through the desk drawers as Kavita trailed behind him, her face growing sadder and sadder. “It’s not here, is it?” she said finally.

  Osita sighed. “I’m so sorry, Aunty Kavita. I don’t think it is.” Guilt filled him as she shook her head, dashing the edge of her hand against her eyes.

  “It was like a part of him,” she said, “and now it’s gone and he’s gone.” She sniffled and looked up at her nephew, her face crumpling. “He’s gone, Osita. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “I know, Aunty. I’m sorry.” He hugged her in the humming silence of Vivek’s empty room, holding her as she cried.

  * * *

  —

  Down the corridor, Chika listened to his wife’s swelling sobs, his phone beside him, lit up with missed calls. He didn’t move from their bed.

  Six

  Vivek

  I kept the book for the title, for how it was spelled. Beautyful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn’t swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn’t fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty.

  Beauty.

  I wanted to be as whole as that word.

  Seven

  Osita

  I spent my last year of secondary school avoiding Vivek’s house, not wanting to see his eyes or deal with the shattering in his voice. I didn’t see Elizabeth either, but everything felt so spoiled with her; I couldn’t imagine
fixing it. I avoided the sports club, convinced she’d be there if I came, swimming slow laps in the pool or heading to the squash courts, her legs moving apart from my own.

  My mother was quietly delighted that I was spending so much time at home. The deadlines to apply for universities abroad came and passed. Aunty Kavita might have reminded her, but the reminders never made their way to me. I wondered if I should follow up, but after my fight with Vivek, it felt easier to just let it go. I told myself that it had always been more of Aunty Kavita’s dream, anyway. It was a strange thing for my mother and me to be accidentally united on—this idea of a foreign education dying like an unwatered plant in a dark corner. Instead I applied to universities in the country, those closer to home. Vivek’s family had been selling us dreams I was no longer buying; my father was right, they were not my home.

  Vivek came to my graduation with his parents. He and I acted like everything was fine when we met, but we avoided each other for the rest of the day. Before they left, Aunty Kavita came up to me.

  “How come we haven’t been seeing you around, beta? Did you hear back from the American schools? I sent your mother the application forms. You sent them in, yes?”

  I had no idea what forms she was talking about; I’d never seen them. “Sorry, Aunty. I didn’t get into any of the schools.” I tried to look ashamed, which wasn’t very difficult. “I was afraid you’d be disappointed in me.”