The Death of Vivek Oji

by Akwaeke Emezi

  In the picture, Vivek was wearing the dress, a wraparound tied on the left of his waist. The neckline fell into a V, showing the bone of his sternum. His hair was down and falling around his face. Juju had combed and plaited it with gel into a hundred small plaits, then let them dry and released them into many small waves cascading down his body. He was sitting in my lap with his legs crossed, the dress riding high on his thighs, his torso leaning forward as he laughed into the camera. One arm was around my neck and I was looking at his face. My expression made me cringe. It was, for lack of a better word, adoring. Unfettered. As if there was no danger of anyone seeing me gaze at him like that. As if we were alone and I wasn’t afraid and we weren’t cousins and any of this wasn’t terrifying.

  Vivek had shaved his chest and legs—he did that often in those last few months—and his toes were painted a red that matched the flowers on his dress. I remembered the first time I saw him in that dress; I was surprised at its long sleeves and shoulder pads. It would have been almost demure if not for the neckline, which he would cover with his hair. But he spun around to show it off, and for once he looked happy and not tired, not like he was dying or suffering. I couldn’t help but be happy for him. I had surrendered by then, you see, and we were in Juju’s house, in our bubble where everything was okay and the outside world didn’t exist. Sitting on his grave with the dress in my hands, I felt the weeping churn in my chest.

  Everything would have stayed okay if he hadn’t left the bubble. If he hadn’t felt the need to start going outside and putting himself at risk. How were we supposed to protect him if he wouldn’t stay inside?

  On the day the market burned, I had gone to Juju’s house to look for him. She told me he’d gone out again. I had shouted at her, unfairly, as if I didn’t know she couldn’t stop him. No one could stop him—we had all tried already, many times. I went out, jumped on an okada, and set out to look for him. I knew he liked to visit one woman near the market who sold puff-puff, so I told the okada man to go down Chief Michael Road. We had just passed the first junction when we heard the noise and saw the crowd in the distance. My okada swerved to the side of the road and stopped.

  “Commot, commot!” shouted the driver.

  “You’re not going again?” I asked.

  “You dey craze? You no dey see riot? My friend, commot, make I go. Keep your money sef.”

  Grumbling and cursing, I got off and he sped away. I sighed and looked around and that was when I saw Vivek a few blocks down, unmistakable in that dress. I called his name but he didn’t turn around and so I ran to him, pushing his shoulder when I reached him.

  “You don’t hear your name?!”

  My cousin turned and looked at me calmly. “I’m Nnemdi,” she corrected.

  I wiped my face with my hand. Today of all days. “Okay, sorry, Nnemdi. Please, can we go back to Juju’s house?”

  “No problem. But I want to get some puff-puff first.”

  I stared at her, then gestured to the mayhem ahead of us. “You want to enter that? For puff-puff?”

  She looked at the crowd and her face wavered. She was twisting her hands together like she did when she was nervous. “It won’t take long. Can we go after I buy it?” she said.

  I wanted to shout at her, but the last time I did that in public, she had threatened to punch me in the face, then ran away. I wasn’t able to chase her—it would’ve looked too somehow—so I went back to Juju’s house and waited till she came back on her own. This time, I gently held her shoulders and looked into her eyes. The cotton of the dress was soft under my palms. “Nnemdi,” I said. “I’m sure even the woman selling it has packed her things and gone already. She won’t be there. Everyone is going, see.”

  A plume of smoke was rising against the horizon from the market. The road beside us was packed with speeding vehicles, buses and taxis and private cars. A trader carrying folded yards of cloth piled precariously around her zoomed past on an okada. It was weaving through the other vehicles, and as it passed us, it swerved to avoid a pothole and some of the cloth fell off, landing in a cloud of sand. The woman shouted at the okada driver to stop, but he didn’t, shouting back at her as he continued to speed away from the brewing mob.

  “We have to go,” I told my cousin. “Biko, before something happens to you.”

  She glared at me. “Why is it me you think something will happen to? You nko?”

  “Please, don’t start this now. You know it’s not even safe for you to be going out of Juju’s house like this, let alone in this area, let alone in this situation! Don’t act stupid. Let’s go!”

  “I see.” Her face had settled into coldness. “So now you think I’m stupid?”

  “Nnemdi, please. You can fight me when we reach Juju’s house. Let’s just go. Biko.”

  “You’re ashamed of me,” she said, her voice surprised. “That’s why you don’t like me going out like this. It’s like you’re always ashamed, Osita. First of yourself, then of us, now of me.”

  “Jesus Christ. That’s not true. Abeg—”

  “No, it’s true. You don’t mind anything when we’re inside and nobody can see us, but that’s why you don’t like me to go outside like this. You don’t want anyone to see me. Or is it that you don’t want them to see me with you?”

  I groaned and clutched at my head. We didn’t have time for this. What would happen if someone looked too closely at her, someone holding a machete and buffeted by a mob? How quickly they could hurt her, kill her. I grabbed her arm and started to drag her away. “We don’t have time to be quarreling on the road!”

  She tried to pull away and started hitting me. “Let me go! Hapu m aka!!”

  I lost it. “We have to go now! Do you know what they’ll do to you?”

  Nnemdi gasped and wrenched away from me with all her strength, breaking my hold. I was startled by the pain in her eyes, surprised that the truth could hurt her so much. She pulled herself away with such force that she stumbled, and her heel caught on a stone, and she fell. It happened so fast. I saw her head strike the raised cement edge of the gutter at the side of the road. I saw her body slump, eyes closed, blood pooling into the sand within seconds.

  I screamed.

  “No no no no!” I ran and knelt by her, sliding one hand under her neck to lift her head up. “Nnemdi. Nnemdi!” Maybe she wouldn’t recognize that name after hitting her head. “Vivek,” I whispered. “Vivek, open your eyes. Please, bhai. Open your eyes.” My hand was now wet with blood—there was so much blood. Panic was a vulture inside my body, trying to get out, pecking and flapping wildly at me. I looked around and scrabbled to get the cloth that had fallen from the okada. I ripped off the plastic covering and lifted her neck again, using the cloth to try and stop the bleeding.

  Hospital. I needed to get her to a hospital. No one around me was paying attention; everything was chaos; people were running all around us. I lifted Nnemdi and carried her against my chest, using my upper arm to cushion her head. I stood at the side of the road and an okada skidded in front of me. The driver was, unexpectedly, a woman.

  “Wetin happen?” she asked, staring at Nnemdi.

  “She fell down. Please, can you take us to a hospital?”

  She nodded. “Enter,” she said, and I climbed up behind her, carefully, sitting far back enough so Nnemdi could fit. We sped off.

  “Anyangwe Hospital,” I called out to the driver. “Do you know it?” It was just around the corner from Uncle Chika’s house, walking distance. I could run and get them while the doctors took care of Nnemdi. The driver nodded and I bent my face to Nnemdi’s, wind whistling past us. “Wake up,” I begged. “Wake up for me.” We wove through cars and I kept my arms clutched tightly, her knees draped over the crook of my elbow. Her shoes fell off and I didn’t care. When we reached the junction of a side road leading to the hospital, a giant pothole filled with water blocked most of the road. The okada
stopped at the edge.

  “My bike no fit enter that one,” she said. “E go spoil my engine. We can go around by the main road. Abi the hospital is just there?”

  “No wahala,” I said, carefully climbing down. “I can walk from here. Ego ole?”

  She waved her hand. “Forget the money. Go and make sure your wife is all right.”

  I nodded, tears solid in my eyes, and she drove away as I waded through the edge of the puddle. The side road was a shortcut, small and narrow, unpaved, shadowed by trees. I knew this small road well—there was a side gate from Uncle Chika’s compound that opened up into it. When Vivek and I were still in secondary school, we had broken the rusty padlock and cleared a path so that we could use the gate to sneak out of the compound. I got through the puddle, legs wet to my calves, and I was passing the gate when I looked down at Nnemdi and stopped.

  There was something new in her face. It didn’t look like her anymore. Hurrying, I knelt down and laid her on the ground to check her neck for a pulse. There was nothing. I held my hand in front of her nose. Nothing. My sleeve and shirt were soaked in blood. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes blurred and I felt as if I was going to faint. I shook her, called both her names, as if it would do anything. We were under a flame-of-the-forest tree. An orange flower fell down and landed on her chest.

  I knelt there, close to the fence, no one else on the road with me. I put my hand on her face and called her names again. It felt as if I was imagining the whole thing.

  I was there on the road with my cousin’s body in front of me.

  Someone was going to see me.

  The thought took precedence and adrenaline shot through me. I can’t tell you why I did what I did next, except that Uncle Chika’s house was right there, and I knew the hospital was now useless, and I didn’t know how I would answer any of their questions if I walked into either place. Vivek had always told me and Juju, “Make sure my parents don’t find out. They already have so much to deal with. Make sure they don’t find out about Nnemdi.”

  So I did what he would have wanted me to do.

  I untied the bow the dress was fastened with, and I stripped it off her body, crying the whole time, my hands shaking, my head scattered. I took the material I had used to soak up the blood and unfolded it. It was akwete, in a red-and-black pattern. I used it to cover my cousin and I picked her up again, and I walked to the side gate—the lock was never fixed—and pushed it open with my foot. I ran through the backyard, along the side of the house to the veranda, where I laid Nnemdi down by the welcome mat. There was so much blood, all over both of us. I couldn’t stop crying.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.” I stroked some hair off her face and pressed my forehead against hers, my tears falling on her nose and mouth. My uncle’s voice sifted through the window.

  “Did you hear that?” he was asking my aunt.

  “Someone is at the door?” she replied.

  I choked back a sob, sniffed, and held my cousin’s face in my hands, kissing her lips. “I have to go,” I told her. “Please, forgive me. I have to go.”

  I reached around her neck and unfastened her silver chain, the Ganesh pendant still warm against my palm. I clenched my fingers into a fist around it.

  “I love you,” I said to her silent eyes. Then I got up and ran, bent in half so I couldn’t be seen through the windows. I ran away, through the back, through the side gate, pausing only to close it behind me. I ran down the side road and picked up the dress from the ground, shaking off the orange and yellow petals that had accumulated on it. I ran down to the main road, past the hospital gates, and people stared at me, but the grief on my face must have looked familiar this close to the hospital, as if I had lost somebody there. I asked a woman selling oranges at the side of the road for a polythene bag. She stared at the blood on my clothes in alarm, but she gave me a black-and-yellow bag and handed me a sachet of pure water.

  “Clean your face,” she said. “Gịnị mere gị?”

  “I was in an accident,” I said, as I rinsed myself, pale red water in my hands.

  “Chineke! Are you okay?”

  “Yes, Ma. I’m just trying to reach home.”

  “There’s plenty blood on your shirt.”

  “It’s not my own.”

  “It’s not good to be walking around looking like that.” She called out to a woman selling clothes in a kiosk next to her, gaudy bedazzled T-shirts and ankara dresses hanging off bone-white headless mannequins. “Vero! Biko, nyem shirt for this boy.”

  The woman stuck her head out of her kiosk. “Fifty naira!” she called back. I dug into my pocket and pulled out a hundred, handing it to the orange-seller. She looked at me in surprise, then waved it at the other woman, who nodded and came out with a black T-shirt that had a bedazzled crown on it. “This one will enter him,” she said. The orange-seller gave her the hundred naira and received fifty back. She tried to give it to me but I shook my head. “It’s okay, Ma.” I put the bag between my knees and took off my shirt right there on the road, pulling on the black one. It was a little tight but it fit. I put my bloody shirt and Nnemdi’s dress into the bag, and when I looked up, both women were staring at me.

  “That’s how you just naked yourself outside your house?” said the clothes-seller.

  “Mind your business,” the orange-seller told her. “Get home safe, you hear?” she said to me, and I nodded.

  “Daalụ, Ma.”

  There was still blood drying on my jeans, but they were dark, so they didn’t show much. I went straight to the bus stop and took a bus to Owerri. When I paid the conductor, some of the notes were stained with blood, but he didn’t even blink.

  My parents weren’t home when I reached the house, so I took the key from under the mat and let myself in. I had enough time to take a bath and burn my bloodied clothes with the rubbish in the backyard, which I was supposed to burn anyway. I don’t know why I kept the dress, knotting it into that bag and putting it under my bed. I rinsed the necklace and kept it under my mattress, even though I risked my mother finding it if she came into my room. It was unlikely that she would. I couldn’t bury it—I just couldn’t.

  I still remember the blood washing down the drain of the bathtub as I poured containers of water over my body, scrubbing myself until the water was clear and then pouring and scrubbing even more, going through buckets and buckets, until I had used all the water in the bathroom drum. I dried myself with a white towel, to make sure that not a drop of my cousin was left on me, then fetched water to refill the drum. Then I left the house, knowing it was only a matter of time before Uncle Chika would call to tell my father what had happened, and I didn’t want to be there to pick the call.

  When I came home late that night, my parents were weeping in the sitting room. When they told me, I wept with them as if it was my first time.

  I have pretended every day since then. I pretended with the girls and at the burial and with everyone. It was why I didn’t go to see anyone, why I stayed in Owerri. I needed to learn how to behave with this secret dropping petals inside me like this. I helped Aunty Kavita look for the necklace after she got me from Port Harcourt, as if I wouldn’t go home and pull it out, press it against my mouth, and choke back my sobs so that my parents wouldn’t hear.

  When we told Aunty Kavita our theory that Vivek had gone out as Nnemdi and someone must have killed him during the riot, I could barely talk, my throat was swelling up so much. They thought it was grief. “The boys were very close,” my aunt said afterward, finally allowing other people the right to mourn her child. I listened to them wonder what had happened to the dress, knowing the whole time that it was hidden under my bed, soft and stiff. I watched my aunt cry as she imagined the suffering her Vivek had endured. I wanted to tell her that Nnemdi didn’t feel anything from the moment she fell, that she was asleep in my arms when she died, that there wasn’t pain lik
e that, but I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. We had told her as much truth as she could handle. I was keeping the rest for myself.

  So there I was with the dress, at the grave, sitting there as the sun washed up in diluted yellow. I didn’t know what time my aunt and uncle would arrive. I felt like I was always running just a few steps ahead of them, holding secrets they couldn’t catch up to. I picked up a hoe that was lying by the back door and dug carefully at the base of the little star fruit tree, deep enough so that rain wouldn’t wash it open, trying to hack the roots apart. I used my hands to dig the rest, around the roots, making small excavations, pouring water into it to soften the soil. When it was deep enough, I took the dress out of the bag. I held it to my face, trying to smell my cousin’s skin, trying not to smell the dried blood. It smelled like nothing much. I put it inside the hole and buried it, then shifted sand and leaves on top so they wouldn’t see that something had been buried there.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told the grave. “It was an accident. I would never have hurt you, not in a thousand years. I swear to God. You were my brother and I loved you. I only wanted to protect you.”

  I put my hand on the cement and it was cold. “I miss you every single day.”

  My voice broke and the grave said nothing back. I knelt there for a long time, and finally I stood up and dusted the dirt off my knees. The sun was stronger in the sky now. I wiped my eyes and picked up the polythene bag. Holding it tight in my hand, I pulled the photograph of us out of my back pocket. I had considered burying it as well, but I couldn’t; I couldn’t let everything rot in that grave with my cousin. I stroked my thumb across the glossed surface before putting it back in my pocket with the necklace. Then I walked away, knowing that I would be leaving, going far away, to somewhere I could put his charm around my neck and wear it every day, and maybe then it would feel like he hadn’t left me after all.