by Uwem Akpan
But each time they brought up a new subject or ordered more drinks, I started giggling like they were going to surprise me with another badass toast.
“So, what are you doing tonight?” Brad asked.
“After this, we mean,” Alejandra said, forking the last piece of salmon from Brad’s plate.
“Nothing,” I said. “Maybe work?”
“Come on, man, you’ve got the whole weekend,” he said.
“Ekong, we were thinking of catching a late movie,” she said.
“Absolutely, I’m coming!” I said, almost choking on my soda.
“Fucking perfect,” he said, giving me a fist bump. “We’re trying to decide between two movies, Split and Suicide Squad. Great reviews. You make the choice.”
I chose Suicide Squad without waiting for them to say what they were about. I liked Brad and Alejandra’s spontaneous spirit. I also felt they had so enjoyed our outing they were finding a way to prolong it. It was an evening to remember. Chelsea was my best part of NYC so far, because of how they made me feel.
We had no interest in dessert, but they were in no hurry to leave. So I asked Brad what his war story was. Alejandra quickly ordered for three cups of coffee. When the waiter placed our cups before us, Alejandra rubbed Brad’s back.
“Vietnam,” Brad said stoically, his hands clasped in front of him like in prayer, as the waiter poured our coffee. “The Vietnam War has fucking shredded my extended family to this day. My cousin committed suicide in the rice paddies of Vietnam upon learning my grandma was protesting the war in Union Square. My grandpa’s brother never returned from the fucking Korean War …” Alejandra nudged Brad to drink his coffee. His trembling fingers betrayed his pain.
Brad said, “Well, the point was that I never go to my extended family at Thanksgiving any longer, because it always turns into a big argument between the hawks and the doves, warmongers and peaceniks. It never fucking changes.” But, like Alejandra, he had remained quite nostalgic for the celebrations during his childhood. I reached across the table to hold his hands and said I knew what it meant for the two wars that happened long before he was born to still be raging within this tough-talking New Yorker.
Brad looked away and pulled his hands back and folded his arms. Alejandra said he found it difficult discussing wars. We finished our coffees.
BUT MY NEW FRIENDS were not done with surprising me on this magical night.
The bill came with pictures of our faces during the toasts—including our biggest laughs when we toasted our survival of the bedbugs. Apparently, when Alejandra claimed to use the restroom at the beginning, she had gone to finalize plans for the restaurant staff to secretly take photos of us during the toasts, having put me on the seat with optimal view. “You guys are too mischievous!” I said as we roared again with laughter.
The waiters cheered that they had gotten the shots right. They forwarded them to our email addresses. Alejandra emailed them to Jeff—who she said played a role in organizing this surprise. When I called to thank him for a memorable evening, he joked they should frame the photo and hang it in my apartment, an elixir, a bronze serpent, for the days when the bugs would roar back or brook no relief. “Jeff’s got the worst mouth in Manhattan!” Alejandra warned me, as we left for the movie theater. “Hey, listen, we believe he’s the only one who knows the secret of avoiding the bugs. But he won’t say, maintaining the secret is not useful. We just want to know what it is.”
I did not know why Jeff would hide something like that from them. But I promised I would try my best to get the information.
IN THE MORNING, I rode the E to Queens to buy Nigerian foodstuff. I spent the afternoon cooking abak-atama soup and steaming wraps of corned beef moi moi, boiled-egg moi moi, and sardine moi moi. And with all the sweet thick Starbucks drinks I was consuming, I prepared even more etidot soup—which was what my grandma had used to control her diabetes. After serving the soups into small plastic containers and stacking everything up in the freezer, I went to spoil myself in Starbucks.
Later I saw Jeff Wengui smoking and pacing up and down our block. He told me he heard we had a blast, from the dinner in Chelsea to the movies. We posed for a bunch of selfies with mischievous faces, trying to mimic the Chelsea photos.
“Next time you must be there,” I said, sipping my tea.
Jeff paused and hesitated and looked down. “Ekong, do you think you civilians can talk about wars? I really love Brad, but I avoid talking war shit with him or anyone. Sometimes he wants to ask questions about Iraq, but I never want to remember that place, you know. His father was deployed there during the First Iraq War in 1991, when Brad was only four. He saw him return in a wheelchair and die a year later. I think it still hurts him bad.”
“Courage, my friend, courage.”
Already, in a short while, we had traveled a long way from those early days of silent confrontations. Listening to Jeff, I felt even closer to Brad. It was even more profound, more intimate, that I did not get the entire story from Brad himself, but from Jeff, his friend, who struggled to share even while nursing his own war demons. I could not thank my ancestors enough for the warm blanket of intimacy that was wrapping itself around my new small community.
Jeff cleared his throat. “I googled your fellowship. I know you’re working on the long effects of the Biafran War.” He stalled and threw away his cigarette and put his hands in his pockets and looked down. I felt bad, like I was forcing him to remember Iraq. I adopted his silence and moved beside him, shoulder to shoulder, facing the street, facing a line of mounds of sealed transparent bags standing on the curb like badly spaced flower shrubs. I stared at these bags as though I could see the bedbugs inside.
The wind came in, big and strong. It skimmed the sealed plastic and drew a muffled whistle. I knew this was not the time to ask Jeff for his bedbugs secret.
JEFF QUIETLY SAID he was offended by my comments about the Chinese on Monday. I apologized and said the Chinese were also creating jobs. I tried not to be judgmental because now I was talking to a friend. I swallowed my venom because maybe I should say Jeff—away from Brad and Alejandra—was more expressive, vulnerable.
He asked whether the Chinese treated our people better than the Americans. I pretended I did not understand his question, but it did unsettle me a bit. I did not like these comparisons. And since he was Chinese American, with a foot in both camps, I could never win. Talking colonialism, any type, simply exhausted me. It gave me no joy to compare our torrid procession of colonial masters, white, Black, or Asian.
“But, Ekong, do you think the Chinese in Nigeria today could possibly treat your minority peoples worse than the Biafrans?” he said abruptly, glancing at me.
It felt like he was turning the screw on me. I turned and faced him. My mind dwelled on the African immigrants who were being beaten and locked up in freezing immigration centers by the Chinese authorities in Zhangzhou. I was angry and ashamed because in Nigeria our police protected the Chinese like white people.
“Well, Jeff, it’s difficult to make these comparisons,” I managed to say.
“Hey, you’re dodging!” he said folding his arms.
“I can honestly say it’s easier to get a Chinese visa than an American or European one. Chinese consular officers don’t belittle us even though China doesn’t believe in human rights. But, you know, China has been known to do very nasty things to its own citizens! I’m saying it’s just difficult to judge or compare Igbo colonialism in a three-year war fifty years ago to what a real superpower like China is doing right now in peacetime. For example, I don’t know why China is bringing fake drugs into Africa, or sponsoring killings in the gold mines of Ghana and Congo …”
He stepped back, lit a new cigarette, and puffed and blew into the wall. I threw my cold Starbucks tea into a trash can and searched his face, as he pulled at his goatee, his eyes searching the skies. He was not the unfeeling tease the others knew him to be, or the distant Chinese I saw in our streets back home.
“Yes.”
“Well, I say hire the Biafrans to help you with worldwide victim propaganda!”
“Not funny, man. I’ve done everything for America, my country … almost dying in Iraq. Yet sometimes you live with this doubt about whether you’re American enough. Whether you belong. Some days, this insecurity frightens you more than facing enemy bullets in Iraq.”
“Be strong.”
“Don’t get me wrong. Brad and Alejandra are wonderful friends. See how far they went to welcome you to Hell’s Kitchen? See how they refused to spray their apartment, to keep you safe? We’re fine. We make mistakes, we apologize to each other. I’m sorry you misunderstood us the day my brother died. Been here five years. We’ve grown in talking deep stuff. But you’re so right: anyone who is a minority just has to be strong and hopeful.”
I MET KEITH on the landing of the second floor, on his way out. He looked really sharp. But he was not his usual self; he was looking daggers at me. I quickly complimented his clothes. He said he was going to a dinner and a Broadway show.
I appreciated when he straight-up told me he was worried for me, because, these days, I seemed to be having a lot of fun with the white and Chinese and Latino folks of Hell’s Kitchen, with everyone but him. He told me I was always in a hurry around him. “Ekong, the other evening,” he said, “you literally ran away, claiming you needed to call the Bronx, and yet seconds later I saw you lugging down Jeff’s garbage, like a slave. I just wanted to tell you how confused I am. And I wanted to tell you my brother did the Ancestry.com and 23andme.com stuff and said we have genes from sixteen African countries. None was Nigeria, which is where I really want to go. I mean, I really love what your little niece said the other day about your village in Nigeria … you Africans don’t understand the nightmare of the strange longing for home some of us suffer in this country.”
“I would just pick a place to visit,” I said when I got a chance. “I mean, you can still come to Nigeria.”
“But I just wish I knew my ancestors’ true ethnic group! You understand how you really, really want to belong?”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t … you’re spending way too much time with our neighbors! You’ve forgotten I was right behind you that day, recording everything. Everything. On this same damn stairwell. Jeff couldn’t even afford to look up, like Black people were dirt. Should I forward the clip to you, to refresh your memory? Do you know how traumatizing this could be for that girl? Come on, nigger, don’t tell me what lies and spin they fed you with! You have no damn clue what it means to be a minority because you’re all Black in your country.”
Though I knew he did not understand our tribalism issues, of course I also knew I did not have his same gut understanding of his racism issues. But I did not want to be impoverished by our joint ignorance, to allow it to define my budding relationships, to block me from the growth that could only come from relating with sundry people, the kind of diversity only cosmopolitan NYC offered.
I had chosen to remain positive.
I could never let anyone, not Usen, not Keith, decide whom I should befriend based on the racial or tribal or gender histories of our broken world. I had not come all the way from Ikot Ituno-Ekanem to enlist in entrenched racial divisions in NYC. Besides, I had just been humbled by the confessions of the war woes of my neighbors and their families, of their direct or passed-on traumas of all kinds of wars. So far, I had succeeded in limiting my malice to the Humane Society Two at work, instead of blanketing the whole place with it. And who was I even to think that I, Ekong Otis Udousoro, did not harbor any shred of distrust or discrimination, of any kind, in my thought or action?
Well, since Keith had stood his ground, I apologized and confessed that bugs had united me with the neighbors. But he stepped away from me in worse horror than when he saw the cop selfie. I told him even if the exterminators did not succeed on Monday, Jeff might know the secret to save my ass from bedbugs. “Oh no, be warned,” Keith said. “Chinks will never help you! Chinks betrayed the civil rights movements, not just by not joining us to ask for those rights, but by cornering the benefits once we succeeded. Anyway, your friends had the bugs two years ago. They’ll have them again next year! I’ve never had them—not once. Maybe when you take care of other people’s precious dogs, you’re a bit more responsible, cleaner. I think this cleanliness is also part of why the landlord respects me …”
When the pets whined upstairs like I was hurting Keith, he dropped his voice, excused himself, and bounced downstairs. While I clomped up the stairwell, certain in my research that bugs had nothing to do with dirt, I abhorred what was happening to my relationship with Keith and Usen, my two Black anchors in NYC.
CHAPTER 15
Ikud, the tortoise, knows how to embrace his wife
I HAD JUST FINISHED A CUP OF TEA AND A WRAP OF moi moi for breakfast when Ofonime called. First, she apologized for “everything” and said she had to back her husband for peace’s sake. “Ekong, please, just accept your relative in New Jersey as you see him!” she said portentously. When I saw she was not ready to say more, I said I understood everything, to get her off the phone.
On the long train ride into New Jersey, I read the last chapters of Thumbtack in My Shoe, the last of the eight manuscripts for the next editorial meeting. It was sponsored by Bob Hamm.
The book was set in Trinidad and Tobago, and I wished it would never finish, because I was in love with the first-person point of view of the eighty-year-old protagonist. The story began when the doctor told him he had one more week to live: it was a reflection on his life as a cook in different households. In spite of the brutal racism he had suffered all his life both from white and Asian families, his portraits of Caribbean food and beautiful beaches and the Main Ridge Forest Reserve were as nostalgic as Ujai’s longing for the fresh fruits and the scenic valley of Ikot Ituno-Ekanem, or as evocative as the descriptions of the lush beaches and hilly islands of Mistress of the Sea. However, what made the book most memorable was its unique exploration of “Black shame,” that the old man’s last employer, a Black family, had been the most abusive.
I sent a quick email to Bob, to let him know how much I loved this book and how much it reminded me of my own Biafran shame. I was reflecting on the Biafran reconciliation meeting that awaited me in New Jersey when I got a despondent text from Emily. Jack had told her Chad Twiss had indeed seduced the author of Trails of Tuskegee. Chad had not only promised to get him enough money to buy a house and send his kids to college—things the author had discussed with Cecilia Myers. No, he talked up a big movie option and simultaneous six-figure publishing deals around the world. He had fixed the auction for Wednesday.
I called Emily when I changed over to a bus. I did not know what to say, except to feel bad for Cecilia and Emily, who first believed in the book. But Emily said if I must tell Father Kiobel, I must let him know that losing the book was not a big deal to her. “He thinks too highly of the publishing industry, ha,” she said, and laughed.
My head throbbed with images of Chad shitting on Trails of Tuskegee behind the author’s back yet pocketing his fat percentage.
WHEN I ALIGHTED in a little picturesque city in New Jersey, it was as chilly as yesterday. But I was dressed like these Americans around me, in jeans and a shirt and a gray I ♥ NY sweatshirt. Looking around, I noticed most of the Blacks who had traveled with me moved in one direction. And most whites moved in the other.
I studied my map app twice, yet it still asked me to move in the white direction. After a brisk twenty-five-minute walk, I spotted Tuesday’s church, its tall gold-plated cross cutting into the blue clear skies, a heavenly lightning rod. I put my map away and followed the cross like the Star of David. Sometimes it was obliterated by thick foliage and other buildings, but it had entered my
heart. I knew where I was going. The houses here were more spread out on the streets than in the Bronx, with their well-kept lawns and flowers and hedges. The meadows bore a hint of fall, a fire approaching the leaves.
I waved confidently to folks on their porches or lawns playing and barbecuing, but I got nothing back. But, unlike in Chelsea, I did not like the smell of this American barbecue. It smelled of lighter fluid and chemicals of instant charcoal. A Black man drove out of his garage. I stopped and waved with two hands. But even through the windshield I could see that the shock on his face from seeing another Black ass was more exaggerated than a face carved on a watermelon. When he drove by, he stuck out his hand and gave me the middle finger salute.
My faith had landed me in a strange world.
When the traffic increased on the road, I knew the early Mass had just ended. Of those departing on foot, nobody looked me in the face, and a few crossed over to the other side. As they say, if folks leaving the shrine do not answer to your greetings, maybe the oracle itself is deaf. I called Tuesday to say I was three minutes away. He said I should wait in front of the church, for he was in a quick meeting in the basement. “Please, no worries, take as much time as possible,” I responded in an attempt to be as pleasant as Ofonime suggested.
The fields on both sides of the church were marked by life-sized Stations of the Cross, like the ones of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and as I drew near to this beautiful church, the smell of incense hit me. The individual Stations were linked with a winding path of non-motorized tarmac, while ours back in Ikot Ituno-Ekanem was paved with lose pebbles. I could have stared at the fields forever, for, in all my stay in America, nothing had reminded me more of home.