Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  He drove her from the house, keeping it up until no other outcome were possible. “Blessing, our Blessing, the taxi is here!” pursuing her to the gate with mockery. Even Matthew started to laugh. Mother had to hide her mouth. He held the car door open for her. “You’d best read your Bible and give up selling all your worthless potions.”

  Father took hold of Raphael’s wrists gently. “That’s enough,” he said. “Grandmother went through many bad things.” He didn’t say it in anger. He didn’t say it like a wild man. Something somber in his voice made Raphael calm.

  “You come straight out of the bush,” Grandmother said, almost unperturbed. “No wonder my poor son is losing his mind.” She looked directly at Raphael. “The old ways did work.” Strangely, he was the only one she dealt with straightforwardly. “They wore out.”

  * * *

  Something happened to my research.

  At first the replication studies showed a less marked effect, less inherited stress, lower methyl levels. But soon we ceased to be able to replicate our results at all.

  The new studies dragged me down, made me suicidal. I felt I had achieved something with my paper, made up for all my shortcomings, done something that would have made my family proud of me if they were alive.

  Methylation had made me a full Professor. Benue State’s home page found room to feature me as an example of the university’s research excellence. I sought design flaws in the replication studies; that was the only thing I published. All my life I had fought to prove I wasn’t slow, or at least hide it through hard work. And here before the whole world, I was being made to look like a fraud.

  Then I read the work of Jonathan Schooler. The same thing had happened to him. His research had proved that if you described a memory clearly you ceased to remember it as well. The act of describing faces reduced his subjects’ ability to recognize them later. The effects he measured were so huge and so unambiguous, and people were so intrigued by the implications of what he called verbal overshadowing, that his paper was cited 400 times.

  Gradually, it had become impossible to replicate his results. Every time he did the experiment, the effect shrank by thirty percent.

  I got in touch with Schooler, and we began to check the record. We found that all the way back in the 1930s, results of E.S.P. experiments by Joseph Banks Rhine declined. In replication, his startling findings evaporated to something only slightly different from chance. It was as if scientific truths wore out, as if the act of observing them reduced their effect.

  Jide laughed and shook his head. “We think the same thing!” he said. “We always say that a truth can wear out with the telling.”

  That is why I am sitting here writing, dreading the sound of the first car arriving, the first knock on my gate.

  I am writing to wear out both memory and truth.

  * * *

  Whenever my father was away, or sometimes to escape Iveren, Mamamimi would take all us boys back to our family village. It is called Kawuye, on the road toward Taraba State. Her friend Sheba would drive us to the bus station in the market, and we would wait under the shelter, where the women cooked rice and chicken and sold sweating tins of Coca-Cola. Then we would stuff ourselves into the van next to some fat businessman who had hoped for a row of seats to himself.

  Matthew was the firstborn, and tried to boss everyone, even Mamamimi. He had teamed up with little Andrew from the moment he’d been born. Andrew was too young to be a threat to him. The four brothers fell into two teams and Mamamimi had to referee, coach, organize, and punish.

  If Matthew and I were crammed in next to each other, we would fight. I could stand his needling and bossiness only so long and then wordlessly clout him. That made me the one to be punished. Mamamimi would swipe me over the head and Matthew’s eyes would tell me that he’d done it deliberately.

  It was hot and crowded on the buses, with three packed rows of sweating ladies, skinny men balancing deliveries of posters on their laps, or mothers dandling heat-drugged infants. It was not supportable to have four boys elbowing, kneeing, and scratching.

  Mamamimi started to drive us herself in her old green car. She put Matthew in the front so that he felt in charge. Raphael and I sat in the back reading, while next to us Andrew cawed for Matthew’s attention.

  Driving by herself was an act of courage. The broken-edged roads would have logs pulled across them, checkpoints they were called, with soldiers. They would wave through the stuffed vans but they would stop a woman driving four children and stare into the car. Did we look like criminals or terrorists? They would ask her questions and rummage through our bags and mutter things that we could not quite hear. I am not sure they were always proper. Raphael would noisily flick through the pages of his book. “Nothing we can do about it,” he would murmur. After slipping them some money, Mama would drive on.

  As if by surprise, up and over a hill, we would roller-coaster down through maize fields into Kawuye. I loved it there. The houses were the best houses for Nigeria and typical of the Tiv people, round and thick-walled with high pointed roofs and tiny windows. The heat could not get in and the walls sweated like a person to keep cool. There were no wild men waiting to leap out, no poison grandmothers. My great-uncle Jacob—it is a common name in my family—repaired cars with the patience of a cricket, opening, snipping, melting, and reforming. He once repaired a vehicle by replacing the fan belt with the elastic from my mother’s underwear.

  Raphael and I would buy firewood, trading some of it for eggs, ginger, and yams. We also helped my aunty with her pig-roasting business. To burn off the bristles, we’d lower it onto a fire and watch grassfire lines of red creep up each strand. It made a smell like burning hair and Raphael and I would pretend we were pirates cooking people. Then we turned the pig on a spit until it crackled. At nights we were men, serving beer and taking money.

  We both got fat because our pay was some of the pig, and if no one was looking, the beer as well. I ate because I needed to get as big as Matthew. In the evenings the generators coughed to life and the village smelled of petrol and I played football barefoot under lights. There were jurisdictions and disagreements, but laughing uncles to adjudicate with the wisdom of a Solomon. So even the four of us liked each other more in Kawuye.

  Then after whole weeks of sanity, my mother’s phone would sing out with the voice of Mariah Carey or an American prophetess. As the screen illuminated, Mamamimi’s face would scowl. We knew the call meant that our father was back in the house, demanding our return.

  Uncle Jacob would change the oil and check the tires and we would drive back through the fields and rock across potholes onto the main road. At intersections, children swarmed around the car, pushing their hands through open windows, selling plastic bags of water or dappled plantains. Their eyes peered in at us. I would feel ashamed somehow. Raphael wound up the window and hollered at them. “Go away and stop your staring. There’s nothing here for you to see!”

  Baba would be waiting for us reading ThisDay stiffly, like he had broomsticks for bones, saying nothing.

  After that long drive, Mama would silently go and cook. Raphael told him off. “It’s not very fair of you, Popsie, to make her work. She has just driven us back all that way just to be nice to us and show us a good time in the country.”

  Father’s eyes rested on him like drills on DIY.

  That amused Raphael. “Since you choose to be away all the time, she has to do all the work here. And you’re just sitting there.” My father rattled the paper and said nothing. Raphael was twelve years old.

  * * *

  I was good at football, so I survived school well enough. But my brother was legendary.

  They were reading The Old Man and The Sea in English class, and Raphael blew up at the teacher. She said that lions were a symbol of Hemingway being lionized when young. She said the old fisherman carrying a mast made him some sort of Jesus with his cross. He told her she had a head full of nonsense. I can see him doing it. He would bark
with sudden laughter and bounce up and down in his chair and declare, delighted, “That’s blasphemy! It’s just a story about an old man. If Hemingway had wanted to write a story about Jesus, he was a clever enough person to have written one!” The headmaster gave him a clip about the ear. Raphael wobbled his head at him as if shaking a finger. “Your hitting me doesn’t make me wrong.” None of the other students ever bothered us. Raphael still got straight As.

  Our sleepy little bookshops, dark, wooden, and crammed into corners of markets, knew that if they got a book on chemistry or genetics they could sell it to Raphael. He set up a business to buy textbooks that he knew Benue State was going to recommend. At sixteen he would sit on benches at the university, sipping cold drinks and selling books, previous essays, and condoms. Everybody assumed that he was already being educated there. Tall, beautiful students would call him “sah.” One pretty girl called him “Prof.” She had honey-colored, extended hair, and a spangled top that hung off one shoulder.

  “I’m his brother,” I told her proudly.

  “So you are the handsome one,” she said, being kind to what she took to be the younger brother. For many weeks I carried her in my heart.

  The roof of our Government bungalow was flat and Raphael and I took to living on it. We slept there; we even climbed the ladder with our plates of food. We read by torchlight, rigged mosquito nets, and plugged the mobile phone into our netbook. The world flooded into it; the websites of our wonderful Nigerian newspapers, the BBC, Al Jazeera, Nature, New Scientist. We pirated Nollywood movies. We got slashdotcom; we hacked into the scientific journals, getting all those ten-dollar PDFs for free.

  We elevated ourselves above the murk of our household. Raphael would read aloud in many different voices, most of them mocking. He would giggle at news articles. “Oh, story! Now they are saying Fashola is corrupt. Hee hee hee. It’s the corrupt people saying that to get their own back.”

  “Oh this is interesting,” he would say and read about what some Indian at Caltech had found out about gravitational lenses.

  My naked father would pad out like an old lion gone mangy and stare up at us, looking bewildered as if he wanted to join us but couldn’t work out how. “You shouldn’t be standing out there with no clothes on,” Raphael told him. “What would happen if someone came to visit?” My father looked as mournful as an abandoned dog.

  * * *

  Jacob Terhemba Shawo was forced to retire. He was only forty-two. We had to leave the Government Reserved Area. Our family name means “high on the hill,” and that’s where we had lived. I remember that our well was so deep that once I dropped the bucket and nothing could reach it. A boy had to climb down the stones in the well wall to fetch it.

  We moved into the house I live in now, a respectable bungalow across town, surrounded with high walls. It had a sloping roof, so Raphael and I were no longer elevated.

  The driveway left no room for Mamamimi’s herb garden, so we bought a neighboring patch of land but couldn’t afford the sand and cement to wall it off. Schoolchildren would wander up the slope into our maize, picking it or sometimes doing their business.

  The school had been built by public subscription and the only land cheap enough was in the slough. For much of the year the new two-story building rose vertically out of a lake like a castle. It looked like the Scottish islands in my father’s calendars. Girls boated to the front door and climbed up a ramp. A little beyond was a marsh, with ponds and birds and water lilies: beautiful but it smelled of drains and rotting reeds.

  We continued to go to the main cathedral for services. White draperies hung the length of its ceiling, and the stained-glass doors would accordion open to let in air. Local dignitaries would be in attendance and nod approval as our family lined up to take communion and make our gifts to the church, showing obeisance to the gods of middle-class respectability.

  But the church at the top of our unpaved road was bare concrete, always open at the sides. People would pad past my bedroom window and the singing of hymns would swell with the dawn. Some of the local houses would be village dwellings amid the aging urban villas.

  Chickens still clucked in our new narrow back court. If you dropped a bucket down this well, all you had to do was reach in for it. The problem was to stop water flooding into the house. The concrete of an inner courtyard was broken and the hot little square was never used, except for the weights that Raphael had made for himself out of iron bars and sacks of concrete. Tiny and rotund, he had dreams of being a muscleman. His computer desktop was full of a Nigerian champion in briefs. I winced with embarrassment whenever his screen sang open in public. What would people think of him, with that naked man on his netbook?

  My father started to swat flies all the time. He got long sticky strips of paper and hung them everywhere—across doorways, from ceilings, in windows. They would snag in our hair as we carried out food from the kitchen. All we saw was flies on strips of paper. We would wake up in the night to hear him slapping the walls with books, muttering, “Flies flies flies.”

  The house had a tin roof and inside we baked like bread. Raphael resented it personally. He was plump and felt the heat. My parents had installed the house’s only AC in their bedroom. He would just as regularly march in with a spanner and screwdriver and steal it. He would stomp out, the cable dragging behind him, with my mother wringing her hands and weeping. “That boy! That crazy boy! Jacob! Come see to your son.”

  Raphael shouted, “Buy another one! You can afford it!”

  “We can’t, Raphael! You know that! We can’t.”

  And Raphael said, “I’m not letting you drag me down to your level.”

  Matthew by then was nearly nineteen and had given up going to university. His voice was newly rich and sad. “Raphael. The whole family is in trouble. We would all like the AC, but if Baba doesn’t get it, he wanders, and that is a problem, too.”

  I didn’t like it that Raphael took it from our parents without permission. Shamefaced with betrayal of him, I helped Matthew fix the AC back in our parents’ window.

  Raphael stomped up to me and poked me with his finger. “You should be helping me, not turning tail and running!” He turned his back and said, “I’m not talking to you.”

  I must have looked very sad because later I heard his flip-flops shuffling behind me. “You are my brother and of course I will always talk to you. I’m covered in shame that I said such a thing to you.” Raphael had a genius for apologies, too.

  * * *

  When Andrew was twelve, our father drove him to Abuja and left him with people, some great-aunt we didn’t know. She was childless, and Andrew had come back happy from his first visit sporting new track shoes. She had bought him an ice cream from Grand Square. He went back.

  One night Raphael heard Mother and Father talking. He came outside onto the porch, his fat face gleaming. “I’ve got some gossip,” he told me. “Mamamimi and Father have sold Andrew!”

  “Sold” was an exaggeration. They had put him to work and were harvesting his wages. In return he got to live in an air-conditioned house. Raphael giggled. “It’s so naughty of them!” He took hold of my hand and pulled me with him right into their bedroom.

  Both of them were decent, lying on the bed with their books. Raphael announced, very pleased with himself. “You’re not selling my brother like an indentured servant. Just because he was a mistake and you didn’t want him born so late and want to be shot of him now.”

  Mamamimi leapt at him. He ran, laughter pealing, and his hands swaying from side to side. I saw only then that he had the keys for the SUV in his hand. He pulled me with him out into the yard, and then swung me forward. “Get the gate!” He popped himself into the driver’s seat and roared the engine. Mamamimi waddled after him. The car rumbled forward, the big metal gate groaned open, dogs started to bark. Raphael bounced the SUV out of the yard, and pushed its door open for me. Mamamimi was right behind, and I didn’t want to be the one punished again, so I jumped in. “Good-
bye-yeee!” Raphael called in a singsong voice, smiling right into her face.

  We somehow got to Abuja alive. Raphael couldn’t drive, and trucks kept swinging out onto our side of the road, accelerating and beeping. We swerved in and out, missing death, passing the corpses of dead transports lined up along the roadside. Even I roared with laughter as lorries wailed past us by inches.

  Using the GPS, Raphael foxed his way to the woman’s house. Andrew let us in; he worked as her boy, beautifully dressed in a white shirt and jeans, with tan sandals of interwoven strips. In we strode and Raphael said, very pleasantly at first, “Hello! M’sugh! How are you? I am Jacob’s son, Andrew’s brother.”

  I saw at once this was a very nice lady. She was huge like a balloon, with a child-counseling smile, and she welcomed us and hugged Andrew to her.

  “Have you paid my parents anything in advance for Andrew’s work? Because they want him back, they miss him so much.”

  She didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, they changed their minds. Well of course they did, Andrew is such a fine young man. Well, Andrew, it seems your brothers want you back!”

  “I changed their minds for them.” Raphael always cut his words out of the air like a tailor making a bespoke garment. Andrew looked confused and kept his eyes on the embroidery on his jeans.

  Andrew must have known what had happened because he didn’t ask why it was us two who had come to fetch him. Raphael had saved him, not firstborn Matthew—if he had wanted to be saved from decent clothes and shopping in Abuja.

  When we got back home, no mention was made of anything by anyone. Except by Raphael, to me, later. “It is so interesting, isn’t it, that they haven’t said a thing. They know what they were doing was wrong. How would they like to be a child and know their parents had sent them to work?” Matthew said nothing either. We had been rich; now we were poor.