Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  * * *

  Jide and I measured replication decline.

  We carried out our old experiment over and over and measured methyl as levels declined for no apparent reason. Then we increased the levels of stress. Those poor mice! In the name of science, we deprived them of a mother and then cuddly surrogates. We subjected them to regimes of irregular feeding and random light and darkness and finally electric shocks.

  There was no doubt. No matter how much stress we subjected them to, after the first spectacular results, the methyl levels dropped off with each successive experiment. Not only that, but the association between methyl and neurotropin suppression reduced as well—objectively measured, the amount of methyl and its effect on neurotropin production were smaller with each study. We had proved the decline effect. Truth wore out. Or at least, scientific truth wore out.

  We published. People loved the idea and we were widely cited. Jide became a Lecturer and a valued colleague. People began to speak of something called Cosmic Habituation. The old ways were no longer working. And I was thirty-seven.

  * * *

  With visitors, Raphael loved being civil, a different person. Sweetly and sociably, he would say, “M’sugh,” our mix of hello, good-bye, and pardon me. He loved bringing them trays of cold water from the Intermittent Freezer. He remembered everybody’s name and birthday. He hated dancing, but loved dressing up for parties. Musa the tailor made him wonderful robes with long shirts, matching trousers, shawls.

  My father liked company, too, even more so after his Decline. He would suddenly stand up straight and smile eagerly. I swear, his shirt would suddenly look ironed, his shoes polished. I was envious of the company, usually men from his old work. They could get my father laughing. He would look young then, and merry, and slap the back of his hand on his palm, jumping up to pass around the beer. I wanted him to laugh with me.

  Very suddenly Matthew announced he was getting married. We knew it was his way of escaping. After the wedding he and his bride would move in with her sister’s husband. He would help with their fish farm and plantation of nym trees. We did well by him: no band, but a fine display of food. My father boasted about how strong Matthew was, always captain. From age twelve he had read the business news like some boys read adventure stories. Matthew, he said, was going to be a leader.

  My father saw me looking quiet and suddenly lifted up his arms. “Then there is my Patrick who is so quiet. I have two clever sons to go alongside the strong one.” His hand felt warm on my back.

  By midnight it was cool and everybody was outside dancing, even Raphael, who grinned, making circular motions with his elbows and planting his feet as firmly as freeway supports.

  My father wavered up to me like a vision out of the desert, holding a tin of High Life. He stood next to me watching the dancing and the stars. “You know,” he said, “your elder brother was sent to you by Jesus.” My heart sank: Yes, I know, to lead the family, to be an example.

  “He was so unhappy when you were born. He saw you in your mother’s arms and howled. He is threatened by you. Jesus sent you Matthew so that you would know what it is to fight to distinguish yourself. And you learned that. You are becoming distinguished.”

  I can find myself being kind in that way; suddenly, in private with no one else to hear or challenge the kindness, as if kindness were a thing to shame us.

  I went back onto the porch and there was Raphael looking hunched and large, a middle-aged patriarch. He’d heard what my father said. “So who taught Matthew to be stupid? Why didn’t he ever tell him to leave you alone?”

  * * *

  My father’s skin faded. It had always been very dark, so black that he would use skin lightener as a moisturizer without the least bleaching effect. Now very suddenly, he went honey-colored; his hair became a knotted muddy brown. A dried clot of white spit always threatened to glue his lips together, and his eyes went bad, huge and round and ringed with swollen flesh like a frog’s. He sprouted thick spectacles, and had to lean his head back to see, blinking continually. He could no longer remember how to find the toilet from the living room. He took to crouching down behind the bungalow with the hens, then as things grew worse, off the porch in front of the house. Mamamimi said, “It makes me think there may be witchcraft after all.” Her face swelled and went hard until it looked like a stone.

  On the Tuesday night before he died, he briefly came back to us. Tall, in trousers, so skinny now that he looked young again. He ate his dinner with good manners, the fou-fou cradling the soup so that none got onto his fingers. Outside on the porch he started to talk, listing the names of all his brothers.

  Then he told us that Grandmother was not his actual mother. Another woman had borne him, made pregnant while dying of cancer. Grandfather knew pregnancy would kill her, but he made her come to term. She was bearing his first son.

  Two weeks after my father was born, his real mother had died, and my grandfather married the woman called Blessing.

  Salt instead of sugar. Iveren loved looking as though she had given the family its first son. It looked good as they lined up in church. But she had no milk for him. Jacob Terhemba Shawo spent his first five years loveless in a war.

  My father died three days before Matthew’s first child was born. Matthew and his wife brought her to our house to give our mother something joyful to think about.

  The baby’s Christian name was Isobel. Her baby suit had three padded Disney princesses on it and her hair was a red down.

  Matthew chuckled. “Don’t worry, Mamamimi, this can’t be Grandpa, it’s a girl.”

  Raphael smiled. “Maybe she’s Grandpa born in woman’s body.”

  Matthew’s wife clucked her tongue. She didn’t like us and she certainly didn’t like what she’d heard about Raphael. She drew herself up tall and said, “Her name is Iveren.”

  Matthew stared at his hands; Mamamimi froze; Raphael began to dance with laughter.

  “It was my mother’s name,” the wife said.

  “Ah!” cried Raphael. “Two of them, Matthew. Two Iverens! Oh, that is such good luck for you!”

  I saw from my mother’s unmoving face, and from a flick of the fingers, a jettisoning, that she had consigned the child to its mother’s family and Matthew to that other family, too. She never took a proper interest in little Iveren.

  But Grandmother must have thought that they had named the child after her. Later, she went to live with them, which was exactly the blessing I would wish for Matthew.

  * * *

  Raphael became quieter, preoccupied, as if invisible flies buzzed around his head. I told myself we were working too hard. Both of us had been applying for oil company scholarships. I wanted both of us to go together to the best universities: Lagos or Ibadan. I thought of all those strangers, in states that were mainly Igbo or Yoruba or maybe even Muslim. I was sure we were a team.

  In the hall bookcase a notice appeared. DO NOT TOUCH MY BOOKS. I DON’T INTERFERE WITH YOUR JOB. LEAVE ALL BOOKS IN ORDER.

  They weren’t his alone. “Can I look at them, at least?”

  He looked at me balefully. “If you ask first.”

  I checked his downloads and they were all porn. I saw the terrible titles of the files, which by themselves were racial and sexual abuse. A good Christian boy, I was shocked and dismayed. I said something to him and he puffed up, looking determined. “I don’t live by other people’s rules.”

  He put a new password onto our machine so that I could not get into it. My protests were feeble.

  “I need to study, Raphael.”

  “Study is beyond you,” he said. “Study cannot help you.”

  At the worst possible time for him, his schoolteachers went on strike because they weren’t being paid. Raphael spent all day clicking away at his keyboard, not bothering to dress. His voice became milder, faint and sweet, but he talked only in monosyllables. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Not angry, a bit as though he was utterly weary.

  That Advent, Mamamimi,
Andrew, Matthew and family went to the cathedral, but my mother asked me to stay behind to look after Raphael.

  “You calm him,” Mamamimi said, and for some reason that made my eyes sting. They went to church, and I was left alone in the main room. I was sitting on the old sofa watching some TV trash about country bumpkins going to Lagos.

  Suddenly Raphael trotted out of our bedroom in little Japanese steps wearing one of my mother’s dresses. He had folded a matching cloth around his head into an enormous flower shape, his face ghostly with makeup. My face must have been horrified: it made him chatter with laughter. “What the well-dressed diva is wearing this season.”

  All I thought then was, Raphael, don’t leave me. I stood up and I pushed him back toward the room; like my mother, I was afraid of visitors. “Get it off, get it off, what are you doing?”

  “You don’t like it?” He batted his eyelashes.

  “No I do not! What’s got into you?”

  “Raphael is not a nurse! Raphael does not have to be nice!”

  I begged him to get out of the dress. I kept looking at my telephone for the time, worried when they would be back. Above all else I didn’t want Mama to know he had taken her things.

  He stepped out of the dress, and let the folded headdress trail behind him, falling onto the floor. I scooped them up, checked them for dirt or makeup, and folded them up as neatly as I could.

  I came back to the bedroom and he was sitting in his boxer shorts and flip-flops, staring at his screen and with complete unconcern was doing something to himself.

  I asked the stupidest question. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like? It’s fun. You should join in.” Then he laughed. He turned the screen toward me. In the video, a man was servicing a woman’s behind. I had no idea people did such things. I howled and covered my mouth, laughing in shock. I ran out of the room and left him to finish.

  Without Raphael I had no one to go to and I could not be seen to cry. I went outside and realized that I was alone. What could I say to my mother? Our Raphael is going mad? For her he had always been mad. Only I had really liked Raphael and now he was becoming someone else, and I was so slow I would only ever be me.

  He got a strange disease that made his skin glisten but a fever did not register. It was what my father had done: get illnesses that were not quite physical. He ceased to do anything with his hair. It twisted off his head in knots and made him look like a beggar.

  He was hardly ever fully dressed. He hung around the house in underwear and flip-flops. I became his personal Mamamimi, trying to stop the rest of the family finding out, trying to keep him inside the room. In the middle of the night, he would get up. I would sit up, see he wasn’t there, and slip out of the house trying to find him, walking around our unlit streets. This is not wise in our locality. The neighborhood boys patrol for thieves or outsiders, and they can be rough if they do not recognize your face. “I’m Patrick, I moved into the house above the school. I’m trying to find my brother Raphael.”

  “So how did you lose him?”

  “He’s not well, he’s had a fever, he wanders.”

  “The crazy family,” one of them said.

  Their flashlights dazzled my eyes, but I could see them glance at each other. “He means that dirty boy.” They said that of Raphael?

  “He’s my brother. He’s not well.”

  I would stay out until they brought him back to me, swinging their AK-47s. He could so easily have been shot. He was wearing almost nothing, dazed like a sleepwalker, and his hair in such a mess. Raphael had always been vain. His skin Vaselined with the scent of roses, the fine shirt with no tails designed to hang outside the trousers and hide his tummy, his nails manicured. Now he looked like a laborer who needed a bath.

  Finally one night, the moon was too bright and the boys brought him too close to our house. My mother ran out of the groaning gate. “Patrick, Patrick, what is it?”

  “These boys have been helping us find Raphael,” was all I said. I felt ashamed and frustrated because I had failed to calm him, to find him myself, to keep the secret locked away, especially from Mamamimi.

  When my mother saw him she whispered, “Wild man!” and it was like a chill wind going through me. She had said what I knew but did not let myself acknowledge. Again, it was happening again, first to the father, then to the son.

  I got him to bed, holding both his arms and steering him. Our room was cool as if we were on a mountain. I came back out into the heat and Mamamimi was waiting, looking old. “Does he smoke gbana?” she asked.

  I said I didn’t think so. “But I no longer know him.”

  In my mind I was saying, Raphael, come back. Sometimes my mother would beseech me with her eyes to do something. Such a thing should not befall a family twice.

  * * *

  Makurdi lives only because of its river. The Benue flows into the great Niger, gray-green with fine beaches that are being dug up for concrete and currents so treacherous they look like molded jellies welling up from below. No one swims there, except at dusk, in the shallows, workmen go to wash, wading out in their underwear.

  Raphael would disappear at sunset and go down the slopes to hymn the men. It was the only time he dressed up: yellow shirt, tan slacks, good shoes. He walked out respectfully onto the sand and sang about the men, teased them, and chortled. He would try to take photographs of them. The men eyed him in fear, or ignored him like gnarled trees, or sometimes threw pebbles at him to make him go away. The things he said were irresponsible. Matthew and I would be sent to fetch him back. Matthew hated it. He would show up in his bank suit, with his car that would get sand in it. “Let him stay there! He only brings shame on himself!”

  But we could not leave our brother to have stones thrown at him. He would be on the beach laughing at his own wild self, singing paeans of praise for the beauty of the bathers, asking their names, asking where they lived. Matthew and I would be numb from shame. “Come home, come home,” we said to him, and to the laborers, “Please excuse us, we are good Christians, he is not well.” We could not bring ourselves to call him our brother. He would laugh and run away. When we caught him, he would sit down on the ground and make us lift him up and carry him back to Matthew’s car. He was made of something other than flesh; his bones were lead, his blood mercury.

  “I can’t take more of this,” said Matthew.

  It ended so swiftly that we were left blinking. He disappeared from the house as usual; Mamamimi scolded Andrew to keep out of it and rang Matthew. He pulled up outside our gates, so back we went past the university, and the zoo where Baba had taken us as kids, then down beyond the old bridge.

  This time was the worst, beyond anything. He was wearing one of Mamamimi’s dresses, sashaying among construction workers with a sun umbrella, roaring with laughter as he sang.

  He saw us and called waving. “M’sugh! My brothers! My dear brothers! I am going swimming.”

  He ran away from us like a child, into the river. He fought his way into those strong green currents, squealing like a child, perhaps with delight, as the currents cooled him. The great dress blossomed out then sank. He stumbled on pebbles underfoot, dipped under the water, and was not seen again.

  “Go get him!” said Matthew.

  I said nothing, did nothing.

  “Go on, you’re the only one who likes him.” He had to push me.

  I nibbled at the edge of the currents. I called his name in a weak voice as if I really didn’t want him back. I was angry with him as if he was now playing a particularly annoying game. Finally I pushed my way in partly so that Matthew would tell our mother that I’d struggled to find him. I began to call his name loudly, not so much in the hope of finding him as banishing this new reality. Raphael. Raphael, I shouted, meaning this terrible thing cannot be, not so simply, not so quickly. Finally I dove under the water. I felt the current pull and drag me away by my heels. I fought my way back to the shore but I knew I had not done enough, swiftly
enough. I knew that he had already been swept far away.

  On the bank, Matthew said, “Maybe it is best that he is gone.” Since then, I have not been able to address more than five consecutive words to him.

  That’s what the family said, if not in words. Best he was gone. The bookcase was there with its notice. I knew we were cursed. I knew we would all be swept away.

  Oh story, Raphael seemed to say to me. You just want to be miserable so you have an excuse to fail.

  We need a body to bury, I said to his memory.

  It doesn’t make any difference; nobody in this family will mourn. They have too many worries of their own. You’ll have to take care of yourself now. You don’t have your younger brother to watch out for you.

  The sun set, everyone else inside the house. I wanted to climb up onto a roof, or sit astride the wall. I plugged the mobile phone into the laptop, but in the depths of our slough I could not get a signal. I went into our hot, unlit hall and pulled out the books, but they were unreadable without Raphael. Who would laugh for me as I did not laugh? Who would speak my mind for me as I could never find my mind in time? Who would know how to be pleasant with guests, civil in this uncivil world? I picked up our book on genetics and walked to the top of the hill, and sat in the open unlit shed of a church and tried to read it in the last of the orange light. I said, Patrick, you are not civil and can’t make other people laugh, but you can do this. This is the one part of Raphael you can carry on.

  I read it aloud, like a child sounding out words, to make them go in as facts. I realized later I was trying to read in the dark, in a church. I had been chanting nonsense GATTACA aloud, unable to see, my eyes full of tears. But I had told myself one slow truth and stuck to it. I studied for many years.