by Leye Adenle
‘What if they used their scanner to find you, and then they simply followed you to me? Is that a possibility?’
‘Yes,’ Adesua said.
‘No,’ Brother Moses said.
‘Can we leave now?’ Adesua said. She looked bored.
‘He must want to come with us,’ Brother Moses said.
‘It must be his choice. Master Osaretin, will you come with us?’
Chapter 8 Always Coming When You’re Going
I was on my feet. Adesua and Brother Moses were waiting for my decision. Time ticked away in its linear direction.
‘I need to pee,’ I said.
‘We don’t have time,’ Adesua said.
‘I’m coming,’ I said, and I went into my room and shut the door behind me. My brain was working faster and harder than it had ever done before. So far I had not witnessed anything extraordinary enough for me to start believing in magic. Brother Moses did produce a snake from his afro, but in the dim light how could I be sure of what I saw? And the silent storm was a solar flare. But it was Rachel who had told me this, and they claimed she wasn’t the one outside.
I went to the window. Rachel’s car was outside, three floors down. I could see her through her windshield. She was making a call and waiting for it to be answered. I’d left my phone in the living room.
It could still all be a scam, but it would be the most elaborate scam ever, hardly worth anything they could get from me. There was something happening, but I just didn’t know what it was.
I had to make a decision. To believe them would be to suspend all logic, something I’d never managed to do, hence my inability to find a Nigerian girl interested in me, as most of them believe that atheists are evil. I no longer bothered to explain that I’m actually agnostic.
On the weight of evidence, Adesua and Brother Moses were mad, and should I continue to listen to them, or to follow them, I would run the risk of being infected with their madness. I was sure they believed what they said, and I was worried that soon they’d have me believing it too.
A year ago my neighbour locked himself out of his flat. He knocked on my door and asked if he could climb out of my bedroom window to his. He managed it without falling. After that I stopped leaving my bedroom window open when I was out.
I pulled the curtains fully apart then slid the one movable glass pane all the way across. I poked my head out to see just how far it was to the adjoining window. Like my neighbour, I would have to first climb onto the ledge that ran beneath both our windows, then, with one hand still safely tethered to my own window, I would reach out to his, get a good grip, then hoist myself over. Leaning out further, I could see that his window was open. I looked down. I looked at his window again. I raised my left leg and put it through my open window.
Brother Moses was on his side of the sofa. His shoes were also on the stool but Adesua and her shoes were gone.
‘Where is she?’ I said.
‘She went to catch you in case you fell.’
‘Oh.’
I shut my bedroom door and sat back down in the tub chair.
‘You are not really playing your cards right with her,’ he said. Cards? I didn’t realise I had cards.
‘Magicians get the prettiest girls,’ he said, ‘and girl magicians always go for magicians.’
What was that he said about always using girls to trap me? ‘In your letter you said I shouldn’t know a woman,’ I said.
‘Yes. It is one of the requirements. Did you know a woman?’
‘No. But Adesua and I…’
I left it to his magician head to complete the sentence. ‘Oh no, no, no, no, no. She would never have. She merely made sure you wanted to be with her so much that you wouldn’t have any thought for another woman. She
cast a spell on you, you see. One of the oldest tricks.’
I nodded and tried not to show that a dagger had found my heart.
‘She doesn’t like me,’ I said.
‘It’s not personal.’
‘She doesn’t think I’m the one.’
‘It doesn’t matter what she thinks.’
‘Where do you want to take me?’
‘To meet a great magician.’
‘Where is that?’
‘Not far from here.’
Adesua returned. She entered my flat as if she lived there. Her eyes swept over me like I was of no consequence. Was that even her name, Adesua? Was she really also Edo? Was she really a woman?
‘They are still out there,’ she said.
Brother Moses stood up and offered me his hat.
‘Use this,’ he said. ‘It will disguise you for just long enough.’ Was that where he hid the snake?
Back in my bedroom, halfway out of the window and halfway from certain death, it had occurred to me that my choices were as sparse as they were obvious: follow them or tell them to get the hell out. I hadn’t considered the second option until I looked down from the very different perspective of having half my body out the window.
‘I don’t want to come with you,’ I said.
‘Fine,’ Adesua said. She turned to leave but Brother Moses placed his arm on her shoulder.
‘I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do this,’ he said. He placed his hat upturned on the stool.
Do what? I wondered.
‘We are travelling magicians,’ he said, ‘we are performers, just like you father, and that is where your training will begin as well. There is a dimension in which all things are possible. The way to access this dimension is through the imagination of others. As performers, it is our job, our desire, our reward, to astonish and mesmerise our audience through our magnificent and grand tricks. Whenever we accomplish this, be it in a child witnessing magic for the first time, or in the hearts of curious pedestrians gathered round a street magician, we unlock that most inaccessible of dimensions: we make them believe, if only for a short while. We make them dream.
‘I cannot make you believe, Master Osaretin. You must do that on your own. And it has to be true faith. That is why I can’t show you any of my top ten tricks which, I assure you, my soul itches to reveal. But I can give you this.’
He held out an object which I had not seen him take out of any of his pockets or his hair. It was a silvery sphere about an inch in diameter. He held it between the tips of his thumb and index finger. My living room curved around its tiny surface.
‘What is it?’ I asked. My hands remained by my sides. ‘I am leaving you my hat, to disguise your appearance if you need it, but just in case you are rumbled and they catch you, use this to get back to this place at this time.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s like a recorder. I have just set it to start recording from a few moments ago. It stops recording and rewinds to when it started when you use it. Take it. I hope you won’t have to use it.’
What harm could a tiny steel ball do? I held out my palm and he placed the object in it. My hand dropped and I had to bend and use my other hand to support the hand with the ball in it. It was as if he had handed me a tome of a book. It was not that heavy, to be fair, but in relation to its size its weight took me by surprise. It was as heavy as, say, a big dictionary.
‘It gets heavier the more it records,’ Brother Moses said. ‘The same conditions from the letter still hold. It will be difficult for you to keep the women off, but you must resist and remain focused for your initiation.’
Adesua opened the door and left my flat without a word, a nod, or even a bad-eye look – which for me would have been better than the way she totally ignored me.
At the door Brother Moses stopped and turned round. ‘When you went to your room to jump, you said, ‘I
am coming’.’
‘I wasn’t going to jump. I was...’ If he didn’t know, he could leave with his condescending conclusion.
‘You said you were coming. Do you remember? Just before you left, you said, ‘I’m coming.’’
‘Yes. So?’
‘
I am coming. That is what you said, even though you were leaving.’
I’d never thought about it till then, but when he pointed it out, for the first time I realised it must be a Nigerian thing, like dressing well which meant moving over on a bench so someone else can fit in. I thought of all the times I’d left a place and said, ‘I’m coming.’ I shrugged off the pointless embarrassment. Everybody says it, anyway.
‘No. Not everybody. Just the people of a particular tribe and the people who have had dealings with them and learnt their ways. See you soon, Master Osaretin. I am leaving now.’
I shut my door. I did the locks. I prodded his hat with the end of my TV remote control and I admired the unusually heavy tiny ball before putting it into my pocket. Then I realised he hadn’t told me how to use it.
Chapter 9 Osmium or Not
I have long suspected that the mind must not be trusted in the hours between bedtime and dawn.
After Adesua and Brother Moses left, I remember yawning so long and with my mouth so wide open that I felt the muscles of my jaw straining. It was late, I was tired, and I had to get some sleep because the world had not ended and there was work in the morning.
It was the most peaceful, dreamless, sweet sleep I’ve ever had: one of those rare times that you fall asleep as soon as your head touches the pillow. Literally. And when I woke up I was refreshed. I got less than four hours sleep and I woke up totally alert, feeling well rested and full of life. I even woke up before the alarm.
As I took my shower, I reflected on the amazingness of the last few hours, how sleep deprivation had led me into a world of magic and portable time machines and magicians with stage names like Mr Magic.
Lack of sleep, those mysterious early hours, and the sheer lure of the fantastic yarn of Adesua and Brother Moses had made it all seem plausible. In the morning, however, I remembered it as what it truly was; two professional scammers who wanted something from me that required me to believe I was a magician. Mr Magic. I laughed, and right then I realised what it was. They wanted to rob the bank and they needed me in some way to carry out their heist. It was plausible. They needed an inside man. They had planned for me to be him. Mr Magic my foot. I had rumbled them.
But, coming down from my mini-euphoria, I found that I was missing the strange and pretty girl, Adesua. And when I passed the purple hat on my way out, harmlessly immobile on the stool, I thought of the smiling Brother Moses with a fondness that surprised me.
‘Where is it?’ Rachel said.
I had booked a meeting for both of us in one of the glass meeting rooms. We had little to do, anyway; the head of IT had asked the infrastructure team to carry out an inspection of all systems to determine whether the solar flare had compromised anything. The head of infrastructure had sent out an email informing all staff that they were not to do anything on the network until he gave the all clear. As a result, all members of staff who did not know how to configure a router were using social media on their phones or sharing stories about the previous night with their colleagues.
I scanned the open plan office before removing the sphere from my pocket.
‘Let me see.’
She held her palm out.
‘It is very heavy,’ I said.
I placed my free palm under hers and put the sphere in her hand.
‘Wow. You are right. It’s heavy.’
I took my hand away from under hers and she tested the weight of the sphere.
‘It is really heavy,’ she said, as if she hadn’t believed me.
She placed it onto the glass surface of the stool between us. It landed with a clank so loud I feared the glass would break, then it rolled about an inch and stopped. She picked her phone from the stool and started punching at its key- board. She looked up from the screen, looked down at the sphere, then looked back at her screen. Her face showed that she had discovered something.
‘It is osmium,’ she said.
She showed me what she had found on the internet. Osmium (from the Greek osme (ὀσμή) meaning ‘smell’), element symbol Os, atomic number 76. A hard, brittle, bluish-white transition metal in the platinum group, blah blah blah. Densest naturally occurring element, with a density of 22.59 g/cm3. The picture on her phone, of a rough roundish metallic lump, was not the same as my perfectly spherical, polished ball.
‘Osmium. That sounds radioactive,’ I said.
‘I don’t think it is. Have you weighed it?’
I hadn’t thought of doing that. For a second in the morning, when I’d forgotten about the ball in my pocket and I was putting on my trousers, I did think it weighed more than it had when Brother Moses first gave it to me. But just as quickly I concluded that it was only in my mind because Brother Moses had said it would get heavier. I wasn’t sure any more.
‘You mean to see if it gets heavier?’ I said.
Rachel gave me a ‘don’t be stupid’ look. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just want to know how heavy it is.’
She picked it up into her palm and brought it to her nose to sniff, then she set it back down on the stool, this time by placing her palm down and gently tipping it side- ways to allow the sphere to roll off. It still made an even louder clank when it touched the glass. It rolled all the way to the edge, where the metal rim stopped it.
I saw Daniel walking towards us. He was the head of digital security, the only white man in the IT department. He was British, and he liked Rachel, which made me think he didn’t like me because a lot of people just didn’t believe there wasn’t something between us. He opened the door without respect for the fake meeting we could be having and said, ‘Osa, they’re looking for you upstairs.’
Upstairs could mean many things. On the sixth floor, directly above the IT floor was where we had the servers, above that were the IT service desk and training rooms, and above that was the main IT meeting room and the offices of the IT heads of this and that, including Daniel.
He walked ahead of me. He said, ‘What were you guys
talking about?’
‘Nothing. We had a meeting.’
‘Yeah, I know you booked a meeting. That’s how I found you. What was it about?’
‘We are just catching up on some stuff.’ ‘Yeah? Stuff like?’
He swiped his card on the reader and held the door open for me. I headed towards the stairs at the end of the corridor, but he stood in the middle of the elevators on both sides. I walked back and stood next to him. He hadn’t pressed a button, so I did.
‘We’ve been going over access logs to see who was in the building doing what during the flare,’ he said. ‘We don’t have anything from during the event, but we can see who last went through a door before and after it. I’ve been looking at tapes from the lobby.’
A lift, one of the four on each side of the corridor, opened. It was going up and it was empty. We got inside and he pressed 9. I wondered what I’d been caught doing. Not that I was aware of something I’d done, but it sounded like ‘they’ wanted to see me because they had discovered something I had done that I shouldn’t have.
He didn’t say anything during the short elevator ride. He used his access card to let us into the open plan workspace off of which meeting rooms and private offices radiated. He walked round the perimeter of silent face-to-monitor workers and used his card on his own office door. I’d been there once, to answer a query about lending my pass card to a colleague who had left his at home and needed to pop into the toilet.
‘Sit,’ he said.
I sat. He walked behind his desk, plucked his laptop from its power cable and brought it round to me. He set the computer in front of me, opened it up, and sat on the other chair meant for his guests. I still hadn’t figured out what I’d done and that made me even more apprehensive. His tanned, hairy hand stretched across in front of me to get to the power button and I realised what it was. It was when I went downstairs to the banking floor and went behind the counters. Unauthorised access. This would be my second yellow card.
The sc
reen lit up to a still image of the lobby down- stairs as captured by one of the cameras directed at the elevators.
‘I saw this from this morning,’ he said. He clicked a button, and the seconds of the frozen time counter on the bottom left of the screen began to run.
I watched. I was sick to the belly by this time. I recognised myself walking into the shot. I’d never seen myself from that angle, from the top.
‘This.’ He paused the video as the elevator door opened and I stepped in.
What was I meant to see?
He drew his fingers across the touchpad on the laptop. He opened another video file. Again I saw myself getting into an elevator from the ground floor.
‘That was yesterday.’
He clicked open another video. Again, I waited for the lift to arrive and, when it did, I got into it.
‘There are eight lifts. Two buttons, one on each side, to call any of the lifts. Each time you arrive, you press a button then you stand in front of the lift that’s going to open next.’
He clicked upon yet another video.
‘You’re a consistent chap. You arrive at 6:45 every morning. This one is from last month. See all those people bunched together there in front of one lift? But you, you are standing alone, in front of a different lift. Watch what happens. Your lift opens. The one you picked.
‘I’ve gone downstairs to check. The lights over the lifts don’t tell which one is arriving next. There’s no sound you might be listening to. I phoned the company that manages them; there’s no pattern to which lift comes first. How do you do it?’
Chapter 10 Running Out of Time
‘You have E.S.P. It means extrasensory perception. You have a sixth sense.’
Daniel played video after video, watching with excitement, and looking at me each time with a look that was expectant and thrilled and friendly all at the same time. He had never been friendly to me.
I, for my part, watched myself repeatedly arriving on his screen and stepping into lifts. Goosebumps crept over my body, and the back of my neck felt exposed to an axeman’s aim. Fear permeated my entire being. Daniel continued talking excitedly about his discovery, he continued showing me the videos as if to convince me. He brought out his wallet and from it brought out a coin. It was a fifty pence coin. I’d never seen one till then. He tossed it and palmed it onto the back of his left hand. ‘Heads or tails?’ he said.