The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  Max scrubbed the ‘Godbless’, still raw on his skin. A good Samaritan had found the body in front of the bar and complied, thinking ‘Macmillan Shariff’ was a street name inherited from a colonial master, for what benevolent Nigerian would give their child such a name? Max was dragged out of sleep by the incessant knocks and his younger brother was delivered to him semi-conscious and without warning. He thanked the good Samaritan, who was barely visible in the darkness of the corridor, and dragged André in. ‘Na you be Macmillan?’ asked the Samaritan. ‘Like English textbook?’

  Max shut the door. ‘What are you doing in Enugu?’

  André belched something about staying for a week.

  So Max rolled up his sleeves and undid his shirt buttons. Then he turned his brother over in the tub. It didn’t matter if André appeared on his doorstep drunk in the middle of the night; he was his responsibility. ‘Property of Macmillan,’ the tattoo read. He had waited for André’s coming during his solitude from the furious hedonism of their parents for the first five years of his life. When he started scrubbing André’s back, he remembered the first time he had seen him: his brother had been naked and bloody, just like this. Max had been expecting a baby sister. He was disappointed, little as he was when his mother pushed the baby out, by the baby with the wee-wee just like his own. But he was fascinated because this baby didn’t cry. It really was a miracle because Father was at war in Liberia and Sweet Mother had been in the throes of The Thing for most of her pregnancy. Max had learnt to divine her moods and reminded her constantly to eat for the baby. He was excited as months passed and Sweet Mother’s belly swelled, yet he dreaded the day of the delivery because he had no idea what to do with crying babies. So here he was with not a baby sister, but a baby who never cried. Who was never caught making baby noise. Even when André got to four years of age he still had nothing to say.

  So Max became a more obsessive parent than his mother or father (when the father returned), anticipating André’s wants, protecting him from the rest of the world. Up until that day when he went missing after the rainfall, Max never let him out of his sight. Then André started dreaming and the heat came that February to separate Max from his family forever.

  Max had woken up from the heat that night and dipped himself in the Geepee tank of water. He could hear the music of a masquerade in the distance. There had been no light, as usual, but he wasn’t scared of the dark. He sprang out of the water, suddenly scared that he would drown. The music grew louder so he followed it to the window.

  To hear it was to be possessed by it; he could not separate the distant thump of the drums from the thump in his heart. A flame could be seen from far away, a column of fire in the air. Something large was burning on Freetown Street. It could be Baba Halisu’s car. He had to go and see. Get help maybe.

  The music was coming from the fire. Children had gathered and were dancing round it. A few cars were parked around, big cars he had never seen before. He felt naked, licked by the open night like a raw wound. Everyone he loved, everyone who made him feel safe in the world, was asleep. Yet he moved up the street. He told himself it was the air on his wet body that was making him feel the way he felt. The mute, sweet ache of jamming your thumb in the door all over him. Not the pain, just the feeling. Yet he walked as his father had taught him and André to. ‘If you concentrated too hard you could strike your feet against a stone. If you concentrate soft enough you won’t need light to walk in the dark.’

  The fire seemed to be receding but the music spurred him on. He half-danced to it. He didn’t notice people noticing him when he got close to the fire. He would have felt exposed dancing in the eyes of strangers. His eyes were on the faces of the masquerade. He danced round it, tried to follow its steps but they were too mesmerising; the spins dizzied him. He stomped his feet and wrung his hands in the air faster and faster to match the masquerade as the drummers increased their tempo. At the peak of their crescendo he fell flat on the ground. When he opened his eyes the sky was filled with the faces of children golden with the light of the fire. Then the faces were replaced with a single face, the woman whom his father had chased from their house. Before he could protest she dropped a sachet of something on his chest. ‘Glucose. Lick it.’

  He bit on the sachet and licked. It tasted sweet and metallic and evil, the way it disappeared on the tongue, leaving a chill in its wake. A similar coolness wet his left forearm, which he believed was because of the sachet in his mouth, so he kept on licking until he felt an insect bite his arm. He turned to smack it and saw the woman pushing a hypodermic needle in deeper.

  ‘Noooooooo!’ He leapt up from the ground and the syringe fell off. ‘Leave me alone!’

  The woman smiled at him. ‘Ahn-ahn, big boy like you, you are scared of injection. See this chinkili needle fa.’

  But he was staggering backwards, eyes wide with fright.

  ‘We need to immunise you. Come back here. Please, you people should hold him.’

  Before anybody could hold him, he had escaped from their midst, hurtling down Freetown Street to his home. It was when he stopped at the gate to catch his breath that he realised what he had done. He had disobeyed his father; eaten something from those people and allowed them to put a needle in his arm. He hesitated at the door for the first time in his life, startled by the feeling. Then he sneaked back into the house like a thief, terrified of his own footfalls on the terrazzo, terrified his father would be one of the many heavy shadows occupying the chairs.

  He woke up the next morning with the proof of rebellion painted on his left thumb: The parents would never know the agony he had gone through to wash the gentian violet off without their noticing. They would never know it was that night in February while they slept that he ceased to belong to them.

  When he would share this story with his colleagues years later, the first human beings he ever told, they would laugh and tell him it was normal in those days to lure children for inoculation from their unwilling parents. Glucose, sachets of milk, cubes of Choco Milo and other incentives were given to the children who showed up so that they could entice their friends to come. But there was no way, they would insist, that this activity would happen at midnight.

  Even though he felt apart from the family, he never stopped caring for them. He worried for his mother those afternoons when her eyes grew vacant and unresponsive, when she wouldn’t get up even if food was burning on the fire. All this worrying insulated him from the reality of the times, the world his peers lived in: ethnic clashes that echoed the civil war; the hasty midnight disappearance of southern neighbours and the appearance of northern ones; the arrests of those arrogant enough to complain about the government; the death of Fela from AIDS after the disease spent decades in the government’s black book, some saying it had come from monkeys and others saying it was invented by American scientists; the tyranny of Abacha, which would be rumoured to end with two prostitutes from India and a poisoned apple … Max was unaffected by the world he lived in because it didn’t recognise those living in the last house on the right.

  How he worried and cared for them.

  He worried all those weeks when their father disappeared.

  And most of all, he didn’t stop worrying for André, never did. Not even years later when André went missing for months and there was nothing he could do. Especially then, especially because there was nothing he could do. After going along with his suggestion that they swallow a piece of each other’s hair, Max was sure, even though he believed in science, that they were bonded for life. André’s logic was that this would bind them in the spirit realm and so keep the spirit wives and his murderous phantom twin away. He had just returned from almost a year of disappearance after the Miss World War and wasn’t speaking to anyone, so when he made the request, insisting that Max didn’t ask for explanations or tell anyone, he obliged.

  Anything to make him talk.

  Anything to make him eat.

  Anything to get him out of his room, then
out of the house, which he didn’t leave for days.

  The idea of his brother’s indigestible hair in his belly still made him queasy from time to time. Every time he sat on a toilet bowl he thought of André.

  There was a time a girl almost took André’s place in Max’s heart. He met her after he had switched from medicine to pharmacy and had started work in NAFDAC, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control. Sweet Mother had been negotiating a dispute in some riverine settlement of pre-colonial Africa at her typewriter. Their father was thinking of some way to bring her back to the present. It was 2012 at the time. The country had been shut down by the president’s New Year gift of petroleum subsidy removal; young people marched the streets with #OccupyNigeria placards in protest. André had been deported back to Nigeria after his release from the asylum in the States, founded and fled a church in Sabon Geri, reconnected with his friends from the asylum somehow, and had flown to Rome to form a band with them and begin a worldwide music tour.

  Max was in Amsterdam shopping for lingerie.

  A white girl, maybe French, maybe Swedish, was adjusting the seams of her pantyhose in one the many partitions of the KANT ‘For Her’ shop when he, searching deeper and deeper past the shelves of boxed underwear and rows of hanging clothes for something unique, inspecting labels with his rimless spectacles, stumbled in. He would have turned away immediately if he knew he had stared too long.

  ‘Get out!’

  He apologised, stepped on a mannequin’s foot in his haste and lost his balance. His glasses fell off his face and he was blind. ‘I’m sorry, I am so sorry,’ he muttered, crawling out as fast as he could, away from her milky body wrapped in immaculate lace and her big bewildered eyes. ‘I am clumsy sometimes, I am so—’

  ‘No, no, it’s okay, it’s okay.’ Her voice sounded worried so he stopped in the nearby row of women’s undergarments.

  ‘I am so sorry.’ He was actually close to tears, a twenty-nine-year-old bald man close to tears because he had walked in on a woman trying on underwear. ‘I am useless without my glasses. I have embarrassed myself too much already—’ He stopped when a wave of sugary vanilla hit his nose and promptly regained his sight. She was walking over to him.

  ‘Can you see now?’ she asked, bending over him so that her breasts doubled in the fine cracks of his spectacles.

  ‘O, God.’

  ‘Are they broken? They don’t look broken.’

  ‘No, no, just let me leave you to finish your business,’ he said, scrambling up from the ground with as much dignity as he could manage, grateful that there wasn’t any customer at this far end of the mall. ‘I have distracted you from—’

  ‘It is fine really.’ She stood up ‘I have eye problems too sometimes.’

  ‘I-I don-don’t ha-ha-have eye pro-problems.’

  ‘Okay then.’ She dropped her black brassiere on his lap and disappeared into the small room of clothes racks before he could protest or plead.

  ‘Please hand me my brassiere,’ she said, and he winced at how her voice echoed in the large mall. He felt like an accomplice. He fumbled with the brassiere because he did not know where to hold it; it was a strapless bra and seemed too profane to handle by the cups, cups that must have held her breasts. Her voice returned, even warmer now. ‘I have an optometrist—’

  ‘I don’t want to cause you any more problems,’ he said as the dress went over her head. ‘I will just be on my way.’

  ‘At least wait for me to get dressed; a gentleman like you won’t leave a woman like that.’ Her voice was like a soft song.

  He waited while she paid, then followed her out of KANT, when she tried again. ‘Am I such a terrible person?’ She stopped as he stopped and smiled at him. ‘That you would prefer to walk the streets of Amsterdam blind than walk with me?’

  ‘Thanks for the offer.’ He looked down at her shopping bag. ‘And you have made a good choice.’

  ‘This is for my sister. My twin sister, but thank you.’

  She gave up and wished him a good day and he hailed a taxi. He emerged from the taxi and almost staggered into his hotel, heady as if he had been drinking. He was thinking about her blonde hair and her milky skin and her green eyes. Or were they blue? It was all confusing; he had never thought about anyone else for this long and this hard apart from his brother. A white woman for that matter. And he didn’t even know her name.

  That evening he went to the opening of the Grachtenfestival in the garden of the Anne Frank House, where his brother was supposed to be performing. The brochure for the music festival had promised it. All other performers were there and charmed the crowd with their instruments, and the soft wind and chilly champagne helped, but no André. His band climbed the stage to apologise for the disappointment, and none felt it more than Max.

  As he turned away from the crowd, a hand caught his arm: ‘You must be a great fan.’

  It was she and the coincidence startled him. Her green eyes were liquid in the warm gold of the yellow bulbs strung on criss-crossing ropes above them. A teasing half-smile waited on her lips. She had a small camera hanging from her neck, bright red against her loose black sleeveless dress so sheer he could see her nipples. He didn’t know what she wanted with him. ‘Good … good evening.’

  ‘So this is what you do when you are not snooping around women’s lingerie?’

  ‘No, no, I was, er, shopping. I was supposed to pick one.’

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t believe you,’ she hooked her arm in his and led him along the tide of people dispersing, ‘but you definitely don’t have a lover.’

  His ears burnt at the word ‘lover’ so he looked away. ‘No it was for my mom.’

  She stopped walking when he saw the surprise on her face.

  ‘No, I can explain. I am trying to save my parents’ marriage.’

  ‘And you do this by buying your mother lingerie.’

  ‘I meant to … I will give my father to give my mother.’

  ‘Wow.’ She cocked her head to catch his eye. ‘What’s wrong with him? He couldn’t get it for her himself?’

  ‘No, I mean he can, but they are in Nigeria and—’

  ‘You are from Nigeria! You flew to Amsterdam to buy lingerie for your mother to save your parents’ marriage!’ She threw her head back and laughed.

  She was a photographer. That was all she did for a living. She was in Amsterdam to prepare for a week-long exhibition at a gallery that loved contemporary art and believed her photography was artful enough. He was exploring the city with her. Could he stop walking for a minute? If he could turn that way just a bit so that the street light could catch his face for a second? Perfect. She took the camera in both hands and brought it to her eyes. Click. Could he relax his face? Always too serious – was this how he talked to women? Perfect. Click. She was to marry a man like him once. An arranged marriage in the twenty-first century: could he believe it?

  The wind picked up as they walked and she wrapped her arms about herself, falling silent. After a while she asked him to say something. He told her that before he knew what colours were, he already knew blue was a feeling. He knew it because his mother had marked him blue. ‘She is a painter and illustrator of books. And she writes fiction.’ He told her the mother had marked his younger brother red. He didn’t tell her he was hoping to run into André in Amsterdam. He didn’t tell her no one had heard from him in a year. After having read that André’s tour was to end here at the beginning of the Grachtenfestival, Max had gathered his savings, applied for leave, then applied for a one-month visa to attend the festival; that was what he told them at the VSF office in Abuja anyway. He planned to bring his brother home one last time.

  ‘My brother is …’ He looked up in search of a word. Click. Then looked down at her in surprise, then smiled. Click. ‘My brother is complicated.’

  ‘My twin would say the same of me.’ She released her camera. It fell against her breasts and he winced the tiniest wince. ‘You should come to my
apartment,’ she added quickly when she saw his raised eyebrows. ‘I have my darkroom there. Don’t you want to see your pictures?’

  They kept walking and talking for hours until darkness began to unroll from the sky, catching the streetlights still on. Max enjoyed this hour before morning because it reminded him of the time their father had led them out after the sun had gone down to conquer the night. She made more images of him while he emptied out the litany of facts about humans he had stumbled upon in his years of study. Did you know you can’t see a star by looking directly at it? You have to look away a bit so you can see it brightly in one corner of your eye. The light receptors that see star light are not directly at the back of our eyes; they are below, so the stars have to hit under your eyes before you see them, not straight but under. Skin colour is a very secondary thing. Did you know genetically I might be more related to you than to someone from Namibia?

  Morning met them before they got to her apartment, so he said he had to brush his teeth. She made him promise to come back so he did. Her apartment was walled with bare red bricks and white mortar. It was large, with her bed on the floor and a small kitchenette with a low wall at the other side. The bed was a mess, a tripod and large sheets strewn across it. He longed to make the bed.

  ‘I got this,’ she spread her arms and did a little spin to encompass the whole apartment, ‘on Airbnb. My darkroom is this way,’ she said, smiling at his restrained exasperation. ‘Come.’ She opened another door and he followed and got swallowed into a room lit in dark red. In the low light his face would later hang as a curtain of photos pegged to the ropes above their heads.