by TJ Benson
‘You are two,’ the man said simply after one of those spars, as if he was commenting on the weather.
‘One died in the womb. I ate him. Survival of the fittest.’
‘So he is in you now and you are two.’
Silence.
‘Stop fighting him. He is not dead. He is growing inside you and you are growing inside him and he wants to quarrel. Don’t quarrel with him. Make peace with him, ask him what he really wants. You see him as a parasite but he can be your backbone when faced with a challenge. You see him as a nightmare but he can be a friend.’
André had first come to Japan at age fifteen as part of Madamthemadam’s troupe representing Nigeria in the annual cultural festival in 2003. On their mini-tour he had looked through the falling crimson blossoms at an apartment with the words Come, learn! in bold red letters. Those were the first English words he’d read on a building in Tokyo, a city with text tattooed all over its buildings. His heart had been pulled by the invitation and he’d known he would return there some day. When he did, and succeeded in tricking his Japanese instructor into teaching him the language of martial arts, the next thing he told the old man by way of gratitude was, ‘I knew I would return here.’
‘Anata no itami wa watashi no monode wanai,’ the old man replied. He didn’t know André had spent the better part of his life conquering physical pain and the most gruesome failure of his body – the failure to scream out to his father at the airport before that first visit to Japan.
The face had appeared in the departures section. André opened his mouth to scream. No one was looking but Madamthemadam, and it took only seconds for her to see André’s resemblance to the man who hadn’t yet spotted them but was heading their way. She swung a closed fist into his throat and he doubled over. ‘O, I am so sorry,’ she said when the Japanese escort turned to them. ‘He is fine, aren’t you fine? He is fine. Let’s hurry, we don’t want to miss the flight.’
The boys of the singing group may not have seen who André was trying to scream for, but they saw when she punched his throat shut. When one of them complained on the plane, she replied, ‘Would you stop chattering like a village goat? Am I your mate?’
André’s voice was never the same again. His father told him after he was rescued that he was renting a room at a cheap hotel, waiting for the day he could find his boy and take him home.
For André, thoughts of his father looking for him, yelling his name in the airport, almost made him forget his spirit wives.
Back from Japan, André had never intended to escape from Divine Children. He’d had to keep from sleeping so one night he walked out of his room down to the end of the corridor. He didn’t turn to the stairs; he looked out of the bare window. It was a windy night with just a slice of moon. This was his home, his ship, and he had become its captain. A very sleepy captain who wouldn’t dare to sleep. He laughed a little and leant out of the window. The ground was magnified slightly and he felt as if he were being tipped towards it; the rush of adrenaline was sweet, as was the sensation of flying. When he opened his eyes he was in mid-air and had to use his palms to break his fall. A soft thud in the grass. He blinked. He wasn’t dead. Or injured. Fear was bitter on his tongue: how close he’d been to those three women. They weren’t playing with him at all. They were going to kill him. The only way to keep from sleeping was to keep walking.
In his half-sleepwalk he hadn’t known he’d escaped the wardens by an impossible configuration of movement. He would certainly have failed if he had tried to do it deliberately. He’d walked past them, head half-submerged in another world. The moment he appeared in plain view the guard watching had turned the other way.
André walked, mesmerised by and terrified of the melodious music his spirit wives used to summon him to sleep. He didn’t register the narrow streets clustered with houses and shops, or the moon above, which seemed to be growing bigger and bigger, or the white-silver clouds racing across the sky. What he could see clearly in his half-sleep were people partying all over the world.
In Jaipur a wedding celebration is underway. The bride, a scarlet bindi between the perfect arcs of her eyebrows, smiles, revealing buck teeth as she dances in a circle of her husband’s friends to show them what they have lost.
On the beach in Lamu a purification ceremony is in progress.
Radio has been banned in a Cape Town boarding school for the time being. He sees some of the girls from the boarding school have sneaked into the boys’ hostel to perform live. There aren’t enough girls to go round so some of the boys improvise and everyone is happy, everyone is dancing under the face of the moon.
Some American hippies haven’t let go of LSD yet so they lock themselves in somebody’s murdered father’s house in New York and shimmy and grind in the many colours of neon light that they are. Outside the sun is still setting. A woman manoeuvres her way in, a dark-skinned woman not entirely out of place, even in her African-print wrapper tied over her breasts. At first André does not recognise her; he too is dancing with the hippies, just as he danced in the South African boarding house and at the Kenyan purification ceremony and at the Indian wedding.
‘The Africans have joined us,’ yells a white girl above the music in the high, a place where the drug meets the beat and the moment in her blood, her eyes tightly shut. ‘I can feel them,’ she says, flailing her arms above her head in hallucinatory worship, and André can’t tell the exact colour of her hair because of the flashing lights. ‘They are here,’ she smiles.
And he being here and not here recognises the other African the second she recognises him. She is one of his spirit wives and she has found him at last. A shock of pain and terror makes him stop dancing and soon the hippies in their exalted states of highness and hallucination can feel the presence of the spirit too, even if they don’t know why or what it is. One hippie stops dancing and bursts into tears. A man with long blond hair and a baby face stretches out his hands, eyes closed, to grab at the woman but she dissolves through his grip and strides across the room to André.
André recoils and screams, receding to the teenagers dancing in the boarding school dorm in Cape Town. By now somebody has introduced alcohol. A girl starts confessing to drunkenness and begging the others to let her go back to her room when the spirit wife comes after him. Everybody laughs as the drunk girl stumbles from the intangible impact of colliding into them. André’s ‘sorry’ is lost as he recedes to the Kenyan purification ceremony, joining the men with brooding faces dancing in a ring around a great fire. The priest prompts them to hush and announces that an evil spirit has entered their midst. As he starts to chant in a language André has never heard, the woman emerges from the fire and charges at him, this time with more purpose, so he recedes to the Indian wedding.
When he gets there it has ended. The open garden strewn with lights and confetti is empty. He walks out of it quickly, out to a narrow street now devoid of people. Unpainted storeys rise high on either side and the sky is a light happy blue. Dawn will soon come. He finds a statue of a fat man with full cheeks and arched eyebrows, who seems to be holding in a laugh. The ancient statue is chipped all over, but arranged before it is an assortment of dishes that must have been recently cooked. André wonders about the age of the statue, how long it has had to hold in its laugh. He climbs onto it and leans close to its chest to hear the laughter trapped in concrete for centuries. Maybe the statue laughs because it gets fed all the time. Or maybe it laughs at the food. André laughs out loud as he falls asleep between here and there.
4. HOW DO YOU BIRTH A RHYTHM?
Thirteen. A masterpiece of contemporary art. The Stijl. Thirteen young men in thirteen pictures from thirteen countries. Thirteen copies. Not replicable since cameras, printers and all production materials would be destroyed. Even the thirteen young men. Adolescent suicides all over the world. All at the thirteenth hour. André could feel them after midnight at the precipice of their young lives from his rooftop. Contract drawn up with the photographe
r to ensure families of the thirteen get proceeds from the sales of the photobooks, which would skyrocket after their suicides. Lucky collectors would value the book which, should they decide to sell it, would keep increasing in value over time. The photographer had talent but talent wasn’t always enough, so thirteen.
Before this night when André would fly to the US to fulfil his contract by taking his life, he decided to visit his brother, who was studying at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. To be squeezed in his arms, whether in a fight or an embrace. He wanted whichever Macmillan he would find in Enugu, friend or enemy. To remember what his brother’s breath was like in the morning. These were the things he wanted to think about when he took his last breath.
The last time he had lived with his brother was those few years after he had slept in the lap of an Indian god and woken up in his father’s arms. He hadn’t said anything about everything because there really had been nothing more to say. He had allowed his brother to care for him, waited for him to get fed up but that hadn’t happened. One clear morning, he’d managed to wake up before his brother and studied his sleeping form. He sniffed the sour milk on his breath and started crying. Crying because this was real. His brother, his father, Sweet Mum, the house. Even Ladidi. She was real. She had died. But she was real. And he had lived through things after which he would gladly die before watching Max experience them. Things that would never form into words in his mouth. He had seen these things and had escaped. Somehow.
Max had jumped out of the bed, horrified at having overslept. André mopped his eyes with his fists and allowed himself to see how tall his brother had grown.
‘You-you have bear-bear.’
Max fingered his jaw briefly to confirm if it was true and André burst out laughing. Max joined him, picking him up from his bed and carrying him round the room on his back even though they were no longer children but gangly about-to-be-men. André had to duck low so he wouldn’t hit the fan.
‘Ring a ring of roses,
‘A pocket full of posies
‘Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!’
And Max let them fall onto the bed, both of them laughing. Then they stopped to watch the ceiling fan go round and round.
‘Daddy bought this big bed?’
‘I bought it.’
‘What happened to our small-small beds?’
‘Daddy went to look for you. Sweet Mum stopped working at the hotel and we didn’t have money again so we used them for firewood.’
‘How old are you now?’
‘I am twenty.’
‘That means I am fifteen.’
‘You forgot your age? André, what happened to you? What did they do to you? Where were you?’
Silence.
‘I tried to concentrate so that maybe I would see you in my dream like when we were small, can you remember, André? Can you remember when I ran away from my school in the night to come and rescue you? I tried to concentrate like that but I couldn’t find you. Please, please talk to me.’
Silence.
‘Do you want to eat anything now? Sweet Mum said she will fry akara today.’
André simply had nothing to say to that. Or to anything else.
The opportunity to be part of Thirteen came at the perfect time. He had grown weary of the aspirations people had for him, their admiration and requests to join them and be part of a ‘new generation’ and so on. Perhaps the abundance of these sorts of people who believed he had something to give aged him more than any natural cause. He definitely looked thirty to his mother at twenty-two when he found himself in the midst of a thriving gospel ministry.
After he had been found and his mother reopened Taboo and he started singing in the bar to invoke Ladidi, he was approached by a group impressionable Germans who, after listening to his music, were convinced that he could be on a par with Ben Enwonwu if only he would take brush to canvas. ‘We didn’t hear the words,’ the shortest of the group bathed red in the light explained. ‘We saw images. Exquisite works of art.’
André was touched by the compliment. ‘You guys are so kind, but I haven’t touched a colour since I was four.’
They didn’t join in his laughter. They exchanged glances of wonder, the awe of men who couldn’t believe how fortunate they were to be born in the time of Jesus. ‘We are serious; you could join us to create paintings that will rock the world.’
André recognised the ‘call’ and felt bile in his mouth. He had heard it from his parents, his brother, the only girl he could ever love, his slave mistress, crowds, the army, pastors, protesters, change agents. He knew it so well, this hydra-headed demon that would not let him be. ‘Get out,’ he barked, but they lingered.
‘Talent repressed for so long …’
‘Who knows?’
‘We can find out, my friend.’
But he started yelling expletives in their mother tongue and flinging things at them, yet they were only more convinced that he was the one, that this rage would be brilliant on paper.
Maybe his obsession with high places came from the rush he got when his father had flung him in the air as a child. The man had exhausted him all the time with intimacy, right from the day he returned from the Liberian war, to make up for lost time. During the day his father would fling him up to the blazing sun in the vast blue sky, which had so much room in which to be. At night his father would fling him to the moon. And each time before returning to his father’s capable hands he would think that he belonged there, in the air.
Later that night he drank for the first time when the last German to leave came to join him. André’s eyes were clouded in the mists of alcohol at first so he didn’t recognise him.
‘Jacksmith Kline.’
‘Okay, what do you want?’
‘You.’
‘Er, excuse me?’
‘You. I am a photographer. We are instinctive artists; we have collaborated anonymously for twenty years and we came to Nigeria for inspiration, to find something that is missing. We found you, Herr André, and knew we had been right to come here. But you turned us down. So we are splitting up. Franz and the others will catch a flight back to The Hague tomorrow. I will return to my house in Oakland next week. And I want you to come with me.’
‘For what?’
The man stared at him with his stone-green eyes. ‘To die. I know you want to. I know you’ve tried to. But do you know why you’ve failed? You want to die for beauty. You want to die for meaning. And I can give that to you. Let me tell you about Thirteen.’
André transferred the payment he received directly into Max’s bank account, inventing a student aid organisation to use as depositor, knowing Max was too broke at the time to investigate the source. Nigeria was on strike and so UNN was on strike, which meant his scholarship was suspended. He knew Max would rather die of hunger than return to their Madhouse. So he sent him all the money after visiting him in Enugu one last time. In Kline’s studio one month and one thousand air miles later, he was asked what part of his body he wanted to show in the photograph and he lifted up his shirt to show his tattoo. Property of Macmillan Shariff. If found, return to Block 45 ground floor, Block A, 2nd Avenue, Lowcost Housing Estate. Godbless.
On the top floor of the apartment block from which he was to fly from his body, the delicious peace of his childhood flights from his father’s arms returned to him. As in the dreams someone familiar came to stop him, Ladidi this time, her face wistful in the soft baby clouds of dusk. And as in the dreams a familiar face only renewed his suicidal fervour, for true jumpers could only be persuaded off the edges of buildings in movies. He squeezed his eyes shut, keeping her out, then opened them once more because he wanted to take it all in. He took the last step, then—
‘Can you please step back from the edge?’
He looked down and saw a sea of police lights flashing long before the hum of their sirens met him.
He jumped anyway.
5. IS THERE A GOD?
He had discovered it at
night many years ago after his brother had rescued him from one of his death dreams. He had been halfway back to sleep in his brother’s arms when he heard it: the chirping and cries of insects outside, the great cicadas of the night. He was already familiar with the night sounds but never had they made so much sense and if you asked him he couldn’t explain it to you. But roaming Amsterdam, sparring in Japan and returning from his night gigs in Nigeria at midnight, he realised what he’d always suspected – that the insects, the croaking toads and the shrieks of night birds were all part of a grand orchestra that glorified a Supreme Maker. This knowledge, he decided, was too sacred to keep to himself; he had to share it with you and me, with the world. He returned to Nigeria after completing his sentence at the correctional facility in Oakland and turned an abandoned abattoir in the Sabon Gari Quarters into a meeting room where he had Sunday morning discussions with the worthless men of the community. He visited prisons and talked to prisoners who were close to the date of their release. He started discussions at late-night clubs, when people were drunk enough to listen. He wrote long epistles to his inmate friends in other countries.
In Sabon Gari no district head was interested any more in the washed-out open-air abattoir. Here Quarters children had once taken turns to play dead. This was his simple intent: to gather people who had similar views and ask questions and share ideas. Just talk. That it happened on Sunday mornings wasn’t intentional; it was the only time in the week people weren’t so busy, people who didn’t have churches to go to, at least. He washed the worn concrete floor and cleared the cobwebs from the ceiling. His early congregation comprised all kinds of people, from the prisons and hospitals he had visited with his ideas, to those he spoke to at market areas and bus parks. Yet giving was what they had in common, the senseless kind. It was as if André had struck them with some kind of magic. Even the poor gave money they didn’t have, not knowing how they would get home, and the richer ones, moved by the example set by the poor, would overcompensate. The wealthy felt an intimate connection to the poor, without fear of over-familiarity or of being exploited. They donated amounts they had been too smart to give their former well-established churches. It perplexed André, this giving fever. He had never asked them for their money, not one naira.