Into the Go Slow

by Bridgett M. Davis

Angie was awed by the reverence it evoked. “How long has Islam been practiced here?” she asked.

  “In Kano? Since the sixteenth century,” said Emeka. “It’s the foundation of who we are, our love of Allah.”

  She wished she’d had a love like that, a deep and penetrating faith. Apart from her visits to Unity Temple, she’d had so little experience with religion. At her father’s funeral, Aunt Bea had yelled out, “Get up Samson. Get on up from there!” and six-year-old Angie had waited for him to do so; she stared hard at his dead body, willing him to rise; when he didn’t and they closed the casket, she felt she’d failed him. She’d conflated church with death and failed resurrection ever since.

  Back in the taxi, Nigel kissed her and she was grateful that desire could push away death. She moved her hand over Nigel’s crotch and he groaned lightly.

  “You know what?” Nigel said to Emeka. “We’ll just go back to the hotel.”

  The next day, they tried again. “This time, keep your hands off of me,” said Nigel, only half-joking.

  “I’m not going to even stand near you,” she promised, as they climbed back into Emeka’s car.

  “Today I will take you to Kurmi Market,” said Emeka. “It’s one of the largest and oldest in Africa.”

  They entered the walled city through a different gate and made their way toward the market, the Jakara River shimmering alongside it; soon enough they came upon a thicket of people, making it impossible to go farther.

  “You will want to get out and walk around now,” advised Emeka.

  The market was choked with hawkers, cloths hanging from their arms, five different objects in hand. It dwarfed Gbaja Market in Lagos. It was endless, massive. Sinewy main arteries bordered by gutters turned off into tributaries of slim alleyways. They strolled through what was essentially a giant maze, meandering down one dark corridor after another. Nigel abruptly pulled her into one of the darkened corners, and with vendors eyeing them, kissed her passionately. She’d never kissed in public before and the exhibitionism excited her. Now she was holding on as he pulled her through an alley with its dizzying array of wooden carvings and large calabashes. She ached with longing, felt she’d burst if they didn’t get back to the room soon. They went down another alleyway, this one filled with brass and bronze and beaded jewelry in a blur of shapes and colors. Stall vendors called out to the couple. She followed Nigel along yet another corridor, where sheets of leather hung, their smell of wild beasts driving her to distraction.

  They were running now, lost in the maze, desperate to get out, get back to the room. Vendors kept calling out to them: “Enta,” they chanted. “Enta.”

  Together they ran like escaped prisoners, navigating through the labyrinth, bumping into people, until they turned down a row of stalls with vendors selling cloths. Women stood against a backdrop of traditional prints, pastel laces, and textiles of deep, brooding hues and saturated colors. Angie recognized the women’s faces—the elongated noses and gently brown skin, the high cheekbones. Women like Missy, who’d braided her hair. They called out to her as she and Nigel ran by: “Sistah, come, come Sistah. You are welcome! Sistah, come!” She kept her gaze on the women as long as she could as she and Nigel ran by.

  Finally, mercifully, they found Emeka leaning against the battered Datsun, eating peanuts and tossing the shells onto the ground. They crawled into the backseat, humidity another passenger in the car. Angie and Nigel both instinctively sat on opposite ends, straining against the car doors, not daring to touch one another. After an eternity, Emeka pulled up to the hotel. Like children admonished not to run in the hallways at school, she and Nigel speed-walked in single file back to her room.

  Once inside, Nigel pushed her against the door, pulled up her skirt and entered her right there.

  “God, I love you,” she whispered, her legs wrapped around his waist. “I love you so much.”

  Everything about this felt right. Sacred. As their hands interlaced, she understood why African women married their dead husbands’ brothers.

  They tried again the following day, this time determined to get through a few hours of sightseeing without rushing back. But when they looked for Emeka in the lobby, they couldn’t find him. In fact, the entire hotel was all but deserted.

  “What happened?” asked Angie. She had the sinking feeling that a coup had occurred while they were sequestered away, having nonstop sex.

  “It is Friday,” explained Bola, the Vespa owner. “Everyone is headed to afternoon prayers. Except for me because I am a Christian!” He smiled at them both. “Anyway, you will not be able to get around. The streets are blocked.”

  As if on cue, a call-to-prayer issued forth over the ubiquitous loudspeaker, prompting Angie and Nigel to head outside. There they saw dozens and dozens of men in neat rows along the main boulevard in front of the hotel, each on an individual prayer rug, each prone and facing the West, all praying aloud in Arabic. Their unified voices rang out, creating a vibrating chorus. The spiritual surrender en masse made Angie step backward, made her feel silly for her own Buddhist chant selfishly recited when she was in need or in fear.

  They turned silently and returned to the room.

  For three more days, they went nowhere, distrusting themselves, afraid of “getting caught out there” as Nigel described it. He gathered their rations from the same buka, bringing back an array of bottled pop and chunks of coconut and cans of potted meat and loaves of bread. She laughed with glee when she saw his hands filled with food. It was as though they were fugitives, hiding underground. “I could be her, that Angela, on the lam,” She thought. “Only I get to have my man with me.”

  They didn’t bother with clothes. She lost track of time again, could only tell when night became day from the shuttered window and the sunlight slipping away, moonlight taking its place. On the second night, there were thunderstorms and lightening, the booming torrent itself a turn-on. In the middle of the third night, Nigel said, “Let’s change it up,” and he led her to the tiny balcony, where he entered her from behind and made love to her in full view of whomever might think to look up from the street below. She could see a man riding a rickshaw watching her and her small cries drifted onto the night wind as she came.

  None of it was real, and that was what Angie liked, that surreal quality of their lives together. Their future was a fuzzy outline, but that was OK. They had time to work out everything; she didn’t try to think beyond the moment. It wasn’t hard to do that, as the past four years had been like that anyway: she hadn’t known what was next, hadn’t thought beyond the days in front of her. This felt, in its way, normal.

  On the fourth night, she felt feverish. She found herself clinging to Nigel in bed just for the relief of his cool skin against hers.

  “You need some salt-water air,” he announced, gently moving her hot body away from his. “And we both need the power of the ocean to break this spell.”

  It was true. She felt as though all the sex had drained away her color. She was like a convalescing woman, longed for the sun on her skin. In the morning, they sought out Emeka once again to take them to the Old City. He dropped them off on the bank of the Jakara River and promised to wait for them in that very spot.

  The horizon stretched above the water, white and taut as vanilla taffy. Angie took off her sandals, walked closer to the shore, her feet sinking into the cool sand. She waded in, letting the water lap at her ankles. The breeze helped her to feel a bit better. Overhead, seagulls swooshed across the blank sky, their rhythmic caw caw like an impromptu wake-up call. She watched as one seagull swooped down, dipped its head into the river water, rose with its prize, and flew off. Nigel came up beside her.

  “What do you suppose this all means?” she asked, looking out at the horizon.

  “This what?”

  “This! You and me connecting like this.”

  “I think it was a fantastic coincidence.”r />
  “I don’t think it was that,” she insisted. “Really, what are the odds that we’d run into each other?”

  “Well, if you think about it, the odds were pretty good,” he said. “You stayed with people in Lagos that I had a connection to, so it’s not that strange.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t think it was more than that,” she said, hurt obvious in her voice.

  He turned toward her. “Why are you getting upset?”

  “Because.” She didn’t really know why, only that she wanted him to be as awed by their reconnection, their togetherness, as she was. Otherwise, it felt like just any affair, only more sordid. “Chris told me that Africans don’t believe in coincidence. Everything happens for a reason. Everything is fate.”

  “Chris would’ve said anything to fuck you.”

  She turned to face him. “Do you have to be so crude?”

  “Hey, I’m not the one who tried to rape you.”

  Her head pounded. “Are you saying this is nothing, what we have?”

  “I didn’t know we were still talking about us.”

  The throbbing was relentless, pushed against her forehead. “You’re ready to go back to Regina, aren’t you?” she said. “Just say it!”

  He looked out on the water. “I’d be lying if I told you I’d forgotten all about her.”

  “So go be with her!” She moved farther into the river. She had the urge to jump in, just dive, swim away. She remembered what that taxi driver had said about the Lagos Lagoon, how when someone falls in, they’re so covered in oil they’re too slippery to save. She kept wading farther in. The water rose to her waist. She kept going.

  The water was at her chest when Nigel gripped her arm; she was secretly relieved, and said a quick prayer of gratitude before she turned to face him. His eyes said he still wanted her. She moved into his arms, the water lapping around them, and they kissed for a long, desperate time, as if their lips were charged with reassuring one another nothing had changed. She was the one who pulled him out of the water, toward the raffia hut up a ways on the shore. They crawled inside and she lifted her Indian skirt, slipped off her panties. The sand crunched under her ass, and through the woven straw of the hut she could see clouds, a vast cluster of them. She was shivery cold yet feverish, thought she might faint as his rough jeans chafed against her thigh. She kept her eyes on the piece of sky, which spun before her in a tumble of white clouds, and when he shuddered, she held on tight, dizziness pressing down on her alongside the weight of his satiated body. “I love you,” he whispered, out of breath. “I do love you.”

  She held him as though she might fall off a cliff. In fact, she felt a kind of vertigo, and didn’t free him from her embrace until it passed in a wave. Eventually, they crawled out of the raffia hut and Angie fell onto the cool sand, just lay there. Something ripped loose in her, some kind of band that had been holding together her limbs. She spread across the sand like a rag doll, limp and weak. She could feel herself fading.

  “Angie, you OK?” he yelled from a great distance. She thought she nodded. Or shook her head.

  Nigel tried to pull her up, but she felt too slippery to save. He lifted her into his arms and carried her back to the awaiting taxi. Emeka and he exchanged words, the car moved. Behind her closed eyes, firecrackers of light exploded, and then all went dark. Again, crackling luminescence, then darkness.

  She awoke hours later to a drenched bed. At first, she was comforted by the wetness; assumed she was lying in a damp cocoon of their lovemaking. But Nigel’s head swam above her, a disembodied face. He looked stricken. He’d gotten hot liquid from somewhere, tried to get her to drink. He placed a cool compress on her forehead. His hands, cold against her flaming skin, pushed thumbs against her pressure points, forced open her eyes. He wouldn’t leave her alone, kept poking her, and she hated him. He kept barking questions at her: Did she know where she was? Was she taking the pills every day? Could she walk? She lay there, unable to respond, drifted back to her netherworld, to the place of popping sparkle and dark beauty.

  Bare hands lifted her and the blanket she was in, carried her out. Soon, morning’s air chafed her skin and its sun sealed close her eyelids. Now she was in a moving car, stretched across the backseat, joints aching from the rough motion; all stopped and hands slid beneath her, scooped her out into the dark sun again, carried her inside somewhere, lowered her into a chair, where she slumped over. Her chest hurt. She was cold, so cold. Someone said the word “American” and her eyes opened. Nigel was there, helped her up, led her past a crowded waiting room, down a hallway, behind a door, blanket bunched at her feet. Inside stood a stark metal examining table and a stark black man in a spotless white lab coat.

  “Hello,” he said, mouth hidden beneath a bushy mustache. Fear made her wobble.

  “On the table,” he ordered.

  Nigel helped her onto the metal table. She was freezing. The doctor put her chin in his hand, looked in her eyes. “You don’t feel so good, eh?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “You are feeling like you have the flu, only worse?”

  She nodded.

  “Perhaps you were a little sick like this a couple days ago but got better?”

  She shrugged, didn’t remember.

  “Don’t worry my sistah, you will be fine.”

  “I’m pretty sure she was taking those anti-malarial drugs every day, Doc,” said Nigel.

  The doctor smiled. “Those pills don’t work so well with the mosquitoes in Nigeria. They call that lunch.”

  He left, and Nigel coaxed the blanket from around her, draped it on his arm.

  “What are they going to do to me?” she asked. It felt odd to speak, to hear her own voice.

  “Give you medicine to make you better, just as the good doctor said.”

  “What kind of medicine?”

  Before he could answer, a nurse walked into the room, unsmiling. She wore a long wig but no uniform. “Stand up,” she ordered Angie.

  “Why?”

  “Arm or hip?” asked the nurse.

  “What?”

  “Do you want the injection in your arm or hip?”

  Only then did Angie see the long needle in the woman’s dangling hand. “You’re not shooting me up!” she yelled.

  “This is why you have come here, no?” asked the nurse, nonchalant.

  “It’s OK,” Nigel said, standing beside her. He rubbed her arm.

  She slapped his hand away. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child!”

  “Arm or hip?” repeated the nurse.

  “Don’t you fucking come near me!” Angie screamed.

  The nurse sucked her teeth. “I do not have all day!” she snapped. “Plenty-plenty people are waiting. Sick-sick people, O!”

  Angie could not fathom that needle sliding under her skin. Even as a child, she was in terror of needles. She’d always been afraid of them, even before she found Ella slumped over the bathroom toilet, syringe inside the crook of her arm, needle jabbed into a vein. She endured shots when she had to, like her vaccines to travel, but this needle, she was convinced, was unclean and deadly. And gigantic.

  She got off the table, and squatted, in an ugly and pathetic crouch. “If you come near me, I’ll kill you,” she said. Nigel gingerly lifted her upright. Sighing, as if to say you American girls really are spoiled babies, the nurse barked, “Lift your skirt, please.”

  “No,” she whimpered.

  Nigel grabbed her arms just as the doctor stepped back in. He helped to hold her as Angie screamed. The nurse lifted her skirt, yanked down her panties and jabbed her in the buttock. Pain shot through her entire leg, a pain so acute no sound escaped when she cried out. The nurse threw the needle into a trashcan and walked out. The room spun around her. A million ants danced on her nerve endings. She went limp.

  “Oh shit.�
� Nigel caught her before she hit the floor. “Is she gonna be alright?”

  “She’ll feel like new in a few hours,” said the doctor. “Except for the bruises on her arms.” He hovered over her. “Next time, my sistah, you must let us help you, not fight.”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  The doctor flinched. “You can get her out of here now,” he said brusquely as he left the room.

  Nigel helped Angie sit back on the examining table, held her wrists, looked into her eyes.

  “You OK?”

  With the energy she had, she shook her head. “No. That shit hurt.”

  He sighed relief. “I had to do it Angie. You weren’t getting better on your own.”

  Her leg ached. Badly. A searing burn dripped from her hip to her ankle. “I think I’m paralyzed.”

  Panic moved across his face like a shadow. She felt a sick satisfaction in the thought that he blamed himself. It made her feel they were in this together.

  “Come on, try to walk.” He helped her down, led her out and past the crowd of sufferers, many of them children with runny noses and drooping faces. Sick eyes staring at her as she passed. Nigel led her to a Volkswagen Beetle, gingerly helped her into the backseat and slid in the front. She lay across the space, achy leg stretched out before her.

  “Whose car is this?” she asked.

  “Bola’s. He lent it to me.”

  Nigel tried to start the car, but it wouldn’t ignite. He tried again. And again. Nothing. He leaned his head on the steering wheel. Angie studied the back of his neck for several seconds. Her mouth was glue. “I’ve never been this thirsty in my life,” she said.

  “Yeah?” He opened the car door. “Wait here.”

  He jogged across the road to a kiosk. She watched him buying a pop, parched throat oppressive, and a memory came rushing at her: In the backyard with Ella. She is six, maybe seven. It’s the middle of a harsh Michigan winter and the yard is covered in fresh, crunchy snow. Ella is helping her fill a bowl with it. She wears mittens; Ella’s hands are bare. “There’s nothing in the world better than snow ice-cream,” Ella says as she leads Angie into the house. She tells her to close your eyes and count to twenty. When Angie opens them, there before her is white, glistening ice cream. “Go ahead, Princess,” says Ella. “Eat up.” It was delicious, that sweetness against the cold. She was awed by her big sister’s magical powers, thrilled to be shown something wondrous in the world, something she might never have known existed without Ella. Angie realized she hadn’t thought about Ella these past several days; yet she had always been there, hovering, waiting.