Into the Go Slow

by Bridgett M. Davis

  Nigel returned with an opened bottle of orange Fanta. “It’s warm but it’s wet,” he said, handing it to her through the window. She took a long swig, burped softly.

  “Now how does it feel?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Your leg!”

  Miraculously, the pain in her leg was gone, as was the overall achiness. Her hip was a tender bruise, but still.

  Nigel blew out air. “The power of chloroquine. A miracle drug costing pennies, and still millions of people here die from fucking malaria.” He turned the ignition. “One more shameful example of callous greed,” he mumbled as the car refused to start. He turned again and the engine stayed silent. He pounded the steering wheel. “Fuck!” He tried to light a cigarette, but his hands were shaking; he placed the unlit cigarette in the ashtray. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  She leaned forward, touched him lightly. “I’m OK now.”

  When he looked back at her, she could actually see the fear, like tiny crouching animals, just behind his eyes. He laid his head against the headrest, stared at the car’s interior. “Thank God.”

  He lifted his head and she studied his profile, the shamefully long eyelashes, the rise and fall of his adam’s apple. “Nigel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to see those dye pits.”

  He caught her eye in the rearview mirror. “I think you need to just rest, Angie. Heal completely.”

  “I’m healed,” she insisted. And she did feel new, as though the malaria had stripped away the final vestiges of an old, tentative self.

  He turned around to face her. “I guess that is why we came here.”

  This time, when he turned the ignition, the engine purred.

  She slept the rest of that day and through the night, and the following morning she felt fine, and so before noon they were back in the banged-up Datsun, moving through yet another opening into the Old City. “The Emir’s wives and concubines used to pass through this gate to the palace,” explained Emeka, ever the tour guide. “That was how it got its name, kofar mata, women’s gate.”

  “You’d think they’d have separate entrances,” said Angie.

  Emeka navigated the car expertly. “Legend has it that the Emir loved all his women with the same intensity.”

  “I hear that,” said Nigel, and he gave Angie a goofy smile as she looked over at him. She smiled back. We can joke like this because we’re lovers, she thought, a real couple. She scooted closer, cuddled against him. She felt no desire, nothing, as though the malaria had stripped her of that too. She decided that was OK, felt right somehow. She and Nigel had been tested, been pushed past lust, and they’d survived.

  They followed a narrow road that curved and curved, until they came upon another entryway. Emeka said they should come down here. A gatekeeper stood before the entrance, and Nigel dashed him a couple naira. They entered, the only visitors, save a German family with two small blond-haired boys. The wide-open area was dominated by vast cement holes in the ground, their darkness accentuating the sub-Saharan red earth. Men squatted before the deep vats, some dipping in white cloths, some stirring with dyed sticks, some pulling out long poles, these draped with dripping-wet, inky-blue fabric.

  They watched as each man bent over his vat of dye, hard at work. She had an urge to dip her toe into those deep, shimmering pools of darkness. Sheets of fabrics hung across rope lines, drying, each in a varied shade of blue: cerulean, azure, indigo. The sun hit the hanging sheets, bathing them in light. She had seen these colors together before: in the negligee Ella had worn as she posed for pictures Angie took of her with a Polaroid, pictures Ella sent to Nigel, who’d been caught on a shoplifting charge, was serving a month upstate. The gown, she now remembered, was voluminous in accordion pleats, fanning out in gradations of blue, from the palest sky to the darkest navy. Angie, all of eleven, had snapped and snapped with her child’s hands until there were half a dozen photos developing before them, each of Ella in a slightly different pose, lying across the carpet, soft pleats rising seductively up her ample thighs. Angie wondered was Nigel having the same memory right now, of that graduated blue nightie, of those Polaroids arriving in the prison mail, and she hoped so, hoped they were honoring Ella, silently together.

  Angie kept staring at the dyers, wanting to feel something beyond a memory, something present and timeless. Here was the place Ella had so wanted to see. Angie waited, her mind straining. Nothing came, and she felt disappointed in herself.

  “We should be going,” said Nigel, finally.

  Back in the car, they followed a circular path around the perimeter of the wall, passing back through the kofar mata. “These gates are all securely locked at night,” said Emeka. “And manned by armed guards.”

  “What happens if someone needs to get in after the gates are locked?” she asked.

  “No one goes in or out after sunset,” Emeka answered.

  She looked behind her at the wall rising into the skyline, formidable and protective. It looked like a giant womb. No, she thought, it looks like a giant tomb.

  Kano, its Old City, its wall, its dye pits even, was just a place. The wrong place, Angie realized, because Ella had never been here. They moved along the modern streets, again passing by low-slung houses and Koranic schools and myriad banks.

  She turned to Nigel. “I want to go to that road.”

  “What road?”

  “The one where It happened.”

  His look became grave. “I don’t see the point of that. In fact, I’d say that’s a bad idea.”

  “I want to see it.”

  “What do you think you’ll see? It’s just a road, Angie.”

  “Just a road?”

  “What I mean is that it’s . . .” Nigel struggled for the right words. “I mean there’s no, there’s nothing there that would suggest anything . . . that anything happened.”

  “But something did happen.” She folded her arms, resolved and ready to be out of this banged-up car for good.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” he asked.

  She didn’t hesitate. “A feeling.”

  At first she thought she couldn’t feel her presence because Ella had died so far away. Then she thought it was because she needed to see her body. Then she thought it was because she needed to go to the places Ella had gone. Then she thought it was because she needed to go where Ella had longed to go. But still it hadn’t come, that certain feeling.

  “I need to go to the last place she was alive.”

  Nigel tried, futility lacing his words. “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  She stared at Emeka’s back. “I’m going with or without you.”

  Nigel rubbed his hand down his face, held it over his mouth for a moment, as if stopping himself from saying something he’d regret—or to hold back nausea. Finally he uncovered his mouth. “I know you are, Angie.” He sounded defeated. “I know you are.”

  They agreed to return to Lagos in the morning.

  That last night in Kano, they both fell into a deep, draggy sleep as soon as their bodies hit the bed, the decision itself having utterly exhausted them both.

  During the two-hour flight back to Lagos, she held Nigel’s hand the entire time. He was fidgety, kept glancing out the window, tapping his foot, smoking nonstop. But she was calm. To Angie, it felt right to be on this leg of the journey together, to be sharing this act of homage alongside one another.

  As the plane made its descent, she watched the aircraft teeter above the tarmac, its left wing wobbling; she listened to the wheels whine, and as they dropped down, her thoughts stayed on the spinning wheels, on their yearning reach for solid ground before the aircraft bounced against land, and zoomed along the runway. Nigel gently let go of her hand, unbuckled his seat belt, and said grimly: “We’re already in Ikeja. Let’s just get this over with.”

  TWENT
Y

  As they stood outside the Lagos airport, Angie thought of all that had transpired since she’d last stood in this very spot, upon arriving a month ago. Now she was about to retrace Ella’s last steps, and she was nervously excited, certain this, ultimately, was what she’d come here to do: to bear witness, to honor a sacred place, and with it a life. Her sister’s life. And create a marker to leave behind.

  The go-slow was not so bad—Sunday morning, explained Nigel—and for the most part they moved smoothly along Airport Road. When the taxi turned onto Agege Motor Road, she took in the passing sights, looking for significance in each billboard sign, each petrol station, each roadside vendor. When she spotted a Chevron station up ahead, she recognized it, recognized the cluster of roadside shacks beside it. They whizzed by and she craned her neck to look again as they passed, to be sure.

  “I’ve been on this road before.”

  “You have,” said Nigel. “It’s the road to Fela’s club.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me when we were on it before?” she asked, words tinged with hurt.

  “It’s a major road, Angie. People use it all day long.”

  She looked out her taxi window, straining to find something significant to hold on to, but the images collided together and she feared that some day, in a future that loomed, she’d have trouble recalling this place at all, its acute details a blur.

  “We’ll come down here,” Nigel told the taxi driver.

  “Here, suh?” asked the driver.

  “Right here.”

  The driver pulled over and Nigel offered his hand, helped Angie out, his backpack dangling from one shoulder, her duffel from the other. Cars whizzed by.

  “Where are we?” She hugged the reporter’s bag to her chest.

  “We’re near where Fela’s compound used to be. He built a new one somewhere else. But this is where it was back then.”

  “How far away? Like a block?” She needed to get the logistics right in her head.

  “A few blocks.”

  Angie stood very still, watching the indifferent rush of traffic. An overpass stood a few yards away. “I don’t believe it happened here,” she said.

  “It did, trust me,” said Nigel. His voice was deadpan.

  “No way she’d run across a road this busy. For no reason? That would be suicide.”

  “It wasn’t busy.” He sounded annoyed. “It was late at night and the most dangerous road in Lagos. People knew not to be on it.”

  “Then why would she be out here?”

  Nigel wouldn’t look at her. “She had her reasons.”

  Angie shook her head vigorously. “No, I don’t believe that’s what happened. Maybe that’s what people claimed happened, and maybe the truth is still out there.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “How do you know?” she snapped. “You weren’t here. You were off doing your fabulous interview. You left her alone on New Year’s Eve, so how would—”

  “I was here,” said Nigel. His words hit her like bales of loose cargo. “I did not leave her alone on New Year’s Eve. I was here.”

  Angie couldn’t piece together the implications of what he was saying. Slowly, she started to comprehend. “You saw it happen?”

  Nigel looked at her, eyes brimming. He nodded slowly.

  A car got too close as it flew by, rustling their clothes, and both instinctively backed away. Angie kept stepping backward until she stumbled and fell. She stayed down, and Nigel sat down heavily beside her.

  “You said you were in Guinea when it happened.” She was shaking slightly.

  “I lied about when I got back.”

  OK, she told herself. He lied. OK.

  “I got back the morning of New Year’s Eve. She’d left me a note, telling me she’d gone to Kalakuta. I tried to come straight here and get her. But the coup jumped off, and they imposed a curfew. I couldn’t get to her until late the next day, New Year’s Day.”

  “So you saw it?”

  “She ran across,” he said, voice raspy. “And—”

  “And you saw it.”

  “I saw it.”

  Angie turned on him. “What did you do to make her run?” She reached and gripped his shirt. “What did you do?”

  Nigel placed his hand on Angie’s. It was heavy. “She wasn’t upset with me. It wasn’t me.”

  She let go. “Then what was it?”

  “It was . . . she was upset with herself.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  Angie put her hands to her head. “Please, Nigel just tell me! Just fucking tell me!”

  “OK.” He swallowed. More cars zoomed by. “When I got to her, she was high.”

  “High?”

  “She’d smoked a lot of weed at Fela’s compound.”

  “So she had a relapse?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so?”

  “And so everyone knows Fela laces his marijuana with all kinds of hallucinogens. She was very high.”

  Pain shot through her chest. “This is what we all wanted to know, and you didn’t tell us?”

  “She made me promise, Angie. She definitely didn’t want you guys to know.”

  “Are you telling me she killed herself?” This thought forced her up onto her feet. She hovered over him. He was shaking his head. “That she couldn’t bare the thought of a relapse, so she—”

  “No!” yelled Nigel. He looked up at her. “Do not say that! I told you, it was an accident.”

  “But what made her run into the street? Was she hallucinating?”

  “No. Something else happened that I didn’t tell you about.”

  Angie braced herself. “I’m listening.”

  “Sit down,” he told her.

  She kept standing. “I’m listening.”

  Nigel took in air. “She saw Jide get killed.”

  “In jail?”

  “He never made it to jail. When the police barged into The Voice newsroom, they put him in a chokehold and he died on the spot.”

  Angie felt the full weight of Nigel’s words. “And, and she saw it?”

  Nigel nodded. Her legs weak, Angie plopped back down. She hugged her knees, buried her face in them. For a while, she and Nigel sat in silence, nothing but the sound of lorries and danfos and cars whishing by. The sun was a hot wall against her back. She lifted her head too quickly and black dots appeared. She closed her eyes to steady herself. “Listen, I have to know,” she said. “Did she do it on purpose?”

  “I swear to you, she did not.”

  Angie wanted for him to be right. Still. “But how can you be so sure? She had to be distraught.”

  “She was distraught. About Jide, her own relapse, about us. Like I said, she was high as a kite—”

  Angie opened her eyes, shielded them from the sun with her hand. “So then she might have—”

  “No. The last thing she said to me was, ‘I need to come down.’ Before I knew it, she bolted out into the road. I called after her but she didn’t stop.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that she didn’t run into traffic?” Angie felt the need to be explicit. She didn’t trust her own understanding.

  “The road was empty, OK? It was late at night, the curfew was still in effect, and no one wanted to be out anyway. I told you, this is the most dangerous road in Lagos. She ran into an empty street. She leaped for the curb—I’m never gonna forget that sight—just as an Army jeep came barreling out of nowhere and hit her. It was all so fast.”

  “An army jeep?”

  Nigel nodded. “Didn’t even stop. A fraction of a second later and she would’ve been safe.”

  Angie refused to follow his gaze, yet hungrily imagined her sister leaping to safety, triumphant and alive.

 
“She didn’t look back at me,” said Nigel. “If she was trying to take her own life, she would’ve looked back at me. She would have. I know it.”

  Angie nodded. That made sense. “So then what?”

  Tears suddenly slid down Nigel’s face. “I ran to her and called her name over and over. I checked for a pulse, a heartbeat, but she didn’t respond. I—I tried to give her mouth-to-mouth. She just lay there, eyes closed, unmoving. No blood. I think she hit her head on the pavement.” He shook his head slowly. “I held her hand and, and—” Nigel was crying full on now, his voice a growl, face covered in tears.

  No one came. That was how it was in Nigeria, after a coup. So he held her there, in his lap, and waited for daybreak. He didn’t leave her, and finally someone, a woman walking up the road saw them. He told her that his American girlfriend had been hit by a car, and could she please go get help? He held her in his lap and cried. More time went by, morning traffic appeared and he began to think the worse thoughts—that she’d lie in the sun too long before anyone got there.

  But finally a van came, and a man helped him place her body inside. Nigel rode with her to the morgue. From there, he went to the US Embassy, used their phone to call her mother. It was three in the morning Detroit time. January 2.

  Her mother hadn’t awakened her, had waited until Angie was out of bed. She remembered that right before she got the news, she’d been thinking of Romare, and how sweet he’d been to her on New Year’s Eve, how she’d slipped him into the basement after they’d left Baker’s Keyboard Lounge. She’d led him to her old playroom, where a lumpy sofa had replaced her childhood furniture. Angie had planned to write her big sister a long letter that day, before she saw her mother’s stricken face.