The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  My mother got very angry at him, shouted more things. Afterwards he looked so small and sad that I pulled him closer to me on the sofa. He crawled up onto my lap and just sat there. “I wish we were closer to the river,” he said, “so we could go and play.”

  “Mamamimi says the river is dangerous.” My mother’s name was Mimi which means truth, so Mama Truth was a kind of title.

  “Everything’s dangerous,” he said, his lower lip thrust out. A five-year-old should not have such a bleak face.

  By the time I was nine, Baba would try to push us into the walls, wanting us hidden or wanting us gone. His vast hands would cover the back of our heads or shoulders and grind us against the plaster. Raphael would look like a crushed berry, but he shouted in a rage, “No! No! No!”

  Yet my father wore a suit and drove himself to work. Jacob Terhemba Shawo worked as a tax inspector and electoral official.

  Did other government employees act the same way? Did they put on a shell of calm at work? He would be called to important meetings in Abuja and stay for several days. Once Mamamimi sat at the table, her white bread uneaten, not caring what her children heard. “What you go to Abuja for? Who you sleep with there, Wildman? What diseases do you bring back into my house?” ’

  We stared down at our toast and tea, amazed to hear such things. “You tricked me into marriage with you. I bewail the day I accepted you. Nobody told me you were crazy!”

  My father was not a man to be dominated in his own house. Clothed in his functionary suit, he stood up. “If you don’t like it, go. See who will have you since you left your husband. See who will want you without all the clothes and jewelery I buy you. Maybe you no longer want this comfortable home. Maybe you no longer want your car. I can send you back to your village, and no one would blame me.”

  My mother spun away into the kitchen and began to slam pots. She did not weep. She was not one to be dominated either, but knew she could not change how things had to be. My father climbed into his SUV for Abuja in his special glowering suit that kept all questions at bay, with his polished head and square-cornered briefcase. The car purred away down the tree-lined government street with no one to wave him goodbye.

  Jide’s full name is name is Babajide. In Yoruba it means Father Wakes Up. His son is called Babatunde, Father Returns. It is something many people believe in the muddle of populations that is Nigeria.

  My work on mice was published in Nature and widely cited. People wanted to believe that character could be inherited; that stressed fathers passed incapacities on to their grandchildren. It seemed to open a door to inherited characteristics, perhaps a modified theory of evolution. Our experiments had been conclusive: not only were there the non-genetically inherited emotional tendencies, but we could objectively measure the levels of methyl.

  My father was born in 1965, the year before the Tiv rioted against what they thought were Muslim incursions. It was a time of coup and counter-coup. The violence meant my grandfather left Jos, and moved the family to Makurdi. They walked, pushing some of their possessions and my infant father in a wheelbarrow. The civil war came with its trains full of headless Igbo rattling eastwards, and air force attacks on our own towns. People my age say, oh those old wars. What can Biafra possibly have to do with us, now?

  What we found is that 1966 can reach into your head and into your balls and stain your children red. You pass war on. The cranky old men in the villages, the lack of live music in clubs, the distrust of each other, soldiers everywhere, the crimes of colonialism embedded in the pattern of our roads. We live our grandfathers’ lives.

  Outside, the stars spangle. It will be a beautiful clear day. My traditional clothes hang unaccepted in the closet and I fear for any son that I might have. What will I pass on? Who would want their son to repeat the life of my father, the life of my brother? Ought I to get married at all? Outside in the courtyard, wet with dew, the white plastic chairs are lined up for the guests.

  My grandmother Iveren would visit without warning. Her name meant “Blessing” which was a bitter thing for us. Grandmother Iveren visited all her children in turn no matter how far they moved to get away from her: Kano, Jalingo, or Makurdi.

  A taxi would pull up and we would hear a hammering on our gate. One of us boys would run to open it and there she would be standing like a princess. “Go tell my son to come and pay for the taxi. Bring my bags please.”

  She herded us around our living room with the burning tip of her cigarette, inspecting us as if everything was found wanting. The Intermittent Freezer that only only kept things cool, the gas cooker, the rack of vegetables, the many tins of powdered milk, the rumpled throw rug, the blanket still on the sofa, the TV that was left tuned all day to Africa Magic. She would switch it off with a sigh as she passed. “Education,” she would say shaking her head. She had studied literature at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and she used that like she used her cigarette. Iveren was tiny, thin, very pretty and elegant in glistening blue or purple dresses with matching headpieces.

  My mother’s mother might also be staying, rattling out garments on her sewing machine. Mamagrand, we called her. The two women would feign civility, even smiling. My father lumbered in with suitcases; the two grandmothers would pretend that it made no difference to them where they slept, but Iveren would get the back bedroom and Mamagrand the sofa. My father then sat down to gaze at his knees, his jaws clamped shut like a turtle’s. His sons assumed that that was what all children did, and that mothers always kept order in this way.

  Having finished pursuing us around our own house, she would sigh, sit on the sofa and wait expectantly for my mother to bring her food. Mamamimi dutifully did so – family being family – and then sat down, her face going solid and her arms folded.

  “You should know what the family is saying about you,” Grandmother might begin, smiling so sweetly. “They are saying that you have infected my son, that you are unclean from an abortion.” She would say that my aunt Judith would no longer allow Mamamimi into her house and had paid a woman to cast a spell on my mother to keep her away.

  “Such a terrible thing to do. The spell can only be cured by cutting it with razor blades.” Grandmother Iveren looked as though she might enjoy helping.

  “Thank heavens such a thing cannot happen in a Christian household,” my mother’s mother would say.

  “Could I have something to drink?”

  From the moment Grandmother visited, all the alcohol in the house would start to disappear: little airline sample bottles, whisky from my father’s boss, even the brandy Baba had brought from London. And not just alcohol. Grandmother would offer to help Mamamimi clean a bedroom; and small things would be gone from it forever, jewelry or scarves or little bronzes. She sold the things she pilfered, to keep herself in dresses and perfume.

  It wasn’t as if her children neglected their duty. She would be fed and housed for as long as any of us could stand it. Even so, she would steal and hide all the food in the house. My mother went grim-faced, and would lift up mattresses to display the tins and bottles hidden under them. The top shelf of the bedroom closet would contain the missing stewpot with that evening’s meal. “It’s raw!” my mother would swelter at her. “It’s not even cooked! Do you want it to go rotten in this heat?”

  “I never get fed anything in this house. I am watched like a hawk!” Iveren complained, her face turned towards her giant son.

  Mamamimi had strategies. She might take to her room ill, and pack meat in a cool chest and keep it under her bed. Against all tradition, especially if father was away, she would sometimes refuse to cook any food at all. For herself, for Grandmother or even us. “I’m on strike!” she announced once. “Here, here is money. Go buy food! Go cook it!” She pressed folded money into our hands. Raphael and I made a chicken stew, giggling. We had been warned about Iveren’s cooking. “Good boys, to take the place of the mother,” she said, winding our hair in her fingers.

  Such bad behaviour on all sides mad
e Raphael laugh. He loved it when Iveren came to stay, with her swishing skirts and dramatic manner and drunken stumbles; loved it when Mamamimi behaved badly and the house swelled with their silent battle of wills.

  Grandmother would say things to my mother like: “We knew that you were not on our level, but we thought you were a simple girl from the country and that your innocence would be good for him.” Chuckle. “If only we had known.”

  “If only I had,” my mother replied.

  My father’s brothers had told us stories about Granny. When they were young, she would bake cakes with salt instead of sugar and laugh when they bit into them. She would make stews out of only bones, having thrown the goat away. She would cook with no seasoning so that it was like eating water, or cook with so many chillies that it was like eating fire.

  When my uncle Eamon tried to sell his car, she stole the starter motor. She was right in there with a monkey wrench and spirited it away. It would cough and grind when potential buyers turned the key. When he was away, she put the motor back in and sold the car herself. She told Eamon that it had been stolen. When Eamon saw someone driving it, he had the poor man arrested, and the story came out.

  My other uncle Emmanuel was an officer in the Air Force, a fine-looking man in his uniform. When he first went away to do his training, Grandmother told all the neighbours that he was a worthless ingrate who neglected his mother, never calling her or giving her gifts. She got everyone so riled against him that when he came home to the village, the elders raised sticks against him and shouted, “How dare you show your face here after the way you have treated your mother!” For who would think a mother would say such things about a son without reason?

  It was Grandmother who reported gleefully to Emmanuel that his wife had tested HIV positive. “You should have yourself tested. A shame you are not man enough to satisfy your wife and hold her to you. All that smoking has made you impotent.”

  She must be a witch, Uncle Emmanuel said, how else would she have known when he himself did not?

  Raphael would laugh at her antics. He loved it when Granny started asking us all for gifts – even the orphan girl who lived with us. Iveren asked if she couldn’t take the cushion covers home with her, or just one belt. Raphael yelped with laughter and clapped his hands. Granny blinked at him. What did he find so funny? Did my brother like her?

  She knew what to make of me: quiet, well-behaved. I was someone to torment.

  I soon learned how to behave around her. I would stand, not sit, in silence in my white shirt, tie and blue shorts.

  “Those dents in his skull,” she said to my mother once, during their competitive couch-sitting. “Is that why he’s so slow and stupid?”

  “That’s just the shape of his head. He’s not slow.”

  “Tuh. Your monstrous firstborn didn’t want a brother and bewitched him in the womb.”

  Her eyes glittered all over me, her smile askew. “The boy cannot talk properly. He sounds ignorant.”

  My mother said that I sounded fine to her and that I was a good boy and got good grades in school.

  My father was sitting in shamed silence. What did it mean that my father said nothing in my favour? Was I stupid?

  “Look to your own children,” my mother told her. “Your son is not doing well at work, and they delay paying him. So we have very little money. I’m afraid we can’t offer you anything except water from the well. I have a bad back. Would you be so kind to fetch water yourself, since your son offers you nothing?”

  Grandmother chuckled airily, as if my mother was a fool and would see soon enough. “So badly brought up. My poor son. No wonder your children are such frights.”

  That very day my mother took me round to the back of the house, where she grew her herbs. She bowed down to look into my eyes and held my shoulders and told me, “Patrick, you are a fine boy. You do everything right. There is nothing wrong with you. You do well in your lessons, and look how you washed the car this morning without even being asked.”

  It was Raphael who finally told Granny off. She had stayed for three months. Father’s hair was corkscrewing off in all directions and his eyes had a trapped light in them. Everyone had taken to cooking their own food at night, and every spoon and knife in the house had disappeared.

  “Get out of this house, you thieving witch. If you were nice to your family, they would let you stay and give you anything you want. But you can’t stop stealing things.” He was giggling. “Why do you tell lies and make such trouble? You should be nice to your children and show them loving care.”

  “And you should learn how to be polite.” Granny sounded weak with surprise.

  “Ha-ha! And so should you! You say terrible things about us. None of your children believe a thing you say. You only come here when no one else can stand you and you only leave when you know you’ve poisoned the well so much even you can’t drink from it. It’s not very intelligent of you, when you depend on us to eat.”

  He drove her from the house, keeping it up until it no other outcome were possible. “Blessing, our Blessing, the taxi is here!” pursuing her to the gate with mockery. Even Matthew started to laugh. Mother had to hide her mouth. He held the car door open for her. “You’d best read your Bible and give up selling all your worthless potions.”

  Father took hold of Raphael’s wrists, gently. “That’s enough,” he said. “Grandmother went through many bad things.” He didn’t say it in anger. He didn’t say it like a wild man. Something sombre in his voice made Raphael calm.

  “You come straight out of the bush,” Grandmother said, almost unperturbed. “No wonder my poor son is losing his mind.” She looked directly at Raphael. “The old ways did work.” Strangely, he was the only one she dealt with straightforwardly. “They wore out.”

  Something happened to my research.

  At first the replication studies showed a less marked effect, less inherited stress, lower methyl levels. But soon we ceased to be able to replicate our results at all.

  The new studies dragged me down, made me suicidal. I felt I had achieved something with my paper, made up for all my shortcomings, done something that would have made my family proud of me if they were alive.

  Methylation had made me a full professor. Benue State’s home page found room to feature me as an example of the university’s research excellence. I sought design flaws in the replication studies; that was the only thing I published. All my life I had fought to prove I wasn’t slow, or at least hide it through hard work. And here before the whole world, I was being made to look like a fraud.

  Then I read the work of Jonathan Schooler. The same thing had happened to him. His research had proved that if you described a memory clearly you ceased to remember it as well. The act of describing faces reduced his subjects’ ability to recognize them later. The effects he measured were so huge and so unambiguous, and people were so intrigued by the implications of what he called verbal overshadowing, that his paper was cited 400 times.

  Gradually, it had become impossible to replicate his results. Every time he did the experiment, the effect shrank by 30 percent.

  I got in touch with Schooler, and we began to check the record. We found that all the way back in the 1930s results of E.S.P. experiments by Joseph Banks Rhine declined. In replication, his startling findings evaporated to something only slightly different from chance. It was as if scientific truths wore out, as if the act of observing them reduced their effect.

  Jide laughed and shook his head. “We think the same thing!” he said. “We always say that a truth can wear out with the telling.”

  That is why I am sitting here writing, dreading the sound of the first car arriving, the first knock on my gate.

  I am writing to wear out both memory and truth.

  Whenever my father was away, or sometimes to escape Iveren, Mamamimi would take all us boys back to our family village. It is called Kawuye, on the road towards Taraba State. Her friend Sheba would drive us to the bus station in the marke
t, and we would wait under the shelter, where the women cooked rice and chicken and sold sweating tins of Coca-Cola. Then we would stuff ourselves into the van next to some fat businessman who had hoped for a row of seats to himself.

  Matthew was the firstborn, and tried to boss everyone, even Mamamimi. He had teamed up with little Andrew from the moment he’d been born. Andrew was too young to be a threat to him. The four brothers fell into two teams and Mamamimi had to referee, coach, organize and punish.

  If Matthew and I were crammed in next to each other, we would fight. I could stand his needling and bossiness only so long and then wordlessly clout him. That made me the one to be punished. Mamamimi would swipe me over the head and Matthew’s eyes would tell me that he’d done it deliberately.

  It was hot and crowded on the buses, with three packed rows of sweating ladies, skinny men balancing deliveries of posters on their laps, or mothers dandling heat-drugged infants. It was not supportable to have four boys elbowing, kneeing and scratching.

  Mamamimi started to drive us herself in her old green car. She put Matthew in the front so that he felt in charge. Raphael and I sat in the back reading, while next to us Andrew cawed for Matthew’s attention.

  Driving by herself was an act of courage. The broken-edged roads would have logs pulled across them, checkpoints they were called, with soldiers. They would wave through the stuffed vans but they would stop a woman driving four children and stare into the car. Did we look like criminals or terrorists? They would ask her questions and rummage through our bags and mutter things that we could not quite hear. I am not sure they were always proper. Raphael would noisily flick through the pages of his book. “Nothing we can do about it,” he would murmur. After slipping them some money, Mama would drive on.

  As if by surprise, up and over a hill, we would roller-coaster down through maize fields into Kawuye. I loved it there. The houses were the best houses for Nigeria and typical of the Tiv people, round and thick-walled with high pointed roofs and tiny windows. The heat could not get in and the walls sweated like a person to keep cool. There were no wild men waiting to leap out, no poison grandmothers. My great-uncle Jacob – it is a common name in my family – repaired cars with the patience of a cricket; opening, snipping, melting, and re-forming. He once repaired a vehicle by replacing the fan belt with the elastic from my mother’s underwear.