The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  After the market, after spinning around and around, after our running through the streets, and the empty square, after my thirst, and the dogs, and the hard climb to the fourth floor – after all this, a mood of exhilaration had come over me. Something inside me was straining towards Ade. I felt myself pulled physically, and walked towards him. He went to sit at the edge of the floor; his legs overhung the square. I sat down beside him, and he didn’t move away. It was possible to hear, above or between the roar of the wind, a chiming sound, as of struck hollow pipes. I pointed into the darkness.

  ‘What’s over there?’

  ‘The square,’ Ade said

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘The sea.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘The silent world,’ he said, and let out a nasty laugh.

  I heard the clanging of the pipes, and the dogs, who had started barking, a restless, dangerous sound. Ade said, ‘Over there is where Olu lives.’ I got up. I no longer felt empty or light or lost, but enraged. I pressed my lips together and felt a knot of anger in my chest. I started to walk away. It was Ade’s turn to follow.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. Now the dogs were laughing like hyenas. It was at that point that I should have left to go in search of the silent world. Instead, I got up and climbed some stairs. When I reached the final step I sat down and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew Ade was shaking me, saying, ‘Quick.’ I followed him up to the fifth floor. He had spotted the labourers coming down the stairs; it must have been the end of their working day. Soon we saw their lights, tiny flames encased in what looked like globes of glass, but that was all, we could see no other trace of the men. The lights winked at us from inside their tiny glass globes, and the globes moved also, but moved differently, swaying and jerking as if suspended on invisible strings. We watched until the last light vanished from the square.

  I turned to Ade. ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What did you whisper that night after supper when I sent you to the other end of the garden?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You know, when I was telling you about the silence.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

  ‘You must remember,’ I said. ‘That evening when we were looking at The Ring magazine and you told me about Hogan Bassey and boxing at your school and Olu and all the rest.’

  ‘Eh,’ Ade said. ‘When you told me you could hear everything, but you couldn’t prove it.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you whisper?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Ade asked.

  ‘Just tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Well. The first time I whispered, Sammy McCarthy. The second time, Joe Lucy.’

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked.

  ‘They are the boxers Hogan Bassey defeated in Liverpool.’

  I wanted to say, ‘I bet Sagoe would crush you in a boxing match.’ But I didn’t. The dogs kept quiet too. Ade rose and found a stick, which he began to beat against the scaffolding.

  What else do I recall from that evening? The cold, the air standing up against us like something solid, thoughts and feelings passing through me like a desert wind, my eyes running, my dry mouth. Huddling next to Ade under a sack, I thought about the night of his beating, how afterwards I had let myself into his bedroom and taken him in my arms, how I had moved my hand under his pyjama trousers then passed my fingers over the welts. And when I thought of this, I drew myself closer with one hand, and with the other I searched for the cord of his shorts. But the way he withdrew from my touch, not hurriedly but with a stony sort of dip of his head, I knew that this – my – privilege was gone. Once or twice in the night we heard a truck slipping along in the dark, and now and then its lights came sliding across our blind vista. I mention this only because light was the exception, it being pitch-dark and the harmattan.

  It was somewhere towards morning when I opened my eyes. The sun was big and orange, its surface stained with black marks that appeared to spread like broken clouds of ink. Was it this that prompted us to try to leave the building? Was it as we climbed down the stairs that Ade fell over the edge? It was so sudden. I didn’t even hear his cry. And I did not alter my course but carried on descending towards the square. As I walked via the foundations and peeled back the wooden fence, my thoughts darkened. What had happened to Ade? He had fallen. But where? How far? Later, I discovered that Ade had survived. In that moment, however, as I made my way out of the building, I neither knew nor cared. Hadn’t he mocked me almost continually these past weeks? Hadn’t he tried to ruin my self-belief? Yes, I thought, he had put himself on the right side of truth and wished me gone. I felt light. It was astonishing, the way I felt light, so suddenly. Out in the open I started to walk in the direction of the wind. Progress was difficult. I hardly thought of Ade, but when I did I thought how good it was that this had happened. I had come near to losing my confidence, and my faith in my powers of listening, also in the silent world. I started to run. It was all the same to me if Ade lay broken and dead, lost in the storm. My mind was black. My thoughts circled like ravens around a kill. I thought no more about going back. As I ran I told myself I would embrace darkness and silence, because that was what was in my nature, which was blacker than Ade’s, and wicked, I thought; and love and friendship was not in my line. So I ran through the harmattan towards the silent world.

  When the dust lifted next I had a glimpse of the water. Then the air thickened, and it was as if a red curtain had suddenly come down. I stopped to listen. The silent world was getting close. It was no longer a whisper but a swift wind or snow sliding, and my heart opened to its pull and storm-silence. The further I walked, the deeper it became, until, scrambling over rocks, I felt a force drawing in all the sounds, swallowing them towards its centre. I walked on, scared, more than half-willing, not caring, I thought, if I lived or died. I was tired. The thought of Ade was starting to weigh on my stomach. I pushed these thoughts away. Soon I found myself by the water’s edge. The sky had lightened to a raw pink. I sensed a crack in the earth. I walked up to it and now I was standing before a chasm extending like a tram track to my left and right as far as I could see. I stood shaking, doubting. Perhaps, I thought, Ade was lying in the foundations of the unfinished building, with broken bones. I half-turned, ready to retrace my steps to return to my friend. But the wind picked up, and I felt that charged whisper, and I left doubt behind.

  I closed my eyes and stepped off the edge.

  18

  The Pit

  I fell through the thick dark. I fell and fell. On hitting the ground I lost consciousness. When I woke my body felt hot and broken. I was in some kind of pit. Light of a kind came from I don’t know where, a pale light unlike any I had seen or have seen since. Lying on my back I couldn’t see beyond my knees, which gave me a thrill. I tried to lift my arm, but it was too stiff. The other was not so badly hurt and with great effort I managed to raise it in the air. Reaching up, I felt nothing, and I rejoiced. To my right and left were steep walls. They were damp and warm against my sides. Below the ground was more compact, but still warm, and it flaked off at the touch of my nails.

  I had fallen into one of the city’s open sewers, although I did not know this at the time, because I could see no further than half a yard. My body would barely move, I was in pain, and yet I felt terrifically happy. Strange! My whole being throbbed sweetly. After several hours of blissful rest I understood why. It was completely silent in this pit. I could hardly believe my good fortune. I listened hard, not wanting to hear, but trying desperately to hear, the tiniest sound. But there was none. I laughed and wept, celebrating my arrival in the silent world, until, exhausted, I fell asleep.

  When I woke I felt thirsty. Using my one good arm I slid painfully forward, testing the ground for water. I started digging. It was slow work. After some time I scooped out a hollow, into which, very
gradually, water seeped. It was not much, but I turned on to my stomach and lapped until the hollow was dry. I paused. Soon the hollow became moist again, and I lapped, paused, then lapped again. I continued in this way until my thirst was quenched. After that I did nothing. I lay there like a grub in a dungheap, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, with my face pressed into the ground. My mind felt drugged and free from thought. Hours passed in joy and gladness. I did little else but lie in the murky light, turning from my stomach on to my back and vice versa. I was far from my thoughts. But there were moments when I did not seem so far, when for instance I became aware of my body, its stillness in that dark cramped space, its sweet aching. I became aware of my insides too, panting and ticking in spite of it all. And whenever I lapped from my hollow I felt a silver coolness running along my throat. The flavour of that water was the finest I had tasted or have tasted since. Its cloudy translucence, like sea-polished glass, made me feel calm; as I brought it into my mouth I felt as if the darkness around me was melting on my tongue.

  Perhaps on lapping from my hollow I took nutrients from the earth, since I did not feel hungry. Maybe I chewed on certain kinds of fungus, gnarled growths surviving in the damp and dark, like those monstrous fish that haunt the lower depths. Or did I no longer need to eat? Perhaps time passed more slowly than I imagined. I had the idea I lay in that pit for several weeks – and yet it strikes me now the whole experience might have lasted no more than several hours. Nevertheless, I felt myself withdrawing into myself. I even had a notion that I was becoming thinner. Certainly, I grew more and more content. Every now and then my mind returned to Ade. I wondered what had happened to him after his fall. I thought he might have landed on something soft and was not hurt. I even fancied he would come to join me in my pit and grow to be my friend again, that we would be companions in silence and wickedness. I let these vain hopes blossom in my chest, then I swept them away and surveyed the emptiness they had besmirched.

  Absolute silence reigned in my pit; silence reigns in my attic now. I am the only inhabitant of this tent-shaped space; in my pit I dwelt alone. There are other parallels. A pale gloom spreads from my computer screen, creating a kind of perpetual dusk; so too in my pit twilight reigned – what little light there was seemed to work its way up from the depths, serving not so much to illuminate my pit as to draw shadows from the contours of its walls. I grew to love that light – less light, it seems to me now, than a memory of light, a kind of wan reflected sun, whose lack of clarity, far from disturbing me, perfectly suited my condition. There are other correspondences. For instance here in my attic with its deceptive feeling of freedom, which makes dreamers of attic-dwellers, my thoughts turn almost exclusively on myself; so too in my pit I mused on my condition. Of what, concerning myself, did I think? Core thoughts. Elemental broodings. In short, I wondered what I had become. I questioned myself for a long time. I wondered if I was not like some creature surviving from the azoic age. Eventually I came up with the idea I was a kind of seed. That was it! The pit in which I lay was the black enclosing husk, and I was its naked white seed.

  There within my husk I lived truly for the first time. I had discovered an emptiness to rival the emptiness of the womb, a sweet solitary void free from earthly limits and the rules of men. My body felt weightless. I felt happier than at any other time in my life. It had always been this way with me: right at the beginning, when in the darkness of my mother’s womb I twisted and swam; before this even, before the tick-tock of the pocket watch and the chimes of Lagos clock, before my father’s stories, before even the first stirrings of sound, when I had no ears to speak of, and the silence was in me – only then was I as happy and empty as I was in my pit. All this I understand now. At the time, however, every thought vanished from my mind, and my heart swelled with strange, nourishing energies. I drifted on an unseen volume of air or jet-black cloud, losing all purchase on myself. I wished nothing more than to lose awareness of the passage of time and lie there always thus entombed.

  And perhaps, if things had happened differently, I would have done so. Perhaps I would have remained curled tightly like a partly germinated seed, half-grown but able to grow no more, rotting and disintegrating; perhaps my insides would have begun to fester and turn to mulch; perhaps my skin would have darkened like paper taking flame and I would have flaked or drifted away to settle as a layer of earth. Or maybe I would have taken seed; maybe my hair would have bedded itself into the ground and twisted with the root-work, my limbs atrophying, growing scaly, burrowing in the soil until I became just one more strangled growth surviving in the damp and dark. These dreams of dissolution I contemplate now. To have merged with my pit would have made me very happy. Of course I did not. I did not become earth or vegetable matter but remained myself, more or less; I grew into this woman who sits before her desk, listening to her past, attempting to make sense of its confusing din by typing these stories so that – finally, mercifully – she can become silent.

  What prompted me to stir from my happy dissolution? Why was I unable to dwell forever in the midst of silence? Something shattered my peace. Listen!

  It happened as I was turning from my stomach on to my back, having just drank from my hollow. Mid-revolution, as my ear passed over the ground, I heard a scratching sound, something like the scurrying of a mouse. I pressed my ear to the earth. The noise grew louder and more complicated; now a family of mice were scrabbling around inside my head. I had the painful feeling that by hearing it I was offending some kind of natural law. I squirmed until, eventually, I turned and flopped on my back.

  I lay still and tried to forget what I had heard. I could not bear to think that silence, that perfect friend, had betrayed me. I said to myself, So long as I remain on my back I will never hear that sound again. But I was not able to remain lying on my back. And I did hear that sound again, because I became thirsty, and needed to turn back again on to my stomach to drink. As I neared the mid-point of my rotation my ear started to pass over the ground and I heard the scratching once again. Yet this time there was more to come from the earth; for soon I heard hissing and braying, sighs and sounds of lamentation. I even heard a kind of nasty cackle – yes, I thought, from its obscure depths the earth was having a good laugh at my expense. Parched, turning as fast as my benumbed body would allow, with my eyes shut to this disruption worse than thirst, I succumbed to the earth’s dismal symphony: a strange, complicated, disharmonious music grinding blackly beneath my head, thundering against my skull, as if, deep underground, a medieval army was on the march. I heard creaking and groaning noises. Then, flaming as in some diabolical foundry, a series of sustained wailing notes. It was then – hearing the machinery of the turning earth, my eyes tight shut, trying desperately to turn on to my stomach and lap – I reached up and tore from the walls two clods of earth and stuffed them in my ears.

  19

  Nikolas, Leader of the Nightsoil Workers

  The matchbox is almost four decades old. The cardboard has turned soft, and its lower right side is partially dissolved. I have discarded the matches and replaced them with one of my favourite objects, or rather a pair of objects, which I wish to preserve at all cost.

  The matchbox is surprisingly intact. The strip of sandpaper remains rough to the touch, and the tray slides freely. On its age-stained label I can make out the legend, ‘Paul & Virginie’, beneath which is an etching of a man and woman, both very young. The young man is stripped to the waist, his trousers rolled up to his knees. He is standing on a rock in the middle of a swollen river, trying to cross it. On his back he carries the girl, who is clinging to him, arms around his neck, face half-buried in his hair. Over them looms a black mountain, at its foot banana trees whose serrated leaves appear to flap in the wind, the same wind which has whipped the river into a frenzy of white froth, the same wind which has unfurled the girl’s hair from the scarf she has used to tie it back. The girl appears anxious, but the boy, smiling up at her, is happy to be carrying his load, which seems to give
him the strength to carry on.

  Only moments ago I fetched the matchbox from its hiding place: the tin marked ‘unica’ (which I keep in the wardrobe, behind the stack of papers printed with my history). Now it sits before me on my desk. Carefully, lovingly even, I blow from its surface the accumulated dust, which rises in a fizzing grey cloud. I blink several times, breathe deeply; then, taking the matchbox in my left palm, I slide it open, to reveal … a pair of earplugs. Happily I see they are still intact! Happily they remain a pair (being a pair, perhaps, they should not form part of my unica collection, but the tin is the best way to keep them safe from the mice and damp). The earplugs are not the common kind. Small – although too wide to fit into the average twelve-year-old ear – grey-black, friable, tapering to a blunt point, they look like a pair of goat’s droppings. And yet I count them among my most treasured possessions. They are, of course, the very clods I gouged from the walls of my pit and stuffed in my ears. Not only do they sit mutely in their cotton-wool shroud, but their historical role was to restore silence. Thus they represent for me a goal attained, an example to every other object in the attic, the standard by which I judge them all.

  How I would love to dwell longer on my earplugs. To note their weight and dimensions, to examine the material from which they are made. What a rest to speak of these broken objects from my past. And how instructional! But I must press on with these stories.

  …

  As soon as I stuffed my ears, the pits were restored to silence. But I continued to feel a faint trembling of the earth; which grew stronger and stronger, until it began to merge with the trembling of the shadows, which in turn resolved themselves into the form of a man. I looked up into a wide pair of eyes – trickster’s eyes, handsome, dark, soporific – which were gazing down into my own. The eyes moved swiftly to and fro; in fact, the man’s whole body seemed to be in motion, his hands and torso shook, and his naked skull bristled with night-static. I was too tired to move, and so I did not struggle as the man stooped and, with great care, lifted me in his arms. How had he found me? Had I cried out on hearing the dinning earth? Did he know I had fallen from a great height? He carried me along what I thought was a narrow corridor, then down stairs which must have been cut into the earth. We descended deeper underground, and the heat rose, and a sweet hot odour swelled my nostrils. We moved on, past closed cells and interior courtyards that resounded with his steps. Unspeaking, I clung tightly to his waist. The smell now was like a physical presence; it seemed to push at me with the force of a breeze. We entered a wider space and stopped. Slowly, as my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I saw that we had arrived in a large, sparsely furnished room. I made out a bed and two chairs and, rising from the ground, what looked like stalagmites on which candles burned. The man placed me gently on the bed. I slept at once.