Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  The plane flight was not turbulent, the cashmere clouds above the storm limpid and frictionless. A gibbous moon hung in the air, coating the sky in a soft royal light. In the moonlight the snowglobe tingled at his boy’s fingertip with the charged energy of a plasma lamp. Dayo giggled.

  “Where you’ll go one day, Dayo,” Wale whispered, “the Earth will rise and set. Not the moon. Just you see.”

  Somehow the captain turned their thirty minute delay into a fifteen minute delay by the time they touched down in Washington. The captain did not explain why captains didn’t do the same thing when flights were on time and arrive early. But Wale didn’t complain.

  “On time,” he said. “We’ve made it on time.”

  Tinuke was growing increasingly furious with his secrecy and flatly ignored him.

  They had arrived at 10:45 and the drop was at 11:26. The boy seemed fascinated by the baggage carousel and stared at its scaly conveyor belt until he hiccupped from nausea. The bags spat out interminably: black bags, ruffled bags, those new ones with wheels on them, hard-backed old-leather, garment bags, Samsonites, then a cardboard box wrapped all up in tape, a guitar, a double-bass the size of a coffin, a surfboard and two sets of golf clubs, and finally, at 11:15, Tinuke’s duck-taped duffle.

  They rushed up the stairs, Wale carrying all three bags and not feeling their weight, Tinuke with the boy. Bello was to meet them at the Nigerian Airways counter. He had no idea where it was, not having been home in twenty years. Find someone who knows. I don’t know, I work for American. Do you know? It is over by Air France. Where is that? Terminal D. What terminal are we at? Terminal B. You gotta take the shuttle, sir.

  The shuttle, oh the shuttle, waiting for the squat people-mover bus with walls of windows as it whinnied up with its subway straps and excess baggage space. The driver had the nerve to dismount and smoke a cigarette. Two minutes. The shuttle ran counterclockwise. It puttered to Terminal A first, loaded on some parched looking stewardesses and a chippy co-pilot who pinned some wings on a little school girl’s lapel. Then to C, which was apparently the terminal for geriatrics. Walkers, canes, and the weathered arguments of golden anniversary couples. (“I told you not to leave it open.” “Yup.”)

  And then they were at D, and he could practically smell the pepper soup, could heft the yellow saran-wrapped gari in his hand. Home. The counter was right there. 11:26 and 59 terrestrial seconds. Home. As calmly as he could, he scanned the passengers with their bulk luggage full of designer dresses, university memorabilia, jewelry, Nintendos, CD players, NBA jerseys.

  Bello wasn’t there. He watched the line for a full ten minutes and didn’t see Bello anywhere, or anyone looking remotely official. There were police a few counters away, flirting with an attendant. Not looking for him, which was good. Not looking for him yet. A flash of insight and he realized the handover might be arranged at the counter. He recalled the agreed upon language.

  “Welcome to Nigerian Airways. Passport.”

  “I am going to Taro.”

  “Pardon me?”

  He drew out the R and sounded the O, throwing in his best imitation of a Hausa accent. “I said, I am going to Taro.” He waited for the agreed upon response.

  “Pardon me?” Shaking his head, he beckoned the other attendant over. “I am going to Taro.”

  She blinked her eyes. “This flight is to Abuja. You can take a bus to Taro from there.”

  “Get me your manager.”

  The manager was equally puzzled. So Wale drew aside the security guard, a Yoruba man. He tried the password in his mother tongue. The man started laughing: “You’ve been away too long. Ta-ro. Listen to how this man says Ta-ro. It is time you went home to your country mister—”

  “Doctor. Dr. Wale Olufunmi.”

  The guard stiffened at hearing the appellation. “Dr. Olufunmi. It is time you went home.”

  “That’s what I am trying to do!”

  Wale asked anyone he could find and eventually gave up the password and asked for Bello directly. An agreeable black American told him he knew Bello and led him to the taxi stand. “That’s not Bello.”

  “Damn sure it is. Bello’s his name.”

  His name was revealed to be Bellevue, from Port-au-Prince, and it was a nickname.

  “Sorry, Doctor.”

  Before long the plane began boarding. Then the gate was closed. The women at the desk were eating brown-bag lunches and chatting in a lively way that could only be about men. His wife Tinuke was tired and livid. He normally shared things with her, even, when he could stomach it, emotions. But the twitch in her right eye, the quiver of her arrow-head nose, told him that he was in the process of shattering something that would require months to glue back together. Perhaps years.

  Okay, the fallback position. The fallback to Cape Town. Cape Town! He hadn’t even realized how absurd that was—as if a Nigerian could just saunter into South Africa. The country was reeling towards civil war, for chrissake. President De Klerk was breaking his promises and people were already killing each other by the thousands.

  He dragged his family to the South African Airways counter. Tinuke spoke her first words in hours when she saw the destination. “I am not going to South Africa, Wale.”

  “We have to go.”

  “Why?”

  Because I stole a state treasure from NASA, he thought.

  “Can I ask you to trust me?”

  “I’m not taking our child to South Africa,” Tinuke said. “There is a war coming there. There is apartheid.”

  “I’ll make an inquiry, that’s all. Cape Town’s a very European city.”

  He advanced forward in the line, where the white receptionist scanned his family up and down. She did not ask him for his passport—she asked him, shortly, for his visa. It would take ninety days, she said, for the police background checks to go through, a police background check that he knew was out of the question.

  A white woman edged him aside to be greeted with smiles and laughter. She was offered cupcakes, courtesy of the airline.

  His boy was crying. People were waving good-bye at the gates and hugging and getting plastered at the bars. A crowd of Hindu men and their wives in gold and scarlet saris and their licorice-haired gingerbread children rushed by in a commotion. On a sports bar TV there was a highlight of Dominique Wilkins missing a dunk so hard the ball slammed off the rim all the way to the top of the opposite key, where another dunk was missed by the opposing team.

  At least, Wale thought, I am not the only one.

  He opened his duffle bag and took out the snowglobe. Tinuke began whimpering next to an escalator. He shook up the snowglobe and held it above his head.

  Come, Bello, come.

  Bathing with Perlemoen

  Present Day

  South Africa

  Thursday Malaysius had worked at Abalone Silver for two years. It was the largest abalone farm in the Southern Hemisphere, covering ten hectares, with kilometers of epoxy tanks teeming with the mollusk. The long administrative buildings were made from prefabricated aluminum siding. When Thursday clocked in at eight, a fog layer nursed Hermanus Bay, and whales could be heard snorting and breaching in the distant waves in the spring time.

  Thursday used to work as a clam shucker in one of the government fish factories, but got fired after negotiations with the employee union went south. So he simply walked down the street to Abalone Silver and they hired him as an abalone cleaner. The main difference between the creatures was that a clam had two sides to its shell and an abalone only had one, and was more of a glorified snail that fetched hundreds of dollars in East Asia. When the abalone were happy, they slid along on tiny eggplant colored tentacles, which they would retract when afraid. He sometimes imagined a battle between the abalone and clams of the world; the clams might be better at slicing the abalone with their shells, but the abalone were faster and could suck out the clam with their large feet and then cut it up with their teeth.

  He thought about this battle
more than you might think. Although he tried to remain objective, he would play favorites and manipulate the battle conditions in his mind so that the abalone, surviving in a narrow latitude around the world (compared to clams, which flourished in rivers and streams), could come out victorious. Abalone functioned better in the darkness, so he gave them that, and abalone liked fresh kelp, so he put that there, too, in the battles of his imagination.

  The work at the abalone farm was more stressful than at the fish factory. The bosses were looking to turn a profit rather than provide a government service to society, so the lunch breaks were short and no one brought any brandy. And the job was messier. The sea water got piped in and the mollusks lived for years, so the tanks had to be regularly cleaned and scrubbed, whereas the clams at the fish factory had been killed on the spot. Thursday was charged with trimming the slimy green foot from the seventy millimeter adult abalone for export to China. He was good with a knife and could get through about four in a minute. But when the sea water grew too warm or the pumps clogged, worms would wiggle in and eat the shells, and they were a nuisance because the abalone would outgrow the half-eaten shells and taste acidic. For two months every year, baby anemones would squeeze through the filters and then mature in the tank. They would squirt their seeds into his eyes and cause them to swell up, making it hard for him to get a date. He didn’t cut his fingers much because of his clamming skills.

  Thursday was a steady, reliable worker. He didn’t put in overtime but he punched in on time and didn’t sneak off early. He acknowledged his mistakes and was amenable to criticism. After eighteen months at Abalone Silver, he’d been promoted twice with a two rand per hour increase each time. He also managed to pocket a few shells and buff them into an opalescent polish for the whale watching season to sell to tourists, but he was discreet about it. Discreet that was, until Brother Leon showed up while Thursday was counting the big adults on an abacus.

  “Aweh howsit, Thursday?” Brother Leon asked.

  Brother Leon considered fish factories and abalone farms beneath him. Leon was good looking and cinnamon-skinned, affable, persuasive, skilled at domineering, and wore a hat all day, not a sailor’s snoek cap like his father, but a red brimmed baseball cap that covered a beautiful head of dark-curled locks. Thursday was balding and wiry and the squat Malay nose had never been bred out of him. His deep brown eyes were lozenge shaped, with the left one half-closed in a squint. Being a mate, Leon liked to remind him of all of these things. Leon also had a bigger penis.

  “How’d you get in here?” Thursday asked.

  “I snuck in through the gate.”

  “Get out of here or you’ll get me in trouble.”

  Brother Leon had a way of completely ignoring what you said and making you think you were having a conversation. “Give me a few of those perlies, will you, Thursday?”

  Thursday declined.

  “I just need ten. No, say, a few tens. Seventy.”

  “No ways, my bru. We count in every day. I’ve got a promotion coming.”

  Leon raised his red cap off his head and his locks spilled onto his forehead. This was a trick he used with the women: get'em drunk, and then razzle-dazzle with the locks. “What’s that promotion going to bring you? An extra rand, my broer. That’s donkies. You can make a lot more than an extra rand.”

  “I told you a hundred times that I won’t. I’m not a poacher. They’ve got that dog. Snoopy. The paper said her nose can smell perlemoen through the water.” Feeling righteous, Thursday added: “I’m an honest man.”

  Leon looked hurt. “Ten is all I need.”

  “You that broke?”

  “It’s terrible.”

  Thursday would not give in to Leon’s pleading that easily, not until Leon gave his word to pay it back. Brother Leon was never really down and out. He had a half-dozen girlfriends who would have given him the PIN numbers to their credit cards just to catch a glimpse of his pretty face. Three of them, Jackie, Fadanaz, and Thembisa, left their windows unlocked at night in the hope that he would sneak in, he said. Thursday decided to bring Brother Leon a bag full of some polished shells over the weekend and even bought him some chips, but didn’t listen to his pleas. Then he returned to work at the abalone farm thinking he was as right as rain. Trimming and counting, cleaning and slicing, Thursday enjoyed the gentle way of the abalone.

  Thursday’s boss Mr. Pretorius, a jolly biologist from Kwazulu-Natal, called him into his office one day. It seemed unrealistic to receive another promotion, but Thursday wasn’t going to complain.

  “Thursday, have a seat,” Pretorius said.

  Mr. Pretorius’s mauve sweater stretched over his beer belly in a way that made him look like a butternut. He had a round, lumpy nose and eyes that must have been bright blue as a child, but had faded. He moved in a big way, an assured family man with two kids that played rugby and enjoyed the library, and he maneuvered the steering wheel of his bakkie with the butt of his palm, easy and smooth. Pretorius liked to buy Thursday bags of crisps and loose cigarettes and enjoyed handling the abalone in the tank. He was fantastic at the kind of small talk that can only be perfected by businessmen, and could say entirely original things if he passed Thursday ten times in a day.

  Pretorius’s office had a few posters of the Orient on the walls. Black sample cans of their Abalone Silver export product lined the shelves in eight different languages.

  “You’ve been great here, Thursday, so I—” Pretorius avoided looking Thursday in the eye. “—I think the easiest thing is to look at this yourself.”

  Bashfully Pretorius left the room, returning with a television stand with a video player. He juggled his belly around, wheezing, and plugged in the unit.

  Maybe a training video, Thursday thought. For the promotion.

  Pretorius turned on the television and took the remote with him to his desk. He sat heavily in his neoprene office chair. The screen flashed on with a digital date, then there were some rows of something stretching into the distance. Everything was greenish.

  “This is a surveillance camera, Thursday. We had them installed before you got here.”

  Onscreen a man walked by with a night-stick.

  “That’s Ronald,” Pretorius said.

  Ronald was a security guard from Gabon. In the video Ronald sat down and had a smoke.

  “Going to have to talk to him about that,” Pretorius muttered.

  He fast forwarded the video and the screen turned greener. He pressed Play.

  “Night time now. Watch over there, by the generator. Look, where the fence is. There!”

  On screen a black form could be seen behind the wire fence. The form raised some clippers and then you could see the fence wobbling. Thursday leaned in. The fence peeled up and the figure stepped through, walking straight in the direction of the camera for a few paces. Wearing a cap. Then the figure turned and disappeared off screen.

  “We didn’t get him on the next camera,” Pretorius said. He hit the Pause button and swiveled his office chair towards Thursday. “Do you know who that is?”

  He was looking at Thursday with a discerning eye. Pretorius was a business man who had grown Abalone Silver from a few tanks to a 10 million rand enterprise in five years. He talked straight. If he was asking, he had a good reason.

  “Can I see it again?”

  Pretorius obliged him, rewinding the tape. There was the form in the green darkness. The fence wobbled and then the athletic, confident swagger of the intruder. Then the hat, the turn and the form disappeared off screen. No doubt now: Brother Leon.

  “We lost forty of our oldest females over this, Thursday. A few of them have been around since I started this business.” He leaned forward. “Those will fetch about thirty thousand rand on the streets and they’re worth much more to us for breeding. I’d be grateful if you could tell me who might have done such a thing.”

  Thursday swallowed. Leon! He knew that Brother Leon had a bad thing coming to him. It was plain to see. And any self-respe
cting man would have turned Leon in, returned to the tanks to shuck, clocked-out, gone home. Come back and worked again the next day as the market forces adjusted to the loss of the stolen abalone. This was what Pretorius wanted him to do, though he was giving Thursday his poker face, and trying to act neutral about it. But Pretorius didn’t see some things.

  When they were ten Leon told Thursday that the first feeling he could remember was jealousy. He didn’t say what he was jealous of. That was the same year that Leon had changed for the worse, the year that the new green ping-pong table had become a prime attraction at Chief Albert Luthuli Elementary School.

  Leon and Thursday played together as a team. Leon painted the corners with his wristy forehand and Thursday could block smashes with his good reflexes. They’d made it to the semifinals of the school tournament and been eliminated by a pair they should have beaten. The other kids cheered for the teams in the finals while Leon and Thursday commiserated. The prize of a set of fishing lures, they thought, was going to the wrong people.

  “John can’t even serve, my broer,” Leon said.

  “He’s got no backhand,” Thursday agreed.

  “I didn’t want the lures anyway. Line fish is for voetsaks.”

  “Ja.”

  Thursday didn’t care much for fishing himself, or for competition. As they stood and brooded, a kid named Diego decided to play a trick on Thursday. Diego was the class clown. He shuffled next to Thursday while his eyes were following the game. Thursday was in the perfect position, with his knees locked tight and his back already straight, for the take-down to work.