Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “That’s for me to decide.”

  “Leon said you’d pay a hundred thousand for them.”

  Ip laughed out loud. “He did, did he? Leon’s too flashy. Much too flashy.” He stabbed a finger into his folded newspaper. “It says here that there are many kinds of capital in the world. Financial capital, emotional capital, sexual capital, social capital. I’d say that Leon spends his capital before he earns it, doesn’t he?”

  Thursday laughed along. “He sure does. That’s Leon.”

  “There’s another problem, Hampton,” Ip said.

  “What’s wrong? They’re as healthy as perlemoen can get.”

  “The problem is that they need to be cool. And haven’t you read the papers?”

  “No.”

  Thursday made a point right then and there to start reading the papers more often. His troubles seemed to be coming out of them lately.

  “Maybe it didn’t affect you out there. Koeberg’s down again.”

  “Koeberg?”

  “That’s the nuclear facility. And that’s not it. The coal plant’s down too. So they’re load shedding in Cape Town. Four hour cycles.” He pulled the string of the desk lamp. “Off.” The room became so dark that Thursday couldn’t see a thing. “On. Of course there are generators but with the cost of the diesel it’s not worth my while to keep a few abalone alive. It’s suspicious for my shop and it’s too much hassle. I’m going to throw all those in the dryer.”

  Thursday was growing nervous. The bodyguard seemed to have moved a few inches closer when the light was off. And he couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t just the money, it was also that he’d grown attached to the abalone. He hated the thought of the heat shriveling them down in a dryer, their tentacles drying up into brittle matchsticks, of a slow, scorched death. At Abalone Silver he had killed them, but he was humane about it. He was sure they felt pain, he’d seen them bleed.

  “I can keep them alive,” he insisted.

  Ip shook his head. “You’re right that the flavor’s better alive and there’s certainly demand for them. But we ship our product by the week. It’s too long for them to survive. They’ll die and they can’t be dried.”

  “No, I worked at Abalone Silver. We had blackouts all the time. I can keep them alive.”

  “I’ll give you ten thousand rand for them dry. That’s good money, Hampton. You won’t find a better rate in the Cape.”

  Thursday was so indignant that he considered walking away with the cooler and finding another buyer. Then Ip pulled out a checkbook and scribbled out ten thousand rand. Thursday warily picked it up.

  “Can’t you give me cash?”

  “No, I deal with banks. Next time it’s direct deposit. I don’t want loose cash mucking about with serial numbers on them. If you need a bank, I can get you into a credit union in Maitland.”

  Thursday still had about forty rand left in his Abalone Silver account back in Hermanus that he’d stowed away for hard times. He could cash the check at a branch here. He began to put the check in his pocket, but the thought of Leon leaning against the prison bars of Pollsmoor overwhelmed him.

  “Leon needs the money really bad. Can’t you give me more?”

  Ip narrowed his eyes. “Why? It’s just the flu.”

  Should I tell him? Thursday wondered. Should I tell him about Leon? Ip and Leon had worked together. Maybe they were friends. “Leon’s been arrested.”

  Ip’s bodyguard snorted, and Ip frowned. It was a big, upside-down half-moon of a frown. When he was happy it was not the reverse, more like he pulled his lips back and bared his teeth. The smile was a tool for survival; the frown, for feeling.

  “That fool. That fucking knob!” He got up from his desk and walked to the end of the room opposite the door, behind Thursday. Thursday kept his eye on him, but it was tough with the bodyguard on the other side. He wasn’t sure which one to watch.

  “What happened?” Ip asked.

  “It was a raid. Operation Trident or something. It was scary, broer. They caught him and I got away. He’s in Pollsmoor now and I’ve got to bail him out.”

  He waited for Ip to agree, but he seemed not to have heard. “The car?”

  “The car is impounded. I said that Leon’s in Pollsmoor.”

  Ip grew furious. “I don’t give a shit if Leon’s in Pollsmoor! He should be in Pollsmoor! He’s a fool. Too racy, too fast! Too many women! If I hadn’t lost Rendell I never would have hired him. The fucking cock!” He walked up right next to Thursday, whose eyes for some reason fixed on the number of notches in his calfskin belt. Five of them. “Tell me, Hampton. One thing. Will Leon talk?”

  Thursday thought about how Leon had told his girlfriend Fadanaz about the raid, but Fadanaz was not a cop. “He said he would talk about me.”

  “No one else?”

  “No one else.”

  “Do you think he can make it in prison? Is he going to cry if a bloke comes and rubs butter on his arse?”

  That was the one thing Thursday was sure of. Leon would run Pollsmoor by the time he got out. He wasn’t afraid of anything. “No. He won’t cry.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I swear it, my broer. He’s hard as nails. I swear it.”

  Ip paced back and forth for several minutes. He didn’t sit down again at the desk.

  “Alright. You can keep the money. What did you do with that cell phone he gave you?”

  “It’s right here.”

  Ip took it and removed the SIM card. He crushed it with a key, then he gave it back.

  “You can keep the phone. And the check. You did the right thing by telling me, Hampton. I’ll make some calls to Pollsmoor. Next time, be straight with me. I have ways of finding out the truth.”

  “Sure, sure, sure, no problem. Honest as my word. That’s cool, man. He always said you were the best. Ip’s the best, he’d say to me, heh, heh, heh.” Ip shook his head and turned the door handle to leave. Thursday removed the lid of the abalone cooler. “Don’t you want to look at them? They’re forty years old.”

  Ip shook his head. “They’ll be dead in an hour.”

  Then he left the room.

  Thursday looked at the perlemoen in the water. They were hungry and packed like sardines, but still beautiful and robust. They had forty years of eking out a life in the ocean and deserved a more dignified death. He took a packet from his pocket. “I’ve got good fish meal for them,” he said to the bodyguard. “Can you feed them until you dry them?”

  The bodyguard didn’t reply. Thursday reached into the cooler and let one suck its foot onto his palm. He’d gotten more abalone kisses lately, with their mollusk sensuality, than the real thing. When he looked up he was staring into the silencer of a snub-nosed pistol. “Yissus, man, what are you doing!”

  “Shut up!”

  “He said that I could go!”

  “You shut up! You go nowhere! On the floor!”

  “Ip! Ip! Come in here! He’s trying to kill me!”

  But the door didn’t open. There was no sound at all but the slurping of the mollusk on his palm.

  “On the floor!”

  The bodyguard walked up and kicked Thursday forward, and he held his hand out to keep from crushing the abalone as he fell to the ground. It clattered to the floor. “Let me go!”

  “No, you finished.” The bodyguard removed Thursday’s wallet and took the cell phone and the check.

  Thursday could think of nothing to do. There was no way to kick him, not enough time to get in a punch. He covered his eyes and began to cry.

  “You finished, Hampton.”

  The bodyguard took a step back. Then Thursday heard a low whinny. He turned to see that the thug had slipped on the abalone and discharged the pistol into the ceiling. He was flailing to keep his balance and tripped back over the cooler. The abalone spilled across the floor. Thursday spun around and tried to jump for the gun. But the man grabbed the hem of his pants and tripped him. He pulled at Thursday’s heel with a crushing grip and
wouldn’t let go. Thursday kicked his free heel into the man’s jaw and locked an arm around his head. The man was so strong he began squeezing his ribs with one arm alone. But Thursday had a firm hold and they began a slow struggle of wills. He tried to curl his bicep into the man’s Adam’s apple like Leon had taught him.

  “Get off him!” a voice said.

  It was Ip.

  “Make him stop!” Thursday shouted.

  Ip screamed at his guard and the man relaxed his arm around Thursday’s ribs. Then Ip leveled the gun at Thursday. He swallowed. There was nothing he could do. He just sat and waited, his chest burning with pain. He felt a tiny bit of satisfaction in hearing the bodyguard cough, but it passed as Ip raised the gun.

  This time Thursday didn’t cry when he shut his eyes, waiting to receive the bullet in his brain. And he could have stood there for hours. He traveled down a wood-bored tunnel and back again. There were lights and dreams pushing through it like a geyser. He remembered a white crab crawling out of a hole on a beach, and running its claw back over its eye, intently. And the searing wind-blown sand of that day, whenever it was.

  “You took care of these?”

  He opened his eyes. Ip was looking at the mollusks drowning on the floor. They looked like furry brown saucers scattered on the ground.

  “What, man?”

  Ip was holding the gun up casually, not exactly in his direction. But when Thursday shifted to the side it followed him. “Don’t move.” He bent down to pick up an abalone, testing its weight. “These are plump.” He handed the gun to his thug, who drew back the breech. Then Ip pulled out a pen knife and deftly sliced away the green foot from the abalone on the desk, the mollusk still pulsating, and drew it into thin slices. He chewed on a slice slowly. He motioned for his thug to eat some, who did so, and they exchanged some brusque words in Chinese. “Did you take care of these, Hampton?”

  Thursday started adjusting to the fact that he was having a conversation again. “They were in my tub.” And that words could save him.

  “Did you have an aquarium? What did you give them?”

  “What they need.”

  Ip picked up another large one. The gun was still trained on him. “Can you save them?”

  “I don’t know.” Then: “Not if you’re going to kill me.”

  Ip began putting the abalone in the cooler. The bodyguard, whose cheek was puffing where Thursday had gotten in a heel, looked like he was about to hurl himself at Thursday again. “Get some tap water, Chung.”

  “No,” Thursday said. “They need sea water.”

  “Where can we get that?”

  “The sea.” He bent to pick one up, but Ip tensed. “Let me look at them.” Ip grunted an assent and Thursday turned one over in his hand. “You’ve got about thirty minutes before they won’t be able to recover. They’ve been under a lot of stress.”

  “Can you bring them back?”

  Thursday nodded. “I’m the best.”

  “I’ll pay you for them.”

  “You’re going to kill me.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  But now that he had seen the crab on the beach and the wood-boring tunnel he felt stronger. He could reckon with them. A bullet wouldn’t change anything. “Put that gun down, Chinaman, and I’ll think about it.”

  The thug lowered the pistol.

  “Bail Leon out,” Thursday said.

  “How much is it?”

  “One hundred thousand. He said these are worth it.”

  Ip’s eyes glazed over as he did a calculation in his head.

  “Leon’s a fool. They’re worth sixty thousand alive. That’s an honest price and that’s if they stay alive. We fly out the live ones and you must factor in the cost of the plane ticket. You’re going to need more perlemoen than that.”

  “I can take care of them.”

  “That won’t change a thing. They’re still sixty thousand alive.”

  “No, the ones that come in.”

  “No babysitter!” the bodyguard interjected.

  But Ip was listening. “How much?”

  Even when he had the upper hand, Thursday underestimated himself. “A hundred rand an hour.”

  “Can you do it without power?”

  “Power has nothing to do with it.”

  Ip reached into the desk and counted out 10,100 rand.

  “You said sixty thousand.”

  “That’s if you keep them alive until the end of the week. Ten thousand dried. The hundred is for your first hour. I’ll give you the rest if they make it through to shipment time. I pay cash. That check is worthless.”

  Thursday now realized how little he had understood about their prior negotiations. But he also knew that, just like the last time, he had no choice, he was negotiating for the chance to lick an ice cream cone again and do all the things he had sworn to do. If he could get out the door he could survive. If he could do that he could see how far he would have to run.

  “You have twenty minutes to get to the water,” Ip said. He tossed some keys to the bodyguard. “Chung will drive you. Now gather them up.”

  Chung was not happy about having to chauffer Thursday after their scuffle, and Thursday offered to get the sea water himself but Ip didn’t trust him. Ip didn’t understand anything about Thursday’s kind of loyalty. It wasn’t only to Leon, it was also to the abalone. Thursday would have taken the van and the bucket straight to the sea and nursed them back to health all on his own. Maybe he would have stopped for a Gatsby sandwich—chips, salad, viennas, and minced steak—but he would have returned.

  They drove to the Foreshore, passing a long queue of dejected black men in front of the state warehouse. A car guard attempted to wave them into a spot, but Chung ignored him and steered towards a shipyard. They weaved through the carcasses of tugboats and passed some giant rusty propellers until they came to a ladder that hung over the side to the harbor.

  “Down,” Chung said. He handed Thursday a bucket.

  The water was swirling with an oily film. A dead kingklip floated next to a sorry-looking trawler that probably hadn’t netted a fish in a decade. “This isn’t good enough,” Thursday said.

  “Down!”

  Thursday filled the bucket, trying to lower it far down into the water to avoid taking in the oil. At the top, he said: “This will give them another hour at best. It’s like poison. Take me to the sea, bru. The ocean.”

  “No, we go back.”

  “You want your boss to know that you cost him fifty thousand rand?”

  Chung lit a cigarette with a butane lighter.

  “Where we go?”

  “Hermanus.”

  “Too far.”

  “Then False Bay, at least. They need the water they grew up in. That’s the key.”

  They took the N2 past the water towers and the shacks with garbage bag and tarpaulin roofs and the airport, then cut out to Mitchell’s Plain. Once they got to the sand dunes, Thursday started to get excited. They drove down a dirt road and Chung parked the car. Together they carried the abalone cooler down to the surf and Thursday began changing the water.

  “Hurry up,” Chung said.

  “I don’t want to shock them. They’re almost dead.”

  A pair of Cape Bulbuls winged above the steady wash of the surf. Chung smoked a cigarette and when Thursday looked up he offered one to him, too. Looking at the crescent of the bay, he could imagine Hermanus on the other side, beyond the peaks of the barren mountains, shutting down for the evening. He wondered if anyone would miss him.

  If I had a girl she would miss me, he thought. Maybe I should get a girl.

  “We’ll need to get a lot more water for the new ones,” he said to Ip when they returned to the Chinese restaurant. “And we’ll have to make a run for some gracilaria if you know what’s good for them. The fish meal will bloat ’em up and it’s bad for the flavor.”

  Ip looked at the cooler box. “Will they live?”

  “Yeah,” Thursday said. “They’ll be
fine. Now I’ve done my part of the bargain. Where’s my money?”

  “The shipment flies out on Sunday. You must keep them alive until then.”

  “Where? In Hermanus?”

  “No, here.”

  “I don’t have a place to stay.”

  “It’s Observatory. There are plenty of rooms to let. Go to the supermarket and look at the notice board.”

  “Did you talk to Leon?”

  “No, I talked to some friends of mine inside the prison. They’re going to make everything right.”

  “Lekker.”

  Mrs. Niyangabo

  1993

  France

  The sidelong glance. The whispers. The evasive walk around her by the flight attendants in the aisles. And from beneath her niqab, shadowed forms peering at her across rows of seats, saying Look! Look at her. Look at what she’s wearing!, unaware or, worse yet, unconcerned that Melissa could still see them and hear them.

  She was used to all these things. Even in her own home, Mlungisi Tebogo’s bodyguards would avoid his daughter when left alone with her in the compound, passing along a message from her father without touching her at all. On television, girls her age were chased by boys who would give them flowers for a kiss. She’d kissed one once, a boy, until he’d seen what was beneath the veil, the white skin as lustrous as a pearl on a sienna African face.

  “That’s not right,” he said, recoiling.

  “What isn’t?”

  “It’s just not right.”

  The next time he saw her, he threw a stone at her backside.

  The plane had flown from Harare into Tangiers, where Melissa had switched planes for the flight to Paris. In Harare she had drawn suspicious looks because of her niqab, which covered her entire body in black silk from head to toe, and because of her gloves, which covered her hands. In Tangiers, two other girls stepped onto the plane wearing the same outfit. These girls disconcerted her. It was as if they could pierce her niqab with their eyes because they knew its folds and hidden corners. And she also noticed that the girls managed to sway their hips, to project an alluring femininity, so that instead of hiding their bodies, as Melissa tried to do, they invited others to imagine the beauty obscured by the cloth. Except the girls could remove their niqabs, while she could not. Never.