I have been betrayed. There is no escape from my punishment.
I regret that you are on your own now. It is time for you to leave that home. The money and passport are for your medicine. You can receive treatment as a French citizen now, finish school, live a full life. Remember the people that you love and what I taught you.
Love,
M.T.
Melissa glanced up at Béatrice. Melissa read the letter again and again, trying to make sense of it. She felt herself shaking all over, but she was afraid to move, as if she would splinter into a million pieces. How could it be? How could he write to her so plainly? Would Daddy have really said goodbye to her, just like that?
“Please don’t tell anyone. I’ll pay you.” She handed her a bundle of the money, but the girl waved it away.
“Non, it is for you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Melissa, I have lived here for several years. My own parents disappeared when I was young. For all I know, they may be alive. But it does me no good to grieve for them. It brings me closer to death.”
“You’re an orphan, then.”
“Yes, and I’m not ashamed of it. You should be happy that you are loved. You should do as your father says. Leave this awful place. Go to the hospital, live for yourself.”
But Melissa couldn’t bear the thought. She couldn’t just abandon her father, it was her fault that she had come to France and left him alone. It was her fault that her skin was so ugly. Before she had seen the letter, she might have managed to move on, studied French like the other girls, pretended that she had a new life. Not anymore. Not after what she’d read.
“I can never leave him,” she said.
Béatrice gave Melissa a hug, the first that she had felt in months.
“Then I hope you find him.”
Wale’s Son
Present Day
Cape Town, South Africa
In the glare of the fluorescent Monday, Dayo Olufunmi received a text message from his father that was not going to make his sale easier. Police at home. He clapped his phone shut and decided to answer the shopkeep’s question to move things along:
“America,” he said.
But the shopkeep was a traveler, he’d been out and about before settling in Cape Town, he said, abseiling in Patagonia and running his hand along the cartilaginous breast of a whale shark off the coast of Perth. He’d hunted and been hunted, and he had been there, to America.
“Cleveland it was,” he reminisced. “Had a rock band at the time. Mind you, I’m English and those were the Dark Days, as ye call ’em. Sou Thafrica was the bloody stool of the world, wouldn’t have nuffin to do with it myself. We was called the Stoppards, not after the author. Two brothers, you see, Gavin and Theo Stoppard—”
“Sir,” Dayo interrupted, “can I show you my lamp? It’s my own design.”
“—Theo was bass, as I recall. Gavin on the guitar. Or was it the reverse? Anyway, this bloke put us up in Cleveland. And I thought they was racist here but, man. That oke sees this black guy walking down the street—they was coloured people those days, not people of color—and he says ‘if that nigger touches my lawn I’ll blow his bloody leg off.’ I was like, ’kn ’ell!”
Dayo set the package in his hand on the countertop. Behind him the aisles were filled with lightbulbs and brackets, and chandeliers hung from the ceiling like luminous cobwebs. The shopkeeper explained that he’d shared some whiskey with his host and left with a positive impression of Cleveland.
When the man paused to take a breath, Dayo held the little lamp in his palm. There were three main sections: a black plastic conical base with an inlaid full spectrum bulb and a magnet; a water-filled globe resting upon the base containing pure silicate sand and a figurine of a cat; and a tiny array of solar cells ringing the top of the globe. When the magnet rotated in the base, the cat spun on its axis, its tail functioning as a stirrer to spread around the sand. The bulb shot light into the globe, which refracted off the sand in the water.
Dayo launched into his sales pitch. “This is the moonlight lamp. It reproduces the same clean, unfiltered illumination you get from a full moon.”
The shopkeep shook his head. “I’m not in the nightlight business. You can find children’s accessories at Clicks.”
“This isn’t a nightlight, sir. You see, not all moonlight is the same. Some moonlight is more intense than others. The moon is at its brightest during a solar flare, and the surface of the moon isn’t uniform, so moonlight is affected by its geology. And some of the moonlight that we see here on Earth isn’t reflected directly, but is only radiated later. My lamp reproduces this as closely as possible, at an average of about zero point seven five lux. If you look at the top, you’ll see that these are next generation solar cells above the globe, here and here. The silicate is as close to the regolith on the surface as the moon as can be found here on Earth. Just like the moon, the cells store up daylight that powers the lamp all night.”
The shopkeep put on his glasses and bent over it. “I reckon solar’s the future but the design leaves something to be desired. Stainless is what sells these days, clean lines. Not glass. That looks like a snowglobe to me.”
“It’s based on a toy I had as a kid. See the cat in the bottom of the globe? A magnet in the base makes it spin so that the silicate is dispersed uniformly.”
“Well, c’mon, turn it on for me.”
Dayo eagerly clicked it on, and the cat began to spin until it was blanketed in a cloud of silicate.
“Where’s the light? I can’t see a bloody thing.”
“It’s on.”
The shopkeep ran his hand near the globe of water. After a moment, he reached over to a small rack on the corner and plucked off a keychain, pressing a button so that the keychain LED illuminated some sales receipts on the counter. “Look how bright these are. And they’re only twenty bucks.”
Dayo insisted that no lamp could come closer to real moonlight, repeating the word ‘real’ any number of times. But the shopkeep wasn’t convinced, explaining that he only bought in bulk and the customers had needs and demands.
“—and the customer is always right, ain’t he, my Yankee friend?”
Dayo frantically searched the aisles of the shop looking for a lampshade, found one, frilled like a scallop shell, but it was bolted to the wall. As he scanned for a different lampshade, his cell phone began vibrating in his pocket. Another text message from his father Wale, more predictable than the first: Don’t go home. Don’t talk to anyone. He returned to the counter, where the shopkeep was fingering his business card.
“What kind of name is Dayo? Not American?”
“My parents are Nigerian.”
The shopkeep handed the card back. “I don’t work with Nigerians anymore. I had one steal my entire inventory. Too risky. No offense, of course.” He donned an old-fashioned green accounting visor, and began ticking off numbers on a calculator. “Try Eskom. Cheers.”
Dayo was a powerful young man of twenty, but short, with muscles that bulged in his shirt even though he’d never done a push-up in his life. His brown skin had a healthy sheen and he shaved his head twice a week with a Bic. His wide nose swelled smoothly into deep chestnut eyes and he didn’t have a single hair in his eyebrows, just the suggestion that they were there. His posture was so bad that it was easy to forget about the muscles and the pretty eyes and all the things that a woman might call handsome.
Outside the shop the summer wind was beginning to rage, blowing the haze from the City Bowl and replacing it with the sweet smell of seaweed clinging to the pylons at the foreshore. It was a Wednesday afternoon, but everyone in Cape Town seemed to be leaving for the day. The intersections on Buitengracht leading to the N2 highway were gridlocked with cars and orange-pinnied newspaper sellers. Dayo had been rejected from twenty-eight lighting stores in the two years since he’d developed the moonlight lamp in a fit of inspiration. He’d visited every shop from Parow to Roeland Street without success. He’d already tried Esko
m, the national power supplier, where a glum manager advised him the company only accepted inventions from its research and development wing for legal reasons.
Don’t go home. Don’t talk to anyone.
Dayo hopped in a minibus taxi and headed home. He was not afraid of the police, but of what the text messages on his phone might mean about his father. He stared out the window of the taxi along Main Road, where the antiques shops had covered the sidewalks with their burled furniture, guessing that his father had stopped taking his medicine. At Salt River, next to the fish and chip shops and herbalist stands, black pedestrians gesticulated and chatted over foreign newspapers. Security guards were returning home from work or heading out for the night shift. In Woodstock some coloured teens were skateboarding along a concrete escarpment by a cash machine. Finally he made it home, to the suburb called Observatory.
To his surprise, his Angolan neighbors told him that two policemen had actually been there, and for a moment panic bubbled in his chest. Had his Dad actually been right? Then the Angolan added: “They’re looking for someone staying at Okeke Chikwendu’s.”
Dayo sighed, and took a deep breath, but he still felt a need to tell Okeke, who owned a red claptrap house down the street that he was slowly restoring. Dayo walked over and pounded on the door. “Okeke, it’s Dayo.”
After a few minutes, Okeke poked his head out wearing a pair of safety goggles with a paint roller in his hand. Yellow paint had splattered his denim shirt. A little man, Okeke was his father’s drinking buddy and an attorney from Ibadan who had moved his family to Cape Town mistakenly thinking the Cape Bar would admit him. Now he was in real estate. “What is it, Dayo?”
“Police are looking for one of your tenants.”
Okeke glanced under Dayo’s arm to the street. “Thanks. It must be the coloured guy. I should have given the place to one of our own, but he paid up front.” He handed Dayo some keys. “Do you think you could be bothered to—”
“You want me to take a look around, right?”
“Good man. Tell your dad I’ll be at Jack’s later. There’s a friendly against Ghana and Taiwo’s back on the wing.”
The next step was to find his father. Dayo made his way past the cheery little pastel homes of Obz, with its Victorian and Edwardian homes in states of disrepair and refurbishment, its narrow left-wing streets redolent with Nag Champa incense. He joined the domestics and peddlers walking to the train station, passed over the bridge, crossed the Liesbeeck River, and padded up the grounds of the Royal Observatory. As much as he disliked confronting his father, the manicured lawns and gentle slope of the hill with its squat Cape Chestnut trees made him relax. Anyway it had to be done. At the top of the hill he couldn’t hear the hoots of the minibuses zipping down the Liesbeeck Parkway. The lighting stores and their attendant failures felt far away.
The research lab consisted of three computers and a couple of analog microscopes. There was a dedicated file server that let the scientists working remotely at the Sutherland array in the Karoo transmit their data for later study. The room had two large windows facing the rear of the Observatory with sunlight that gave it a pleasant, disinfected feel. But Dayo’s father had drawn the shades.
“Close the door!” Wale shouted. “Or you’ll contaminate the sample.”
Dayo let the door shut of its own weight. He saw that there was a can of Guinness on the table, with another in the waste bin. His father Wale Olufunmni was an oak-skinned, skinny man who was shorter than Dayo but stood straighter so their heads were nearly the same height. Wale still had stout legs that he strengthened by playing basketball twice a week in the local community gym. His hair had begun to gray, confusing his opponents into thinking he was too slow to drive the lane.
“Dad, it’s three-thirty,” Dayo said, eyeing the Guinness.
His father put his hand on the can without removing his eyes from the microscope. “It’s four-thirty in Istanbul. That’s considered happy hour in Turkey. For those who drink.”
Dayo sat down in one of the squeaking office chairs of the lab. As a volunteer at the Observatory his father enjoyed access to the research facilities. Dayo asked him to grant him access to the computer server so he could check his email. The South African patent office had written saying that Dayo had improperly filled out the forms for his application for ‘Moonlight Lamp’, and advised him to download Form 1216E from their website at no charge.
“The police are looking for one of Okeke’s tenants,” Dayo said.
Wale took his first look at son, found nothing of interest, and put his eye back on the microscope. “What for?”
“Okeke’s Nigerian. That’s usually enough.”
“Okeke’s no drug dealer,” Wale declared. He scribbled some information onto a notebook beside the microscope. He beckoned for Dayo to look at the sample, and as Dayo grew closer he could smell the fumes on his father’s breath. Strong, probably several more cans had been thrown out already. One of his father’s skills was destroying the evidence. Through the lens of the microscope, the minerals of the lunar rock were stacked on top of each other in stratified colors of magenta, tangerine, turquoise, and alabaster. “See this spall zone?” Wale said. “The glass around it came from the impact. But the radial fractures are fairly shallow. The rest of it’s untouched, so untouched that it could be from the mantle. If only I had a SET, then I could verify it. It would be a real find for this country. You’re sure they were looking around at Okeke’s?”
“That’s what the neighbors said.”
“Was there a man called Bello with them?”
“Where did you get the sample?” Dayo asked, changing the subject.
Scratching away at the meteorite, Wale complained that he had requested it from the planetarium, which had allowed kids to get their grubby hands all over it. He popped another can of Guinness. It made a sizzling sound as the widget spat nitrogen into the beer. “No sale today?”
“No.” Dayo didn’t want to get into that conversation, the one that began with advice and ended with his being labeled a failure. “Dad, Doctor Moodley said that drinking on your medicine will ruin your liver.”
“He who is working hard, the proverb goes, should continue to do so, though he won’t necessarily succeed. But if you’re lucky in life you won’t easily fail. I think you may be out of luck, Dayo. How many stores has it been? Twenty? Thirty? Why don’t you join my bamboo business? You can try again when your luck returns.”
“Are you taking your medicine? If you are then you shouldn’t be drinking.”
“Maybe it’s your sales delivery. I sell my bamboo mash blankets by showing it to them. It’s easy. I rub the blanket against their arms—the women, that is. Then I sell them. Easy. Pass me the ruler there.”
Dayo passed the ruler. “You should take your medicine. There’s no need to hide. Bello wasn’t there. The police aren’t after you. They’re after Okeke.”
“Sometimes a story helps,” Wale said, now shining a penlight on the meteorite. “That’s how I sold twenty chairs last week, and six blankets. What story do you tell them about the lamp?”
Dayo went through his routine, trying to emphasize the technical parts. He used the words ‘luminosity’ and ‘umbra’ and ‘aqueous medium’ with what he hoped was familiarity.
His father was shaking his head. “That’s the problem, Dayo. No one cares about technicalities. They don’t want to know how it works, they want to know why they should buy it. Tell them, then show them. I learned that firsthand with my full moon tours.”
Even when his father was on the defensive, he managed to turn things into a lecture. And Dayo was supposed to, according to Yoruba tradition, sit there and take it. But he had been born in America and raised in South Africa. “Are you taking your medicine or not?”
“Just because I’m paranoid, it doesn’t mean people aren’t following me,” his father intoned, taking a gulp from his Guinness. “I can’t remember who said that. Okeke knows. I got it from him.” He placed t
he meteorite back in a glass case, and, teetering through a door, shut the rock sample away in a locker in the hallway. “Come with me, Dayo. Let’s go for a walk.”
Wale squinted as if it was midday outside, when the sun was low in the sky, already dipping beneath the churning clouds above Table Mountain. There was a falcon circling overhead looking to dive on prey in the grass. Father and son walked along the grass until they reached an enormous manhole cover in the middle of a field. Wale squatted down and tried to lift it off, gritting his teeth. “Come, Dayo, give me a hand.” Together they dragged the lid off with a hollow scraping sound, and the scent of old moss drifted from the hole. “This is where they kept the mercury. There were huge pools of it. The idea was to use the mercury as a giant focal lens to observe the stars, since science hadn’t discovered how to manufacture a lens of that size. Mercury reflects like a mirror when it’s still, and there were few vibrations because the scientists buried it underground. At the time it was a significant advance for the Observatory. But when they built the Liesbeeck Parkway and the N2, the vibrations from the traffic made the mirrors unworkable. Can you imagine looking into a pool of mercury? Gauging the stars in a pool of quicksilver like an alchemist? It would be like floating in space.”
Dayo glanced down into the hole and all he could think about was falling into it and having his father close the lid on top of him.
“This is a popular part of my full-moon tour. It has nothing to do with selenometry anymore. No practical value. But this is where I get my repeat customers. From the story. And I let the children come up with their own reasons. You’ve got to come up with a story. Put some tension in it.”
“I based the lamp on the snowglobe you gave me,” Dayo said.
“Yeah, but what does that snowglobe mean?”
“You gave it to me when I was a child. There’s nothing special about it.”
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