Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  His father burped and waved a finger in the air. “There is something very special about it.”

  Once a finger waved in the air, Dayo was certain that his father was drunk. He thought about how to get him home before he began cowering behind every bush in fear of the people he imagined to be following him.

  “It’s about time you knew, Dayo.” He lowered his voice. “That snowglobe came from the moon.”

  “I’m not listening to this,” Dayo said.

  “Once you sell a lamp, you can stop listening. That snowglobe came from Eleven.”

  “Eleven what?”

  “Apollo Eleven.”

  “It’s time to go home.”

  “No, listen!” His father began making big gestures, pointing at the sky that was deepening into violet, and moving into black. There were a few bright stars out already that Dayo strived to name. Wale then told a rambling story about Neil Armstrong and NASA, as if he was intimate with all of them. “That’s what’s inside your snowglobe,” he concluded. “Tell that story to your lamp shops.”

  “You want me to believe that the snowglobe you gave me has dust from the moon inside it.”

  “Yes.”

  “From man’s first trip to the moon.”

  Dayo shook his head. Bello was enough. This, this would call for a whole new level of dosage. Maybe a new prescription, too.

  “I don’t want to hear any more. And what if someone asks me how I got the dust from Apollo Eleven?”

  Wale grew quiet. He bent down and tried to drag the manhole cover back over the old pool of mercury, but careened head-over-heels into the grass. He lay on his back for a few moments, staring at the rugby ball of a gibbous moon emerging above an oak tree.

  “You tell them your father gave it to you.”

  Seeing his father lying down like that, his hair as faintly silver as the moon, and the breath of the alcohol mixing with the moss of the manhole and the fact that Wale was both insane and correct, that Dayo hadn’t made a sale and probably wouldn’t anytime soon, made Dayo suddenly very angry. “You’re a bamboo salesman! Why can’t you just admit it? This place is bad for you. Give it up and take your medicine.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way! I’m your father. Yoruba don’t believe in medicating our problems. We deal with them. That’s where your mother went wrong.”

  “I’m going home.”

  Dayo walked past two drunk bergies splayed out in front of the Yellow Rose, and some dreary men smoking a spliff right out on Lower Main Road. Inside he could see quarts of beer in plastic ice buckets and the sneer of a cricket umpire on the television. He wasn’t thinking about his father’s fantasies now but about his mother.

  Wale refused to talk about her other than to call her names. His entire life, Dayo had heard how she had prostituted herself with strangers and become addicted to drugs in Houston. She was so desperate for drugs that she had embroiled the family in a financial scam that had been caught by the FBI. Instead of going to jail and abandoning his son to an orphanage, Wale had fled to South Africa. There, he’d started afresh by securing them refugee permits—fudging the truth a little for the papers—to allow them to remain in the country for good. Wale learned how to make bamboo furniture to pay for their home in Observatory. Everything he did in his life, Wale said, he did for the family.

  Sometimes Dayo wished he had been put in an orphanage. He couldn’t stand to be around his father anymore, having watched him over the years decline into this sorry state. And it was all fueled by his geology hobby; the more time he spent out at the Royal Observatory, the more unmanageable he became. For the briefest of moments Dayo would see genius, or less even—coherence—in his father’s amateurish ramblings, then Wale would get drunk and launch into an incredible story like the one about Apollo Eleven, or work himself into a state with tales about the great savior Bello. His dad believed that Bello was the one person who could clear their name in America. He was a diplomat, visionary, and expediter all rolled up into one person, whose magic touch would grace his father’s life with redemption. And money.

  It felt like Wale’s mind was on the moon, and he was beaming back signals with a three-second delay, crossing the distance through splattered debris and nonsense. The fact was that Wale sold bamboo furnishings for a living in a suburb of Cape Town that no one besides Capetonians would have missed if it disappeared. And, although Dayo didn’t like it, he knew his father was right that the lamp hadn’t worked. It was time for him to get a job.

  The two of them lived in a comfortable home, with two bedrooms, a living room with an attached kitchen, and a carport that Wale had converted into his bamboo workshop. The workshop contained lathes, bandsaws, jointers, and cutting machines, and part of the space was reserved to experiment with new cultivars of bamboo. His father also kept a large terrarium lit by hydroponic lamps for seedlings. The latest variety, imported from Gabon, doubled in size every week but lacked the tensile strength of other varieties so Wale was trying to cross-breed them with stronger lines. The small backyard was about twenty paces across and had a garden with fastidiously weeded clusters of bamboo.

  By agreement, Dayo and his father stayed out of each other’s bedrooms, but after seeing Wale tonight, Dayo felt obligated to look inside to know how bad his sickness had become. He opened the door and turned on the light. The corkboard was still there. On the board, faded tea-colored newspaper clippings were connected with bright green strings. Most of the clippings were from the 1990s and from Nigeria or contained information about Nigeria. The first, way at the left of the board, bore the headline “Elections Held as Nigeria begins transition to Civilian Rule”. The next read: “General Abboud Cancels Elections”. And shortly to the right, another piece detailed the arrival of President Rawlson Bimini, who seized power from Abboud shortly afterwards. Then there were several articles about a violent crackdown upon musicians and other politicians, and articles about oil in the Delta region. These Dayo had seen before.

  What frightened him were the fresh new clippings about violent terrorism and interreligious strife. In the middle of these new clippings, perched in the center of the web of strings, lay a question in clipped-out capital letters, as eerie and manic as a ransom note: WHAT IS IBEJI?

  Dayo had once searched for the term Ibeji online and been directed to websites of museums containing African art. They were curious little Yoruba dolls that held some importance as collectibles. The pieces were readily available on online auction sites, going for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each, with dubious provenance, as the Western owners bent over backwards to explain how these dolls, which were supposedly so spiritually significant, had graced display cabinets in Indianapolis and Oswego and Derbyshire for decades. But that was hardly unusual for African art, and the collectors were certainly not sinister enough to conspire to ruin his father’s life. The dolls meant something to the immediate family that carved them, if you believed in their spiritual power, but were otherwise harmless. And yet his father seemed to think they represented something much larger than collectible folk art, and, like Bello, were both the source of and solution to all his problems.

  The clippings on the wall were a map of his father’s madness that was becoming increasingly plain for the world to see. Now his father was telling him about the moon as if he’d been there and walked on it. Dayo would have to call the doctor himself, have him wire in a refill.

  He shut the door quickly and retired to his room. His bedside lamp was a crude thing compared to the manufactured lamps he was selling now, the original snowglobe with his father’s so-called moondust inside: basically a conventional incandescent bulb shined up into the globe, which you had to shake to get the light to refract properly, and there was a lampshade wrapped in foil that scattered the light. It had been, to his father’s dismay, his Class 12 project at the Steiner Academy. The other kids had built biodiesel engines and hanging scrolls from rice paper and welded sculptures. He’d made the lamp. For his efforts he’d received
a passing mark and an encouraging note from his teacher.

  The snowglobe had been with him for as long as he could remember. It had a pinewood base and there was a small black housecat in the middle of the fine white flecks. And since he and Wale had moved homes all the time, the only steady pet Dayo’d had was inside the water-filled globe. He’d hold it up to a lightbulb and watch the flecks flurry inside. He imagined it shivering. So desolate was his pet in the globe, in the deserted winds.

  “If one’s private room gives no pleasure,” his father liked to say while pinning strings to his cork board, “the town seems like a wilderness.”

  Dayo’s room began to suffocate him so he went for a stroll, seeking the wild. His father would probably be drinking with Okeke by now and watching a soccer match, but Dayo had no money to spend. A stroll was free, and in Obz at night it could be adventurous. There was tension in the burglar bars that belied the stillness, as if the entire neighborhood thought it would be rampaged by hordes of thieves and Tsotsis at any moment, and the slinking cats on the parapets would do nothing but bear witness.

  The wild soon came. Heeling past the strident top 40 music of the Stones bar, he felt someone watching him. When he looked across the street, though, the only person there was Bernard, the Congolese bouncer at Runnings, who waved and smiled beneath his puffy afro. He decided to stop into the Armchair Theatre, a live music club with torn leather furniture and candle-topped bottles, and ordered a beer from the bar, putting the drink on a tab that he declined to look at. Kesivan Naidoo was on drums with his quartet, Lee Thompson on cornet.

  Dayo realized his mistake as soon as he sat down at the bar, for a guy at the end of the room, a black man with a lazy eye, got up immediately and sat next to him. When he turned around, a coloured guy had slid into the stool on the other side.

  “You Dayo?” the coloured guy asked.

  Dayo sized him up. A heavy man with a big chest, a man not to talk back to. He stuck out his brandy gut as if it was a source of pride. On the drums, Naidoo was swishing slowly as the quartet searched for a groove. The bassist plucked out a trim line for the others to follow.

  “Yeah, I’m Dayo.”

  “We saw you stop into Okeke Chikeendo’s earlier.”

  “Chikwendu.”

  “I’m no Nigerian. Neither is Mush, here.” The guy meant his reticent partner on the other side. He flashed a badge, but closed it too quickly for Dayo to make any sense of it. He thought he saw the word ‘Environmental’. “We’d like to have a word with Okeke. He seems to disappear every time we stop by.”

  On stage, Thompson plugged a mute in the cornet and began sending out triplets in the highest register. The notes had a strident feel, as if he was reliving an argument with a girlfriend.

  “I can’t help you,” Dayo said.

  “But you know him.”

  Dayo sipped his beer. “Yeah, I know him. Save yourself some trouble. We don’t all sell drugs. Okeke’s a family man.”

  Thompson had lowered his cornet and let the bearded Naidoo lean into the drums. The solo began slowly, incorporating all the contemplations that had come before on his snare and high-hats.

  “We want to ask him some questions,” the coloured guy went on. He proffered a business card, but there wasn’t a name on it. Just a number. “Tell him to call me.”

  Dayo fingered the card. “He doesn’t have much cell phone credit.”

  “He doesn’t have to leave a message if he doesn’t want to. Tell him to ask for Mush. We’ll call him back.”

  “Who are you looking for, then?”

  “It’s none of your business, kid.”

  Naidoo was taking over now on the drums. His hand flicked the sticks over his kit as if he was harnessing a spreading fire, his whole body vibrating and his eyes wide. It was said that rhythm begins with the heartbeat but with Naidoo it was somewhere more fundamental. The light perhaps, the pulse of the photons shining in from the moon. If the moon was anywhere, Dayo thought, it wasn’t in the snowglobe but coursing through Naidoo’s veins.

  “All the tenants in Okeke’s are clean,” Dayo said, swallowing some beer. “If you want to arrest someone, check the hostels. The backpackers all smoke dagga.”

  Before he could leave, the black guy seized his arm on a pressure point. It felt like his elbow would pop out.

  “You’d better tell him, Dayo,” the coloured guy said. “Or we might have to swing by, what is it, Mush?”

  “Wale’s Bamboo Hut,” the black man said. “Twenty-two Irwell.”

  “Wale’s Bamboo Hut to find him. It’ll be with a warrant, a very thorough search. Best he contacts us first.”

  The man let go of Dayo’s arm and the blood rushed in painfully.

  Fuck you, he thought, walking out. And your spineless echo of a partner.

  People were clapping for the jazz quartet as Dayo stepped onto the street. He had an intense desire to convert to some far-flung religion and give up any tie to his family. His roots had given him nothing but trouble today. But at the same time, he wasn’t going to turn Okeke over to a lazy cop that was strong-arming his countrymen to make a bust. If I had my lamp, he thought, this wouldn’t happen. In moonlight there’s no color. That bastard would actually have to protect and serve and not harass my people and our skin.

  On the walk home he lingered at a patch of agapanthae blossoms spread open, and the gibbous moon was bright against the fabric of stars. A moth was tickling at the stamens of the agapanthae as they yearned for the light. In the breezy flutter of the flowers he thought he could discern the rhythms of Naidoo’s drums in the jazz quartet.

  As the drumbeats faded into stillness he began to feel nothing for the moon. There was no love there, just cold empty space. He unlocked the gate at his house, passed through the living room, not bothering to turn on the light, and found his bedroom in the black. Lying on his bed, he reached for his lamp and turned it on. Tomorrow his father would take his medicine. Tomorrow there would be a job.

  Adrian

  Present day

  South Africa

  For fifteen hundred rand Thursday Malaysius got his own apartment with a separate bedroom, a closed-in balcony, a Jacuzzi bathtub, and two showers. The black owner, whose name was Okeke, mentioned casually that he was a foreigner, and when Thursday didn’t react to this fact, shook his hand and agreed to the deal. The kitchen was tiny, but he wasn’t there to cook. It was perfect for the abalone. With the month’s deposit, a head flashlight for the blackouts, candles, food, and some extra clothes for the week, he was left with six thousand rand. He started to feel guilty and found the number for Pollsmoor prison and dialed it from a payphone. The operator transferred him from A Block to B Block to C Block until a voice said “Themba, you seen Lebo?” and the line went dead. Then he called Leon’s family in Hermanus. Leon’s mother was upset, but calmed down after Thursday said that he was in town trying to get Leon free.

  Ip didn’t trust Thursday to do anything on his own, so he ordered Chung to drive him around town to get what he needed. He picked up a basic oxygenating pump from a pet store and some PVC tubing to create a siphoning system to circulate the water during the power outages. Chung didn’t talk much owing to his language problems, and he never said a word while he was eating. Over the week, though, Thursday managed to glean a lot from him.

  One day they drove out to Atlantis to scrape fresh kelp from the rocks. Atlantis was a coloured community outside Cape Town that was established during apartheid to provide cheap labor to manufacturing concerns. There weren’t many hills, and rows of eucalyptus trees lined the byways and sometimes there was the squawk of Cape gulls as they drifted in the chill sea wind. Atlantis was not a fishing community like Hermanus. It was a lost community. Gates were falling off hinges, creepers fissuring through paint. The only signs of renewal were televisions and automobiles and mothers pushing baby carriages. The community was lost because the industries that built the town had left it with apartheid.

  The horizon was
more still than Hermanus at that time of the year, too. In Hermanus the whales would be breaching and spyhopping, or slapping their fins on the water. Hermanus Bay gave you the feeling that there were larger things out there. Atlantis, on the other hand, made Thursday depressed.

  “How long you been a smuggler, Chung?”

  “Shut up.”

  Chung didn’t like to get wet and cursed when his foot plunged into a tide pool.

  “I’ve been a smuggler for two weeks. It’s hard work, man. And dangerous. I’ve been shot at three times.”

  “I kill you next week.”

  Thursday shooed away some gulls from the protuberant rocks. “Why would you do that?”

  “Ip.”

  “Ip said you had to do it? Well, why do you have to listen to him? Why do you have to kill me? All I want to do is help my friend. Just ’cause you’re a smuggler? Is that why? That’s not cricket.”

  “Not a smuggler. Import-export.”

  “Everyone knows that perlemoen is illegal. Read the papers. Operation Trident and all that.” He tapped his temple. “You’ve got to educate your mind, my broer. I read the paper every morning now.”

  Chung straddled two rocks and put a kelp strand into the bucket. “Legal yesterday. Illegal today.”

  “That’s called knowledge. It’s illegal because there aren’t enough to go around.”

  “South Africa, forty million people.”

  “So what?”

  “China, one and a half billion people. In China it is legal. So, legal.”

  Thursday wasn’t sure how to respond to that. One and a half billion people would kick the ass of forty million people in any fight, and there wasn’t a thing you could do about it. It would be nothing like the battle between clams and abalone he used to make up in his mind, where each side had a chance.

  He made his way back to the van, but Chung told him to sit down and pulled out a joint. Thursday cupped his hand against the sea breeze to get the flame going, and the dank smoke touched his nostrils. He took a few puffs and suddenly became aware of the sound of the waves and stared at the foam as the tips curled over. He had a quick flash of Leon getting arrested in the darkness and he felt sick. When he looked back, Chung had nodded off.