Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  Farai hadn’t said that her father was dead, only that he didn’t remember. He may have known him, perhaps received tickets from him. But she couldn’t believe that her father had been part of the scam. It didn’t fit. She convinced herself that she could jog his memory later.

  Ruth pattered to the table and cleared the plates. Farai waited for her to leave again.

  “I can see what you’re thinking, that this was a conspiracy of some kind against your father, but it was just a scam. I am sorry if your father was caught up in it, too. There was only one person who could have done it—Nurudeen Bello. If you’re going to Nigeria, don’t ask for Bello. It will get you killed. I doubt he’s even there. He’s likely still roaming the earth, giving people like me a run for their money.” He shifted in his chair, chuckling to himself. “You know why people always fall for these silly scams? Because they think that Africans are inferior. They think they’re not capable of a sophisticated scam. I never thought I’d become like that. Never in my life. And here I am, sitting in the dark.”

  Melissa’s craving for protection had deafened her. She could not abandon the thought that he was a man who had known her father and that Farai could be trusted. She did not sense the broken promise.

  “What kind of pain do you think I’m in, Dr. Farai?”

  She gave him her hand.

  “You wear a glove,” he said. “I cannot tell.”

  Reluctantly, she removed the gloves, unsure of what would be beneath. Then he slipped his hand over hers. Warm, but not clammy with nervousness like her own. She was surprised to find that his touch comforted her.

  “Your palms feel healthy. You are a strong woman. I can tell that you’re in good health. Yes, if you’re in pain it is certainly psychological.” She started to withdraw them. “Wait, I can see them.” He squeezed more firmly, then turned them over. “Did you paint them? With day-glo or fluorescence?”

  “No.”

  “Fascinating. They’re almost—bioluminescent. Are you sure? You haven’t been swimming in the sea? Anything like that?”

  “I have been in Paris.”

  “It’s lovely,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Has this happened before?”

  “Every month.”

  “What about the rest of your body?”

  “The same. It’s vitiligo. There is no cure.”

  “No, this isn’t vitiligo. It’s something else.” He turned her hands over again in his, gently. “I don’t have the facilities at my lab, but I know someone who does. I’ve heard of advances in this field, staining neurons with bioluminescence to map the functions of the brain, still very experimental, of course. But never in the skin. It’s remarkable.” And then, almost to himself, as he held her hands: “You’re beautiful.”

  Melissa was afraid to lose the sensation of comfort. She didn’t want to be studied in a lab like an exotic object. No, she could only feel this in the dark. She pulled his hand closer. She didn’t want to tell him about the other scientist, the one that she had discovered murdered. Each touch of Farai’s was making everything unravel. She had expected warmth. But what she felt was cool, spreading from her groin, the fluttering of a fan by the breeze. The pressure of the wind moving her along.

  “There are cameras,” Farai muttered.

  She guided Farai’s hand up her leg, thrilled by the anonymity of it, but also by the honesty of the darkness. Neither of them had seen the other’s face. This was just touch. She brought her foot up to his groin. There was more sensation now, not just a breeze, but gusts, surging quickly past her, between her legs, as if swaying around a sand dune.

  Melissa wanted to hold this moment. There was no finality, only branches upon branches and leaves of possibilities. Her father could be alive. This man could help her. Answers could be found. She moved her body against Farai’s and felt more coolness brushing within her. A dune piling with sand, each grain moving within itself. She felt his stiffness and tried to pull his zipper down with her toes. Beyond the dune there was more. A rising and falling to the rhythm of his touch, filtered through eons of rich soil, cleaning it for her, shared by her, then hers alone, Melissa’s, and she pulled down her own panties and stroked his groin with her foot while bringing her hand to her own body, cool, feeling a tug of a pure luminous satellite.

  Farai groaned. Melissa couldn’t stop herself and kept on moving, the wonderful unity of a release, that this man would release her, that she would release herself straight into the protection of the tides. Flow with the moon. She was being reborn, she was being released. A child of light.

  A tray dropped behind them with a crash. Several glasses sounded like they were exploding at once. A small yellow light streaked out of the corner of Melissa’s eye, tiny like the flame of a cigarette lighter. Then it sounded like flesh hitting someone clear to the bone. Farai kicked her hard in the knee. She pushed back her chair, clutching her leg, as two more smacks wrenched the air.

  “Dr. Farai?”

  All of it, the moon, the tides, was fading quickly. Melissa slid her panties up and found them moist. She fished for her shoe. At some point the couple beside them had left. She wondered if she had been the cause and decided she didn’t care. For she would make them leave again to feel that release.

  Farai cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Her eyes were blinded this time not by the darkness but by the light as someone switched on the overhead lamps. As her eyesight adjusted she found everything threadbare. The room was partitioned like cubicles and above her an emergency fluorescent shined down from the ceiling. In their cubicle there were three tables, and it was impossible to see the next cubicle. As if responding to some invisible threat, people began scrambling to leave the restaurant. Farai had slumped down across from her. He seemed to have spilled wine on his chest. And the stain was spreading.

  “Dr. Farai?”

  For the first time she had a look at him. A small smile had fixed on his face, and he was clutching at his stomach as if enjoying a good laugh, breathing slowly. He had graying hair and was wearing a pinstriped, fitted shirt. His body was pear shaped, and his skin was pocked with scars. This was the man that had so attracted her, a man who people wouldn’t look twice at on the street, who might even be found ugly. This was the man she had made love to and who had comforted her in the dark.

  “Dr. Farai?”

  She moved towards him. She reached to grab his hand and his smile turned into a grimace and his arms dropped to his chest. He began to slump over. Then she saw the stains for what they were. He had been shot twice in the back. She cried for help, and tried to staunch his wounds but the blood was pouring too rapidly. His body suddenly sprang awake and he threw his arms around her like a child to its mother.

  In the lobby, the hostess was shouting on the phone in Swiss German. She let the phone drop to the desk and looked at Melissa in shock.

  “Your skin,” she said.

  Melissa looked at her arm, expecting to find blood. None was there. Farai had pulled up her sleeve while he was stroking her, and the light was shimmering within her skin with a slight incandescence. Her first reaction was to brush at her arm. When nothing changed, she raised up her other sleeve. It too was capturing the light like a jewel. Never had her skin been so strong before.

  “Are you alright?” the hostess asked. “You have changed.”

  Melissa had been released. Whatever Farai had done, he had released her.

  “Did you see anyone leave here?”

  “Out the rear! It opens into the Münsterplatz.”

  Melissa ran back through the restaurant and out the rear exit. A cool magenta light that gradually faded into a deep blue hung above the Münster castle. Listening intently, she heard the clatter of footsteps in the distance. Then she saw a cobbled path that led beneath a sandstone archway.

  She walked down the path, cautiously, and found that recessed lighting had been set on a flicker setting to appear like torches. It gave the large sandstone bric
ks an ominous quality. A few ancient oak doors lined the passageway with large brass knockers and bronze tracery, but they were sealed shut.

  The flickering light steadied towards the end of the passageway. She stepped into a wide plaza with willow trees surrounded by tall spires of the castle. Not far along, she saw a dark-skinned figure in a black overcoat pacing quickly along a wall of the plaza.

  “Stop!” Melissa shouted.

  The figure bolted towards the far end of the plaza. Melissa ran after him. She descended some steps to a small landing then descended again, with her hands upon a wrought iron railing. Beyond the red-brown brick of the castle she could see the Rhine River surging past in the crepuscule.

  The killer fled towards an area below the castle. The steps bottomed onto a wide flat corridor that ran beside the parapets of the wall for a hundred meters. Here there were about a dozen food kiosks with umbrellas, where people were sitting on the narrow corridor eating summer sausage and drinking elderberry beer.

  Melissa ran swiftly past the kiosks, clutching her niqab to her neck with the river a good ten meters below. The killer threw himself over the parapets and climbed down some iron handholds bolted into the wall of the castle. Below, there was a much smaller footpath that was nearly level with the water of the river, with a skiff rocking in the current, tethered fast by some ropes.

  The killer began untying the moorings of the small boat as Melissa climbed down to cut him off. A sharp wind chopped the surface of the water.

  “Stop! I want to talk to you!” she shouted, running along the bank. The high water lapped over the bank and soaked her shoes.

  The figure paused for a moment, seeming unsure that he’d heard her correctly, and resumed casting off the ropes from the boat. He reached out above and, as if by magic, tugged on something invisible. The skiff began to move. Melissa looked above to see a thick-gauge wire that stretched from river bank to river bank. The boat was connected to the wire by a safety rope. It was some kind of ferry to cross the water. Hand-over-hand, the killer began pulling himself out of reach.

  “Stop!” she shouted. “Please! I want to talk to you!”

  This time he heard her. He stopped pulling himself along and turned his head to take in the plump woman in the niqab. His face shocked her. He looked strikingly like Mrs. Niyangabo, only less refined and even more vicious. And he had watery, yellowed eyes that glistened under the street lamps.

  “Who are you?”

  The killer used his free hand to draw a long black pistol from a pocket. He pointed it at Melissa’s chest. There was no place for her to hide.

  Then Melissa felt a tug of light quickening within her. Rising like a wild, yellow ring of fire, the moon peeked out behind the buildings across the river. The shawl of her niqab was swept upward with the wind and carried away by the water. She did not have to look at her arms this time, for she knew they were alive with the pulse of the tides. She could feel the beams moving within her, could recall the release that Farai had given her. She surged with the power of the river as the moonlight moved within her passionately.

  The killer watched her, suddenly struck by her beauty, and loosed his grip on the rope.

  “You’re the one,” he said, “that he confessed about.”

  The current tossed the skiff to port side and he dropped the pistol into the water. The prow swung around and he nearly fell overboard. Regaining his composure, he pulled himself up and tried to right the boat. But a small wave, full of the force of the mountains, knocked the boat sideways again. Water began to spill into the prow.

  “Please, who are you?”

  “I work for the Ibeji. We thought you had run away.”

  With the rope attached to the wire above, the water would soon capsize him. She ran to try to reel him in, but the rope was out of reach.

  “Come back! Where is my father, Mlungisi Tebogo?”

  “There’s only one left now…Wale…”

  The boat spasmed against its tether, lurching further into the water each time. Then the rope snapped and the man was swallowed by the dark river.

  Melissa crumpled. She wanted to speak with him, that was all. She hadn’t wanted revenge. She wanted to know the truth about her father. Instead, he had told her about someone else who knew everything, as if he hadn’t heard her at all. Now he was gone, too. They all were.

  She slowly began to climb back towards the castle, lost in her misery. Farai’s promise had been broken. The scientist hadn’t protected her at all and had been killed like the other, and her father was no closer. Nothing had changed. As she mulled over these despairing thoughts, her way up the steps was soon blocked by a small crowd.

  “Look at her!”

  “Her skin! Look at her skin!”

  People gawked at her openly now that her niqab was gone, taken by the wind. Her face was exposed. She could still feel the moonlight moving within her veins, hotly. She tried to push through the crowd, but a hand held her back and she found herself looking into the face of a young woman.

  “Are you alright?”

  Melissa nodded.

  “Please, tell us your name. Your skin. It’s so beautiful.”

  “Mel—” Melissa began, then stopped. She suddenly didn’t want to reveal her name. It felt like the only thing she had left in the world.

  “Melle,” the young woman said. “Her name is Melle.”

  Home Affairs

  Present day

  South Africa

  The bullwhip went up and snapped back in a flash, giving Wale just enough time to duck. The guard was angry, he’d been aggravated by a Tanzanian, fresh off the smuggling truck and waving a paper in his face, and finally, he’d had enough.

  “THREE LINES! TWENTY-TWOS, HERE! TWENTY-THREES, HERE! TWENTY FOURS, HERE! THREE LINES!”

  When Wale and Dayo didn’t move, he came at them hard and fast, stepping back to stretch the full length of the bullwhip.

  “Get it up, Dayo!” Wale shouted. “Raise the shield!”

  Clumsily Dayo raised his basket cover, a makeshift shield, and whap!-whap!-whap! the guard rained the whip down, shooting bits of bamboo into the air. Father and son huddled together like a Roman turtle, raising their shields over their head until the guard, furious, moved on and cracked the whip at a group of Congolese men chattering in Lingala, seemingly unaware of the commotion.

  “THREE LINES!”

  The rest happened rapidly: the whip snapped, a pair of spectacles—glinting silver in the sun—shot into the air, one of the men fell to the ground clutching his temple, and their companion in military fatigues hurtled himself at the guard, wrestling away the whip. He had been a commander of the Ninjas in Bouenza, he shouted, and wouldn’t let the guard treat him like an animal. And while more guards joined the fray to retrieve the whip that the commander had taken, Wale spied an opening in the security gate and they were running fast, fast, fast past the hundreds of others, through the turnstile and the beeping radar detector and into the gloam of the Customs House.

  Inside the long, dark foyer there was a corridor that led to the elevators. A stale haze hung in the air, obscuring their vision, and they began to sweat. They put away their shields and were about to press the ‘Up’ button on the elevator when the guards entered dragging the military man by his shirt.

  “Stay calm,” Wale instructed. “Let’s go to the stairs.”

  The elevator door opened as the guards approached with their captive. Wale pretended he had just exited the elevator, looking at his watch as if late for an important meeting. The guards pulled the man into the elevator without noticing and waited calmly for the door to close.

  Dayo and his father walked briskly to the stairwell, where the steps twisted up interminably into the mottled haze.

  “What will they do with him, Dad?”

  “This is Home Affairs, Dayo. In here we will mind our own business. We get in and get out.” He stepped over to Dayo, who was hunched over with his mouth slightly open and looking stupid, and presse
d a thumb into his spine. “Stand up straight. Close your mouth.”

  There were no windows in the stairwell and the air felt as if it had hung there for decades.

  “How far?”

  “She’s on fourteen.”

  They began to climb. These were the first words to pass between father and son for three days. What Wale had caught Dayo doing with Thursday, in that apartment, the dagga in the air, the contraband in the bathtub, was beyond reproach. A drug dealer. A drug dealer! He recalled it: Thursday barreling out the door, leaving Wale with Dayo in the dark apartment. A bag of marijuana on a chair, Dayo with a wad of hundred rand notes in his hand. He had grabbed Dayo by the nape of his neck, picking him up nearly off the ground, like a puppy. Dayo had let him take the money and toss it angrily to the floor. And when they’d gone home he’d bolted Dayo in his room for three days, slipping plates of food in, allowing him, under close watch, to use the bathroom. Wale had considered calling the cops, decided it was too much trouble; he’d contacted Narcotics Anonymous and arranged an interview for Dayo. Unable to look his own child in the eye, for the shame, for shame!, he’d given him a notepad to explain his actions in an essay with a theme of ‘Justice and Responsibility’. Dayo had not written it. And, worse, Wale had realized that Dayo was perfectly happy in his confinement, as he seemed to have spent the days building new moonlight lamps. He feared that his son was lost and it was his fault, for a lack of parenting, for not having protected him from the vices. Was it time, he wondered? Time to consult religion, break down his son’s mind in a house of God? And which would be most effective? Islam, perhaps, as long as he didn’t get fanatical. Or maybe enroll him with the Methodists on Wesley Street.

  His compromise was to take Dayo to the Refugee Reception Office. There was no better lesson in humility than waiting in line at Home Affairs. Every three months, Wale returned to the office to convince the staff that he still had a fear of persecution, and now he wanted to be the first to receive their new biometric ID. With that, provided the proper legislation went through, he might be able to secure a passport. Anything would be possible. So they had risen, grumpily, at four thirty in the morning to get to the foreshore of the bay and join the queue. But now that they had run past the guards, Wale regretted that the lesson in humility may not have been properly instilled.