Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  Book III

  If your own country is not in order, the global village will be a wilderness.

  —Nurudeen Bello, Special Adjunct to the Minister of the Environment

  Melle

  Present day

  South Africa

  And then there was one.

  “Melle will not wear animal-based makeup.”

  One left after catwalking the world.

  “Melle will not kiss another person, man or woman.”

  One left after learning to trace the scorches of bullets, melted carpet fibers, stains and the detergents to remove them.

  “Melle will not smile. Do not ask her to eat. Do not make jokes.”

  How apartments are rearranged. The lengths to which people would go to believe that erecting a wall or tearing one down would hide the fact that death had occurred there.

  “Melle will not flirt. If anyone flirts with Melle she will abandon the shoot, with payment in full.”

  It never varied: two bullets, no clues, a shadow of ignominy that cast a pall of fear over the colleagues.

  “Melle, babe, can you—”

  “—all questions must be directed to me, Melle’s personal assistant. If the question is provocative you must write it down.”

  “Ma’am, could you—”

  “My name is Mademoiselle Béatrice.”

  “Mademoiselle Béatrice, could you please ask Melle if she is ready to shoot?”

  “Melle,” Béatrice whispered through the flap of the tent to Melissa. “The photographer would like to know if you want to shoot.”

  “I need ten minutes,” Melissa said. Waves were flopping near them on the beach. The moon was rising, nearly full but still soft as the light faded. The sun was a weak ring of safflower light in the spray of the surf. There were two trailers lined up along Beach Road, and Melissa in a tent to herself. Inside, there was no food, but a long table, a bottle of carbonated water, a few chairs, a phone book, and the brochure of the Royal Observatory as requested. Also some sachets of Echinacea tea. She leafed through the brochure.

  “We finish at six,” Melissa declared.

  Béatrice pursed her lips in the French manner. “Non, non, non, Melle. There is light until seven forty-five. It is summer. You are booked until then.”

  “Reimburse them.”

  “I will speak with the photographer.”

  Béatrice exited the tent as Melle committed the facts of the Royal Observatory to memory. Founded in the 1800s as a southern corollary to the Observatory at Greenwich. Several second-rate discoveries, located on a site that used to be infested with snakes. Now a research facility, with the observations being carried out at the Sutherland site in the Karoo. And the most important fact, the one that she had seized on: Join us for our award-winning full-moon mystery tour. 8 o’clock. Enquiries: Contact Wale. Bookings highly encouraged.

  She was close. And he was the last. The man’s wife Tinuke had suspected him all along. The flight from Houston: unexplained. Their rapid transit through several countries, on the run, his fear, his guilt. The wife wouldn’t have been surprised to find out he was a criminal, she said. Where do you think he is? The wife had smiled. She had asked what would happen if she revealed his location. He will be brought to justice. She had smiled again. I know exactly where he can be found, she said. Cape Town, wallowing like a dreg.

  She was wearing the same costume she’d sported for years: black ankle length dress, silk sleeves, and her niqab; beneath the veil were sunglasses. Beneath those, tinted contact lenses. She was tall, over six feet, with a plump body. The body she was no longer afraid to show. But she held a monopoly on the sight of her skin.

  Béatrice returned and Melissa could tell the negotiations with the photographer had not gone well. “I am sorry, Melle. But he insists that 7:06 will be magic time. It is the time when the light outside and the light inside buildings is the same.”

  “I know what magic time is. But we are at a beach. What building is there?”

  “It is a car. An advertisement. You will be at the wheel.”

  “Show me the dress.”

  Béatrice laid the black dress on the chair beside Melissa. “I have inspected it. Twenty square centimeters of your skin will show, as agreed. It is your right breast, above the nipple.”

  “Good. Tell him 7:30 prompt.”

  Béatrice left the tent as Melissa changed. When she returned, they exited together onto the beach. There were the usual dozen assistants swarming the site. The sand had been raked so that with the giant granite boulders, the sports car sat in the middle like a fixture in a Zen rock garden. The soft boxes had been laid, the cables buried out of sight in the sand. It was a red sports car, which Melle found distasteful, but she did not complain because she was determined to leave at 7:30.

  The vagaries of fashion ceased to surprise Melissa. After she had been discovered in Basel, Switzerland, by a crowd of festival goers she had been hounded by a professional photographer, first as a freak shot for the tabloids, and then, when the photos depicted the pure illumination pouring from her moonlit body, for her beauty. She had desperately contacted Béatrice at Madame Kaluanda’s in Paris, asking for help.

  “Take the money,” Béatrice had said.

  “But why?”

  “To find your father.”

  Béatrice became her manager when the money started coming in from the photos. Melissa had no fashion experience, for she was used to hiding her body, and Béatrice taught her how to be provocative, to reveal only what excited the imagination. Melissa became Melle now in public, shedding the sickly persona of Melissa like a snake skin. Melle learned to channel the power that Farai had awakened in that dark Basel restaurant, to release herself and harness the lunar energy that charged through her naked form.

  No one had ever seen a woman who exuded light from her very skin. She had never been seen fully naked. It was said that she kept several lovers who were only allowed to make love to her in the dark. There was a following of X-men fans that celebrated her, like the comic book superheroes, as an evolutionary advance. These fans suspected the military industrial-complex of conspiring to kidnap her for field camouflage. Still others suspected the military industrial-complex of having created her. She didn’t complain. She didn’t explain that when she had lost her pigmentation her new skin vibrated with the energy of a natural contrast agent, made visible, like a bioluminescent creature, under the light of the moon. Her niqab had inflamed her condition even further, an incubator of her own making. She took contracts that suited her in unexpected cities. She was on a mission, the tabloids surmised. On a radiant mission to bring her skin to the world. She neither denied nor acceded to this claim; she did not say anything. Melle was reclusive.

  The beach had been cordoned and the paparazzi screened at police checkpoints all the way to Camps Bay and, on the other side, Bakoven. The smell of salt in the air was very strong, the Twelve Apostle Mountains behind them charred from a recent conflagration.

  “Look breathtaking, Melle, stunning,” the photographer said as she approached.

  “Do not flatter Melle,” Béatrice said. “You have an hour and forty-five minutes.”

  “Sure, sure, Mademoiselle Béatrice. I’m there with you. We’ll treat Melle like a princess.”

  There was a swarthy looking black man getting made-up who Melissa recognized from her first shoot in Paris. She remained distracted the entire shoot. She felt sluggish, bloated, and at the same time viscous. The male model—his name was Charlton, she learned—was meant to be twirling a cane and eyeing her from the corner of his eye as she sat examining a map in the red sports car. The photographer explained that Charlton’s motivation was an executive on a stroll on his game farm.

  “Not confidence, Charlton. Ownership. You own this land, you’re satisfied with this land. Good!… You just bought a rhino… And a pangolin for your kids… Think of the pangolin! Good!”

  To drive the point of ownership home, Charlton was supposed to h
old a tamed fish eagle on a gloved hand, but the eagle kept screeching and the handler had to rush in and feed it scraps of dead mouse. The bird would raise its black wings and twist its white head from side to side, so that Charlton complained that his arm was getting tired. It did not seem to like the agitation of the flashes from the soft-box. Tame or not, there was something uncontained in the eagle’s nature, and Charlton began having trouble maintaining his sense of ownership.

  “It scratched my arm!”

  Click.

  Click. Click.

  “Nonsense, Charles, you’re its master!”

  Click. Click.

  “Ow! It bit me!”

  “Where’s the handler? Get him to feed it.”

  The handler ran up with more mouse scraps. Then they were shooting again.

  “Alright, Charlton, ownership! Possession! Good! Melle, you’re ravishing!”

  “No flattery!” Béatrice interjected.

  Click.

  Click.

  The bird began making a hacking sound.

  “What is it doing?” Charlton asked. “Is it sick?”

  More hacking.

  “What is that? ’Kn ’ell it stinks!”

  The eagle had coughed up a mousehead onto Charlton’s sleeve and just as soon began pecking it back up.

  Click.

  “Roll with it, Charlton! You’re the Possessor!”

  Click.

  Click.

  In the midst of Charlton’s groans, Melissa examined the clock in the car and saw there were twenty-five minutes to go.

  “Magic time,” the photographer announced. “Charlton, pick your arm up!”

  “The bloke is heavy!”

  More flashes.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  The clouds were now dripping down the parched mountains, then pouring along the ravines, and flowing out onto the sea. The sun disappeared so quickly it became hard to believe that its rays had ever touched down upon the beach. The photographer was not from Cape Town and had not prepared for the instant changes in weather, in a peninsula where there was always obscurity, the mountains hiding a storm until it was already there. In response, he made a mistake. He called a break. Because while switching films and hauling in more soft boxes; while Charlton was ordering wardrobe to give him a clean shirt; while the fish eagle had been permitted by its handler to frolic in the tuffeted wind, Melissa walked off at 7:30 precisely, where a cab, called by Béatrice, was waiting.

  “Where to ma’am?”

  “The Royal Observatory.”

  Constable Viljoen

  Present day

  South Africa

  In a moment of carelessness, Thursday brushed within striking distance of a white and chestnut patchwork beagle on Arnold Street. He was close enough for the dog to tear a hole in his trousers and it jammed its wet nose through the fence.

  Too late, he thought, it has me.

  But it didn’t yip at him. Instead it panted a few times and sniffed at the blue orb on the lamp in his palm. Then it cocked its head back and howled the call of canines past and to come, of wolves and strays and jackals it had never met, but whose presence the beagle could feel quickening in the glow of lamp. The other dogs of Obz gave a few barks before curling back down to sleep.

  It had been a strange evening. Returning to find a young man breaking into Thursday’s apartment, making what he thought, or hoped, might have been an ally and then seeing him yanked across the room. In the light of the lamp, the form that had attacked had seemed spectral and malevolent. And that voice. That roaring baritone: “Dayo! Dayo! What are you doing here!”

  Thursday had run. He’d run from fear and then slowed on Irwell Street, trying not to attract attention from the bicycle patrols that followed him as a matter of course. He was not successful. The patrol pedaled behind him all the way to Lower Main.

  He paced to Rodney’s Chinese Restaurant feeling lucky to be unbitten and alive. After consideration, he tucked the lamp into the pocket of his tracksuit, hesitating at the door to tousle his hair. He’d gotten a mop cut the other day, with his receding black bangs hovering over his flared nostrils, that the stylist had insisted showed off his eyes. It had to be ruffled, like an unmade but inviting bed, but not sloppy. Just the bed, the stylist said, no jeans or socks splayed all over it. That was the look.

  In Rodney’s restaurant there was a silver-haired couple, a family, and then two men, a black and a coloured guy, greedily enjoying a plate of fried rice, egg rolls, and flash-fried julienned vegetables. Music trickled through on the stereo, the same pentatonic tune of Chinese music that Rodney always played. Rodney’s wife was speaking to the two men and she let out a laugh that reminded Thursday of her husband.

  When she saw Thursday, she stopped laughing to approach his table.

  “He’s not here,” she hissed, somewhat rudely.

  “Rodney?”

  She shook her head. He pursed his lips to say “Ip?” but she interrupted him. “He’s not here.”

  He hadn’t quite expected Ip to be there, but he knew that showing up would send the signal that he wanted to meet.

  “What can I get you, sir?” she asked, again he thought loudly. Formally, too.

  “A Coke.”

  She scratched some letters on her order sheet. “Chicken lo mein and a Coke.”

  “No,” Thursday said. “Just a—”

  “Be right out.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen.

  Thursday had resolved never to eat food in Rodney’s restaurant after the sword incident but he was slightly afraid of Rodney’s wife, so he leafed through a copy of The Tatler. There was an article entitled Melle Brightens the Heart of Darkness. It explained that this year’s fashion season would be eclipsed by a visit from the sensation Melle, who would be introducing her new line of niqab-inspired clothing called Antumbra. Melle had never before come to the continent and she was rumored to be visiting several charities. A local man quipped that they should wire her to the grid, so that she could stop the rolling blackouts.

  Rodney’s wife dropped the noodles in front of him in record time. There was a fortune cookie plain in the middle of the noodles. He picked up a fork and twirled on some noodles but when he brought them to his lips they were stone cold. When he raised his hand to call Rodney’s wife back, she scowled at him. Sipping his drink, he broke the fortune cookie. Inside it read: Convention is therefore a reason. On the reverse, a handwritten note: Get out of here. Cops. Swallow.

  Thursday scanned the room. There, the table with the two men scooping up noodles by the packet full. Not talking to each other, but eating. The ones that Rodney’s wife was doting over.

  Look normal, he thought. Act normal. Drink your Coke. Eat your fortune cookie. Then get out. Get out and go.

  He ate the cookie whole and the paper got lodged in the back of his throat. He swallowed some Coke and it went down the wrong hole, so he coughed violently. He dropped the lamp, and the globe of water dislodged from the base and rolled across the floor. Right under the table of the cops.

  The coloured guy picked up the globe and inspected it curiously, leaving Thursday no choice but to walk over.

  “A cat?” the cop said. “Never seen a cat before.”

  “It’s new,” Thursday said. He reached to grab it back.

  The man was turning it over. “There a light inside?” Then he was shaking it.

  “Sure.”

  “How does it work?”

  The snow was eddying over the cat’s ears.

  “I don’t know. I just bought it.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Seventy bucks,” Thursday said.

  “That’s it?”

  “I mean a hundred. A hundred and seventy.”

  “A hundred or a hundred and seventy?”

  Take it, Thursday thought. Take it and run.

  The man showed the water-filled globe to his black colleague, who put his egg roll down and examin
ed it with intensity, turning it over and over again before handing it back. Then Thursday was headed back to the table. He put a fifty rand note on his plate, picked up his coat, and walked out the door.

  They arrested him at the corner. He heard the ring of the bells on the door and turned around. The coloured guy began calling for him. Thursday pretended not to hear him and kept going, but the black cop had gone around the block and cut him off.

  “Come with us, Hampton,” the coloured guy said.

  Thursday didn’t think to ask for his rights. He didn’t think to do anything.

  The Woodstock police station had a tiny red stone entrance, with a couple of steps and a sign the size of a shoe box. There weren’t any police cars out front and the only person Thursday saw come out was an old woman carrying a satchel of tea towels. Inside it was equally calm. No one screaming, no bergies or wounded men, a long desk with four uniformed clerks answering phone calls. He was taken to a small room with an ash desk, a lamp, and three chairs. They hadn’t cuffed him.

  “Please have a seat while we get our papers together,” the coloured guy said, almost apologetically.

  One of the clerks brought him some tea with too much sugar, and a biscuit with a dollop of crystallized jelly in the middle. It was all very civilized.

  The two cops were still wearing plain clothes when they entered the room. He had, for some reason, expected them to change into uniforms. The black man had thick blue plastic glasses and a shaved head, with a lazy eye and a birthmark on his temple and a conciliatory manner that seemed to want to make up for these deficiencies. The coloured man was bigger, with a barrel chest and a goatee that was blending into his five o’clock shadow. He moved like a man who in his home would sneeze loudly, laugh loudly, and tear down the walls to get his way.