Nigerians in Space

by Deji Bryce Olukotun

  “Go ahead, Constance,” the girl said to her attorney.

  The coffee arrived and all three of them sipped at it. The lawyer asked Thursday if he’d been abused in any way, psychologically or physically. Then she asked about Viljoen’s line of questioning and the Rastas. He summarized what he could remember, but left out the part about Leon’s death. He made it sound as if he was just a clueless man who didn’t have the power to do anything. Neither of the women reacted to any of the charges, seemingly having heard them before. Rather, Constance grilled him again and again about the exact words he’d used.

  “I can get the Rastas tossed out as witnesses on credibility alone—they’re drug dealers. I’m guessing that’s how they were brought in. But knowing Viljoen I also suspect that’s not his line. Be precise, Thursday. In court these words will make a difference. Trident is as discretionary as can be. Any tidbit will be used. You told him you knew Leon but you never admitted to working with him?”

  “Right.”

  “And Mr. Ip? You’re sure you never said his name.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What do you mean you don’t remember?”

  “I may have repeated his name after they asked me. Or something.”

  “That’s it?” she asked. Thursday nodded. “I must be prepared for that. The conversation was probably taped. We must request the tapes to make sure they’re not spliced. They’re a vicious team. I’m lucky I got to you when I did. Mush has more complaints at the ICD than any other cop. Most of the guys don’t survive the night.”

  So that was why Viljoen kept saying the day was in danger of ending, Thursday thought.

  “That’s all I said,” he insisted.

  “Okay. I’m finished, Seneca.”

  Ip’s daughter smiled. Flat teeth with an odd metallic glint to them. “Thank you, Constance. We’ll be right out.”

  The attorney downed her coffee and left the restaurant. Then it was Thursday and a girl in a room with paintings of waves on a beach on the walls. In her presence, he wouldn’t have been surprised if one of the waves had lapped off the wall around their ankles. He could see why the goon Chung had fallen in love with the girl.

  “Thursday, I’m running things now. Dad’s out of the picture for the moment. Constance thinks she can get him out in two, maybe three years. So I’m running things.”

  “But you’re only sixteen!”

  “I’m nineteen. Like, I just look young. And I don’t share his name. As far as we know, Viljoen doesn’t know I exist. He knows you exist.” She sipped her coffee, keeping her eyes on him as she lifted the rim to her lips. “I’ve had your apartment cleared out and cleaned.”

  “The perlies?”

  “Dried.” That meant the Rastas couldn’t turn him in for smuggling. And that made Thursday feel free and, oddly, even more hungry. Seneca said Ip wanted him to go with him inside Pollsmoor unless Thursday convinced her. Rodney and his wife had also agreed to keep quiet. “They’ve got nothing hard to connect you to Dad now. Tell me why I should keep you. Dad said he’d rather have you go inside with him, but he said if you can convince me then he’ll let you stay out.”

  Thursday tried to keep his wits about him. He made an effort to think of her lips as speaking words and not as blowing kisses. As he gathered himself, with two sips of coffee and a generous tear of the flat bread—which she glowered at—he remembered that he had more information than she did. She didn’t know about Adrian. He would hold this close to himself. She was a geitjie, a girl who was bad news, and he would treat her like a geitjie. He fixed an image of the shriveling perlies in his mind to stoke his anger.

  He thought of how Leon would handle a girl like this, how he’d trip up her words and make her doubt. Leon would make her unsure whether she could see him again, and in so doing make her want to.

  “You’re saying he’ll drag me in?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay. I reckon I’ll go inside with your Dad.”

  She hesitated. “You want to go to jail?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t want to run. We’ll spend a few years together and then we can work outside again.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “What?” he said, really acting now, getting into the role. “You said he could protect me!”

  “But it’s prison! There’s violence. There’s rape!”

  “Your dad’s not afraid, is he?”

  “No! But Dad’s not afraid of anything. He’s powerful. You’re not.”

  “First you said he could protect me. Now you say—”

  Her lips swelled in her frustration and her eyes widened. She ordered more coffee, realizing that she’d given away the bluff. “Listen, Thursday. Let’s not argue. All I want to know is what you can do for us.” She looked like she was going to add more, and stopped.

  “I can increase your profits.”

  “By inspecting a few shells?” she laughed. “I don’t think so.”

  “No, not with shells. I found something that can make them grow faster.”

  “We’re not farmers. We’re distributors.”

  “Your dad liked the idea. You can ask him. We can take the small wild ones and grow them larger in a matter of a month. I found a special lamp that works like the moon. I think it will work.”

  She skeptically asked for a demonstration, and he explained that he couldn’t because the cops had broken it while he was in custody.

  She looked towards the door, where her attorney was presumably waiting. “Did they know what it was for?”

  “No, they thought the lamp was a toy. I need to get more. And for that I need ten thousand rand.”

  “Nooitie. No ways.”

  “And,” he added, “I need a share of the profits. That’s full service I’m talking about. I check them out. I keep them alive. And I grow them bigger.” He stuck his finger in the sour cream and licked it. “Mmm, this is good. Me and your dad partners.”

  She was laughing now. “He doesn’t need you, Thursday. That’s the whole point. He’s not going to make you a partner. Bloody hell, you don’t own a thing. You don’t know any of the routes.”

  “You’re right,” Thursday agreed. “I don’t have much. I’m a—” he tried to remember Constable Viljoen’s metaphor—“a fruit guy. Might as well go inside with your dad. We’ll be two peas in a pod.” He paused. “That is, unless I don’t go in.”

  She glared at him suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe I know something. Maybe I know something about a guy called Adrian.” He leaned back and looked at his empty plate. “I’m still hungry. What is this, Mexican food?”

  “Cuban.”

  “Can you get the waitron to come over here? I love this stuff. I love Cuban food.” She stared at him in disbelief, so he went to the bar to order some more flat bread and a steak assado. When he sat down, he said: “Why don’t you ask your dad about Adrian? Why don’t you tell him that this fellow called Adrian is enough to put him away for his life? Oh, yeah. And Chung, too. Do you know Chung?”

  “Leave Chung alone!”

  “Well, I know Chung. It’ll put Chung away too. Ask your dad.”

  She folded her arms. “Blackmail.”

  “Colouredmail,” he smiled.

  “You’re cruel!”

  No, Thursday thought, cruel is what your dad did to Leon. Cruel is what you did to the perlies.

  “All I want is ten thousand rand to buy some lamps and some profits. That’s it.”

  “No ways,” Seneca huffed. She slid out her chair and dropped a hundred rand note on the table.

  “Wait,” Thursday added. “Tell your dad that I’ve got friends who also know this broer Adrian. Anything happens to me, you know what friends do. They gossip. Plenty of gossip all around town about Adrian.”

  He watched her go. He hadn’t wanted to bully her, but he wasn’t going to take orders from a nineteen-year-old geitjie either. He’d had enough. And part of him felt weak for picking on a gi
rl and not saying the same thing to Ip’s face when he’d had the chance, but if Ip was using her as a messenger then he’d use her right back. She may have been smart, but she wasn’t smart enough—or cruel enough—to run things. Ip would pull the strings from the inside the mang just like he had in Observatory. Not a very considerate father.

  The food arrived and Thursday requested a full steak knife. He felt serene for a moment, until he remembered Mush blinking at him back in the cell. It was as if Mush’s blinking and squinting had crossed the natural distance that separates normal people. He could have walked out from the bathroom right then, opened a drawer behind the bar, and pulled out a moonlight lamp. Then Thursday would have covered his hands with his head like the Rastas.

  Rubbing his jaw, Thursday cut at his assado and speared some rice on the fork. Then he stuffed his cheeks with the flatbread. The food warmed him and restored him, temporarily, to peace. How amazing, he thought, not to have tried the flatbread before. On the wall there was a photo of Che Guevarra, whom he’d seen a movie about on a motorcycle, and, munching on flatbread in a Cuban restaurant, he felt solidarity with the man, for he was charging into the face of power, liberating the abalone with dignity, keeping them out of the dryer. Flatbread like Che: unleavened, miraculous.

  In the McClean

  Present day

  South Africa

  When Wale had first started giving tours at the Royal Observatory he’d kept them dry and cited formulas in the interest of objectivity. That had garnered him a loyal following of one hack scientist. Now his full moon tour was more popular than the crowd-puller ‘The Sky Tonight’, which revealed the constellations of the season and celebrated the planets. Nothing in the sky had changed to make the tour more sought after: the moon sailed in its usual place, there’d been no celestial events of note, and he was drinking more than ever, having incorporated tots of sherry into his routine. It was what came out of Wale’s mouth that was different, spiced by the sherry, or a new feel for his audience in the suburb of Obz, and the penchant for mysticism in people that had lost it. He’d learned to speak at length about the city of Harran and its moongod Sin.

  “Harran thrived a long time ago,” Wale was saying outside the McClean telescope, “about twenty-five hundred years ago. What kind of animal do you think the Harranians called the crescent moon?” He used his finger and thumb to make a crescent and then set his hand on his forehead, wiggling his finger. There was laughter.

  “Oh, it’s a cow!” a young woman chuckled.

  “That’s right, a bull. The Harranians called the moon Lord Wild Bull.”

  “Wild bull!” a kid said, and began pawing the ground.

  “Now we will enter the temple of the moon god. Please go quietly.”

  Moving from mirth to solemnity: good for the tension, good for the tour.

  “Wild bull!”

  The temple was the highlight of the show, the reason why the spiritual channelers and the yoga instructors kept coming back. It set them at ease, sliced open the fabric of the night sky to that realm where one escapes, is escaping—where Wale was comfortable. The temple of the McClean telescope was old and classical, with a white dome and a long refracting telescope. It had a wooden floor powered by a hydraulic lift. When the tour entered the dome, a ladder stood uselessly in the middle of the room, but once everyone was safely inside, Wale switched a lever and the pulleys silently raised the floor five meters until the ladder was right beneath the viewfinder of the telescope. There were about twenty tourists in all, mostly white, with a few coloured or Indian or both and one black couple. Then a tall, plump Muslim woman wearing a niqab. Wale had a glance of her lips, which were sparkling seductively with that glitter goo the girls put on nowadays, but mistrusted his eyes.

  The airy chamber of the telescope instilled respect in the tour, and the people kept as quiet as a real temple might have demanded. Votive candles had been arranged in the shape of an octagon. Wale lit them and burned pine rods in a censer, with the smoke curling up, and pulled out an ironwood bowl. The mixture he passed around for the tour to sniff.

  “Pine rods in Mesopotamia were symbols of eternal life. This is called turmus, a mixture of flour, terebinth, olives, raisins, hackberry, and shelled walnuts, all delicacies of the ancient world.”

  He walked over to a crate by the wall and picked up a stuffed toy lamb. He instructed a little girl to make bleating sounds, taking the turmus powder and sprinkling it over the toy. “O seven deities, accept our sacrifice!” The girl kept on bleating. “Very good, young maiden, the lambs are prepared. You have performed excellently.” She hid beneath her mother’s legs.

  Normally, Wale stopped the mysticism there and moved to the telescope. But the girl hiding behind her mother’s legs, peering out, made him continue. He remembered when his son Dayo had peered out like that once, long ago, historically. The archaeologists were thankfully unaware of the carbon dated exploits of Wale’s crumbling family. He kept talking about Mesopotamia. The Temple of the Moongod, his mouth was saying, had been destroyed many times, to be built again, and the discoveries were bizarre and exotic.

  “There was a chamber where an enormous cauldron of wrought iron was discovered. The cuneiform inscriptions suggested that it had once held the Head of Harran.” He lowered his voice, and used a candle to illuminate his visage from below. “This was a fate so sinister that the rumor of it alone provoked enemies of the Harranians to destroy the temple.” He identified the small kid in the group who had shouted out earlier. “A young boy—yes, a young boy much like you, little Wild Bull—was seized from his family in the middle of the night and brought to the temple. There they boiled borax in the giant cauldron and cast the child in, where he would suffer the most unimaginable pain. For hours and hours he would boil in the cauldron. Hours and hours.” Now Wale went up to the boy, placing a hand under his jaw. “After supplicating the seven deities, the high priest would approach the human sacrifice and lift his head.” He pretended to lift the boy’s head, knowing not to touch him to avoid angering the parents. “The tendons would be as soft as chickens in a stew. The priest would pull the head above the cauldron, and ask the child to reveal the prophecies of the moon.” He allowed the silence to gather. Then: “IN THE NAME OF RAB EL-BAHT,” he boomed, “TELL US WHAT YOU SEE ON THE DISC OF THE MOON!”

  There was quiet. A woman coughed. Wale cocked his ear, ready to channel the spirits.

  “Wild Bull!” the boy shouted, and began running about the room.

  “And there you have it,” Wale concluded. “The words of the prophetic Head of Harran.”

  The tour laughed with relief as Wale waved his hand towards the ladder. “Enough of this hocus-pocus. Come on, come on, step right up. One at a time. Look into the telescope and see your future.”

  He was greeted with applause as the members of the tour took their turns peering through the telescope, nodding their heads at his informed comments. He helped children mount the ladder, one father, an aloe farmer from the Karoo, asking questions with the patience of a man who spent his days surrounded by succulents.

  "And what do you think of water on the Moon?… What, if anything, do unmanned missions do?… A supernova is, correct me if I’m wrong, an explosion?”

  Wale dispensed the answers with ease, feeling confident, feeling valued, until the woman in the niqab, who had remained quiet, said: “I have a few questions, Doctor Olufunmi.”

  Startled, Wale said: “Doctor? I’m hardly a doctor. I’m only a volunteer. And a sometimes priest.”

  “Yes, of course,” the woman agreed quickly. “But I have been advised you are very knowledgeable in astronomical matters. Specifically the geology of lunar rocks.”

  Forcing a laugh: “I am an amateur.”

  “Are you familiar with Jonathan Shoboyoja’s work? Or perhaps that of Suzanne Ibibio?”

  Wale looked at her more closely. Who was this woman asking after Nigerian scientists? Not Nigerian, for she had mispronounced the names. He noticed th
at the other members of the group were as unsettled by her as he was. But their fear seemed more awe-inspired than suspicious, since they trotted around her with respect. He denied any knowledge of the names with humor, prompting a chuckle. It was enough. The woman may have smiled beneath the niqab, may have frowned, but either way, she relented and the rest of the tour relaxed. They continued peering through the telescope. Then the room suddenly grew dark.

  “Why did you turn off the lights?” someone asked.

  “I did nothing of the sort. The power must have gone out.”

  The mother nervously inquired if they were stuck in the dome.

  “No, the floor is hydraulic.” Wale pulled out a pocket flashlight and walked over to a pulley. “Nothing to fret over. We have them in my home country every day.”

  “I suppose we should be grateful here,” someone muttered.

  He asked his acolytes to blow out the candles. Next, he lowered the hydraulic floor, and escorted the group under the scratchy oak trees and across the manicured lawns to the gift shop, where the attendant was waiting with a flashlight. The town of Observatory was half a kilometer away, but the grounds of the complex felt very removed on the hill.

  Wale was thanked and offered tips, which he refused, and made his way to the lab. There he downed a few pints of Guinness and scratched at a rock sample. The woman in the veil had startled him with those questions about the other Nigerians. Two names, unrelated to the tour. He had avoided answering her questions well enough, he thought, but then that might also be a problem. Maybe he shouldn’t have answered at all.

  Rather than steadying his nerves, the beer made him restless. His legs walked him outside of their own drunken motion, the grass slippery in the evening dew. Like a dowsing stick they pulled him to the manhole cover, his hands wrenched it off, and he was staring down into the pool of mercury with the moon shining through some receding clouds.