Foreign Gods, Inc.

by Okey Ndibe

  That night, Stanton sat at his desk and wrote with fury. His body ached. A terrible fever boiled inside him. His stomach felt queasy, as if awaiting the slightest provocation to convulse and heave. But vomiting would be a futility. His belly was filled with air. A persistent pain droned in its walls. It would be horrible, he thought, to vomit one’s innards.

  He wrote in a delirious state. Air stood stagnant in his hut. The hut was dizzy with effluvia. The stink of his armpit lay thick as sin. The lamplight lent a dull, ghoulish glow to the hut. It was difficult to see, but he flung his sorrows onto the diary. Sweat poured from his brows, fell freely, and smudged his entries. He wrote about his terrifying visions, about his betrayal of God and Queen, about his wife and two sons training their eyes on the ground, about the terror of Ngene mocking him, about his hopes unraveled. His heart had a jumble of thoughts, and he wrote whatever it dictated to him. He scribbled until his hands began to ache. His last words were a desperate plea: “Lord, bid me incinerate the heathen god! Command and it shall be done! Let your faithful prove themselves worthy soldiers.”

  He put the quill aside and lay in his bamboo bed. Sweaty and sleepless, he soaked up the voices of night. Crickets dinned at his ears. Toads croaked their dirges. The equatorial forest swayed and swooned in time to the wind. Mosquitoes swarmed about him. They bit without mercy. Distraught and terrified, he didn’t bother to swat them away.

  Then he began to have another wide-eyed dream. A white-shrouded figure dominated the dream. It materialized out of the fabric of darkness, a towering giant. Stanton batted his eyes. He swiped across his eyes with the back of his hand. The figure did not disappear. It stood immobile. It was a perverse patch of whiteness in a massive black quilt. He gazed at the apparition, larger than life. He saw that its mouth was agape, the portrait of anguish. Or hunger. The roundness of it was filled with darkness. It imparted a grotesque quality to the apparition’s face, as if the mouth opened up to a bottomless pit.

  Stanton wanted to shout at the pasty apparition. Perhaps, he could cast away the vile anomalous presence with holy words. He tried but seemed to contend with a force that was indifferent to his power. He cast his gaze sharply to the right. The pagan apparition refused to be shirked off. As if it had anticipated Stanton, the figure re-formed right in front of his eyes. He turned left. His nemesis stood there, too. He set his eyes on the floor; the apparition stared up at him. He shut his eyes, and the incubus glowed in the darkness beneath the pupils. Whatever Stanton did, it was there to haunt him.

  Sweat poured from his pores. It was partly the doing of hot, humid weather but partly the result of a night rife with terrifying presences. His head throbbed with a searing pain. His body wafted a stench. It was, he believed, the contagious stink of Africa. Prior to blundering into this accursed continent, he’d never known himself to stink this way. He was loath to mention the name of this strange, intimate smell; he was too afraid to call fear by its name.

  He saw his mission imperiled. He tossed and turned, wasted by despair. He heard the bark of some wild animal, a series of long, ravenous blasts punctuated by bloodcurdling growls. Then he heard the persistent nervous mooing of cows. His heart beat riotously, as if he were present at the carnage.

  His mind fastened on the ferocious barking and the dread-drenched mooing. He pictured the scene. For all he knew, it could be happening some distance away—a good two or three miles away, perhaps. Yet, the night always created the illusion of nearness, as if the encounter between prey and predator were being staged just outside the threshold of his hut.

  Africa at night held great charms and unpredictable terrors. Like the cows that mooed their agony, faced with who knew what foe. Or the night’s ceaseless commotions that filled his ears. The tears that flooded his eyes each time he beheld the moon’s terrible luminousness. The stars, iridescent against the sky’s pitch-dark backcloth, that made him swoon. Add to these images a poisonous, slithering snake rustling in and out of a barn to claim eggs or a clucking chicken for a prize, or the upturned tail of a scorpion hidden among the rocks, ready to deliver a vicious sting. Or his particular nightly pestilence, the armada of mosquitoes that sang awfully in his ears and bit with unforgiving fierceness.

  A fog seemed to dissipate; Stanton came to understand that a Christian was nothing if he was estranged from the cross. He fell to his knees, thankful that his mind was awakening to clear visions. If he must salvage things and save his imperiled soul, he had to come up with a heroic gesture.

  There was no doubt in Stanton’s mind what action God was calling him to take. It was to physically annihilate Ngene. That was what God sent him to Utonki to do. That he hadn’t accomplished that task so far was the reason sleep had been emptied from his eyes. The reason his nights were besieged. He’d challenge the converts to an ultimate test of faith. He’d order them to prove the mettle of their faith by vanquishing Ngene. He’d goad them to seize the deity and set it on fire. But what if the converts demurred? Or, worse, renounced their faith?

  Stanton was in this cauldron of thoughts when the cocks crowed the dawn. Their notes startled him. He pitched himself from the bed and wiped his eyes with palms slick with wetness. His eyes twitched, weary. The hut’s dimness disoriented him. He surveyed the room, eager to master the hut. Despite the upheaval of the night, he relished the calmness that came from the simple magic of finding everything in its place.

  His gaze fell, lethargically, on the paraffin lamp on the table. Its light long extinguished, the lamp was like a forlorn contraption that had served its purpose and fallen into disuse. It evoked no emotion in him, only indifference. In the wake of the night’s torment, he found it hard to connect the lamp to his scribbles, the many secrets and yearnings he had confided in his diary.

  Next to the lamp was his notebook, its spine mangled and fragile. It was open to the last sheet of his writing, a page filled halfway with his squiggly, unsteady longhand. Stanton picked up the diary. He held it close to his face, but inclined at an awkward angle, exposing it toward the mercenary and feeble shafts of light that seeped into the hut. His brows furrowed, he tried for a few moments to discern the blotchy writing in the rogue light. Struck by the futility of his effort, his mood darkened. With the nonchalance of a child disowning a worthless toy, he opened his hand and let the diary loosen from his grip. It spiraled and hit the table with a thump, then slipped to the dirt floor.

  He was groggy from the lack of sleep but relieved that another day had dawned. He had not swum for several days, but decided he must swim that day. The jaunt to the river sapped his energy. He’d seen the villagers bathe naked, even though men and women never bathed together. For no reason he could articulate, he decided to swim naked. He removed his underwear and tossed it on the grass. He stood on the shallow banks, the water knee-deep. He was flabbier by far than any man in the village. Two sideward sags accentuated his paunch, leaving the impression of a three-sided pot.

  He bent down, scooped water in cupped hands, and threw it over his shoulder. The sands, soft as sludge, yielded under the gentle pressure of his feet. He dug his heels in, entranced by the sensation of himself slowly sinking into the river’s silty softness. Bathing, he muttered to himself in an unintelligible tongue.

  He was still throwing water on his body and over his shoulder when some women and children arrived to fetch water. They were astounded to find him naked. They were shocked to find his penis even smaller than they had imagined. The children directed sly glances at him until the women hushed them away. With the children gone, the women began to make heckling sounds. They sneered and leered. They groaned and moaned. They grunted and gasped in mock-amorous hunger. Stanton appeared oblivious. At any rate, he ignored them.

  “A child he is where a man should be a man!”

  “I said it before: a stick that small irritates a woman’s thighs!”

  “No wonder,” another exclaimed knowingly, “his wife drove him from the house!”

  “Who would blame her?”
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  The women talked excitedly, but their eyes remained trained on Stanton. Their looks ate him with fascination and disgust, the fascination and disgust with which a hawk stalks a sumptuous prey before swooping. A look of curiosity intermixed with pity. As they watched, he began to wade deeper. He stopped when the water rose to his waist. He crouched until the river’s undulating tug lapped gently around his shoulders. He shut his eyes, readied, and plunged.

  The women raised their voices in excitement, like mothers calling out to their sons at the fall of dusk. They saw the arch of his back before it disappeared in the muddy depths. They kept vigil, waiting for that moment when he would come up for air.

  IKE STIRRED AWAKE TO the shuffle of feet outside his door. He heard a few timid taps, and then the door opened. His mother, a silhouette, filled the doorframe, obscuring the wicker lamp that dangled from Alice’s hand.

  “Ike. Is my son awake?” she whispered. Behind her, Alice swayed the lamp from side to side, and his mother’s long shadow moved in the darkness.

  He stretched, letting off sleepy grunts.

  “Ike, are you awake?”

  She rushed toward him, her shadow lengthening and contracting. They met in an embrace. He clasped her tightly, then loosened his grip, startled by how frail she felt to the touch. In the darkness he felt a twinge of gratitude that he could neither see her visage nor be seen by her. Yet, his sight unavailing, his other senses were acute. He smelled her sweat, her frowzy hair. He saw her through the unfaltering language of the hands. She was bonier, skinnier, feebler, than he could have ever imagined. Her flesh seemed sheared.

  “Mama, how are you?” he asked.

  “The way you left me,” she said in a voice drained of emotion.

  He felt the wash of her against his shoulder, the pound of her heart against his body. “Is your health fine?”

  She sighed. “Are you talking about health? Your mother has only one breath left to her and you’re talking about health.” Each jut of her bones stood out, like an accusation. It had been four years since he had sent her any money. In his mind, he tried to farm the blame to Queen Bee. But he couldn’t convince himself that his ex-wife was altogether to blame.

  For all the harm Queen Bee had done, gambling, undeniably, had done more. It was partly because of his mother that he’d chanced gambling. Through his sister, she had sent one of those occasional heartrending letters, filled with entreaties and recriminations, chiding him for abandoning his own mother. He remembered the question that inflicted the deepest cut: Do you have another mother I don’t know about, a different mother you love and care for?

  He’d had some cash on hand then, a little more than three thousand dollars. But there were bills waiting to be paid. And Queen Bee had demanded a thousand dollars to shop for clothes.

  Caught in a bind, Ike had dropped his guard of cautiousness. He had set off on his first trip to Atlantic City. He’d meant merely to dabble. He had been confident of hitting it big quickly, using the winning to provide for his mother. That first outing had proved a fiasco. His loss had been so brisk and big that, for the first time, he had drawn two thousand dollars on a credit card to pay some bills and gratify Queen Bee’s shopping mania.

  He was not deterred by that inaugural misstep. Instead, the appalling adventure had lent him a strange form of determination. Not even the ensuing streak of losses could extinguish the spark of hope that spurred him. As he sneaked back to the casinos again and again and the losses mounted, the superior force of desire mastered each moment of hesitancy. He was sustained by the sheer force of hope; he was led, helpless, into gambling’s firm, merciless grip.

  “Welcome home,” his mother said, unsettling his thoughts. “When your sister told me you were finally coming, I wondered if I would be alive to see you.”

  “Mama, you will be alive for a long time,” he said.

  “You forgot me, Ike.” Her voice quavered. He squeezed her a little tighter, almost imperceptibly. “You forgot your mother. If anybody had told me the one son of my womb would ever toss me aside like a rag, I would have said it was a lie. But you did.”

  “Mama, please don’t speak like that. I never forgot you.”

  “Words, words, words, that’s all I hear from you. That’s all I’ve heard for years now. Does a hungry woman live on words? When at night the stomach rumbles with hunger, do words calm it? You have left me a thing to be laughed at. Yes, Ike. I’ve tried to pretend to have no ear, but the ear hears things. People laugh at me. Her son is in America, they say, yet she’s left to chew sand for food.” Her body shook, her voice hardly more audible than a whisper.

  Ike felt the sharp slice of her words and clenched his jaws. He wanted to console her, to make pledges of redemption, but each word that scratched the inside of his throat died there.

  He unclasped her. She retreated from his embrace and silently, blindly, regarded him. Alice had withdrawn with the lamp. A patch of darkness stood between them. A mosquito sang close to his ear, but he dared not slap the air. He could hear her quiet sobs, the faint chatter of teeth. What look was etched on her face, masked by darkness? A scowl? He felt scoured by her unseen, grief-stricken eyes. It was better when they were clasped in an embrace, no dark gulf between them. In the darkness, Ike slowly clenched and unclenched his fist.

  “But for God, I would have been long dead,” she moaned. “Only God knows why I’ve been left here, to be neglected by my own son. You’ve let my enemies laugh at me, Ike. You should have married a good Christian wife, Ike. She would not have let me suffer. A Christian woman would have set your eyes in the direction of home. She would have reminded you of me, even if you had wanted to forget.”

  Ike’s mind raced to the cash Usman Wai had given him, crisp notes in fifty-dollar denominations. He felt tempted to fumble in his wallet for that roll of cash and hand her six notes. Give her the cash there and then and silence this storm of sorrowful words. He restrained the urge, not because he was struck by the silliness of the gesture, but out of fear that she might disdain the gift, open her palm, and let the spurned cash flutter to the floor.

  “Nobody will laugh at you,” he said. “Not anymore, Mama.”

  She hacked out a cough; her body convulsed in the darkness. “Ikechukwu, are you asking me to cook and eat your words?”

  “I’ll leave you money before I travel.”

  His original plan was to keep all of Wai’s cash. Just in case things came up. He’d need some of it, for sure, to bribe his way past the customs post on the day of departure. The statue of Ngene packed in his suitcase, he would have to tread gingerly, at once meek and quick witted. He must know the right moment to sneak a roll of cash, a persuasive amount of it, into some customs officer’s hand.

  In the dark, he groped for his mother’s arm. She trembled in his grip.

  “Mama, nobody will laugh at you anymore,” Ike said, feeling an awful tightness in his chest.

  She gasped and broke into a soft wail, as if his words wounded. “My son, do words fill an empty stomach? Do promises put a plate of food on my table?”

  “Mama, I’m not making promises. I’m telling you what I’ll do. I’ve said I’ll leave you some money before I go.”

  “And once the money is finished, then what? I’ll be back to eating sand?”

  “I’ll take care of you. Once I get back to America, I’ll look after you.”

  “You spoke the same words before, Ikechukwu. Remember, in a letter after your father died? You wrote words with your hand, but your mind wiped me away.”

  “Things were hard for me for some time—”

  “Do you tell me things were hard for you? Is there any language to describe what I’ve been through? Days and days in which the stomach saw no food; the mouth found no words to tell its woes. Are you telling me of hard times? If I had words, I would tell you stories that would make the wind weep. I’ve died many times, only the grave shunned the bag of bones I’ve become.”

  A stealth tear tickled Ike’s r
ight eye, then slipped down his face. In the silence of his heart, he recited, Hail Mary, full of grace, but got distracted and lost his way. He settled for the grace of the darkness that stood between them.

  The silence swelled grotesquely, as terrifying as the words.

  “How’s Nne?” he asked, scrambling to steer the discussion to safer ground. He couldn’t believe his grandmother was still alive. The last time he saw her, she was wiry and shrunken, her skin wrinkled like corn tassel, her eyes all but conquered by darkness. Yet she’d been steely, her love of talk undimmed, her spirits irrepressible. She still trudged to the village stream, her pot of water balanced on a leafy wedge placed on her head. Nne lived nearby, in a hut. “I wanted to wait and see you before going over to Nne’s.”

  Even before his mother spoke, Ike felt something fiery pass in the darkness. “Did you hear she sent for you?” his mother asked.

  “She did?” Ike said in surprise. “How did she find out I came home?”

  His mother clucked her tongue. “You don’t know she’s a witch?” She paused, as if allowing him room to voice his mind. He stayed silent, too astonished to raise a protest. Her words swirled in the air, hard to absorb.

  When he did not fill the silence, she continued. “Yes, I’m talking about your grandmother. You’re not to see her.”

  “Mama, I don’t like these words you speak.”

  “Still I must speak them. You’re not to set foot in her hut. And you’re not to see that one who sits and drinks all day.”