Foreign Gods, Inc.

by Okey Ndibe

  The gin had sickened him. Walking was as much of a chore as standing still; the ground shifted and played pranks with his unsteady feet. The world whirled about him, left him giddy. He’d taken care of his mother; he now craved a pillow on which to nestle his head.

  Stepping into the house, he threw one last glance at his mother. She’d thrown her entire being into husking. He scuffed away to answer the call of his bed.

  His body was lulled into a near-tranquilized state the moment he lowered himself, shoes and all, on the bed. He lay face down. Hanging on to a fading consciousness, he began to retrace the day’s events.

  He replayed his encounter with Pastor Uka. As some of the episodes floated in and out of his mind, he summoned a smile.

  On balance, he reckoned the day a success, if not something of a coup. The scare he’d felt moments before stepping into Osuakwu’s shrine—and the way he’d quivered as Osuakwu prayed over the kola nut—seemed now distant. Distant and uncalled for. If the statue of Ngene disappeared—when the deity disappeared—Osuakwu would swear that one man, and one man only, was responsible. That man was Pastor Uka, who carried the burden of cause, motivation, and declared intent. Osuakwu knew that Ngene was Uka’s Baal. He knew about Uka’s boast that Ngene would be destroyed, decimated in a puff of smoke that would come from heaven. It suited Ike’s purpose. He could plot and execute his goal in absolute anonymity, beyond the pale of suspicion.

  Ike tried to shape his face into a smile but couldn’t, the skin on his face set as the bark of deadwood. Above him, the ceiling spun and spun with gathering speed. He became a miniaturized being, a mere eye, encased inside a cyst. He floated, tumbled freely, in the spheres. Light as gossamer, this eye was on a journey to see. It bobbed and bumped until he attained an altitude that should have hampered scale. Surprisingly, everything could be seen in replete, complete splendor. Everything in the world and beyond spread itself out, surrendered to the gaze of the eye. He could see a sea, a shimmering, emerald sea. The sea’s waves roared with laughter. The sea’s froth sang of idyllic joy. Looking at the sea’s rollick, Ike knew the wondrous language that linked past and present things.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Thumps rattled the door. Ike bolted up, then realized he had dreamed through a downpour. Its rage spent, the storm now fell in feeble sleets on the zinc roof.

  Slowly he opened his eyes. A sharp ache throbbed within his skull. He rubbed at his eyes as he clambered to sit up.

  The door shook with another round of knocks.

  He winced. “Who is it?” he asked in a sour tone.

  “Alice, sah.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Somebody wants to see you, sah” his niece said. “She’s been waiting.”

  “She? Who is that?”

  She whispered: “I don’t know, sah. She’s a mother.”

  “A mother? How do you know?”

  “She’s here with her children,” she said in a hushed voice.

  Ike hissed. It was not as if he didn’t expect that a stream of relatives would come to “greet” him—greeting being, in this case, an excuse to lay their woes at his feet and then request some money. It was a game marked by conceits, highly interesting if you were merely an observer of it. But if you were cast in the role of inexhaustible benefactor, it could be a trying experience.

  “I’ll be out in five minutes,” he said.

  He leaned back in bed, propped on his elbows. Peering out the window at the red, soggy earth, he pressed on both sides of his head to crush the pounding pain. He felt mildly peeved at the unknown intruder who’d come to claim a first place in the game of “greeting” and “receiving.”

  He mentally rehearsed the game’s all-too-familiar ritual. It invariably began with an eager smile, a hug, or a firm handshake. Then followed a superfluity: “Did they say you came back?”

  You nodded.

  “I was just at the market to buy a few things to make soup—the price of things these days!—and then I overheard somebody say you’d come home. Great happiness swept me away. I didn’t know when I broke into dancing—such was my delight! Every day, I’ve been praying to God to keep you safe in the land of white people. Every day, I say to God, I’m a sooty destitute, I have nothing, but please bless Ikechukwu with health and riches. Bless Ikechukwu for me, because I know that when he has, he won’t see me hungry and throw his eyes in the bush. Poverty is not bad; what’s bad is to be poor in people, to have nobody. Our people say that when I lack and the person who would help me lacks, too, then death has entered and occupied a seat. That’s why I’ve been begging God to forget me but never to forget you. To look at you—see your cheeks, surfing with sheen, your skin aglow—God has been hearing my prayers! Just to see you, happiness has filled my stomach to the brim.

  Into the ear flows a catalog of privations and a litany of needs. Then silence, a deep, expectant silence.

  He drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with the doughy scent of wet earth. Suddenly a radiant sun broke out. It imbued the fizzling ropes of rain with a silvery brilliance. He could not tell what day it was. Had he slept and woken up on the same day, or had he fallen into a sopor, slept through a night, and woken up the next day?

  He’d taken much longer than five minutes. Cupping both hands in front of his face, he blew breath, sniffed—and recoiled. There was no time to brush now; he lobbed two cubes of peppermint in his mouth. Then, with instinctive wariness, he set out to meet his guests.

  The visitors sat on a wooden stool out in the veranda, a woman flanked by five children, two daughters and three sons. They sprang to their feet as he made his way, warily, to them. He did not immediately recognize them. He squinted, looking. The odor of squalor wafted into his nostrils.

  “Good evening, sir,” said the woman. She had a placid look and wore a blouse of faded blue over a skirt that had come apart at the hems. Her feet were shod in a pair of thread-bare slippers.

  “Good evening, sir,” chimed her brood, shyly averting their eyes, their faces impassive.

  “Good evening,” Ike said, peering.

  “You don’t remember,” she said, her tone half guilty, half recriminatory. “Regina. Don’t you remember Regina?”

  “Regina?” he said doubtfully. He was about to ask which Regina, but—jolted by recognition—held back. His mouth flew open with shock. The frumpy, reeking apparition before him was his first love, once the object of his anguished infatuation.

  “You don’t remember me?” she inquired in an apologetic tenor. Her voice, now familiar—the sole survivor of her ravaged body—snapped him awake from his doldrums. “I know I’ve changed. Life has been hard.”

  She’d hurt him years ago. She had dumped him for Emeka Egoigwe, a tall, mustachioed man of ostentatious habits. Egoigwe had made a vulgar display of his fortune, acquired—so it was widely whispered—by unscrupulous means. He owned more cars than anybody cared to count and had a fetish for matching the color of his clothes and wristwatch with the color of each car he drove. He—again, it was whispered—used bleaching creams to lighten his skin.

  Two of Ike’s friends had warned him that Emeka Egoigwe—who was called Merciless for the way he picked up, used, and dropped women—appeared to have designs on Regina, but Ike had dismissed their report. “Egoigwe is not Regina’s type,” Ike had told his friends. “He’s an uneducated oaf. Regina doesn’t care for money. She loves me because of my brains. Do you know she cries whenever I write her a poem? Does Egoigwe know how to read, much less how to spark a woman’s heart with a love poem?”

  “Remember that woman does not live by a poem alone,” cautioned one of his friends.

  “And that some women love the poetry of fresh-minted cash,” said the other.

  “Not my Regina!” Ike boasted, his finger slicing the air for emphasis.

  A few days later, Regina broke up with him via a blithe, terse letter, written in a lackadaisical tone that lanced him. He still remembered the lines that most savaged him: Don�
��t think that I no longer care for you. I enjoyed your poems and stories and our visits to Uvunu. But it’s time for me to graduate from childish love. It’s time to grow up.

  It was as if somebody had used a sharp, serrated knife to slice his heart. It grated to read Regina consign what they had to childish distraction, to be discarded in order to graduate into a mature, cash-driven love. No, he could not recognize Regina in the words! Egoigwe, the rogue opportunist, must have offered her the sentiment even if not the language.

  Ike might have skulked off to a corner to lick his wounds. Instead, he was too obsessed to let go. He had enlisted his two friends in an amateurish plot to frighten off her suitor. They composed a letter that they clipped under Egoigwe’s windshield: We, the undersigned, having constituted ourselves into a vanguard and committee in the defense and cause of genuine love, hereby give you, Mr. Emeka Egoigwe, hereinafter to be known as the putative usurper, an ultimatum to forthwith cease and desist from any form of amorous contact or advances to Regina.

  The next day, an uncle of one of the boys called the vanguard to his home. He informed them that Regina’s new lover had blazed with rage over the letter. “You three boys are lucky that I talked the man out of visiting you individually at home to personally deliver his response to your letter. Are you boys mad? Is Regina the only woman in this world that you would risk provoking a man as callous as Egoigwe? Do you even know anything about the man?”

  The three boys stared in silence.

  “He’s a killer,” said the man. “He’s like our police: he can kill and go.”

  On learning that Egoigwe’s fortune came from a career as a ruthless drug pusher, Ike and his friends had decided to give him—and Regina—a wide berth.

  From afar, Ike had monitored Regina’s relationship with the wealthy drug pusher. He had tracked their numerous breakups and reconciliations. He knew of all the times the man took Regina on a shopping spree in Rome or London, of the black-and-blue beatings he gave her anytime he suspected that her eye had strayed in another man’s direction, or whenever she dared ask questions about his escapades with other women. Through all the time he monitored the vicissitudes of their relationship, Ike’s one dream was that she’d return to him one day, a teary penitent. That she’d throw herself on his mercy so that he would have the opportunity to withhold any forgiveness or mercy.

  Shortly after Ike got a scholarship from the Rotary Club International to study at Amherst College, he heard that Egoigwe, after a breakup that lasted more than a year, had returned to marry Regina. From time to time, he’d draw her into his mind, his remembrances fueled by malice. He wished her marital woe. He hoped that he would abandon her for another woman. Sometimes he caught himself and recoiled, shocked that the passage of time had done little to curb the bitterness he felt toward her.

  A year ago, without an effort on his part to conjure her, she had popped into his mind. In the next e-mail to his sister, Nkiru, he had inquired after her. Nkiru’s reply had startled him. Emeka Egoigwe had died shortly after Regina’s birth of their fifth child. Nkiru offered no further details; apparently, the accounts of the man’s death were too sketchy.

  Now, as Regina stood before him, Ike realized that his heart had softened, even if it still incubated a measure of resentment toward her.

  “I heard you came home,” she said, her voice breaking. “I brought my kids to come and greet you. It has been a long time. A lot has happened.”

  His ears registered the sound of her voice, but her words glided past, left no emotional print on his mind. She seemed to register his inattentiveness. She fidgeted and fell mute. He waved her and her children to a long stool on the veranda. She slouched down, then her children crowded about her, nervous. Her children wore desolation on their bodies, their eyes sunken. One of the boys, the youngest child, scratched persistently at his skin. Ike looked at the child, then flinched at his pocks of rashes.

  Ike and Regina exchanged looks. There was a plaintive note to her expression, as if she trusted her eyes to plead her case. Shame, loathing, shock, seized him all at once. Her eyes—unbelievably dead! Their deadness deepened her pallor, completing her slovenly, frowzy appearance. Those eyes! How they once sparkled with life. He used to gawk at them, enraptured by their seductive power, amazed at their flirtatious glaze that drew him effortlessly into obsession. How those eyes once complemented her chiseled face that was adept at transmitting infectious joy. Her pulchritude gone, her face—marred and joyless—was a macabre advertisement of angular jutting bones.

  His eyes fell to her breasts. He could remember when they were supple and firm. Now they hung flat, lifeless as rubber. He looked away with the quickness of a guilt-ridden voyeur.

  The woman in front of him was woebegone, the portrait of a hag. Time and hardship had laid their merciless hand on her.

  He made mighty mental efforts to recall the pristine body that had awakened his youthful desire, but the devastated body in front of him was unyielding, blocking him from the reach of that beatific memory. He tried to recall their trysts of long ago, how they would repair to their favorite hideout—a copse that was past the shallow, clayey Uvunu, off the beaten track. He worked his mind to recall how his fingers would find and knead her breasts, her lips smack against his, both of them trembling, pouring perspiration. The body before him would not cooperate. It stubbornly transposed itself in place of that former vivacious body.

  “Things have been hard for me, very hard,” she said. She swept both hands to indicate her children. “Feeding them is often impossible. They stay up at night, crying from hunger. When I heard you’d come home, I said let me take the children to go and see you. You have a good heart. I know you will help.”

  Her certitude irked. Why, he thought, drag another man’s children to me to feed? He wished to be curt and dismissive, but the children’s eyes gawked at him, their own voiceless pleas even more harrowing.

  Suddenly, his thought zipped to Queen Bee. One day, perhaps, Queen Bee would come to him, her skin disheveled, body as ravaged as Regina’s, to plead for succor. A sinister gush of compassion rushed inside him.

  “I understand your husband—”

  “He died four years ago,” she interjected. She patted her youngest child on the head. “He died a week after Tochi was born.” The rash-infested child squirmed.

  “But he had money—your husband.” Only after the words had tumbled out did he realize that an accusatory accent, unbidden, had crept into his voice.

  She emitted a grunt and rolled her eyes.

  “No, he was known to have money,” he persisted. “What happened to it?”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, and she turned her face away, gazing vacantly. He watched her struggle to hold tears at bay. He saw her composure weaken. A single tear streaked down her cheeks, but she wiped it before it could drop to the floor. She quickly turned to face Ike. Her two youngest children stood in front of her, staring, as if her distress were a rare form of entertainment. The three oldest clung to her side, like protectors offering an armor of comfort. They cast sneaky, accusing glances at Ike.

  “Go outside with your brothers and sisters,” she instructed her oldest daughter. “Take them outside and play.”

  “In the rain?” asked her daughter, frowning.

  “The rain has stopped. Take everybody outside.”

  Her youngest son balked at going outside with the rest. She glared at him. Picking at his rashes, he ran to join his siblings.

  “Have you heard how my husband died?” Regina asked in a dry voice.

  Ike shook his head from side to side.

  “In London, right at Heathrow—that’s where it happened.”

  “At Heathrow? From what cause?”

  “Just listen,” she said, a sad smile parting her lips. “He’d arrived from Thailand, carrying things in his tummy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m telling the story. Just listen,” she admonished. “His stomach bulged with packets of he
roin he’d put in condoms and swallowed. He was standing in a queue to go through customs. Then he suddenly became sick. One eyewitness said he hugged his stomach, then began to shout like a woman in labor. After a while he fell to the ground and began to roll around, still shouting.”

  “Did they get him medical help?”

  “Medical help?” she echoed exasperatedly. “From what I was told, British officers surrounded him and began questioning him—”

  “Even as he rolled on the ground?” Ike interjected.

  “Am I speaking with water in my mouth? Yes, they questioned him as he rolled all over the ground, grabbing his stomach.”

  “That’s murder!” he said heatedly.

  Calmly, she said, “They were questioning him until he began to foam at the mouth. That’s when they called for an ambulance. He was already a quarter to dead. Before they could get him into an ambulance, he’d become a corpse.”

  “You should sue,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “That’s murder! They had no right to deny him medical attention. Even the worst criminal has a right to medical attention. Sue Heathrow … Maybe it’s British immigration you should sue. Or customs. Just find a good British lawyer. It’s called wrongful death.”

  “Wrongful death?” she sneered. “Do you write poetry with death? Is death ever wrong?”

  “Yes, the British authorities were negligent. You can get money. A lot of money.”

  She regarded him inquisitively. “You see me in this condition and you’re telling me to go to London and sue? Who’ll allow a rag like me into Britain? And even if they allowed me, then what? You want me to walk into a court in England and tell them, ‘You people killed my husband. Yes, my husband swallowed things a man should never put in his stomach, but it’s you who killed him.’ That’s what you ask me to do?”