Foreign Gods, Inc.

by Okey Ndibe

  No trace of sympathy registered on the officer’s face. Instead, the man said, “Two thousand dollars.”

  Ike cringed. “Where can I find two thousand dollars? My mother was in the hospital.”

  “Das why I no talk big money. I mercy you.”

  Ike knew that the gale had swept past, and he’d survived it, even if barely—even if by a stroke of luck that now needed to be perfected. His shot nerves had repaired themselves, and he could affect a becalmed state. He felt steeled enough to pursue another emotive line.

  “The worst thing is I lost my job in New York just before I traveled.”

  The officer turned away, a vexed look on his face. “Look, my friend, I done tell you say your palava big o. Trus’ me, thank your God say no be that wench dey handle you. Two thousand dollars no be anything for dis kin’ case.”

  “I didn’t even finish paying my mother’s hospital bills.”

  The officer turned sharply. His face bore the expression of a man with no time to kill. “Oya,” he said, in a tone of reasonableness, “bring one thousand five.”

  “A thousand five hundred?” Ike asked.

  The officer nodded.

  “Dollars?”

  The officer puffed up his chest. “A thousand five hundred dollars,” he said, chopping at the air. “Last.”

  Ike cadged. He appealed to the officer to remember that he’d returned home to see to the care of a hospitalized mother, and that he’d just lost his job prior to the trip.

  “Oya, bring one thousand,” the man officer said. He frowned up. “I no wan’ waste more time.”

  Ike cast a sideward glance at the huddle of officers and saw the “wench” wagging her fingers at the statue.

  “Five hundred,” he offered.

  The mustachioed officer glowered at him. “You tink say na joke I come here joke?” He made an exaggerated motion of turning away.

  “Please,” Ike pleaded. “I’ll make it six hundred.”

  The officer would not budge. Irritable, he threatened to hand Ike back to the hound. “You wan’ make dat woman put you for cell?” he asked. “As you see am so, she can castrate any man. Just like dat, no mercy! If she vex, na inside detention you dey go. Straight! Mosquito and bedbug go take you do Christmas. Den tomorrow, we take you to go see magistrate.”

  Ike felt touched by anger. Yet, through the fog of that emotion, he was able to glimpse the fortune that awaited him once the statue made it to New York City. He turned aside, pulled his wallet, counted seven hundred dollars, and then handed the bills to the officer.

  The officer touched three middle fingers to his tongue and counted the cash. “Add hundred,” he ordered. Weary of the haggling, Ike complied. A wild, nervous smile lit up the man’s face. “Oya, no more problem. Come, you fit take your bags now.”

  As they walked back to the customs desk, the officer lifted his shirt and tucked the cash underneath his belt.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  A sally of stench hit Ike’s nostrils the moment he opened the door to his apartment. It left a ghoulish impression, reminded him of feculent silt. He jerked his head back in a flinching gesture.

  Had something—a rat perhaps—burrowed its way into his apartment and met its death? Had he forgotten to flush the toilet? Had he left dirty dishes in the sink? Or was it some food, carelessly left out, that had gone moldy and festered?

  Holding his breath, he pulled his suitcases into the room. He then slammed the door behind him, for he did not want the smell to slip out his door and menace other tenants. As the hallway light shut out, he found the apartment wrapped in a gooey darkness.

  His right hand groped the wall, searching for the switch. He flicked it, but light did not flood the room. A chill zipped down his spine. Bumps erupted on his skin. He flicked the switch again. And then again and again.

  Fear compounded his anger. Why had the bulb chosen now to die? He was sure he didn’t have an extra bulb in the house.

  Then he remembered the disconnection notice from the light company three days before his trip. His light bill was then delinquent by three weeks. He’d scrawled the power company’s customer service number on a piece of paper and tacked it on the wall beside the refrigerator. But, swamped with errands, he had forgotten to call and make the payment.

  He whacked the side of his head.

  “Idiot!” he cursed.

  Teeth gritted, he gave the switch a sharp, upward chop. Scraped, his finger sizzled with pain. He sucked in air, wincing. He ran the hurt finger across his lips, probing for a cut, for blood.

  Something seemed to stir in the darkness. He crouched, then ducked to the right, like a karate maven evading a punch. Who, what, was this thing appareled by the night? Was it the source of the terrible smell? Was the stink this being’s rancid breath?

  His eyes roved and scoured the darkness. For a while, there was nothing but an eerie stillness, the sinister stillness of a night-draped terror. His eyes began to water from the intensity of gazing into darkness. His eyelids began to twitch, blinking uncontrollably. A misshapen figure formed and unformed before his teary eyes. This image wiggled, feinted, danced like a waif.

  Ike opened his mouth to shriek, but his vocal cord was bereft of sound, lifeless. He wanted to pirouette, grab the doorknob, and yank the door open. The hallway light would flood the room, revealing the prowler. But his limbs remained frozen. If he turned, he would expose his flank to attack. Why, the fearsome foe in the dark might then fell him with a vicious blow.

  There was a scurrying. He started and jumped. Landing, he stamped his feet furiously. He swung his arms wildly. Heels dug in, he bent his knees, flexed his biceps, and raised his hands, pivoting from side to side, ready.

  Gradually, doubt settled in. Was there really somebody —something—enfolded in the darkness, ready to do him harm? Was there anything more than an illusion?

  Next came shame. Surely, if people could see him now, they’d think him deranged. What shame to be caught in a fighter’s springy posture, flailing against an illusory antagonist.

  Next—dread swept him. It came back with the thought that there was indeed a presence in the darkness. It was no less real for its invisibility. If he pitched his hand forward, he’d touch this thing. Its skin would be horrid to the touch, a feral foe’s furry skin, or hard, like something hewn from bark.

  The thought of it made his skin crawl with bumps.

  He stood pat, shivering.

  The smell came at him in waves. Sometimes faint, sometimes overpowering, it made him dizzy. He was trapped between the liquidity of the odor and the horror of the darkness.

  He wiped his eyes. The traipsing figure seemed to fall instantly quiet.

  He sniffed lightly, seeking to detect the stink’s particular character. He ruled out a dead rodent. The odor didn’t have the stark smell of decayed flesh. He had a hunch that it wasn’t food either.

  Did the stink emanate from trapped, soured air? Was it because he’d shut up everything before he traveled; every window latched, a pad of newspapers squeezed in to cover a small hole where the air conditioner was installed. Had the trapped air fermented and turned acrid?

  Could a smell so foul be birthed by sheer air?

  The phone rang. Heart heaving, he sprang for it but blindly crashed against his suitcase, which toppled over with a thud. He heard its lock spring free, its contents spilling. His left leg caught the fallen suitcase. Doing his blind best to regain his balance, he was instead propelled forward, an awkward flying object. For a moment he had the sensation of being suspended in midair; he couldn’t tell where was up, where down. Then his right rib cage slammed against the edge of the shaky-legged center table his ex-wife had spitefully left behind when she cleaned out the rest of the furniture. The table gave a cracking whine as it shattered. He crumpled to the ground, sideways, bunching up his body as actors do in movies when shot. The pain took its time sharpening, spreading. Ripples of it tore through his body. He gasped, grabbed his rib cage, and sl
owly rolled over to settle on his back.

  As if from a dreamy fog, he heard the phone ring two more times. He let out a mirthless smile as his voice announced, I am not here to take your call. Please leave a message, thank you. Three beeps—then:

  “Chief Ike, this is Usman Wai,” announced the caller in a familiar raspy voice. “Just calling to find out if you made it back today as planned. Please call me as soon as you come in; I’ll be up till midnight. Even later. Don’t fail to call—it’s extremely important. Hope you had a terrific trip. Bye for now.”

  A click. Silence.

  The pulsing pain concentrated his mind. For a while, nothing else mattered. Not fear. Not the stink-touched air. Not a girl’s string of curses that reached him from the street. Not the smattering of jeers and cheers that answered her. Not the indolent chatter of the adult congregants gathered in front of Cadilla’s package store to dawdle, dream, and flirt. Not the sound of a car screeching to a halt in front of Cadilla’s. Not the boom of merengue music that followed.

  Nothing mattered but the spasms of pain.

  Lying on the floor, curled up in the fetal posture, the darkness seemed cushiony. Bottomless.

  The pain spent its edge, abating gradually.

  Afterward, he lay on the floor, from comfort less than necessity. He was in a half daze, floating in and out of a state that was neither sleep nor wakefulness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Throughout the night voices crowded his head. They were of the night, born of the dark coming from somewhere beyond his reach, muted, inaudible, insistent. His head was the echo chamber for their inarticulate, inchoate musings.

  He lay down where he fell, captive to the strange autogenous sounds that whirred inside his head. And to the hurly-burly that floated up from Cadilla’s store.

  After a while, he felt pressure build up around his groin, an urgent summons to pee. A groping trip to the bathroom was out of the question. For a while, then, he simply ignored the tightening sensation. Finally, he swept the floor until he touched the fallen, yawning suitcase. He dug his hand into it and probed. His fingers touched a heavily wrapped sturdy object. He shivered with foreboding, hoping the statue had not cracked with the suitcase’s crash.

  He drew out a cotton shirt and rolled it up into a ball. Urine seeped out in treacherous spurts as he struggled to unzip his pants. He placed the balled shirt against his groin and allowed himself to go. The shirt quickly soaked up, warm to the touch, but turning cold. He let the wet shirt fall off his hand, and then he yanked his waist away.

  He tried to draw a deep breath but stopped when his expanding lungs instigated a shooting pain.

  The stink! It now oversaturated his lungs. It wasn’t, he now realized, the smell of something dead. It was neither rotten food nor air bottled up in a locked, dank space. The ooze had an implacable quality to it. Indecipherable. The closest he came to fathoming it was that it was not one thing but an awful miscellany.

  He rocked with a shudder as a rogue word flashed through his mind. Haunted. His apartment was haunted.

  He’d expected to gain a sense of relief once he returned to the staid familiarity of his residence. Instead it had come to this: fear. It’d come to a terrible heaviness of spirit—and to a mind encumbered by a palpable gloom.

  HE WAS STILL SUPINE when strips of light began to sneak into the room. Rising slowly, he staggered toward the windows, his body tilted rightward to contain the still-raw pain. He parted the gauzy, see-through blinds and then drew apart the satiny folds of the curtain. He opened the window, and air rushed in through the metal security grille.

  He looked out on the streets, milling with people. The young waltzed in that shoulder-swaying, weave-legged fashion that was a simulated dance. The old trotted to a slower rhythm. Streets abundant with sounds, swagger, colors. Cars zipped past. Buses stopped and shuttled. There was an odd robustness in this multitude of solitary beings.

  For the first time he felt he’d truly returned from Utonki. The city was there before his eyes. It was there in more than one sense. There—for him. Strangely—considering all his old grouse against the city—he felt comforted to be back. His heart swelled with the satiety of a man about to reach out and touch his dreams.

  It was magnificent to have his sight back. He turned away from the window, fixing his eyes on the familiar contours of the room. Shafts of sunlight swept the room. Everything that fell under his gaze brought him a flush of delight. The smashed center table that he now saw as a blow struck against Queen B. He looked at the fallen, open suitcase, its lock severed, the wrapped statue of Ngene lying atop a disheveled mess of clothes. Even the flowered shirt wet with his piss. He smiled bemusedly, the terrors that had seized him in darkness gone with the light.

  A sudden spasm stabbed his side. He bent sharply. A whiff of stink floated to his nostrils. Quickening, he sniffed. To his dismay, the smell had grown even stronger, as if the light had fermented it.

  He panned around, searching for any visible source. He looked under his couch and inside the refrigerator, but found nothing. Dipping his head first in his bedroom and then the bathroom he detected nothing.

  He returned to the living room and sniffed again. Once again, the smell seemed ranker.

  He balled himself up on the couch, in no mood or shape to continue the futile detective work. His entire body was racked by weariness. Sleep, he thought, remembering how the terrifying darkness had wrung sleep from his eyes. If he slept, he would awake refreshed. With some luck, he’d discover that the odor had lifted and crept away.

  He shut his eyes. For a moment, a drowsy sensation overwhelmed him. Limb by limb, it claimed him. The sounds of the streets became muted, and the world gyrated slowly in whorls. His body sloughed off layer after layer of weight until it was ready to float away, doze off.

  The air felt suddenly heavy and still. Something opaque, mildly menacing, stirred in the air, stretched in the stillness. This thing had a presence oblique as mist, and a voice that croaked from an indeterminate distance, muffled. It struggled, turned, twisted, and tossed. It then became a word being born in the dense air, a fetus of a name that had been here before, a name straining to be exhumed, born again. Slowly, assuredly, some disembodied force whispered the sound. The sound seemed to emanate from the womb of time, to ride the air, until it became a veritable howl birthing a name, a name that belonged to the past but was now insistent on inhabiting the present. For a moment, the sound seemed emblazoned in the very air. Then it groaned and moaned its way into the open, slid and slipped out into the world, this name that was both not his and his.

  Su-tan-tee-ny. Su-tan-tee-ny! Stanton!

  Ike was about to answer to the name when he clambered into consciousness, his body hot, beads of sweat smudging his brow. His heart, like the name that pounded in his head, jumped like an animal snagged by a trap, startled.

  The unclaimed name swelled the air, swirled and prowled, howled intermittently. Su-tan-tee-ny. Stanton!

  For a moment, its echoes lured Ike back into sleep. Then, as if from nowhere, a muddy flood rushed down the side of a mountain. It turned into a crashing river, a howling river powered by rage, as it sped toward him. Catatonic, he was the river’s for the taking. He wanted to shriek. If he could shriek, rend the air with his agony, perhaps something, somebody, might save him. The river might even show mercy. But something smothered his throat, stilled his voice. Suddenly, his frozen body received some residual animation. He arched, ready to take a plunge, to lose himself in the rushing wave. Then, just before the final moment, the turbulent flood about to smash into him, he harnessed everything within him and—jerked awake!

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Ike’s brow boiled, the room topsy-turvy. In the distance, he glimpsed a parade of specks floating toward him, growing larger, clearer, as they approached. Then, in quick, whirling succession, he saw his mother’s whitlow-ravaged thumb, his uncle’s war-earned belly gash, and those eyes deadened by grief.

  He did
n’t know how to fend them off. He sat helpless before their menace. Light sweat slicked his forehead. A nervy pain pounded inside his head. Slumped on the couch, he panted, unnerved by the nightmare that had startled him awake and by the grotesque images that came with waking.

  Relax, he coaxed himself, but his inner voice carried little conviction. Relax. Think of other things.

  Sleep was impossible under the circumstances. To regain quietude, he had to master his mind, to rein in its many flights. The trick, he felt sure, was to shepherd his thoughts toward more practical matters. And there were quite a few.

  It was paramount to pay his electric bill, to have his power restored as soon as possible. Sleeping in darkness—being awake in darkness—was no joy. He had to pick up his mail, buy some food, and, once power was restored, check his e-mails.

  The trouble with focusing on practical problems was that he had little money. He didn’t have a dime left of the five hundred dollars Tony Iba had given him. All of it—and more—had gone to the customs officers in Lagos. Then he had spent forty dollars on transportation back to his apartment. There was nothing in his checking account. And he had used up his credit card limit buying the ticket.

  Despite his money woes, he decided not to rush into selling the deity. He’d wait for a week, even up to ten days. With Ngene in his possession, he could afford to tarry. He had a hunch that the deity’s value would appreciate if he waited. Yet, he had to arrange to pay the electric bill. Several other bills, ignored before his trip, would have fallen overdue. Thinking about it all seemed to take too much of his energy. For want of something to occupy his mind, he reached for his cordless phone. He pressed the button for voice messages and—prompted—entered his password. Then he pressed the phone to his ear. An automated voice announced: You have nine new messages and four saved messages. Two messages were from Usman Wai, including the one that had sent him crashing to the floor. Three were from the rental management office. Of those, one was a gentle reminder that his March rent was a month past due and that he had yet to respond to two letters from the office. The second message, left three days later, was a terse request to call the office immediately. The third informed him that another letter had been dispatched to him demanding immediate payment of overdue rent along with assessed late fees. Three callers had failed to leave any message.