“Jehova God, all the machinations of the Evil One shall not succeed, all the weapons fashioned against us shall not prosper, in the name of Jesus! Father Lord, we cover all the planes in Nigeria with the precious blood of Jesus; Father Lord, we cover the air with the precious blood of Jesus and we destroy all the agents of darkness….” His voice was getting louder, his head bobbing. She needed to urinate. She felt awkward with their hands clasped together, his fingers warm and firm, and it was her discomfort that made her say, the first time he paused after a breathless passage, “Amen!” thinking that it was over, but it was not and so she hastily closed her eyes again as he continued. He prayed and prayed, pumping her hands whenever he said “Father Lord!” or “in Jesus’ name!”
Then she felt herself start to shiver, an involuntary quivering of her whole body. Was it God? Once, years ago when she was a teenager who meticulously said the rosary every morning, words she did not understand had burst out of her mouth as she knelt by the scratchy wooden frame of her bed. It had lasted mere seconds, that outpouring of incomprehensible words in the middle of a Hail Mary, but she had truly, at the end of the rosary, felt terrified and sure that the white-cool feeling that enveloped her was God. Udenna was the only person she had ever told about it, and he said she had created the experience herself. But how could I have? she had asked. How could I have created something I did not even want? Yet, in the end, she agreed with him, as she always agreed with him about almost anything, and said that she had indeed imagined it all.
Now, the shivering stopped as quickly as it had started and the Nigerian man ended the prayer. “In the mighty and everlasting name of Jesus!”
“Amen!” she said.
She slipped her hands from his, mumbled “Excuse me,” and hurried into the bathroom. When she came out, he was still standing by the door in the kitchen. There was something about his demeanor, the way he stood with his arms folded, that made her think of the word “humble.”
“My name is Chinedu,” he said.
“I’m Ukamaka,” she said.
They shook hands, and this amused her because they had only just clasped each other’s hands in prayer.
“This plane crash is terrible,” he said. “Very terrible.”
“Yes.” She did not tell him that Udenna might have been in the crash. She wished he would leave, now that they had prayed, but he moved across into the living room and sat down on the couch and began to talk about how he first heard of the plane crash as if she had asked him to stay, as if she needed to know the details of his morning ritual, that he listened to BBC News online because there was never anything of substance in American news. He told her he did not realize at first that there were two separate incidents — the first lady had died in Spain shortly after a tummy-tuck surgery in preparation for her sixtieth birthday party, while the plane had crashed in Lagos minutes after it left for Abuja.
“Yes,” she said, and sat down in front of her laptop. “At first I thought she died in the crash, too.”
He was rocking himself slightly, his arms still folded. “The coincidence is too much. God is telling us something. Only God can save our country.”
Us. Our country. Those words united them in a common loss, and for a moment she felt close to him. She refreshed an Internet page. There was still no news of any survivors.
“God has to take control of Nigeria,” he went on. “They said that a civilian government would be better than the military ones, but look at what Obasanjo is doing. He has seriously destroyed our country.”
She nodded, wondering what would be the most polite way to ask him to leave, and yet reluctant to do so, because his presence gave her hope about Udenna being alive, in a way that she could not explain.
“Have you seen pictures of family members of the victims? One woman tore her clothes off and ran around in her slip. She said her daughter was on that flight, and that her daughter was going to Abuja to buy fabric for her. Chai!” Chinedu let out the long sucking sound that showed sadness. “The only friend I know who might have been on that flight just sent me an e-mail to say he is fine, thank God. None of my family members would have been on it, so at least I don’t have to worry about them. They don’t have ten thousand naira to throw away on a plane ticket!” He laughed, a sudden inappropriate sound. She refreshed an Internet page. Still no news.
“I know somebody who was on the flight,” she said. “Who might have been on the flight.”
“Jehova God!”
“My boyfriend Udenna. My ex-boyfriend, actually. He was doing an MBA at Wharton and went to Nigeria last week for his cousin’s wedding.” It was after she spoke that she realized she had used the past tense.
“You have not heard anything for sure?” Chinedu asked.
“No. He doesn’t have a cell phone in Nigeria and I can’t get through to his sister’s phone. Maybe she was with him. The wedding is supposed to be tomorrow in Abuja.”
They sat in silence; she noticed that Chinedu’s hands had tightened into fists, that he was no longer rocking himself.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?” he asked.
“Last week. He called before he left for Nigeria.”
“God is faithful. God is faithful!” Chinedu raised his voice. “God is faithful. Do you hear me?”
A little alarmed, Ukamaka said, “Yes.”
The phone rang. Ukamaka stared at it, the black cordless phone she had placed next to her laptop, afraid to pick it up. Chinedu got up and made to reach for it and she said “No!” and took it and walked to the window. “Hello? Hello?” She wanted whomever it was to tell her right away, not to start with any preambles. It was her mother.
“Nne, Udenna is fine. Chikaodili just called me to say they missed the flight. He is fine. They were supposed to be on that flight but they missed it, thank God.”
Ukamaka put the phone down on the window ledge and began to weep. First, Chinedu gripped her shoulders, then he took her in his arms. She quieted herself long enough to tell him Udenna was fine and then went back into his embrace, surprised by the familiar comfort of it, certain that he instinctively understood her crying from the relief of what had not happened and from the melancholy of what could have happened and from the anger of what remained unresolved since Udenna told her, in an ice-cream shop on Nassau Street, that the relationship was over.
“I knew my God would deliver! I have been praying in my heart for God to keep him safe,” Chinedu said, rubbing her back.
Later, after she had asked Chinedu to stay for lunch and as she heated up some stew in the microwave, she asked him, “If you say God is responsible for keeping Udenna safe, then it means God is responsible for the people who died, because God could have kept them safe, too. Does it mean God prefers some people to others?”
“God’s ways are not our ways.” Chinedu took off his sneakers and placed them by the bookshelf.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“God always makes sense but not always a human kind of sense,” Chinedu said, looking at the photos on her bookshelf. It was the kind of question she asked Father Patrick, although Father Patrick would agree that God did not always make sense, with that shrug of his, as he did the first time she met him, on that late summer day Udenna told her it was over. She and Udenna had been inside Thomas Sweet, drinking strawberry and banana smoothies, their Sunday ritual after grocery shopping, and Udenna had slurped his noisily before he told her that their relationship had been over for a long time, that they were together only out of habit, and she looked at him and waited for a laugh, although it was not his style to joke like that. “Staid” was the word he had used. There was nobody else, but the relationship had become staid. Staid, and yet she had been arranging her life around his for three years. Staid, and yet she had begun to bother her uncle, a senator, about finding her a job in Abuja after she graduated because Udenna wanted to move back when he finished graduate school and start building up what he called “political capital” for his run fo
r Anambra State governor. Staid, and yet she cooked her stews with hot peppers now, the way he liked. Staid, and yet they had spoken often about the children they would have, a boy and a girl whose conception she had taken for granted, the girl to be named Ulari and the boy Udoka, all their first names to be U-names. She left Thomas Sweet and began to walk aimlessly all the way up Nassau Street and then back down again until she passed the gray stone church and she wandered in and told the man wearing a white collar and just about to climb into his Subaru that life did not make sense. He told her his name was Father Patrick and that life did not make sense but we all had to have faith nonetheless. Have faith. “Have faith” was like saying be tall and shapely. She wanted to be tall and shapely but of course she was not; she was short and her behind was flat and that stubborn soft bit of her lower belly bulged, even when she wore her Spanx body-shaper, with its tightly restraining fabric. When she said this, Father Patrick laughed.
“‘Have faith’ is not really like saying be tall and shapely. It’s more like saying be okay with the bulge and with having to wear Spanx,” he said. And she had laughed, too, surprised that this plump white man with silver hair knew what Spanx was.
Ukamaka dished out some stew beside the already warmed rice on Chinedu’s plate. “If God prefers some people to others, it doesn’t make sense that it would be Udenna who would be spared. Udenna could not have been the nicest or kindest person who was booked on that flight,” she said.
“You can’t use human reasoning for God.” Chinedu held up the fork she had placed on his plate. “Please give me a spoon.”
She handed him one. Udenna would have been amused by Chinedu, would have said how very bush it was to eat rice with a spoon the way Chinedu did, gripping it with all his fingers — Udenna with his ability to glance at people and know, from their posture and their shoes, what kind of childhood they had had.
“That’s Udenna, right?” Chinedu gestured toward the photo in the wicker frame, Udenna’s arm draped around her shoulders, both their faces open and smiling; it had been taken by a stranger at a restaurant in Philadelphia, a stranger who had said, “You are such a lovely couple, are you married?” and Udenna had replied, “Not yet,” in that flirty crooked-smile way he had with female strangers.
“Yes, that is the great Udenna.” Ukamaka made a face and settled down at the tiny dining table with her plate. “I keep forgetting to remove that picture.” It was a lie. She had glanced at it often in the past month, sometimes reluctantly, always frightened of the finality of taking it down. She sensed that Chinedu knew it was a lie.
“Did you meet in Nigeria?” he asked.
“No, we met at my sister’s graduation party three years ago in New Haven. A friend of hers brought him. He was working on Wall Street and I was already in grad school here but we knew many of the same people from around Philadelphia. He went to UPenn for undergrad and I went to Bryn Mawr. It’s funny that we had so much in common but somehow we had never met until then. Both of us came to the U.S. to go to university at about the same time. It turned out we even took the SATs at the same center in Lagos and on the same day!”
“He looks tall,” Chinedu said, still standing by the bookcase, his plate balanced in his hand.
“He’s six feet four.” She heard the pride in her own voice. “That’s not his best picture. He looks a lot like Thomas Sankara. I had a crush on that man when I was a teenager. You know, the president of Burkina Faso, the popular president, the one they killed—”
“Of course I know Thomas Sankara.” Chinedu looked closely at the photograph for a moment, as though to search for traces of Sankara’s famed handsomeness. Then he said, “I saw both of you once outside in the parking lot and I knew you were from Nigeria. I wanted to come and introduce myself but I was in a rush to catch the shuttle.”
Ukamaka was pleased to hear this; his having seen them together made the relationship tangible. The past three years of sleeping with Udenna and aligning her plans to Udenna’s and cooking with peppers were not, after all, in her imagination. She restrained herself from asking what exactly Chinedu remembered: Had he seen Udenna’s hand placed on her lower back? Had he seen Udenna saying something suggestive to her, their faces close together?
“When did you see us?” she asked.
“About two months ago. You were walking toward your car.”
“How did you know we were Nigerian?”
“I can always tell.” He sat down opposite her. “But this morning I looked at the names on the mailboxes to find out which apartment was yours.”
“I remember now that I once saw you on the shuttle. I knew you were African but I thought you might be from Ghana. You looked too gentle to be Nigerian.”
Chinedu laughed. “Who says I am gentle?” He mockingly puffed out his chest, his mouth full of rice. Udenna would have pointed out Chinedu’s forehead and said that one did not need to hear Chinedu’s accent to know that he was the sort of person who had gone to a community secondary school in his village and learned English by reading a dictionary in candlelight, because one could tell right away from his lumpy and vein-scarred forehead. It was what Udenna had said about the Nigerian student at Wharton whose friendship he consistently snubbed, whose e-mails he never replied to. The student, with his giveaway forehead and bush ways, simply did not make the cut. Make the cut. Udenna often used that expression and she at first thought it puerile but had begun, in the last year, to use it herself.
“Is the stew too peppery?” she asked, noticing how slowly Chinedu was eating.
“It’s fine. I’m used to eating pepper. I grew up in Lagos.”
“I never liked hot food until I met Udenna. I’m not even sure I like it now.”
“But you still cook with it.”
She did not like his saying that and she did not like that his face was closed, his expression unreadable, as he glanced at her and then back at his plate. She said, “Well, I guess I’m used to it now.”
“Can you check for the latest news?”
She pressed a key on her laptop, refreshed a Web page. All Killed in Nigeria Plane Crash. The government had confirmed that all one hundred and seventeen people aboard the airplane were dead.
“No survivors,” she said.
“Father, take control,” Chinedu said, exhaling loudly. He came and sat beside her to read from her laptop, their bodies close, the smell of her peppery stew on his breath. There were more photographs from the crash site. Ukamaka stared at one of shirtless men carrying a piece of metal that looked like the twisted frame of a bed; she could not imagine what part of the plane it could possibly have been.
“There is too much iniquity in our country,” Chinedu said, getting up. “Too much corruption. Too many things that we have to pray about.”
“Are you saying the crash was a punishment from God?”
“A punishment and a wake-up call.” Chinedu was eating the last of his rice. She found it distracting when he scraped the spoon against his teeth.
“I used to go to church every day when I was a teenager, morning Mass at six. I did it by myself, my family was a Sunday-Sunday family,” she said. “Then one day I just stopped going.”
“Everybody has a crisis of faith. It’s normal.”
“It wasn’t a crisis of faith. Church suddenly became like Father Christmas, something that you never question when you are a child but when you become an adult you realize that the man in that Father Christmas costume is actually your neighbor from down the street.”
Chinedu shrugged, as though he did not have much patience for this decadence, this ambivalence of hers. “Is the rice finished?”
“There’s more.” She took his plate to warm up some more rice and stew. When she handed it to him, she said, “I don’t know what I would have done if Udenna had died. I don’t even know what I would have felt.”
“You just have to be grateful to God.”
She walked to the window and adjusted the blinds. It was newly autumn. Outside, s
he could see the trees that lined Lawrence Drive, their foliage a mix of green and copper.
“Udenna never said ‘I love you’ to me because he thought it was a cliché. Once I told him I was sorry he felt bad about something and he started shouting and said I should not use an expression like ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ because it was unoriginal. He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.”
Chinedu said nothing. He took full mouthfuls; sometimes he used a finger as a wedge to nudge more rice onto his spoon.
The Thing Around Your Neck Page 14