She couldn’t stay there, she determined. Not in such a place, where food was left to rot in the refrigerator overnight; where neighbors were thieves; where there was no one, no friends, neighbors, or family to ask after her. Still, how humiliating it would have been to return to Aunty and Uncle, a widow, with nothing but the suitcases she had left with months earlier. Who would marry such a woman? Ifi decided that she must speak the truth to them. She began a letter to Aunty.
Dear Aunty,
I have truth to tell you. It has all been a lie. We do not live in a mansion. We live like rats. Worse than rats. In a shack, surrounded by gangsters, akatta. They have attacked Job, stolen his car. He is no doctor. I married a pretender. I am afraid here.
After signing the letter, Ifi sealed it and rummaged through the kitchen drawers until she found a stamp. She stamped the letter and pulled on her boots.
Just steps from the front door, the weight in her body suddenly dropped. So swift was the movement that it took all of Ifi’s effort to remain standing. Stirring the air as it dropped, the letter fell away to the scuffed floors. Ifi reached for the telephone. Balanced on the kitchen countertop, near the emptied pot, it was beyond her reach. Pain pulsed through her back and thighs. Can it be happening now? So early. Too early. I haven’t even spilled water. A strangled whimper reverberated, a peculiar gasp and moan that Ifi had never heard before. The voice belonged to her. She tried to shape the sound into words. Nothing but a damp moan escaped her body, like that of a grunting dog.
In a hapless countermelody, the phone rang out, filling the room and punctuating each of her moans. Pain pounded through Ifi’s body, and her eyes began to flicker. She hefted her weight to one side and struggled to rise. A few more pushes between each burst of pain, and she would be on her two feet. Her eyes flickered and she groaned.
A heavy thud forced the door forward, and then a second, and then a third. Under the weight of each thrust, the room rattled and hissed in protest. Ifi’s whimpers turned to small cries. Is it happening? Have they come to beat me? Had she willed this to happen to her with her unforgiving thoughts of Job? As she lay on the floor bracing for the attack, Ifi imagined another scenario: Job all alone in this country, once again. Perhaps he would go on as if they had never met. Perhaps he would start over with a new wife. Unlike Ifi, his new wife would be beautiful and young, and she would trust in him completely, like a good wife.
A strong urge, something like jealousy, growled inside of her. Ifi dragged her weight with her forearms. Slowly, gradually, her body began to slide across the floor, away from the noise of her attackers.
Wood along the door’s frame splintered, and the door thrust open. Jamal. For a moment, he stood in the doorway, glaring at Ifi. A wild look took over his face. Daring him to attack her, as he had attacked her husband, Ifi growled rabidly.
Jamal took the room in three steps, but he didn’t come near her.
There’s nothing to take, she had the urge to tell him, but the anger, fear, and pain were all coming from one place, and they forced their way through her back, her belly, and her legs. I will have this baby, oh, she thought to herself, on this floor, with this teenage boy as witness.
“The phone, lady, the phone,” he said to her.
Will he take it and throw it away? But the pain was too terrible. All Ifi could feel was her hand, obeying his command with a motion to the countertop.
He placed the call.
“My aunty’s at work,” he said.
He’ll call 9-1-1, she thought in relief. Giving in to the pain, she began to calm. Soon she would be in a hospital bed, and the baby would be out of her.
He disappeared. When he reappeared, he was holding the blanket from the bed and a towel from the bathroom, the very towel that was still stained with Job’s blood from the night of the attack. Jamal swaddled the blankets around her, and she felt as if she was drowning under the weight of the sheets. Sweat rinsed down the sides of her face before she realized that she was hot and thirsty. She fought to pull the sheets apart from her body. In answer, he brought her a cup of warm tap water in a dirty cup. Seeing the pieces floating in the cup, she hesitated.
“Drink it,” he said.
Another contraction rattled through her body. She obeyed.
They were still, the two, for fifteen minutes or more. Ifi couldn’t be sure. Then suddenly, she was gazing up at another tall brown boy who stood in the doorway, another boy like Jamal, but without his softness; older, at least sixteen or seventeen. Ifi tensed. What can they want with a pregnant woman in labor? But then, as she wheezed, struggling to breathe, she reminded herself, This is America. Anything was possible. Maybe Mrs. Janik had called the police. For once, Ifi prayed that the old woman would put her gossip to good use.
“Oh shit,” the older boy said. “What the fuck? She having a baby.”
“Yeah,” Jamal said.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“We need your car,” he said.
“No way, man,” the older boy said, but his eyes never left Ifi.
“You want me to call 9-1-1?” Jamal asked. “You want them to have police come here and pick the lady up while we here?”
The boy backed into the doorway. “Naw, man. You wouldn’t.”
“We just go and drop her off at the hospital. They won’t even see us. If we don’t, we’ll be in deep shit. Something could happen to her and the baby.”
“No way, man,” the boy said again.
“Yeah, we gonna use your car,” Jamal said with an urgency tinged with anger. Though he was smaller, he thrust the taller boy into the broken door. Another large splinter sounded as the door bumped the back wall.
“Fuck you, man,” the boy said. “I ain’t part of this.”
“Naw, you are,” Jamal said back, and as their eyes met, it was suddenly clear to Ifi that she was face to face with yet another of Job’s attackers. It filled her with rage. “Give me your keys,” Jamal said. Another quick shake to his partner, but the boy wouldn’t budge.
The other boy shook his head furiously. “Naw, fuck you. You on your own.” And just like that, he shoved Jamal one time, just hard enough for him to sprawl on the floor next to Ifi, and he disappeared out the door in a crash of footsteps.
Jamal swung his gaze in all directions. For the first time, he looked frightened. “I can’t call the police,” he said, more to himself than to Ifi. He picked up the phone. He began to dial some numbers and then hung up.
“Call my husband,” Ifi said. Her voice was strangled and low, but the words produced sounds.
“No way,” Jamal said. “No way.”
“Call Mrs. Janik,” Ifi said.
“Who?”
“The old lady.”
He made as if he would do just that. Then he stopped in the doorway and returned to Ifi, where she was writhing beneath the sheets. “I can call my aunty at work. She’ll pick you up. Mrs. Janik is crazy. Everybody knows that.”
“Call Janik,” Ifi said again, through gritted teeth.
He grabbed the phone and dialed some numbers, but even from her place on the floor, Ifi could hear the ringing.
Jamal hung up. He dialed another series of numbers. He said Ifi’s address into the phone. He told the voice to hurry, but nothing more.
“You called hospital?” Ifi asked.
“Yeah, sure,” he said, grimly. “Now let’s get ready.” He helped her to her feet and wrapped the blanket around her. Her boots were thankfully still on her feet.
They stood at the top of the landing, Ifi leaning against Jamal’s broad, skinny shoulders, and it looked impossible. He sighed and then half lifted her against his body. One step at a time, they made their way down the three flights of stairs. Twice Ifi thought they’d stumble and fall the whole way, so she clung to him more tightly. At one point, she felt his skin break underneath her fingernails, but she couldn’t let go. Even the tiniest release would surely send the baby spilling out of her insides and onto the steps.
On the bottom stair, Jamal leaned her sideways against the wall. He stood in the doorway, peering out into the street.
After Ifi had begun to lose hope that the ambulance would arrive, Jamal suddenly thrust the door open. A cool shock of air breathed on Ifi’s face. It felt good. Somehow it calmed the pulsing in her back to a mere ripple. Jamal grasped Ifi and lifted her, gasping in sharp, jagged breaths from the effort. They plunged out into the whiteness of the snow to a yellow cab.
“Where is the ambulance?” Ifi asked in confusion.
“We’ll get there,” he said.
He hefted her across the snowy walkway, and again Ifi was forced to half submit as they made their way to the cab.
The driver, an ashen-faced man, gazed at them in bewilderment. “I don’t want no mess on my seat,” he protested. “I don’t want no trouble.”
Jamal offered the driver a steely expression, the one Ifi imagined that he had shared with Job the day he and his gang had attacked her husband. He started to open the door, but the cabdriver hit the gas. Back door flapping like a bird’s broken wing, the car careened down the street and around the corner.
Both Ifi and Jamal stood in the abandoned street, their mouths open in a stupor until the cold overtook Ifi’s body in shivers, and the waves in her back buckled her knees.
“Shit, damn motherfucker,” Jamal said. The sharp edges of his teeth bore through his clenched jaw. He led Ifi back into the building.
“Please, Jamal,” she said, using his name aloud for the first time.
Without a word, he loped up the stairs. A moment later, he returned with a grave expression on his face. He had another glass of water in his hands, but before he handed it to Ifi, he started talking quickly. “I can’t stay with you. I gotta go. I told them you’re here, the address and everything, so they’ll find you. I can get the crazy lady to wait here with you until they come. Just don’t say nothing about me. I can’t go to jail. I promised my daddy.”
When his words began to make sense to Ifi, she was surprised by her tears. “You are not leaving me, oh,” she wailed. “I won’t tell. He won’t tell,” she said of Job. “He has not. I will promise you.”
A pained expression crossed Jamal’s face. He hesitated, then collapsed on the floor next to her with his face in his hands, his back turned to Ifi. She ventured to reach for him, but he knocked her hand away. Sirens wailed as the ambulance and police arrived. His body flexed and tensed like a cat ready to pounce. Jamal burst out the door, leaving it swinging behind him. Just moments later, flustered attendants propped Ifi onto a gurney and carried her out to the ambulance. Her last backwards glance reached Mrs. Janik, cup of tea in hand, peering out of the window of her apartment.
The angry and puckered face staring back at Job belonged to his son. His first son, because there will be many more, he decided. Tall, sturdy-backed boys whose nameplates will be followed by MD, JD, PhD. Before setting the boy back in the incubator with his own swollen, trembling hands, Job stared into the wrinkled face for one long moment.
When he had received the telephone call, he was on the line at the meatpacking factory, white gloves to his elbows, drenched in the blood and fluids of an animal. In his white jacket, white gloves, facemask, and hat, Job felt, in a peculiar way, like a surgeon. Instead of an electric knife that buzzed and whirred as it sliced through frozen flesh, bone, and fluids, he wielded a scalpel, neatly slicing through the layers of fat and cartilage of a patient.
Strange how quickly he had taken to the work when his supervisor first introduced him to the line. But Job had a secret system that he hadn’t shared with anyone. It was simple: he told himself that he was a machine. Nothing but bits of iron held together each of his joints, and the muscles and tendons were really hardened bits of twisted wire. This is what he told himself, and he moved like it, staring at the broken cow in front of him, sawing, breaking apart each bit with a sudden swift turn of his wrists, thinking of his life in America, thinking that finally he would raise the money for a better home, a place where a doctor and his wife could live.
Supervisors circulated among the rows of identical lines, shouting for the workers to keep things moving, to pick up the pace. Each time they stopped at Job, they nodded with approval. Once, a tall, willowy Somali woman, complained that she needed to urinate, but the supervisor yelled obscenities into her face until she whimpered back to her place on the line. Secretly, Job sided with the supervisor. She had no business here among men if she couldn’t handle the work. When a portly Mexican man, angered by the woman’s treatment, had spoken up on her behalf, he had been fired on the spot. A surprise it was that the man had spoken on her behalf anyway. It was the Mexicans who complained that the Somalis used their prayers as an excuse to break the line. And the Somalis complained that the Mexicans used their cigarettes as an excuse to break the line. Job had sided with the Mexicans on that one.
During his interview, as his tie-and-jacketed supervisor had questioned him, Job had to clarify that he was Nigerian, and from the south, and so he wouldn’t be wasting the factory owners’ money on prayer breaks throughout the day. After the Mexican man was fired, he returned three days later, begging for his place on the line back, the position to which Job had promptly been promoted, the fastest line with the highest pay. While the man descended to Job’s former position at the bottom of the line, Job switched stations and resumed work, his fingers cutting and flashing with efficiency. Wet floors, the noise of whirring knives, the cold of the room meant nothing to him. He simply moved, keeping up with the line, cutting and sorting the pieces of flesh as he had been instructed in the orientation video, blindly imagining the life he would live in the palace Ifi had described to her aunty.
Only when he reached home each night did he stare down at his large, swollen digits. In the shower, he would turn his palms up to his face and let the warm water run down them, rinsing them clean, thawing his talons until they became human and he could hold a fork again.
Because they would never understand, because they would consider the work beneath him, Job couldn’t explain to anyone, least of all Ifi or Emeka, the strange pride he took in his work, cutting and scoring cow parts that would be distributed to restaurants and grocery stores all over the nation. Each time he took a bite of seasoned beef in pepper soup, he was secretly reminded that once he had held those precious pieces in his hands.
His first laceration. It had happened fast—on the day he received the call about Ifi and the boy. Job had been slicing, panting, with quick turns of his frozen hands and wrists, when he heard the click over the intercom, a grainy voice interrupting the rhythm of his movements on the floor to say he had a call. Just that bit of distraction broke the wires of Job’s machine, and he was human again, looking at his hands and looking at the lump of flesh on the table. His hands were cold, ice cold, and his joints were sore and pink from curving around the knife handle. Where they weren’t sore, his fingers and palms were numb with tingles that ran up the length of his wrists.
Regaining his composure required all of his attention, and so Job pressed on, ignoring the urgent call over the speaker until a supervisor tapped his shoulder, after first, according to the man, calling Job’s name over and over. Then it happened. One turn, too fast, and Job sliced a tear that landed through the thick, rubbery protective gloves.
Not until he was standing in the office overlooking the floor with the phone cupped to his ear did he notice. As he listened to the voice, he stared out at the teeming swarm of workers spread across the floor, albino cockroaches with quick, precise movements. Looking out, trying to make out the faces of the Somalis, the Mexicans, the Vietnamese, the Sudanese, the Bosnians, they all looked the same, faceless behind the masks and underneath the white jackets and white hairnets. Without the sound of the whirring knives, the cold, the slickness of the floors, he saw how the floor looked to him from the ground when he was a machine, just those moments before the intercom took him out of his dream. It was peculiar, as if Job was watching him
self on the floor, working the knife one way and the other, dropping the bits into the sorting bins. He didn’t know what to make of it all—Do I feel insignificant? Do I feel like a giant? As he gazed out, a nurse was saying that Ifi was giving birth. “That’s wrong,” Job had said, and he explained that it was too soon. “No, no,” the nurse had said in excitement. “The baby is premature. God help us, we can’t tell them when to come. Some babies come when they’re good and ready.” And Job knew that she didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand.
He hadn’t had time to put the pieces of his life together in the right order. He hadn’t saved money for a new home. He hadn’t restarted classes at the university. He hadn’t obtained a degree. Instead he was alternating shifts at a meatpacking plant and at the hospital as a nurse’s aide. He lived in a home infested with roaches, with a wife swollen and fast approaching the permanent middle-aged frown he had seen on too many women.
When he put the phone down, he sucked in a deep breath, his face pitted with such a scowl that when the secretary said, “Oh, Job,” she thought he was grimacing from the wound in his hand. Only then did he notice the smear of blood filling the opening in the glove. When he peeled back his gloves, he found the blood had traveled up to his elbow. A spot of blood dribbled down the body of the telephone. After, as the medic cleaned and stitched his tingling hand, he watched maintenance wipe away his bloody print with a few sprays from a clear, bleach-smelling agent.
Cleaning and stitching hadn’t taken long. What took a while was the succession of workman’s compensation forms. Job had to report the “incident,” and they wouldn’t allow him to leave, even for Ifi’s delivery, until the forms were signed with the appropriate signatures. Each of Job’s urgent protests was pacified with the stubborn politeness that Midwesterners seemed so expert at when a situation required contention. They could make the most humiliating and painful information sound so pleasant. Then it was all done, and Job looked at the neat square bandage on his hand.
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