by Libba Bray
As if by surprise, up and over a hill, we would roller-coaster down through maize fields into Kawuye. I loved it there. The houses were the best houses for Nigeria and typical of the Tiv people, round and thick-walled with high pointed roofs and tiny windows. The heat could not get in and the walls sweated like a person to keep cool. There were no wild men waiting to leap out, no poison grandmothers. My great-uncle Jacob—it is a common name in my family--repaired cars with the patience of a cricket, opening, snipping, melting, and reforming. He once repaired a vehicle by replacing the fan belt with the elastic from my mother’s underwear.
Raphael and I would buy firewood, trading some of it for eggs, ginger, and yams. We also helped my aunty with her pig-roasting business. To burn off the bristles, we’d lower it onto a fire and watch grassfire lines of red creep up each strand. It made a smell like burning hair and Raphael and I would pretend we were pirates cooking people. Then we turned the pig on a spit until it crackled. At nights we were men, serving beer and taking money.
We both got fat because our pay was some of the pig, and if no one was looking, the beer as well. I ate because I needed to get as big as Matthew. In the evenings the generators coughed to life and the village smelled of petrol and I played football barefoot under lights. There were jurisdictions and disagreements, but laughing uncles to adjudicate with the wisdom of a Solomon. So even the four of us liked each other more in Kawuye.
Then after whole weeks of sanity, my mother’s phone would sing out with the voice of Mariah Carey or an American prophetess. As the screen illuminated, Mamamimi’s face would scowl. We knew the call meant that our father was back in the house, demanding our return.
Uncle Jacob would change the oil and check the tires and we would drive back through the fields and rock across potholes onto the main road. At intersections, children swarmed around the car, pushing their hands through open windows, selling plastic bags of water or dappled plantains. Their eyes peered in at us. I would feel ashamed somehow. Raphael wound up the window and hollered at them. “Go away and stop your staring. There’s nothing here for you to see!”
Baba would be waiting for us reading ThisDay stiffly, like he had broomsticks for bones, saying nothing.
After that long drive, Mama would silently go and cook. Raphael told him off. “It’s not very fair of you, Popsie, to make her work. She has just driven us back all that way just to be nice to us and show us a good time in the country.”
Father’s eyes rested on him like drills on DIY.
That amused Raphael. “Since you choose to be away all the time, she has to do all the work here. And you’re just sitting there.” My father rattled the paper and said nothing. Raphael was twelve years old.
I was good at football, so I survived school well enough. But my brother was legendary.
They were reading The Old Man and The Sea in English class, and Raphael blew up at the teacher. She said that lions were a symbol of Hemingway being lionized when young. She said the old fisherman carrying a mast made him some sort of Jesus with his cross. He told her she had a head full of nonsense. I can see him doing it. He would bark with sudden laughter and bounce up and down in his chair and declare, delighted, “That’s blasphemy! It’s just a story about an old man. If Hemingway had wanted to write a story about Jesus, he was a clever enough person to have written one!” The headmaster gave him a clip about the ear. Raphael wobbled his head at him as if shaking a finger. “Your hitting me doesn’t make me wrong.” None of the other students ever bothered us. Raphael still got straight As.
Our sleepy little bookshops, dark, wooden, and crammed into corners of markets, knew that if they got a book on chemistry or genetics they could sell it to Raphael. He set up a business to buy textbooks that he knew Benue State was going to recommend. At sixteen he would sit on benches at the university, sipping cold drinks and selling books, previous essays, and condoms. Everybody assumed that he was already being educated there. Tall, beautiful students would call him “sah.” One pretty girl called him “Prof.” She had honey-colored, extended hair, and a spangled top that hung off one shoulder.
“I’m his brother,” I told her proudly.
“So you are the handsome one,” she said, being kind to what she took to be the younger brother. For many weeks I carried her in my heart.
The roof of our Government bungalow was flat and Raphael and I took to living on it. We slept there; we even climbed the ladder with our plates of food. We read by torchlight, rigged mosquito nets, and plugged the mobile phone into our netbook. The world flooded into it; the websites of our wonderful Nigerian newspapers, the BBC, Al Jazeera, Nature, New Scientist. We pirated Nollywood movies. We got slashdotcom; we hacked into the scientific journals, getting all those ten-dollar PDFs for free.
We elevated ourselves above the murk of our household. Raphael would read aloud in many different voices, most of them mocking. He would giggle at news articles. “Oh, story! Now they are saying Fashola is corrupt. Hee hee hee. It’s the corrupt people saying that to get their own back.”
“Oh this is interesting,” he would say and read about what some Indian at Caltech had found out about gravitational lenses.
My naked father would pad out like an old lion gone mangy and stare up at us, looking bewildered as if he wanted to join us but couldn’t work out how. “You shouldn’t be standing out there with no clothes on,” Raphael told him. “What would happen if someone came to visit?” My father looked as mournful as an abandoned dog.
Jacob Terhemba Shawo was forced to retire. He was only forty-two. We had to leave the Government Reserved Area. Our family name means “high on the hill,” and that’s where we had lived. I remember that our well was so deep that once I dropped the bucket and nothing could reach it. A boy had to climb down the stones in the well wall to fetch it.
We moved into the house I live in now, a respectable bungalow across town, surrounded with high walls. It had a sloping roof, so Raphael and I were no longer elevated.
The driveway left no room for Mamamimi’s herb garden, so we bought a neighboring patch of land but couldn’t afford the sand and cement to wall it off. Schoolchildren would wander up the slope into our maize, picking it or sometimes doing their business.
The school had been built by public subscription and the only land cheap enough was in the slough. For much of the year the new two-story building rose vertically out of a lake like a castle. It looked like the Scottish islands in my father’s calendars. Girls boated to the front door and climbed up a ramp. A little beyond was a marsh, with ponds and birds and water lilies: beautiful but it smelled of drains and rotting reeds.
We continued to go to the main cathedral for services. White draperies hung the length of its ceiling, and the stained-glass doors would accordion open to let in air. Local dignitaries would be in attendance and nod approval as our family lined up to take communion and make our gifts to the church, showing obeisance to the gods of middle-class respectability.
But the church at the top of our unpaved road was bare concrete, always open at the sides. People would pad past my bedroom window and the singing of hymns would swell with the dawn. Some of the local houses would be village dwellings amid the aging urban villas.
Chickens still clucked in our new narrow back court. If you dropped a bucket down this well, all you had to do was reach in for it. The problem was to stop water flooding into the house. The concrete of an inner courtyard was broken and the hot little square was never used, except for the weights that Raphael had made for himself out of iron bars and sacks of concrete. Tiny and rotund, he had dreams of being a muscleman. His computer desktop was full of a Nigerian champion in briefs. I winced with embarrassment whenever his screen sang open in public. What would people think of him, with that naked man on his netbook?
My father started to swat flies all the time. He got long sticky strips of paper and hung them everywhere—across doorways, from ceilings, in windows. They would snag in our hair as we carried out food
from the kitchen. All we saw was flies on strips of paper. We would wake up in the night to hear him slapping the walls with books, muttering, “Flies flies flies.”
The house had a tin roof and inside we baked like bread. Raphael resented it personally. He was plump and felt the heat. My parents had installed the house’s only AC in their bedroom. He would just as regularly march in with a spanner and screwdriver and steal it. He would stomp out, the cable dragging behind him, with my mother wringing her hands and weeping. “That boy! That crazy boy! Jacob! Come see to your son.”
Raphael shouted, “Buy another one! You can afford it!”
“We can’t, Raphael! You know that! We can’t.”
And Raphael said, “I’m not letting you drag me down to your level.”
Matthew by then was nearly nineteen and had given up going to university. His voice was newly rich and sad. “Raphael. The whole family is in trouble. We would all like the AC, but if Baba doesn’t get it, he wanders, and that is a problem, too.”
I didn’t like it that Raphael took it from our parents without permission. Shamefaced with betrayal of him, I helped Matthew fix the AC back in our parents’ window.
Raphael stomped up to me and poked me with his finger. “You should be helping me, not turning tail and running!” He turned his back and said, “I’m not talking to you.”
I must have looked very sad because later I heard his flip-flops shuffling behind me. “You are my brother and of course I will always talk to you. I’m covered in shame that I said such a thing to you.” Raphael had a genius for apologies, too.
When Andrew was twelve, our father drove him to Abuja and left him with people, some great-aunt we didn’t know. She was childless, and Andrew had come back happy from his first visit sporting new track shoes. She had bought him an ice cream from Grand Square. He went back.
One night Raphael heard Mother and Father talking. He came outside onto the porch, his fat face gleaming. “I’ve got some gossip,” he told me. “Mamamimi and Father have sold Andrew!”
“Sold” was an exaggeration. They had put him to work and were harvesting his wages. In return he got to live in an air-conditioned house. Raphael giggled. “It’s so naughty of them!” He took hold of my hand and pulled me with him right into their bedroom.
Both of them were decent, lying on the bed with their books. Raphael announced, very pleased with himself. “You’re not selling my brother like an indentured servant. Just because he was a mistake and you didn’t want him born so late and want to be shot of him now.”
Mamamimi leapt at him. He ran, laughter pealing, and his hands swaying from side to side. I saw only then that he had the keys for the SUV in his hand. He pulled me with him out into the yard, and then swung me forward. “Get the gate!” He popped himself into the driver’s seat and roared the engine. Mamamimi waddled after him. The car rumbled forward, the big metal gate groaned open, dogs started to bark. Raphael bounced the SUV out of the yard, and pushed its door open for me. Mamamimi was right behind, and I didn’t want to be the one punished again, so I jumped in. “Good-bye-yeee!” Raphael called in a singsong voice, smiling right into her face.
We somehow got to Abuja alive. Raphael couldn’t drive, and trucks kept swinging out onto our side of the road, accelerating and beeping. We swerved in and out, missing death, passing the corpses of dead transports lined up along the roadside. Even I roared with laughter as lorries wailed past us by inches.
Using the GPS, Raphael foxed his way to the woman’s house. Andrew let us in; he worked as her boy, beautifully dressed in a white shirt and jeans, with tan sandals of interwoven strips. In we strode and Raphael said, very pleasantly at first, “Hello! M’sugh! How are you? I am Jacob’s son, Andrew’s brother.”
I saw at once this was a very nice lady. She was huge like a balloon, with a child-counselling smile, and she welcomed us and hugged Andrew to her.
“Have you paid my parents anything in advance for Andrew’s work? Because they want him back, they miss him so much.”
She didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, they changed their minds. Well of course they did, Andrew is such a fine young man. Well, Andrew, it seems your brothers want you back!”
“I changed their minds for them.” Raphael always cut his words out of the air like a tailor making a bespoke garment. Andrew looked confused and kept his eyes on the embroidery on his jeans.
Andrew must have known what had happened because he didn’t ask why it was us two who had come to fetch him. Raphael had saved him, not firstborn Matthew--if he had wanted to be saved from decent clothes and shopping in Abuja.
When we got back home, no mention was made of anything by anyone. Except by Raphael, to me, later. “It is so interesting, isn’t it, that they haven’t said a thing. They know what they were doing was wrong. How would they like to be a child and know their parents had sent them to work?” Matthew said nothing either. We had been rich; now we were poor.
Jide and I measured replication decline.
We carried out our old experiment over and over and measured methyl as levels declined for no apparent reason. Then we increased the levels of stress. Those poor mice! In the name of science, we deprived them of a mother and then cuddly surrogates. We subjected them to regimes of irregular feeding and random light and darkness and finally electric shocks.
There was no doubt. No matter how much stress we subjected them to, after the first spectacular results, the methyl levels dropped off with each successive experiment. Not only that, but the association between methyl and neurotropin suppression reduced as well—objectively measured, the amount of methyl and its effect on neurotropin production were smaller with each study. We had proved the decline effect. Truth wore out. Or at least, scientific truth wore out.
We published. People loved the idea and we were widely cited. Jide became a Lecturer and a valued colleague. People began to speak of something called Cosmic Habituation. The old ways were no longer working. And I was thirty-seven.
With visitors, Raphael loved being civil, a different person. Sweetly and sociably, he would say, “M’sugh,” our mix of hello, good-bye, and pardon me. He loved bringing them trays of cold water from the Intermittent Freezer. He remembered everybody’s name and birthday. He hated dancing, but loved dressing up for parties. Musa the tailor made him wonderful robes with long shirts, matching trousers, shawls.
My father liked company, too, even more so after his Decline. He would suddenly stand up straight and smile eagerly. I swear, his shirt would suddenly look ironed, his shoes polished. I was envious of the company, usually men from his old work. They could get my father laughing. He would look young then, and merry, and slap the back of his hand on his palm, jumping up to pass around the beer. I wanted him to laugh with me.
Very suddenly Matthew announced he was getting married. We knew it was his way of escaping. After the wedding he and his bride would move in with her sister’s husband. He would help with their fish farm and plantation of nym trees. We did well by him: no band, but a fine display of food. My father boasted about how strong Matthew was, always captain. From age twelve he had read the business news like some boys read adventure stories. Matthew, he said, was going to be a leader.
My father saw me looking quiet and suddenly lifted up his arms. “Then there is my Patrick who is so quiet. I have two clever sons to go alongside the strong one.” His hand felt warm on my back.
By midnight it was cool and everybody was outside dancing, even Raphael, who grinned, making circular motions with his elbows and planting his feet as firmly as freeway supports.
My father wavered up to me like a vision out of the desert, holding a tin of High Life. He stood next to me watching the dancing and the stars. “You know,” he said, “your elder brother was sent to you by Jesus.” My heart sank: Yes, I know, to lead the family, to be an example.
“He was so unhappy when you were born. He saw you in your mother’s arms and howled. He is threatened by you. Jesus sent you Matthew so tha
t you would know what it is to fight to distinguish yourself. And you learned that. You are becoming distinguished.”
I can find myself being kind in that way; suddenly, in private with no one else to hear or challenge the kindness, as if kindness were a thing to shame us.
I went back onto the porch and there was Raphael looking hunched and large, a middle-aged patriarch. He’d heard what my father said. “So who taught Matthew to be stupid? Why didn’t he ever tell him to leave you alone?”
My father’s skin faded. It had always been very dark, so black that he would use skin lightener as a moisturizer without the least bleaching effect. Now very suddenly, he went honey-colored; his hair became a knotted muddy brown. A dried clot of white spit always threatened to glue his lips together, and his eyes went bad, huge and round and ringed with swollen flesh like a frog’s. He sprouted thick spectacles, and had to lean his head back to see, blinking continually. He could no longer remember how to find the toilet from the living room. He took to crouching down behind the bungalow with the hens, then as things grew worse, off the porch in front of the house. Mamamimi said, “It makes me think there may be witchcraft after all.” Her face swelled and went hard until it looked like a stone.
On the Tuesday night before he died, he briefly came back to us. Tall, in trousers, so skinny now that he looked young again. He ate his dinner with good manners, the fou-fou cradling the soup so that none got onto his fingers. Outside on the porch he started to talk, listing the names of all his brothers.
Then he told us that Grandmother was not his actual mother. Another woman had borne him, made pregnant while dying of cancer. Grandfather knew pregnancy would kill her, but he made her come to term. She was bearing his first son.
Two weeks after my father was born, his real mother had died, and my grandfather married the woman called Blessing.