Irregular Verbs

by Irregular Verbs

  She rose until she struck a wall of fire, and then she burned.

  Adegoke’s uncle led him back to his office, sat him down in a plush leather chair, then went to his desk and picked up a dark green bottle. He opened it, poured two glasses and held one out to Adegoke. “Scotch?”

  Nodding gratefully, Adegoke took the glass and drank. It had a very different taste from palm wine, burning his throat like fire, and he coughed.

  “Gently,” Michael said. “Good scotch is to be savoured.”

  “Thank you, uncle,” Adegoke said. He took a much smaller sip, found it went down more easily this time. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Nor did I think I would see you.” His uncle held his glass under his nose and breathed deeply, then smiled and nodded. “I should hate to tell your mother you were so foolish.”

  “But uncle—” Adegoke’s uncle threw him a look, and he let his head drop in shame. A vacuum cleaner sat on the floor nearby, idle.

  “How did you get the number, anyway?” his uncle asked.

  “One of the women at my station,” Adegoke said. “She said she had been talking in her sleep. She wrote down what she had said, brought it to me—it talked about a fortune to be claimed, I thought—”

  His uncle held up a hand. “Talking in her sleep?” he said. “That is unforeseen. It may be we need more time before we can roll out fully.”

  “I’m sorry, uncle. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Talking to myself,” his uncle said. “Your girls—they have value as workers, of course, but what is much more valuable is the space in their heads. We can use each one of them to send a million messages every day.”

  “Messages?” Adegoke asked.

  His uncle nodded. “Some are for ourselves, like the one that brought you here, but that is only a sideline. The world is a market, nephew, a million times bigger than the Mile Twelve, and people will pay us to be their hawkers—sell watches, drugs, anything or nothing. We feed the messages to your workers and the lines that let them run their machines carry the messages as well. When the rest of the World Bank money comes in, we can build stations all over Africa.”

  “But, uncle—” Adegoke felt a pain in his stomach, as though invisible fingers were squeezing him hard. “Uncle, this is black magic.”

  “What’s happening to her?” Paul asked. For the first few minutes Safrat’s body had been limp, as though she had been in the deepest sleep, but now she was twitching, writhing.

  “She is burning,” the babalawo said. He opened his shoulder bag again, started digging around in it.

  “I should call the foreman,” Paul said. “Disconnect the machine.”

  “Get water. Try to cool her.” The babalawo pulled out his wooden tray and a wooden rattle with a brass head. He shook it in the air, then tapped it against the tray. “Elegua, open our sister’s path. Clear the way for her.”

  Paul opened one of his water bottles, poured a stream onto his sister’s forehead. She jerked her head away as it made contact, but her twitching eased slightly. “Isn’t there any other way we can help her?”

  “Elegua must open the path, and Safrat must pass through,” the babalawo said. “But the orishas never make it easy.”

  The pain was intense, every inch of her body licked by the flames. Her muscles froze at the fire’s touch, trying to recoil from it, but there was nowhere to escape.

  She had a moment’s respite, a cool touch on her face, and in that moment she reached out and seized the chain that led up through the wall of fire. Again words and sentences she barely understood ran through her, but she focused on climbing the chain up and through the wall.

  Now she was in a space like one of the street markets: shapes her eyes could not resolve flew at dizzying speeds through narrow alleys, while lights flashed over the hundreds of doors on every wall. Noise like the shouts of a hundred hawkers and the blare of a thousand car horns surrounded her, almost driving her back into the wall of fire.

  Desperate to escape, she ran to the nearest door; its handle, though, was of a design her hand simply could not grasp. She ran to another door, found it the same: another door, then another, before finally finding one she could open. A chain ran through the opened doorway, and she followed it gratefully, glad to be away from the lights and the noise.

  When she reached the end of the chain she got a sensory feed: just vision and motor feedback, a view of a carpeted floor and the bottom of a sofa.

  The vacuum cleaner by Adegoke’s feet suddenly whirred to life, moved a shuddering foot towards him. His hand jerked, spilling a few drops of whisky onto his trousers.

  “Honestly, nephew,” his uncle said, “do they really still tell you such stuff in the villages?”

  “Uncle, I—” Adegoke looked down nervously at the vacuum cleaner advancing on his foot. “Is that how you won your position here in the city, by magic?”

  His uncle shook his head, turned to the computer sitting on his desk and pressed a key that made the screen light up. “Do not talk of such absurd stuff,” his uncle said. “I won my position because I had family willing to help me, like everyone else in Lagos.” He ran his finger in a spiral pattern over the screen, then tapped it twice; the vacuum went dark and stopped whirring, a few inches from Adegoke’s foot. “I went to Manchester Polytechnic, nephew, and I can tell you: there’s no such thing as magic.”

  The sensory feed cut out before Safrat could see where she was, and she found herself back in the noise and light of the market. Though she was a bit better prepared this time it still was overwhelming, and she went quickly through the next door she was able to open: here she had only a timer input and a dimmer to control, but again she was disconnected and driven back to the market. Through the next door she connected with a speed toggle and feedback motors that controlled sharp metal teeth, again being disconnected after a few moments. Finally she found a safe haven, somewhere with no motors or visual but with numeric and audio input. She took a moment to calm herself—the drugs were not keeping her heartbeat even, she had to remember—only half-listening to the audio feed until she recognized her foreman’s voice.

  The lights dimmed and then flickered as Adegoke’s uncle peered at his computer screen, frowning; then the shredder on top of his wastebasket turned itself on, grinding away at nothing.

  “Uncle, do you see?” Adegoke said, his voice rising. “This is the cost of doing magic you don’t understand.”

  “I told your mother to come with me, to the city,” his uncle said, not turning from the screen. He ran his finger in a long curve over it, tapped it in three spots, and the shredder stopped. “I told her not to raise her children in a backwater, but she wanted to stay by your grandfather.” He took a deep breath, shook his head. “So I promised her, any of her sons that wanted to come to the city, I would get them jobs. She did not tell me she would raise them as savages.”

  Adegoke was silent for a moment, shocked by his uncle’s outburst. He looked around at the now-quiet room, gathered his courage to speak. “You would not talk that way to my mother,” he said. “She taught me to respect the eggun and the orishas, and she would not want to see her brother mixed up in black magic.”

  “For the last time, this is not magic,” his uncle said. He spun the computer around so that Adegoke could see the screen. “This connects to the main server. I control all the machines in my office through that, and the messages to and from the women go through there as well. Do you see? Not magic, just technology. Technology we control.”

  Safrat listened carefully to what the two men were saying. She did not recognize the second voice, the one arguing with the foreman, but it was clear from what he had said that he was the sorcerer. The babalawo had said she must confront him, and she expected this was as close as she was going to get.

  “Let the women go,” the speakerphone said.

  Both Adegoke and his
uncle turned towards it. His uncle reached out for the TALK button, paused when he saw the light was already on. “Who is this?” he said angrily.

  “Let the women go,” the speakerphone said again. “Remove your spell from them, in the name of Eleggua and Oggun.”

  “Do you see, uncle?” Adegoke asked. “Do you see?”

  “Will you shut up?” his uncle said. “This is no spirit. Someone has hacked into our server, and is playing games with us.” He reached for the phone, stopped and turned instead to his computer, swirling his finger over the screen and tapping it a half-dozen times.

  “The women are suffering,” the speakerphone said. “Let them go.”

  Adegoke’s uncle let out a snort. “I’ve sent a message to our computer security team,” he said. “This spirit will not be with us much longer.”

  Unsure what to do now, Safrat withdrew from the phone. She had confronted the sorcerer, but did not think she had changed his mind; she wished she could ask the babalawo for help.

  A piercing wail cut through the noise of the market: police sirens. Down both ends of the alley she was in she saw flashing red lights, had no doubt who they were pursuing. There was no time to find another door that would open, and no reason to think she could escape that way anyway; all she could do was go back down the chain she had climbed, through the wall of fire, and hope she could hide amongst the other women.

  To her surprise the wall did not burn on her way down, and once she was back in the cattle pen she moved close to the bundle of readouts that bore her name. She watched her heart beating, tried to make it slow enough for her to rest.

  Now that she had a moment she could think about what to do. She tried to think of stories she had heard where people outwitted babalawos, but there were none: in the stories, evil babalawos were always undone by their own magic.

  Looking around, Safrat saw all the other women in the cattle pen around her: bundles of hearts and lungs and brains, the sorcerer’s messages being fed in and streaming out of them. She took a breath, readying herself for another trip through the wall of fire.

  “She’s burning again,” Paul said.

  Safrat’s body was twitching again in front of them, her chest rising and falling spastically. A low groan emerged from her throat.

  “More water,” the babalawo said, shaking the bronze rattle over her head. “Elegua, bless our sister . . .”

  Paul shook his head. “It’s too much for her. We have to shut this off.” He looked around at the booth, hoping to find a control he understood, but there was nothing. Instead he ran out into the hall of the telepresence station, looking for a way to contact the foreman.

  The lights brightened, flickered and finally failed: only the glow of the computer screen was visible in the darkened office.

  “Uncle . . .” Adegoke began.

  “Secure the server,” his uncle was shouting at the phone. “I don’t care! Get it done!”

  “What is happening, uncle?”

  “That hacker crashed our server,” his uncle said.

  Adegoke heard the cellphone at his belt buzzing, picked it up. The call display showed it was the emergency phone at the TP station, programmed to autodial his number. “Excuse me, uncle,” he said. “Yes?”

  Two men in short-sleeve shirts ran in the door, both holding flashlights. “I am sorry, Mr. Oyelolo,” one of them said. “We’re getting too much traffic.”

  “Is this the foreman?” the voice on Adegoke’s cellphone said.

  “What about the firewall?”

  “Who is this?” Adegoke asked.

  “They’re getting right through somehow. It’s as though the messages were coming from our own system.”

  “Messages?”

  One of the men read from the screen. “Dear Sir: I have been requested by the Nigerian National Petroleum Company to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter. . . .”

  “My sister Safrat is in booth—hold on—booth eleven,” the voice on the phone said. “Something is wrong. You must shut it off, now.”

  Adegoke frowned, then looked over at his uncle conferring with the other two men. “Fix it,” his uncle was saying. “Block them out.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Oyelolo, but we’re not rated for that,” the other man said. “This must be a problem with the architecture. Only the men from the Bank can fix it.”

  “But if they fix it—if they see—”

  Adegoke lowered his phone, covering the receiver with his palm. “Uncle—” he said.

  His uncle turned to look at him, his eyes hard. “Damn it, boy, can’t you see that I am busy?”

  “I am sorry, uncle,” Adegoke said. He held his phone to his mouth again, spoke softly. “Do not worry,” he said. “I think your sister will be all right in a minute.”

  Safrat rose early, feeling better-rested than she had since coming to Lagos. The telepresence station had been closed ten days now, supposedly for repairs; the word was, though, that the old owners had given it up and let the World Bank run it directly. Meanwhile the foreman had paid everyone for the days when the telepresence station was being repaired, so long as they reported each day to collect their pay, and as the time passed they had all stopped talking in their sleep. Word had only come yesterday that the station was to re-open.

  “I don’t like you going back there,” Paul said. “How do you know it’s any safer?”

  Safrat looked around at the crowded room, the waking and still-sleeping forms around them, and shrugged. The job Tinubu had promised Paul had never materialized, and most days he still sold water; if the foreman had not kept paying her they would have been back to sleeping on a plastic sheet in the alley.

  “What choice do I have?” she asked, and picked up her buckets to take to the borehole.

  THE DRAGON’S LESSON

  Child, why are you crying? Your first bleeding came this morning, and how many gifts did I give you to mark the day—black stone bracelets carved smooth, and a silver necklace so fine a spider might have woven it. Yes, and now you have your own house, as a sister should, walls woven tight against the wind. What reason do you have for tears?

  Ah, I see. No, it is no shame—even a lion feels the bite of a fly, as we say. But you must understand, this is not a time for tears. Let me tell you a story—no, you have not heard it before; it is not one of our stories, but was told to me by one of the Dead Men. Of course not. They wear veils to face their gods, as we do; only their god is the sun, and he is everywhere, so they must go veiled whenever they are outside. Beneath they are as alive as you or me. Some are even handsome—and better lovers than our men, I can tell you.

  Do not look so shocked, child. You are a sister, now, and must learn to deal with men. In truth the Dead Men are not so frightening; they are more like sisters than our men are.

  This story is of a man named Ramaad—I do not know, it is a word in their language. The Dead Men do not live like us. Their men and women live in houses together, and they have many houses built together in large camps. Ramaad was the son of a trader, but his father was not wealthy, and Ramaad knew he would not be given any trading goods when he left home. He had only his friend Yas’al to help him, but he was no better off. His father Inkasar had once been a wealthy trader, travelling far from his home in Akhaduu and returning with the rarest goods, but had somehow lost it all; now he was even poorer than Ramaad’s father, with nothing to trade but the old stories he had heard, for which the other Dead Men in their pity gave him just enough food to live. So Ramaad and Yas’al, as they grew, would spend many hours together around Yas’al’s fire, planning the trading journeys they would someday make and listening to Yas’al’s father tell his stories. To Yas’al they were nothing but a poor old man’s ramblings, but Ramaad listened carefully, for his father had told him Inkasar truly had been to all those far places. There was one story especially that Ramaad remembered: a tale of a creature called
a dragon that flew all over the world, and would bring great riches to anyone who killed it.

  The day came when the two boys were old enough to start on their trading journeys, but Yas’al had to stay at home with his father, whose health was failing; so each of them vowed “I love you like salt”—which is the strongest oath the Dead Men have to swear by, since nothing is any good without salt—and pooled all they had, and it was Ramaad alone who left the village. He took their goods and traded well, returning each season to share what he had gained with Yas’al, and also the stories he had heard—for stories may bring food to a toothless mouth, as he well knew, and everywhere he went he would trade the stories he knew for others. One story, in particular, he hoped to hear more of. Yes, that one. You’re right, that is just what he thought; but for a long time he could learn nothing more, and he began to think that this story, at least, Inkasar had simply invented.

  Years passed, and Ramaad and Yas’al became used to their arrangement; so much so that when Inkasar finally died, Yas’al did not join Ramaad on his journeys, as he had always said he would, but remained at home and took care of their affairs in Akhaduu. Ramaad continued his journeys, slowly building their stock of goods, taking only small risks and keeping them always one step ahead of hunger.

  One day, while on a journey far from home, Ramaad heard of a man who was said to know something about dragons. The man lived several days travel off his route, but Ramaad had never forgotten the story Inkasar had told, and calculated that he could make the journey and still come out ahead on his trades. He made the trip only at night, for fear someone might follow him, and when he reached his destination found only a small hut, which he thought at first must be abandoned, as there was no fire within. Still he went inside, hoping he might somehow recoup his losses, and found there an old man so badly crippled it was a wonder he could feed himself. His legs were missing, and one of his arms, and when Ramaad saw the scars of fire on the man’s face and body he knew why the hearth was cold.