“Don’t you beat all,” Santiago had said before the ceremony as the two of them rushed around helping to decorate the dank, smelly barn, tossing flower petals and silver foil stars over everything. “The white princess from the dark continent.” Flannery had given him the finger.
“I can’t believe he asked you to sing effing Celine Dion for his wedding,” said Santiago now, his breath warm in her ear as they danced sloppily to the country music.
At the ceremony earlier, she’d stood in front of the small crowd, holding a scratchy mike and singing “My Heart Will Go On.” At Dryden House, Flannery and Alyce had devised a drinking game for the film Titanic, which had just come out, and forced everyone to play it over and over, Celine Dion belting out the cheesy song in a continuous loop on the sound track. The game was mostly based around character names, which the actors repeated ad nauseam in every piece of dialogue.
“Jack,” mimicked Flannery in a high-pitched voice of faux desperation, trying not to trip over Santi’s feet.
“Rose,” said Santiago in a low-pitched voice of the same.
“Jack!”
“Rose!”
Flannery was trying to have fun. As she danced, she told herself she wanted to fit in with her old friends again, though Alyce was more and more a stranger and her sister sick. Santiago was the only person who didn’t seem to have changed, and an appreciation for that welled up in her. Even when they were all nineteen and took a bus downtown to the tattoo parlor called Forbidden Fruit on Sixth Street, Santiago was the only other one who didn’t chicken out, getting a fleur-de-lis tattooed on his forearm. Santiago was always game.
“We’re friends, aren’t we?” They continued to dance. Flannery immediately wished she hadn’t asked. The booze talking again.
“Is that what you call it?” He sent her into a twirl.
Flannery knew her desire to be adored by ex-boyfriends wasn’t admirable. She remembered with shame harassing a sad-eyed Australian conservation volunteer whom she’d ceremoniously dumped after only a few weeks of dating, later inviting him to events, showing up unannounced at his door, constantly calling to check up on him. One day he’d finally said, “Look, it’s not just a figure of speech when I say I don’t want to see you again.”
With Santiago, she really thought living in Nigeria would give the grout of friendship time to set, slowly filling in the cracks and gaps left between them. As they stepped and twirled on the sawdust—drunkenly, neither of them particularly good in the first place—she thought about those summers in grad school when they would shack up together, spending nights on booze or cocaine or ecstasy, turning his apartment into a two-person rave, filling it with dozens of plants they didn’t know how to take care of, bought impulsively from the greenhouse at the twenty-four-hour big box store. Santiago would drill holes in the ceiling, and they’d hang plastic potted ivies and peonies and begonia, which they’d drape with white Christmas lights, dancing wildly beneath them, shouting out the windows at people walking down below.
“I don’t even have a fingerprint,” she remembered saying dreamily once as they came down, chain-smoking on the bed, listening to the Smiths over and over on the CD player. She was referring to the background check for her teaching assistantship when the DPS told Flannery her prints were incomplete—not enough curling grooves to distinguish her identity from all the others in the system. “I’m a ghost. I’m not even here.” She’d liked the idea of being between spheres, a free agent.
“Oh, you’re here all right,” Santiago had replied, putting his hand up her skirt, along the inside of her legs that she propped on the bed frame, her legs that went on forever. She’d laughed and kissed him then, saying, “Wherever we are, it’s amazing.”
As they danced, Flannery gripped Santiago more tightly.
Flannery pressed her cheek against the cool glass of the passenger-side window. Clouds covered the moon and, at the edge of town, the streetlights barely gave off enough light to drive by. As dark trees moved against dark sky, they looked like shadow puppets acting out a tale of horror, screeching and clawing at the air.
When Santiago dropped Flannery at her apartment, he nodded but his gaze remained on the steering wheel, punishing her for not inviting him inside. She knew better—Santiago was an enabler. She squeezed his shoulder before getting out, leaving another trace of her half-formed fingerprints.
The neighborhood was still, and the air carried the echo of an accordion from the cinder-block Tejano bar behind her apartment building. Closing the particleboard door behind her, Flan tossed her dress into the hamper and turned on the shower. Showers wasted water compared to bucket baths, but she loved them. She remembered when she became old enough to take one by herself, how the light shot horizontally through the tiny window near the ceiling, illuminating the steam. The beads of water looked like dust but moved differently when she blew on them, somersaulting more slowly, with a delayed reaction, or what she would later learn to call viscosity. Back then, it was also how she imagined her mother’s brain: clouding up with steam, becoming obscured and slow.
Funny to think that she might have become a scientist because of the curiosity that began in her parents’ beige-and-pink shower stall. When Flannery had focused on atmospheric dynamics in graduate school—her dissertation was on how Arctic snow melt affected atmospheric patterns of humidity—and began to study snowflakes, her family raised eyebrows. A snow scientist from Abilene, Texas? Where a white Christmas was only an Elvis song on the radio? But maybe that was why she loved it so much. All precipitation was magical to her, extraordinary. On the rare afternoon it rained in Abilene, it was a holiday; the dust settled and everything smelled clean. This experience was something Flannery had in common with Kunle, with all Nigerians who lived in the hot and dry northern half of the country.
During graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, in the Department of Climate System Sciences (they called students in the more traditional meteorology program “weather wankers”), Flannery joined a lab run by a scientist doing work on the North Pole. She liked the idea of working with ice, with the process of freezing and the idea of stasis, however brief—life suspended.
Flannery turned out to be pretty good at her job, but after six months on an isolated Arctic research outpost gathering data for her dissertation, she wanted to travel somewhere warm before applying for the postdoctoral fellowships that were the natural next step for her research—and that would probably send her back to the North Pole or the Klondike or Siberia. When a grad school friend invited her to join the team of the current international EOP, intended to study changes in monsoon activity in West Africa as a result of climate change, she thought it would be a nice working vacation, a chance to get a tan.
EOP stood for “enhanced observing period,” when scientists interested in a similar phenomenon pooled their expertise and descended upon a particular area with ships and planes and satellites and land-roving equipment to spend a year measuring and recording an enormous amount of data at once. An EOP required an army of workers, hiring gobs of recent PhDs like Flannery as well as local scientists.
Flannery was assigned to lead a team performing measurements of air and soil in the Sahel region of Nigeria, stationed at the university in Adamanta. One afternoon, Flannery and a colleague were scheduled to teach three local scientists, including Kunle, how to interpret readouts from the machines before they buried them in the sand to protect the delicate processing chips from intense afternoon sun. Kunle was a no-show.
After the session, Flannery volunteered to follow up and was given vague directions to his room on the outskirts of the university campus, a long, winding walk through dilapidated concrete academic buildings surrounded by the red and yellow blossoming Pride of Barbados, which did its best to camouflage the university’s decline.
Arriving at an area of wild vegetation dotted with houses and residence halls, Flannery eventually stumbled into the ramshackle, overgrown yard strung with crisscrossing clotheslines. Kunle�
�s room was in a BQ, or “Boys’ Quarters,” a term for the small building adjacent to a residence that, during colonial times, had been used to house servants or “houseboys.” BQs—and his was no different—were usually a row of three or four rooms connected by a slab porch, which, since there wasn’t a proper kitchen, was where inhabitants set up hot plates and buckets of water.
When Kunle pulled open the door, Flannery held out a small bag of oranges, saying, “Ekaaro.” To her surprise, standing in front of her was the same preppy man she’d met at the canteen a few days before. Kunle smiled and invited her inside the tiny room he shared with three other graduate students, all from his home state directly to the east. There was one mattress on the floor (they took turns sleeping at different times), one desk, and above it a shelf stacked to the ceiling with photocopied textbooks. There was a small, fuzzy television set and a wardrobe piled with suitcases, which the men lived out of since there wasn’t space to truly unpack.
He offered her a corner of the mattress, and she sat down primly, while he lay back against the wall, sighing with his whole body. He was covered in sweat and his face looked hollowed out, which, along with his close-cropped hair, accentuated his prominent cheekbones.
“Malaria?” she asked.
He nodded.
“In Adamanta?” The unique plateau elevation of the city meant most mosquitoes couldn’t survive there.
“I went home last week.” He smiled. “To my village.”
Despite his looking weak with sickness, Flannery could still feel the strong pull of attraction. His pleated slacks and soccer jersey were endearingly mismatched, and she had a strange and embarrassing urge to take them off and wash his feverish body with a cool, wet cloth. She wanted him, not sexually yet, but in some generalized feeling of possessiveness.
“I’m sorry I’m not in a better state. It’s not often I get house calls from Americans. How do you find Nigeria?” This was a question everyone asked Flannery and the two other Americans working with her.
“I like it. I’m still here.” She flipped through the stack of photographs he offered as entertainment: Kunle as an undergrad lined up with friends and girlfriends; Kunle in the northwest during his Youth Service years.
“You try. You try small, small. But for how much longer?” he asked. The implication: foreigners always swooping down, rearranging things, then leaving.
They lounged together in easy silence, her original mission forgotten. One of Kunle’s neighbors from Cross River State stuck her head in to ask if they’d eaten—“Done chop?” They spooned up her Calabar stew, sucking the periwinkle snails from the shells and scooping big chunks of leafy greens with balls of soft fufu made from boiled cassava.
She remembered watching through the doorway the brassy light of dusk slice through the branches of a mango tree and thinking: What sort of horrible, beautiful place is this? She remembered touching Kunle’s forehead, burning with fever, and closing her eyes. Had she thought of her mother then? Of her mother’s worst days and her own many nights waiting for fevers to break and medicines to kick in? Of discovering her mother standing in the middle of the street without pants on, delirious, and leading her back inside? Maybe she did. But she had not yet realized that sickness follows you to the ends of the earth.
Running a bar of oatmeal soap across her chest, Flannery was still surprised how easy it was to once again take for granted all the normal amenities found even in a low-income housing block in the States. Showers and dependable electricity, running potable water, paint on the walls—not that some people didn’t live that way in Nigeria, like the wealthy who could afford their own generators.
On the other hand, it really hadn’t been difficult to adjust to daily life in Nigeria, either. She’d come to enjoy the tiny frogs that emerged from the drain in her kitchen sink, reading by candlelight or headlamp, the act of bathing by scooping bowls of water from a plastic bucket and pouring them over her head, even the daily trips to the market on a public transportation system that consisted of a fleet of rusting vans, their doors askew, women leaping on and off with babies tied securely to their backs in sheaths of vibrant-colored cloth.
After her shower, Flannery climbed into bed and cracked the sheet so it ballooned up and then floated back down, settling over her. There was the sound of police sirens a few blocks away. She searched the nightstand for her cell phone. It was eight hours later in Nigeria. Kunle would probably be reading in his lab, waiting for the electricity to flicker back on so he could work. She dialed his number, sixteen digits long.
“How body?” were the first words from his mouth. His voice was a space heater radiating warmth that flushed through her body, and she tried to picture him, graceful and solid, on the other side of the phone, eyes shining like mica.
“Body fine-o,” she said.
Flannery rehashed the wedding for him. How the ceremony itself had taken place outside the barn beneath an old live oak strung with bits of mirror to catch the sunlight. How the processional was played on a harmonica, and the whole event started late and was poorly organized, which surprised no one who knew Steven and Lou. The booze was free.
“Why didn’t she wear white? I mean, except for the obvious reason, oh.” His voice didn’t sound normal. He sounded exhausted. Sad.
“She’d tell you it was because she prefers the color green, but the real reason is that Lou and Steven sneer at convention.”
In Kunle’s culture, it was common to have two weddings—one following the Yoruba tradition of dancing, throwing money, and gifting yam, and another, the “church wedding,” observing Christian tradition. When they first became lovers, Kunle had been surprised that none of her close friends back home were religious. Technically, Santiago and Harry were Catholic and Brandon was Muslim, but they weren’t practicing. In Nigeria, Western religion had become ubiquitous, and even most academics were ardent churchgoers. Flannery tagged along with Kunle sometimes because she liked the singing, but otherwise it was an issue upon which they agreed to disagree. To Flannery the whole thing seemed like a strange imperialistic holdover, but to Kunle it was the only good thing they’d gotten from their colonial years under the British.
“I’ve been thinking about places we could get married when you come,” she said. “There’s a city park near the air force base where the trees are full of wild peacocks.”
“I was denied the visa.”
She closed her eyes. How many disappointments could one month bring?
Kunle told her he had waited in line for two days at the U.S. Consulate in Lagos only to have an American in a suit look at his application for two minutes and shake his head, pointing at the insufficient balance in his bank account. Kunle felt humiliated, the man implying Flannery’s letter of invitation meant nothing, that he couldn’t be trusted to come home. As though he wanted so badly to live in America he’d do it by subterfuge. “I wish I could be there for you and your sister.” To Kunle, family was family, it didn’t matter that he’d never met Molly in person.
They were silent for a while. Along with the disappointment, Flannery had to admit that she also felt a little relief. Now she wouldn’t have to merge her two worlds. Now she couldn’t be blamed for choosing just one: the one that lit every fiber of her being on fire, not the one that dragged her through a mire of sickness and guilt.
“I won’t be in the States much longer anyway,” she said, willing it to be true. Technically, she could return to Nigeria without funding, but her savings were almost gone. What would they live on?
“You’ve had a breakthrough.” Hope crept into his voice.
“Sort of.” Lying in bed, Flannery wished love wasn’t so hard on a person. She wished it didn’t make everything else so unimportant by comparison. “I might be able to do more of the work from Nigeria than we thought.”
“Light will be a problem.”
“We’ll have to get a good generator.” She wrapped the sheet tightly around her, pretending he was holding her the way he like
d to, one arm woven through hers.
They spent the next hour doing this—fixing hypothetical problems associated with transferring her project back to Nigeria. Whether she could afford the new malaria meds that didn’t give one nightmares or panic attacks. How to go about shipping special equipment for the lab and dashing—bribing—it through the port.
Eventually Flannery became tired, struggling to keep her eyes open. She needed rest to attack her work in the lab tomorrow. To find answers. Plus, she was supposed to help Brandon photograph the snowflakes he was growing via electricity, which was the least she could do after how he’d set her up in his institute, giving her this chance to use the machines that would eventually—they had to!—arrive at something useful.
“Tell me about the palm-wine drunkard,” demanded Flannery playfully, yawning, hovering on the verge of sleep. International phone cards were so cheap that Kunle liked to stay on the phone while she fell asleep; he said he listened to the rocking of her breath for long minutes before hanging up.
“You know it better than I do now.”
“Pretty please.”
And so he began: “One day the palm-wine drunkard was drinking a jug of wine, when someone came running to tell him his tapper had fallen to his death from the top of a palm tree. The palm-wine drunkard decided he must travel to Dead Town in order to bring him back home. . . .”
SANTIAGO
I can crush some pancakes,” said Harry, “but that’s it.”
“Which is exactly why I invited you.” Santiago punched a button on his keychain to unlock the car. They were on their way to a cooking class at the organic fortress known as Foodie Farm. “To make me look good by comparison.”
Distracted, Santiago narrowly missed running over the heap of construction tools in the corner of the garage as they pulled out of the driveway. Santi was still in the process of renovating the fire station, but money was becoming a serious problem—one of the many reasons he couldn’t refuse Harry when he’d called a month earlier to say, “You know how we just gave up our downtown office and decided to work out of the fire station even though it isn’t exactly done yet? Well, how would you feel if the boys and I crashed there with you for a few, I don’t know . . . let’s say weeks?” Harry and Alyce’s house in town was rented until next June, and anyway, he said he wanted the boys to think of this as a vacation. Boys’ camp at Uncle Santi’s.
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