Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  “I believe your aburo is fed up with politics,” Madame Messalina replied. “I was explaining that if he wanted to throw away all we’ve given him and become a street rat again, he would have to return to where—”

  “It’s not even like that!” I interrupted.

  “So how is it like? Explain yourself to us!”

  “What’s going on?”

  We all turned toward the voice that had conveyed the question, and the major general stared back at us all, looking unusually disheveled: hair unbrushed, shirt unstarched, and composure unavailable.

  “Well, speak up!” Madame Messalina urged me.

  I swallowed a few balls of saliva and exchanged the sweat on my palms several times over. “I don’t think I can run for president anymore.”

  “Oh, that’s absolutely perfect,” the major general said. I was not sure if he was being sarcastic. I was not sure anyone else in the room was sure, either; their eyes all looked as bloodshot as mine. “I’m just coming in from Abuja. Those soldiers have some big balls.”

  “You didn’t say you had to be in Abuja,” Alhaji said. “Why weren’t we in on this?”

  “There’s nothing to get your punani wet about. I just got the phone call this morning to show up as quickly as possible.”

  “Why are you always harassing me?” Alhaji exploded from his seat, shooting the skinny young man on his lap into the air. “What is wrong with being a homosexual? Can I not fuck whomever I want to fuck? Does it make me less of a man?”

  “Of course you can’t fuck whomever you want to fuck,” the major general replied coolly. “If it was okay for everyone to fuck whomever they pleased, then pedophiles wouldn’t be in prison. They feel a natural urge to fuck children, right? It’s the way they are. They can’t fight their nature. Just because you can’t be imprisoned for it because you have brother faggots making laws doesn’t make it right. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll have pedophiles in power, too, and fucking children will be okay.”

  “Oh, behave, we’re not here to fool around,” the major general’s other friend said. “What was the emergency in Abuja?”

  “Well, the good news is, there is going to be a presidential election announcement next week. The bad news is, the head of state himself will be running.”

  “That’s not possible,” Madame Messalina muttered.

  “I wasn’t going to be the one to argue that with him,” the major general replied as he came close to me and collected the whiskey from my hand, taking a swig straight from the bottle. “Each political party is going to declare unanimous support for his bid and then find a way to scramble into all the other positions of his new government that his cronies don’t take for themselves.” He took another swig and allowed the news to simmer into our senses. “You won’t be president after all,” he continued, talking in my direction. “Maybe you’ll have to settle for a senator or honorable or something, a position with less pressure. But you’ll be fine. I believe in you.”

  “But I don’t want to be a senator or honorable or anything at all,” I reiterated. “I just want to be done with all of this.”

  He slapped my face lightly and almost choked on his whiskey while struggling to contain his laughter. “What happened to your balls, young man? Did Alhaji take them? Did he touch them at all? And you had better be joking, because if you aren’t, I’ll have to really cut them off for you.”

  “Don’t scare aburo,” Alhaji said. He was seated again, and the skinny young man was atop his lap with a palm hidden in Alhaji’s buba. “It’s like this, ehn, we spent about a hundred million naira alone canvassing for support for you, and your campaign has not even started, they have not even announced the elections yet. And over half of this money went to the people in the military regime. Will we get it back from the Federal Reserve with a withdrawal slip over the counter at the Central Bank? You have to get into power and reward us with contracts now! What’s all this talk about changing your mind?”

  “This doesn’t even make any sense,” I said. It was hard to put a lid on my confusion, which was quickly turning into rage. “First, how do we just wake up one morning and decide to take sides with the military regime we’ve been fighting for years?”

  “Major General, you’ve stuffed his brain with too much money,” Madame Messalina chided. “The young man thinks he’s attained a position to question us.”

  “Oh, yes, we’ve been fighting them for years,” said the major general. “Do you expect us to go stark raving mad now that they’ve given us what we all really wanted?”

  “Having the head of state leading a democracy isn’t the democracy we all really wanted,” I said.

  “Democracy?” Major General’s friend cried. “The last time there was a democracy, I was a civil servant, and I still managed to send all my children to the top schools in England. And I’ve had five acres of land in Equatorial Guinea for the last ten years, but a democracy wouldn’t build and roof my mansion. It’s not a democracy or the lack of a democracy that gives you anything in this bloody country. It’s a seat at the table, and that’s all we’ve really been fighting for.”

  I looked all around the room—the marble walls and glass chandeliers, the Persian rugs and Italian furniture, the testament of one person’s wealth and a hundred persons’ poverty—and I wept. “Someone has to stand up to all this madness.”

  “You want to stand up for the people? You want to stand up for the people, abi?” Madame Messalina echoed.

  I noticed her stand up slowly, I watched her move toward me every step of the way, even when she collected the bottle of whiskey from the major general’s hand, but I had no idea what was going on till she tilted the bottom of the bottle to take a swig for herself before bashing my head with the hardened glass. I felt the blood seeping out slowly from my skull as I raised both hands to deliver my head from the repeated blows smashing against my wrists.

  “Stand up now, you bastard!” she screamed as I crouched slowly and fell to the floor. I could hear Tessy screaming; it drowned out the other words in the background as my vision went black. In the darkness, my body moved. I was dragged by my wrists till someone picked up my legs. The voices in the background resumed when my body stopped again. Tessy was still screaming. But when I felt a sharp pang on my right elbow, my eyes jolted open and everything became clear again.

  “I’ll cut off your hands before you can think of cutting off the hand that fed you,” Madame Messalina screamed, butcher knife in hand and arm in the air. The knife came down again on my elbow, and another sharp pang of pain shot through my body. “This would take the whole day,” she complained as she tossed aside the knife and stormed out of the room.

  Alhaji and the major general’s other friend pinned me down on the hard wooden surface; the cabinets and sink were on the other side of the kitchen, where the major general had his hand placed over Tessy’s mouth. “Please, please, calm down,” Major General was mumbling to her. “He fucked up already. There’s nothing I can do. If you don’t shut up, you’ll probably join him, and I can’t afford to see you go like this, baby. I’d beg her if it would solve anything, but you know how she is when she gets—”

  Madame Messalina returned wielding a cylinder of cooking gas, leaning it against her leg as she dragged it, and both the major general and Tessy froze silent. She slammed the cylinder on the kitchen counter, just beside where my arm was, and pressed the head of the valve with the sharp edge of her knife, letting out a rush of gas. The pain this time was freezing cold, and it tingled as the room clouded with white propane. I pulled and kicked, struggling with every bit of life left in me till the pain stopped, but the gas kept on choking.

  The mist cleared and the voices returned. Tessy was screaming again, and unbelievably, somehow, my right arm was still pinned down, covered in a white flaky cast. Madame Messalina slammed the cylinder on my whitened arm, but I felt nothing. I looked around the room, begging for someone, anyone, to come to my rescue. But each and every one was filled with a
s much dread as I was.

  Madame Messalina slammed, and slammed, and slammed again, and did not stop until I started feeling pain again. This time the sharp pang did not go away. And when I looked at my arm, I saw nothing past my elbow. The white flaky cast faded into a ring of blood, and the other half of my arm lay unmoving a few meters away. The whole room, even Tessy, was silent save the chorus of woe that bellowed from my throat.

  “Get this corpse out of here,” Madame Messalina muttered as the metal cylinder dropped on the floor with a loud empty echo. “In fact, you know what? Drop it off with Yisa Adejo. Tell him it’s a gift. And get a haircut before you come back here. I’ll need someone for the meetings this week, and I can’t have you representing me looking like a gorilla.”

  “Ah,” the major general’s friend pleaded with a forced smile, “but my wife says I should stay away from the barber for some time, so my hairline can grow out again. She says I’m becoming bald.”

  Madame Messalina asked, “And what does a haircut have to do with a receding hairline?”

  “It’s like that deforestation thing they’re always talking about on the Tuesday-morning show on NTA. They say if you stop cutting down the trees, they’ll keep growing and growing and one day the forest will be full again. And it will be good for the environment and all of us.”

  “Ode. Trees are not like hair. How many times do you see hair falling off the scalp like unripe guava? Every bloody day! And how many times do you see trees falling off the face of the earth like unripe guava? Exactly. You can’t outsmart a receding hairline, you idiot. In fact, you know what? Remain with Yisa Adejo when you get there. Tell him you’re a gift, too.”

  When Madame Messalina walked out of the room, Tessy made to run toward me, but the major general held her back and clasped her head between his palms. “You know you can’t mention this to anyone. Not your father or mother or even your bathroom mirror.” His hands began shaking furiously and he broke down crying, kissing her cheeks and mixing his tears with hers. All the while, Tessy’s eyes remained fixed on my amputated arm.

  Epilogue

  Still 1998

  Of all the troubled misadventures of my Nigerian existence, the affair I reflect upon with least enthusiasm is my going to a prison cell. Not my first venture, which was at the age of eight, when I followed the prison-support team of my friend’s church to evangelize to inmates back in 1983, even though that particular venture was quite uneventful. Not my second venture, which was about nine years later, the same night I spoke to Anikulapo. It was my very last venture that was my soul’s greatest gloom, the same night I caught a little glimpse of Yisa Adejo.

  I could not remember leaving Madame Messalina’s kitchen, but by the time I awoke, I was out of her house altogether. My head bobbled around in the darkness, and it continued even as my eyes opened and struggled to focus. I was seated in the back of a moving pickup truck on a road that had a thick canopy of vegetation on both sides and a cloud of upset dust trailing the vehicle. Someone was with me in the back of the truck, and when I lifted my gaze toward the person, I saw her face, barely visible in the waking sun—Zeenat. It had been years since her face appeared to me last, and still the confidence in her smile fueled me with hope. The world we had shared was thoroughly different from the world I lived in now. Maybe it was for the best that death, the fleet-footed messenger of God, had couriered her innocent soul from this world of ambition, greed, and the wrath of men. She smiled at me. I tried to reciprocate, but a flood of pain gushed from the corner of my lips to my whole face, and my eyes fluttered shut again.

  I woke again, still seated, but there was no bouncing around. I was in a huge room, an office complete with a few bookshelves and portraits cramped side by side along the wall, a wooden desk and two chairs, one on either side. A few men in matching khaki outfits took turns washing their hands in a bowl of water on the desk and proceeded to munch on roasted maize piled up just beside the bowl of water.

  “Ehen! Oga Yisa,” one of the men forced out midchew. “Your wife called as you deh wele the freshman, I think she wanted to know what you wanted for dinner.”

  “What’s there to think about? It’s either she wanted to know or she didn’t.” They stared at each other inconclusively for a while. “It doesn’t matter. I won’t be home for dinner. But today is Tuesday, so be sure you don’t forget to take Jaja to teach the children math. And have a guard stay with him if you don’t want to be there. I can’t have a criminal alone with my children.”

  I felt like a fly on the wall, listening in on break-time banter between civil servants in a government office. What seemed out of place was the naked man floating upside down in the middle of the room, bound at the feet with a steel chain, hanging from the ceiling fan. He moaned as he tilted from side to side, and with each oscillation, a drop of blood dripped off his forehead into a stainless-steel bowl on the floor. I could feel bile rising through my throat at the sordid sight, but before it could reach the back of my tongue, my eyes fluttered shut again.

  The next time I awoke, I was lying naked on the floor of a small room opposite another naked body, under the keen scrutiny of a dim yellow lightbulb. I heard metal clanging against metal, and a door in one of the walls slid open. A man strode in whistling a tune—it took me a second to recognize Lagbaja’s “Konko Below” even in my state—and he hauled the naked body opposite me out of the room, leaving behind a dark red liquid trail. He left the door open and returned a few seconds later and emptied a bucket of whitish something on the floor where the naked body had been. I recognized the something instantly from the scent alone—concentrated antiseptic disinfectant—from my boardinghouse days when I would sneak into the bathroom during afternoon siesta, right after the cleaners had finished washing the place with disinfectant and before the other boys rushed in to shower before afternoon prep, and I would masturbate to months-old thoughts of Zeenat like a caveman who’d just discovered fire.

  “You don wake, abi?” The whistling man had returned. “E be like say you don ready to join your people. Oya stand up, halele!”

  He forced me to my feet and dragged me out of the room. We went past a few shut doors, all the way to the end of the corridor, where an old man sat cross-legged behind a desk.

  “Where the uniform?” the whistling man asked, and the older guy pointed to a black polythene bag leaning against his desk on the floor.

  “Oya wear cloth quick quick before Oga Yisa change e mind,” the whistling man continued. “We suppose don wele you as you enter, but Oga Yisa talk say one army man dey come tomorrow to pay for your sins. But if tomorrow come and nothing enter my pocket, I go still wele you my own. I no care if the army man wan marry your sister, if e like make e marry you join sef, I go still wele you and nothing go happen.”

  Though I had not finished dressing by the time his rant was over, he had started walking away, so I had to follow him as I tried to lace my oversize trousers. We went past a few more shut doors, an open yard littered with a few trees and benches. Two scruffy dogs retreated from our path, scurrying behind a little zinc shed and causing the loud eruptive flight of about half a dozen blackbirds. The noise had all fizzled out when we reached the other end of the yard, the gateway to the boulevard of prison cells. We went unnoticed through the chatter and odor booming from both sides of the dividing corridor to the second-to-last gate on the right.

  “I suppose don give you food make you chop before you enter cell.” I drew nearer to hear the whistling man under all of the noise. “But Oga Yisa talk say dem cut your hand comot because you deh bite the hands wey deh feed you.” His head recoiled in laughter as the iron gates swung open. “Oya enter quick quick, halele!”

  All the inmates remained quiet and unmoving as long as the warden was in view, but the moment he was out of sight, their eyes pried at the new prey. A few inmates circled cautiously and whispered to each other. Only one of them closed in. He was not much bigger than I was, but his uniform was much more fitted; his overgrown be
ard did little to hide a few scars on his face and seemed to taper down his chest like a necktie. My imagination wandered in search of what crimes he must have committed to bring him here.

  “Welcome, Ihechi,” he whispered, placing one hand on my shoulder and lifting my half-arm with the other. “The wardens had told me someone new was coming. When they mentioned your name, I thought it was impossible, but I told them to bring you to my cell nonetheless.”

  I looked into his eyes and surveyed his face to no end, but it was the voice replaying over and over in my head that found the answer. “Mara . . . dona?” I stammered. “Bee Money . . . Capone?”

  “Inside here, it’s Okunrinmeta.” He smiled. “Don’t ask me why or how. Even though I’m in charge here, I’m not the one who chooses the names.”

  He put his arms around me in a warm embrace, and I sobbed into his uniform, “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You think it’s only hardened criminals in Kirikiri?” he whispered into my ear. “Accountants are here, executive directors, and journalists, too. Many are in our age grade. It doesn’t take much to get in here under this regime.”

  I tried to force out words through the tears and spittle. “This is injustice.”

  “Injustice is only injustice when it happened in the past. This is the present. There’s no judge to decide justice in the present, just witnesses who are as powerless as victims.” He lifted my head up and pointed a path through the crowd. “Come, let me show you something.”

  We walked through the maze of inmates—each of the many faces a labyrinth on its own of different stories, all manners of fortune and misfortune encrypted into their smiles, frowns, laughter, scars, and wounds—to the far corner of the room, and right there on the floor I saw Mendaus and Pastor’s son folded knees in arms on the floor. Mendaus flinched as he saw me and tried to hide his face away, but there was no hiding place.