by Wole Soyinka
Hardly a day passed without an “accidental discharge” at both official and moonlighting roadblocks. Weren’t such “accidents” always the fault of stubborn posturing by those grammar-spouting know-alls, who claimed to be impeccably versed in their rights, their civic dignity and legal entitlements? So? The lumpen clodpoles refused to obey the unwritten law of tort on demand, sometimes no more than a hundred naira, equivalent of twenty-five cents U.S. currency, hardly any more than the price of a stick of cigarette in his village, less than the cost of a kilishi wrap. Submission to such a simple law of supply on demand would grant them leave to proceed without hindrance to their destination. As principled porters of the burden of law, those custodians of a people’s safety did not deny that greedy ones were to be found within their ranks, rotten eggs in the basket who demanded five hundred—a full U.S. dollar and a half—and felt a counter offer of a mere two or three hundred—forty to sixty cents—a mortal insult that could be expunged only with an “accidental discharge” that split the egghead wide open and scrambled its yolk on the tarmac. The consequence remained the same—and someone must clean up afterwards. Enter the scavengers. A new statistic entered the local lore of transformative power, while the new industry raced to replenish its stock of consumer material. Menka did not even bother to include the steady carnage on the roads, the voluntary supply line that advertised its latest contribution under lurid headlines—“Ghastly Motor Accident in Kogi State: Seventy-Three Passengers Killed Instantly”; “Luxury Bus Overturns and Catches Fire: A Hundred and Thirteen Passengers Roasted to Death”; “Why the Hasty Burial? Missing: Traders’ Merchandise.” Or pipeline explosions as an existential norm in the heart of cities. They evaporated communities in one sensational flash, hurling sleeping citizens through the midnight air to shower their shreds over ponds and gutter streams of petroleum leakage until scattered communities attain one roaring consummation of fire. Union at last!
Innumerable times Menka found himself musing over the latest crop of human flares, usually with himself fresh but drained from yet another massed surgical marathon. How did it take so long for the new market venture to spring to life and catch fire? Sooner or later, however, the law of supply and demand asserts itself. The process was impeccable, human sensibilities coarsened by the very language of transmission. Being merely trapped in an overturned bus and burnt alive loses place in soup kitchens of empathy, becomes more distinctly palatable when transmitted as being “roasted beyond recognition.” Rare? Medium? Char-grilled or overdone beyond caloric value? Indifference turns to active toleration, butchery turns vicarious, a form of grim but gleeful participatory theatre. How was it possible not to anticipate the logical end, the terminus of remorseless logics of a progressive dulling of sensibilities that underlay the furtive patronage of a once unthinkable commerce? Unthinkable? Just when was it last deemed unthinkable? When did abnormalities cease to be the norm? Difficult to set a date. Mail order of disposables of morbidity—yes, that much Menka had grimly predicted. Orders via the internet—it was bound to be the next stage: I bought it on eBay! Blood and Brain Spatter as Retrieved. Certificate of Authenticity by the XYZ Police Patrol, Attestation by Selfie. Like fast-food restaurants where you could view a menu complete with itemized descriptions rendered near-irresistible by luscious photography. Prized possessions under auction, heirlooms…after all, even Lost and Found has an expiry date. In the end, no claimants, up for auction. Yet even the geniuses of National Pre-eminence had yet to touch the logical destination where, propelled by technology, a market had moved business beyond fumbling beginnings into streamlined online transactions. But it had. It had.
Indeed it had. And it affected all four—inadvertently thrown together in a freakish pursuit in subtle to blatant ways. Duyole, in his immediate all-pistons-firing response, soon dubbed the improvised quartet the Worrisome Foursome, himself at the arrow head as the Guerrilla Worrier—to be distinguished from the Gong o’ Four. It was apt. They worried even routine notifications from their banks, online bargain enticements, real-estate promotions and even familiar online cookies, presumably destined to be understood only by the Codex insiders. Even Zoom invitations to social and professional events. Words, normally innocent, took on suspect connotations. The innovation of drive-throughs—common with pharmacies, McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, etc. elsewhere—where purchases were made through car windows—took on conspiratorial angles—just who were those sitting behind tinted windows, making orders across special in-set kiosks at the end of sectioned-off departments of shopping malls? Only shamelessly tight-fisted Nigerian Big Men went shopping on their own, or accompanying their stewards or housekeepers, yet some had taken to the despised ranks of “a go drive myself” plutocrats. Or else were driven through such sections, made orders through the driver but took immediate possession of both room temperature and refrigerated packages. Orders would have been placed in advance by numbers, by email or telephone. The driver received but passed the goodies immediately to Big Man seated in the “owner’s corner,” where it promptly disappeared into a briefcase, or the voluminous pockets of the agbada.
For Baftau, it amounted to finding a new mission in life. At the mandatory send-off meal for the Jos visitors, the old man revealed that he had abandoned the normal haunts of his infrequent visits to Lagos. Instead he had asked to be driven to the meat markets, strolled through the stalls like any shopper or anonymous inspector, unaccompanied. I wanted to be sure the diabolism hadn’t arrived at the stage of meat-swaps, he confessed. You never know with such people. Costello moved among his local colleagues posing probing questions, eyeing each with unaccustomed suspicion and checking on their shopping habits. At least, he reassured himself, there was no indication yet of any Nigerian-made salami or sausages in the cold cuts sections of the gourmet delicatessens. A change in Duyole was the most observable. He seemed unable to disguise the fact that the situation irked him. He was the acknowledged problem solver, had failed to put his finger instantly on the vital key to unraveling a clearly entrenched marketing revolution, yet he was condemned to be far away from it all in a few days. Bisoye noticed the sharp drop in the normal ebullience of her irrepressible spouse. Still, she put it down to his approaching relocation to the United Nations, a move whose implications only began to sink in as he progressively organized that departure.
It’s like a parasite, Menka mumbled. It enters the body, feeds on it and, in some cases, takes it over completely. Knowing that is bad enough. When it starts to proliferate, where do you begin?
The mood lightened only when Bisoye re-entered the dining room, stood behind Duyole’s chair, and theatrically placed her palm on his forehead, as if to check for any signs of a feverish onset. Her guests, at first puzzled, moved to tease the couple at the show of affection. She shook her head.
“I’ve been worried about him over the past few days. Something is wrong. He never once interfered in my preparations for your send-off lunch—that’s a record. Not once. Not even when it was downgraded from dinner so Papa Baftau could catch his flight back to Jos.”
The ensuing outburst changed the somber atmosphere and brought them back to their accustomed selves. More or less. The good-byes were far more genial, upbeat. Even Menka began to feel reconciled to the implications of his hurried transplant. In any case, Lagos, he was certain, would lead the Boriga thread to its legitimate conclusion. He had known Duyole the longest, recognized his moods, and could bet his silver graduation scalpel that his friend was already up to something. He detected those familiar spells of absence, terminated by a sudden boisterous cover-up as he rejoined the company. In a way, it was almost back to student days and company.
Sated, Kighare returned to his apartment after Jos departed Lagos. He collapsed on the bed, fully clothed, in that blissful state of mind of an active interlude where one is confident that a problem has been assumed by others, no different from the adoption of a problem child. The surgeon no longer felt isolat
ed. In any case he was too full to even make a pretence of attempting a further dent on the debris strewn around the rooms. Within seconds, he was fast asleep. He woke up hours later not knowing where he was, what time of the day it was, only with that out-of-body sensation of believing that you have woken up on a yet undiscovered planet. It was a short-lived sensation.
Suddenly Dr. Menka realized what had woken him up—the sound of an explosion. He sat up, listened intently. There were no further noises. No cries, no panicked movements, no cries for help, no disordered movements, curses, or praise of GodAllah. A veteran of Boko Haram’s embattled northeastern front, he felt something familiar percolate through, even to his half-awakened senses. He got up, listening intently while he walked slowly to the window to look in the direction of the main house. No, there was no sign even of a fire, no flicker of impending flames, but he was certain that the deadly sound had emerged from the main house of the family home.
17.
A Deadly Rivalry
That vitality gone? It did not seem possible. Dissipate, drain away, just like that? Against all his professional valuation, Dr. Kighare Menka fought to persuade himself that the figure lying on the hospital bed, seemingly inert, was bursting inside with the world’s collective energy, only it was under suspended animation. Any moment now the tormenting deactivation would end, his friend Duyole would erupt with new schemes now under hidden gestation, an effervescent laugh that childishly mocked, Et tu, Brute? Fooled you too! Such a force of life knew no restraint, accepted no disabilities. It was not for a lack of contenders in that special league of zero inhibition. All the way from boarding school, many had tried to rein in that spirit. Even he, acknowledged the closest, longest-suffering friend, would sometimes give Duyole a kick under the table. The response was guaranteed—a frontal discomfiture: Stop mangling my ankle! The company would take his side, leaving the restraining toe-cap buried under uproarious laughter. That now-recumbent form knew the effect he created in others. He relished it. It inspired him to exceed his last outrageous provocation on any space of tranquility, any space that was content with simply being left alone. Affronting neither man nor beast. There had been times in those early days when, feeling suddenly overwhelmed, even threatened by such overabundance of sheer zest, Menka felt that his salvation lay in attempting to rival him, to prove that he also could exude such spontaneity of the sheer joy of life, that he had it in him, only preferred to keep it in check, to draw on it for special occasions. He ended up conceding defeat. And who would be the first to rub his nose in it? None other than the gloating provocateur. At heart, Gumchi Kid, you are just a desert hermit on temporary leave of absence.
Duyole Pitan-Payne—and never was a double-barreled calling card rolled out by its owner with such vintage-port relish—Aduyole Pitan-Payne speaking…Yes, Menka nodded ruefully, his friend was right. For that surgeon from a little-known village called Gumchi, the most recent and definitive test had begun barely two months before, his reticent self placed dead centre of public attention and already wilting from the burst of notoriety. Even the handful of appearances he could not successfully escape felt like unseasonal heatwaves of public exposure, left him wishing he had never even heard of a national medal of honour. Or else that it had happened in a different environment where such incidents were taken in stride, nothing different from the new coat of paint that was once acquired by Gumchi’s one and only neighbourhood shop—no increased clientele, no branching out, no diversifications, no media photo shoot, just a one-glance wonder and back to its business of selling cigarettes by the stick, condensed milk by the can, sugar by the cube, salt by the spoonful, mini-piles of kola nut on a tray, the neatly folded flat brown paper wraps of the famous kilishi, dried horsemeat, rounded up with an assortment of knick-knacks that looked more like leftovers rescued from the nearby capital, Abuja, to provide Gumchi a veneer of commercial activity. At such moments Menka missed Gumchi with protesting pangs of unfair deprivation.
He had not resisted when his colleagues denied him a place on the surgical team. He knew them all, had worked with them in the past. He was capable of banning emotions to one side, cutting up his friend, probing and sewing him up again. His hands would be steady as on any other patient, but the others firmly said no. They gave him a stool in the theatre, and he watched the tutored motions of their hands, sometimes the expressions on their masked faces. He followed the silent communication between them, born of decades of practice, and knew exactly what their hands were doing—probing, cutting, suturing. All that he had been able to bear. Indeed, without handling a pair of forceps, probing a tissue to extract one foreign body after another, he felt his hands at one with theirs and knew his friend was in reassuring hands. It all seemed unreal, he as spectator while others did the work, but he admitted it was best that way. He knew when the patient went into shock, then slipped into a coma. When it was all over, they wheeled him out together, settled him in intensive care. Now Menka was merely keeping watch. The coma was into a second, then a third day. All he could do was run reels of distractions through his mind—anything but dwell on prospects. Just keep him alive, both physically and in mind.
The impossible task was to detach himself from that patient, leaving only the friend, the same overqualified surrogate whose list of visitors was tightly controlled. And they were compelled to wear surgical masks to reduce the risk of infection. Infection? The surgeon found such a concern ironic—a precaution raised in the wrong direction. Any infection would be nothing more than fair returns. This friend had infected all and sundry with his rampaging virus of existence. It seemed unfair to others. Now was payback time when that antiseptic space, fenced off by clinical green screens, should be humming with friends, colleagues, and gate-crashers, lending him vibrations of strength, but they had all been banished. Resisting to the last, even his wife, Bisoye, had been forced out on that first day, but only into another room, assigned a bed and sedated until relations could come and take her home. She returned to a home where messages of sympathy and public outrage had replaced the stack of invitation cards then being readied for distribution. Saturday that weekend had been designated the multi-mega-magnum party by none other than the patient himself. And this was despite the event being supposedly conceded to his wife’s less gregarious charge—menu, invitation list, band, décor, event souvenirs, and whatever else defined a Pitan-Payne splurge. It was, after all, her initiative in the first place—a send-off bash for her irrepressible spouse, headed for a United Nations assignment.
That was once-upon-forgotten time. Reality in progress left her with futile protests as that very object of celebration took it over, turning it into a triple-pronged affair. There was now Menka’s success to celebrate, Duyole reminded wife and household, gardeners, callers, and guard dogs indiscriminately. He thinks he’s one up on me, but you wait, he has another thing coming. I intend to bury his award under this shindig. Next the return of Damien, the prodigal son, so get your Bible arithmetic right, darling girl—that calls for the slaughter of two fatted calves, one for Damien, one for Menka. Think I’ve forgotten? Menka’s crime, at least thirty years without hope of remission, remained an enduring excuse. The Gumchi Kid had chosen to defect after his return from graduation in Bristol, heading north where his home was instead of joining his “twin” down south in Lagos. Even when Menka was passing through Lagos en route to somewhere else, or stopping over on return, a mere sighting of him was a return of the prodigal son, each celebration more prodigal than the last.
Factually—and it was wise always to check on Pitan-Payne—the designation, as it happened, was more appropriate for Damien, the long-lost son, who had surfaced in the home under mysterious circumstances, already long in the tooth at thirty-six but kitted out with a wife and two children. The mystery was no such thing to Menka. He still winced every time he recalled the discreet negotiations that ultimately succeeded in reinserting the smooth rolling stone into the family hearth, overcoming fierce
opposition from Duyole’s sister, whose right of possession seemed even more violently embedded than anyone ever remotely discerned in his wife, Bisoye. She was, after all, mistress of the home, and thus the one who had the right of first refusal, as was muttered and bruited around in baffled accents from both interventionists and armchair commentators. Even preceding her in entitlement logic would be the two products of his early “off-shore” marriage, Katia and Debbie, from a black Canadian. They voiced no resentment of the family addition—more accurately, revelation. Selina brushed all such counters aside. Only after these breasts have withered, she thundered as she cupped both breasts in her hands as warning of a long wait ahead for all such optimists. You want to feel how firm they still are? And that’s no Botox! She threatened to camp on the couple’s doorstep night and day sooner than have an “imposter” pollute the Pitan-Paynes’ vintage bloodline. That bastard son and his second-generation white-trash bastards? God forbid bad thing! Even the inevitable capitulation was of the most ungracious, bitter, and unforgiving mode. She boycotted the Pitan-Payne home for months until called to order by the family patriarch, Pop-of-Ages—name acquired from his favorite hymn, “Rock of Ages”—to whom one and all deferred, some of the time.
The pseudo-prodigal on bedside watch felt his shoulders sag as one pummeled all over again from the sheer recollection of his family meddling, albeit on passionate invitation by Duyole himself, his mediation embraced with relief by all, including Sister Selina. Menka was her face-saving deus ex machina parachuted directly from heaven. It elevated him instantly in her private family rating—still marginal, no more than an honorary status, but still, thenceforth entitled to be referred to as “family doctor.” There already was one, his ancient portfolio routinely extended down from the patriarch himself to cover every new blood addition or tolerated attachment. However, it did not hurt to be able to indulge in the occasional throw-aside—As I was saying to one of our family doctors, you know, the famous Dr. Menka, the celebrated surgeon…