She is twenty years old, and behind her, on a laboratory’s cold slab, lies a cadaver. His face and chest are hidden under a blue sheet, as if that could shield him from the indignity of what is happening to the rest of him. She and the other first-year medical students have been picking him apart for four months, stripping him down to his essentials, naming him by his pieces. After every session, the pain in Ntinyari’s back escalates into a smoldering spot of lava.
“Sometimes, I dream I am him,” she says to Brother-on-a-scholarship-abroad.
With each conversation she feels she is regurgitating her brokeness into the world, soiling it. Brother squints into his video-chat window, trying to make out the seams along which she is coming undone, but even he cannot tell her what hurts or why.
“You scored an A, Nti.”
“He’s dead. He feels no pain.”
He does not understand that she is a composite of mismatched parts: too-large eyes; a short, rounded nose; arched eyebrows; a too-small mouth; and ears flattened against her head. She is God’s leftover pieces.
They chat once a week, but she does not settle. What is murky about her does not fall to the bottom and leave clarity that she can decant and inhabit. She grows more turbid. She fails her exams that semester. She drops out of medical school. And all who know her shake their heads and lament wasted potential.
* * *
At twenty-five she swipes right on a dating app.
“Architect,” he says over what he insists are the best burgers in Nairobi.
Ntinyari hides her disappointment at having to pass a first date in an open yard, among rough-sawn benches, chairs, and tables, while all around, expats smoke pungent marijuana. But slowly she relaxes into his world. He nods his head to music she has never heard before. He calls out the names of artists and sound tracks.
“This is the real stuff,” he says.
She is envious of his confidence, his firm belief that he belongs — a sticky kind of envy that forms a lump in her throat. His gestures are wide, his posture straight yet relaxed. She is ashamed of her inability to be as large, to saturate every space with her own contentment. Mother’s words return to her: you have everything. She smiles wider and wider as he talks. She could choke on that smile.
When he calls asking for a second date, Ntinyari is scared. How soon before he realizes she is broken? Date after date, she works hard at being interesting and nodding intelligently.
“You are so different from anyone I’ve been with before,” he says after date five.
Her insides liquefy with gratitude. She settles into this warm feeling. She deserves it. A month later, she is sharing her secret, and he is listening intently, beer can in midair on its way to his mouth. She knows this will be different from Kiku. And it is.
He is not afraid. When she pulls off her leg to illustrate, he puts his hand out for it. She lifts it up to where he sits on his car’s bonnet, as though making an offering to a god. He gives it a light toss and takes another gulp off his beer can.
Ntinyari sips wine in kisses from her place on the picnic blanket. He has brought her to Karura forest for date twelve, to the twitter of birds and the rustle of leaves and an air so fresh that she feels slightly dizzy. In her mental checklist, she has ticked “romantic”.
“Can you pull off the other one?” he asks.
As he examines both legs and notes that there is no blood, his expression — his bewilderment — makes her feel proud, as though this coming apart is a gift, and she is special.
He drinks from his can and considers her closely. When he speaks, his voice is cold and exact: “Now come get them.”
Not even the realization that she is terrified makes Ntinyari demand that he give back her legs. She tries lifting herself up onto the car bonnet. He is testing her, must be testing her. Sometimes, this is the way to love and be loved. She laughs as she struggles. She laughs and he laughs.
“I will break you,” he says when he leaves her a year later.
“Look,” she pleads. “Look, no pain.”
She pulls off an arm. It is as easy as breaking a Barbie doll apart. Klack! She could throw her head against a wall to make him stay and make her lovable again.
* * *
At twenty-nine, she has climbed to the significant position of team lead at an advertising agency, which means she is often sitting on the bad side of her boss’s desk. Everyone in the open plan hall beyond the woman’s glass office can see Ntinyari squirming as she waits for the boss to finish typing out an email. When the woman shuts her laptop, Ntinyari feels herself crinkle under her gaze, like foil on a fire.
“This job is too big for you, Ntinyari. Don’t you agree?”
Pain is the cheekbone-chiselling bob cut her boss wears and its stark red highlights. Against the light of the window in her office, she looks aflame.
“Have you considered looking for something you can actually handle?”
There has been an email from Ntinyari’s nightmare client, the bank man in charge of the agency’s largest contract. He regularly shares briefs at 5 p.m. and expects work delivered by 8 a.m. the next morning, forcing Ntinyari and her team to work overnight.
“We are trying our best. It’s just not possible to work on his….”
Boss Lady jabs her finger at Ntinyari. “Excuses. Excuses. How long are you going to live like this? Doesn’t it bother you to be so mediocre?”
Ntinyari does not dare to let the door bang on her way out. She walks back to her desk under a deluge of stares and whispers. In that soup of 24-7 office-wide music, advertising jargon, too many hugs, and endless brainstorming sessions, she stands out for her inability to dissolve. She lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. Spontaneity, she’s heard someone say, or perhaps just more life than a rock. She’s heard worse things whispered about her, and a few of these have made her lock herself in a toilet stall twice this past year.
Laughter explodes from one corner of the office. It’s Maina, her team’s social media strategist and perpetual latecomer. Today he arrived at eleven o’clock but is now seated on someone else’s desk, telling what must be a funny story for all the laughter it’s causing. He’s a creative, he says, and his ideas need time to percolate, so no, he hasn’t yet worked on the Christmas campaign proposal the client wants to see tomorrow, and she should buy him time, because that is her job, isn’t it?
She has a First Class Honours degree in Marketing, but it is only a piece of paper in the face of office politics and client ass-kissing.
“You will keep running away when things get tough and then discover you have wasted your life,” Mother said when Ntinyari quit Medicine nine years ago.
For entire weekends she lies in bed afraid of something she cannot articulate. Something gaseous and amorphous. She is trapped in her bedding. And when her undrawn curtains darken again and a whole day is gone, guilt takes on a tangible form and becomes her companion in bed, cold and cutting, insistent on cuddling.
In September, she is passed over for a promotion at the agency. Two mornings after, she cannot find the big toe of her left foot. On another, her eyeball hangs out of its socket; she cannot quite get it back in. And on yet another, she has only one breast. Then she comes home from work one night and stumbles upon her hand still clasping a dirty teacup on the kitchen counter. How did she not notice all day? She sits staring at it for a long time, knowing that she has crossed a certain dangerous line.
Yet she experiments. She detaches her lower jaw and sits disfigured through meetings. She hops around the office on one leg. She walks blind into walls. She leaves her buttocks on a chair in the kitchenette area. She stands by the water dispenser with her intestines spilling out of her in twisted, visceral knots. No one looks at her twice. No one says more than a dry, hurried, “Hi.” She has vanished from the world.
* * *
She weeps with upraised arms. She sways in the slow, melancholy music the choir members foment in the depths of their despair. Ntinyari is broken before the Lor
d. Pastor David bellows into his microphone and reverberates off the walls: “Receive the healing.” If the Holy Spirit descends, He only descends on other people. To them go grace and renewal. Ntinyari swallows her bitterness and sings louder.
* * *
One Saturday morning, while sitting on her couch, she has a maddening itch in her scalp. She attacks it with the lid of a pen, then the point. It multiplies and spreads, as angry as a thousand ant bites. She plucks off her head, sets it between her knees, and gives her scalp a thorough scratch. Thus, with ten fingers aggravating her itch, she alights on an idea: the thing that is wrong with her is inside her head, the only part she has never broken down. It must be.
Self-help books tell her to picture what she must excavate: a malicious, black ball nestled between the lobes of her brain. She finds a screwdriver. She tries to coerce the seven screws in her skull out of their holes. Hours or years later, one flies off and cracks her T.V. screen. Alas, the other six are bolted down tight. All is futile. Nothing can be mended.
On her bedroom floor of cold brown tiles, she uncouples her feet from her ankles, her toes from her feet, and her nails from her toes. Piece by piece, she lays herself out on the floor in the lazy parallelograms of sun falling in through the window. She is thirty-one years old. She can no longer hold together; she has never known how to hold together. She decouples hip from torso, thigh from hip, knee from thigh. She watches herself from where her head lies on its side. Even now, nothing is missing.
* * *
Life seems a row of glass windows on which she slides, leaping, reaching, appearing, and disappearing. She is a mere reflection. She does not die; or perhaps she does.
Dr. Oduor is a cliché: a white head, thick spectacles on the bridge of his nose, and an array of framed certificates on his wall. His greeting is flat. He mechanically tracks her movements from the door to the chair. All he will do is lecture her, as others have done since she woke up at the hospital, all of them whispering because she committed a crime and could be arrested if discovered. A peppering of allusions, here and there, to the value of life and the importance of talking about one’s problems. Even her doctor and the nurses had to pretend she accidentally swallowed a boxful of paracetamol.
“Do you want to live?” asks Dr. Oduor.
Is it so simple? Wanting or not wanting? She looks away.
A lonely, dwarf palm is trapped in a pot in one corner of his office. A laden bookshelf is sagging in the opposite corner. Above a hand basin is the painting of a nondescript stretch of beach in which wanders a bare-chested, black boy. Ntinyari imagines him looking over his shoulder at her.
“You just wanted attention,” he would say.
When she does not respond, the doctor jots down something on his pad. If she were to begin trying to scratch off her face, would he be forced to lock her away in a psychiatric ward forever?
“Do you want to live?” he asks again.
So irritating. She could scream luminous colours onto his ugly, off-white walls. She could crack thunder and flash lightning. She could burn his books and dance around the fire naked. But she is just a body in a chair and tired, so tired.
“Do you think it was easy?” she asks.
Now he has no words, staring out of his silly glasses. He sits back in his chair, retreating behind defenses. He is going to tent his fingers and attempt to cower her. She glares all her anger at him and forces him to break eye contact first.
“I am not your enemy.”
She fills up like a glass under a tap of cold water. Her voice is dissolving when she speaks: “Who is my enemy? Who is doing this to me?”
Does he not see that she is in too many pieces and some have been lost? He passes her a box of tissues before she realizes she is crying.
“Look, Ntinyari. Depression is treatable, but you must want to be treated.”
She has not wanted to accept that word. Depression.
All that she has suffered summarized in a single word. Depression.
The feeling of being constantly submerged in dark waters. Depression.
How can such a large thing be so neatly delineated?
He puts a rough hand on hers. She nods.
But this will be a long journey. Ahead are years and years of pills and therapy. Ahead are days when she will wake up a confusion of parts. Days so small, so hard, so gnawed upon. Bruised, ugly days when she will almost fail at putting herself back together. Ahead is the gigantic impossible task of lassoing and pulling down an intangible, ferocious beast.
But then, at last, the day will come — surely it must come — and a golden day it will be, when Ntinyari no longer disassembles.
20
“The River of Night” © Tlotlo Tsamaase
Originally Published in The Dark (Issue 66, November 2020)
The river of night settles in my thighs waiting for your tongue. It knows your patterns, your timings, knows the hour is always seeking you.
You cum at the witching hour—always, a booty call is my body to collect the spam of your illicit desire to be with someone. Your satisfaction is always the end credits. Hush. The buzz of a cigarette, a mosquito, a fly, technology humming in our veins—an eye in our room. I sit huddled, knees tight to my breasts. Today, the air doesn’t know I’m human. You tell me I’m only good for your exhales. I’m your lit joint, you’ve licked me, sealed me good so I don’t flee.
“Did I get you high, baby?” I ask.
“Not high enough,” you say. “Again,” you instruct me. You flick the lighter, and burn me into your firework. Tonight, every night, I’m your zol, I’m your jol.
I’m the drug you hide from your wife.
* * *
“Leloba,” Matshwênyêgô says, and I hate the way she tosses my name across our open-plan office desks. “Aren’t you sick of this dead-end job? I mean, sure, you’re an editor, but shit sure doesn’t feel like it sitting here. No windows, just a bloody jail cell. Plus”—she taps her manicured index finger counting one of the many reasons why I shouldn’t be here— “no one treats you like you hold a senior role. Look, everyone here thinks you’re small, that you’re inconsequential. They know that you’re not made for this job. What if you get fired? How will you pay the rent? Where will you live?”
It’s all my fears tumbling out of her mouth. I didn’t study journalism or creative writing, instead I’m self-taught, and the imposter syndrome is a daily claustrophobic suit I’m unable to take off—it’s my skin.
“I still don’t get why you’re punishing yourself,” Kakanyô says, spinning in her swivel chair. “Go back to architecture, fam.”
I shrink into my seat. The twins know me more than I know myself.
It’s creepy the way they emit my thoughts. But they’re right. I let people walk all over me; my body is a basic welcome mat for assholes. I committed the foulest career change: five years after studying architecture plus eight month’s stint of dabbling through architectural firms, I quit my profession as an architect-in-training to being a sort-of architectural journalist-cum-proofreader-editor. Everyone thinks architects makes millions on their first job. My job paid me peanuts: I worked weekdays and weekends raw into the night. I was on the hem of death, sewing my nerves with alcohol. To save myself, I had to quit. I am now living the consequences of it: a failure.
“Right now, you’d be a registered architect with your own firm making millions,” Matshwênyêgô whispers. “Words don’t make money, designing buildings does. You’d be like a fucking STEM woman, a lot of opportunities out there for you, ja.”
“Not just that. You’re a Motswana woman. There are a lot of cards you can play. Black. African. Poverty. Female,” Kakanyô adds as she leans on her desk ignoring her article and its impending deadline.
“That really doesn’t sound genuine,” I say.
“Well is being genuine paying your bills?” She raises her finger to shut me up. “Barely. You can’t just survive life, you need to live life.”
“Succes
s takes time,” I say.
Matshwênyêgô scoffs. “Ja. Sorry, but I don’t want to start living life when I’m a septuagenarian. Then what’s the point of living?”
“You wasted such a good opportunity; you wasted your life,” Kakanyô adds in agreement. I wish they’d keep their voices low. I don’t need everyone knowing I’m a failure.
Fortunately, a notification beeps of an incoming article I need to edit. I drown out their conversation. We continue punching out stories, interviewing sources, editing and working painlessly at some forgettable media organization.
Kakanyô is my colleague-slash-roommate who has a streak of negativity, so is Matshwênyêgô who’s an overly perfectionist. She analyses every scenario or domestic hygiene. If she’s not worrying about the state of the kitchen, she’s worrying about my future, whereas Kakanyô picks at everything about me, from my abilities, to my dreams, to my choice of boyfriends. But living with them makes life less lonely. Every single day they wake before I wake and press a warm cloth to rub the sweat of nightmares from my forehead.
We’ve been Siamese—not literally but in the sense that we’re stuck in the same job, the same house, same age, like orbiting planets in the same womb circulating an identical lifestyle.
I find it so hard to differentiate them. Sometimes they disappear on the weekends. I never see them leave, I just wake up and they’re gone. They return days later and I wonder how they’re able to go over their leave days. I don’t want to fuss over how they lead their lives, they’re grown-ups. They’ve no family ties, no standing status and are okay with it. I wish I could be as confident as them.
The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) Page 26
