Dominion

by Nicole Givens Kurtz

  “Things have changed,” she said in a rush. “I was seen, and we need to leave right now. Your ngunja is beautiful by the way.”

  “What? Thank you…”

  “Can you tear a portal here?” she asked as they started moving.

  “It’s illegal to…” Odun began, then paused as he recalled the unpleasant border official and the rules he’d broken already.

  “It’s a long way back to Oeg,” Aule crooned. “Kurian jails are horrible.”

  “You’ve said enough,” Odun groaned. He grasped Jooh and tore a portal, destination: Tuntun

  Atlantic.

  SLEEP PAPA, SLEEP

  SUYI OKUNGBOWA DAVIES

  Max Aniekwu stands in the shadows of an abandoned danfo under the bridge at Otedola, where he always meets his buyers. Grime lines his wrist and tucks under his fingernails, making his increasingly sweaty palms greasy. Dark clouds splotch over a sky as gray as TV static, announcing an impending thunderstorm; yet Max sweats and juggles the Ziploc bag from one slimy palm to another in search of some friction. He shifts from foot to foot and wipes his gleaming forehead with the back of his free hand, leaving dark stains.

  Max knows something is different this time. Beside the fact that the buyer is late, something in his chest simply doesn’t sit right. He should never have taken this job, not from Chidi of all people. Max wipes sweat from his brow again, now rethinking it all. Chidi, whose tips and contacts have twice gone bad and landed three colleagues in the police net. Chidi, who every trader worth his salt in the black market has blacklisted.

  He should turn around right now, dump the bag inside the abandoned danfo and leave. But that’ll ruin his cred on the market. Rule number one: never stand up your buyer. He’ll struggle with finding another buyer for sure, and God knows how he’ll eat then. Remember, Maximus. Remember why you gats to do this shit in the first place.

  There’s a couple peals of thunder, and a mild drizzle begins to bathe the bridge overhead. Max, unable to shake off the spiders marching up the nape of his neck, considers a break for it. Worst case, he’d ask Chidi to call the buyer, apologize, and set another delivery time and date. He’s tired from all the digging, anyway.

  He’s still thinking this when a shadow falls upon all other shadows around him. Max looks up, into the scraggly face of a gangly dark man. The man wears a long, gray kaftan that cloaks a sheathed curved dagger clamped to his belt. He’s draped in an equally gray shawl over his head, hiding most of his features, but Max can still see two lines of vertical tribal marks etched into each cheek, right below piercing eyes.

  “Ne Maximus?” he asks. His accent is heavily northern.

  Max swears under his breath, his anger flaring. Not only did Chidi tell the buyer his full name—you never tell a buyer your name because you never know what they’re going to do with it—Chidi the idiot also brought him a northerner.

  Was he not clear enough about his preferred client types or was Chidi just stupid? Even after Max made him repeat it like a mantra: get only middlemen who buy and smuggle to storage centers in Cotonou and Yaounde for shipping to boutique museums that do live exhibitions in China, Mexico and Poland, Chidi still defied his instruction. He knows that anyone else is a big risk with the police, especially these northern guys who everyone says only buy to eat, even though no one has ever been able to prove that, which makes it even more of a problem. Knowledge is power, and the lack of it, danger, his father used to say. Truest word, that.

  Max looks the man up and down from shawl to sandaled feet. Twilight looms, and with the street lights yet to come up, there is nothing before him but a tall, gray ghost.

  “Your order?” Max inquires.

  There’s a moment of hesitation, then the man says, “Yatsun, hakora, da kunnuwa.” Max nods. Having lived in Kaduna for a couple years, he knows what those

  Hausa words mean.

  Toes, teeth, ears.

  Max opens up the Ziploc bag and shows him its contents. The man stretches a bony index finger and pokes about in the bag, inspecting the five dead toes in the plastic, poking at both ears and making a squishy sound. The bloody teeth are wrapped in clear cellophane, and for a minute, Max thinks he’s going to open it up and inspect that too, but the man seems satisfied after the ears. He reaches into his robe and produces a black polythene bag. He pulls out a bundle of dog- eared one-thousand naira notes and begins to count. Max counts along silently and re-zips the package. The man stops at fifty and hands it over.

  Max hands him the Ziploc, grabs the money and shoves it into his jeans pocket, keeping his hands there. He turns and heads up to the bridge in the rain, jumps into the next yellow danfo down to Berger, climbs out and hops into another to Isheri, his hands tight in his pocket the whole time. The bus snakes its way into the heart of the maze that is Lagos. He drops off at Ishola Bello and walks the remaining couple of miles in the rain, down to his miniflat at the end of the close. At no point does he look back.

  ✦✦✦

  The dead of night prods Max awake. Electricity is still out from the week before, and the rain from dusk has mixed with the bottled air in the cramped miniflat, producing humidity that is thick to the touch.

  Max slogs through the living, out front to the verandah and powers on the 650VA gen. A couple yellow bulbs blink into life, except the living room’s, which has burnt out. He turns on the TV for light and flicks through a couple of DSTV channels. Most channels are out of subscription, so he settles on EWTN, the Catholic station. He doesn’t know why he still watches it. Maybe because his father, Mazi Aniekwu, made him watch it when he was growing up. The Catholic way, as he’d say. His father’s been dead for years now, but Max has found rhythm and solace in the routines, the chants, the incense. It’s his go-to for post-harvest downtime.

  Max leaves the background noise on and, in the kitchenette, pours water into a bowl, squirts in liquid soap, and washes his hands for the sixth time since returning from the bridge. He turns out the water, squirts another dose of soap and starts again. After the digging, his father always said, you have to wash death off you. He was wrong, though, Max knows. You can never wash off death. Never.

  He mixes three hits of fruit bitters and a hit of schnapps in a mug and gulps it down. It traces a familiar burning dryness from his throat to his chest and settles in a squirm of wet warmth at the pit of his stomach. He pours another slush and takes the mug to the living, just as the priest begins the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

  There are mud tracks on the floor tiles that he didn’t notice before. They run from the door, but don’t end at Max’s feet at the entrance to the kitchenette. The TV’s light is insufficient, so Max squints to follow the tracks, which he notices are odd because while one is a complete footprint, the opposite foot has most of the sole with no trace of toes.

  The footprints end at the couch where a man sits with his back to Max.

  The mug slips from Max’s hand and crashes on the floor. The man on the couch doesn’t stir or flinch at the sound; Max is devoid of all movements but for the flickers of television images over his head. Cautiously, Max steps around the broken ceramic to the front of the couch.

  The man’s eyes are open and stare at nothing. There are only tunnel mouths where his ears should be, and Max discovers the cause of the odd footprints: one of his feet has five stumps instead of five toes. If Max could see into his mouth, he’d see that the teeth were gone too.

  But Max is frozen with shock at the face.

  The face is that of Mazi Aniekwu.

  ✦✦✦

  Later, Max can only remember little of how the next few hours of this night went. First, Max fights

  a persistent urge to swoon. The TV lights blur, and he no longer hears the priest’s invocations.

  Then he hiccups, dashes into the restroom and hurls the schnapps and Mummy Isheri’s jollof rice

  and Coke into the sink. He wants to turn on the tap to rinse the waste, but his hands shake sor />
  much that he pulls off the faucet head.

  After some time, Max rises but does not return to the living room. Instead, he locks the bedroom door, and without putting out the light, gets into the bed and throws the blankets over his head.

  An hour passes, maybe two. Max’s eyes are wide open and bloodshot, his tongue tasting of ethanol, bile and dread. Sleep is a faraway phenomenon incomprehensible to his restive mind, but he persists, counting the seconds with his heavy heartbeats, asking questions and answering them himself.

  The second rule: never dig up the grave of your own relations. Never.

  The second rule that’s supposed only to be a myth, a story to scare wannabe harvesters who think grave robberies are for kids. The second rule he has now broken, and that has now come home to roost—literally.

  The generator groans from low petrol once, twice, then shuts down.

  Oh God, fuck it.

  Another hour passes before Max dares to rise and grope his way across to open the bedroom door. Armed with smartphone torchlight, he focuses the beam on the floor.

  There are no footprints where the first beams land. Hope and relief start from the bottom of his stomach and swell as the beams pass from tile square to tile square, showing nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  The next tile has a footprint, but without toes. The tile after that has only a footprint also. And so the one after, and the one following that.

  The thing that used to be Mazi is still seated in the couch when Max lifts the beam from the floor. It sits frozen, but the blink blink of its dilated pupils are directed at Max.

  Max spins, speeds into the bedroom and slams the door.

  ✦✦✦

  Max stays holed up in the bedroom for half a day before any manner of sense returns and he realizes he cannot retain his sanity if he spends another night with Mazi’s ghost in the house. If it does not return to the depths from which it came, he will have to take it back himself.

  Dread piles in his chest at the thought of touching it. He hasn’t touched his father since… when? The day he packed up and left the man alone with his big dreams of grooming his son into taking over the family’s funeral parlor. That was no life for Max; he didn’t want to be a pawn in Mazi’s fantasies.

  But Kaduna was hard for a twenty-something year old man with no university degree, and after several failed efforts to find some steady way to build his life, Max decided that life as an undertaker was better than surviving on hope alone. So he packed his bags once again and headed back to Lagos.

  Except, by then, Mazi and everything he built was gone. No trace, no extended family, no will, nothing. The most credible story came from word on the streets, that it was Mazi’s apprentices, a group of three known harvesters, who murdered him and ran off with everything he owned. There were stories that said they’d cut him up and sold his parts in the black market. Na im make him body lost, they said. Others said he’d been buried somewhere remote, but no one could point Max in the direction.

  Max knows it’s his fault. If only he’d stayed then, he’d at least have known where his father was buried and avoided it completely.

  He did eventually stay, but only after it was too late. Nwanso, the biggest name in the undertaking and harvesting business and friend to his father, had taken a good look at his hands and said, “Come work for me.” He wormed his way into the market under her tutelage, met her nephew Chidi on an early run and took a weird bonding to the guy despite that Chidi was, and still is, pretty shit at his job.

  Maybe Chidi reminds him of what he would’ve been had Mazi remained alive: a young man stuck in the family’s grim business. Maybe Max is living his father’s dream vicariously through Chidi. Or maybe he is saving Chidi—or thinks he is—to keep the shadow of guilt at bay. Over time, the lines have blurred and Max no longer remembers why he does it: because it’s work with little risk and few consequences that puts food on the table; or worse yet, because it keeps him close to his father.

  ✦✦✦

  Handle this thing, Maximus. Handle it.

  Max grits his teeth and tiptoes out of the bedroom with his eyes shut. To look upon it will be acceptance of its existence, and Max refuses to look and tries to un-know what he thinks he knows. He gropes, breathing heavily, his teeth clenched. He reaches out, retracts his hand, reaches out again and yelps when his fingers touch something sticky.

  The thing sits as he left it. Blink blink. Max lifts a leg, the one with toes still complete. The body slides off the couch as one unbendable unit and thumps on the ground like an ounce of hardened bread. Its skin cracks when it lands. As he pulls it, more cracks appear and travel upward, upward. Max retches but does not stop dragging. Across the tiles, to the kitchenette, where he shoves it under the shelves with his leg and shuts the door. He retches again, but there is nothing left to vomit. He shuts and opens his eyes, shuts and opens them again, blinking away the ghostly caricatures that form on the edges of his vision.

  Finally, he fetches his only two neckties and binds the hands and feet of the thing, a hankie over his nose the whole time. Max does not look it in the face, choosing instead to look at the stumped toes and remind himself that this is not Mazi. The hankie soaks a couple trickles of tears from his watery eyes. Max tells himself it’s because of the smell.

  He has to borrow a car. Chidi’s hearse, maybe. The bastard was dumb enough to make this mistake so he has no choice but to help in getting Max out of it.

  ✦✦✦

  It’s drizzling under an early gray sky when Max catches a danfo to the funeral parlor at Ojodu. It’s a stall squeezed between a coffin maker and a provisions store, only long enough to house a casket and a corpse table. Chidi sits on a stool under the canopy outside, for the lack of a corpse to attend to, running his fingers over a phone screen in a way Max knows he can only be playing Candy Crush. Before he hails Max’s arrival, Max grabs him by the singlet and shoves him into the back room of the parlor. There’s an office the size of a toilet cubicle in the back, too small to have a desk, but with a desk in it anyway. Max shuts the door and puts Chidi up against the wall, his heavy wide palm on Chidi’s chest.

  “Maxy, wait, wait,” Chidi pleads. He’s thin and haggard, and has nothing on Max, who has spent too much time with crude weights fabricated by a roadside welder.

  “Don’t be calling me that name, are you mad?” He hates it. Maxy. Sounds too much like Mazi.

  “I no tell you about the northerner guy because you for no do,” Chidi says, “but I need that money die, I swear.” He touches the tip of his tongue with his index finger and points to the sky.

  “You stupid idiot,” Max snarls. “Which kain grave you arrange for me?” Chidi frowns.

  “Answer!” Max pushes against his chest. “Who dey inside that grave?”

  “I no know na. I no check before I mark am.”

  “Eh?” Max slaps him across the cheek, hard. Chidi yelps. His eyes water and sweat pools in the curve of his singlet. Finger marks start to materialize on his cheek.

  “Wetin be the first thing I tell you when we start this business?” Max asks, his hard stare boring holes in Chidi’s face. Chidi breathes and breathes and says nothing.

  “You gats to check the fucking register for every single harvest!” Max says. “You gats to check! You don’ forget wetin Nwanso talk? You don’ forget?”

  Chidi mumbles a no.

  “And even if you forget, you no get eyes? You no see wetin happen to Nwanso? You no see say na everlasting fuckup to—”

  “Harvest your own people, I know,” Chidi says. “But no be your person we harv—”

  “Fuck you!” Max screams, fighting a choke in his throat. He releases Chidi and pounds the desk and kicks a chair. “You for check this grave, Chidi! You for check this fucking grave!”

  He turns his back on Chidi and hides his anger in his elbow. Why, why? He wanted to see his father again; yes, but the real one, the one who taught him to watch EWTN. N
ot this, not this.

  Chidi shuffles on his feet and watches Max, unsure. After a silence punctuated by Max’s sniffles, he asks, “You dey cry?”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Max wipes his eyes and turns to him. “Wey the wagon?”

  Chidi coughs. His breath smells of tobacco. “Why, wassup?” “Are you mad? You dey still ask stupid questions?” Chidi frowns. “Ah? Na my car now. I gats to ask—”

  Max’s grip on Chidi’s throat is strong enough to cut him off.

  “Get me the fucking keys.”

  ✦✦✦

  Max returns to the miniflat at Ishola Bello after the fall of darkness. There are dull throbs in his joints from digging twice in two days, and the drive back from Jafojo Cemetery was especially jarring because the hearse is a rusty old container. The only thing he can think of is sleep.

  He strips and takes a freezing bath, then proceeds to wash his hands in the wash basin. He does it six times, seven times, but it does not stop him from replaying the blink blink of the Mazi-thing’s eyes once he put that first shovel of humus into its face. Taking another freezing long bath does not drown out the sight of its gap-toothed mouth, the stumped foot as the earth closed it up. Even sleep and two sweaters cannot melt the iciness in his chest.

  Max wakes after midnight, swamped in a cocoon of wool and sweat. He pulls off the sweaters and heads to the kitchenette for a bitters-and-gin mix.

  There are footprints from the door, thicker, muddier than the last time. There’s a man in his couch.

  ✦✦✦

  Heavy pounds rattle his front door by morning. Max opens the door a peep and finds himself staring into Chidi’s face. He sidles out and shoves Chidi backward.

  “You this boy, you no dey hear word? We agreed no visit.”

  Chidi puts his hands up. “I know, I know. But I get work today, so I need the wagon.”

  “Ugh.” Max shoves his hands into his trousers and tosses him the keys. “Oya go. Leave me alone.”

  Chidi lifts a finger. “Wait first. Another thing.” Max rolls his eyes. Chidi pretends not to notice.