by Ben Okri
For many days I wandered about in the darkness of the city. I drove around in the day looking for jobs. Everywhere I went workers were being sacked in great numbers. There were no strikes. Sometimes I listened to the Head of State’s broadcasts on the radio. He spoke about austerity, about tightening the national belt, and about a great future. He sounded very lonely, as though he were talking in a vast and empty room. After his broadcasts music was played. The music sounded also as if it were played in an empty space.
In the evenings I went around looking for friends. They had gone and no explanations or forwarding addresses were given. When I went to their compounds I was surprised at how things had changed. The decay of the compounds seemed to have accelerated. Doors were left open. Cobwebs hung over the compound fronts. Outside the house of a friend I saw a boy staring at me with frightened eyes. When I started to ask him of the whereabouts of my friend, he got up and ran. I went back to my car and drove around the city, looking for people that I knew. Then I really began to notice things. There were people scattered in places of the city. There seemed no panic on their faces. It began to occur to me that the world was emptying out. When I took a closer look at the people a strange thought came to me: they seemed like sleep-walkers. I stopped the car and went amongst them to get a closer look, to talk with them, and find out exactly what was happening. (The radios and newspapers had long stopped giving information.) I went out into the street and approached a woman who was frying yams at the roadside. She looked at me with burning, suspicious eyes.
‘What is happening to the country?’ I asked her.
‘Nothing is happening.’
‘Where has everyone gone?’
‘No one has gone anywhere. Why are you asking me? Go and ask someone else.’
As I turned to go the fire flared up, illuminating her face. And on her face I saw a sloping handwriting. On her forehead and on her cheeks there were words. Then I noticed that her hands were also covered in handwriting. I drew closer to read the words, but she began screaming. I heard the ironclad boots of soldiers running down the streets towards us. I hurried to my car and drove off.
As I went home I noticed that a lot of the people in the streets had handwriting on their faces. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t noticed it before. And then I was suddenly overcome with the notion that my neighbour had words on his face. I drove home hurriedly.
It was dark by the time I arrived. I couldn’t risk having the car three streets away, so I parked it outside the compound. I think it was with that act of caution that the thought of fleeing first occurred to me. The birds had increased over our street. The radio was still on somewhere in the distance. Its battery was getting weaker. The wind whistled through the compounds. Stray dogs roamed down the street. I sat outside and waited for my neighbour. When he didn’t come back for a long time I went and knocked on his door. There was no reply. I went to my room and ate, and then I went and sat outside again. I listened to the radio dying. I listened to the thin military voices. The night got darker and still my neighbour didn’t return. I listened to the wind straining the branches of the trees. Stray cats eyed me in the dark. I went to my room and I slept that night with the feeling that something was breaking on my consciousness. When I woke up in the morning I noticed that the Head of State’s lonely face kept slipping into my mind. I had a shower and ate and went and knocked on my neighbour’s door. He still hadn’t got back.
I prepared to go out but thunder sounded in the sky. By the afternoon it had started to rain. The street swelled with water. The gutters overran. The rain poured into the open doors of the rooms and fell on the stalls with their undisturbed display of goods and beat down on the clothes that had been left hanging. The wind blew very hard and shook our roof. The branches of a tree strained and then cracked. From afar I could see smoke above the houses. The rain poured down unceasingly for two days. My neighbour still didn’t return. The water went up to the bumper of my car. The rain finally extinguished the distant radio. The Head of State made desperate broadcasts about cleaning the national stables. I sat in my room, imprisoned by the rain. I listened to the water endlessly falling. My roof began to leak. I heard a cat wailing above the steady din. Sometimes the rain accelerated in its fall, and managed to obliterate both time and memory. It soon seemed as if it had always been raining. With the city empty of people, I began to hear broadcasts in the rain. And then in the evening of the second day, a realization came upon me. I went to the window, my ears reverberating with persistently dripping water, and looked out. That was when I discovered I had temporarily lost the names of things.
I stayed indoors till the rain stopped. Then I stayed in another day, to enable the water to sink into the swollen earth. I went and tried my neighbour’s door several times and then I went into his room. Nothing had been disturbed, but he seemed to have altogether vanished. On the fourth day I ventured down our street and witnessed the proliferation of disasters. Trees had fallen. Houses had crumbled before the force of the wind and rain. Dead cats floated in the gutters. There were no birds in the air. I went back to my room. My head jostled with signs. I got out my box and stuffed it full of my papers and clothes. I packed all my food into the back of the car. I left my door open. I tried my neighbour’s room for the final time. I got into my car and set out on a journey without a destination through the vast, uncultivated country.
It wasn’t easy getting out of the city. There were so many roadblocks and soldiers were all over the place. They stopped me and searched the car. At every one of the roadblocks the soldiers commented on the food I had at the back. They asked where I was going. I told them I was going to visit my mother who was ill in the village. Then they would ask if I thought that people were hungry. When I said no, the soldiers would take some of my food and wave me on. By the time I cleared through the last roadblock I had very little food left. But that wasn’t what worried me. What made me anxious, as I drove through the forests, was that the car kept giving me trouble. It would stall and I had to sit at the wheel and wait for the engine to cool. When it did start, and move, it did so erratically. The car would suddenly, it seemed, start driving me. It picked up speed, and slowed down, of its own inscrutable volition.
I drove for a long time down the winding forest roads. I managed to cross a wooden bridge that had been partly devastated by rain. For long periods of time I heard only the purring sound of the car. Sometimes it seemed as if I were driving on one spot. The road and the forests didn’t seem to change. I crossed the same partly devastated bridge several times. I got tired of driving without seeming to be moving. I stopped and locked all the doors and got some sleep.
I felt better when I woke up. I was driving for a while when I felt that I had broken the sameness of the journey. Mountain ranges, plateaus of ambergris rocks, and precipices, appeared all around me. I passed a clay-coloured anthill. I slowed down for a pack of hyenas to cross the road. I came to a petrol shack. The door was open. There were dirty barrels of petrol and diesel oil in the front yard. I stopped the car and parked. I passed the greasy hand-pump and knocked on the door. An old man came out. He had a pair of grey braces over a black shirt and he wore filthy khaki trousers. He was barefoot.
‘You’re the first person I’ve seen for a long time,’ he said.
I asked him to fill the tank. He didn’t say anything to me as he did so. I changed the water in the radiator. He didn’t have any brake fluid. I sat on a bench and listened to the insects of the forest while he slowly and painstakingly looked the car over and tuned the engine.
‘How do you manage to live here?’
‘I manage. I like it.’
I paid him. As I was getting into the car the old man said:
‘Don’t go that way. I haven’t seen any vehicles coming back. Stay where you can be happy.’
I nodded, smiling. I shut the door and started the car. As I moved away I waved at him. He didn’t wave back. He stared at the car motionlessly. I drove on into the forest.
Further along I ran over a goat that had been crossing the road. I felt the wheels bump over its body and I stopped. The goat jerked on the tarmac. When I came out of the car I heard violent noises and saw people emerging from the forest and rushing towards me. The men had machetes and the women held long pieces of firewood. I ran back to the car, but when I started it the engine only whined. The people pounced on the car and smashed the bodywork with their machetes and firewood. They broke the windows and several hands reached for my face. The car started, suddenly, and I sped off with a few hands still grasping for my eyes. I swerved both ways and people fell off and I drove on without looking back. Afterwards I saw blood and bits of flesh on the jagged, broken windows.
And then it was as if the rain that had fallen in the city began to catch up with me, intensified. The forest reverberated with thunder. Lightning struck in the trees. The leaves were blown into frenzies by the relentless wind. The car kept swerving and sometimes it was as if the wind was blowing the car on, lifting it at the back. Sometimes I did not feel that the wheels were on the road. I drove on air. I drove on through the torrential rain. There were trees swaying and leaves flapping everywhere. And then there was water pouring on the trees everywhere. Now and again someone would emerge, soaking, from the forest and would run across the road and wave for me to stop. I did not stop for anybody, or for any reason. I drove on in demented concentration. Soon my eyes got tired. I was thrashed by the rain and all I could see was the windscreen and the forests distorted in the rain. I found it difficult to blink and when I did I felt the blankness pulling me into sleep. I would wake up to find myself veering off the road. I managed to sleep while driving.
When night came thickly over the forest I couldn’t separate the darkness from the rain. Occasionally I saw a flash behind me which I thought belonged to a car. I adjusted the mirror and in the crack of a second I saw my face. Thunder broke and exploded in front of me. A moment later there was a forked, incandescent flash which lit up the handwriting on my face. I negotiated a bend and heard a deafening crash in the forest. Something shattered my windscreen and I drove wide-eyed into the darkness. Insects flew into my face. Wind, rain, and bits of glass momentarily blinded me. Then I saw that a tree had fallen across the road ahead of me. The car spun into the vortex of leaves and branches. And then there was stillness. For a long moment it was completely dark. I couldn’t hear, see, or feel anything. And then I heard the whirring engine and the insistent din of insects and rain.
I tried to move, but couldn’t: I felt I had become entangled in the car. I heard magnified grating noises. I was covered in crumbly earth which seemed alive and which stung me. Something settled inside me and I extricated myself from the front seat effortlessly. When I was out of the wreckage I saw that the car had run into a large anthill. There were ants everywhere. I pushed on through the rain. I couldn’t find the road. I went on into the forest. I passed rocks flowering with lichen. I moved under the endless lattice of branches. Thorns of the forest cut into me. I didn’t bleed.
I came to a river. When I swam across I noticed it was flowing in a direction opposite to how it seemed. As I came out on the other bank the water dried instantly on me. I went on through the undergrowth till I came to a village. At the entrance there were two palm trees growing upside down. I went between the trees and saw a man sitting on a chair outside a hut. When the man saw me his face lit up. He ululated suddenly and talking drums sounded at distances in the village. The man got up and rushed to me and embraced me:
‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’ve been waiting for you.’
‘That can’t be true.’
The man looked quite offended at my remark, but he said:
‘I have been sitting outside this hut for three months. Waiting for you. I’m happy that you’ve made it. Come, the people of the village are expecting you.’
He led the way.
‘Why?’
‘You’ll find out.’
I followed him silently. As we went on into the village, I noticed that there was a woman following us. Whenever I looked back she hid behind the trees and bushes.
‘We’ve been cleaning up the village for your arrival,’ the man said.
We passed a skyscraper that reflected the sunlight like blinding glass sheets.
‘That’s where the meeting will take place.’
The huts looked solid and clean with their white ochred walls. The iroko and baobab trees were neatly spaced. The bushes were lush. The air was scented with flamingo flowers.
We arrived at the village square when it occurred to me that the place was vaguely familiar. It was a very orderly and clean place. And then suddenly I realized that I couldn’t see. I didn’t hear the man leading me anymore. I heard singing and dancing all around. I panicked and started shouting. The dancing and singing stopped. I stood for a long time, casting about in the menacing silence. After a while, when I quietened down, I heard light footsteps coming towards me.
‘Help me,’ I said.
Then a woman, who smelt of cloves, in a sweet voice, said:
‘Be quiet and follow me.’
I followed her till we came to a place that smelt of bark. She opened a door and we went in. She pulled up a stool for me. I could have been sitting on solid air for all I knew, but the woman’s presence reassured me. I heard her moving about the place. She set down food for me. I ate. She set down drinks and I drank. Then she said:
‘This will be your new home.’
Then I heard the door shut. I soon fell asleep.
When I woke up I felt things coming out of my ears. Things were crawling all over me. I stood up and called out. The door opened and the woman came in and led me to the place where I had a wash. After I had eaten, she sat near me and said:
‘We heard you were coming. It took a long time.’
‘How did you hear?’
‘You will find out.’
‘Why have you all been waiting for me?’
She was silent. Then she laughed and said:
‘Didn’t you know we have been waiting for you?’
‘No.’
‘Didn’t you know you were coming here?’
‘No. But why?’
‘To take your place in the assembly.’
‘What assembly?’
‘We kept postponing the meeting because you hadn’t arrived.’
I grew weary of asking questions.
‘The people of the village have been anxious,’ she said.
‘When is this meeting taking place?’
‘Two days’ time.’
‘Why not today?’
‘The elders thought you needed time to rest and get used to the village. It’s an important meeting.’
‘What is the meeting about?’
‘You are tired. Get some sleep. If you need me call.’
Then I heard the door open and shut again.
In the village everything had a voice and everything spoke at me. Sounds and voices assaulted me and my ears began to ache. Then slowly my sight returned. At first it was like seeing through milk. When my vision cleared, the voices stopped. Then I saw the village as I had not seen it before.
I went out of the place I was staying and walked around in bewilderment. Some of the people of the village had their feet facing backwards. I was amazed that they could walk. Some people came out of tree-trunks. Some had wings, but they couldn’t fly. After a while I got used to the strangeness of the people. I ceased to really notice their three legs and elongated necks. What I couldn’t get used to were the huts and houses that were walled round with mirrors on the outside. I didn’t see myself reflected in them as I went past. Some people walked into the mirrors and disappeared. I couldn’t walk into them.
After some time of moving around, I couldn’t find my way back to where I stayed. I went about the village listening for the voice of the woman who had been taking care of me.
I stopped at a communal water-pump and a woman came up to me and said:
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’m lost.’
‘I’ll take you back.’
I followed her.
‘So you can see now?’ she asked, turning her head right round to me as she walked.
‘Yes.’
And then I had the distinct and absurd feeling that I knew her. She was a robust figure, with a face of jagged and familiar beauty. She wore a single flowerprint wrapper and was barefoot. Her skin was covered in native chalk. Her eyes radiated a strange light which dazzled like a green mirror.
‘Who are you?’
She didn’t answer my question. When we got to an obeche tree she opened a door on the trunk. Inside I saw a perfect interior, neat and compact and warm.
‘I’m not going in there,’ I said.
She turned her head towards me, her face was expressionless.
‘But this has been your new home,’ she said.
‘It can’t be. It’s too small.’
She laughed almost affectionately.
‘When you come in you will find it is large enough.’
It was very spacious when I went in. I sat down on the wooden bed. She served me food in a half calabash. The rice seemed to move on the plate like several white maggots. I could have sworn it was covered in spider’s webs. But it tasted sweet and was satisfying. The cup from which I was supposed to drink bled on the outside. After she had cleared the food from the table, I pretended to be asleep. Before she left I heard her say:
