by Ben Okri
‘You’re as short as ever,’ he said, laughing. ‘Some people never grow.’
‘And I need telescopes to see you,’ I said.
He asked us to sit. We sat, gingerly, on the edge of the settees. He did not sit, but towered over us. He spent the whole time talking about himself. He offered us nothing to drink. The sight of decanters, bottles of champagne and whisky in the glass cabinet near us made us very thirsty. He seemed rather dimly to remember me. He didn’t ask a single question about how we were doing. He talked about his time in England and about all the white girls he had gone out with. He fetched us his awesome album of photographs and made us look through. He talked about the company owned by his father, of which he was now managing director, and about the forthcoming financial contest and how they were going to bury the town in money. While he addressed us he kept shouting instructions to drivers, servants, and bodyguards. The smell of excellent cooking wafted up from the stairs and we salivated as he talked, uninterrupted, for an entire hour. He only stopped when the sound of dancing and guttural voices came from the street. We went to the balcony and saw people fleeing in different directions on the street below.
The dancers looked fierce. They were muscled, with animal skins round their waists, feathers in their hair, charms round their necks, and weighted bangles on their arms. They all carried machetes, some had spears. Their faces were daubed with antimony, their bodies covered in native chalk and animal blood. The leader of the cultic dancers wore a rather terrifying gold-fringed lion headdress. They held live chickens and danced vigorously in front of the house, chanting and clashing their machetes, with sparks flying. When Odeh made a sign to them with his fan the cultic dancers jumped, chanted something, bit off the heads of the chickens, and spat them on the ground. They danced wildly and let the chicken blood pour on them. The headless chickens flapped and the dancers weaved. At another sign from Odeh they dashed into the street, waving their machetes murderously. They tore after bicyclists, ran after children, pursued the women. In a few minutes the street was completely empty. The dancers had scattered everywhere, clanging their machetes on doors, scraping them on the tarmac, singing their fearful ritual songs.
Odeh told us that we should stay in the house till a special car came for us. I asked why. He stared at me incredulously. Takwa laughed nervously and said, nodding in my direction:
‘Don’t mind him. He thinks because he is a manager from Lagos he can do what he likes in our town.’
Odeh shook his head.
‘It’s dangerous to go out now, you fool,’ he said. ‘This is an unofficial curfew. My father’s people will clash with Assi’s midgets. No one can say what will happen.’
Takwa added:
‘Everyone in town knows what it’s like.’
I didn’t say anything for a while. Takwa opted to stay. If he hadn’t taken to mocking me, to reminding Odeh of what I did years ago, and if both of them hadn’t ganged up on me and made me feel like an outsider, if they hadn’t done all this knowing full well that I was trapped there in Oguso Lodge, I might not have made any decision at all. But I began to think that if the dancers in the streets were dangerous then I must leave. It might have been sheer perversity on my part, but I felt that their cultic activities were no business of mine. Besides, if both cults were clashing how could I be sure I was safe in Odeh’s house when the other party might just take to attacking it? After all I was in the home of one of the town’s manufacturers of terror. How was I sure I wouldn’t be its victim? I had enough of my own problems weighing me down. I decided to leave. I felt up to my neck with our powerful people, our politicians, our governors, who had their cults as a way of maintaining and spreading their influence. I was tired of those who create our realities, and who encircle themselves with dread.
‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see you again, Odeh. You have changed.’
He smiled and warned me again that it wasn’t sensible to leave. I said my goodbyes, and left.
It was as I traced my way back to the hotel, feeling the curious emptiness of the town, feeling the darkness thicken in the air, remembering my adolescent adventures in those streets, that I became aware of a different aspect of the place that I had forgotten. Years ago we were returning from a football match and we had taken a short cut through the forest when we heard the beating of drums. I heard those drums as I walked down the empty streets. The drums were insistent and eerie. They spoke of dread, of death, of sacrifice. Then I remembered that around that time of year, when the harmattan had passed, and when the rains swelled the river, washed away shacks, and inundated the parched earth, that cults carried out their rituals which seemed a thousand years old. I remembered it had been said that the head of the cult, who was never seen by untitled people, needed blood for his elixir. They said he was one hundred and eighty years old. We who were students lived in fear of returning late to school. We lived in terror of all the stories about the bright students who had vanished, of those that had been killed, their bodies found by the wayside, miles from town. I remembered the dark underbelly of W. And it was with a new fear, a complex adult fear, that I tried to get back to the hotel.
Then suddenly, without any thunderstorms or lightning, it began to rain. The shops were shut along the streets. People looked out furtively from behind their curtains. An occasional car shot down the road. With the rain falling silently, with bells and clanging machetes, drums and cowhorns sounding everywhere, with weird chants roving the streets disembodied, the town suddenly took on the atmosphere of a place inhabited by nightmares. All around I could hear the noises of the rival cults clashing, could hear them engaged in an eternal battle for power and ascendancy. It has never been revealed how many heads have been lost in the encounters. It is the town’s secret. The rain poured down, thunder sounded low in the sky, lightning flashed over the houses of the poor. And then a woman ran past me, screaming:
‘There are no fish left in the river!’
When I looked round she had disappeared. I began, I think, to hallucinate. I saw the secrets of the town dancing in the street: young men with diseases that melted their faces, beautiful young girls with snakes coming out of their ears. I saw skeletons dancing with fat women. I passed the town’s graveyard and saw the dead rising and screaming for children. It seemed as if the unleashing of ritual forces had released trapped spirits. Nightmares, riding on two-headed dogs, their faces worm-eaten, rampaged through the town destroying cars and buildings. They attacked the roads, they created pits at the end of streets for unwary drivers to sink into.
It rained harder. I could have sworn that the forests accelerated in growth and drew closer to the town, became dark green veils between houses. Floodwater and rivulets from overflowing gutters swept through the streets, transferring the garbage from one area to another. It came as a shock to discover that over certain houses, which I later identified as belonging to cult members, the rain did not fall. I pushed on, thoroughly wet. Thunder clapped above me. I felt the drops of rain beating heavily on my shoulders, as if the rain was composed of stones and not water. Mounds of rubbish, knee-high, formed around me. The lightning flashed, made each second incandescent, and I felt heavy things falling on me, wounding me. And when I looked I saw that it was raining fishes. I screamed. I ran. Children flowed in the water like holographic images, their mouths liverish, their eyes wide open. I noticed that my shirt had been dyed red by the rain. People called out to me several times. When I turned to look for them I saw nothing.
I got to the hotel and found that it was shut. I climbed in through a back window. The hotel was deserted. In the dance-hall there was a white cat sitting on the counter. It stared at me with green eyes. I went upstairs to my room. In the distance, surrounding the town, I heard the thundering drums rolling with the soft pelting of rain. I looked out of the window and was astonished to find that it wasn’t raining at all. I went downstairs, through the smelling backyard, and made a proper check. It was raining everywhere, but not o
ver the hotel.
Then I saw a terrible flood-tide rolling down the street, as if a great dam had broken and the tarmac itself had become unleashed. Odeh’s father, a crown of money on his head, sat on the crest of water, as if on an invisible barge. His sceptre was of silver. His face was stiffened, as if he were in an advanced stage of demonic possession. Servants, carrying his litter, shouted his praises around him. His cult members, wild and relentless, carried the trophies of the day’s victories, the bodies and the spoils of the defeated.
I started to go back in when I noticed that there was a film of dust on the cocoyam plant at the hotel-front. The banana plants were also dry. There was a red moon at the far corner of the sky. Transfixed by all these details, my head turning, I noticed also that the flood-tide had drawn closer. One of the cultists saw me and in an instant, as if to punish me for my impertinence, the thundering drums, the clamour of machetes, came in my direction. I ran into the hotel, barred the door, and tripped over the white cat as I rushed upstairs. When I got to my room the hotel was surrounded with thunder. I sat on the bed, lit a cigarette, and found myself both sweating and trembling. I looked for a bible and found none. I paced up and down the room, not daring to look outside. The cultists hammered at the doors. I heard the sounds of splintering wood. I began frantically to look for something – anything. I ransacked my briefcase. As if I were trapped in a nightmare I looked for something, a magic object, that could save me. A bottle of POWER-DRUG fell on the floor and cracked. The liquid poured out. I heard the door give way downstairs with a mighty crash. In my utter confusion I began to scoop up and drink the contents of the drug that was spilling on the floor. I heard the cultists, who were reputed to eat their glasses after a ritual drink, marching up the stairs. I counted the thunder of their feet. I choked on broken glass. A deafening wail shook the hotel. Then I heard them banging on my door. I opened another bottle of POWER-DRUG. My mouth bled. I had drunk half the bottle when the door caved in and I saw the rush of an undammed river, a flowing black mirror, with lightning flashing all over it. Odeh’s father, eyes wide open, was on the crest of the water. Behind him his followers, covered in antimony, held in their hands a miniature of the molue that had crashed into the lagoon. The flood-tide poured over me and I sank into the nightmare of drowning.
The Crude Mythology of Survival
Two days later, Takwa was explaining to me the principles of ritual terror. He said that the imaginings of the victims grab hold of their throats and begin to strangle them. Takwa was in good humour. He told me that the town had witnessed a downpour which would create a new world record. He told me that in some parts of town it had rained blood and that crayfish were seen falling over the market. He said that sections of W. had been virtually rearranged by the tidal rain: that several houses, including a bank and our college chapel, had been washed away altogether. Volunteers had been sent all around the delta area to find the missing buildings. Then he said that as they simply couldn’t be found the two millionaires had offered to replace them.
He had come to my room with some other schoolmates and he talked so much I didn’t even get a chance to say hello to them.
‘How many prostitutes did you have last night?’ one of them asked, looking round at the mess of the place.
‘None.’
‘What have you been doing then?’
I had no idea. I had absolutely no recollection of how I had passed the last two days. I felt as weak as an invalid. My nerves were on edge. I kept trembling. The sound of drums opened up holes in my head. The bats had multiplied in my mind. The clinking of coins, the rustling of pound notes, sent me into a helpless tremor. When Takwa saw the bottles of POWER-DRUG on the floor, he said:
‘Ah, he’s been keeping a new drug to himself.’
They shared a bottle between them. I protested. They laughed. I began to tell them about the molue beneath the lagoon, of the people who had died, and about the Rastafarian, but they stared at me, swaying. Then they forced my clothes on me and dragged me out to the arena where the financial contest was going to take place. I complained, but I was quite glad to leave the room.
The streets were full of people again. Apart from the overflowing gutters, and the heaps of garbage tangled about the place, it was as if nothing had happened in the town. It might have seemed as if the macabre fiesta had been entirely imagined by me, if I hadn’t noticed the scavenging expressions that had crept into people’s faces.
Takwa, in an expansive mood, told me that the events of the last three days had been unprecedented. The powers that be, he said, were growing stronger every day. He said that if I wanted to survive in the country, or anywhere in the world, the secret was to join the strongest side and ‘pour your blood into the basin’. He said that the forces which rule the country were of a kind impossible to imagine. Takwa sang the praises of the forces, as if they were everywhere, as if they were listening, as if they were a substance of the air that could punish him at any second.
‘It’s all politics,’ he said. ‘That’s what today’s contest is all about.’
‘What?’
‘Politics,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There is no politics without power,’ he said. ‘And there is no power without fear.’
He looked at me pityingly.
‘The strongest fear in this town,’ he said, ‘is to be defenceless, to be without a powerful godfather, and therefore at the mercy of the drums.’
He rode the wave of his certainty.
‘New stars are growing every day. They grow from the same powers, the same rituals …’
‘… the same smell of blood in the afternoon,’ I interrupted, paraphrasing Okigbo, the poet.
He shrugged and with a triumphant smile he said:
‘That is the beauty of our world.’
I was happy for him. He did not have a sunken molue in his brain. Rastafarians and diseased children didn’t torment him. He hadn’t been a salesman of nightmares – he had only ever been their administrator. He slapped me on the back. But as we neared the pavilion where the event was gathering momentum his face took on a sneer. Then he stopped, blocked my path and, to my greatest surprise, asked:
‘Whose side are you on?’
My former schoolmates, all of them grounded in that strange town, their faces miserable, their eyes mean and rat-like, their features similar in their despair, crowded me. I stared at Takwa for about three long uncomprehending minutes. Then, at the sound of trumpets from the pavilion, I knew instantly how he kept his job, acquired his expensive habits, his carefree lifestyle, his languid indifference, when everyone else in the town was starving. I also knew that because he was safely on the right side, the strongest side, he would never understand what it was like to live with seven corpses in your dreams, to live with women eaten by ringworm, or children bursting with stomach worms. I spat in Takwa’s face and went on to the pavilion. Neither Takwa nor my schoolmates lifted their hands against me. Those were the last two mistakes I made in that town.
When I got to the pavilion I could not see, for there were too many people present. It was an open-air event. At the centre of the gathering there was a covered platform. Around it, packed, sweating, noisy, were the ordinary inhabitants of the town – the touts, beggars, carpenters, bar-owners, prostitutes, managers of pool shops, clerks, oil-rig workers, petty bureaucrats, people with odd afflictions, an old man without an eyelid, a young man with crutches. It was so crowded that it seemed as if the event were a large political rally, or a gathering of people seeking cures from the ministrations of faith-healers. I mingled with the crowd and pushed my way to the front. I heard people around me saying that powerful herbalists were withholding the rain. I could not see. Deep into the crowd, almost unable to move, I realized that I was hungry. I had not eaten, as far as I remembered, for days. The crowd scared me. People kept jostling one another. They were restless and eager for the event to begin. Surrounded by people who looked downtrodden an
d mean, every face a stranger’s, I grew afraid. I felt the POWER-DRUG eating up my stomach, gnawing through the lining, inflaming my intestines.
A mad energy rode me while the proceedings began. I felt angry and reckless. Then as I pushed forward I passed a group of fishermen who had come to the event with nets. They had come to catch money. In a moment of hallucinated illumination it struck me that all those present – the market-women from the creeks of dark rivers, the clerks from remote bureaucracies deep in the delta villages – had one thing in common. We needed modern miracles. We were, all of us, hungry. We had all abandoned our private lives, our business lives, our leisure, our pain, because we wanted to witness miracles. And the miracle we had come to witness, which seemed to comprise the other side of ritual drums and dread, was that of the multiplying currency. We had come to be fed by the great magicians of money, masters of our age.
I still couldn’t see. The crowd was so dense that the platform was obscured and only the stars in the sky could be seen, the unnumbered stars, presiding eternally over our curfews and follies.
As I neared the front I heard a voice over the loudspeaker droning on about the unfolding event. I recognized the voice. It belonged to another schoolmate who had become the personal secretary of a politician. When I could see what was going on I was struck with the fact that the platform which seemed so ordinary from the distance was in fact a magnificent dais, a pagoda brightened with coloured lights and golden tinsel. Large portraits of the two millionaires hung on either side of the platform. Odeh, attired in rich brocade, sat at a glass table, fanned by women. Assi sat on the other side. Behind both of them stood the respective bodyguards of their fathers. The ritual dancers associated with both men, dressed in different kinds of animals skins, were far behind. They occasionally clashed their machetes and sent sparks flying in the air.
