Walking on Cowrie Shells

by Nana Nkweti

  “I was stationed there for the First and Second Congo Wars,” says the nun, leaning into a panel and the door slides open smooth as butter, her smile rueful as she explains the rest: “The archdiocese sent me here for peace and quiet in my final years. Then came Naaman.”

  • • •

  Why did Naaman and others like him start to turn? Damned if I know. By the end, maybe a quarter of them would go that way. They would be calm for an eternity, the meek inheriting the earth, then something would just snap, render them id and leathery instinct and gnawing anger. No one knew why. I had a theory I never shared with Orliac. Refined on nights when I was sauced and given to panty-waist philosophizing. I thought about times when the living was easy, about dying hard—collapsing in the midst of a dead run from your hut, fleeing for your life, hard-scrabble though it was, then it’s all over, all that existence and subsistence. But then it’s not, there’s a second chance, but you are different now, naught but a sleepwalking version of yourself, the you of you yowling—“wake up, wake up”—inside. Then one day you do.

  You know the rest. There were many killings, other Namaans who took life, not just limb. Then came calls for answers, followed by government crackdowns and goose-stepping suppression. Next thing we knew, Nyos families started fleeing with the afflicted, crossing borders into tent camps. Some surlier host governments took drastic measures. Borders were closed, emergency Organization of African Unity meetings held. Orliac was subpoenaed, gave testimony at the UN as death squads drove zombie population numbers so low that there were only about three hundred confirmed cases a decade ago. Amnesty International launched “Z Rights Are Human Rights” campaigns to keep them safe from whack jobs both domestic—certain indigenous parties believed gorging on Z parts granted life eternal—and abroad—like the Born-Agains, a militant religious group that violently spread their “God Hates Zombs” message by any means necessary. But at just three hundred worldwide, the Nyos survivors were containable, nonthreatening. A source of pity in the West—with calls to designate them as an endangered “species” and keep them on a reservation—but still stigmatized in their homeland, even after the Cameroonian government created the ill-funded Departement des Affaires des Morts-Vivants.

  My job once the truth was out: press conferences, informational films and billboards for the public; behind the scenes at negotiations with power brokers (sure, Big Agro can sell Africa grossly subsidized cotton and GMO corn at twice the price of our local markets, just keep those aid packages coming). You have to understand that people wanted to be lied to; they put their trusting hands in mine to willingly traipse down that garden path. They didn’t really want to stare into that abyss, to reckon with its crags and ice and deep-burning fires. A lot of Africans were different, though; they lived by the pit, gazed into its bottom plenty, haggled and bargained with dwellers therein for that new government job or enough school fees for that whip-smart tenth child of theirs and, if they were lucky, just a bit of that sugarcane to make their bitter lives sweeter. These folks have touched the slithery underbelly of darkness, so they never quite bought the snake oils I was selling, but that’s all right, my particular bill of goods was meant for others—for antsy international investors, for crusading human rights activists, for the US State Department.

  Yes, some who died early on in the hot zones might have been saved had my spin-doctoring been less convincing. But then there’s that which was saved: minds kept from shattering, economies kept from collapsing. Remember when that swine flu flare-up practically kneecapped the British economy? Can you even imagine what would have happened to those teeter-tottering African GDPs if the truth had gotten out? Talk about a shit storm, financial FUBAR.

  Look, I’m fine with what I did. Sleep like a baby. Like Chelsea. In my condition, I’ve come to terms with many a thing. I’m sure this might make me a monster to some. But I’ve met real monsters and trust me, I don’t come close.

  • • •

  “Arretez-vous! Arretez!” a voice yells from behind as a bullet comes shrieking past my head. I’m halfway through the steel door but I instinctively pivot to a knee and fire. Two bodies thud to the ground. For a split second, I’m twenty years old, a pissant grunt in Sudan again, then—pop!—another shot snaps me back, has me up and running through the steel door, straight into a panic room—those tailor-made bunkers beloved by Hollywood pooh-bahs and Saudi sheikhs flush with petrodollars and paranoia. Barely got my left foot in before the door clangs shut behind me. Soldier boy, manning the control panel, shrugs at my scowl, tipping his head toward the CCTV screens showcasing jackbooted thugs, in grime-spattered wife beaters and ratty cargo pants, ripping through the hallways. Armed up the wazoo. Shooting indiscriminately at lamps and computer screens alike. Jesus.

  The control panel says we’re locked in tight. I turn in search of the sister, finding her in a smaller room, kneeling next to a pallet by the wall. There is blood everywhere. But no one is screaming.

  “Sister?”

  “Not me.” She moves slightly and I see Anasta’s slight form on the makeshift bed. “It’s the girl. She’s been s-h-o-t.”

  Like spelling it out will hide the truth from the child. There is a seeping bullet wound on a thigh that looks too tiny to make a worthy target. It’s bleeding all the same. My one step forward has me swaying like a willow. I check to see if I’m shot too.

  No.

  Step one. Steady. Two. Steady. Steadier still as I reach the bed and drop to my knees on the floor beside her. Anasta’s eyes are closed. She looks peaceful.

  “She will live,” the sister says, patting my hand. “It’s barely a flesh wound and the young heal so much faster than we. Praise God.”

  “She’ll live,” I say out loud, testing the weight of it in the air.

  I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. Let loose a ragged chuckle. Dumbass. Here’s me roiling with fear, panties twisted, worried that a dead girl might die.

  She’ll live. Because I am dead too, you see. So what I’ve been walking and talking and fighting and fucking just like any other creature that God whispered life into. The deep, deep spark of me was snuffed out the moment I lost Mambe and Chelsea. Just didn’t know it for a while, not till I sat in an office looking at another doctor in a lab coat tell me what I already should have known. I was a dead man walking.

  But I’ll live. After a sort.

  Three hours later there are ’copters. Then sirens. Then the rescue. That ragtag team of would-be insurgents long gone. Toting everything in the joint that wasn’t nailed down.

  Three days later, we will learn that the Born-Agains mounted the siege. Eventually, even this country’s forensics will catch up to my investigation and we’ll discover that the star’s death was staged by that selfsame group, attacking her and her child “abomination,” siccing dogs on the screen idol to drum up anger around an alleged zombie attack. But that version of events is too inflammatory, the government will say. Bad press. So the perpetrators will be punished quietly. Locked away in some dank cells much like the hoosegow I visited all those years ago. And I will craft my patented “princess” cover story—“Death by Automotive Misadventure.” Plausible enough given Cameroon’s notoriously treacherous roadways.

  This is what we will tell the fair-haired father when he swoops in, cameras flashing, to collect his convalescing child. This is what we will tell you. The only truth you’ll ever know. And you’ll accept it because you once set out sugar cookies for Santa, you trust deeply in the power of your voice and your vote, and expect that when you die, when you are nothing but bone and bliss, there lies a new beginning, a sweet hereafter.

  The Statistician’s Wife

  Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.

  —PAUL BRODEUR

  They were bloodhounds worrying a bone. The two homicide detectives sniffed, smelled something off in the pairing of this forty-year-old Boston Brahmin and his young village bride. Elliot Coffin Jr. was as American as Coca
-Cola, and capitalism. The bland portfolio of his upbringing was made of Happy Days and hedge funds in happier days, pre-Madoff. He was undisputedly American. His recently deceased wife—Victoria Coffin, née Chiamaka Victoria Okereke, recently of Cambridge, Massachusetts, by way of Lagos State, Nigeria—was not. These simple facts, on their surface, so nakedly banal in nature, had kept Coffin Jr. moored in the sterile Cambridge PD interrogation room, even as his wife lay below on a steel slab in the morgue, soul hovering, body beginning the slow decay that would solidify the truth of her death.

  The detectives observed him through a one-way looking glass. The man before them had slate-gray eyes, seemingly void of grief, set deep in a handsome, angular face of severe symmetry broken only by a nose whose slight crook hinted that he could take a punch, or perhaps deliver one. The very definition of buttoned up: this man in navy-blue Brooks Brothers and Presidential pocket square, in a custom-fit Turnbull & Asser of crisp, creaseless white. Too quiet, he was, as if the intricate Eldredge knot of his silk tie were a garrote at his throat. Too sharp, he was, the obstinate geometry of his frame leaving you with the overall impression that if you brushed against him, however slightly, you might bleed.

  He put the detectives on edge.

  Coffin Jr. was an economist—no, statistician, he’d insisted—from a well-respected family: a financier father, a bepearled mother. But the girl in the morgue, just a girl, hardly a wife, was no blueblood. In the couple’s wedding portrait, now bagged and blood-splattered in evidence, she was soft and cocoa-skinned, like the sweet promise of uncut brownies.

  —

  Data Set Entry: August 10, 2005. Euless—Dallas suburb. Johnny Omorogieva, 45, from Edo State, murdered his RN wife, Isatu Omorogieva, 35, also from Edo State, repeatedly striking her on the head with a hammer in front of their 7-year-old daughter.

  —

  “Why don’t you start from the beginning, Mr. Coffin?” asked the detectives in tandem, a Greek chorus of interrogation. “Where were you this morning?” Their questions anchored him. For some time now Elliot’s thoughts had been fluid, even as a slice of his consciousness remained alert. He had always had a particularly tidy mind: compartmentalized, cubicles of awareness, now calculating and assessing his surroundings, his circumstances. He noted the taller detective, barely inching past his partner, had passed a hand through his rusty-nail head of hair ten times, waiting. He noted the second hand on the bulbous wall clock was off by 2.5 seconds, exactly. He time-lined the tragic particulars of his morning: relaying the data to them as neutrally as he could, maintaining a barely managed remove, even as a part of him silently screamed his innocence, while another grieved.

  “I wake up at five on the dot every day,” said Elliot, breathing in deeply to steady himself, remembering the heady aroma of Ethiopian Sidamo coffee from that morning. “I noticed that Vicky’s side of the bed was empty but nothing felt amiss. Not yet.”

  On Thursday mornings, he told them, his RN wife worked the eleven-to-seven shift at St. Joseph’s Nursing Home and Assisted Living the night before. This morning he woke up. He rose. Shuffled barefoot to the kitchen—Vicky has, no, “had,” remember, had a habit of borrowing his slippers and shedding them anywhere and everywhere but bedside. He had moved through the TV-less TV room, then through the dining room, his footsteps keeping time with the tick-tock of an octogenarian grandfather clock, a family heirloom, ostensibly a wedding gift from his parents, but really, only his mother. In the kitchen he’d fixed a cup of already percolating, preset joe. The fair-trade kind Vicky insisted upon. He’d yet to turn on a single light, had no need to, in fact, the predawn hallways imprinted on him, despite having lived there merely a few short months.

  Their Beacon Hill home was his wedding present for a wife whose body lay cooling in a small pool of blood at the far end of the kitchen island even as he went outside for the morning paper. He had yet to find her. No, not yet. He’d read the paper. Had his morning constitutional. It was after. Only after retracing his steps—tick-tock, tick-tock—after the need for a second cup drew him to his private reserve of kopi luwak, hidden deep in the recesses of a cupboard’s topmost shelf, far from the disapproving harrumphs of a wife who’d deemed the harvesting of his “cat shit” coffee so unspeakably creepy and cruel she’d shamed him into a secret stash, sipped only when she was—where exactly?—he wondered, confused and foot-dragging now, bare soles gathering dust as he considered callouts and impromptu double shifts and who-the-hell-is-she-withs till he stumbled, practically tripping over her.

  Before the crippling disbelief. Before the confusion/fear/rage rendered him a dark, howling thing, he had been smiling, chuckling inwardly, at the sight of one of his slippers, the right one, flung carelessly by a trash bin. Vintage Vicky. Stooping to retrieve it, it was then, in that moment, that he saw its mate, right there, lynched on the left foot of her prone body: her outstretched limbs in angles unnatural, knife embedded in her back to the hilt of its pearlized handle, a piece of another wedding gift, a full set, part of him dimly noted, even as another part had him screaming her name. Over and over and over again.

  Everything rushed forward after that, with a relentless, almost mechanized momentum: try to revive her, try again, shake her, shout out for her, shake her, shout, call authorities, answer door, answer questions, sit in ambulance, answer questions, submit to checkup, answer questions, watch them take her, answer questions, sit in waiting room, ask them questions, sit at this table, answer questions, answer questions, answer questions. All the while, what was your question?, hands spasmodic—open now, now shut—as he clutches a pinstriped blue slipper—now open, shut now—stained crimson with blood and a single tangerine drop of her favorite nail polish, Siren #440.

  —

  Data Set Entry: January 1, 2007. Burtonsville, Maryland. Kelechi Charles Emeruwa, 41, from Old Umuahia, Abia State, was charged with, and convicted of first-degree murder after stabbing his estranged wife, 36-year-old RN and mother of three young children, Chidiebere Omenihu Ochulo.

  —

  “Tell us about your marriage, Mr. Coffin,” the detectives prodded genially. “How long you two together? How’d you meet?”

  “We were happy. Had our ups and downs, I suppose,” Elliot replied, what else could he say? In couples therapy, he’d called married life “nonmonotonic,” like a line graph that swings up and down, full of vicissitudes, variables aplenty. Dr. Klein misheard his one-word assessment and erroneously repeated “nonmonogamous” and Vicky, daughter of the second of ten wives herself, lost it. Together, they lost a whole session to that mishap, yet the word still struck him as astute. The ups: she has, no, had, dimpled cheeks and dimpled knees. A way of peeling an orange that was pure art. One fluid curl springing zestfully off her knife’s edge. The downs that curved up: when they first met in Lagos, he’d been sick, she’d fed him vitamin-C-laden oranges and tangerines and clementines along with mouthfuls upon mouthfuls of mmiri an ji—the Igbo answer to chicken soup. He’d been bedridden, and mortified, at the time. He worked with the World Bank, for Christ’s sake, was more than well traveled across a continent rife with illnesses long since conquered in other climes (he half expected bubonic plague to make a comeback there).

  He was conditioned to keep his guard up. He’d taken all the requisite precautions. The regimen of shots—yellow fever, typhoid, cholera—and oral prophylactics, a grab bag of chloroquine, iodine tabs, plus the occasional herbal remedy.

  It was chicanery that got him.

  “You bought water from vendors on the street?” his future wife asked, barely concealing a grin.

  “I was hot,” he’d answered, “and it was Perrier.” He grimaced at the acrid memory of its aftertaste. “So I thought.”

  “Perrier isn’t spelled with four r’s.”

  “I repeat. I. Was. Hot.” He was still hot—had a fever, in fact—and was unamused, in no mood really to be mocked by this nineteen-year-old housegirl—this Lagos parvenu from some backwater town in Anambra State. He
vowed to tell his driver, Chibuzo, that this ridiculous young cousin of his just would not do, that he’d no need of a nursemaid, he was fine, really, just fine on his own. He’d weakly thrown off the thin bedsheet, which weighed down on him with the oppressive yet all-seeing heft of an X-ray bib—and her knowing stare.

  “Ndo, you look hot,” she said, faint frown clouding her brow as she put her hand to his own. Satisfied by what she felt there, she was all smiles again, handing him a bottle of water, cheekily adding, “Don’t worry. I read the label.”

  For two weeks, she’d been his Nightingale, the much-ballyhooed call to Chibuzo forestalled, then put off again till he’d gotten better and gotten back to work. On the evening of his third day back at the office, he came home to find her waiting on his steps, a covered food dish place-set on an Anatomy and Physiology book, all balancing on her knees.

  Without a word, he took her in.

  After that, she’d come daily: to feed him, to tidy, to finish homework on his computer. She was a nursing student. She teased him relentlessly about being her toughest clinical case. He grew accustomed to her: taught her chess, the Sicilian Defense, and how to sacrifice a queen. But mainly they talked. Or rather she talked—about her classes, her fledgling coin collection—and he listened. By turns, she drew him out. While he absolutely refused to ride the okada motorcycles or danfo buses that put-putted across the mega-city’s pockmarked streets—playing chicken with pedestrians and motorists alike—he did allow Vicky to show him her Lagos. Places beyond the high, reinforced walls of his hermetically sealed condo complex on Victoria Island.

  “Las Gidi is a city that is thick and heavy like nni ji. Best taken in small bites,” she told him, over dinner at a bukka chophouse, feeding him yam-foufou from the spoon of her fingertips. “Tasty though, no?”