by Uwem Akpan
“I regret to deny you the visa to the United States of America the second time.” This time the rejection stamp sounded like a muffled gunshot. “It’s my considered opinion that if we processed your visa you will lie your way to remaining in America …”
I snatched up my passport from the tray and walked out on him.
The security stepped forward to drag me back to swallow every last word of my humiliation. But Lagoon Drinker stopped them.
OUTSIDE, THE RAIN HAD NOT MELLOWED, and the skies were darkening. The flood smelled of the sea, as though the Atlantic had overrun its beaches.
When I had gathered myself, I put up my umbrella and started wading toward the taxi berth. I was too sad to remove my shoes or roll up my trousers. I did not know whether I was crying or not because the wind drove and battled the rain so hard I was completely wet. I was startled when the pamphlet ladies ducked under my umbrella, clad in raincoats and rain boots.
They said they had heard about the dancer who made the consular officers laugh. They asked whether I thought the student got the visa because of his bleached onyibo skin, whether they should recommend bleaching in their updated pamphlets. I said it had nothing to do with his color change. They assured me they had advised him to do everything to avoid using O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, as port of entry because the internet chat rooms had listed it as the most notorious for turning back Nigerians.
“Uncle, as courtesy for helping you debrief, could you share your interview details?” they said.
“No!” I said.
“We’re sorry. But if de sadists no want you for deir country, don’t be mad. Look at us. We sef shall never even see de inside of dis beautiful embassy whose visas we dey help process daily.”
“Go away.”
“Chai, you selfish man o … it’s like embassy soccer match: Santa Judessas/Lagoon Drinkers ten-uncle-zero!”
Before I could kick them out from under my umbrella, they put a pamphlet in my hand, pushed my fingers to clasp it, and fled. I slogged away, embarrassed and angry.
A broom of lightning swept the skies, applauded by a procession of thunder. When a wedge of wind snapped the umbrella, I tossed it in a trash can and held on to my waterproof folder and pamphlet. Now the damn pamphlet was getting soaked. I was not going to open my folder to stick it in. I stormed back to the trash can and smashed the pamphlet inside. But the wind deflected and landed it in the flood. In frustration, I pursued it down the road. An embassy car splashed water on me and created waves that drove the pamphlet farther away.
“Stupid pamphlet, you’re not also allowed to mock me!” I said, pointing, chasing. “As our people say, both God and utere, the vulture, can never abandon the corpse. Two interviews, and I couldn’t even get to present my documents … excellent!”
I waved at the old man’s relatives, who were huddled under big umbrellas. They did not wave back but looked at me like I was a madman. I walked toward them. They moved away toward a trio of cops. Hearing folks laughing behind me, I turned sharply to see the Depression Discount assholes tracking me under two big green tarpaulins. They said God had punished me for lying to them that I was not reapplying. They said if not for the police they would have tossed me and the juju woman into the lagoon, like the Yorubas did to the Igbos during the genocide and war. When I groped the flood for stones to haul at them, they scattered.
CHAPTER 3
Daddy, when is Thanksgiving?
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, MOLLY TOLD ME HER CONGRESSMAN had put in a call to the State Department, which had asked the embassy “to review” my visa application. And when the embassy emailed me an invite to a third interview, everyone insisted it would not hurt to try again, especially since I did not have to fill out another form or pay a new fee. They told me to remember the endless interviews of Usen’s wife, before she was allowed to join her husband.
This third interview turned out to be a mere formality, though I had gone with a letter from a psychologist to prove that I was sane. My regret was that the pamphlet ladies did not show up that day. Though the new visa was scented like a newly minted dollar bill on my passport, I had suffered so much already I could no longer feel the joy of coming to America. This accentuated the emotional farewell between Caro and me before the flight to Lagos, from which I would get on a New York flight. The old Bekwarra man did not crack his second interview. His son told me this in an email, in which he expressed shock that I had gotten my visa and apologized for “not responding to your greetings after the second interview on that rainy day.” He said his father’s health was deteriorating. This weighed on my mind until the stern JFK immigration folks took me in and asked their thousand foolish questions, as the embassy touts had predicted. They said they were calling to verify my proof of accommodation with my landlord. They said they were calling Molly to verify whether she was my supervisor and whether I was truly editing a war anthology. When they got angry that they could not reach her with the office number, which was what I had put down on my visa application, I panicked and offered her cell phone number. They called her in New Haven, Connecticut, where she was visiting her retired Yale professor parents for the weekend.
That Saturday afternoon, August 27, 2016, in my navy-blue Nigerian senator wear, I did not feel any relief even when they finally said, “Welcome to America!” and stamped my passport. I did not stop trembling till I cleared customs—after more questions and a search of my belongings—and finally arrived at my address in Hell’s Kitchen in a taxi.
Stacking a huge bag, a boom box and a carry-on on my head and strapping a blue-red bulky computer bag behind me, I hiked and panted up the tight stairwell to my floor, the steepest steps I had ever climbed, since each flight went straight to the next floor. It was worse than climbing a steep mbod irim, and I had to shorten my strides to avoid ripping my trousers. My door was one of the three forming a semicircle around this stairwell of rusty twisted vertical bars with sharp edges. The ceiling was a low sky, its leak stains ominous clouds, the round light fixture half filled with dirt, a dying moon. A hallway linked up with this open area, like the tail of a noose.
My apartment was unlocked and painted a light blue, the blinds off-white. It was much smaller than I had thought. When I gave Caro a video tour on WhatsApp, she did not think much of the kitchen because it was much smaller than ours. But she appreciated the fact that Lucci had left bread, eggs, peanut butter, Coke, and Budweiser in the pink orchid Whirlpool fridge to welcome me, and, on the lovely little dining table, instructions about the local shops. He weighed the note with three keys, with further instructions to always use all of them. This table was surrounded by three old beat-up chairs. In the living room, there was a bookshelf, a chandelier, a green recliner, and a Sony TV. Atop the shelf, there was a black-and-white portrait of a smiling old man with large friendly eyes, dried lips, and a black earring and thick silver hair. The windows opened onto the street, where a twenty-four-hour parking sign twinkled nonstop. All the windows had gaps, hence the few mosquitoes buzzing in the apartment. Caro and I had not worried about mosquitoes but about the coming winter when we had discussed New York. Besides, we had been told since primary school that American mosquitoes did not give malaria.
Apart from the whole place having, in my opinion, too many wiring pipes running along the dusty walls, there were also too many taped wires and electrical sockets, as if it were some improvised recording studio. The tapes came in many bright colors, like the plumage of nsasak, the sun bird. My bedroom looked like a little storage area between the living room and the kitchen, exactly the length of the full bed and a footpath; it had one of those beds you fold into a cabinet fixed to the wall. I liked the small bed and its navy-blue sheets and multicolored bedcover. I put most of my clothes in the ample cabinet shelves above it, while my sweaters and suit were in the big closet in the living room. I left the boom box I had brought by the bed, which was how I loved to listen to my audiobooks. The wooden floor was old and scraggy, and glued together with
a dirty yellowish filler in places. This was not exactly the glistening floor of the New York apartments we saw on TV or in magazines, but I was not going to allow this little inconvenience to spoil the excitement of living by Times Square. “Ekong Baby, the most important thing in a bedroom is the bed,” Caro consoled me.
I was elated when Usen rang to welcome me and to say he would bring his family to visit me the next day. He could not come to the airport because of a crucial meeting with his landlord.
Molly herself called to say she could not wait to see me at work on Monday. And I could have hugged her when she added, “I really gave the JFK immigration a-holes a piece of my mind when they phoned to say they’d detained you and asked me all these stupid questions about the usefulness of your fellowship! And why is it their business whether your relatives were personally hurt in the war? They made it sound as though Andrew & Thompson were helping you apply for asylum. Even I felt humiliated listening to them. God knows what shit questions they asked you.” She said they only let me go when she lost her cool while rehashing my torrid visa interviews for them.
But now, because she was still fuming, I could not say how angry the officers themselves were with me after that call. I could tell right away she was quite an expressive and passionate lady who called things as she saw them.
Next, Molly said to call Gregory Lucci in Purchase, New York, to arrange to pay rent. However, when I did, he was still seething from his own run-in with the same immigration authorities. “These thugs interrogated me for thirty long minutes as if I’d stolen my apartment or something,” the old man said in a trembling voice like he wanted to cry. “Buddy, I’m so relieved you called, because now I know you’re safe. They were so rude they threatened to send you home or stick you in quarantine if I didn’t cooperate. And can you believe they tried to trip me up by asking me to corroborate some of what Molly had told them? Claiming she was too upset for them to understand her?”
When I responded that he was a very understanding man, it seemed to console him. Then he eagerly confided in me he had rented my apartment for thirty years, and how much he loved it, though the landlord, Tony Canepa, was refusing to renovate it just to provoke him to leave. He said something about “rent stabilization” but I did not understand. He asked about my family and age and was happy to hear I was married. He promptly said the married usually treated his space better. He was shocked when I said we did not want children. But, giggling with embarrassment, he scolded himself for nursing this stereotype that Africans could never decide not to have children. Then he added that I could remove his crucifix above the door and his photo and hide them somewhere. When I said it was fine because I was also Catholic and liked the photo anyway, he was pleased. He spent a bit of time trying to pronounce Ikot Ituno-Ekanem, my village.
I wanted to know whether there was paperwork on the subletting to be filled out or signed, but he said no. “You mean I don’t have to sign anything with you or the landlord or the city?” I pushed for clarity. He assured me that, according to the law, he had informed the landlord, which he did in writing as soon as Molly had contacted him. He praised me for being a stickler for laws, just the kind of subletee he and the landlord preferred. We agreed on when and how to get his rent to him, the first installment being the rent for both August and December.
Finally, he was really moved that I had come all the way from Africa to understudy publishing. It meant so much to him that I was a Morrison Fellow; he told me when he first read The Bluest Eye in 1970 it felt as though he were being thrown into a distant country and culture. “Buddy, I’ve been meaning to say you must be a really special person!” he said, laughing. “I’m an avid reader myself. I’m so honored to host you in my humble abode. I apologize on behalf of our crazy immigration officers.”
But what stayed with me was his weak, wavering voice. I could tell he was a kind old man. His voice seemed weaker the harder he laughed, yet it was a comforting, trusted grandfatherly presence in a strange land. I texted Molly to say how pleasant he was. She replied with a thumbs-up emoji.
I ATE BREAD AND COKE and napped till the sun came down. When I stepped out with Lucci’s cart to shop at the Food Emporium in Times Square, I ran into my two nearest neighbors chatting by the stairwell, one Asian, one white. I stopped to greet them, but they ignored me. The Asian was a tall sinewy man with a flat shaven head and a goatee whose strands you could count. His teeth had a double gap. He was wearing black jeans and a white long-sleeved T-shirt under a red short-sleeved shirt. Though both men shared the same height, the white guy was broad-shouldered, with thick heavy lips and thick glasses in brown round frames. He had a yellow long-sleeved T-shirt over tight white trousers that revealed his calves were bigger than his thighs.
I went nearer and said another hello. But it did not earn me even a glance. I was ashamed and lost. The place suddenly seemed too small for me and them. So I backed off slowly and lugged my cart down the stairwell, glancing over my shoulder to the mailboxes. However, the voices of the two men actually seemed to be getting louder, their laughter chasing me from the building—or maybe it was in my head. I was sweating and my back ached as I rolled into the streets.
But seeing the majestic skyline, “the rich man’s skyscrapers,” to use Usen’s description, up close set my heart pounding. I was always crazy about Times Square. After Caro and I attended the long midnight Mass that ushered in the New Year in Nigeria, we would not go to bed until six a.m. Nigerian time, when we had witnessed the New Year ball hit Times Square on CNN. It was like experiencing New Year’s twice. It was always a special private thing between us; now I missed her so much the pull of the square felt raw, as though she would suddenly show up if I hurried and burst into it. But I was impeded by cars and tourists clogging the streets, the restaurants overflowing onto the curbs. New Yorkers and their tourists came in all manner of colors and races and sizes and clothing and languages. It was intense. The air around Hell’s Kitchen was full of the assorted beautiful scents of ethnic food. Though I could not place the cilantro smells, those of curry reminded me of the Indian restaurants of Abuja, and those of baked overripe plantain fleetingly of my village.
Yet entering the square was more surreal than anything TV could conjure. The atmosphere sparkled with life and images and sound, whole sides of skyscrapers covered by screens. Sometimes these screens were interactive as the same advertisement exploded and splashed from screen to random skyscraper screen, like the ball in ping-pong doubles. The square was the glare of a lacerating kaleidoscope.
The sheer energy alone from the diversity of people pouring in from all over the world could have lit up the place. It felt so global, so democratic, as though all these lights had already boiled and refined every soul down to essential humanity. From the glow on the faces, the excitement from even the American accents around me, I could see that even Americans found this as fascinating as the foreigners. And the cops were everywhere, armed like soldiers. I was shocked to see all these beautiful ladies in cowboy boots and colorful bikinis shaking their boobs like bells. But when I got near enough to realize their breasts were merely painted like they were in bras, I knew the square was even wilder than I had thought.
The only thing that remotely reminded me of home was the statue of Father Francis Duffy behind the cross in Father Duffy Square. The face of this fine Irish American soldier, who had meritoriously served as chaplain in the Spanish-American War and First World War, had the same sharp features and seriousness of the Irish priests and nuns who sacrificed everything to plant the Christian faith, Western education, and hospitals in southern Nigeria. His eyes and lips really resembled those of Father Gary Walsh, who defended the people of Ikot Ituno-Ekanem during the Biafran War. I would not have wanted to remember the war here, but the atmosphere was like an anesthesia and this seeming familiarity was like a precious opening, a doorway into the unbridled effervescence that was Time Square.
I BOUGHT TWO BASEBALL CAPS from Forever 21 and a set of long satin
pajamas from Victoria’s Secret for Caro. Of course, she was excited; we texted back and forth. Then I parked my cart and joined others in climbing to the top of the red and silver bleachers of Father Duffy Square, where a camera projected my face on a thirty-foot screen. It was all so sudden, like my head was sucked out of all proportion by a magnifying mirror. I recoiled from the horror in my eyes, but before I could smile like others were doing, the camera had cut to something else. I was still feeling my face when a big cheer washed over me. Without knowing what was going on, I scrambled down and grabbed the cart to join the jokers in front of the Marriot Marquis Hotel. They sounded like fun.
There was a giant screen atop the latter that showed miniatures of everyone standing there. A titan of a girl was superimposed on the screen and she would pick up these miniature images from the screen as if to bite them, like King Kong, but then she would just kiss the image and put it back down. I wanted to be picked up. But I was not lucky. When staying in one place for a long time did not favor me, I moved about and waved to the girl. As our people say, you cannot stand in one place to watch the masqueraders. Nothing. When she picked one baby whose family was eating hamburgers on one of the little red dining sets outside a McDonald’s, the mother held her precious baby closer. As I watched folks eating, I had no guts to ask the family whose images got picked up what it felt like, because if my neighbors could not answer my greetings, why should these random folks?
When a cop politely tapped my shoulder to move my cart for it was inconveniencing others, I apologized, got ahold of myself, and disappeared into the Food Emporium. I packed up as many groceries as possible, because hauling stuff to my apartment was not something I wanted to do often. But what I remembered most was buying yams, a common food in Nigeria. While the name rang with nostalgia, these yam tubers were nothing like what I knew. Our Nigerian yam could be as big as a human thigh, whereas these ones were a little bigger than potatoes.
