by Uwem Akpan
CHAPTER 23
America was meaningless
IT WAS A STEADY WINDLESS SATURDAY NOON WHEN I RAN into Keith pacing the sidewalk in front of our building. In white Crocs and a long blue Portuguese flannel nightshirt over a red T-shirt, he looked like a man who was sleepwalking. I was trying to decide whether to greet him or not, when he suddenly swooshed away from the building, unwittingly coming toward me. My heart began to beat fast. When he saw me, he waved and called out to me. He stopped before me, yet he could not look me in the eye and had his hands behind him, to discourage a handshake, I supposed. His cologne so filled the air I thought it might attract bees.
Thinking he was going to talk about the clash with Brad, I spoke first: “I’m sorry, I heard you guys had a bit of a confrontation.”
“I don’t want to talk about your friends, please, okay?” he said, still looking away.
Still standing there on the sidewalk, I reached out for a handshake, to invite him further into my space. But, instead of moving, he stretched and bent forward and released one hand to offer the lightest of fist bumps.
I saw progress.
He hesitated, but just as I opened my mouth to compliment the weather, he burst out:
“Look, Ekong, I’ve got the bugs!”
“Welcome to New York, my village,” I said.
“Could you stop sounding like that embassy lunatic you told me about, Lagoon Drinker? You keep downplaying this stuff.”
“Then maybe I’m more of a New York toughie than you.”
“Come on, man, stop …”
“Listen, without humor, you can’t deal with this shit. So smarten up and tell me when you discovered you’re the newest carrier in town.”
“This morning. This freaking morning, and I called the landlord right away. Though I have no itches, my thighs, my back, my arms are fried. My ass has been ripped in shreds, dripping liquid like I need a diaper. If I don’t wear cologne, I smell like the egg yolk of a farm-raised chicken …!”
“Hey, dude, calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down, because I just need to know what to tell my school principal on Monday. No school wants this shit on its profile.”
I advised him to buckle up because these little fuckers were already winning. I told him he might struggle with light-headedness and insomnia. “Keith, hey, I would’ve taken you out to eat, to really welcome you to the club, like the fancy dinner Brad, Alejandra, and Jeff organized for me, if you don’t mind me bringing their asses into this, our little midday tell-all,” I said. “However, in your case, the restaurant tables or spoons aren’t long enough to maintain this distance, you know.” He was laughing now, and for the first time that afternoon he lifted his eyes to behold my face. He was less sad, less embarrassed, less frightened, less alone. He said he had showered five times already but still felt dirty.
“Bro, were you able to get the secret from Jeff?” he asked.
“All he told me was that the secret is not healthy,” I said. “I don’t think he would ever say.”
“Then what’re all the cozy chats in the stairwell about? I warned you, chinks won’t help you!”
BURSTS OF WIND BEGAN to come in from the river, whipping the streets. The trees shook till the leaves abandoned the branches and rode the currents. On earth, each frenetic gust pressed on the piles of garbage and the plastic-wrapped furniture till you could see the shapes of wing chairs and love seats carved momentarily in sharp relief.
After I relayed to him the instructions I got from Jeff when my neighbors first revealed I had bedbugs, Keith demanded in a rather curious way, “Is this how they do it in Asia, then?”
“Do I look Asian to you?” I said.
“Why do you Africans always act like we, African Americans, are stupid and clueless? … I’ve placed an expedited order for a snazzy electronic bedbug detector. Expensive but great reviews.”
I ignored the taunt on Africans and went on to tell him about the bedbug inspectors. Suddenly he got back his confidence: he warned me to keep away from Lucci. Keith was furious the guy had rented so many places in this city a quarter of a century ago. “His fellow Sicilian, the landlord, says the crook has got an empire of illegal sublets!” he said. But then he asked me to just play along with Lucci, for I would not be able to get rid of him. He said if I did not cooperate, Lucci would harass me with phone calls or visits. He reminded me he had my spare keys and knew I was a lame duck, for I had signed no papers and was an alien. I said Lucci was already leaving me endless voice mails full of random personal questions. He said the rogue was building my profile so if the landlord dragged him to court for illegally squatting, he could at least tell the judge I was his dearest internet friend whom he invited to New York, to garner publishing experience from his friend’s niece. He said, to save his lease, he could marshal these intimate details, including my grandma’s maiden name and the shape of her tombstone. Lucci was desperate, he confided, because mine was the last of the six apartments he once had on the block. “Organized racketeering is a big problem here, man!” he said. “You Africans need to stop romanticizing America.”
I did not like this revelation about how Lucci was mining my personal details. By the time Keith said Lucci was only fifty years old but always talked like he was eighty, Canepa’s age, I was weak. I remembered his myriad practiced laughs and cries and coughs. I felt like someone was in the process of stealing my identity. When I remembered he had already extracted information when I arrived, about my wife and our desire not to have children, I felt like one who suddenly realized he had been duped all his life. I needed to lie down. I needed to go upstairs while my legs could still carry me.
Completely agitated and forgetting Keith himself was still adjusting to being around carriers, I stepped forward. But he glared at me and backed off as though I had come too close, as though I were going to worsen his bedbug woes. “Stop right there, you African nigger!” he warned.
“What?”
“You heard me!”
I lost it and exploded, asking him what “you African nigger” was doing in that sentence. “And you get this right,” I shouted. “We ain’t no descendants of slaves. There’s just nothing like African nigger but just nigger and that is you guys, period. I’m tired of this Africa-this, Africa-that shit. You sound like a certain Angela Stevens at Andrew & Thompson. Didn’t history tell you Benin City in Nigeria was the grandest medieval city, the first city on earth without crime, before Britain and Canada massacred its citizenry, looted its arts, and razed it in 1897? Did they not tell you that city’s moat was once longer than the Great Wall of China? You sound like all your Lagos embassy folks, paid to invent a thousand ways to insult us. Ino-mkpo, just get African out of African American. What’s even African about you if you hate our asses so much?”
I drenched him with all my frustration in America, telling him it was cowards and unpredictable and useless folks like him that we Africans sold to slavery, not counting the good folks white people kidnapped on their own, burning down kingdoms that did not cooperate. I blasted him that people like him had put this idea of being superior to Africans in the heads of their primary school kids like Ujai. I laced my tirade with endless Annang profanities.
When I spat on the ground between us to underline my irritation at our mutual misunderstandings, it jolted him. He blinked and stepped back. I stepped forward and spat again. He turned around and walked toward Times Square. I trailed him, but he kept his cool with hands in his pockets, like I was berating someone else ahead of him. I let him go when I saw two NYPD officers at the intersection of Fiftieth and Eighth.
I WAS STILL FUMING when I got to my apartment. But by this time I was fuming at myself, for saying more to Keith than I needed to, or was true. I had gone too far with the whole thing about who was sold into slavery. The truth was if the African Americans had a bit of support in America, who was to say they would not have flourished like white folks of Australia—those real descendants of die-hard death-row w
hite criminals shipped there by Britain?
Standing there by my window, I hated the fact that I had sounded more bitter about my African American brethren than Tuesday Ita, and more discriminatory than the Humane Society Two. I held myself totally responsible for this second breakup. I had let myself down, beginning to join the ranks of those I hated—the sadists. I could see the faces of the good embassy touts, disappointed in what I had become in America. I could also see the bad touts pelting me with stones, saying all my precious relationships with my neighbors were a lie. It was not just the Black American I had lost. America was meaningless. I could not live with anyone.
I, the immigrant, had also become the problem. I felt I could never snap out of it, that things could only get worse. I felt like I had lost my entire balanced feel to life, like a man who was either screaming or whispering when he simply wanted to talk. These days, life came to me in frightening exaggerations.
I was sinking. Fast.
To cut the dread growing in my head, I splashed cold water on my face and began to drink, mixing Azteca de Oro brandy and Stolichnaya Elit vodka. I was angry with Jeff’s chair, for it reminded me of the friendships I had won and lost in America. I covered the chair with Lucci’s navy-blue bedsheet and dragged and deposited it near the door like a blindfolded prisoner awaiting execution. I walked around the apartment gulping and reciting Mohammed Dib, the Algerian poet, like a new rosary:
I was then still sustained by some kind of hope,
but hope so enclosed in inaccessible places
that I now hesitate to call it hope.
A stone had been dropped into an abyss
and I listened to its interminable fall.
I was that stone
and the hope
I clung to was that I would never reach the bottom.
CHAPTER 24
“Call White America’s Bluff” Thanksgiving Mass
DEPRESSED AND SLEEP-STARVED AND COLD, I WAITED outside Starbucks till it opened. Since I could not shake the thoughts that Lucci could invade my apartment, I had carried some of my important things like my passport and some clothes in my computer bag. And yet, I could not really concentrate. I left the café twice to check up on the apartment, the first time cleaning up and restoring Lucci’s photo to the shelf. I searched the streets for someone with a huge nose, fitting Jeff’s description of Lucci.
It was nine a.m. New York time, three p.m. Nigerian time, when my phone started to ring. I knew the long Sunday “Call White America’s Bluff” Thanksgiving Mass was over. It was a six-hour celebration. As soon as the first callers said it was a great occasion and that my wife read well, I congratulated them. But, given my deepening woes in Hell’s Kitchen, it was as though taking in too much good news would weaken my guard, exposing me to Lucci’s torment. I could not reach Caro.
My friends apologized that they could not send videos because the internet was slow. I perused all the photos and text descriptions of the bustling crowds that had come to protest American racism on this hot sunny day. They overflowed the church into the fields, swamping the life-sized Stations of the Cross, down to the edge of the valley and the adjacent school. There was a group of Liverpool fans in their red colors; they carried a large banner with the message: NOT IN OUR NAME: KICK FATHER ORRIN OUT.
I was equally captivated by pictures of people perching atop the Stations of the Cross to get a better view of things, like concertgoers, especially the shot of Gabriel, or Two-Scabbard, the youth leader, who had asked me to speak at the canceled memorial. Today, he dared to sit atop the Twelfth Station, the Crucifixion. He had climbed the cross higher than Jesus. In fact, he was sitting on the horizontal beam, on Christ’s shoulders, the Lord’s head in between his thighs, his feet dangling, tapping the Lord’s torso, his two scabbarded machetes slung across his bare sweating body. He wore dark glasses and a face paint of charcoal, like the war dancers of Tungbo, Sagbama, at their October 22 annual festival celebrating their liberation from Biafra. WE MUST TALK BIAFRA! was written on his chest. It was as though he had gone up there either to cut Jesus’s body loose from suffering, or to behead him. The only reason folks did not haul him down or stone him for blaspheming this most sacred of sacramentals was because this was an extraordinary gathering: we were totally fed up with racism and American police brutality.
Then my friends sent me pictures of our white parishioners arriving in a police-protected convoy. When they and their children stepped out, all of them were dressed like Usen’s family in New Jersey and hung their heads in humility. With the photos of the crowd applauding, I could imagine the valley clapping back. The Awire Womenfolk, camped out in a field, yodeled and gyrated and beat their nkwong, as though they were accepting the initiation request of our white guests into their association.
I could not resist calling up Two-Scabbard, who told me that once inside the church, the tension was such that the speeches could not wait till after Communion. So the Americans had gotten up from their usual front pews and quickly denounced Father Orrin and the American police, surprising everyone with striking proverbs. They blamed the major religions for not doing enough to stamp out all kinds of discrimination. They apologized for slavery. They praised Father Kiobel for saving our villages from doom. “Hearing of our white wickedness in New Jersey, how could we abandon you in Ikot Ituno-Ekanem?” one of the white speakers said rhetorically, and pointed to our enlarged Chelsea and New Jersey photos and the Indian American cop selfie, posted everywhere. “As your ancestors say, both God and utere, the vulture, cannot reject the corpse. How could we allow the CIA and MI6 to cart us to safety in Europe or America when you’ve received us with open arms all these years? As your ancestors say, when palm oil touches one finger, it touches all. You’ve never harassed our children for crying during Mass or for using the restroom. Please, then, accept our humble gesture of standing here today, to cry together for the damage racism has perpetrated on our dear Church, the Body of Christ. We want to assure you that Bishop Salomone of New Jersey also believes we’ve made the right decision to stay on. In the last week, we’ve Skyped with him daily. He sends his apologies and has already personally notified Pope Francis of, not just the criminality of banning Black folks from a Catholic church, but of the mortal sin and deep wound this inflicts on the Body of Christ … we hope you’ll forgive us today. We also want to apologize for all our expatriates who quickly fled and abandoned and betrayed you once this crisis broke. As the ancestors say, some flies go to cover the wound, others go eat it. It’s important that we stick together, hand in hand, through this, as racism flares back up in America. We’re also grateful to Father Kiobel for his guidance in the past week.”
Then Two-Scabbard said the Americans got emotional when they read out the Annang praises I used to distract Ujai at the train station. Though their accented Annang led to sobs and muffled laughs in equal measure in the congregation, it must have reminded our old people of Father Walsh’s broken Annang. And anything, anybody, that reminded us of our wartime pastor was a god.
Other villagers who called wondered, though, why our New Jersey host, Tuesday Ita, was not in the pictures and wanted me to confirm the rumors of his new color. They said his phone was switched off. I did not reply. I equally ignored those who wanted to know whether the Native American cop really tasted our mmun-edia.
They said the most emotional part of the Mass was when Father Kiobel, after accepting the American apologies on behalf of the people, said almost in tears that Mary’s poster reminded him of his late mother. Nobody had ever seen him that emotional before. He had even opened up about his personal experience of the prewar genocide in northern Nigeria. When he could not continue, everyone had clapped and assured him he was really their priest now, for hurting more than he was able to say from this war, like them.
Excited that Father Kiobel had brought up Biafra, I ran out of Starbucks to scream into the phone for more details. My fellow villagers pleaded that I should wait for the video clip, for the experience
could not be summarized. Instead, they spent time regaling me with stories of dancing and singing in and out of the church after the American apologies. Mercifully, that night the internet finally allowed Caro to forward the clips to me. She said she herself was jealous of Father Kiobel’s ability to tell his own story. Knowing Biafra was a no-go area for us, I said nothing.
One of the videos began with our tense priest pacing the sanctuary of the packed church. This rough week had taken a toll on him; he looked different and ragged because he had neither shaven nor scraped his head. His round babyish face was lined with misery, and he had lost weight, too, like that of a long-suffering refugee. Of course, given his obsession with clothes, we all knew he had bought brand-new vestments for this occasion. But today I loved the deliberate nattiness to his dressing. As he pointed repeatedly at Mary, in the poster-sized photo from New Jersey as he said she reminded him of his mother, his wrists were adorned with beautiful blue-white tzitzit bracelets with golden menorah clips. I loved the Jewish touch, a counterpunch to the anti-Semitic rhetoric in New Jersey.
“PRAISE BE TO JESUS!” Father Kiobel exclaimed in the video.
“Honor to Mary, the Mother of God!” responded the church crowd.
“My dear friends, I thank you for the welcome and applause for our American speakers! Their refusal to abandon us is a rare gift to all of us. In their words and presence, we also hear the goodwill of our friends in that New Jersey church.
“On a personal note, I must say, our people in New York—the very victims of such orchestrated racial profiling—have asked me to use this occasion to also talk about our ethnic issues, in keeping with the spirit of today’s Mass. Please, allow me to personalize this spirit by confiding in you that this old white woman in the wheelchair, Mary of New Jersey”—he stopped momentarily in front her group picture—“who led the protest to Bishop Salomone—has reminded me of my late mother like nobody else in the last fifty years. I also want to use this chance to apologize to all of you who believe I’m suppressing conversation about what happened to us all fifty years ago.”
