The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  This is how you go on a blind trip. Walk to the nearest main road. Hail the nearest public transport, be it bus or motorcycle. If motorcycle, ask to be taken to the nearest garage. If bus, ask for the final bus stop. Alight at the stop before that – you are not looking for an ending, you are looking for a journey. Avoid bus stops. Never bother with distance. Never worry how long it takes. Sleep through the hours. Sleep where night finds you.

  The bus reached a small village with trees, narrow pre-colonial roads and small houses with red rusted zinc roofs just as daylight began to fade. When they turned at a roundabout that had a statue of a youth corps in full regalia lifting up a hoe, he decided to alight. He went into a shop and asked for a bottle of Amarula, the only alcohol his body could abide because it was sweet, and asked where he could find accommodation for the night. The teenage girl still in her school uniform of blue skirt and white shirt told him in a thick accent that made him realise he was in Tiv land that there were a couple of hotels, but he rejected them and told her he was looking for a place to rent. She smiled and picked up her phone to make a call in Tiv punctuated with long laughs. When she was done she smiled at him and told him to wait for her uncle.

  The man came on his own motorcycle and she came round the counter to hug him. He then turned to greet Macmillan. He was grateful for the warmth but a little uncomfortable with the handshake; the man held his hand too long.

  ‘We rike omo Yoloba in this virrage,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘Shebi you omo Yoloba?’

  ‘I am from Kaduna state, sir, but my mother is—’

  ‘Ah krimb bike lerrus go. You go marry wife from this land omo Yoloba, hahahahaha.’

  Max climbed onto the motorcycle, clung to the man as it dragged him into the village. There was an electric bulb on in every single house and his mind wandered to the power problems in the big cities he had lived in. Every president promised 24-hour electricity during elections and failed.

  The okada stopped. Under a huge grandmother tree was a strange abandoned house. Max decided it would do. He had not grieved for the boyhood he had never had; he had not grieved when he lost his brother and sister to the Miss World War; he had not grieved the stranger that returned to the house in the form of his brother without his sister; he had not grieved any of the misfortunes that had afflicted him in the past because he’d made up his mind to fix the situation every single time. Now his death couldn’t be fixed, but, as he’d discovered on the bus on his way here, life had given him a gift: a date for his demise had been set, so he could grieve it.

  Max thanked the man and wondered, as his new landlord climbed onto his motorcycle, how much older than thirty-three he was. Fifty? He didn’t look very wrinkled and his slight limp might have been from bending over while working on the farm. In the house, Max walked round the room, caught a reflection of himself in a mirror, and began to cry.

  The sound of his crying was alien to him, a rasping he could not recognise as his own, but, come to think of it, this was because he had never heard its sound before. He didn’t stop. He saw the images of all the people he had lost in the mirror and gave himself over to the narcotic intoxication of death. When he was spent, he found himself in a dream.

  Everything seemed aquamarine. His clothes floated somewhat and it was harder than usual to move. He heard his mother calling his name but it wasn’t from this watery place; it was from a distance, a memory. So he closed his eyes to find her. The morning sun scorched them open. The air was crisp and the small apartment was dusty. There was something familiar on the walls, in the cracked mirror. Something of him belonged here but he couldn’t think what. When he had fallen into bed the previous night, it hadn’t locked him out, even though he was one of those people who usually couldn’t fall asleep for the first few nights in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar bed. The familiarity of the small room was strange. On an impulse he dug into his pocket and switched on his phone. It exploded with several text messages, all from André, then messages from colleagues at work, then from his father. Had they found out? His fingers shook so hard the phone almost slipped. He inhaled deeply and calmed himself. Then he opened the very first text message, from André.

  SWEET MOTHER IS DEAD. WHERE ARE YOU?

  Watching his brother make cake batter with the father, Max feels an overwhelming surge of gratitude. Life has granted him one wish: he won’t be burying his brother. The precariousness of André’s life is something that has kept him on edge since childhood, because he knew that if life decided to take his brother, he wouldn’t have the moral grounds to begrudge it. Having survived fifteen or sixteen suicides, multiple body mutilations, the Miss World War, three spirit wives or more, eighteen Amsterdam prostitutes or less, and having fathered a child by one of them, André had lived a full life by twenty-seven. This not including the year of slavery, the year Madamthemadam milked his penis to replenish her youth, the eternal music tour in Rome at age twenty-one, the year of incarceration at the Oakland asylum facility, and the year of evangelical ministry. It was almost as if André had grown older than his elder brother.

  But this, of course, was impossible, for Max had spent too many years in the solitude of care, solidifying into premature middle age and baldness, having lost hope of finding understanding outside himself. At the edge of thirty-three he had been a father to his father and to his André but now, as he helps his father pour his dead mother’s vanilla sponge-cake batter into a pan, something almost washes off the gratitude he felt moments ago.

  It is the realisation that he can never rescue his father from this grief or André from the abundant persecutions of his life. And it was too late to save his mother from whatever it was that haunted her in their Madhouse all those years, for it was impossible to save a dead woman. He is grateful he will leave this world before André, but he can never return them all to those hot December afternoons when they sat on their father’s lap and made rain.

  The Five Catechisms of André

  1. WHY DID YOU LOSE YOUR PARENTS?

  ‘Have you seen my mother?’ André asked, going from shop to shop in a strange town. ‘I am looking for my mother,’ he explained to strangers. ‘We live in Sabo,’ he informed a drunken man in the gutter. The man laughed at him. The woman selling rice and beans from a zinc shed saw him talking to the mad man and laughed at him.

  Where was he?

  One moment he was following Ladidi to where she must have fallen, and the next he felt lifted up by giant hands and the world went black. Even in this blackness he had the sensation of being rolled in the air. He opened his eyes to find himself in a room with no roof full of bodies, most of them still, limbs all mixed up, though some were alive and sitting on the edge of the walls which opened up to a moving azure sky, all of them looking out. He was hit with a blast of sunburnt air mixed with stale dried blood and wet sand. He could taste these smells on his tongue and when he gulped them down they churned his belly. He couldn’t wonder why the room was moving or why it had no roof but opened up to the sky. He couldn’t wonder which leg was his or which hands were his because he was thinking of Ladidi as she disappeared into the wave of falling bodies, the crimson blooming from her stomach on the yellow dress as she fell. He was thinking of how beautiful the blooming red made the dress and how she didn’t scream and thrash her hands in the air like the others dying; how she just fell with her face calm, mysteries resolved, satisfied with life at fifteen. That was the last glimpse he caught of her. The next moment he would be snatched up into the air, then black out. Her face had been serene, eyes half-open as she slept with the sea of dead bodies, somehow regal even in death. A hand over her crimson blossom blooming over her yellow dress.

  Ladidi, Ladidi. Queen of the dead.

  More people were beginning to awaken. As they did, they quickly disentangled themselves and retreated to the furthest corner, too stunned to scream. Those sitting on the edges of the walls offered down unasked explanations; some even went so far as to speculate on the origin of the war �
� they were calling it the ‘Miss World War’ now. Apparently some newspaper reporter, a Christian woman in Lagos, had said the Holy Prophet himself would surely marry one of the contestants in the Miss World competitions if he saw them. Nobody had expected the following sequence of events. Muslim twelve-year-olds must have said their goodbyes to their Christian playmates the previous evening and then returned with cutlasses the following day. The massacre happened everywhere: markets, schools, hospitals, everywhere. André thought of Ladidi the whole time these stories were told. How fitting it was that she would die in such an event. A war on beauty. The perfect crisis for a perfect girl.

  The Miss World War.

  The next time he opened his eyes the room had stopped moving. No one was inside it with him. The sun was still in the blue-paper sky and the wall in front of him fell open. A chubby man with bulbous red lips and a balding scalp wearing a blood-splattered singlet over his potbelly yelled, ‘Abi, you no wan commot for my truck?’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ André stood up and jumped out onto the ground. The ground was different here, light brown. He turned to the man to ask which place this was but the man wasn’t there; he had climbed into the front seat of the truck and slammed the door. As André started to walk towards him, the truck coughed and shot out into the hot afternoon. It occurred to him that if he asked people where he was they would think something was wrong with him and lock him up. He reasoned he couldn’t have been taken very far from home – how many times had he opened and closed his eyes and opened them before he got here?

  So he went from shop to shop asking around for his mother. By noon he was so hungry the world swayed before him. He saw a little girl in a worn purple-check uniform, skipping to an imaginary beat and nibbling a biscuit. He begged her for it. She giggled and held the biscuit out to him, and once he’d taken it she screamed, realising that he meant it, that he wasn’t just playing with her. A few houses ahead a woman rushed out and yelled at the nearest person, finger pointed at André, ‘Kidnapper! Catch am o! Catch am! Kidnapper! He wan’ steal my pikin. Catch am!’

  André had a good head start. He ran across the street, past gutters and narrow paths between fences till he found himself in the village market. He went to the okada men parked at the entrance, hustling passengers, and when they saw him approach they hustled him. ‘Have you seen my mother?’ None of them knew who he was; how would they know his mother? So he walked on, coveting sliced pineapples, peeled oranges, kuli-kuli and biscuits displayed for sale. He grew envious of the lepers and beggars on the fringe of the market who could beg for and receive alms. He didn’t realise it but by evening he had somehow retraced his steps back to the area he had fled. The little girl who had given him her biscuit started screaming again, and the mother abandoned the clothes she was drying on the grass in front of her house and ran after him screaming, ‘Thief! Thief! Thief!’ Within minutes he had been pushed into the gutter at the side of the road, weighed down by a car tyre thrown over his head. ‘Petrol, petrol – somebody bring petrol!’

  ‘Abeg na small boy.’

  ‘Na so dem dey small.’

  ‘Too much in this area.’

  ‘He stole my wristwatch, my gold wristwatch!’

  ‘This petrol is not enough.’

  ‘Go buy petrol, na. You wan waste gallon for this Obasanjo regime?’

  ‘He is an evil child, look at him. Chanting incantation. It will not work! Me too I have my Jesus. Evil child. Tufia!’

  ‘Wait, wait what is he saying? Everybody keep kwayet, keep kwayet! You people should calm down. Let’s hear what he is saying.’

  André was shuddering with the weight of the tyre on his shoulders, staring unseeingly at them.

  ‘Oya, talk!’

  ‘My mother – my mother – I am looking for my mother. I am-I am-I am looking—’

  ‘Thunder faya you there.’

  ‘So na today dem catch you na im you sabi say you get mama.’

  ‘Abeg pour the petrol!’

  ‘See im face, see that scar for im eye? E be like say dem don beat am before.’

  ‘But he no wan stop.’

  ‘This life.’

  ‘This petrol never reach.’

  The chill of the petrol soothed him as it cascaded from his scalp down his body. He couldn’t hear the voices any more, couldn’t hear their accusations. Another person would have tried to fight back, to resist, but he was already mesmerised by the vapour of the petrol and the attention these people were giving him, mesmerised by all this activity for his sake. If martyrdom was the price, so be it. He bowed his head in the gutter with the resignation of a child whose mother drags him home from play and instructs him to undress for an evening bath. He shut his eyes and waited for it, for the world to explode in flames around him.

  When he opened his eyes he found his face in the most delicious-smelling grass he had ever inhaled, well-watered grass in the gentle heat of the sun. He rolled over and saw a clear sheet of blue sky. The air was cool and warm and so pleasant that it tickled his cheeks and he began to laugh. Until he heard the distant whimper. He stood and turned to the origin of the sound. There he was – across the grassland was the speck of a little boy. Even though he could not make out the details of the face, André felt a stab of familiarity in his lower belly so acute that he winced. The boy’s complexion reminded him of Ladidi, but it wasn’t that; something else about this boy provoked an indescribable connection. He began to jog through the bush, skipping over broken branches and small anthills towards the boy. When he reached level ground he saw that the child was in fact sitting on a small rock in the middle of a river, his ash jalabiya as soaked as his face and soft, curly hair.

  ‘Big water is coming!’ yelled André, not knowing how he knew but certain in his gut that it was. ‘Leave the river now!’

  But the boy just kicked his leg in the water.

  ‘Leave the water now! Save yourself!’ André screamed, and there it was, the gush of water roaring from a distance. Just as the little boy turned to look at him, just as the wave grew into a wall that would collapse on him, André was snatched up into the air, his howls muted in his gullet, and thrown into the night where he was about to be burned with a tyre over his neck. He fell back into his body and jumped out of the gutter to join his fleeing would-be executioners to the soundtrack of siren wails and gunshots. The punch of shots in the air punctuated his heartbeat and the sound of the siren curdled his blood till he could taste adrenaline raw and metallic on the back of his tongue. How come his own execution couldn’t inspire as much fear in him?

  Someone snatched him by the arm and pulled him into a house with the front windows covered, shoved him into a corner where other bodies were and told him to shush. He remained huddled there with the others, barely registering the rank smell of palm oil, stayed there long after the siren cried past the house. He fell asleep in the lap of a sleeping man. When he woke up the next morning to the shuffle of people leaving what he now realised was the kitchen, he found that the man was dead. Shot in the chest.

  ‘Eyah,’ said the madam of the house, a fat woman whose skin shone in the harsh morning sun through the kitchen windows. ‘Don’t worry; just go home, ehn.’ She adjusted her wrapper, loosely tied under her breasts, and moved the chewing stick to the other corner of her mouth. ‘Just go. I will handle it.’

  André stood up.

  ‘Who be your mama?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Who be your papa?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘You wan chop? I boil yam last night but e be like say e never spoil.’ The woman opened and closed several pots before finding the burnt yams. She sniffed the pot and thrust it at him. ‘Oya. Do quick-quick commot. My husband go enter town now-now.’

  The half-burnt, almost rotten yam tasted so delicious. When he was done he was reluctant to go. He wanted the woman to adopt him for a while but she misunderstood.

  ‘Don’t worry, just go, you hear? I go handle am. I no
blame those animals, I no blame them.’ She fetched some water from a bucket and packed the dirty plates, scores of them, outside and began washing them, still talking to herself. André was sure she didn’t know when he slipped outside. ‘If you say na military now they go talk say na democracy we dey. Which kain democracy wey police go dey pursue people like animal for night?’

  2. WHY DO SOULS SEEK EMPTY SPACES?

  Hunger quickly replaced finding his mother as a priority. Those burnt yams from that strange woman’s kitchen must have triggered this. He realised in the days to come that he had been looking for his mother not because he liked her more than his father or Max; he had been looking for her because she was the source of life. All that he knew – his father, his Max, the house, the universe – had come from her. Before her was a hunger her milk had first temporarily satisfied. Now that she was gone he returned to his original hunger. His wandering became less linear. He wasn’t worried about getting lost so long as he wasn’t hungry. When his belly was filled with half-eaten oranges or spoilt bananas he found in refuse dumps, he concentrated on the original hunger that made due babies restless to come out into the world screaming for air: his hunger for life. The hunger to be let out into the world and experience colours, textures, tones and forms other than the blood red of his mother’s womb.

  He would sit down in a rain-washed gutter or lean on the trunk of a low tree and watch people walk past him. They all had places to go. Different people, but all wearing the confidence of a certain destination. He felt like any of the planets in the universe, yet not bound to revolving around the sun, no pre-ordained path to follow. He would stare at a woman restraining her restless boy of about eight not with grief but with hunger.

  He could afford this pastime, this hunger, because he was learning new ways of satisfying his belly hunger. He would hail a motorcyclist and ask to be taken to any market. Then, when they rode into a gallop, he would seize the opportunity to dig into the rider’s pocket, then use some of the money to pay him. This way he was thrown into different parts of this monster city with houses crawling over mountains to the other side. This way he learnt names of different parts – Apata, Ring Road, Ojo and several others he would soon forget – but never the city as a whole. One night he was dropped on a street lined with beer parlours that had open grills roasting fish and chicken. Naked women stood waiting on the road nearby, and when cars stopped they would rush to them. Sometimes one or two of them would get in; sometimes the cars drove off without anyone.