The Madhouse

by TJ Benson

  All this caring reminded him of his childhood, and so his curiosity of that time returned. When his bunkmate in the narrow room assigned to him fell asleep, André would turn the lamp flame high and study his genitalia. One day Madamthemadam caught him sitting on his bed, head bowed as he explained, ‘I am growing hair down there.’

  She nodded and smiled and marched briskly on. He began to think of Sweet Mother each time he saw Madamthemadam and it filled him with pleasant melancholy and not grief, as if Sweet Mum had died and become a memory and he was grateful for the little time he had spent with her. He didn’t need to question where he was because wherever it was he was safe. Nobody was hurling a blazing tyre over his head. He was given food in an unplastered hall three times a day. From someone whose diet had progressed from nothing to refuse to the occasional plate of rice and biscuits, the food was a delight. He didn’t bother to make friends. He wasn’t curious about the layout of buildings in the compound or the purpose of the institution that kept him and other children his age. All he wanted to do was concentrate on healing his foot so that he could leave and go on with his quest to sate his hunger for the world. Besides, he didn’t have one naira to pay for all these things they were giving him.

  To serve Madamthemadam somehow, he joined the boy’s band and tuned their guitar. One morning he told Madamthemadam that he wanted to bath by himself.

  ‘Are you sure, my pikin?’

  ‘Yes, ma.’

  ‘Your foot is still hurting you?’

  ‘It has healed, ma. The wound’s about to become scar.’

  She smiled down on him and gave him a bucket. ‘Take this to the kitchen. You know the kitchen?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Ask Ejiro, that albino uncle; tell him I said he should give you a little hot water, that he should mix it for you for bathing.’

  The man dressed in rags gave him the stare as he stirred a cauldron of yam porridge on the furnace, face blackened with soot, while André made his request. Minutes later André was in the bathroom with a dozen other boys who stopped all activity to watch him bath by himself. He simply wasn’t aware of them; he concentrated on focusing his weight on his right foot while he scrubbed his body with the sponge given to him. It had been so long since he’d bathed himself! How lovely it was to feel the foamy sponge glide over his chest, into his armpits, replacing the milkiness of after-sleep with sharp orange. He splashed more hot water and shut his eyes to scrub his face, oblivious to the return of Augustine.

  Laughter started like a drop from one boy and spread through the bathroom like crackling thunder. How mean the voices of boys laughing at you can sound. He opened his eyes and was surprised to find his member shooting up before him, a bigger Augustine than the one he’d met at eleven. He fell on his knees in the puddle of dirty water as the boys laughed louder and began to half-cry. Ejiro rushed in and the laughter died. He gave everyone a glare before returning with Madamthemadam. She assured Ejiro that she would take care of it and asked André to stand up.

  ‘Pack your soap. Let’s go.’

  She led him down the corridor, still dripping with suds, out of the boys’ dorm to her office by the gate which led into a bedroom and bathroom.

  ‘Wait here for me. Let me collect more hot water from the kitchen.’

  He nodded in gratitude, calming himself, thinking of Sweet Mother as Madamthemadam bathed him thoroughly once more, scrubbing his genitalia without surprise at his erection and towelling him dry.

  ‘I am sorry, ma,’ he said, face to the ground as she applied Vaseline to his limbs.

  ‘Sorry for what, my pikin?’ she said, waiting for him to put his other leg into his jeans and zipping up when he was done.

  ‘Sorry for my wee-wee.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Do you want me to make it go?’

  He nodded vigorously.

  ‘Oya, start reciting state and capital,’ she said, unzipping his fly.

  ‘Abia, Umuahia.’

  ‘Quick-quick,’ she said, kneeling down. ‘Or didn’t you do primary school?’

  ‘I did, ma.’

  ‘How old are you again?’

  ‘Fourteen years, ma.’ His voice was shaky, like he would start crying, ‘but I am a special—’

  She grabbed his jeans and pulled them down, just like that. His lower belly swirled and ached with an unsteady mix of sugar and pain. Any wrong touch and it would burst and splatter all over Madamthemadam, all over the terrazzo.

  ‘Good. Now continue.’

  ‘Akwa Ibom, Uyo.’

  She took his penis in her mouth and sucked. The way his mother had sucked out mucous from his nose, the way Max had sucked on his shallow flesh wound so that he wouldn’t scream when he saw the blood, except Madamthemadam’s sucking was a little more rigorous, and faster.

  ‘Anambraaa … Awwww … Aww—’

  When the painful storm in his lower belly subsided she didn’t spit out what she sucked. Replacing the storm with sickening sweetness, sickening but sweet, sickening but sour, sickening … She looked up at him, ‘Anambra what?’

  ‘Awka.’

  ‘You must not tell anybody. The day you tell anybody,’ – she brought her big face to his and he was so terrified he wanted to run but he knew he couldn’t run, not from this – ‘you will die, fiam.’ She snapped her fingers next to his left ear, ‘Just like that.’ She rose onto one knee. ‘Now say thank you.’

  He was shuddering too violently to form any word.

  ‘I didn’t hear you!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There was no one to tell. Even if there had been someone he could talk to, the words wouldn’t form themselves. He submitted himself to Madamthemadam’s milking every week, promised not to tell anyone and always said thank you. And each time felt he was dying.

  The day Madamthemadam summoned him to her office and removed all her clothes and showed him her thing and asked him to put his thing inside it, he was sure he wouldn’t come out alive. He entered Madamthemadam’s abyss and was surrounded by her smells of old cosmetics and onions and her flesh, and felt himself falling once more into darkness, propelled by the torque of the sweet-sickening swirling from the base of his lower belly to his pelvis until he stopped at the faces of three women lit up in the blackness of nowhere. They spoke different things to every cell of his body, which he could hear all at once. The summary which was they were the tripartite midwives to the destinies of his father, his brother and of his future son. They told him he had usurped the natural order of things by saving his father from dying as a child; when fate made adjustments for that he killed his twin in the womb and took his place in the world of the living and would therefore have his dead son. Had he not interfered, their destinies would have been fulfilled, and now that they had to exist he would have to marry them. This was the only way he could attempt some form of atonement. He thought it was rubbish but he promised to think about it, admitting that he didn’t fully understand what they meant, and they told him the only way he could be married to them was if he died. That way he could be with them forever, give them a reason for existing since they were not supposed to exist in the first place. He got fed up with their nonsense at this point and asked them what kind of guardians would be assigned to kill off their owners, and in fury they flung him back into his body, which was being pressed down by Madamthemadam.

  ‘Ma, I’m not breathing,’ he lied, feeling the searing heat flashing through Augustine, but she didn’t let him go. She pinned down his hands until he was done emptying himself into her.

  ‘Don’t worry, my pikin; I no fit carry belle,’ she said when she was dressed again. But he was still there on his back with his blank face gazing at the ceiling, trying to re-establish contact with the tripartite guardians of destiny so they could take him away.

  In time André began to understand his place in the scheme of things. He had found order in the disorder of world events; even random motion begot patterns and became predictable after a while. But to dwell o
n the predictability of life – the reoccurrence of its metaphors, the rise and fall of nations, astonishing developments that were swept aside by even more astonishing devastation wreaked by man and acts of God – was to court suicide. For if he – flesh, blood and bone – was destined to be just one man in the tumultuous sea of many men, he wanted out.

  What difference could he make in the world? What use was his life? At first he would be a footprint that disappeared with rain or sand. He was certain that if he was wealthy he would be even more desperate to kill himself, because living in luxury and knowing that a seven-year-old was slaving in a factory in China or a teenaged girl was being forced to make babies somewhere in Nigeria, would have made for sleepless nights in any seven-star hotel in the world. He wasn’t frustrated with life; it was just that he hadn’t asked to be born. He was simply done with it, so he called his father from Amsterdam, at a time when he was hiding away in a new apartment from a music festival his band had committed to.

  ‘Daddy, I think I am going to kill myself.’

  He had ruminated on the possibilities: drug overdose, wrist-slitting and falling from rooftops were out; he wanted no drama. He didn’t want pain any more because he was no longer angry. Maybe drugs to put him into a sleep he would never awaken from.

  ‘Young foreigner sleeps to death in Watergraafsmeer’ the international headlines would read. Comforting really. After being raised by parents whose lives were well documented in Nigeria, after being identified as a ‘music prodigy’ in North American tabloids and filling up galleries across Europe with followers who would draw blood for his paintings, after raising a church notorious for holding the most reported on and most controversial religious gathering in Twentieth-Century Africa, to die quietly was a rare gift he could give himself.

  ‘Write about it first, or compose something about dying,’ his father responded.

  André remembered the days of childhood when he could hear the buzz of the sun. Those days that didn’t end. When night finally came he would crawl into bed, exhausted from the hours it had taken the sun to crawl from one end of the horizon to the other. Then those days started repeating themselves. This was probably the most traumatic aspect of his childhood, reliving days all over again. He would guess something his father would say just as he was about to say it, but they just said he was experiencing déjà vu. What they didn’t know was that time had stopped moving forward; they were just repeating circles round the moon. And this is why he would never grow old. The only way to fix this back then was to kill himself. Death was the only way to end the tyranny of his ghost twin. How many reasons did he require to die? He pushed the handful of sleeping pills he had in the apartment around on his palm and thought about Jesus surrendering himself for crucifixion. Surely the world would be a better place without him? Macmillan might have a life after all. His brother would accuse him of being selfish but was it selfish if he was saving them all?

  A few hours later, André’s phone beeped with a text message, a sentence that roused him out of his drug-induced slumber:

  You have become a father.

  He jumped out of the chair but the ceiling flew higher and he hit the ground. His eyelids fought with him to shut. He clawed the sofa, clung to it, waited for the speeding room to crash. Once it had stopped he crawled to the bathroom and climbed into the tub, hoping the chilled water would wake him fully. But it overwhelmed him. The water closed over his nose and his body shut down to the sweet relief of death.

  A baby. His baby. Ha!

  He pulled himself out of the water, crawled out of the bathroom, out of his apartment. A memory of salvation returned to him from childhood. ‘Red oil,’ he begged from door to door, remembering how his mother had tilted his head back and forced the viscous fluid down his throat. ‘Please, just a spoon of palm oil,’ he begged the Italians and the Dutch and the French he encountered on the streets of Amsterdam as the city swayed with its lights, as though he were on a ship at sea, rushing in on him, pressing down on him and leaving him empty on the ground, daylight ebbing away on the tarmac of St John’s Street, only to pick him up and throw him at a wall, then thrash him into the great waves of people. ‘I’m having a baby, I need to be alive,’ he explained when someone asked what he needed palm oil for. ‘I’m having a baby,’ and the person went away. Then he fell into the arms of a man recognised from the nightmare to be Max, except this Max was fresh from a magazine shoot in crisp wool trousers and a pink-spotted dress shirt. ‘I’m having a baby,’ he repeated. ‘Red oil,’ he said again before passing out, knowing that Max, whether spirit or angel or demon or ghost, would understand.

  Flash on.

  ‘André, can you hear me? What happened?’

  Flash off.

  ‘No, I am his brother. I can sign.’

  Flash on.

  ‘You will be fine. Hold on to life for me. You will be fine.’

  Madamthemadam’s singing group had been successful whenever they’d had to perform, at a church or a convention and even once for the president, because it was composed of deranged boys. People were sympathetic towards the deranged, especially when they were captured young and kept in a home like the Divine Children establishment. Madamthemadam believed that André, the most deranged of all, was responsible for the success of the group and her solicitation for funds. She made him captain of the home, which pushed the other boys even further from him.

  When André squeezed his eyes shut he could almost sniff the phantasm of petrichor from those slow, hot afternoons when they had been children and their father had taught them how to make rain. He invoked it after each visit from Madamthemadam, and the yolky mist swelling in the pit of his belly would clear.

  She had started wearing curly wigs and red lipstick and smearing foundation over the gigantic pores of her meaty face. At any hour of the day her once barren eyebrows carried twin arcs drawn on with eye pencil, which gave her the look of being permanently surprised. It was a horror to be woken up by her in the night. Years later, when the eye-pencil style had become all the rage, he would be repelled by women who wore make-up.

  Knowing his place in the scheme of things didn’t make his duty to her, to the home, any easier. He kept trying to escape back into that dark place where those spirit-women waited for him each time she put his thing inside her thing, but the midwives were elusive. The day the singing group were to perform for the Japanese Embassy to qualify as representatives for an annual cultural festival in Japan, Madamthemadam hustled him away from the choir to her office for a quick session. ‘For good luck’, she said.

  As she unzipped his trousers he shut his eyes when she took him inside her. When he opened his eyes he saw the three women at last. He was most grateful. He had made the connection between what they said about saving his father and the little boy he had seen in one of his earlier visions, so he didn’t question them this time.

  ‘I will marry you,’ he begged. ‘Please, I will marry all of you.’

  The spirit-women exchanged smiles. ‘Do as we say. Now think about the moment you were born.’

  ‘But I was a baby! How can I remember?’

  ‘Concentrate.’

  ‘Concentrate.’

  ‘Concentrate.’

  ‘I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!’

  ‘You are struggling to breathe.’

  ‘You are taking your first breath in the world.’

  ‘You are back to the day you were born. Now go back even further.’

  ‘Go back.’

  ‘Go back.’

  ‘Go back.’

  ‘I have one question!’ he cried. ‘Just one human question before I go.’

  Their silence told him they were listening.

  ‘Why don’t I have a guardian for my destiny? Why do my brother and father and future son have guardians and not me?’

  ‘Because you are the key.’

  ‘Because you were never meant to be alive.’

  ‘Because through you the questions of their lives
will fold in and answer themselves.’

  ‘Now go.’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘Go!’

  And he slipped into the dream he had awoken from years ago when he was a child and still shared dreams with his brother. Events flashed simultaneously all around him and he couldn’t perceive them as sights or sounds but only as feeling. All his senses, including those he had been unaware of, came to a head to penetrate these moments. Whether good or bad, it was all too beautiful and too excruciating to bear so he pulled himself out of it and found himself panting before the disappointed faces of the three women.

  ‘The portal was not too far off.’

  ‘Had you waited a little longer …’

  ‘Come back, let’s do it again.’

  ‘No!’ he yelled and jumped up, propelling himself back into his body. Before he got back in, the women said as one, ‘When you return to us, we will never let you go.’ And so he knew he could not afford to lose consciousness again. He had to keep from sleeping. But he had to escape Madamthemadam somehow.

  A few years later, André found himself in Tokyo so he sought out a Japanese sensei. That’s how he spent the largest sum of money he’d ever got in his life: learning Japanese and martial arts for peace of mind. He held his sensei accountable for his qualms with life. He would wake the grey old man with spotted skin early in the morning and exhaust him with questions, and they would bond over their comprehension of life. The man valued it, respected it. Sometimes André thought the man was no different from Nigerian preachers. Sometimes he would ask his sensei a blasphemous question and they would spar from dawn to noon, the malicious venom of André’s dead brother making up for his lack of skill and experience. Then they would sit at the roots of the oak tree in front of his retreat and André would remark that the old man wasn’t as strong as the Japanese senseis in movies.