Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  –No worry no, child. We all got here some way; we’re all leaving here the same way. Unlike our criminally innocent and terminally adolescent confreres and soeurs yonder ways back home, folks here have learned that a long, long, long time ago.

  He walked over and put his arm around Yvonne’s shoulder. Yvonne began to casually walk with Malik out of the courtyard. She reached up to her shoulder and took Malik’s hand. She glanced back at Ndiya. Just then Malik said something in French and Yvonne laughed. Her eyes brightened, focused on Ndiya, until the thick beam of the doorframe drew its eclipse across her face.

  Muhammad’s place was three times the size of Shame’s. Three rooms. He used the flat roof outside his window as an outdoor kitchen. A butcher block stood at one end. A small refrigerator hummed low in the corner of his living space, which was furnished with nothing but woven mats, layered one on top of another, and thick pillows. A clear plastic sack filled with water hung from a single strand of fishing line in the center of each window. Like all the windows she’d seen here, none had glass or screens. The oblong shapes spun slowly, waved in the breeze, and cast huge, gauzy shadows on the opposite walls.

  Ndiya ran into Muhammad one day on her way, lost, as usual, back up from the waterfront. In Lamu, she’d accepted that getting lost was basically the only way to find anything or get anywhere, there being largely nothing to find and, most often, really, nowhere to go. In order to find something, or someone, she had to find, or to actually get anywhere she really had to go, she had to ask. She hadn’t met Malik and Yvonne yet. So she hadn’t yet glimpsed the magnitude of what such chance encounters could mean. When she did she found that, in Lamu, one’s will was interactive, even the most singular happening was a plural thing, if not a cosmos.

  As she walked, the sky above the erratic alley she was following had suddenly gone dark. The sound of winds approached and she could smell the fragrant dust of a heavy rain gathering nearby. The alley led waveringly across town, she thought, about halfway up the hill from the waterfront. It jogged upward then downward every fifty meters, taking its course between ruins, vacant lots where roosters and hens picked in the scrub, and buildings strung with laundry. On one line, a row of black robes and sheets of sheer black fabric. On the next, floral dresses and blouses, the likes of which never appeared in the streets. She turned, yet again, this time uphill, and found herself face to face with Muhammad wheeling his cart in the opposite direction.

  –I left the dock early, the afternoon Fly540 from Nairobi was canceled. Where are you going?

  –Ah, home, I think.

  –Come. It will rain soon. I’ll make you a tea. It’s this way.

  Muhammad led Ndiya back the way she’d come, around the corner and through a low archway. They turned right and she found herself in yet another small, unfamiliar square. There were hundreds of these squares created by the junction of three or more alleys and, at times, by a vacancy created at the site of a ruin. All of these squares were unique, irregular shapes, different colors in the windows and walls, graffiti scrawled or stenciled here or there. Even the smells and sounds were distinct: curry, fresh fish, freshly shaved wood from a shop, dry flame of a welder, dye from cloth drying, the insect buzz of a barber, various attempts at wash water and sewage drainage. The donkeys were a constant. Despite the endless variation, all the different squares looked exactly the same to her. She couldn’t tell them apart at all. The fact that they were all different made them identical to her eyes.

  The two stopped walking. Ndiya stood staring at Muhammad until he smiled in playful weariness and pointed behind her. When she turned around she was six feet from the dull yellow benches in front of Muhammad’s building, fifteen feet from the door to Shame’s building where she’d been staying for two weeks. Suddenly she wondered if she had recognized the scene, as if she’d already passed by here, maybe several times, looking for this exact spot along one or another of the intersecting alleys. Muhammad parked his cart along the side of the building and chained it to a thick drainpipe coming down from the roof. He looked up at her.

  –This may be Lamu, but I’m Nigerian.

  He took her hand and led her up the stairs to the third floor. He undid the padlock on his door and locked it on an iron loop beside the latch. Years of motion from locks hanging from that loop had worn the wood away in a deep arc. The door was fastened at the top and bottom in large wooden hinges. It cast open silently and the fresh breeze began to flow into the hallway. Compared to Shame’s closed fist of a room, everything about Muhammad’s place seemed wide open. He piled three large cushions in a corner of the room beneath a window and gestured welcome.

  –I’ll wash, pray, and then I’ll make the tea. It won’t take long.

  –I didn’t know you practiced, Muhammad.

  –To call it practicing is about it, I’m afraid. I go to mosque on Fridays for appearances, for business really. One simply must do that.

  –That covers it?

  –No, but it has its role. If I want to stay here, I’d have to marry into a family eventually. But the mosque makes me a visible, if not a known, quantity. Otherwise, really, no one sees you at all.

  –I see.

  –Right. Or you don’t. And that vision hasn’t really all that much to do with the eyes. That’s how it works here. The visible in a losing battle with invisible structures of appearance.

  –You’re Hausa? That’s usually Muslim, right?

  –Yes, yes, of course. But my family was mixed. My father was a Fulani. His family were river people. He was a boat captain. My mother was Hausa, but she was a renegade. An American might call her a hippie, how do they say, a flower child. I was too young to understand any of this in the ’70s, but the world of rivers and river traffic in the North of Nigeria was changing. Drying up. The mode of a modern nation was to be roads, not rivers. And Islam in the Sahel had been fluid and tolerant. My parents were Muslims, both, but they were unconcerned with dogma. They’d married across race. At the time that wasn’t promoted nor was it prevented. Their lives hadn’t been defined by Biafra and all that shit as had been the case in the South.

  As she listened, Ndiya felt like she was being pulled into a narrowing alleyway. Muhammad went ahead.

  –My mother considered herself an artist, beyond tribe. We moved to the Southwest, Yorubaland. My father had found work as a truck driver. The government had gone highway-mad, he said. It was, he said, as if they’re paving new rivers every week. We lived in Oshogbo first, on the edge of a revival of traditional arts, sculpture, and painting: a women’s movement to reclaim feminine powers and spirituality. My father lived on the asphalt rivers, returning home weekly, at first, then monthly after a year or so, and then not much of ever after that. My older brother was in university in Ibadan when the generals claimed the government, took over the rather low-flying, tenuous national design, or fraud, and crashed it all into the ground.

  Ndiya fought the urge to stop him. She followed as the alleyway of Muhammad’s story continued to close in on them both.

  –In my mind, my brother was killed in the crash of the state. In truth it was a cholera outbreak in his dormitory. The university administration called it an accident, pointing to vengeful gods and even to sorcery and wizardry in the faculty. The students went on strike. But, of course, a strike ultimately depends upon the strength of the opponent. The controlling force must be strong. Otherwise there’s nothing to strike against. The universities, like the failing banks, had no force. In fact there was nothing to strike against. The way it turned out, from my teenage perspective, it looked like the students, the living no more than the dead like my brother, weren’t necessary parts of a university. Or the nation. One didn’t need students, even less citizens. All they needed were bodies and there was an endless supply of those for whom things like cholera, to say nothing of sorcery, were simply facts of life. And death.

  Muhammad stood in front of Ndiya who sat along the wall leaning on a huge green pillow embroidered with gold threa
ds and glass beads. He mostly looked out the window, as if he wasn’t speaking to her. She noticed, very, very far away, a familiar pendulum swinging in a long arc. It seemed to swing away from her in both directions. She let it be.

  Muhammad continued. His voice sprawled over a melody, pushing the beginning and end of each sentence up, the tone of his voice deepening in the middle of phrases. Ndiya felt like kissing him, though the desire wasn’t, she felt, sexual in the least. It wasn’t him. She felt like kissing his life, the story he was telling her, as much for the texture of the air it created, as he stood before her in this strangely open room, as for whatever he was describing. He wasn’t saying much and, at the same time, what he did say—maybe how he said it—felt like it stole them off somewhere together, never to be found again. Since they’d met, Shame was constantly delivering her to people like this. And then, somehow, he’d always be elsewhere while she dealt with them. And soon after they appeared, something else came along to subtract her from their—or them from her—company. Muhammad continued,

  –My brother died when I was fourteen. My mother kept my father alive in my mind by constantly bringing him up and, here and there, by showing me money he sent to her via courier. I remember how she held it up in her hand as if it was a procedural exhibit in an official case of some sort. It looked like a lot but the currency was collapsed, the money wasn’t worth anything. I was a kid. It meant nothing to me. My brother was gone. My father’s presence had been filmy at best. He’d kept on as a driver but, as far as I could tell, had become a money changer, a business run mostly by Hausas and totally by the small minority of Muslims in the Southwest during that period of national collapse. Maybe my father was passing as his wife’s husband, if not her brother. To me, he’d never done much toward passing as my father. And I’d grown up without much sense of needing one.

  Ndiya leaned back and looked up through the window at the sky tumbling toward the darkness to her left. Muhammad was right. It would rain soon. Notches of stone showed through in the deep window frame where the plaster had been chipped away. The inverted image of her body floated above her, splayed across the plastic skin of the sack in the window. Muhammad continued talking. She noticed her reflected legs, bent into a mermaid shape. They flipped like a tail underwater when she uncrossed and then recrossed them. She felt like she was sinking into the padding of mats underneath the cushions. Then she interrupted him.

  –This all sounds familiar enough to me, Muhammad. Let me guess: She threw herself into a life in the church? Or did she stay with the women’s collective or whatever it was? Very familiar, to me. My experience is that women, especially women with children, who’ve been through hell, often fall into a cloud of other women who are, often enough, in orbit around a strong but in some way off-limits man of some kind. A preacher … or something like a preacher.

  Muhammad continued to look out the window. His mouth smiled but the rest of his face didn’t move. He tried to picture Ndiya’s face without looking back at her. What did the woman who’d just spoken look like? He wondered exactly what kind of pain she’d just fumbled into the lives of women she imagined. He knew there was no question of asking. Ndiya felt cool. A bead of sweat dropped along the underside of the arm that propped her upright. She watched Muhammad’s faraway eyes. “He’s exactly like everyone else Shame ever met,” she thought. “He’s always elsewhere.” Then Muhammad turned to her, rolled his neck. “Familiar,” he whispered, and shook his head. When she looked up at him his eyes were waiting for her. His thumbs rubbed his index and middle fingers in the universal money-motion.

  –You didn’t hear it from Shay-em because I have told him none of these things. Unless my mother published her memoirs, it must be familiar. OK. I’ll wash, pray, and then tea for two—

  When Muhammad said “familiar,” Ndiya heard “familia.” This made her smile and think of Arturo, all those impossible galaxies away, his wide, open face and the impenetrable dignity of his safely and utterly closed mind. This made her wince and smile. Muhammad walked across the room to a low shelf. Three books lay on the shelf horizontally, next to a pack of incense sticks bound with twine, and a few small, ceramic containers. He crouched down and took out the middle book. Ndiya wondered if it was his Koran. He removed a thin, pink paper pamphlet from the book and put the book back where it was. Rising, he took a small, lidded container from the shelf as well. She watched the mats give under his bare feet as he approached. It seemed just then that he traversed a distance far greater than the room allowed. He bent down, extended both hands and handed her the small jar.

  –My mother’s mother: this is sand from the Osun riverbank. Taken from the temple my mother helped build before my brother died. It wasn’t enough, I guess. When I was fourteen, after his death, we moved to Ibadan to live; as you say, to live with the father my mother had found for my lost brother. Though he wasn’t a preacher. He was a guru. Is this familiar?

  Ndiya searched Muhammad’s face for anger or irony, at least an angle. But she found none of that. He just handed her the pamphlet and walked into the next room. That was actually all he did: these acts were only themselves; they were gestures utterly without affect. Ndiya heard the water tap in the next room open and splash on the floor. Beneath the sound of the water she heard Muhammad’s voice, no words. He was humming a song or maybe he was crying? She couldn’t tell. She opened the small jar and found coarse grains of sand with green flecks, dried bits of leaves she thought, mixed with the sand. The pink booklet was a song book: “The Divine Song of Creation” by One Love Family. On the cover it read: “For total spiritual liberation and to prevent end-of-century Global De-ecology. To be sung at schools, colleges, universities, and homes in the Holyland, and the universe.” She turned the booklet over and, centered on the back, it read:

  The Highest Spiritual Center

  Of the Universe

  KM 10 Ibadan – Lagos Expressway

  PO Box 16741, Dugbe

  Ibadan, Nigeria

  The New Holy Land of the Universe

  In the pamphlet she found two folded fliers printed on newsprint paper that was so thin Ndiya worried that the pages would come apart in her hands. The edges were tattered, and tiny insects, she guessed, had made a series of holes in the paper. On the cover of one was an oval portrait of a black man with a thick beard. He wore a look of insistent, somewhat impatient, concern in his eyes; it was the theatrical look a parent uses to say, “You haven’t finished your dinner.” He also wore a turban and a garland of flowers around his neck. Under the portrait it read:

  SATGURU MAHARAJ JI

  The Saving Grace Across Year 2000

  I am the one who vibrated the whole creation including your very self, taking the nucleus first body, Adam, and changing bodies to save humanity in every age.

  Ndiya felt a tenderness toward these thin pages which Muhammad had carefully transported with him. The booklets had been protected but, in a way, not preserved. The partial care hinted at a hope that the power represented by the artifacts, whatever that power was, would be allowed to decay without being betrayed or abandoned. This made her feel as though she had no right to hurry the disintegration, so she took extra care opening the pages. At the same time, she had the sensation of surveying a disaster of some unfathomable depth and scope, a disaster one couldn’t escape. One had to let it leave, if it would, on its own. The distant pendulum appeared to her again. She checked her mermaid image hanging from an invisible line in the plastic orb above her head. Suddenly she felt like she was floating in a shaft of shadow and light high above the town. To dispel the feeling, she focused on the pamphlet.

  Inside the cover she read a two-page series of exhortations and revelations. They informed that, through the energy of Maharaj Ji, one may:

  Realize yourself, the Grace to re-incarnate and be free from religious manipulation, racism, slavery, tribalism, illness and untimely death. You will become producer instead of consumer.

  It is thus that you will know that al
l the things you are buying for your comfort like television, radio, cars were originally made here but Satanic forces of Europe stole them, from Africa, forced those geniuses to teach the oyinbos. After teaching them, they destroyed all traces that could link such high consciousness with the nucleus culture till I came to rescue you.

  So, be wise, for a stitch in time saves nine. Many of those who were used by the official Euro-American government-sponsored CIA to mount false propaganda against the people have almost succeeded in ruining the political, economic and social life of this nation and continent judging by the ignorant obsession they have and buffoonery attachment to the scriptures that are part of the colonization of Africa and the world that have denied these blessed people the only chance out of hell.

  On the back page of the first flyer it read:

  HOW TO USE THE HOLY NAME GURU MAHARAJ JI

  To communicate with Maharaj Ji, sit with legs crossed (on lotus), concentrate on your inner self and call Guru Maharaj Ji many times. It has been proved beyond all reasonable doubts that meditating on lotus feet enables one to be taken beyond the forces of darkness.

  So next time you have a headache, or any other ailment, call Guru Maharaj Ji seven times into a glass of water and drink it. To kill a witch or dispel any devil from haunting you in sleep, call Maharaj Ji 25 times before going to bed. No one can block your safety on land, sea and air is 100% by remembering Maharaj Ji. Try him now. All it costs you is a discount price of unconditional Love.

  Ndiya looked up from the impossibly thin paper of the pamphlets. The rain outside had stopped just, it seemed, when the splashing water in the next room ceased. She could hear Muhammad humming under his breath. If he’d been crying, that too had ceased. None of the arched doorways between the rooms, in fact, had doors. Then she noticed something different about the air in Muhammad’s place. She thought, at first, it was the rain outside, or perhaps it was the extra rooms that circulated the air. The sun shone again and the ghostly, oblong shadows of the sacks in the windows reappeared on the walls. Ndiya couldn’t decide what gave the air in Muhammad’s place its strange quality of openness.