Ikenga

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “Okay,” Nnamdi whispered excitedly to himself. “I can do this!”

  He slipped on his gym shoes, jeans, and a T-shirt, being careful not to make too much noise. His mother was a heavy sleeper, but if he banged on anything, she’d come and check on him. He opened his window and gently slipped out. Then he opened the gate a crack and took off down the road. As he ran, he could feel his pulse quicken and deepen. He gave in to it. Then he willed it. He felt his footsteps grow heavier, his legs longer. He ran faster. Judging from the intensity of the pleading, he had to hurry.

  He ran for over a mile and there, on the dark and deserted road, he saw them. A white shiny BMW had stopped in the middle of the road and three men stood in front of the headlights. Two of the men wore expensive suits. The other man wore shabby rags and Nnamdi could smell him from where he stood—a mixture of feces, sweat, and hair oil. The man in the rags, who was gently swaying, held the two well-dressed men at gunpoint.

  For a moment, Nnamdi just stood there, feeling unsteady as his mind processed it all. This was Never Die, the man who had robbed his mother weeks ago. Nnamdi balled his fists.

  “You be idiot?” Never Die growled. “You no see dis gun? GIVE ME DE KEYS!”

  One of the men had the keys. They jiggled in his shaky hand. “This c-c-c-car, na my graduation presen—”

  “Give me de keys here, abi you wan mek I blow your head?!” Never Die screamed. If this had been Three Days’ Journey, the car thief, he’d never have allowed the men to exit the car with the keys. He’d have shoved the men out and made off with the car in a matter of seconds. Never Die wasn’t as crafty.

  Nnamdi was a shadow in the street and none of the men noticed him until he was practically on top of Never Die. The two men scrambled back as Nnamdi wrenched the gun from Never Die’s hand and threw it aside. Never Die was squirmy and he managed to get free of Nnamdi’s grasp for a moment. He pulled a switchblade from his tattered pocket and held it in front of him.

  “The Man!” Never Die shrieked, looking him up and down with wild eyes.

  Nnamdi’s mind was on autopilot. He would subdue Never Die and make sure he was jailed, as Never Die should have been when he robbed and humiliated his mother weeks ago. He ran at Never Die and Never Die ran at him.

  Never Die was a strong man and Nnamdi found himself starting to panic as the two grasped at each other’s shoulders and arms. Nnamdi landed a punch, but Never Die came right back at him. There was a moment where Nnamdi had Never Die’s arms, but then he twisted and got loose. Oh no! Nnamdi thought just before Never Die slashed him across the chest with his switchblade.

  The pain was sharp and hot. Nnamdi roared and shoved Never Die back. He looked down at himself and only saw shadow, but he could feel wetness. Tears ran down his face. Mama Go-Slow had been brutal but she hadn’t stabbed him. Am I going to die? he wondered. At the same time, crazed fury flooded his system. He bared his teeth, his rage fueled by the pain.

  “Come on,” Never Die taunted with a nervous laugh, taking a step back. “Give me reason to kill you.”

  Nnamdi slapped the knife from Never Die’s hand and headbutted him. Never Die went down like a sack of yams. Then Nnamdi was on him, punching and slapping and kicking. Tears flew from his eyes as he beat Never Die. Memories of his humiliated and terrified mother fueled him, as did the hot sting of his stab wound. Nnamdi heard the sound of the car starting and screeching off. He’d saved the two men, but he didn’t stop punching Never Die.

  “Please!” Never Die wept. “Stop, o!”

  Nnamdi didn’t stop. He punched Never Die in the jaw. Then he punched him in the jaw again. He kicked him in the side. Daddy was a failure, Nnamdi thought, slapping Never Die one last time. And now I am, too. Never Die lay there, unmoving, his nose bleeding, his face swelling, his legs in a strange position. Nnamdi stood up, tall and shadowy. A hulking monster. But in his mind, he came back to himself, his thoughts clearing, the anger draining away. He blinked. He stared into the darkness, seeing the result of his actions clearly. Was Never Die dead? Had he killed him?

  Nnamdi threw his head back. “YAAAAAAHHHHH!” he screamed. He turned and ran off.

  Stuck

  “OH MY GOD,” Nnamdi whispered over and over as he made his way home. He still felt heavy and strong and his head was throbbing as if it were full of exploding stones. The night air was hot, pressing at his head. He was sweating. Or was that blood he felt dribbling down his belly? Did I kill him? I might have killed him, he thought. He made his way home only because his feet took him in that direction. A scrawny dog trotted out of an alley, took one look at him, whimpered, and scurried away.

  “What am I?” he whispered. He looked at his arms. They were wrapped in shadow. His hands were the size of dinner plates and strong enough to crush rocks to dust. He heard himself breathing heavily, his mouth open. He sounded like an elephant. He stopped and touched his chest. He felt mangled flesh there, and wetness, though he could not see blood due to his body’s darkness. This was nothing like what he’d imagined being a superhero would be like. If he’d killed someone, he was no better than the Chief of Chiefs. He was worse. A monster.

  On the other side of the street he saw the akara lady, sitting at her stall, frying fresh akara over a flame. If she was out, it couldn’t be really late at night. She usually went in around eleven. Her pot was empty. She was frying up her last batch of akara. She looked up at him as he passed on the other side of the one-way street. He could hear her gasp and her heart rate quicken. The akara lady stared at him and lifted a tentative hand, either a greeting or signaling him to stop. He kept running.

  He scrambled up and over the wall in the back of the house, easily scaling the sharp glass and barbed wire. As he approached his window he slowed down. If Never Die was dead, he would never commit a crime again. So why wasn’t Nnamdi changing back? By the time he got to his window, he was shuddering with panic. He could not let his mother see him like this. A violent monster. She’d think he’d come to rob or kill her. Regardless, at his size, he couldn’t even fit through the window. He sat down in the grass in front of the window and leaned against the wall.

  He might have killed a man tonight. He had not controlled his power. He hadn’t just been angry. In the jumble of anger, outrage, and shock, he’d been consumed by rage. He could blame no one but himself for what he’d done. He crept to the garden. Maybe there he would calm down and shift back to himself. Maybe his father would even appear or at least speak to him. Maybe.

  Nnamdi stood among his growing yams, tomatoes, onions, sunflower shoots, peppers, and herbs. The smell of this place would usually have soothed him. But in this state, his senses were heightened. The plants stank; the smells were too strong. The crickets and katydids sounded like sirens. There was a turkey in someone’s pen that was not sleeping soundly; he could hear it restlessly ruffling its feathers. He could hear all the people in the apartment building and houses next door breathing deeply, sleeping in their beds; their lives were not complicated and messed up, like his. Someone turned over and farted. Someone snorted. Someone sighed. Then his entire body seized up, accompanied by waves of rage that flowed like fire in the veins of his hands. He gritted and ground his teeth, hissing and moaning at the pain.

  He held his breath and counted to ten, hoping it would stop. Then he erupted, grasping handfuls of onion stalks and yanking, tearing at the delicate sunflower stems, stomping on the tomatoes, kicking, clawing, ripping. Lastly, he mashed and mashed the yams into mush. He stormed to the half-closed window of his bedroom and put his fist right through it. CRASH!

  “What was that!” he heard his mother shout. “Nnamdi?! Are you all right?”

  Nnamdi looked from side to side, holding his painful fist. But no matter where he looked, he couldn’t focus, not with his eyes or his mind. His veins heated with burning rage again and he bit down on his tongue to stifle a scream. He tasted blood in his mouth as he heard hi
s bedroom door opening. Can’t let her see me! he thought, running to the gate, nearly knocking over a sleep-weary Mr. Oke. He shoved the gate open and it banged hard on the wall. Nnamdi loped off into the night.

  Dark Time of the Soul

  HE FLED TO the one place where he had always found peace: the abandoned school down the road. He came here when he needed quiet. Abandoned long before he was born, the school was a forgotten place and thus a good place to go to forget. Chioma had told him that a young wealthy couple had returned to Nigeria from America with hopes of making things better in Kaleria. Sadly, they were set upon by Mama Go-Slow, Never Die, Three Days’ Journey, and several scammers. Within a year, the couple had abandoned their project and fled back to the United States, nearly broke.

  The abandoned school had four thick concrete walls, a sturdy but unfinished roof, and several rooms. And all were covered with creeping vines. A nest of noisy weaverbirds sat in one of the corners. A lizard scurried across his foot. A few damaged desks had been left behind and plants had begun to grow into the glassless windows. Nnamdi looked at the wall near the back, where the phrase He who is afraid of doing too much always does too little was engraved into the cement in ornate writing. This sentence usually inspired him, but tonight it didn’t. The small flowerpot on the windowsill where Chioma had planted a mystery seed was still there and he resisted the urge to smash it.

  Nnamdi groaned, staring up at the concrete ceiling and the night sky through the holes where it had collapsed. His belly was empty, his mind was clouded, his fists were clenched with fury, and his heart was heavy. He curled up in his corner, right there on the floor. In the darkness, he heard night creatures scurrying about. He felt mosquitoes trying to penetrate his skin and probably lapping up his leaking blood. He shivered, remembering the thick, meaty sound of his fist connecting with Never Die’s face. He whimpered and then his body clenched up with a hot wave of rage. What if I killed him? Nnamdi thought, closing his eyes. Isn’t how I thought it would be. I’m no hero.

  Poor Nnamdi fell into a restless sleep.

  * * *

  Birds tweeted. Nnamdi opened his eyes to the leafy ceiling of the abandoned school. Outside, the bright sun shone. He looked at his hands. He looked at his body. He was still the Man. He was stuck. He pounded a fist on a desk and it cracked into three pieces.

  He deserved this.

  Nnamdi was a shadow. He stood over seven feet tall with superhuman strength, but he was nobody. His clothes, which disappeared when he was the Man and reappeared when he changed back, seemed to have disappeared for good. He could feel the wind directly on his skin. When he stepped into sunlight, it seemed to reject him; the sunlight would not touch his shadowy body. And then there was the rage pulsing through him like radioactive poison injected into his veins. It made it hard for him to think.

  By the third day, Nnamdi had punched through one of the school walls with his fists, uprooted three large trees, and smashed all but one of the desks into pieces. He was dangerous and he knew it, so he only left the abandoned school when he couldn’t take the hunger any longer. When the sun set, he went begging, seeking out sellers who had stalls in the darkness.

  There was only one seller who did not run away from him. She sold groundnuts and only frowned at his gruff, angry voice and hunched shadowy figure. “I’ve seen stranger things than you,” she told him. She gave him some of her leftovers and some of her remaining bags of “pure water” when it was late at night. He would quickly thank her and be off before she could muster up the nerve to ask him any questions. He’d eat the groundnuts in a few gulps, barely chewing, not tasting the food at all.

  Was his mother looking for him? Did the newsletter run stories about him and how he was one of Kaleria’s latest missing children? Or even worse, did it run stories about how the Man had murdered somebody? He did not know what day it was. He barely remembered what it felt like to be the twelve-year-old boy that he had been. He’d lost his way and he wasn’t interested in finding it. The boy named Nnamdi retreated to a corner in his mind, where he curled up and let the darkness envelop him like the waters of a disastrous flood.

  “Nnamdi?” Chioma’s voice echoed far into the room he’d locked himself in, where he was curled up in a sea of darkness. Her voice touched his ears.

  His world stood still.

  Nnamdi, he thought. That’s my name. She was at the far end of the large schoolroom in the doorless doorway. She stepped one of her sandaled feet onto the concrete, keeping the other in the overgrown grass. The sun shone in behind her, making her nothing but a shadow. “Nnamdi,” she said again. “Is that you?”

  He slowly stood up, grasping a piece of the freshly buckled concrete. He shook his head, trying to clear and focus his mind. Instead, his temples throbbed and this made him even angrier. He pounded a fist against his leg. Across the large room, Chioma cautiously crept through the door, tightly grasping her backpack. Her braids were down and she pushed one from her face, her eyes settling on Nnamdi. She saw him; she shuddered and took a step back.

  “Go away!” Nnamdi shouted, his voice deep and powerful. The lizards in the building skittered in various directions, all away from him. Some ran out the windows, some out the doorway, some scurried around Chioma’s feet. They sounded like scraping paper. The walls were suddenly alive with the quick movement of hundreds of orange and green and brown lizards.

  “I knew it was you!” she shouted back, her voice shaky with emotion. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about it. . . . You did it, didn’t you? How could you?!” she screamed, her voice cracking. “You’re . . . you’re just as bad as the man who killed your father!”

  She whimpered as Nnamdi growled deep in his throat.

  “What’s happened to you?” she whispered. “What . . .”

  Using all his strength, he threw the concrete. When it left his hand, he grunted with satisfaction. Any violence he produced decreased the burning in his body. The sharp, jagged piece of concrete buried itself deep in the wall behind Chioma.

  She screeched, turned, about to run out the door. But something made her stop. She relaxed her shoulders and turned back around.

  Nnamdi threw another chunk. “I HATE YOU!”

  He threw another and another. Chioma didn’t move as she glared bravely at Nnamdi. He was tired; he was spent. There was a hole beside him now where he’d dug up the concrete. He examined her face more closely. She looked determined, her nostrils flared, her eyebrows creased, her lips pressed together. He could hear her rapid heartbeat. She was terrified. She was grasping her backpack’s straps. Her eyes were dry. His friend since they had been babies. Chioma had always been there.

  Nnamdi shut his eyes, crouched to the ground, and curled his body as tightly as possible. He needed to protect himself; he needed to protect Chioma. Moments passed and everything was quiet. She had left. Good. He retreated further into himself.

  Nnamdi felt someone take his hand. Chioma’s hand was tiny on top of his, but it was also firm and warm. She grasped his hand as if she would not let go. He was nearly twice her height, four times her weight, and he was sure she could not see his face. And unlike Mama Go-Slow, Chioma knew nothing about juju. Yet still, somehow Chioma saw Nnamdi.

  “You can’t hurt me,” she whispered close to his ear. Then she leaned forward and threw her arms around him. Nnamdi certainly was not small, but now he felt as if he were.

  Behind his eyes, Nnamdi let himself remember what seemed like a time light-years away. Two years ago he and Chioma had sat outside in his father’s garden on the hottest day of the year, playing tic-tac-toe on Chioma’s phone. It was a Saturday night, and rather than waste fuel running air-conditioning, everyone in the neighborhood had decided to go outside, even the younger children. It was all rather magical.

  Nnamdi had been in the garden, reading an X-Men comic book by flashlight, when Chioma had come walking by on her way to her cousin’s house. When C
hioma saw him, she decided to join him instead, sending her cousin a quick text. They’d laughed and laughed over the game, enjoying how evenly matched they were. Neither of them had a care in the world that evening, the stars twinkled above in the clear sky, and the garden’s night flowers made the air smell so sweet. Back then Nnamdi had no reason to be so serious or angry. No one was wondering where either of them were. Light-years away.

  “Everyone thinks the Man kidnapped you. They’re even talking about him possibly killing your father,” Chioma whispered, still hugging him. “It’s ridiculous.”

  Nnamdi’s body was still prickled with heat, his mind still clouded, though less than it had been when she’d first arrived. “You were a really big story in the newsletter,” she continued. “Your mother said the window to your bedroom had been smashed and there was blood on it. So horrible! You mashed up the garden, too. Even your yams. The police interviewed your mother, me, your friends at school. None of us knew anything. I didn’t tell about all you told me because I didn’t think it would help. I didn’t really believe it . . . not yet. Took me a day or so. Plus, I knew it would all just end up in the newsletter.” She paused, pulling her arms away. He heard her shift to sit beside him.

  “After a few days, we heard nothing. It didn’t make sense. The Man wasn’t a killer or kidnapper,” she said.

  “The Man is a killer,” Nnamdi growled.

  “No,” Chioma said. She paused. “Nnamdi, I started thinking about everything and . . . Well, I came here.”

  Chioma continued talking and Nnamdi listened. She told him that Never Die was alive. He was in Kaleria’s hospital receiving the best treatment money could buy. The town was treating him like a victim instead of a criminal. He told authorities that he’d been thinking of robbing two men but then the Man had attacked him and beaten him nearly to death. All Nnamdi focused on were the basics: Never Die is alive, he thought. I didn’t kill him. He opened his mouth and breathed in the truth.