GraceLand

by Chris Abani

  “Yes sir,” Lieutenant Yar’adua said, saluting and making his way back to the tank to carry out his orders.

  The Colonel watched as some younger members of the crowd began to gather stones and rocks, anything that could be used as a projectile. The Colonel turned to the soldiers behind him and, identifying a sergeant, motioned for him to come over. He pointed out the troublemakers to the sergeant and asked him to have a few men armed with tear-gas launchers aimed at the edges of the crowd. They would need to keep the crowd contained in one place if they were to maintain control.

  Lieutenant Yar’adua walked back to where the Colonel stood smoking a cigarette and watching members of the press creep closer.

  “Sir!”

  “Proceed.”

  “De General said to send some men to remove de press while you talk to de Beggar King. He wants you to calm him down and remove him from dis place with minimum damage.”

  The Colonel swore under his breath.

  “How? By magic? Okay, take a group and begin to round up de press, starting with dose one over dere,” the Colonel said, pointing to some members of the press who had crept forward.

  “Yes sir!”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Sir?”

  “Handle it yourself. Don’t send junior officers.”

  “Yes sir!”

  The Colonel turned back to the crowd. “You—come forward,” he said, pointing to the King.

  “Make we meet halfway.”

  “Sure,” the Colonel replied.

  The two men advanced on each other. As he approached, the King felt trepidation. Something was not right here. The army never talked. He suspected the press had something to do with this sudden offer to talk, but there was something else. He had been around enough rats in his life to know their smell. Looking around, he scanned the rooftops for snipers. The Colonel walked toward the King, keeping a fake smile plastered to his face for the press. No need to appear menacing to the world, he thought. Underneath it, however, he was cursing the King, wishing he could handle this his way: walk straight up to the King, draw his Collectors’ Edition 1911 Colt .44 automatic and blow the bastard’s head right off. Better than his morning shot of gin with a coffee chaser. He cracked his neck and swallowed hard to keep his anger in.

  The crowd of protestors stood watching the King and the Colonel get closer. Whatever group mind had held them together before seemed to have deserted them. They began to break up into clumps of twos and threes, drifting to buy things from the ever-present hawkers, who, sensing a possible trade, had followed them. They stood munching on fruit or cookies and downing soft drinks. The Colonel saw the crowd begin to break up and smiled. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly mobs lost focus if their leader was separated from them. He glanced at his watch. In this instance, it had taken less than two minutes. Seeing the Colonel smile and glance at his watch, the King stopped and stared around him, convinced that he was walking into a trap.

  “What’s wrong?” the Colonel asked.

  The King shook his head and resumed walking. This was it, he thought. Well, at least there would be television cameras to record it all. If he died now, he died a hero of the people.

  Drawing closer, the King recognized the Colonel as the officer he had been searching for all this time. This was the man who had murdered his family so long ago. He was older, but it was the same sneering smile and the eyes that the King could never forget.

  What happened next would be described differently later. Some would mention butterflies surrounding the King; others, cats; others still, dogs; others said eagles. Some also said that a hand reached down from heaven and handed him a sword with which to smite the unjust army.

  The King reached into his dashiki and pulled out an ugly dagger. Before the Colonel could release his pistol, the King sprang and sunk his knife deep into the Colonel’s throat. The soldiers at the blockade opened fire and the bullets lifted the King bodily into the air. He soared, arms spread, before falling to the ground in a broken rumpled heap.

  The crowd scattered in panic, bullets and angry soldiers chasing them. The three druids stood their ground, bullets buzzing about them like angry hornets. Tired of spells, with Jagua in the lead, they were swatting at soldiers with their magic staffs, knocking them out. The protective bubble they believed their spells wove around them broke when a soldier they missed stopped and shot them all, point blank: Jagua in the face, the other two in the chest.

  Madam Caro took four bullets in her ample backside but didn’t slow down, the pestle she used to pound amala and eba at her buka held high, pounding army heads into submission. An unknown man ran toward the oncoming soldiers wielding an old Igbo sword called an akparaja. Short, wide and double-edged, it cleaved heads off with ease, littering the floor like a pineapple harvest. He took ten soldiers before running out of luck on the end of a bayonet.

  The youths who had been gathering rocks and stones earlier hurled a fusillade at the soldiers, but they hit the helmets and riot body armor without doing much damage. Tear-gas canisters were fired at them. Apart from the choking smoke, the canisters of gas caught a few by surprise, tearing holes through them. Cameramen sought shelter and continued to film. The street was too narrow, and the bulk of the crowd jammed each other tight. When the shooting finally stopped, there were bodies everywhere. Conservative estimates by the press put the casualty figure at about two hundred. What no one could have guessed was that when the film of the King jumping the Colonel and stabbing him was broadcast, he would be deified, turned into a prophet, an advance guard, like John the Baptist, for the arrival of the Messiah.

  Elvis felt the hot sun burn his face, and with it the first stab of a headache. He opened his eyes and glanced around him, taking in the wilderness of crumbled and derelict buildings. To his right a pole rose up out of the ground, marking the site of what used to be someone’s house, a silent sentinel, a beacon.

  “Hassan! Hassan!” a woman called out in a voice hoarse from effort, but only the howling of the wind greeted her.

  All around, scavengers, human and otherwise, feasted on the exposed innards of Maroko. They rummaged in the rubble as bulldozers sifted through the chaos like slow-feeding buffalo. Here some article of clothing still untorn; there a pot; over there a child’s toy with the squeaker still working. There was a lot of snorting coming from a clump of shrubs as a pack of hungry dogs fed. The hand of a corpse rose up from between the snarling dogs in a final wave.

  Elvis took it in and tried to recall what had happened before he came to be there. He vaguely remembered the dreams and walking. He searched around for clues as to where he was, and then it dawned on him that he was lying in the rubble of what used to be his house. By his foot a piece of paper stuck out from under a concrete block. He could see it was torn from an almanac. It bore the legend JESUS CAN SAVE. He shut his eyes and hoped this was another dream. He opened them but it was no dream. He struggled to his feet and stood swaying while he tried to gain his balance. Where was his father? Had he slept through all the destruction? When had it happened? Where had he been? Where were Comfort and her children? Jagua? Confidence? He searched frantically for any sign of his family, and one of the human scavengers, seeing him scramble about, called out: “No worry yourself. I done search dere. Nothing dey, only dead body.”

  Elvis stared at him uncomprehendingly. Corpses? Whose? Where? But the man was gone. Elvis scrambled over a final pile of rubbish and rubble and stopped short when he saw a piece of colored cloth sticking out from the mud of the swamp. He recognized his father’s lappa. He stood still for a long time before he approached it. In that time he experienced nothing. Thought nothing and felt nothing. He wondered whether he would be able to weep for his father’s death. If he was dead, that is. It was more likely that Elvis would feel relief, though.

  He scrambled down the pile of rubble, half falling, half sliding, until he came to the bottom. He was brought to a halt by his father’s foot poking out at an odd angle. He cla
wed the debris away and exposed the body. There was a hole the size of a saucer in his chest, ribs crumbled like a cracker into lots of pieces, as if a large object had rolled over them. Sunday’s eyes were popping and his mouth was forced open into a silent laugh. Elvis’s glance took in the body of a policeman lying not far from his father’s body. It only took a minute for him to work out the general sequence that must have led up to his father’s death. What puzzled him, though, was the policeman. What had killed him? He approached the body. The entire back of the head was missing and there were claw marks all over the body. It looked like he had been mauled by some large predator. That was really strange, because there were no animals of that size anywhere near Lagos or Maroko. It certainly wasn’t the work of a ghetto rat.

  Elvis sat there in the rubble and tried to figure out what had really happened. He wished his head would stop pounding for just one minute. The inside of his mouth was furred and tasted like an old slipper. It bothered him that his father was dead and all he could feel was relief. Dead. That word fell with a thud like a mango loosened from a tree.

  He gazed at the bodies of his father and the policeman and then he took in the whole of Maroko. What would he do now? He had no money, and all his worldly possessions had been in their house. Whatever had survived had already been looted, and he didn’t think he could get anything back from the scavengers. He didn’t know what he was going to do about burying his father. Whatever happened, there was no way his father was going to get an elaborate funeral. No cows or dogs slaughtered to ease his passage into the next world. He had to find a way to take his father’s body back to Afikpo. He tried to wrap it in a scavenged length of cloth. He had almost succeeded when he was interrupted by the harsh bark of a voice.

  “What are you doing?”

  Elvis glanced up and saw the uniform of a soldier with a big shiny gun standing over him.

  The uniform barked at him again: “I said, what are you doing?”

  “He is my father.”

  “So what? Where are you taking dis body?”

  “To bury him.”

  “No! Government say no dead body can leave here without clearance from HQ. You get clearance?”

  “I …”

  “Do you want me to arrest you?”

  “But …”

  “If you annoy me I will kill you and add you to your father.”

  “So what happens to my father?”

  “You answer soldierman with question?”

  Elvis didn’t see the slap coming, but the blow knocked him over. He tasted blood.

  “I’m sorry … but my father …”

  “All right, since you have apologize, I can let you have de body for some money.”

  “I have no money …”

  “No what? Get out of here now,” the uniform said, descending on Elvis and pounding him repeatedly with his rifle butt.

  Elvis stumbled away. The tears that wouldn’t come for his father streamed freely now as he felt worthless in the face of blind, unreasoning power. He could return later, when it was dark, but he knew the body would be gone.

  Elvis started walking again, unable to accept his situation. One minute he had a life—not much of one, but he had one. And the next, everything fell apart. He walked for hours. He had no plans, no ideas about what to do or where he was going, he just walked. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, but at least he was not standing still.

  He kept walking until he found himself underneath one of the many dusty flyovers that littered the city. Another ghetto had been growing here for a long time, but now it just exploded as the influx from Maroko brought more life flooding into it.

  All around him, everywhere, there were people: food sellers, softdrink hawkers, tire vulcanizers, small-time car mechanics, women and men lying on top of their belongings and hundreds of beggar children. Over to his left a child slept on a broken chest of drawers and another huddled in a basket once used to store yams.

  Some of these children had always lived here. Others, here with their parents, had been displaced from other ghettos by Operation Clean the Nation. His eyes caught those of a young girl no more than twelve. She cut her eyes at him and, heaving her pregnant body up, walked away. He glanced at another child and saw a look of old boredom in his eyes. Elvis read the city, seeing signs not normally visible. A woman sat by the roadside begging for alms, her legs as thick as tree stumps, her arms no more than plump plantain stems clutching the air vainly. Her torso was a lump of soft dough kneaded into shapelessness and swollen by the yeast of shame which she inhaled daily. Her body was covered in ripe yellow and red sores, throbbing with the pus of decay. She sat there as if her pain had taken root.

  Some distance away from her, a man stood, then sat, then stood again. Now he danced. Stopped. Shook his head and laughed and then hopped around in an odd birdlike gait. He was deep in conversation with some hallucination. It did not seem strange to Elvis that the spirit world became more visible and tangible the nearer one was to starvation. The man laughed, and as his diaphragm shook, Elvis thought he heard the man’s ribs knocking together, producing a sweet, haunting melody like the wooden xylophones of his small-town childhood.

  In another spot, a young girl hawked oranges from a tray on her head. She had just got out from school and had barely had time to put down her books before snatching up the tray and heading for the streets. In a poor family everyone had to earn their keep. She sometimes let her male customers feel her firm breasts for a small fee. She marveled at the sweet stickiness she sometimes felt between her legs. She was saving up to go to secondary school.

  Elvis traced patterns in the cracked and parched earth beneath his feet. There is a message in it all somewhere, he mused, a point to the chaos. But no matter how hard he tried, the meaning always seemed to be out there somewhere beyond reach, mocking him.

  He found a quiet spot that didn’t seem to have a claim staked on it. Curling up, he covered himself with the torn bit of cloth he had been wrapping his father’s corpse in, and settled down to sleep.

  Elvis woke up in Bridge City, feeling more than slightly confused. His stomach rumbled noisily but he was too broke to eat. He got up and stretched. He wondered what to do for money, remembering Okon telling him something about selling blood in hospitals. But which hospital? Just then he heard someone call his name. He turned round and, sure enough, there was Okon.

  “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Den I will indeed live long.”

  They both laughed.

  “What are you doing here?” Elvis asked.

  “I should be asking you. I live here.”

  “Since Maroko was demolished?”

  “No. For months before den. You?”

  “I just got here last night,” Elvis said. “But I’m not ready to talk about it yet.”

  Okon nodded sagely: “Words cannot be force. When dey are ready dey will come. Have you eaten yet? No? Come den.”

  And over breakfast Elvis probed Okon about what he did. Whether he still sold blood for a living.

  Okon laughed. “No. I stop dat long time. For a while we hijacked corpses from roadsides and even homes which we sold for organ transplants.”

  Elvis shuddered. Okon noted it.

  “I know how you feel,” he said. “It is bad for a man’s soul, waiting at roadside like vulture, for someone to die, so you can steal fresh corpse, but man must survive. When dey start to demand alive people, me I quit. I am not murderer. Hustler? Survivor? Yes. But definitely not a murderer.”

  Elvis had stopped eating and had been studying Okon’s face.

  “But your face tell me you know about dat type of thing,” Okon continued.

  “And now?” Elvis asked.

  For the first time he really saw Okon for what he was: a tired man. His eyes were bloodshot and rheumy and fought hard to suppress any glimpse of the soul beneath. His face was weathered dark-brown leather with fine lines all over it.

  “I am caretaker.”


  “Caretaker?”

  “Don’t rush things, my friend—gently, gently. Watch, look, learn. If you like things, den you can join. Until den, just come here and eat. I will square de owner. Okay?” Okon said softly.

  Elvis nodded.

  “Why are you helping me?” he asked.

  “Because nobody help me.”

  Elvis looked away, suddenly guilty that he had questioned Okon’s intentions.

  “Have you heard anything about the King?” Elvis asked.

  “So you never hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “De King done die.”

  The days passed quickly, and Elvis felt he had always lived in Bridge City. Time lost all meaning in the face of that deprivation. In Bridge City the only thing to look forward to was surviving the evening and making it through the night. Elvis soon got into the swing of things with the help and guidance of Okon. He became a caretaker, guarding the young beggar children while they slept.

  Bridge City was a dangerous place, and when darkness fell, it was easy to be very much alone in the crowds that milled everywhere. Hundreds of oil lamps flickered unsteadily on tables, trays, mats spread on the ground and any other surface the hawkers who flocked to Bridge City at night could find to display their wares. Yet even all that light could not penetrate the deeper shadows that hung like presences everywhere.

  Young children who had been out all day begging were prime targets for the scavengers spawned by this place. They were beaten, raped, robbed and sometimes killed. So they came up with the idea of “caretakers.” The children paid one set of scavengers to protect them against the others—simple and effective. Just thinking about the degradation made Elvis’s skin crawl. He watched the children huddled on rubber sheeting exposed to the night and the vampire mosquitoes. On rainy nights they slept standing up, swaying with the wind as the rain was blown everywhere, flooding their sleeping places.

  The two things Elvis missed most were books and music—not the public embrace of record-store-mounted speakers, but self-chosen music, the sound of an old record scratching the melody from its hard vinyl, or the crackle of a radio fighting static to manifest a song from the mystery of the ether. He often thought about teaching these children to dance. He didn’t expect it to save them, but it would give them something in their lives that they did not have to beg, fight for or steal.