by Bryan Hurt
Each of them despised herself for her own contributions to the disaster. Ellie thought that her father had turned out to be right about her selfishness, and Jeannette spent weeks remembering having ever only asked about nest eggs, and Edna told friends that someone more confident would have worried less about her husband being well-liked and more about where he was stationed. And Betty kept hearing Roy’s silence on the phone after she’d shocked them both with her rage.
WHAT THE SENATE report spared them was the last thing their husbands had seen that night while they slewed across the pitching and ice-covered platform in the rain and sleet and wind in their survival suits waiting for their rescue. While Jeannette and Edna and Betty and Ellie had sat by their phones castigating themselves for ever having entrusted their lives to other people’s promises, off to the southeast of their husbands’ platform as if in a silent movie the sea was rising, and one after the other their husbands had turned in that direction, confused that everything was black until they realized that they weren’t seeing any crests or spray and that that was because they weren’t looking high enough. And when they did look higher they saw, like a line across the sky, the thin white edge of the top of the wave. And they recognized it as the implacability that would no longer indulge their mistakes, and would sweep from them all they had ever loved.
Prof
by Chika Unigwe
“Prof! Good morning!” I cannot easily recall the name of this man with a raspy voice who has just greeted me but I give him a friendly wave and what I hope is a warm smile in return. Before I reach the door of my flat, I run into two more people whose greetings—even in these days—are as enthusiastic as the man’s: “Prof! How you dey?” This from our Ghanaian neighbor who runs a hairdressing salon and who, after the business with the phone tower, told me that were I ever to grow my hair, he would be my personal stylist. “Our own prof! Good morning, ma!” From Njide, pregnant with her second baby. I am used to it by now, neighbors treating me like a mini celebrity, rushing to take my shopping from me, coming over to greet me, telling me their problems as if I had the power to solve them all, leaning into me as they speak as though all they had to do was touch the hem of my billowing dress and they would be healed. Frank often teased me about it, telling me that thanks to the phone tower, he was now one half of a celebrity couple.
When the cell phone tower suddenly materialized opposite our street, I told anyone who would listen that it was an interceptor, set up to connect to phones by mimicking cell phone towers and sucking up data but nobody would believe me. Rose, a woman who lived in the flat below ours, had asked me, in a rather mocking tone, if I had studied to be a spy at the same time that I was getting my degree in mathematics. Rose had laughed at her own joke and even Frank had been unable to hide his laughter. When he caught me scowling at him, he had said to Rose, “I’m sure my darling would make a wonderful spy!”
“Idleness is driving you mad, you’ve got nothing to do,” another neighbor said, the same man who said once that, had I been his wife, he would have made sure that I had enough babies to keep me busy.
“None of this teaching rubbish,” he said. “A wife should stay home and have babies!” Our childlessness, five years after we moved into the neighborhood a newly married couple, was a constant source of gossip. The fact that I taught mathematics at the university did not impress our neighbors. It did not help matters either that I had been discovered to use a washing machine for my laundry rather than join the other women in the courtyard sweating over huge basins of dirty laundry which they washed by hand. “What sort of a woman uses a machine to wash her husband’s underwear?” Rose asked me once before I became the local celebrity. Without waiting for a response, she answered herself, “A lazy one!”
When I told Frank what the man had said about idleness causing me to run mad, Frank had simply said, “Ignore him. What does he know about all the work you put in for your students? What does he know about how all your intellectual pursuits keep you busy? He would be better off chasing money to raise his thirteen children!”
When he said this, a tenderness for him swelled up inside me and as I leaned in to kiss him, my Frank, the only man I ever dated who supported my desire not to have children, saying that he understood why anyone would want to put their career first, that he understood that not every woman wanted to be a mother, he said gravely, “Perhaps, you are reading too much sci-fi, seeing conspiracy theories everywhere. This tower thing, maybe you should drop it, eh?”
Yet two months later, the much respected Daily Star had written an article accusing the government of setting up fake phone towers around the city. The government had at first denied it but when irrefutable evidence was produced in the form of leaked official documents, they capitulated and apologized in long, officious sentences: “We live in dark and dangerous times. Boko Haram terrorists pose a real and significant threat to us and to our dear, beloved state. It is in the interest of security that the Enugu State government set up towers to collect information which has helped us forestall attacks and arrest would-be perpetrators . . .
“We are a democracy and we understand that the manner in which we have gone about this might appear undemocratic and for that we wish to tender our sincere apologies. We have already begun the process of disabling those towers and are working with the state security service to find new, less invasive ways to continue to safeguard our state . . .
“However, it would be inaccurate—as the report claims—to portray the state government as engaging in ‘bulk collection’ of the contents of communications. What data we collect is not looked at or retained unless investigators sense a tie to terror, and only then on the authority of a judge . . .”
I WAS VINDICATED. The very day the news broke, Rose stood at my door with a plate of jollof rice and a crate of Maltina to “see our professor!” She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “You have a very intelligent wife oo,” she said to Frank, her eyes beaming as if she herself were being complimented. The neighbor with thirteen children began to bow whenever he ran into me and one of his children asked me for an autograph, giggling excitedly as I, too embarrassed to refuse, signed a sheet of paper with my name. Neighbors began to seek my opinion on everything from whether to take a loan to which political party they should vote for, shouting “Prof! How are things today?” whenever they saw me. When Frank asked me how I knew about the tower, I did not tell him about the wonderful coincidence of reading about such towers in the USA in a journal one of my colleagues at the university subscribed to just before the one opposite our house went up. Or of the voices I told Frank I no longer heard, which told me, assured me in fact, that what the government was setting up was no ordinary cell phone tower.
Those voices I have heard clearly since I was sixteen and saw my best friend, Mmeri, drown in a pool. The voices—all three of them—have always been there for as long as I can remember, subdued, hardly ever making their presence known especially after Father took me to see a nice doctor who asked me a lot of questions, made notes, and who prescribed some medicines with names I could not pronounce—but after Mmeri died, they came to the fore. One of them—the little girl’s—even took on Mmeri’s high-pitched stutter. When there was nobody else with whom I could share the depth of my sorrow or the fears that kept me from sleeping at night, the one with Mmeri’s stutter became the hands that rocked me until the fears ebbed away. When I worried that I would not pass the entrance exams to the university, the deep male one who sounded like a priest told me I had nothing to worry about. He was right. I made it into my university of choice. When my pocket money was stolen from my purse just before I had to return to school, the female one—which I imagine for some reason as belonging to a woman with a small stomach and toned thighs—whispered in my ears that my stepsister, Ifeyinwa, had stolen it. I just walked up to Ifeyinwa and demanded that she return the money that she stole from me, and she did. I told Frank about it years later, when we started dating and I
feyinwa tried to break us up. I did not tell him about the voice identifying the culprit but about Ifeyinwa stealing my money and being too shocked when I confronted her to deny it. Frank began calling her Ifeyinwa-the-thief behind her back. He was not fooled by her friendliness and always found an excuse not to sit and chat with her when he visited, even though he talked a lot with my brother, and with me, he never ran out of things to say. Spurned, she took to calling him Talk-like-a-woman-Frank to his face, which to her annoyance did not bother Frank much. The first time she called him that he told her he liked women too much to be insulted by the insinuation that he talked as much as women did. “It’s not even an insult,” he said, “if you think about it.” That would have been enough to shut anyone up but not Ifeyinwa, who the voice with the stutter says is “as foolish as a sheep.’’
FRANK DOES NOT talk much these days. I walk into my sitting room. He is sitting down—as he has been doing for the past couple of days—on the sofa. I kiss him softly on his forehead. It is like kissing a fish, his forehead is moist and cold. I say hello but he does not even look at me. He stares straight ahead at the TV, which is off. I sit beside him and switch it on. The three o’clock news—which we have always listened to together—has just begun. There is a new camp being set up in Polo Park, the newscaster—the really pretty one with long eyelashes and deep dimples whom I nicknamed The Kangaroo—says, “Even as I speak, the government is setting up isolation tents there. I have been inside one of those tents myself. I must admit to feeling a bit envious. The tent’s neat, the camp itself is very clean. Bigger and cleaner than the previous camp. It is very secure. The safest place in Enugu. No crime. No power outage. No need for a generator. It is a Utopia.” The camera zooms in on her carefully made-up face and she smiles an awkward smile, as if she has food stuck between her teeth. “Remember, if you or anyone you know is exhibiting any of the symptoms of the virus, please come to the camp. If you can’t make it, call any of the numbers showing now, and the government will send someone to bring you. We can fight this. We can contain this virus but everyone has to help. Keep away from anyone who is showing symptoms. This is a terrible illness. It is spread through contact. Remember the three watchwords: Cleanliness. Vigilance. Distance. We can fight this. Yes. We. Can.”
I turn to Frank and begin to speak but his eyes are glued to the screen, as if he were memorizing the flashing series of emergency telephone numbers scrolling the bottom. I reach for the remote control in the crack between the cushions on which he and I sit, and switch off the TV. My husband groans and sinks deeper into the sofa. I inch closer to him and stretch to take his hand. As soon as I make contact, he snatches it back as if I were a leper, and groans again. I pretend not to mind. I say to him, “You really do not believe what The Kangaroo said, do you? Utopia my nyash! You don’t think that she believes it either? You could see it in her eyes. Her heart wasn’t in the message.”
I move back to my own side of the sofa. “Listen, do you or do you not trust me?” I have put on the voice I use when I am scolding an errant student.
Frank groans again. His breath comes in short sputters like the dying engine of a car. It hurts me to hear it.
“I hate to see you this way, my poor darling.” My tone is softening at the edges, becoming fluffy, flirty even. “Do you need anything? Water? Tea?”
Frank shakes his head and sinks deeper into the sofa, the blue of his shirt segueing into the blue of the sofa so that it appears as if he were melded to the chair. He does not say anything. He does not need to. I have always been able to tell what he is thinking. I respond now to the thoughts I see darting across his mind like a restless lizard.
“Why do you want to go to that place? Have I ever let you down? Have I ever been wrong? This isolation camp is just the government’s way of taking control. This disease, this Ebola, do you think it fell from the sky?” The soft edges are hardening up again. My tone is urgent. How can Frank be blind to this? “The government manufactured it to get as many people as they can sick. And then they created this camp where you can be ‘cured.’ I tell you, anyone who goes there is going to be implanted with a chip that will make it easier for them to be monitored. I will not let that happen to you! Have I not told you that a colleague of mine knows a doctor who is at this very moment putting final touches to the antidote? That doctor will come here and cure you.”
Frank opens his eyes and turns toward me. His eyes are red as if he has conjunctivitis. His is a textbook case, ticking off all the boxes for the symptoms: Fever. Red eyes. Chills. He is shivering now, his shoulders hunched to keep out a cold that only he can feel. I miss my Frank. I miss his voice. I miss the conversations we had at the breakfast table every day. I miss the Saturday mornings we spent in bed making love with the enthusiasm of teenagers just discovering the wonders of sex. If I could take his place, I would. I would bear it better, knowing what I know. It is not fair that it is Frank who has gotten ill.
“The hunger that is hopeful of being assuaged does not kill,” I tell him, hoping to make him laugh. When we had just started dating and I still lived at home, there were very few opportunities for us to get intimate. Frank always used that phrase to console both himself and me that soon, we would get our own place, get married, and be able to “do it whenever and however” we chose. It has evolved to become our secret sex code. Frank looks at me and the sadness in his eyes is so intense, I look away immediately. I get up, walk into a room, and return with a damp towel with which I begin to wash him. His face, his arms, and beneath his shorts. Every time I touch him, he flinches. Each time I shush him, placing a finger on his lips. “Please,” he says, his voice so soft he might have been whispering. I work in silence starting from his head and then moving gradually to his hands and then, unbuttoning his shirt, I wash his stomach. “Please,” he says again. It comes out as a whispered “plis.” I begin to hum under my breath, the John Legend tune we both love:
’Cause all of me
loves all of you,
love your curves and all your edges,
all your perfect imperfections
I wash first his right leg, then the left, scrubbing the dark, rough skin of his knee, which, no matter how much shea butter I bully Frank into rubbing on it, remains dry and callused. When I start on his right foot, the woman’s voice tells me it is time to remind him of things he might have forgotten. I stop humming and begin to talk.
“You’re such a worry bug, my darling.” I wish I could tell him about the voices, which warn me now that he must not be allowed to go to the camp. They tell me that if he goes, he will not come out alive. They ask me how many of the people I know who have gone in so far have come out. And they tell me that if Frank does come out alive, he would not come out the old Frank, he would be nothing more than a robot, implanted with a chip to control him. Either way, if he went I would lose him. I cannot bear the thought of that. All three voices assure me now that an antidote is on its way for this mysterious illness, that the antidote will be brought to my door and Frank—together with anyone else who takes it—will be saved. I trust those voices but Frank, who, when he announced that he wanted to marry me, was informed by the envious, older Ifeyinwa that I had spent some time in a mental institution and was prone to “bouts of insanity,” but had not been put off, would certainly question me about the veracity of the voices. He will ask me, as he did once when he thought I was talking to myself (I had actually been dictating into my phone), if I still took pills. Those pills, which now too, the voices tell me, the government has somehow found a way to switch with their own pills so that they could rid me of the voices and better control me. Of course I am not taking them. I am not that foolish but Frank will not understand. He thinks I ought to take my medication “because it is dangerous not to.” On our honeymoon, the stuttering voice had told me that the man lying in the bed with me was not Frank but a devil who had taken his place. I had to get rid of him so that Frank would return. I had to slash his throat but I had nothi
ng sharper than a nail file in the hotel room. I had never killed anything, not even a chicken, but I straddled him and brought the tip of the nail file to his neck. He jumped up and grabbed my hands, swearing as he did so. He sounded like my Frank. He looked like my Frank. How could I have wanted to hurt him? I dropped the nail file and let him hold me. He supervised me every day as if I were a child while I took my medication, handing me the glass of water and waiting until I had swallowed the pill. He only stopped two weeks after, when I convinced him that I would never, ever play “drug truancy” (his words) again. So what if the voice was wrong then? It does not mean that they are wrong now. What about all the times that they have been right? Even if the voices are wrong now, can I also discount the rumors going round?
AS THE WEEKS went by and the illness continued its round of the city, and found its way as a regular feature on the news, it made sense that the neighbors would seek my thoughts. Rose stopped me two weeks ago as I walked to work.
“It was manufactured by the government,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I cannot divulge my sources. If I did, I’d have to kill you.” I laughed to let Rose know I was joking.
“Why? Why would they want to make us sick? What have we ever done to them? Are we at war with our own government?” Rose looked confused.
“Control.”
When another neighbor challenged me and said, “But they said it was a man who ate bush meat in Liberia who brought it in here,” I laughed and said, “You expect the one who seeks to control you to tell you that?”
At first, the neighbors deferred to me. They agreed with me that of course it was a government ploy. They agreed that a government that was so corrupt that even local government chairmen could afford to buy private jets would want to squash any opposition by citizens by spying on them with fake cell phone towers, that a government that has never been known for its transparency would seek total control in this way—with a manufactured virus and internment camps—that this made sense. But when Rose’s son became ill—they said he began to bleed from every part of his body—Rose had him taken to the camp. It broke my heart to hear that she did not have enough trust in me, that she could not see that she was making it easy for the government to gain control of her family. “He’s my only son. If he dies, my life is finished,” Rose said when I asked her the next day why she had sent her son off. Not too long after that, Rose herself too became ill and was carted away. Then Rose’s husband and aged mother who lived with them. And now, it has entered my own house like a sneaky thief in the night, invading Frank’s beautiful body, coloring his eyes red. But I am not afraid. The voices tell me to be strong, that anytime now, a man will appear at our door with a serum that will cure Frank and keep anyone who takes it immune to the evil machinations of the government.
