Lagoon

by Nnedi Okorafor

  Before the strange woman giving a speech on my wife’s phone finished, my wife and I agreed on one thing: We were getting the hell out of Lagos, immediately. Something was going to blow. Lo and behold, not minutes after the woman finished speaking, BOOM! Something did blow! We didn’t know what, but we heard the sound. We threw the kids in the car with all the naira we had, some clothes, food, and our laptops, mobile phones, chargers, and got moving.

  We made horrible time because people were already trying to escape the slowly rising water. We managed to head northeast on the expressway, and after about an hour, everything stopped. Nothing could move. Many tried to drive through the grass and dirt on the sides of the roads, but they got stuck there as well. People turned off their cars and climbed out to stretch their legs and talk, and soon the road became a market. Hawkers kept our bellies full with spicy suya, groundnut, cashew fruit—those girls were making a killing. But they were providing excellent service. Young men blasted music and eyed women. Babies cried and slept. Mosquitoes sucked blood.

  Both sides of the road where we had stopped were flanked by shallow bush. There was nowhere to go until the gridlock broke up. I was sitting in the car and the boys were in the back sleeping. My wife was standing close by, talking to two women she’d just met. One was very tall and dressed like she was about to walk onto a Nollywood set, her tight pink-gray dress matching her pink-and-gray platform-heeled pumps. The other looked more like my wife, in black pants, heels, and a white top.

  “We’ll be stuck here for three days,” the black slacks woman said.

  “It’ll be fine,” the tall Nollywood woman said.

  “I pray, o,” my wife said.

  “I heard it was getting crazy on Victoria Island,” the black slacks woman said, nodding. “Riots, idiots burning everything; people are posting it all on the Internet. I was watching with my BlackBerry.”

  My wife sucked her teeth. “Well, how different is all that from what happens every day? Didn’t that ‘luxury-bus-robbery-turned-tragic-accident’ happen near here?”

  She was right—it did . . . right where we were parked, actually. Well, maybe about an eighth of a mile up the road, but that was close enough. I knew this because I had seen it with my own eyes. I’d never told my wife the truth about it. I’d been coming home from work when I drove past the scene that night.

  Mangled, twisted bodies all over the goddamn road. I am not exaggerating. Traffic was routing through the grass and dirt to get past it. Unlike most, I didn’t slow down. I moved quickly. I didn’t want to see. Even in the dark, that swift passing was bad enough for me. My window had been open, and the air had reeked of blood and fouler things. I must have been overwhelmed because I felt faint, my vision blurred for a moment and the road before me undulated, and I could have sworn that I felt the car jump. But I hadn’t driven over anything. Then I was past the scene.

  My wife later heard about the accident and asked me if I’d seen anything. I told her that I must have passed the area right before it happened. I don’t normally lie to her, but she didn’t need to know that I’d been there. If I’d told her what I’d seen, she would have demanded details, I’d have told them to her, and then she’d have cried for hours over the dead. Then my sons, who are always listening behind doors, would have had that sick look on their faces that they always get when they learn something they are not ready to learn. My white lie was to protect them . . . at least, until the photos came out in the papers and on the Internet showing the brutal scene. There were torn-up bodies littering the road, blood, intestines, skid marks of skin, twisted torsos, body parts broken off. The photos would make anyone want to vomit.

  These roads are full of ghosts. I’d always known that. That’s why I’d have preferred to be as far from the expressway as possible at midnight on a night like this, when something was attacking Lagos.

  But we were stuck.

  I was looking down at the road when I saw a large black spider dart by and disappear into the grass. I shuddered. I hate spiders and this one was huge . . . and very fast.

  “You’re a what?” I heard my wife screech. I’d tuned out of their conversation and now I tuned back in. My wife and the woman in the black slacks were staring at the tall Nollywood-looking woman.

  “You’ve been talking to me for the last half hour,” the Nollywood woman said. “Do I look dangerous?”

  I made eye contact with my wife before turning to look at the tall woman. She was . . . one of them. She looked so normal. Except . . . it’s hard to explain. There was a flicker of oddness about her if you looked long enough. Like she was more than what she was and less than what she was presenting, like a double-exposed photo. My wife took a step toward the car, and I was about to leap out when the ground shook.

  The boys woke up. “Daddy, what w’dat?” Loteh asked, slurring his words from sleep.

  “I don’t . . .” I looked toward the Nollywood woman. She was looking up the busy road. So was my wife.

  The ground shook again. This time harder. My wife came running to the car, the two women behind her. I watched the Nollywood woman, waiting to see her change into a monster or something.

  “Udeh! What is going on?” my wife shouted.

  I could only shake my head. I didn’t know where to focus. My children in the back seat, the shuddering road, my wife, or the “woman” standing behind her?

  “Get out of the car!” the Nollywood woman shouted. “Hurry! It’s not safe!”

  My wife and I stared at her. The boys started scrambling out. I opened the door to get out. The woman in the black slacks ran around the car and up the street stumbling and pointing back at us, shouting, “I’ve seen one of them! Back there! Back there!” People leaped out of their cars and ran up the road with the woman, away. Away from us.

  I grabbed my bag and my wife’s purse. One of the boys snagged a bag of food, the other, my wife’s phone. And that’s when the road began shaking like a snake fighting a feisty rat.

  “Get off the road!” the Nollywood woman screamed. She was right beside me. Everything was shaking, but even in the darkness I could see right into her eyes—clearly, steadily. They were brown but glowed like the sun was behind them; a sun from another world, maybe. In that moment, I understood in my gut, she was not human. She was not earthly. She was something completely other. But she was not evil, either. I felt dizzy but I had to stay alert. For the sake of my family.

  I dragged my wife and kids into the grass, completely forgetting about the tarantula I’d seen run in there, and the Nollywood woman followed. If she said get off the road, then it was best to get off the road. We were the only ones to do so. It was dark except for all the headlights. Who would want to run into the tall grasses, bushes, and shadows in such darkness? So everyone else ran up the road.

  At least they ran away from . . . it. To this day, I will never really know what “it” was, o.

  Not far from where the accident took place last year, the road was undulating. Then it began to stretch like hot plastic. Something beneath it groaned, deep and cavernous, “OOOOOOMMM.” The air stank of tar, and I felt a blast of heat on my face.

  “Don’t move,” the Nollywood woman said. We didn’t. But everyone on the road did. They screamed and ran. People started their cars and tried unsuccessfully to drive out of the gridlock, into the grass. “OOOOOOOOOOMMM,” the road said as it began to move beneath the vehicles. My nostrils stung from the stench. My wife pressed the kids close to her as she watched the Nollywood woman. My sons were crying as they looked up the road where something enormous was heaving and piling over itself.

  The road was rising up in a huge snakelike slab of concrete, the faded yellow stripes still in view. Then it rippled into a concrete wave. It knocked cars off itself as it rolled toward the fleeing people. When it got to them—well, you heard nothing but shrieks of agony. I covered my sons’ ears. They were too far and it was too
dark for us to see what was happening. I was glad.

  And then it went quiet.

  “OOOOOOM,” the road said. This time it sounded almost as if it were in ecstasy. The screaming had stopped. Had it eaten everyone? That was when the Nollywood woman ran into the road. She ran at the road monster, her heels sinking into the soft concrete.

  “Stay here,” I said. My wife only looked at me, and my children were pressing their faces to her legs.

  Quickly I crept alongside the road, afraid to touch it but also not daring to go too far into the grasses. I slowed down when I was close enough to see the Nollywood woman. The monstrosity was so terrifying that I changed my mind and moved deeper into the grasses, getting on my knees and crawling. Snakes and tarantulas were nothing compared to what I could see.

  Let me tell you something—that woman, she was from outside this earth, yes. But that thing, that thing that was haunting the road, it was from here and had probably been here since these roads were built, maybe even before then. I am not a Christian or a Muslim, or maybe I am both. But I also believe in the mysteries we can never understand, especially in my country. This thing was one of them.

  “Bone Collector,” the Nollywood woman said as she looked up at it.

  It piled up before her, reaching five stories into the sky. I swear to you, this is what I saw. Concrete that smelled like fresh hot tar . . . and blood. It smelled like blood, too.

  “Why?” the woman asked it. “Why do you do this? Why now?”

  “I collect bones,” it said. The voice sounded blistering and wet. I felt the vibration of it deep within me. It made me feel like nothing but meat, like it could shake that meat from my bones, the bones it wanted. “I have always collected bones. I am the road.”

  “Collect my bones and then never collect again,” the woman said. “I am everything and I am nothing. Take me and you will be free of your appetite.”

  Everything around me seemed to go silent. I couldn’t even hear the grass rustling. Can you imagine? Never in my entire life had I witnessed such a selfless act. She was not from earth. Yet still. I thought of Nigeria’s worst diseases—pervasive corruption and unsafe roads. The one who had spoken through my wife’s phone was right. She and her people were indeed agents of change. I could feel the change in me then, while I knelt there. I’m sure I was not the only one, either.

  I feel it now.

  I watched it take her. I owed it to her to not turn away. I saw the pain on her face as she was pulled into the road’s hot flesh, as it turned to mush beneath her high-heeled platform shoes, pulled her down, her pink-and-gray dress pushed up around her as she sank. She never screamed, never made a sound, just let it take her. The road shuddered, the road stretched, but in the end, the road was satisfied. It laid itself back down, and became still. And when it was done, I heard the relieved sigh of millions of ghosts.

  Not long after, the gridlock cleared up. Some people came back, got in their cars, and drove away. My wife and I got into our car with our sons, drove around the abandoned vehicles, and left Lagos.

  After the road ate that woman, I do not think any other people died on the Lagos–Benin Expressway. Not that night.

  CHAPTER 41

  AFRICAN CHAOS

  I was there.

  Though, maybe I shouldn’t have been there. Maybe my mother was right. She’d warned me not to travel to Nigeria. She said that of all the African nations, this country was the one she heard the weirdest things about on CNN. Internet fraudsters, Christians and Muslims killing each other in the streets, a government that openly robbed its people blind. To her, Nigerians were a race of troublemakers. “You ain’t no African,” she declared the night before I left. “You American. They gon’ eat you alive.” Then she hugged me and gave me five hundred dollars and a bottle of cod liver oil capsules.

  My mother hated hip-hop, too. She called it “successful trash” and “crass ghetto bullshit.” She’d always felt I should have been singing in church. She said she didn’t raise a rapper. But I am what I am and I be what I be. I can sing well enough but the church isn’t for me. My mother can deny it, but she raised me to be free. A sharp thinker who goes after her dreams. And despite her issues and the fact that my father left us with nothing but debt when I was a baby, she did a good job.

  For years, I’d been digging on Anthony Dey Craze, the lyrical genius rapper from Ghana. A Ghanaian friend of mine turned me on to his work, and then months later I saw Anthony live. His performance . . . How can I describe it? It changed me. Listening to him in my car or on my phone was one thing. Live was something else entirely. It was in the bass of his voice, the flow of his words. There was a rhythm to his performance that swayed the entire audience! You could practically see waves of it rolling over everyone. I’d never experienced anything like it. That shit came straight from the soil of the continent, I just knew it. I wanted to learn how to do that. So when I opened for him at a show in Atlanta and he asked me to go on tour with him in Ghana and Nigeria, all expenses paid, of course I said, “Hell yeah!”

  The show that night in Lagos was amazing. I was the opening act, and I don’t think the audience was expecting me. I don’t think they were ready for a six-foot-tall African-American woman in a glamorous evening gown with a shaved head who could both rap and sing. I took the stage like a dragon. I wrapped things up with a freestyle session. I was so deep in the zone that I don’t even remember what I was spitting. It was just coming and coming and coming. I should have known there was something in the air. Backstage, Anthony came up to me, gave me a big hug, and said that I was officially his protégée. I was speechless! Everything in my life was coming together.

  I grew up in Athens, Georgia. Up until three years ago, the farthest I’d ever gone from home was Jackson, Mississippi, to attend Jackson State University and study psychology. I was the first in my family to go to college. And by my junior year, to my mother’s horror, I also became the first to record a hip-hop album. Never in a million years could I have imagined I’d wind up on the streets of Lagos during some sort of riot.

  I’d gone out looking for Anthony after the concert. His producer told me he’d slipped out and that I’d find him down the road at some place called Bar Beach. That’s why I was out there. I really didn’t plan to go anywhere alone. I just wanted to see if maybe he hadn’t left yet.

  There were some guys milling about near the entrance of the nightclub. I leaned against the door and watched the road. The club was on the corner of a busy intersection, and I watched the traffic and enjoyed the night air.

  This was how I actually saw it. I saw the sonic boom. I swear to God, the very air shivered. I saw it coming up the street. At first, I thought I was just tired and overwhelmed from such a wonderful night. I wondered if I needed to go and eat something. I can never eat before a performance, and now I was starving.

  But the air really did shiver. And as I stood there, it came right at me. There was no physical breeze; it came like a ghost. Then it washed over me like a great wave of water. When it passed, I felt drenched, heavy.

  There was a brief silence, like the moment after an intake of breath.

  Then BOOM! Deafening noise that made my head vibrate!

  People dropped to the ground, a man fell off his okada, windows shattered, car alarms sounded, two cars went over curbs. For a full minute, the constant traffic of honking, beeping cars, trucks, okadas, red buses, beat-up orange danfo mini vans, motorized tricycles in front of the nightclub completely stopped. I should have gone inside. Instead, I stepped into the sea of people, holding my ears. In those first few minutes many others did too. And soon the sides of the roads were full of people like me, curious, afraid, excited people who were scared of being indoors.

  We were all wondering the same things: What blew up? Was something else going to explode? My head throbbed and I struggled to ignore it. I stood on shaky legs at an intersection, pres
sing close to a streetlight to avoid getting knocked around too much. The traffic started moving again, but people were clearly scared. You could see it on their faces.

  “Did you see that?” Someone tapped roughly on my shoulder.

  Rubbing my temples, I turned. An old bent man in a long tan caftan and a wide-brimmed hat leaned on a dark wooden cane. He stank of many cigarettes and had a bushy gray beard and tufts of wiry hair on the sides of his head.

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “You saw it. Na wao, the first thing you say to me is a lie, kai!”

  “I . . .”

  “Maybe you know what it was, then?”

  “The noise?” I asked.

  “No, the shivering air. Was it a bird?”

  “I don’t think so?”

  “A plane?”

  I frowned.

  The man grinned. He didn’t have many teeth. Then he laughed wheezily and said something in another language. Could have been Yoruba, Hausa, or complete gibberish. I don’t think it was gibberish. The man had a glint in his eye and it put me on edge.

  “What do you think it was?” I asked.

  “You assume that I think.”

  “I need to get back to the club,” I said, turning to leave. This was too much weirdness for me. Plus, the car alarms and exhaust were increasing my headache. I turned back to him.

  “Where are you from? Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America, right?” he said.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I can tell, o. I got an American cousin,” he said with a smile. “I got cousins all over the world.”

  “Um . . . wow,” I replied. An okada passed dangerously close to him as he stood with his back to the road. He didn’t seem to mind or even notice.

  “Yes, you saw what you saw and I saw it too,” he said. “It’s going to get really interesting here soon, you’ll see. It’s a great time to be in Africa! And at least you can say that you saw it all begin.” He pointed a gnarled finger at me. “You can say you were there. That is not something most young American girls can say. If you ever make it back to your country, make sure you tell them about your country here. Just because you are American does not make you American. This is your home.”