Foreign Gods, Inc.

by Okey Ndibe

  A persistent thought beat a conga in his mind: What if you’re caught? He stood, transfixed by the question’s awful refrain. For a moment, he was so confused that he considered exiting the shrine empty-handed, renouncing the dream that had brought him into a god’s lair at 11:00 P.M. Then an idea entered his head. Caught, I’d say that I entered the shrine to save Ngene from Pastor Uka. I’d say I had overheard Uka plotting with some shadowy men that night to steal the deity and make a bonfire of it, and I hastened to protect it.

  Preposterous as the response was, it sufficed to bolster his resolve. It was as if a force stronger than dread had come to the rescue and pried him from his fluctuating heart. That guiding force held up beatific images to his imagination. It showed him glimpses of all the pleasures to be had by a man if only he stood firm. Instantaneously, the welcoming waft of crisp dollar notes filled his nostrils. He pictured a penitent Queen B kneeling before him. Cadilla and the insolent horde that gathered at his store would be dazzled by his affluence, struck with awe. All his bills would be paid off, with lots of cash to spare. The vision took on a palpable force, and that force melted his fear and sluiced away its sediments.

  His legs, which had been heavy, jerked, like a horse’s, into life. His heart continued with its clamor, but its beat was now harnessed not to capitulation but to dreams of things to be possessed by the brave who stared fear down.

  Hands sweeping the dark air, he touched the deity’s face. His fingers felt something viscous and thick, and he knew it was sacrificial blood. He groped along the statue’s wooden outline all the way to its torso. In the dark his hands could feel the sturdiness of the chiseled wood. The statue rested on a squat base that enabled the deity, in the eye of even casual beholders, to exude an air of grandeur appropriate to a god whose department was war.

  He placed one hand around the statue’s neck and the other on its rump, and then lifted. Finding it much heavier than he had expected, he put it down. How could something so spare and lanky prove so dense and earthbound? In the dark, he wondered whether the deity had tensed itself, made its weight leaden, bent on deadening the abductor’s will.

  He knew that Ngene was a mobile deity. As a youngster, he had on numerous occasions seen Osuakwu hoist it upright on his shoulder and trek to villages far and near—wherever an oath needed to be taken—and back. Yet, his uncle was not only much older, he was also a man of meager musculature. And years of overquaffing kai-kai had made the old man seem frailer than many men his age.

  Ike flexed, but when he lifted the statue a second time its weight seemed lighter, mysteriously much lighter. He placed it on his shoulder, the same way he’d seen his uncle carry it, and turned to leave. He didn’t raise his legs high enough; his sneakers scraped against the earthen floor and screeched. His heart jumped. From a nearby room Osuakwu coughed twice, muttered something dreamily, then resumed his snoring.

  He gingerly stepped out of the shrine.

  A soft breeze cooled the beads of sweat on his face and neck. He drew several deep breaths and prayed the night to keep his secret. The drafts of air were mixed with the deity’s disgusting smell. He kicked out his legs to shake off an incipient cramp.

  His head, crammed moments before with a jumble of emotions, became strangely uncluttered. The pressure of the statue’s weight against his hand and shoulder kept him rooted in the present. He wondered how long he’d been in the shrine, impaled by fear. It seemed to him like hours.

  As he walked with the statue toward his home, his legs felt now limber, now lifeless. Sometimes he feared that his legs had turned into wooden stilts, had the illusion of being rooted on the same spot, or even of falling backward. That illusion was heightened by the night, shrouded in a widow’s dark cloth, a swirling, liquid darkness. In his mental rehearsals, he had counted on the darkness serving as a dumb ally of his scheme. Instead, it had unaccountably turned foe. The darkness cast spells, exhumed fears he never suspected he still nursed, and made his heart pound like a drum beaten by a drummer possessed.

  A spasm rocked his spine as a roving owl cooed its awful anthem. Other cacophonous creatures paused fleetingly, as though wary of the owl’s talon and scotopic eyes. Then they resumed their unmelodious din.

  It was an awful moment. Until he encountered it, he would have sworn that he had shaken free of the dread of darkness. His heart, pounding anew, betrayed him.

  His tossing, riotous mind swept him in the direction of his life in America. All he could think of was the word “accent.” It was as if the very name of America could be formed with those six perilous letters. Instigated—provoked—by that word, his heart surged up in a new wave of resentment toward America.

  Indeed, that one word, “accent,” was the reason he was out that night, a deity’s stinking statue pressed against his shoulder. Some part of him felt that America’s collective will had compelled him to sneak out that night, a thief. It would also be the beginning of his revenge—if his will could hold up against the sway of fear.

  He could accept that he’d failed at shedding his burdensome accent. He’d tried, but failed, to coax his tongue to roll around English words in a fashion acceptable to that strange animal called corporate America. Yet, he was, until that moment, certain of his liberation from the species of irrational fear that froze him in the shrine. If, before that traitorous moment, he had looked hard at himself, if he’d stared into his inmost heart and assessed himself as a man, he would have considered himself free of any form of superstition. At any rate, he would have judged himself beyond the spell of pagan notions that once enthralled one of his maternal aunts, his mother’s older sister, now long dead.

  Onu kputu kputu, this aunt was called, an onomatopoeic tribute to her diarrheic mouth, a mouth that was never dry of stories. He remembered her long-ago stories about nights so dark they gave people a perfect sense of what it must mean to be purely, horribly blind. Such nights, she would say, were favored by witches and wizards who traipsed through space, disguised as bats and owls, to do their bloody business. It was the sort of darkness, according to another lore of hers, which made malevolent spirits hungry for the road. Another of her claims was that, whether dark as charcoal or bright with the dazzle of moonlight, the night had eyes.

  She was the archetypal talebearer, said to stay underneath a shade and still see the sun. She knew when any man slipped out at night to sneak into a widow’s bed. She knew when a married woman took a lover among the sex-crazed youth of the village. She knew all the men and women who had eaten the malediction of witchcraft, who sailed at night to drink others’ blood. She could tell who among the villagers harmed their neighbors with malignant gris-gris.

  Tiny lakes of perspiration emerged from imperceptible pores and streaked Ike’s forehead. The itchy dots became streams. With each step, some silent voice told him it was better to turn around and return the deity to its shrine. But, at last, he arrived home.

  He gave a delicate push and the gate squeaked open. In his pocket he searched out the key to the house. He was about to insert it into the keyhole, but recoiled. What if his mother had chosen this, his last night, to brave another conversation with him? He left the statue outside the door, then entered the house. The darkness in the living room seemed even heavier than the one outside. For a moment, he stood, ears strained to pick up any sound. Hearing none, he dashed outside and hoisted the statue up, carrying it in his twinned hands. He set it down quickly to lock the door. In his bedroom, he walked cautiously, using his toes to grope, to navigate toward the suitcases. He swaddled the statue in some of his clothes and old dust-laden newspapers his late father had read and hoarded. He pushed the swaddled treasure against the back of his bigger suitcase and then arranged other clothes around it. He locked the suitcase, then felt the tug of a hideous pressure in his loin. He retrieved the bottle of cognac he had emptied and hidden under the bed. Then, kneeling, he held the bottle with unsteady hands and peed, relishing the bottle’s feel of heat.

  He tucked the bottle
under the bed and lay down. The night air had become cooler, but he was drenched, exhausted. It was as if he’d just brawled with a strong, sinewy foe. He began to make the sign of the cross, but his maternal aunt’s apparition materialized in all her taunting solidity, aborting his prayer. She stood over his bed, her ironic storyteller’s face wreathed with malice. “Do you have the strength to wrestle with Night?” she teased. She rocked with a menacing laughter. Still quaking with mirth, the ghost merged into the darkness and disappeared.

  He lay in bed, unable to sleep. The air in his room was dense. Breathing became a chore. Sweat beaded his forehead and poured from his armpits. He tossed and turned, ravaged by insomnia. Unable to see, he didn’t know what the time was, but he was tormented by the sensation of time grinding lazily, guaranteeing a long, stretched-out night. He felt as if he were the lone solitary soul awake in a sleeping, dreaming world. His body was too racked by weariness to fend off the terrors or pray the demons away.

  In the eerie swell of silence and darkness, his interior quaked with clanks and tremors. He was like a man swept along by a powerful, implacable current. He grasped after every flimsy, floating twine, aching for rescue. After a while, he reconciled with the futility of every effort.

  Suddenly, he heard isolated pelts on the zinc roof. Then the beat changed into the furious clang and clatter of a tropical torrent. Would he survive the storm? Ike wondered.

  Chief Tony Iba had promised to send a driver at 8:00 A.M. to give him a ride to the Enugu Airport. Until then, he would lie awake and await the dawn.

  A PIERCING CRY STARTLED him awake. The cry circled and circled in his head as he struggled to rouse from a sleep that had drawn him away.

  “Aiyi! Aiyi! Aiyi! Utonki, anwuo muo! Anwuo muo! Anwuo muo! Anya afu m ifeo!” Osuakwu’s wail shook the leaden dawn.

  The clarity of the cry astonished Ike. Living in several American cities, he’d forgotten how quiescent the Utonki dawn could be, so that the voices of women going to or from the village stream or of men greeting one another as they set out for their farms carried far.

  The priest kept screaming that he had died, that his eyes had seen something. It was the same torrent six or seven times and then silence.

  Ike’s hands shook. As he held his breath, he made out other sounds and voices. He heard neighbors’ doors as they were unlatched and flung open. Then there were the worried voices of men and women, stirred too early from sleep, as they hurried toward the shrine, exchanging questions. At such times, certain that something dreadful had happened, the people of Utonki were wont to speak at the top of their voices. It was as if, speaking loudly, they could shake off the tremor in their voices. That tremor was a product of deep, instinctive fear—of that yet-unknown malevolent force that seemed to hold Osuakwu to the ground, writhing. Several loud voices intruded on Ike’s consciousness.

  “What is it this early in the morning?” “What is this thing our ears are hearing?” “Why is Eze Ngene announcing his own death?” “Did the night grow horns to menace the chief priest?” The voices made dire assertions: “Something stronger than Cricket surely has gone after Cricket in its hole.” “A toad doesn’t do a noon sprint for play; something is usually after it.” “There’s terror in that cry.” “When a woman runs and holds her breasts, it is still play. When a woman must flee, she doesn’t hold down her flapping breasts.” They prayed: “May our eyes never see our ears.” “May all bad spirits fly off to the Evil Forest.” “What we don’t know, may it never know us.” They made declamations to shore up their spirits: “There’s nothing the eye sees that can make it cry blood.” “There’s nothing that can’t be mended in this world, only death.”

  Osuakwu’s fresh cry of agony drowned out the other voices. His anguished cry, like a toneless refrain, was harsh decoration for the conversations.

  One man’s voice struck a note of prophecy: “Perhaps Ngene has decided to change the hand that brings it food.”

  The suggestion shocked the drove into a momentary hush. Presently, a man’s excited voice said, “You have brought out a new word! There must be a fight between Ngene and Osuakwu. Why didn’t I think sooner about that instead of twisting in worry?”

  Eavesdropping from his bed, Ike understood the implication of the theory. His maternal aunt had once told him that the deity was capable of acting capriciously when it wanted to dismiss an inept priest or to hire a new man to minister to it. Sometimes the deity just killed off the incompetent chief priest. Then, through divination, it revealed the name of the next man it had chosen to be his voice. But there were times when the deity made a serving chief priest go berserk, a raving lunatic.

  The words of the worried whispering men suggested that Osuakwu’s cries signified the onset of the priest’s mental malady.

  Ike started as a tap on the door disrupted his monitoring of anonymous voices. He curled up to feign sleep. Three sharper knocks thudded against the door, but he maintained silence. His mother turned the knob and stepped in. She stood near the door, as if scared of her son thundering in rage if she went closer. One eye opened, Ike looked at her, mute. Strips of light silhouetted her emaciated frame. As if he were seeing her for the first time, it dawned on him that she had lost a frightful amount of weight since her husband’s death.

  Against the light, she looked like a shroud, ghostly. He’d easily defied her wish that he not visit Nne and Osuakwu. His triumph was proof that she’d also shrunk from all directions, lost her vitality and voice. In the face of his open defiance, she had merely skulked off into silence. Inside, he felt a tinge of regret at the ease with which he disobeyed her.

  “Are you awake? Or did I wake you?” she asked in a tentative, apologetic tone.

  He rubbed his eyes with the back of his palm, thinking, Who but a corpse could sleep through the chief priest’s rumpus? He wanted to say that he was awake, but the words died in his throat. Did she, he wondered, hear his heart’s riotous beat?

  She sniffed the air.

  “Something smells in your room,” she said.

  “I smell nothing,” he said quickly, reprovingly.

  “Pastor would have come to sanctify your room. But you chose to dine with demons.” There was an old feisty spark in her voice, as if she had equipped herself for one last, parting fight.

  “Thank him for me for not bothering,” he said.

  “Anwuo muo!” the chief priest wailed again.

  In the semidarkness, Ike’s mother appeared to tremble. Ike sat up in bed, again wiped the sides of his eyes, and yawned. His breath smelled rotten.

  “Have you heard your uncle’s cries?” she asked. “Perhaps the devil he’s been eating with now wants to eat him. Perhaps a black scorpion has stung his anus. Perhaps his youngest wife has broken his head with a pestle. People had warned him that a man his age shouldn’t have married a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. But did he listen? No! He sold his ear to the devil and bought a mat with the money. Maybe the sapling has finally cut off his—rope.”

  Ike smiled, amused by the difficulty with which his mother said “rope.” Even children freely used the word, but his mother spat it out as if it were a sin-drenched word, a poisonous word that had crawled into her mouth.

  When Ike said nothing, she asked, “Are you still leaving today?”

  “Yes. Chief Iba will send me a driver soon.”

  “I’ll be praying and fasting for you. Pastor will pray even more, so that God may open your eyes.”

  “You don’t need to fast for me, Mama. Please, please, eat. You need it. A week or two after I return to New York, I’ll send you more money. You’ll have enough money to eat whatever you want.”

  She shook her head sadly. “Pastor and I’ll pray and fast until you’re delivered. Go well.” She sniffed the air, turned, and walked away.

  Osuakwu wailed. Ike’s nostrils filled with a faint, yeasty smell.

  Outside, a car horn beeped. Ike dragged his suitcases out. He lifted the one with the statue and pushed it in
side the trunk, waving off the driver’s offer to help.

  “Death has come for me at dawn!” Osuakwu wept.

  Ike’s legs felt wobbly. “I will be back,” he said to the driver as soon as the trunk was shut. Rushing back to the house, he washed his face with his palm. Using a washcloth, he scrubbed his armpits and neck. He dressed hastily in a pair of jeans and a maroon T-shirt. Then he hastened to Osuakwu’s abode.

  Many people milled about, hands clasped across their chests, murmuring or silent. Ike wove his way past the small, growing crowd to the entrance into the shrine. Osuakwu sat on the bare floor, torso leaning back, eyes fixed on nothing, like a dead man’s. Osuakwu had cast aside his undershirt, revealing his World War II scar, and his chest that rose and fell at uneven intervals, like a heart’s throes before death.

  “Osuakwu, ogini?” Ike asked, standing to one side of his prone uncle.

  Other sympathizers hushed, as if they expected the distraught priest to gather his wits and speak reasonably to his US-based nephew.

  For a while, Osuakwu did not stir. Ike felt perspiration trickling from his armpits. He folded his arms, confused, afraid to speak any more words. Suddenly, Osuakwu sat up, his lips parted as if to shriek, except that no words came.

  Their eyes met. Ike saw a vacant look in Osuakwu’s gaze, as if his uncle could suddenly see into time, into space, into the recesses of secret treacheries.

  Ike couldn’t tell how he was able to mutter, “I’m leaving this morning.” Hands still folded, he edged his way out of the crush of people, his legs wobbly but miraculously holding up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO