We tried to teach ourself to see humans as he did, with the same grace, to follow his example. After Soren and the loss of her faith, the Ada had decided that her life was better with Yshwa in it after all. It didn’t matter to her if he was real; she believed that the church around him was irrelevant, and she hoped that her afterlife would be one of oblivion. The Ada chose him because she needed a moral code to control us with, one that could protect her and others from our hungers. Yshwa had a good code, a simple one: love. Still, we found it difficult, unnatural even, to embrace his ways. The only vessel we truly cared about was ours: the Ada. Apart from her, we did hold Saachi in some regard for being the container of a universe, and Añuli for being Añuli. The Ada, however, cared about more than those two—she cared about Saul and Chima, about her friends; she had a long list of loved ones. We did not, as the beastself had demonstrated with Itohan’s older brother in Georgia, and were not inclined to—most of what we knew of humans was what the beastself knew, that they were cruel, that their world was cruel, that everyone was, inevitably, going to turn into dust. We could see the logic of the beastself’s philosophy—to hunt and feed on bodies, to use them in wringing out pleasure, to put that before anything, because otherwise, why were we alive and what was the point?
But it was not the using of humans that alarmed the Ada enough to try and guide us with a code. It was the places we went for pleasure with Asụghara guiding us—the ecstasy we felt in tricking humans and watching their heartbreak, watching them crumple against walls, seeing the shocked pain in their eyes. We had no remorse; we left that to the Ada. We became complicit in many betrayals, met men who lied and devastated their women, who despised humans like we did, who acted like they were gods and not humans. We let Asụghara play with these men, and when she was tired of batting them around and baiting them with the Ada’s heart, we helped her remind them that divinity was deliberately not accorded to all flesh, that they were nothing, no better than the women they thought they could injure. The men all confessed their love to the beastself, with their mouths or with hunger in their eyes after she left them, after she threw them all away. The Ada suffered in this because, like a human, she had loved some of them.
When we were faced with Yshwa, it was easy to justify the things we had done. We did not care. The Ada wanted to be contrite. Asụghara wanted to burn the world down. We were guilty only of allowing the beastself to run the body into mattresses and hearts. What did it matter?
“You are weak with lust,” Yshwa told us.
“Argue with the beastself,” we said, and we left Asụghara out for him.
She shrugged. “They are only humans.”
“You’re no better,” he countered. “Driven by instinct, incapable of restraint, ruled by desire.”
Asụghara hissed, offended. “You don’t understand—” she began, but Yshwa raised a hand to silence her.
“You forget,” he said. “I once had a body too.”
The silence that fell was weighted. “I just want to be free,” Asụghara said eventually.
We wondered if she meant from us, if she wanted to be a separate self, with her own body, doing as she pleased. If so, she would have to learn, as the Ada had, what things in this life were impossible. The whole is greater than the individual.
“I thought you wanted to follow my teachings,” Yshwa said, but he meant all of us, not her.
We hesitated. The Ada wanted to follow him, that much was clear; she had never tried to steer all of us as firmly as she was attempting now, but we were many and she was small.
“Don’t ask me to stop for the humans,” Asụghara spat. “Taking from them is the only pleasure we have left.”
“You can’t lean on that forever,” Yshwa said.
“Do you have a better plan? Do you know how to make the pain stop?”
It was only with eyes like ours that we saw Yshwa flinch, just with fractions of his skin, as if he was remembering. “It doesn’t.”
Asụghara spoke for us. “Then we won’t either.”
He came up and laid his hand on her cheek. It burned, and she turned into the Ada. “Do it for me,” he whispered.
The Ada’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s not fair, Yshwa. We just want it to stop hurting. Or have you forgotten? At least you got to die.”
She wanted to look away—we wanted to look away—but Yshwa held her face tight. His breath felt like a thousand tiny cuts against our skin.
“We’re gods,” he reminded her. “I don’t have to be fair.” When he pressed his mouth to her forehead, our bones boiled underneath. The Ada closed her eyes. “I will lead you,” he whispered, “down the paths of righteousness for nothing, other than the sake of my name.” When we looked up again, he was gone.
It was not the last time he tried to save us, to pull us out of our own condemnation and wrap us in his peace. Yshwa knew the Ada’s secret fear—that she had become evil because of the things Asụghara had done.
It didn’t matter. He was not enough.
We stopped hunting because it had lost its shine, but we could not give Yshwa what he wanted. There was too much safety in sin, too much sweetness to walk away from. We took lovers who belonged to other people, kissed husbands after the sun had set and also in the broad brightness of afternoon. We gave the Ada new men, not entirely reformed, but not as cruel as the ones before them. She felt a little safer with these ones, so she wrote about them to Yshwa, like evidence of small remedies, proof that she was slowly, somehow, being saved.
Chapter Nineteen
You cannot find it. And if you find it, you cannot touch it.
Ada
Dear Yshwa,
I am lying in bed in my lover’s shirt. He always leaves something behind, but he doesn’t mean to. The first time it was that navy cardigan, the one I wore till he came back. The sleeves were too big and they swallowed up my elbows.
Yesterday, when he left, I walked him to the train and he kissed me on the platform. I watched the train pull away and then I walked back up the stairs, across the concrete of the plaza. I walked through the battered white door of my building and up the rickety stairs to my apartment. His white T-shirt was lying on my bed. It smelled like him. I stripped off my clothes and pulled it over my body. I slept in his scent.
I love him, but not too much. Carefully. He doesn’t touch me when he sleeps but he holds me against him when he’s awake. It is simple with him. There’s fun, good friendship, and powerful orgasms. Sometimes, it feels like I don’t need anything else.
“I don’t believe in missing people,” he tells me. “If I miss you, I can just call you.”
He’s rarely in the country when he calls. I love him, but just enough.
“Look at this,” he says, watching us in the mirror, our skins wet and gleaming. “This is so fucking beautiful.”
Don’t get me wrong. I still want forever, Yshwa. But I’ve learned that you can’t force forever on the wrong people. They belong exactly where they are, giving exactly what they want to. I don’t ask for anything more. I figure I shouldn’t have to. Besides, I think about you all the time and it helps me detach from all of this. It releases me. When you look at life from far away enough, the things we talk, think, and gossip about fade to tiny dots, to nothing. I think, will this all matter in thirty years?
I will see my other lover, the painter, in a few weeks. None of us share continents, which makes things simple. I touch his face like it’s holy. He likes to tell me that I’m free, that I can’t be held in a cage, and I used to deny it. But one day I realized I don’t tell him about the others because something about that really does keep me free. I love him, though, and it feels easy.
When I think of them and the love I hold for them, it unfurls into a greater love. My chest multiplies with it. I even want to hold the faces of my friends and tell them I love them. I don’t feel trapped or anchored, which is really strange, Yshwa. I stop being afraid of relocations and I can move wherever I want because I kno
w that I will be loved constantly across all space. And even if it fades with them, it will bloom again. We are all conduits. It moves through us freely.
Yshwa, I am tired of pain. It’s just easier to focus on love and an existence outside this world. At least that feels like freedom.
Still, you like to send me new lovers, like impulsive presents. Like that one who I thought was going to be cocky and brash. He arrived after I had a difficult week and he turned out to be shy and clumsy, like a boy. He was single-minded in bed, his face serene and focused, his body hammering. Boys fuck like that, fast and hard and desperate. But when we stood on the open train platform, exposed to the sky, he pulled me to his chest. I turned my head away so my lipstick wouldn’t stain his clothes and he kissed my forehead more times than anyone had in the past few years. He talked about tennis all the time, like Ewan used to. When we said good-bye, I was wearing the same dress he’d met me in.
“I’ll miss you,” I texted.
“You made my trip,” he typed back.
Still, I am very lonely. They help me forget this, but sometimes it shows up like a continent shifting onto my chest. I’m so tired of being empty. I turned it inside out and wore it like a glove, smeared it on the walls until my house shouted empty, empty, empty. I didn’t know what to do with it afterward. All I know is that it hurts to be in the spaces between freedom.
“Can I have a hug?” I ask my white T-shirt lover.
“Of course,” he answers, and holds me. “Are you okay?”
I want to tell him that my heartache is acting up again, but instead I smile and lie and lie next to his body, watching an animated movie flicker across the screen. I take a little comfort in the fact that he chose to be lying here with me. It matters, even though I still feel lonely with him there.
He saw the scars on my arms for the first time today.
“We have to talk,” he said.
“I used to cut myself,” I replied. “I stopped.”
“I’m glad you stopped,” he said, but it reminded me of how long all of this has been hurting. The pain is so old, Yshwa. I don’t even have the strength to want anything anymore. I just float and stare at the sky, and when the pain hits, I arch my neck to keep the water from overcoming my face. Months ago, the painter looked at me as we lay in his bed.
“That sadness never really leaves your eyes,” he said.
When I was out in Lagos with a group of friends, I met this Somali boy who told me I inhabit a space between depression and happiness, a sweet spot, a brilliant spot. I stared at him and wondered if it was true. If it was, could that spot be more real than either end of that spectrum? It would be a point of perfect balance, I thought.
“You are the most beautiful woman I have seen in all my life,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
He stared at me, then laughed. “Beauty is beauty,” he said, shaking his head. “It just is.”
I stared back at him. He hadn’t been able to stop drinking all night. He had worked his way through small glasses of tequila, larger glasses of vodka, occasional cups of tap water, and he was now holding a blue glass full of gin. I watched him and then I told him about Ewan. When I mentioned Donyen, his face changed.
“You’re too pretty to be gay,” he said.
Later that night, he asked if we had met in a previous life, and I said nothing. We all went to another club, and there, he took my hand and pulled me out under some purple lights.
“I will miss you,” he said. “I wish we had more time.”
I wasn’t sure what he was running away from, but I wanted to tell him that I was the wrong place to run to. It was impossible for me to love him. He had too much hate inside and he thought I would fall for words, as if you can get me with my own weapon. Try a god, I should have told him, they like when you run to them.
Honestly, Yshwa, I just want to rest. Let me find a place where even if I’m alone, I can sit on my veranda and look at a mango tree and we can just talk. You will be the words in my mouth and the ones that fall from my fingers; you will be the one to whom I direct my longing.
NZỌPỤTA
(Salvation)
Chapter Twenty
Hiding, oh, hiding! The hidden should hide very well, because I am letting go the leopard.
We
Allow us a moment to explain a few things. When you break something, you must study the pattern of the shattering before you can piece it back together. So it was with the Ada. She was a question wrapped up in breath: How do you survive when they place a god inside your body? We said before that it was like shoving a sun into a bag of skin, so it should be no surprise that her skin would split or her mind would break. Consider her burned open. It was an unusual incarnation, to be a child of Ala as well as an ọgbanje, to be mothered by the god who owns life yet pulled toward death. We did the best we could.
Because we came through gates that did not close behind us, it was easy for us to make reality loose for the Ada. We had one foot on the other side at all times; it was nothing to step away from this world. And you must know this, you must see, how this world is a terrible and wicked place. We sectioned off the Ada in lavish and extravagant folds, playing fast with her memories. There are many advantages to a broken mind.
When the Ada was a child and the neighbor’s son came into the room she shared with Añuli, when he reached his hand between the Ada’s legs, under the cartoon nightgown she wore, we decided that she did not need to remember the exact ripplings of his fingers. Not that time, or the time after, or the time after that. It continued until the Ada wrote Chima a letter and asked him to stop inviting the neighbor’s son over late at night, which was when it stopped. We sectioned off the image of his silhouette bending over her bed, of his arm reaching. When the neighbor himself, the boy’s father, groped the Ada when he had her alone in his living room, when she was twelve, we did it again. We sectioned well—the Ada who was before the sectioning was not the same child after the sectioning. When she reached back for the memory, it would be as if it belonged to someone else, not her.
There was only us; we couldn’t entrust her to anyone else. Saachi left and Saul was always at his hospital, and the Ada was at the whim of Chima’s hands. He beat her often because he could—he was the first son and the firstborn, and she was his responsibility. The Ada fought back, and cried for her human mother until she realized that it made no difference. Even when Saachi did return, once or twice a year, it was not real. “She will leave,” Chima reminded the Ada, when she tried to report him to Saachi, “and it will be just you and me again.” By the time he raised a belt to her, the Ada knew no one would stay long enough to protect her.
When we were first placed inside her, with these humans, the odds were that the Ada would survive. It was, in retrospect, a very low bar to set. She did not die, yes, but she was not guarded, she was violated, so as far as we were concerned, they failed. This is why we have never regretted stepping in, whether as ourself or the beastself. Show us someone, anyone, who could have saved her better.
Sectioning the Ada gave her isolated pockets of memory, each containing a different version of her. There were versions to whom bad things had happened and, therefore, there were also versions of her to whom these things had not happened. The Ada could look back on her life and see, like clones, several of her standing there in a line. This terrified her, because if there were so many of her, then which one was she? Were they false and her current self real, or was her current self false and it was one of the others, lost in the line, who was the real Ada? We could not alleviate her terror because we would not allow a bridge between her and the past sections of her. We had separated them for a reason. Many things are better than a complete remembering; many things we do are a mercy.
But there were still dangers involved in what we did; sectioning is a brutal exercise, after all, and it became uncontrolled. The Ada was living in multiple realities at once, floating loosely between them, forgetting what each one felt like
as soon as she moved to a new one. It was as if she had been thrown back into the open gates and was trapped forever between realms. For her it was deeply unsettling and felt like a developing madness. So the Ada started marking her skin in new ways, to remind herself of her past versions, tattooing her arms and wrists and legs. We accepted this because it was a worthy sacrifice; there is little difference between using a blade and this alternative, this ripping through the skin with multiple needles, injecting ink until the flesh swells and leaks and bleeds. She had a thick sleeve of black ink tattooed down her left forearm, where she usually did the blood offerings, and she never cut herself again after that. We had all evolved.
She even put a portrait of us on the high of her left arm, of herself staring out, of us peering over her shoulder with our mouth fastened to the junction of neck and trapezius, a phantom arm wrapping around her, a ring suspended in the blankness. All these things she was doing to her skin made her closer to us; it was like an advertisement, a timeline of sections, who she was on the inside being revealed on the outside. We have always been in support of that, like when we carved up her chest. Knowing that Ala, in her cruel motherlove, would not permit us to return through her mouth and into her womb, all we wanted now was wholeness. But when a thing has been created with deformations and mismatched edges, sometimes you have to break it some more before you can start putting it back together. And sometimes, when the thing is a god, you need someone holy for that.
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