I blink. My vision does not get any better.
Heaven isn’t dark like this, though. At least, not in the way them preachers describe it. Or is it my eyes? Do they still work proper?
I cannot make out the face of this ankara-dressed person before me. Smallish, a boy or girl approaching teenage years. The person has a long stick—bamboo—in their hands, raising it every now and then, dipping it back into the water—that’s how we’re moving. Rowing, yes? That’s what it’s called.
This is a canoe. Not Heaven.
I want to laugh, but I cannot, because there is a pain in my windpipe that makes me think my voice box will shatter if I speak, but I move my lips anyway, whispering as loud as I can.
“Th—thank you.”
There is a loud ringing, garbled by the water that has collected in my ears, so that I cannot even hear myself. I realise the ringing is in my own head, and it has been there all along.
I try to move, sit up, but as I turn my head and make to find purchase for my elbows, there’s a scrick—I hear this one clearly because it happens inside my own body—and then excruciating pain shoots up my spine, up the back of my neck, into my head, then cascades back down, tingling my fingertips, my toes. The cold and pain have conspired to make my joints static points, my bones throbbing entities. My whole body whines, the ringing in my head louder and louder. I would scream if I had a voice.
Then I am going under again, darkness closing in from the edges of my vision, stretching its fingers to press my eyelids shut, but I am not afraid. I am not afraid anymore.
THE NEXT TIME I open my eyes, I do not know how long has passed.
I first notice I’m no longer cold. Pain no longer comes in bursts, but in one long existence of hurt. My body has accepted it, stuck to numb, but my mind hasn’t; not yet. All my senses seem to be back in full force too, because for the first time I’m hit with the sharp smell of open sewage.
I want to rise, but memory warns me against it. I turn my head and look around instead.
I lie on a mat, on a hard floor made of wood—with neither patience nor finesse, because I can feel the spaces between the planks on my back. The mat is the rubber kind, with frayed faux thread on the end. My pillow is a lot of rolled-up cloth tied together.
A kerosene lamp hangs in the middle of the ceiling above, giving off light and heat. The ceiling itself is of plain, exposed zinc, as is the wall in front of me. The other three walls are of wood, littered with tattered old posters of English Premier League football clubs, especially Manchester United. Stacked along these walls are all kinds of books, just as old and tattered as the posters: some packed in Ghana-Must-Go bags and old rice sacks, some stacked openly in all their dog-eared glory.
Outside is constant noise; some of it the intermittent swish of water that tells me I’m still somewhere close to the lagoon; but lots of noise from children, chattering away in that carefree manner only children can maintain in a cold world. I listen for a bit, hoping to catch something to give me a hint of where exactly I am, but the language sounds quite foreign. It seems to have Yoruba underpinnings—I catch a familiar word here and there—but most expressions in the language are not Yoruba in the slightest. Or English. Or pidgin. Or anything I’ve heard in Lagos before.
Then there’s that smell. Now this, I recognise: the classic Lagos smell of sewage, refuse, spirogyra and faeces all commingling in stagnant water. Stick around long enough, and this just becomes part of the air. That I’m smelling it now means I’m somewhere that takes the cake. I can taste the filth on the back of my tongue, despite it being swollen.
Mosquitoes buzz about in my ears, a couple settling to bite into my skin. It’s too great an effort to lift my arm and swat them so I just let them take their pound of blood. If anything, I’m happy to be alive enough to be bitten.
My rescuer has taken off my shirt but left my jeans on. They are torn in long, burnt strokes, as if by a fiery knife. I look at my chest and almost scream. There is a branching redness under my skin, pressing against it as if struggling to break the surface. The tree of lines starts from my chest, right where Sango’s axe or the strike from the sky had touched me, then spreads out about my body: up to my neck, into my groin, like a climbing vine.
My thoughts hover about the attack on Cardoso House. That’s that it was: an attack. Sango didn’t come to shake hands or discuss; he came to destroy. How did he breach Papa Udi’s defences? The nsibidi staves Payu stuck in the ground since Ajala were never removed. Now I remember that image of lightning striking Cardoso House and starting the fire, and I realise he might’ve not needed to breach the ward. He came from above.
Where are Papa Udi and Fati now?
I have not cried in a long time, so when the first tear drags warmth into my ear, it actually surprises me more than anything. I would wipe it, but my hands are still too heavy, so I just let it flow, let the middle of my chest cave in and wash me of the heaviness.
A portion of the zinc wall opens—an afterthought: that’s a door—and a not-yet-teenage boy steps in, wearing an ankara buba and sokoto, deep yellow with purple and green scattered over it. My rescuer, it occurs to me, which almost gets me laughing. Do I always have to be rescued by teenagers?
The boy stands there, unmoving, afraid to approach. The open door lets in cold air, bringing with it an even stronger stench that causes me to cough. I suddenly feel embarrassed I’ve been crying, struggle to raise my arm and wipe my tears. The boy is no longer there when I’m done.
A moment later, he returns with a man so tall he has to bend to enter into the room. He is dressed in old jogger trousers and a faded t-shirt showcasing Pasuma Wonder. He has a smiling face, the patronizing kind that immediately marks him as a carer: teacher, nurse, volunteer.
My guess is right; he squats before me, that smile on, and tells me his name is Justice Ayorinde. We are in Makoko, a fishing community hanging on to the edge of Yaba and Ìsàlẹ̀ Èkó, caught between these landforms and the Third Mainland Bridge. He is a schoolteacher here, a former volunteer medic who stayed on to help the community and the children. This humble abode is his living quarters.
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you for saving me.”
“Oh, Hafiz here did all the work,” he says, rubbing the boy’s head, a gesture so affectionate it feels out of place in this dank, decaying slice of Lagos. “He found you floating in the water while on a fishing trip. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything if he hadn’t brought you in.”
Hafiz reminds me every inch of the first time I met Fatoumata, the way he refuses to look at my face. The thought of her pinches another hole in my chest, but I blink them away.
“Thank you,” I say to the boy. He looks away, shy. Or scared?
“Well, I’m happy you’re alive,” Justice says “For a while, I thought you weren’t going to rejoin us in the land of the living.”
“How long was I unconscious?”
“You’ve been lying here for four days,” he says.
What?
He nods. “Mnn hmm. My biggest worry has been food. You haven’t eaten anything in this time. We force-fed you water, and since it’s not like we can fish medicine out of the lagoon”—he chuckles at the thought—“we just had to keep your temperature stable with a sponge bath.” He looks over at my body, his eyes hesitating for a moment on my chest and the network of red lines. “You heal quite quickly though. Abnormally so.” He frowns.
“Well,” Justice says, rising, “rest some more, mister…”
“Mogo,” I say. “David Mogo.”
He pauses for a second, then something shifts on his face, and he’s about to voice it, then he looks at Hafiz, who is still very scared. He pats the boy on the head and says something in that language I’ve been hearing. The boy nods once, glances my way, and slinks out the door.
Then Justice turns to me and says: “Godhunter.”
I nod.
He squats again and helps me sit up, expertly guiding me with a hand on my c
hest and back. I flinch, expecting the quick jolt of an impression, but feel nothing. I’m not sure if the lightning strike has messed with my system, but for once I’m grateful my powers aren’t working right, so I settle instead for listening to Justice grunt near my ear, struggling with the unanticipated weight.
“We’ve heard about you,” he says. “That you’re something...different. I suspected when I saw these.” He points to the lightning scars on my chest. “Lichtenberg figures. Happens when electric current enters your body, passes through your blood vessels, and leaves at an exit point.” He sits on the mat himself. “Now, the first thing that comes to mind that causes exit points for electricity is lightning.” He pauses for effect, watching my face. “Do you know how many people are struck by lightning every year in Lagos?”
I shake my head.
“Zero. Lightning strikes barely happen in cluttered places. Which makes me think whatever struck you didn’t come from up there.”
He pauses again, to watch my reaction, like a doctor delivering bad news in bits. I grimace at a tightness below my ribs making it difficult for me to breathe.
“Why was he afraid?” I say with a nod towards the door.
Justice looks down. He’s a young man, aged by work. I place him around mid-thirties, a few years ahead of me, but with the air of someone who’s already fed up with the world.
“There’s a policy against bringing in outsiders of any kind,” he says. “It’s bad enough in there that we can’t get the basics—water, power, food, medicine, education—so taking on refugees is not in our best interest. The Baálẹ̀ forbids it.”
He reads my expression, which asks, so why did Hafiz do it?
“Because I taught them compassion,” he says. “Hafiz is one of my better students. He had dreams of going to the University of Lagos.” He says this with a handwave in the general direction of what I presume will be Akoka, home to Lagos’s formerly premier higher institution. “But even though Lagos has become less... habitable, he hasn’t lost hope. Yes, we’re all here clinging on to survival, but people like me, and my students like Hafiz who listen, we think there’s more than just locking ourselves in here, trying to survive.”
“Mmn.” I get the feeling.
He rises again, a finality to this one. “Rest. You’ll need it a lot soon.”
“For what?”
“You’ll need to leave,” he says matter-of-factly.
“I see.”
He nods, as if he’s sorry. “The youth society here does not joke with these things. They can be ruthless. Me, I’m just an outsider, I can’t dictate. I also don’t want Hafiz to start life thinking people get punished for doing good things.”
Right. “Fair enough.”
“Sleep,” he says again. “I’ll have to wake you after midnight. I have a strong feeling you might be required to meet someone.”
“Your Baálẹ̀?”
“Oh, no,” he says, a furrow on his brow, not quite fitting into his face. “Someone much more important and powerful. Our Olùṣó.”
I know that look; I’ve seen it many times in my line of work, mostly with people trying to describe something they’ve seen, but which their brain is still trying to process. I also know what that word means. It’s an old Yoruba word for a sentry, a keeper.
I don’t need to ask to know he’s talking about a god.
Chapter Sixteen
I DON’T SLEEP, of course.
Insomnia and I, we go way back. I was a restless kid; wide-eyed at midnight, tussling at 3am, screaming out of dreams close to dawn. Papa Udi told me he used to have me sleep in his bed when I was younger. Said he used a ritual on me once, to put a stop to the bedwetting so he could sleep without the smell of urea choking him. Then at ten, when I got my own room, he’d run out in the deep of night, flashing his cutlass, chasing screams that ended up being nothing more than dreams and shadows. He wagered it was my childhood brain trying to process abandonment, trying to understand the things my body saw and felt with its eyes and fingers.
Tonight though, it’s because my body aches like I was built by angry carpenters. I stand outside, on what passes for the balcony of Justice Ayorinde’s quarters. I lean on what passes for a handrail, built from scrapwood—everything in this shanty is built from scrapwood—and the contraption sways back and forth with my weight. There’s a kerosene lantern hanging off a nail on the shack wall adjacent to me, turned off because Justice believes just standing here is a risk, but I insisted it’ll be difficult for anyone to recognise me in this darkness anyway. He then went to bed and asked me to wake him up once the clock strikes midnight.
I stand here, eye on Justice’s mobile phone clock in my hand, trying to convince myself that there’s a slim chance a sliver of my old life—Payu, Fati, Cardoso House, anything—has to have survived. Just... has to. The only way I’ll ever know this is, first, by getting out of here. Second will be to find someone to give me the dirt on Sango and how to find him.
Justice had the right idea. If the Makoko community has been protected all this time by an orisha serving as their Olùṣó—well, well, well, am I not in luck?
A late night grocery canoe goes by on its last round, sending ripples across the water, calling out wares. The paddler is a young girl, as young as Hafiz, navigating the vessel with a bamboo stick thrice her height. Mind flits back to Fatoumata, but I brush it aside. The crier is a woman, her face lit by the kerosene lantern perched atop her heap of wares, over which she waves a couple of alcohol bottles and calls out for late night drinkers (I don’t know what she’s saying, but calling out wares sounds the exact same way in every language). Justice says it’s the Egun dialect, specific to Egun fishing families commingled from Badagry, Ìsàlẹ̀ Èkó and other riverine areas of the Niger Delta—these were the people who first came to Makoko and made it home. The way she pronounces the words though, I sense she might not be an original local. Justice did say there are other African immigrants here as well: Gabonese, Togolese, Beninoise, Ghanaians and Cameroonians.
The heavy stench of wet shit smacks my nose, reawakened by the disturbance of water. I shut my eyes and bow my head, trying to avoid throwing up or spitting in disgust. It reminds me that this place, in the end, is little more than an inaccessible slum. Yes, the people are happy, protected; yes, they’ve been shielded from the upheaval and destruction likely barraging through Lagos right now, but I can’t say for sure if they’d needed an Olùṣó for that to happen. No one wants to leave Ìsàlẹ̀ Èkó to walk on makeshift footbridges of scrapwood plank; no one wants to boast of basic architecture suspended on stilts a few feet above water; no one wants to leave their brick walls in Upper Island to come live in tin-can houses of zinc, thatch, tarpaulin and sacking. The Lagos State Commissioner for Waterfronts literally had Makoko earmarked for demolition right before The Falling.
The stone the builders rejected is now the safest stone.
The phone in my hand beeps the alarm I set for midnight. I look up, and the boat has vanished from sight. The crier too has become quiet, her lamp gone out. All noise stops at once, like someone pressed pause on a record player. The distant chugging of a small generator grinds to a halt. Tiny window-squares of light start to go out, almost in sync.
I open the door and point the mobile phone torchlight into the shack. Justice is awake, his kerosene lamp in his hand, the snuffed out wick giving off smoke.
“We have to turn out all lights at midnight,” he whispers.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Shh,” he says. “Go now. Try not to make any noise.”
“Where am I going?”
“Just follow the walkway,” he says. “The channel is widest at the tail end of the waterway. You’ll know when you get there.”
“You’re not coming?”
He widens his eyes as if I’ve just mentioned a taboo. “No one ever sees the Olùṣó,” he says. “Not even the Baálẹ̀.”
“So how d’you now know there’s one?”
He cocks his head and regards me, like, Seriously?
“Okay fine. How do I get back?”
He shakes his head. “Once you meet the Olùṣó, if all goes well, you likely won’t be coming back.”
I hand him the phone, and he promptly turns off the light. He hands me a polythene bag that smells of fish: inside is a change of threadbare clothing, a pair of shorts and a plain polo shirt with holes in it. Can’t complain; I’d rather have this than walk around in lagoon-and-lightning-tattered jeans and a bare chest of Lichtenberg figures, screaming danger to everyone I meet.
“Thank you for your kindness,” I find myself saying, undressing in front of him. He doesn’t look away or show discomfort. Life of a medic.
“No worry at all. Just…” He sighs. “Things are mad out there, from what I’m hearing. It’s the reason we stay here, under the Olùṣó’s protection. But we can’t continue to live like this. I just want things to be better. Can you make things better?”
I want to tell him I’m just an ordinary man like him too, so how can I change the world? But even I know that’s not quite true.
“I’ll do my best.”
Something pricks my mind after I’m done dressing, right before I turn to leave. “Wait. You said if all goes well.”
“Yes?”
“So, what if all doesn’t go well?”
He pauses for a bit. “Then you definitely will not be coming back.”
THE CHANNEL IS indeed widest at the tail end as I come upon it. The way the people of Makoko have built their houses: they’ve laid each shanty along in a row, leaving a sort of ‘main street’ for water vessels to pass through. The tail end of the channel, the part that opens into the Lagoon main, is devoid of dwelling on either side, clearly by design. The houses don’t resume after the break, either: the few buildings here have a clear look of abandonment. A couple of stilts show where houses have been knocked down.
David Mogo Godhunter Page 12
