Ннеди Окорафор - Lagos Noir

The shrill nervous laugh comes again. I wonder what she’d do if I told her Lucy tried to bite me twice in the last week while I was cleaning.

Every woman has that friend — you know, the one you go to when you need a procedure done. You don’t go to her because she told you she’s had one done, you go to her because you know she has.

After five minutes of beating around the bush, wondering if you should say you’re asking on behalf of a friend, you come right out and say it: “I’m pregnant, and I need to find somewhere to get rid of it.”

You hold her stare, and your eyes beg her not to pretend that she doesn’t know a place, that she hasn’t had a procedure.

Less than a year later, here I am being ambushed into being that friend for Stephanie. I’d never told her I’d had an abortion, but I figure she must have not believed it was typhoid that caused me to constantly walk briskly into the ladies’ room for two weeks. Especially since I’d refused to go to the office clinic, saying it would pass. It did pass, after I took two personal days off and came back looking as normal as ever.

I’m so hungry for a smoke that after frantically searching my hollowed-out decorative book, I go to my ashtray and light a quarter-smoked joint I find there.

All the while she’s watching me without a word. I recognize the look in her eyes.

“Don’t worry, I don’t feel the need to hide certain things about myself,” I say.

Stephanie spends the next two hours crying and telling me about her issues with the man she’s dating. I spend the time relighting partially smoked joints. I drag on about six of them till my fingers are burning.

“You just have to learn how to pleasure yourself by yourself,” I mutter.

“What?”

“I have to let Lucy out soon,” I say.

She starts to leave a few minutes later — without a phone number, but with detailed directions to the clinic.

“It’s been there for about fifteen years, my friend told me. You’ll find it easily.”

She pauses and asks what I think the likelihood of a police raid is.

I laugh. “In Nigeria?”

“You should laugh more. Or smile.” She is standing at the door, inviting mosquitoes into my house, talking this nonsense. “People in the office say you never smile, and when you do it is fake because your eyes look dead. Your laughter sounds nice. A little scary, but nice.”

Later that night, I stand in my bathroom naked, smiling at my reflection. With teeth showing. Without. With lips spread wide. Without. Only left cheek raised. I smile. Eyes widened. Eyes crinkled. I smile.

Some days, like today, I get really tired. I want to be at home with the covers over my head but I’m sitting at my desk instead, earphones in, Frank Ocean’s “Strawberry Swing” playing so loudly it is going to my chest. I’m watching the others at their desks in the open office, looking like bubbleheads. They’re loud bubbleheads, and I really want to scream at everyone to shut the fuck up and get out. Days like this, I hate people. Hate their ease of conversation, their laughter, their being.

I walk to the bathroom and call my doctor to ask if it’s okay that I’ve been using diazepam to sleep, along with the prescribed epilim.

“I should have told you before I started taking it, but it’s just been hard to sleep and every night I try on my own but it’s been impossible.”

“Try it for two more days and if you still can’t sleep, we’ll find you something to use more permanently.”

“Okay,” I say. “Also, I’m running out of diazepam.”

“Have you been drinking coffee?”

“Yes, in the mornings.”

“You know you are not allowed that. It’s a stimulant.”

I whine about how he’s taking all the good things in my life away from me. We always do this: I complain about every drug and instruction; he insists I do what is best for me.

“Something is bothering you. That’s why you can’t sleep and that’s why you’re cranky.”

“It’s nothing.”

Honestly, it is nothing. Sometimes this happens. I don’t know there is something, but I’m reacting to it, then I finally figure out what it is hours or days later.

“All of this sucks.”

“What?”

“Living. It gets heavy after a while.”

“Have you thought more about taking a vacation?”

“See, the only reason I like to go to new places is because I like the journey, eating up roads or clouds and moving through the world quickly — it’s just the way I want to live: a flash through life. I wish journeys would last forever. Like I wonder if the plane could just keep flying and never land. So I don’t have to actually live, work, or vacation. I like sitting in a plane or a car with nothing to do but just watch time pass.”

“You know you could make your life a constant journey, right? Be an air hostess or something,” he says.

“No, no. Then I’d be living during the journey. Serving people. I hate interacting with people.”

“Okay.”

He says nothing else for a while and I think the connection has broken. Then, “So, why do you like suspending your life?”

This is the part I hate. Whatever answer I give won’t satisfy him. He’ll try to find some deeper meaning to it and ask me if that’s what I’m masking. That’s why I prefer the phone calls, because it’s easier to get out of the conversations.

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

I hear that little ah sound, but the silence fills the space again, like when someone starts to say something but they change their mind. I hated it when my last boyfriend did that. To have my therapist do the same thing is even more annoying.

“That’s your assignment,” he says after a while. “Write about why you want to suspend living.”

“But I already wrote about why I want to die.”

“So, is the answer to both the same?”

I think for a moment. “No,” I reply.

“If you say no, that means you already know the answer. But I won’t push. We’ll talk about it in our next session, okay? Actually, you need to come in person soon.”

“Okay.”

On my way back to my desk, I walk past Kaz’s office and he calls out for a cup of coffee.

I used to get angry about being asked to perform these menial tasks, but not anymore. I stop at my desk to pick up my purse. Then I make him a cup of coffee. What’s the point of getting angry in this Lagos? I add two cubes of sugar, and two ten-milligram diazepam tablets. No cream. I started adding the tablets last week after his wife came in to drop off his hypotension medication one morning. He didn’t notice when I added one pill; he still hasn’t noticed now that I use two.

After work, I walk past Freedom Park, turn left on Broad Street, and head to the taxi park in front of the hospital. I stop at the makeshift canteen, where a group of men are sitting under a sign that says, No idle sitting — eat your food and go.

“I’m going to Lekki.”

One of them gets up and says, “N3,500, let’s go.”

“E never reach your turn-o.” He yells back that Baba Hafusa has gone to pray, so it’s his turn. The other men grumble and argue.

“Is anyone going?” I ask, tired of their bickering.

“See,” one pipes up, “Baba Hafusa ti n bo.”

The man who wanted N3,500 says to me, “Sorry, sister, the next person has come.”

I turn around and see a limping man. I reach into my mind, trying to figure out why he looks so familiar.

“Sister, where are you going? My car is in front.”

I walk behind him. “Lekki, and I’m only paying N3,000. Will you drive...” I drift off as he lays a hand on his bonnet, rubbing the chipped yellow paint on its dent.