Ннеди Окорафор - Lagos Noir

The woman walked over, handed the scoop to Osei, who now drew forward, no longer able to feel his legs. He tipped the scoop into the pail, poured water over his wife, and saw her shiver as if cold, despite the warmth of the room. As Osei poured, the pastor went to work. He laid his large hands on Bisola’s head first, then her forehead, jaw, neck, and shoulders. Lower and lower he went, till her whole body was covered from front to back with the resurrecting essence of the third day. He commanded the earth to release the baby’s trapped soul, and then commanded the mother’s body to reabsorb the soul. Bisola belched and belched, all of the pent-up gas unfurling itself at the combined sensations of water and hands cascading down her body. At the end, she stepped out of the tub gleaming with oil that smelled like incense. The attendant helped her into her clothes, telling Bisola that she was strong, she had held on till the end, and she was now being rewarded. Before he disappeared behind the cubicle to ready himself for the next supplicant, the pastor gave Bisola a bottle of curry-smelling oil and told her to place it under her pillow before she went in for delivery the first day of the following week. The bottle was calibrated, and for every night she had it, the oil was meant to drop a notch. If she ever woke up to see the oil hadn’t dropped, she was to phone her husband and hurry to the hospital before the sun rose high in the sky. The pastor’s deep eyes glowed as he retreated behind the blue curtains.

Bisola turned to the attendant. “So will I feel baby kick now?”

“Of course!” The attendant took one of Bisola’s hands and placed it over her stomach. Bisola waited for the familiar thud. She moved her hand all over, thinking the restarted heart may have shifted with the force of all that spiritual activity. She waited some more. “Osei, come and feel...”

But Osei was already beside her, feeling too for the thud. Suddenly he said, “Yes! Yes!”

“What?” Bisola stared at him. “You feel it then?”

“Thank you. Oh, thank you!” Osei was now at the door, where he had left the half-empty food flask on the floor. He grabbed it and pushed it at the attendant. “Thank you for helping us.” Then he was out of the office in a flash.

The attendant was laughing. “All this for me?” she asked, holding onto the flask with both arms.

Bisola called out to Osei. She hurried after him, past the anteroom where the crowd calmly shifted in their chairs, past the corridor with framed words of hope, and past the thick sweat of clamoring desperation in the reception lobby. Outside, she didn’t try to talk to him until they got to where he had parked the motorcycle. He had chained it to a massive, useless chunk of metal that once belonged in the factory. As Osei unlocked the chain and rolled out the motorcycle, Bisola saw that he had his face turned into his shirt collar. He was sobbing. But he still gripped the handlebars like he was waiting for her to embark. Bisola didn’t come close. The silence of the late night, except for the sounds of the ruckus from the lobby a distance away, bubbled in the rift between them. Finally she said, “It’s all for a miracle. And miracles cost more, my husband. What would you have me do?”

“Bisi. Oh, Bisi,” Osei mumbled.

Bisola approached, climbed onto the back seat, and anchored the cycle with her weight so he could get on with ease. It was then she noticed that the smell filling her nose was not his oranges or hair grease, but the lingering fragrance of incense from the tub.

“But it’s also like a hospital, not so? I’m their open farm and can’t run from the cutlasses and knives.” She shifted her weight on the motorcycle, placed a hand on the last spot the attendant had positioned it on her stomach. “We will go home now, wait for the oil to drop in the morning. And we must never, ever be late, my husband. The oil will drop. You’ll see.”

Obalende

Madu had never reached into the back of the videocassette cupboard: that dark, dusty place where the films were older than God. But today, bored and desperate not to rewatch another film — Nneka the Pretty Serpent, Terminator 2, Mortal Kombat — with his sister Ifechi, he got on his knees in front of the cupboard and thrust his hand in, taking out the first tape he touched. The cassette had his father’s initials on its side, written in black ink on a strip of adhesive paper.

Ifechi peered at it. “What film is that?”

Holding the cassette up to his face, Madu read the title: A Taste of Paradise .

Ifechi hesitated. “Madu...” she warned, “it’s Daddy’s film.”

“So what?”

Madu stood and took the tape out of its case, noticing, through the clear plastic in the cassette’s center, that both spools had almost an equal amount of tape around them. He slipped the tape into the player and pressed play.

“Won’t you rewind it?” Ifechi asked.

“Let’s see what kind of film it is first.”

They waited as the familiar whirring sound started from the cassette player. Then a massive penis filled the screen.

“Jesus!” Madu shrieked, jumping back and away from the TV without taking his eyes off it. His sister stood frozen, watching the screen like it would rip her into a million pieces if she dared to turn away. For a while, the only sounds in the living room were the hum of the cassette player and the creaking of the ceiling fan as the blades turned. The old TV was acting up again — there was no sound. Madu crept toward the set and brought his palm down against its side twice, sharply, like he’d seen their father do many times to get the speakers to function. It worked. They heard moaning sounds carried on waves of fluty background music.

Two white men, one white woman, a white bed, white walls, a white floor littered with long-stemmed red roses, all the more stark against so much white. The woman lay writhing on the bed, her legs spread wide as she touched herself. Ifechi, distressed to find that the exposed flesh between the woman’s legs was the same pink as her best pinafore, decided that yellow was her new favorite color. One of the men straddled the woman’s head and she took his penis in her mouth.

“She’s licking it, sha!” Madu cried, his mouth hanging open.

The second man, who’d stood leaning against a wall watching the other two while he stroked his penis, bent to pick up a rose. He held it in one hand, and with the thumb and forefinger of the other he stroked the rose’s unnaturally smooth stem: up, down, then up and down again. He kneeled between the woman’s legs and took the hand he found there, sucking on each finger like she’d dipped them in chocolate. Then he trailed the flower up the woman’s thigh.

“Hei!” Ifechi said as the rose stem disappeared beneath the patch of blond pubic hair between the woman’s legs. “Is it not paining her?”

“It’s not paining her,” Madu replied without looking at his sister. “She would have told them to stop.”

“Madu,” Ifechi said, with a nervous glance at the door, “what if Aunty Hope comes?”

Aunty Hope ran the small hair salon downstairs, and she looked in on the children while their parents were at work. It was also her job to make sure that the children did not mix with the urchins, as their father liked to call the happy, unkempt bunch that ran about the neighborhood most afternoons, rolling tires down the streets.

With the children on holiday, Aunty Hope had to check on them more often. Some days she would march them down to her salon and have them sit there for hours with their books. Aunty Hope’s moods were tied to the frequent and unannounced NEPA power cuts: happy when there was power, surly otherwise. Like many of the residents and small businesses in their Obalende neighborhood, Aunty Hope could not afford a generator.