Chris Abani - GraceLand

The youths who had been gathering rocks and stones earlier hurled a fusillade at the soldiers, but they hit the helmets and riot body armor without doing much damage. Tear-gas canisters were fired at them. Apart from the choking smoke, the canisters of gas caught a few by surprise, tearing holes through them. Cameramen sought shelter and continued to film. The street was too narrow, and the bulk of the crowd jammed each other tight. When the shooting finally stopped, there were bodies everywhere. Conservative estimates by the press put the casualty figure at about two hundred. What no one could have guessed was that when the film of the King jumping the Colonel and stabbing him was broadcast, he would be deified, turned into a prophet, an advance guard, like John the Baptist, for the arrival of the Messiah.

Elvis felt the hot sun burn his face, and with it the first stab of a headache. He opened his eyes and glanced around him, taking in the wilderness of crumbled and derelict buildings. To his right a pole rose up out of the ground, marking the site of what used to be someone’s house, a silent sentinel, a beacon.

“Hassan! Hassan!” a woman called out in a voice hoarse from effort, but only the howling of the wind greeted her.

All around, scavengers, human and otherwise, feasted on the exposed innards of Maroko. They rummaged in the rubble as bulldozers sifted through the chaos like slow-feeding buffalo. Here some article of clothing still untorn; there a pot; over there a child’s toy with the squeaker still working. There was a lot of snorting coming from a clump of shrubs as a pack of hungry dogs fed. The hand of a corpse rose up from between the snarling dogs in a final wave.

Elvis took it in and tried to recall what had happened before he came to be there. He vaguely remembered the dreams and walking. He searched around for clues as to where he was, and then it dawned on him that he was lying in the rubble of what used to be his house. By his foot a piece of paper stuck out from under a concrete block. He could see it was torn from an almanac. It bore the legend JESUS CAN SAVE. He shut his eyes and hoped this was another dream. He opened them but it was no dream. He struggled to his feet and stood swaying while he tried to gain his balance. Where was his father? Had he slept through all the destruction? When had it happened? Where had he been? Where were Comfort and her children? Jagua? Confidence? He searched frantically for any sign of his family, and one of the human scavengers, seeing him scramble about, called out: “No worry yourself. I done search dere. Nothing dey, only dead body.”

Elvis stared at him uncomprehendingly. Corpses? Whose? Where? But the man was gone. Elvis scrambled over a final pile of rubbish and rubble and stopped short when he saw a piece of colored cloth sticking out from the mud of the swamp. He recognized his father’s lappa. He stood still for a long time before he approached it. In that time he experienced nothing. Thought nothing and felt nothing. He wondered whether he would be able to weep for his father’s death. If he was dead, that is. It was more likely that Elvis would feel relief, though.

He scrambled down the pile of rubble, half falling, half sliding, until he came to the bottom. He was brought to a halt by his father’s foot poking out at an odd angle. He clawed the debris away and exposed the body. There was a hole the size of a saucer in his chest, ribs crumbled like a cracker into lots of pieces, as if a large object had rolled over them. Sunday’s eyes were popping and his mouth was forced open into a silent laugh. Elvis’s glance took in the body of a policeman lying not far from his father’s body. It only took a minute for him to work out the general sequence that must have led up to his father’s death. What puzzled him, though, was the policeman. What had killed him? He approached the body. The entire back of the head was missing and there were claw marks all over the body. It looked like he had been mauled by some large predator. That was really strange, because there were no animals of that size anywhere near Lagos or Maroko. It certainly wasn’t the work of a ghetto rat.

Elvis sat there in the rubble and tried to figure out what had really happened. He wished his head would stop pounding for just one minute. The inside of his mouth was furred and tasted like an old slipper. It bothered him that his father was dead and all he could feel was relief. Dead. That word fell with a thud like a mango loosened from a tree.

He gazed at the bodies of his father and the policeman and then he took in the whole of Maroko. What would he do now? He had no money, and all his worldly possessions had been in their house. Whatever had survived had already been looted, and he didn’t think he could get anything back from the scavengers. He didn’t know what he was going to do about burying his father. Whatever happened, there was no way his father was going to get an elaborate funeral. No cows or dogs slaughtered to ease his passage into the next world. He had to find a way to take his father’s body back to Afikpo. He tried to wrap it in a scavenged length of cloth. He had almost succeeded when he was interrupted by the harsh bark of a voice.

“What are you doing?”

Elvis glanced up and saw the uniform of a soldier with a big shiny gun standing over him.

The uniform barked at him again: “I said, what are you doing?”

“He is my father.”

“So what? Where are you taking dis body?”

“To bury him.”

“No! Government say no dead body can leave here without clearance from HQ. You get clearance?”

“I …”

“Do you want me to arrest you?”

“But …”

“If you annoy me I will kill you and add you to your father.”

“So what happens to my father?”

“You answer soldierman with question?”

Elvis didn’t see the slap coming, but the blow knocked him over. He tasted blood.

“I’m sorry … but my father …”

“All right, since you have apologize, I can let you have de body for some money.”

“I have no money …”

“No what? Get out of here now,” the uniform said, descending on Elvis and pounding him repeatedly with his rifle butt.

Elvis stumbled away. The tears that wouldn’t come for his father streamed freely now as he felt worthless in the face of blind, unreasoning power. He could return later, when it was dark, but he knew the body would be gone.

Elvis started walking again, unable to accept his situation. One minute he had a life — not much of one, but he had one. And the next, everything fell apart. He walked for hours. He had no plans, no ideas about what to do or where he was going, he just walked. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, but at least he was not standing still.

He kept walking until he found himself underneath one of the many dusty flyovers that littered the city. Another ghetto had been growing here for a long time, but now it just exploded as the influx from Maroko brought more life flooding into it.

All around him, everywhere, there were people: food sellers, softdrink hawkers, tire vulcanizers, small-time car mechanics, women and men lying on top of their belongings and hundreds of beggar children. Over to his left a child slept on a broken chest of drawers and another huddled in a basket once used to store yams.

Some of these children had always lived here. Others, here with their parents, had been displaced from other ghettos by Operation Clean the Nation. His eyes caught those of a young girl no more than twelve. She cut her eyes at him and, heaving her pregnant body up, walked away. He glanced at another child and saw a look of old boredom in his eyes. Elvis read the city, seeing signs not normally visible. A woman sat by the roadside begging for alms, her legs as thick as tree stumps, her arms no more than plump plantain stems clutching the air vainly. Her torso was a lump of soft dough kneaded into shapelessness and swollen by the yeast of shame which she inhaled daily. Her body was covered in ripe yellow and red sores, throbbing with the pus of decay. She sat there as if her pain had taken root.