Teju Cole - Open City

I was by then much taller than he was, but he was stout and had the stubbly beginnings of a beard. We promised once again to stay in touch with each other, and I remember telling him I was thinking of going to America, if I could find a way out, though, as it turned out, I didn’t leave until a few years afterward. He was wearing dark glasses that day, which he didn’t take off, though the sky was overcast; his girlfriend had on a white polo shirt and tight shorts, and looked bored, and was, as such, the instant object of my envy. That I had my own girlfriend didn’t matter. Dayo’s girl struck me as impossibly cool.

I took his address and phone number — he wrote them down, I recall, on the back of a religious tract someone had pinned to the fence — and not long afterward, I called him. Then there had been a party at his house, a wild one, with lots of drinking. The girl wasn’t there by that point — they’d split up — and I had split up with my girl, too. Afterward, I lost Dayo’s address and, in any case, by the time I came to the United States, three years later, I had no serious intention of writing to him, or anyone else. The promise to write had simply been a gesture of respect, an acknowledgment of the fact that once, when we were in our early teens, we’d been close, and even for a brief moment best friends.

I doubt I would have recognized him thirteen years later, in a grocery store, much less his sister. But now, the certainty with which she pinned me to my name, the ease with which she repeated it, made me think she’d thought of me but never expected to see me again. And perhaps I had been the unwitting target of a schoolgirl crush: the brother’s friend, the sophisticated aje-butter , a self-confident older teen. On the earlier occasions that I had gone to Dayo’s house, there had been one or two other school friends there as well, and she had ignored us, of course. Perhaps she was more interested in us than she’d let on. Maybe that memory remained now, as she stood with a box of muesli under her arm, and the embers of that memory were what made her catch my eyes, and hold them, as she asked me the expected questions: marriage, children, career. When I had answered, plain answers that I was careful not to deliver too brusquely, I felt it polite to ask her the same.

She was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, she said. I acted suitably impressed, and made vague noises about how busy she must be. But I did not want the small talk to go on, so I looked every now and again at the basket in my hand, and nodded as she talked. Her brother was in Nigeria at the moment, she said. He’d gone to the U.K. for graduate school, at Imperial College, but had returned home and gotten married. Moji said she’d been in closer contact with him during the six years he’d been in London. We don’t talk very often now, she said, he’s got a kid, he runs his own civil engineering firm. But he’s had some strange times. He had an accident in 1995, just before going for his master’s. I suppose that’s the biggest thing, really, that’s happened to him since you left Nigeria. He was studying in the east at the time, in Nsukka, and he was in a bus crash, out on the highway at night. The bus ran into a motorcyclist who was riding without lights, and it careened off the road. Ten of the fourteen people onboard died instantly; another three were badly injured, and one of them died later. Dayo alone had walked away without injury. I think maybe he dislocated a shoulder or something, but nothing major at all. When you have such an experience as that, she said, everyone immediately thinks it would make you more religious. That wasn’t the effect it had on him. He became more thoughtful, I guess. He went through life, for the next couple of years, in a kind of distracted daze. He spoke about the accident just once, after he came back to Lagos — that’s when we found out it had happened. Maybe it was a news item buried inside the papers — ten killed in Nsukka crash, or something like that — so we might have heard of it, but we could never have imagined he would be involved. He simply kept it to himself until he came home on semester break; he’s funny like that. My parents, of course, made him come to church for a special thanksgiving service. He went along with it. Then he put it out of his mind, filed it away like it had just been a bad dream and, if he revisited it, it wasn’t in any public way. Me, of course, I was curious, and I used to badger him about it initially, but he just clammed up, and that was that. I’ve seen dead people at the scene of an accident — I guess everyone who lives in Nigeria has — but I’m sure it’s different if you were in the accident yourself, or if that body lying by the side of the road could easily have been yours. So for a long time, everyone treated Dayo as if he was the luckiest person in the world, but I think his attitude was that it would have been luckier to be nowhere near the crash at all. Anyway, he’s mostly past it now, and it was all so long ago. I’m sure that’s more detail than you wanted.

We’d used up our common ground, and there seemed nothing left to chat about. She assured me that I would hear from her again, and marveled once more, in what had become a quite irritating way, that we had run into each other. I don’t really believe in coincidences, she said. Something either happens or it doesn’t, coincidence has nothing to do with it.

At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook. Speaking with him just before I left home, I had asked if I should bring anything, and he’d said I should bring a check, so I could pay him. I had taken the checkbook out of its drawer and placed it on the table with my gloves and keys. But I then left it behind, and didn’t realize I had done so until the 2 train came to the station. I was embarrassed at having to meet him empty-handed. But I was supposed to give him only two hundred dollars, and I had my bank card with me. I could get cash. It seemed vaguely illicit, putting cash in an envelope and sliding it across a table, but it was better than not paying him right away.

When I came out of the Wall Street station, I looked around for a cash machine. I hadn’t been to that part of town since I had gone on my night walk there in November. Now, in daylight, with the sun pouring into the deep clefts formed by the sides of skyscrapers, the street’s ominous character was tamed. It had become an ordinary street, a place of work, marred in the normal way by construction cordons and divots where the road was undergoing repair, and nothing at all like the Dante-esque vision of huddled and faceless bodies I had experienced a few months earlier. After a short walk, I found a cash machine inside a pharmacy, but was unable to take money out of it because I typed in the wrong four-digit code for my card. So I tried again, and failed again. I tried five times, with different numbers, all of them wrong. I wasn’t alarmed — which I would have been if I had thought the card was compromised — but rather, sad: I had simply forgotten the number. A thought flitted through my mind: how terrible it would be to blank out like this while seeing a patient. This was the ATM card I had used for more than six years, and it had always had the same code. I had used the card on my recent trip to Brussels and, indeed, I had been entirely dependent on it for that journey.

Now, as I stood in a little pharmacy on the corner of Water Street and Wall Street, my mind was empty, subject to a nervous condition; this was the expression that came to me as I stood there, as though I had become a minor character in a Jane Austen novel. Such sudden mental weakness, I thought (as the machine asked if I would like to try again, and I did, and failed again), was from a simplified version of the self, an area of simplicity where things had once been more robust. This was true of a broken leg, too: one was suddenly lessened, walking with an incomplete understanding of what walking was about.