Lagoon (18 page)

CHAPTER 37

THE BOY ON THE ROAD

Adaora, Agu, Anthony, and Ayodele were in Chris's black BMW on their way to the airport. Agu grasped the wheel and squeezed. The traffic hadn't moved an inch in over two hours.

Ahmadu Bello Way is the best road in Lagos. With its thick smooth asphalt, it is nothing like the deathtrap known as the Lagos–Benin Expressway. If that highway is full of ghosts (as Adaora's mother believed), then Bello Way is full of angels. At least on a normal day. Today, however, was anything but normal. Never had the road been so full of cars and people. On the left, just beyond a few buildings, was Lagos's lagoon, and on the right were the well-maintained buildings of the city's affluent Victoria Island community. This was supposed to be a beautiful place.

“We should just leave your car,” Agu said. A boy was running through the traffic. He leaped onto the hood as he ran by, laughing. A girl carrying a tray of peeled oranges was going from car to car. Adaora glared at her.
Stupid girl,
she thought.
Or desperate.
The girl wasn't the only hawker trying to make some money from the chaos. Women and girls had emerged selling all sorts of foodstuffs, capitalizing on the chaos. But even
that
wasn't going well. As Adaora watched, two young men knocked over a girl who was selling boiled eggs. They ran off with her money and handfuls of her eggs.

Some people were indeed leaving their cars. They'd inch to the side of the road, get out, and walk away. Or run. Fights were breaking out all over, between and sometimes on top of the gridlocked cars.

“We leave the car, then it'll take us forever to get to the airport,” she said. “And we're running out of time. It's already past three.”

“Maybe. It can't be more than fifteen miles.”

“We should stay with the car,” Anthony said. He nodded toward the chaos outside. “Who knows what we'll end up doing if we go out there. It might go badly.”

A woman selling bags of cashews was arguing with a driver. He got out of the car and knocked her tray of nuts to the ground. A truck driver leaped out of his car just as the first man slapped the woman.

“This is terrible,” Adaora said, appalled. Another man and two women ran over and joined the truck driver in beating the man who'd attacked the cashew-selling woman. Another woman took the cashew-woman's tray and beat the man over the head with it.

“It's getting worse. Get out of the car!” Agu said, turning off the engine.

The four of them got out. Anthony took Ayodele's hand and Adaora ran around the car and grabbed Agu's hand, and they scrambled away from the fight.

Adaora felt it. A sort of swell in the air.

Pressure.

“That one! See?” a man who'd been staring at one of the fights shouted, pointing in their direction. “See him? That boy!”

Boy?
Adaora wondered, meeting Agu's eyes. Then Agu was looking past her, in the direction the man was pointing. Adaora turned to look too.

The little boy stood nearby in a sea of people—men, women, children, everyone moving everywhere all at once. But
he
wasn't moving, and no one leaned toward him or reached for him or even brushed close enough to touch him. And in the vehicle headlights, he seemed detached. Not quite there.

He wore brown trousers and a dirty dress shirt.

Why is that little boy all alone?
Adaora wondered.

“He is one of them!” a woman cried. She wore jeans and a red blouse. Her short hair stood on end, she had no shoes, and she was wearing a sign around her neck that said
REPENT. LAGOS WILL
NEVER BE DESTROYED!

*   *   *   *

Fisayo was sure of what she was seeing. She had already seen plenty of them. He stood out as Satan would stand out in a sea of angels. He'd been there when the three people were snatched by the sea, just last night. The first victims. She had a good memory for faces.

Lagos was flooded with evil; the end of days was here. Her throat was sore, her voice raspy from telling the News to all who would listen. There were fights going on all around her—people overtaken by devilry. But she focused on the boy and only the boy. The child-witch of Satan. The worst of them all. She wouldn't let him out of her sight. Not again. He would not escape. When she'd seen him on Bar Beach, she had instantly disliked him. He'd been clinging to a man, like a dog. Now only he stood still in the sea of chaos. She raised her gun. She pulled the trigger.

*   *   *   *

Agu saw it about to happen. He turned and started running.

*   *   *   *

The bullet smashed into the mute boy's left eye. He stumbled to the side and then sat down hard. He lay back. Comfortable now. His mind focused for the first time in his life. If he had had anything to say, he could have said it.

*   *   *   *

At the sound of the gunshot, the fighting stopped.

*   *   *   *

Fisayo turned the gun on a woman and pulled the trigger, stumbling back as it fired. The bullet hit the woman in the arm.
Lagos is hopeless.
She turned it to a group of fleeing people and pulled the trigger. A man fell, blood pouring from the heel of his foot where he'd been shot.
It is over.
She'd never shot a gun but it felt natural to her. Maybe
that's why God had shown her the military man in the alley with the knife in his neck; had led her eye to the gun in the shadows a few feet away. It was not one of the big AK-47s that they normally carried; God had left her a weapon she could wield. In the name of Jesus; thanks be to God.

She pulled the trigger a fourth time and nothing happened. She smelled smoke. Her eyes stung with it. She'd done things. Terrible things. Her clients would have never guessed she lived in the “jungle,” deep in the slums of Ajegunle, Lagos. That for the last month, she'd had to live on a human-made island of packed rubbish. She smelled too good. She walked too tall. She fucked with too much skill.

She hoped her brother would forgive her someday.

*   *   *   *

Poof !
Ayodele blew into billions of molecules just as Fisayo pulled the trigger of the empty gun again. To Adaora, it looked like she became the kind of mist you see at the bottom of a large waterfall. Slow-moving and gray. And it smelled like the sea. Several people screamed. Adaora didn't blink. She wanted to watch.

But as she watched, Fisayo was there, surrounded by the mist, and then she was not.
No,
Adaora thought, horrified.
There was something.
She saw it only for a split second but she knew she'd seen it. In that moment, she had seen Fisayo, clothes and all, spread apart. She'd expanded as a photo expanded when only enlarged vertically and not horizontally. At the same time, Fisayo seemed to fade. Then she was gone. Adaora grasped her chest, understanding what she'd seen. Ayodele had pulled Fisayo apart on a molecular level. Adaora shivered.

*   *   *   *

Fisayo heard nothing. Saw nothing. And said nothing. She would never feel anything again.

*   *   *   *

A young man who'd been recording the chaos happened to point his digital camera at the boy just as the bullet hit him. He kept filming
as the boy sat down hard and then lay back, blood pooling around his small head.

The young man squeaked with horror as three other men and a woman ran to help the boy. He continued filming as the three men realized there was nothing they could do. He got up close, not believing what he was doing. He'd never seen death. He'd always thought he'd run from it when he came across it, yet here he was, pushing his camera up into the boy's face. No one stopped him. He and his camera were capturing the boy's soul.

This young man with the recording camera would post the boy's death on the Internet minutes later using his phone. Millions would watch the boy's surprised but calm face turn toward the camera. The pool of blood spreading behind him like an expanding halo. Then the boy's face would go slack and the light would dim from his eyes, finally going out completely. The boy would join the group of murdered young people who became iconic figures of troubled times, like South Africa's Hector Pieterson and Iran's Neda Agha-Soltan. This child would become the Boy Who Died so the World Could See.

The mute boy never knew his father or mother. He was found in a Dumpster and then placed in an orphanage. No one ever bothered to name him, and he never knew how to name himself.

He was only eight years old.

*   *   *   *

Adaora threw herself back into the car and curled into a tight ball. Standing behind Agu, she'd seen the light go out in the boy's eyes. A hand took hers and squeezed.

“What did you do to that crazy woman?” she asked Ayodele, who sat beside her in the car now holding her hand.

“I took her to the water,” Ayodele said. “That's all she wanted.”

CHAPTER 38

UDIDE SPEAKS

Everybody saw it.

All over the world.

That was the real introduction to the great mess happening in Lagos. Nigeria.
West Africa. Africa. Here. Because so many people in Lagos had portable
chargeable glowing vibrating chirping tweeting communicating connected devices, practically everything was recorded and posted online in some way,
somehow. Quickly. The modern human world is connected like a spider's web.

The world was watching. It watched in fascinated horror, for information . . .
but mostly for entertainment. Footage of what was happening dominated
every international news source, video-sharing website, social network,
circle, pyramid, and trapezoid.

But the story goes deeper.

It is in the dirt, the mud, the earth, in the fond memory of the soily cosmos.

It is in the always-mingling past, present, and future.

It is in the water.

It is in the powerful spirits and ancestors who dwelled in Lagos.

It is in the heads and hearts of the people of Lagos.

Change begets change.

Ayodele knew it.

All her people know it.

CHAPTER 39

CODE NAME: LEGBA

I was there.

To be specific, I was in the Testament Cyber Café, not far from Bar Beach. The waters of the ocean were rising, and the government was trying to figure out who was attacking us. Yet there I was in the cyber café totally unconcerned, and up to no good. Okay, so I was good at it. I was good at being up to no good. I was good at 419. Nigerian Internet fraud.

My code name was “Legba.” It was perfect because Legba is the Yoruba trickster god of language, communication, and the crossroads. I am Igbo and I peddle in words. I am American, born and raised. Igbo American, then. Or maybe American Igbo. That sounds better.

I'd come to Lagos to spend time with my grandfather. Two months. A good chunk of my summer vacation. Granddad was cool. I loved him. I was glad to come and be with him for such a long period of time. Before, I'd only come to Nigeria with my mom and dad and sister, and those times were only for a couple of weeks, or less.

This time, when I got here, I found my granddad was a spry old man who could still dance to highlife and liked to go for long walks every morning with his hands behind his back and a smile on his face. I was good at making Granddad laugh, too. He liked having me around. My major was engineering but my passion was acting. I could imitate
anything
. Any voice. Any personality. Granddad's
favorite impersonations were Grandma and the actor Nkem Owoh— I could do them both perfectly.

Anyway, I had a lot of cousins, and I grew close to many of them. They were shady and I could type fast. And not only could I impersonate anything in voice, I could do it in writing, too. So, that's what I was doing in that cyber café with my cousins Uche and Afam. Like I said, I was up to no fucking good. Who would suspect an Igbo guy who was American using the name of a Yoruba god? The stupid American white woman was going to wire her “Nolly­wood lover” another large sum of money, despite the fact that he hadn't been there to meet her in Accra two weeks earlier.

My plan was genius. Seriously, the woman was an idiot. She really believed her Caucasian blood and money made her irresistible to one of Nollywood's top film directors. She'd even told me these things in those exact words. She had no clue that she sounded like a racist condescending asshole. There was a
very
pure strain of White Privilege running through her. So why not capitalize on her idiocy?

There were many of us in the cyber café, despite the madness outside and the strange woman appearing on our computer screens and mobile phones earlier. We were all up to the same shit, mani­pulating the same weaknesses. Classic 419. To those with mediocre skills, it is like playing the lottery. To masters like me, it is like being a superstar gymnast on a very narrow balance beam—risky but sure. The payoff is only a matter of time. In my case, the payoff was every few days. We were all in there trying to finish up our last bits of business before the power went out. No one could say we were not dedicated people.

I'd just sent one of my well-crafted love-letter e-mails to the lady to ensure that she'd send the money ASAP. I told her that I was in Lagos and needed the money immediately to get to Accra; I'd return the money to her as soon as I got back to Lagos. I really could have been a writer. I could make a woman think and do anything with a few well-chosen words.

“Now we wait,” I said to Afam, leaning back in my chair. They were the cheap metal folding kind, but I felt like a king on a throne.

Afam grinned and we slapped hands and shook and snapped each other's fingers. I did the same to Uche. Afam brought out a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. Beside his head the sign read,
NOT ALLOWED: 419, PORNOGRAPHY, SPAM, OR SMOKING
. I looked over his shoulder and could see the café owner at his front desk turn our way, a sour look on his face. He was a squat dark-skinned Yoruba man who wore cheap clothes and no wedding ring. I chuckled when he didn't get up.

There was a crash outside and, I kid you not, through the window I could see a group of youths jumping on an SUV like it was a trampoline. This was on the road right outside the café. They were shouting and laughing at the terrified passengers in the car. The SUV sped off, the guys on the car tumbling to the street. Most of them got up laughing. One of them was grimacing with pain as he held his knee. Everyone in the café looked worried, but most still turned back to what they were doing. It was scary, but I had a job to do, too.

“We should get the hell out of here,” Afam said.

“Relax, dude,” I told him. “We need to get a response first.”

“How do you know the woman is even awake?”

“She's in the US. It's eight p.m. here, so it's afternoon there. Trust me, I know her. She's just sitting down at her computer.”

Uche looked ready to piss his pants. I'd never have admitted it but I felt the same way. I wasn't sure if people were just wilding out or if it was murder-rioting like they occasionally did in the north when a Christian looked at a Muslim the wrong way. Uche bit his nails as he spoke, “But what if—”

“Afam, whatever the fuck is going on, we better wait it out here because some crazy shit's going down. Who knows, this may be our last chance to get online for a while.”

“But what if . . .”

Ping!
The white woman had responded. I could see the preview of the e-mail in my inbox.

“The money is on the way. Sent it to the same address. When we meet, we can . . .”

As I was reaching for the mouse to click the message open, the room shook and the computer screens flickered.

“Shit,” Uche said, looking around. “Not that woman again. Please not again. What was that?”

“Don't know,
sha
,” Afam said, his cigarette hanging between his lips.

We all froze. Not a good time for NEPA to take the power.
Just stay on long enough to let me read my e-mail,
I thought, my heart beating fast with excitement. But I already knew it was good news. The money was on the way.

An old man walked into the café and stood in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips. He was wearing a long black caftan. With the door open, the noise of the riots was loud. Several people ran out, cautiously moving past the old man. The room rumbled again, and I looked out the café window. A large truck passed by, and people in the street leaped out of its way.

Keeping one eye on the man standing in the middle of the café, I clicked the message open. Before I could even start reading, the room began to shake like crazy! We all fell to the floor. The lights went out. Monitors crashed down around us. You couldn't hear anything but breaking, cracking, falling, and yelling. Pieces of the cement ceiling began to collapse onto us. The old yellowed floor tiles buckled.

I was going to die.

The lights flickered. The door had fallen off and the doorway was now lopsided. A table had fallen on the three of us, and we peeked out from beneath it. People coughed and moaned and lay sprawled on the floor or beneath chunks of ceiling or wall. A woman shoved a computer off her, and it crashed to the floor. The owner
slowly stood up from behind his counter. Those of us who could turned to look at whatever the fuck was entering the gaping hole that used to be a doorway.

It was massive. Taller than the room. But there was no longer a ceiling. So it could fit. It did not touch the ground, so the rubble, glass, and bodies made no difference to it. Everything was still shaky and I'd been whacked on the head pretty hard by the table, but I know what I saw.

It was a masquerade.

This was not some guys dressed up in an elaborate costume to perform Nigerian theatrics to celebrate the spirits and ancestors; this was the
real thing
. You'd have to truly
see
what I saw to understand. Its tiers of wooden platforms could have been twelve or fifteen feet in diameter. And it stood over thirty feet high. Bamboo sticks and canes stuck out of the top half, and it was covered in ceremonial cloth decorated with colorful geometric shapes and magical designs . . . and the designs were spinning and moving. Alive.

There were forty, maybe fifty brown-skinned human figurines on it. I could see them running around it like fleas, no, like fairies or little people. I could see the mother, father, the one in police uniform, the horses, the trees, the palm-wine tapper. I knew all the characters because since I was a kid I'd enjoyed the performance of masquerades. The theater of them. But never could I have imagined something like this. The upper and lower parts were even divided by the giant yellow serpent, the sign of Igbo pride and mightiness. And it was looking around curiously.

The creature was every color of the rainbow, glowing deep and powerful in the night. And it made music. The creature's cloth quivered with the beat it sent into the ground. The sound was impossible, I swear. The sound of life, the beginning.

Holy shit, this was Ijele. The Chief of all Masquerades, Igbo royalty. Ijele does not ask the small or big masquerades to leave the
village square when it wants to enter. They have to. Ijele is the climax and it performs alone. If this thing wasn't Ijele, then I'd gone mad. It shook, hovering over the ground, and began to move toward the one computer that was still standing. Oddly enough, this computer had a lit screen . . . and the old man in the black caftan was standing in front of it.

Nobody dared to move as Ijele, the grand masquerade of masquerades, one of the greatest spirits of Nigeria, slowly danced toward the man in black. And the man in black didn't move. All this under the dark night sky, for the power in the area was completely out, even in the places that had generators.

They stood before each other. By this time, my two cousins had run off, as had anyone else who could. But I stayed to bear witness. This was something I could tell my grandchildren about, if I lived. I was witnessing a miracle. My days of fraud . . . Even as I knelt there under the table, I knew they were over.

It all became clear to me in that moment. All that had been happening for the last several hours. The terrorist who'd hijacked all the computers and mobile phones. We'd all watched her speak, but still we were focused on our own things, on getting what we could get. I was so focused on getting the white woman to pay, even when the madness washed into the streets.

But this woke me up. The coming of Ijele. I am not being melodramatic and I am not crazy. And I am not out of danger. But I will never practice fraud again. Never. I swear.

As I cowered under that table and watched Ijele and the man whom I now believed was one of the aliens look at each other, I felt this great swell of pride and love for Nigeria. I felt patriotism. I would die for it. I would live for it. I would create for it. This was
real
. Tears were streaming down my face.

“Ijele,” the man in black said.

Ijele bounced, and as it came down, a drum beat deep like the bottom of the ocean sounded, shaking the husk of the building.
GBOOM!
It was like the sonic booms we'd heard twice within the last twenty-four hours, except much louder, much closer. The remaining café walls shuddered and some crumbled. No one groaned. Those who were able to had fled. Except me.

How do I explain what I saw next?

They went into the computer. Does that make sense? Ijele became like gas and the man in black became like smoke and, together, they dissolved into the computer.

After several minutes, I got up and walked over to the computer. It was still on. I don't know why, but I logged into my e-mail account. I was surprised when I could access it. But I wasn't surprised to find all the e-mails and my contacts erased. And I was glad.