Watchlist (25 page)

F
RANK DOES NOT
talk much these days. I walk into my sitting room. He is sitting down—as he has been doing for the past couple of days—on the sofa. I kiss him softly on his forehead. It is like kissing a fish, his forehead is moist and cold. I say hello but he does not even look at me. He stares straight ahead at the TV, which is off. I sit beside him and switch it on. The three o'clock news—which we have always listened to together—has just begun. There is a new camp being set up in Polo Park, the newscaster—the really pretty one with long eyelashes and deep dimples whom I nicknamed The Kangaroo—says, “Even as I speak, the government is setting up isolation tents there. I have been inside one of those tents myself. I must admit to feeling a bit envious. The tent's neat, the camp itself is very clean. Bigger and cleaner than the previous camp. It is very secure. The safest place in Enugu. No crime. No power outage. No need for a generator. It is a Utopia.” The camera zooms in on her carefully made-up face and she smiles an awkward smile, as if she has food stuck between her teeth. “Remember, if you or anyone you know is exhibiting any of the symptoms of the virus, please come to the camp. If you can't make it, call any of the numbers showing now, and the government will send someone to bring you. We can fight this. We can contain this virus but everyone has to help. Keep away from anyone who is showing symptoms. This is a terrible illness. It is spread through contact. Remember the three watchwords: Cleanliness. Vigilance. Distance. We can fight this. Yes. We. Can.”

I turn to Frank and begin to speak but his eyes are glued to the screen, as if he were memorizing the flashing series of emergency telephone numbers scrolling the bottom. I reach for the remote control in the crack between the cushions on which he and I sit, and switch off the TV. My husband groans and sinks deeper into the sofa. I inch closer to him and stretch to take his hand. As soon as I make contact, he snatches it back as if I were a leper, and groans again. I pretend not to mind. I say to him, “You really do not believe what The Kangaroo said, do you? Utopia my nyash! You don't think that she believes it either? You could see it in her eyes. Her heart wasn't in the message.”

I move back to my own side of the sofa. “Listen, do you or do you not trust me?” I have put on the voice I use when I am scolding an errant student.

Frank groans again. His breath comes in short sputters like the dying engine of a car. It hurts me to hear it.

“I hate to see you this way, my poor darling.” My tone is softening at the edges, becoming fluffy, flirty even. “Do you need anything? Water? Tea?”

Frank shakes his head and sinks deeper into the sofa, the blue of his shirt segueing into the blue of the sofa so that it appears as if he were melded to the chair. He does not say anything. He does not need to. I have always been able to tell what he is thinking. I respond now to the thoughts I see darting across his mind like a restless lizard.

“Why do you want to go to that place? Have I ever let you down? Have I ever been wrong? This isolation camp is just the government's way of taking control. This disease, this Ebola, do you think it fell from the sky?” The soft edges are hardening up again. My tone is urgent. How can Frank be blind to this? “The government manufactured it to get as many people as they can sick. And then they created this camp where you can be ‘cured.' I tell you, anyone who goes there is going to be implanted with a chip that will make it easier for them to be monitored. I will not let that happen to you! Have I not told you that a colleague of mine knows a doctor who is at this very moment putting final touches to the antidote? That doctor will come here and cure you.”

Frank opens his eyes and turns toward me. His eyes are red as if he has conjunctivitis. His is a textbook case, ticking off all the boxes for the symptoms: Fever. Red eyes. Chills. He is shivering now, his shoulders hunched to keep out a cold that only he can feel. I miss my Frank. I miss his voice. I miss the conversations we had at the breakfast table every day. I miss the Saturday mornings we spent in bed making love with the enthusiasm of teenagers just discovering the wonders of sex. If I could take his place, I would. I would bear it better, knowing what I know. It is not fair that it is Frank who has gotten ill.

“The hunger that is hopeful of being assuaged does not kill,” I tell him, hoping to make him laugh. When we had just started dating and I still lived at home, there were very few opportunities for us to get intimate. Frank always used that phrase to console both himself and me that soon, we would get our own place, get married, and be able to “do it whenever and however” we chose. It has evolved to become our secret sex code. Frank looks at me and the sadness in his eyes is so intense, I look away immediately. I get up, walk into a room, and return with a damp towel with which I begin to wash him. His face, his arms, and beneath his shorts. Every time I touch him, he flinches. Each time I shush him, placing a finger on his lips. “Please,” he says, his voice so soft he might have been whispering. I work in silence starting from his head and then moving gradually to his hands and then, unbuttoning his shirt, I wash his stomach. “Please,” he says again. It comes out as a whispered “plis.” I begin to hum under my breath, the John Legend tune we both love:

'Cause all of me

loves all of you,

love your curves and all your edges,

all your perfect imperfections

I wash first his right leg, then the left, scrubbing the dark, rough skin of his knee, which, no matter how much shea butter I bully Frank into rubbing on it, remains dry and callused. When I start on his right foot, the woman's voice tells me it is time to remind him of things he might have forgotten. I stop humming and begin to talk.

“You're such a worry bug, my darling.” I wish I could tell him about the voices, which warn me now that he must not be allowed to go to the camp. They tell me that if he goes, he will not come out alive. They ask me how many of the people I know who have gone in so far have come out. And they tell me that if Frank does come out alive, he would not come out the old Frank, he would be nothing more than a robot, implanted with a chip to control him. Either way, if he went I would lose him. I cannot bear the thought of that. All three voices assure me now that an antidote is on its way for this mysterious illness, that the antidote will be brought to my door and Frank—together with anyone else who takes it—will be saved. I trust those voices but Frank, who, when he announced that he wanted to marry me, was informed by the envious, older Ifeyinwa that I had spent some time in a mental institution and was prone to “bouts of insanity,” but had not been put off, would certainly question me about the veracity of the voices. He will ask me, as he did once when he thought I was talking to myself (I had actually been dictating into my phone), if I still took pills. Those pills, which now too, the voices tell me, the government has somehow found a way to switch with their own pills so that they could rid me of the voices and better control me. Of course I am not taking them. I am not that foolish but Frank will not understand. He thinks I ought to take my medication “because it is dangerous not to.” On our honeymoon, the stuttering voice had told me that the man lying in the bed with me was not Frank but a devil who had taken his place. I had to get rid of him so that Frank would return. I had to slash his throat but I had nothing sharper than a nail file in the hotel room. I had never killed anything, not even a chicken, but I straddled him and brought the tip of the nail file to his neck. He jumped up and grabbed my hands, swearing as he did so. He sounded like my Frank. He looked like my Frank. How could I have wanted to hurt him? I dropped the nail file and let him hold me. He supervised me every day as if I were a child while I took my medication, handing me the glass of water and waiting until I had swallowed the pill. He only stopped two weeks after, when I convinced him that I would never, ever play “drug truancy” (his words) again. So what if the voice was wrong then? It does not mean that they are wrong now. What about all the times that they have been right? Even if the voices are wrong now, can I also discount the rumors going round?

A
S THE WEEKS
went by and the illness continued its round of the city, and found its way as a regular feature on the news, it made sense that the neighbors would seek my thoughts. Rose stopped me two weeks ago as I walked to work.

“It was manufactured by the government,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“I cannot divulge my sources. If I did, I'd have to kill you.” I laughed to let Rose know I was joking.

“Why? Why would they want to make us sick? What have we ever done to them? Are we at war with our own government?” Rose looked confused.

“Control.”

When another neighbor challenged me and said, “But they said it was a man who ate bush meat in Liberia who brought it in here,” I laughed and said, “You expect the one who seeks to control you to tell you that?”

At first, the neighbors deferred to me. They agreed with me that of course it was a government ploy. They agreed that a government that was so corrupt that even local government chairmen could afford to buy private jets would want to squash any opposition by citizens by spying on them with fake cell phone towers, that a government that has never been known for its transparency would seek total control in this way—with a manufactured virus and internment camps—that this made sense. But when Rose's son became ill—they said he began to bleed from every part of his body—Rose had him taken to the camp. It broke my heart to hear that she did not have enough trust in me, that she could not see that she was making it easy for the government to gain control of her family. “He's my only son. If he dies, my life is finished,” Rose said when I asked her the next day why she had sent her son off. Not too long after that, Rose herself too became ill and was carted away. Then Rose's husband and aged mother who lived with them. And now, it has entered my own house like a sneaky thief in the night, invading Frank's beautiful body, coloring his eyes red. But I am not afraid. The voices tell me to be strong, that anytime now, a man will appear at our door with a serum that will cure Frank and keep anyone who takes it immune to the evil machinations of the government.

W
HEN
F
RANK FIRST
became ill, he agreed with me that it was just a flu. He was a nurse and even though he had helped care for Ebola patients before it became an epidemic, he had always been careful, wearing gloves and surgical mask. He gorged on Panadol and vitamin C. And then we thought it might be malaria and Frank dutifully added artesunate to the cocktail. And then when it could no longer be denied that it was the dreaded Ebola, and he still had the strength to talk, he asked me to drive him to the camp. “Let me go, please.” By then my voices had warned me not to let him out of my sight, their warnings urgent and insistent, clutching me around my neck, shouting into my ears. By then too, the rumors had begun to make the round of doctors harvesting the organs of Ebola patients in their care to sell abroad. A few years ago, a private clinic on Agbani Road was closed down because it was discovered that the doctors there were taking out the healthy organs of unsuspecting patients and selling them for ridiculous amounts to wealthy clients in Ghana and Cameroon. What stops these doctors at the camp from doing the same now?

“I can't. Can't you see that my love?”

Now, he no longer has the strength to hiss out more than a “plis.” I am not sure what he is begging for anymore but whatever it is, I have to do the right thing by my husband. I have to keep him home until the serum comes. He will not fall prey to the government.

I stand and kiss him on the lips.

“Do I not prove my trust in this antidote that is coming by kissing you?” I place a hand against my forehead. I do feel a bit feverish. My joints ache but I have been working hard, looking after Frank. The ache will go if I lie down and rest. I am certain of that.

A man stands alone in the black night watching a passenger train speed past. Its yellow-lighted windows are splashed with colored hats and coats; flashes of silverware and glassware; with shoulders in black jackets and bright wool sweaters; with pointed and rounded and upturned noses. Three men in hats are drinking glasses of beer. The children dunk strips of buttered toast in cocoa. An old man snores like a happy pig, his mouth open, his giant milk-white teeth exposed. A young mother pulls a picture book out of her giant purse. Everybody on the train is warm with that consoling feeling of being on an adventure.

The man outside who sees the train knows none of the passengers personally, but they feel oddly familiar as each of their faces appears briefly before him in the dark; it is as if he does know them, the way a person can feel intimately connected to strangers in a crowd. Even though he stands apart, he recognizes he is of them, as thoughts are of words, as something is of nothing.

That he intuits this last sense at all is remarkably peculiar, because although the man outside in the dark, in the grass, cannot experience the train journey himself, it is his very act of witness that has rendered all of it—and all of them—not only material, in the first place, but beautiful, as well.

“This is brilliant work,” the international public radio correspondent emphasized for the benefit of his listeners. He sat with Dr. Flame and Dr. Flame in his studio; it was a warm summer afternoon. Outside the window, green palms splintered the clear blue sky. “For those of you just joining us, we're talking about an astonishing paper and mathematical model created by the Drs. Flame, a couple of young physicists making big waves in the scientific community. Tell us, Dr. Flame and Dr. Flame—this paper presents mathematical proofs for a highly unusual idea about the nature of reality.”