He grew up with a mother who liked to go to church. She was, as he said to his wife, Fola, when they were still dating, spiritual. “My mother likes her church,” he said, “Everywhere she looks there are demons lurking.” It rubbed off on him. He believed these things too whether he wanted to or not, that there were powers beyond what he could see. It made sense to him. In university, when he visited a conservatory in Ibadan during a field trip for an agriculture course he was taking that semester, one of his friends nudged him and pointed at a plant with such ostentatious leaves, leaves falling over themselves, splayed open like hands begging for forgiveness, and said in her clear, affected voice “God is an artist.” He rolled his eyes. She was a poet, and she often said things like this; she often got distracted in class because she was writing haikus in her black journal, twirling her red, threaded bookmark as she stared into space. How sentimental, he thought, was it to think that way. Sometimes, he thinks it is sentimental, and other times he does not, and often he does not know which man he is.
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He cheated on Fola weeks after his best friend from university died, cheated with a girl from his office named Sarah. Lisped, big-haired Sarah.
He did not believe it when he got the call that his best friend, Olusoji, was dead, did not believe it when he was told that Olusoji just fell down and died. Olusoji was, like him, in his late forties. It was ridiculous. He had heard such stories before, people falling down and dying, people collapsing in showers, on bathroom floors, or by the side of their cars, just before they put in the keys and opened the doors, spread out until they were found. This did not make sense, people falling down like flies, ripe fruits, shot birds.
Years ago, on their way back from a party, theyknocked down a woman who was crossing the road. Their vehicle struck her and he felt more than heard the thud of their vehicle connecting with the woman; an almost plastic sound. It was dark, the road was empty, and there were rumors about armed robbers lurking on highways setting these kinds of traps, causing unsuspecting passengers to step out of their vehicle where they were then attacked. They did not stop to help the woman, they drove away. He did not think about that night for a long time. The memory was washed away by the amount of alcohol he had consumed, the effervescent rush of adrenaline of that night, the subsequent ten-hour sleep. Years later, the memory of that night resurfaced when he was taking a late night shower, washing the scent of a woman he had adulterated with off himself. He froze. For one long minute he did nothing but let the water slide down his body and pool at his feet. He began to scrub again. At first he did this slowly. Then he scrubbed harder, and faster. Peeled flesh is not acceptable penance, he found. The memory, and the guilt of it, stayed. Ever so often he remembers it; the plastic sound, the tyres climbing over the woman’s bones, the woman’s screams.
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Fola was a tall woman, four years younger than he was. For six year after they started trying to have children, they found out that they couldn’t. There were several miscarriages and one stillbirth, and after each one of these misfortunes, his mother would summon them to her church where they would receive zealous prayers. His mother’s flat was five floors high, and from her balcony, they could see the community below them, could commit to a warm blowing breeze. After prayers, they would retire to his mother’s house to eat and rest.
Fola liked the view from his mother’s house: the school’s football pitch often occupied by boys playing football until sunset, the rivulet of water that ran behind the school fence, traders with wares brimming out of their storefronts, the neighbor’s compounds filled with mundane, yet dramatic secrets. They slipped between the nearly unhinged gates of the school one time and walked around aimlessly and slowly, in zigzags. They mounted themselves onto the fence and watched the stream of water polish rocks. The rocks gleaming with unrelenting wetness.
“A part of me wants to dip my toes in the water,” she said. She threw rocks into the water. “Where is the source of this even?” she asked. He did not know. “Let’s watch the sun set,” he said as they walked back.
In those few years of want, they went from casual worshippers to fairly devoted ones. The casualness was hard to shake off, the devotion difficult to endure. She started to go to the field alone and he would watch her from his mother’s balcony, watch her walking across the field, her hands moving up and down in prayer, balled into fists, swinging wildly as though she were yanking off invisible chains. Soon, the first child came. They named the child Oluwaseyi: God did this. One time when Fola was on the field, a remarkable sun set behind her while she was on her knees, praying. It was just her in the field where she was surrounded by low, patchy grass, kneeling in one spot with her eyes closed. The sky was orange, the clouds tremulous, and from where he watched, she seemed to be vibrating, caught up in prayers as she was. He thinks about that moment often; the sun, an empty field, Fola vibrating in one spot.
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Fola told him about the time she was kidnapped for three weeks. And he had not known about this, about her kidnapping when she was younger. She told him on one of those nights after a miscarriage. She had no memory of those three weeks.
“The last thing I remember before it happened was someone waving a white handkerchief in my face. I’m assuming it was laced with drugs. I passed out. I don’t remember anything.” She said it as though she were confessing something.
Fola, too, came from a family that believed in spirits, that believed there were things unaccounted for, forces beyond plain sight. Like him, she could not escape the grip of these beliefs. A higher power was valid reasoning. She told him how her family fasted and prayed for her return. How pastors laid hands on her clothes. “The pastor said my clothes had my essence. He compared them to power flowing through Jesus’s garment. He said my clothes would serve as a point of contact for me. I don’t know. I feel like those prayers saved me,” she said.
“You don’t remember anything at all from that time?”
“No,” she breathed. “What if they took my womb?” she asked him. “Those kidnappers, what if they used juju to steal my womb?” He did not mention the scans and tests they had done at the hospital that showed that everything was fine with her, and with him too, or that clearly, her womb was still intact given that she had been able to conceive in the first place. But he understood what she meant, understood the idea of evil powers working dark magic against her happiness. She was not the kind to look to him for self-assurance, not one who enjoyed being pandered to.
“You’re saying nonsense. There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said. She slept before he did, slept while he wondered if he believed what he told her. How would he know if there was something wrong with her? Who did she think he was?
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He had gone for Soji’s funeral, himself and the friends he had grown up with, all of them gathered at Ilorin for the burial ceremony, finding it in themselves to smile and be jovial with one another despite the circumstance. They had not seen one another in a long time. What was this new smile Soji had? they asked. A front tooth was missing in one of the pictures displayed at Soji’s wake keep. When did this happen? When did he lose his front tooth? On the ride home, he parked on the roadside repeatedly. He spread open his shirt collar wider, prayed mindless prayers, mumbling words interspersed with “Thank you, Jesus.” His chest felt light, filled with air. This was not his first encounter with death, or grief. He was twenty when his father passed, had tasted the pain of losing a loved one, the enduring pain of it, and had leaned on Olusoji during this period, while his mother leaned on her faith, leaned into it so deeply, he worried. For where was the grief in her eyes, why did she seem whole while he was broken? How did she lose herself completely in faith, lose herself enough to bypass grief?
His affair with Sarah began shortly afterwards. One day in his office, the light flickered on and off very quickly. So quickly he doubted it happened. “What was that? Did you see that?” he asked Sarah. She raised her head slowly, pen tucked behind her ear, nodded and smiled. “The light flickered,” she said. “I thought it was just me.” He didn’t even find her attractive, her nose was too long, and she had a lisp she tried to hide. But she talked, despite the lisp, in a slow, seductive way. He could tell that she liked him. And the day it happened, in the confines of his small office with the windows sealed shut and doors locked, he tasted her skin. She tasted leaden, rubbery, her body not quite pliant or familiar like Fola’s, yet he continued to taste, to touch, till the rubberiness wore off, mattered less, till all that was left was for him to impale Sarah. He did. In a way that was mindless, atavistic, selfish, so that he did not care for Sarah, or even for himself. It was something to be done, worked through quickly, and forgotten.
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Oluwaseyi, when she finally came, belonged to Fola in a way that she did not belong to him, was committed to Fola in a way he could not demand of her. He did not understand it, but there it was; Fola had more power over her. He taught Seyi how to write. Held her hand while she wrote her letters, her ‘g’s and ‘y’s. He helped her through those elaborate curves, held her as she learned how to walk. In many ways he formed her, but how she became someone so separate from him, someone who he did not completely understand surprised him.
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Fola could smell it on him in an instant without even trying too hard. That’s what she said.“Is there another person you’re sleeping with outside?” she asked. He could not deny it, he tried to, but it was his first time. He found it hard to deny. His silence was the giveaway and for days she didn’t speak to him except in front of the children, didn’t sleep in their bed either, slept on the couch, until Seyi found her, and then she returned to their room but arranged pillows in the centre of their bed as a divider. He tried to wash it off, this other woman, scrubbed extra hard, tried to brush her insistent taste off his tongue, the taste of rubber. But couldn’t. Instead, he remembered that accident with Soji years ago, the plastic sound, tyres climbing over bones, the besetting scream. He wanted to speak, had things to say, but couldn’t say them, swallowed over and over. He developed painful throat lumps as a result.
“I can taste it,” Fola had said, and he wondered what she meant by tasting it. If now too his tongue tasted like rubber, like lead. Weeks later she moved out of the house. Told the kids she was traveling to see her sister and would be back soon. It was exam period and ordinarily she would be the one to wake them up at midnight to read in the living room, gathered around the centre table, watching them while she ironed, or read, or pretended not to sleep. He found it strenuous, waking up early to prepare and then drive the children to school daily, to pick them up after and think of what they would eat. To be the lead caretaker, the one who had to keep them constantly on his mind was something he enjoyed for the first few days. This is what family is about, he thought. And then he was tired of it.
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Their second child, Moyo, the one who he thought was kinder to him, who balanced the scales Seyi had tipped, had the gift of music. He discovered when she was a baby that the baseline of Osadebe’s Yoba Chukwu could calm her. He would loop that baseline, so that it played non-stop and no matter how intense her tantrum was, she would allow herself to be calmed. He was aware of, and enjoyed, her musical development: her pitch perfect hearing, the tiny rasp she learned to employ while she sang, her rise in the church choir. She made him cry with her voice once. He thinks it is precious, her talent, and sometimes, it is hard for him to think about it in concrete terms. So she can sing, what does that mean, why does it matter, what is she to do with this unearned gift?
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Fola was drinking a beer the first time he saw her, smiling as she spoke to another girl and he thought that her smile was an affected one. A smile of graciousness, not one of joy or excitement or even amusement, and he told her so, unkindly, with a braggadocio he has since shed. Then in the midst of the people at the very cramped party venue, so cramped they had opened the front door so that people could spill out, she stood to meet him, dragged her eyes along the length of his body and asked “So what do you want with me?” The beer bottle in her hand was held carelessly at the neck, a strong wind could take it from her, it could slip to the ground between them, shatter at their feet. As she stood up straight in her wedges, he realised she was taller than he had anticipated. They were at eye level with one another. “Nothing” he said, and she pushed him back with her fingers, “Then go away,” She said. It was the same thing she said to him when he went to her sisters’ to ask her to come back to their home. Go away. He did. He returned again and again till she agreed to return home. She came back home a few days later.
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There was a boy too, Bolu, the last child, just before Fola turned forty. And sometimes, the house felt too full. On some days, there would be music blaring from one of the rooms, palm oil being bleached in the kitchen so that everywhere was filled with smoke, taps left running, doors being slammed, a quarrel escalating into shouts and fist fights between the children. It was once just him, and then himself and Fola, and now it was all of them, would for a long time be all of them. And just like his parents did, he took his children to church. Their big church with its large spanning roof and stained windows subdues anyone who looks up in prayer or for whatever reason. He is no different. Some Sundays feel planned to him, feel like an orchestrated personal assault, like a battle for his true and complete salvation. The building and the sounds: loud, urgent pianos, brassy trumpets, resolute drums. Sometimes, if he was close enough, he would stare at the hands striking the stretched reed of the talking drums with vengeance and purpose and industry, moving so fast they blurred. Hands and voices and feet stamps summoning with intent a supreme entity. When Moyo sang lead, her rasp, torturous in its elusiveness, is what convinces him of a personal assault, of angels pulling invisible strings. Other times, it is a slow chorus sung by thousands of people-who all want different things and have different degrees of need- that does this. His needs, he thinks, are plenty. There is not one big encompassing need, there are tiny small ones, tiny problems that need resolution. Better that way.
Somehow they fell off. He lost interest, Fola did too, he could tell. She slept off without praying at night, got up late on some sunday mornings and missed church, her bible unopened for days at a time. Perhaps even more than he did. But they bore it. It was something to be done.
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“I’m going to take all my children and leave you,” Fola said to him when she returned from her sister’s. He does not remember what he said afterwards, if he had said anything at all. The children were in the house that day, in their rooms, and after she said this, the entire house became silent as though they had sensed the tension, or heard her exact words even though he knew it was impossible.
Because he couldn’t say it to her, at least not so soon, he said to himself as he drove to his farm in Ibadan, “Don’t threaten me with my children. Don’t threaten me with my children.” He earned more than she did. What could she have done with four children all by herself? Once, she told him how a small boy had thrown up on her in a bus headed to Oshodi. The warm sludge of vomit hit both her and the woman next to her. The boy’s mother had apologized profusely and explained that they were homeless, thrown out of their house two days ago and so she and her children had slept outside. They have malaria, it must have been the mosquitoes, the woman said. Her husband, a motorcycle driver, had packed some clothes in a bag and left her with the children, and even though she did not know many people in Lagos, she was going to Oshodi to see if they could squat with someone she used to know and had not seen in a long time. When Fola told him this story, it upset him. “What kind of man would do something like that?” he said “Just leave his family and go?”
“That’s how men are,” Seyi said. She was on the long sofa, stretched out, her legs crossed at the ankles as she worked on a crossword puzzle. She knew that he cheated with Sarah, had sent him a long email about it, telling him that adultery was wrong, that he should stop hurting her mother. There was no home computer. She must have gone to a cybercafe to type the email, or done so from her school library during her lunch break, and he wondered how she knew. If it was Fola who told her, wondered how it would have been said, what exactly was said about him. Whatever it was, he thought, Seyi would believe it. This, too, upset him.
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He was the one who found out that Bolu liked boys. While going through the history tab on his laptop, he found a strange website and had watched the video that begun to play as he opened the page: two men feverishly touching one another, kissing, before one begins to move slowly down the other’s body. He knew who was responsible. There were other similar web pages in his history tab, and a Facebook account with Bolu’s name. He wanted to talk about it. That was his plan on his drive home. He wanted to have a conversation. At home, Bolu brought his dinner, one glass plate covered the other to keep the food warm. Realizing he did not have the words to have that kind of discussion, he threw one of the plates at Bolu, possessed by true anger because how dare Bolu do that in his house. The plate, sent on a wayward errand, had delivered more than was expected. A bruise would have been manageable, or a swollen shin or forearm, but not this amount of blood coming from right under the eye. The blood changed things, put fear in him. He had driven the boy to the hospital himself. There were oval crescents of blood on his car seat that refused to wash away. He thinks about how the last thing his son saw clearly with both eyes was a glass plate hurtling towards him, an ordinary day that turned sour. In one instant. Just like that.
When it happened, Bolu had screamed and screamed. He did not expect that much blood, did not think that Bolu’s lanky body could produce so much. They had taken Bolu to church. For deliverance. They had fasted: Bolu, his wife and himself. Surely, this was a spirit too. It had to be, otherwise why else would it be so?
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He thinks that the way accidents happen, the instantaneous nature of accidents is a testament to the presence of spirits, to a pre planning of some gods somewhere. Driving from Lagos to Ibadan, he has seen cars upturned in bushes, vehicles blazing with fire, squashed bodies and shattered glass. Glistening, blazing chaos. In a way it was exquisite. If he were a god, if he could destroy someone’s life so definitely, he would. He would revel in that power, learn the craft of it, all the things that had to align for the perfect destruction, enjoy both the idea and the execution, the cumulative repercussion: people bereft of their loved ones, breadwinners and guardians, people left gaping and aching with insatiable need. The scale of it was fascinating to him, all subject to one perfectly timed moment.
There was, for instance, a fire next door the year Seyi got married. It was from an unnoticed gas leak, a lit match. There was a loud boom, and then fire. People in the apartment building ran out, other neighbours too, drawn out by that single boom. The child who lit the match was badly burnt, rushed to the hospital for treatment. And when the parents of the child returned home, the mother screamed and screamed and held herself closely, wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. The couple needed a place to stay for the night, and Fola offered their place. The neighbours stayed in one of the children’s bedrooms. The one with the bigger windows that faced away from their burned down flat.
He liked to talk about the fire, simulating with sound and his hands the big boom. “Just like that, Fire. Without warning, in one second. That poor girl. All she did was light a match. Just imagine it.”
The father gone on a Friday morning to work, the mother, a tailor, out to make an emergency delivery to a bride-to-be, leaving the thirteen year old girl at home. There was a lot of hand wringing afterwards by the girl’s mother, moments when he assumed she was thinking about the fire, the wrong steps she had made, the questions she must ask herself everyday, about the kitchen, the gas cooker, the leak, the child. Why did she agree to take the sewing job? If her husband made more money maybe she wouldn’t have taken up sewing even. If there was electricity earlier in the week, she could have delivered the dress days earlier, rather than on the day the devil was in town.
“These things happen,” he said to her. It was what was said. Doctors had said it to himself and Fola when they had miscarriages and stillborns, people said it to him when his father passed. “These things happen and it is not your fault.” His son had one proper functioning eye because of him. People fell down in the bathroom and died.
The woman did not recoil when he said this, did not even blink. He wondered if she even heard him, if she nodded only out of politeness. She was well a week later, or seemed to be, taking to heart the doctor’s conviction that her daughter’s burn would heal over.
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When they made love, Fola let him tie her hands above her head. The first time it was unplanned. He just took the curtain ribbons and tied her hands. He discovered that he liked it when every touch-even one as light as a finger grazing the edge of her belly, meant something. In those moments, he could breathe on her and she would gasp and squirm and he enjoyed that power. Even the slightest thing could make her squirm when he tied her.
After his affair, she did not let him touch her for a long time. When finally they had sex, she tied his hands at the top of his head with a belt, held his throat in her hands and rode him. He could not breathe properly.
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He was not sure where the god that engineered his accident started from, and while he sat in the hospital, his legs and neck in bandages, he tried to figure out where the starting point was, tried to demystify the orchestration. If it was the call from his poultry manager that the poultry was on fire and he decided to travel to Ibadan even though it was late, or if it was instantaneous, the god just placing the giant log of wood in front of him on that Lagos-Ibadan expressway. He saw it only when it was too late. His car turned over, his head went through the glass, his hands were trapped underneath him.
This time he was the one doing the screaming, wondering if and when help would come. There were still rumours about people setting these kinds of traps on expressways, causing unsuspecting passengers to step out of their vehicle where they were then attacked. He woke up in a hospital, and Seyi was there beside him.
“Mom went home. She went to take a shower. Moyo and Bolu are downstairs.” Seyi said, looking down at him. She removed the crust from his eyes.
“Oh God. Oh God. Who plans these things?” he said, taking the measure of his being.
“What are you talking about, this man?” Seyi said, her face close to his, “I don’t understand what you are saying.” He did not understand her either. But now was not the time to get into it.
“Pass me that glass of water.” he said. He took a long gulp and when he was done, Fola arrived.
“I told you to stop driving in the night.” she said. She brought with her food, and oranges. She sat by his bedside. It was six weeks before he was discharged, and he was bound to the wheelchair for several months. His children came to see him while he was recovering. Seyi brought her children along on Sundays. Eventually, he was able to convince Fola that he was strong enough for sex. She did not believe him, and was tentative. “You have to be on top though,” he said.
He considered her on top of him, considered her in a way he had not done in many years. She looked down at his face too. Sometimes, he wondered what she looked for when she stared at him. When she got off him, both of them gasping, she turned to face him. “You know what I want?” she said, “I want you to stop pretending that you love me. Just stop.” It upset him that she said this.
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One of his favourite praise songs has a line that talks about the unknowability of God. Every year, his church has a week-long retreat, and different preachers are invited, and people come from far and wide, tents are set up outside the church building, plastic chairs lined up as closely as possible to accommodate the crowd. On one of the nights, the crowd sang the song. Unknowable God. They were on their feet, eyes were closed, hands raised up to the heavens. Unknowable? Why then were they here if they would never know? What was the point of this striving if they would never achieve what they strived after?
He had known Fola for upwards of three decades, They had lived and fought and made a life together. And yet, she did not know him, or he did not know her. Because if they knew one another, why would she say what she said to him, that he did not love her, and why, if he knew her, would he be surprised by it? He wanted to know. And the unknowability of her, of God, of himself, troubled him.
If he were Adam, he would eat the apple if that tree were near. And on other days, he would not. He wouldn’t want to know anything. Oh, that he was a man sure of himself. The difficulty was that the tree was there everyday, and who knew how long those two waited in the garden- fluffing the ears of elephants, riding the backs of big blue whales – before they gave in?