Where You Go – Somto O. Ihezue

It follows me. Rain tapering against the window. In a bath, water trailing down my skin. I do not step into puddles. I cannot will myself to believe the still spread is nothing more than liquid over solid ground.

When the last sandstorm left town, it took Athjar’s eyes with it. Hands thrown over my ears, I still heard them, his screams, I’ve never heard anything like it. As night fell and the desert winds with it, I pulled Athjar from the sands. In his face, I did not find his eyes. I knew when I saw his skin – cut in a hundred places like he’d been caught in a knife brawl – that I should have left him buried. Needle sands; that is what the locals called them. It is why we drape in the thickest of wool, from the ends of our hair, to the tip of our toes. Their cuts came with a blistering infection and with the nearest clinic two valleys away, I watched the fever take Athjar. With his passing, I am all that’s left of those who came here to Maradi, looking for answers.

Today the winds are kind. Kind enough to leave the goats behind when they send hay scattering through the streets. I fasten the straps of my eye-gear and a memory walks in. Hair braided in sand, mind half lost, I had bartered Dike’s ring for a sand coat, a pair of silver rimmed goggles and information about The Collecting. I remember the flickering of the gaslight, I remember my shadow leading the way into the makeshift shrine that served as a storehouse and a bedroom. Sometimes, in my dreams, I see it, the grin spread across the diviner’s face as he pushed the goggles into my hands. With lenses scratched all over, I wouldn’t see a dune rattlesnake if it was slithering right in front of me.

I turn a bend in the road and I arrive. Like every other house in Maradi, the building is a pile of metal scraps, sand bags and everything else. I ramble up to my one-room spot on the fourth floor. There are no railings on the stairs. If I slip and fall to my unquestionable death, the feral cats from the sewage will rip me to pieces before anyone finds me. So I lean against the wall. Inside, the table – the only piece of furniture I own, greets me. Kadiri would never have liked it here, she and Abike.

*

21 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 5 days before …

It was Kadiri’s second year at the oncology center. A cyst the size of a berry had been found lodged in a corner of her brain.

‘The doctors said she has less than a month now.’ I stared down at my hands, then up to the cobwebs in the ceiling and down at my hands again.

‘No, they — they don’t know that, they don’t know how strong she — she is —’

‘Abike I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ I reached for her, and as I pulled her into me, her sobs came down hard rocking both our bodies.

After the Oil War ravaged half the continent, from Djibouti down to the Table Mountains, Abike who had lost her sight, her family and her home, became one of the last living members of the Ailopin people. When she came to us at the Botswana Sanctuary for Continentally Displaced Persons, no one had thought she’d make it. We thought wrong.  She grew up sauntering all over the savannah with my daughter, Kadiri. The two were never more than a whisper apart. They’d squeeze into themselves, learning the texture of each other’s hair. Abike saw through Kadiri’s eyes. When the last of the Zebras migrated with the rains across the Chobe National Park, the girls would find them, easing them as they weeded ticks from their hide. In return, they’d get back rides across the grasslands. Bodies sailing in the wind, the echo of their voices would be heard for miles and miles as they ran reckless and wild.

A week before the Maitisong Festival, Kadiri died. Abike didn’t cry. Not when the body was brought in from the morgue nor when we laid her in the ground. She was being strong for both of us. Kadiri liked to stand in front of my mirror. There were other mirrors, but she said mine made her look like a painting. I shattered it. I took her things, the carvings on the wall, her seedlings in the old Milo tins, shoved them into a box and threw it down the stairs. It stayed at the bottom of the stairway for weeks. I had lost Dike five years into our marriage and Kadiri had become everything to me. With her gone, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t.

‘I’m leaving Botswana.’ I had rehearsed the line for days.

‘When? Why?’

‘Soon dear.’ I lifted my head to pull the tears back in, ‘I’ll probably head home to Nigeria, I’m not sure’.

‘When do we leave?’

I realized I’d been holding my breath all along. ‘Abike, I got in touch with your clan’s people, they are so eager to see you.’ I said, drawing in a lung full of air, my hands reaching into hers.

‘What? No!’ she yelled, pulling away.

‘I don’t know where I’m headed and I don’t — I don’t know — Abike I’m not okay, do you understand?’ My voice was starting to break under the weight of the sobs I was stifling. ‘I’m not right for you, not the way I am now. You deserve better.’ The confused creases had still not left her forehead, ‘You belong with your people, your family’.

‘You are my family.’

‘Abike please listen —’

‘Where you go I go, Mama.’

That was the last we spoke of it. Together, we left Botswana. From the spice markets of Morocco to the Serengeti, we traveled the continent. Before long, she started to fledge. As a young girl, I had also fledged but I was nothing compared to Abike. At the pyramids, she ran her hands across the hieroglyphics, translating texts lost to the ages and startling the tourists. In the Congo Basin, the birds had flocked to her as she called them by name.  She had all these stories, stories before her time, before mine. There were times when I stared at her in wonder and she’d turn to me and say, ‘I see you’. I was the one with the eyes, yet Abike made me see.

Then it happened. She dropped in front of me, fingers clawing at her neck, face paler than paper. Frantic gasps escaped her lips as she reached for her voice.

‘Ma — Mama.’ That was the last thing Abike said before disintegrating into a puddle of water. I never stepped into a puddle ever again.

*

It stayed on the headlines for years. The papers read: “ON THE 23^RD OF JUNE 2052, LAGOS, CAPITAL CITY OF UNITED WEST AFRICA SANK INTO THE ATLANTIC”. No one had expected it, but no one was surprised. After The Great Tsunami leveled Tokyo, we knew what was coming. But that wasn’t all. As the granite walls of Cathedral Church of Christ stumbled into the depths, as Third Mainland Bridge caved beneath the blue of the ocean, the last of the Ailopin, men, women and children across the globe, vanished. Panic came next, though, not for the Ailopin. The collapse of Lagos and the consequent drowning of millions had trumped the disappearance of an almost extinct clan. People thought I’d gone mad when I spoke about it. The only ones who believed were those who had seen it and the spirit tribes. We were calling it, The Collecting.

From the Congo, where I had lost Abike, I took the first flight back to Nigeria, and then on to my hometown; Ire-mmili. It has been years since I last was there. Botswana had been home for many years, with Dike, Kadiri and Abike. My spirit sisters had been waiting, they knew I’d come.

‘Ókpúkpú Ókpúkpú ànyì nnō, welcome home, bone of our bone.’

‘Ìhè ná áfù gī ná áfù ànyì, What aches you, aches us too,’ they said as they took me in.

Under the dancing stars, I was brought to the Hall of Daughterswhere my braids were loosened and soaked in the first milk of a mule.

‘You have known suffering, now know rest,’ an elder chanted as she washed my hair in the milk. My sisters gathered, chanting alongside the elder who now came kneeling before me.

‘See, see your mothers,’ she said as she lined my eyes with tanjèlé, ‘see the bones that bind you.’

One by one, they came to me, sharing in my grief, siphoning the much they could bear. In Ire-mmili, pain was shared, but there were limits. Pain brought with it a darkness, one that not only marked the soul, but replaced it. So when my sisters took of my grief, they took with them fragments of the darkness that was starting to consume me. I never thought they’d perform the ritual, not for me, not after the things I had done.

Long before men could speak, back when the sun rose in the north, our first mother Oshimmili had clawed her way through the dirt and into the world. Where her hands tore through the soil a forest sprouted stretching as far as the eye could see, the birthplace of the Ire-mmili. The initiation rite of spirit sisters was performed deep in the heart of the forest, before our mothers and their mothers before them and beneath its leaves, we laid our departed. Seeing as I had not been keen on an initiation that included a hot knife slicing flesh from between my legs, I had gotten rid of the forest.

Clad in nothing but my strength, I had ripped out tufts of my hair, meshed it in my blood and bound it to the silver of a crescent moon. With a voice like a child possessed, I tossed my ritual into the fire I had started, and cried:

‘Till the blood in my veins runs still, no tree shall hold root on this soil! Never again shall it know the green of grass or the songs of sparrows!’

For my abominations, I was dragged through the streets and whipped. I remember the giant snail shells clanging off my neck, announcing the coming of the spirit killer. Right there, as I sat amongst my sisters, I could still feel the hot poker searing into my back, marking me with the seal of banishment. Now all was forgotten, all except the forest. It still lay desolate and there was no undoing it. They’d have to kill me to break the curse.

With the help of my sisters, I combed the spirit wild for years, searching, for a sign, a lost soul, anything. We weren’t the only ones looking. There were others who had lost people to The Collecting.

Soon, we stopped talking about it. It was easier that way. Like everyone who had fled the coastlines for the mountain ranges and desert towns, I left Ire-mmili and headed north. It was there I met Athjar. His wife was an Ailopin and had disappeared just like Abike. He didn’t like puddles either. He was part of a cult that had gotten word about a diviner up in Maradi who could help. I joined them.

*

I raise a glass of water to my lips, careful not to stare into it. A knock comes on the door. It comes again, louder this time. The landlady’s niece, she’s come to remind me my rent was due. I do not answer. I bring the glass down to the table and it tips over. On meeting the floor, its shards fly past my feet, spreading to the corners of the room.

‘I know you’re in there, witch!’ her voice comes, heavier than her knocks, ‘I am going to call Big Auntie, she’ll send you packing this time!’

I listen as her angry footsteps disappear down the stairs. A towel in my hand, I kneel over the pooling mess. When a piece of glass cuts into my knee, I do not feel it, not until I see the blood. With the pain starting to set in, I examine the wound, hoping it is something I can stitch up myself. Thin streams of blood trickle down the gash and drop into the water, sending ripples across it. In the circles, I see myself, what was left of me. Taking the towel, I press it hard against my reflection and my hand goes right through.

‘What the -!’

In crippling terror, I pull back at my arm, but it stays, like it’s caught in a snare. I pull again, harder, fear tearing through my body. Whatever is holding onto me, I feel its grip tighten, dragging me in by the second.

‘Help! Somebody help!’ I call out toward the door, the landlady’s niece should have returned ‘Help! Please, help me!’

No one comes. My shoulder goes in and I know my head is next. Terrified that I could be inches away from falling into a chasm of water or something worse, I shut my eyes and gulp in a lung full of air. Water does not meet my face, only warmth. I peel open my eyes and far in the distance the lighthouse of Apapa stands, piercing the sky. The rays bouncing off its huge torch spill into the atmosphere lighting it up.

‘Lagos,’ I say under my breath lest I scare it off.

It is all here, its sky-liners, the overhead railroads, most in ruins, but here. And there’s the colour, like the rains of September came and never left. Algae like carpets of green crawl over the buildings in the most intentional manner. Vines, branches and foliage loop and weave through windows, down rooftops. A breeze whistles in the trees and comes for me, combing through my hair. Swaying down to the grass, it runs through them, and like a hall of children they whisper ‘shhhh’. This place, Lagos, it feels like something alive.

Unsure, I walk. With each step, the grasshoppers dart off the waist high grass. The hares follow, peeping cautiously before hopping off like toads wearing fur. I come upon a stream. Its water is a mirror. I see the scales on the trout and the smooth corners of the pebbles at the bottom. Squatting for a drink, I spot someone right by the water’s edge, their legs crossed in meditation. There are markings spiraling the ground around them. I inch in for a closer look and they jerk awake, eyes piercing mine.

‘Sorry I — sorry who are – what is this – this —’ I barely stutter through before they come speeding at me. I do not see their feet leave the ground. Walking backwards as I make to run, I trip over a rock, my body thudding hard to the ground. I sit up and my assailant pushes into me, their hands wrapping my body.

‘Mama, it’s me.’

In a raging desert storm, wind and sand thrashing at me, I could pick out that voice. Pulling her face up to mine, I look at the strange thing. Behind the intricacy of the dye patterns on her face, behind the cowries and corals lined in her hair, I see her staring back at me.

‘Abi – Abike?’

‘Mama,’ she sobs, wiping the tears starting to stream down my own cheeks. ‘Praise Father! It worked this time. I’ve been trying for so long.’

‘Nwa’m,’ I say as the pieces of my heart find each other, ‘nwa oma’m, my beautiful child.’

I squeeze her into me. The prickly scent of herbs in her hair, the night shade of her skin, the energy burning within her, it overwhelms me and I take it all in.

‘What is going on? Why — how are you here?’

‘You are more beautiful than I imagined,’ she says, running her fingers through my braids.

Bringing my hands to her cheeks, I stare into her eyes, ‘You can see me?’

‘Yes Mama, yes I can,’ she laughs, ‘Father healed me’.

She goes on and on about this Father, how he made her stronger, faster. How she never fell ill or stopped to catch her breath. I do not hear half the words she says, I do not care about any of it. She is here with me, nothing else matters. I bring my forehead to hers, she smiles, the kind of smile you give an old friend.

‘You look the same as the day I lost you.’ I hadn’t seen it at first, not with all the tears clogging my vision, but her face, it has not aged a day.

‘Really?’ she asks, her tone riddled with amusement.

‘Yes. You’ve been gone for so long and —’

‘How long?’

‘You don’t know?’ She shakes her head from side to side, rather slowly, like she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. ‘Abike, it’s been over two decades’.

‘What?’ her eyes sink, ‘And all that time, you’ve been alone?’

‘Abike it’s fine. Look at me,’ I lift her chin ‘It’s alright. We are together now’.

She pushes into me again, gently this time.

‘Wait till you see Kadiri,’ she muffles, her mouth pressed against my chest.

‘What — what are you talking about?’

‘Kadiri, Mama she’s here,’ she says gesturing to the bushes.

I watched Kadiri thin out on a hospital bed. Her hands were clasped in mine when the light left her. I laid her in the garden behind our home, next to Dike. Looking towards the bushes and seeing no one there felt like losing Kadiri all over again.

‘Abike, honey, there’s no … ’

Then I see it; Mmēghárị ányà, Illusion sorcery. It wafts around her like a scent, a scent you could see. I’ve seen it way too many times, it’s impossible to miss.

‘Ow! Mama what are you doing?’

Tasting the strand of hair I pulled from her head, I realize it would take ten of my sisters to craft a curse this potent and even more to break it.

‘Abike, Kadiri is not here,’ I shake her vigorously, perhaps hoping to shake her out of it.

A rustle comes from the bushes. It’s a boy. Others follow, appearing from behind the trees and nearby buildings. Soon we have an audience around us. It’s uncanny but they all look quite like Abike. It’s not the dye on their faces, nor the jewels in their hair. It isn’t the exquisite Ankara material they are draped in either, their cuffs and shoulders lined in glistening gold. It’s something else. The Illusion! It wafts around them too. To craft sorcery of this scale, one would require an unending source of power. Something is not right with this place, with these people.

‘Abike what have you done?’ the boy asks, his eyes scanning me, ‘And who is this?’

‘She is my mother.’

Mother? Questions erupt from the gathering. Did she say mother? What has she done now?

‘You know better than to go against Father,’ the boy continues, a frown setting in his face.

‘Father would be furious,’ someone from the crowd chimes in.

‘Father? What Father?’ I can sparsely mask my irritation any longer.

The ground beneath our feet starts to rumble as if to answer my question. Heading in our direction, giant rhinoceros’ trample through the grass. If the gathering weren’t as unfazed as they are right now, I’d have grabbed Abike and run. When the beasts halt and the dust settles, the riders come into view. The rider in the lead dismounts and when his feet hit the ground, it does not make a sound. He is tall, taller than the guava tree in our garden back in Botswana. With his face long and thin, his eyes half closed, vacant, he reminds me of a professor I had back at the university. The spongy afro sitting on his head is the white of cotton. He makes his way up to us, a staff engraved in carvings, clenched in one hand. Beneath his robes, his left arm and legs stay shrouded. The people pour to their knees, heads to the ground. He and I are all that’s left standing.

‘She must leave.’ He does not look at me when he speaks to Abike.

‘Father please,’ Abike pleads, rising to her feet.

‘You’ve disobeyed me again and again. Why?’

 I step in between them, ‘Ehh, I don’t know who you are or what— ’

‘I have lived ten thousand lifetimes before the first of your kind crawled through the mud. Do not presume to speak to me.’ His voice is empty. No pitch, no expression, empty. ‘You are not welcome here’.

‘Fine, but I’m not leaving without my child,’ I grab hold of Abike.

‘Your child? You flatter yourself, witch,’ he says, mockery tainting his voice. ‘Abike is not yours, she never was, and she never will be.’

‘And who are you to dictate what is and what isn’t?’ I let him hear it, the anger in my words.

‘Alápa-dúpé. I am Alápa-dúpé. Abike is born of my blood.’

There is utter silence.

‘So where were you?’ I crack open the quiet, ‘when your people were massacred and scattered across the continent? When I took Abike, nursed her, protected her? Where were you?’

‘Protected her? You can barely protect yourself,’ the mockery is louder now, ‘I am protecting her, protecting all of them from that insanity of a world. Here she is safe. Here she gets to survive, to thrive’.

‘You stole my daughter, you psycho! And these people,’ I gesture to the gathering, ‘you took them from their homes, their families.’ Though I have no idea what she looks like, I imagine Athjar’s wife is somewhere in the crowd listening. He never had a picture of her, said he needed her to exist only in his memory.

‘I have had enough. I do not need to explain myself – least of all to you. You know what is out there?’ he says, turning to the gathering, ‘The wars, the suffering. They have massacred your brothers and your sisters and they’ll do the same to you. Your strength, this paradise, your immortality is a blessing possible through me’.

‘Alápa-dúpé, forge of the Ailopin, mind wielder, the fall of rain and tempest of Olodumare,’ I say, bringing his focus back to me, ‘Yes, I know very well who you are’.

I’d heard the stories, some more terrifying than others. They said he was an ancestor who killed his Chi and stole his seat. It is said he once struck a village of his own people with madness and made them feast on themselves.

‘I also know that just like every other ancestral deity, the end of your lineage, is the end of you.’ I catch it, the subtle narrowing of his eyes. ‘That is why these people are here … they fuel you. Without them your existence, your power, is a myth. Their immortality is not a gift, it is a guarantee that you get to live forever’.

Murmurings escape the crowd. Those close to him draw back.

‘Choose your next words wisely,’ he inhales, clasping his hands around his staff.

I see him now, I see as he unravels.

‘Or what? You’ll murder me like you did millions of Lagosians?’

‘Murder? Millions? What are you talking about Mama?’

‘Oh, you didn’t tell them, how you drowned the other tribes and citizens of Lagos just so you could keep your exotic birds in this little exotic cage.’ Talks of drowned and murder fill the air. ‘You say our world is a disaster, an insanity, do you know what you did when you destroyed Lagos! The imbalance and strife you wreaked! You are the evil in the world!’

‘A spirit killer accusing me of murder. That’s a bit of a conundrum don’t you think?’

I can feel him flipping through my mind like it’s some picture book. ‘Get out of my head!’

‘Go on, tell them, tell your daughter how you bound those spirits and set them ablaze. How you sentenced them to a fate worse than death. Tell her.’

To a people like the Ailopin, murdering spirits, souls who had perished once before was evil unheard of. A second death is utter erasure from every existential plane. It means they never get to see the ones they left behind, the ones they love, not in an afterlife, not in reincarnation, not ever. It is a punishment meted out on people who had led the most despicable, abhorrent lives. And without batting an eye, I had done the same to my own ancestral spirits. I watch the fear and confusion on the faces of the Ailopin people slip away. I watch disdain take their place. But it is irrelevant. Their hate is theirs and they can keep it. All that matters to me is Abike.

‘Then you know what’s coming for you,’ I catch his gaze and I hold it.

‘Witch!’ He charges at me, staff raised, lightning sizzling through it.

I charge back.

When we meet, he brings the staff down, probably intent on splitting my skull. I grab it midair. The lightning runs from the staff, right into me. I do not waver. His eyes widen in disbelief and in that distraction, I pull the staff from his grip. Bringing it to my knee, I break it in half.

‘You filthy peasant!’ Hitting me across the head, he sends me crashing meters away. I pick myself up, collapsing back to the ground and throwing up a mouthful of blood. My head feels like it is coated in steel. From the corner of my eye, I see him draw near.

‘You dare stand against me! I, who saw the birth of the sun!’ A spear materializes in his hand as he speaks, ‘No one will mourn you’.

‘Father no!’ I turn to see Abike holding him back from me. Like a rag doll, he tosses her aside.

‘Don’t you touch her!’ With my scream comes a force, stronger than the sandstorms of Maradi.  Just like he did me, it takes him, sending him headfirst through a stone pillar and right into a building which proceeds to collapse with him in it. The once-clear clouds blacken as I soar to the sky. Lightning and hail pour from above, causing whatever lies in their path to come undone. The trees crackle to a crisp as buildings crumble and fall.

‘The blood of seas courses through me. They who stand against me, stand against many,’ I say as the strength of my sisters pours into me.

I had known I would not last a minute in combat against Alápa-dúpé. So before he came charging at me, I channeled my sisters. Ours was a bond that transcended time and space. Their power courses through me like a river, consuming me. It is unlike anything I have ever felt. I am one and I am three hundred.

‘Mama! Mama!’ I hear it through the storm raging around me, like a candle flame in the dead of night. ‘You need to stop! You’ll destroy us all!’

With my life force starting to ebb away, I do need to stop. Power of this intensity, though tempting is never meant for one to keep. Through a witch’s scream, I let go of it and before I fall to the ground, Abike catches me. Being in that power, everything else was shut out, everything, except the rage that had sparked within me. Returning to myself, I see clearly now. Burning foliage litters the ground and the buildings lie in far worse state than before. The life I once felt in this place now feels gone.

‘This, this is why you are not welcome here,’ Alápa-dúpé says as he pushes a boulder off himself, ‘humanity kills everything it touches’.

‘No I — I did not mean for any of this to happen.’

‘But it did,’ he says, pointing to the people. Scattered across, some are injured and being helped up by others, some lie unconscious. ‘Abike,’ he turns to her, ‘you know what you must do’.

Exhausted, I am still in her arms, but my hands latch tightly to her. She looks at me, her eyes are red shot but they hold no tears.

‘This is goodbye Mama.’

‘No, Abike no,’ I tighten my grip on her.

‘Mama —’

‘Listen, listen to me, I cannot live in a world where you do not exist, I will not. Please come with me, we can be a family again. We’ll be happy and …’

*

I am back on the wet floor of my apartment. Did she just send me back?

‘No no no no,’ I cry, touching the water, the pieces of glass piercing my fingers.

‘We have to leave now.’

Startled, I jolt back, swinging around to the voice. I watch Abike step out of the shadows and stumble up to me.

‘No, this is another one of his mind tricks,’ I say, shutting my eyes.

‘Mama it’s no trick. I have bound our spirits, it was how I was able to pull you to me. We can never be separated.’ She traces her hands up my head, cupping my face in them, ‘Where you go, I go’.

‘Oh Abike … but your eyes,’ I caress her face. Her sight is gone once again.

‘I see you.’

Bringing her forehead to mine, ‘Nwa oma’m, I see you.’ 

‘We must hurry, he will come for me.’

‘Let him come.’