The Hypothetical Man

by Mark Lekan Lalude

I have thought that when God wants to punish someone for sins unknown, committed in the life before, he sends you to Africa. And if he is so incensed, he sends you to Nigeria. Africa is purgatory, Nigeria is hell. I have found myself, a sinner of certain iniquities unknown, banished from heaven to Africa as an illegitimate child, to Nigeria, to Ondo, to Akure, to hell. Akure? Yes. Hell? Yes.

Akure is a small town. It is a home to silence, an ever raging sun, desolations, badly performing businesses and seedy streets and private abodes sprawling in their old glory and laid to waste and domestic illogicalities, and existential blunders. The Ala, a big river, ran through it. There had been sworn claims by the younger boys — the ones who contrived a beauty of the desolation by sneaking into people’s compounds to pluck mangoes and Indian almonds on their way from school — bags strewn in nearby bushes — that they have seen alligators in the river.

Akure is a small town. The town was the people and the people were the town and I was in the middle, neither town nor people. In it were streets — privileged areas of old and new houses alike, swept clean of people, blanketed from time to time by silence, and the whispers of idyllic winds. And in its sprawling slums of houses with rusty corrugated iron sheets, there were crowds of people who seemed to find the frustrations of their station in life expressed in constant quarrels and domestic dramas.

I was born here two decades and three seasons ago. I drank from the Ala, bathed and fished from it. The beauty of a simple childhood — of fishing from the Ala, of innocent escapades with the girls, of watching Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan in friends’ houses on VHS tapes, of studying the martial moves of the actors to replay the scenes when the electric power was out, while my grandma who I lived with waited patiently to cane me for being a “vagabond”, all vanished with my going to the university. The university was a place where I found that my natural brilliance floundered in the face of some unknown opposition.

From the onset, my mind had rebelled. Falling from the vertiginous climb of arrogant professional pride, when I thought myself the next renowned justice of the federation, the acclaimed lawyer strutting in the glory of “matters”, a trans-border expert, and all sorts of contrived positions, I found myself — after having been jarred by such realities as a hostile, unrewarding environment and malicious instructors and material poverty — in an encasement of identity crisis, a schizophrenic dilemma. Today, a criminologist, tomorrow, a sociologist, and to add to that, a professor of literature — all a confusion built for a future revisit. There was only one instance that I thought anything that I wanted could be real — it was the point where I realized that a moneyed parentage could have achieved anything, and of course it did for those others that I knew. At the end of it, when others had gone on to the law school, I found that my ominous feeling of wanting to be elsewhere from the start was relevant, relevant more so that the improbability of a university lacking electricity to process results was a barefaced admittance.

There comes a time in a young man’s life when he is tired and can no longer be his relentless self, when all hell is let loose on him in the harshness of failed things and redundant designations. Was it my lot to fail in a penultimate year, be set back two years in a strike and in an extra year, to hurt so much in a recessed economy and to wish for a better life in vain? It was God’s way of saving you from something, maybe sudden death at the law school or some other perishing disaster. We give God the glory. They weren’t as bothered about the delay as much as what it signified, relatives and mother and father and grandparents. We were that superstitious. Especially as I would believe that I had been undone by an evil eye at that moment when in freshman year, I had been called out by an instructor and he had declared me a distinction student. Maybe it was true that some power worked against human destiny when it shines brightest. Just as we thought that Iya Calabar, that leathery-skinned termagant with a head of kinky white hair that lived two houses away from my grandfather’s house was to be pointed at for the deaths of our neighbours: a pregnant woman and an auto mechanic, both of whom had died nights trailing themselves. Tragic. It had always been like that — in Africa, we like to blame other people for our own problems, and so I did making efforts to hold on to little victories, while I held my instructors to the blame of my haunt and a jinxed luck to my failures. Pathetic.

A year after I conquered school, I found myself as others did, unemployed and the third human in my grandfather’s house. He never told me that he knew young men like me who owned cars and real property. My grandmother just cooked every morning and summoned me from my bed of daily brood to attend to the grave business of early breakfast. Law school had grown into a realm where it could only be grasped by the well-heeled. Days had passed after the declaration of my conquest. But papers, even yellowed papers with a seal, a scrawled endorsement and a watermark that could only be read properly with mercury light are no guarantee for a duly engaged livelihood. I am done, but not yet. I know other young men in this plight stoned to the destruction of a violent living, nailed to the criticism of an idle nonchalance.

Every day I saw them. The Fajana brothers and their sister. Their house was a third from ours. Their father had been dispossessed of his existence by the activities of a sexually indiscriminate wife who was their mother and who later inherited his abode. She had died shortly after, probably from an overworked heart. The house was left to the devices of children that even in their young adulthood needed guidance. The girls came and left. Light-skinned ones, tall, short, dark-skinned, busty, wide-hipped females with a heightened sense of their sensuality marshalled by the Fajana girl who was an accomplished whore by the way — I had known her from her primary school days to sleep with boys in the bush on the way to her school. Now she didn’t know any school, only hotels, and sometimes sleazy ones, sometimes ones that pretended to have stars.

I realised how insatiably bored people become when they have more than what they want, when one day as I passed, she inspected me with the practiced eyes of a jaded slut. I found the existential fatalism these young men applied to their living appalling. For one of them, Dare, was a lawyer, schooled in England, but as the offspring of the rich must show some waywardness, holed up with his friends and drinking and smoking and savouring the young women who sometimes drifted in an acquired domesticity in their kitchen in large T-shirts and bared thighs keeping mute and looking strange to the prying eyes of an early visitor. I was the early visitor. Visiting out of curiosity.

They weren’t the only ones that posed a question mark to their perpetual occupation of space in a mass of living cells breathing the corrupt air of the country. There was Diyan, an antiquated oddity who had sojourned in America but was a living disappointment to anyone that nursed the thought of stowing away to the United States. He owned a small bed and breakfast inn in Ipoja Estate where we lived and that was about his only possession in the world save for his constant print shirt, ripped denim shorts and some large native necklace that he wore and that was pretentiously African. He was in the habit of staying drunk for the hours he stayed awake and would have the fridge at the inn always stocked full with beer. Coquettish. Coquettish are you girls. And he would sway to a distant tune in his head, smiling inanely at the girls that had struck a partnership with him — he appreciated them — for if they hadn’t partnered with him, he would have been out of business. At his place was the Fajana girl, a female pimp, whoremaster first rate, who coordinated the girls and had the profit running.

I had stayed six months at my grandfather’s house still imprisoned within the walls of my sanity and conjecturing on the problem of my constant insolvency. The poverty of my days and the bleakness of my contained nights ate at the vein of my educated consciousness. Violence is not far from the poor. At some point I began to see things the way they were — in rude shades of blue and black, in sepia hues of stark privation and nagging lack. A man I met once, his name he never told, but for his rumpled clothes — which looked like he slept in them — declared to a girl who sold newspapers at the front of the National Industrial Building — after cuddling her — that he thought the government hoped the workforce is reduced through starvation, by denying them the privilege of their seven months’ salary.

We give God the glory.

I wondered how he survived all those months — and even then — I didn’t have to wonder further, just as a man came out of the building and pointed at a small vial containing some traditional powdered herb in a displayed array of others, How much is that? It’s hundred naira sir. And the image of Rumpled Clothes scurrying over to him cured my perception of a government job. Such was the way things were becoming, government workers -no salaries. One leg here, one leg there.

Basic survival.

The other day, a sleek car had slowed by me, hip hop blaring in heavy thudding, and a head had popped out and I had been asked to be lifted. It had come to him easily — a materially fulfilled young man showing off his mobile capability. I had been wrapped in my thoughts and was jarred by this obscene picture of someone from my past, showing me what I should become. “Hey, Banjo. How far?” I didn’t want to know. I had seen it, and knew that this wasn’t the same Banjo. Secondary school mate. Bus driver’s son. I sat with him in front, and he was beaming his smile at me in an effusion of familiarity. A male character sat in the backseat. His toilsome smile alienated his eyes which were sunken in a clean-shaven skull and his facial features were marked by years of brutal savagery concealed in deliberate mystery. I had the feeling that this was the first step in self-betrayal, but I had to find out.

Violence is not far from the poor.

Today is my first hit. Days in fraudulent commune with disembodied persons venting their greed in virtual space while we fed on it. Spirits or man I wouldn’t know, but they were supposed to be white men. How would we know they weren’t demons? After all we communed with our bare feet on the shelled back of a tortoise. The charm for good luck. And if you think so, yes, the devil was our patron. A gang of boys — Banjo and his friends and I — who drank vodka and champagne and — maybe snorted the white-powdered crystalline thing — Girls? We partied with them and fucked them and used them — how else were we to define love if they came to spend our ill-acquired livelihood and as fellow revellers? I knew that this wouldn’t last for long — either we would be visited by irate spirits who felt that they couldn’t suffer, bringing us all the money while they were damned to hell or our greedy foreign victims led the men at the financial crimes to us.

Worry, Worry, Worry.

The devil was our patron.

Yetunde was my girlfriend. Her narrow, delicate face ending in a small, pointed chin would darken with concern as she worried about my activities which were becoming too destructive for my soul. Her voluptuary form, articulated in a well-built body and feline grace would turn away from me in disapprobation on the grounds of my constant adventures with the green bottles. I thought she loved me. But what did it matter? Girls were my play toys. Apolaustic? I could think of no less than twenty-five young females who have thrashed around the apartment with me during the weekends, from the bathroom to the kitchen to the living room and to the bedroom. Moaning. Legs wrapped around me. Vermilion tipped fingernails digging into my back. They all pretend to love me — God knows — to only get more out of my pocket, to only reach further into its linings.

But what did it matter?

Nothing.

God will judge you! God will judge all of us. What else would a young woman, after being gorged with exotic food bought by a young man guided by the appetites of a rudderless existence expect from him, if she were to follow him back home on a rainy, cold Friday night? Dance? I believe God doesn’t reason like twenty-something year old, silly young women.

I didn’t know this is what we came here to do.

God will judge you!

If the devil thought we had made a paradise for ourselves in his hell, and was displeased because that was not what was intended, he soon communicated his displeasure. Banjo. Car. Rainy night. These were the instruments of the devil in the development of an evil plot — victims, causal factors and circumstances. And so it happened that heavy clouds gathered and darkness fell the day we found Banjo’s body hunched over the steering wheel in his car that was parked in front of the apartment, engine running and air-conditioning on.

Pandemonium.

Banjo buried. A way of life is the product of experiences coded into existence. We know that a return is to unmake a life lived, to destroy an arrangement of many influences. The four young men and I were left with two choices — to live that one life of riotous revelment — of booze, of women and of freedom. And the uncertainty of leaving — into the arms of quickening poverty, to near wretchedness. We can only live once, and to indulge that one existence is the aim of any earnestly misguided soul. We chose the former, molded in our ways, stuck with our habits. I could hear it in time with the rhythm of my heartbeat. The clock. The ticking off, of our seconds, our minutes and of our hours piled into experiences from wayward ventures. I saw an anxious restlessness — afflicted of an impending inevitability — in the other young men’s mien even in their sometimes boisterous drunkenness. I felt it too. I mean, how could you not feel it, when life has been altered in a way peculiar to your habit, when something was distressingly out of order? It was the pestilential expectation of disaster. I stopped getting drunk, and I saw — for the first time — the horrid mess that was our lives. Yetunde was by now gone. She had left with some other moneyed, morally displaced, trap-door of a young man who she will pretentiously try to change.

But what did it matter?

Love is like that in hell.

The news. A flash of sound hurriedly dispensed by impatient men. Black-clad men. Uniformed men. Policemen. Who? Your friends. Banjo’s friends. They were driving too fast, apparently had alcohol flowing in their veins as blood. Something went wrong, maybe the driver thought the uncovered drainage was a car park, or it could have been that he slept off. But we know that they made the drainage their highway and the highway their drainage. Conclusion: no one made it. Was it funny? But I laughed. I laughed because it was over, at least for me. There was only one option left for me out of the two that had earlier been. Leave. But to where? Maybe to Ghana, at least some people said it was better there. Am I going to chart a new existence, new precepts, forget this past in which resides Banjo and the four friends and our demon white men?

But what did it matter?

Mark Lekan Lalude is a Nigerian writer. He is also a postgraduate student of law at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria. He has published his poems in the Saraba Magazine and in Ife Studies in the Arts and Languages Journal, 2011 edition.