stickman review

Sunday

by Walse Tyoden

I was dying to die.

It surely wasn’t the feeling I had when I left home in the morning, nor when I was by a nightmare prematurely woken, despite the sleeping pills, at the crack of dawn. Who, bar the suicidally determined, opens their eyes at sunrise intending they shall be closed, by the day’s closing, in death? Of death’s day, I am like everyone else: uncertain of its certainty. The only ill feeling I had exiting the house, rushing to enter my car, running as I was running late, was of breaching my punctuality once more. Kyeran again and that boyfriend of hers. What’s about him not a clergyman-dad to like? The dyed-beige Mohawk? The facial tattoos? The sagging pants? The all-in-your-face neck jewelery? The nicotine-cum-pot-blackened lips? Just the sort to whom I’d, sashaying thrillingly through the nave with Kyeran’s hand in mine, give thereof to wedded bliss.

I have been wrestling of late with the burliest of parental bugbears; filial recalcitrance, of the adolescent strain. Nothing but the enduring narrative; we had puberty to thank for Kyeran’s omniscience. To her, just now, all we do, her mother and I, is say stuff about stuff about which we know nothing.

She‘d snuck in at sunup to keep the Sabbath—a concession she occasionally felt obliged to grant us. Determined not to mar her day with an early altercation, Plangnan, with whom the enmity fared worse, left for church with the neighbors. I wanted to talk. Our run-ins had gone from never to rarely to sometimes to often to very often. Her inebriation shelved all talk.

The nightly nightlong outings were part of a set of lows that materialized following the exchange she’d heard between Plangnan and me, one not intended for her ears. Words have weight. These ones were obese. And jarring to hear. Nails on a chalkboard. Kyeran’s as Plangnan’s. Securing the administration of a slap, mother to daughter.

Kyeran had happened upon our dialogue, gleaning the lamentable part of her mother’s lament. “I’d much rather remain childless.” She was an only child, one we’d despaired of before she came, a score of years into our marriage.

“Why not find some secret way to kill me, mama, so you can revert to your accursed childlessness?” A slap-trigger response.

Hardly has any transmission not been unwieldy since that day, daughter to mother. Whenever they speak to each other, the words burgeon, the pounds piling apace. Till I intervene. Might they really be again, the halcyon days of lean discourses, skinny conversations, of eons ago? Kyeran became ever icy (and yet she’d not all her life lived in one of those sub-zero South Pole places).

Figured by now I’d seen it all. Called often to mediate, life and its troubles I’ve seen aplenty since my ordination. Emotionally distressing situations were a staple in my line of work. But none as heart-rending as Kyeran’s rebellion, none as adept in divesting all food of taste. Routinely I’m buffeted by blow-after-unforeseen-blow of her delinquency. Accelerating to church this Sunday, with the windows all wound down, I’m yet assaulted by the stale liquor reeking from the seats. She’d steal my car keys and keep the car out till the small hours. She’s driven it to near dereliction and me to near depression since going dissolute.

I’m well acquainted with how tortuous a path to navigate it can be for the pubescent impression, the self-consciousness that attends the physical attainment of womanhood, the more difficult in a world intent on sexualizing their femininity. As to Kyeran, I had by now no illusions as to a certain corporeal cession. Of a nine-month specter, in daily fear Plangnan lived. A fetish it becomes to apprehend telltale signs. It would grieve us with anguish immensely known if, discovering, she put a period to it. Plangnan’s dreams picture the eventuality. It has fled from me, and however much I try at night to catch it, I prove but a poor sprinter: sleep. I would lie on my bed one way. Then another. Right. Left. Right. Left. As a child’s head replying a wordless ‘no’ to an adult’s question. Sleepless are those who have issues. Most sleepless are those who have issues they would not leave at the Lord’s feet.

My sister said to me the other day, “You should have more often put your foot down,” as though it was mostly suspended in air. Was she right? Have I let too many ‘I can’ts' stand in for ‘I won’ts'? Is Kyeran the result of sparing many a childhood spanking? Poetic justice then, is it? We must, for not making her to, cry. Objectively speaking, I can say neither I nor Plangnan is blameworthy. The love/discipline dichotomy, as far as I can tell, was never hazy to all parties concerned. Kyeran is entirely of Kyeran’s making. She, after all, is in the bracket when most easily we unwisely choose—for one must over the other prevail—when confronted with the great binary of light and darkness.

Hadn’t I seen it coming? To be sure, there were intimations. My first inkling the very brassy demands on the living room LG, ever on her lips the rendition issuing forth, the speaky variant that fastens a word commonly to its human variant meant for the female canine.

My pace slows to a halt at ‘Question,’ an intersection so called because of a man so called, the city’s self-appointed traffic warden. ‘Question Intersection’ is the weekday scene of sometimes prolonged traffic tie-ups—the conveyances four abreast, six if you factor unruly drivers squeezing through the flanks—as cars, buses, trucks struggle for spatial superiority, the slothfulness of their locomotion a license for daredevil commercialism. Biscuits, homemade pastries, peanuts, sunglasses, yoghurt, bread, newspapers, confectionery, sacheted water, even canisters of gasoline, to slake thirsting vehicles dehydrated by the often hours-long crawl, dribble through impatient automobiles. You’d think these hawkers have another life with which to replace, should it be thus lost, the one they have. Before it became ‘Question Intersection,’ it used to be manned by the police. If the snarls now are bleeding lesions, the ones then were gangrenous ulcers.

Question is “Question” because he speaks only in questions, or not at all. “Can’t you follow instructions?” “Don’t you see the direction of my hands?” “Want me to smash (a handy, hardy staff always in hand) your windshield?” “Think I haven’t better things to do?” But he doesn’t, for everyday there he is at his post. Coming with dawn, going with dusk, with the predictable constancy of the pair, he could not be more dedicated with a fat salary. Folks say he lost his wife of a decade to a well-heeled usurper—her boss at a job he got for her—and with her his marbles. The traffic police had long relinquished him the spot. Some said he was on the payroll of the force. Mentally challenged, his superior dexterity would never get the uniform on his back.

But the day is Sunday and Question doesn’t work on Sundays. Probably because the roads see fewer motorists on Sundays. Jams do still occur—nothing remotely comparable though to the usual—such as this Sunday’s. A sachet of water appears before me. A voice accompanies it. “Na ya own.” In commercialese: mine for the taking; upon, of course, the parting with legal tender. Her eyes go to the insides of five fingers I lift to her, chandelier-like earrings dancing in the air. I’d pass. The merchandise is retracted.

I whistle over one of the newspaper boys. Four of his colleagues race him to me and crowd by my window, touting. Might as well make the most of a bad situation. Perhaps there’s news to use. I’ve ever fancied myself a polymath, the better to enrich my sermons. I screen the dailies, inspecting the newsworthiness of their headlines. On one in large red print: MASS FAILURE IN NATIONAL EXAM. The same headline in the same paper three years in a row—new news that is old news. Why has not the government done about this something? And I know the answer to the question as a question. How can it, with functionaries busy with the business of aggrandizement?

Told by a church member one evening, when my debit card expired and I needed some money, that banking services were offered at the National Assembly complex if I could but get inside, I made an attempt on spec. Seeing my surplice and, I surmise, in deference to the occupation it denotes, the soldier/sentry, curiously, lets me in. Not a question. It was there, looking for a place to park at the lot, that I was confronted by an unsightly showing of our legislators. The parking lot disrobed them, baring their nakedness. Alas, members of parliament, notorious for their mercenary lodestar, far removed from enactments of Third World prosperity, seemed possessed with gaining a motoriety—in all its steely variety—once in office: pricy four-wheelers. My mouth is momentarily left agape by this gleaming army of mechanical ostentation, a veritable hallmark of Nigeria’s democlassy—as if we elected them to, against one another, compete in brandishing this vehicular indulgence.

As though that wasn’t enough, on my way to the banking hall, walking past a widely known member of the House of Representatives, I overheard his overly audible phone-talk to a personal chauffeur, “Nanpet, where are you parked? By the way, in which car did we come?”

I was just as frightened for Nigeria’s future by an equivalent scene I once encountered at a market. Having a shoeshine, I had occupied myself surveying the market in its multiple incarnations. Like mission control on the day of a space launch, it was all activity, a panorama of animation. An urchin—six, seven years tops—comes close to where I’m seated bearing his wares: grimy towels that could pass for rags. Grubby his clothing, in spots torn and frayed. Doubtful his young hair, knotted, had made the acquaintance of a comb. He stands transfixed, looking at a window display of a mannequin of roughly his age; a breathless, inert contemporary; equal height, equal width, equal size. He takes in the shoes, pants, shirt, his visage slowly assuming a scowl. “So you think you’re some hotshot guy, eh? Think you’re better than me ‘cause you got on new clothes today?” Then, from his juvenile mouth, a string of obscenities, capped with blue words for his mother—as though she somewhere exists—and him: him, not it. As truly spoken as to a mute, no retort was expected, despite all absorption of the interlocutor’s rhetoric.

The age in his swearing belying any presumption of childhood make-believe, I did not know at which most to wonder. The quite incredulous certitude that his addressee, heedless of all appearances to the contrary, possessed the capacity to process his belligerent grudging, or the actuality of so callow a mind dispensing such profanity-riddled animus as can only the long-in-the-tooth expletive-inclined. Of one thing though I was sure: the prognosis for my country was scary. In that kid I saw it distinctly. The seething venom the have-nots have for the haves.

Finding nothing meriting a purchase, I hand back the newspapers. One of the boys chooses that moment to advertise one I hadn’t checked. His is a surreptitious marketing. He doesn’t offer it outright but teases with the front page, which he partly obscures, yet yielding enough for me to see a picture, one for arresting eyes—of anatomical exception; a sub-Saharan peculiarity perverted: the girth of a tree encircled by svelte arms, face tilted toward branches overhead, eyes sleepy, lips delicately parted as though to bite some invisible apple enticing, like that by which a trailblazing forebear damned us, long braids ending with the back, the briefest of knickers over her outsize, ultra-protuberant posterior. I bet you cannot look and not linger. Saartjie Baartman would roll in her grave. She looses the bet.

Noting her wager loss, he envelops her in the dailies and lopes off, tittering. I watch him catch up with his mates, the lot of them all Kyeran’s contemporaries: sixteen, seventeen-year-olds, Nigeria’s wasted future. The post-typewriter breed I call them—having no conception of that once-upon-a-time device that very audibly spawned words on paper; unforgiving with errors; demanding a push to the left whenever it exhausts its reach to the right. Seems today that was another lifetime, a time they hadn’t life. Some of this breed I was compelled to engage at a newsstand one day, the day being the twentieth anniversary of the annulled June 12 elections of 1993.

They were secondary school students on their way home after school who had clustered at the stand, not to vet news that directly affects, or could affect, them, but to dwell on the redundant; the girls on gossip and fashion magazines, the boys on football publications. And yet the headlines before them were speaking of an event that had life or death ramifications even for their unborn lives. As happens every year, every paper at the stand carried on its front page the item in question, and yet they carried on as though the headlines were invisible. Was this apathy due to government’s serial failures, or a bequest from parents? – their mothers enamored with tacky ‘nollywood’ indies and reruns of latino soaps; their fathers with the ‘Premier League,’ ‘Bundesliga,’ ‘Serie-A’ and ‘La liga.’ No matter, it mattered that we were constructing a nation peopled by males versed in nothing that is not football punditry—of leagues abroad—and females besotted only with objectifying themselves—of Kyeran’s league. Just the recipe we need for leapfrogging to the First World. Talk about the stunted, aspirational bending over backwards to stay stunted, aspirational.

“Does any of you know what happened on this day twenty years ago?”

“A presidential election, was it not? What is that, grandpa? That’s history.”

And history was to them just that: history, no more—tales of a period bygone, recollections of desiderata unfulfilled, opportunities missed, forever buried by time, exhumed only by retrospective forays of no substance. They belong to the present. The past has for them no meaning. They know not we are, learning nothing from it, apt to have it repeat itself, history. A fallibility not the preserve just of youth.

I make abortive attempts to educate them that if the past is history, then history is the last second before the present. Can one successfully distance oneself from something so always close? Don’t we all constantly make withdrawals from the bank of memory? Is it a place to where they never venture? Not for them its existential imperative? Must they not then live above regrets, nostalgic reviews, wistful reminiscences? They might as well be certified amnesiacs. How can life be lived thus, for living demands that one remembers? A quotidian necessity no less—the location of your mouth to feed, of your hair to comb, your bed to sleep…To never once forget, need never remember, is to be superhuman, to be like God.

It’s what bothers me with Generation-Today: their inability, nay refusal, to accept any reality that hasn’t the presence of the present. Their belief that a belief in the Creator is a belief that should not be believed. Yet nothing is ever made by nothing. It’s the cause of the curse that’s Kyeran’s dismaying course; unsurprising when, as with many of the lost tribe, divinity is dispossessed of its throne in the heart. What sorrow both as father and minister gnaws my heart on the account that she’s not saved, that she’s not availed herself of the salvaging bounty of Jesus’ deathless death. Heavens, why choose to suffer the sentence when the Judge has slammed the gavel and declared you guiltless of a crime whose due penalty has been borne on your behalf by another? A wonder about which I’d not for the first time wondered.

A blue sedan negotiates rudely into my pathway, cutting me off. Such insolence on our roads. And into my view comes an incongruous bumper sticker:

THE SON OF GOD GAVE HIS LIFE

THAT YOU MIGHT GET YOURS.

The words stare at me. A sigh leaves me for Kyeran. The gospel? A fruit could no farther from the tree fall. My left palm journeys from hairline to nape. I shake my head and hold a thumb and forefinger to my closed eyes, feeling their unwelcome wetness. The hooting from behind returns me to the intersection. We’d been green-lighted. The sticker guy had proceeded.

I finally arrive at the gladdening russet gates of the church. I made it…just in…

Time: 10. 51. 06: watching my predecessor’s admittance.

Time: 10. 51. 07: projected into the path of avian wayfarers.

Another day at the office for Boko Haram.

The dissipating smog shows I am a groggy quadruped. I see Panle, our long-time guard, his eyes unblinkingly betraying horrified astonishment. Mine promptly scan about. Where’s his body? The precincts yield upended vehicles; dismembered limbs; smouldering entrails; ghastly contortions; homicidal smells; lucky witnesses, hands on head, wailing; absent portions of the church’s façade; a crater the size of a mini-pool; Mangseh, our talented organist, two-thirds of him missing; and Mrs. Twasding, always garishly attired, her life a viscous crimsonness snaking blithely.

From the auditorium, the congregation—consecutively happy-clappy—jostling, pours out, a surging mass, like wildebeest on the Serengeti migration, as much to flee from death as to bring it to its bringer, making a beeline for me—colorful spermatozoa speeding toward a fateful egg.

Bloodied, I struggled up, heartened by the approach of concerned brethren. Until the inexplicable thump to my gut. It was Patrick, unfailing attendee of vespers, the gentlest forty-something you’d ever meet. Then the sole of Joe’s Reebok…Joe, ever the polite usher, in it. I spat blood, in it two teeth. Elder Gupiya, revered as church elder by all, reaches for me, smites me, so excruciating I marvel at this expertise. Vlong is next. Two slaps, impossibly painful. Everything is magnified in this vortex of agonizing incomprehension.

Out of the hubbub appears Daspan, our choirmaster, sanctity in high decibels ejaculating from the white and blue of his cassock. He pulls me to himself and strikes me viciously, relentlessly, each lethal descent asking in increasingly stentorian tones why I forgot the hood maketh not the monk; each a predatory beak pecking at the finite grains of my mortality. My heart beat like a drum thumped in dervish festivity, so bad I felt like it showed outwardly—you know, like you see in cartoons. Was this Kyeran’s fault? Maybe, maybe not.

Surviving had attracted a worse corollary. Death, cheated, piqued hence not a bit, ventured forthwith another bid, its intent trebled. Unbelievably missed in the first draft, I was up for the second. The choicest pick. The ordained tally, one shy, must add up.

Then it hit me, as did Patrick again, the heels of his hand to my face preternaturally stinging. An accomplice erroneously assumed: succeeding the suicide bomber’s was my Toyota. Flawlessly disguised by rubbledust, I was implausibly unrecognizable. They could see me, but could not see me. There’d doubtless be a good deal of penitents later. Had I my vestments on—awaiting unconcernedly in the sacristy—perhaps this would not be. Fatality decreed by acclamation, weaponized varieties came at me, my pleas muted by the melee. It was as though everyone craved a mark resembling the Nike logo alongside their monikers in the consequent rollcall for contributory assaults in braining the vicar. Mr. Dangkat, check; Nanle, check; Dr. Pusmut, check; Satmun, check…

I was dying to die, leave quickly this God-hating, sin-loving world. I hungered for my bite of this portion that’s the lot of the breath-bestowed to taste, taken once and for all by all. My apportioned exit made it easier to swallow, to hug a macabre imminence. If the maker of time was calling time on my time here, “No time like the present,” was I saying to his “Time’s up.”

Like a jack-in-the-box outing comes the voice of true faith, the bearer Dakwal, gesticulating animatedly. Among devout churchgoers most praiseworthy Dakwal ranks peerless.

“Enough… enough….this should not be. This isn’t right. We should not do this.” A fish in the net—hardly a pleasing testament to all my sweaty declamatory exertions, but very much so in the present circumstance. How sweet can be the fruits of our labors.

A remonstrance ensues; the oldest men, the women, joining in. Why grant him residency on earth who despises it? Celestial concupiscence beckons. Death to him. Thus only would he savor the coital honors of six dozen ethereal purveyors. Vociferous, bellicose, portentous. Communicants were laboring to say the same one thing: to hell with piety, like it can therein be found. The urge to spill blood seemed to run, like vampires, in their blood. Alas, their revulsion of the act made them as different from the perpetrator as six is to half a dozen. I thought, with all I taught, this lot was not the sort to do things of this sort. It’s not supposed to be this way. Like a flat tire.

“I don’t say we spare him, but let’s hand him over to the authorities,” cries Dakwal. It was not so much to spur them to clemency as to condemn the extrajudicial recourse.

“And what happens after that?” asks Mr Dangkat.

“He’ll be let off if conditions are met,” answers Vlong.

No untruth there. Justice suffers in this country where the law is slack with the lawless for the right price. Here, Themis, to being blindfolded, she prefers looking the other way. They’d rather take it in their hands than let the law take its course, this tub-thumping churchgoing scrum.

About me are saturnine faces, eyes blazing with devilment. Are these mouths opened, deafeningly advocating my murder, the very ones so used and closed, wafer on their tongues, by a rite I’ve with sacerdotal panache performed umpteen times to their solemn receipt? What happened? That universal condition of man, change? Concert violinists they were; spit-guzzling, head-butting rockers they are. How the faithful have proved faithful.

Are these zealous killers they of the ubiquitous nods, the ‘Amen’ refrains, the unflagging applause, the unstinting offertories, to whom most meticulously I’ve explicated the Writ?—love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those curse you. They listened. With the total intensity of a habitual flier to a flight attendant’s safety demonstration, apparently.

Being a Christian is being a follower of Christ, and Christ did not as much as voice rudeness, not a word in displeasure, when he was mocked, slapped, spat upon, beaten to a bloody mess and nailed to a 300-pound cross he’d struggled to bear to the scene of life’s most rewarding tragedy. And these done to one through whom the world exists, by those to whom he gave being. So much for walking in the master’s steps.

Of His life professors, not possessors, are they only. Like politicians. He may reside, not preside, in them. There I was working with the assumption they came for weekly refills of the canteens of their souls. At a bloody cost, I discovered the receptacles were leaky. Does not the act without give an unimpeachable reading of the state within? So Sunday was for them merely another observance in the litany of rituals life recommends? – school, work, church...The roots indeed had not grown southwards enough.

I look skyward. “Lord, please.” The sun, heartbroken, summoned the clouds to obscure its vision and the day, like the day, took on a darker hue, a dusky grayness. It was beginning to enter my mind decisively, the notion—hideous, brawny, coercive, tenacious, straining against my mindgates—that I would this day breathe my last. My efforts, with every blow, were failing to keep it out. Coming out of this alive? I wasn’t, anymore than you can laugh from tickling yourself.

I can see the light presently turned off, the knob by the hands of my very flock twisted to the left; can with surreal eyes see rapidly gained on me—nothing to do in the way of outdistancing—homilies past of mine of life unraveling in an instant. One minute you think you have it plentifully, the next you’re in extremis. So goes the path sometimes of the ineluctable arrival of departure. Best to submit to it when it comes; let it run its course. As that chilling sensation that hits the brain upon an overly cold swig. I so longed to hear death’s beckoning call when Jiba bludgeoned with the nail-studded club. I knew at that moment my end had come; today I meet my Maker. I was going to die, as surely as the devil does no good deed.

It was an eternity of a quarter of an hour. Then, with them, I was gawking at me.

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