By Demilade Oladapo
Someone is cackling in the shower and there’s a racket from the filling station on the next block. While these sounds prickle, they are not so much why Tijani curls up, disturbed, in bed. He hears some buzzing from a choir of invisible insects scattered around different fixations. They buzz about the weight he carries within, echo fleetingly about mountains and drifting angels, taunt him about his former love interest, the girl Anita who walks with a dagger in her purse. Altogether things stir as though determined hoverflies are in his head concerted, making renditions that coincide so that he has hands clasped over his ears to shut out noise, an intrusive instinct, a feeling of dread maybe, or a risqué arousal, a sense of failure.
Perhaps, in a more precise sense, what Tijani is trying to shut out is the thing from his iPhone X clawing at him since he made a post on Twitter only to find twenty minutes afterwards that he’d made a grave oversight, a mere typo that is. Such an important tweet, which he must now delete. If he reposts it, maybe he’ll get some engagement again. No, he pushes his phone aside, calls himself stupid out loud. Worried his flatmate may have heard, he follows his statement up with, Cockroach, stupid cockroach, hate cockroaches.
His eyes filter about the room for the source of his angst; they scan the white walls infested in certain parts with leprous watermarks, the bookshelf by the window. He tracks the source down, it seems, to a buzz within—the dead weight of worry in his chest. His boss is yet to pay for the fourth month running. Yes, this is why I’m agitated and panicky and why my heart feels heavy, he says to himself. No sooner does he begin to think of a way to suppress the heaviness than yet another rendition forms: he perceives Anita hurling words at him.
Anita was compelled by the series of posts online he occasionally made about women. It started, he thinks, from his post earlier in the year that reflected his discomfort with having conversations with the types who bare their cleavages; making and keeping eye contact, say during a conversation, becomes quite difficult, he mentioned in the post. Anita had not said anything then. Not even when he talked about his one experience at the movies and the empty cinema save for a pretty girl that sat a few rows from him, and how despite the inner nudge to talk to her and ask for her number, he didn’t, hence “dodging a bullet” since, by his diagnosis, she looked expensive, a little like the high maintenance, not to say materialistic, type.
On another occasion, however, Anita invaded his DM after he made a quite spirited rant about GenZ ladies, the point of which was why this generation, his generation of women, had become, even more so than their predecessors, notoriously attached to desiring men’s money as though it were their natural right. It irked him; the rapidly increasing population of young women whose romantic fancy, and perhaps primary life objective, was to be associated with a man who’d cater for all their financial needs. They flaunted this fancy on social media as though it were a flex. So, he was moved to addressing this supposed social malaise, and Anita finally just couldn’t tolerate his obtuseness, as she claimed, anymore.
The paragraphs after paragraphs of text, the voice notes, from Anita stabbed him, and continued to, for weeks.
You’re a fool, you know that? These derogatory sentiments you’ve been sharing for some time now. How much have you spent, how much do you even have, for you to think you’ve been spending on women? I should have known that you’d become this misogynistic shit like the rest of your kind. All this time you’ve been asking me out. I’m glad as of now to be rid of your hounding and harassment. You incel, creep, manipulator. No wonder no girl wants to be with you.
He got blocked.
For some weeks he didn’t blame her. He instead felt guilty, burdened with silent suspicions of Anita’s claim of harassment being true. But then a somewhat indignant awareness began to form in him. He would remember how quite unstable a character he had noticed Anita to be. During their last exchange of texts right before she blocked him, he had said: You’re becoming an angry feminist and I’m worried for you, that you may be, I don’t know, maybe losing your mind. He had not really meant any offence by that, or so he thinks. You’re stupid, Anita had retorted: Are you implying I’m crazy? I’m not crazy! Not really, at least not yet.
He had wondered why she added that last bit. Later, he felt that, in a way, it supported his speculations. First, it hinted at a strangeness about her that he’d previously overlooked. Second, it suggested by some stretch that her transition into angry feminism (which her Twitter bio now spelt out) might be a trauma response. Third, it implied she was somewhat batty and was aware of this.
In bygone times when they still related well and shared things, he chanced upon a dagger in her purse, and she explained that it was for her own protection (he didn’t bother asking against whom). She told him faintly about how her father mistreated her mother and did things to her as well. She hadn’t exactly spelt out the details, but Tijani put two and two together.
Every now and then when he and his flatmate Bright talk about girls, he references the case of Anita with some dismay. It’s time you forgot that witch. Your post that night wasn’t offensive. All that talk about harassment is just dust, I’m telling you.
Bright’s words, though not the source of his eventual indignation, quietly encourage it.
He’s turning on his bed still, the footfalls of Anita’s words echoing through the packed courtroom of his mind. His head aches.
You’re wrong about me, he says, his eyes again fixed at the leprous corner of the wall. His words are whispery: It’s the trauma you’ve suffered from your dad’s abuse, it’s what makes you think every other man is just the same, that they’d steal your dignity every chance they get. There’s a solemn quality in his tone now, tinged with self-importance: even the ones like me, whose only crime was making repeated overtures to you, like asking you out on a date and asking again. Then a quality of righteous pity, a growing irritation: This trauma is why you carry a dagger in your purse all the time; it’s why you see things that are many times not there, like imagining I’ve suddenly become a predator of sorts.
In the next set of minutes, he, too, will begin to see what’s not there: a shimmering on the surface of his phone bearing a credit alert from his boss. But when he picks up his phone, he finds a missed call from his father. The last time, a couple of weeks ago, when he talked to the man, he had just read Driven to Distraction in a bid to understand himself more, why there often was a competition in his head, particles jostling for an audience, why he often felt grey and overwhelmed, why…
He drifts back to the phone conversation.
Daddy, he says on the call with an assuredness akin to one who’d just made a relevant discovery. Many things about you, about me, they now make sense to me…I read this book… I’m beginning to think I have this thing called…He names it…Think I got it from you, have you ever heard of the condition?
No, I don’t think so, what’s—
I think it’s the cause of the restlessness, the depression.
There is a short pause. Well, his father says slowly, in my case, I think the problem has been you know, not having money, poverty. That has been the main reason, for the depression.
His father’s words—a record of what has been—start to fade, dissolving against his ears now. Yes, Tijani thinks, as he notices a wall gecko making its passage under his study desk. The depression, your acts of delusions too, he says of his father who also, of course, knows a lot about the ministry of imagining things, ghosts of the unlikely. He calls Tijani every other day to say, by some working of fate, the fraudster would return to his electronics store someday, they’d cross paths again and the man would relinquish the 250k he took from him six months ago. I just know it, as God lives, his father tends to say on the calls.
Oh, shut up, Tijani says still curled upon the mattress. I just want some quiet.
On cue, a dragonfly lifts from the choir of insects and pitches a prospect into Tijani’s mind, so that he remembers the event from days prior. He recalls church, sees his pastor teaching on the symbolism of mountain depictions. The scriptures want us to think in mountains, the suited man says, quoting different verses. One sticks: Genesis 28:10 to 22. Jacob dreams of the elevated place, God’s dwelling. Heaven, here on earth.
The church roars Amen, following the pastor’s Hallelujah somebody.
Heaven is not far, he says. It’s here, praise Jesus! You only need to look, see and dialogue with the spirit, and minister against every terrorism of the mind and transcend your worries, look beyond the physical, transcend your worries, yes!
The congregation begins to explode, bawling in diverse tongues having keyed into the projected idea, allowing it to arouse their souls.
The perception of the church service lasts a short while before slowly declining as Tijani now attempts a parallel, however not entirely certain of its correlations. He breathes his thoughts into the thick air of the room: is that what his father does on the call whenever he talks about the event from months prior, dialogue with the spirit? Is this pattern, hoping of a kind, healthy for the heart of any man under such circumstances? By snapping at him, has Anita tried in some way to minister, counterattack a terrorism akin to what she’d for long been exposed to? Is her action, from that night, well-informed and totally justified or merely some form of spurious defence?
A sudden howl returns, interrupting Tijani’s conjectures. Bright does this every day under the shower, cackling. He is having a monologue in the cubicle. He comes out of the bath and says, I’ll be the best filmmaker in the world, you all just wait.
A tall dream, Tijani thinks. But unlike him, Bright actively sees and films his mountain, and has faith he’ll climb it.
The sulphuric stiffness in Tijani’s head begins slowly to waver, he is trying to imagine his own bigger picture, a mountain, perhaps, with angels and all. But he senses from the rear the imminent buzzing from a doomsaying tsetse fly, so he pulls himself out of bed, a ball of sunray rests over his face, doesn’t bear any scalding sensation, instead pats him with a softness. Tijani decides to take a walk under the full, tender glow. Some vitamin D may do him some good.
He has an inkling of what the imminent buzzing—which he doesn’t want to indulge—will be: another speculation, the founding of a theory that all around him are a people (Anita, his father, the church, Bright, too, perhaps) going insane, a people who have grown accustomed to the gospel of illusions, who like himself need therapy, whose redemption lie in the exorcism of their fixations, their tangled mess and trauma. He thinkshe is projecting and the only one who needs saving is himself. Maybe everyone else sees things the way they ought to, and he sees contrarily.
He sails out into the sun, and the vast views torch him with some freshness. There’s some mystical quality about the air today, he thinks after walking half a mile, and the colour of the skies too, and the decorum of traffic, the general outlook embodied by faces unperturbed. He allows his nostrils absorb the fragrance of the open space. He trudges along pavements, turns left into an eloquent street where he catches the sight of two fellows sharing the same facial qualities and physique. A tenderness spills in his head. There’s some music now around him, the clamour by the choir of insects have subsided and in their wake angels with soft violins are beginning to sprout. He sees a beautiful lady in a crop top. On another day he may have felt a stirring, but currently, he can only smile and imagine how graceful she looks. The feeling of tightness is giving to a therapeutic freedom, steadily he feels limitless in some inexplicable way. There’s a woman selling roasted maize by the roadside. They make an exchange. She drops a naira note in her purse while he unwraps the maize and bites. He is in some relief, a progressive delight, vague and distinct at once. He walks two miles further when he discovers another pair of identical faces, this time two little girls of the same height trailed by an older man holding a belt with a German shepherd strapped to it.
He perceives a whiff of joy from the whirring trees. Vehicles appear to expel an incense of invisible grey in place of smoke. He wants to continue walking, to indulge without stop this little act of peace. Right and left of him are constructions in fading and unfading paint. He takes a left and another left as the path before him unfolds, under the warm sunlight, downward into silence. He keeps walking till perhaps the silence surrounds and swallows him whole, so that every dead-weight theory of angst inside him can give to the music of stillness, so that he too can wake every morning and cackle in the shower and, on Sundays in church, spring up from his chair, surrendering all of his faculties to the tender affair of elevation.
