It wasn’t there.
When Victor Akan cut through the small passage just behind his rented apartment and greeted his neighbours in a bright tone underscored by a neutral face, he never imagined his broken-headlamp, paint-bleached, cracked-windscreen, always-breaking-down Audi 80 would be gone-gone.
The only thing left of the car was a wet tyre trail and the steering wheel, which he picked and turned left and right as though navigating through the smoky, blue morning haze.
Victor stood still for the longest as if the events leading up to the car’s disappearance would reveal themselves in an astral projection like in some futuristic crime thriller. He picked an oddly smooth gravel in the centre of a triple Venn diagram. After studying its surface, Victor tossed it into his pocket and lumbered to his rented apartment.
He didn’t wince after stepping on a nail and impaling his toe. Victor felt the pain as a mere itch, an echo of pain. Shoulders slouched, he prodded back home, keeping the news to himself.
Blessing, his neighbour, threw hot water from filtered parboiled rice on the ground just as Victor rounded the bend. The scalding-hot liquid splashed on Victor—who didn’t flinch—and rinsed off the blood trickling from his shanked, bleeding toe. The bowl dropped from Blessing’s hand and clattered to the ground. She raised her hands to her mouth, unable to settle between shock or an apology, to comment on the hot water soaking through Victor’s clothes or the nail poking through his toe.
Eno caught a glimpse of her husband’s gravel-shaped head through the half-parted curtains still draped over her closed fist.
The baby had finally dozed off after rationing insomnia to everyone the previous night, forcing her parents to writhe awake like logs turning into vipers.
Eno dashed outside to urge Victor to open the gate quietly, but he jangled the iron, clanged the bolts, and swung the gate back on the frame with enough force to tear it off its hinges.
The baby’s peal broke the calm and the haze afforded by the morning fog. Eno raised her eyes to the ceiling and threw her poisoned gaze at her stupid, useless husband.
Victor slammed the steering wheel against the butterfly sewing machine that sat in the right corner. He stomped to the bathroom cursing heaven and hell, his parents, the government, his wife, but not his precious, little daughter.
—
The previous day, after having spent ten thousand naira—all the money he’d made that morning from driving—to retrieve his impounded vehicle, Victor came home to an extra pair of oddly familiar shoes on his often-decluttered veranda.
Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have returned home so early. Hard worker that he was, he would’ve stayed patrolling the streets of Calabar till late in the evening when he would come home with suya or Agege bread for his doting, beautiful wife who was at home all day taking care of their child, whom a neighbour once called an eyesore.
All the doors of all the other houses in the compound were shut. The initial bustle of the early morning had dwindled, and now, everyone had dispersed to where money dragged their aching muscles and parched throats as the midday sun split the wispy clouds to reveal a lapis lazuli sky.
The thump of a struck ball resounded through the slanted louvres from Victor’s house. He walked up to the door and found it slightly ajar. Pushing it open, he furrowed his brow at a football match blaring on the TV, its volume at the highest.
The commentator’s smoky voice filled the parlour like incense.
Victor picked the remote and pushed a button down, sucking out the depth from the commentator’s voice until a silent whimper crept into the parlour. He listened for a while before tentatively raising the TV’s volume. Victor parted his lips to voice his wife’s name, but he tiptoed towards the bedroom and peeped through the slightly billowing floral print curtain.
His heart sank to the floor. The view from the slanted curtain knocked out the air from his lungs. Throwing the curtains back, Victor leapt from his slightly crouched position and grabbed Gideon, the plumber who sold toilet seats and pipes just out front, by his slacked trousers.
Gideon unmounted Eno and attempted to fumble his belt into the buckle, but Victor drove his shoulder into Gideon’s stomach and took him down. They shuffled in the tight space, bumping their heads against the bed’s legs, and grunting as they squeezed their palms around each other’s necks.
Gideon punched Victor in the face; Victor scratched the bastard’s eye. Gideon managed to writhe out of Victor’s death grasp and rattled across several lanes while Victor gave chase.
A few minutes later, Victor slunk into the living room, heaving and puffing. His chest and shoulders expanded and compressed like an accordion played by an amateur.
He stomped to the bedroom.
“In our house! In front of our daughter! Chai!”
“My love, forgive me.”
“Eh eh, better call me Victor. Who’s your love? Who’s your love?” His voice broke.
“Who is your love?” He fought the tears brimming in his eyes.
Silence bridged the intervals between their heavy breaths.
Eno slowly folded her wrapper over her chest.
Victor slumped into the sofa and gazed at the TV, but his eyes were focused inwards on imaginings he couldn’t project. His pulse leapt and dipped as if plotted by an electrocardiograph going haywire.
He sat still while Eno quivered in the corner next to him. She knelt to beg.
He looked into her eyes and knelt next to her.
Holding her hands in his, he asked, “How could you?” in a voice so tender, a voice so levelled you could feel the summit it was trying not to reach.
The woman was too stunned to speak. She scrambled her words and tried an incorrigible lie, but Victor, undeterred by her ramble, cut through the charade.
“How many times? I just dey waka dey suffer for wetin?”
The commentator on TV parroted on, filling the silence that followed.
“How many times? How long, ehn, how long has it been going on? So, I’m just there, sweating under the sun to bring money for another man to be sweating on top of my wife? Chai!”
Victor let go of her hand.
“How long!?”
“This is the first time, I promise. My love, it has never happened before.”
“Liar! How long? So, I’m just there driving up and down, here and there, collecting insults, and you’re here doing all this. Everyday. Is this why you always call me to ask when I’m coming back?”
“No. It was a mistake. It was a mistake,” her voice cracked. Tears sluiced down her burning cheeks.
Victor looked past his wife to the girl in the cradle. A wicked thought cut across his mind. His heart leapt in his chest and lost its rhythm. He’d heard stories of men whose children weren’t theirs, how some of them had died from heart attacks, how families dissolved into strangers held together by a broken illusion of unison, of a Venn diagram split into random circles with no single overlap.
He tried to declutter his mind but couldn’t shake the ugly thought out of focus.
“How am I even sure that is my daughter?” He gestured at Idong wriggling in her cot.
“What kind of nonsense question is that?”
Eno’s agitation emboldened Victor.
“Ehne, nau. How am I sure?”
“Say anything, but that. Don’t say that, don’t say that at all. This is the first time I—”
“I don’t want to hear it. Don’t even. In fact, tomorrow we’re going to the hospital. We’ll do a DNA test.”
Eno broke into a callous laughter.
“Yes o! Let us go. Let us go. We can even go now if you want.”
Victor could see the fire in her eyes. He wanted to believe her, but to do so he had to call her bluff.
“Tomorrow, we’re going!”
“No problem.”
“And I swear to God, if I find out that you’re lying, tomorrow-tomorrow, you’re going back to your father’s house.”
Victor couldn’t believe what he’d just uttered. To shake off any lingering doubt about the decision, he stood up, scooped the car keys, and drove out.
The cool air dried off the sweat from his temple. Elbow leaned against the car’s door and stroking his chin, Victor ran the events over and over in his mind, to both convince himself of its reality and to dilute the pain, just like how repeating a song too many times invites an inescapable nausea.
While dropping off a passenger at the Marian walkover, task force members, greasy men with afternoon sweat caked into their cassava-starched shirts, swarmed his vehicle. They smelled like the losing team after a football match; their foul breath could kill a fly or light a cigarette.
One of them, wearing a striped shirt, fished for the key in the ignition, his other hand grappling with the steering.
The frustration of having just caught his neighbour in bed with his wife, of having spent ten thousand naira to have his car released earlier in the morning, and now, these greasy men trying to swindle him of his hard-earned money brought Victor to the end of a rope.
Victor let go of the steering. He popped his seatbelt and grabbed the task force man by the neck and squeezed like he was wringing wet linen, like utong unen. The other task force members yelled and cursed in Efik; they left the car and sprung on Victor.
“Kpong enye, or aya mkpa mfin, mmbo fi, kpong enye, Victor kpong.” Leave him alone, or you’ll die today.
They jerked Victor’s firm arm, which refused to budge. Others punched Victor’s head now ribbed with veins, but he didn’t budge until a higher-up in the Task Force came and quelled the altercation by whispering in Efik and taking Victor under his shoulder to the foot of the walkover.
—
Now, today, when they were supposed to go for the DNA test, his car was stolen.
He sat on a low stool and stared at his wife. Clenching his right fist, he counted his knuckles with his other palm. If he could yank out his eye and hurl it at her like a golf ball, he would. He sufficed to rest his chin on his interlocked fingers as a thought began to form in his head.
Maybe this was a sign, God’s way of telling him to run. What if tomorrow, early in the morning, before the sun yawns over the horizon, he eloped with the ₦5,000 in the drawer and never returned? He could run to a new city where he could drape a new name over himself, learn a new language, get a different job, and never look back.
He’d probably fund himself through a degree in civil engineering and settle down with a new family. If his daughter wasn’t his daughter, then that’d mean his ‘wife’ wasn’t his wife. It was either that or commit suicide or murder—he could barely suppress the rage coursing through his veins and his mind attacking itself.
How could he have been so blindsided? Now, his car is gone! How much bad news before a heart finally breaks? Why was life singling him out for all this trauma?
He would’ve just sent her out if he wasn’t a man easily crippled by shame. Even when Blessing asked why he’d been chasing Gideon earlier in the day, he mumbled something unintelligible and walked past her. He liked to keep things contained: wine in a bottle, broomsticks in a bundle, a neck in a squeeze. If he was a sculptor, he would be able to carve the entire Marian market on a mustard seed.
He drooped his head, stood up, and splashed cold water on his itchy face.
“Dah!” he yelled, waking the baby Eno had managed to lull back to sleep again.
She yelled at him to keep it down, and he screamed back that the car had been stolen. She heaved and dropped her hands to her side. Slowly, the baby fell asleep again.
Victor, too busy making inquiries about the stolen vehicle and the whereabouts of Gideon, couldn’t find the time to head to the hospital. He hadn’t spoken to Eno all day. When he returned, he didn’t eat the eba and banga soup she placed on the table for him. That night, mother and daughter snuggled in bed, while Victor slept on the sofa in the parlour.
While shrivelled in the parlour, the size of a baby’s clenched fist, a loud bang roused Victor from sleep. The second bang led a heavy boot through his front door that tore it off its hinges.
Three men in balaclavas trooped into the yawning house.
One lowered his gun at Victor while the other two went into the room and dragged Idong and Eno into the parlour. One held a knife to the child’s throat, another held a machete to Eno’s neck, and Victor stared down the nozzle of the gun pointed at him by the last robber.
Victor’s arms fell to his side like steamed kelp; the weight of a dozen misfortunes in rapid succession tipped his hemispheres. Feeling every little pain chip back his already receding hairline, he chuckled—a deep, hollow laugh that stunned everybody, including his infant daughter.
Victor guided the robber’s gun down to his chest and dared the towering man to pull the trigger. Death would carve a much-needed exit in his wounding life which is as empty as an anemone’s shell. The vein on Victor’s forehead bulged like a straw. He grew spirited and gestured and barked and sent spittle flying in all directions.
Standing behind him, Eno begged and wailed, her face a web of snot and tears. She threw her hands back as Victor tackled the robber. They grunted as they tussled on the carpet.
Pow!
A shot rang out.
A blackhole of silence sucked every decibel of sound from the room.
Victor felt the vibration of the gun going off right in front of him and the torque of a bullet tearing through his tissues. He reached for the hole in his chest, but he felt nothing—no pain, no spiralling ache. Alerted by a cough behind him, he looked back to find his wife draped on the floor, blood dripping from her forehead like a bruised turnip.
The robber who had fired the gun stared at them with his eyes wide open before he rushed to Eno and shook her, pushing Victor aside. Victor leapt on the man and clawed his face, pulling the mask off to reveal a familiar face.
The robbers booted Victor in the face and pulled their exposed leader—who tugged the mask back over his face—out from under him. They shuffled out of the house like ninjas.
If Victor’s reflection could form in his wife’s clotting blood, it’d have shown his face snagged and crinkled like a funeral kerchief.
He yelled for the neighbours as he sat on the floor shaking his numb wife. Victor pressed his forehead to Eno’s. His tears fell into the tears in her eyes and trickled towards her ear.
—
All through the morning, as he sat in his bathroom rolling his wife’s ring, which he’d now passed a string through, Victor cried. Life didn’t have to be this hard.
How did the bullet pass through him? What sorcery could explain this madness? Isn’t the comfort of a difficult life the option of suicide when one’s self-help philosophy no longer suffices as a driving force? Wasn’t that the consolation prize for those cheated out of intelligence, beauty, wit, opulence, tax evasion and generational wealth?
By morning, the hole in Victor’s chest had knitted scar tissue over itself. When he narrated the story to the crowd who surrounded the apartment, they thought him a witch who had used his wife for rituals. Blessing tried to explain the hot water and nail scenario to them, but a mob has no ears.
It didn’t help that when they moved Eno, her blood had trickled into a rectangle that housed three intersecting circles. The bloody Venn diagram drew an impassioned uproar from the crowd.
A ragged teen with a chipped tooth rolled two greasy tyres towards Victor, who’d already been doused with black-market fuel by a man in caftan. The mob broke into a deafening chant.
A man in a wife-beater set a petrol-wet rug ablaze and smashed the glass on the pavement where Victor lay.
The fire spread all over him.
In no time, Victor was a licked kerosene mango as flames curled from his body in all directions. The sweltering mob parted for him as he broke into a frantic run terminated by a lurking man who struck the back of Victor’s head with a long piece of wood.
Victor teetered into the gutter and sloshed through the spirogyra-polluted water before the dizziness forced his eyes shut. His head hit the water and never came back up. Fragmented words swarmed in his head, echoes of curses not sharp enough to break through the dense, black water. From fire to water; he went from burning to drowning.
The image of his wife and daughter flickered in his fogged mind.
The mob took hours to disperse. Unlike in some cases where a police van would screech onto the scene and interrupt the ruckus, no such thing happened. The mob was victorious, even though most people involved in the carnage had no clue why they were remitting violence or the crime of its recipient, justice was served. Jungle justice.
Still stuck in the gutter, Victor’s lungs held more water than oxygen.
Hours later, Victor’s brother, Micheal, and Eno’s sisters, Faith and Marigold, came to the house and took Idong from the landlord, who had kept the baby safe from the carnage.
When night fell, Gideon and a couple of street boys huddled in a rickety pickup truck and drove to the junction to retrieve Victor’s body from the gutter. They groped the greasy, murky water with a long bamboo only to turn over charred flesh glued to worsted wool. They searched the entire length of the gutter.
He wasn’t there.
Once the mob dispersed and the corn sellers set up their rusted grills and coal, Victor swam through the spirogyra-coated water without once coming up for air. As evening dawned and moonlight filtered through the clouds, Victor roused to his feet, having reached where the thin gravel-studded gutter broke into a wider one. He crawled into an empty street at Parliamentary Extension where he spotted an abandoned building into which he stumbled.
Each treacherous step he took forward set off an odd rattling sound in the sealed hole in his chest where the bullet had passed through.
What could be making that sound? The bullet? No, it had passed through him. How had his body not collapsed into the hole in his chest? His charred flesh shed itself as he picked at it, turning from hot pink to brown, while the flesh on his tummy peeled back to reveal keloids that slowly caked back into unblemished skin.
How could Eno die just the day before he wanted to run, the day they were supposed to do a DNA test, even though he couldn’t actually afford one? How had the bullet blasted through his back? So, Gideon was behind this? Was he also the one who stole his car? Why wasn’t the mob able to kill him? Who sparked the first rumour? Where was his wife’s body? Questions cloned themselves in his head and branched into a myriad of subquestions. One could imagine his synapses clogged by question marks wriggling like crochet hooks tangling his dendrites.
Victor looked to the corner of the house where a coir rope looped over itself like a brown tree snake. He dragged himself there and tested the weight of the rope with a small toss. He whistled as he hurled the free end of the rope over a fan’s hook and secured it with a double knot. Victor levelled a block under the fan, stood on it, and looped the free end of a rope into a lasso.
He fished out his wife’s ring, which had somehow managed to sink into his chest and kissed the cold metal. He rubbed his palms together and fastened the rope around his neck. He confirmed the knot with a slight tug and kicked away the cinderblock.
The rope constricted his oesophagus and dented his jugular. He struggled for air and flailed his legs as his face swelled like a puffer fish.
Two hours passed, then three hours, then four. Instead of flies buzzing on his corpse, Victor woke up to find himself in a delirium, still suspended from the ceiling fan, with blood in his eye, a steering wheel in his hand, and a hood over his head.
He was now somehow in his stolen Audi 80, suspended above the ground by the ceiling fan. On display in both side mirrors were memories of him and his wife in their happy days when their love was thicker than that seemingly impenetrable smoky blue morning’s haze, followed by a scene of him kissing a passenger a few months prior, while his wife stared from behind the windscreen, followed by a scene of Eno kneeling next to a river and crying and returning to a deadpan face on cue as directed by a high priestess dressed in red, followed by a scene where the priestess guided Eno to smash eggs and two olive oil bottles on a gravel in the centre of a Venn diagram, followed by a scene where Eno picked the gravel and walked away.
In the rearview mirror, his wife’s wedding ring, the car’s steering wheel and the noose around his neck formed a Venn diagram that burst into flames. The rope snapped just as the image burned into his memory.
He lay on the floor of the building, heaving and ugly-crying. He clasped one hand on his thumping chest and groped for the gravel, so he could throw it and try again. He swept his fingers on the floor and crawled all over.
It wasn’t there.
Abasi-maenyin Esebre is an Oron storyteller who centres Calabar in his writings. His essay Grief: Its Invisible Gerund was shortlisted for the continental non-fiction competition organised by Agbowo Magazine and won the 2023 SEVHAGE PRIZE for non-fiction. His essay Call Me By My Name has been published in AFREADA. He’s on Twitter @esebre20813 and Instagram @Abasimaenyin
