Nosa was satisfied. We approached the T-junction that led into Ozumba Mbadiwe. At our right was the 1004 estate recently emptied of civil servants in keeping with ‘monetization’. All civil servants were to rent their own houses or, if they earned enough, to use the excess money to buy back places where they had spent all their lives from the Federal Government. It was getting light out and this junction would soon be a bottle neck. I shivered. Maybe it was the air conditioner. No, I was sweating. Then I heard it: a rumbling that began on the left side of my tummy and travelled down to tie itself up in a painful knot at the pit of my stomach. Oh no.

     “Shit dey catch me,” I told Nosa. The idiot laughed. He continued laughing as he took the turn into the dual carriage avenue named for one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers. I really had to go. Aunty Alero and her obsession with food. I knew I should not have had that last slice of pizza the night before. I let out a ‘silent but deadly’. A very stinky fart.

     “Haba, Eghosa,” Nosa screamed. He wound down both windows, ignoring the fact that it was drizzling and we would get wet. The lagoon breeze rushed into the car. The fresh air against my face felt good and the feeling passed but I knew it would return.

     I had other documents in the fat envelope: my two hundred page manuscript for what I hoped would be my bestseller; a collection of my unpublished short stories; a letter from my mom, a Chief Magistrate with the Delta State Judiciary; my birth certificate; and my license to practice medicine. Basically I had packed anything with my name on it. I did not want to be stranded on any claim I made to the interviewing officer.

#

     Nosa dropped me off at the Walter Carrington address with only the slightest of hiccups - I had to run after his car shouting for him to stop because I forgot to drop my phone and lighter and cigarettes with him. They were not allowed in the Embassy. Who knew what weapon of mass destruction these resourceful Nigerians could fashion from those items? I let out a burp as I looked around me. The indigestion was starting to act up again. I had run after Nosa all the way to the British side of Walter Carrington. Walking back, I noted the embassy names. Italy. India. Malaysia. Sweden. The buildings all faced the scenic lagoon, which from this distance looked healthy and swimmable. Everybody knew better. I noticed, through the wire mesh fence that cut off the crescent from the lagoon, oyibos of various shapes, tones and sizes getting off speedboats to resume at their different embassies.

     “Brotha. Brotha,” someone called out. I felt a tug on my sleeve and turned. I faced the tobacco-stained smile of one of the hustlers who resumed at Walter Carrington each morning. “You don staple your passport photo?” he asked, waving a stapler at me. I had not. I parted with one hundred Naira for two well-placed staples on either side of my white-background, ears-visible, face-forward, 5cm x 5cm photo. Nice, I thought. Who knew area-boys could be so helpful. It was seven a.m.

     I spent forty minutes on the queue. Not my fault. I had asked the chap manning the crossbar which of the two queues non-immigrant applicants joined and he pointed the one on the left out to me. It was when I had gotten to the head that I noticed that everyone around me had big x-ray jackets. I, a doctor, should have noticed earlier. What I thought were envelopes loaded with as much information as mine were in fact just part of a medical for those who had won the visa lottery that the kind Americans threw at the rest of the world each year. I had to rejoin the next queue, the one on the right, and start again. The idiot at the crossbar looked at me as if I was mad when I told him, quite politely, that he had misled me. “Me?” he exclaimed in that hand-on-the-chest manner my people are known for. At least the time passed with some entertainment. A newspaper vendor came and advertised his wares.

     “Buy your Daily Sun hia! ‘Pastor sets congregants on fire!’ See the man wicked goatee. See him beard like Osama own,” the vendor announced.

     Someone on the left visa-lottery queue, obviously at ease that his HIV test had come clean, laughed back, “How the man beard take different from your own?”

     “Brotha, just buy the paper and you’ll see. Look, all your visas are waiting for you in Jesus’ name.” A resounding amen followed that one. He continued, “And since your visa is no longer news come and read about the pastor who burn him congregation for fornication. Hear wetin he talk, ‘I did not burn them. I only told them to roll around in petrol-soaked floor. And I flogged them’. Una hear. Buy your Daily Sun.”

#

     It was ten minutes past eight by the time I emptied my pockets and spread my arms for the beeping looking-like-a-laser-gun piece of equipment that a female guard waved at me as if she was swatting at flies. My eyes were fixated on the other guard’s uniform. He had this big shiny Starsky-and-Hutch badge askew on his chest. He was checking my envelope and making small talk. “Good luck to you, sah. Ah, you be Bini? My mama is Bini. Good luck o,” he repeated as he handed back my passport. As I entered US soil, I heard him speaking to the guy behind me, “Ah, you are Bini too. My mother must be around today.”

#

     It was nine thirty when the urge to shit struck me again. We had been held in a large hall and during the last hour had been in a queue leading up to a series of glass windows behind which several quite black and very Nigerian office-people sat. “Next to window ‘e’,” I heard and I moved. A nice lady asked me to fill some gaps in my forms. Seeing my clumsiness, which she mistook for anxiety, the lady told me to relax and ‘break a leg’. We were in theatre. High farce, more like it. I was anxious. I was hungry and I had this tap in my pants threatening to burst forth. I walked over to a guard with a slightly tidier badge and asked where I could ease myself. I walked past the second Benin boy who had been right behind me on the queue. He looked cool enough and said hi to me in an American accent. He was huddled in conversation with a tall skinny guy with dreadlocks. They were both standing. About seventy of us were standing. The rest were in seats numbering about forty. It reminded me of The Titanic. But who cared. With my documents I was going to get my visa. My writing was going to be the best that it could be and I was going to be famous. Maybe grow dreadlocks and a long beard like Ben Okri or the Petrol Pastor. I followed the guard’s directions and walked through a metal detector to the inner rooms. The toilets were straight on and to the left. Whoa. The inner room looked and smelled a lot better than where they were keeping us. It looked like something from one the new-generation banks while the one I had just left looked like an Afribank hall. You could see oyibos behind glass windows talking to applicants. This must be where they do the penultimate screening before the interview proper is conducted, I thought. As I passed an applicant talking to a freckled white girl, I heard the American ask, “What does semi-official tailor mean?” I did not hear the answer to that one.

     The toilets were not so bad. I walked in on a bottle of Windex at the wash-hand basin. A pair of talkative cleaners were mopping the floor. They ignored me. While relieving myself I heard them talk about an incompetent supervisor until their voices became a drone in my ear, bruzzz . . . brezzz. I had a stupid grin of relief when I finished – I had taken a shit on US soil. I walked past a group of applicants doing musical chairs on an array of benches that faced the counters, behind which sat the Americans questioning the next batch of Nigerians. Bruzzz . . . brezzz. As I entered the general waiting room I wondered where the real interviews were taking place. Definitely not in the public place I had just seen. There had to be an inner private sanctum where one could sit and take it up the ass from these people. Where one could rant, rave and beg in the privacy of one’s own shame. I walked over to a wall space that had opened up beside ‘Bini boy’ and his dreadlocked friend.

     Dreadlocks was talking, “. . . I hear that if you have a British visa it’s a lot easier.” He had an odd accent. It seemed like Hausa polished with cockney.

     “Maybe,” Bini-boy replied. He turned to me and said, “I’m not actually Bini. I don’t know what was wrong with that security man. I am Esan.” We shook hands.

     “I hope so o,” Dreadlocks said. “I have a British visa that expired with my last passport. See, I’ve stapled it to this one. Hopefully they will see that I have travelled.”

     I looked at his passport. It was two booklets stapled together as one. This was supposed to help with your travel history so the interviewers would not think you wet behind the ears. The boy had travelled sha: visa to the UK and half of the EU countries. Why was he worried? The twenty-six year old passport that I had stapled to my new one had just one trip on it: the time when mommy, Nosa and I had gone for Aunty Ifueko’s wedding. My big cousin, Ifueko, had insisted that she wanted her two cute, yellow nephews to be the pageboys at her wedding ceremony.

     “What are you travelling for?” I asked Dreadlocks.

     “Oh? I’m getting a transfer from the American University in Oman to Howard.”

     “Then you don’t have any problem,” I said.

     “Ah. One never knows with these people.”

     “But you’ve paid your school fees.”

     “So? I’ve tried for the transfer before. But because of my Muslim name the delay took so long that I lost my admission.” And his admission deposit, no doubt. He did not mention that.

     Bini-boy spoke, “I heard that’s been happening a lot since nine-eleven.”

     I found a bit of my wit, “I don’t know what they expect Nigerians to go and do there o. I’ve never heard of a Nigerian terrorist . . .”

     “Except for some of our leaders,” Bini-boy interjected.

     “Except for those,” I agreed. “But really the worst we would have done was maybe sell the World Trade Centre as our father’s garage and auction the Pentagon as his kitchen.”

     Dreadlocks was still worried. “I hear that if you speak only when spoken to they won’t get mad. I hear that they must at least ask you why you think they should believe you’re coming back . . . why you won’t run once you see America.”

     “I don’t think anything matters. But at least looking at you, they should at least feel comfortable. You look like an American rapper,” Bini said, trying to build up the chap’s confidence.