Jukebox - A Short Story by Emmanuel Iduma
- By Emmanuel Iduma
- Published September 5, 2009
- Fiction
-
Rating:
Emmanuel Iduma
Emmanuel Iduma's first novel, I Believe in Red, is what he is working on. Born in 1989, he has written other published and unpublished short stories and poems. He is a student of Law in a Nigerian university, where he resides with his parents. HIS BLOG.
Jukebox
By Emmanuel Iduma
Sometime later, in the course of this decade, when she would remember that moment, it would be the image of congealed blood. It was black, not red. It was black when they carried him in, struggling between the arms of two small-bodied men; black when she had sat earlier in the porch waiting for him and the rain was gathering, black when several interlinked ants scurried on the floor of the porch, and black in her head when she said “yes, I agree to marry you.” So when they carried him in and placed him on their bed, the bedsheet was easily coloured, stained. She thought it was trivial and unfair to think that she had only laid it that morning. It was his back that the blood was coming from, gushing fiercely, even resplendently, even with a measure of fulfillment, and she did not know what to do.
Just before he had come in with blood turned black, when she had sat at the porch and saw the rain gathering, Pa Joe had come to her, wearing the same flower-patterned shirt he had worn two days ago. He was old but not bent, still tall, but age had caught up with his eyes, he wore heavy-rimmed eyeglasses. He did not sit beside her, though there was an empty folding chair, his favorite: he sat on it every evening, just before the sun turned blood red. When she looked at him, he gave her a crumpled paper. It read, DID YOU DO ALL I ASKED YOU TO DO? She looked at him, and nodded. Then he walked past her, out of the house, out into the street. It was the first time in many months that he had done that, walking out of the house, he always stayed inside. But today Pa Joe walked past her, and would not be in the house when the small-bodied men carried her husband in.
The day he finally stopped hearing, Pa Joe would dedicate the rest of his life to silence. This was strange, considering that he had heard and heard, had lived his life surrounded by sound, sound of machines working, roaring in confidence. But that day his hearing ceased, he was grateful for the sounds he had been accustomed to, the giant machines that had produced thundering sounds. So he wrote to his daughter-in-law (who used to resume her complaint where she had left off the day before; who left soon afterwards because her husband died, and her son was wayward, and there was another man she had already slept with) on a crumpled sheet of paper he found under his bed, an old wrapping paper for a roll of tissue paper, I CANNOT HEAR A SINGLE WORD YOU ARE SAYING. She said, “What?” But he did not hear and he demonstrated, pointing at the crumpled paper. She was impatient, looked at him twice: the first look was more accusatory than disbelieving, and the second had the assuring undertone of “I must leave now.” But even after she had left and her son came to his father’s house with a woman he said had agreed to marry him, Pa Joe still believed, still believed the deafness was temporary.
Before a man rushed to tell him that his son was dead, Pa Joe could hear the radio distinctly playing, despite the loud noise from the machines, a song from a musician he could not recognize, “You look wonderful tonight.” The lyrics made him think about fine times when he could dance better without falling or panting from exhaustion. Later he would understand this as the voice of God speaking in the midst of the fiery furnace, in the midst of when life taking what it had given. So, when the man rushed in to tell him about his son’s death and the radio was playing distinctly, he suddenly felt the tiredness of many years overtake him. Many years since his son had told him to leave the job; many years since he had put his foot down and said the job gave him a sense of fulfillment, a reason for continued existence. And this singular disobedience made the weight of grief heavier, the weight that descended once he got to the hospital and saw his son sprawled on the bed. The weight that increased when they said it was a gunshot, a terrific gunshot from God-knows-who, a God-knows-who who shot at several policemen that attempted his arrest.
When he wrote to his grand-daughter-in-law on a crumpled paper that she had the power to stop evil, it was on a day that the rain had been so heavy and by the simple sight and sound of it, Pa Joe thought God had changed his mind and was going to destroy the world with rain. The evil he wrote to her she could stop was the evil of her husband returning late at night or not returning for days. Pa Joe wrote, YOU CAN STOP THIS EVIL. GO AND FIND OUT WHAT IS KEEPING HIM AWAY.
Her favorite part of this story, when she would narrate it, would be how her granddaddy-in-law heard the words of a song, though he was deaf. This appeared uncanny at first, incredible even, but when it happened repetitively, it began to bear semblance to something mystical and had a surreal sense of significance.
A day came when Pa Joe got tired of the silence, and with envy watched her laugh. The envy condensed, and could fill, first a bowl, then a bucket, and then could make a river. So he decided to make his eyes his ears, watch the Jukebox play music, and enjoy the music by the rise and fall of the electronic bars that was displayed on the screen and that indicated the progression of the song. This idea exhilarated him; all day he waited for her to return from her work at the local hospital. He kept rehearsing the idea: to watch the music play, and enjoy it by the rise and fall of the electronic bars, by just watching it.
On the day she decided to discover the evil that kept him away, the wind blew back and forth, terribly, and she cursed, but went on. He had large earphones around his neck, the type worn by disc jockeys, and she rested her confidence on the earphones, saying to herself, he cannot hear my footsteps. He walked past their street, a short street that had few houses and a bar. In front of a bar there were three men and one woman, and it appeared it was polyandry, because the men seemed to be all over her. When her husband saw them he shook his head and looked immediately ahead, then turned his head behind, as though he searched for other eyes to affirm his disapproval. She ducked and was glad it was a dark gown she was wearing. He kept moving, out into the next street, a left turn from theirs, and her legs unexpectedly began to ache, to whine that they wanted no more. But against them she moved on, reducing the distance from him. Now, the wind was terrible, in its flamboyance and pride that Aeolus had given it a leave, to bite into her skin and eat it up. She had worn no cardigan, just the black gown, so the wind was happy and bit her with silent glee. This was when she saw him stop by a gate, of a house that was glistening with faint light, as though a stubborn candle had been mounted on a pole and cast overhead, despite the night and the wind. She stopped when she saw him walk through the gate, but was too defeated by the wind that she just turned, cursing as before. But her legs revolted soon afterwards and she stood on a spot near their house for many minutes, until the wind again prevailed over her legs.
It was prior to the time Pa Joe told her to find the evil that kept her husband away that he wanted to enjoy the music by watching it. On that day he waited for her, sitting in the parlour and not the porch, on that day he remembered his son. His son’s face had no contours, like a glorified being, like a man ready to sail to heaven, to the purest of pure. Then the face trembled into obscurity, changed its outlook, became like a badly formed zygote. And finally, the face became the sound of the gunshot, searing through and killing, rumpling the face and stuffing life. By the end of his recollection, tears had formed, and that was when he heard the noise of the door opening, his daughter-in-law returning. The elation returned when he wiped his eyes dry; he regained his colour, waiting to watch the music.
When she returned from the wind he was waiting for her in the porch. Her hands were held together and it was clear that the wind had prevailed. She stopped when she saw him, and stood beside his seat like a deviant child. She knew he knew that she had failed to see where the evil had come from because suddenly the darkness that she had left him in was gone; there was a little lantern. With this lantern she could see the writing on the little paper he gave her. It was not crumpled like others, something he had torn from a pad she kept in the parlour where she wrote her market list on weekends. When the light of the lantern fell on the paper like a small tree collapsing after a large rain, she read the words, his handwriting was bolder: DO NOT FEAR. Unexpectedly, the wind increased. But she was standing, her hands holding the paper he gave her tightly, and there was no way to show that the wind had prevailed.
Earlier the week, when Pa Joe had told her to confront the evil, she saw her husband reading a book on their bed, relaxing his back on a pillow. She thought he had the face of a child finding that fire could burn. When she pried, looking behind the book, it was titled “The Four Islamic Schools of Fiqh and their Leaders,” and she was both flummoxed and irritated that he had brought the book into their house.
“What are you reading?”
“A book,” he said, almost with a smile. His face irritated her further, his face that had unnecessary smartness and cunning.
“What kind of book is that?”
“Please, don’t start.”
He only said ‘don’t start’ when he was beginning to get irritated, like the last time she had reminded him that he had not found a place of work and he had ranted on and on about her arrogance and impatience. So when he said it again, she only sighed and walked out of the room.
As soon as she entered Pa Joe smiled and his face seemed to show an expectation. She understood in part; she only understood his smile but did not understand that he also had an expectation. When she smiled in return he stretched a sheet of paper to her which she read still having the smile: PLEASE PUT ON THE JUKEBOX. She looked at him in surprise, the kind that comes from seeing a man walking upside down. She had already said, “What?” before she remembered the peculiarity of her granddaddy-in-law. She sat by him and searched her handbag for a pen and wrote with it on the paper he had given her, I SHOULD PUT ON THE JUKEBOX? When he read it he nodded, and she looked at him quizzically, almost with a face like the moon when the sun refused it light, with exactly the same question the moon would have asked, “Why?”
But she obeyed him, when his face retained its smile and great expectation, and she had begun to see reason to his request: to lessen the severity of his situation, to normalize again. Yet she doubted that his head had not reconfigured, and that somehow the disability had a malignant cancerous cell that had begun eating him up when he stopped hearing and now reached his brain and made him think that he could listen to music.
Because of the surprise of it, the huge doubt in her heart, she simply put in the coin and did not bother to do any selection. There were already several compact discs inside, but she would have, if the circumstances were less perplexing, selected the order in which she wanted the discs to play. Now, she did not, and only pressed down the play button, at the same instant looking at Pa Joe.
The smile had gone and was replaced by another face she thought did not belong to him.
On his part, he started seeing the bars on the Jukebox’s display, something he knew was called LCD, and his thoughts seemed to spell the letters. First, L. Then C and finally D. The letters were falling around his head, like a waterfall, defining his focus. It kept on like this. For many minutes, he saw the letters even when he watched the rise and fall of the bars, and this was not the enjoyment he expected. Soon, the letters began a horrific thumping in his chest, so that in each thump he could distinguish which was from the L and which was from the C and which was from the D.
Very soon he held his ears with both hands because there was a sudden rush of the letters which came with more thumping and a new noise he could not define. It was an internal noise, but it surged into his ears, his eyes became blurred and there was nothing again in the parlour but the surging of the letters as noise. He held his ears closer, tighter, refusing to believe that the letters came to his ears as noise.
In that section where she would describe what she saw when the music began to play, there would be incoherent language because she tried with great unfulfilling effort to write that it was not magic, but an unusual intervention from, perhaps, heaven.
When she turned to him and saw a face that was not his and saw how his body began to contort when he held his ears with his hands, her feet became numb and her eyes became as though a sequoia had grown before her so that she could not see. Meanwhile, within the reach of her ears was the sound of the Jukebox, as though it sang for a packed-full audience and not at the request of a man with a peculiar situation as her granddaddy-in-law.
At the cease of the noise of the letters, Pa Joe thought it was the end of the noise, and that he had even imagined all the noise. This made him look again at the Jukebox, to see if he could find the enjoyment of music he sought. But things began to happen that he did not expect. Words in little saunters began to leap at him, so that he was so confused he just opened his mouth as though he wanted to swallow the words. This was only his first reaction. His second reaction was standing, wearily, up, then he fell back, and then his son’s wife ran to him. He let her hold him and guide him carefully back to his seat. That was when he heard the unmistaken clarity of the song while his mouth remained open and his hands too frozen to try covering his ears. The part of the song he heard was,
I would sacrifice anything come what may
For the sake of having you near
In spite of a warning voice
Comes in the night
And repeats in my ear,
“Don’t you know you fool
You never can win
Use your mentality,”
Step up to reality,
But each time I do
Just the thought of you
Makes me stop before I begin,
‘Cos I’ve got you under my skin
By Emmanuel Iduma
Sometime later, in the course of this decade, when she would remember that moment, it would be the image of congealed blood. It was black, not red. It was black when they carried him in, struggling between the arms of two small-bodied men; black when she had sat earlier in the porch waiting for him and the rain was gathering, black when several interlinked ants scurried on the floor of the porch, and black in her head when she said “yes, I agree to marry you.” So when they carried him in and placed him on their bed, the bedsheet was easily coloured, stained. She thought it was trivial and unfair to think that she had only laid it that morning. It was his back that the blood was coming from, gushing fiercely, even resplendently, even with a measure of fulfillment, and she did not know what to do.
Just before he had come in with blood turned black, when she had sat at the porch and saw the rain gathering, Pa Joe had come to her, wearing the same flower-patterned shirt he had worn two days ago. He was old but not bent, still tall, but age had caught up with his eyes, he wore heavy-rimmed eyeglasses. He did not sit beside her, though there was an empty folding chair, his favorite: he sat on it every evening, just before the sun turned blood red. When she looked at him, he gave her a crumpled paper. It read, DID YOU DO ALL I ASKED YOU TO DO? She looked at him, and nodded. Then he walked past her, out of the house, out into the street. It was the first time in many months that he had done that, walking out of the house, he always stayed inside. But today Pa Joe walked past her, and would not be in the house when the small-bodied men carried her husband in.
The day he finally stopped hearing, Pa Joe would dedicate the rest of his life to silence. This was strange, considering that he had heard and heard, had lived his life surrounded by sound, sound of machines working, roaring in confidence. But that day his hearing ceased, he was grateful for the sounds he had been accustomed to, the giant machines that had produced thundering sounds. So he wrote to his daughter-in-law (who used to resume her complaint where she had left off the day before; who left soon afterwards because her husband died, and her son was wayward, and there was another man she had already slept with) on a crumpled sheet of paper he found under his bed, an old wrapping paper for a roll of tissue paper, I CANNOT HEAR A SINGLE WORD YOU ARE SAYING. She said, “What?” But he did not hear and he demonstrated, pointing at the crumpled paper. She was impatient, looked at him twice: the first look was more accusatory than disbelieving, and the second had the assuring undertone of “I must leave now.” But even after she had left and her son came to his father’s house with a woman he said had agreed to marry him, Pa Joe still believed, still believed the deafness was temporary.
Before a man rushed to tell him that his son was dead, Pa Joe could hear the radio distinctly playing, despite the loud noise from the machines, a song from a musician he could not recognize, “You look wonderful tonight.” The lyrics made him think about fine times when he could dance better without falling or panting from exhaustion. Later he would understand this as the voice of God speaking in the midst of the fiery furnace, in the midst of when life taking what it had given. So, when the man rushed in to tell him about his son’s death and the radio was playing distinctly, he suddenly felt the tiredness of many years overtake him. Many years since his son had told him to leave the job; many years since he had put his foot down and said the job gave him a sense of fulfillment, a reason for continued existence. And this singular disobedience made the weight of grief heavier, the weight that descended once he got to the hospital and saw his son sprawled on the bed. The weight that increased when they said it was a gunshot, a terrific gunshot from God-knows-who, a God-knows-who who shot at several policemen that attempted his arrest.
When he wrote to his grand-daughter-in-law on a crumpled paper that she had the power to stop evil, it was on a day that the rain had been so heavy and by the simple sight and sound of it, Pa Joe thought God had changed his mind and was going to destroy the world with rain. The evil he wrote to her she could stop was the evil of her husband returning late at night or not returning for days. Pa Joe wrote, YOU CAN STOP THIS EVIL. GO AND FIND OUT WHAT IS KEEPING HIM AWAY.
Her favorite part of this story, when she would narrate it, would be how her granddaddy-in-law heard the words of a song, though he was deaf. This appeared uncanny at first, incredible even, but when it happened repetitively, it began to bear semblance to something mystical and had a surreal sense of significance.
A day came when Pa Joe got tired of the silence, and with envy watched her laugh. The envy condensed, and could fill, first a bowl, then a bucket, and then could make a river. So he decided to make his eyes his ears, watch the Jukebox play music, and enjoy the music by the rise and fall of the electronic bars that was displayed on the screen and that indicated the progression of the song. This idea exhilarated him; all day he waited for her to return from her work at the local hospital. He kept rehearsing the idea: to watch the music play, and enjoy it by the rise and fall of the electronic bars, by just watching it.
On the day she decided to discover the evil that kept him away, the wind blew back and forth, terribly, and she cursed, but went on. He had large earphones around his neck, the type worn by disc jockeys, and she rested her confidence on the earphones, saying to herself, he cannot hear my footsteps. He walked past their street, a short street that had few houses and a bar. In front of a bar there were three men and one woman, and it appeared it was polyandry, because the men seemed to be all over her. When her husband saw them he shook his head and looked immediately ahead, then turned his head behind, as though he searched for other eyes to affirm his disapproval. She ducked and was glad it was a dark gown she was wearing. He kept moving, out into the next street, a left turn from theirs, and her legs unexpectedly began to ache, to whine that they wanted no more. But against them she moved on, reducing the distance from him. Now, the wind was terrible, in its flamboyance and pride that Aeolus had given it a leave, to bite into her skin and eat it up. She had worn no cardigan, just the black gown, so the wind was happy and bit her with silent glee. This was when she saw him stop by a gate, of a house that was glistening with faint light, as though a stubborn candle had been mounted on a pole and cast overhead, despite the night and the wind. She stopped when she saw him walk through the gate, but was too defeated by the wind that she just turned, cursing as before. But her legs revolted soon afterwards and she stood on a spot near their house for many minutes, until the wind again prevailed over her legs.
It was prior to the time Pa Joe told her to find the evil that kept her husband away that he wanted to enjoy the music by watching it. On that day he waited for her, sitting in the parlour and not the porch, on that day he remembered his son. His son’s face had no contours, like a glorified being, like a man ready to sail to heaven, to the purest of pure. Then the face trembled into obscurity, changed its outlook, became like a badly formed zygote. And finally, the face became the sound of the gunshot, searing through and killing, rumpling the face and stuffing life. By the end of his recollection, tears had formed, and that was when he heard the noise of the door opening, his daughter-in-law returning. The elation returned when he wiped his eyes dry; he regained his colour, waiting to watch the music.
When she returned from the wind he was waiting for her in the porch. Her hands were held together and it was clear that the wind had prevailed. She stopped when she saw him, and stood beside his seat like a deviant child. She knew he knew that she had failed to see where the evil had come from because suddenly the darkness that she had left him in was gone; there was a little lantern. With this lantern she could see the writing on the little paper he gave her. It was not crumpled like others, something he had torn from a pad she kept in the parlour where she wrote her market list on weekends. When the light of the lantern fell on the paper like a small tree collapsing after a large rain, she read the words, his handwriting was bolder: DO NOT FEAR. Unexpectedly, the wind increased. But she was standing, her hands holding the paper he gave her tightly, and there was no way to show that the wind had prevailed.
Earlier the week, when Pa Joe had told her to confront the evil, she saw her husband reading a book on their bed, relaxing his back on a pillow. She thought he had the face of a child finding that fire could burn. When she pried, looking behind the book, it was titled “The Four Islamic Schools of Fiqh and their Leaders,” and she was both flummoxed and irritated that he had brought the book into their house.
“What are you reading?”
“A book,” he said, almost with a smile. His face irritated her further, his face that had unnecessary smartness and cunning.
“What kind of book is that?”
“Please, don’t start.”
He only said ‘don’t start’ when he was beginning to get irritated, like the last time she had reminded him that he had not found a place of work and he had ranted on and on about her arrogance and impatience. So when he said it again, she only sighed and walked out of the room.
As soon as she entered Pa Joe smiled and his face seemed to show an expectation. She understood in part; she only understood his smile but did not understand that he also had an expectation. When she smiled in return he stretched a sheet of paper to her which she read still having the smile: PLEASE PUT ON THE JUKEBOX. She looked at him in surprise, the kind that comes from seeing a man walking upside down. She had already said, “What?” before she remembered the peculiarity of her granddaddy-in-law. She sat by him and searched her handbag for a pen and wrote with it on the paper he had given her, I SHOULD PUT ON THE JUKEBOX? When he read it he nodded, and she looked at him quizzically, almost with a face like the moon when the sun refused it light, with exactly the same question the moon would have asked, “Why?”
But she obeyed him, when his face retained its smile and great expectation, and she had begun to see reason to his request: to lessen the severity of his situation, to normalize again. Yet she doubted that his head had not reconfigured, and that somehow the disability had a malignant cancerous cell that had begun eating him up when he stopped hearing and now reached his brain and made him think that he could listen to music.
Because of the surprise of it, the huge doubt in her heart, she simply put in the coin and did not bother to do any selection. There were already several compact discs inside, but she would have, if the circumstances were less perplexing, selected the order in which she wanted the discs to play. Now, she did not, and only pressed down the play button, at the same instant looking at Pa Joe.
The smile had gone and was replaced by another face she thought did not belong to him.
On his part, he started seeing the bars on the Jukebox’s display, something he knew was called LCD, and his thoughts seemed to spell the letters. First, L. Then C and finally D. The letters were falling around his head, like a waterfall, defining his focus. It kept on like this. For many minutes, he saw the letters even when he watched the rise and fall of the bars, and this was not the enjoyment he expected. Soon, the letters began a horrific thumping in his chest, so that in each thump he could distinguish which was from the L and which was from the C and which was from the D.
Very soon he held his ears with both hands because there was a sudden rush of the letters which came with more thumping and a new noise he could not define. It was an internal noise, but it surged into his ears, his eyes became blurred and there was nothing again in the parlour but the surging of the letters as noise. He held his ears closer, tighter, refusing to believe that the letters came to his ears as noise.
In that section where she would describe what she saw when the music began to play, there would be incoherent language because she tried with great unfulfilling effort to write that it was not magic, but an unusual intervention from, perhaps, heaven.
When she turned to him and saw a face that was not his and saw how his body began to contort when he held his ears with his hands, her feet became numb and her eyes became as though a sequoia had grown before her so that she could not see. Meanwhile, within the reach of her ears was the sound of the Jukebox, as though it sang for a packed-full audience and not at the request of a man with a peculiar situation as her granddaddy-in-law.
At the cease of the noise of the letters, Pa Joe thought it was the end of the noise, and that he had even imagined all the noise. This made him look again at the Jukebox, to see if he could find the enjoyment of music he sought. But things began to happen that he did not expect. Words in little saunters began to leap at him, so that he was so confused he just opened his mouth as though he wanted to swallow the words. This was only his first reaction. His second reaction was standing, wearily, up, then he fell back, and then his son’s wife ran to him. He let her hold him and guide him carefully back to his seat. That was when he heard the unmistaken clarity of the song while his mouth remained open and his hands too frozen to try covering his ears. The part of the song he heard was,
I would sacrifice anything come what may
For the sake of having you near
In spite of a warning voice
Comes in the night
And repeats in my ear,
“Don’t you know you fool
You never can win
Use your mentality,”
Step up to reality,
But each time I do
Just the thought of you
Makes me stop before I begin,
‘Cos I’ve got you under my skin