My search for a female friend turned out better. It started with the hint of a promising relationship with a stylish white American, who wore her dresses like personalized fashion statements and plastered herself with rings – nose rings, ear rings, ankle rings, finger rings, even the index of nipple rings. She was a junior at NYU and her name was Missy, or so she preferred to be called. Our meeting was promising in that, after conversing on the exotic at the cafeteria for about an hour, she gave me her phone number. When I called her to set up a first date, that promise began to cloud over.

            “There’s something I need to know,” she said. “Do you get high?”

            “I’m African, you know. I never get low.” It was an attempt at humor, to evade answering a question that I was unsure what the right answer was.

            “I mean: do you do stuff?”

            “Depends on the stuff.”

            “Come on, it’s either you get high or you don’t. I can’t go out with you if you don’t do stuff.”

            I only had a vague idea of what she was talking about, but since it was obviously an important test for me to pass, I said: “Sure, I do stuff all the time.”

            It was a ruinous outing. We went to a ‘rave’ where the techno music was insufferably metallic and loud, and everyone was so buoyed up by Ecstasy or Adam that it was as if I was witnessing a surreal realization of a mass levitation project. I was so noticeably out of place that Missy simply floated towards a fellow in an all-leather outfit who had long risen above the level of a mere mortal like me. I left quietly.

            After Missy, I began to date Kristal, a graduate student from Belize. Her ancestors, she told me, had been Igbos – like me – shipped over to the Americas as slaves. So, we often fondly called each other “my brother” or “my sister.” She had only one more semester to go, and she was already engaged back home. I did not know that though until a month into our relationship, when her fiancé called her on her cell phone in the middle of the night.

Her own “high” was the theater. So, we spent several evenings at a small, dense-toned theater near the campus called The Stage. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Hatful of Rain. Amadeus. Constant Star. Stones in His Pockets. Hamlet. Private Lives. The Wizard of Oz. Hedwig and the Angry Inch. We watched them all. For me, it was a return, this time deeper in its impact, to a world that had fascinated me as a boy at the Ali Baba Cinema. For her, I think it was an escape from the tedium of living in America. “There’s a law everywhere you turn in this country,” she would say. “It’s hard to believe that people don’t get arrested for snoring at night.” 

            “You never know,” I told her, after we watched Private Lives. “Maybe you’ll marry this guy in Belize, and someday we’ll still run off together. Back home.”

            “You’re rewriting the play,” she said, linking her arms with mine. “And life is not a theater.”

            “It could be,” I said, “our theater.”

            “It could be – except that I have to go back to Belize.” She pronounced it almost like Breeze. “That’s my home, really.”

            She left the day after her graduation. She could not wait, she said. Our relationship had been of some importance to her, but not in the way that I had begun to hope. She had brought a breezy warmth into my life that I had been unable to find in America before her – and after. She had made all the heady phrases in my “Before America” journal actually begin to come alive – about “the joy of life,” “the ascent of the imagination,” “the land of plenty,” “the special theater of God.” Shortly after she left, I began a new journal: “After America.” And it was at that time that I began thinking of building a website, of creating a virtual community of people of like minds and experience, my own theater. 

After Kristal returned to Belize and The Stage ceased to seize my attention, I had first turned to the television for companionship. I had never been a television buff. Back in Nigeria, the fitful electricity supply system and the near-monopoly of television stations by the government had not endeared me to the medium. In any case, it had been a more open world, sometimes with almost an excess of companionship. But, holed up in my apartment in New York, with the telephone as my best friend and lifeline, I learnt to sit in front of the television in the evening with a can of beer at hand, like a character in a commercial for an impossible cure for loneliness.

The “reality shows” first captivated me. The rage then was one about a band of sea-thieves shipwrecked on a desert island and haunted by nifty natives. It was an elaborate set, a rich attempt to provide vicarious enjoyment in the starkness of being and survival. It was number one in the ratings, and everyone was talking about it. Some people were also making bets about who would emerge the last survivor – and go home with a million dollars. It was a staggering sum, I felt, for such poor playacting. After some time, my interest waned. The “reality shows” were, after all, more built-up than real.

            Next, I became a fan of a quiz show that promised a million dollars to any contestant who managed to correctly answer twenty questions. For each correct answer, the contestant won a twentieth of the prize money. Not surprisingly, contestants poured in from all parts of the country, some all the way from Alaska and Hawaii. What was I doing sweating my life away in the bookstore? For a time, I considered competing to become a contestant, but even if I could overcome the restrictive entry criteria, how would I know the answer to such a question as how “eggs Benedict” is prepared, or the state in America that has “Oro y platta” as its motto, or what one cartoon character said to another in a 1970s comic series?

            I moved on to the late night talk shows, and I remained a fan for a long time. It became a great nightcap, a breezy way of summing the events of the day and exposing them in their laughable underwear. These were not shows that shirked or dressed up savagery, yet they were flush with the very thing that I had been missing since my arrival: laughter, rolling-in-the-sand laughter. Whoever had set the clocks of the late night shows at about midnight must have been in the spirit at the time. It was a good time for America to laugh at itself, before going to bed.

The timing was also right because the late night news, about an hour or so before the late night talk shows, dripped with so much blood and dissipated so much gun smoke that the late night talk shows were like strong bursts of fresh air. I had initially been drawn to the news as a way of knowing what was happening around me. Soon, I began to dread its strange-but-familiar revelations. At this stage, only my fascination with the late night talk shows remained. My interest in the evenings shifted to the Internet, a wider world with more variables. It also gave me a better way of keeping pace with what was happening back home, instead of the occasional obituary notice about Africa that cropped up between a murder and a tax sleight on television news.

The Internet was also another return, via a different route, to my past. At boarding school, one of the great things that had linked us to the world beyond was the allure of pen pals. There were the scams, of course, like sending our films to be processed in photo laboratories in London or ordering sunshades from merchants in New Jersey – and neglecting to pay the consequent bill. We told ourselves that these people must be so rich that they never seemed too upset about our not paying the bills, or that they were so foolhardy that they sat back in their offices across the ocean and expected their fanciful bills to move us to anything beyond scorn. But we were boys, and film addicts, and none of those scams ever compared with the thrill of pen pals – especially with young women that we slept with in our daydreams. Unlike the matter of the bills, we were not negligent in replying their letters.

The great hurrahs were when the replies came back with pictures and exhilarating pledges of love. The school roared when I received a reply in a large white envelope plastered with lipstick traces. It contained ten pictures of Alana, my pen pal from Beverly Hills, vacationing in Acapulco. The names signified to me by their resonance, and the pictures shimmered with the iridescence of youth and the colors of the beach. But the white envelope with the lipstick traces made everything else pale in comparison. I became known as Acapulco, or Acapulco Wayne, and that white envelope made me the favorite consultant to all other pen pal solicitors. Every one wanted to score like me, to own such an envelope and press it to his lips as if the traces were petals of flesh. I charged a nonrefundable tin of Bournvita for every letter that I wrote and a tin of Peak milk for every advice that I gave. Not only was I the best student in English, I had an impressive handwriting – a combination that served me, and my clients, well. I remained the sole owner of a lipstick-smeared white envelope though, an artifact I kept with me for many years.

            The Internet brought back memories of those pen pal days in a wistful way. Nothing ever came of any of them in the long run, to the best of my knowledge. They bloomed and petered out according to a rhythm that was beyond us, but in their brief periods of bloom they blessed us with a grand vision of ourselves and of the world. I still thought about Alana sometimes, or rather her name would sometimes bob up in my mind. Now, all alone in America, I decided to trace her. I had seen and heard enough about America to know the sort of people that could afford to live in Beverley Hills. Had she really lived there? Had she in truth been as beautiful, as white, as she had looked then in the pictures she had sent to me? If I could find her now, now that she must also have outgrown the silly avowals we had been flush with as teenagers, what would we have to say to each other? But I could not even properly begin my search. I was stumped because, over the years, her surname had blurred in my memory. Was it Laupers or Lopez or Llosa or Lepierre or Lupons or Lupaski? What was the use anyway? 

            The only success I did record on the Internet’s People Search engines was my attempt to trace Chidi. For a long time, I had been too upset to bother about him. But living in America myself had made me reconsider. Maybe he was merely one other toiler in America, only making enough money to pay the ubiquitous bills. Or maybe he was just another alien searching for his soul in adult toyshops, where he would never find it. I did find Chidi on the Internet, and it was the last time I looked for anyone. He was in a federal penitentiary for a drug possession offense. He must have been writing to his father from prison or through someone else because he had already been inside for some years. I could not imagine Chidi, the Chidi that I had known, being associated with drugs. I thought about what next to do for a couple of days. Would it not be better to let him be than to write him and confirm that I was aware that he was in jail? But he had been my closest friend at a time, so I sent him a Robert Louis Stevenson quote card: “A friend is a gift you give to yourself.” So, you never forget, I added. I never received a response.

            I turned to online dating sites and chat rooms. I was intrigued by the proliferation of such avenues, and how they harked back to the pen pal era. That things had changed since we searched for pen pals soon became clear to me. We had been bashful in those days, hiding our lust in honeyed words and Shakespearean sonnets. It was a brazen new age now, one that had little faith in the imagination. These sites thrived instead on soft pornography and leaping invitations: “Hi, I’m Jenny. I have green hair and love to wear mauve panties. I’m looking for a guy with purple eyes and the right inch.” What ever had happened to the chase?

            I began to construct my website one snowy night in February, two years after my departure from Nigeria – or arrival in America. I would name it afteramerica.com, I had decided. Coming to America had seemed like a going forth to me, a sojourn into the heart of a magnificent newness. Now, it felt like a lonely return to a wizened future that I had already lived in in its morning glory.