The Cadavers - A short story by Eghosa Imasuen
- By Eghosa Imasuen
- Published July 20, 2010
- Fiction
-
Rating:
Eghosa Imasuen
Eghosa Imasuen, a Nigerian novelist, was born on 19 May 1976. He has had his short fiction published in online magazines like blackbiro.com, http://African-writing.com, http://africanwriter.com, and thenewgong.com; and has written articles for Farafina Magazine. His first novel, To Saint Patrick, an Alternate History murder mystery about Nigeria's civil war, was published by Farafina in 2008 to critical acclaim. He was a member of the 9 writers, 4 cities book tour that was concluded in early June 2009 in Nigeria and was named 'writer of the festival' at the 2009 Lagos Books and Art Festival. He is also a medical doctor and lives in Benin City, Nigeria, with his wife and twin sons.
The Cadavers
- A short story by Eghosa Imasuen
Ewaen heard himself snore.
This was something he had not become used to even though it had happened more than once. Ewaen knew he snored; it wasn’t that. He had to know because Sissi would not let him not know. But Sissi did not know this: that at times when waking up Ewaen could actually hear a snort or two of his sonorous breathing. And this morning as on the few other mornings – and afternoons, or evenings – when it happened, it still brought a smile to his face.
This asleep-smile was something to behold, Ewaen knew. He could imagine his girlfriend looking at his face as he woke. He could see Sissi smile in response to the slight, silly upturning of the corners of his mouth. How she would think that he was waking up from a pleasant dream. How she would watch him for a few more minutes, not interrupting whatever she thought he dreamt about. He longed for when she would whisper in his ear. Wake up, Ewaen. Wake up or you’ll be late. Now that he was used to, but not to the point of being bored with it. No. He was used to it the way one became used to ice-cream, or a sweaty tumbler of Gulder. Sissi’s lips against his ear, whispering. She made his mornings smile, she did. Ewaen curled himself into a ball, his shin hitting the pillar of wood.
Pillar of wood?
Oh yes. Now he remembered. Sort of.
He opened his eyes and received his second surprise this morning. He was on the rug. He tasted it first – granules of sand mixed with lint – because his mouth was open and he had recently begun sleeping on his face. Sissi had suggested that sleeping face-down reduced snoring.
Still, he was surprised: sleeping face-down did not mean sleeping on the ground, did it? What was he doing down here?
He had not yet awakened enough to have the energy to move his head so he used his eyes. They took in through half-closed eyelids the foot of his bed that rested against his knee. They scanned across to the empty snow of an absent TV station. They glanced, and looked properly a moment later, at the socks that dangled in front of his face. Brown cuddly socks with a picture of Winnie the Pooh over each big toe, socks that smelled of old wrappers and an orange rind.
Sissi’s feet.
What were Sissi’s feet doing on his bed? Oh, that wasn’t even a good question. A better one was this: if Sissi’s feet were on his bed, why was he on the ground?
Oh, yes. The Onyinye argument.
Slowly other sounds joined his snoring. The banter of a morning at Aiwerioba Estate: water splashing into plastic buckets from the tap outside his window; the vroom-vroom of warmed-up cars. The noises, smells, and chatter from twenty-six kitchens travelled to him in waves, waves that drowned out the sound of his own snoring.
***
As arguments go, this was slowly becoming pyrrhic. There would be no winner.
“I cannot believe you’d call her name when we were in bed together. So you are dying for her?”
“I didn’t call her name.” But he did, didn’t he? Ewaen spoke above the roar of the shower. He hoped the flat was now empty. It was nine already, everyone would have left for class. As the spray of cold water hit, cold water that helped to rouse him now that Sissi and her waking-tongue were on strike, he tried to play the tape back. The tape of last night. They had been in bed. She was on top. She always liked being on top. She liked to wrestle him for the position and would give a whoop of triumph when he finally let her win. They had put on the condom before starting anything, even before Ewaen had all his clothes off – she said taking the break to put on the rubber later would kill the illusion of spontaneity. He now moved in her; he watched her climb towards her climax. He watched the reflection of the TV lights on her sweating breasts, he watched those breasts heave, watched them rise and fall, faster and faster. His hands were on her hips but his mind was on Anatomy, wasn’t it? Yes, Anatomy. Tuesday. Cognition, association, and word play: that was what he used to prevent coming too soon. Think of a very bad book, last weekend’s football scores – okay ignore the fact that Arsenal won. That mightn’t work. The brain moved in mysterious ways. He had been thinking of when they would wake up if they kept this up for much longer, thinking if he’d be late for class, thinking that it would be his turn to lead dissection tomorrow, that he would need to pack his pen torch, his lab coat, thinking that Onyinye would, as usual, be in front of the cadaver first, thinking that he would have to do better than last time, if only to prevent another argument with Onyinye. And as most brain teasers and association word games go, he had come full circle: if he didn’t want to prevent another argument with Onyinye, he had to be awake early, he would have to end this quick. Sissi’s breathing was faster now, irregular, more urgent. It wouldn’t be long now. Ewaen had spoken, tried to say something. Sissi liked it when he called out her name.
Ewaen turned off the shower, dried himself with the blue towel, a souvenir from daddy’s celebration of ten years as a banking entrepreneur.
That was what he had called out, her name. Sissi. Onyinye? But what did it matter?
“What does it matter? I am your girlfriend! Not Onyinye. And you know I don’t like you mixing with that stuck-up crew!”
Oh. Did he speak his thoughts? The shower was off. She heard. “That was not what I meant, Sissi.” He hated using that name Sissi, but next to the full version, Akpanusikekesi, he felt he had no choice. No one called his girlfriend Akpanusikekesi. “Okay, even if I said her name, what does it mean? You know she’s in my Anatomy group; I was preoccupied with prepping for dissection today.”
“You were preoccupied while making love to me? That is what I am now, a mercy fuh . . . you were doing it because of pity?”
Ewaen muffled his chuckle by biting on the towel. She still couldn’t say the word. He came out of the toilet dragging under his feet a length of toilet paper he had stepped on. This drew a smile from his girlfriend. “See how stupid you look. Comot that shit paper from your leg, my friend.”
Good, comedy usually worked. She had laughed.
“So it’s all forgive and forget?” Ewaen asked.
“Forgive what? No. Go and ask your Onyinye what you and she have. When you’ve done that, then we’ll see.”
Sissi left. Ewaen stayed back for another ten minutes doing the things she normally helped him with. He dressed his bed, packed his videogame controllers in a heap by the TV stand, and swept. He heard his neighbours from next door, 42W, waking up. Noisy, as always. Doors banging shut, mosquito-netted shutters swinging open. Boisterous laughter. Ewaen closed his room door.
Ewaen said see-you-later to his only flatmate who would still be at home after nine in the morning, Harry. Harry was washing clothes in the parlour. Ewaen was going to say something but stopped himself. Why waste spit. He knew what Harry riposte would be.
“Me, wash clothes outside? No, Ewaen. That na fuck up na. You no see the chicks don already wake up. They go laugh me say big boy no fit afford dry cleaners.”
Why were Lagos boys so full of it? Ewaen pointed at the puddle forming in the middle of the parlour. Harry nodded: I will mop up when I’m done.
It was sunny outside. Nine in the morning. Vitamin D sun was what Professor Okafor called it. It was healthy; it made you grow strong bones. Yes. It also made trekking to class hell.
God, I hate sweating, Ewaen thought. He saw Tuvo from next door and shouted a greeting, “Forty-Two-Warri! Una good morning o!”
“Dude, aren’t you late for lectures already?” The boys of 42W were all Warri boys. Ewaen had often wondered himself about the coincidence. They never went for lectures and this morning they already had the football out. They would still be sweating, playing ball when everyone else on the estate got back from class.
He waved at them. “Today na Anatomy. I won’t be late.”
***
“Don’t put that in your mouth!” Onyinye said. Ewaen’s pen dropped to the floor. It landed with a clatter that brought a look from Professor Okafor. Ewaen mouthed an apology and bent to pick it up. The pen had been on an absent-minded journey from the green atrophied muscles of their subject to his lips when Onyinye slapped it from his fingers.
Was he really going to put it in his mouth?
Ewaen supposed he was. He liked Anatomy that much. Sissi said it was the only subject that brought him to class. He felt his girlfriend’s stare, a feeling of heat, a wire-mesh of light electricity on his back, and glanced up at the group working on cadaver number 4. Sissi looked away as soon as their eyes met; Ewaen put the pen in his pocket and smiled.
Anatomy was the only subject that disrupted Ewaen’s conceit of feigned flippancy in school. His routine on other days was wake, play videogames, trek to the buka in front of estate, eat, sleep, maybe gist with the boys of 42W, play videogames till late at night, and sleep. He supposed that a few more meals could be interspersed within this routine. Maybe Sissi would come to visit; this would change the last two items in his daily itinerary to make love, no sleep, wake up hearing yourself snore, a whispered “Wake up, Ewaen,” from wet lips next to your ear, make love some more, and miss classes for the day.
But not on Tuesdays. On Tuesdays he would try to leave the estate before nine. Anatomy began at ten-thirty, so to kill the extra minutes waiting for the Pharmacy class to finish with their dissection, Ewaen and his friends would drink tea at the Tea House. The Tea House was a brown Art-Deco hut just at the gate to the Medical faculty. It was run by the Filipino wife of one of their lecturers. Ewaen, Onyinye, Eric, and Taseh, and sometimes Sissi, would sit there sipping cups of the boiled green herb. Sissi didn’t always sit with the four of them. When the bell rang they’d make for class.
Ewaen had become used to the smell of formalin, so pungent that it left an acrid film on your tongue; he had adjusted to the yellow glow of incandescent light-bulbs swinging above the cadavers; to the click-clack of cock-shoes and high-heels on the white-tiled floors. He swam in a glow of expectation every time they were in Anatomy lab – great expectations and ambition. I will be a doctor after all; a good one, a surgeon.
“Lift the ventral patch of skin medially, expose the forearm wrist flexors and trace the median nerve distally to the carpal tunnel.” Onyinye spoke and frowned at Ewaen. Oh shit; it was his turn to read today, why he had hurried to class this morning determined to be here before her, why he had had the argument with Sissi in the first place. Word games and association. Ewaen thanked goodness he was dark, if he could blush he would have gone purple; he suddenly saw Onyinye with her shirt off, with her bare chest rising and falling, her shiny sweat reflecting the yellowish glow off the swinging incandescent light bulbs. It was absurd. His bulge, thankfully hidden by his lab coat, told him that it was sexy as hell. Especially now that Onyinye had gone red in the face. Her short reddish-brown hair seemed to stand on end.
No, Ewaen thought, he hadn’t said anything out loud.
Onyinye was a tyrosinase-positive albino; this diagnosis had been made during physiology class by their lecturer at the beginning of second year. It, the diagnosis that is, made Onyinye self-aware. When she blushed she would try to hide it by holding an open book to her face. She did the same now, Ewaen saw. She held up the dissecting manual to her face as if ashamed that he had made her angry. Ewaen apologised to the dissector of the day, a bespectacled tribal-marked boy who had geek written all over his face.
- A short story by Eghosa Imasuen
Ewaen heard himself snore.
This was something he had not become used to even though it had happened more than once. Ewaen knew he snored; it wasn’t that. He had to know because Sissi would not let him not know. But Sissi did not know this: that at times when waking up Ewaen could actually hear a snort or two of his sonorous breathing. And this morning as on the few other mornings – and afternoons, or evenings – when it happened, it still brought a smile to his face.
This asleep-smile was something to behold, Ewaen knew. He could imagine his girlfriend looking at his face as he woke. He could see Sissi smile in response to the slight, silly upturning of the corners of his mouth. How she would think that he was waking up from a pleasant dream. How she would watch him for a few more minutes, not interrupting whatever she thought he dreamt about. He longed for when she would whisper in his ear. Wake up, Ewaen. Wake up or you’ll be late. Now that he was used to, but not to the point of being bored with it. No. He was used to it the way one became used to ice-cream, or a sweaty tumbler of Gulder. Sissi’s lips against his ear, whispering. She made his mornings smile, she did. Ewaen curled himself into a ball, his shin hitting the pillar of wood.
Pillar of wood?
Oh yes. Now he remembered. Sort of.
He opened his eyes and received his second surprise this morning. He was on the rug. He tasted it first – granules of sand mixed with lint – because his mouth was open and he had recently begun sleeping on his face. Sissi had suggested that sleeping face-down reduced snoring.
Still, he was surprised: sleeping face-down did not mean sleeping on the ground, did it? What was he doing down here?
He had not yet awakened enough to have the energy to move his head so he used his eyes. They took in through half-closed eyelids the foot of his bed that rested against his knee. They scanned across to the empty snow of an absent TV station. They glanced, and looked properly a moment later, at the socks that dangled in front of his face. Brown cuddly socks with a picture of Winnie the Pooh over each big toe, socks that smelled of old wrappers and an orange rind.
Sissi’s feet.
What were Sissi’s feet doing on his bed? Oh, that wasn’t even a good question. A better one was this: if Sissi’s feet were on his bed, why was he on the ground?
Oh, yes. The Onyinye argument.
Slowly other sounds joined his snoring. The banter of a morning at Aiwerioba Estate: water splashing into plastic buckets from the tap outside his window; the vroom-vroom of warmed-up cars. The noises, smells, and chatter from twenty-six kitchens travelled to him in waves, waves that drowned out the sound of his own snoring.
***
As arguments go, this was slowly becoming pyrrhic. There would be no winner.
“I cannot believe you’d call her name when we were in bed together. So you are dying for her?”
“I didn’t call her name.” But he did, didn’t he? Ewaen spoke above the roar of the shower. He hoped the flat was now empty. It was nine already, everyone would have left for class. As the spray of cold water hit, cold water that helped to rouse him now that Sissi and her waking-tongue were on strike, he tried to play the tape back. The tape of last night. They had been in bed. She was on top. She always liked being on top. She liked to wrestle him for the position and would give a whoop of triumph when he finally let her win. They had put on the condom before starting anything, even before Ewaen had all his clothes off – she said taking the break to put on the rubber later would kill the illusion of spontaneity. He now moved in her; he watched her climb towards her climax. He watched the reflection of the TV lights on her sweating breasts, he watched those breasts heave, watched them rise and fall, faster and faster. His hands were on her hips but his mind was on Anatomy, wasn’t it? Yes, Anatomy. Tuesday. Cognition, association, and word play: that was what he used to prevent coming too soon. Think of a very bad book, last weekend’s football scores – okay ignore the fact that Arsenal won. That mightn’t work. The brain moved in mysterious ways. He had been thinking of when they would wake up if they kept this up for much longer, thinking if he’d be late for class, thinking that it would be his turn to lead dissection tomorrow, that he would need to pack his pen torch, his lab coat, thinking that Onyinye would, as usual, be in front of the cadaver first, thinking that he would have to do better than last time, if only to prevent another argument with Onyinye. And as most brain teasers and association word games go, he had come full circle: if he didn’t want to prevent another argument with Onyinye, he had to be awake early, he would have to end this quick. Sissi’s breathing was faster now, irregular, more urgent. It wouldn’t be long now. Ewaen had spoken, tried to say something. Sissi liked it when he called out her name.
Ewaen turned off the shower, dried himself with the blue towel, a souvenir from daddy’s celebration of ten years as a banking entrepreneur.
That was what he had called out, her name. Sissi. Onyinye? But what did it matter?
“What does it matter? I am your girlfriend! Not Onyinye. And you know I don’t like you mixing with that stuck-up crew!”
Oh. Did he speak his thoughts? The shower was off. She heard. “That was not what I meant, Sissi.” He hated using that name Sissi, but next to the full version, Akpanusikekesi, he felt he had no choice. No one called his girlfriend Akpanusikekesi. “Okay, even if I said her name, what does it mean? You know she’s in my Anatomy group; I was preoccupied with prepping for dissection today.”
“You were preoccupied while making love to me? That is what I am now, a mercy fuh . . . you were doing it because of pity?”
Ewaen muffled his chuckle by biting on the towel. She still couldn’t say the word. He came out of the toilet dragging under his feet a length of toilet paper he had stepped on. This drew a smile from his girlfriend. “See how stupid you look. Comot that shit paper from your leg, my friend.”
Good, comedy usually worked. She had laughed.
“So it’s all forgive and forget?” Ewaen asked.
“Forgive what? No. Go and ask your Onyinye what you and she have. When you’ve done that, then we’ll see.”
Sissi left. Ewaen stayed back for another ten minutes doing the things she normally helped him with. He dressed his bed, packed his videogame controllers in a heap by the TV stand, and swept. He heard his neighbours from next door, 42W, waking up. Noisy, as always. Doors banging shut, mosquito-netted shutters swinging open. Boisterous laughter. Ewaen closed his room door.
Ewaen said see-you-later to his only flatmate who would still be at home after nine in the morning, Harry. Harry was washing clothes in the parlour. Ewaen was going to say something but stopped himself. Why waste spit. He knew what Harry riposte would be.
“Me, wash clothes outside? No, Ewaen. That na fuck up na. You no see the chicks don already wake up. They go laugh me say big boy no fit afford dry cleaners.”
Why were Lagos boys so full of it? Ewaen pointed at the puddle forming in the middle of the parlour. Harry nodded: I will mop up when I’m done.
It was sunny outside. Nine in the morning. Vitamin D sun was what Professor Okafor called it. It was healthy; it made you grow strong bones. Yes. It also made trekking to class hell.
God, I hate sweating, Ewaen thought. He saw Tuvo from next door and shouted a greeting, “Forty-Two-Warri! Una good morning o!”
“Dude, aren’t you late for lectures already?” The boys of 42W were all Warri boys. Ewaen had often wondered himself about the coincidence. They never went for lectures and this morning they already had the football out. They would still be sweating, playing ball when everyone else on the estate got back from class.
He waved at them. “Today na Anatomy. I won’t be late.”
***
“Don’t put that in your mouth!” Onyinye said. Ewaen’s pen dropped to the floor. It landed with a clatter that brought a look from Professor Okafor. Ewaen mouthed an apology and bent to pick it up. The pen had been on an absent-minded journey from the green atrophied muscles of their subject to his lips when Onyinye slapped it from his fingers.
Was he really going to put it in his mouth?
Ewaen supposed he was. He liked Anatomy that much. Sissi said it was the only subject that brought him to class. He felt his girlfriend’s stare, a feeling of heat, a wire-mesh of light electricity on his back, and glanced up at the group working on cadaver number 4. Sissi looked away as soon as their eyes met; Ewaen put the pen in his pocket and smiled.
Anatomy was the only subject that disrupted Ewaen’s conceit of feigned flippancy in school. His routine on other days was wake, play videogames, trek to the buka in front of estate, eat, sleep, maybe gist with the boys of 42W, play videogames till late at night, and sleep. He supposed that a few more meals could be interspersed within this routine. Maybe Sissi would come to visit; this would change the last two items in his daily itinerary to make love, no sleep, wake up hearing yourself snore, a whispered “Wake up, Ewaen,” from wet lips next to your ear, make love some more, and miss classes for the day.
But not on Tuesdays. On Tuesdays he would try to leave the estate before nine. Anatomy began at ten-thirty, so to kill the extra minutes waiting for the Pharmacy class to finish with their dissection, Ewaen and his friends would drink tea at the Tea House. The Tea House was a brown Art-Deco hut just at the gate to the Medical faculty. It was run by the Filipino wife of one of their lecturers. Ewaen, Onyinye, Eric, and Taseh, and sometimes Sissi, would sit there sipping cups of the boiled green herb. Sissi didn’t always sit with the four of them. When the bell rang they’d make for class.
Ewaen had become used to the smell of formalin, so pungent that it left an acrid film on your tongue; he had adjusted to the yellow glow of incandescent light-bulbs swinging above the cadavers; to the click-clack of cock-shoes and high-heels on the white-tiled floors. He swam in a glow of expectation every time they were in Anatomy lab – great expectations and ambition. I will be a doctor after all; a good one, a surgeon.
“Lift the ventral patch of skin medially, expose the forearm wrist flexors and trace the median nerve distally to the carpal tunnel.” Onyinye spoke and frowned at Ewaen. Oh shit; it was his turn to read today, why he had hurried to class this morning determined to be here before her, why he had had the argument with Sissi in the first place. Word games and association. Ewaen thanked goodness he was dark, if he could blush he would have gone purple; he suddenly saw Onyinye with her shirt off, with her bare chest rising and falling, her shiny sweat reflecting the yellowish glow off the swinging incandescent light bulbs. It was absurd. His bulge, thankfully hidden by his lab coat, told him that it was sexy as hell. Especially now that Onyinye had gone red in the face. Her short reddish-brown hair seemed to stand on end.
No, Ewaen thought, he hadn’t said anything out loud.
Onyinye was a tyrosinase-positive albino; this diagnosis had been made during physiology class by their lecturer at the beginning of second year. It, the diagnosis that is, made Onyinye self-aware. When she blushed she would try to hide it by holding an open book to her face. She did the same now, Ewaen saw. She held up the dissecting manual to her face as if ashamed that he had made her angry. Ewaen apologised to the dissector of the day, a bespectacled tribal-marked boy who had geek written all over his face.