ìdájí
What was it about fogs? What stories did they tell? What did a fog do? Did it just sit and stare? Listen to the conversations around it? The whispers from the chirping crickets; the hooting of the owl. Did fogs feel at home so far off from the heavens? Their settlement upon the earth, en masse, mobile and heavy. Did they feel lost? Could they not wait to be gone as well?
Kanyinsola wondered these things as she stared ahead at the early morning fog staring back at her. It loomed, pouring down the red hills, enveloping the bushes nearby, the old concrete blocks and heap of gravel by the uncompleted building they would never really complete. It was five a.m. and she stood at the verandah of the bungalow, a single bulb spotlighting her, its glow, a dome over her. Arms resting upon the balustrade of the verandah, she looked into the cusps of dawn. Nothing but a rigid darkness fronted by the fog in her glory. Wicked cold.
She sniffed for the umpteenth time in those early hours and concluded that the fog, possessing her through her orifices, was as well clouding her mind like it did the environment.
It had been exactly five minutes since the call. She still gripped the phone in hand like it would fly away from her, like a raven that had conveyed its message.
Kanyinsola had thought she was dreaming her ringtone when the call first came in. But she had groaned out of sleep and squinted at the metal glow from the phone that early in the morning. It was her best friend calling.
“Bimpe…”
“Kanyin, I know you’re wondering why I woke you up this early,” Bimpe said.
With her words, Kanyinsola sat up, yawning, and waited for her friend to continue. After a pause, Bimpe went on, “Lanre is dead, Kanyinsola. They say it was a freak accident. Electric shock. He was trying to pump water in his apartment, and all those naked wires… I heard it from Femi himself. We were texting this morning and he told me. The funeral was yesterday… he died earlier this week,” she sighed, “I’m so sorry.”
Kanyinsola acquired a position on the bed that told her she had in fact not been sitting up before. She sniffed, tapped her hair bonnet and sniffed again, “What are you saying? Bimpe, are you serious right now?” But oh, she was. Something as macabre as this could be the only reason her best friend wakes her up five a.m. with a phone call on a Saturday morning.
“I’m so sorry. I couldn’t believe it myself, and it’s so crazy because I even talked to him on that Monday. That was the last time we spoke, he was even asking of you,” she sighed again, “They said it was on Monday evening he died. They buried him at his hometown in Ijebu yesterday.”
Disbelief. Whoever even said anything about disbelief? Kanyinsola believed it. Immediately Bimpe informed her Lanre had died, she believed it. Stunned, she was, but not in disbelief. And she despised herself for it. Maybe because Lanre had already been dead to her before his actual death. The best she could’ve done was have a little doubt about it, but doubt was not in the room with her. Lanre was dead. He was.
“Wo, I’ll chat you in the morning, my girl,” Bimpe retired, “I just wanted to let you know.”
Kanyinsola floated out of the bedroom to the verandah, her nightgown sweeping the chilly concrete floor; there on the porch, she stared towards the morning fog.
Lanre was dead. He was. Lanre with his almond skin and two chunks of goatee that would not connect. Lanre, whose hairy armpit she had trailed with her tongue until it got to his biceps, and she sucked it. Lanre who had basked upon her glorious bareness, carefully lay her down before tasking himself with her breast into his mouth. And now, he was dead.
Lanre who she had ghosted.
In the last weeks, she had abruptly pulled herself from him without an explanation or communication whatsoever. She shut him off everywhere. Kanyinsola never actually blocked him from reaching her, but just didn’t respond to his reaches. She slammed the doors of her life in his face; a glass door, one where he could press his palms upon and linger, long for her while she watched him. She went on with it for two months, months where Lanre had had to ask Bimpe to try to get to her for him. He had pleaded for attention, questioned himself, the relationship they had shared, searched for whatever it was that might have caused Kanyinsola to abandon him like that. She suddenly became an island, one where he was banished from for a cause unknown to him.
Kanyinsola pulled out her phone and checked his last texts, the most recent ones just the weekend before his death.
— Kanyin, you still aren’t answering me…
— Talk to me, Kanyinsola.
Unanswered calls, bubbles of text messages from his end shooting from the corner of her phone. Days and days of them, each seen, deliberately unacknowledged.
— I’ve been calling your phone Kanyinsola. Please pick up, you’re making me go crazy. At least tell me what’s wrong.
— Please…
— Kanyinsola.
Kanyinsola exhaled and put the phone away. She stared hard into the cold and dug for tears.
She stayed unblinking, let her eyes burn so the tears would come. Nothing. Now she loathed herself more. The boy was dead, she should mourn. Shed a tear. But all that filled her veins were cement.
And then the guilt came and joined her on the verandah, wrapping its arms over her shoulder, curating the thoughts in her head. He’s dead now, Kanyinsola, are you happy now? God, Lanre is so dramatic, why did he have to die? Yes, I ghosted him, but not that I wanted him out of the universe literally! Guilt panned her and Kanyinsola wondered why. Why was she feeling guilty? She had nothing to do with his death. But still it would not let go; the fact that he had died without answers, with her back turned to him, Kanyinsola felt her conscience terribly disappointed in her. “Fuck,” she muttered. He really did not have to die; how would she live with the way she treated this man in his last days? A man that supposedly loved her.
She heard the flick of a light switch from inside the house and she knew her grandmother was already up. The old woman rose at the wee hours of the morning here in her home in Ikorodu. Kanyinsola used to live in the heart of the city, in Ikeja, in close proximity to where she worked as an executive assistant. But following immediate evacuation from her landlord who wanted to renovate his building, and facing Lagos’ house hunting crisis, she had decided to move to Ikorodu there in her grandmother’s home until she found an apartment. Bimpe was already staying with a flatmate, she did not want to disturb. And so in the hills of Ikorodu, in its narrow streets with its weeds and its early morning fogs, she remained, transiting to Ikeja for work everyday until she sorted her accommodation out.
She started to head back into the house thinking she could get a bit of sleep until after sunrise. But she wouldn’t. She could not get Lanre off her mind.
She ghosted him. She was supposed to be the ghost, not him.
He was not meant to die.
DESCENT
Lanre had found Kanyinsola on the internet; seen her public profile, admired her pictures, and he had texted her with a little “hi.” The power of a ‘hi’; the reality of infinite possibilities that could ensue from a hi. Would he ruin my life? Could the stars rewrite from this one hi? How many scars does he possess? Would I etch more carvings into his skin that would immortalise upon his flesh into more scars? Kanyinsola had thought. She was dying to see the epilogue when the story had not even begun.
Like most Lagos girls in their mid-twenties, she had had her taste and share of the men of the city. Lanre wasn’t unique; he was a book she judged by its cover. He did not ride into her life on a pale white horse bearing scrolls of promises. He was the classic kind. A Lagos man. A gym bro with sessions in the evenings after working all day indoors as a product developer. He wore pinstriped senators on weekends and took photos before well-carved mirrors. He could afford a car—or not, but didn’t own one. Uber, Chowdeck, Dostoevsky, and drinks with friends on weekend nights. He was irreligious with a Muslim background. They called that genre of men The Yoruba Demons; flirtatious, liked to give the impression that they tiptoed around social media, but no, they owned those streets. Kanyinsola wanted him to break her heart quickly before she got bored.
On a white-hot-Sunday, they met for the first time. It was not a date. She visited his home after the first few days of talking. She willed it. They had lunch and Lipton, talked about work and Lagos’ architecture.
Sitting on a sofa across, he beckoned like a gentleman, “Can I join you…over there…”
“Sure, it’s your place,” she had chuckled. Is this man shy? And then he came by the sofa she was on and they interwined, his head laying on her chest. She liked them like that; shoulder level to her when they lay. She liked them like babies. But she knew what she had come there for, and it wasn’t long until she was kissing him till their clothes excused them. And they were standing, her against the wall, him solid as a brick. When he was dripping, reaching for the condom, she wiggled an index to his face. She would not sleep with him on the first meeting; she liked them longing. But they did everything else; from the living room to his bedroom, they acquired positions like sculptures. His ass to her face. They invoked ecstasy like a spirit, their moans the incantation. And Lanre finished upon her, breathless and in awe.
Their continual communication were still waters, and the next weekend, they met again at a bar where she was acquainted with his friend, Femi. Femi who—through Kanyinsola—would meet Bimpe.
A fortnight after their sexual encounter, Kanyinsola was having her morning shower, scrubbing down her upper thighs and legs when she noticed a small raise in her anal area. She paused for a breath, then ran her finger down through it, felt its firmness, its roundness as the pitiless shower cascaded upon her. The raise was the size of a pimple. She placed her palms over her mouth in a suppressed gasp, bathed finish, dressed up and went to work.
She decided to not overthink it, but she knew. A depth of her was aware of what the unwelcome foreign body was. Throughout that day, she was unable to focus at work; her vision blurred with the myriad of things racing through her mind. Maybe I’m mistaken, she thought. By tomorrow morning, it’ll be gone. Lanre texted her phone but she looked at his notification come in and felt only headlights of anger. It was the first time she would not reply.
Showering the next morning, she noticed the raise still remained in her anus. And it was the second stage of the reality. Acceptance. Kanyinsola fell on her knees in the shower and cried, curling herself into the position of a fetus on the bare tiles. There, she cursed herself, cursed her choices; and in the following hours, her phone browser history was filled with questions relating to anal warts, STDs and the human papillomavirus.
It had to be him. Lanre. She had been with a number of men but he was the most recent, and it burned her that you did not even have to have sex with a man to contract an STI because she never fucked him. She mostly never had sex with these men; it was only the make out sessions, the one she procured when they met for the first time, to keep them longing. It happened more times that they did not call or reach out again; it was always the feral first time make outs and nothing else. But in that aspect, Lanre had been different; he had been calling her phone, texting her for the past days, but rage had blindfolded Kanyinsola’s eyes for her to see to them. She was angry with him because now he had given her her first STD.
HPV, the virus responsible for warts, could be contracted even through non-sexual activities, especially skin to skin contact—this, Kanyinsola was learning from all the research she had been doing since her genital warts came. Everything she discovered, informed her HPV was the most common sexually transmitted disease, and study showed how most people would get it at some point in their lives. The warts were not dangerous, but Kanyinsola was hypochondriac; her eyes perceived a weed but her mind interpreted it as a raging, towering beanstalk. At a conference she had attended months back, she had learnt about a woman who got cervical cancer caused by HPV, and she descended into panic. She never put down her phone; she ran through archives and libraries of the internet, and they told her the same things about the STD. HPV would eventually go; the immune system would suppress it. But she couldn’t stop crying about it; in her work bathroom, at the back seat of the taxi.
This is what I get for laying with a man. A man from this city. These men are dogs, I’ve always known. Returning from work that evening, she went into a pharmacy and asked for the best wart removal topical money could buy so she could get on therapy. She knew she shouldn’t, but she felt filthy. She felt reckless. There were no seats at her table for regret and embarrassment, but the duo had ushered themselves in, acquired the best chairs. She could not imagine having to deal with the warts hived up in her anal area for any other moment, possessing her body like that, shoving her confidence to the back. The reads told her the wart removal ointment would get the warts out in a couple of days, but she knew the HPV would remain in her body until her immune system took its time with it. She housed it as a secret, never even mentioned it to Lanre himself, because what would that change? Kanyinsola swore she was done with men and every morning, she rose, cursing him for the blotch on her white garment.
“Lanre has been trying to reach you, he can’t. What’s the problem?” Bimpe asked her one evening during supper at one of their favourite restaurants, “He’s asked me to reach you.”
Kanyinsola had rolled her eyes, toying with her fork in the creamy pasta, “Bimpe, I’m done actually. I don’t have Lanre’s time. Don’t let him disturb you, I’ll attend to him at my own time, I’m just busy with so much on my plate.” Even to Bimpe, she was not able to spill. She feared being judged, told herself she could bear the burden of it on her own. Besides, at the time, the wart tissues were dying; the treatment was doing its job. But Kanyinsola still felt like rust metal.
Like the foreign body she harboured, something took over her in those days. Hypochondriasis holding hands with misandry; a glaring disgust at intimacy—existentialism. Madness. Even while she healed of the warts, the experience transformed her. Her woolly cola hair grew past her shoulders, and she would sit in the shower and stare at the windows while Lanre’s cries stacked her phone. Night and day. She slept on the floor, avoided mirrors. She fasted while Lanre brooded. She needed him to respect himself and stop disturbing her.
Moons rolled in the night skies; she had her eviction from her apartment and had to move to Ikorodu. In those passing months, she dove back into research on HPV in women—and viruses by extension, hating those wicked intruders who would ruin something as precious as lovemaking. That was when she saw it hyperlinked, staring at her from her phone’s browser feed: IT IS NOT THE MOST COMMON TIMEFRAME TO DEVELOP WARTS TWO WEEKS AFTER HPV EXPOSURE. WHILE INDIVIDUALS MAY EXPERIENCE WART DEVELOPMENT WITHIN WEEKS OF INFECTION, IT CAN ALSO TAKE MONTHS OR YEARS FOR WARTS TO APPEAR.
Kanyinsola put the phone down and let the salt in the air settle upon her eyelash. She allowed herself the newfound information on the viral infection, knowing then that she most likely did not contract the infection from Lanre as that would be a rarity; just two weeks after their encounter. It was the other men, the ones she’d been with before him; the many ones, and she had just taken it all out on Lanre for nothing. She did not even know who particularly. She reached for her phone.
There Lanre was, professing his love, begging for answers, an explanation somehow; where he could find her, why she was hurting him. Kanyinsola wanted to say something, but she shook it out. It was already too late now, what would she tell him? She had shut him off for months, what would her explanation back into his life be? He would be disgusted by her and the way she had handled everything. And so she ignored him again. He’s a fine man, he could get any other girl; he would leave me alone.
She left that reality unwritten. The script should play. There was nothing to rewrite. She had overreacted, but nobody knew how she’d felt in those times of her affliction. She continued to ghost him.
Until Bimpe’s five a.m. phone call that morning.
ONTO
“Look at it Sewa, look!” Kanyinsola urged her co-worker frantically.
They were in the staffroom at work, their workspace sliced and sectioned by cubicles. Sewa, her co-worker had her desk right next to Kanyinsola. A white ceiling gridded with fluorescent tubes that lit up the hall, spanned right above them, and that moment, Kanyinsola was pointing to the ceiling, showing Sewa the light directly above her.
“Kanyin, nothing happened to it,” Sewa said, “It’s working perfectly, nau.”
“No, but it’s…” Kanyinsola stared at the white glow of the bulb, “…it was twitching right now, I swear.”
“Nothing’s wrong with that bulb,” Sewa concluded and faced her computer again, her expression clearly perplexed at Kanyinsola’s erratic behaviour recently. She’d been nudging her all morning, trying to show her that the bulb was twitching; but whenever Sewa turned to see, its glow was stable.
What twitched were Kanyinsola’s eyelids as she scratched an itch on her neck. There had been itches everywhere lately. General discomfort. Insomnia. Lack of appetite. Pimples. The gloomy weather did not help, and neither did the recurring nightmares.
“Sewa, look at it! It twitched! It’s shaking!” Kanyinsola grabbed her co-worker’s shoulder, and when Sewa turned up to look, the light remained; still, metal. Unshaking.
“Kanyinsola, what is your problem?” Sewa said, glancing at Kanyinsola, then back at the bulb which was not twitching. “Are you sure you’re fine? The bulb is not shaking, and even if it were, I’d notice cos that’s what I’m using here too.”
Kanyinsola looked at the fluorescent tube. It did nothing, but immediately Sewa turned back to her desk, it twitched again—at least to her. No! Kanyinsola dashed up from her seat and ran into the restroom.
There in the restroom hall, she observed her features in the wall of mirrors lined before her. Toilet stalls were terraced behind. She fingered her face, peered at the dark circles around her eyes, and then right there, she burst into a hysteric laughter.
“I know you’re there. You’re doing this to me, Lanre, I know. We’re alone in here, so show yourself,” she spun around, squinted at the mirror, “Come on out, be a man!” and then the laughter was gone. “If you’re going to haunt me, at least be a man about it. I’m looking at the mirror now, show yourself.”
It had been occurring for weeks now. The ‘haunting’. At first, she’d thought it was all in her head, but she was beginning to refute that. It was weeks after Lanre was buried; she awoke to Missed Calls from his number. As if he flashed her in her sleep. When she would try to call it back, the number was unavailable. Then she began texting him, leaving him her own messages; answering all those ones she had ghosted.
It made sense to her that Lanre was coming for her. After all she had done to him. He was a Lagos man; even in death, a Lagos man would ruin your life. It was what she got. She’d thought she would move past the original guilt that was there when she learnt of Lanre’s death. She submerged herself in work, appreciated the house hunting stress Lagos gave her. At the same time, she took to advocacy on women’s sexual health on her social media, following the STD she had acquired. Despite her being in a celibacy phase, she got the vaccines—on HPV, on Hepatitis B. Kanyinsola got other STI checkups, and she was free of them, but still something lingered; a panic. A constant anxiety.
Even she knew she had become a mad woman, and that was a shame. Because why would she allow that incident take the wheels of her life and steer her unto a path of extremity in everything? She was never a spiritual person, but at the witching hour, she felt her knees finding the cold bare floor; whether to pray, she did not know. Whenever she found sleep, she was a somnambulist. When she spoke, it was soliloquy. Her friendship with Bimpe was straining. Queries were piling up at work. And now, Lanre was haunting her.
“Talk to me! Show yourself!” she screamed at the bathroom mirror, to the reflection she didn’t want to believe was herself. As she spoke, breaths formed condensation on the mirror glass, and she peeked at it, running a finger through its mistiness, forming a heart shape. She laughed, “Oh, you see…I can see your breaths…you’re standing right behind me, aren’t you?”
“Kanyinsola, who are you talking to?” a female voice joined her in the bathroom hall, and Kanyinsola jerked backwards to see another co-worker of hers stepping out of one of the toilet stalls, gaping at her. She’d been in there all along. Kanyinsola froze. “Kanyinsola, are you okay…? Whose breath are you seeing on the mirror? It’s yours… And who is Lanre?”
“Um…I was…I was on a call actually,” she lied, pumping the room with awkwardness. And then she was out again, grabbing her bag from her desk, and fleeing into the streets of Opebi, Ikeja.
“Bimpe, he’s haunting me!” she called Bimpe and cried to her on the phone. Her heels wobbled on the busy streets, and she almost found herself in the path of a speeding keke NAPEP.
“Aunty, you no dey watch?” the tricycle driver hurled at her.
“Kanyinsola, where are you? I’m hearing traffic. Are you out of work? Who’s haunting you?” Bimpe asked.
“I’m going home, I just left. Lanre. It’s Lanre, Bimpe, he’s onto me.”
“What…? Look girl, I’m out with Femi right now, but we need to find time to talk. What do you mean Lanre? He’s late. You’ve been acting really strange lately, and how can you leave your job by this time of the day? You never told me what happened between you two, but I can see his death is affecting you greatly, we should…”
“—you know what? You won’t understand anyway,” and then she hung up the phone.
She smashed the phone into the wall when she got home; that way she wouldn’t miss more calls from him, and those texts would not serve as apparitions either. She chopped her hair with scissors, locked her windows, and left the food her grandmother served her, right outside the door. Her monthly blood flow found its way out of her legs, but she did not pay attention to it.
Kanyinsola dreamt of a tombstone that night. A tombstone that bore Lanre’s name and information; the earth still thick around its base. A fresh grave. But right next to the tombstone was another; one that bore Kanyinsola’s name, but not really. The surname had changed. Engraved upon the tombstone in her dream was her name, but with Lanre’s last name. A couple in death.
Kanyinsola screamed from her sleep. Her grandmother would come knocking soon. Her screams were frequent like a ritual, even her grandmother had suggested a mountain they could go to and pray; one recommended by her church pastor. But in that blue darkness, Kanyinsola tapped the bedside drawer for her pills. Some days, she would be in a dilemma between the temazepam or some caffeine, but at that moment, sleep was the enemy. She didn’t want to close her eyes because all she saw was Lanre.
She sat up on the bed, and there she sobbed into her thighs. What was this? What was this story of her life? What is happening to me…? But she had been dying for this, after all. She saw that ‘hi’, and all she wanted was the ending. This was the ending.
Her grandmother did not knock upon her door; perhaps the old lady was tired of her dramatic shrieks. Bimpe too had not showed up that day; she knew her friend would have called her phone endlessly, but she had destroyed that. Bimpe ought to have come to her instead, but she didn’t. Kanyinsola feared that she too was tired of her.
The bedstand creaked. Did it usually creak before? Or was Lanre just the one rocking it gently now? Like an incubus. She considered wearing magun, holding a bible upon her bosom as she slept. A gecko eyed her on the wall, its eyes like highlights in the darkness. There he is. Monitoring spirit. She would run. She would run far away to a place he would never catch her. The clock ticked, judging her. It was past four a.m. Kanyinsola walked out of the room to the verandah.
Midnight was alive, NEPA was not. The darkness beckoned from beyond. There was that fog again. The one she could only find in Ikorodu, never in Ikeja. And now the fog danced, it whispered—its voice a rush louder than the hooting and chirpings of the night creatures.
“Kanyinsola…” Whose voice was it? Perhaps it was Lanre’s. Or just the fog’s. Still, she gave in to its summoning, her bare feet stepping off the verandah onto the naked earth.
Onto. He’s onto me…
She wondered who was watching as she walked into the early morning fog. Wondered who would see wispy gases swallow her up whole. Maybe the owls bore witness. She walked until all she could breathe was the fog.
*****
In two days, Bimpe sat by Kanyinsola’s grandmother in her living room which smelt of candlewax and biscuits. The old woman was sobbing into the shawl layered over her sofa’s armrest, and Bimpe placed her hand on her back, consoling her.
“Nibo l’omo yi wa, tori olorun,” the old lady wept.
Bimpe’s voice was hoarse despite the past few days being speechless for her. There had been no time to cry yet. She encouraged hope, and had come that day to show Kanyinsola’s grandmother the graphic designs for Kanyinsola’s missing poster. She had already posted them on social media, but the woman needed to see the one that would go for print; that would hang stuck upon the bases of the bridges in Yaba, and along the walls of the parks in Oshodi.
The graphic designer had used Kanyinsola’s best picture for her missing poster. The one on her LinkedIn profile.
=====
Image: Remixed ChatGPT