“Pardon?”
“You heard me. America. 1600, the wild, wild, west, baby.”
God blinked, eyebrows halfway to his hairline.
“Are you sure? I’m… I’m not sure you understand. This is the chance to fulfill any wish. Any wish. You could change anything about your world; you could end w–”
Bolu chuckled. How could he possibly explain himself to a creature like this? Of course, it was not lost on him that a lesser man might have asked for an eradication of conflict in the Middle East, or the economic prosperity of West Africa. He knew what those simpletons often dreamed about. He knew the average man would have lost his mind at the opportunity of meeting God himself, but Bolu had already encountered Godhood. Many times, in fact. He spent his childhood seeing the true face of omnipotence every night at eight.
His family was never one for church, but the TV sufficed. One-liners and flashing pictures were his scripture. Ratty cloak swaying in the wind. Boots crunching softly on the sand. Hat casting a shadow over a pair of eyes. There was a certainty in that man on his TV, a consistency. That man could live a thousand lives and suffer a thousand tragedies, could have every variable of his existence spun wildly off course, and his story would still end with him pointing his colt single action at the heads of those who wronged him. A blissful sort of changelessness, that was godhood.
As a boy, after crashing and tumbling his way through his homework, he’d scramble to the living room every Friday evening and sit inches in front of the battered box of wires cosplaying as a television, waiting breathlessly for it to light up with his show.
And it really did feel like his show. He liked to imagine this production created in the far-off land of Hollywood was created for him. To help shield him from the nincompoopery brewing outside. It wasn’t that he hated his people, no, don’t be silly. It was just that Nigerians had a chronic lack of imagination that always irked him. They were far too small-minded and comfortable in their simplicity, too bound in the sticky trappings of humanness to be more, to be like the man on TV, to even concern themselves with that kind of Godhood. They discovered, eddying around in their day-to-day smallness, solace. Bolu discovered bondage.
So yes, when God showed up next to him in a bathroom stall, breathtakingly phosphorescent, offering him omnipotence, Bolu was thoroughly disinterested in dirtying his fingers with the ungrateful ‘real world’. He wanted a taste of that past, that glorious American yesterday. He knew, with a conviction that made everything else he thought he knew brumous and translucent, that he was meant to be under the western sun. He was meant to be pointing his revolver at the heads of his enemies, not trapped in a land where the past had been chucked across the sea and the future had been scrubbed like a sand-print kicked clean. Face split open with a smile, Bolu wiggled out the last bit of urine and shook hands with the deity.
“I-it seems I didn’t explain properly,” the God said, laughing nervously and scratching his beard, “you have been chosen at random in a test to prove the goodness of mankind. Your–I should not be telling you this–your people have abandoned my father’s grace, and he’s talking about sending the flood again. I’m offering you the chance to–”
Still shaking hands, Bolu raised his other unwashed hand to silence the God.
“Now, now,” he said, “I’ve humoured your nincompoopery but I think it’s time I got serious, uh, Mr…”
The god blanched. “Jesus Christ?”
“Right, Mr. Jesus Christ. You’ve asked me what I wanted and I told you. So, chop-chop. A golden revolver, a leather hat, a bag of coins and a mighty steed, please. Don’t make me ask again, Mr. Christ.”
Mr. Christ looked around, as if searching for witnesses in the bathroom stall. He shut his eyes tightly and muttered something about not wanting to do this, but Bolu wasn’t listening. He just kept shaking the deity’s hand until finally, Mr. Christ sighed and snapped his fingers.
That was how it came to be so. Bolu spent the next several days touring the great American west as a legendary outlaw, putting miles on the souls of him and his steed, throwing behind him a trail of dust as he speared further and further into the horizon.
Except, even he’ll admit ‘outlaw’ might be somewhat of a reach. By the end of the first week, he hadn’t gotten the chance to actually fire his fancy revolver, and there was the issue of a nagging deity tagging along the whole way, complaining about frivolous diseases, making him wear a stupid bandana over his–if you asked him–rather handsome visage, and asking Bolu to spend his hard-asked coins on the sick and dying instead of prostitutes and casinos.
But it wasn’t entirely drab. The Wild West, untamed Americana, was ravishing to behold. On evenings, they’d ride on cliffsides, watching the sun sink with oranges and pinks into the distant sands, and Bolu would feel a great sense of belonging. His homeland was untamed as well, but there was no majesty in its wildness. Only meaninglessness, only suffering. Days back home ended the way mosquitos died: with a splat and the subconscious act of forgetting. Bolu and Mr. Christ rode aimlessly for those few days, but the wonder came in that it didn’t feel aimless. It felt like every direction he pointed held a great big truth to offer him, as if the very nature of the land, each cloud, each sand particle, each town was imbued with a great, unnameable significance. That was America, Bolu decided. That was the promise.
On a fateful dark morning, as he and Mr. Christ sat talking around a campfire, destiny came a-knockin’.
“Bolu,” Mr. Christ said, “do you know why I came to earth?”
Bolu bit kernels off his cob. “To fulfill a wish or something like that?” he said.
Jesus looked into the fire. His hair was matted, his brown skin flaked with dirt, his beard scraggly and pointing every which way, as if it was trying to escape from its host. If he hadn’t appeared in a literal column of dazzling light, Bolu would have simply thought he was some kind of lightskin toilet watcher freak.
But of course, there was the matter of his eyes. Mr. Christ had no pupils or irises to speak of. His eyes were simply black marbles in his head, entirely so. No white or brown or any of the typical colours Bolu had grown to associate with eyes. Just black all through. And they seemed to be expanding ceaselessly. As in, the blackness was always growing deeper, and if Bolu looked at him long enough, he could pretend he was tumbling through them, he could pretend he was mere moments from grazing the bottom with his fingers. Yet surely, the black parts of our eyes are what take in light. Bolu knew that. He sometimes thought maybe Mr. Christ had let all the light in, all the light that was and is, and he’d gone blind from it. That would explain why, as he looked into the fire, black holes glistening, it looked like Mr. Christ was seeing nothing at all.
“You’re partly right. Did you see what happened to that girl, Amina Barau? It was all over your news.”
At first, Bolu said nothing. His silence extended and extended, and then just when one would assume he simply hadn’t heard the question, Bolu said, “Of course I saw it. I don’t even watch the news but of course I saw it. That is all we can do, isn’t it?”
Mr. Christ turned to him, then back to the fire.
“My father is at his wits’ end, Bolu. It was the police, you know that? It was kept under wraps but it was men in uniform that did that to her.”
“They used pure-water sachets,” Bolu said, still chewing, “maybe condoms are expensive in the north. Then again Hausas wouldn’t be able to afford it if it was free.”
Mr. Christ turned to Bolu again. “Are you having a laugh, Bolu? I was hoping you’d prove something to my father.”
Bolu looked at his corn. The kernels had hardened and turned a kind of bronze from the heat of the fire. He liked it this way, the roasted corn they sold outside his house was blackened, and hard. Hurt his teeth and made him cough.
“You wanted me to do something foolish, like bring that girl back to life,” he said, looking up at the deity, “but if Amina doesn’t die, someone else will. We are like that, my people. We are small.”
“Bolu. You h–”
Bolu stood. “Abeg. You are killing my enjoyment. That is not why we’re here. I need to shit.”
Mr. Christ began explaining to an uncomprehending Bolu that no, toilet paper has not yet been invented, and that it would not be invented for another two centuries, and that he would have to rely on boiled corn cobs for such activities, when suddenly, Bolu coughed hard and wretched into his hand. Slowly, he pulled it back and saw a biting-red pigment splattered on his palm.
“I see,” he said, quivering with excitement, “it must have happened when I wasn’t noticing.”
Mr. Christ stood and looked over at Bolu’s hand, frowning.
“Of course,” Bolu exclaimed, laughing heartily, “of course! I’ve made enemies, and they’ve endeavored to poison me! Finally!”
“I think you have Tuberculosis,” Mr. Christ said.
Bolu grabbed Jesus by his shoulders. “Come! It is finally time for some action! We ride at dawn!”
“It is dawn.”
“Then how’s ‘bout we get ta blastin’?” Bolu said, glaring out into the nebulous distance and chewing on a grass straw he’d plucked from the ground.
As he wrapped the bandana around Bolu’s face, Mr. Christ tried to inform him that they had no way of knowing who exactly poisoned him, but he was quickly dismissed. Obviously, they would simply retrace their steps and visit every one of the several locations they had spent the last week in.
The first town they hit was a tiny, dusty thing called GlassHole. Bolu and Mr. Christ clambered off the steed as they neared the saloon. He turned to the deity and placed his index to his lips, before taking a step back. Brimming with anticipation, Bolu kicked open the door–a door which, he had been disappointed to discover, was an actual door, not the swinging double kind he’d seen on TV–of the saloon, glowering out at the people. Most of them were playing cards, some were at the bar nursing beers, a blond girl stood sweeping in the corner next to a smiling German Shepherd. Behind Bolu, Mr. Christ cowered, offering whispered apologies to everyone.
His spanning gaze stopped at the barkeep, a hairy middle-aged man in a stained brown apron.
“Howdy partner,” he said, tipping his hat.
The barkeep blinked. “Partner? I know you, son?”
Bolu chuckled and walked deeper into the bar, his hand resting gently on the grip of his sheathed revolver.
“Alright now, I’m not one to point fingers, but I harbour good reason to believe someone in this room po-”
“Come again?” the barkeep said.
“I said, someone in this–”
“What?” bellowed the barkeep, “take that bandana off your face boy, I can’t hear you.”
With a huff, Bolu reached for his bandana and ripped it off before Mr. Christ could stop him.
“I said, some fella in this–”
“DEAR GOD IT’S A NIGGER!”
An older man at one of the card-playing tables dropped everything and reared back, aghast.
“How the hell did it even get in here?!” The barkeep hollered.
“Heavens, kill it! Quick!” Another man screamed.
At the corner of the bar, both the blond girl sweeping and the smiling German Shepherd doubled over and promptly vomited.
“What’s the policy for this? Who gave it a gun!”
“It’s one of them minstrels, I know it!”
“If we stay still, it might forget we’re here and leave.”
“Susan, stop vomiting!”
“Jesus Christ, it looked at me!”
“It’s blocking the fucking exit!”
“Where’s my goddamn crucifix?!”
Panicked, Bolu turned to Mr. Christ, but the deity had his head in his hands and was muttering something about this being worse than the cross. Mercifully, Bolu remembered a crucial lesson he’d learned through his religious text, television: always trust your instincts.
His eyes darted all over the bar once more, over the barkeep trying to scare him off with a broom, over the old man holding a barstool defensively, over the child crying huddled in the corner, until his intuition led him to land on the blond woman, newly recovered from her bout of fear induced nausea.
Immediately, Bolu knew in his soul he’d found his poisoner. He drew his golden revolver, his own personal slice of heaven, his path to godhood made manifest, and pointed it at her. Of course, guns weren’t legal where he was from. He’d never even seen one in person prior to his wish, but he could feel it in his gut. He didn’t need useless things like practice or, god forbid, a conscience. The gun spoke to him. It told him to pull the trigger, and he did, and there was a bedazzling flash, and he was twelve again, and in the room over his mother was watching Boko Haram burn his people on the news, and the clock hit 8pm, and his show would come up, and Boko Haram would disappear, and his mother’s frown lines would disappear, and Amina Barau would be at home sleeping when the policemen left the bar drunk, sand-caked boots in search of something small and crunchable, a crack loud enough to blanket the fact that they would wear that uniform for years and years and years and years and likely die in it, and scarcely amount to anything more than a grain of concrete dust in a crumbling, unnamed coliseum moments before Rome died, before the world died. Under the light of that old CRT all that would–that could exist was the great American west, Nigeria an afterthought, the promised land surely keeping its promise. At that moment, he realized that was it. That was it. Godhood: The ability to make everything else small. He had reached it.
The flash faded. The young blond girl stood frozen, blood pooling at her feet. Then she exhaled. Which clearly confused her. She patted herself all over, looking for holes that weren’t there. Bolu tilted his head, as confused as her.
“Fido!” the barkeep cried, rushing over to the German Shepherd that was now clearly missing an eyeball.
Bolu smirked, blowing off the non-existent smoketrail rising out of his muzzle.
“Alright then,” he said, sheathing his gun and turning, “it seems ol’ Goldie here has spoken. The gun never lies, after all. Next time teach your dogs not to mess wi–”
They beat him senseless. A barstool came flying into the back of his head. The barkeep slammed the broom down on him. The blond woman kicked at his crotch. Fist after fist after fist rained down on him like hail, and he couldn’t tell if the blood he spat onto the hardwood floors was because of that weird tubercul thing Mr. Christ had mentioned or because the blond woman had begun to slam her heels into his neck.
A red pool quickly formed by his head, and as he laid there on his side getting pummeled, he noticed his reflection gazing back at him through the crimson. He flashed a porous smile. When the barkeep ran to the back and returned with a Doglock Blunderbuss, Bolu couldn’t focus long enough to combat a creeping suspicion. Smiling back at him was no manner of God, or man, at all.
=====
Image: MikeGunner Pixabay remixed