I
This is the point in the night when you become. Your upper limbs swing wildly, extensions of a zombie bathed in blue, then red, then blue beams. You do not know what song comes next. You do not care. Five strides away, your roommate fashions an arch out of another’s spine, slowly yielding obeisance from the soul he’s been after all weekend. To your left, four girls shriek in delight. Jesus hangs on for dear life, suspended around a clavicle by silver and disbelief. A lady pauses to re-adjust her hijab, mindful of the junior who’s been staring reproachfully. You walk to the corner of the quadrangle to refill your cup.
Three steps in, the DJ begins the transition to Chuddy K’s Gaga Crazy.
“Every time I come around, every time I come around.”
Two swigs down and you’re buzzing, trying to make it back to your spot in time.
“This club is going—”
You ditch the cup. You can almost touch the circle. Just one more step.
“—crazy!”
Ground zero. Your night starts again.
Anyone who has become can describe that moment. Most won’t remember until prompted. Sometime during the night raw wanderlust hits, and you become one with the music. You become a cell in the superorganism that is a sapien dance floor. The worst dancers become. The waist whiners become. It is a magic non-unique to our hall, but with a flavor that lingers at the tip of the tongue years later. Blackest nights giving way to euphoria. It is the way of bonfires at this sanctum of Nigerian medical education.
II
You have watched the sun set from your outdoor throne, an abandoned concrete pole a few feet away from the Male Boys’ Quarters. You’ve done this more times than you can remember. For different reasons. A segue into the evening and whatever tasks lie in store as the day gets dark.
Today the gas giant seems unwilling to go down. Perhaps, like you, she has grown disinterested in monotony, as the days blur into each other with frightening speed, and you both grow older in fatigue’s bosom. She’s been intense for four fortnights and then some. Nights are horrible. Old pages of Lantern and Macmillan Basic Science textbooks no longer hold sole descriptions of global warming. Shirtless, you feel the heat in waves, watching shadows dull in intensity, waiting for the coming cool. This is one way to watch a sunset.
Do you want doctors dead to scenery? The men who built this hospital complex certainly did. The ones who have come after are uninterested in such frailties as greenery. There is no training on how to behold a sunset with longing. Our mandate is simple: learn, become, fill, serve, sacrifice — in no particular order. It is an efficient system that births world-class students. No one needs sentimental navel-gazing doctors. You don’t seek greenery you can’t see.
In your case, dusk is magical because watching comes with other thoughts. An organized and chaotic cascade certifying that you are indeed conscious. For a few minutes, right before your smartphone’s inexorable dopamine pull breaks the spell, all that exists are mundane musings on the future, fresh regrets, and free-fall emotions. Sometimes houseflies and lumbar back pain send you packing before any magic begins.
III
Horny chorales of croaking bullfrogs soundtrack 1:40 AM. There should be noise drowning out their pipes. Music should blare from select rooms, competing with the noise of industrial Ox fans and loud gossip. A hall of over 600 men and women shouldn’t be dead every night. There should be power. Sleeping with the lights on shouldn’t be a rarity.
There is nothing to watch out here. The occasional stranger traipses down a corridor to rid themselves of urine or stercobilin-stained shit. Nothingness forces you up the stairs of an adjacent block in the hopes of finding a muse. When you arrive, you peer at the landscape of Ìbàdàn, and it is grim. The city is dark. A son of the soil is Minister for Power, yet all but a few structures are pitch black. When he campaigns for the governorship, as he did in 2022, concessions will be made so that no one responds with jeers. He will give you a generator or attend to some other minor need, and his sins will be temporarily forgotten. The polls will come around, and because this Hall is politically liberal, he will lose. You are back down the stairs when this thought surfaces, a bright spot in an otherwise bleak night.
IV
Only fourteen people failed your class’s second Medical Board exam. So, rightly, the whole world knows, since bad news travels faster than banga soup down hungry gullets. Fourteen rooms are more comfortable than ever. Day is night is day. Fourteen students have altered their life courses. It is not the change in destiny implied in whispered conversations. But fourteen souls now linger behind in the race to El Dorado.
One evening, you pass out after a good night dancing in mosh circles. And then you stop attending bonfires altogether. (This happens months before failing the exam.) There are but a few things you wouldn’t sacrifice to relive one more of those nights. Memories made with set-mates fold out of an envelope – returned to sender, torn at the edges. Someone has clawed out each timestamp against nature’s better judgment.
Already they make the separation in their minds. They don’t greet you the same way anymore. Empathetic WhatsApp status updates on the day the results were released became memes about economic hardship hours later. The world did not stop for your grief. Some carry on as if nothing happened, and it is admirable, until their eyes betray shame felt on your behalf, and you’re forced to turn away.
Fourteen names gradually become anathema. You will swear the Hippocratic Oath a year later than the rest. Fathers, sisters, and grandkin are saying, It is well. You, too, will be doctors.
V
On the evening train connecting South-Western Nigeria’s two metropolises, a young man conducts a homegoing ritual: he is learning his church’s greetings. To his left, a middle-aged man in grey pants and a brown shirt taps away at his phone, engrossed in whatever it is men his age do. To his right, a lady in a black body suit and knockoff Louis Vuitton flats also taps away at her screen, engrossed in a WhatsApp tête-à-tête. Ahead yet behind is a reminder of the failure from which he’s fled.
Once upon a time the train did not exist, and the young man travelled by road. He was proud to be a medical student at the University of Ìbàdàn. This has since changed, not unlike how the city has transmuted in worth and meaning. The Botanical Gardens are two love stories. Dugbe is a dinner. Set-mates in other departments, bar two, have bid the premier varsity farewell. Secondary school classmates are married. He is outdated.
“Like the wi-fi on the train?” his alter ego asks. “Like the wi-fi on the train,” he half-mumbles.
Watch him hide behind words again. He is typing. His fingers bang out codices as tweets. There are 7,200 seconds from the train’s first jerk to the screech of carbon-manganese steel as it stops, yet for none of those does he choose to be naked in thought. His ennui gives way to anger and disappointment during the day. He waxes philosophical about existence. He would rather die than admit Paybac iBoro and Lupe Fiasco’s verses are temporary salves for eternal pain. WAV. files drown his sorrows in hi-hat turbulence.
The train comes to a stop, thrusting him onto dilapidated roads worse off than his last visit two years ago. Entropy arrives all the same.
VI
“Twice upon a time, there was a boy who died/Who lived happily ever after, but that’s another chapter.”
André ‘3000’ Benjamin was twenty-three years old fully half of the second-greatest rap duo of all time when he delivered these lines on Aquemini. Videos from other songs on the album, such as the hyper-illustrated Rosa Parks, show an eccentric rhyme-smith in the throes of world-changing youth. His poetry poured in an unending flood, exactly as Teju Cole put it in Treasure Beach: of the poetic as the link by which different kinds of excellence understand each other, rather than mere communication of sentiment. André is fifty now. He admits to having nothing to rap about because of his age. Instead, he plays the flute for release, and gives songs weird titles like That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into A Panther And Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control…Sh¥t Was Wild.
Many do not believe him. And why should they? This man gave the world that Life of the Party verse in 2021.
“Hey, Miss Donda, you run into my momma, please tell her I said, ‘Say something,’
I’m starting to believe ain’t no such thing as heaven’s trumpets,
No after, over, this is it, done,
If there’s a heaven, you would think they’d let ya speak to your son”
You remembered that record earlier today while preparing to write about different forms of death through the lens of Aquemini. At home, you observed with fear how much older your parents had become. Your father groans with every bend. Your mother’s arthritis makes sewing a trial of faith. When they both stand from the sitting room cushions, “Jesus!” bears the strain – at least you hope he does. You worry med school won’t be over quickly enough, and worry about being a distant shadow in their final years and missing all the gossip about their uni days and girlfriends that cooked and NYSC in Port Harcourt and dealing with grief in the early years and perpetual sibling trouble and parties in the 80s and that time Ayuba came to UI and the snake they killed in your room and the clock that’s Tigi’s agemate and Oghene’s first birthdays and TJ’s CU days and Aunty Flo and neighbourhood jealousy and scraping by as civil servants and gambles made in faith and that herniorrhaphy that nearly rendered this train of thought an alternate timeline.
Until the train ride home, you hadn’t seen them in over a year. Your desire to escape the ghosts of bad memories loses out against the fear of, one day, having to look to cumulus clouds for any sign that they can hear you cry. They want you to go to church, but you don’t tell them about unbelief and how the COVID years’ secrets killed any mustard seeds that survived. You are willing to pretend. For now.
There are two other questions buried in the Life of the Party verse.
“Always smiled (read as frowned), but was he happy inside?” You don’t know.
“I’m supposed to smile as if God knew that I would be troubled/Keeps me around for what?” You don’t know.
You don’t know, and you don’t know, and you don’t know.
VII
Another morning arrives. So you do what you have to do, and hope it’s enough.
You craft imperfect monstrosities from a universe where we are Eildrich. You navigate the world of Hemingway scholars as a mere Nnedi lover and Ekwuasi fanboy. To be heartbroken is to be a vessel for words threatening emergence from the void, from that primordium where inspiration lives. Paranoia is a poem in the offing. Regret is a short story. You channel all of that as best as you can.
You try to make your mind a sturdy receptacle. You try to hold still.
“Beware that they don’t someday sing shallow be thy name. Both now and in the thereafter, do good work. Now, because that’s all we are at the end of the song. Thereafter, because it would be a continuation.”
You try to follow suit and write from the marshland called nothing – that in-between – hoping you survive the end. You write so that your path on the journey to the last page exists in someone else’s memory, at least. You mark the finite and hope.
VIII
“They say a boy joined the angels today. They say he took a potion to find release and that the void ceased. They say he is not with you, with them, with us, with all the King’s men, with all the other children of the world; that he is ‘another,’ loved and missed; they say what they know to say until they can’t say anymore.
“Listen closely. They are still saying. His soul will rest in peace, they say. He was just a boy, they say. A little boy who craved the divine.
“They say it was too early for the boy who was loved; who is loved.” ▪
Cover image: Fons Heijnsbroek, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons