Glory be Mercy (2)

It took a day too long for Mercy to realize she was dead. Time floated by, cinnamon dust in liquid, aromatic, flowery, intense, and lingering. Mercy went about her usual activities: up at 4 a.m. before anyone else in her oversubscribed hostel room, rushing until she found an open lecture hall to watch the sun rise over the vertiginous landscape while hovering over Introduction to Physiology questions, two classes right before and after the Zuhr prayers at 1 p.m., the long walk back to female hostel block B, in bed and lights out before other students returned and dared to urge her to join the evening’s shenanigans, seeking sleep amidst gossiping girls. Ignore, ignore, silence, silence, the routine of a misanthrope.

When she did realize she was dead, it was because an entire day had passed and the usual hunger pang, one of few that arrived to indicate to her she was still a body, an organism with immanent needs beneath a bony frame, failed to do so. Her body was finally quiet. It was just her, the fractional self, moving along in time, yet separate from it. She had never imagined death to be so freeing. She had rarely imagined death at all, a banality in the calluses of a Kaduna childhood.

Birth, she had dreamt. The passage of natality, a rapid abstraction of initiation. In an instant, less time than the snap of fingers, she remembered she was somewhere else, distant from the idea of a human. Next, she was the child of Mr. and Mrs. Itopa Yesufu. Mother’s origins were unclear, perhaps intentionally opaque, although something was intermittently mentioned about the Cameroons. And father? Well, Father talked, did he not. He spoke of his father, Yusuf, a soldier bold enough to serve with pre- and post-independence Gowon. So bold he was that he left his son, Itopa, in Kaduna with his second wife, unmarried but consummated, and returned to his LGA in Kogi when the spoils of militarization waned. In a deliberate and perhaps rebellious fusion of an almost Muslim, almost Hausa identity, Mercy’s father, Itopa Yusuf, would be renamed Itopa Yesufu in Kad Poly. He was that student who had the effrontery to match the brazen pace and wit of the lecturers in the chemistry department. A destined pharmacist, Itopa Yesufu found glory in hospital after hospital, almost ending up at GlaxoSmithKline in early 1983. Then, he injured his foot in a freak accident involving a steel rod and an open construction site. A man who could not walk straight was useless in a lab, he lamented to his children years later, and so, he single-mindedly prepared for a reinvention. A painstaking reordering of the self that would see him choose Mercy’s mother out of the harem of supple ladies he boasted sought after him when he opened his pharmacy. When Mercy was born in 1989, the father she met doled out medication for the array of illnesses plaguing Malali residents. He was bestowed with the honorary title of doctor for being the only Mr-Cure-It-All within miles of the ungwa.

To be the first child of a man who felt his star could have been brighter if only, if only, circumstances had better aligned, came with conditions. Mercy’s primary inheritance was a mantle of greatness. She would end what had begun before her, join the ceaseless search, balance wants with opportunities to attain heights of sheer success. It was easy for her to do this, or at least she had thought it easy when, as she started excelling in primary three, and her father, seeing the shine of what the child could be, squeezed customers at higher prices for malaria medication to funnel into her private schooling. Mercy perceived then, across many mornings of standing in front of a mirror in perfectly pressed pinafores, that all she had to do was bow down and let herself be pushed. To be pushed was to be freed from the wrangling of indecision, of precision in the crafting of identity. Mercy was comfortable with wholly being her father’s daughter because it struck her, with each additional achievement, the years accruing into a clear vision of hard work equaling riches, that there was nothing wrong with living a life laid out for you when life itself was a jumble of coincidences, a series of perhaps, maybes, and could have beens. She was a born cynic dressed in the garb of next generation.

Her cynicism and its mutation into a particular propensity for loneliness multiplied in death. She did not head toward home as any young ghost might be expected to do. The nearest she got to the familiar was Ghana Road, where she settled in the groove of a parapet on the house of a man who fancied himself a far relative of Sokoto royalty. It was a comfortable spot, high enough to feel the touch of wind pass through her otherworldly body but sufficiently close to wistfully observe the stretch of road below. A tournament of desires, Mercy watched like she had never watched. The man leaning into the seamstress who tapped away at her machine. The carpenter too short to paint the top of his rectangular contraption. Was it a bed frame in vertical or the skeleton of a cupboard to line one of the many shops on the road? There was poor Adamu, who received a slap on the back of his head at intervals as regular as the call to prayer. His boss was the owner of the convenience store spilling onto the street. Crates of soft drinks and bags of pure water kept the store’s doors ajar and Adamu in perpetual trouble for not correctly stacking them. The vulcanizer fought with the man who sold engine oil lined symmetrically in sliced halves of plastic bottles. One would think that their enterprises did not similarly depend on the failures of a vehicle. The motorcycle mechanics who never seemed to completely fix anything, each client returning with glee, joy at an excuse to pause for the day, escape from the marauding sun. The young boy who stood alone and sold petrol from a jerrycan. His repeat customer who always only bought just enough to fill a glass bottle of Fanta. The woman who unsmilingly dished out kosai at the beginning and end of each day. The other woman who smiled and dished out kosai and fried yam and undoubtedly had the superior pepper. The people that gathered around them unfailingly. The people that dispersed, closed shops, and stored away their possessions as soon as the sky turned from blue to hyacinth black. A world with its earned revolution of people and things, a rhythm unto itself.

While alive, Mercy had thought her loneliness extraordinary. She had been convinced, through the suppression of many things she wanted to say but could not find anyone to tell them to, that she was, somehow, living a remarkable life. A life that could never be documented, detailed, or shared with as much thoroughness as it was lived. In her perch, her lonesome phantasmal perch, this thinking rearranged itself. Loneliness was a tidy excuse. There were no gods to intervene in the business of living. There were no merchants of desire to trade and fulfill wishes of exceptionalism. How else could she explain the unfolding of Ghana Road, its placid occurrence, the people who refused to be anything but themselves with a frightening regularity. It made her ache. It made her want to smile. It made her realize the duplicitousness of her cynicism. Her life had never been solely about her father and his unrelenting fantasies to exist beyond his failures. If it had been so easy for her to bear the mantle of greatness, why had she often felt angry? Somewhere, in the narrative of her life, as set in stone, as predetermined by all the things her family could not afford, all their palpable aspirations for better, for a reality that cohered around comfort, Mercy had forgotten how to be happy.

Or maybe she had never known. No, that was untrue. There had been a time, however shortened, when she had liked being alive. She had not been unaware of the things to come, so present were the signs of the future. Her father’s late nights at the pharmacy and his extended trips to source medicines in bulk. Her mother’s agitation for her to learn how to sweep and clean properly, agitations for order, for structure in the coming unknown. Mercy’s life was a blueprint of how to work hard to arrive at lasting happiness. Before the lessons solidified and she could not distinguish them from her nature, there had been days of pure joy. Days she spent with Glory and the many children who enlivened their low-cost building. The continuous games of hide and seek, pretend families, sùwe with rectangles drawn on roughened cement. Fleeting, but their bodies had been theirs to play with, to play through.

Her mottling had indeed begun earlier than she would care to admit. She could not remember the last time she had truly spoken to her sister Glory. Their relationship turned sour and perfunctory just as Mercy entered Senior Secondary. She had begun to view Glory as her parents did: someone unwilling to rise to the demands of life, to take complete responsibility for their existence. Where she had long tolerated her sister’s indolence, she had come to find it fatiguing. Less of Glory was more of Mercy. And Mercy was eager to exit their domestic arrangement. She had entered ABU with a forceful sense of relief that it was the beginning of the end of her exertions. She imagined finishing her degree and the arrival of a renewed dawn. One child had made it. One child had done what several generations merely whispered. Mercy had felt that Glory was purposefully ignorant of the stakes of their common happiness. Even if she empathized with her sister’s inclination to be different, to strike another path, it did not seem that Glory really believed in her chosen direction of alterity. When she was alive, Mercy could not imagine another way for them to be themselves. A way that they would survive the roughest edges of their portion without complete sacrifice, without capitulations to excellence. Mercy went in search of Glory because, more so in death, she could not understand how her sister lived.