Portrait of Man as Pendulum
Moyosore Orimoloye
For the seven consecutive mornings since you began trekking this route, the food hawker has called out for buyers of the same meal. You do not know why she is so tenacious; for seven days she has tried to fill these motorcyclists, bus drivers, and newspaper vendors and for seven days, she has failed. You thought it was just the hoodlums, who broke up the road at night and pretended to fix it, for tips, all day long, who had embarked on projects that could never end.
You hurry into the bank and join the long queue in front of your favourite cashier. Today, you realise she smiles before and after attending to every customer, so that this must be standard procedure, and you’re not as special as you thought. You’ve never spoken to her and mull over the idea of her thinking you incapable of speech. If life were a dramatization of poetry, being unable to speak would have made your love apparent. You really want to speak to her, but the only way you know how to start conversations is to ask for names. But you already know her name, it’s there, stapled to her jacket. She labours through this seemingly unending queue daily, doling cash to people who’d be back in a week or less for more. You remember the hawker and the hoodlums. The only difference is the fancy jacket and the air conditioners, blaring, huffing and puffing ice around her.
You look around the bank with your new-found lenses and make wild guesses at the professions of other people on the queue. The old man ahead of you is a professor, for sure. His afro betrays his identity. You wonder how close he is to retiring and lament the futility of his life, spent chasing after truths constantly under revision. The one behind you is his friend. They hugged when he came in.
“Prof Prof!”
“My Lord!”
“Prof Prof!”
“My Lord!”
The exchange went on till they hugged again. They had probably not seen in a while and could possibly never see again. Sometimes, you wished everyone was this way, hugging the way heaven and earth must have the night before they set out in opposite directions of each other. You assume the new man is a judge. You wonder how futile his life has been as well, sending criminals behind bars with scientific regularity and still failing to create a just world. Another day, another gavel bang and still, justice will never be done. The next man looks young, with his shirt tucked into his jeans and as you venture to analyse how the engineer must have also failed at a task he continues to attempt, Prof completes his transaction and you step before the cashier, dumb. You hand in the withdrawal slip and she hands you the money sent you to get drinks for the naming ceremony of your cousin’s first child. You head for the store of the woman who has tried, for the better part of her life, to cure thirst.
At the table, filled with drinks and the ash of a thousand cigarettes, you can no longer remember what the child was called. You think to ask the father after he’s had a few more bottles, but you already know how it would turn out. You wonder why people name their offspring anyway; in primary and secondary schools, the child will be bullied, his name modified into instruments of torture that will send him bawling into the arms of his parents or into classroom corners. After that, he’d move on to the university where he’d be known by alphanumeric codes and after that, he’d be known by his surname or profession or a combination of both.
Another well-wisher takes control of the auxiliary cord and Fela comes booming out of the speakers. Like clockwork, everyone proclaims Fela a prophet. You are not sure Fela is a prophet. He seems, to you, merely a journalist who spoke of times that have not and might never change. You want to bring this up, but you know how the argument will go. Nothing is new. You even think you saw a sliver of grey in the newborn’s hair.
The party moves on to a new club in the area.
“Opening ceremony after naming ceremony, today go lit”.
You want to remind the speaker that his status updates have envisaged this lit-ness for the past five fridays but mornings always come with melancholic misquotations of popular authors, but you refrain from this line of action. A politician declares the club open and a few good bottles of champagne are wasted. Inside, you cannot hold back from informing your friends that the club is, in fact, not new. They press you to explain further and you tell them you’ve fucked a quarter of the prostitutes outside, and the rest, you’ve seen before. You tell them there’s also nothing fresh about the meat of the Suya Meister and the songs of the disc jockey. The deejay, as though in protest, plays Cardi B’s Bartier Cardi and your mates throw their hands about rather animatedly. You tell them the song has been streamed a million times on Tidal. Your cousin thinks he’s caught you when he asks about the beer. The others cheer and bang the plastic table with their bottles, which you proceed to tell them are recycled.
The night doesn’t quite go well after this, you give an example of God, saying the creator is always trying, like other artists, to create something immortal, but always fails. You give an example of the newborn; another trial by God that is doomed to die. And because superstitious people often retch when fed the truth, your cousin breaks two bottles on your head.
You wake with a bandaged head and cannot tell if the head is banging from the injury or the hangover. Standing over you, in a clinic, are your cousin, his wife, cradling the baby in her arms and the rest of the party. The private ward you are in smells of drugs and disinfectant. A nurse enters the room, punctuates the silence with a barely audible greeting, and relieves you of the lines that must have, overnight, tethered you to life. You prepare to leave for home and the story to tell your mother is fabricated, staircase slip. No apologies are offered, or needed.
The next morning, at home, a different set of people are standing over you. Your father and mother look half-disturbed and half-concerned, the sum of the two being the equation for care. With a disturbing regularity, they bring in food and drugs by eight every morning, four every afternoon and eight every night, stand over you while you eat and watch you swallow the pills. You recognize the truth that led to your injury in your parents, going through the same motions for five consecutive days, so that halfway through lunch on the fifth day, you protest for some variety and refuse to partake further in the unending ritual of nutrition. They agree not to stand over you whilst you ate again and implore you to take a bath, something you hadn’t done since returning home, but you beg them to realize the failure of baths as well; litres of water are wasted every day and the next day still meets us unclean. You protest the brushing of teeth and the washing of clothes for similar reasons. Your parents hope, to God, that this abrupt change will pass.
It doesn’t pass. The next morning, you protest the crowing of the cockerel. You chase it round the compound, catch it and give it a thorough beating. Your father rushes out to save its life. You gather stones before climbing up to your room again. You line the stones at the window overlooking the street and wait for the hawkers that come by every noonday. Your father rushes into your room when he hears glass breaking and is greeted by a pebble; the passers-by have gathered to stone you and unable to keep up, you lie face down, thinking of alternative lines of protest. He shouts for them to stop and identifies himself, peeks out the window and rubs his palms together, apologizing profusely. When the apology is accepted, he turns on you and berates you for minutes. You are not listening, only your body is in the room. Your stomach begins to rumble for food and realizing your hunger strike has failed, you storm out of the room and head for the kitchen. Your father follows you, promises to take you to a mental hospital, says weed is finally catching up with you, says you’re making your mother cry herself to sleep, says you have lost your mind. You find the food.
Morning comes and the cock crows again, your father’s alarm clock blares, the kettle whistles in the kitchen, the television comes on soon after, your mother belts out a Christian tune, the neighbours honk at their gatemen and, holding your head in your hands, you let out a long scream. You wonder why the world is always so eager to set up orchestras of the cliché. As you expect, your parents rush into the room, and ask what the matter is. Your mother asks with palpable concern and you can sense she is close to tears. You tell her you feel like Solomon, in the book of Ecclesiastes, when he discovered everything was vanity. That you have only just made an extra realization that everything is also cliché. She shakes her head slowly. You turn to your father and try to explain that it was while meditating upon the works of Camus that you came upon this truth. Your father says you use the word truth too lightly and your mother breaks down, sinks into the cushion chair beside your bed and says, amidst sobs, “See what you’ve caused oh! See what you’ve caused. Book, book, book, philosophy, philosophy, philosophy. I think you can see what you have turned your son to, Daddy”.
You see your father shrink under the weight of his recently discovered culpability. You were not yet twelve when you became familiar with the writings of Kant. Your father picks her off the chair and they leave your room. You decide you’ve found the solution to all these unnecessary explanations, in protest against the circadian rhythm, you’d sleep in the mornings and wake up at night.
Mid-dream the next morning, you are startled awake by the thundering shouts of “Hallelujah!”. You know your mother must have invited Pastor. You sit up in bed and try to conjure the face of Pastor. He was a young handsome man when you last saw him; bespectacled, balding, but handsome. You remember his altar calls, impressing upon people the need to come before the throne of mercy and rededicate their lives to God. He is no different from the hawker, hoodlums, banker, professor, and judge; peddling a salvation that, like other things, is easily lost. You hear him raise his voice in prayer in Yoruba and wonder when he made the switch to the indigenous. He quotes the Bible in Yoruba and you begin to doubt it’s him. You have to go to the sitting-room to confirm.
The man that woke you up from the pleasantness of your scripted dream is not Pastor. He is a white garment Pentecostal. You wonder when your mother switched churches again. You wonder what your father thinks of this arrangement. He hasn’t ever really cared for the religious and you imagine him hunched over a bottle of beer, now, thinking out steps to take to cure your madness.
Madness?
Of course, it’s madness. How else would we be holding this conversation if it wasn’t?
But this is the first time I’m responding to your dull narration of my life!
Well, maybe here is when the madness truly begins. The pastor in the white sultana heard you shriek at me and breaks from prayer. He calls you to kneel between him and your mother and they start running circles round you. The periodic calls and responses of the man and woman get louder every complete circle around you.
Stop!
You scream stop and they almost do, but the pastor, taking it as an indication of the writhing of the spirit of insanity within you, increases the speed of prayers that have taken the-
Stop!
Were you talking to me? How was I to know? I think we need to find me a name, so that I’d know when you are referring to me.
Albert.
Of course. But the pastor assumes the spirit is speaking through you again, this time confessing the name of its hirer. He stops abruptly and asks your mother; “Ta lo n je Albert?!”. Your mother tries to think. “Arabirin, tan’je Albert?!” You want to give me a surname but you keep quiet. The pastor is still screaming at your mother, asking her to scan her memory for the name, when your father stumbles in through the front door, drunk. He sees the red candles and new ornaments that now decorated his house and flies into rage, tearing down the silk hung on different pictures on the wall and knocking down the multi coloured candles that were lit in a semicircle. The pastor takes flight, a few flower-vases break, the curtain is alight. Your mother rushes in and out of the kitchen and douses the little flame. You think she could have easily used her tears. Your father turns to you and orders you into your room.
Daddy, it’s Albert, you have to understand!
“You’ll explain that to the psychiatrist tomorrow.”
Your mother slithers into your room with a clear bottle of water and starts sprinkling in all directions. Have you ever wondered she might be the root of all your misfortune, she was missing you when you lost your job, she was always offering you black soaps too. What if it’s all her machination? And here she is, again, sprinkling water round your room and muttering to herself. So, you stand up and inch towards her. She intensifies her mutterings and sprinkles water in your face so that you become sure of her malevolence and grab her by the throat. You push her towards the window which is now just a net. She finds a way out of your grip and makes for the door, screaming “Jesus” all the way. You don’t follow her. You think about the incident, you are now sure even gods are not spared from this eternal periodicity. If not, why would people keep calling for Jesus on a case-by-case basis, when, by the events at Golgotha, he had saved the world eternally.
At night, you try to keep up your protest against the circadian rhythm but you are too tired from the events of the day. You fall in and out of sleep till you get caught in the middle, in a space where sleep and movement are impossible. Out of the corner of your eyes, you can see the door open, but you can’t turn to check who is coming in. The room is dimly lit by a candle on your reading table and it flickers with each of the seven shadows entering the room to take positions around your bed. You want to scream, or at least cry, but no words escape your throat. You call for Jesus internally, nothing changes. You even call for me…
Morning comes and you are still breathing. Outside, your cousin and some other men are waiting by the car. You know what this means. You look around your room, pick a book of poems by your favourite dead poet, five sheets of A4 paper and a pencil and walk slowly down the stairs and into the car. The men were unneeded. Your father pays them and they file out. Your cousin greets you but you don’t acknowledge. Do you feel he is in some way culpable? Does he feel so too?
The drive to the hospital, 45 minutes away from Lagos, is uneventful. Every 10 minutes or so, boys and girls, selling the same things — sausage rolls and carbonated drinks — run after your dad’s car and press them to the window at your side. Nobody talks throughout the journey, except your dad, every quarter hour, to policemen demanding bribes. You remember the hawker, the hoodlums, the cashier, the professor, the judge, the engineer, the deejay, the cockerel, the pastor, Jesus, and add the policemen to the list.
At the hospital’s assessment unit, for new arrivals, you search, in vain, for other deeply brooding, contemplative patients like yourself. Two were restrained with actual chains, two were brought in sedated and the last one was alternating between laughter and an inaudible monologue. You look at your father and wonder if he still thinks this is the right decision, if he considers you in league with these textbook schizophrenics. You remember a story he told about Nietzsche grabbing a horse in the middle of the street and shouting “Mother” and think this must be where the urge to run into and hide in your mother is coming from.
The nurse asks the same questions of the relatives of all the patients and you add her to your growing list. When you finally get to see the psychiatrist, he asks you the same questions the nurse had asked and you tell him to refer to the notes the nurse took. He scribbles something into the file. He then asks about when you started smoking, what books you have been reading recently, how many voices you hear, what the voices say, and enough questions to fill the file. You feel he understands you. Your father leaves you in the care of the professionals, your mother leaves you in God’s care.
The days roll into weeks and you tire of protesting the disturbing regimentation of your life. Times for breakfast, lunch, recreation, medication and dinner were largely unaltered. The only interesting days are Wednesdays, when your parents come visiting. They regard you like a child in boarding house or prison and turn you around, ask if you’re being well fed and discuss with the teacher or warder or psychiatrist. Your father, against the wishes of your mother, brought you books every week. He’d say “Keep your mind strong, boy” and tap your back lightly, almost tentatively, as though you could break. You do not like the drugs, they make you sleep too early and spend a whole week finishing books you could have read in just a few days. One Wednesday, your parents come and the teacher or warden or psychiatrist wants to grant you a holiday or parole or a trial leave. They ask if you still hear me speak and you say you don’t any longer. Your mother jumps up dances and everyone in the room is apparently moved. They say it’s the drugs, that you’d need to keep using them for a very long time. Your mother says it’s God.
Albert. Albert. Are you still there?
About the author: Moyosore Orimoloye is a poet from Akure, Nigeria. His poems have been featured in the following online literary journals: The Ilanot Review, Transition, The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, The Rising Phoenix Review, Afridiaspora and Arts and Africa. His poem, “Love is a Plot Device and your Insecticide is Not” co-won the Babishai Niwe Poetry Award in 2016. He is the executive editor of Agbowó, an online literary and visual arts journal.
