Adaptation [Part I]
Hints of a Beginning
His mother once said to him; do not get too close to the world. It’s a mirage; chase it too long and it takes you.
Her words sank into him.
When he was nine, he dreamt of his mother at table with an unknown boy. He watched from a distance as they ate in silence. Once in a while, they’d look out the window where he stood, but pay him no mind.
As the years went by, his dream recurred. And one day, when he was eleven, he saw the boy’s face. The boy was him.
It’s been ten years since his dream, but buried somewhere within him is a mortal fear. A fear that one day, if he were not cautious enough, he’d lose himself. He’d become like the boy in his dreams; alone, and watching from the outside.
His head is rested on the windowpane as the bus moves.
He’s watching small towns fade past the corner of his right eye, as long chains of sandstone ridges enter his vision. His eyes red and calm, he takes off his glasses and draws deep breaths of an air heavy with rain and memories.
From his left breast pocket, he retrieves a letter. He begins to unfold it, but stops halfway, leans sideways and returns to watching time slip past thick clouds and geology.
When the bus sways to a new lane, he unfolds the letter and his mother’s words begin to bleed into him.
My dear Austin,
How have you been? I’m so sorry I haven’t written to you in such a long time now. The cholera broke me for a while, but thank God I’m fine now. I hear the teachers might strike again. I hope they do, so you can rest a little — and so I can see you. I miss you, my sweet boy. Please let me know when you’re ready to visit, so I can prepare pounded yam and egusi soup for you, just as you like it.
I kiss you a thousand times.
P. S.: How are your butterflies? I hope they’re doing better now.
Another thousand kisses to you, my dear boy.
Love, mama.
October 15th; 1989.
Two weeks ago he travelled the same road in the opposite direction. He watched sandstones and small towns emerge and fade as the bus moved. He read the same letter then. His mother’s words traced a smile in his heart.
But when he got home that evening, she was dead. She’d died around past noon that day — about the same time he’d read her letter on his way home.
That night, he wept. He thought of the flow of time, and he wondered how he could ever know if he was headed in the right direction of it or not.
And now hours later the bus reaches its final stop. He alights and begins to stare at the bus’s windows. When he buried his mother, a part of him stayed with her. She was his link to the world, but now she too had become a mirage.
He’s still staring at the bus’s windows, childhood memories floating beneath his eyes. He wonders now if he’d become like the boy in his dreams; alone, and watching from the outside.
After a while he cleans his glasses and puts them back on, draws deep long breaths, then picks up his luggage, and walks away.
On December 31st; 1979, a young girl found her older sister’s body on the floor. Her hands were wrapped around her stomach and her body curved inwards. Her nails were broken and had strands of hair sticking out of them like deformed stick figures. A thick, pale liquid formed a small pool at the corner of her mouth, so that as the girl tilted her sister’s head, the liquid trickled down her face. And from her nose, a thick mass of mucus hung like stalactites. Her eyebrows were flared, the black of her eyes melted in the white of her eyes. The final ripples of her pain captured in the crests of her forehead’s folded skin.
On the floor was an empty bottle of rat poison.
On seeing this, the young girl lay on the floor beside her sister’s body.
The young girl was ten. Her name was Ify.
It’s been ten years now, and sometimes childhood memories still flicker across her mind. At an early age, she learned to purge the shadows cast by those dark childhood years.
She learned to write; to weave quiet words together, and with those words she forged a space for herself. In that space she told stories of people and death.
People for whom dying was not a sudden event, but a voluntary one.
It’s 10:30 in the morning.
She’s lingering by the doorsteps of her professor’s office. From time to time, she draws deep breaths of an air heavy with anxiety and polite conversation.
After a while, a young woman ushers her in.
The professor puts his newspaper down and lowers his glasses.
“Your work is too shallow,” he hands her a draft of her manuscript, “you don’t seem to appreciate the complexities of the main character. This is a real work of literature, not a ‘fantasy novel’.”
She nods, glances at the title page. It’s battered with red ink and a list of suggested readings.
“Scenes one to five are okay. But you would need to rewrite the whole of scenes six to fifty-three. Feel free to go through your draft for the rest of my corrections. That would be all.”
She starts towards the door, the man calls.
“Ify,” he says, “it’s your third draft now. You should take a break from adapting for now. Use the strike period as opportunity to think about the protagonist. Explore his feelings. How would you react if your own identity was stolen? Inside out is a complex work, so I have made a list of books you should read, they do a fine job of exploring the characters’ states of mind. I hope you find them useful.”
She nods, thanks him, leaves.
At an early age, Austin’s mother piqued his interest in science. She taught his mind to wander from stars and planets, to minerals and molecules. She taught him to read, and together, mother and son set out on several expeditions, discovering Newton and Kepler in local libraries.
As time went on, Austin’s mind wandered between pages, until one day, they settled on a picture book about butterflies. From that day he voyaged through gardens and bushes, watching butterflies mingle and drift in the breeze.
Watching them flap their wings gave him a strange type of sensation. A feeling he could not understand at the time.
And years later, when his mind drifts off to those windy afternoons, he gets that feeling again.
He still has no words for it, but the closest he gets, is that watching the wings come together from opposite ends, produced in him a yearning for a thing whose beauty rested in its harmony, in its merging of parts to form a whole.
And so it was only natural that he chose to study biology in university, with the intentions of becoming a Lepidopterist.
But now he’s holding dead butterflies.
Beside him is a medium-sized, makeshift garden. The base is loaded with loamy soil, on which grows a network of lilies. And sprinkled about the branches is an assortment of butterfly eggs and pupae.
It’d been so for weeks now. The butterflies would mature past the pupa stage, but die just before completing their cycle.
He picks them one after the other, examines them, lays them in a wooden container.
A knock comes on the door. He opens. The man at the door hands him a letter. Austin glances.
“But this was sent last week,” Austin says.
“Don’t blame me, I’m new,” the mailman says, “besides, you’re lucky, some people’s letters are over a month old.”
Austin shakes his head, shuts the door.
The letter’s from the school library. He’s to renew his card within seven days.
He’s halfway to the library when it begins to rain. He seeks shelter underneath one of the roofs of a chain of kiosks at the mini market.
The rain pours for a while, and time edges slowly into the evening. Austin’s mind wanders between butterflies and library cards. He wonders at that moment if he’s ever read an essay about monarch butterflies on National Geographic before. He tries to recall, but gives up. If he has, he thinks, it would have been easy to remember.
He’s leaning to his left against a zinc partition. His thoughts begin to settle, his mind slowing down in sync with the rain, when he hears rustling somewhere in the kiosk.
“Who’s there?” he asks.
The rustling ceases, and a woman’s voice cuts through the dark.
“It’s the last rain this year,” she says.
“How do you know?” Austin asks, straining to catch a sight of the woman.
She takes a pause. “I’m eighty seven years old,” she says finally, “that means I’ve seen eighty seven rainy seasons. Do you know anyone who’s eighty seven?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Me neither,” the woman continues, “it seems the older I get, the younger the people I know. When I was little, I knew a lot about old people. My mother told me lots of stories about them. Why they had grey hair, why their voices were calm but hoarse. She said the reason some old people in our village had hunched backs was because of the rain.”
“The rain?”
“Yes, the rain. She said long time ago, the rain got too heavy for the people of the village, so they got together to put an end to it. They stopped the rain, and for a while, things were good. But as time went on, the clouds got heavier and darker, without producing rain. With time, the clouds began to descend lower and lower, forcing people to bend their heads low as they walked. It went on for hundreds of years, and so generations of hunched people walked about the village, their backs curved outwards beneath the low dark clouds, never looking up. It seems silly now, but for a long time, I feared I’d grow old to become hunched, too.”
A quiet moment passes between them and mingles with the ebbing rain. The woman asks: “What do you fear the most?”
Austin thinks a while.
“Losing myself,” he says finally.
“Losing yourself?”
“I’m afraid that one day I’ll wake up and I wouldn’t be myself anymore. That somebody somewhere will take my place, and all I can do, is watch. I’d watch until I’d slowly slip away.”
Another pause runs between them, and Austin starts towards the exit.
“If you lose yourself,” the woman says, “become something else.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. You can be bird or sheep or woman. Everything is alike, because everything is nothing.”
Ify’s halfway to the library when it begins to rain. She seeks shelter underneath one of the roofs of a chain of kiosks at the mini market.
She’s leaning to her right; and as the rain pours, her mind wanders between the pages of her manuscript.
How would you react if your identity was stolen?
She thinks about that a while, then concludes it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for her.
As a gust of wind blows raindrops her way, she closes her eyes and allows her thoughts wander between the pages of her manuscript again. In her mind she sees a man walking a narrow road. He’s a silhouette of a man, and as he walks, the streetlights go off one after the other, until he gradually fades into the darkness.
The thought dissolves and her mind drifts off to that harmattan night, ten years ago. She’d fallen asleep beside her sister’s body. When she awoke, she found her mother wailing, her hands wrapped around her sister’s corpse.
She remembers feeling jealous at the time, a part of her wishing her mother’s arms were wrapped around her like they were around her sister.
When her mother noticed she was awake, her eyes flared, and from underneath her pain, rage crawled out of her.
“I always thought it’d be you,” she said to Ify in a a calm voice, “I wish it were you.”
And now as the rain begins to quiet down, the air begins to fill with shrieks, traffic noise and distant chatter. Ify rests her head on the zinc partition and can hear two people conversing. Their chatter floats randomly from rain, to hunch-backed old people.
As Ify listens, a silence falls between them. And after a while, she hears the woman ask:
“What do you fear the most?”
Another silence runs, then she hears the boy say: “Losing myself.”
Ify listens to the rest of their conversation, and as the boy leaves, she watches him, a silhouette of a boy, disappear into the main road. And as he crosses to the sidewalk on the opposite end, the streetlights come on.
Thanks for reading. Continue to Part II here
