When the sun rises, so do I. Through the curtains, filtered dawnlight kisses my eyes. I wake.
It’s 7:05 am, and I should still be fast asleep. After a long night of drinking, first at Freedom Park and later at Quilox Club, ending in a deeply unsatisfying threesome with Chiamaka and Ronke—runs girls I’d picked up in Swe Bar—I’d finally drifted off into dreamless slumber at about five. Now I am awake. Laying in this soft bed, in the softly lit executive suite of the Lagos InterContinental Hotel, nestled between two soft, naked bodies, I find myself thinking of last night, of the early minutes before the start of the Afropolitan Vibes concert at Freedom Park amphitheater, the only part of the evening that I genuinely remember.
We’d arrived early—Asiru, Lekan, Chris, and I. In the cloudy sky, the sun had taken on an orange halo as it sank against a field of dizzying purples, red, blues, and yellows. We found a nice table near the stage where the air was scheduled to vibrate with loud, live music in a few hours and settled down with two bowls of pepper soup, a plateful of suya, and a calabash of allegedly fresh palm wine. A young man with a goje who looked like a vagrant was sitting on the sand at the edge of the stage, playing softly. I’d watched the sun slowly drown in the horizon while my old friends from university, whom I hadn’t seen in months, tried to distract me from memories of my dead brother. They meant well, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about their words. When they realized I wasn’t really paying attention, they slowly shifted their discussion to arguments about football and politics.
Sitting there silently in the strange light of sundown, I momentarily regressed into a sort of dream state and, in so doing, found myself free of sadness for the first time since my mother had called screaming into the phone that Tunji was dead. But as the sun finally fell, I became aware of the thick white wall surrounding the Park, and of the Park’s history, which I had learned about while failing my first year at university. It poisoned my mood.
Freedom Park was built on the grounds of the old, colonial-era Broad Street Prison, the first prison set up after the British seized Lagos in 1861. Originally built with mud and thatch, it was repeatedly arsoned by anti-colonial freedom fighters, so the British rebuilt it with brick. Thousands were imprisoned and executed by enforcers of the British colonial will, including many of Nigeria’s founding fathers. But after independence, Nigeria took control of her own destiny and became responsible for her own cruelties. Many people were kept incarcerated there in the years following, including highway robbers and separatists who had been on the losing side of the civil war. The prison was finally pulled down in 1976, and Freedom Park developed over it. Imprisonment replaced by artistic expression. A history of pain was overwritten with the promise of regularly scheduled pleasures.
Perhaps I was sitting in the exact spot where someone had been kept in chains like an animal for resisting foreign invaders; perhaps I was eating from a table that stood where someone had been killed, offered as a sacrifice on the altar of law and order in the new republic. Freedom Park was a palimpsest, and whatever fragment of happiness I’d glimpsed in the drowning sun could no longer be perceived clearly through its history. I wished then that I hadn’t known anything about the Park and its history of pain and violence; perhaps I’d have been able to hold on to that happiness longer. History is a burden, knowledge is misery, and I know too much about Lagos, this city where I was born and where I, like my brother, will probably die. I’d spent the rest of the night, and more money than I reasonably should have, in a blur, blunting my mind and memories with marijuana, lust, and alcohol in an effort to recapture the happiness. I failed.
I rise, lift Ronke’s perfectly manicured hand off my chest, push Chiamaka gently until she rolls over, and slide out from between them, underneath the covers at the end of the bed. The hotel had provided a fluffy white robe with a stitched gold emblem and comfortable straw slippers. I put them on. The lights are off, but immature daylight illuminates the clothes, condoms, receipts, underwear, bundles of cash, and bottles on the floor. The slick, modern decor of the room, which I had admired when I booked it, seems tainted by what we did here yesterday—three people caring nothing for each other, licking, rubbing, and slapping flesh against flesh desperately. The place now seems sleazy.
I catch my dim reflection in the large rectangular mirror set in an old mahogany frame, carved with leaf and flower designs, and notice that my entire body somehow seems substantially smaller, somewhat shrunken and skinny, like I have lost a sixth or so of my weight in the last few days. I choose not to think about it too much. It’s probably just an optical illusion, light and shadow playing games at dawn. Or the result of a residual high. I grab an almost-empty bottle of Jack Daniels from the floor and walk over to the window. The sun glints over the lagoon, making it shimmer like liquid silver, and for a moment, I forget just how filthy the water is beneath the soft waveforms of the surface.
I take a large swig of the whiskey, throw the empty bottle on the bed between the girls, and sink to my knees. Tears roll down my face. I kneel there, weeping softly, watching the sun rise over the water until the sudden trill of my phone drags me back to the present.
I rise from the floor, wipe away the tears, and walk to the dresser where my phone sits, insistent. The caller ID reads “Mum,” and I instinctively reach for it before pausing. I would love to talk to her now, to share memories of playing with Tunji in the sand at Bar Beach, to tell her how desperately I wish I could bring him back, but I know she will only cry and wail and tell me how terrible my life is and that I should come with her to church before God takes me too. Often, I find myself wishing he’d done just that.
I gaze at the screen, my hand frozen. On the other end of the call, she is probably sitting in her bed, morning prayers just completed, bible in her thin hand, and her hair bound up in a silk scarf. I can’t talk to her now. Not when I’m like this. My body thaws, I pick up the phone, swipe to dismiss the call without answering, and put it on silent. My skin feels too tight, my legs unsteady. Ashamed, I walk to the bed and fall back into the valley between the two naked women, narrowly avoiding the bottle. I feel like Adam, hiding among the trees of the Garden of Eden.
I am alone. I mean, I have always felt alone, living more in my head and in the bottle than in the world, keeping most of my thoughts and emotions to myself, but Tunji’s death has triggered something. I have been feeling a new kind of aloneness, a deeper and more complete kind of aloneness that has suffused every thought and emotion I have. It hurts. I don’t want it.
I wrap my arm around Ronke’s waist and pull her to me. Her voice, sultry with drowsiness, drifts to me, “Ah ahn, you’re awake already?”
She moans, pulling a pillow to her chest as I rub myself against her. She sighs. “Let me put you back to bed. Try for a little pleasure before the end.”
I ignore the strange conclusion to her sentence, not understanding what she means by it, and we have joyless sex for a quarter of an hour while Chiamaka pretends to sleep. When we are done, I fall asleep again, exhausted and empty.
By noon, we are all awake. I give them 
125,000 to get back to their campus and take care of themselves when they get there, slipping an extra 25,000 into Ronke’s hand while Chiamaka is putting on her makeup in the bathroom. She rewards me with a wink but doesn’t take the money, pressing the cash and my hand back against my chest. Her long hair swishes as she shakes her head and adjusts her dress like a second skin.
“It’s okay. I really don’t need this,” she says before she kisses me on the cheek and looks at me with something like pity in her impossibly gray eyes. Ashamed, I look away and say goodbye without returning her gaze.
I take a shower, slip into my T-shirt, jeans, and sunglasses, which all seem a bit too big, and then check out of the hotel and drive back down to Swe Bar in Onikan where music with incomprehensible lyrics, set to bass as thick as the heartbeat of a decadent god, and the thick smell of whiskey welcome me like a womb.
With dawn come sharp flares of pain, red needles of light beneath my eyelids.
I turn away from the rapidly rising sun, my hands instinctively covering my face as the hangover begins to blossom in my head. My hands are covered with the familiar wetness of vomit and dew. My back is sore from sleeping on the unforgiving concrete sidewalk leading out of Tafawa Balewa Square, less than a mile from the bar. A woolen echo fills my head, silencing the world. My bones press against my skin, making my body feel small and not quite fully developed. I feel like an accident.
Peeking out from between my fingers, the upside-down city smiles back at me in the fading twilight, its badly maintained buildings and hastily constructed steel towers like uneven teeth in a yellow-gray mouth of sky.
There is a bus stop near me. I can tell by the tangle of traffic—mostly beat-up danfos and molues, secondhand motorcycles and scratched cars. Old men sit by the roadside on low stools under brightly colored umbrellas, their limbs unfurling as they ready their stalls and kiosks for the day into which I have clumsily emerged. There is a carnival of bright plastic buckets and metal trays carried by women, children, and young men hawking wares. The colors are too bright, the silence in my head too unnatural.
In a sudden surge, sound returns to the world, and the sudden hysteria of feet slapping against the concrete and tires crunching pot-holed road, car horns blaring, and engines growling all explode into my consciousness. Four roads dance into a roundabout a little distance away, and there are no traffic lights. It’s pure Lagos chaos, and it makes my hangover feel like an irresolute death.
I groan and sit up, hanging my heavy head between my legs and leaning my back against a cracked, upright concrete slab for support as people walk past me, staring, shaking their heads and hissing. Tears and saliva fall from my face to the ground as I wonder wretchedly why I hadn’t been the one to die instead of my brother.
Tunji had always been the ambitious one. The smart one with the scholarship to UNILAG, the handsome one who got married to a beautiful wife at twenty four; the fun one who had friends everywhere and went from being an accountant to a successful restaurant owner; and the one who’d planned to retire a millionaire at fifty, just like our father. I was the mediocre one, the plain one who got below average grades in class, who barely managed to graduate from Osun State University after stumbling through four years of English literature, who worked as a DJ and producer for street musicians and dodgy radio stations.
Despite this achievement gulf between us, and the constant remarks of our parents who fetishized their public image and the way our lives reflected on them, Tunji and I always remained friends. Perhaps even more than we were family, we were inexplicably friends. When we were children, we always insisted on playing together no matter what our vastly disparate cliques thought of the other. Whenever Tunji got picked as football team captain, and the captains took turns selecting team members, he would always pick me to join his team first, even though my feet were as clumsy with a ball then as they usually are after a dozen or so glasses of shepe now. Whenever my friends and I went to smoke igbo on the rooftop of our hostel, I always insisted that they allow Tunji to join us despite his reputation as a “scholarship boy,” because I knew he liked the mental freedom that came with the herbal high, even if he didn’t like the dank, cloying smell of weed. He was the first person that I told when I failed my first year at university, and he drove all the way to Ikire to drink with me and be beside me when our father arrived to tell me what a shame I was to the entire family.
I was the best man at his wedding, and I ran around Lagos like a wild animal for eight weeks helping to make arrangements with caterers and florists and musicians and the million other vendors, so the couple wouldn’t have to. And even though once the ceremony was over I got drunk and passed out in the carpark a few minutes to midnight, Tunji came to find me, put ice packs on my face, poured water down my throat until I woke up, and dragged me back to the after-party, laughing all the while. Our moments of connection were always like that, characterized by our just being there for each other, not necessitated by anything beyond who we were to one another.
But they were also characterized by this: my constant failing, my constant falling, and Tunji’s unwillingness to let me hit rock bottom and break. The truth is, I gave up on myself early. I became an alcoholic wastrel when I was about nineteen. Since then, I have had little ambition in life beyond drinking myself into some semblance of ignorant bliss and making myself as small as possible, trying not to disappoint my parents much more than I already had once I realized I’d never be able to live up to my father and brother.
My father was a legendary hotelier with properties dotting the city. And Tunji—he was going places. At least he was until an articulated truck skidded off the Ojuelegba Bridge and fell to the road below, smashing him into a pulpy mess in the front seat of his Range Rover SUV.
My mother has been crying and praying for three weeks, inconsolable. I’ve been drinking. Whiskey. I’ve been drinking whiskey. I’ve been drinking because I don’t know what else to do. Palm wine is best for celebration, but whiskey is good for pain.
“You’re lucky armed robbers or policemen didn’t kill you when you were sleeping,” says a rusty old voice in confident Yoruba. It sounds like it’s coming from both inside my head and above me at the same time. I raise my head to see two thin eyes set into a wide, wrinkled face, smiling at me.
“But then again, you don’t have much time left.”
“Who are you?” I groan. The man speaking to me is a small, shriveled old man with a big gray afro and small gray eyes; he has a wise, seen-the-world look to him like a living sunset. He is wearing a green and brown Ankara shirt and trouser combination with plain brown sandals and a gold watch that looks more expensive than he should be able to afford.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says and tosses a 500 note onto the ground in front of me. “That should be enough to get you home. I think you’ll find that your wallet is no longer with you.”
“I don’t need your help, old man,” I shout, louder than I intend to, as I reach for the note to hand it back to him. My fingers settle on sandy concrete, my vision swims, and I fall over, banging my head hard.
The man looks down at me pitifully as he pushes his money into the front pocket of my shirt.
“Foolish boy,” he says. “Go home and wait. There’s no need for all this drama. You’ll be gone soon enough.”
The calmness with which he makes this strange statement, and the familiarity of it, jolts me out of my drunken haze just long enough to ask, “What the hell does that mean?”
“If I tell you . . .” begins the old man before a brief pause and tilt of the head. And then, “Forget it. I’ve already done what I can to make this easier for you. Just take the money, and go home.”
I drag myself up from the floor and grab hold of his trousers. “Why did you say I will be gone soon? Are you cursing me with juju?”
“I don’t curse people,” he says as he shakes his leg free of my grasp. “I’m not a babalawo. I’m . . . no one.”
He walks along the sidewalk, whispering something to himself, and I start to think that he will leave without saying more, but he stops and turns to face me and says, “Look, this isn’t easy for me either. It has only ever happened twice before.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He sighs and shakes his head before finally speaking. “What would you say if I told you that this city, like you, is alive? It was born, it grows, it eats, it loves, it will die. Since it was a child, it has learned to eat what it needs from the lives of the ever-growing flood of people that come into it, become part of it. Its riverbanks have become cradles, its slums have developed into fists, its gray roads have grown teeth, its traffic and owambes and construction and beaches have developed a rhythm like a pounding heartbeat. And the city, like all living things, will always do what it needs to survive; fight to stay alive, defend itself from threats to its life. And what would you say if I told you that you, young man, have somehow found a way to make yourself a threat to the city?”
I hear the words he says, but they don’t make sense to me. I know from experience that words can sometimes shake free of meaning and become abstract noises when heard in hangover or post-high, but this is different. He is talking of Lagos like it’s a person, a real human. Not in metaphor but in substance. Puzzled and hungry for understanding, I can only mutter, “The city is alive?”
“Yes,” he says. “Look, go home. You won’t understand now. Take the money I gave you, and go home. Drink some more and forget all this. In the evening, you’ll really notice the change, and maybe you’ll start to understand.”
“What will I understand? What will I see? What is happening to me?”
“Bloody hell. I should have just stayed away. Give me your hand,” he says impatiently as he kneels on the ground beside me. The pedestrians on the increasingly busy street stare at us even more than they did before, but I don’t care. I do as I’m told.
He puts his hand into mine, and it feels like an old earthenware plate, but what is even stranger, it feels like this small old man’s hand is larger than mine. Much larger.
“This is what I mean. First in your depression and now in your grief, you have been thinking strangely of this city, viewing it all wrong through the lens of your pain. You have linked parts of the city with negative memories, with painful histories, with almost everything wrong in your life, with everything wrong in so many lives. Usually most people link parts of the city with both good and bad memory and emotion. There is a balance, and the city works it out. But you, with your sadness and grief, have threaded a pure and persistent pain to the very essence of the things with which cities are made, and it has obstructed the city’s breathing, pressed against its organs. You have become a sickness, a cancer, so the city is pressing back against you. You must understand, none of this is malicious. Now you will shrink as the city destroys you. You will become smaller and smaller and smaller, and eventually you will disappear into nothing because Lagos can no longer survive with you in it.”
The air around me smells of reused cooking oil, sweat, and exhaust. A danfo heading to Yaba passes by, the conductor calling out the destination. There is a white sticker on its back window where in faded red font it declares, “God’s Time is Best.”
Dazed, I ask the strange old man, “How long do I have?”
“In one or two days, it will be as though you never existed. You will be forgotten. Your mother will not remember that she had more than one son. Your friends will not miss you. You will be subject to a great and instant forgetting. You will have been nothing but a wick, nameless, snuffed out. A discarded bundle of memories and experiences without a name. The city will absorb you and your experiences and purge them. It must to survive. And when it is done, it will adjust itself and its people so that it may continue to live.”
I throw my head back and close my eyes to shut out the sun, and I start to laugh and laugh a long laugh that becomes a cough, and before long, I am choking.
I feel the eyes of the old man on the back of my head and his hand on my shoulder, so I ask, “This is ridiculous. Why should I even believe any of the rubbish you just said to me?”
He rises to his feet and straightens his back. “Because I am the city. And I will not let your twisted pain kill me.”
And with that, he scatters into a tiny billion pieces that are seamlessly absorbed by the air and concrete and mud and madness, leaving me hung-over and confused on the cracked Lagos pavement, wondering if he was ever really there at all.
A sharp knife of sunlight cuts through the space between the curtains of my bedroom and across my body, separating my consciousness and leaving me half-awake for the third time this morning. A part of me wants to rise early, but the bed is warm and soft, and exhaustion keeps dragging me back into sleep like an anchor until memories of the old man penetrate the fog, and I remember. I remember. I am disappearing.
I sit up, my torso crossing the line of light, and am surprised at the alien nature of my own movements, the arcs my limbs trace are unfamiliar and strange, so strange. I am afraid of my changing self. The fear paralyzes me, but what do men who are shrinking into themselves do? There is a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the bedside table, its glass edges and amber liquid beautiful in the light of the young sun. I stare at it for what could be seconds or hours—I am not sure—yearning for the familiar comfort and knowing that it will not, cannot, help me anymore. I turn back to the window and watch as dawn unravels, skeins of light spreading across the wide sky and think of the artists selling cheap paintings of sunrise on canvas in Jakande Market alongside wooden art, beads, bracelets, necklaces, talking drums. If Lagos truly is alive, then its many markets must be its beating heart. I almost smile.
When the sun is high and bright, I briefly consider visiting my mother, taking her up on her open offer to take me to church. Perhaps her pastor can pray for me when he is finished counting his profits from last Sunday’s collection.
No. But I should at least talk to her. I want to talk to her. I need to. She is the only family I have left even if the old man, who says he is the city, says she will not remember me when I am gone.
I rise on unsteady legs like a newborn calf and go into the living room, stumbling. Falling into the middle of the sofa, fighting to breathe evenly and cleanly, I pull my phone out of my pocket, press “Mum” on the smooth screen, and hold it up to my ear with a skeletal hand. My grip is so weak; the phone slips from my hand when she answers, and it takes me a few seconds to retrieve it.
“Goodbye?” she repeats when I finally say the word. “What do you mean goodbye? Where are you going?”
“Yes,” I confirm. “I know things have been difficult between us lately, but I just wanted to say goodbye, and I love you.”
“Where are you going?” she asks again.
“I don’t know,” I tell her because even though I want to confess to her that her son is being consumed by a city, it would be too confusing and too cruel.
“What does that mean, ehn?” she asks before retreating into the safety of her religion. “You’ve started with your wahala again, but this is not the time for it, so I need you to listen to me. Don’t go anywhere yet. There is midweek service today, and pastor Chris has been asking of you since the funeral. Come with me, and let us—”
She is still speaking, but her words are too familiar to mean anything to me. She keeps talking. I drop the phone to my rake-thin thighs and stare at it, mesmerized, like it is a gemstone or a small, talking animal. The tears begin to flow, and I find myself once again confronted by the widening gap between myself and the woman who birthed me. We used to be very close when I was younger, and my mind more malleable, but my entire adulthood has been a series of estrangements. I want to talk to her now, to tell her how sad, angry, confused, and scared I am at everything and nothing, how desperately I need to feel like something about my presence in this world mattered before I am gone from it, but all she can do, all she has ever done, is tell me to come to church. She has no other counsel to offer but the comfort of her god. I wish that once, just this once, she would try to talk to me without the wall of her faith between us, even if she has no assurances to offer me. I just want to know that in this moment we are equally human. I put the phone back to my ear and repeat myself, ignoring her own stream of words, “Goodbye, Mum. I love you.”
She will forget me soon, and perhaps that’s for the best. Sometimes even family means nothing in the end. I wish Tunji were still here. Lagos is a cruel city to take him like that, to erase me in retaliation for poisoning it with my grief. I throw my phone at the wall, and it shatters into a hundred useless pieces. And then all the fear and anger and pain and grief and disappointment and depression and confusion congeal into something liquid in my chest that drips down my ribs, tickling me as I laugh and laugh with all the bitterness in me until tears run down my face like a poisoned river, and I close my eyes to keep them in.
I drift into something like sleep, and there I feel the flowering within me of a potential for something like happiness, something much deeper and something more unique than the chemically induced high and obliviousness of alcohol. Something beyond my strange circumstances and my changing body. Something so much . . . more. When I open my eyes, it hits me.
I imagine myself as I used to be a few days ago, heavily and intentionally, until I feel like my imagination has taken form, has physical weight. I imagine a hand shaped like a city with expressway fingers, open air market palms, and beach surf fingernails squeezing me. Just like the old man said, I see the city compress me, and I lift my left hand up and stare at it.
My forearms thin almost immediately. I see my skin tighten and the flesh padding my bone diminish like it is evaporating. My stomach twists with fear and excitement. But I don’t stop. I press on, my mind swelling with imagination as I picture more of the city in the hand that squeezes me. In that hand, I see the filth and congestion of Obalende, its winding, yellow molue queues and ugly, dirty shanties where so many in Lagos pass through on their way to the day’s labors like callouses on the palms. I see the lovely colonial townhouses, mansions, clubs, and hotels of Ikoyi where the rich and powerful nest themselves like the lines in the little finger of the city. I picture the filthy canals, waterways, and shacks on stilts of Makoko, running along the lagoon where the Egun fishermen who migrated from Badagary eke out a living, and in my mind, it is the back of the hand of the city that squeezes me. I see the new rows of apartment buildings and townhouses that are being built in Ajah, the place for the once-growing middle class that seems separate from but flows into the city like its cephalic vein. I see the roiling, dirty waves of Bar Beach like Ronke’s fingernails, long and extended and pressed against my chest. I inhale air and exhale myself. I feel my ribs contracting, my chest emptying me out into the city, as I imagine what it is doing to me, and I will it to press against me even harder, to accelerate the process. It is exhilarating. Spittle collects in the corners of my mouth as I collapse back on the couch and continue my fading away.
It gets easier and easier as I do it, my imagination yielding more of the city and less of myself. My legs become thin stalks, and my torso reduces to thin board after a few cycles of squeezing and letting go, squeezing and letting go. I am developing a muscle for erasing myself, strengthening it with high-intensity exercise.
I have reduced myself to little more than a skeleton before I feel the urge to be out in the city as I do this. To insert the unreality of my situation into the absolute reality of Lagos, to be in the open city as I picture it pressing onto me.
I push up from the couch and struggle outside to my car. The difficulty of walking outside is expected, but pulling open the door takes far more effort than I thought it would. It has been so hot and humid that the air outside is thick, hazy, saturated with water vapor, smoke, prayers, and dreams. The sun feels heavy on my head. I nestle myself in the driver’s seat and look at my face in the mirror.
I am gaunt. Adrenaline erupts and surges through my veins as I rev the engine and press the horn until Ladi the gateman comes out to open the gate, holding up his sagging trousers with one hand. When I pass, I floor the accelerator and swing the car out onto the road, rear tires smoking and showering everything with dust, sand, and gravel. By the time Ladi is a speck in the mirror, too small to distinguish from the hundreds of other pedestrians, I am sweating profusely.
The wind blows wildly through the windows as I barrel down Okobaba Street, ignoring the traffic lights and dipping in and out of potholes recklessly.
And then there is a large, lovely woman in the car with me. I know it is Lagos because it can be no one and nothing else. She is wearing a spectacular gold and blue traditional iro and buba made with expensive aso-oke. The iro is tight against her wide hips, and the buba has a low-cut neck that would be revealing if it wasn’t for the half dozen matching stringed-bead necklaces around her neck. Her stiff, blue gele is a large and elaborate affair like the train of a wild peacock wrapped around her head and pressing against the roof of my car. She speaks as I round the highway exit and climb up the causeway that leads to the third mainland bridge.
“What are you doing?” Lagos asks as she adjusts her gele and turns to face me with piercing gray eyes. “You can’t stop this once it has begun.”
“I am not trying to stop it. I am embracing it,” I reply, bizarrely buoyant. I no longer fear anything, not my mediocre and pointless life, not this overwhelming and cruel city and its history, not even my coming demise. Even my grief for Tunji has morphed into something new. There is freedom in acceptance. With practiced ease, I take the image of the woman sitting beside me into my mind, and in my imagination, I picture this manifestation of Lagos, broad and beautiful, sitting on my chest, compressing me. I am delighted when I see my fingers, tight against the wheel, shrink. To imagine the city is to lose myself.
“You should have done this sooner,” says Lagos. “Accepted things. You should have accepted the life you had. Perhaps I wouldn’t have had to purge you.”
“Perhaps,” I say because I cannot think of anything else to say.
“Do you want me to stay with you?” the city asks. “Until the end?”
“No need,” I say. “I want to do this alone.”
“I understand. And I am sorry,” says the city. “I am only trying to survive.”
I mouth the words, “I understand.”
“Is there anything you want before you’re gone? Any final requests?”
“I want to see Tunji, even if only for a moment, right before the end. Can you do that?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says.
When I glance to my right, there is nothing but a gourd of palm wine in the chair where the woman that is the city had been. I wonder what we are celebrating as I reach for it and take a swig. It tastes like freedom.
An okada whizzes by, barely an inch from me, and I almost hit it. My arms and fingers are so small; it is difficult to control the car now. My vision is blurring at the edges. Shapes and colors are bleeding into each other like reality around me has been stabbed. Or perhaps my eyes are becoming too small to see clearly. I look up through the windscreen. Above, the sun is retreating behind a silver and black curtain of clouds. The skyscrapers of the marina in the distance, the shanties on the edge of the water, all of it now seems less real than the dream-images I have of them in my head, pressing against me. The horizon of my existence grows nearer and nearer. I am carrying my version of the city in my mind, a private and complete burden that I will soon be free of just as the city will soon be free of me.
The sky begins to weep rain.
I press my foot down harder against the accelerator, and the vehicle vibrates intensely like a lover in orgasm.
When I can no longer keep control of the careening car, I swerve right, hard.
Tires scream, the world spirals, and I crash through the barrier. Everything slows as jagged metal and hot rubber slam into my windscreen, cracking it and bringing in the smell of smoke and the raw bite of pain. I fall. I fall for what seems like a long time.
When the car breaks the surface of the lagoon, water rushes in. I close my eyes and imagine that all of Lagos, from Badagry to Ikeja is liquid around me. It gets harder to breathe, but I am not sure if it is because my lungs are shrinking rapidly or because I am drowning. I feel myself become small, so small and slight. I turn my body over to this water that is the city and so much larger than myself.
In the instant before there is no more of me, I see Tunji’s eyes blossom open like flowers in the darkness. I hear his voice in my head, and his voice is my voice, the voice of the city, which is the only voice that exists, the only voice that has ever existed, and it says, Everything dies, and everything will be forgotten. Ideas. Feelings. Lives. Cities. Monuments. Gods. Memories. Everything. Everything tends to zero.