“A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.”
—CHINUA ACHEBE, THINGS FALL APART (1958)
Uduak’s unraveling began with an unexpected visit.
The sun was slowly drowning across the horizon, casting linear streaks of light into the sky where the clouds absorbed them, creating new hues of orange and pink and silver-edged blue.
Uduak walked slowly, pushing his wheelbarrow ahead of him with effort. Its coat of forest green paint was almost completely stripped away, and its load of battered and scratched oil drums, assorted wiring, and loose tools clanked uncomfortably against each other with every revolution of the wheel on the bumpy asphalt. The slapping sound of his rubber slippers against his callused soles reminded Uduak of the sporadic gurgling pulses of the crude oil transfer pump that had failed to start all day despite his best efforts and ministrations.
He was flanked on either side by vibrant, overgrown green bush that had choked what used to be a two-lane access road down to a narrow path barely wide enough for his tall and bulky frame. Nature was reclaiming what belonged to it, now that the road had fallen into disuse. No one, except him, took advantage anymore of the access the road provided. The chorus of evening song was slowly filling the air as the nocturnal animals and insects awakened. Thin rivulets of sweat ran down from his balding dome and dripped off his chin as he tried to keep the barrow steady while balancing as much of the load as possible on the fulcrum of the wheel. Uduak could smell the sickly-sweet odor of the old sweat that had completely soaked his white vest and Ankara-print trousers while he’d been working earlier. The air still held some residual heat from the afternoon sun. His clothes were almost dry now in the cooler air of evening, but he was still perspiring, and he felt sticky and unclean. He craved the cleansing touch of water and the comfort of his home. Uduak paid no attention to the setting sun or the clouds overhead or the cries of the early evening crickets. He focused on the road home with the echo of his own thoughts loud in his head.
Last month it was the de-salter.
Now it’s the stupid transfer pump.
What next?
He kept a steady pace, determined to get home before darkness fell. Not that he was worried about anything happening to him at night, even though at times, when he was alone in the darkness, he thought he could sense something, like an animal perhaps, watching him. But no, he told himself, he wasn’t afraid, he was just being prudent since he was the only one that still used the Ukpana II refinery access road. It had been abandoned for almost twenty-three years.
I’ve been trying to restart Ukpana II for almost a year, and I just keep finding more problems.
Uduak came to the point where the road intersected with a path of hard-packed earth that led back to the village. The top edge of the sun’s disk dipped below the horizon, and he turned into it. In the distance, he could clearly make out the towering udala tree that marked the center of the village square. It looked like there was a crowd gathered around its expansive trunk, loosely orbited by playing children. Their tittering and shouting carried on the cool evening air. He began to slow down, each step more hesitant than the other.
I’m asymptotically tending towards home.
A bitter smile cut across his face. Asymptotically. It was a word he hardly ever used anymore but it triggered a flood of memories: Memories of sitting at an unsteady wooden desk, scribbling equations and geometric diagrams across his notebook. Of slowly coming to terms with the apparently arcane physics and mathematics and chemistry that Miss Kayode, the plump and kind-eyed youth corper that had been assigned to teach science to the children of his village in his senior year, gave them to work through. Miss Kayode had often used words like “asymptotically,” “derivative,” “determinant.” Back then, most of the children in his class didn’t know what any of it meant, not really, they just memorized the words to pass their exams. But Uduak understood. At least, eventually. The seemingly abstract concepts of things tending toward infinity, and symbols denoting varying rates of change, all just sort of clicked in his mind when he thought about them for a long enough time, like a language that he’d not even known he could speak until he heard someone else speak it first. He’d done well in school that year, placing at the top of his class in physics and mathematics, second in chemistry and eighth in English, in a class of more than a hundred that included children from all the nearby villages. Before she left at the end of her service year, Miss Kayode had recommended him to Samuel Ukekpe, the pot-bellied, loud-voiced and perpetually ebullient local ExOil Inc. liaison officer that managed community outreach for the company, doing the minimum required to stop the community from complaining about the oil spills and the never-ending poison that was churned out of the refinery flare stacks. Uduak had been the first person from his small village to get a full scholarship from ExOil to go study Mechanical Engineering Technology at the Federal Polytechnic, Ukana. Samuel had even guaranteed him a job as a refinery operations technician when he graduated. Samuel had told him he was going to be rich and successful if he did well, and so Uduak worked hard because there was nothing he wanted more. He was going to be an oil man.
Uduak dry-swallowed and shook his head as though he were trying to dislodge the memories. Those days, when his world had seemed full of inevitable promise, were now far behind him. Remembering them only sent sharp lances of pain through his chest and left an unsavory aftertaste in the wake of his dreams that had never been and would never be.
No.
I will make it right.
I will fix this refinery. I will fix Ukpana II.
Uduak raised his head and spat a gob of saliva into the bush, as though ridding himself of the vile draught of unfulfilled potential. He puffed out his chest, accelerating with renewed determination.
I am going to be an oil man.
He crossed the threshold of bushes that marked the village boundary and came face-to-face with the person at the focus of the gathering and the true reason for his slowed approach to home: Affiong—his brother-in-law, whom he hadn’t seen in over three years.
Affiong stood just under the towering umbrella of udala tree branches, several other villagers gathered around him, most of them sitting on the floor with their eyes bright and their jaws descended. The children moved around the central group, running, laughing, and jostling for turns with a new toy robot that Affiong had brought with him, which responded to their questions with an almost-human, conversational quality in perfect Efik. Some of the older children pointed their phones at the running ones, recording what was happening for their social media, too proud to engage or argue for a turn. They were not yet connected to the national power grid, or to the interstate road network, but they had mobile data. Everyone had mobile data.
Affiong was wearing a perfectly tailored black suit, a white shirt and blue tie, with black leather shoes only a little scuffed and muddied by the unpaved earth beneath them. He paused the story he was telling the gathered group and raised a hand when he saw Uduak appear. “Ah Uduak! You are here finally,” he shouted in unusually nasal Efik as he dropped his hand and scratched at his temples through low-cut hair. An affectation he had introduced to his speech since he’d first come back from the city.
“Brother-in-law, come and join us, I was just telling everyone about the new government building in Uyo, the one they say is the tallest in Africa now. And look, I brought schnapps.” Affiong gestured with both hands at several bottles of clear liquid on the floor.
Uduak’s wife, Ndifreke was standing at the front of the crowd, their baby daughter Mbono quietly tied onto her back with a bright yellow and red Ankara wrapper that matched his own trousers. It was the same material they’d bought when they’d attended her mother’s funeral. That was the last time Uduak had seen Affiong. Ndifreke nodded to acknowledge Uduak. Their first child, Udom, had finally gotten his turn with the robot and didn’t even as much as look up at the mention of his father’s name.
“Affiong, welcome back,” Uduak hailed back, ignoring the alcohol. Affiong knew that he’d developed a drinking problem for several years after ExOil stopped his scholarship payments and shuttered their operations in Nigeria. He’d only managed to stop the craving for it when he’d begun working on Ukpana II. “It’s been a long time. I hope your journey was not too difficult.”
The circle of villagers opened with a murmur, angling their bodies to observe the interaction between the two men whom everyone knew had despised each other since they were children. In the distance, a goat bleated.
Mama Ebiye, the oldest woman in the village, whom many people believed was so close to death that she could already commune with the ancestors, often said that it was because Affiong and Uduak had been born on the same day, only forty minutes apart. Something that had never happened before or since except in the case of twins who shared a mother. Once, when they were only six years old, they had been brought before the village council because they had been fighting with each other and trampled all over a patch of freshly germinated afang vegetables, ruining it. Mama Ebiye had said then, that they were two halves of the same spirit that entered the world through separate bodies, neither one of them at peace because of it. She still repeated that sentiment sometimes. Uduak hated it whenever she brought it up, and he was sure she would have done so again if she were present, but her eyesight had deteriorated, and her hips had grown so weak that she was no longer able to leave her home to attend most village functions, spending most of her time in bed. Still, it was true that Affiong had been a consistent presence in every childhood memory, whether playing games near the stream that ran beside the village to the ocean, or helping their parents plant yams in clearings just beyond the village. When they were enrolled at school, they traded first and second position on most subjects—except English, which neither were very good at. But in all else, they were always competing. That was, at least, until they entered their senior year when Affiong started to struggle at school because his mother had developed a persistent, hacking cough that never subsided. Just two months after Uduak started at the polytechnic, Affiong had run away from the village to go to Uyo, seeking any menial labor that would pay enough to hospitalize her.
“Thank you. The journey went smoothly,” Affiong said and then added, pointing toward the main village access road, “I have my own transport pod now, so it was not stressful at all.”
Uduak’s breath caught when he saw the perfectly smooth egg-shaped vehicle. The top of its matte black surface caught the last of the light from the sky. “That is amazing,” he said, because it was true. He’d never seen anything like it before.
“Yes o, it is. It is a self-navigating pod. They have one of those AI things inside, so I don’t even need to do anything most of the time. I just tell it to bring me here and just like that, I can see all of you again.”
Uduak swallowed his jealousy. “Wonderful.”
The looks from the crowd and especially from his wife made him even more uncomfortable than he already was. He was supposed to be the one who had gone to the city and made it big. He was the smart one. The one with the scholarship. The reason why the big man from the oil company had come to meet with the village council, saying that it was time someone from their community finally joined ExOil operations so that maybe, one day, they would all own a part of the valuable resource that lay buried beneath the land of their ancestors. He was supposed to be the one with the money and the schnapps and the suit and transport pod that looked like a potent god’s egg. Uduak’s place as the village’s promising child had slipped and shifted beneath him over the years, until it was completely gone. He already knew that everyone he had grown up with now saw him with different eyes, but the look they gave now was new, their disappointment filtered and distilled through the obvious mesh of Affiong’s success. Their looks made his skin prickle like the light reflected from their eyes was made of needles.
I will not show weakness.
He set the wheelbarrow down, lifted his head up and walked toward Affiong, enduring the needle-light.
“So, what are you doing with all those tools and drums there?” Affiong asked, jutting out his cleft chin toward Uduak’s abandoned load. “Eket just told me that you are trying to get that old ExOil refinery running again by yourself, is that true?”
Uduak stopped at the edge of the crowd and shot a stinging look at Eket; a short, middle-aged man covered in burn scars since his teens, from a fire at a vandalized pipeline. He’d been siphoning petrol, back when that was a thing. These days, Eket spent most of his time drinking cheap ogogoro and spreading rumors. They had been drinking buddies for a while, when Uduak had been living close to the bottom of the bottle, so he was not surprised that Eket was the one who had told Affiong about Ukpana II. Eket returned his look with unfocused, bloodshot eyes, remorseless. He already had one bottle of Affiong’s schnapps cradled in his arms like a child or a bag full of silver coins. The problem with Eket’s blabbering was that Affiong had a way of making a mockery of things that Uduak cared about, but without overtly mocking them. It had always been that way since they were children. In their senior year, he had taken to calling Uduak “Joseph the Dreamer” because he always spoke of his future working at ExOil after Samuel Ukekpe’s visit to the council. Something Uduak hated but never complained about because the surest way to make a nickname you hate stick to your skin forever is to complain about it.
“Yes,” Uduak said, looking back to Affiong. “It’s taking some time, but I’m making progress. I already managed to get the storage tanks flowing to the main facility again.”
“Really?” Affiong said, miming exaggerated interest as he stepped out of the center of the crowd, toward Uduak. “But what are you trying to achieve exactly? No one uses that dirty oil or its products for anything anymore. Its worthless. Besides,” he pointed up and motioned his arm in an arc, his fingers dipping at every nearby aluminum rooftop, “the village already has solar panels installed.”
“It’s not enough,” Uduak replied. Which was true. “There’s never any power at night. The government has been promising to connect us to the grid for years and yet, here we are. If I can get the refinery working again, I can make fuel for the generator and connect it here.”
“Hmm.” Affiong nodded his head. “Well, the Kawashida central power stations are already up and running. We always have power in Uyo. It’s just the government that is slow to reach here.” He smiled. “Maybe we should get a Kawashida portable, don’t you think?”
Uduak flinched at that name—Kawashida. The company that had changed the world. His world. Kawashida. It was the only reason Affiong could come back to the village with his tailored suits and egg-shaped transport pod that caught the dying of the light while he, Uduak, struggled to revive an abandoned network of unit operations that could distill fuel from crude oil.
Affiong continued, “No. It’s too expensive. We can use the refinery and the generator temporarily if everyone here is happy with it.” He flashed his large teeth in an oily smile that told Uduak he already knew they were not. “The oil is just sitting there.”
Emem, the woman who had the largest farm in the village and sat on the council, scoffed.
Uduak tensed. He had not even discussed it with the village council before he started. He’d been drinking when he made the decision on his own after years of considering moving to the city to try to get a job as an entry level technician at the Kawashida plant in Uyo. He may not have finished school, but he was smart and good at figuring things out and at least, he’d thought, he still had enough practical and transferable skills to find work managing general equipment. But the thought of working at a Kawashida plant felt like it would be the final humiliation in a long sequence of failed dreams. He was supposed to be an oil man. Pride and deeply rooted resentment fertilized each other in his mind until they had grown, become a great, green sinewy mass of bitter spite that clawed its way into his heart and fused itself with his will. He’d dropped the bottle of ogogoro in his hand and decided he was going to fulfil his destiny. That he was going to reignite the bright, burning future he had once dreamed of for himself. He’d stopped drinking and started working on Ukpana II the next day, and he didn’t stop even after the village council had summoned him and told him to, that it was too risky to do it on his own and that they didn’t want to have to deal with any problems if anything went wrong.
“They just don’t understand. It’s a refinery, not an evil forest. They will be fine with it once I get things working fully.” Uduak puffed out his chest, looking around the crowd. “In fact, we can even sell power directly to the nearby villages and make money. The generator there has a huge capacity.”
Affiong nodded, that movement also exaggerated. “Still dreaming big dreams eh, Joseph the Dreamer?”
A burst of giggling and sneers erupted from the crowd. Uduak saw Ndifreke look away toward Udom who had drifted toward the pod with three other children, custodians of the robot now. It was just like it used to be when they were children, with Affiong trying to embarrass him, and succeeding.
I will not let Affiong shame me here.
“It’s not a dream, Affiong. It’s a reality. I have gotten the pipelines to flow again, and I have fixed almost all the equipment and cleared out most of the units. Things that all of you laughing here have no idea about because you don’t know anything about technology. I have done a lot of detailed and difficult technical work on my own, and I’m now very close to being finished. The refinery will be up and running soon.”
The laughing stopped abruptly.
“Okay brother-in-law, I meant no harm. I was just teasing you.” Affiong folded his arms in front of his chest, still smiling like he knew some secret Uduak didn’t. “So how soon is soon? A few days or maybe a week, I assume?”
Uduak saw the trap he was being led into just a bit too late to pull himself back from it. “Yes,” he lied.
“I see. Then we should support our kinsman,” Affiong said, speaking to the crowd. “We should do a commissioning or opening ceremony. Get all the members of the council to see what our gifted brother has achieved all by himself. Hundreds of people used to work in that refinery you know. Hundreds!”
A murmur went up and Uduak suddenly felt a throbbing headache develop at his temples. He felt very alone.
“Enough. This is not the place for this. I will discuss it with the rest of the council tomorrow,” Emem said, adjusting her wrapper around her waist. “For now, let us finish celebrating your return first, eh? Or you don’t want to eat the meat I cooked for you before it gets cold?”
Affiong bowed toward her. “Thank you, ma.” And then he turned back to Uduak, “I really look forward to seeing what you’ve done when it is ready. It will be amazing to see a real oil refinery operating again, just like going back into the past.” He laughed and then drifted toward Emem who was seated on a stool in front of a large metal pot full of food. “Let us eat!”
Ndifreke gave Uduak a look and a strained smile before she joined her brother and several others gathered in front of the blackened metal pot, baby Mbono still sleeping quietly on her back.
“I’m not hungry,” Uduak said to no one in particular as he ground his teeth and turned away, headed back to the hut he had inherited from his uncle which he now shared with Ndifreke and the children. Midstep, he thought he saw something move in the bushes, like an animal stalking prey, but he concluded that it was just the wind. As he gripped the handles of the wheelbarrow tighter and kept moving, he wondered if there was a way he could get the oil in and start the fired heater for the crude distillation tower at the abandoned ExOil facility. There were massive storage tanks full of oil, enough to distill. He just needed to get it inside. He wondered if he could siphon some oil into a large drum and manually pour it into the distillation tower, even if the transfer pump wasn’t working. Perhaps, if he pulled it off, he could get it to run stably for a few minutes or even about an hour, long enough to make it seem like he’d been successful to some degree. Enough to make Affiong respect him and perhaps restore some of the village’s eroded faith in him.
Matches.
He needed matches.
He tried to remember where he left the last box of them as he picked up his pace, the wonky wheelbarrow and its cargo bouncing ahead of him.
• • •
Kawashida fuel cells were invented by a team of scientists at the ShinChi Technology Company of Japan, just sixteen months before Uduak was due to graduate with a diploma in Mechanical Engineering Technology from Federal Polytechnic, Ukana.
Uduak didn’t know exactly how the fuel cells worked. No one really knew all the details except the research team at ShinChi, and they kept their secrets, but Uduak like everyone else, knew that the cells were biological. That was what made them special.
By using a proprietary genetic modification technique to rewire the metabolism of a heterotrophic bacterial strain, making it autotrophic, and then further splicing the synthetic microbe with a cocktail of high cell density, rapid reproduction genes, Dr. Haruko Kawashida and her team created a living, breathing, renewable supply of energy for the planet. The synthetic autotroph used concentrated sunlight to efficiently consume carbon dioxide and exchange electrons, creating a steady stream of electricity. An engineered nanoparticle was used to further facilitate rapid communication and across the mass of the organisms as they grew and emitted current, enabling full control of all its actions, including its rate of reproduction, which was extremely scalable, allowing the current to be used in a variety of ways. Kawashida cells proved useful in a variety of applications: from heavy industries that needed energy dense fuels or very expensive installations, to smaller portable devices. This, as well as the fact that the Kawashida cells could be coupled to wastewater treatment, where it would use the organic material as additional substrate, or to saline water desalination systems to catalyze the electrochemical pathways while simultaneously making the water drinkable; all these made Kawashida cells a unique technical marvel—a single solution to multiple problems—a potent panacea for an ailing planet.
But the technical aspects of Kawashida cells were not what truly changed the world so much so quickly, not by themselves anyway. Technical alternatives for power generation had existed before Kawashida fuel cells, and they too would have probably gotten bogged down in arguments about pricing and distribution and who would bear the cost of transitioning or abandoning older technologies, if not for the timing. The perfect timing. A demonstration of Kawashida cells’ ability to power the entire Keiyō Industrial Zone, while also making the entire operation carbon-neutral in less than a week, took place three days after the 46th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Accra, Ghana ended with yet another series of non-binding resolutions. There had been parallel protests in almost every city in the world, and violent riots in some, with Canada’s protests triggering a change in government. The frustration at the slow pace of climate actions, and the excuses that continued to flow from politicians while they prioritized the economy over the planet, had been simmering for decades and finally boiled over. So, in the week that followed, when ShinChi live-streamed their change-over from the national gas and nuclear grid to the Kawashida cell power plant, everyone watched both the sharp drop in net atmospheric carbon dioxide and the continued stable industry operations driven by the easy-to-feed-and-grow organic matter of the cells. Then the protests pivoted to demands for action, demands for Kawashida.
Kawashida cell technology quickly made its way around the energy-hungry and climate-changed world, defended by a slew of ShinChi lawyers and the latent but obvious military backing of the Japanese government. Many rich nations in Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Africa quickly bought into it, glad to be free of their fossil fuel addictions. Others followed when they saw the writing on the wall.
Oil prices crashed from a hundred and three dollars per barrel to less than twenty cents in four months. OPEC panicked and cut production to create artificial scarcity. But that only gave an opening to the hydrogen, methanol, and biofuel markets which had been positioning themselves, in the decades prior, as alternatives to gas, oil, and chemical feedstocks. It was really all in the timing. Within two years, Kawashida cells had changed the world in what was, by historic standards, the blink of an eye.
Uduak hadn’t known any of this until the semester was about to end and Samuel Ukekpe sent him a video message, explaining that ExOil was cancelling his scholarship since it was stopping all its operations in Nigeria and fully divesting all its assets.
In the video, Samuel was animated and sweating profusely, his large head set against a cream-colored background. “If you look at the news, you will see it everywhere. Kawashida this. Kawashida that. Wahala for who no follow Kawashida now. Even me too, I no longer have work here after two months. It’s time for everybody to answer their father’s name, Uduak. Go back to the village. I have sent you the last payment for the semester yesterday. Use it for transport money and keep the rest,” Samuel had said, before adding, “Sorry ehn.”
When the message ended, the silence echoed the death-blow to his dreams and aspirations of being an oil man. It sent Uduak reeling, unable to eat or sleep or attend his final classes. For years, he had seen the oil industry as his only way to clamber out of a small and limited life in the village, and just like that, it was gone.
With the coming of Kawashida, all across the Niger delta, the oil wells were shut, the money stopped flowing, the facilities were abandoned. Some of facilities and equipment that were closer to the big cities were retrofitted to use biomass and hydrogen or whatever else was possible with the least amount of effort and cost. Some were coupled to nearby Kawsahida power generation systems. Others were stripped for parts. The rich economies, and the big population centers in the smaller economies, all moved on with the changing technology, even though some, like much of Russia as well as spots in the middle east, remained reluctant. But even in the countries where Kawashida cells had been rapidly adopted, not everyone was carried along. The government in Nigeria, inefficient as it was, forgot the wide-eyed people in the small, remote villages that had once vomited their oil for the world’s greedy consumption. For Uduak, nothing made sense anymore. His dreams had drowned in the future. So, when he got home, he got married and settled down and tried to find a way to move on, but he couldn’t let go. So, eventually, he picked up the bottle and began to try to dissolve the dreams of his forfeited future in the sweet oblivion of ogogoro. Until one day he looked up and saw the stacks from Ukpana II stabbing impotently up at the sky and he felt the swell of inspiration that he used to feel in school when he finally understood something that he’d been taught and had an idea how to solve a problem. If everyone had left him, his dreams, his village, behind in the past, then perhaps he could bring the past back again. He could walk into that rusty tombstone to his dead aspirations and with all the intelligence and ingenuity that Miss Kayode had told the village he possessed, he could bring its pipes and equipment roaring back to life. He convinced himself that every liter of fuel he distilled would be a testament to his promise, to his value and would mordantly scorn Kawashida in the process too. And thus, Uduak had set to work almost a year ago.
• • •
Mbono had been crying like her mouth was full of fire for more than seven minutes when Uduak finally opened his eyes.
His daughter’s shrill cries finally pierced through the curtain of exhaustion that had fallen over him once he’d set the wheelbarrow down behind the hut, laid down on the raffia mat that Emem’s daughter had woven for them as a wedding present, and promptly fell asleep. His eyes wide and his head foggy with a half-remembered dream of being on the village council, he turned his head to his right and caught sight of the beaming full moon through the window, cradled by a soft puff of clouds as it hovered in the sky over the village.
All that light, reflected from the sun.
It’s beautiful.
In a brief, silent space between moments, while Mbono paused for an intake of breath, and his head was still giddy with dreams, he found himself caught in a thought.
If the sun can light up the sky with nothing more than its reflection, maybe it’s enough to power the world. To power the village. Maybe I don’t need to keep working on Ukpana II.
His daughters’ cries resumed with vigor, and the thought evaporated quickly, like kerosene spilled on asphalt in the midday sun. Uduak shook his head as the sound slowly chipped away at his sanity. He turned away from the moon framed in the window, over to his left side; a mistake that brought him face-to-face with Ndifreke who, like him, was now wide awake. She was glaring at him with well-fermented disdain that fizzed and frothed around her narrowed eyes, threatening to spill out onto the rim of her curled-up nose. Uduak knew she’d been holding in her words all day. He was tempted to look away, but he only shut his eyes instead.
“Enye mi. Useless man,” she muttered under her breath as she sat up on the mat and adjusted the wrapper that was tied around her bosom.
A chill ran up Uduak’s spine. It was about to begin. Again. He clenched his jaw and grit his teeth.
This happens every time Affiong comes to visit.
“Unen! Go and comfort your daughter, she is crying. You are smart, aren’t you? You know everything? So, you should know how to comfort a crying child,” she said, louder this time.
Mbono was six months old, and slept atop a small, padded raffia mat in the far end of their room. They’d been trying to train her to sleep through the night on her own, so Uduak knew that Ndifreke was only saying these things to hurt him. He kept his eyelids shut, hoping she would let out all her frustrations, tire quickly, give up, stop hurling insults at him and, if the crying persisted, go see to their wailing daughter whose cries seemed to only be growing louder.
“Maybe she is hungry, and she needs to be fed. Are you not the one that has been repairing the distillation-something-something that is still not working? You waste your time there instead of working on the farm, but you think I am the one that will both harvest yam and squeeze breast for your children by myself.”
Uduak winced at that. He’d tried to wake up earlier than usual for the last few months to till the land they had marked out, heaping the loose reddish-brown soil into new ridges, and weeding the existing ones so that it would be easier for her to plant new yam heads and harvest old ones when he went to work on Ukpana II. But his efforts had either gone unnoticed or unappreciated. She kept going, every word laced with venom.
“You can’t provide for your child. You can’t comfort your child. It is so hot here! Mosquitoes and heat will soon kill her. You have been working on that stupid thing since how many months now, and yet fuel for the generator we have not seen. Money to buy portable Kawashida, that one too we have not seen. Useless man.”
Ndifreke pronounced Kawashida with an affected nasal tinge, mimicking the way Affiong said it because that was where she’d heard the word most often, but that only made the name sound even more irritating to Uduak. He felt a red, persistent throbbing develop at the base of his skull.
“Ndi . . .”
“Don’t Ndi me!” she shouted, pointing a finger at him like it was a knife.
Her braids were loose, and the moonlight made them look like streaks of frozen lightning. Her face was bony and full of teeth, like her brother’s, and the more she insulted him, her face burnished with silver light, the more her resemblance to her brother seemed to resolve itself to the fore.
Uduak had married Ndifreke the year after he came back from Federal Polytechnic, Ukana, with nothing but a broken dream and the leftover money from this scholarship for the semester that Samuel Ukekpe had sent to him when ExOil suddenly went belly up. He married her for several reasons. Because his uncle, who had been taking care of him since his parents died when he was six years old asked him to. Because she was young and beautiful and was one of the few women in the village who were of appropriate age at the time. Because she was a good woman who diligently took care of her mother with whatever money Affiong sent her from the city. Because he needed something to do to give him a sense of purpose that didn’t involve becoming an oil man. Because she, like many other young women in the village back then, still looked at him with stars in their eyes, since he was the man the outsiders had come to talk to the village council about, not knowing that the world had shifted and he had already lost all his promise. Because her family’s plot of land was right next to his uncle’s, and of course it made sense for the families to form a union. Because she’d never laughed with the others whenever Affiong had called him “Joseph the Dreamer.” But of all those reasons, sometimes Uduak admitted to himself that he married her because he knew that Affiong would absolutely hate it.
Affiong didn’t even attend the wedding ceremony.
Uduak wondered now, seeing the intensity of hate and spite with which she spoke to him while their daughter wailed in the background, how much of that bile was hers and how much of it was a reflection of Affiong’s abundance.
“Look at where your family is living. The same hut your uncle gave us. No change. No improvement. First you were a drunkard, now you are wasting all your time on nonsense. Who did I offend to end up with a useless man like you? We are suffering o! Ehn. We are suffering! You just want to be a local village champion. You want to claim a pointless victory with that refinery.”
She continued berating him until Uduak finally had enough and rolled over, turning his back to her. She was worked up and trying her best to hurt him with words that were more spiteful than usual. And it was working. They were eating into his soul like acid through flesh, filling him with the acrid feeling of dream-residue. He stared back out at the moon waiting for his daughter’s crying and his wife’s insulting to stop. He tried to divert his mind with thoughts of the refinery, considering the best way to temporarily bypass the pump, perhaps with an elevated tank and an angled flowline to the tower, when he heard her say something that cut him to the quick.
“Nobody even needs your rubbish refinery thing anyway; they have been laughing at you since Affiong came. The village council has already agreed to buy a second-hand Kawishda portable from a dealer in Uyo until the government connects us to the power grid. Affiong is helping us to arrange it. He will pay for half even. Affiong was mocking you when he said he wants to see your thing. They just want to see what you have been wasting your time with, but they are not going to use it even if it is working at all so if you like, be there by yourself with your refinery-nonsense!”
She kissed her teeth with a loud, venomous hiss like a threatened snake.
They are buying a Kawashida portable?
“Who told you that?” Uduak spun back to face her with wide eyes as he grabbed her wrist. “Who?”
“Nobody told me anything.” She slapped his grip away. “I was there when they discussed it and agreed before you came back from your stupid Ukpana II.”
Uduak groaned.
No. No. No.
Even his own people had accepted the thing that had ruined his life, and they were bringing it right to his doorstep.
The red, persistent throbbing in his skull spread to his temples.
He took his head in his hands and held it.
No. I need to show them. I am a smart man. I am a good man. I am an oil man. I need to show them I can be the person they thought I would be.
He heard Ndifreke exhale a scoff as she shook her head. “My brother was right. You are a dreamer. You can’t even accept reality when it has been hitting for you in the head for the last ten years.” She climbed off the raffia mat and picked up their daughter who immediately stopped crying and plopped her thumb into her mouth.
“I’m taking the children to my mother’s house to sleep. Affiong is there. You better wake up from this foolish dream of yours because very soon, nobody will care about you or your refinery nonsense again.”
And with that, she left the room, her footsteps echoing in the newfound silence of the hut. He heard her saying something inaudible to Udom, who was sleeping in the main room where they received guests. There was a rustle, more footsteps and then, silence.
Uduak was alone in the house.
He felt unstable. A kaleidoscope of emotions swirling together at once in his head made him feel dizzy, and the light from the moon was suddenly too bright, like it had expanded or moved closer to the village. He closed his eyes again, pressing his eyelids as close together as he could, causing small motes of red light to appear somewhere in his consciousness like tiny, persistent explosions. The motes flitted about randomly like dust in Brownian motion, whizzing about almost in tune to the pounding of his headache. He lay back down onto the mat for almost fifteen minutes, his head throbbing, until he thought he heard something enter the room, something that felt cold and wet and sharp and dangerous and dark and nameless like a leopard with blood dripping from its mouth. The feeling intensified until it settled beside him. It made him tremble. He pressed his eyelids tighter together, frozen with fear, but the feeling of the thing in the room next to him would not go away. Finally, he exhaled a breath he didn’t even know he was holding and accepted its presence. He stopped shaking. The motes of light behind his eyes disappeared with the suddenness of a conjurer’s trick.
Uduak opened his eyes. A smile cut its way across his face. He was not sure why, but he was happy all of a sudden. Ecstatic even. He leapt up from the raffia mat laughing and singing a song his uncle had taught him when he was nine. A song they used to sing when they worked on the farm together. He remembered where the matches were. Uduak made his way to the open space at the back of the hut that served as the kitchen to retrieve a knife and his box of matches.
• • •
“Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Eket’s voice was harsh and guttural and frantic and extremely unnerving to the few villagers who were still awake to hear it. They were not surprised to hear Eket shouting at night, he did so frequently enough—singing, shouting, making strange noises when he’d had too much to drink. But this night, they were mostly surprised by the fact that his voice had none of its usual drunken slur or jovial tone. There was only fear in his voice. Fear and the sound of the word. Fire. They woke others and then they all came out of their red-brick and aluminum-roof houses slowly, most of them not fully free of sleep. That was, at least until they saw Eket kneeling on the ground near the base of the udala tree, pointing at an orange halo of flame in the distance like the sun had fallen into the bushes. The goats owned by richer members of the village council were bleating madly, and all the chickens that usually ranged freely had disappeared, fleeing as far as they could from the beast of heat, of light. It looked like a portion of the bush had been taken over by bright orange trees made of fire.
The villagers all knew that it was the Ukpana II refinery on the Northwest edge of the village, that was engulfed in flames. It was just beside the polluted Opo River whose surface still reflected tiny rainbows in daylight. Eket kept shouting and jumping and pointing at the fire. He was wearing only a pair of knee length shorts, and the loose muscles of his chest, softened by alcohol, pendulated furiously, but no one paid much attention to him.
They stood and stared at the enormous fire, their faces illuminated by the glare of the moon, most of them too shocked to react.
While they watched the burning in the distance, Ndifreke staggered out from between the huts into the clearing, her legs barely carrying her weight. She stumbled several paces towards the crowd, one hand held up in front of her and the other clutching her belly tight.
It was only when she screamed her daughter’s name, “Mbono!” that they finally turned, just in time to see her spit out a mass of blood and collapse onto the dirt. Crimson blood flowed out from her center like an unfurling evil flower.
There was a chorus of gasps and shouts.
Several people ran toward Ndifreke’s fallen body at the same time, but Mfon, the junior midwife who had helped her deliver Udom and Mbono and whom she’d been trying to convince Affiong to marry, was the first to reach her.
“Sister Ndi!” Mfon cried as she turned her over and saw the stab wounds in her belly leaking the life out of her.
“Mbono . . .” Ndifreke croaked through spurts of blood. “Uduak . . . he killed . . . Affiong . . . help my children . . .” Her voice trailed off.
A circle had formed around them. Emem, wrapped in a piece of white linen, stepped forward and spread her arms out to stop them from crowding into her. She kept shaking her head.
Mfon tried to lift and cradle Ndifreke’s own head in her arms, but halfway through the motion, it suddenly felt leaden, like all the muscles in her neck had stiffened.
She was dead.
A child’s familiar wail cut through the shocked silence, and then that seemed to give them all permission to let out all the words they had held in.
Ahhh!
Mbono o!
Where is Uduak?
Where is Affiong?
Abasi o!
Water!
Still inside her hut, lying down and staring at the thatch insulation where no one could see or hear her, but where she’d clearly heard everything, even the roar of the fire, Mama Ebiye’s lips began to move fervently, whispering, “Uduak and Affiong. Fire and blood. Within an hour of each other.” Over and over and over again.
Outside, there were cries of anguish and tears of sadness and embraces of comfort and shouts of anger and cries for water and a multitude of trembling tongues trying to make sense of the terrible thing that was happening in their village.
In the distance, the orange halo flared and lit up the night as the fire continued to lick and grow and roar.
• • •
Uduak stood on the top-level access platform of the crude oil distillation column, staring down into the inferno that had spread from the main crude oil tank and now covered everything below with an orange and gray shroud.
His was sweating profusely, his eyes were watering from all the smoke, and his hands were covered in the black of crude oil and dried blood. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other because his bare soles were uncomfortable against the increasingly hot metal grating. But he was still smiling, the same unyielding bone-sickle rictus imprinted onto his face that had remained since he got up from the raffia mat after fighting with Ndifreke.
He’d followed her after she took the children to her mother’s hut and waited outside while she talked to Affiong, hidden between two parallel walls. He waited until the lights from whatever device Affiong was using to power his devices went out and the hushed voices went quiet. Then he’d gone in, stealthily moving through the house on bare feet. He’d slit Affiong’s throat first, drawing the knife across smoothly like he was inscribing a mark across the curve of it. When he did it, he stood back and watched the look of horror on his brother-in-law’s face as Affiong woke with a start, in a world of pain and unable to speak, spraying frothy blood all over the floor as he instinctively reached for his phone. It had taken almost half a minute for Affiong to die. When he did, Uduak took Affiong’s phone and went to the next room where Ndifreke was sleeping. Mbono was awake in a corner of the room but quietly cooing. He walked up to Ndifreke and covered her mouth with one hand before stabbing her in the belly seven times. Udom never even woke up. When Ndifreke stopped struggling, Uduak left the house and ran out through the village square until he came to Affiong’s egg-shaped vehicle. He pressed an icon that bore the same shape as the pod, and its surface slid open to reveal a pair of plush seats. He sat inside and said, “take me to Ukpana II,” but nothing happened, so he stabbed at the seats and the panels and then he threw the knife away and ran through the access road, all the way to Ukpana II. He’d frantically made his way back to the transfer pump that was connected to all the storage tanks, and he turned a valve to cut off the intake line before trying to drag a drum of oil to the distillation tower. He fell and it fell with him, spilling everywhere.
I am an oil man.
He’d struggled up to his feet, run for the fired heater, and opened the fuel valves. It took him four strikes of the matches to finally get the heater working even though the oil transfer pump wasn’t working, and there was no oil inside to be heated at the inlet of the distillation unit. He’d left the heater going anyway and climbed up along the access ladders to the top of the tower, reaching the platform just in time to see the metal frame of the heater expand and burst, vomiting superheated air and flames everywhere.
And that was where he’d stayed since, watching the fire slink and grow around the facility like an infection, or perhaps a synthetic microorganism, setting everything it touched ablaze.
He continuously shuffled his feet, trying to minimize the impact of the rising heat.
Conduction. I remember what Miss Kayode taught me.
Heat flux is equal to negative conductivity multiplied by the temperature difference and the conductivity of steel is high, and fire is hot and my feet are cold and everything is burning burning burning and that’s so funny because steel is mostly iron and so is blood too, and my hands are covered in blood and oil and oil is mostly carbon and you need to add carbon to iron to make it steel and the steel beneath my feet is hot and everything is burning burning burning.
He laughed with a sound that surprised him. It was more a series of strident cracks than a laugh, Uduak looked up at the beaming moon, still flashing his new smile.
Look at me.
I am an oil man.
He felt an urge to howl but he didn’t.
The fire continued to climb up the tower steadily like a vine until the smoke and the heat became too much for him to bear. Uduak covered his mouth and his nose with his forearm and climbed atop the rail, holding onto the top bar with one hand. It burned but he held on until he could smell his own flesh.
He let go.
Falling, he took one final wide-eyed look at the facility he had dreamt of so much, and he was suddenly not sure why he had even cared so much about it, about keeping the rusty, broken wheels turning for an industry that had harmed his land and his people so much. He couldn’t understand why it had mattered more than his wife and his children and his life. Ukpana II didn’t look so impressive in the haze of smoke and fire.
What have I done?
The strange smile that had been plastered on Uduak’s face finally receded as he fell under the power of gravity, inexorable, like the future, towards the burning remains of a past he had never been able to let go of.
• • •
At dawn, when the village council sent a search party to inspect what was left of Ukpana II, they found Uduak’s remains beside the charred steel base plate of the ruptured transfer pump. There was nothing left of him but a broken, blackened skeleton surrounded by embers.