I fell through the thick dark. I fell and fell. On hitting the ground I lost consciousness. When I woke my body felt hot and broken. I was in some kind of pit. Light of a kind came from I don’t know where, a pale light unlike any I had seen or have seen since. Lying on my back I couldn’t see beyond my knees, which gave me a thrill. I tried to lift my arm, but it was too stiff. The other was not so badly hurt and with great effort I managed to raise it in the air. Reaching up, I felt nothing, and I rejoiced. To my right and left were steep walls. They were damp and warm against my sides. Below the ground was more compact, but still warm, and it flaked off at the touch of my nails.
I had fallen into one of the city’s open sewers, although I did not know this at the time, because I could see no further than half a yard. My body would barely move, I was in pain, and yet I felt terrifically happy. Strange! My whole being throbbed sweetly. After several hours of blissful rest I understood why. It was completely silent in this pit. I could hardly believe my good fortune. I listened hard, not wanting to hear, but trying desperately to hear, the tiniest sound. But there was none. I laughed and wept, celebrating my arrival in the silent world, until, exhausted, I fell asleep.
When I woke I felt thirsty. Using my one good arm I slid painfully forward, testing the ground for water. I started digging. It was slow work. After some time I scooped out a hollow, into which, very gradually, water seeped. It was not much, but I turned on to my stomach and lapped until the hollow was dry. I paused. Soon the hollow became moist again, and I lapped, paused, then lapped again. I continued in this way until my thirst was quenched. After that I did nothing. I lay there like a grub in a dungheap, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, with my face pressed into the ground. My mind felt drugged and free from thought. Hours passed in joy and gladness. I did little else but lie in the murky light, turning from my stomach on to my back and vice versa. I was far from my thoughts. But there were moments when I did not seem so far, when for instance I became aware of my body, its stillness in that dark cramped space, its sweet aching. I became aware of my insides too, panting and ticking in spite of it all. And whenever I lapped from my hollow I felt a silver coolness running along my throat. The flavour of that water was the finest I had tasted or have tasted since. Its cloudy translucence, like sea-polished glass, made me feel calm; as I brought it into my mouth I felt as if the darkness around me was melting on my tongue.
Perhaps on lapping from my hollow I took nutrients from the earth, since I did not feel hungry. Maybe I chewed on certain kinds of fungus, gnarled growths surviving in the damp and dark, like those monstrous fish that haunt the lower depths. Or did I no longer need to eat? Perhaps time passed more slowly than I imagined. I had the idea I lay in that pit for several weeks – and yet it strikes me now the whole experience might have lasted no more than several hours. Nevertheless, I felt myself withdrawing into myself. I even had a notion that I was becoming thinner. Certainly, I grew more and more content. Every now and then my mind returned to Ade. I wondered what had happened to him after his fall. I thought he might have landed on something soft and was not hurt. I even fancied he would come to join me in my pit and grow to be my friend again, that we would be companions in silence and wickedness. I let these vain hopes blossom in my chest, then I swept them away and surveyed the emptiness they had besmirched.
Absolute silence reigned in my pit; silence reigns in my attic now. I am the only inhabitant of this tent-shaped space; in my pit I dwelt alone. There are other parallels. A pale gloom spreads from my computer screen, creating a kind of perpetual dusk; so too in my pit twilight reigned – what little light there was seemed to work its way up from the depths, serving not so much to illuminate my pit as to draw shadows from the contours of its walls. I grew to love that light – less light, it seems to me now, than a memory of light, a kind of wan reflected sun, whose lack of clarity, far from disturbing me, perfectly suited my condition. There are other correspondences. For instance here in my attic with its deceptive feeling of freedom, which makes dreamers of attic-dwellers, my thoughts turn almost exclusively on myself; so too in my pit I mused on my condition. Of what, concerning myself, did I think? Core thoughts. Elemental broodings. In short, I wondered what I had become. I questioned myself for a long time. I wondered if I was not like some creature surviving from the azoic age. Eventually I came up with the idea I was a kind of seed. That was it! The pit in which I lay was the black enclosing husk, and I was its naked white seed.
There within my husk I lived truly for the first time. I had discovered an emptiness to rival the emptiness of the womb, a sweet solitary void free from earthly limits and the rules of men. My body felt weightless. I felt happier than at any other time in my life. It had always been this way with me: right at the beginning, when in the darkness of my mother’s womb I twisted and swam; before this even, before the tick-tock of the pocket watch and the chimes of Lagos clock, before my father’s stories, before even the first stirrings of sound, when I had no ears to speak of, and the silence was in me – only then was I as happy and empty as I was in my pit. All this I understand now. At the time, however, every thought vanished from my mind, and my heart swelled with strange, nourishing energies. I drifted on an unseen volume of air or jet-black cloud, losing all purchase on myself. I wished nothing more than to lose awareness of the passage of time and lie there always thus entombed.
And perhaps, if things had happened differently, I would have done so. Perhaps I would have remained curled tightly like a partly germinated seed, half-grown but able to grow no more, rotting and disintegrating; perhaps my insides would have begun to fester and turn to mulch; perhaps my skin would have darkened like paper taking flame and I would have flaked or drifted away to settle as a layer of earth. Or maybe I would have taken seed; maybe my hair would have bedded itself into the ground and twisted with the root-work, my limbs atrophying, growing scaly, burrowing in the soil until I became just one more strangled growth surviving in the damp and dark. These dreams of dissolution I contemplate now. To have merged with my pit would have made me very happy. Of course I did not. I did not become earth or vegetable matter but remained myself, more or less; I grew into this woman who sits before her desk, listening to her past, attempting to make sense of its confusing din by typing these stories so that – finally, mercifully – she can become silent.
What prompted me to stir from my happy dissolution? Why was I unable to dwell forever in the midst of silence? Something shattered my peace. Listen!
It happened as I was turning from my stomach on to my back, having just drank from my hollow. Mid-revolution, as my ear passed over the ground, I heard a scratching sound, something like the scurrying of a mouse. I pressed my ear to the earth. The noise grew louder and more complicated; now a family of mice were scrabbling around inside my head. I had the painful feeling that by hearing it I was offending some kind of natural law. I squirmed until, eventually, I turned and flopped on my back.
I lay still and tried to forget what I had heard. I could not bear to think that silence, that perfect friend, had betrayed me. I said to myself, So long as I remain on my back I will never hear that sound again. But I was not able to remain lying on my back. And I did hear that sound again, because I became thirsty, and needed to turn back again on to my stomach to drink. As I neared the mid-point of my rotation my ear started to pass over the ground and I heard the scratching once again. Yet this time there was more to come from the earth; for soon I heard hissing and braying, sighs and sounds of lamentation. I even heard a kind of nasty cackle – yes, I thought, from its obscure depths the earth was having a good laugh at my expense. Parched, turning as fast as my benumbed body would allow, with my eyes shut to this disruption worse than thirst, I succumbed to the earth’s dismal symphony: a strange, complicated, disharmonious music grinding blackly beneath my head, thundering against my skull, as if, deep underground, a medieval army was on the march. I heard creaking and groaning noises. Then, flaming as in some diabolical foundry, a series of sustained wailing notes. It was then – hearing the machinery of the turning earth, my eyes tight shut, trying desperately to turn on to my stomach and lap – I reached up and tore from the walls two clods of earth and stuffed them in my ears.