CJ
There are no direct flights from Lagos to the small towns of the middle belt. So, on the morning of Vi’s wedding, I stepped off the train at Miango in Plateau State. Normally, I would have hired a car and an AI, but I was trying to keep a low profile.
It was dawn and the platform was deserted. Even the ticket conductor had yet to arrive. The porter was probably sleeping in a warm corner swaddled against the harmattan cold. Outside, I was struck by the curiously dream-like quality rural Nigeria possessed. The colours were somehow more authentic. The tidy brick houses that lined the dusty road were a deeper red brown; the rows of cacti that acted as their fences were a more vibrant shade of green. Shops were designated by hand-lettered signs. Fat cotton-ball clouds drifted lazily in an unbelievably cerulean sky that was quickly brightening.
While I waited by the bench that marked the station’s bus stop, I was engulfed by a feeling of utter desolation. Without the close press of tall buildings above my head, everything stretched into infinity around me, and I imagined I could float up and be lost in that terrible blue horizon. The world felt empty, and I was reminded why I hadn’t been back here in so long, even though it was where I had grown up. I gripped the bench to steady myself and the feeling soon passed, but I could not calm the dread that had lodged itself at the bottom of my belly.
An old-fashioned red pick-up truck barrelled down the main road, and a woman was waving frantically out of the driver’s side window. Vi and her fiancé, Olamide, were here to meet me. I could not conceive how they had managed to get away from their hectic pre-wedding schedule, but I was glad they had. I was relieved to see a familiar face.
“Em!” squealed Vi as she launched herself out of the cab.
I caught her easily and wrapped her in a bear hug.
“Emeka Okafor, put me down!” She tried to sound indignant, but she was laughing too hard. “You bully.” She mock-punched my arm when I put her back on her feet. “You haven’t changed at all.”
Once she regained her composure, Violet Parker—soon to be Ogundare—took charge. She was still as tall as she had been in secondary school, but her body, which had once been fat and lumpy, had smoothed into sleek curves. Her olive skin and curly black hair spoke of her multiracial heritage—her mom had been Lebanese-Nigerian.
Olamide—“call me Ola”—and I shook hands as we were formally introduced. He was a rotund little man with an unruly Afro. His round head seemed to grow directly out of his shoulders, and his bulbous nose gave him the impression of a cheerful snowman.
“We got you a room at the rest home on Mission Drive,” Vi said as Ola bundled my luggage into the truck. She still moved impatiently, as if she needed to be somewhere more important, but love had softened her. Gone were the tight Victorian buns into which she used to trap her hair; now a simple ponytail sufficed. She’d opted for gene therapy for her myopia, and had abandoned her horn-rimmed glasses.
“We wanted to have you stay at the farm, but with both our parents in town, we thought we should spare your sanity,” said Ola with a wry smile.
As he fired up the engine, Vi and I shared a look. The man had a sense of humour. I approved.
“So how’s the new man?” Vi asked me, never one for subtlety.
“He’s great,” I said. Kevin’s musty smell still lingered on my shirt from when he had he dropped me off at the airport the night before. We had argued again that morning, and his kiss had been perfunctory. The last I saw of him, he had been waving goodbye, his dark hair catching the neon lights while he scanned the oncoming traffic. “Just great.”
Vi eyed me quizzically.
“And what about you? How’s work?” I asked before she could question me further. She worked for some big lab in Abuja, but I had only a vague idea what she actually did.
“Well, my project’s in limbo right now. The company had wanted me to divert our research into this new thing they’re doing—meta-human targeting,” said Vi. “I won’t bore you with the science, but there are more of them popping up every year and nobody’s quite sure why. It used to be just people who could play the piano with their feet. Now you’ve got people who can change their skin colour or walk through walls.”
“Oh, like this guy in Lagos,” I said, remembering something that had popped up on my news feed a few days ago. “They say he’s incredibly strong, fast and, apparently, bulletproof. Runs around in a mask and black leotard, beating up area boys and rescuing people from burning buildings.”
“Eh-heh, like that,” Vi said. “Except most of them are using their abilities to rob banks and do wayo.”
“I see…” was all I could say. It was one thing to have such stories in one’s feed—they were usually data traps to lure one into giving up one’s metrics—but to have it confirmed by one of the most level-headed people I knew was something entirely different.
“Anyway, the company wants to figure out a way to track and identify these people, and they want to use our bio-genetic research to do it. Well, I told them to go fuck themselves, so they put me on indefinite suspension. With pay, of course. Ola and I bought the Yangs’ old farm.”
“The one with all the horses?”
“Yes, but those are all gone now,” said Ola. “They went bankrupt in two thousand and twenty-five. We’re going to fix it up and see if we can get anything to grow out there.”
“Imagine me a farmer.” Vi sighed comically. “Just the thought of collecting eggs again gives me the creeps.” I could see her in a pair of overalls and a Fulani straw hat—like the ones my mother used to wear—weeding the vegetable garden. Except Vi hated weeding.
“You’re right. You won’t last a week.”
She mock-punched me again as I laughed.
That evening, after a good, long nap, I met up with Vi at the Falling Meteor Bar. Named after some long-forgotten celestial event, the bar had once been a popular snack spot. Though the new owners called it something else, it would always be The Meteor to us. Ola was at the only club in town, attending his bachelor party, and would not be joining us. We found a table in a fairly quiet corner, away from the speakers which were blaring the latest Afro-pop, and ordered our drinks.
We were deep in conversation when we heard a crash from across the room. A tall man in an old-fashioned plaid jacket was helping a young waitress to her feet. He had possibly caused her to drop her tray of drinks, though I could not figure out how. The woman brushed off his attempts to help and began clearing the mess. The man stood uncertainly after she’d gone and scanned the room. Then CJ spotted us and waved.
Maybe it was because I hadn’t seen him in such a long time—not since his father’s funeral—that it struck me: I had forgotten how he moved. CJ wove through the crowded bar with an odd combination of a schoolboy’s awkwardness and a dancer’s grace. Eyes downcast, his bearing as stiff as a cornstalk, he would throw his hands up, palms out, like crisp military salutes, apologising to everyone in front of him. Yet, for all this, he never actually hit anyone—never even touched them. Without his constant apologies, I doubted any of the weekend crowd would have noticed him go by.
“H-h-hi g-guysss,” said CJ as he reached our table. “H-how’sss… everyone doing?” CJ spoke as if he was dragging the speech out of himself in uneven loads. Sometimes words would spill out, tumbling over themselves in their eagerness to be heard. Other times, a short phrase or gesture seemed to be all he could manage.
“Ceej!” Vi threw her arms out and CJ leaned down awkwardly to hug her. He and I exchanged the complex handshake and half-hug-with-brief-back-slap thing that straight men give each other. He had filled out quite a bit since I last saw him—almost as big as me, and I had a personal trainer. Seeing him up close made my heart yammer; I hadn’t realised how much he looked like Kevin. They had the same fair skin and glossy black hair, but where Kevin’s eyes were a sharp green, CJ’s were as blue as a dry season sky.
He smiled shyly as he sat—his smiles were always shy, as if he wasn’t sure it was fully appropriate. Indeed, he always seemed slightly bewildered by everything around him. Simple questions seemed to catch him off guard. CJ couldn’t always tell people how he felt from one moment to the next, but ask him about the stars, and he would come alive.
CJ knew the name of every star, nebula and constellation in the night sky. His parents had saved up for a year to get him the powerful telescope that had been his prized possession growing up. Back then, the three of us would spend the evenings of our long vac on the roof of his parents’ house, spinning tales about our futures. I never had much of an idea of what I was going to do beyond leaving this town, but Vi was going to become a mad scientist who would cook up the cure for cancer in some basement lab, and CJ would be Nigeria’s first Euro astronaut, hopping from star to star. That’s why we were so surprised to hear he had gone into the newsies, writing stories for the feeds.
After graduation, I had taken off for Nollywood, while Vi had gone to ABU Zaria on a full scholarship. CJ had stayed behind to help his parents on their farm, as his father’s health had been failing. I didn’t hear much from him during those years. Vi was the bond that held the three of us together; she was the one who called me when CJ’s father died.
At the funeral, CJ’s eyes had been glazed and he’d worn a strange, lopsided smile. He looked like he was on another planet entirely. I should have gone to him then, but I had just come out, and was dealing with my own issues. CJ left for Lagos soon after that, and even Vi lost contact with him. This was the first time we had all been together in more than ten years.
“There’s something different about you, Ceej,” said Vi, after ordering us a round of beers.
“Oh, really! W-w-well—I mean… What do you mean?” He blinked and used his forefinger to push his thick, old-fashioned glasses up the bridge of his nose. It was a gentle, careful movement, as if he was afraid he would break them. When had he started wearing those?
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s something.”
“W-w-well, Vi… I-I don’t know about that,” CJ said.
Vi leaned back and stretched out her hands, surveying him through a square she made with her thumbs and forefingers. She turned to me for support. “There’s definitely something, isn’t there, Em?”
Vi was right. There was a certain solidness about CJ, an assurance that was new. For Vi and I, it had been the childhood taunts that had bound us together, the name-calling that echoed with the odd prescience of children, but what drew CJ to us was subtler. He never played any sports, though he had the physique for it. He didn’t call attention to himself with stellar grades like Vi did or a flamboyant persona like me. Yet, there was something not quite right about him. Maybe it was the way he would stare at people, as if he was studying their movements, or how it would take him a few minutes to react to things, as if he was struggling to remember what the appropriate response should be. Back then, it had been as if he was lost and trying to understand where he was. Now, that was gone.
I looked at CJ and we locked gazes for a moment. I knew that look too well; I saw it in the mirror every day.
“Seems like the same old CJ to me,” I lied. Before Vi could protest, I called for another round.
The next morning I awoke in the clutches of a crushing hangover. I stumbled to antiseptic toilet in my room at the rest home and promptly threw up. Then, for fifteen minutes, I burbled under a cold shower. When I emerged, I was almost myself again. I sat on the edge of the bed, my skin drying and tightening between my shoulder blades, and tried to remember the events of the night before. I didn’t know whether to trust my memories, because they seemed more the stuff of my adolescent imagination. Surely the CJ I knew, the strange boy with the faraway eyes, who could stand perfectly still for hours, who walked in pin-drop silence, would never have done what I think he had.
Vi and I had gotten into some mock argument about why we had never dated in high school—I was sure that my sexuality had been a well-kept secret; she assured me it hadn’t. When the bar closed, she had returned home and CJ and I had ended up on a rooftop somewhere—must have been a building on the grounds of the rest home. Whose idea had that been? Mine? His? It didn’t really matter. Above us, a bright constellation had shimmered like a universe of possibility.
“So why the newsies?” I had asked him. “Weren’t you supposed to be up there among the stars? You should have at least joined the Nigerian Space Agency.”
CJ had shrugged, a bemused smile on his face.
“There are enough Nigerians in space,” he had said. His stutter was gone—just like when he would speak about astronomy. “Besides, why be up there when you can stay down here and change things?”
“I don’t know about that. This country has more problems than one man can fix.”
“That’s true, but if we all work to the best of our abilities, we can make a difference.”
“You sound like your dad when you say that.”
CJ’s expression had grown sad. “My father tried to teach me a lot of things. I just wished I had been a better student. You know, I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me until I moved to that metropolis of ours and started hearing people’s stories. So many times all they needed was someone to listen to them or to step in at one critical moment—”
“Someone to save them, you mean?” I had said. I too lived in the city and, making my way through the movie industry, I’d heard my own tales of woe. Stories of thwarted ambition, greed and self-destruction, usually. “Look, our people are always looking for someone to swoop in and rescue them from the problems of their own making. We need to start saving ourselves, if you ask me.”
“So, what would you do if you saw someone in need and you knew you had the power to help?” He had turned his gaze to me. There had been a look in his eyes then, something I could not immediately place. For a moment he had appeared unutterably alien. “Would you stand by and watch them suffer?”
“It’s not that simple, CJ.”
“Yes, it is.” He had turned back to gaze at the stars. “We all have unique abilities that could change the world; sometimes people just need to be reminded of their own power.”
We’d lapsed into a thoughtful silence, each occupied with our own musings. It occurred to me then that CJ and I had never spent much time alone together, without Vi to anchor us. It felt as if I was getting to know him all over again.
“Come, what is a walz?” CJ had turned back to me. “Vi said I would have to do a walz tomorrow.”
“It’s a waltz,” I had said, laughing. “You mean to tell me you still haven’t learned to dance like a Euro? You sure say you be oyinbo true-true?”
CJ had blushed deeply and ducked his head.
I had risen and offered him a hand.
“Oya, let me teach you some moves. I don’t want you to disgrace yourself tomorrow.”
He waved my hand away and stood facing me. CJ was nearly a head taller than me, but something of his old awkwardness had returned, stirring long-forgotten memories. I had snaked one of his arms around my waist, while I draped my arm across his shoulders, my other hand in his. The feel of him had been almost familiar. Strong and solid, yet gentle, holding me with the lightest of touches.
We had danced for a little, I remember that much. I had pulled in closer, breathing in his smell—a mix of beer, aftershave and something indefinable. Then, nuzzling his impossibly smooth cheek, I had kissed him. Softly at first, tasting the skin in the hollow between his jaw and neck, moving to his mouth. His lips were almost girlishly soft. He did not resist—at least I don’t remember that he did.
Try as I might, I could not remember exactly what happened after that. Images and impressions slid through my mind, slippery as a bar of soap. There had been a sensation of air against my face and body, as if I was falling or flying, and then…nothing. I couldn’t even remember how I got into bed.
Wait.
I was naked when I woke.
I never slept naked.
I stood, ignoring the surge of pain in my head, filled with desperate hope. I tugged frantically at the covers on the bed, flinging pillows aside until I found it. Yes. That smell—a sharp sting I could not identify. He had been here. What must his body have felt like? What might he have whispered or screamed? God, how could I have gotten so drunk? I was usually much better at holding my liquor.
I folded the bed sheet carefully and sealed it in the vacuum bag in which I normally kept my underwear. I shaved, dressed and packed, since I would be leaving right after the reception.
In the lobby, I searched the pimply, teenaged desk clerk for signs of disapproval. I used to get them all the time from the landlord of my apartment building in Lagos whenever I had a “friend” stay overnight.
“Good morning, sir,” he greeted me with an eager smile. Perhaps he hadn’t been the one on duty the night before. “Your guest left something for you this morning.”
“My guest?” I asked cautiously.
“Yes, the oyinbo man who stayed with you yesterday night. He left this with me.” The boy handed me an old-fashioned e-reader. It was CJ’s diary. He had carried it everywhere with him throughout secondary school.
“Thank you.” I took the tablet.
“Oga, I like your shades,” he said. “They make you look just like that actor, Max Power.”
“Really? Everyone tells me that.”
I looked at him closely. He was a skinny country boy with slightly buck teeth, awestruck by the big city guy in front of him. He reminded me a lot of myself at that age. On a whim, I fished out my extra sunglasses and threw them to him. He caught them deftly and beamed at me.
Just then, the driverless limo pulled up. I was Vi’s “maid” of honour, and it was time to attend to the bride.
The ceremony was a modest affair on the lawn of the old Yang farm. Despite Vi’s suspension, her employer had provided a lovely stage with a canopy garlanded in blue-and-white roses. Clearly, they still wanted her back.
Vi wore a cream, medieval-style gown that flattered her ample curves. Bucking tradition, she had left her hair loose, with only a simple coronet of white roses circling her head. I wore a pale blue suit that matched the other bridesmaids’ gowns, while the groom and his men wore cream suits with back shirts and white ties.
As the judge spoke, I looked about, pleased with the arrangements. The guests were seated below the dais and I spotted CJ immediately.
He looked distant, as if he were listening for something only he could hear. His black hair was brushed back, an attempt to control his unruly curls, but one lock had escaped to fall over his forehead. He must have felt my stare, because his eyes focused and he turned to me. Grinning widely, he gave me a cheesy thumbs-up. Typical CJ.
When it was time for the couple’s first dance, CJ came up to where I was sitting at the high table.
“W-wanna dance?” he asked.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. Times may have changed, but I was still a gay man, and this was still Nigeria.
CJ laughed. “Oh come on.” He urged me to my feet. CJ was surprisingly strong, yet I sensed this had required hardly any effort on his part. “Wouldn’t want our practice to go to waste, would you?”
“Aren’t you scared people will think you’re gay too?” I asked as we started to dance.
He shrugged. “Human sexuality is such a wide continuum. Can you imagine what it might be like for a non-human?”
I gave him a quizzical look. For a moment I thought I caught a glimpse of secret knowledge in his expression, as if another person entirely were hidden beneath the man I knew. Then he grinned.
I left soon after that. My part was finished and I had no desire to mingle further with the denizens of my home town.
Once on the plane, I booted up CJ’s e-reader. The entries stretched back decades. Many were cryptic poems of loss and alienation, but most were stories, fantastic tales of men and women who could fly or run at speeds faster than sound or lift tractors with one hand. They were good too. The mystery of CJ’s career had finally been explained. The most recent entry, though, had been added just last year. It was a movie script.
I patched my agent on my com feed.
“Max, where have you been?” She sounded hysterical, but then Maggie Yuen always came across that way. “You were supposed to be on set in Hong Kong two days ago.”
“Relax. I had to see some old friends. Besides, that movie is so behind schedule, two days won’t kill anyone.”
“Well, the studio is probably going to try and knock down our fees now,” she said sourly. “I hope it was worth it.”
I thought about it for a moment before answering. “I have my memories. Mags, you know how you’ve been disturbing me about opening my own studio?”
“Of course, you’re a hot commodity. Why should you let these studio boys be dragging you up and down?”
“Well, I think I’m going to do it.” I turned down the volume just in time or I would have been deafened by her cries of delight.
“Okay! You need a script for your first vehicle.” She’d already called up a list of writers and was highlighting names. “Let me get hold of Chuks…”
“No need. I’ve already found one.” I peered at the e-reader. “What do you think of this title: The Super Man?”
Chinelo Onwualu is a writer, editor, journalist and dog person living in Abuja, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. Her writing has appeared in Ideomancer, the Kalahari Review, Saraba, Sentinel Nigeria, Jungle Jim, and the anthologies AfroSF: African Science Fiction by African Writers and Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond.