THE END

No longer living but not quite dead, I sit peacefully in this temporary way station, alone. Waiting. A pale wooden mask hangs on the wall, thick-lipped. Beside it, an unfamiliar green and white flag hangs from three thumbtacks. A wrinkled plaid sack dangles from a doorknob by its wrinkled plaid handles.

I’ve been asked to stay until evening, and so I postpone my exit. Courteous even at the brink of eternity.

Empty minutes make long hours. I’d like to get on with it, not wait here all day. But sitting still isn’t so bad. It feels like the right thing to do. And I’m not capable of much else.

For now, the stillness soothes me.

The couch was coarse-textured and bone white. My feet, up on the armrest, stayed asleep while my head awoke. A small girl was complaining, “I don’t want to go alone.” A wide woman scolded her in a whisper, “You’re big now, you’re old enough. Now you go!” “You have to come.” “We have a guest. I can’t leave before he wakes up. Ssh! Be careful crossing!”

They were both very dark. The little girl wore glasses. By the time I understood where I was, she had left.

The woman—Adesina’s fiancée, the hairdresser—wore a yellow robe. I watched her through a doorway as she gave herself a new face at a vanity table in the bedroom. The ritual took time, and she performed it patiently. When she was satisfied with the metallic green that covered her eyelids and the two shades of red on her lips, she removed her head—or, the elaborate, ringleted hairpiece—and scratched her shorn scalp behind the ear.

She passed through the living room en route to the kitchen. I said, “I’ll get out of your way in a minute or two.”

The sound of my voice provoked a scowl. “He wants you to eat dinner with us. But I work from eleven to five. If you stay, you’ll be alone until the children come from school.”

She didn’t hide her displeasure. She wanted me gone, but Adesina wanted the opposite.

“I apologize for the inconvenience,” I said, closing my eyes to shut out the uncomfortable light.

“Do you know what time they called here last night? Close to midnight.”

“Again, apologies.”

“Hm!”

She closed herself in the bedroom. A small mercy.

I was looking for my shoes, planning to try walking, when she came back out. “Don’t think I didn’t notice how you left me out of your story.” She was hissing like a viper, and puffing herself up to an intimidating size. “ ‘Here is poor Adesina, raising his children all alone after his little wife died.’ I am nobody—just the housekeeper who cooks and cleans for him and makes lunch for his children every day and nurses them when they’re sick. I know: you wanted people to feel pity for him, so they would send money. Do you know how much they sent us? Three hundred dollars— four coats and a coffeemaker. For that he put his poverty on show for all to see. I told him he should come with me and sell underwear at the flea market on Sundays, but he wanted his day of rest. Why not? He has me to slave for him while he puts his feet up. Why not rest?”

I could have defended myself, I could have said I was only trying to help a man who’d lost his wife, whose daughter needed expensive glasses, who had unpaid bills. But she didn’t give me a chance.

“My mistake was to agree to live here and help with the children before he married me. Why should he hurry now? No reason what-so-evah.”

She disappeared behind the bedroom door and spent the rest of the morning watching television and talking on the phone, emphatically and conspiratorially. I went back to sleep, and woke to find her mopping the kitchen floor in a royal blue dress that displayed every contour of her belly. She was still bitching, now with a Bluetooth headset hooked over her ear. “I’m tired of wasting my time. Why did I come here? Not for this.”

When she left, she told me, “If you go, be sure the door locks behind you. A thief could walk off with everything.”

Alone in this alien space, I survived the hours by recording last night’s events. The task left me flattened. Returning to the couch, I sought refuge in sleep but couldn’t find my way there. I didn’t see the point of eating, but eventually had to. In addition to Gatorade and ketchup, the refrigerator held a bag of okra, a tub of orange rice, and a jar of hot pepper sauce. There were also blackened plantains, a KFC box containing two leftover pieces, and a package of frozen spinach defrosting in its own puddle. In the end, I ate a tomato from a bowl on the counter and some corn flakes.

I’ve now brought this account up to the present instant. Here I sit, beached on the sofa until my host returns. My belly inflates and subsides, a mechanism that has served me for half a century. I am a slow pump: up, down, up, down. A coarse machine, emitting foul smells and revolting substances. Slowly running down, coming to a stop.

If I seek a subtler, intangible self—my soul, my me—I find nothing. Which leaves me, again, with my creaking, aching body.

Nothing more to say.

Why (the bundled woman must wonder as she walks her fuzzy pooch) would a man sit in the backseat of a car parked on a dark street with the motor running, on an Arctic December night, lit only by his monitor’s screen?

It’s a long story.

The two older brothers came home from school, arguing, and found me snacking on Oreo Cakesters in the kitchen. They turned straight around and answered my mouth-full “Good afternoon” with polite “Hellos” as they fled.

The little girl arrived later, along with the youngest boy. She pestered her big brothers to play Barbies with her, a hopeless cause, while Tiny played a handheld electronic game that beeped roughly every half second. As soon as I returned to the living room, the four of them ran to hide in their father’s bedroom. I wished I knew how to show them that I’m not a white devil—but even more, I wanted to be left alone.

There was no peace to be had. Behind the closed door, the brothers seemed to be playing a video game—rifle fire, explosions, death-metal soundtrack—until one of them said, “Stop leaning on me,” and then a littler voice said, “You stop.” Then came the thump of a small body landing on the carpet, and a wrestling match with squeaks of smothered fury, until the girl reminded them in a whisper, “That man is out there.”

The dull pain of recognition: Cain and Abel, Angus and Bob. This is one of those insights you have repeatedly through the years, that illuminates but doesn’t help. Like these two boys, I’ve lived the archetype forever, never transcending it for a minute. One more failure.

If I had more time . . . I still wouldn’t do better.

It seems that, as Adesina and his white-sweatered friend helped me up the stairs, I said to them, half conscious, “Don’t eat me.”

I can’t tell if my little joke offended my host or not. He recounted the moment with an inscrutable smile.

Let’s be coherent, though. Begin at the beginning.

Adesina clasped my hand in both of his, welcoming me like a long-lost brother. (An opposite archetype: Castor and Pollux to my Cain and Abel. Black to my white.) The vein in his forehead bulged with enthusiasm. While the loving girlfriend made dinner and the children did their homework, we drank orange soda in his living room and nibbled on homemade plantain chips and fried doughy bits that he called chin chin. We ignored the sputtering noises from the kitchen, only half of which came from the frying pan.

One of Adesina’s eyes had an alarming blood spot in the white, which I didn’t comment on. As we snacked, I wondered whether he would lose the eye, but checking now, I see that the blood spot fits the description of a subconjunctival hemorrhage, caused by straining, and should go away in two weeks. I’m glad.

He delayed with silly pleasantries, but reached the obvious question soon enough. “How did you happen to find that club, of all places?”

I couldn’t answer with his children in the next room and my enemy frying tilapia on the stove, and not a closed door in the place.

He held up his pink palm. “If it’s personal, I’m sorry.”

“I’m concerned about my car,” I said, dodging the question. “I parked in front of the club last night. They wouldn’t tow it away, would they?”

“I think the police have better things to do. Don’t worry—I’ll take you there after dinner.”

I complimented the chin chin, doing my part to fill the air. He told me, sotto voce, “You should have tasted my wife’s. These have too much butter and not enough sugar.”

He shook his head mournfully. For an instant, his loss was mine.

My fish stared at me blindly from a sauce of pureed tomato and red pepper. At the edge of the plate sat a glob of yam flour boiled in water. Adesina courteously steered the conversation away from me and my unspecified troubles. He told how his supervisor stood on a desk to change a light bulb and fell, breaking her ankle, and now she’ll be out for weeks. The fiancée asked if they would promote him now, and he said, “No, but I’ll have to do most of her work.”

“And they’ll pay you more?”

“No.”

“Then why are you happy?”

“Because the company has laid off some people, and now my job is safe.”

“You’re so ambitious!”

Fortunately, it’s not my job to recount the conflict that followed. Adesina can write his own diary.

As soon as the others finished eating, I said, “I should go.”

“I’ll take you,” Adesina said.

He had tears in his eyes. (Rage? Embarrassment? I couldn’t tell.) His daughter sat on his lap and tipped her head against his chin, to comfort him. He squeezed her shoulders, but his gaze went thousands of miles away.

His car, a gray Cavalier, is even older than my Buick. As he drove, he explained that he’s an Anglican, but he fears that his wife’s ghost is watching him, and he doesn’t know if she’s angry or pities him. He knows he should keep his promise and marry his fiancée, but something stops him. He tries to be a good father, but never knows what to say to his boys; his own father died when he was two, so he isn’t sure of the best way to discipline them.

The houses we passed sagged forlornly. They pressed close to the sidewalks, and hid their tenants behind shades with curling edges. I pitied Adesina more than I pitied myself, and that’s saying something.

To keep him company in his misery, I shared the saga of Eka. He made sympathetic clicks with his tongue as he listened; when we reached the club, he parked behind my car to hear how the story would end.

His first response surprised me. “These women are vampires! They suck everything they can from you.”

I hadn’t thought of Eka that way, although her accent does bear a resemblance to Béla Lugosi’s. “I’m sure they see it differently.”

“Look what they do to us! This one is never satisfied and insults me in front of my children and guests. That one will marry a man she doesn’t know and throw away the one who took her in when she was sick. It’s inexcusable.”

I can’t remember anyone taking my side so wholeheartedly, ever. Much as I enjoyed the support, though, I saw the limitations of his perspective. “I don’t think Eka is ungrateful. She’s just trying to take care of her son, and her mother.”

He stared through the windshield, into the past.

“My grandfather used to beat my grandmother with his cane. I hated him for that. But now I think some women don’t respect you if you treat them kindly.”

“Your wife wasn’t like that, I assume.”

“No, she was a good woman. I wish you could have met her. She didn’t deserve to die.”

His eyes filled with new tears. If we’d had this conversation back when I interviewed him, I would have exploited those tears for maximum effect. Sometimes it’s better to be unemployed.

Returning my sympathy in kind, he said, “We can never understand them. Who knows? Maybe your Eka wanted you to fight for her. It’s something to think about.”

I thought about it, but couldn’t see Eka as Guinevere: dropping her handkerchief and exulting as a pair of knights slashed each other to bits for the privilege of returning it.

Unless that’s exactly what she wanted.

With the suddenness of a storm cloud blotting out the sun, the mood of fellowship ran out. I had to get away from Adesina, back to solitude. “Thanks for everything,” I said, and climbed out.

“Call me any time you want to talk!” he shouted as I closed the door on him.

Ten feet from my passenger door, on a lawn that’s only slightly larger than a bath mat, an inflated snowman glows from within. Twinkling lights in four colors twine along the railings of the front stairs. My intention, since this morning, has been to pull into my rented garage, close the door, and start the motor—but I can’t do that, because Eka would blame herself.

If there’s a place for me on this Earth, I don’t know where it is.