From Grand Island, the highway dipped and descended towards Kearney. I distracted myself by counting the exits on both sides, reading out their names – Alda, Wood River, Shelton, Gibbon – and wondering what these places looked like. Would I be the first Nigerian to move to Gibbon? What would my daily life look like in Wood River? How would I participate in community life in Shelton? How long before I began to feel at home in Alda? Would the people there, the ‘natives’ of Alda, help me settle in or regard me with suspicion? Would they let me come close, study them, smell them, touch them, observe them, write about them, place them in a web of patterns? Probably not, and for good reasons.
I had a professor who admired Lévi-Strauss, read Lévi-Strauss, wanted to be Lévi-Strauss. In his free time, when not teaching courses in English literature, he travelled to villages in the interior, interviewing people, sometimes staying for days listening and learning. He was working on a book of patterns. To make sense of the world in the interior. He disappeared one day, in the creeks, never to be seen again. It was the same professor who said migration was the great equaliser. When people migrate, he said, especially when forced off their land by difficult circumstances, they shed old hierarchies and begin a new life, collectively regarded by their hosts as newcomers. I recall thinking he had a point but wondered if he wasn’t missing some other point; some refugees or migrants carry with them, on their bodies or in their minds, the currency to start with fewer obstacles than others.
Somewhere after Gibbon, I turned the radio on, listening to the news for the first time in many days. There were refugees drowning as they tried to cross to Europe from North Africa; there were refugees trapped at the US–Mexico border. The world had stayed the same. I was not missing anything. I tuned away from the news, landed on NPR, where a British-Gambian architect based in New York was talking about his new project in Florida, and going on about his very international background, growing up here and there, dragged from one European city to the other by his diplomat parents. He reminded me of Sara. They were of the same world, where you strategically announce your social status by downplaying the same. I switched the radio off. Edna and Allen crossed my mind.
The day after my ‘trial’, two days before leaving Boston, Allen texted to invite me to one of his ‘spring rituals’, an overnight ‘cleansing’ at Forest Hills Cemetery, where e.e. cummings and Anne Sexton were buried. I agreed. I was out and about in town. And when the time came, I took the train back to Forest Hills, following Allen’s instructions which he’d sent over in three text messages: ‘The cemetery is divided into streets and avenues. Go straight on Rural Ave, steer right on Cypress Ave, and left on Lake Lane, which runs along a small pond to Fountain Ave. When you hit Fountain Ave, go right for a few steps and look left. You’ll find Chadwick’s mausoleum. Can’t miss it. I’ll be hiding behind…’ And there he was, between the mausoleum and the small hill into which it nestled, smoking a joint.
‘I’m waiting for night to fall,’ he said when I arrived.
I leaned against the mausoleum. It was green and lush all around, with trees and shrubs lining each lane, each avenue, each street, as though to shield the dead from the sun.
‘So, they finally kicked you out, eh?’ he said when I got there.
‘Well, I saw it coming,’ I said.
‘It’s probably a good thing,’ he said, smirking, ‘you never struck me as the residency type.’
He took out a book from his tote bag and began to read as if I wasn’t there. I recognised the book. His scholarly edition of cummings’ Tulips and Chimneys, published by the University Press of Western Mass, with an introduction by the eminent cummings scholar Richard Chester, who, as Edna once told me, had recently left his wife for Allen’s ex-girlfriend.
Night fell.
The cemetery workers were gone.
The cemetery was empty. And like bats we emerged and walked back to Fountain Ave, which was just left of Lotus Path, where three phallic gravestones stood like palace guards.
We turned right, climbed a small incline on the grass.
He led the way. I followed, and soon we were there, at the site where the ritual would begin, a small circular slab on the ground, surrounded by dry leaves and pebbles left by visitors: Edward Estlin Cummings, 1894–1962. Someone had left a box of matches and a pack of cigarettes, both beaten and faded. There were coins and pencils. We sat on either side of the grave, facing the road below, and the pond was visible to our left.
Sandwiches and grapes appeared from Allen’s tote bag. He’d instructed me to bring the booze. There was a bottle of whisky in my satchel, and potato chips.
As was his custom, we ate in silence, which was fine by me, except that it gave room for the dean’s voice to resume its torture, and with each bite I could see the dean’s mouth moving, his shoulders rising and falling with every point as he read me the decision the committee had reached.
A cool breeze came and passed, setting off a chime in the distance. Allen ate like an animal, holding the food close to his mouth, hurrying it into his system, breathing heavily. I wondered if it was part of his ritual, filling the silence with the noise of mastication.
Done, we passed the whisky between us. He started rolling a fat joint and broke the silence. ‘So, Frankie, tell me, what are you going to do now? Go back to Africa?’
He lit the joint. ‘Or we could start a small press together,’ he added.
It didn’t occur to him that I would need a permit to stay and work in the US, that I had to account for every single minute I spent in his country.
‘I’ll drive out to Nebraska,’ I eventually answered, ‘spend a couple of days with my dad’s old friend… maybe write something, I don’t know.’
At midnight, Allen stood up and went closer to the pond. He took off his clothes. I did the same. The moon was up and bright. We stood facing the pond. Ripples formed and dispersed on the surface. The place was silent, yet I felt there were voices chanting inside me.
He stretched his hands forward. I did the same. He began to speak into the night, into the void, reciting words, long lines, each beginning with a word in Latin. His words were abstract, heavily referential, cadenced. I could barely make out any meaning, but I found myself transfixed. He was speaking to himself, to the space within, a private speech, and I could see how it transformed him, how he seemed lighter, freed from the anxieties that weighed him down, free from the world of the living, communing both literally and figuratively with the dead.
After he’d finished his ritual, he turned and began to walk on the path around the pond. I followed him. He broke into a quiet jog. We did the loop twice and retired where we started, camping out there until we both fell asleep.
We woke up around seven in the morning. Perky had left me several voicemails. I texted her to say I was back at my place and needed time alone, that I’d see her later in the day.
Allen and I picked up our trash. He rolled himself a last joint. Around eight we left the cemetery for his place in Roslindale.
He stopped at the liquor store on Hyde Park and Blakemore and bought a cheap bottle of vodka. At the Budget Mart on Blakemore and Florence, he bought hotdogs and said something about his money running out.
In Dale Square, we saw a small pop-up market in full swing. ‘It’s one of those farmer’s markets where everyone and everything gives the impression of extreme happiness and social awareness,’ Allen said.
We walked in but didn’t last a minute, unable to survive conversations about rare tomatoes and lotions made from butterfly excrement.
We got to Allen’s apartment.
He drank from the bottle of vodka. And soon was too soaked to talk.
He fell asleep.
I called Perky and said I was coming over. I left a note for Allen.
Before leaving, I scanned his room again – a single bed, books everywhere, a wardrobe, a door leading to a tiny kitchen, a framed picture of small Allen in a sharp suit standing between a dapper-looking man and a woman in a hat. An only child, like myself. A pathetic creature, like myself. I hurried out the door, knowing it was probably the last time I’d see him.
On Washington Street, towards Forest Hill Station, I stopped for breakfast at a small Dominican sandwich shop, just a block away from a run-down brick building that had caught my attention with the inscription above it: Puritan Ice Cream Co., established in 1905.
I ordered a Havana Cubana, ate it fast and left.
Close to the train station, on the Washington Street side, I saw an entrance to the Arnold Arboretum. I’d read about the Arboretum and had once planned to visit it. It was now or never, I thought, and went in.
A stone by the side said I was on Blackwell Footpath, and the path itself curved into a flurry of trees. As I walked further the clacking and pounding of the trains at the station began to fade. Soon I was at the Bussey Brook Meadow with birds singing and crickets chirping, ticking and buzzing.
‘Many birds stay in Bussey Brook Meadow all year. The others leave for warmer climates in the Fall and return to nest here in the Spring.’ So said a sign on the left side of the path, on a spot near a clearing dense with brown leaves.
‘Migration is difficult and risky,’ it continued, ‘but the benefit of better weather further south, longer days and more food makes the trip worthwhile.’
I squinted to read the rest of the text, which was gradually fading from exposure.
‘Some birds,’ it continued, ‘travel long distances, crossing oceans and continents, while others make a series of short flights, stopping to rest and feed along the way.’
There were interlocked vines everywhere, on both sides of the footpath, leading me further away from the Washington Street entrance. Multiflora roses, wild grapevines, nightshades, black swallow-worts, poison ivies, Japanese bittersweets, Virginia creepers.
I reached the end of the footpath, went through the gate, crossed South Street and re-entered the Arboretum through the South Street entrance. It began to rain. I stood under a heavy oak tree. And when the rain passed, feeling more and more exhausted, I decided against further exploration and went straight to Perky’s place.