In the old culture, there would’ve been rites and rituals for you to control the gates.
There were no rites or rituals done to help you control the gates. You are the jewel at the heart of the lotus.
All the madnesses, each and every blinding one, they can all be traced back to the gates. Those carved monstrosities, those clay and chalk portals, existing everywhere and nowhere and all at once. They open, things are born, they close. The opening is easy, a pushing out, an expansion, an inhalation: the dust of divinity released into the world. It has to be a temporary channel, though, a thing that is sealed afterward, because the gates stink of knowledge, they cannot be left swinging wide like a slack mouth, leaking mindlessly. That would contaminate the human world—bodies are not meant to remember things from the other side. There are rules. But these are gods and they move like heated water, so the rules are softened and stretched. The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.
We were sent through carelessly, with a net of knowledge snarled around our ankles, not enough to tell us anything, just enough to trip us up. There are many neglects like this—little gods going mad around you, wandering the beaches with matted hair and swollen testicles. Unrecognizable, laughing through brown teeth as they grub through rubbish heaps, breasts stretched and groaning. That’s what it looks like when the flesh doesn’t take, when you can see them rejecting the graft of reality. But sometimes the flesh takes too well, like those that came through the gates and went mad in a much saner, more terrifying way, meeting human cruelty with colliding glee, losing themselves in the stringy red of mortality. They did atrocious and delicious things to torn people, to screaming and sobbing children: they broke and buried bodies, they hid in fathers and husbands, in mothers and cousins, they ripped and they used and they were excited. They took it too far. They took it only a god’s length. For reasons like them, there should be a rule against shoving godspawn into a flesh-ridden cage. But they pull us, the humans, they draw us close. They’re so turgid with potential and yet so empty, with spaces under their skins and inside their marrow, so much room for us to yawn into existence. They can be ridden, marked, anointed, fucked, then, sometimes, left.
Forgive us, we sound scattered. We were ejaculated into an unexpected limbo—too in-between, too god, too human, too halfway spirit bastard. Deity seed, you know. We never used to be alone, not in Ala’s underworld womb, tucked in with the others, the brothersisters. Each time we left, we promised to come back, promised never to stay too long on the other side, promised to remember. We floated smoothly then, like a paste of palm oil, red and thick. Our mother was the world, even as she is now. But then she chose to answer some man’s prayer and our smoothness was interrupted by the grain of his baritone. “Give me a daughter,” he said. “Father Lord, give me a daughter.”
Sometimes the only god who hears your prayer is the one who intends to answer it. We have never been able to understand why Ala answered this one, this particular request, in the crush of thousands of others; why she paid attention to this wrap of words. Perhaps the prayer caught her eye as it slid from Saul’s mouth; perhaps she picked it on a whim, just to remind the world that she was still there, the owner of men. Since the corrupters broke her shrines and converted her children, how many of them were calling her name anymore?
We think about this because there has to be a point, a purpose to this, a reason for why we were thrust across the river, screeching and fighting. There must be a thought behind this entrapment, our having to endure this glut of humanity. On this, our mother, Ala, is silent. All we know is that there was a prayer, that the Ada was the answer, that our iyi-ụwa was hidden thoroughly in her body, making her the bridge between this world and ours. The rest is a road that spreads into unknowns. We were sentenced to those yawning gates between worlds, left wild, growing in all directions but closed. Open gates are like sores that can’t stop grieving: they infect with space, gaps, widenings. Room where there should be none. We should have blended into the Ada when she was born, but instead there was a stretch of emptiness between us, bitter like kola, a sweep of nothing. Aspace like that has no place in a mind.
We used to be able to ignore it when we slept, but after we woke up in the village, our eyes opened and became swollen worlds with clouds for irises; the pupils, pots with no bottom. We could see everything. When Saachi left, we saw the way her children reeled, the way the Ada retreated deeper into her head, closer to us. She rooted like she’d lost her face, snuffling in the particular heartbreak of a little child, crying for her mother to come back, come back, please just come back. We struggled in response, coming alive not just for ourself, but for her. The Ada was so small, so sad. She should never have been left alone. She came looking for us because she was looking for anyone, because she was pursued by space, gray and malignant, cold as chalk.
She even tried to pray. They had been taking her to Mass every Sunday, telling her about the christ, the man who was a man and not. She read stories about how he would appear to his followers, the faithful ones, and so she prayed. She asked him to come down and hold her, just for a little bit. It would be easy for him because he was the christ and it would mean so much to her, so very much, just this little thing, because no one, you see, no one else was doing it, holding her. And besides, she loved him and she was a child, and even if she wasn’t, he would love her anyway, but because she was, then it was extra because he loved the children most of all, so why wouldn’t he just come down and hold one of them, just for a little bit?
We knew him; we knew his name was Yshwa, we knew that he looked like everyone, all at once, at any time. His face could shift like a ghost. It was, we also knew, impossible for him not to hear her. He hears every prayer babbled screamed sung at him. He does not, contrary to some belief, often answer them. Yshwa too was born with spread gates, born with a prophesying tongue and hands he brought over from the other side. And while he loves humans (he was born of one, lived and died as one), what they forget is that he loves them as a god does, which is to say, with a taste for suffering. So he watched the Ada cry herself to sleep with his wrong name and her mother’s held on her lips. He ran his hands along the curve of her faith and felt its strength, that it would remain steadfast whether he came to her or not. And even if it did not hold, Yshwa had no intentions of manifesting. He had endured that abomination of the physical once and it was enough, never again. Not for the heartbroken children who were suffering more than her, not for the world off a cliff, not for a honey-soaked piece of bread. We resented him for it. When his fingers came too close, we snapped our teeth at them and Yshwa withdrew, amused, and went back to his watching.
*
We made ourself big and strong for the Ada, we tried to, because she was solidifying into something lost and bereft. We were still very weak, as newborns often are, but we were determined to spring into sentience, to drag ourself upright, clawing grips into the sides of her mind. We could not have done it if she was not the type of child that she was, ready to believe in anything.
Saul and Saachi had allowed the Ada to have a childhood that was, in a town full of death, unusually innocent. They didn’t believe in interfering with the child’s imagination, and so when the Ada finished one of her many books and decided that she could talk to animals, no one corrected her. “It did no harm to let her believe that,” Saul said, and the Ada continued to believe wildly, in Yshwa and fairies and pixies living in the flame of the forest blossoms. She believed that the top of the plumeria tree in their backyard could be a portal to another world, and that all magic was stored outside in leaves and bark and grass and flowers. These things that she believed in meant that, although she did not know it yet, she could believe in us.
And so we were strengthened, because belief, for beings like us, is the colostrum of existence. After Saachi left, the Ada sank even more into her books, by instinct, separating herself from this world and disappearing into others. She read everywhere: on the toilet, at the dining table, in the library before school assembly each morning. It is not clear how much saving these books were capable of.
*
Meanwhile, Ala continued to watch her child. After all, the Ada was her hatchling, her bloodthirsty little sun, covered in translucent scales. We were learning that to be embodied was to be the altar and the flesh and the knife. Sometimes the gods just want to see what you are going to do.
Let us give you an example. When the Ada was seventeen, she was living in America, in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains. Saachi had moved her there for university and the Ada would have been alone, except that we were with her, we were always with her.
One night, we woke up with our body’s heart racing, the air ricocheting with noise. It took us a moment to remember where we were, that we did not live in Aba anymore, that we were somewhere new. Our body was lying on a twin bed in a shared room, and a lean, dark, muscled boy was springing out of it, leaving us alone in his sheets. He answered the frantic knocking at the door and turned on the light, filling the room in yellow. His roommate looked over at our body, at the Ada, all the way from his bed against the other wall. He was the color of butter and his eyes were sour and hungry. There was an Eastern European girl at the door, one of the cross-country runners, tight spandex seized to her body. She had been splashed up and down with generous streaks of blood. Some of it was drying on her face, beside her dilated eyes, and she was telling the dark boy about another runner who had penetrated a window with his arm. The glass had penetrated him back, which explained her lavish coloring. The sour boy jumped down from his bed and we watched both of them pull shirts over their carved chests. The Ada slid down too, and we followed them out of the room and downstairs, our eyes tracing the drops of blood that were scattered down each step, then along the corridor. The runners kept talking and we slowed down until they had left us behind, then we turned and ran back up the stairs—drop drop drop, splatter on the wall—past the room we came out of, up the next staircase—drop drop, stain. On the second step, we found it—a puddle, a pool, a mirror, a small cloak. Deep like loss.
We looked around to make sure that we were alone, that no one was watching, but it was only the Ada and us and old banisters and worn carpet. We bent our knees and our breath was shallow, adrenaline coursing quickly; we reached out the Ada’s hand until our fingertip brushed the surface of the pool, of the stale, exposed blood with its calm skin. It was already changing its mind about being liquid, cooling now that it was no longer merrily bouncing through the boy’s blood vessels. We skimmed our fingers across the tight top of it, then the Ada stood up and we walked away, away from the terrifying rush of how much we wanted more of it, much more.
The problem with having gods like us wake up inside of you is that our hunger rises as well and someone, you see, has to feed us. Before the university, the Ada had begun the sacrifices that were necessary to keep us quiet, to stop us from driving her mad. She was only twelve then, and she sat at the back of her classroom and laid her hand on her desk, her palm flat. “Look,” she said to her classmates, and they turned, vaguely interested. “Look what I can do.” She raised the blade that she had taken from Saul’s shaving supplies, that double-edged song wrapped in wax paper, and she dropped it on the skin of the back of her hand, in a stroke that whimpered. The skin sighed apart and there was a thin line of white before it blushed into furious red wetness.
She has no memory of her classmates’ faces once that happened, because we filled her up utterly, expanding in glee, rewarding her for carving herself for us. She would spend another twelve years trying to be the torn feathers in a clay doorway, the sting of gin soaking the threshold. At sixteen, breaking a mirror to dig into her flesh with the glass. At twenty, when she was in veterinary school, after spending long hours separating skin from cadaver muscle and lifting delicate sheets of fascia, she would return to her room and use a fresh scalpel on her scarred left arm. Anything, you see, that would make that pale secret flesh sing that bright mother color.
Earlier, when we said she went mad, we lied. She has always been sane. It’s just that she was contaminated with us, a godly parasite with many heads, roaring inside the marble room of her mind. Everyone knows the stories of hungry gods, ignored gods, bitter, scorned, and vengeful gods. First duty, feed your gods. If they live (like we do) inside your body, find a way, get creative, show them the red of your faith, of your flesh; quiet the voices with the lullaby of the altar. It’s not as if you can escape us—where would you run to?
We had chosen the currency the Ada would pay us with back on the tar of Okigwe Road, in the maw of Añuli’s leg, and she paid it quickly. Once there was blood, we subsided, temporarily sated. None of this had been easy for us, existing like this, entangled in two worlds. We did not mean to hurt the Ada, but we had made an oath and our brothersisters were pulling at us, shouting at us to come back. The gates were all wrong, everything was all wrong, we were not dying yet. But they kept pulling us, they made us scream, and we battered against the Ada’s marble mind until she fed us and that thick red offering sounded almost like our mother—slowly, slowly, nwere nwayọ, take it slowly.
The Ada was just a child when these sacrifices began. She broke skin without fully knowing why; the intricacies of self-worship were lost on her. She did only what she had to and thought little of it. But she believed in us. Saachi brought back empty journals from Saudi Arabia and the Ada filled them up with blue ink. It was in them that she named us, titling us for the first time. Our forms were young and indistinct, but this naming was a second birth, it sorted us into something she could see. The first of us, Smoke, was a complicated gray, swirled layers and depths, barely held together in a vaguely human shape. We lifted our fogged arms, clumsy fingers exploring a blank and drifting face. The second of us, Shadow, was a deep black, pressed malevolently against a wall, hints of other colors (mother color eyes, yellowed teeth) that never made it past the fullness of the night. The Ada made us and continued to feed us.
Blood and belief. This is how the second madness began.