Ọbịara egbum, gbuo onwe ya.
Of course I came. Why wouldn’t I? Let me tell you, Ada meant every world to me. But I can’t lie; this third birth of a thing was a shock. I had been there, just minding my own business as part of a shifting cloud, then the next thing I knew, I was condensing into the marble room of Ada’s mind, with time moving slower for me than for her. The first thing I did was step forward so I could see through her eyes. There was a window in front of her face and one useless boy beside her. It was cold. I looked around the marble for Ada and there she was, a shred in the corner, a gibbering baby. I didn’t touch her—that wasn’t my style. I’ve never been the comforting type. Instead I sank my roots into her body, finding my grip on her capillaries and organs. I already knew that Ada was mine: mine to move and take and save. I stood her body up. The boy was crying and angry, still sitting on the floor.
“Go then!” he said, sulking. “Go!”
I made Ada pick up his jacket, and then she and I walked outside. Once we were away from him, I released her and focused on the rush of being here. I felt drunk and full of life; it flooded the pockets of my cheeks. I was a me! I had a self! I spun in the marble, giddy and ecstatic at existence, before remembering the reason I’d arrived. I swung around to check on Ada.
She was stumbling in front of Hodges Hall, dialing the phone number of one of her friends, an older Nigerian girl called Itohan, who lived in Georgia. I listened because honestly, it was just fascinating to have ears, to hear how Ada’s voice reverberated inside her skull. She was sobbing as she told Itohan what happened, or at least what she could remember of what happened. I didn’t interfere until Itohan told Ada to pray, that their God would forgive her. That didn’t even make sense to me. Forgive her for what? I slid in gently and made Ada end the call. I could already see that she was clearly better off with just me.
Ada ran her arms through the bushes under the boy’s window and the thorns scratched her skin bloody. She wept. I didn’t mind the bleeding; it made me feel good, just like it always had, back when I was only a drift in the shifting cloud of the rest of us, floating through her. She walked across the road, over a small green hill, where there was a church and a graveyard. In the center of the graveyard, there was a cross that was seven feet tall. Ada wrapped her bleeding arms in the boy’s jacket and lay on the concrete base, staring up into the sky as she cried some more. I lay down there with her, stretching through her. I wondered if she could feel that she wasn’t alone. Her thoughts were translucent streams fogging up the marble—how she had disappointed her christ, how she wouldn’t be able to pray again, not now, not ever. She knew what she was supposed to do—forgive herself for fucking and talk to the christ—except that she couldn’t do either and she didn’t think it mattered; she didn’t think she was worth for-giving anyway. I watched her thoughts and frowned. She seemed very lonely. Poor thing, I thought, to be so in love with this christ. Why disturb herself with him if it was giving her so much pain?
But I liked her other choices, like the graveyard and the drying blood on her arms. Ada stayed there until the sun set, then I moved her to the house down the hill. She seemed to have good memories of that place and her friend there, Luka. He had left for the summer so his room was empty. It still smelled like him, though, and it felt like a safe place for Ada, so she hid in it. But the boy, Soren, he came looking for her there. It was something I was going to have to teach her, that there were no safe places left.
He was angry that Ada had disappeared and furious when he saw the crusted scratches on her forearms. He took her back to his room, and the wounds on her arms didn’t stop him, the memory of her sitting in the sheets and screaming didn’t stop him. No, the boy fucked her body again, that day and every day afterward, over and over. He would look into her eyes and swear in time with his thrusts as he fucked her, never bothering with a condom, always coming inside her.
“I fucking love you. You have no idea how much I fucking love you.”
Except Ada wasn’t there anymore. At all, at all. She wasn’t even a small thing curled up in the corner of her marble. There was only me. I expanded against the walls, filling it up and blocking her out completely. She was gone. She might as well have been dead. I was powerful and I was mad, he could not touch me no matter how hard he pushed into her body, he could definitely never touch her. I was here. I was everything. I was everywhere. And so I smiled at him, using only Ada’s mouth and teeth.
“You love this,” I corrected. “You love fucking me.”
He got angry again. The boy was so predictable, so easy to provoke. Human beings are useless like that. I liked making him angry, sha. I would hold him with Ada’s arms and smile in the dark while he cried after his nightmares. It was good that he lived with pain. Ada was never there when there was a bed. If I made sure of anything in my short life till then, I made sure of that.
When she had to go and get a pregnancy test, the first of many, Ada called a taxi from the clinic and took it back to campus. The driver was a biker. She could tell because he had Harley-Davidson stickers everywhere. They reminded me of the other taxi, the one Ada’s mother took in another lifetime, when we were both born. I was fond of stickers in taxis, so I said, with Ada’s mouth, “I love motorcycles.”
“You should give me a call,” the driver replied. “I’ll take you out on my bike one day.” He gave Ada his card. The boy lost his temper when he found out and ripped the card into pieces. A few days later, he found Ada out back behind the dorm, weighing a broadsword with both hands, looking at knives that one of her collector friends had brought over in his truck. The boy got angry and banned Ada from ever playing with blades again. Ada looked at him and I stared through her eyes and kept her silent. She and I watched his anger bounce around and we did nothing, said nothing. What was there to say? It was more interesting to watch his fury grow at the dullness in Ada’s eyes, the smooth emptiness of her face. It is not easy to look at me, I know this very well.
When Ada first met the boy, he told her this story about how much he loved his mother, how he and his brother went and drove nails through the hands of a man who threw stones at her in Denmark. I remembered it when I arrived. The image of the man being held against the ground, his palm forced open, the boys baring their teeth. The nail tearing through flesh and ligaments with metal purpose, the man’s screams, the blood bursting. It was true, and me, I like true things. Yet, when Ada started to think that she loved the boy, I allowed it. It would make things easier for her. She was not like me; she was not strong. One time, the boy was leaving for a volleyball tournament and Ada held her hand to his face as they said good-bye. I watched through her eyes as his smile went away.
“Stop it,” he told her. “My mother looks at me like that.”
She must have been in front of me that time. I never looked at him with anything that could have been contained in his mother’s face. The boy made Ada a gibbering thing in a corner—this is the truth, but he would never get her again. I had arrived, flesh from flesh, true blood from true blood. I was the wildness under the skin, the skin into a weapon, the weapon over the flesh. I was here. No one would ever touch her again.
*
When the May term ended, Ada left her school and that little run-down town in the pretty mountains, and flew to Georgia to stay with Itohan. Soren flew to Denmark, but he took her teddy bear, Hershey, with him. If you didn’t know him, you could call that cute, but he was such a thief, you know, he stole and stole and stole. Fucking bastard. In Georgia, Itohan took Ada to a hair salon. Ada sat in one of the raised chairs and stared at her reflection, all that heavy hair hanging from her scalp.
“Cut it off,” she said.
The stylists, even the other clients, were appalled. They were Black women who paid and took money to get and give long hair, thick hair, straight hair, and she had it pouring from her head like an afterthought.
“All that pretty hair?” they asked, horrified. “You sure?”
“I’m sure,” Ada said. Of course she was sure. I was sure. Me, I remembered when Ada had been born, with wet hair that was black as jet and slick as a fish. The hair she had now was dead, deader than hair usually is. Besides, I had arrived and something had to mark that, so cutting her hair felt correct.
“Make the first cut then,” the stylist said. She didn’t believe Ada would do it, but she didn’t know her and she certainly didn’t know us.
Ada took the scissors from her, took a piece of hair from right above her forehead, pulled it down before her eyes, and snipped near the roots. The women in the room gasped, staring in shock. I grinned—shebi I told you the girl belonged to me now. Ada dropped the hair into her lap, on the smock they had put around her neck.
“Can you cut the rest, please?” she said.
The stylist shook her head and took the scissors from her. When she finished, Ada asked for her eyebrows to be waxed, and then she walked out of the salon, looking more like me. She was about to turn nineteen. Back at Itohan’s apartment, she called another boy in Virginia, the brother of a friend, who’d arrived from Togo the semester before with a starched wide shirt collar that made Ada think of home. He and Ada had been flirting for hours each day, ever since the summer started. There were a few days when he wouldn’t take her calls, after she told him about Soren, that she had a boyfriend. I grimaced when she said that, but I had promised to let her hold her lies if they would keep her sane. After a while, the brother called her and said it didn’t matter. Somehow, that made it easier. Ada called Soren and told him she was breaking up with him. I stood heavy in her bones when she did it. The boy was so boring in his sobbing anger, I had her hang up on him. Ada never got her teddy bear back. I told you he was a thief.
After Georgia, the Ada went to see Saachi, who was softer in the body now. The human mother had moved to America the year before. She stopped in Nigeria first to collect Añuli, then they went to America and rented a small apartment in a town in the Southwest. Saachi had wanted Saul to come because he could get his green card, but old failures in London meant he wouldn’t be able to practice medicine in America, so the man refused.
“What am I going there to do? To go and sell popcorn?” he said.
“And what’s wrong with that?” Saachi had replied. She didn’t believe in pride when it came to Ada and the others. But Saul was the way he had always been, so Saachi and Añuli moved without him. The two of them lived in the one-bedroom space and Añuli slept on a futon in a small room with no door, next to the kitchenette. When Ada came to visit, she slept on the sofa in the living room. One morning, she woke up and Saachi was standing in the kitchenette, looking at her. She was holding a cup of coffee and Ada knew it would be black, just like she knew all of Saachi’s glasses of Coke would be laced with Bacardi. Many things were always the same.
“When you sleep,” Saachi said, as if it was nothing, “you look exactly how you did as a child. Exactly.”
Ada rubbed her eyes, and when she opened them again, Saachi had walked out of the room and she was alone. They had argued about Ada’s haircut when she first got there, and Saachi had left Bible verses in the bathroom on Post-it notes, about how a woman’s hair was her crown. I had Ada ignore the notes. She was still getting used to moving with me; I was heavy and I made her different, or maybe he had made her different, but either way, nothing was the same. Saachi watched her like she always had, ever since Ada was a fat baby with a protective pottu on her forehead.
“You used to smile,” Saachi said. “You were such a happy child. Why are you not eating?”
This was actually true, but the not eating was just an experiment I was doing, to see how close to the bone I could get Ada down to. She had started restricting by herself before I showed up, for some human reason, probably trying to control her body since she couldn’t control her mind. It’s not important. The point is once I was there, I took her to new weightless places. 118 pounds. She ran every day for an hour. I had her eat only salads. Hunger grabbed her from the inside, intimately. It felt like it had a purpose, like it was doing something. Ada lifted dumbbells and continued running. One day, just like that, she dropped down to 114 pounds of human flesh. Let me tell you, I’ve never almost flown that well since. Ada’s shoulders became knives in her back, and her legs looked even longer than when she took ballet in her first semester and the instructor told her she’d need XL tights because her legs were that long. But yes, no, she was not eating. It wasn’t important anymore, what happened to her body, not since I was there.
I appreciated it, of course—embodiment was luxurious, at least at first. I felt a new power, a flood of greatness that yes, Ada would regret later, valid, but for now it was good, rich; it meant I was an I, like I and I, like I wasn’t going back to that larger we. Ha! How can? No, I was free. I had elevated, transcended, in fact. Risen like steam until it was me standing in the field of Ada’s body. She named me this name, Asụghara, complete with that gritty slide of the throat halfway through. I hope it scrapes your mouth bloody to say it. When you name something, it comes into existence—did you know that? There is strength there, bone-white power injected in a rush, like a trembling drug.
Wait, is this how humans feel? To know that you are separate and special, to be individual and distinct? It’s amazing. But I had to remind myself that I wasn’t human or flesh. I was just a self, a little beast, if you like, locked inside Ada. Still, it was nice to be able to move her body and feel things. When I came in front, I moved like those masquerades from her childhood, with meat layered in front of my spirit face.
All I’m saying is, it was good to walk in the world.
I never forgot Virginia or the boy Soren—the place and person who midwifed me here. I also didn’t forget that Ada was Ala’s child. It would be too careless to forget something like that. If you are a python’s child, then you are also a python—simple. There should have been a regular molting that came with that, but I was not regular. I wasn’t allowed some gentle and slow shrugging off of skin. No, my own was to tear it away as soon as I came through, splitting it into pieces that were never found, coming out damp with blood. This is what happens when you act as if a human can hold godmatter without it curdling.
Ada loved me, sha. She loved me because I hated that boy. She loved me because I was reckless; I had no conscience, no sympathy, no pity. She loved me because I was strong and I held her together. I loved her because me, I had known her since I was nothing, since I was everything, since that shell-blue house in Umuahia. I loved her because I watched her grow up, because she gave offerings since I started awakening, feeding me from the crook of her arm and the skin of her thighs. Let me tell you now, I loved her because in the moment of her devastation, the moment she lost her mind, that girl reached for me so hard that she went completely mad, and I loved her because when I flooded through, she spread herself open and took me in without hesitation, bawling and broken, she absorbed me fiercely, all the way; she denied me nothing.
I loved her because she gave me a name.