"We just kept searching for food, lest we die." A Quick Q&A with Mo Cadillac.

The Cost of Greed

Kamal ended his inglorious life in the deep, dark, red fluid-laden churner of the magnitude of the creature of the lake. We had flown over the once shrinking aquatic space determined to survive the depression that had ran aground our economical institutions and impoverished our populace. It began as a recession, the dry season refused to give way to the rains until the government declared famine. It ravaged our village and sacked our king. It strode majestic through our streets, its gait lifted, its swagger boisterous. Emboldened by its conquest, it marched on. The King’s Guard could not stand its weaponry. If they could not fight it, what could our cutlasses and hoes have done. The sun scorched earth would have become our resting place, if we had attempted to fight the seemingly insurmountable. We fled our homes. We flew to nowhere. We just kept searching for food, lest we die. 

Kamal stumbled on a bag of grain under a rock, it had fallen off a truck headed for the human towns. He grew fat, while others got leaner. I became suspicious of Kamal not only that his limbs were fat and feathers bright but he left the clan at night. I trailed him to the rock, where he fed. Kamal was accosted. He refused to share the spoils despite multitude of pleas. The gods heard our cries and sent rain. We flew back home leaving an obese Kamal by the lake. He couldn't lift his body.

#WriterPrompt is a regular flash fiction event we run on our Facebook page. Writers post stories in response to a picture, then workshop them with other participants and members of the SSDA team. Mo Cadillac's winning story was a graphic story of greed and just deserts.

Tell us a little about yourself and your ‘name’ Mo Cadillac. Where does it come from?

I am Michael Chukwuemeka Mbegbu, birthed and bred in Lagos, Nigeria. I obtained a Bachelor's degree from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri in Nigeria. Mo Cadillac is gotten from the car brand Cadillac and Mo from the 42nd element on the periodic table, molybdenum. When I am not writing, I visit art galleries, I listen to soft music and read.

What inspires you to write and how often do you make time to practice your craft?

Writing to me is a creative venture in which one draws out his or her imaginations using the power of words and language to create pictures, to tell a story to entertain, inform or influence a social change. I am inspired by the works of great writers such as Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. I tell myself if I want to change the world or influence it like Mark Zuckerberg did with Facebook, then I would have to develop and use my talent, writing, to do so. I write as often as I can. When I am traveling I write, when I am in traffic I write.

What writing tips could you offer new writers?

New writers should never give up on themselves. They should continue to work on their writing skills until they become mature.

Mo Cadillac is a Christian who lives and writes in Lagos, Nigeria.

"I write out of a sense of curiosity." An Interview with Namwali Serpell.

Namwali Serpell's creative work plays fast and loose with genre, making her popular with readers piqued by the unexpected. SSDA teamster, Efemia Chela got a sneak peek of the Zambian writer's newest short story, "Company" and chats to her about its exciting premise, Afrofuturism at large as well as her highly anticipated debut novel.

Perhaps what I enjoy the most about your writing is the inherent element of surprise in your work. I listen to this strange podcast called Welcome To Nightvale and the host has a mantra - "Past performance is not a predictor of future results." This statement applies to your writing in some ways; readers can never anticipate what you’ll write next. We’ve had a bank statement, Facebook posts and your latest story uses Samuel Beckett’s play, “Company” as a point of departure.

Could you speak to your peripatetic (I suppose one could call it) approach to subject, character and form in your storytelling?

NAMWALI: I write out of a sense of curiosity. The idea of having the same voice--these days, people call it a “brand”--bores me immensely. I also believe that constraint is the mother of originality, so the delight I take in writing often comes from figuring out which form resonates with the experiences that intrigue me at any one time. These are often quite distinct.

Being a Zambian writer, when you look at Zambian literature does it influence your writing at all? Do you think there are any gems, overlooked novels or stories that people should read?

NAMWALI: The Zambianness of my writing comes more from a sensibility I derive from hearing stories from friends and relatives than from our print literary tradition, which as you know, is not very extensive. My father’s colleague collected and translated a big volume of Zambian folk tales about Kalulu that we used to read when I was a kid--we called it the Omnibus. I loved them! But your own writing is some of the best Zambian fiction out there--so I’ll recommend Efemia Chela’s “Lusaka Punk” to those looking for places to start.

Ha ha. You're too kind!

“Company” is an incredible sci-fi story - ripe with bizarre sensory images, ominous apocalyptic grandeur and clever social commentary on race. It features in McSweeney’s most recent quarterly. Though I don’t want to give too much away, the story is about a woman, Lila and the unnamed narrator on a space and time-travelling quest for a valuable natural commodity. On what should be a routine stop in a village to harvest some, things go badly awry.

How did the idea for story evolve and finally come to life?

NAMWALI: I had a dream about a bubble floating over the ground with little legs sticking out from the bottom--it was a portable invisibility room of sorts. It became a time travel machine in the story, and the rest sort of grew out of that. I have long been obsessed with the opening line to Samuel Beckett’s "Company": “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.” I had included the sentence in an early draft of the story to describe the beginning of the protagonist’s training.

After I had a complete draft, McSweeney’s reached out to me to solicit a story for their “Cover Stories” issue, asking that I cover a classic story, the way you might cover a song--I was given complete freedom as to how. Since I’d already included one Beckett line in my story, I decided to go back and reread "Company", and I discovered many other lines that resonated with the Afrofuturist story I’d already written. So I incorporated them into my prose--the story is now about 40% Beckett’s original lines. It was a wonderful way to be in conversation with his work. I think of it as a Janelle Monaé cover of a Philip Glass song.

Your writing often addresses technology, an uneasiness that characterises modern living and it unlocks wholly imaginative futures. As a theme in your work why do think you peer into the future so often?

NAMWALI: “Peer” is the right word. I am a big fan of sci-fi that reaches slightly forward from the crest of the present--the “near future.” The show Black Mirror, for instance, appeals to me because of its plausibility and its satirical edge. I was greatly pleased to discover, for example, that one element of a sex robot I invented for a Tin House story in 2012 had been patented by the time I gave a reading from the story in 2013. An audience member at another reading I gave pointed out that, despite the insistent variety, my stories all concern mediation--the things between us, through which we talk, love, hate, hurt, and so on. Sometimes they are texts, sometimes they are technology, sometimes they are other people.

I’ve often thought that Afrofuturism, retrofuturism and SFF have such great appeal in Africa because living with the disappointment, the discontents of the postcolony, it is a way for us to begin again. To relive and reimagine both the past and the future as a creative continuum. This genre is something you both lecture on and write about in fiction. What are your thoughts on Afrofuturism?

NAMWALI: Well, they’ve only had such great appeal in Africa lately, as Nnedi Okorafor points out here. And in the founding document of Afrofuturism, Mark Dery’s 1992 essay, “Black to the Future,” he coins the term in the midst of bemoaning the relative dearth of Afrofuturist texts: “Why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists?” That historical absence is telling--how can you imagine a future when your present remains so steeped in material lack and violent negation?--but it also inspires the Afrofuturist writers who are scribbling away now. My aim as a black sci-fi writer is not only to help fill that void, but also to riff on the void, to think about the annihilation of black bodies and black culture as a ground zero from which we might build a new politics or even a utopia, which etymologically means "no" + "place".

You’ve written a lot of short stories but just finished the manuscript for your first novel. Did this change in form, require a changing of gears or was the segue into a novel quite natural for you?

NAMWALI: Well, some of my short stories are just chapters of a future novel! But, yes, now that I have moved into the process of editing the entire manuscript, I am thinking more about larger scale questions: How and when do characters return to influence the plot? What are the thematic threads stringing this mess together? Where do I cut off a chapter to keep the momentum going rather than aiming--as one might in a short story--for a sense of closure?

Are you allowed to tell us a little a bit more about your forthcoming book, The Old Drift?

NAMWALI: Yes! This will be my debut novel and it should be coming out in 2018. It spans more than a century and multiple genres, including the Gothic and sci-fi. It tells the story of three multicultural Zambian families over three generations, spiraling down to a love triangle and a political movement. I use the saga of these families to pose some rather grandiose questions: How do you live a life or forge a politics that can skirt the dual pitfalls of fixity (authoritarianism) and freedom (neoliberalism)? And what happens if you treat error not as something to avoid but as the very basis for human creativity and community?

Being an African writer is unique kind of burden. Thinkpieces on us, what we should write, how we should conduct ourselves, where we should live, even, abound. Often where one’s home country doesn’t have a particularly strong literary community, any pre-eminent author that arises is pressured to grow it. Or write for their nation, whatever that means. These discussions often come down to at their heart, the role of the writer.

Do you have any opinions on the role of the writer?

NAMWALI: The role of the writer is to write. I do like to say that The Old Drift is the Great Zambian Novel you didn’t know you were waiting for, but my tongue is firmly in cheek. I am more interested in trying to capture the quiddity of a place and its cultures than in propaganda, pronouncements, or pulpits. I’m too "movious", as we say in Zambia, to be patriotic.

On Namwali’s Bedside Table

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s brilliant novel Kintu, which has just been reissued in the U.S., and which I’m rereading for a conversation I’ll be having with her in Brooklyn next month; Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue; and I’m privileged to have an advance copy of Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom.

"Company" by Namwali Serpell can be read in Issue 49 of McSweeney's which is out now.

Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC, Berkeley. Her story “The Sack” won the 2015 Caine Prize for African writing. It first appeared in the Africa39 anthology, a 2014 Hay festival project to identify the best African writers under 40. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011. Her first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2009, and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize. Her first novel, The Old Drift, will be published by Penguin Random House in 2018. She tweets occasionally @snamwali.

Interview by Efemia Chela a.k.a. @efemiachela 

#WeekendRead - Sese Yane's 'The Corpse'

A mysterious death, an old man and a taciturn coroner populate the strange landscape of Sese Yane's intriguing tale. Enjoy "The Corpse", which was originally published in our 2014 anthology, Terra Incognita.

I

The coroner, a pitiful recluse, once found himself burdened with a so-called occurrence at the morgue that he could not retell his wife, but could not keep from her either, it seemed to him. He lay next to his wife that night, listening to his silence and how it was being shattered in a manner that amused him. His silence, it occurred to him, was persisting throughout his speech, and therefore, in a way, he was never robbed of it; that overwhelming will to silence, that is—that fundamental part of his being. Naturally, as long as he avoided talking about this so-called occurrence, he was not saying anything at all, and that’s how we can only assume it seemed to him.

* * * *

One warm Tuesday afternoon, a middle-aged man snaked his way onto the bus, where he sat by the window and waited. His window was slightly open and he thought he might close it later when the bus got into motion and the wind became too much for his face.

The middle-aged man, it’s important to say, had sideburns that sloped sharply along his cheekbones to join his moustache. Naturally, this gave him a wolfish appearance.

A young man occupied the seat next to him, but the middle-aged man, a very private man, despite being the proud owner of very public sideburns, did not notice this young man. He only concerned himself with the general happenings inside and outside the bus, without focusing on anything in particular. Therefore it’s true to say that he indeed noticed the general fact that a young man had taken up the seat next to him but beyond that general activity of this sitting down by a young man, he noticed nothing about the particulars of the person doing the sitting. This was because, naturally, he was not interested, for sitting down has always been a mundane activity to some people. This folding up of one’s body, halving of oneself, so to say, has, for some curious reason, never interested many people in the world.

When the bus left the station, the middle-aged man kept himself occupied with the illusory movement of buildings and trees along the way. This illusory movement had always fascinated him since childhood. He’d kept his eyes so focused on things rushing by that by the time he got to the country, his head was pounding with a headache. But now, as a grownup, he knew how to regulate his observation. He did not, so he thought of his art, have to pour himself out of his eyes, because, so he said to himself, his eyes were narrow, far too small for the act of seeing, and to see, he thought, one had to be artful.

He would focus on something definite that was far away and watch how it slowly changed position almost anonymously, until it slid out of the window of perception again, almost anonymously. And so in this art of his, he followed a house perched like an old bird at the top of a distant hill, its red tiles fascinating him, its hedge of evenly spaced trees that had arrow-tipped crowns... He followed a purple-crowned tree by the ravine, and for the next few kilometres found himself counting every purple-crowned tree that appeared, without keeping up with the number—counting by beginning over and over, but counting every purple-crowned tree nonetheless.

On this day, he was greatly pleased, because he didn’t have to close his window. Its angle of opening and his angle of sitting allowed just enough wind without irritating his ears or his face, and just enough wind to allow him to keep his coat on, for, out of lethargy, he didn’t want to remove his heavy coat. Besides, it would have meant extra luggage for his hands, which were already busy drumming the briefcase on his lap.

The road that cut through the township was damaged from a poor drainage system that floods the asphalt surface, and here the bus had to slow down. At this point, there were more passengers alighting than those who were boarding. The middle-aged man had about three kilometres to go, he thought. As the bus slowed down once again to negotiate a puddle that might or might not have been concealing a pothole, the middle-aged man saw the rotting remains of a dog on the shoulder of the road. The smell of death hit his nose from the open window before he immediately decided to hold his breath. It was quicker than closing the window.

But as the bus tore its way farther and farther away from the black dead dog, the middle-aged man could still see behind his eyelids the sardonic smile of the black dead dog, that disturbing smile we see on naked skulls and rotting carcasses. The middle-aged man continued holding his breath out of disgust. Minutes rushed past his open window and they dragged with them trees and houses and people, and still the middle-aged man held his breath, amazed that he could do this. His eyes actually lit up as eyes do when they’re threatening to smile...way past a minute, past two minutes, past three minutes, passengers alighting, someone excusing themselves for stepping on another’s shoes, a hearty laugh somewhere at the front, perhaps the driver’s, or the conductor’s, still holding his breath out of fascination of his ability to do so.

But past ten minutes, and fifteen, he was no longer amazed but afraid that he could do such a thing. He decided, against this childish merriment, to get his lungs back to their use. Something was terribly amiss. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t suck in air from the outside world. His lungs impenetrable, his nose a pair of blocked tunnels, he seemed not to remember how to breathe in.

He dropped his briefcase to the floor.

Why won’t they fix this road anyway, he thought.

The young man who had sat next to the middle-aged man had already alighted from the bus, the man now noticed.

God! I have overshot my destination...

* * * 

When the bus conductor found the middle-aged man, sprawled out, half on the seat and half on the floor, it was the hideous sideburns that struck him first. He prodded the body with the tip of his boot, and once he was sure, took the seat directly on the other side of the aisle and stared at the corpse for a while before calling out to the driver.

II

Death by asphyxia, the coroner wrote in his report then quickly moved the body to a small moveable freezer, covered it with rags and a broken squeegee, and pushed the small freezer into the store. For a moment, he could not decide what corridor to follow, and made his way for the toilet, but changed his mind halfway. He returned to the store and reset the squeegee, nervously patted the rag then hurriedly walked all the way past the lockers until he came to the fire exit. He ran down the stairs all the way to a dead end in what looked like it used to be a vestibule but was littered with all manner of equipment.

The effect it had on him was sudden. Entrapment. He forgot he had come down on a stairwell. Lost in this sea of broken chairs, broken lamps, broken trolleys, and bed-stretchers, old buckets, old stained books, and strewn papers, as three fluorescent tubes widely spaced above him illuminated this dusty sea of broken things. Under a sustained hum, he remembered, almost with what can be said to be an exaggerated childlike triumph, where he had run up the stairwell again, until he came to the correct corridor and made for the glass doors, heaving past the human-traffic, trolleys, stretchers, breathing hard but breathless nonetheless.

“No one saw me,” he said to himself, almost too loudly. What a moustache! But of course no one will suspect me, the coroner thought at the gardens. He didn’t notice the bench until he had sat on it. It is not unusual for the morgue to lose a body. They lose bodies all the time, all the time, certainly, and people pick up wrong bodies all the time. In any case, I won’t be here. I should call in sick tomorrow just in case. A headache, yes a headache, I have a headache, after all. It won’t be lying...

He fumbled a cigarette from his breast pocket and stared at it thoughtfully. What he felt was fear, not that he was afraid of being found out. After all, he wouldn’t be caned if he were to be found out. He was too old for the cane, it now occurred to him; he was afraid entirely for something else—the unnameable fear of being a source, or perhaps being at the source, of some vague disorder in the world.

The coroner lay next to his wife that night and thought of the moustachioed corpse, now lying in an old, unused water tank in his garden shed.

After several attempts at words, just as someone might wait impatiently for the mocking swash of a wave to lick their foot, he spoke, “This corpse, Honey, beautiful moustache, you see. That’s the first thing that tells you that he’s different, but that’s a disguise too... I’m standing there, I’m thinking... I have done this over a hundred times, right, but for some reason, and I don’t know how. I must say, one usually gets the feeling that something is about to happen before it happens... I may say I don’t believe what I finally see, but at the same time it’s as if I’m opening him up with the specific intention of seeing what I’m now seeing,” said the coroner and went quiet for a while, for it now occurred to him that he could not retell his story with the accuracy of how it had unfolded itself to him; the suspense and alarm of it all was now, to his frustration, being lost in his narration.

“Anyway, I write asphyxia in my report,” said the coroner, “because it’s asphyxia too... But I believe, strongly believe, the reverse is what happened. Not the reverse as we might know it but the reverse as we might speculate a new kind of reverse no one has ever experienced before. Well until this man.

“The man had no lungs,” said the coroner.

“Born without lungs, can you believe it? Ah, but that’s a ridiculous story. It’s unscientific.” The coroner laughed a silent laughter of embarrassment.

The coroner had not intended to disclose the incident of the strange corpse to anyone, or at least not yet. As he lay next to his wife, he thought how curious it was that his intern, this day of all days, had not shown up to work. She had offered the most ridiculous of excuses for her absence. “It’s as if the universe knew,” said the coroner to himself. I should not have known what to do in such event...

III

“Well, I guess, in a way, someone can,” said the coroner to his wife, absentmindedly, pulling the bed sheet to his side. There’s always an excuse, wouldn’t you say, one way or the other. I think people are naturally lazy. A word here to replace an activity there; you don’t have to show up if you can explain your absence. The grand miracle of words, so to speak, but don’t get me wrong. There’s a good reason for laziness, certainly. There’s always a good reason for everything, otherwise there would be nothing.”

The coroner was trying to avoid thinking about the corpse; trying to conceal his enthusiasm from himself. He was half tempted to jump out of bed and run to the garden shed to be with his corpse, but was held back by the even greater beauty of procrastinating and having something interesting to look forward to in the morning.

But he also wanted to talk about the corpse.

He sighed against his wife’s neck, ecstatic with this beautiful dilemma, and searched for her hand under the sheets until he found the small hand and clasped it tightly over her warm thigh. He closed his eyes and smiled to himself, snuggled closer to her so that he felt his skin being warmed up by her nightshirt as his body pressed hard against her behind. The coroner again sighed that sigh of defeat, and watched the back of his wife’s head. She had been quiet all the while and was looking away from him.

The coroner had never talked so much to his wife, he now thought. If he had to keep talking, he would have to explain his years of silence too—a silence that had always seemed to him to be executed by malicious will. Unless he was giving his report, and in a mathematical language, the coroner found it unbearable to talk to people. At home, he usually stayed in the library, dissolving himself in the dark timber shelving, and in the panelling, or turning the pages of one of his numerous books...or looking outside the window, at the twittering long-tailed birds jumping from tree to tree in the garden, now at the changing blue of the sky, now at the different shades of green on the foliage—basically hiding from his wife but trying not to think of it as such...

When his daughter stood at the door, watching him, (if he called her she would hide behind the door but if he decided not to notice her she would keep coming piecemeal until she reached his leg) he would sit her down by his side and passionately instruct her from one of his books, or from a train ticket for a journey he once took to Tbilisi from Batumi, or from a receipt for a latte in Turin, from anything, really. All this was to avoid or to atone for this avoidance, or even to punish himself for this avoidance, of talking to his wife, who might be in the kitchen or somewhere in the house.

You see, even after eight years of marriage, he still dreaded running into her in the corridors of their house. He got into bed with the airs of one too tired for a conversation; his consciousness of the exaggeration of conversation crippled his relationship with everyone. But this particular night, certainly because of the strange corpse, he had already said too much, and now he kept talking because he thought stopping abruptly would interfere with the equilibrium of a room he had already filled with his sound. In his estimation, he should perhaps keep talking until his words died naturally and proportionately to the falling volume of his sound.

“This intern,” said the coroner, “Apparently I’m too old-school. I know and yet...makes you think, though, so much has happened around you. Where were you, all this time... Christ! There’s nothing left for me to do. I’ve done everything. I’ve got everything. I don’t want anything. What am I going to do now? That’s exactly what I was thinking, standing there...before her frog-like eyes, big, beautiful,” said the coroner to annoy his wife.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life, I’ll tell you that. Have you ever lost something that never existed? That’s the greatest loss...and yet how careless of us? I mean the garret. I was thinking about the garret. It’s been years...all these years, so many years...

“Why was I still holding onto all these inaccurate tales? I’m thinking, it all comes back to me, flood-like, but I can’t discern a thing. Mr Monkey, that’s all I have on my mind, this vague memory, a silly sock monkey. I didn’t lose Mr Monkey. I threw him in the garret, and I lied because I love Father. Father thought I was afraid of him. I could see through him clear like glass. I am the one who made him,” said the coroner...

“Bring a cane! he would pretend to shout to me after being given the report of one thing or the other I had done during the day, a good cane! But I was never afraid of him. I pitied him instead. Brought him the best cane. I was very confident that he wouldn’t, but I wanted him to cane me too, badly...but, by my foolishness, I had already manipulated him by bringing him the best cane. Naturally he couldn’t cane me. The cane was too perfect,” said the coroner, “simply too perfect... Had I brought him a bad cane, a poor cane, so to say, there’s no doubt he should have gotten angry and used it. But the perfect cane incapacitated him, always...

“I used to wait for him at the gate every day as he came home from work. I don’t know, perhaps a little afraid that he wouldn’t come. And when I saw his figure in front of the sunset, like an apparition, as if he were walking from inside the sunset itself, I ran to my room and hid. In my childish soul I thought he was overburdened by his own presence. In a way, that’s why I believed I had lost Mr Monkey, for Father’s sake. I could never lie to him. I had to believe that I had lost the toy and not thrown it away, naturally for Father’s sake. I never attempted to fool Mother, though, never pitied her that way. We were equals in pitying Father, I thought,” said the coroner, “but I’ve always pitied her in her own way, and I’ve always pitied everyone else in their own way too...

“But it was those frog-like eyes of hers that reminded me of the long-forgotten, inaccurate tale I had made up for myself to protect Father from a lie. She’s young,” said the coroner, hoping this would enrage his wife, excited by the thought of the corpse in his garden shed. “Timid, like a sweet little kitten, domineering when talking to those corpses. In fact, she’s more eloquent when talking to them than when she’s talking to the living. She’s got a natural stammer, but very comprehensible when talking to a corpse, can you believe that? When I ask her a question, for instance, because she’s somehow comfortable in my presence, because apparently I’m too ‘old-school’, as she puts it, she answers me by way of telling the corpse and so I have to listen to what she’s telling the corpse because that’s meant for me.

“But she can’t do this when talking to the other staffers. For some reason, she chooses the option of stammering. I guess you can say I’m special in that regard,” said the coroner hoping to irritate his wife... “And so, for a laugh, because, naturally, that’s what she wants, you see, I will sometimes talk to her through all these things in the morgue. For instance I’ll ask the fluorescent tube to tell her to hand me a scalpel, the window to tell her that I need some cotton wool, etc, etc, and how she laughs when I do that.”

The coroner was overwhelmed with excitement just thinking of the strange corpse in his garden shed.

IV

Oh, how right I was to be brave enough to move the corpse from the hospital’s storeroom this evening instead of waiting to come up with a better plan, thought the coroner.

There was no better plan, and it now indeed surprised him that he had gone along with what now looked like the worst plan. He could obviously not have gone through with such a poor plan the following day, he thought as he started talking about the lung-less man to his wife, again—talking of the lung-less man as if he were not real but a story he was inventing for the sole purposes of annoying her. Indeed, he talked about the corpse with the intention of annoying his wife; he described the corpse in flowery language, because poetry can never be believed, and is proof of madness. Similarly, according to him, verbosity was proof of deceit, for he had already talked too much. To justify this unnatural occurrence, the coroner was trying to convince his wife, but also more himself, that he had lost his mind.

He squeezed his wife’s small hand again, put his lips to her neck and, with that little touch, his mind dissolved into vertigo. He thought he heard the distant howling of dogs, the whistling of trees. Oh how beautiful life is, especially whenever his wife wore a pinafore dress, how beads of rain trickled down the windowpane, how nothing seemed to exist when you pulled away from the eyepiece of the microscope... How small and ridiculous and yet amazing everything seemed to be, especially because it was small and ridiculous. His eyes misted. To disclose by concealing, or to conceal by disclosing. This sharing with his wife was a truth he could not tell anyone else, not even her, and it gave him a thrill this making of himself unbelievable...and he, for his own amusement, and also to his utter disbelief, which was also part of his own amusement, was at this time convinced that he was making up the story about the corpse.

At that very moment, after his unprecedented monologue, loneliness finally crept in to claim what had always belonged to it, just what the coroner, unbeknown to him, had been desperately waiting for. He turned onto his side and slept.

Jason’s note: “Sese Yane provided me with an adequate bio. The standard run-of-the-mill “I am from, I’ve done this, here I am” sort of bio I know must have pained him to write. I’ve chosen to forget that bio existed, and instead, in the spirit of this interview, I’ve chosen to go with his explanation behind the bio – which I feel is far more entertaining and far more befitting his character. I don’t think he’d mind, too much. Enjoy.”

“… I had to avoid saying "Sese Yane is a writer etc etc" and had to settle for things like "He is from Kenya" simply to avoid saying "I am a writer", and so to say "his other works have appeared", which is pretty much an admission that "He is a writer" even though he disagrees with this... it's all confusing really. So, forgive me…”

"Holding a wolf by the ears." An Interview with Sese Yane.

Kenyan writer, Sese Yane is a hard one to pin down for a couple of questions. But the bizarre truths in his stories and the unique narrative style of his characters make it well worth the effort. Jason Mykl Snyman finds out what makes him tick and talks  to Sese Yane about writing success and the game of anonymity. 

Sese, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview with me. I’ve been a huge fan ever since we shared some space in Short Story Day Africa’s Terra Incognita anthology – and I must confess, I’ve been looking forward to chatting with you for some time.

However, I’ve been hunting down some info on you, and I must be honest, you’re a bit of an enigma. I enter this interview knowing very little about you. I don’t know what you look like. I only recently found out that Sese Yane isn’t your real name. Yet, I get the feeling that things like faces or names don’t hold too much value. I also get the feeling that traditional interview formats would bore you to tears. I’m now going to attempt to trick you into telling me who you really are - auribus teneo lupum.

Tell me what matters most to you in this life?

SESE: I mean you’re right, faces or names don’t hold too much value. It has never been my intention to be an enigma if that’s how I come off; I only chose to write under a pen name for what I consider to be very practical reasons, and now that I talk of them it seems that I cannot even enumerate them. But what’s a name really? Even in my stories I try as much as possible to avoid naming the characters. Unfortunately we live in a world where you are your name, and you want to put your name on anything you allegedly own.

For me, to choose to write under a pen name was more out of shame than anything else. I didn’t want anyone to know that it was I who had written all this embarrassing stuff. And then I have said elsewhere that I could not stand to see my name against anything; my name seemed false under those circumstances. I am not my name.

I remember once reading Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search For Meaning, and there’s somewhere there in the opening pages where he says that he had wished to publish the book under no name. I don’t remember his reasons but I agree with them.

But enough of that. You ask a very interesting question and maybe I should spend most of my energies on this one. What matters most to me in life? Truth is I wish I knew. Most days I simply try to find something to look forward to, and sometimes it is something as negligible as a TV show that I really want to watch that gives meaning and purpose to that day. Sometimes it’s just a thought.

In an email earlier this week, you told me that you felt your work isn’t all that rewarding to read. That may have been modest of you. Though, they say one should work hard in silence and let success make the noise. Do you feel you’ve enjoyed some success in your writing?

SESE: This is a tough one, Jason. It is true that my work is not that rewarding to read. I know this. But it was rewarding to write it. I don’t read my work, because I already know it will not be rewarding, but damn right I was laughing when writing it. If I wanted my work to be rewarding to the reader, I would endeavour to make it really simple, and then I would have no fun writing it. But then again we try to find a middle ground because no publisher will want to put their readers through something really opaque in the 21st century, and therefore we have a paragraph here and there that is eloquent before we hold our breath once more and dive under.

You don’t have to read the entire story, a paragraph is enough, as Thomas Bernhard has Reger say in the Old Masters. Also, you don’t have to read a book at all, as Milan Kundera has Tereza carry Anna Karenina around in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. You can find pleasure in a book other than by reading it; in any event, some books cannot be read; you can only marvel that this kind of literature is even possible, and if that alone gives you pleasure then so be it.

And so when it comes to writing, sometimes you don’t even try to remember the reader, you only try to explore the limits to which you can stretch style, and then nobody will want to read your story, but this matters very little to you if you’re not even a real writer to begin with. Sometimes you just want to be obscure because you simply don’t want anyone to understand you, you are wrestling with yourself; you just don’t want to write.

You must be sick to death of talking about "The Corpse" by now. To the reader though, it truly is a fascinating read. I’ve always thought of it as an exploration of human nature, or the lack thereof. A man who is so analytical in thinking that he’s barely human. Perhaps, even, less alive than the titular corpse which finally gets him talking, thinking and acting out of character. What drew you to these people, and why did you feel the urge to explore them?

SESE: I am really glad you found the story a fascinating read. I don’t know if you know this but the story received terrible reviews elsewhere, but my best was a reviewer who said something to the effect that the story just whizzed above his head. I love reviews, especially the bad ones because they make me laugh; the nice ones, like yours, leave me mortified.

In this story, I was trying to pit a logical man against an illogical situation. You see we like to assume that there is that which is logical on the one hand and that which is illogical on the other, and that only the logical should matter to us. But what if the logical only exists inside the confines of the illogical? For instance we cannot logically explain why we are here, how it all began, but we can logically explain what we are doing now, at least sometimes... And sometimes, actually most of the time, the logical is only the illogical that is ‘well explained’; and sometimes, actually most of the time, this logical explanation is substituted by yet another logical explanation; it’s a game of ‘logical musical chairs’.

In the story the logical man meets the illogical corpse, and he explains this situation to himself logically by avoiding thinking about it, and he avoids thinking only by thinking about something else; perhaps there’s no corpse at all, he’s simply making all this up. That’s the logical explanation.

The first time I read "The Corpse", I finished it and put the book down. I picked it up, flipped back and read it again, and again. I remember thinking, more and more:

This guy’s got a bit of a Roald Dahl thing going here.

And it was great, I loved it. It stuck out from the rest of the anthology. It’s clear and flowery in the right places, and it’s a little playful and sinister at the same time. As the closing tale in the collection, it lingers, perfectly, and almost erases everything else you’ve read. Did anybody teach you to write this way, or did you stumble upon it by yourself? Who could you name as your literary influences?

SESE: Those are very kind words, Jason. Thank you. The truth is I didn’t grow up reading. To this very day I don’t like reading; I suffer my way through the text. I have some terrible issues with concentrating. But then in high school there was this boy (the inspiration behind that story Godfrey and I) and he made literature fun. He was Kafka before I even read Kafka, and I am sure he had never read Kafka himself. And there we all were, shocked out our minds. You can see in that short story Godfrey and I we all run away from the classroom when he’s narrating one his blasphemous stories. When someone asks me to name my literary influences, they have to start with him.

And even then I didn’t think that I would be able to write. I didn’t think writing was humanly possible, just like I didn’t think songs were composed. I started by writing epigrams, not knowing that they were called epigrams by the way; I just wrote them; they simply came to me. And then I wrote synopses, the kind that appear behind novels, pretending that the books were already written (I was yet to meet Borges by the way). And then one day in college I just found myself writing stories for the student magazine, but I wanted them surreal, and I wanted the sentences to be long and breathless and childish, even though I was yet to meet Witold Gombrowicz, Thomas Bernhard, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, etc.

But I think the turning point for me really is one night at home and I’m going through something in my Encarta and it leads me to Dostoevsky, and the paragraphs I find myself reading are from Notes From The Underground; I think that’s where literature finally and resolutely began in me. Or maybe not, perhaps it began with Florence and the Machine. The thing is, when it comes to literary influences I want to believe I simply looked for these writers after the fact, for comfort, and I keep growing the list every day. I don’t allow them to intimidate me simply because I cannot reach their genius.   

What was your favourite story from the Terra Incognita anthology and why? I know. It was mine. Mine ("What if You Slept?") was your favourite. What was your second favourite story and why?

SESE: So, this is probably the easiest question so far. I want to answer it in a different kind of way. This one time, and it seems like a long time ago, I was working on something, and I can’t seem to remember what, with my father outside the house. It was a Saturday. I was probably in high school then. And then I escaped his eye and ran into the house, because I am naturally lazy.

I am standing before the television and there is this film, and this character says something… philosophical; I don’t know what philosophy is at that time but I am moved almost to tears by what this character is saying. And so I sit on the table, very close to the television so that I don’t miss a word, and watch the whole thing. It looks like a quasi-animated film, if such a thing exists. The film is about a man who keeps running into these people who just talk about things (philosophy)… and then we learn that he is trapped in a dream, but something very interesting he says, and I don’t quite remember the exact words, that these people are sharing with him ideas that he believes are not coming from himself even though he knows he is dreaming; the ideas are both new and vaguely familiar to him.

For the next few days I basically watched the same station hoping that they would repeat this film so that I would catch its title, but they didn’t. I have never been so frustrated! And years later when I discovered how to use the internet I continued with my quest until it brought me to Richard Linklater, but not before meeting the Norwegian genius Ingmar Bergman; actually when talking of literary influences I probably like Bergman the most!

My favourite story in Terra Incognita took me back to that moment, back to that moment when I was watching Waking Life; this is a story I have thought of writing too. And one more thing, maybe two, the language was precisely what I call language, and the last thing:  I met Coleridge! A moment I cannot forget like the first time I read these beautiful words from yet another great: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.       

"The Corpse" appeared in Terra Incognita as well as the Apex Book of World SF4, and it was your first short story publication, if I’m correct. I don’t know. I don’t fact-check much. Sometimes I just make things up. Was this the first time you’d entered a short story competition?

That’s correct. "The Corpse" was my first published story, and to that I’m eternally grateful to SSDA. It was also the first time I had entered a short story competition.

Enjoy the second part of this philosophical interview with the enigmatic Sese Yane. Part Two can be found here.

Jason’s note: “Sese Yane provided me with an adequate bio. The standard run-of-the-mill “I am from, I’ve done this, here I am” sort of bio I know must have pained him to write. I’ve chosen to forget that bio existed, and instead, in the spirit of this interview, I’ve chosen to go with his explanation behind the bio – which I feel is far more entertaining and far more befitting his character. I don’t think he’d mind, too much. Enjoy.”

“… I had to avoid saying "Sese Yane is a writer etc etc" and had to settle for things like "He is from Kenya" simply to avoid saying "I am a writer", and so to say "his other works have appeared", which is pretty much an admission that "He is a writer" even though he disagrees with this... it's all confusing really. So, forgive me…”

Interview by Jason Mykl Snyman

#WeekendRead - Tade Thompson's Rosewater

Earlier this week we featured Nick Wood in conversation with Tade Thompson. Our #WeekendRead is an excerpt from his newest book - Rosewater where the main character, Kaaro, has a life is far more complicated than he wants it to be. But he left simple behind a long time ago when he was caught stealing and nearly killed by an angry mob. Now he works for a government agency called Section 45, and they want him to find a women known as Bicycle Girl. And that's just the beginning. 

CHAPTER ONE

Rosewater: 2066

I’m at the Integrity Bank job for forty minutes before the anxieties kick in. It’s how I usually start my day. This time it’s because of a wedding and a final exam. Not my wedding, not my exam. In my seat by the window I can see, but not hear, the city. This high above Rosewater everything seems orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic curving sluggishly around the dome. I can see the cathedral from here. The window is to my left, and I’m on one end of an oval table with four other contractors. We are on the fifteenth floor, the top. A skylight is open above us, three-foot square, a security grid being the only thing between us and the morning sky. Blue, with flecks of white cloud. No blazing sun yet, but that will come later. The climate in the room is controlled despite the open skylight, a waste of energy for which Integrity Bank is fined weekly. They are willing to take the expense.

Next to me on the right side Bola yawns. She is pregnant and gets very tired these days. She also eats a lot, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I’ve known her two years and she has been pregnant in each of them. I do not fully understand pregnancy. I am an only child and I never grew up around pets or livestock. My education was peripatetic; biology was never a strong interest. Except for microbiology, which I had to master later.

I try to relax and concentrate on the bank customers. The wedding anxiety comes again.

Rising from the centre of the table is a holographic teleprompter. It consists of random swirls of light right now, but within a few minutes it will come alive with text. There is a room adjacent to ours in which the night shift is winding down.

‘I hear they read Dumas last night,’ says Bola.

She’s just making conversation. It is irrelevant what the other shift reads. I smile and say nothing.

The wedding I sense is due in three months. The bride has put on a few pounds and does not know if she should alter the dress or get liposuction. In my opinion, women have two beauties. The outward appearance that everyone sees and the inner, secret beauty that is true and that women show only to the one they love.

Bola is prettier when she is pregnant.

‘Sixty seconds,’ says a voice on the tannoy.

I take a sip of water from the tumbler on the table. The other contractors are new. They don’t dress formally like Bola and I. They wear tank tops and t-shirts and metal in their hair. They have phone implants.

I hate implants of all kinds. I have one. Standard locator with no add-ons. Boring, really, but my employer demands it.

The exam anxiety dies down before I can isolate and explore the source. Fine by me.

The bits of metal these young ones have in their hair come from plane crashes. Lagos, Abuja, Jos, Kano, and all points in between, there have been downed aircraft on every domestic route in Nigeria since the early 2000s. They wear bits of fuselage as protective charms.

There are those among us who are shining ones. We know them on sight - we are caught in a vortex and drawn to them as are everyone else. Bola is one of these. I often catch myself staring at her without knowing why. She often catches me staring at her and winks. Now she unwraps her snack, a few wraps of moin-moin.

‘Go,’ says the tannoy.

The text of Plato’s The Republic scrolls slowly and steadily in ghostly, holographic figures on the cylindrical display. I start to read, as do the others, some silently, others out loud. We enter the xenosphere and set up the bank’s firewall.

Every day about five hundred customers carry out financial transactions at these premises. Wild sensitives probe and push, trying to pick personal data out of the air. I’m talking about dates-of-birth, PINs, mothers’ maiden names, past transactions, all of them lying docile in each customer’s forebrain, in the working memory, waiting to be plucked out by the hungry, untrained, and freebooting sensitives.

Contractors like myself, Bola Martinez, and the metalheads are trained to repel these. And we do. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer. A professor did a study of it once. He found a correlation between the material used for firewalling and the activities of the customer for the rest of the year. A person who had never read Shakespeare would suddenly find snatches of King Lear coming to mind for no apparent reason.

We can trace the intrusions if we want, but Integrity isn’t interested. It’s difficult and expensive to prosecute crimes perpetuated in the xenosphere.

The queues for cash machines, so many people, so many cares and wants and passions. I am tired of filtering the lives of others through my mind.

I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city …

On entering the xenosphere there is a projected self-image. The untrained, wild sensitives project themselves, but professionals like me are trained to create a controlled, chosen self-image. Mine is a gryphon.

The wild ones have self-images that are not accurate, that do not map to their current selves. It is not deliberate. It takes time for a mental image to correspond to the actual person, although it varies with individuals. A bald man may have a more hirsute self-image for years.

My first attack of the day comes from a middle-aged man from a town house in Yola. He looks reedy and very dark-skinned. I warn him and he backs off. A teenager takes his place so quickly that I think they are in the same physical location as part of a hack farm. Criminal cabals sometimes round up sensitives, yoke them together in a ‘Mumbai-combo’-a call-centre model with serial blackhats.

Either way, I’ve seen it all before. I am already bored.

During the lunch break one of the metalheads comes in and sits by me. He starts to talk shop, telling me of a near-miss intrusion. He looks to be in his twenties, still excited about being a sensitive, finding everything new and fresh and interesting, the opposite of cynical, the opposite of me.

He must be in love. His self-image shows propinquity. He is good enough to mask the other person, but not good enough to mask the fact of his closeness. I see the shadow, the ghost beside him. I don’t mention this out of respect.

The metal he carries is twisted into crucifixes and attached to a single braid on otherwise short hair. This leaves his head on the left temple and coils around his neck, disappearing into the collar of his shirt.

‘I’m Clement,’ he says. ‘I notice you don’t use my name.’

This is true. I was introduced to him by an executive two weeks back, but I forgot his name instantly and have been using pronouns ever since.

‘My name …’

‘You’re Kaaro. I know. Everybody knows you. Excuse me for this, but I have to ask. Is it true that you’ve been inside Utopicity?’

‘That’s a rumour,’ I say.

‘Yes, but is the rumour true?’ asks Clement.

Outside the window the sun is far too slow in its journey across the sky. Why am I here? What am I doing?

‘I’d rather not discuss it.’

‘Are you going tonight?’ he asks.

I know what night it is. I have no interest in going.

‘Perhaps,’ I say. ‘I might be busy.’

‘Doing what?’

This boy is rather nosy. I had hoped for a brief, polite exchange, but now I find myself having to concentrate on him, on my answers. He is smiling, being friendly, sociable. I should reciprocate.

‘I’m going with my family,’ says Clement. ‘Why don’t you come with us? I’m sending my number to your phone. All of Rosewater will be there.’

That is the part that bothers me, but I say nothing to Clement. I accept his phone number, and send mine out of politeness, but I do not commit.

Before the end of the working day I get four other invitations to the Opening. I decline most of them, but Bola is not a person I can refuse.

‘My husband has rented a flat for the evening,’ she says, handing me a slip of paper with the address. Her look of disdain tells me if I had the proper implant we would not need to kill trees. ‘Don’t eat. I’ll cook.’

By eighteen hundred hours the last customer has left and we’re all typing at terminals, logging the intrusion attempts, cross-referencing to see if there are any hits, and too tired to joke. We never get feedback on the incident reports. There’s no pattern analysis or trend graph. This data is sucked into a bureaucratic black hole. It’s just getting dark, and we’re all in our own heads now, but passively connected to the xenosphere. I’m vaguely aware that a chess game is going on, but I don’t care between whom. I don’t play so I don’t understand the progress.

‘Hello, Gryphon,’ someone says.

I focus, but it’s gone. She’s gone. Definitely female. I get a wispy impression of a flower in bloom, something blue, but that’s it. I’m too tired or lazy to follow it up, so I punch in my documentation and fill out the electronic time sheet.

I ride the elevator to street level. I have never seen much of the bank. The contractors have access to the express elevator. It’s unmarked and operated by a security guard who sees us, even though we do not see him or his camera. This may as well be magic. The elevator seems like a rather elegant wooden box. There are no buttons and it is unwise to have confidential conversations in there. This time as I leave the operator says, ‘Happy Opening.’ I nod, unsure of which direction to respond in.

The lobby is empty, dark. Columns stand like Victorian dead posed for pictures. The place is usually manned when I go home, but I expect the staff have been allowed to leave early for the Opening.

It’s full night now. The glow from Utopicity’s dome is omnipresent, though not bright enough to read by. The skyline around me blocks direct view, but the light frames every high rise to my left like a rising sun, and is reflected off the ones to my right. This is the reason there are no street lights in Rosewater. I make for Alaba Station, the clockwise platform. The streets are empty save the constable who walks past, swinging her baton. I am wearing a suit so she does not care to harass me. A mosquito whines past my ear, but does not appear to be interested in tasting my blood. By the time I reach the concourse there is a patch of light sweat in each of my armpits. It’s a warm night. I text my flat to reduce internal temperature one degree lower than external.

Alaba Station is crowded with commercial district workers and the queues snake out to the streets, but they are almost all going anticlockwise to Kehinde Station which is closest to the Opening. I hesitate briefly before I buy my ticket. I plan to go home and change, but I wonder if it will be difficult to meet up with Bola and her husband. I have a brief involuntary connection to the xenosphere and a hot, moist surge of anger from a cuckolded husband lances through me. I disconnect and breathe deeply.

I go home. Even though I have a window seat and the dome is visible, I do not look at Utopicity. When I notice the reflected light on the faces of other passengers I close my eyes, though this does not keep out the savoury smell of akara or the sound of their trivial conversation. There’s a saying that everybody in Rosewater dreams of Utopicity at least once every night, however briefly. I know this is not true because I have never dreamed of the place.

That I have somewhere to sit on this train is evidence of the draw of the Opening. The carriages are usually full to bursting and hot, not from heaters, but from body heat and exhalations and despair.

I come off at Atewo after a delay of twenty-five minutes due to a power failure from the north ganglion. I look around for Yaro, but he’s nowhere to be found. Yaro’s a friendly stray dog who sometimes follows me home and whom I feed scraps. I walk from the station to my block, which takes ten minutes. When I get signal again my phone has four messages. Three of them are jobs. The forth is from my employer.

‘Call now. And get a phone implant. This is prehistoric.’

I do not call her. She can wait.

I live in a two-bed, partially automated flat. I could get a better place if I wanted. I have the funds, but not the inclination. I strip, leaving my clothes where they lie, and pick out something casual. I stare at my gun holster, undecided. I cross the room to the wall safe which appears in response to signals from my ID implant. I open it and consider taking my gun. There are two clips of ammo beside it along with a bronze mask and a clear cylinder. The fluid in the cylinder is at rest. I pick it up and shake it, but the liquid is too viscous and it stays in place. I put it back and decide against a weapon.

I shower briefly and head out to the Opening.

How to talk about the Opening?

It is the formation of a pore in the biodome that covers Utopicity. Rosewater is a doughnut-shaped conurbation that surrounds Utopicity. In the early days we actually called it The Doughnut. I was there. I saw it grow from a frontier town of tents and clots of sick people huddling together for warmth into a kind of shanty town of hopefuls and from there into an actual municipality. In its eleven years of existence Utopicity has not taken in a single outsider. I was the last person to traverse the biodome and there will not be another. Rosewater, on the other hand, is the same age, and grows constantly.

Every year, though, the biodome opens for twenty or thirty minutes in the south, in the Kehinde area. All the people in the vicinity of the opening are cured of all physical and some mental ailments. It is also well-known and documented that the outcome is not always good, even if diseases are abolished. There are reconstructions that go wrong, as if the blueprints are warped. Nobody knows why this happens, but there are also people who deliberately injure themselves for the sole purpose of getting “reconstructive surgery.”

Trains are out of the question on a night like this. I take a taxi which drives in the opposite direction first, then describes a wide, southbound arc, taking a circuitous route through the back roads and against the flow of traffic. This works until it doesn’t. Too many cars and motorbikes and bicycles, too many people walking, too many street performers and preachers and out-of-towners. I pay the driver and walk the rest of the way to Bola’s temporary address. This is easy as my path is perpendicular to the crush of pilgrims.

Oshodi Street is far enough from the biodome that the people are not so dense as to impede my progress. Number fifty-one is a tall, narrow four-storey building. The first door is propped open with an empty wooden beer crate. I walk into a hallway that leads to two flats and an elevator. On the top floor, I knock, and Bola lets me in.

One thing hits me immediately: the aroma and heat blast of food which triggers immediate salivation and the drums of hunger in my stomach. Bola hands me field glasses and leads me into the living room. There is a similar pair dangling on a strap around her neck. She wears a shirt with the lower buttons open so that her bare gravid belly pokes out. Her heavy breasts push against the two buttons keeping them in check and I wonder how long the laws of physics will allow this. Two children, male and female, about eight or nine, run around, frenetic, giggling, happy.

‘Wait,’ says Bola. She makes me wait in the middle of the room and returns with a paper plate filled with akara, dodo, and dundu. She leads me by the free hand to the veranda where there are four deck chairs facing the dome. Her husband, Dele, is in one, the next is empty, the third is occupied by a woman I don’t know, and the fourth is for me. Dele Martinez is rotund, jolly, but quiet. I’ve met him many times before and we get along well. Bola introduces the woman as Aminat, a sister, although the way she emphasises the word, this could mean an old friend who is as close as family, not a biological sibling. She’s pleasant enough, smiles with her eyes, has her hair drawn back into a bun of sorts, and is casually dressed in jeans, but is perhaps my age or younger. Bola knows I am single and has made it her mission to find me a mate. I don’t like this because … well, when people match-make they introduce people to you whom they think are sufficiently like you. Each person they bring is a commentary on how they see you. If I’ve never liked anyone Bola has introduced me to does that mean she doesn’t know me well enough or that she does know me, but I hate myself?

I sit down and avoid talking by eating. I avoid eye-contact by using the binoculars.

The crowd is contained in Sanni Square, usually a wide-open space framed by exploitative shops and travel agents, behind which Oshodi Street lurks. A firework goes off, premature, a mistake. Most leave the celebrations till afterwards. Oshodi Street is a good spot. It’s bright from the dome and we are all covered in that creamy blue electric light. Utopicity’s shield is not dazzling, and up close you can see a fluid that ebbs and flows just beneath the surface of the barrier.

The glasses are high-end with infra-red sensitivity and a kind of optional implant hack that brings up individual detail about whoever I focus on, tag information travelling by laser dot and information downloading from satellite. It is a bit like being in the xenosphere; I turn it off because it reminds me of work.

Music wafts up, carried in the night, but unpleasant and cacophonic because it comes from competing religious factions, bombastic individuals and the dome tourists. It is mostly percussion-accompanied chanting.

There are, by my estimate, thousands of people. They are of all colours and creeds: black Nigerians, Arabs, Japanese, Pakistani, Persians, white Europeans, and a mix-mash of others. All hope to be healed or changed in some specific way. They sing and pray to facilitate the opening. The dome is, as always, indifferent to their reverence or sacrilege.

Some hold a rapt, religious awe on their faces and cannot bring themselves to talk, while others shout in a continuous, sustained manner. An Imam has suspended himself from a roof in a harness that looks homemade, and is preaching through a bullhorn. His words are lost in the din which swallows meaning and nuance and shits out a homogenous roar. Fights break out but are quashed in seconds because nobody knows if you have to be “good” to deserve the blessings from Utopicity.

A barricade blocks access to the dome and armed constables form up in front of it. The first civilians are one hundred metres away from Utopicity’s dome, held back by an invisible stanchion. The officers look like they will shoot to kill. This is something they have done in the past, the latest incident being three years back when the crowd showed unprecedented rowdiness. Seventeen dead, although the victims rose during that year’s Opening. They were … destroyed two weeks later as they clearly were not themselves anymore. This happens. Utopicity can restore the body, but not the soul. The god told me that back in ‘55.

I cough from the peppery heat of the akara. The fit drives my vision to the sky briefly and I see a waning gibbous, battling bravely against the light pollution.

I see the press, filming, correspondents talking into microphones. Here and there are lay-scientists with big scanners pointed finger-like towards Utopicity. Skeptics, true believers, in-between, all represented.

I feel a gentle tap on my left shoulder and emerge from the vision. Aminat is looking at me. Bola and her husband have shifted out of earshot.

‘What do you see?’ she asks. She is smiling as if she is in on some joke but unsure if it’s at my expense.

‘People desperate for healing,’ I say. ‘What do you see?’

‘Poverty,’ says Aminat. ‘Spiritual poverty.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. Maybe humankind was meant to be sick from time to time. Maybe there is something to be learned from illness.’

‘Are you politically inclined against Utopicity?’

‘No, hardly. I don’t have politics. I just like to examine all angles of an issue. Do you care?’

I shake my head. I don’t want to be here, and if not for Bola’s invitation I would be home contemplating my cholesterol levels. I am intrigued by Aminat, but not enough to want to access her thoughts. She is trying to make conversation, but I don’t like talking about Utopicity. Why then do I live in Rosewater? I should move to Lagos, Abuja, Accra, anywhere but here.

‘I don’t want to be here either,’ says Aminat.

I wonder for a moment if she has read my thoughts, if Bola matched us because she is also a sensitive. That would be irritating.

‘Let’s just go through the motions to keep Bola happy. We can exchange numbers at the end of the evening and never call each other again. I will tell her tomorrow, when she asks, that you were interesting and attentive, but there was no chemistry. And you will say …?’

‘That I enjoyed my evening, and I like you, but we didn’t quite click.’

‘You will also say that I had wonderful shoes and magnificent breasts.’

‘Er … okay.’

‘Good. We have a deal. Shake on it?’

Except, we cannot shake hands because there is oil on mine from the akara, but we touch the back of our hands together, co-conspirators. I find myself smiling at her.

A horn blows and we see a dim spot on the dome, the first sign. The dark spot grows into a patch. I have not seen this as often as I should. I saw it the first few times but stopped bothering after five years.

The patch is roughly circular, with a diameter of six or seven feet. Black as night, as charcoal, as pitch. It looks like those dark bits on the surface of the sun. This is the boring part. It will take half an hour for the first healing to manifest. Right now all is invisible. Microbes flying into the air. The scientists are frenzied now. They take air samples and will try to grow cultures on blood agar. Futile. The xenoforms do not grow on artificial media.

In the balcony everyone except me takes a deep breath, trying to get as much inside their lungs as possible. Aminat breaks her gaze from the dome, twists in her seat and kisses me on the lips. It lasts seconds and nobody else sees it, intent as they are upon the patch. After a while I am not sure it happened at all. I don’t even know what to make of it. I can read minds but I still don’t understand women.

Down below it begins, the first cries of rapture. It is impossible to confirm or know what ailments are taken care of at first. If there is no obvious deformity or stigmata like jaundice, pallor, or a broken bone, there is no visible change except the emotional state of the healed. Already, down at front, younger pilgrims are doing cartwheels and crying with gratitude.

A man brought in on a stretcher gets up. He is wobbly at first, but then walks confidently. Even from this distance I can see the wideness and wildness of his eyes and the rapid flapping of his lips. Newcomers experience disbelief.

This continues in spurts and sometimes ripples that flow through the gathered people. The trivial and the titanic are equally healed.

The patch is shrinking now. At first the scientists and I are the only ones to notice. Their activities become more agitated. One of them shouts at the others, though I cannot tell why.

I hear a tinkle of laughter from beside me. Aminat is laughing with delight, her hands held half an inch from her face and both cheeks moist. She is sniffing. That’s when it occurs to me that she is here to be healed as well.

I get a text at that moment. I look at my palm to read the message off the flexible subcutaneous polymer. My boss again.

Call right now, Kaaro. I am not kidding.

Tade Thompson lives and works in the UK. He is the author of a number of SFF, crime, general fiction, and memoir pieces. His alternate history crime novel Making Wolf from Rosarium Publishing was released in September 2015 and his latest novel is Rosewater. More of Tade's thoughts and writing can be found at his blog, Long Time After Midnight.