Speak No Evil Read online

  I’m not here. This isn’t happening. A ticket will only add fuel to the possible fire already smoldering at home. Niru you are irresponsible. You are careless. You this boy! You don’t think. Jesus! My father will shout in a tone that makes you feel like the whole world is disappointed by your birth. These are the moments when I’m almost positive that my parents never meant to have me. The perfect OJ would have been just fine for them on his own. I’d always wondered why there was such a big gap between me and OJ, that maybe I was an accident. Then my mother told me that I actually had a sister born too prematurely to survive more than a few hours after birth. That’s when your father started going to church more she said. We didn’t have a proper funeral. She was too young. My father has never said a word about it.

  The night air is cold against my face. I should have stayed. Then Ryan and I would be on our way to doing whatever and at least being late would be worth it.

  You can go now, Officer Williams says as he hands back my license through the car window. In the rearview, I see Officer Green sitting in the squad car’s passenger seat. He fills the whole space with his body. Officer Williams says, listen, since you don’t have any tickets or previous violations, we’ll just forget that this whole thing happened. You get home now, but no more speeding, you hear? I nod but my hands won’t stop shaking.

  My father sits at the kitchen table waiting when I open the door. There is a place mat but no food in front of him and the space between the silver fork and knife is occupied by a small black rectangle that I know is my phone. I swallow. Good evening Daddy, I say. My father says nothing for a long time. He grinds his teeth and drums his fingers on the table. This man that usually has so much to say about everything in his deep, imposing voice and gravelly Nigerian accent is silent. I’m scared. Who is Ryan, he asks as he removes his glasses. I have not seen him like this before, angry, yes, confused, only once, but never both together. My father’s hands shake as he tries to control himself. He is all power, all will. He’s the one who reminds us constantly that if he could walk ten miles to get sardines and tinned tomatoes for his family during the war, dodging low-flying Nigerian fighter planes that made a sport of strafing hungry refugees, then there is nothing he or we can’t do. But he can’t control this.

  Gwamniru, I’m asking you to tell me what is this, he shouts and his voice rises an octave with each word that leaves his mouth. His eyes narrow until they are colored only by red veins. His eyes are like that because he grew up in the dust he says, even America can’t change that. When I was younger he would invert his eyelids to reveal the pink membrane beneath with its streaking capillaries. Then he would chase me from room to room laughing. I wasn’t always certain that the monster behind me was really my father, so I cried. Then my father would hold me and offer me ice cream. My mother didn’t like that. She says children don’t like uncertainty.

  Am I really seeing what my eyes are seeing, he shouts as he holds up my phone. I can make out Tinder alerts that I should have turned off. I don’t know why I didn’t. I can explain, I say. Explain what, he shouts and sprays a mist of saliva with the words he expels from his mouth. What will you explain? Who and who are you explaining to? My friend, keep quiet. Does your mother know about this filth you want to explain? He slams the phone down on the table. I wince. The glass vase at its center which now holds glass pens, some coins, receipts and sheets of paper that no one knows what to do with shakes and the coins inside rattle. Does your mother know? I have to tell your mother. I have to tell her that this is what her son has been doing. I never should have let your mother name you. I told her, we don’t give men that kind of name, but she insisted that it had to be this name. The disgrace. I remain frozen midway between the kitchen door and the kitchen table. I want to grab the phone and break it into tiny pieces, but I can’t move. Ify, my father shouts, Ify! Are you in this house? Come see what your son is doing. Are you in this house? My mother’s Mercedes was in the garage when I came in, but I didn’t smell any food. There is a faint odor of the trash I should have taken to the curb this morning and one of the countertops has just been sprayed with Lysol, but there is no pepper scent, no home-baked butter loaf, or any of the things she made every once in a while to remind herself that she actually could have gone to culinary school like she wanted instead of medical school like my grandfather demanded.

  In my house. In this house, my father shouts. You want to bring this kind of sinful, satanic rubbish into my house. Tufiakwa. It can never happen. He takes two steps toward me with the phone in his right hand before he turns around and stomps into the family room where he closes his left fist around the thorny switch of a bougainvillea twisted across the mantel. Ify, he shouts up to the landing a floor above, but my mother still doesn’t answer. I told your mother, I told that woman that we should have sent you to school in Nigeria, not this useless place. How can a son of mine do this? My son? No, it can never happen. Then he charges back into the kitchen and is suddenly so close that I can smell the honey-roasted peanuts on his breath. He has only been home a few minutes and his tie still hangs from his white collar. There is a ketchup stain near the knot and I know it has probably bothered him the whole day. He is the kind of man who always wears white shirts, who cares about appearances. Before a man leaves his house each morning, he should be washed, lotioned and dressed in smart clothing. You have to pay attention to these things, he says, otherwise people will think you have no parents.

  He grabs my ear. Daddy, I yelp as he twists and pulls me forward. You want to go and do gay marriage, is that what you want, you want to go and carry man, put your thing for his nyash? Abomination. A BOMI NATION. He pushes my face down into the kitchen table. A salty warmth fills my cheek. My tongue burns. Daddy let me tell you— Tell me what. Tell me how you want to go and collect shame and disgrace for this family. Tell me how you want to go and do all sorts of despicable, filthy, unnatural and unclean things. How can—no. You want to kill me?

  The pain spreads from my cheek up to my eyes and into my forehead. My tears pool as I try to blink away the stinging feeling in my nose. I want to sneeze but I can’t sneeze. I want to swallow, but I can’t swallow through my constricted throat. My father lets go of me and backs away to the wall. You stupid child. You are going back to Nigeria pronto. Immediately! Sharp! Daddy you’re over—I’m over what? See this boy with the audacity to open his filthy mouth and say word to me. No, you are going back to Nigeria. I will personally escort you to Holy Spirit Chapel or Mountain of Fire or whichever one so we can burn this sinful nonsense from your body. I’m overreacting—open your mouth and say it again. He launches a half-hearted slap toward me but lets his hand drop to his side. Do you know what you have done? Do you know what this means? Are you really telling me the truth, that you are going out and gallivanting with the gays, the homosexuals? Where did you learn this kind of behavior? Is it in school? Is this what are they teaching you? I’m going to call your headmaster right now. I need to speak to that your headmaster immediately, then I am buying your ticket home. We will pull you out of school and send you back to Nigeria for spiritual revival. Daddy, listen to me, I say. He straightens against the wall and his shoulder knocks the frame of one of my mother’s market scene photos. It settles into a listing position. He rubs his shoulder. I’m listening, he says softly. Upstairs the toilet flushes, sending water through the pipes. My father and I look up and then at each other. I can feel my heart separate from the rest of my body. I want to hand it to the frothing old man in front of me and say, take it. It’s yours, because it has always been yours, if not for your sperm, your food, and the school fees that you pay on my behalf, then who and where would I be? Nothing. I am because you are. I say nothing. Each word I search for flies from my brain before I can send it off my tongue.

  Then his hands are around my neck pushing and shaking me. My ears begin to ring and I can hear myself scream even as my father’s shouts grow louder in my ears. It fills my whole body with burning. His hands tighten as s
pittle beads on his lips. His wedding ring chafes my skin and I wish it would sever something that can end this immediately. If there is anything like a bright spot it’s imagining what he will do when that first spurt of blood erupts from my throat and spatters on the ceiling. But maybe he will smile at having done the Lord’s work to rid the world of such abominable evil. Maybe he will cite the story of Abraham and Isaac from whatever damp cinder-block prison enclosure the state would carve out for him. I hold his collar in my hands. His sweat has made the material soft. I pull and my father’s head snaps back. Speak, ngwa. You said you want to talk then talk. Tell me with that your filthy mouth. Let me hear what you want to say. My father bangs my head against the wall and the room vibrates. He slaps me once and then again. Speak you bloody fool.

  Obi, stop, stop it, kwusi. Are you trying to kill my son, you want me to lose another child, my mother shouts, mba, mba, mba. I can see her now in her purple housecoat and shower cap. I can smell the rose-scented milk bar that she uses, that she buys in multiple packs because I steal them from her. Her face is wet, from the shower, from tears, I can’t tell. She forces herself between us, pushes Dad back with both hands and encircles me in the smell of roses and damp terry cloth. Obi, have you lost your mind, she says as she touches my face. What in the name of ever-loving God are you doing to my child? Ask him, my father shouts, ask that thing what I’m doing to him. I’m sending you back to Nigeria, no more of this rubbish, no more. I will clean you up. I will clean you— Obi, chelu, my mother says as she holds me up. The room spins around me. My mother touches my head and I feel like fainting. Calm down, can’t you see he’s bleeding, she says. How can I be calm? This is not a matter of calm. There is no calm here. My father moves towards us. I shrink into the wall. It’s enough, it’s enough, she shouts. You want me to call police for you? She is crying. Look at me. Can you see me? Goddammit, she says. She never says that. Chineke, she wails. I collapse into her shoulder and sink down as my knees give and the air rushes back into my chest between sobs. My brain searches for something like strength or dignity, but the space before my eyes is blank and empty, except for this pain. So you think it’s okay that your son wants to run around with the gays, my father shouts, you want him to follow them and marry man. My mother’s arms stiffen beneath my shoulders. She looks down at me, then she looks away.

  3

  My mother wakes me up by turning on the lights. My eyes burn and my head throbs. She opens the door quietly, but I know she has been standing there for some time. Her shadow sweeps across my bedroom floor. She has tried her best not to hover since what I’ve come to think of as “The Great Revealing” but I feel her worry as intensely as I feel my father’s disgust. I hear her dart halfway up the stairs with each loud noise I make in my bedroom. I watch her feet shift outside my door while she tries to decide if she should knock or just leave me be. The night it all happened, she helped me from the kitchen up to my bathroom and said nothing until after she pulled the first aid kit from underneath the cabinet, placed it on the bathtub lip beside her and used a warm wet gauze to clean the cut that opened when my father banged my head against the wall. It will be okay she whispered as she held me and rubbed away the dried blood on the back of my neck. She smeared Neosporin on my cuts and kissed my forehead.

  I know why she hovers. It was only a few years ago that OJ and I came home from school to find my mother’s car nudged up against the garage wall, with the doors open, the key in the ignition, engine running, the gear in drive. OJ’s hands shook as he reached into the car, placed the gear in park and retrieved the keys. He told me to wait while he crept up the steps. The kitchen door was wide open and her flats lay scattered haphazardly on the floor by the kitchen table. Maybe we should call 911, I said. I had ignored his instruction to stay in the garage because it seemed safer not to be alone waiting for whoever or whatever had done this to come back. OJ handed me his phone and said, get ready, as we moved slowly through the kitchen. We found my mother in the powder room splashing water on her face. If she was surprised to see us, it didn’t show. She asked OJ to get the ibuprofen from her handbag. She followed us from the powder room to the kitchen still holding a pink hand towel. She pulled us both close and then broke into sobs. A patient in her care for the last ten years had committed suicide. Her parents found her in her bedroom with an empty bottle of whiskey and prescription sleeping pills. She was seventeen.

  That night I told my mother, I’m not going to kill myself, but I spoke as much to my reflection as to her. It was the first thing I’d said since we left the kitchen. I know, she said but she still sat at my desk after she switched off my bedroom lights. The chair creaked every time she nodded off.

  The days since then have been a timeless fuzz. I feel time pass but nothing actually seems to happen. I’ve heard my parents argue on the landing. The boy should go to school, I hear my father say, enough of this nonsense, it’s because you have treated him like a woman that he’s behaving like this, he should get up and get ready. Are you really that phenomenally stupid, I hear my mother say. She speaks softly but my father shouts in a voice he knows I will hear. You want him to go to school looking like this because you can’t control your anger? I had a very good reason. You think these people don’t take note of things like that. Let them take note. They can mark the progress because I’m not even close to being finished. If you touch my son again, I will kill you myself. Do you hear me? Let them bring police, FBI, CIA, whichever one, but I will kill you myself. Have all your senses just left you? He’s your son for God’s sake. Your own son. I don’t care. Then get out of this house. What? I said you will get out of this house, just get out of my sight until you’re prepared to sound like a reasonable human being. Ify? Get. Out.

  Sometimes I wonder how my parents found each other. They are so different, like matter and antimatter, and I don’t know that their marriage won’t zap itself into oblivion. My mother comes from a family that has always had everything. She was born during the civil war years, in Kenya where my grandfather worked as a doctor with the World Health Organization. Her brothers live in places like South Kensington and Sandton where they run banks and mobile phone companies. One of her sisters is a geologist who fell in love with an Australian while completing her masters at Cambridge. She lives in Perth with twin girls whose lean figures, sand-colored hair and blue eyes already have them modeling. Her youngest sister stayed in Nigeria and married a civil servant who owns a lot of real estate in the capital. My mother went to medical school but learned French because my grandfather liked to read Rimbaud and Baudelaire. My grandmother was a teacher and filled their homes with books and paintings.

  My father is a true village boy from eastern Nigeria who lived a childhood of near starvation, neglect and an everyday struggle against enemies trying to crush him at every turn. He went to University of Nsukka, graduated first in his class and then got an oil company scholarship to do his graduate degree in America. My parents met during National Youth Service after he came back to Nigeria with an MBA from Columbia University. My mother says she fell in love with him because he knew exactly where he was going, but his strong sense of direction sometimes presents its own set of problems.

  I’m not coming out, I say into my pillow. I have left my bed only to use the toilet and after even those short steps I’ve felt weak and exposed. I can smell myself in my sheets. I am on the verge of smelling like the homeless men and women in McPherson Square and at Union Station. Niru, love, we’re going to church, my mother says. She sits on the bed beside me and strokes my cheek with the back of her fingers. Can you please get up and get ready? It’s important.

  Her voice sounds gravelly and that makes me turn to her. She’s already dressed in blue pants and a white top with a yellow cardigan but she hasn’t done her makeup. I push her hand away from my face. My stomach growls. Will Daddy be there, I ask. I don’t know, she says, I haven’t really spoken with your father. But that’s not the point. If he’s there or if he’s not there, we sh
ould still go. Sometimes it’s good to put your problems before God. She gets up and draws back my curtains, allowing a gray light to sweep into the room. My eyes slowly adjust to the new light. I can see outside to the driveway covered in a wet shine from the previous night’s rain. The garbage and recycling bins still sit at the top of the driveway. She says, he’s your father, Niru, you will have to talk with him at some point. I’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen. At the doorway she pauses and holds on to the frame. How’s your head, she asks. I touch my scalp. I tell her my head still hurts.