Indigo (17 page)

Louis ran ahead then, to get the elevator, but Jerry knew that the elevator would not be impressed by what had gone on. In the elevator, at least, Nurudeen's father would get a slow ride. And though it was clear that they looked at things differently, Jerry could not help believing that the secretary would be riding down in the elevator with the man, that she would accompany him, in fact, everywhere he went. At first Jerry liked that thought a good deal. Later, however, he didn't get any pleasure from it at all.

It was daybreak by the time they got back to Smart's place, with its silly refrigerator walls. Smart's “gang,” as Jerry thought of them, seemed now more like his family, a tired group of people who wanted only to find their dank room and sleep.

“I've told Elwood to awaken us at noon,” Smart said. He then went into his private room and closed the door. It was left to Parker and Louis to sleep at the tops of the metal hallways again, to raise the alarm should anyone try to enter or leave.

“Nurudeen's at home alone,” said Pamela. “I really need to go to him.”

“It is morning,” Jerry told her. “It seems to me that if there was danger it would have come at night.”

The mats they'd used earlier were as they had left them, one here, one over there, an arm's reach away. Jerry sat down on one of them and removed his shoes. He'd been wearing the same clothing for three days, but that, somehow, hadn't bothered him much. When he thought of his shower and his solitary meals with Jules standing by his side he couldn't concentrate, as if those activities were a part of a dream or a past life that had ended long ago. He thought of Charlotte for a moment but he quickly left her alone as well. To think of her now seemed foreign and uncomfortable.

Pamela stood in the dim room playing with her car keys and watching Jerry stretch out. “It's been a long night,” she said. “There has been a lot to take in.”

“Tell me how you could have married such a man,” Jerry said. “He's too old for you and he is too strange.”

“He is Nigerian,” Pamela said.

She spoke as if such a statement answered everything but Jerry asked, “How long were you together?”

“We were never together, really.” Pamela came over and knelt on the mat. “He is not a Western man, nor does he pretend to be, but he is a great man, and he could be great for Nigeria if this thing works. He is not corrupt, he has dignity and honor, but he isn't Western, that's all.”

“You are still tied to him then?” Jerry asked, and Pamela shrugged. “My house in Anthony Village belongs to him. Nurudeen's school fees and my study in America were paid by him. When he comes to the house occasionally I am always there.”

Jerry wanted it to be beyond him to understand how such a smart and beautiful woman could involve herself in something like this, but the truth was he could picture her easily now, waiting for Nurudeen's dad, perhaps asleep and hearing his key in the door.

Jerry reached over and took Pamela's car keys from her. He put the keys on the floor beside him and then took off his shirt and placed it over them. He could not see Pamela's expression but when he sat up a little and reached over to touch her he could feel an exhaling and a movement in his direction. His fingers worked the buttons of her blouse well, as if they belonged to another, and when the blouse was open and her dark shape was there, he moved up next to her and felt her breasts against the exposed skin of his chest. Though it felt wonderful, however, it did not feel right. It felt, after all, like a bleak kind of payment, and it was suddenly beyond Jerry to continue, to go further with the idea.

Pamela, with her clothing removed, came onto the mat next to him, settling first on her side, facing him. She had not read his mood and asked, “Are you doing this only because Nurudeen's father can?”

Her face was inches from his own, her eyes nocturnal. Jerry touched her breast again, feeling the nipple rise, and thinking, momentarily, that he might try, until he noticed the reaction of his own body, which was soft where it should have been hard, uninvolved from his chest to the tops of his knees. The idea that he would want this woman because Nurudeen's father could have her sat in his mind like a tumor.

Though Pamela misread it all, she nevertheless tried to come to his aid by saying, “Perhaps it is only because it has been too long.”

Her voice was matter-of-fact, but after she said it she made no move for her clothing, as Jerry feared she might. Instead she came closer, aligning her body evenly with his, as if settled in for the night.

Jerry was immensely pleased with that and felt something good filling his chest. He felt it in his lower back too, and then in his legs and finally in the binding muscles of his neck and shoulders. He did not feel it in his groin, but Pamela's steady breathing told him that she knew he wouldn't find it there, even with such closeness, at least not now, at least not this time, and he thought, what a good woman she is after all.

When they finally slept it was six a.m., though real sleep came only to Pamela, with Jerry waking often, to lift the sheet that covered her and let a shaft of dim light shoot down across her breasts and belly. It was strange, but what he felt as he looked at her was not desire, nor even a sense of wonder at being where he had never been before. What he felt was rather a kind of detached curiosity, an unencumbered focusing of attention, and a great pleasure too, though he understood perfectly well that this was the final portion of Pamela's job. After having coaxed him and cajoled him and straightened his spine, she had now been ordered to fold her legs around him in order to give him a wonderful reason not to want to leave. And somehow Jerry knew that in his understanding of all of that and in his refusal to do it, he had wiped the slate clean. He believed that Pamela knew it too and he had the clear idea that, if things were only different, he and Pamela would surely be able to start again.

Jerry stayed that way, awake and watching Pamela, until around nine, when he slipped from the bed and soundlessly got back into his clothes. Pamela had woven the web around him that Beany had assumed he would be unable to break. Yet while she slept he did break it, walking up the hallway and past the sleeping figure of Louis, who was dead to the world but a little back from the door. Jerry had Pamela's car keys with him. He held them tightly because he did not want them to make a sound, and because the feel of them digging into his hand kept him alert, intent on finally getting away, and kept his fatigue at bay. It was Christmas morning, 1983, and he was about to save himself, though Beany Abubakar and the people sleeping down below would have him believe that, with his help, they could save their whole world.

P
ANEL
N
UMBER
T
WO

February 25, 1984, a.m
.

Though he was expected in a week, the artist did not come back to the school until over two weeks had passed, by which time the first panel had been viewed by everyone and was covered by a thin Plexiglas sheet, something the school board said would protect it, but which also made it hard to see.

The second panel was delivered on a Saturday. The artist came alone in his truck but found Joseph and his crew and asked them to help him unload it and secure it to the wall. Luckily, the crew was on hand. It was the morning of the school's main fund-raising event, the annual auction, so they were preparing the central courtyard. The artist too would come again that night to pound out panel number three in public, thus bringing his obligation to the school to an end.

This second panel was larger than the first; though less active it was broader in scope. After that hectic beginning the artist needed the extra space to accent some of the nuances of the story, its softer middle, the stranger manifestations of its asides. He wasn't unhappy with panel number one, but he thought of it as essentially a foreign tale, an entry, while the second panel seemed truly African, unembarrassed by its Nigerian center, unflinching in the things it told.

Since the artist had promised that by the night of the auction all three panels would be done, he ran home in order to get ready to come back that night, and when he was gone Joseph's crew stood looking. They all agreed that it was easier to look at this second panel, not only because it was larger than the first, but because it was not yet under glass.

By the time the woman and the boy arrived, the custodians had finished their work and were resting in the shade, watching as the woman and the boy stood in front of the second panel, listening while the woman looked at the boy, asking him what he thought.

“It is all too difficult,” he said. “I don't like it very much.”

The woman then said that she thought the second panel looked vulnerable next to the first, but really not difficult at all. Although neither the boy nor the maintenance crew understood what she meant by that, the boy nodded, staring at the panel again. He wanted to accommodate his mother in this, but he didn't know how. In the second panel everything seemed in congress—at least he might have said that. But he really didn't like such things very much, so though he kept his head fixed in an attentive pose, what he was actually doing was watching his mother, out of the corner of his eye, as she absorbed herself in the artist's version, so primitive yet so modern, of what had taken place when the story took its African turn.

One

Christmas Day
, 1983

Pamela's Peugeot wouldn't start, so Jerry Neal sat in it, listening to the engine try to turn over, in front of a growing number of interested passersby. He turned the key and watched the gauges and turned the key again, but though the battery seemed strong and the fuel tank was full, the car wouldn't start.

It was a hot morning, the Peugeot was already an oven, and Jerry could see smoke coming from the mountain of garbage that sat behind him. He put his head in his hands and rested his elbows on the steering wheel. He then rolled the window down and looked at those who stood there looking at him. There were perhaps twenty of them now and they were all men. Jerry could see that they did not know him, that they had no expectations at all.

“Excuse please, Oga,” said a voice.

He had been so intently concentrating on the driver's side of the car that he'd ignored those standing to his right, but it suddenly came to him that this thin voice had been calling to him for some time. Jerry thought for a moment that he'd get out and run, but then he sat back and prepared himself, hoping only that when he turned his head he would not find someone holding a newspaper up, pointing at his passport picture on the front page.

“Excuse please, Oga, but you forget sometin' small,” said the voice. “In our everyday haste sometime such forgetting takes place.”

The closed car window kept the voice distant, but the face was familiar, and in a moment Jerry realized that it was the ironing-board boy, who was cupping his hands to see in.

Jerry opened the passenger door.

“Get in,” he said, “hurry up about it.”

The boy was surprised, but happy with the prospect. He quickly jumped in and closed the door, saying, “You will laugh when I say, Oga, but you forget de immobilizer. Dis Peugeot got one underneath de floor mat on you own side.”

It was true. Jerry's car had an immobilizer too, a device meant to slow thieves down. When he took the key from the ignition he saw a smaller key on the ring next to it, and when he pushed the rubber floor mat aside he was able to quickly disengage the immobilizer, and just as quickly start the car.

The ironing-board boy was delighted. “Nevermin', Oga,” he said. “Once in a time every man forget like dis. Even myself, I do that.”

Jerry had been careful leaving Smart's hideout and it had not been easy. He'd had to summon the will to break away from Pamela, to take his life into his own hands once again. It had been his first purposeful act since all of this began, but now, only moments later, he was sitting in Pamela's Peugeot with the ironing-board boy, slowed by a device designed to slow thieves. And before he could move again the back door opened and Pamela got in. She looked at the ironing-board boy and smiled. “Hello, Bramwell,” she said.

“Hello, Miss,” said the ironing-board boy.

It is at times like these that men don't know whether vertigo is a physical or a mental thing, whether the world truly turns, or whether the turning is in a delicate balance thrown awry, the inner ear on strike against the absurdity of the words it hears. Jerry held the steering wheel and pinched his eyes shut, but when he opened them again she was still there, smiling slightly in the rearview mirror. She shrugged when she saw the look on his face. “It
is
his name,” she said. “If you don't like it blame his father.”

Jerry's mind flipped like his inner ear had just done, but he suddenly understood something without having to be told. This ironing-board boy was another one of Beany's sons, Nurudeen's older half-brother by another mom.

The car had somehow put itself into gear so Jerry let out the clutch, giving them a slow roll away from the other parked Peugeots, down the rutted path to a roundabout that would get them back up on the highway again.

“Where are we going?” Pamela asked. “I gather nothing you heard last night made you want to stay?”

To have smooth pavement under the car was reassuring, and for the moment Jerry didn't answer. To be above Lagos like this, coasting along in the morning traffic, made him breathe easier. Harmattan had diminished since last he'd noticed. The tops of buildings were sharp against the sky.

When he looked at the boy next to him he somehow saw, now, as if the magic of his name had done it, an altered boy, a boy with better posture and more intelligence in his face than the ironing-board boy had had. “Well, Bramwell,” Jerry said, “where do you keep coming up with these ironing boards?”

Bramwell smiled. “I buy them in the market,” he said. “I get them for around eighteen naira each.”