Open City (21 page)

W
E EXPERIENCE LIFE AS A CONTINUITY, AND ONLY AFTER IT FALLS
away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with an outsize intensity. These were the things
that had been solidified in my mind by reiteration, that recurred in dreams and daily thoughts: certain faces, certain conversations, which, taken as a group, represented a secure version of the past that I had been constructing since 1992. But there was another, irruptive, sense of things past. The sudden reencounter, in the present, of something or someone long forgotten, some part of myself I had relegated to childhood and to Africa. An old friend came to me out of this latter past, a friend, or rather an acquaintance whom memory now made convenient to think of as a friend, so that what seemed to have vanished entirely existed once again. She appeared (apparition was precisely what came to mind) to me in a grocery store in Union Square late in January. I didn’t recognize her, and she followed me for a while, tracing my steps around the aisles, to give me an opportunity to make the first move. It was only when I noticed that I was being shadowed, and was beginning to adjust my body into that skeptical awareness, that she came right up to where I was standing, in front of a display of carrots and radishes. She said a bright hello, waved, and addressed me by my full name, smiling. It was clear she expected me to remember her. I didn’t.

She looked Yoruba, with a slight slant to her eyes and an elegant swoop to the jaw, and it was clear from the accent that that was where I should look for the connection between us. But I failed to find it. At the same moment that I confessed to having blanked out on who she was, she accused me of just that, a serious accusation, but jocularly expressed. She couldn’t believe I had forgotten her, and she said my name several times in quick succession, as if to chide me. My lighthearted apology masked the irritation I suddenly felt. I feared for a moment that she would overextend the charade, and make me cajole her into saying who she was, but she introduced herself, and the memory was restored: Moji Kasali. She was the older sister (by one year) of a school friend, Dayo. I had met her two or three times in Lagos, when on school breaks I would visit Dayo at home. Dayo and I were rather close friends during the junior secondary years,
but he hadn’t stayed at NMS long, leaving at the beginning of the first senior secondary year, and transferring to a private school in Lagos. We made an effort to communicate with each other the following Christmas break, but when I visited him at home, the gateman turned me away, and when he returned my visit a week later, I wasn’t home. We no longer had the NMS connection, and I was sure he’d made new friends. Our friendship faded. About a year later, I’d met him at some tennis courts in Apapa. He was with a girl, playing the man-about-town, and our conversation was stilted.

I was by then much taller than he was, but he was stout and had the stubbly beginnings of a beard. We promised once again to stay in touch with each other, and I remember telling him I was thinking of going to America, if I could find a way out, though, as it turned out, I didn’t leave until a few years afterward. He was wearing dark glasses that day, which he didn’t take off, though the sky was overcast; his girlfriend had on a white polo shirt and tight shorts, and looked bored, and was, as such, the instant object of my envy. That I had my own girlfriend didn’t matter. Dayo’s girl struck me as impossibly cool.

I took his address and phone number—he wrote them down, I recall, on the back of a religious tract someone had pinned to the fence—and not long afterward, I called him. Then there had been a party at his house, a wild one, with lots of drinking. The girl wasn’t there by that point—they’d split up—and I had split up with my girl, too. Afterward, I lost Dayo’s address and, in any case, by the time I came to the United States, three years later, I had no serious intention of writing to him, or anyone else. The promise to write had simply been a gesture of respect, an acknowledgment of the fact that once, when we were in our early teens, we’d been close, and even for a brief moment best friends.

I doubt I would have recognized him thirteen years later, in a grocery store, much less his sister. But now, the certainty with which she pinned me to my name, the ease with which she repeated it,
made me think she’d thought of me but never expected to see me again. And perhaps I had been the unwitting target of a schoolgirl crush: the brother’s friend, the sophisticated
aje-butter
, a self-confident older teen. On the earlier occasions that I had gone to Dayo’s house, there had been one or two other school friends there as well, and she had ignored us, of course. Perhaps she was more interested in us than she’d let on. Maybe that memory remained now, as she stood with a box of muesli under her arm, and the embers of that memory were what made her catch my eyes, and hold them, as she asked me the expected questions: marriage, children, career. When I had answered, plain answers that I was careful not to deliver too brusquely, I felt it polite to ask her the same.

She was an investment banker at Lehman Brothers, she said. I acted suitably impressed, and made vague noises about how busy she must be. But I did not want the small talk to go on, so I looked every now and again at the basket in my hand, and nodded as she talked. Her brother was in Nigeria at the moment, she said. He’d gone to the U.K. for graduate school, at Imperial College, but had returned home and gotten married. Moji said she’d been in closer contact with him during the six years he’d been in London. We don’t talk very often now, she said, he’s got a kid, he runs his own civil engineering firm. But he’s had some strange times. He had an accident in 1995, just before going for his master’s. I suppose that’s the biggest thing, really, that’s happened to him since you left Nigeria. He was studying in the east at the time, in Nsukka, and he was in a bus crash, out on the highway at night. The bus ran into a motorcyclist who was riding without lights, and it careened off the road. Ten of the fourteen people onboard died instantly; another three were badly injured, and one of them died later. Dayo alone had walked away without injury. I think maybe he dislocated a shoulder or something, but nothing major at all. When you have such an experience as that, she said, everyone immediately thinks it would make you more religious. That wasn’t the effect it had on him. He became
more thoughtful, I guess. He went through life, for the next couple of years, in a kind of distracted daze. He spoke about the accident just once, after he came back to Lagos—that’s when we found out it had happened. Maybe it was a news item buried inside the papers—ten killed in Nsukka crash, or something like that—so we might have heard of it, but we could never have imagined he would be involved. He simply kept it to himself until he came home on semester break; he’s funny like that. My parents, of course, made him come to church for a special thanksgiving service. He went along with it. Then he put it out of his mind, filed it away like it had just been a bad dream and, if he revisited it, it wasn’t in any public way. Me, of course, I was curious, and I used to badger him about it initially, but he just clammed up, and that was that. I’ve seen dead people at the scene of an accident—I guess everyone who lives in Nigeria has—but I’m sure it’s different if you were in the accident yourself, or if that body lying by the side of the road could easily have been yours. So for a long time, everyone treated Dayo as if he was the luckiest person in the world, but I think his attitude was that it would have been luckier to be nowhere near the crash at all. Anyway, he’s mostly past it now, and it was all so long ago. I’m sure that’s more detail than you wanted.

We’d used up our common ground, and there seemed nothing left to chat about. She assured me that I would hear from her again, and marveled once more, in what had become a quite irritating way, that we had run into each other. I don’t really believe in coincidences, she said. Something either happens or it doesn’t, coincidence has nothing to do with it.

A
t the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook. Speaking with him just before I left home, I had asked if I should bring anything, and he’d said I should bring a check, so I could pay him. I had taken the checkbook out of its drawer and placed it on the table with my gloves and keys. But I then left it behind, and didn’t realize I had done so until the 2 train came to the station. I was embarrassed at having to meet him empty-handed. But I was supposed to give him only two hundred dollars, and I had my bank card with me. I could get cash. It seemed vaguely illicit, putting cash in an envelope and sliding it across a table, but it was better than not paying him right away.

When I came out of the Wall Street station, I looked around for a cash machine. I hadn’t been to that part of town since I had gone on my night walk there in November. Now, in daylight, with the sun pouring into the deep clefts formed by the sides of skyscrapers, the
street’s ominous character was tamed. It had become an ordinary street, a place of work, marred in the normal way by construction cordons and divots where the road was undergoing repair, and nothing at all like the Dante-esque vision of huddled and faceless bodies I had experienced a few months earlier. After a short walk, I found a cash machine inside a pharmacy, but was unable to take money out of it because I typed in the wrong four-digit code for my card. So I tried again, and failed again. I tried five times, with different numbers, all of them wrong. I wasn’t alarmed—which I would have been if I had thought the card was compromised—but rather, sad: I had simply forgotten the number. A thought flitted through my mind: how terrible it would be to blank out like this while seeing a patient. This was the ATM card I had used for more than six years, and it had always had the same code. I had used the card on my recent trip to Brussels and, indeed, I had been entirely dependent on it for that journey.

Now, as I stood in a little pharmacy on the corner of Water Street and Wall Street, my mind was empty, subject to a nervous condition; this was the expression that came to me as I stood there, as though I had become a minor character in a Jane Austen novel. Such sudden mental weakness, I thought (as the machine asked if I would like to try again, and I did, and failed again), was from a simplified version of the self, an area of simplicity where things had once been more robust. This was true of a broken leg, too: one was suddenly lessened, walking with an incomplete understanding of what walking was about.

I was already late for my meeting with Parrish, who had been recommended to me by a colleague. But I left the pharmacy and wandered around the area, and tried to calm myself down. It was cold out, the sunshine giving no warmth as a breeze came stiffly off the East River two blocks away. The clouds in the bright sky were small and numerous, and ruffled like breaking waves. I shivered, and tried to ignore the nervousness, hoping it would simply float away. I went
down to Hanover Square and twenty minutes later, having no definite number in mind, went to another machine, this one in the lobby of a bank. I tried the withdrawal again, hoping that the memory in my fingers, their familiarity with the pattern, might bail me out, as it sometimes did in the case of phone numbers. I was surprised the machines permitted so many attempts. In any case, all failed, and I was left with a handful of printed receipts. I had kept thinking that the number was 2046. But that wasn’t it; that number came from the title of the film by Wong Kar Wai. The number I was after was something similar, had been picked even before the film was made, but it was 2046 that kept echoing in my head.

When I finally sat down with Parrish, I told him that I had neglected to bring my checkbook. I said nothing about the cash machines. He was solemn, and as he adjusted his cuff links, I had the feeling of having disturbed a carefully calibrated universe. I apologized, and assured him I would put the check in the mail right away. He shrugged, and I signed the tax paperwork he had prepared for me. I was awed by this unsuspected area of fragility in myself. It was an insignificant portent of age, the kind I tended to smile at in others, the kind I took as a mark of vanity. I thought of the few white curls that had sprung up and were now nestled in the black mass of my hair. I used to joke about them, but I knew also that the entire head of hair would someday change color, that the white strands would multiply, and would win eventually, that if I lived to old age, like Mama, there would be hardly any of the black ones left.

I went down Broadway, past the old Customs House, and down to Battery Park. It was a clear day and I could see right across to Brooklyn, to Staten Island, and the glimmering green figurine of the Statue of Liberty. The Tetris-like line of buildings sat in the still afternoon air. The park brimmed over with the noise of children too young for school. Their mothers fussed around them in the playground. The creak-creak of the swings was a signal, I thought, there
to remind the children that they were having fun; if there were no creak, they would be confused. This had been a busy mercantile part of the city in the middle of the nineteenth century. Trading in slaves had become a capital offense in the United States in 1820, but New York long remained the most important port for the building, outfitting, insuring, and launching of slavers’ ships. Much of the human cargo of those vessels was going to Cuba; Africans did the work on the sugar plantations there.

In profiting from slavery, the City Bank of New York was not unlike the other companies founded by merchants and bankers in the same time period—the companies that later became AT&T and Con Edison emerged from the same milieu. Moses Taylor, one of the world’s wealthiest men, had joined the board of the City Bank in 1837 after a long and successful career as a sugar merchant. He became the president of the bank in 1855, and served in that capacity until his death in 1882. Taylor had helped fund the war effort on the Union side; but he had also made massive profits from brokering the sale of Cuban sugar in the port of New York, investing the profits of the sugar planters, facilitating the processing of the cargo at the New York City Customs House, and helping finance the acquisition of a “labor force.” He had made it possible, in other words, for plantation owners to pay for the purchase of slaves; this he did in part by operating his own ships. He had six of them sailing the high seas. Taylor and other bankers like him knew exactly what they were doing, and their optimism paid off. The profit margins were irresistible: a fully outfitted slaving ship costing around $13,000 could be expected to deliver a human cargo worth more than $200,000.
The New York Times
noted in 1852, as the City Bank brought in its greatest profits, that if the authorities pleaded that they could not stop this profiteering, they were simply confessing their own imbecility, and that, if it was a matter of will, the moral guilt they were incurring was equivalent to that of slave traders themselves.