Doing Dangerously Well (22 page)

She flipped open her cellphone and dialled a number. “Hello. It’s Barbara.”

“Barbara, darling,” her father shouted. “How are you? Can you hear me?”

“Yes. The line’s pretty clear.”

“Can you hear me?” he repeated. “Speak louder. The phone …” Then, to his wife, “The phone lines are appalling.”

Barbara rustled some paper in front of the mouthpiece and tapped it a couple of times. Yellow eyes shot heavenwards.

“How’s Kenya?” her father shouted.

“Pretty hot. I’ve been on safari. Did you get the carvings?”

“Ah, that’s much better,” her father said to her mother. “Yes,” he yelled. “We got them. Why did it have Canadian stamps?”

“UNEP ships everything to Canada,” Barbara yelled back. “For security reasons.”

“Very wise,” her father commented to himself.

“I’m just phoning to say they’re flying me to Nigeria today, so I’ll be gone for a week.”

“Be careful,” her father shouted. “I’ve been in those kinds of places. Have you got a pen?”

“Yes.”

“Right. Take this down. Don’t, I repeat, do
not
eat the food. Got that? And for god’s sake, don’t drink anything. Even bottled drinks.” He raised his voice half an octave. “Never, I repeat,
never
ask for ice—that’s made with local water too. Don’t talk to anyone you don’t know. Don’t take local transport. And most importantly, if you’re in an accident, and I’m only saying
if,
don’t, I repeat, do
not
under any circumstances get a blood transfusion. It’s probably infected.”

“Okay. Got it.”

“Now, read it back to me. Let’s make sure you’ve got it.”

“No eating, no drinking, no transportation, don’t talk to anyone, no transfusions.”

“And no ice. Well done. Don’t forget they still have AIDS there.”

“No sex. Got that. Okay, gotta go. Bye.”

Barbara snapped her cellphone shut. She dodged and bobbed around the apartment, throwing her most valuable items into a suitcase, cramming in numerous boxes of condoms around the sides, as these would doubtless be in short supply.

Astro watched her pack. “Bobble, what are you planning to do over there?”

“They’re just presents, Astro. For my friends.”

“What friends? You don’t know anyone!”

Barbara adjusted her sarong. “Yes, I do. There’s Femi.”

“You’ve never met the guy! You don’t even know if he’s alive!”

“And I have an important contact I’m seeing in Lagos. She’s a journalist called …” she scanned her memory, “… some local name.”

“Oh, okay, then. What was I thinking? I can see you’re right on top of things.” He marched out of the room with his plastic bags.

At the airport check-in, Astro knotted the tops of his plastic bags with sharp tugs and wrote “A” on them in felt tip pen. He chucked them onto the scales, sniffling.

“Take care, Bimble.” His voice wobbled. “Send me a postca-”

“Passport?” the woman at check-in reached for his documentation.

“Yeah, I’ve got one,” Disoriented, Astro sniffed. “Bib, why—”

“Can I have it, then, please? And your ticket?”

“Sure! Take it! Take everything! What do I care?”

“Just need the passport and ticket, sir.” She tapped into her computer.

Barbara traced the outline of Astro’s lips with her finger, then fell on him in a passionate embrace in which time/space and all material existence disappeared. After protracted complaints from check-out and other passengers, she abandoned him at the US Immigration checkpoint, making her way to the Air Nigeria counter, bound for Lagos. A vast array of people stood in a haphazard queue, all jostling, arguing, bidding noisy, tearful goodbyes, some screaming recognition of long-lost friends. They carried oversized boxes of electronics, suitcases wrapped with duct tape and overstuffed bags, some of which emitted a pungent odour of meaty food. Almost every passenger carried crates of fresh water, water filters and the like; some rushed to airport washrooms, returning with dozens of filled water bottles.

The women wore enormous headdresses and voluminous wrappers of vivid colour, while the men, in billowing tunics with elaborate embroidery, gesticulated their way past the airport’s officialdom. Other passengers leaned on their luggage, slumped, their despairing eyes conveying the mark of death. Perhaps they had discovered yet another dead relative or had to attend yet another funeral.

The plane was two hours late. Barbara, anxious to secure a seat and having heard horror stories about overbooking, stormed her way to the front through the crowds at the gate. After a brief sprint to elbow out any last competitors, she finally made it onto the aircraft and sat between a large, boisterous woman with a cooler on her lap and a businessman on his cellphone.

“Is Wole on seat?” he boomed.

“Excuse me.” Barbara tapped him on his shoulder. “You can’t use the phone while we’re taxiing. It’s totally against IATA regulations.

“Wole?” the man shouted. “Hey, Wole! Worraps? I’m on the plane. Yes. We’re just leaving the terminal now.”

The woman slammed down the tray in front of her, opened a dish and spooned out some hot food smelling of rotting flesh. She then started to slurp it up.

Barbara fumed to herself. “Okay. Just keep centred. Stay in the ever-present now. Find joy in this moment.”

“777,” the progress report continued. “Pretty full. The stewardess is now walking down the aisle … Twenty litres only … I have an oyinbo sitting next to me.” He paused, and then discreetly, at the top of his voice: “Forty-five, maybe fifty.”

Barbara butted in. “Thirty-seven, actually.” When she heard no correction, she snatched the phone from him and yelled into it. “I’m thirty-seven, though I can’t see how it’s any of your business.”

He snatched his phone back. He kissed his teeth and threw her a long look of deep contempt. He lingered in this censorious scrutiny before gathering himself, turning his shoulder away from her and resuming the conversation. “Oh. The stewardess is starting her instructions. No, I’m not scared. We all have to die sometime. But I’d prefer to die first class.”

Barbara pressed her buzzer.

After a minute, a flight attendant appeared. “Yes, ma’am?”

Barbara looked knowingly at her fellow passenger. The flight attendant looked at her, query in her eyes. Barbara nodded again at the cellphone and the tray. Finally, the attendant understood.

“Sir, sir.”

He waved her to hold. “The stewardess is trying to speak to me.”

“She’s called a flight attendant,” Barbara pronounced at full volume.

“Yes. No, she’s standing next to me. Ah-ah! Wole! How am I supposed to know?” More discussion. “Just a minute.” He turned to the flight attendant. “Yes?”

“Please put the cellphone away, sir. We’re getting ready for takeoff.”

He turned back to his cellphone. “She says we’re getting ready for takeoff. She wants me to put the cellphone away.” More discussion. “Well, those are the regulations. Otherwise the pilot cannot hear what the control tower is saying.” A pause. “Yes, but the plane could crash …” Barbara tried to grab the cellphone again. He held his hand in an imperious stop sign. “… if people use their cellphones.”

The woman next to Barbara unbuckled her seat belt. “Where is the toilet?” she barked in enquiry.

“Please,” the flight attendant said. “Sit down. You can’t move until the seat belt light—”

The woman shifted her cooler onto Barbara’s lap and stood up. “I need to go now.” She bumped past Barbara and the businessman.

The flight attendant lurched after her. Barbara, seizing the opportunity, stormed to the front to deposit the foul-smelling cooler on the flight attendant’s seat. She had specifically requested a seat next to vegetarians.

“No,” the man was saying when she got back. “I said it could
crash
…” he shouted the last word, “… if the pilot cannot hear the control tower.” He settled back, legs wide, and laid his arm across the back of Barbara’s seat. “That Russian plane crashed because some idiot didn’t close his cellphone-oh.” He took his shoes off. “Oh—now we’re taking off.”

“Please, sir, turn your cellphone off,” the flight attendant called from the back of the aircraft, where she was busy rattling the toilet door.

“Of course,” he yelled back at her. He stretched out his toes. “Well, the pilot thought he was cleared for takeoff, but no, there was another plane landing. Anyway,
sha,
you know these backward countries like Russia. You would think people died quickly. But no—in a crash like that, people burn. It takes time.”

Barbara popped 6 milligrams of tranquillizer into her mouth and looked down at the newspaper on his lap. Laid out in florid colour—a shocking report of another dam rupture.

She grabbed the paper and scanned the news, breathless: a dam downstream from Kainji had broken. Young, proud and strong, Jebba Dam had been heroically carrying the extra load its older sister had abandoned. Now, buckled in pain and screaming for help, it could hold no more and had broken, killing another hundred thousand people.

Discouraged, she laid her drugged head on the welcoming bosom of gentle slumber, eventually slumping onto the businessman’s outraged breast, and only awoke, with a jolt, after the plane had executed a bumpy landing. She could already smell the humidity through the air conditioning system.

She grabbed her bags as passengers started jamming the corridors to the exits.

“Please sit down!” a voice urgently warned. “Stay in your seats until the plane has come to a complete halt and the warning lights have been turned off.”

Women dragged bulky objects into the aisle and blocked the exits.

Finally, after an interminable taxi, the plane stopped and the doors were opened by the flight attendants with vexed scowls, looking as if their nerves were frayed to one or two gossamer threads that linked them to continued sanity. The boil of passengers burst and the plane emptied. Barbara followed as people ran across the tarmac of Lagos’s Murtala Muhammed International
Airport towards the terminal. Small women assumed Herculean strength as they carried bags twice their size on heads, shoulders, hips, streeling children.

It was nighttime and, though Barbara could see very little, the humid air punched into her and she could smell the odours that signalled a shift of culture—smells that carried more weight, stronger presence, greater purpose. Voices shouted from all directions, workers lolled in doorways or strolled to their posts, and the stars could be seen through the haze of humidity, as there were few lights to erase the night sky.

Inside the terminal she followed the crowd as they rounded a corner and dashed into customs and immigration, joining a vast sea of people in a cavernous hall with no working fans. Only four or five officers were on duty. The heat was oppressive. There were no seats.

Barbara spotted the man who had sat next to her. He had managed to bulldoze his way close to the front—within thirty people he would be served. She could see him on his cellphone. He was no doubt relaying his good news to his friend. Barbara sat down on her suitcase.

Over two hours later, Barbara reached the immigration counter.

“Name?” The immigration officer fanned himself with some papers.

“Barbara Glass.”

He flicked open her passport. “Glass? That’s your name?” He leaned on his podium. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Of course I’m sure.”

“Why?”

“Pardon?”

“Why Glass?”

Barbara, sensing danger, decided to mirror his body language. She leaned on his podium. “Don’t know.”

“Oh—really?” He looked at her as if he had caught her in a lie. “Very interesting … And where are you from?”

“The United States.”

Then another trick question.

“Is this your passport?”

“Yes.”

The officer beckoned to a comrade, who was in the middle of a long-winded anecdote to two other colleagues that eventually met with generous laughter. Barbara sighed loudly. Her officer did not notice. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply and emitted a long, resonant “ohm.” She meditated on the word that appeared to cause such confusion. “I am as the glass,” she intoned. “I am here, yet I am not here. Absence is my presence. My presence is absence. Viewers lie behind, the viewed in front. Where is behind and where is in front? Light flows through. I am the glass.”

She opened her eyes. The officer’s face betrayed a look of deep concern. He scribbled on her landing card in red pen. Some minutes later his colleague strolled over in slow motion. The two conferred.

“She says her name is Glass.”

They turned their backs to her, checked the passport again, then turned round.

“Is your name Glass?” the second officer inquired.

“Yes,” she nodded to herself. “Oh yes, very much so.”

They were confounded.

“Are you married?” the second officer asked.

“No.”

“Enh?” They looked perplexed. “A pretty girl like you! That’s too bad. What happened?”

“Is there something the matter with you?”

Both pairs of eyes peered at her, compassionate.

“No.” Barbara catapulted out of her gentle musings. “You see, this is a typical example of the obsolete notions of patriarchal hegemony in which—”

“Look at this woman vibrate!” The first officer kissed his teeth in disgust.

“You should get married-oh!” the other instructed. “What are you waiting for?”

They examined her passport further and called a third officer. He was the most astute of the bunch, and he conducted an interrogation worthy of Solomon.

“Is your father’s name Glass?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Outclassed, the first officer stamped her passport, then sent her on through customs, where three officers stopped her. “Anything to declare?”

“No.”

“Please come this way.”

Barbara knew much of her cargo might be hijacked at this point. She readied herself for the battle.

They flicked through her passport.

“Glass? Is that your name?”

“Yep.”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.”

Confused, they put the passport to one side and opened her bags. A large, black vibrator popped out. Two officers looked at each other, the whites of their eyes turning pink. The third officer, obviously less a man of the world, took it out.