Page 7 of The Death of Vivek Oji

I pushed him harder, then again, out of the room, and he just kept taking it, his mouth slightly open, looking like a fucking mumu.

“Chineke, what’s wrong with you?” I knew he was having an episode, I knew he was sick, but I didn’t care. I was tired of covering up for him, tired of him being sick or strange or whatever was wrong with him. I really liked Elizabeth, you know, and now she was there, angry and crying in a corner of the bed, after he’d been standing in the door watching us for God knows how long. So I pushed him with all the anger I had and Vivek fell off the concrete landing, two steps down onto the ground. He broke his fall as if by reflex, twisting so that his hips and shoulders hit the sand, but his head still rocked from the impact, his eyes were gone, he still wasn’t here. Elizabeth screamed and I ran back into the room, terrified that Aunty Kavita would hear her from the main house, terrified that I’d hurt Vivek by pushing him so hard.

“Shh—it’s okay,” I said, climbing back on the bed and wrapping my arms around her. “It’s okay.”

“I want to go home,” she sobbed.

“No wahala. Come.” I took her hand, then led her off the bed and through the door. Vivek was curled up on the sand below, with his hands pressed to his face, hyperventilating. “Don’t mind him,” I said as we passed. “His head is not correct.”

I escorted her out to the main road and she entered a taxi without looking back at me, slamming the door so hard that the frame of the car rattled. I watched it drive away, spluttering black fumes from the exhaust. She was never coming back, I thought in that moment; our relationship was over. I dug my hands into my pockets and walked back to the house, dragging my feet.

When I got back, Vivek was sitting on the landing, his back propped against the door frame.

“I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as he saw me, trying to stand up quickly. “I don’t know what happened—”

“You know what happened,” I said. “I don’t even care again. I’m tired. Every time with this your thing.”

“Osita, please—”

“I said I’m tired.”

He ran a hand over his head, distressed. “What do you want me to do? Should I go and say sorry to her?”

“Don’t fucking talk to her,” I snarled, and Vivek flinched. I shook my head and raised my palms, backing away from him. “It’s enough,” I said. “It’s enough.” I didn’t look back as I walked away. I threw my clothes into a bag, then caught a bus back to Owerri, knowing I’d miss the SAT class the next morning. I didn’t care.

My mother stared at me when I walked into our house. “You’re home,” she said, frowning. I hadn’t been back in a while. Usually she would shout at me for being away so long, but this time she just looked up at me, her shoulders rounded and tired. She was sitting in the parlor with a tray of beans in her lap, picking out the stones, and she looked like maybe she had been crying.

I put down my bag. “Yes,” I said. “I’m home.”

Four

Vivek

I’m not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them.

So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?

Five

After Vivek died, Osita went to Port Harcourt and drank until the days were sabotaged in his memory. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, and when he got there, no one cared about where or what he had come from. He was tall and immaculately dark-skinned, muscled and handsome and generous with drinks, so the oil workers he fell in with were more than happy to spend time with him. There were hotel rooms and some women, and a memory of dirty glasses stacked high and teetering before they crashed into a sink and broke, then the warped sound of people laughing. Osita watched the glass bounce. He felt carpet against his back and tasted a vileness in his mouth, as if someone had vomited into it. A girl straddled his hips and lowered her face to his, but it blurred to nothing.

Then he was floating on an inflation tube in someone’s pool, his hands and feet trailing in the water. A bald woman was treading water next to him. “You’re crying,” she said. It was only then that Osita noticed the tears slipping into his ears. Itwas evening and the light was leaving. “It’s raining,” he told her, slurring his words.

She laughed. “It’s not raining.”

“It’s raining inside me,” he said, and a wave of darkness took over. When he woke up, he was lying on a pool chair on his stomach, his head turned to the side. There was a small pile of sand on the cement next to him, thrown over his drying vomit. No one else was by the pool. Osita sat up and found a bottle of schnapps that someone had left on the floor. It was still a quarter full.

He drank some more.

He was gone for a few weeks, and they only found him because his aunt came to Port Harcourt looking. One of the Nigerwives there connected Kavita with a taxi driver who knew everyone in town.

“He’s tall,” she told him. “Very black. Gorimakpa. And one of his front teeth is broken.”

After two days, the taxi driver took her to one of the hotels. The receptionist quickly allowed her upstairs because she was Indian and angry and demanding things in a raised voice. When they unlocked a door near the end of the corridor, Kavita walked in to find Osita lying on the bed, snoring loudly, his breath gurgling in his chest. She flinched at the smell of the room and shoved his shoulder. Osita jumped up, grunting in alarm and rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days; stubble spread from the curve of his skull to his face.

“Aunty Kavita? What are you doing here?”

“Put on your clothes,” she said. “I’m taking you home.”