In the Jungle

t is 2009 and it is not yet a crime to love you. The sun is a big yellow circle, bright and burning. We wake up with our arms around each other. But you push me and I know we’re sharing a dream. We are running, a rusty red train behind us. Its black iron grills are menacing teeth, its windshield is a pair of dark sunglasses glare glued to our backs, approaching. We’re edged into the tracks and our feet won’t move fast enough. Smoke hurtles out of its head. It cloaks everywhere, blinding our sight and our path. Behind is the only thing we can see and it is coming, fast, the end, coming for us and everything. But you shove me against the wall and it dissolves, and I’m awake, free, alive, off the mattress.

And it’s in your arms, real, warm, your lips moving, saying, repeating, You dey all right? until I nod, nod, say, Yes.

I relax, settle into you, and you laugh, push my head. You stand, spit, thick yellow bulb falling between my legs. Please, Sinzu, I beg, wanting us to never end. No food for lazy man, you say before you strut off into the sun and I watch you become dust.

I sit up and let your kelebe graze my leg. I refuse to clean it off; will carry you with me through the day. Jamiu and Figo are on the mattress now, as if they’d been awaiting our demise. But I think about it and who knows if we'd been two, three, thirteen, all of us hugging to sleep under this bridge?

Everyone knows there's no time to lose, so I stand. From under the bridge I can see there is nothing. It is Sunday so traffic is light. Women in towering headgears, girls with buzzcuts in pink armless gowns, little boys in ugly corduroy suits and oversized pointy shoes. I miss Saturday, the blessed day of obtaining. I dip my hands into my pockets to see only one chain out of all the ones we snatched remains. No cigar, not even small claro. In another pocket there’s one dirty Rizla and I keep it, fold it neatly, because I know I will need it.

I walk into the sun and it is burning my head my face my neck, everywhere there is a hole in my singlet. But I am freezing cold and I am trembling. I walk to the paraga woman and say, One shot, no yiyo, I don't like the one that draws like I am drinking spit. She looks at me and says, Where my money? I look at her and say, Trust me, this night.

She shakes her head like a mistake and I want to slap her. But I need the paraga like my people need Jesus. I will drink it from the cup and I will gurgle it and it will whoosh and wash my mouth, burn my throat, clear my eyes and settle my mind. So I reach for the necklace and ask, You want?

The paraga does its work.

A bus drives past but it is full and there’s already a conductor. I trek back to under the bridge where buses will stop. The air is cool here in the shade. I want to just lie here all day but money has to be made. No food for lazy man.

The first bus that’s here, I ask the conductor, Owo ero, money for loading passengers? He hands me fifty naira and I say, Gonsoun, he should get out. The second is empty and I know the day is easy because it is a Sunday. It is slow for everyone and money will crawl like it is on lean.

I hop inside and ask the driver, You need conductor?
He says, Call passenger, call passenger, no time for swegbe, no time to waste time.
Mushin Olosha waso, Mushin Olosha waso, I shout, and two people enter. One is a swaying old man on whose creased face and breath is the evidence of sleep and ogogoro. The other is a woman with a tray of ewa agoyin balanced on her head. She's on her way to sell so I open the boot and help her put her wares.

Back in the bus, the driver doesn't drive. He looks back, tells me, Call Ojuelegba, not only Mushin.

Ojuelegba waso, Ojuelegba waso, I get down and shout. A woman with five little children, the oldest maybe six, the last wrapped behind her back, approaches and asks, Mushin how much?

Waso.
Ehn?
Waso.
I don't have fifty. Mushin that is here I will now pay fifty naira.
Fuck off, I tell her. Oloshi. Tell your wretched husband to buy you a car so you won't be dragging innocent children around Lagos. Useless woman. Ashewo two kobo. Close your vagina.

Somewhere around Total, the sun hides behind a cluster of white clouds. I am clinging to the yellow bus, waiting for the world to end. Aureate rays jut out of holes, the clouds casting large shadows. The sun is thousands and thousands of burning beams and it looks like heaven is about to smash open. I don’t see anything or anyone; I just know at this last moment I want to be with you. When the trumpet sounds and the herald looks down at us unworthy beings I want them to see you and me and know that humans can create beautiful things.

We get to Ojuelegba and I hand the driver his cash, remove four fifty naira notes for myself. I work hard for my money and what did he do but face his front and drive? But now he is shouting as I am bouncing away, complaining that two hundred naira is too much and I should give him his full money. I continue walking, shoot out my chest, raise my shoulders like there is boil under my armpits.

Ojuelegba on a Sunday, Ojuelegba on a Monday, Ojuelegba at midnight everything is the same. Everywhere is people walking, smashing into you like the wind. The traffic will be a standstill because at the junction, molue, danfo, taxi, keke, okada, everyone wants to go first. Just last week one container from the bridge fell on top one car under, flattening the roof and everybody inside. I saw it there with my two eyes. Blood is just like tap-water, the way it runs.

The smell of boli is dancing in the air and with my nose I follow. I see Debe and Atobo smoking igbo and screaming Keeper. Everyone is surprised when I tell them Keeper is my real name. I was born on these streets, under the bridge in the park here in Ojuelegba. My mother became cross-eyed after she birthed me. They say I held on to her insides, refused to let go, pulling, pulling, as I was pulled by the people who relieved her of me. She returned to the village when I was fourteen, but me, no way I was going to follow. I am a Lagos boy. Forget what you hear, it is better to die a lion than to live a senile dog.

I let my eyes sweep as far as it can see, searching for you. I know you're not here but love makes us lose all beliefs, convictions. We say it is hope but someplace deep we know the truth.

I see Sinzu for Ipaja yesterday, Atobo says.
I know, I say. We were together yesterday night.
They are playing ludo and I run my hands over the board. Let us start again, let us start again, I say, snatching Atobo’s igbo. A different person would have had his head punched in but they just smile and the board is reset.

I say, I choose blue and I go win this game, who wan bet?

I drop my fifty naira and so do Atobo, Debe, and the last guy standing. I don't know his name. I don't even know his face. I just know he's looking at me like he wants to kill me so I unhook my shorts and dip and rub the naira notes against my prick. If he's a hard guy, he'll punch me. He's a pussy so he spits, picks one naira note and stands to leave.

Why na? Debe says as he jabs me.
The guy wan fuck me. He wan fuck me. You see his face?
I pick the notes and wipe them against my shorts, slap them on the bench. Teebayz joins us and now we are back to four. His beard is sweeping the floor. Fifty naira entry fee, fifty naira entry fee, I shout and Teebayz drops two hundred. Baba Olowo, rich kid, we hail him. Teebayz's parents are pastors who haven't given up on him.

We are on our fourth game when Debe receives a phone call. I have been second three times so I have lost one-fifty. When the call ends, he says, Guys, I get job.

We follow as he walks away. Debe is half Lebanese so he is red under the sun. He is fat and walks slowly so we crowd behind, nudge him with our bodies. He is telling us about his job. A big church in Lawanson is having a special thanksgiving service. It is packed. Cars are parked outside, overflowing to adjoining streets. He’s to jack a few, see what he can get, remit half to his employer.

Lawanson is maybe fifteen minutes away so we walk. The cars are there waiting like Christmas gift. There is no security. We pull off our shirts and singlets and wrap them around our hands, punch the side windows. The glass shatters and showers to the floor in tiny, tiny pieces like something precious. There are two or three with alarms but we open their bonnets and remove the heads of the batteries before anyone is around. Monies in safes and in briefcases and in boots. Phones and laptops, too. Shoes and suits and shirts and although I can't find my size, I find a royal blue shirt that will make you look like a prince. I wear a couple more and feel myself bloat like a king. I will sell them at Kotangora bend-down-select.

Sirens shriek from God knows where and we run and run and don't look back. I don't know who is following until I see a dented blue police truck in front of me and turn and see my guys turning and running. We run through streets bordered by old women who wet the road with dirty water. We run through streets with beer parlors disguised as churches. We run through streets with bad roads even police trucks can’t navigate and we run back to the park.

Ipaja bus, Ipaja bus, I yell because the policemen will come here to look for us.

Atobo is the conductor for a bus going to Ipaja and we troop inside. He hangs onto the doorway and calls for passengers as the bus meanders the traffic zigzagging. Ipaja hundred naira, Ipaja hundred naira, enter with your change.

We are already at Oshodi when Atobo pokes his head in and taps me. It is because of Sinzu you're making us go to Ipaja, abi? he says.

No oo. I smile. The policemen won't look for us in Ipaja na, they won't even pass Mushin.

He gives a knowing nod and the others elbow me and Teebayz calls me ashawo. But I am not a prostitute, only you can make me scour the world. Sinking valleys, mountaintops, what are they but Lego bricks to a man searching for his love?

Ikeja is a sea of people. I try to look over them, but I can’t see where the heads end. Atobo doesn’t start shouting Ipaja, Ipaja, before the commuters begin to rush inside the bus. They push and pull from all angles and he grabs on for dear life. Enter with your two hundred Ipaja, enter with your two hundred. The ones from Ojuelegba start to complain and he tells them to fly off if they don’t like it. Silence. The higher the demand...

It is five hundred Atobo removes from the wad before he hands the driver his money. I say he should have taken more. I tell my guys I’m going to the bank and they say I should call them when I’m done. Ipaja under-bridge is a desert. I walk and walk and pray to God I find you. I don’t know what I’ll do, I don’t care, I’ll let the future unfurl itself. Seeing you is enough for me, what else is there? Do you know what you do to me? Do you?

At the bank there are only civilians. In the park is Habobo. He considers me like I’m a white cockroach, spits on the ground, his fat cheeks bouncing like a bulldog’s. I want to spit on his face but I need his help. (Maybe that is why I want to spit on his face.)

Please na, where Sinzu?
Na Egbeda I see am last.
Egbeda is no-go, my feet wouldn’t dare. Maybe Habobo knows and that’s why he says so.

In Egbeda, they call me adodi, adofuro, and you can just see those malevolent market women with their surrounding feet, slapping hands, burning tires.

I walk back to the bridge and I see Debe and Atobo breaking open a shop. With my palm as a visor over my eyes I search for Teebayz and that’s him trying to bust into a shop with a blue banner that reads BIBLE DEALS EVERY LAST FRIDAY OF THE MONTH in white, in caps just like that. I ask what he’s doing and he says, I want to burn this place down, burn it all to the ground.

There’s a small kiosk by the side of the road. I remember the man who owns it, a stupid Urhobo man who drags out his large prick and pisses on any bus that parks in front of his kiosk. A thin plywood, it is not hard to kick it open. The idiot sells second-hand novels so I carry what I can carry and tear and scatter the rest. I piss on the Mills and Boons, the Harlequins. Is that love, what they do, the tender quivering, is that love? What we have is stiffer, harder, made for fiercer mere men to gods like us? We are the controllers of our fortunes, we decide our own fate. Fuck destiny.

Debe says we should go and sell the clothes at Kotangora but there are no buses and it is only twenty minutes away. So we run, then walk, then run again. I am last with all the books in my hands. It is at Kotangora that Atobo receives a call from his former secondary school mates. They say one of them is celebrating his birthday and they need him to bring skushis. They say they will be at a hotel in Ahmadiyya around five. Ziloc is the name branded on its gates. We don’t know what to do to kill the time as it is just one. I say we should go to Mushin, something always happens in Mushin. I sell all the books for fifty naira each.

We get to Mushin and at GTBank in Olorunshogo, our people are having a meeting. There is our big lemon banner that says National Union of Road Transport Workers (Lagos Branch) falling down. We sit, all four of us, on white plastic chairs. Lolade with the fat yansh and small breasts catwalks toward us with a bucket of doughnuts and hands one to me. Atobo and Teebayz get one each too. She acts like she doesn’t see Debe, walks away. He smiles and look at his fat head expanding. She comes back, hands him two. As she is leaving, he takes his hand and squeezes her yansh.

At the meeting there is plenty igbo and paraga and MC Oluomo is performing. God is faithful because we are just sitting down on our own before somebody starts pressing gutter water into our hands. Good music, good igbo, good everything—closest thing to heaven, really.

Chairman Eba is saying something we aren’t really listening to. Everything is drawing, in slow motion, Eba’s face rounding and squaring, thinning and longing, when we start hearing noise coming from our back. We look and no one has to tell us it is our friend–Trouble we are looking at in her ugly face. Legs have started moving before anything even happens. I am in a keke on my way to Ladipo and bang bang. I am sitting beside the rider in the front. A bullet tears through the black nylon that is the back windshield, and the glass in front, right in front of my face, between my two eyes, is its exit. I feel my forehead, my face, my neck. No blood, no nothing. I don’t understand. I look to the rear, back to the front. I look at the five people squeezed into the seat behind me and then the tricycle rider beside me. I put my face to the tiny hole on the windshield. Cracks adorn the glass, stretch out, overlap to form angel wings.

It is in the tricycle that one black boy with his yellow teeth tells us Casa, our secretary, at Jibowu, slapped and pushed to the floor one boy who was rude to him. The boy leaves and returns with his people and they break Casa’s legs. Casa comes to Mushin to rally boys up and they go back and shoot and kill two of the Jibowu boys.

At Ladipo I see Teebayz buying roasted corn, we call Debe who says he’s at LUTH. When he says LUTH, I want to die because what is he doing at the hospital? But he tells us, I’m fine, I’m fine, the bastard okada rider just rode his motorcycle here and evaporated.

It is around four and we are meeting at Olosha, under the awning of Texaco petrol station. We decide to go to Ziloc, but where is money? We are going to have to take two buses to get to Ahmadiyya. First option is maybe to go to Ipaja first then to Ahmadiyya. Or Oshodi first then a bus to Agbado and we’ll get off at Ahmadiyya. Getting a bus to Oshodi is easy so that is the answer.

All the buses already have conductors so we jump and cling to the back of a bus as it drives off. The rays of the sun bounce off the roof of the bus, fumes floating, blurring everything in front. Clouds bunch up against the horizon like cotton balls. Oshodi is already bristling with people, all we have to do is move against the crowd, dip our hands into a few bags and pockets, snatch necklaces off necks, tear earrings off ears. All my earrings end up being panda so bye-bye they go. But both Debe and Teebayz get enough money that we take a bus and buy Coke and Gala. The bus almost runs over a little boy and his sister at Super and we fling our Coke bottles at them from the window, shout, Use the footbridge next time oloshi.

Atobo is already at Ziloc when we get there. They have this nice blue swimming pool the color of clear skies, a snooker table, and a television with football on. He tells us he came straight from the meeting and stood at Ahmadiyya. His friends are butti children, with fresh cheeks and soft hands. I wink at one with a dimple and thick thighs and look at him smiling like somebody is tickling him. Atobo’s supplier is nowhere around yet but there’s igbo but no Rizla. I forage into my pockets and fish the only one I have out. Atobo swaggers to a group of boys in yellow and asks if they have any to spare. See their furtive glances, this is power. He returns with two. We smoke and talk about the meeting. Atobo says if he had waited, he’d have killed at least five of those guys. I say I’d have killed ten. Teebayz tells us we’re all pussies who run at the first sight of real trouble and I grab his neck in my palms and ask, Who’s the pussy now, ehn, who’s the pussy?

We want to swim but they say the pool closed at four. The boys offer to buy asun and we say, Sure. All I’ve eaten is one doughnut, half a corn and one Gala and one Coke. Even if my stomach is full, who refuses free food? We play table tennis but are too stoned and the ball is too light and just floating around so all we do is laugh. Around eight the supplier arrives and with him igbo, sk, monkey tail, dongoyaro, crack and everyone’s favorite hero. We take everything except hero. Sk is my favorite and it smells like shit. I am high already and I am happy. The supplier sets his spoon on fire, sucks hero into his needle, slaps his upper arm and jabs himself. The plunger goes down majestically and the big sun rises in his eyes. He sits on the chair and reclines its back against the iron railing. He brings his legs up and crosses them on the table, and in the way his lips droop then curve into a smile I see a happiness I am sure I will never know. I want to be like him, to soar, to get lifted. But I am afraid once I start to fly, I will never stop and will keep going higher and higher until the sun will singe my wings and I will fall from the zenith of the world and I will hit the ground and and and...

The boy I winked at drops something into my pocket. He walks like he’s a swiveling chair. He stops, takes off his clothes. His fat thighs, the way the meat bounces. He turns and there is the bulge in his boxers, belly button the size of a baby’s fist, hair everywhere, broad thick shoulders, a smile on his face. I’m still staring when he jumps into the pool and he’s looking at me too. He doesn’t know that he’s wasting his time because he’s not you.

We are back in Mushin and right there at Olorunshogo is a crowd throwing sachet water and buckets full of water at one another. I don’t know how it started or why it’s happening, but I see a truck ferrying bags of sachet water turned sideways on the road there in the middle. The road turns red yellow then green with the traffic light. I run to get maybe two bags and they are like missiles against my skin. I am laughing and I am in pain, suffering and smiling. They hit me and explode and I am soaked. I can feel my body dripping like I am the stone and all around me is the spring. I am gushing as I am running with the bag. I get to cover and I start to throw at anyone, everyone I see. Then you are here, right beside me, reaching for inside my bag of water. I want to hold you but the world is against us and we are throwing and throwing, fighting for our lives, our love. The sachets explode on the floor, explode on bodies, I am blinded by water as the air around us hums. My tongue tastes minty. What would it take for this to last forever, what would it take for you to stay with me in this moment? Why don’t they see that this is perfect, why do you refuse to see this is how it’s meant to be? People begin to disappear and it is time to find sleep. Tomorrow is Monday and everyone knows what that means. Oshodi at five a.m., Oshodi at five p.m., Oshodi is always a goldmine. Thousands and thousands of people starting and closing their day, herding where the shepherd calls. You take me by the hand, pull me to find a bus retiring for the night. We climb into the front seat, your hands holding steady to mine, your head on my shoulder. You smell like a day of hard work. Inside my pockets I find wet naira notes, a piece of paper with smudged ink. You ask, What is that? and I tell you, A boy gave me his number. You grab the paper and there it goes, sailing out the window, a curse, away into the sea, far from us.

Beside the railway tracks, we find a parked station wagon. It is purple in the silver moonlight, inside it smelling like a bakery. I refuse to let the day end so I exert no force as we push the wagon forward. I turn my back to it, look at your face, your arms, your gripping palms, you. I off the royal blue shirt, hang it wet on your pushing arms, and you dip those hands inside your pocket, hand me a big gold mallam ring. You’re enough, you’re enough, you’re always enough and so forward the car goes. I just discovered you and where is the time to study you, know you, scour your plateaus, comb your crevices, do more than this finding you in snatches, the grooves tucked around your face, the nevi scattered above your left ear, the bumpy stitches bisecting your ribs, the circles of your thighs, the bullet-graze above your knee before rest takes you away from me? But I know you can only sift through life’s offerings, hunt what exists, nothing more, so inside I go and fold into you because this is all we have.