Before we traveled to the polling stations where we would work as ad hoc officers, before we rode to the local government headquarters with a policeman we had flagged down and then on to the collation center in a small bus the local government had hired, we first made our usual pilgrimage to the store of the man who gave us use of his generator to charge our phones. The Corpers’ Lodge, our interim home atop the hill overlooking the school where we served, was prone to power outages that lasted for weeks, and we were in the middle of one such long, lightless stint. In exchange for the storekeeper’s generosity, we let him pretend he was one of us. He joked with the boys and was handsy with us women—slapping a thigh, rubbing a shoulder, sneakily copping feels, making noise about looking for another wife. This bad behavior was executed with uninhibited nonchalance, as if you’d be the prude to complain at the minor excesses of such a good-natured man.
That night I was the only woman with the four boys because Rukayat, whom we called Alhaja on account of her uniform of green and grey hijabs, had stopped visiting the man’s store. I, too, wished to avoid him, but the boys insisted I be there. Once, they had gone to charge their phones without Alhaja and I, and returned to tell us the man had been cranky like one who just lost a big bet. He kicked them out after thirty minutes, phones barely charged. Alhaja and I thought it was silly that our harassment was the precondition for his charity, but saw no productive way to protest that banal injustice. That night though, I had no choice but to go to the store with the boys, because a month prior, at the training for ad hoc election officers, we had been instructed to arrive at our polling areas with some pocket money for food, to accept no gifts from villagers, and to keep our phones charged in case we needed to call for help. No one had asked why the government was sending us into a situation where carrying out our duties as election officials might result in emergency. Perhaps the officials were aware of the insanity of our situation and had decided we were expendable, a regrettable cost in this pretend democracy. We were being inducted into a unifying facet of Nigerian existence: one day you wake up and discover your death is part of the plan of some depraved person in power.
So, two nights before election day, I sat with four of my colleagues and our drunk host around a fly-infested table spotted with sploshes of beer and condensation rings, waiting for the bars to fill up on our phones and power banks. Three of the guys were drinking too, talking about the English premier league with our host. Wisdom, the economics teacher who schooled at Uniben, supported Manchester United. He was tall and big, a sabi boy for whom pleasure was a religion. His brain was programmed for filth, and nonsense spewed out of his mouth with unnerving regularity, yet he always had a charming smile on his face. When Alhaja and I had decided we were no longer interested in being groped by the generous store keeper, Wisdom thought we were acting childish and was eager to let us know. “No be just touch?” he said. “Who no like better thing? See your package nah?” He rounded out his hand over his chest as he said this. “Alhaja sef wey dey wrap body for hijab; you no need microscope to take sight wetin she carry.”
Wisdom was five and six with Abbey, who taught mathematics and physics and supported Chelsea. On paper, the two of them were a year apart, but those who know knew that Wisdom was at least five years older. Eze, the last of the drinkers, we called The Law. He was simultaneously the school’s government teacher and a lawyer in a private practice at the state capital; he had made a deal with the school principal and only taught classes on Fridays. He, too, was a vocal supporter of Chelsea.
Tinuke, the fourth boy and my English co-teacher, was the kind of viceless Christian I used to distrust. No alcohol, no drugs, doesn’t even curse. Our story started with contempt and ended with love. In the middle of that arc, in the days when we first became friendly, I would try to get him to take sips out of my drinks, which he always refused, smiling. I told him even Jesus turned water into wine. He told me the Bible calls wine a mocker and those seduced by it fools. Who knew! I once tried to convince him that drinking Coca-Cola like he did was worse than alcohol, so he stopped taking soda and thanked me later, saying he had always needed motivation to quit. He was irritatingly conscientious in a way that sometimes made me want to be good, and other times made me want to trouble him until I found the limits of his virtue. That evening, while the others debated football, we talked about the A Song of Fire and Ice series. He was telling me about the debts GRR Martin owed to Tolkien. I never read Tolkien as a child and was already wishing for my bed, barely grasping a word of what he was saying, but his nerdy enthusiasm was a delight to watch.
Night fell. We climbed our way uphill, returning to the Lodge with fully-charged devices, the dim light of the night sky struggling to penetrate the deep shadows cast along the stony path by the school’s dilapidated buildings. Tinuke was walking by my side, ahead of the three boys who were still arguing about football. On our way to the store, he had taken two large paint buckets to the well at the bottom of the hill on which our Corpers’ Lodge sat and filled them with water, which he now carried effortlessly uphill as if they were paper-weight. I held his phone and torch light. I knew I was going to take one of those buckets from him at the top of the hill, and had done this enough that he must also have known it was going to happen.
I had been the only English teacher in the entire school for a full term until Tinuke showed up and was given two of the three senior classes to teach, leaving me with mostly junior ones. It was a demotion, and I was angry until I wasn’t. When I first reported to the school as my place of primary assignment, I had asked its boorish principal to reject me. I wanted to live in the state capital for health reasons, and knew of deals she had made with other corpers, who exchanged money for freedom from a year of national servitude. I was mildly asthmatic then and still carried an inhaler, even though it had been six years since I had an attack; I thought I had a chance of convincing her to let me go.
“So what do you want me to do for you?” she asked after I entered the dust-filled hovel she called an office, one side filled with stacks of unused textbooks and the other with hoes and cutlasses caked in mud. I did a little curtesy, showed her my inhaler, and explained why I needed to return to my home in Ibadan.
“What do you have to offer?” She was breathing loudly and fanning herself; the heat in that office rose, suffocating. I registered the smell of camphor and freshly-cut grass, a heady combination that transported me to my mother’s bedroom and the fields of my secondary school, to days when I wanted to be the kind of girl who could wrestle freedom from her mother’s tight ọ̀já. I asked how much the principal wanted, going against my mother’s never-answer-a question-with-a-question rule, because I had no idea just how much my escape was worth in Naira. “My friend, get out of my front,” she cackled, doing her best Patience Ozokwor imitation as she stamped the letter approving my posting.
The other girl, with whom I had waited outside the office, made her an offer of 100k right away, which she accepted. She would later joke, after one of those useless teachers meetings that followed our morning assembly sessions, where she screamed instructions and barked prayers, that she was always going to reject that girl anyway, because she was a graduate in mass communications and I had studied English, and she wasn’t ready to have two women teaching English in her school. “No balance,” she said, shaking her oversized head and twisting her mouth as if her mind had bitten on the thought and it tasted like unripe àgbálùmọ̀.
Tinuke brought the balance she needed. He cared for the students in a way I never would, and they were lucky to have him for the single term he was with them. He was the kind of person who went to class even when his recurring migraines flared up, week-long episodes that kept him otherwise marooned in his room. He would sit in front of students with sunshades on, and instruct them to talk in whispers. I once asked why he was punishing himself this way, when the rest of us needed no excuses to skip class. He said it was because he was behind schedule with his lesson plan. And why was he behind on his lesson plan when he was always teaching? Turns out he had devoted himself to backfilling holes in those kids’ educations.
Now, behind us, as we walked up the hill, the passionate arguments of the other three guys about men chasing balls became too much for me. I turned, about to insult them, but noticed fast-moving threads under their feet that lit up like Christmas lights under the rays of my torch.
“Snakes!” I cried, and the boys began to prance like baby goats. I was horrified; Tinuke and I had walked over those tiny snakes too. Abbey had picked race at the word “snake,” his lanky body flailing uphill like a helium mascot as he sprinted past us, his shouts of “Blood of Jesus!” resounding around the hill. The Law stomped hard, particularly determined to kill as many of the little snakes as he could. When we got to the lodge, he took off his sneakers and showed us fragments of snake carcasses lining the soles.
“Oh god,” I said, impressed and repulsed by the taboo mosaic of snake entrails. “We are not supposed to kill them.”
“This is not Idemili,” The Law said, his words catching under labored breath. “That is the place where they are not supposed to kill snakes.”
“It’s actually just pythons,” Wisdom said.
“I don’t think anything will happen to us if we kill snakes, even in Idemili,” Tinuke said when we had all simmered down.
“So, the law of the land doesn’t apply to you, abi?” I asked.
“It only matters if you out yourself,” Tinuke continued. “These taboos are meant to control people. If a python is killed in the forest and no one is around to hear it…”
Tinuke was a walking contradiction. There was a Jesus-shaped hole in his otherwise logically-consistent, reasonable, science-oriented brain. He refused to believe in superstitions because he claimed he was protected by Christ! I usually bathed in the outhouse behind our lodge before sunrise, before it became soiled by the boys, and every morning, without fail, I would hear his fervent whispers of prayer leaking out of his window. Why anyone that young, intelligent, and handsome would wake up every day to utter combative prayers was a peculiarly Nigerian mystery, decipherable only after many decades of life in this country. I had personally not prayed like that since I was a child, accompanying my parents to church revivals where preachers led us in screaming matches against imagined enemies. I could not make out what Tinuke said in those mornings, but I understood the cadence of his daily supplication.
**
As we left the school the day before elections, students lined up by their windows to wave at us. We were dressed in our uniform: white tops and khakis, our bags filled with what we felt we needed for the two days we were scheduled to work in the state elections. One of the students ran out of class to hug Alhaja. A MIDI version of Like Toy Soldiers played in my head and I could feel myself wanting to both shed tears and laugh my ass off. That parade of impish demons wasn’t sad to see us go; they were happy for the free days ahead, as we were the committed part of their teaching staff. Tinuke did a terrible royal family imitation as we waved back at them, all of us oblivious to the finality of those moments, mistaking full stops for running commas and ellipses.
There weren’t many cars on the road that day; it was the Friday before elections, and people had already traveled to vote. Usually, when we wore our whites and khakis and waited by the lonely road that went past our village, people would stop to give us lifts. Even those with small cars offered to take us in batches to our destinations. We were beloved in a way I could not appreciate, especially during those despondent days when I mourned my inability to move back to Ibadan. The local folks understood our part in their children’s education and were eager to show us kindness; we were a protected class. But on that day preceding the elections, we waited for nearly 45 minutes. Eventually, a policeman in a sleek Peugeot pulled up and asked us all to get into his car if we didn’t mind. Wisdom and Abbey stacked in the front seat while Tinuke, Alhaja, The Law, and I sardined ourselves into the back. The policeman was a good-looking, well-spoken Northerner. He had advanced degrees in statistics, and spoke with that hybrid Hausa-Queens English accent that would make anyone swoon. I didn’t hear most of what he said because I was too busy staring at his mouth in the rear-view mirror. He was encouraging the boys to join the force. He ignored Alhaja and me.
“We need educated people,” he said. “People trained in GIS, in statistics, in criminal law.” At a checkpoint, another policeman pointed his gun at the car before noticing the uniform and quickly stiffening into a salute. “See?” the fine man said. “We give guns to people with low IQs in this country and expect them not to misbehave, when it is proven that anyone with a gun is already going to act with less intelligence. We are being policed by a force of armed chimpanzees.”
The boys laughed. I joined reluctantly, smarting at the comparison of men to beasts but also knowing I had no sympathies for policemen, the fine man driving us included. Tinuke seemed genuinely interested in what the man was selling.
The policeman dropped us off at the expressway intersection that led to the local government headquarters, and sped off in his Peugeot as we waved enthusiastically. Right as we alighted, I got into Tinuke’s face. “Do you really want to become a policeman?”
“No,” he said. “I am going into short service.”
“What?” I had expected him to reply with a joke.
“Don’t act so surprised. You think I can’t make it in the military?”
On the contrary, I thought he was more than capable. I was jealous of his ability to do with his body things that matched the beauty of his mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about his legs: They were stocky and strong, and with them he walked like a hulking baby until he got on the football field. In fact, it was while standing under the tree, watching him play with the other guys, that I first started to like him. I witnessed his sometimes-tentative movements transform into an elegant dance as he jinked between people, crouched low to gain support, or stood slim to evade tackles. He dribbled with grace and shot the ball with force. A goal! He bear-hugged and lifted Wisdom, who protested being handled like a baby. I started to laugh. He continued his celebration, running down the pitch with arms spread wide like he was ready to ride the air. The question wasn’t whether he could succeed in the military, but rather what business a special human being like him had in the Nigerian armed forces.
“Of course you can,” I said. “But why the military?” I still staked ground in his personal space; we were waiting for traffic to quell so we could cross to the other side of the expressway and continue our journey. He told me some story of an uncle, a general he admired for his stern forthrightness within his family of sluggards. I was confused by his tone. His assessment of his folks had been delivered with an emotionless meanness that mismatched the kindness with which I’d seen him treat everyone, even difficult students.
“Don’t be so harsh on your family,” I said.
“It’s just the truth.”
“So you stopped trying to see good in them?”
“I tried,” he said.
“So you stopped trying?”
“No. But now, I just pray.”
The flow of traffic did not stop entirely, so Wisdom slalomed to the middle of the road and ordered oncoming vehicles to come to a halt, holding out his hands like a traffic warden. He was part of the Federal Road Safety Commission Community Development Service Team, and was eager to show off. Our colleagues started to walk across the express, while Tinuke and I stayed rooted where we were.
“Hey,” Wisdom shouted. “You for carry mattress nah.” He accompanied the chastisement with a cackle that irritated me.
I raised my palm at him and mouthed “waka” as Tinuke and I crossed the road. I had no response to Tinuke’s comment about prayer; for me, talking to God was consigned to a past that continued to recede.
**
In an uncharacteristic show of government efficiency, small buses were waiting for us at the local government headquarters, ready to take us to the collation center on the southern tip of the state, about two hours from our base, where we were to disperse to our polling stations. Manning the buses was the Local Government Inspector, a man whose name I never learned, and only referred to as LGI. Today he was stationed at the gate to the headquarters, in his wheelchair, with an umbrella up over his head to shield him from the sun. LGI was a slight man, body like a stick drawing except for his well-veined forearms. He wore an oversized short-sleeved dress shirt that slouched against his thin frame and made him look even smaller. He had a spectacularly sharp tongue, had no qualms about wielding it, and on most payroll days, when we all gathered at the headquarters to be counted, you could hear him cutting into hapless corpers with colorful insults that made my heart sing.
Wisdom was our liaison officer, so he paused to confer with LGI while we piled into the bus the man had wordlessly gestured towards after we had greeted him obsequiously. Abbey and The Law sat on the first row, Alhaja and I on the second, and Tinuke sat alone in the back, reading the bible on his phone. We left the front seat by the driver empty for Wisdom, who soon joined us and told us LGI wasn’t happy with us because we were late. The man had lost his voice, so couldn’t bark at us as was his custom, and we laughed as Wisdom relayed that message in mimicry of the LGI’s dried up voice.
On our way out, at the roundabout just after the headquarters, a young woman flagged us down, and Wisdom instructed the driver to pick her up. We were trying to return the favors other people had paid us on those days we traveled from the lodge to the local government headquarters. The young woman joined Tinuke in the back seat. From the front of the bus, the rest of us watched as she asked him questions about what he was reading, and saw how she touched his arm while responding that she, too, loved reading the bible. He leaned towards her as he asked her what her favorite book was, and they continued in this manner of old friends reconnecting. Wisdom called attention to the love blossoming in the back seat. “So the pastor isn’t ashamed of dipping in a fresh honeypot,” he whispered.
“He just doesn’t like to play home games,” Abbey said.
The young woman laughed at something Tinuke said and threw her head back like they were actors in a skit. “Ah,” Wisdom added, “look at him turn to Zizou in an away match.”
I laughed with those fools but was jealous of how quickly this local woman had pulled Tinuke out of his shell. Even after I stopped resenting him for taking my job, becoming his friend had been a much tougher project. When he wasn’t talking about Jesus, he was great company. But he loved to talk about his Lord and Savior, and I didn’t need to know more about that man from Galilee.
The young woman was pretty. She had a mole on her left cheek that stood out against her smooth light skin, and the braids on her head framed her round face like a halo. Before alighting at her stop, she gave Tinuke her phone number, and the boys cheered as she closed the door of the bus. I relished the blush of embarrassment on his face.
**
At the collation center, I sat with Tinuke and his Jesus friends from Orientation Camp. Most of the friends I had made in my own three weeks of orientation had secured redeployments. At camp, we had moved as a clique, eager to express our disdain for the appalling state of the camp: we were forced to shit in farmlands adjacent the campgrounds because the toilets were always brimming with excreta, ate bland food sold by rude vendors, and had to dodge horny army men who treated orientation camp like hunting grounds. I thought we were all in it together, until they all relocated out of state, back to their home cities, and I was left to spectate their happy lives from my phone, thumbing through social media updates, jealous of their weekly soirees and resentful of the country for making me waste a full year of my young life in a village. I was spending weekends at the state capital, drinking my way through razz parties and occasionally meeting up with Tinuke’s Christians. They all lived in what they called “family house.” I visited once, and it was only a little better than a refugee camp: they slept on the floor in common rooms, cooked their food in large cauldrons, ate on schedule, and had mandatory morning and evening devotions. They also had rules that covered their dressing and how they related across genders. No smoking, no drinking, and women were only allowed to wear trousers if it was the green khaki we were all given at camp.
The members of the Jesus crew who showed up at the collation center were an overly enthusiastic bunch; they shared news of their lives like they could break into song any minute. It was apparent that Tinuke was well-liked, especially by the women who lingered around him to chat in turns.
“Rugged, we missed you at the last rugged,” said Debola, a petroleum engineer who had schooled in Ibadan.
“What?” I asked. They all smiled, then Tinuke explained to me that he was in charge of evangelism for the local government and was therefore nicknamed “Rugged,” after rural rugged, the group’s tag for their outreach programs.
Debola did not stick around—she and some other members of the crew had planned a prayer session. Tinuke and I were left with Grace, one of the lingering women, who had taken particular interest in me. She was cute, shorter. She had thick lush eyebrows and a Close-Up smile and interrogated me like a personality questionnaire come to life. She had traveled most of the state for evangelism, she said, and had macabre stories to share about each place. She knew how to grab attention and not let go, connecting one anecdote to another seamlessly, punctuating them with her laughter. She was too loud. I listened, nodding, pitying the victims of her proselytizing—they stood no chance. She was a lawyer by training, but would have been a great writer—I told her this and another full-bodied laugh escaped her mouth. She said she liked taking photos and had portraits of the members of their Jesus family on her phone. She showed me the pictures. The photographs were good. She was good. Everyone in those portraits looked into the camera like they were staring into the eyes of a lover.
Lawyer Girl Grace made Tinuke promise to invite her to our lodge soon so she could come hang out with me. Of course, I was her ticket to Tinuke. Maybe everyone who met him wanted to fuck him. That thought made me laugh at myself, and when she asked why I was laughing, I said how ironic it was that my friends from camp hadn’t offered to come see me and yet she, a stranger, had.
“Of course,” she said. “I think we can be friends.” I almost believed her.
That night, we slept on flattened cardboard boxes on the floors of empty offices at the collation center. I was sandwiched between Debola and Grace, and both of them were heavy snorers. How did anyone survive in the family house? Around midnight, soldiers fired shots into the air. They said they were warning would-be miscreants to stay away, but the only apparent danger to our lives was the guns they wielded. Their shots saved me from the symphony of snores, and by the time things calmed down I, too, was able to sleep. Before sleeping, I texted my mum: “You know I love you.”
“Are you okay?” she replied. I did not respond. Four hours later, I woke up to another text: “Please take care of yourself o. Your father and I are praying for you.”
**
In the morning, we were mobilized to our polling units. Mine was a stall that smelled like its original purpose had been to sell vegetables. My interpreter was also an ad hoc official, brought in from another part of the state where the dialect was markedly different from the locals we were serving. He could understand them, but was nearly as useless as I in communicating the rules of the electoral process. Right after the elections started, three men accompanied by policemen approached my polling unit. They introduced themselves as agents of the three major political parties. One of them was a surprisingly agile, round mass of flesh. “We have already agreed on the result of this polling unit,” he said. He was flanked by the other two regularly-sized agents. Their hierarchy matched their size: he spoke, and they bobbed their heads beside him. “Just do your normal thing and give us the ballots that remain. We will not disturb you at all.”
I had no objections, considering the policemen who were supposed to protect us were already on their side. The interpreter told me this town had the reputation of always voting for one party. And although other parties had agents in attendance, they all worked towards the success of the ruling party. It wasn’t a question of who would win, but how large the margin could be. The interpreter spoke as if the wisdom of the arrangement was apparent. I nodded. Questioning grown men in this country was like surrendering to a tooth extraction, and I could never change their minds, so I know to keep my opinion to myself, especially when outnumbered, as I was in that shed where people milled in and out to cast their votes, each meaningless act infused with pretend purpose.
After polling ended, I left the station to the control of the agents, and took a short walk with my interpreter down a row of unoccupied houses located in that middle-of-nowhere. I had heard that people from this part of the country build houses in their hometowns as buffer against future alienation, a vestigial practice that followed from the civil war. Some were mansions, gilded and painted in bold colors. There were more modest houses too, but even those had huge fences fortified with curling electric wires. I dialed my mother, but my phone was out of service. On our way back to the polling unit, a lone bar returned to my phone, and I received a notification: One hundred and fifty thousand naira had been transferred into my bank account. Back at the polling unit, I asked the agents who sent me the money.
“For your effort and your beauty,” the round man said. His colleagues concurred with laughter.
Later that evening, we all gathered at the collation center, sharing stories of our experience. Wisdom bragged about the money he had received from the men at his polling unit: fifty thousand naira. Tinuke had refused to help the agents. He conducted the elections just as we had been instructed and struck out all unused ballots.
“Mr. Pastor,” Wisdom said, “it’s like you don’t need money.”
We all knew he was the kind of person who always did things the right way. He stayed in the school library we had both been assigned to and never left a minute early, even though students rarely visited its four dusty shelves. The rest of us taught our classes and retired to the lodge to rest, but he considered it his Christian duty to abide by the principal’s demand that we remain in our offices until evening. Wisdom kept mocking Tinuke and some of the other guys joined in on the hazing. Tinuke laughed at their jokes. He seemed indifferent to the discomfort his piety brought to the party and benevolently looked past the moral inferiority leaking out of the jokers.
One of the policemen came to where we were gathered and asked Tinuke to follow him. The man’s voice was sharp, containing none of the joviality we corpers usually enjoyed from men of the force. Worried about Tinuike, I also followed the policeman to a shed at the back of the collation center, where most of his colleagues were gathered.
“Who is this? Your girlfriend?” The man talking was clearly the head of the operation.
The officers laughed. The collation center was a sprawling complex in the middle of a proper forest, filled with barely used offices and abandoned vehicles. The shed where the policemen had gathered was behind the building where, earlier in the evening, we had submitted our polling unit results. It was a bamboo structure, covered with dried palm fronds. On the floor around the shed were cartons of beer, packets of Nasco biscuits, cigarette stubs. It was a party peopled by stinking men.
Their leader started to address Tinuke. “This is not what life is all about,” he said. “Do you think we don’t all care about this country? Soon you and your small madam will have a family and you will understand that what is behind six is more than seven.”
I was scared for Tinuke. The men were drunk. The only time I ever felt the police were my friends was when I was dressed in the white shirt and khaki pants. I had ridden in the back of their trucks many times, and in front too, laughing through their awkward stories and constant flirtations. But at that moment, in that shed, I felt such malevolent energy emanating from them. Even as their boss delivered his avuncular speech, some of the men were shouting threats in Yoruba, telling Tinuke how foolish he was.
I got the gist pretty quick. Because he hadn’t cooperated and handed over the unused ballots, no police officer assigned to that polling unit received their own bribes from the party agents, who had apparently made a final offer of two hundred thousand naira to Tinuke. The policeman now said they’d had to convince the agents not to “deal with” him, and wanted Tinuke to offer them special thanks for saving him.
Tinuke thanked them but didn’t sound remorseful or disturbed by their threats. In the end, they let us go. As we walked away from the shed, my body began to shiver. I held on to Tinuke’s arm, and under my skin next to his body, I could feel his heart, steady.
“Do you want to die?” I asked. Tinuke did not respond, so I kept talking to stop my shivers. “Those men are ready to waste you. Is it a sin to do what you can to stay alive? Or does the Bible say thou shall not allow policemen to rig elections.” Tinuke laughed, and I wanted to punch him, to pass to him the anxiety in my body, the appropriate fear anyone should feel in the presence of Nigerian policemen.
I called my mother, and told her about what Tinuke had done.
“That young man is the future our country needs,” she said.
“The future of our country is risking his life for nothing.”
“And what do you know about righteousness?” she asked.
It had been nearly two years since, in a fit of mistaken chutzpah, I revealed to her that I was no longer a Christian. This was during the holidays, right before I began my final year in school. Since then, every conversation returned to my lack of faith. “I know the righteous will not inherit Nigeria,” I said.
“You this child,” she said. “May heavenly father deliver you.”
I laughed and told her I would call her when I returned to the lodge. I heard her saying, “Your father wants to speak to you,” as I cut the call.
**
The next time I called my mother, Tinuke had gone missing. When it was time to leave the collation center and return to our lodge, he had stayed behind with his Jesus friends, who had decided to hold an impromptu revival service the day after the election. It was Grace’s idea. The other Christians lived in the state capital and Tinuke was the only one returning to our village. I had wanted to wait with him so he wouldn’t be alone on the road, but he promised he would be fine. That was the last thing he said to me. “Go. I’ll be fine.”
I hopped into one of the trucks, pressed between policemen. Wisdom, Abbey, The Law, and Alhaja sat behind me. The boys were chugging beers given to them by the policemen, who seemed happy today to share their bounty. Alhaja and I sat through the trip in silence. I was tired; she looked uncomfortable.
Tinuke had walked away with the rest of the Christians, talking animatedly as they shrunk into the horizon. He did not return to the lodge on Monday and calls to his cellphone returned the voice of a woman saying again and again, “The number you have called is switched off,” until her sing-song message became the soundtrack to our panic. We knew little about his family, had no one to call, and since he was one of the few people we knew who kept their life away from Facebook, searches for his name on the internet returned no relevant information. With no one but the local government officials to inform, we made the required calls and bore the burden of his absence on our own.
**
One evening, at the dawn of my friendship with Tinuke, the guys in the lodge traveled to the state capital for a big party. I would have attended, too, if my period hadn’t started with a paralyzing vengeance. I had been in bed all day, hugging my hot water bottle and moaning. I missed things I did not normally value: my mother’s throaty laugh, and the way light caught on the walls of my childhood bedroom in the evenings, glimmering like a sea of crystals. I even thought of my final-year boyfriend, an inveterate liar who gave the best hugs, and wished he were there to squeeze me hard as he had always been eager to do on demand.
Before the boys left, I went to the men’s part of the lodge, entered Tinuke’s room, and told him I needed someone to cuddle me. I must have looked a sorry sight, tears in my eyes, snot nearly dripping from my nose. He put down his Bible and told me to come. My sore body fit into his as he wrapped his arms around me. I started to sob quietly. I felt his penis harden through his shorts against the small of my back, and then soften again, and I smiled through tears as I drifted to sleep.
When I woke up in the middle of the night, I was alone, covered with a wrapper that smelled so strongly of him. For a moment, I allowed myself to forget where I was or what had transpired. I was captured in momentary bliss that had no real referent—absent thought, or even bodily feeling. Then I heard Tinuke’s voice, meaningless words ratcheting out in staccato rhythm as he prayed in tongues. He was out on the football field. Suddenly, I felt a strange remorse at having spent the night next to him. I was not sorry that I had sought comfort; I had accepted that I would always rely on the capacity of others to get over the inconvenience of me. I felt sorry, not about his arousal, but for all of the things we desire and do not permit ourselves to indulge. I returned to my room before the other boys returned at daybreak.
**
When the state officials called us to say they found Tinuke’s body, Wisdom let out a loud plaintive cry. I had never seen so much emotion pour out of a man. We had been having morning prayers since Tinuke went missing, and even Alhaja had joined us. With each prayer session, we renewed our faith that somehow he was still alive—that God wouldn’t do this to one of his finest soldiers.
I broke the news of his death to Lawyer Girl Grace. She told me about the last time she saw Tinuke: They had left him by the side of the road. He had insisted they leave, that he would be able to get to our village on his own. When we were done reminiscing, she asked if she could pray with me, but I told her I had to go. We had invented a faith to carry us through the days when Tinuke was still only missing; now, that faith was nothing but an inconvenience.
The officials told us to spend the last three months of our service year with our families and only to return to receive our certificates. At the passing out parade, The Law, Alhaja, and I reunited under a tree by the entrance to the orientation camp grounds, shielded from the sun’s fury while we spoke of the surreal end to our time at the Corpers’ Lodge. We had become strangers to one another, an odd trio clutching the paper evidence of our time in service close to our changed bodies: The Law’s belt was straining under the weight of his substantial belly, and Alhaja had replaced her hijab with a simple scarf wrapped tight around her hairline, showing cheekbones more severe than I remembered. None of us had heard anything from state officials about Tinuke; we had neither authority nor desire to ask questions. While we waited, The Law called Abbey and Wisdom, trying to convince them to join us so we could take a final picture together. I watched him smile and joke with the other guys, felt a desperate urge to weep, and told Alhaja I needed to grab something from a vendor by the main road, where I entered a bus and never returned.
During one of those months after we left the lodge, but before we returned to receive our certificates, Chinasa, one of my students, called me. She was a brilliant girl who loved Tinuke, and one of the worst gossips I have ever known. She told me about the new corpers brought in to replace us. “None of them know English like you,” she said, then sighed like an old woman recounting her youth. “None of them nice like Master Tinu.”
At the start of our service year, when we had just arrived at the school on the hill and I was seeking a solution for how depressed I felt because I couldn’t successfully escape from that middle-of-nowhere, I started a journal, hoping to spark my own interest in my new life in an unfamiliar place by taking note of beautiful things. Now, I have tried and failed to banish the details of that year from my mind. I close my eyes and it comes rushing back like a celestial vision: pawpaw trees whose delayed, synchronized fruition led to weeks of continuous feasting; the lone guava tree whose flash season gifted us just one edible fruit, which we all split, the other fruits lost to impatient kids who couldn’t wait for the deep green to change color; the red bulbous fruits of the cashew tree that continued to ripen hourly right until our departure; students eager to translate our names into their language and ever-ready to use our inability to communicate in their tongue to their roguish advantage; the rundown lodge at the top of the hill, shielded from the ruins of the classrooms below by a row of dogoyaro trees whose leaves turned the ground cheerful gold in the dry season; even the bathroom behind the lodge, made with corrugated sheets, which overlooked the steep sidehill dotted with jagged shrubs that harbored lizards. In the evening you could stand by the lodge and see the fading brightness of the sun on one horizon, and the crispy outline of the moon stuck on the other, both holding the day in suspension. I could have seduced you with the beauty of that idyllic place, but what is beauty worth in this country that is always trying to kill us?
About the Author:
IfeOluwa Nihinlola is a writer from Ògbómọ̀ṣọ́, Nigeria. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctoral candidate in the Art History Department at Emory University.
*Feature image by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash
Isele Magazine 