Freshwater(2)

We came from somewhere—everything does. When the transition is made from spirit to flesh, the gates are meant to be closed. It’s a kindness. It would be cruel not to. Perhaps the gods forgot; they can be absentminded like that. Not maliciously—at least, not usually. But these are gods, after all, and they don’t care about what happens to flesh, mostly because it is so slow and boring, unfamiliar and coarse. They don’t pay much attention to it, except when it is collected, organized and souled.

By the time she (our body) struggled out into the world, slick and louder than a village of storms, the gates were left open. We should have been anchored in her by then, asleep inside her membranes and synched with her mind. That would have been the safest way. But since the gates were open, not closed against remembrance, we became confused. We were at once old and newborn. We were her and yet not. We were not conscious but we were alive—in fact, the main problem was that we were a distinct we instead of being fully and just her.

So there she was: a fat baby with thick, wet black hair. And there we were, infants in this world, blind and hungry, partly clinging to her flesh and the rest of us trailing behind in streams, through the open gates. We’ve always wanted to think that it was a careless thing the gods did, rather than a deliberate neglect. But what we think barely matters, even being who we are to them: their child. They are unknowable—anyone with sense realizes that—and they are about as gentle with their own children as they are with yours. Perhaps even less so, because your children are just weak bags of flesh with a timed soul. We, on the other hand—their children, the hatchlings, godlings, ?gbanje—can endure so much more horror. Not that this mattered—it was clear that she (the baby) was going to go mad.

We stayed asleep, but with our eyes open, still latched on to her body and her voice as she grew, in those first slow years when nothing and everything happens. She was moody, bright, a heaving sun. Violent. She screamed a lot. She was chubby and beautiful and insane if anyone had known enough to see it. They said she followed her father’s side, the grandmother who was dead, for her dark skin and her thick hair. Saul did not name her after his mother, though, as perhaps another man would have. People were known to return in renovated bodies; it happens all the time. Nnamdi. Nnenna. But when he looked into the wet blackness of her eyes, he—surprisingly for a blind man, a modern man—did not make that mistake. Somehow, Saul knew that whatever looked back out of his child was not his mother, but someone, something else.

Everyone pressed into the air around her, pinching her cheeks and the fatty tissue layered underneath, pulled in by what they thought was her, when it was really us. Even asleep, there are things we cannot help, like pulling humans to us. They pull us too, but one at a time; we are selective like that. Saachi watched the visitors flock around the baby, concern sprouting in her like a green shoot. This was all new. Chima had been so quiet, so peaceful, cool to Saachi’s heat. Disturbed, she looked for a pottu and found one, a dark circle of velvet black, a portable third eye, and she affixed it to the baby’s forehead, on that smooth expanse of brand-new skin. A sun to repel the evil eye and thwart the intentions of wicked people who could coo at a child and then curse it under their breath. She was always a practical woman, Saachi. The odds were good that the child would live. At least the gods had chosen responsible humans, humans who loved her fiercely, since those first few years are when you are most likely to lose them. Still, it does not make up for what happened with the gates.

The human father, Saul, had missed the birth. We never paid him much attention when we were free—he was not interesting to us; he held no vessels or universes in his body. He was off buying crates of soft drinks for the guests while his wife fought us for different liberations. Saul was always that type of man, invested in status and image and social capital. Human things. But he allowed her name and it was later, when we were awake, that we knew that and understood at last why he’d been chosen. Many things start with a name.

After the boy Chima was born, Saul had asked for a daughter, so once our body arrived, he gave it a second name that meant “God answered.” He meant gods answered. He meant that he called us and we answered. He didn’t know what he meant. Humans often pray and forget what their mouths can do, forget that every ear is listening, that when you direct your longing to the gods, they can take that personally.

The church had refused to baptize the child without that second name; they considered her first name unchristian, pagan. At the christening, Saachi was still as thin and angular as London while Saul’s stomach was curving out a little more than it used to, a settled swelling. He wore a white suit with wide lapels, a white tie lying on a black shirt, and he stood watching with his hands clasped as the priest marked the forehead of the baby cradled in his wife’s arms. Saachi peered down through her thick glasses, focusing on the child with a calm seriousness, her white hat pressing on her long black hair, the maroon velvet of her dress severe at the shoulders. Chima stood next to his father in olive khaki, small, his head reaching only up to Saul’s hands. The priest droned on and we slept in the child as the stale taste of blessed water soaked through her forehead and stretched into our realm. They kept calling a man’s name, some christ, another god. The old water beckoned to him and, parallel to us, he turned his head.

The priest kept talking as the christ walked over, scattering borders, dragging a black ocean behind him. He ran his hands over the baby, pomegranate water and honey under his fingernails. She had fallen asleep as Saachi held her and she stirred a little under his touch, her eyelids fluttering. We turned over. He inclined his head, that foam of black curl, that nutshell skin, and stepped back. They had offered her to him and he would accept; he did not mind loving the child. Water trickled into her ear as the priest called her second name, the god’s answer, the one the church had demanded because they didn’t know the first name held more god than they could imagine.