Freshwater(8)

“You may be a chief,” she wrote, “but you are not a god.”

She was correct, even more than she knew. He was not a god. He’d had to pray to one in order to get the Ada; she was not a child he could have created alone. Still, Saachi gave him many chances, windows and windows, ways he could have been worthy. In Malaysia with A?uli, after she got the job offer, Saachi called him.

“What do you think?” she said. “Should I take it? Will you be able to look after the children?”

“Let’s talk about it when you get back,” he said.

So she flew back to Nigeria with the amen, and by then, the Ada, who had never been without them for this long, almost didn’t recognize them. We, however, knew already that forgetting could be protection.

Saul had paid for the trip, and when Saachi told him that the doctors had advised against skin grafts for A?uli’s scar, recommending it be left as it was, Saul hissed. “So it was just a waste of my money, a wasted trip,” he said, and then he walked away.

Saachi looked at his prideful back, then she looked at their bank accounts and at their family and she made a choice. It was easier to get free for the sake of her children than for the sake of herself—she did things for the Ada that Saul would never have lifted a finger to do. We admit, we accepted her because of that. She took the job and left the house at Number Three and as it turned out, she never lived there again.

Our brothersisters rejoiced from the other side—they had succeeded in chasing her away. No god would intervene, because ?gbanje are entitled to their vengeances; it is their nature, they are malicious spirits. Besides, there were many ways to look at what happened. Our brothersisters broke Saachi’s heart, yes, but they also set her free, releasing her from the akwete blanket that Saul had condemned her to. If they had not thrown her last born into the road, she would never have gotten away. They meant to punish her: they took her children, they filled her mouth with sand. But it is only a fool who does not know that freedom is paid for in old clotted blood, in fresh reapings of it, in renewed scarifications. If Saachi did not know this before, then being a god’s surrogate surely taught it to her. Such lessons are never easy.



The next five years of her life were contracted away in Saudi Arabia, and when that contract ended, Saachi called Saul.

“What do you think?” she asked. “Should I come back to Nigeria or should I try London?”

Saul had already left in all the ways that mattered, so it was not surprising that he said nothing, that his mouth was a gray space. Saachi was alone, and she knew that although Saul hated the money she made, he needed it. We thought he was weak; we knew he was chosen only because he would give the Ada her correct names. We did not pay attention to him.

In the face of his grayness, Saachi went to London, just to see what it was like and if, perhaps, she could move them all there. But when a depression seized her, she left and flew back to her deserts, to Saudi. By the time her last contract ended, the human mother had spent ten years there, from Riyadh to Jeddah and, finally, the mountains of Ta’if. She returned to Nigeria once or twice each year with suitcases that smelled cool and foreign. She left behind the sacrifice of three children fastened to an altar with thin sinews, and she would pay the costs of that for the rest of her life.

And this is how you break a child, you know. Step one, take the mother away.





Chapter Four


In the old culture, there would’ve been rites and rituals for you to control the gates.

There were no rites or rituals done to help you control the gates. You are the jewel at the heart of the lotus.




We

All the madnesses, each and every blinding one, they can all be traced back to the gates. Those carved monstrosities, those clay and chalk portals, existing everywhere and nowhere and all at once. They open, things are born, they close. The opening is easy, a pushing out, an expansion, an inhalation: the dust of divinity released into the world. It has to be a temporary channel, though, a thing that is sealed afterward, because the gates stink of knowledge, they cannot be left swinging wide like a slack mouth, leaking mindlessly. That would contaminate the human world—bodies are not meant to remember things from the other side. There are rules. But these are gods and they move like heated water, so the rules are softened and stretched. The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.

We were sent through carelessly, with a net of knowledge snarled around our ankles, not enough to tell us anything, just enough to trip us up. There are many neglects like this—little gods going mad around you, wandering the beaches with matted hair and swollen testicles. Unrecognizable, laughing through brown teeth as they grub through rubbish heaps, breasts stretched and groaning. That’s what it looks like when the flesh doesn’t take, when you can see them rejecting the graft of reality. But sometimes the flesh takes too well, like those that came through the gates and went mad in a much saner, more terrifying way, meeting human cruelty with colliding glee, losing themselves in the stringy red of mortality. They did atrocious and delicious things to torn people, to screaming and sobbing children: they broke and buried bodies, they hid in fathers and husbands, in mothers and cousins, they ripped and they used and they were excited. They took it too far. They took it only a god’s length. For reasons like them, there should be a rule against shoving godspawn into a flesh-ridden cage. But they pull us, the humans, they draw us close. They’re so turgid with potential and yet so empty, with spaces under their skins and inside their marrow, so much room for us to yawn into existence. They can be ridden, marked, anointed, fucked, then, sometimes, left.