The cars don’t make sense to Rita. They never had, even when she was a child. She used to wonder why they were in such a hurry and what about highways encouraged their haste. Whenever she found herself on the wrong side of the express, she held onto her Papa’s (or anyone else’s) hand as tight as she could as they led her through the storm of oncoming vehicles.
She stands there now, at Cele Bus Stop in Lagos, contemplating her fate. Is this the day she finally climbs into a ring, puts on boxing gloves, and takes on a raging 2008 Toyota Corolla or a fire-breathing crimson Lexus, and it hits her so hard it becomes obvious to everyone watching that this isn’t a fair fight? Or that rather than a fight, it is premeditated murder?
She stands there, as far away from the asphalt as geographically possible, a customer’s order in hand. Her phone has been buzzing for thirty minutes now. The man explained over WhatsApp how he had a function to attend in an hour and asked if she’d make it to his location in time. He needs the clothes for the event and can’t go unless he has changed into them.
Rita would have sent a dispatch rider to deliver the items, but she was in the market already, so she opted to save money and do it herself since the location was close by. Now, the danfo bus has disgorged her on the edge of a madness-inducing, delirious highway without a pedestrian crossing in sight.
She curses every decision that led her to this point. From the moment she decided to emerge from her mother’s womb rather than strangle herself with the umbilical cord, to choosing to sell clothes online for a living rather than attach herself to rich sugar daddies and leech her way to the grave, and agreeing to respond to the customer’s message when it popped up on her phone.
Why didn’t anyone set her right after each of these bad decisions? Why didn’t Papa, with his small frame and enormous heart, hold her close as a baby and say, “Rita, my little girl, you don’t belong in this cruel world. It is too fast and too angry for you. Everyone here always has somewhere to go. But your own destination is back where you emerged from.”
She blames them, her parents, for everything. They cared too much about proving to the world that they could make babies, rather than worry about what the world would do to their baby. How it would wrap its large hands around her neck whenever she was on the verge of deciding anything, reminding her of her smallness, her flaws, her insecurities, and daring her to go ahead. She dithered between every choice for longer than necessary, until someone came and told her exactly what to do. Where to put her foot so she wouldn’t trip.
Sometimes, there was safety in this for Rita. When others helped her make her choices, it reassured her that making choices was easy for other people. It helped her believe that there was hope for her. Someday she’d say she wanted to go to this college or drop out of that one, and the world wouldn’t be there to challenge her decision.
But when Rita eventually got to this point, after Papa died and grief pushed her away from home to another city, far from her friends and family, Papa’s invisible hands nudging her towards the dim lights of Lagos, she realised that freedom was a curse. Making her own decisions left her exposed. No one to fall back to. No one to blame. Nothing between her and the highway of reality, speeding towards her to crack her bones and leave her bleeding on the asphalt.
It was why it happened the first time. That evening when she tried crossing the expressway at Mile 2, after waiting for an hour. She was dithering even as she crossed. Should I keep going forward, or should I run back now? She wasn’t sure if she was asking about crossing the highway or leaving the city.
No one cared enough to hold her hand. Why would they? She was an adult. She was supposed to be independent. Strong. Dogged. These were the things everyone who survived in this suffocating city had become. Rita wasn’t any of those things yet. How could she, when she merely arrived two weeks prior, floating on the wings of grief?
Her eyes were closed as she shuffled along. If she had opened them she would have seen that her legs weren’t moving as fast as she imagined. She was sprinting in her mind, but in real life, she was taking baby steps, her teeth clenched, her feet unable to move without permission. She heard the people on the other side calling out to her. But it was like the crowd voices on the amapiano songs she loved listening to when she wanted to lock the world out.
She was locked inside herself at that moment, and everyone was too far away to pull her out. They had their own lives to live. Their own people to be. Why would she expect them to move out of their comfort zone, to put their lives at risk just to salvage hers, when, if she exchanged places with them, she would have stood perfectly still?
They felt just the way she usually feels, wanting to do something but unable to. Until it was too late.
It was a bike. It had seen Rita and tried to bank to the right, but she decided to rush forward at that very moment, throwing herself into it.
There had been a downpour earlier in the day, so puddles of water littered the road. Vestiges of the wind that heralded the rain still licked Rita’s skin, threatening a second coming.
They collided and tangled into a mess of machine and humans, and she was unable to feel her feet or hands.
Rita lay immobile on her back for seconds before the invisible barricades were removed and people could now rush into the scene. She lay watching the evening sky, noticing how day made way for night. Was Papa somewhere else now, doing the business of life? Could she go now to join him, or was that another thing she needed permission for?
*
The phone is still buzzing. Rita senses an opening. The cars seem to have slowed down for a minute or two now. She puts one leg forward, ready to dash to the other side of the road. She almost takes off when she sees a menacing Dangote trailer charging up the right side of the highway. She instantly loses her nerves and retreats to safety.
I can’t keep doing this to myself every day, she thinks, and almost breaks down in tears. I’m an adult now. Why should crossing a highway be this hard? Very few people know this side of her. She hardly lets anyone see because she hardly has anyone. She’s been surviving on her own since she came here. Until now.
Rita has something in her bones, beneath her skin, that holds her ransom. Hugs her from the inside. A monster. For a long time, it has been there, reaching, reaching, taking her will from her and releasing her only when it wishes.
She only recently put a name to it when she saw a similar behaviour exhibited on stage by Tempter, a popular Amapiano singer she loved. It was the first time she had watched his live show, even though she had viewed countless of his music videos on YouTube. The show was the first time she saw him.
In the middle of a performance, he froze on stage. He had cracked out a dance move minutes before, when suddenly he stopped and let the beats just play on, the crowd singing along. The uninitiated were confused about what was going on. To their untrained eyes, he just stopped singing, pacing the stage hopelessly. As if something had turned off in his brain and he was waiting for it to come back on. But Rita, watching online from countries away, caught his face when the camera panned on the big screen; it was twitching.
She sat up on her bed and looked closely into her computer screen, observing the singer like a specimen in a bottle. His eyes were blinking rapidly, and the corners of his lips seemed to be moving of their own accord. She felt a deeper connection with him at that moment, transported through the internet and fibre optics to find the monster beneath his skin.
Tourette Syndrome was what they called it in the entertainment headlines the next day.
She looked it up, and the entries described a disorder associated with repetitive movements or involuntary activities. There were videos of people doing the tics, which ranged from belting out offensive words to vigorously shrugging their shoulders. At awkward moments, they suddenly started performing weird actions, as though possessed.
It all seemed familiar to Rita, behaviours she had watched herself perform countlessly, her eyes twitching even now as she watched the videos, her body surrendering control to the thing within that took over whenever it wanted, leaving her imprisoned outside herself.
As she read about it online, she struggled to hold onto her cell phone. The choppy rivers within her raged and roiled.
They said it was a disorder that had no cure. No one understood its cause. Rita understood why it eluded them so. They couldn’t figure it out because it wasn’t math or science. It wasn’t Tourette Syndrome, as they called it. It was the thing that lived within every human, manifesting as madness or creativity or athleticism. Understanding it was like understanding why Einstein was smart or why Hitler wanted to take over the world, rather than become a priest or a farmer. It was a beast that sank its teeth into your being and pulled you this way or that till you became whatever it wished.
To attempt a cure for this is to attempt to cure humans of being human.
*
Rita stands now on the brink of the world. Reality is zipping past her at 180 miles per hour. Her phone is buzzing non-stop in her pocket. Her customer, now beyond rage, would empty the contents of Mount Vesuvius on her if he could. She can still make it if she only just moves.
The memory from two years ago when she got knocked down has taken her captive. The pains that shot through her body, the hours she spoke with people who came to see her at the hospital, even though, high on drugs, she wasn’t the one speaking with them.
Everything becomes vivid now, standing before her like the audience in a concert, and she is the singer Tempter, unable to sway them.
A wrong move now would be fatal, she knows. Whatever would hit her would slap her into the afterlife. But there is no way out. Taking a bus to find a pedestrian bridge would mean her going further into the belly of this haphazard city, miles away from her destination. It’ll cost much more to piggyback to this point. A huge slice of the small profit she was hoping to make from delivering the clothes personally. Unlike her small town, Benin, where she grew up, surviving Lagos requires not just independence, strength, and doggedness. It demands deep pockets as well.
So, the only way for her is through.
She feels defiance stir within her. But her face is twitching and her legs wouldn’t take her where she wants.
She knows that crossing this chasm would build a bridge from her fears to her confidence. One she can traverse again and again. She’d score one against the writhing thing within her, and from there would emerge a new Rita, an independent woman living in a chaotic city.
Her shoulders become steady, purpose returns to her feet, and she takes one step forward, memory and biology fighting her. Fighting to make a puppet out of her. Another step forward and her fears become corporeal. The zooming cars become a length of consistent, spitting serpents.
One of the reptiles stops and cocks its head at her, then hisses, mouth yawning apart and fangs drooling with venom.
She jerks backward, the polythene bag she’s carrying dropping to the ground.
The world eddies and reality shapeshifts. Cars are cars again. The highway is the regular stretch of black asphalt again. Lagos is the realistic landscape where nightmares come to life. And she’s Rita again, the girl who’s afraid of taking her life by the horns.
“Are you okay?” someone beside her asks, and she shrieks, jumping out of her head. She turns and sees a woman flanked by a man with a child in his arms. She looks down at her feet and sees the bag she was carrying muddied by dust. “We saw you going back and forth, so we thought you needed help,” the woman says.
Rita searches her face and sees genuine concern behind her eyes. She’s young, probably a little older than Rita. Or quite younger and only aged a little more because of childbirth. Could it be possible that a stranger in Lagos can really care for someone? Isn’t that like trying to mix oil and water? Two years she’s lived here and only on black moons does anyone extend real care to her.
Could this be a sign? That this move she’s attempting to make would bear grave consequences, and thus, the universe is trying to warn her off it?
How could the universe suddenly be her ally, she wondered, when it had rigged every step of the way with booby traps since the day she was born? No. This isn’t the cosmos reaching down; it is the leviathan within her punching upward. And if it means anything, it means that what lies on the other side of the highway would be to her benefit.
That is all the sign she needs.
She’d go ahead, whether or not she’d get run over. Whether or not she could die.
“I’m fine,” Rita says to the kind woman, flashing her best grin. “Thanks a lot for your concern.” There is a crack in Rita’s voice, as though a dam is about to burst through, flooding her cheeks.
The woman notices, puts a hand on Rita’s wrist, and holds on for a minute as if to say I see you, the way Rita saw Tempter on the stage that day. Then she withdraws and goes back to the man. For a second, Rita hopes the woman won’t let go. She’d tell Rita what to do, tell her to take a bus tonight back to Benin. Tell her never to cross highways on her own. But the moment passes and Rita finds herself again.
She watches the woman and her family cross the road after looking both ways for minutes. They hold hands as they go, a car zooming past as they touch down on the other side. How easy it is for them. How negligible this act. Where she fights a war with herself, they merely look both ways and skip ahead.
She feels alone again, vulnerable to the consequences of her decision.
The cars unlock a new level of ferocity. Evening is approaching and motorists are eager to get home. She draws a deep breath and begins another attempt. It may be her last, who knows? But she’s willing to see this decision through.
*
They used to say Rita was possessed. As a child, she’d spontaneously get into strange fits where she’d do tics for minutes, her shoulder jerking or fingers twisting. Nothing anyone did could get her to stop. Once, after she dropped a ceramic plate in the kitchen, splashing food on the cabinets and her feet, her mother, having endured enough, forced bitter shrubs into her mouth. Her mother and aunt both held her tight on the ground, pried her jaws open, and forced the leaves inside.
“E go cure you,” her mother said. Then she stood over Rita with a cane, ordering her to chew and swallow. The leaves tasted like all the sorrow in the world. But Rita wanted to be well, too. She didn’t want to embarrass herself anymore at school and have other children laugh at her. She wanted to be normal. To fit in.
She spent the rest of the day in the toilet, defecating, relieving herself of everything she had eaten for the past few days till she thought she’d pass out. Everything came out but the monster inside her.
When Papa returned, he took her to the shower, washed her up, and held her tight. That night, he and Rita’s mother had a big fight, their voices reverberating through the house and haunting Rita in her room.
When Rita was 12, Papa travelled to Abuja for a business meeting. As though Rita knew what was coming, she cried that she wanted to follow him. But the flight had been booked already and there was no space for a small, erratic child in the place Papa was going.
The afternoon he left, Rita’s mother came into her bedroom and asked her to dress up. They had somewhere to go.
Amidst tics and twitches, Rita forced herself into a colourful princess gown Papa bought her last Christmas, resorting to looking her best even while being led into the unknown.
At several points on the way, she wanted to break free of her mother’s grasp and flee. But she couldn’t make herself do it, no matter how badly she wanted to. Like many other things in her life up to that point, the decision had been made for her, and she was going to comply.
In Rita’s memory, the place they visited stands out. Like a castle on a hill. It has been imprinted on her mind’s eye.
The church was still being constructed and the strong smell of freshly cut wood hung in the air. Skeletons of beams and haphazard scaffolding stood outside the building, and heaps of sand peppered the edges of the compound like dunes in a desert. A bell was tolling inside the church even though Rita could see none, and when they crossed the threshold people sitting in the pew turned to watch them walk in, this plump woman and her restless child.
A man with a bald head and dirty robe was preaching at the pulpit, his feet bare and caked with dust.
When the service was over, members shuffled out till the church was empty of people, save mother, daughter, and the preacher.
“Come,” the man waved to them with a smiling face, and Rita felt like throwing up.
He led them to a smaller room behind the altar decorated with a purple curtain, a large wooden crucifix, and a mahogany table. On the table was a stand with five or six guttering candles, and the faint stench of wet books corrupting the air. Rita and her mother took seats in chairs that faced the prophet and then allowed him to watch them.
“She’s the possessed girl?” the prophet asked several minutes later, as casually as one asking what time it was.
To Rita’s surprise, her mother didn’t reply immediately, as though wincing at the question herself. As though unwilling to accept that a demon has taken over her child. “Ye-yes,” she stuttered.
The man sat back in his high-back chair and steepled his fingers. “Then let’s wait till it manifests.”
Seconds turned into minutes. Rita became uneasy. Tense.
Soon, she felt the monster within her reaching for her bones, squeezing her shoulders. She gave in and soon began to tic. Her lips made their own decisions. Shoulders took flight. Eyes became someone else’s. Her body was a parade of movements that she didn’t authorise.
“It has started,” Rita heard her mother whisper, then the prophet rose. He walked around the table and came to her, then placed both hands on her head, muttering words under his breath. She felt a spasm pass through her, her body vibrating like a fish out of water. Her tics became worse as her anxiety levels grew, till the world transformed around her.
Rita looked up and the man holding her head was a masked clown clothed in palm fronds and raffia. To her right, her mother had become a similar masquerade with two faces and fire bellowing from her nostrils.
Rita screamed. Her body freed up instantly and she jumped from the chair. She found her way out of the office, the church, and almost out of life, heart pounding against her chest. She blamed Papa for leaving her, and nearly hated him for that. She told herself then that should anything bad befall him and he doesn’t return to her anymore, she’d run away from home and never look back.
And when it happened seven years later, Papa dying of diabetes, she did run.
*
Rita can’t take it anymore. Darkness has begun to stretch itself around the world, but she still hasn’t braved her fears. Tears lock in the edges of her eyes now, threatening to find their way out and chart paths across her cheeks. She refuses to give in to them, not desiring the attention the world gives to a crying woman on the highway. Her phone has long stopped ringing – the customer must have found an alternative. She wouldn’t get paid for the delivery. Her efforts coming here have been a waste.
Unless she can make it across, just to win the tormentor in her mind.
Memories of her last accident dance in her eyes, plaguing her body. She lifts one foot and the world starts to transform again, taking on serpentine shapes.
The cars have become violent, hissing across the highway at breakneck speeds. Rita tells herself that she isn’t afraid. They can’t bully her.
She doesn’t want to see the multicoloured reptiles. So she shuts her eyes and does the unthinkable.
Rita begins to walk across the expressway unsighted. It feels like she’s walking through her life, from the moment she became bipedal as a child, no longer crawling on all fours, to her first birthday when she couldn’t stay still for a photograph, ticking all over, ruining her cake. She walks through the different classrooms of the different schools she moved to, the mockery and jeers consistent through all, to the prophet in the church, fleeing and hiding from her mother, and then the moment Papa died, sundering her world in half.
The six months it took her to heal from the accident open themselves to her again. She walks past every moment. Two years she’s been in Lagos, and 21 years she’s been tormented by herself. It all ends now. One way or another.
She’s halfway into the express, she thinks, and it’s going to happen any second now.
She runs into something, rather than something running into her. It doesn’t flip her world. Doesn’t turn her downside up. It is sturdy and metallic and wouldn’t give.
Is this what the end of the world feels like? Is the edge of reality barricaded with walls?
She opens her eyes and sees that she’s walked into a stationary vehicle, the glass wound down and the occupants eyeing her like she wants to snatch their phones. She looks left and right and sees that the world is now at rest, no longer speeding along. Traffic has gathered on the highway, stretching as far as the fading evening lights can allow her to see.
The serpentine phantoms have now been tamed.
Rita heaves a heavy sigh of relief, a smile touching her features. She gathers herself and walks between the vehicles to the other side. Today, she has won. Tomorrow she’ll be brave again.
*Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash