There is something about today that is yet to settle in with you. Something that felt like someone invisible yet very near was watching you.
The first time you had this feeling was at your boarding school at Ikot-Ekpene when a JSS 2 boy who stayed a bunk away from yours died. You’ve kept awake all night as rumours continued to spread of his visit to Akubue Paschal, a classmate of yours who had fallen sick shortly afterwards and who was said to have punished him some weeks before his death. But you’ve never punished anyone. Would he attack you for being there without saving him, for being a coward in the face of injustice? You felt the pain that followed the belt on the boy’s body and his eyes meeting yours calling for help, but you had looked away and went another direction just to avoid making enemies with Paschal.
“You have no enemies, you say. Alas, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the frail of duty must indeed have made foes. If you have none, little is the work you have done. You hit no traitor on the hip…you poured no cup from perjured lips, You’ve been a COWARD”
This poem, whose author you have forgotten tormented you. After some days the feeling disappeared.
The feeling came again in 2020 at Umusiome Hospital, towards the end of the days of COVID-19. You had thought the feeling came with the unfamiliar smell of the hospital…, ‘No, that’s not the word’, it was not an unfamiliar smell as you know this smell comes with some hospitals and that was not the first time you slept over or looked after someone in a hospital that smelled that way. Debunked, you began to think it was the incense burnt by the other patient, a short unpleasant man, with hands so short that it looked like they were pegged to his arms. This incense does not have the familiar scent of the one burnt by the Priest at SS. John & Paul (Iba Pope, Awada, Onitsha) during the Sunday benedictions or Holy Mass. When your brother was moved to another ward weeks later after your complaint, the feeling never went away, but you woke up one day feeling like it was never there, it’s gone.
But these were years back. You’ve become an adult now, with malnourished strands of beards gathering at your lower jaw. You thought of going to Kachi’s place to spend the night. How much you’ve missed him, you told yourself – a ritual to emasculate your ego, but in actual sense, you were looking for a means to run away from your fears. It was not the weekend yet, it was still Wednesday and you would have Jurisprudence class the next day. The plan was out of the box.
You live off campus, in a hostel called Woodland without the woods, just a stone’s throw from the school gate. The hostel was so quiet that you could hear the jiggling sounds of the onions being splashed fiercely by Obinna into the sizzling oils from his kitchen at the far end. You could have gone to knock at his place to start up a discussion but you dread talking to the fellow housemates as you are keen on the thing “Privacy”. His name you’ve learnt from other boys when they scream at him to pass the ball in their monkey-post football marches downstairs. He always looked at you in a certain way, the way that suggests that he wants to be your friend, or rather, that says “I know what you are”, so you avoided him more.
“Let me go to night class”, you said out loud. At least it is the only place that registers little human interaction during the night. In the bathroom, baring your shy nakedness to the midnight blackness, you felt a hand run across the line of your spine. You jolted up almost immediately, the soap falling at a distance, you looked back in shock to see who it was, but saw no one. You ran your hands through your body, cold rashes hit the softness of your palm.
“A mam na onye nche m no nso (I know that my redeemer liveth)”, your voice rang, a song you have learned to sing over the years to assure yourself of the presence of God. You quickly checked your phone, it reads 8:00 pm. It was time. Time to speak with Okenna, a friend who has been fighting cancer for the past few months. 8:00 pm has become a ritual you both have formed over the months. The past week, he has always been the first to call, and with each day, his voice became weaker, he laughed less and only listened to you talk and talk. Each call leaves you with tears, each call breaks you. You wondered why he had not called this evening and decided to clean up and call him.
Opening the bathroom, there he sat, on your bed. “Jesus!”, you screamed, cleaning your eyes to clear off your hallucination but he did not vanish. You pinched yourself and you felt the pain. It’s no child’s play.
“Onye?”, your voice asked, shaking, trembling, and panting audibly. He turned, smiled at you and vanished.
Hours later, you woke up at the Health Center at Umueze, a pack of injections stuffed into your veins, with Obinna your neighbor seated beside you.
“I know you saw something, I heard you ask ‘Onye’ before the loud scr..ea..m” He stuttered and stopped as if he realized it was not the best time. “You have got some missed calls from different people, but the name Kachi recurs and I have told…”
“Help me dial Kachi?”, You said, cutting him short.
The number at the other end rang for a while and then a familiar voice came up “Nnam ndo, I guess you’ve heard….”
“Tell me nothing has happened to Okenna”
“He passed…”
You went quiet for some minutes before letting out a loud shout and falling from the bed, you opened your eyes, it was your room at Ikoyi, Lagos. It was 2025 and you are late to CDS thumb printing. Just a dream.