Singkem

Finding Amobi

By Etim Singkem

Amobi told me he would live in a BQ when the new semester started. This is why me and my roommate Mmenie-Abasi are going around all the Boys’ Quarters on campus, finding Amobi.

We met the year before the pandemic, in my third year. Amobi was in his second. We used to live in Bello Hall and we spent a lot of time together. It’s not like he was my person or anything clearly in that line. He never said where he stood, though the first day we met, our conversation ended with Sam Smith. Other conversations followed afterwards, and other things happened, but as one of my friends would say, NEPA wan bring light no mean say NEPA don bring light. These other things that we managed were suggested, they lacked clarity, and in that manner, they would only briefly raise the tide we were flowing in. When it ebbed, at its inconclusive end, we returned to safe ground: pretty much music and school stuff. Amobi was in the faculty of science, but believed that virgins could give birth and that the body is a temple. But from the start, I knew. One day we were talking about the Lamb, and I was asking if he really felt freed by his blood, when I saw it. I also saw, clearly written on Amobi’s face, the person I had stopped being when I left my parents' house to come study in Ibadan. They used to call me Brother Silas, and everyone thought I was anointed for music ministry. But immediately I got to Ibadan, I made friends with boys like Mmenie, who had piercings and wore beads on their ankles. By the time I met Amobi, I was getting weary of many of them, of our noncommittal convictions, and was again hungry for something that had a taste of the past. So when I met Amobi, I knew I wasn't that much different from him, who definitely needed a world, within this costume party, where he could free his face of masks. For two semesters, we worked slowly on creating that world, or at least I did, stopping often to test its pillars for firmness and strength. It collapsed when we attempted to take its stairs up, to ride a high wave. It was at the palm wine party.

The first BQ, a short and solemn row of rooms, cowers under dust, weed and the shame of its disrepair. Its doors are locked, the padlocks rusty. A whole year has passed, perfectly lost to the pandemic. Now we have lectures online, but everyone is so untrusting of the system that we are all here in Ibadan anyway, living in rundown apartments, paying too much rent because the landlords know the halls of residence are closed. The BQs, like the halls, are under university jurisdiction but nobody knows for sure how they work.

“Some may still be open. Let’s try,” I tell Mmenie. “One more at least. Just to be sure.”

We hop into a maruwa. Mmenie asks me why we call it keke maruwa, everybody everywhere else calls it keke napep. “It's Governor Maruwa,” the driver starts to explain. “That time in Lagos he is the one that is starting to import keke.” His voice, though deep, flutters with the pride of knowing. He’s in a blazer over a jalabiya; the harmattan started harsh today.

When we were young, my parents built a fence around our house and forbade us from going outside because kidnappers were getting at people’s children. They advised us to never speak of great things we have or have coming because jealous people could steal them away, divert them with evil. My brother did that, told no one his CGPA all through uni, never showed any sign his grades were good, and you guessed it, he came out with First Class. That’s another way of saying that if you keep your treasure in public, thieves will get at it. If you show people what you have, they’ll want it.

When the maruwa driver finishes his lecture, we thank him and Mmenie asks, “What are they like? The dreams you have about them.”

We talk about Amobi with a pronoun that is not his, because we are boys.

I’ve had only a few bad dreams about Amobi. In them, something kills him, like others in the pandemic years: #endSARS*, the police, the pandemic itself. A boy in my faculty was killed while working in a factory and the student union went to protest his death. That night I had my first nightmare about Amobi. He didn’t exactly look like he could work in a factory, but you never know. And who knows what happens in the east there, in Onitsha and Aba and the other manufacturing places. I spent that week in a worried frenzy. Every day I called the two numbers of his that I had. On Google and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, I varied his three names in search boxes. I found old accounts on the dusty bottom shelves of Facebook, one his and another belonging to someone who could have been his female relative or another person’s female relative. They both looked dead, these accounts, and had one picture each, pictures as foggy as the heart in anguish.

I daydream when I wake from the nightmares. I don't dare imagine any of my heart’s hopeful desires. I am okay that Amobi is fine and the palm wine party actually ended that night and we returned to our world, even if to ride low tides again. I try to believe his disappearance is not tied to the party, that it’s nothing more than a lost phone or a temporary need to disconnect from a fast-paced world. The party, this was post-exams and we were at the Botanical Garden, between concealing untrimmed hedges, surrounded by everything from music and laughter to smoke and the darkness of dusk. It was a music show, one of those things from Theater Arts or Music or was it the student union, and there were amateur artists trying to seduce people with the way they held their mics and strummed their guitars. But this was before alcohol threw the purpose away and DJ music paved the way for things different in nature. I had gotten Amobi drunk, relishing his chuckle every time I forced him to sip a bit more from my cup. He was seated between my legs on one of the swing seats in the fun park area, his thin frame a mass of sweet heat; this was understandable because seats were scarce. On the other swing seat, two people also sat. I loved the way Amobi shifted closer every time I made more room to accommodate him; it gave me hope. Then, I discovered him hardening, so I let my hand hover over it to make sure. I leaned in and told him he was beautiful. The alcohol hadn’t kept me in a particularly good place myself and I must have forgotten where we were. I love you, I said to Amobi. He said nothing, but held my hand firmly on his hard self. I kissed him on the chin cautiously, you know the way your mouth can just brush over someone’s cheek if you’re sitting that close to each other. He did nothing, so I moved in again. Sometimes the drink speaks to you. It said, Take your little friend away, and what it added next it took away itself. Unreliable bitch! I was torn between He’s not comfortable and You’ve exhibited your treasure outside. Once I got him out of the Botanical Garden, I took the first route: Hope you’re comfortable now? You didn’t say anything there!

I think I’m tipsy, he said. He sounded more than tipsy.

My bad, I said. I won’t do it again next time. Now I imagine the thieves laughed when they heard “next time.” I moved in to give him balance as we walked. I had more experience; still, I can only imagine how I walked myself. Foolishness and audacity, two sides of the same coin, and that’s the change you get from the drink. Thanks for your patronage!

We stop on Barth Road to see the BQs around here. We can already feel the emptiness as we climb down the maruwa. Mmenie mumbles. And then says something anyway. There are more than a score of these BQs scattered around campus and don’t I think it a little crazy to go around lonely deserted places finding someone who disappears one day and doesn’t tell his friends his whereabouts. “And I thought this guy was just some random self-hater you met in Bello. What are you not saying?” What I’m not saying is that I meant everything I told Amobi on that swing seat. But Mmenie knows nothing about this. He doesn’t know that his friend fell in love and couldn’t say it because, somehow, there were so many things to get out of the way first, to be sure of, from within and without. Everything was always going to be too late. Taking him out of the party was too late. How fucking careless was I? But how cautious can a person be? When great things first come to you, you forget jealous neighbors, potential thieves and kidnappers, and you shout for joy.

“You seem way more bothered about this than I thought,” Mmenie says again. “I think if something happened to him, the whole school would know.”

“He lives in the east,” I say.

“Well, we have internet. And why not reach out to his department again if you really mean to find him. I mean like the HOD, not just another of his classmates. If he’s not attending classes at all, he probably has communicated something to them.”

Mmenie is tired of finding Amobi. His tone is increasingly berating. He wouldn’t normally sound like this, but he knows there are things I’m not saying. At first, I was afraid Amobi would say no, and that being forceful would make him retreat entirely. I knew he was afraid of becoming. Now I am ashamed that of all the people I could possibly meet, I find in a church boy something to love. My friends have something they say about this, and that's what Mmenie will say if I tell him, but their thesis doesn’t support my feelings.

“Did something happen between you guys?” Mmenie tries again. “Like is he ghosting you? ’Cause you’re always doing weird things with these boys.”

We are laughing. I should tell Mmenie about the party. But it’s too late. I am becoming Amobi. But whom am I hiding from? Hadn’t I long stopped being the kind of boy who is ashamed to talk about boys?

“Answer me for fuck’s sake and stop laughing. Were you guys dating?”

“No, we were just friends,” I say. We keep laughing; it’s easier that way. I’m asking myself: At what point did dating even start? Amobi could text me have you eaten? out of the blue. But “it looks like NEPA will bring light” doesn’t mean “NEPA's brought light”.

I was getting better as we approached the Central Mosque, the alcohol loosening its grip on my brain, so I guessed Amobi was, too.

“I wish we were not going back to that crowded hostel,” I said. He said nothing.

“How do you feel?” I said.

“I think,” he said, “I think people were looking at us. I saw like five people there that I know.”

Fuck them, I thought. “I don’t think it matters that much.”

He said nothing. And then, “But what will they think?”

The next morning, when I texted to ask how he was doing, Amobi answered, Fine bro. I pretended that this was him typing even though clearly those were not his words. I didn’t want to be too sure of the kidnappers who were behind him, guiding his hands, like our parents did when we were children and they taught us how to write ABC. They probably had kidnapped him and stolen what we showed them at the party. The day after, I wanted us to see, so I texted him.

—Guy, he replied. I’m travelling. I just got on the bus at Peace Mass.

—You didn’t tell me.

No reply.

—Well, safe journey, dear. I’ll check up on how the journey goes.

—Thanks man, but don’t worry, I’ll update you once I’m home. I need to preserve my battery.

That’s how he was gone, with the semester like that. Then the pandemic came. No calls. Dead numbers.

I find Amobi two weeks later through a classmate of his. He started popping up once in a while in the Zoom classes. When I get his new number, I message him on WhatsApp because I am scared of what I may sound like.

—Hey Amobi, this is Silas.

He’s online. Minutes after he has viewed the message, I'm still waiting for his reply. Mmenie stands up from the bed and walks up to the study table where I’m sitting. He hovers over my shoulders, trying not to say anything. I fear my fingers will shake. Finally, Amobi starts to type.

—Brother, the text comes in. Long time, hope everything is fine.

I sit there, just stare. I was right about the kidnappers, wrong for pretending. I had often hoped, in the time before I found Amobi, with half-happiness, that God was not among the kidnappers this time. Maybe my real delusion was not denying the kidnappers but denying God’s presence among them, believing that my two semesters’ worth of work in the opposite vineyard would bear some fruit. My friends always say it, it’s harder to break free from God’s chains because they first wrap up your brain. I was happy he didn’t leave me there at Mosque Junction to take the way to the Chapel of Resurrection, where he used to join other brothers at the empty parking lot, praying into the cold night. It was my first sign of hope. Back when we first met and argued things like the pregnant virgin, he often left me on our way back to Bello to go and pray in the chapel. I knew, because I used to be that person, that it was to cleanse himself of guilt. Now, even though I was not happy to hear them, bro and guy and man sounded just okay; he was within reach. Brother sounds like a deeper fall. Can I ever find a person lost in that depth?

Mmenie has his hands on my shoulders and the only feeling clear to me is his voice: “But we’ve found Amobi. Why do you cry?”

* #endSARS is the hashtag for the Nigerian movement against police brutality, especially that perpetrated by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad unit.

Etim Singkem is a writer from Nigeria. An alumnus of the Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing Workshop, his works have appeared in Praxis Magazine and agbowo, among others, and have been nominated for awards such as the Angya Poetry Prize and the Punocracy Prize.