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Silhouette of man on motorcycle

Faces at Dawn

By Chimezie Chika

 

Having travelled far, I came upon
Mountains of histories,
Dead lakes on which libraries are erected
  – Jared Angira, Hitch-Hike

 
I

He met the white woman on a wet night, along a dark alley which he had taken to bypass the crowded Awka Road. The moon in the sky was cut in half, like a tilted gray disc, the weak light from the sky oscillating between full-blown moonlight and soft darkness. The traffic was sparse, one or two cars speeding past every 15 or 20 minutes, their head and tail lights blazing brilliantly for a moment and then leaving the street darker after they had disappeared into the night. And on that lonely alley—pale, dripping, ghoulish—the white woman stood shivering. 

 

He was on his way back from the Centre for Refuge church meeting. Since the Great Arctic Surge, the CR was one of the three controlling powers in charge of everything, from governance to food rations. The CR had cells all over Remaining Africa. As an administrative member of the Onitsha Cell, he was obligated to attend CR church meetings on Friday evenings. After the meeting he’d gotten on his motorcycle and started home. The sermon about the Good Samaritan who rescued a man who was robbed on his way to Jericho rang in his head as he pressed hard on the throttle. 

The decision to take the lonely alley instead of Awka Road was unconscious. He simply turned right into Tasia Road as he got to ABS Junction. Deep in thought, he almost ran into the pale figure and was quick enough to use the breaks. 

“What is wrong with you? Why are you standing there in the cold?”

The figure continued to shiver. 

“What is your name?”

“Marge,” the figure said in a shaky voice. 

He stood there thinking for a moment, then he told her to get on.

She didn’t move.

“You are not helping yourself here. This is a dangerous road. And you need a place to clean up,” he explained.

The white lady, suddenly conscious of herself, tried disentangling her wet dress from the way it stuck to her body. 

“I am coming back from the CR church meeting, so you don’t need to be afraid. I am a Good Samaritan. In these times, we need more of that.” 

 

He did not remember all their initial exchange that night. The memories came in scraps, like shards of a broken mirror. But of that night, he remembered these:

The CR service had just ended and, as he was about to climb his bike, the rain started. He ran back into the hall and sat on one of the white plastic chairs. He watched other members of the congregation and some of the CR trustees who were praying or sitting around and discussing. They talked about the mounting refugee problem and how the CR Central Council was dealing with it. They talked about the fierceness of this year’s rainy season which had given the earth no respite so that, at the moment, unsightly pools of water had blocked off some roads in the Ado area. Other vicinities near the Niger waterfront had been vacated and there was fear that the rising volume of the river could render them permanently uninhabitable. Then there was the coming cold, too; always the biting cold. 

The discussions jumped from one foreboding topic to the next. He did not join in; he simply listened and watched the rain until it slowed to a drizzle. He went outside, as people began to come out, and mounted his bike. The engine sputtered a few times when he started it before picking up. He drove towards the first junction where the road bifurcated. In his mind, he carried the weight of his heavy thoughts. One moment there were world powers enriching uranium and threatening each other with cold gestures. One moment poor countries hovered on the brink of failure, excluded from this perpetual battle for supremacy. One moment there were vague warnings of the warming earth. One moment he was just a cartoonist in a market city sending warnings of his predictions of disaster through caricatures in newspapers. Who would have thought then, who would have imagined that everything would come to this?

 

“Ordinarily, you should know that no one would help you at this hour. Maybe in the daytime. But at this time? No.” 

He fiddled with the handle of the motorcycle to get it ready.  

“I don’t have much battery life on this bike now or else I’d have driven you to a CR shelter in the North District. Don’t worry. Get on, I will take you home.”

He felt the wetness of her slippery skin as he sped through the streets. He was going at high speed to beat the night curfew and she was clinging tightly to him, her blond hair flying behind her like a pale night flag. The motorcycle, an old Bayani, manufactured in the vehicle factories of New Mumbai, sometimes sputtered and coughed when he changed gears, but it had monstrous speed. The Bayani was sold to him by an Indian who had been living in CR territory for more than ten years. He was part of a wave of Asians who’d escaped the harsh religious regime of the Harashi in Remaining Asia 15 years ago.

After about 15 minutes, he entered a narrow, well-lit street and stopped before a low red gate. They got down and he opened the gate and ushered her still-shivering body in. He pushed the Bayani in and parked it under a shed in front of the small bungalow. 

“Wait here,” he said to her when they got to the front door and went to lock the gate. 

He came back and opened the front door, reached in and switched the light. They stepped into the parlor. 

“Welcome to my modest home.” He made a wide sweep with his right hand. 

She sat down on the edge of a sofa, still shivering, her eyes roaming all over the room. She let out a deep breath.

“You are rich.”

He sat down opposite her. “You think so?”

“Yes. You’re privileged.”

“I suppose that is the truth. But I am not sure my situation is luxurious. Not by Old World standards.”

“Hmm.”

He got up. “You must be hungry. I will get you something to eat. First you need a hot bath and a change of clothes.”

He picked up his bunch of keys from the table.

“Come, I will show you to the bathroom.”

He left her at the bathroom door and went into the kitchen. He stood for some time under the bright lights of the kitchen trying to decide what to cook. His mind was blank and it seemed to him that the effort of thinking was a burden. He paced around the kitchen a little, staring at the neat, mammoth pieces of technology tucked into the walls. He realized what was wrong. HouseAid was not working and, from the moment he stepped inside, he had been thinking for himself. He went back to the central control panel near the door to the parlor and began to turn the switches. As he flicked the last switch, tiny blue lights blinked in the ceiling and a voice from the central speakers said: 

“Welcome, master. What can I do for you?”

“I am trying to cook. I can’t think of anything.”

“You have a visitor,” the electronic voice said, “and that is why you are at a loss.”

“Yes. Probably. I don’t know what she would like.”

“Yam is a general food. Cook yam.”

He went towards the kitchen.

“Can I be of help, master?” The same voice came up again. 

He did not reply this time. 

He opened the shelves and removed the things he needed and began to cook. When he re-entered the parlor with two plates of food, she was sprawled lengthwise on the long off-white sofa, her face calm in slumber, her hair spread around her head like a halo. Her legs and lower thighs were exposed. Her skin looked fresh now and there was no sign of her earlier distress. He’d forgotten to give her the sweater and pants he promised. He went and brought a blanket and covered her with it. 

He looked at his watch: it was almost 11. The temperature conditioner was humming and the television was playing a muted program. He switched off the lights and went to his room. 

 

He woke up very early to wash his motorcycle. Marge was still sleeping in the parlor as he opened the door and stepped outside. The cold hands of morning grabbed him with stinging intensity. He shivered and drew the zip of his coat to his neck. He hosed the Bayani slowly, washing away the soap suds. The rear fender was rickety and the water battered it, almost tearing off what was left of it. This was what he needed to do but he had not always put himself in the right frame of mind to get it done. Yet, every day, he pondered existential and religious questions that had no bearing on the practical side of his life. Perhaps he would have to tell HouseAid about it, so he’d be reminded of it every time, and finally get it done.

As he finished, Marge appeared at the doorway, wearing the sweater and pants he’d placed beside her on the sofa while she slept. She looked much brighter. He rushed forward.

“Let’s get inside. My neighbor…”   He hurried her in. “My neighbors can’t know you are here. I am sure you know the risk.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning. Hope you are feeling better. You slept off last night without eating.”

He caught her studying him.

“I will get the food ready. You know where the bathroom is, if you are ready to use it now.”

By the time he was ready to leave, it was already very bright outside and Marge was using the bathroom.

“Your food is in the microwave in the kitchen,” he said at the bathroom door. “I am off to work. Please don’t go outside. Everything you need is within.”

 

In the office he fiddled with the light pen which he was using to make bible transcriptions on the system. The last sentence code he wrote said: Come to me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give ye rest. It was being used for a new CR program to take in refugees from Remaining Asia. 

He thought of the night before, how he couldn’t sleep. His mind had made several renegade detours to the white figure sprawled on the sofa in his parlor. Much as he tried to concentrate on the work he was going to do at the office in the morning, tossing in bed, he could hardly stop himself from thinking about the stranger he’d brought home—the image of a white figure shivering in the darkness. Was there a divine order at work there? It was in fact an uncommon sight that he had in his house at that moment. Even as a CR administrative member, he had to admit that Old World refugees were not treated well. They were the principalities and powers that must be cast away by the faithful. It was a different matter with those from Remaining Asia. 

A lot of people were helping Old World refugees, so he wouldn’t be the first. It was the way of things for people to always break the law. That was why laws were made in the first place—in anticipation of the bad eggs who would surely break them. The idea that he was a bad egg didn’t please him at all. But why was he even helping Marge? What was her story? Nothing was beyond the reach of doubt. But could her story be so unique as to be different from that of the majority? How could one gauge such things? He had to find out what he could. 

 

That night, he talked with her. They had just finished a meal of hot pasta.

“Marge, how come you were standing there the other night?”

She shot him a sidelong glance without replying, pushing her almost yellow hair back with a jerk of her head to keep it from covering her eyes.

“I was abandoned,” she said quietly.

“Abandoned by whom?”

“I have been all over the place. People always abandon me.”

He sensed something and decided not to ask any further questions. 

“I need water,” she said after a moment of silence. 

He went to the kitchen and got her a bottle of water. 

“Here,” he said.

“Thank you.” 

She slurped the water, her throat pulsing with alternating bulge as the water went down. 

“How old are you?” He asked

“Thirty-nine.”

“You look 31 or so.”

“Do I? I will take that as a compliment.”

He did not reply. He stared at her and waited. 

“I was on the last airbus that left America during the Arctic Surge. I was lucky because I nearly died with the rest. The scoundrel I was dating abandoned me in a storeroom and ran away with my boarding ticket. You know, America was in total chaos at that time as the glaciers encroached closer with each day. I thought those would be the worst days of my life. But I was wrong. I have seen far worse here.”

He watched her mouth, the way her words came so fast that he had to strain his ears to hear some of them. It was the longest she’d spoken since he met her.

“The years of the Arctic Surge… that was 20 years ago, yes? Those years, they are the craziest time in human history… terrible. What you said… what could be worse than the Arctic Surge?”

“Your people have turned everything upside down.”

“Everything is already upside down, my friend, except God.”

“Except God? What has God got to do with the high-handed groups that rule the world now? Look at Remaining Asia. See what the Harashi is doing there. Here, the CR is not any better.”

“The CR is doing all it can to accommodate refugees and foreigners.”

“Now, there you go defending tyranny.”

“I am not defending anything. There’s nothing to defend. The CR is doing the Lord’s work.”

“I am sorry. You seemed different,” Marge said. Her eyes were glazed, her eyebrows tilted towards each other. “The way the world is now, one would think we’d all have some common sense and stick together, but no, there’s always the old human problem. We are our own worst enemy in the universe.”

He stared at her silently, trying to understand what was going on in her mind.

“You mean, why is the CR making differentiations between the indigenes and refugees?”

“Yes. Why set up all these immigration bottlenecks and yet they need people?”

“You have to understand that despite everything, there has to be law and order. If you want to live the semblance of a decent life, you have to live in Harashi or CR territory. They have their merits and the merits weigh a lot. Unless you want to wallow in the Savagelands.”

“What merits are you talking about? Treating people from the Old World as if they don’t exist? Rationing food and jobs to them? Not allowing them full citizenship privileges and monitoring them? What merits?”

“These circumstances are what they are. We should first give thanks that we are alive.”

“You facetious bigot!” 

He stared at her in surprise. She had raised her voice at him. Marge looked downwards, recoiling from his gaze. She moved her legs from the floor to the top of the sofa and lay down, turning her face away from him. He waited in the parlor for a while before retiring to bed.

He could share these memories with Marge. He felt clear-headed as he thought this. He would guarantee her for the papers. She would stay here. 

Sometime during the night, he woke up to relieve himself and, on opening the bathroom door, he thought he heard a noise in the parlor. He walked over and opened the door as quietly as he could: he saw nothing strange. Marge’s white figure lay on the sofa, her chest rising and falling gently in sleep. He closed the door and walked back to his room. 

As soon as he entered the kitchen in the morning to make tea, HouseAid reminded him of the motorcycle fender he was supposed to repair.

“Yes,” he said. “I will probably get it done today.”

“How can I be of help?” The voice came again.

“Nothing, for now.”

As he rode to work he saw the heaviness of the cold season that was coming. The morning fog was thick and impregnable. Every rain now foretold a sure apocalypse in the violence of the sheer volume of water that came down. The CR had years ago completed a drainage facility that collected the water and channeled it into generating power for rocket reactors. 

He was shivering when he arrived at work. His nose felt numb and he kept rubbing it with his mittens. In his cubicle, he spent long hours transcribing the immigration verses for the CR program. One phrase stayed with him: Arise and shine for thy light is come! He gave the A a calligraphic flourish. He pondered the poetic line. Whose light had come? The Indians from Remaining Asia? The Old World refugees? The lawless and godless vagrants of Savagelands? 

He left work early at two and rode towards the garage at Lower Iweka. He took the Cemetery Tunnel, riding through the claustrophobic darkness lighted at intervals by dim yellow bulbs, until he emerged at the Lower Iweka flyover. 

“Ha! What is wrong this time?” Ezeadigo, the garage owner, asked him as he arrived.

“It’s the fender,” he said. “I want to change it.” 

He kicked out the motorcycle stand and balanced the machine. A strong wind banged the rusty steel gate of the garage against the wall. He turned for a moment, startled, before facing Ezeadigo once again. 

“I will do it myself. Just bring me the fender… and credit it to my CR account.”

“Okay, brother.” Ezeadigo said, smiling. 

He spent the next two and a half hours working on the old Bayani. He left the garage by five and took the long Isiokwe Road on his way home. As he made to enter his gate, Sister Adeola, one of his neighbors, hailed him. He sighed under his breath, anticipating her talkativeness. Did she find out in his absence?

“I heard some noise from the direction of your house,” she said.

“You didn’t go to work today?” He turned off his ignition.

“No, I reported sick. You know how hard it is to secure a sick leave. I had to call my cousin in the executive.”

“Good for you. How long will you be off work?”

“Two more days. I have never stayed this long without working. Would you like to come in for a drink? I have a bootlegged bottle of Nkwu.”

He considered the invitation for a moment, staring into her dark mirthful eyes and her lustrous afro. 

“Thank you, Sister Adeola,” he said. “I am afraid I have a whole lot of work to do. I will take the invitation next time.”

“Okay. Next time don’t tell me another story. I will be waiting.”

He laughed and pushed the motorcycle inside the gate.

He heard Sister Adeola say something in his direction. He was already inside the compound.

“See you later,” he shouted back without knowing what she had said. 

Marge smiled when she saw him enter. He noticed how much younger she looked when she smiled. 

“I managed to cook. It was a struggle to use all these machines but I managed. I must have made a clatter though.”

“Yes, you must have,” he said, remembering Sister Adeola. 

Later that evening, he sat down opposite her in the parlor.

“Tell me about the scoundrel.”

“What scoundrel?”

“The one who abandoned you.”

“Oh.” She went quiet.

“Why did he abandon you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he… maybe he was just being selfish, I don’t know. Why would I know?”

She had a sad look on her face now and seemed almost on the brink of tears.

“All I ever did was love him.”

“You certainly didn’t do anything wrong there. I have been disappointed a few times by love too.”

“You know, we met at the United Nations in New York, where I was a young intern at the time. He had that cowboy look about him. He was from Montana. We had been together for two years when the Arctic Surge started.”

“Did he love you, as well?”

“I think he did. I like to think he did. What I don’t understand is—”

“Well, Marge, our true characters as human beings are brought to the fore in times of catastrophe. We do not know ourselves. We are all strangers to each other. We are all just pretenders.”

She broke down in tears. He went over and rubbed her shoulders. 

 

He was riding to the CR church meeting that evening. His cell was having an induction for a new member. He was thinking of what to do with Marge. Should he help her apply for papers? But he didn’t know her too well and he could not bring himself to surety a stranger for CR papers. She had been in his house now for three weeks, hiding in the clandestine fold of gadgets. He looked forward to seeing her at the end of each day and having long conversations. But how long will he be able to sustain the ruse? He fiddled with the throttle and changed to the third gear to increase his speed. As he cut into a narrow street to bypass a rocket reactor installation site, he rammed into something wide and heavy and lost his thoughts.
 

II

When he came to, he saw that he was lying in bed in a Spartan hospital room, his face heavily bandaged. A sharp pain seared through his forehead at regular intervals. He fell asleep again. 

The next time he came to, Marge’s blurry face hovered over him, smiling. She was sitting close to the bed.

“Is that you?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s me. Try not to talk. Your accident was—”

“How did you—?”

“Shhhh!” She hushed him.

He relaxed a little. But he felt the tom-tom of his heart mounting. He stared at Marge again through the haze of his blurry vision. She was supposed to be hiding. How did she escape the authorities on her way here? How did she know?

“I had to do what I had to do,” she said. “You know, when our airbus landed in Lagos all those years ago, we were first sheltered in camps near the airport. I cannot talk about all that happened there. You may not be aware, or you may be. I got a little connection there but I sold my soul for it. But there were those who were repeatedly assaulted against their will.”

She stopped talking. He waited for her to continue but she simply reached out for his right hand and held it. He fell asleep still feeling his right hand in both of hers. When he awoke at night, he was damp all over. He felt the heaviness of a human figure lying beside him on the bed. It certainly seemed like it was her… it had to be her. But he wasn’t certain, for when the light of morning came, she wasn’t there anymore. He felt empty and hungry. In the intervening days, the only humans he saw were prim nurses and doctors in white overalls who barged into the room speaking in clipped language, followed closely by MedAid robots.

 

The day he was discharged he went straight to Ezeadigo’s garage to see about another motorcycle, walking the short distance from the CR Health Complex. Ezeadigo hastily serviced another old Bayani and he rode it home, calculating, as he went, that he had already spent a large part of his yearly savings. 

“Welcome, master,” HouseAid said as he entered the house. “How can I be of help?”

“Nothing,” he said, looking through the empty parlor before going towards the room.

The room door was slightly ajar. He went to the bed and sat down, his head in his hands. 

“Where is Marge?”

“She left two days ago, master.”

He shook his head slowly. 

“Where could she have gone?”

“Coordinates say north. The North District and beyond.” 

He shook his head again.

HouseAid’s electronic voice came up again. “You need to drink water, master. Low water levels. Dehydration.”

“Alright,” he said and left the room for the kitchen. 

When he returned, he pulled out a cabinet from the wall near the bed and brought out a sheaf of papers. They were mostly cartoon doodles from his time as a young cartoonist years ago. He studied a particular sheet where he had drawn the caricature of a drowning face surrounded by high waves. He smiled a little. No one knows this part of his life now. It seemed like centuries ago, but his mind was swollen with the bittersweet memories. He could share these memories with Marge. He felt clear-headed as he thought this. He would guarantee her for the papers. She would stay here. 

He stood up. He had to find her. He changed his shirt and wore a new coat that had a sash in the middle. Outside, he kicked the starter of the motorcycle several times before the engine came to life. He twisted the throttle hard, revving up the engine repeatedly, before putting the machine into gear and driving off at full speed. He had to find Marge very quickly. This was what he knew he must do. In the rubric of his life, there was only one path to follow: the road to desire and goodness. 

He rode north. The houses and bridges and bland, brutal infrastructure whizzed past him as if they were running away from him. He needed only to see her face. Her face—and she’d return and he would help her. He was only a simple Good Samaritan with little complications. That was what he had been in the five decades of his life. For now, he’d forgotten her face. Or—it was not her face that he’d forgotten, it was that enigmatic expression in it. The only thing he recalled now was the yellow and the paleness.

Soon he left the city and rode through the cold countryside of the North District. There were more trees here and he spied the gated enclosures of CR communes all over the landscape. These were also supposed to be the locations of the so-called Psalms Cells, the PCs, where felons were sentenced to years of reciting psalms in solitary confinement, aggressively monitored by the CR police. Could Marge have been convicted to spend time in his absence? He dismissed the thought. The existence of these cells had to be mere rumors. 

He rode at high speed through deserted roads for five hours—stopping only once to refill at a tiny petrol station on the outskirts of a commune—until he came to a place where semi-arid steppe stretched into the horizon, an expanse that was dry, dusty Sahel in years past. A small steel sign on a concrete pillar by the roadside warned that venturing beyond this point was dangerous:

CR TERRITORY ENDS HERE
VENTURE AT YOUR OWN PERIL

He crossed the concrete marker and entered the Savagelands. Trees were sparse from this point and he saw no houses. After an hour he stopped near the edge of a valley. He left the engine running and stood on top of a boulder to look at the lay of the country before him. He saw what appeared to be houses or tents and a lot of ruins and derelict infrastructure. But it was hard to tell exactly from this distance. He had no binoculars. 

As he turned to leave, a ragged group of men started emerging from the shrubbery nearby. Their faces were dark and greasy, their cheeks sunken. They were a motley group of Africans, Asians, and a lot of Old World people. 

“Stop there!” They yelled at him.

“Where you dey go?”

His eyes went from one to another. They had guns and assorted weapons.

“You nor dey talk?”

“I am looking for a woman.”

“Hahaha! What woman?” The one who appeared to be the leader asked. His entire front teeth were missing. 

“She’s very fair and has long blond hair.”

“She fery fair and has lon blond h-hair,” the leader looked around at the others and burst into hysterical laughter. “Men, search am! Beat am! E be like say e nor dey fear to come here. See am. Na them dey enjoy for the other side.”

The men rushed at him. They beat and slapped him and tore at his clothes, stripping him to his briefs. For a moment they struggled savagely among themselves for the ownership of his clothes and boots, shouting and exchanging a few punches. The leader laughed and climbed the motorcycle and drove forward. The motley ran after him, laughing loudly. He watched them disappear behind the cluster of shrubs and made no move to run after them. Agents of darkness, he remembered a code he’d transcribed in his office cubicle a year ago.

He got up and continued walking, trying not to think. He walked for a long time, naked and horribly cold. Night came upon him but he did not stop. Sometimes he would fall down out of fatigue but he did not stop walking. 

As dawn approached, he looked up and saw a row of dilapidated houses. He slumped by a leafless tree and closed his eyes. When he opened his eyes, it was already morning. Clouds in the ruffled sky hung like punched pillows. The air was clear and cold. He shivered. He looked up and saw islands of faces near the row of houses. They were motionless, staring at him in stony silence, like medieval statues in an old tomb. At the far end of the last house, he saw a white figure with a pale yellow mane of hair walking down a corner. The figure turned back for a moment and he saw the familiar flicker of a tormented shadow in her eyes. He called out to her once, twice, but she continued to walk and did not respond. He was too fatigued to go after her. He watched her figure getting thinner and thinner with each step until the shroud of distance swallowed her. 

 

 

Chimezie ChikaChimezie Chika is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His works have appeared in, amongst other places, The Shallow Tales Review, The Republic, Lolwe, Efiko Magazine, and Afrocritik. He was a 2021 Fellow of the Ebedi International Writers’ Residency in Iseyin, and currently resides in Nigeria.

Header photo by palidachan, courtesy Shutterstock.