On the outskirts of the 3rd Mainland Bridge, the old lady dropped Alohan off. For the weeks following, he wandered around, vagabonding the peripheral roads stemming out of the bridge, astounded by his fate. What had Erasmus been doing with acid? Had the acid really been part of Erasmus’s photography development lab materials, or for something else? Why had the man not warned Alohan of the acid prior to their scuffle? There’d be no opportunity to ask Erasmus these questions. Well, at least now Alohan was as far away from the man as possible. Best this way. What he had lost because of Erasmus was not quantifiable; it was not money. One could never assign a monetary value to one’s body parts. But neither was the loss as all consuming, as total, as when he lost his parents or Ivie. Still, it was a profound loss. To lose parts of one’s body was a source of intense sorrow. Once upon a time he had a full face and a full set of lips and two working eyes. Those were the days when he took it for granted that a face should be whole and that a mouth and an eye, when commanded to open, would obey. Now, life had not only taken away a portion of his face, it had also once more reduced him to a common street beggar, to parading the roadsides in tattered clothing, listening to the incessant yapping of oka n’ube vendors who lined the roads. And the way the vendors talked! It was astonishing to Alohan that people could talk so interminably. Alohan wanted silence. He wandered silently, trying hard but failing to ignore the sounds around him, constantly feeling an urge to weep.
“E don die,” a vendor was saying, seated at his shedlike stand made of plywood and corrugated metal sheets. The air smelled strongly of roast corn. Half a dozen purple bush pears softened with the fire’s heat.
Two stands over, a short, big-bosomed woman stood in front of a pile of tomatoes and garden eggs, her feet akimbo, tying her Ankara wrapper. “E don die?” she asked.
“Baba Go-Slow don pafuka—dead and gone,” the first woman said. “True true this time.”
Death, Alohan mused, was probably a more palatable state of being than having to endure the sorry state of things in the country. If it was true that Baba was dead, then okay. Good for him.
“Na so?” a lanky man asked, joining the conversation. “Sai Baba? Our very own Johnny Walker? You don’t mean it!”
“I mean it o,” the woman said.
A heaven ticket vendor walked up to Alohan, handing him a flyer. “Buy your salvation here! Stairway to heaven! Pure gold from God!” He waved the remaining batch of white paper back and forth as he spoke. His voice was as forceful as a prosperity preacher’s, except instead of promises of material wealth on earth, his was a promise that would take the purchasers straight to heaven.
But how to get to heaven? Alohan wondered, taking the flyer but offering no money in return. Perhaps the flyers contained more information. If so, he wanted to read it. But the heaven ticket vendor, wanting money in exchange, snatched back the paper and walked off, hollering as he did, “Gold tickets to heaven! Meet your heavenly father by way of me!”
In just a few minutes, a crowd had formed around the hollering man. People in polished trousers and shirts, elegant gowns, shoddy singlets and shorts, fathers with children, childless fathers, mothers carrying their babies on their backs, mothers carrying their babies on their hips, childless mothers.
A man in washed blue dungarees and no shirt inside made the purchase, and bringing the paper in his hand to his lips, he kissed his ticket to heaven.
Another man, seeing Alohan, exclaimed, “Haba! Na wetin happen to your face?” And then, remembering the ticket in his hand, looked at it, and happily sauntered off.
Hunger was making a fiery pit of Alohan’s stomach and rendering his head woozy. He sighted a fallen fruit underneath an ackee tree a few yards away and walked toward it. With his undamaged, unbandaged hand, he picked up the fruit. On the visible side, the fruit had been a yellow-orange color, but when he turned it around, he saw that the other side was still green. Aware that the unripe fruit would certainly poison him if eaten that way, he tossed it far away from him despite his hunger. Palatable as death might be, he was not yet ready for it. He looked around in search of another fruit. As luck would have it, he found one, the entire fruit a bright red and already split open, revealing its three black seeds. He brought the ripened fruit to his lips, but just as he opened to eat, he felt the painful tugging around the side of his mouth, and he remembered the state of his injury. His mouth would barely open. A painful, pain-filled mouth. At the thought of having to pry open his aching mouth to eat, his appetite vanished.
He turned back to the crowd to see police sirens flooding the place and police officers whipping their batons in the air, attempting to disperse the crowd.
Rain clouds were blooming up above, gray and thick. The air was full with the scent of the impending torrent.
“Shebi you want enter heaven?” a second heaven ticket vendor was asking a policeman. “If you want enter, release me, make I sell you your own ticket na!”
A small crowd joined the vendor, adding their voices, shouting at the police officer to let the man go. “Na wetin concern you here?” one man said. “No be with our own money we dey buy our salvation?”
The sky bellowed with thunder, a series of four rolls, like drumbeats, followed by a large slash of lightning through the sky.
The police released the heaven vendor, who ran in the direction of Alohan only to pause. “Salvation for you?” he asked, a smirk on his face.
A white van pulled up to the curb of the road. The heaven vendor exchanged greetings with the driver, before stepping into the van.
The rain began pouring now, so hard it blinded.
Now, when Alohan thinks about it, he knows that there must have been a reason for the rain. Never a good one. Just as with his parents, the rain is never good news.
What happens to him next is something he does not like to think about. Because, what for? He would like to skip this part, as it is yet another terrible, life-altering moment for him. Better to try and erase it from his memory. But, of course, he cannot. So, whenever he decides to tell his story without any skipping, then what happens next is the blindfold.
The darkness of the blindfold descended upon his eyes, a little like his hands on those women’s hair he used to steal. A furtive transfer. And then, there was a scurrying. He screamed out of his damaged mouth, which opened only as much as his injury would allow. He screamed more. The pain cascaded through his face. He wrestled with the man who held him, his burnt, bandaged hand and arm flailing, slapping, hitting, scratching any surface he could find, trying to free himself from the grip. A pair of ominous voices floated around him, hushed, muffled, awash with whispers. More pain cascaded through his face, and then his body.
They threw him into the back of a van. He could tell it was a van from the climb he’d had to make to get in. He could tell from the hardness of the van’s flooring, on which he’d been forced to sit. He felt the heat and proximity of other flesh when he finally settled into surrender.
The engine rumbled into life. The sky rumbled too. The engine rumbled more. The sky retorted. Back and forth they went like a call and response, the van and the sky. Alohan felt the bobbling of the automobile as the van sped over road bumps and potholes. How long was the ride? An eternity but also quite fleeting. Shoulders bumped into him at his sides. It was a sad kind of reassurance, to know that there were others with him, stolen in the same fashion as he, that alas, he was not alone. He listened to the sounds of their coughing and crying and hollering. He listened to their muffled, jumbled, misshapen words. And then he heard the silence, so much silence trapped in the womb of all that darkness, trapped in the wailing of the pouring rain.
*
Alohan still remembers the drop-off, the aggressive way in which the handler ripped off Alohan’s blindfold at the same time that daylight was entering into the van’s wide-open back, shocking his eyes. He also remembers being ushered out of the van, then being made to stand in a queue of young men not far from a cement shack, uphill from the muddy, grass-filled ditch. A tall, lanky man with a nose like a hook arrived and began appraising the queued men like one appraises a house or any material property, eyes scanning and scanning, nostrils widening and contracting, as if he were also sniffing them out.
Finally, after several minutes of assessment, the hook-nosed man spoke. “These boys, them be like pikin. Wetin we fit do with pikin? Na who go take dem serious?”
“Na only training it go take,” the handler replied.
In the distance, a row of girls were climbing into a van.
In the days and weeks and even months that would follow, Alohan would mull over what he saw next, question himself and his sanity, wondering if his eyes or his mind had somehow faltered or maybe all of it was a trick of the light. Maybe his mind, desperate for comfort, conjured up once more the image of the one person who would have been for him the very embod-iment of comfort.
The handler and the hook-nosed man had been immersed in their haggling and discussing of terms as the van carrying the girls approached—closer, and closer still—up the dirt road that was only a stone’s throw away from where Alohan stood. Out the van’s windows, at least a dozen morose faces of girls gazed with eyes like a collective plea. The van slowed down and then all but stopped as it clambered over a ditch. It was in the moment of almost stopping, in the same moment that the hook-nosed man laughed riotously at something the handler had said, that Alohan could have sworn he saw her: a young woman who looked like the older version of the young girl he used to know, still with two cornrows of hair, one at each side of her head. Except this time, when he peered, and when the sun glinted its setting rays to illuminate the young woman’s face, Alohan saw that the cornrows were made from locks. Locks similar to his own. Focusing his eyes, he was surprised to see also the perfectly round mole, just above her upper lip, in the very spot where hers had been when she was still alive.
Alohan gasped and made to run after the van, but from fatigue borne of hunger, his legs gave out. He fell to the patchy earth. The van clambered out of the ditch and sped off.
Pulling himself to his knees, Alohan pleaded with the hook-nosed man. “Oga, I dey beg you, please, na where—”
If the man could only tell him where exactly this place was, and more importantly where that van was taking the young women, he would be so grateful. But Alohan had hardly finished the question when the man snarled, “If you open your mouth again, I go cover your jaw with slap!”
Then, down to the cement shack they all trekked, each man lined up behind the other.
The witch doctor peeking out of his shack, wearing only a wrapper tied across his chest, received them, one at a time. When Alohan’s turn came, the man’s chalk-painted face gave Alohan the impression of a ghost.
Inside the shack, hens squawked. Near the witch doctor’s stool sat a bucket of dead hens. The witch doctor led Alohan to the bucket, reached into it with his old, vascular hands, pulled out one of the hens, leaving blood trails like curved lines all across the earthen floor. To this day, Alohan has not forgotten the red-painted hands of the old man, how crimson bright they shone in the dark unlit shack. How sticky with blood and all that gore. Aside from the van carrying his sister, this is perhaps his strongest memory of that time and place. Even the oath ceremony he forgets. He doesn’t remember the proverbs or idioms that the witch doctor made him recite. He doesn’t remember what toenail the witch doctor cut, or what section of his hair the witch doctor took from. He only vaguely remembers vowing not to betray anyone of his superiors, or else a punishment for him, and for his family. What kind of punishment? He still does not recall. His mind had instead been heavily on that image of his sister’s face through the window. As the witch doctor recited his chants, Alohan had been immersed in wondering at the tricks of his mind, how his mind had gone and conjured up the image of Ivie so unexpectedly. But of course, his fatigued mind was capable of playing such tricks on him. He was, after all, bone weary from such a long journey, lacking clarity of mind, maybe even a bit delirious. Or maybe it was just that his mind had been giving him a sign, and if so, a sign of what? Perhaps a sign that should have deterred him from taking the oath? Perhaps he should not have taken the oath after seeing her image, not after seeing even the possibility of her, or more likely, simply the face of a person who very much resembled his Ivie. His Ivie was, after all, dead. Still, he should have somehow sabotaged the oath. Perhaps his life would have been much less cursed afterward, if cursed at all. Perhaps the trial would have been smoother if he’d only sabotaged the oath. Maybe Ava’s accusation was part of the juju punishment. Maybe it all could have been avoided if he had only not taken the oath. But his mind had been too much a whirlwind. And anyway, it wasn’t as if he’d been given a choice.
His third-strongest memory of that time is of being once more ushered into a vehicle, this time a 4Runner, then the driver driving through the roads, after all of the young men were back inside of the vehicle. It must have been early evening, and as the 4Runner sped through the road, he saw in the distance the red-roofed, white-painted Oba’s palace, and above the grand edifice, hundreds of bats flying out under the glow of the setting sun. It was only when he saw the palace and the bats that he knew that he’d been, for that brief moment, home in Edo. How had he not known? To fail to recognize your own home? It had all looked so different at first. It’s true that things change with time and age. Or maybe his mind had been too damaged to remember.
Far ahead of the vehicle, the road melted into the horizon, the sun like a floating halo around the outline of the trees.
__________________________________
From This Impossible Life by Chinelo Okparanta. Used with permission of the publisher, Mariner Books. Copyright © 2026 by Chinelo Okparanta.
