Alobam

Illustration by Pedro Gomes

It was past ten when Obum finally called back. By then, the club was packed, and Ralu had stopped telling anyone who asked that he was waiting for someone, and so had allowed a couple to settle in the private booth with him. They had immediately begun making out, the girl in her Christmas hat—Ralu wondered briefly if she was eighteen yet, she had the cautious excitement of a teenager venturing into the night for the first time—glancing at him shyly, almost apologetically, before falling totally into the kiss. He’d let his eyes settle on them for a second, and then away, at the dance floor that was dim, sparkly with lights, and packed with bodies bumping and grinding to Olamide. The DJ had been on fire all night long, giving them jam after jam, and if he were here, Obum would have been on the dance floor, too, lost in the music, lost in the undulation of bodies. Ralu loved to watch him, his joy and his freedom so ordinary, it pulled most people in, women grinding against his groin, turning around to hug him through bouts of laughter between songs, the occasional guy grabbing his waist and twisting, brief waist-jabs made loudly playful so that the surrounding air crackled not with aggression but good humor. His loud singing in the car as they drove back home, or the calm of his face as he slept exhausted in the passenger seat. Recently, though, things had been different: he seemed perennially distracted, his eyes buried in his phone more than usual whenever he was at the house, and little things annoyed him or made him cry. Ralu had tried to make him talk, each attempt met with a wall of stoicism, which had made Ralu all the more worried because Obum liked to talk, his Instagram bio said, in this house, we are vulnerable and radically honest, and so he had decided that perhaps what Obum needed was a distraction, this, a wild Friday night at the Element. But two hours after he was supposed to show up, having said he’d take a keke after hanging out with his friends, he was only just returning his calls.

Ralu watched the phone buzz on the table, unsure how long to let it ring before stepping outside. He had grown weary from waiting, from the annoyance and uncertainty of unanswered calls, and had merely stayed back out of a need to drink. Now that his phone was ringing, Obum’s name flickering on his screen, all that anger and uncertainty had vaporized, so that his heart seemed to sigh with relief. It was loud in the club, Teni going omoge loke loke. He poured himself another shot of Hennessey, which he’d opened after the first hour of waiting. The phone stopped ringing. He could feel the couple’s presence, now that they were no longer kissing, now that they were whispering earnestly to each other. He glanced at the girl again, her fingers toiling with the ends of her braids; she looked older now, she was probably eighteen or nineteen, he thought, still too young to be in the clubs, in his estimation. The guy with her was young, too, but definitely older than her. Probably Obum’s age-mate, twenty, or older. Ralu had thought him too old to be wearing his jeans below his ass, so that his blue boxer shorts showed as he walked to the booth, but maybe it was the drink talking, he’d had a long day at work and he was tired. He caught their eyes on him. “Feel free,” he said, loud and smiling, nodding at the bottle, still half-full, on the table between them, and the guy smiled and said, “Manchi!” His phone buzzed again, stopped, and then flickered with a text notification. He picked it up. I’m so sorry, it said, I’m high af and seated alone outside a store on M.M. Way. Please come get me.

All the cars, all the lights on the road. It was as though he had water in his eyes, he saw everything first through a glaze, and then extra-bright. When a car approached, he felt both hopeful and afraid—hopeful that it would be Ralu’s dark-blue Honda pulling into the curb, afraid, when it wasn’t, that the quizzical glint of the headlamps would linger for too long and that the car would stop suddenly and a stranger would emerge and march towards him. He plugged in his earphones. Before the storeowner, Inusa, locked up for the night, he’d said, handing Obum a blanket, “You fit sit down for here, I go leave the bench outside, and the security light go dey on,” and Obum had felt a gratitude so wide and engulfing, he’d thought he would cry. Instead, he’d nodded and said thank you before watching the man walk down the street, his white jellabiya so long, it almost grazed the pavement.

If the evening had gone well, it most likely would have ended at Inusa’s store, as it usually did, Ibrahim chatting with him while he made their Indomie and fried eggs, Obum practicing his Hausa by interjecting every other minute, which pleased and amused Inusa. But the evening had not gone well. Rushing out of Ibrahim’s house, the cold outside had attacked his exposed arms, and yet he did not return for his jacket, shocked and confused and shattered as he’d felt. He reached into his pocket for his phone, opened Instagram. The cold nibbled at his fingers. Top on his feed was Ralu, who in several pictures was wearing a red Christmas hat ringed with blinking stars, his colleagues, all in almost-uniform suits and ties, smiling around a Christmas cake. Ralu, too, was smiling in all the pictures, but Obum knew he hated posing for pictures; standing shirtless by the window at home, the sun perfect against his body, his demeanor wonderfully lost and forlorn, Obum would pretend to be riveted by something in his phone as he sneakily took pictures. What are you doing, Ralu would say, catching on, his lips twisted in amusement, his pose immediately awkward. Stay as you were, Obum would say, laughing, knowing it was a lost cause already. They would go through the pictures together, Ralu saying, Send me this one, and, Have you thought of taking up photography seriously? You’re really good, like, photos-in-a-museum good.

Obum wondered what was taking him so long. He eased his hand under the blanket, warming it, and then returned to his phone. He found himself on Ibrahim’s page. His fingers seemed to move of their own will, scrolling through high-resolution pictures until they got to the grainy ones in which Ibrahim was not yet so inked, not yet buff. He was lanky in these pictures, all arms and legs, a gangly boy. In one of the pictures, he was holding a chair above his head, facing a classmate who was also holding a chair above his own head. Obum remembered that day, the sun, the roughness of their play. They’d just written their final exam in their final term as juniors and were heady with joy (if they knew then what they knew now, of responsibility and immense loss, would they have looked forward to adulthood?). He remembered Mr. Jackson walking into the classroom and barking at everyone to kneel down, they were making so much noise. He remembered that he got his, the note said,

re you okay?” Ralu asked as Obum put on his seatbelt. He did it with religious care, put on his seatbelt whenever he got into the car, something people rarely did in Kano. He sat, after fastening his seatbelt, with a stillness, his back pressed firmly against the chair, hands clasped in front of him; it was an unnatural stillness, stiff, the stillness of a person afraid of unfurling. bum was starting to feel better. His heart no longer raced, no longer felt like something swelling, swelling, ready to burst, and his head no longer ballooned, making the world seem endlessly confounding. He was still worried that Ralu was angry with him, and that the moment they got home, he would grab his shoulders, pin him against the wall, and yell in his face. He reminded himself that it was Ibrahim’s edibles speaking, he’d never seen Ralu raise his voice at anyone before, and then he worried that he was muttering his reassurances out loud, and that Ralu was hearing everything, and silently judging him. akuo died, people said, long before his physical death. They said he died when he was eighteen, not twenty-three. Two years after they graduated from secondary school, after Ralu entered his second year in Nnamdi Azikiwe University and Makuo didn’t even gain admission, he started going to Weather Head with Crazy Man who was about ten years his senior. He returned to Aminu Road one evening, Ralu was told, high like there was no tomorrow, found his father beating Obum, and punched the man. Nobody liked the way the man beat his children, they told Ralu. After all, he and his wife weren’t the only evangelists in Sabon Gari and others hadn’t killed their children yet. But nobody clapped for Makuo for fighting his father, for standing in the doorway after letting Obum run off, and saying, “If you ever touch am again, I swear, you go regret my next action.” Nobody liked that he turned on his mother and said, “And you, too, if you didn’t want us, why did you bring us into this world?” And so, after he died, people said he had died on that day he’d punched his father and insulted his mother. bum had not felt himself fall asleep, but now he woke up to Ralu’s fingers in his hair, twirling and twirling. At first he remembered nothing, only the sadness that had lulled him to sleep, and then he remembered everything. He remembered Ibrahim’s bathroom, the white tiles on the wall, the white towels on the rack, the mirror that was clean and clear, making him think that the cleaning man must have come around recently. He remembered that he was still seated on the toilet, that the water he’d been shooting up his ass had finally come out clear, when the edible kicked in, his head light and awake, his heart palpitating, his toes, dick, asshole awash in a sweetness. Remembered that he stood up, flushed the toilet, and then got in the bathtub, under the shower that was already spraying hot water. Almost immediately, Ibrahim rapped on the bathroom door before gently pushing it open. He got in the bath behind Obum, wrapping his arms around Obum’s body, his hard dick pressed against the cleft of Obum’s ass. His arms, sturdy and inked and veined, Obum ran his fingers around them, throwing his head back, allowing Ibrahim grip his neck to pull his head back, staring into his eyes and forcing him into an impossible arch. The spank on his ass, it was shockingly rough, too rough too early; Obum gasped, whimpered, and Ibrahim gripped his neck even tighter. Whose are you? he asked, and Obum whispered, Yours. ne moment, Obum was asleep, and the next he was awake and crying. Ralu immediately slid beside him on the couch, holding his head against his shoulder. Obum wrapped his arms around him. His body was warm and trembly. “Am I a terrible person, Ralu?” he said, between sobs. “Do I deserve terrible things?”