Boy |Chimezie Umeoka

—An Excerpt

The boy woke up with a weight in his head. He had slept with a bulging head last night during the aftermath of walking miles and miles, submitting photocopied files and brightly toned passports to the faculty officer. The tumbling pain of stress always took a severe toll on him, like he was sickly different. His sickness came in a persistent, unfailing style; his head pioneered the cause. It would begin to juggle and rumble silently under the confines of his hormonal sensations. Then, by the chill night, with the birds chirping their moonlight call, a strenuous cold would embrace him, making his legs shiver against each other and his teeth jam like a typewriter. When he was little, those illnesses always engulfed him on the verge of exciting quests. Maybe his mother's fear that her village people had found him a suitable specimen for their pagan ambitions, since she herself was too spiritually guarded, was true. He straightened his bedsheets, yawning to the call of the gentle rumblings in his belly. His whole body shivered; the pain rose to its apex and dissipated as fast as it came. He slumped back to the bed. His body had more control over him than his will to exist. The voices of his roommates floating alongside those of the neighbors outside swarm to his hearing. There was this girl. Her voice stood different from the others, like a washing when crowds were scraping. His audio aesthetics had its specifics. 

Pa Eleganza was an old shoemaker who had a small, almost-roofless kiosk outside the house. He was as old as an old man can be; he had a white beard that had not seen the brittle usefulness of a comb for a long while. His kiosk was bent like his stature, almost touching the ground on which it stood. He was the only one the boy had talked to, the only one he could talk to, at least for a while. There was something about Nsukka people that was swallowing. Their glorifying energy. They always expected the boy to talk, like talking was something you must do. It was with these kinds of people that the boy didn't feel the need to perform. The need to perform had been stripped away from him in the presence of these people by that ghostly force that hovered over his being. But the old man was different. He knew how to meddle with silence, like he did with shoes. It was delicate with him; every moment had its own construct, its own weaving, and undeniable authenticity. The last time the boy visited, the sun had spread out its radiance, casting beads of perspiration on passersby. The old man was playing a song by Chief Osadebe on a black stereo with a long antenna that had a golden naked wire coiled around it. It was the type of stereo that used big Tiger batteries. The boy always compared the batteries to the size of his sliding feces on the landscape of the toilet bowl when he was a child. It made him feel nostalgic, casting blurry memories of him running out to the dirty streets in Aba to buy the batteries for his father's radio. But the old man was nothing like his father. His father was Tupac. Anything he knew about Tupac, his father was. 

‘Nna, how are you? did you bring shoe?’ The old man asked. His Igbo was different, clearer than the ancestral hummings of other Nsukka natives. Good knowledge had benefited him to use central Igbo. 

‘Yes, I used it to swim the rivers of Aba. Ofugo ife.’

The silence between them was thick; one could almost reach out and feel the weight. The boy had expected the man to respond, to say something, even though the thought of replying haunted him. But he felt at ease when the man changed Osadebe's track to another Igbocentric song he could make no sense of, then said, ‘As for Osadebe, he has tried his best. His legend is something no other traditional musician from the east can rub off from our minds in the nearest future… egwu amandianaeze.’

It made the boy feel safe, the way the old man took silence and made it a definite existence, the way he spoke without seeking secondary interest. The boy found the voice to reply, to say that Chief Osadebe was a histrionic legend who served a generation of Igbo menfolk. The old man laughed at his stance, calling him the Gen Z advocate. When the shoe had received its deserved stitching, the boy felt relieved, like he had managed to release a huge outflux of words he had conceived in his bladder of perusal for a long time. Now he had the thought of going to the old man’s shop as he struggled to dismember the shadows of sleep stitching his eyelids. 

When he finally woke up and managed to walk outside, towards the bright blue-lit morning, he was shaken by the presence of a few neighboring boys who had gathered outside the house. His hand vibrated as he accorded the rituals of handshakes towards them, feeling his voice too dry and mechanical. That certain masculine exuberance hovered around their presence; it made the boy feel unequal. Something about other boys made him think so little of himself. But they called him boss. They verbally initiated him into their convent of regard. He knew that his silence made them think highly of him, although he didn't think much of it because he knew it was just an assumption, and assumption was the lowest form of knowledge. It was such a disappointment that there was nothing high about him, that he was just a boy who had been sent to study at a university by his mother, a boy who had enough fear of the future to deal with that everything else about life made him a passenger of doubt. They were talking about the girls from the Faculty of Engineering, comparing whose breast was bigger and who had the most moving nyash. They all agreed that Udoka's breast was the biggest, bigger than two earthen calabashes put in order. But these things didn't matter to him. Give him his literature and physics, and take your world. But the world could never bend to his shape. The things that mattered the most were the things he felt lazy doing. As he looked forth, he saw Pa Eleganza opening up his shop. The boy walked up to him with the gait of the night.